GOP candidate who called Hitler ‘the Fuhrer’ attacks opponent as enemy of white men
Republican Madison Cawthorn, who is running for a North Carolina House seat, put up an attack website this week accusing his Jewish opponent Moe Davis of being backed by a supporter who “aims to ruin white males running for office.”
Both Cawthorn and Davis are white men, but the website claims that a journalist named Tom Fielder, who has written favorably about Davis, “quit his academia job in Boston to work for non-white males, like Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males running for office.”
The smear was first reported by The Bulwark.
The web page in question is part of MoeTaxes.com, which is sponsored by the Cawthorn campaign, and has since been edited. It now claims that Fielder is simply “an unapologetic defender of left-wing identity politics.”
The page also features an edited photo of Davis as a marionette puppet.
“Revelations about Madison Cawthorn’s blatantly racist comment come days after over 150 former classmates at Patrick Henry College — more than half the entire student body during his time there — signed a letter and posted it online calling Mr. Cawthorn a ‘sexual predator’ who lied and vandalized property while attending the college for a little over a semester in 2016-17,” Davis said in a statement to The New York Times.
Cawthorn told The Times that the page’s original language was poorly worded.
“The syntax of our language was unclear and unfairly implied I was criticizing Cory Booker,” Cawthorn said. “I have condemned racism and identity politics throughout my campaign including during my convention speech when I highlighted [Martin Luther King Jr.’s] vision for equality.”
Cawthorn previously drew the ire of Jewish voters in his district after he shared photos from a visit to Adolf Hitler’s vacation home. In a caption on the photo, which was shared on social media, Cawthorn referred to Hitler as “the Fuhrer” and said the trip had been on his “bucket list.” It also called Hitler a “supreme evil.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO