Madison Cawthorn, the Republican candidate running for former Rep. Mark Meadows’ (R-NC) old seat, scrambled to put out the fire sparked on Thursday by his racist attack involving Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), who is Black, and a journalist who volunteered for Booker’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Cawthorn had posted the now-revised broadside on MoeTaxes.com, his website about Democratic opponent Moe Davis. The post attacked Davis’ ties to reporter and ex-Boston University dean Tom Fiedler, who “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 broken grammar made it unclear whether it was Fiedler or Booker whom Cawthorn was accusing of victimizing white male candidates.
Davis slammed Cawthorn’s “blatantly racist” remark and stated that the Republican “has clearly established his poor moral character.”
“If racism has no place in America, then it surely has no place in Congress, either,” the Democratic candidate said in a statement.
Cawthorn edited the post after it was first flagged by the Bulwark. The post now claims that Fiedler left Boston University to “become a political operative and is an unapologetic defender of left-wing identity politics.”
The Republican claimed in a statement that the original sentence contained a “syntax error” that failed to “convey my intended meaning.”
“My intended meaning was, and is, to condemn left-wing identity politics that is dangerous and divisive,” he said.
Cawthorn also claimed that he was not referring to Booker when he was decrying the supposed victimization of white male candidates.
“My concerns were never with Cory Booker but Tom Fiedler who I believe is more of a political operative than a journalist based on his pattern of biased reporting,” he said.
