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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSeth Abramson...It's Time to Talk About Madison Cawthorn
https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/its-time-to-talk-about-madison-cawthornThe North Carolina Congressman is a key January 6 figure too few are talking about.
Note: Throughout this essay, the words of Rep. Madison Cawthorn appear in bolded text.}
Weve entered an era of American history in which we must be more on guard against recurrences of the past than ever before. Donald Trump, if not convicted of incitement to insurrection by the Senate in February, may run again for presidentin a storm of vengeance and spitein 2024. If he doesnt, one or another of those of his offspring who havent fallen far from the tree might well do so, bringing with them the same depravity of spirit and hatred of democracy that festered in their father for decades.
But it may equally be that, over the next ten or twenty or thirty years, the recurrence of Trumpism as a dangerous monolith at the center of our democracy comes to us in the form of someone outside the Trump family: another man or woman with no scruples, a history of deceit, a willingness to incite the very worst in us, and a penchant for fraud.
Its in this spirit that I write about a twenty-five year-old Republican Congressman from North Carolina, Madison Cawthorn. Cawthorn, we recently learned from The Nation, was elected to Congress of the strength of lies about his military service, his educational background, his work experience, and even his experienceas it turns out, wholly illusoryas a Paralympian. Why these lies werent caught by media before this Trump-in-waiting made it to the halls of Congress, we dont yet know.
What we do know is that in mid-December 2020, Madison Cawthorn encouraged Trump voters to call the Capitol and lightly threaten members of Congress on the subject of the 2020 election results, in doing so saying to members of Congress, as he explicitly recommended, You know what? If you dont start supporting election integrity, Im coming after you, Madison Cawthorns coming after you, everybodys coming after you.
In the event anyone thought Cawthorn had accidentally slipped into unfortunate and indelicate hyperbole, the Congressman appeared at Trumps Stop the Steal rally on January 6 to expand on his prior incitement. He repeated that he was encouraging Trump voters to make their voice[s] heard because our Constitution was violated [on November 3]. He ranted that the mob was doing thiswhat he thought or believed the crowd was about to do is unclearbecause theyd been forced to do so, indeed because no one else would make sure they [their representatives in Congress] stood up for election integrity.
Cawthorn spoke closer in time to Donald Trump on January 6 than either of Trumps adult sons, and was introduced by the same music Trump himself is introduced by (Macho Man by the Village People). He began his speech on the day of the armed insurrection by shouting, Wow, this crowd really has some fight in it! Im so glad each and every one of you have come. He proceeded to underscore to the gathered mob that the Capitol was only two miles away down Pennsylvania Avenueas though he were a traffic cop directing them to their final destination. He juxtaposed the lack of courage at the Capitoljust two miles away, down Pennsylvania Avenue, you cant miss it!with the courage that he said he saw in the angry masses before him.
Cawthorn then said that in the new Republican Party that is rising, the people should have a voice in the government, an unusual way to be speaking just 60 days after an election in which the people of the United States quite vocally expressed their preference for Joe Biden over Trump. Unless what Cawthorn meant was more literal: that the mob before him needed to be inside the seat of government in order to be heard.
Less than two hours after Cawthorn spoke, they would be.
Cawthorns January 6 speech falsely decried all the fraud the Democrats have done in this election, and opined that the Republicans up at the Capitol were hiding and not fighting and in doing so were trying to silence your [the January 6 mobs] voice.
Make no mistake about it, Cawthorn warned darkly, they do not want your voice to be heard! But, he shouted, this crowd has the voice of lions!
He then repeated that a new Republican Party was on the rise that would go and fight inhe said, pointing at the CapitolWashington, D.C. Indeed, he kept pointing at the Capitol to remind the mob that at 12PM today we will be contesting the election on Capitol Hill. He implied that the crowd needed to send a message to Republicans who think Trump voters should sit idly by and sit on our hands, punctuating his call by shouting at full volume, THEY HAVE NO BACKBONE!
Cawthorn ended his January 6 address with a request: I want you to chant so loud that the cowards I serve with on Capitol Hill can hear you, adding that only by making this chant would Donald Trump know who supports him. The proposed chant was USA! USA! USA!the very same chant Mo Brooks had just minutes earlier proposed in his own inciting speech, which indeed became one of the chants insurrectionists employed during their assault on the Capitol just two hours later.
