NC-11: My Dark Journey Into the Soul of a Model Young Republican Candidate
Madison Cawthorn is a handsome guy, if your tastes run towards toothy, muscled blondes. In interviews, the 25-year-old Republican practically gleams with youthful vigor, his locks swept back and gelled à la Richard Spencer. Cawthorn’s age is his selling point; he paints his relative inexperience as a key motivation for why he’s running for Congress in North Carolina’s 11th district. “I don’t really think there’s any time to wait,” he told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo shortly after his lopsided victory in June’s Republican primary runoff. “Our country’s in dire times, and if it doesn’t have somebody come out to help and someone to lead a patriot revolution of this younger generation, then I feel like we’re going to have a generational time bomb go off in the Republican Party.”
It’s clear Cawthorn sees himself as that person. With his primary victory over Donald Trump-endorsed Lynda Bennett, Cawthorn created a narrative that was eagerly, if belatedly, embraced by the upper echelons of the Republican Party; he spent a Monday in late July hobnobbing with Trump, Lindsay Graham, and Rudy Giuliani at Trump’s Washington hotel. The Republicans need new blood, and who better than Cawthorn, with his perfect story and his perfect looks? He’s a “fighter,” to use his favorite term, who survived a devastating car accident at 18, which left him partially paralyzed and using a wheelchair. He’s a real estate investor and the CEO of his own company; a motivational speaker who just wants to inspire others; a devout Christian; a lover of the Second Amendment; a family man, already engaged to be married to Cristina Bayardelle, an impressively buff fitness influencer and CrossFit champion who also loves guns. Cawthorn is Republican catnip.
But after I first wrote about him, I received a flurry of emails, many from North Carolinians who will be his constituents if Cawthorn wins his general election race against his Democratic opponent, Moe Davis. These constituents told me that there was more to know about Cawthorn than his hatred of socialism, his eyebrow-raising legal battles, and his penchant for posting vacation photos with distasteful captions—including a joke he made about conquering Mexican restaurants in the same way that conquistadors conquered “entire civilizations,” and another about the fulfillment of his dream of seeing the vacation home of, as he put it, the “Führer.” (The experience, he wrote, “did not disappoint.”) “Strange to hear so many laughs and share such a good time with my brother where only 79 years ago a supreme evil shared laughs and good times with his compatriots,” Cawthorn mused in the caption of the latter Instagram post, which featured a photo of him and his brother smiling widely in front of the Eagle’s Nest, where Adolf Hitler vacationed in Berchtesgaden.
So I decided to look a little closer. And while Cawthorn’s campaign didn’t provide any answers—they did not respond to several requests for comment, which included a detailed list of questions—what I discovered was illuminating. Cawthorn often talks about the need for Republicans to have a fresh young face, and to wrap conservative ideas in “better packaging” and “better messaging” that is less “abrasive.” But “better packaging” is just that—packaging. Cawthorn is following the playbook of other, more successful far-right Republicans in recent years, attempting to rebrand his extreme views—which include what I would describe as white supremacist-adjacent nationalism—as squarely in the mainstream of the Republican Party. In doing so, he’s co-signing those ideas for a new generation of voters who may be turned off by Old White Men but who might embrace them from a fellow millennial.
https://theslot.jezebel.com/my-dark-journey-into-the-soul-of-a-model-young-republic-1844324325?utm_medium=sharefromsite&utm_source=theslot_twitter
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all facades and advertising pap that the rubes eat up like snake oil from traveling salesmen. Very Trumpian.
Sounds like more of the same.
