This is an interesting little tidbit I just came across. I missed this the day after election night. Kevin McCarthy struck a conciliatory tone, or at least tried to, with Madison Cawthorn in the wake of the latter’s defeat.
Asked Kevin McCarthy about Madison Cawthorn’s loss, and he said: “I want to help him. He had some issues but he's young and so you don't wish somebody ill … I want to help him, I brought him in, I still want to help him. He’s young. His career’s not over.”
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) May 18, 2022
Good of McCarthy to reach out to a congressman who caused him nothing but mountains of grief.
But Cawthorn did not buy it. No, Sir. Cawthorn did not reach back to McCarthy to thank him (so far as we know at least) and in fact, he did just the dead opposite. He issued his Dark MAGA manifesto and he deliberately left Kevin McCarthy off the list of the “good guys.”
We presume that this is the image that Cawthorn was looking to project.
You will notice that McCarthy’s name is conspicuous by its absence. That’s an important omission because McCarthy had previously come under fire from MAGA, dark, grey or some other shade — hey I got it: 50 Shades Of MAGA. I can’t wait for the movie.
McCarthy’s crime as you recall was being caught on tape discussing removing Trump from office after the January 6 riot at the capitol. Then he further enraged the “America First” wing of the party by supporting a bill that gave $40 billion in aid to Ukraine. So McCarthy is not riding high with the MAGA crowd these days, which could become problematic if/when he takes the gavel in November.
On the other hand, you will notice that Ultra MAGA (you think I’m joking about the 50 Shades?) Elise Stefanik is not listed as one of the good guys either. So that may mean that in Dark MAGA world Marge Greene rules. Which since she’s the biggest mouth in the room, — not the loudest voice, the biggest mouth, there is a difference — makes a kind of sense.
What I think is going to happen with Cawthorn is one of two extremes: He’s either going to wimp off into the sunset and maybe live in his parents’ basement, something like that, or he’s going to do something crazy. He’s got seven months left in Congress so I guess we’ll see exactly what he does. Maybe it will be more Dark MAGA, which was maybe supposed to scare people or rally the troops, but it doesn’t seem to have done either.
Or, he may end up as a talking head on right-wing TV. That possibility does exist — unless he continues to raise hell with the Republican establishment. That is going to diminish his chances for that.
We shall see. This is an era where we all live and learn.
The way to find out what a term meant before it was used strangely ois to google it with date setting, with the “till” setting being one day before the strange usage. Someone did that with “Dark MAGA,” and reported that it basically means “fascism.”