Madison Cawthorn's Problem Is That He Picked a Fight With a Koch Brother Mini-Me [View all]

[JoanofArgh]

The hits just keep on coming on Rep. Madison Cawthorn, the tree-punching MAGA troll from the newly insane state of North Carolina. Geez, it’s like a guy can't get pulled over (again) for a motor-vehicle violation or stopped (again) at an airport while carrying a gun without it ending up all over the newspapers and on TV. And mysteriously, every time it happens (again), the local news somehow gets ahold of the details of Cawthorn’s entire rap sheet.

And now, a questionable stock thing? And Senator Thom Tillis wants to bring the House Ethics Committee down on his ass? How’d that happen? Isn’t it enough that Cawthorn made those infamous remarks about cocaine-fueled sex orgies among his fellow Republicans? Can’t a brother get a break?

On the surface, as far as his politics go, Cawthorn isn’t any different from Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or any of the other Bedlamites in the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives. So why has he turned into Velcro for almost every kind of public scandal? The answer may lie in the fact that, unlike those two, Cawthorn has made some dangerous enemies back home, the kind who want the wingnut playground all to themselves, and who have the money to buy their way in.

To understand what’s happened to Cawthorn, you have to go back to last fall. Art Pope is North Carolina’s Koch Mini-Me, a wealthy conservative sugar daddy who is probably the person most responsible for the newly insane state of North Carolina becoming newly insane. He bankrolled the Republican takeover of the state legislature, as Jane Mayer detailed in the New Yorker in 2011:

In the spring of 2010, the conservative political strategist Ed Gillespie flew from Washington, D.C., to Raleigh, North Carolina, to spend a day laying the groundwork for redmap, a new project aimed at engineering a Republican takeover of state legislatures. Gillespie hoped to help his party get control of statehouses where congressional redistricting was pending, thereby leveraging victories in cheap local races into a means of shifting the balance of power in Washington. It was an ingenious plan, and Gillespie is a skilled tactician—he once ran the Republican National Committee—but redmap seemed like a long shot in North Carolina. Barack Obama carried the state in 2008 and remained popular.


The Republicans hadn’t controlled both houses of the North Carolina General Assembly for more than a century. (“Not since General Sherman,” a state politico joked to me.) That day in Raleigh, though, Gillespie had lunch with an ideal ally: James Arthur (Art) Pope, the chairman and C.E.O. of Variety Wholesalers, a discount-store conglomerate. The Raleigh News and Observer had called Pope, a conservative multimillionaire, the Knight of the Right. The redmap project offered Pope a new way to spend his money. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/10/state-for-sale

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a39841527/madison-cawthorn-insider-trading-airport-gun/