Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

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 go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.