A person attending the January 6 Stop the Steal rallyindeed, even a child attending that rallywould have taken from Cawthorns speech that the courageous patriots of the new Republican Party would rise up at the Capitol at noon and go and fight like lions. In short, the picture Cawthorn painted for the armed mob before him mirrored exactly what that mob would go on to do in the hours after his speech.
The only other possibility that can be imaginedthat Cawthorn merely wanted the crowd to mass half a mile from the Capitol (the furthest it could legally go) and shout so loud it could be heard inside the House and Senate chambers (an impossibility)finally runs counter to common sense. It would render meaningless Rep. Cawthorns exhortation to go and fight or the notion of rising up. And notably, fighting and rising upthe latter an event commonly known as an uprisingwere two repeated themes in Cawthorns brief address. In light of the events of January 6, its hard to see this as mere coincidence; this is particularly true given that Cawthorn was both aware of the tenor of the crowd and aware of the words that had already been spoken to that crowd by the time he addressed them. As Ive written in this space before, incitement cases are as much about context and other evidence of criminal intent as they are about the words of a single speech.
When Cawthorn ultimately spoke during the certification of Bidens victory, it was after he had objected to the Biden electors from Arizona and Pennsylvania and would have stood ready to contest several othersincluding Wisconsinif he and his compatriots had been able to find a senator to stand with them. In an early-morning January 7 speech he knew would be televised, Cawthorn conceded that I want a new generation of Americans to be radicals, but called the insurrectionists cowards for fighting against Capitol police. The latter comment was a remarkable one, given that just over twelve hours earlier, he had made it clear that courageous people fight.
Cawthorn then went on to call the state-court judges who had issued rulings about the conduct of the 2020 election prior to election day usurp[ers] of powers vested solely in state legislatures, implying again that the November election had been illegitimate.
And then, the unthinkableor, the depending on your view, the inevitablehappened.
On January 23, Cawthorn told CNN that he had never seen any evidence of frauda stark contradiction of what hed claimed 120 minutes before the assault on the Capitol.
In view of the foregoing, is it unreasonable to think of Cawthorn as an insurrectionist and Trump-in-waiting? The brief catechism that helps us answer this question seems simple enough:
Do we find in Cawthorns political career, as in Trumps, pathological deceit? Yes.
Do we find knowingly false and politically motivated claims of election fraud? Yes.
Do we find the man on video gleefully giving inciting speeches to an armed mob? Yes.
Do we see in the man a willingness to persist in undermining democracy even after its most sacred temple has been defiled? Yes.
Because Cawthorn is young, it is easy to dismiss his actions on January 6 as secondary to those of several Trumpist elders: Reps. Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs, and Mo Brooks. But as any who heard Cawthorns January 7 speech will recall, the twenty-something freshman representative is fond of discussing the patriots of Americas past: generally speaking, men his age willing to face accountability and even dire consequences for their decisions. So why should Cawthorn be any different, at this moment that federal criminal investigators are considering the actions of members of Congress in the lead-up to an armed insurrection against the American government?
Americans deserve to know how Madison Cawthorn came to participate in the Stop the Steal rally, and what communications he had with its organizers and headlinersincluding Donald Trumpin the weeks before January 6. Cawthorns other speeches, including a December 15 speech in Georgia in which he deliberately stoked anger against Congress, must also be carefully reviewed by investigators.
In Georgia, Cawthorn claimed that he was letting the riled-up crowd in on a secret: their Congressional representatives secretly had contempt for them. In response to that contempt, he added, Were not the party thats going to sit on the sidelines. He said Americans must live on their own terms, and that the federal government shouldnt be able to tell them what to do. He urged the crowd to fight back against government overreach.
While Cawthorn did, on December 15, decry burning cities for the sake of social justicenot so much a call for non-violence as a gratuitous denigration of the peaceful Black Lives Matter movement, which has never, in fact, burned a cityleft unsaid was what type of fighting back would be appropriate if the cause at stake were one that, unlike ending racism, Cawthorn and his audience had an interest in.
