The QAnon Boomerang
When inciting a moral panic, one must pick the right target
At age 26, Madison Cawthorn has much to be proud of: He’s the youngest member of congress (in fact the first one to be born in the 1990s), he’s a national figure whose words constantly make headlines, and he’s proven that there is, in fact, a behavioral line Republican congressional leaders cannot cross, although one that highlights their own fundamentally selfish politics.
Over the last 18 months, Cawthorn has made a name for himself as part of a cohort of anti-establishment Republicans who pitch their appeal to the far right in ways that embarrass the party. In early March, Cawthorn denounced Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as a “thug” and the Ukrainian government as “evil.”
That was only the most recent of Cawthorn’s habit of outré behavior. As CNN notes,
During his short tenure, Cawthorn has racked up a remarkably long list of eye-popping controversies: he brought a congressional candidate onto the House floor, which is against the rules, and falsely told people that the candidate was a staffer; he was seen cleaning his gun in the middle of a virtual hearing on veterans' health; he got busted for driving on a suspended license; and he was hit with an ethics complaint after getting into a verbal altercation with GOP Rep. David McKinley on the House floor, to name a few.
Through all these controversies, Kevin McCarthy, House Minority Leader and the person best situated to punish Cawthorn, either bit his tongue or gave the mildest of wrist-slaps. McCarthy has been similarly indulgent of two other members of his caucus, Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, both of whom attended a convention organized by white nationalists.
But now Cawthorn has finally gone too far. Appearing on a podcast earlier this month, the young congressman shared some lurid stories of “sexual perversion” and drugs on Capitol Hill:
The sexual perversion that goes on in Washington, I mean being kind of a young guy in Washington, where the average is probably 60 or 70. You look at all these people, a lot of them that I’ve looked up to through my life, I’ve always paid attention to politics … Then all of a sudden you get invited to, “Well hey, we’re going to have kind of a sexual get-together at one of our homes, you should come.” What did you just ask me to come to? And then you realize they’re asking you to come to an orgy. Or the fact that some of the people leading on the movement to try and remove addiction in our country, and then you watch them do a key bump of cocaine right in front of you.
Are these stories true? Maybe but maybe not. Cawthorn is a known fabulist. Called to the carpet by Kevin McCarthy, Cawthorn reportedly said his stories were exaggerations. But the conservative lobbyist and consultant Roger Stone, who knows Cawthorn and is not unfamiliar with decadent behavior among Republican elites, posted a comment on social media saying, “Congressman Madison Cawthorn just told me has NOT retracted his claims about drug fueled orgies among DC elites.”
The truth of Cawthorn’s statement is less pertinent than its provenance. As several acute observers (notably Amanda Marcotte in Salon as well as Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman in The Washington Post) have pointed out, all Cawthrorn was doing was taking the standard QAnon inspired moral panic about sexual perversion and directing it against members of his own party. Cawthron has taken the QAnon knife and turned it into a boomerang. It’s the second part, the fact that the conspiracy theory is aimed at fellow Republicans, that is the sticking point.
As Waldman and Sargent note:
The claim that children everywhere are being “groomed” into some form of depravity has become ubiquitous on the right; as Fox News host Laura Ingraham recently asked, “When did our public schools, any schools, become what are essentially grooming centers for gender-identity radicals?”
Various laws attacking trans people are regularly justified with claims that they are defenses against creeping deviancy. Even giving a trans teen love and support is characterized as “abuse,” a horror from which children must be protected.
Ultimately, this sort of language has become omnipresent for lawmakers such as Cawthorn, almost like the air they breathe, which is why they regularly slip into it so reflexively. But as this episode shows, these tendencies can boomerang: The lure of depicting Washington as a kind of bottomless cesspool of degeneracy — a guaranteed right-wing applause line — led Cawthorn to accidentally hit his own colleagues with friendly fire in the form of charges of “sexual perversion.”
The one place this analysis can be challenged is in the question of whether Cawthron “accidentally” hit his own colleagues. Cawthorn’s comments might have been ill-advised—the Republican establishment is now, it seems, turning against him and will support primary challengers—but they were not necessarily inadvertent.
As a member of the Trumpist wing of the GOP, Cawthorn is invested in an anti-establishment narrative that paints his faction as at war not just with the Democrats but with the so-called Republicans in Name Only (RINOs), who control the party. Trumpists suppose that these Rinos are in thrall to the Deep State and the corruption of Washington.
It’s notable that Cawthorn is already running ads where he’s cast as the brave truth teller, standing up to “the radical left, the establishment, and the media”
I’m not sure whether Cawthorn’s line of argument will be enough to stave off a primary challenge, especially with Republican leaders in his state of North Carolina mustering against him. But it has to be understood that he does have a strategy of sorts and isn’t flying blind. The strategy is the very same one the right used against Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden: making wild accusations of sexually illicit behavior to discredit. The Cawthorn gambit is that what can work against Democrats can also work against the leadership of his own party.
(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)
Share and Subscribe
If you liked this post, please share:
Or subscribe: