"Your kindness, encouragement, and light-heartedness have written a complex chapter in my heart that I will never stop reading."

Wrote Representative Chuck Edwards, quoted in "Scoop: Rep. Chuck Edwards singled out young female aides for special attention" (Axios).

I've got to give Edwards credit for writing. I like "a complex chapter in my heart that I will never stop reading." It was enough to make me look up where he went to college. Wikipedia says he "attended" Blue Ridge Community College. I think "attended" means he did not graduate. I asked A.I. if that sentence was likely to have been written by A.I., and the answer was no. I'm told that sentence is "poetic but not overly generic or perfectly balanced like much AI romantic prose."

I wondered which party has the burden of this problematic member of Congress and it took me so long to find the answer that I assumed he was a Democrat, but no, he's a Republican. You only get the info in the second-to-last sentence, which tells us that "Edwards... is a top Democratic target in November." I misread that at first.

Edwards succeeded Madison Cawthorn. He was a complex chapter. Remember?

ADDED: I'm not making a new tag for Chuck Edwards, but I already had a tag for Madison Cawthorn. The last time I used it was October 10, 2024, and in that post, as in this one, I asked if you remember him. That was right before the last election, when Elon Musk was proclaiming "I’m not just MAGA, I’m Dark MAGA!" At that time, Wikipedia said that Dark MAGA was "a belief promoted by former U.S. representative Madison Cawthorn that former president Trump would return to power 'with a vengeance.'" And: "Railing against 'the cowardly and weak members of our own party,' Cawthorn wrote [in May 2022]: 'It's time for the rise of the new right, it's time for Dark MAGA to truly take command.'"

Does anyone say "Dark MAGA" anymore? Maybe our eyes have gotten used to the dark. Trump did return to power with a vengeance. 

By the way, Cawthorn is currently running to get back into Congress, but this time it's a different district, Florida's 19th congressional district. His old district was North Carolina's 11th district, so Edwards's difficulties are no help to him.

What did Elon Musk mean by "I’m not just MAGA, I’m Dark MAGA!"

I saw this in real time in the live feed from Saturday's Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and I thought he might just be referring to his black clothing and his black-on-black Make-America-Great-Again cap.

And then I thought it might be a slang use of "dark" as in "Dark Brandon." Remember that? Wikipedia says:

The phrase "Dark Brandon" was initially a meme created by online progressives to parody supporters of "Dark MAGA", a belief promoted by former U.S. representative Madison Cawthorn that former president Trump would return to power "with a vengeance."  It copies the "fashwave" aesthetic used initially by online supporters of figures like Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis....

So Dark MAGA preceded Dark Brandon. 

Remember Madison Cawthorn?

Railing against "the cowardly and weak members of our own party," Cawthorn wrote [in May 2022]: "It's time for the rise of the new right, it's time for Dark MAGA to truly take command." "Dark MAGA" references a fringe movement advocating a vengeful return of Trumpism.

With that background, why would Elon Musk choose to horse around with the phrase "Dark MAGA"? Could he be seriously connecting to the Cawthorn meaning?

In discussions of Elon Musk's recent declaration, I'm seeing various sources that discuss the 2022 use of the phrase, so let me just select one to quote: "Dark MAGA: Will It All End Here?" by David Levi Strauss (in The Brooklyn Rail, which seems like an interesting publication, around since 2000, but only just noticed by me today).

"The defeat for now ends Mr. Cawthorn’s brief political career, which began with the promise of being the youngest person ever elected to Congress."

"Now, at age 27, he is left with an enormous social media following and potentially lucrative career opportunities outside electoral politics." 

Those are the last 2 sentences of the NYT piece "Election Deniers Thrive Even as Trumpism Drifts: 5 Primary Takeaways."

Obviously, "the promise of being the youngest person ever elected to Congress" means that it was promising to begin one's career as the youngest person ever elected to Congress. As written, it seems more likely to mean that he had a shot at becoming the youngest person ever elected to Congress.

We're prompted to wonder what will Madison Cawthorn do next. Is an enormous social media following really translatable into a lucrative career? I question how much of the following is real. It could be bots and it could be people who are only interested in him as a member of Congress, perhaps specifically as a Republican in hot water.

When I saw the news about Cawthorn, I did not think: Where will his meteoric career zoom next. I thought: Okay, now I don't have to think about Madison Cawthorn anymore.

"I was raised on Proverbs and pushups... I subscribe to Judeo-Christian beliefs... I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ."

"I think if you think about my political ideology, where it really stems from, you know, my ethics and my morals and what I think is right and wrong, you look to ancient Jerusalem, you got ancient Judeo-Christian values. So right and wrong... I also cling to a lot of traditional values and a lot of traditional ideas, because they’ve worked in the past."

"I think that we have bred a generation of soft men and that generation has created a lot of problems in our society and our culture... designed to reclaim and restore masculinity in a society that is ever more dismissive of what it means to be a man."

Those are quotes from Madison Cawthorn, from 2020 and 2021, presented by Politico in an effort to shame him over 2 photographs that show him in what looks like a party setting and wearing women's lingerie, in "Exclusive: Madison Cawthorn photos reveal him wearing women’s lingerie in public setting/The embattled congressman has outraged Republican colleagues with accusations of orgies and drug use." 

Cawthorn is running for reelection and has a lot of rivals. After Politico published this exposé, Cawthorn responded the photos are from some game show on a cruise ship: "I guess the left thinks goofy vacation photos during a game on a cruise (taken waaay before I ran for Congress) is going to somehow hurt me? They’re running out of things to throw at me... Share your most embarrassing vacay pics in the replies."

Cawthorn asks to be treated the same as any other politician with an embarrassing old photograph. But if he's made the masculinity of men a core political value, a photo of him in women's clothes is a different problem for him than it would be for a politician who eagerly embraces an ideology of gender fluidity. 

But I would say that within the tradition of distinct gender roles, there has long been playful cross-dressing. It's perceived as comical precisely because you believe in the immutability of the 2 sexes. That's what's going on in the great movie comedy "Some Like It Hot" — with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis trying to pass as female in the presence of Marilyn Monroe. Old-time television with Milton Berle and Flip Wilson in drag isn't  hilarious because they were displaying any inner femininity but because people saw them as obvious men wearing women's clothes.

"Science isn’t Burger King; you can’t just ‘have it your way.' Take notes, Madame Speaker. I’m about to define what a woman is for you. X chromosomes, no tallywhacker. It’s so simple."

Said Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), quoted in "Republicans thought defining a ‘woman’ is easy. Then they tried. Josh Hawley, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn opened their mouths and accidentally showed how complicated it is to define womanhood" (WaPo).

The article is by Monica Hesse, who writes:

And this is where I got the poor OED editor involved, just to make sure I understood exactly what Cawthorn was talking about. She explained that “tallywhacker” is likely an Americanism, a variant of the word “tallywag,” which means “the testicles; the male genitals,” though Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as “a sea bass of the Atlantic Coast.”

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) was asked by a HuffPost reporter to define “woman,” and replied, “Someone who can give birth to a child, a mother, is a woman. Someone who has a uterus is a woman. It doesn’t seem that complicated to me.”

When the reporter asked him whether a woman whose uterus was removed via hysterectomy was still a woman, he appeared uncertain: “Yeah. Well, I don’t know, would they?”

[W]hen these lawmakers attempted to show how much smarter they were on gender science than a judge who takes things seriously for a living, what came out was gobbledygook.

Anyway, congratulations to Ketanji Brown Jackson for getting through the hazing process. I had to avert my eyes. I knew she'd make it, and so did everyone else who knows the game. Spare me the part of the game where you assert that your party had to do it because the other party did it that other time.

He'll have to name names then, won't he?

 

If he doesn't, people will infer he made the whole thing up.

The screenshot is from Drudge, and the links go to "Kevin McCarthy Says Madison Cawthorn Admitted He Exaggerated Claims About Cocaine and Orgies: He ‘Lost My Trust’" (Mediaite) and "'He's an embarrassment': Republicans threaten to primary Cawthorn over controversial antics" (CNN).

By the way "admitted he exaggerated" means that the underlying assertion is true. It's just that the words were imprecise. 

I don't remember to use my "embarrassment" tag often enough. You know, there are different ways of being "an embarrassment." An embarrassment to whom? Just himself? Or to the party? Or to a bipartisan group of powerful Washingtonians?

"Rep. Madison Cawthorn says his fellow lawmakers have invited him to take part in orgies in Washington and snorted lines of cocaine right in front of him...."

"'The sexual perversion that goes on in Washington. I mean, being kind of a young guy in Washington, where the average age 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,' Cawthorn, who was elected in 2020, said. 'Then all of a sudden you get invited: ‘We’re going to have 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,' he said."

From "Madison Cawthorn says DC is orgy-filled, cocaine-fueled ‘House of Cards'" (NY Post). 

I know almost nothing about Cawthorn's credibility, but I do sometimes wonder, when I watch Washington politicians and journalists, what drug I am seeing? I don't have the depth of experience needed to analyze this very well. I'm just aware that when you try to understand why people are speaking and acting the way they are, there might be some substance distorting their behavior. There could also be some sort of mind-bending sexual obsession. What are we dealing with, really, when we deal with the human being?