He did, however, offer some hints.
Cawthorn told the Georgians in that December 15 crowd that fighting back would mean acting differently from a Republican Party that, in his view, is filled with cowardice and unwilling to stand up and fight for what needs to be donemeaning that whatever the actions that would be called for if the federal government were to in the future again seek to silence them (which is what Cawthorn would tell a mob on January 6 its representatives at the Capitol were trying to do), it would surely involve (a) courage, (b) movement, (c) fighting, and, most importantly. (d) doing an extremely hard and previously unthought-of thing that needs to be done.
Its easy to imagine every January 6 insurrectionist believing their actions fit that bill.
There is a new Republican Party rising! Cawthorn had shouted in Georgia in mid-December. One that is going to fight against the Left! One that is going to fight back against them stealing elections! Not surprisingly, his speech was littered with gratuitous militaristic phrases like hold the line, the final battle, and an urgent exhortation to never back down.
Cawthorns words in both December 2020 and January 2021as well as their context, and the meetings and phone calls and text messages with White House officials or Trump allies that preceded and followed themmust now be scrutinized. What contact did Rep. Cawthorn have with Trump on December 15, 96 hours before Trump announced the January 6 Stop the Steal rally at which Cawthorn would speak? What contact did he have with Reps. Gosar, Biggs, and Brooks prior to the insurrection?
Though Madison Cawthorn had no role in the impeachment of Donald Trump except to vote against it, hes already, now, carrying water for the former presidents meritless First Amendment defense to allegations of insurrection, doing so on Twitter on January 23 with characteristically violent metaphors: Iron sharpens iron, the clash of ideas sharpens minds.
At worst, Cawthorn is a knowing Trump co-conspirator who halfheartedly sought to withdraw from a seditious conspiracy after it had been perfected on January 6. At best, hes a freshman Congressman dangerously insensate to how his violent rhetoric plays in the current political landscape, a context in which the very men he clearly idolizes and trails behind are publicly stoking domestic terrorism via The Big Lie that Trump did not lose the 2020 presidential election.
In either case, its hard to see how he can continue to hold an office of public trust, as his actions have made the publics maintenance of any trust in him all but impossible.
Thomas Hurt
(13,903 posts)sweetloukillbot
(11,009 posts)cilla4progress
(24,728 posts)just unfollowed Abrahamson on Twitter. He was raging at Malcolm Nance about who knew what 1st ....
thoughts?
pbmus
(12,422 posts)However, the best intelligence will always know that objective reality is what you see, hear, and experience and not what you think...
Grasswire2
(13,569 posts)...many people will swarm to disrupt the thread and to discount whatever it is he has to say. Truth tellers sometimes have that kind of a following.
Dorian Gray
(13,493 posts)whether people want to be cautious about the way he disseminates information?
Grasswire2
(13,569 posts)Dorian Gray
(13,493 posts)Okay
magicarpet
(14,145 posts)Phones, emails, and text messages reviewed,.... the co-conspirators up the ladder who master minded this ransacking of the US Capitol would finally be revealed.
Then properly dealt with.
Cracklin Charlie
(12,904 posts)Unqualified Nazi.
Again, congressional seat attained without education, experience, or qualifications. This is not normal.
Who put him there?
kairos12
(12,858 posts)stopdiggin
(11,302 posts)Callow youth. Not much between the ears. Has already embarrassed himself several times on national TV. I think I'll keep my sights set on some people that are well up the food chain ...
young_at_heart
(3,767 posts)Asheville voted for Col. Moe Davis, a retired and respected Air Force prosecutor. All the surrounding small communities and counties voted for Cawthorn, who had a flood of dark money helping him. He encourages violence and repeats "The Big Lie" in his speeches. He's an utter disgrace and he makes Charles Taylor look like an angel in comparison. I can't stand the thought of him representing me for the next four years....a mini-Trump!!
BobTheSubgenius
(11,563 posts)This situation is much larger, and much worse than I had imagined, and continues to worsen, almost daily.
These people and this whole realm of sedition and deceit need to be all swept into a pile and tossed where they belong.