A Demagogue in Despot's Clothing

​It’s only just come to light the last few days, but a week ago, far-right GOP terrorist-in-training Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) gave a fire-and-brimstone religious “call to arms” that terrorism expert Malcolm Nance compared to a video you’d see from a jihadist.

The speech was given at the North Carolina Faith & Freedom Coalition's "Salt & Light Conference."  Making it more pronounced was Cawthorn’s use of propaganda techniques for the video, with a musical soundtrack and footage of religious settings, the Bible and Washington, D.C. to appear as if this was a speech to Congress.

"It is time for us to stand up and say 'no' to your tyranny,” the clip begins.  “Now is a time for our pastors and our congregations, like this one here, like many of you that you represent. It's time for us to stand up and declare boldly that as men and women have faith, we have a duty to stand against tyranny. We have a duty to be civically involved, we have a duty to save this country for the next generation."

I must admit, I do agree with Cawthorn on one thing – that it is time to stand up to tyranny.  But what Cawthorn is so self-righteously unaware of is that it is his own party that has become fascist, which is almost the very definition of tyrannical.

When he dives deeper into Religious Mode, his confusion and total lack of understanding – not that fact, reality and even actual religion matter to him – shows so blatantly that it’s almost comical, except for how dangerous it all is to democracy, trying to whip up religious fervor, an emotion where accuracy has never been a great concern.

"Look into the Old Testament, look at David, look at Daniel, look at Esther,” he proclaims. “Look at all these people who influence the governments of their day to uphold Christian principles. “

Never mind, of course, that “the Old Testament is the Jewish Bible, hardly the foundation of Christian principles.  And David, Daniel and Esther – all part of that Hebrew Bible and Jewish history – lived long before Jesus.

But Cawthorn is only getting worked up, building to his personal jihad on the mount.  "It is time for the American Christian Church to come out of the shadows to say, 'no longer are we going to allow our culture to be determined by people who hate the things that we believe in,'" Cawthorn rails, later adding, “…if we bend the knee to the Democrats today, our country will be lost forever, our children will never know what freedom is. It's our duty to stand up, Let us stand united as men and women of faith to fight for our country."

To quote the great columnist Molly Ivins – this sounds better in the original German.

That the person carrying this supposed high-moral torch of Jesus and Christian principles has as troubled a voice as does Madison Cawthorn, with his long history of sexual abuse charges and lying about his personal history, makes his attempt at evangelistic demagoguery all the more despotic.

Terrorism expert Malcolm Nance said that if you took out the words "Washington" and "Christian" from the speech, it would sound like the videos he has heard from al Qaeda and ISIS calling for jihad.

Fernand Amandi, a Democratic strategy expert in public affairs and communication, looked at the video and was even more blunt:

"The dictionary definition of the word terrorist is someone or groups of people that use the threat of violence or intimidation to try and establish political goals," Amandi said. "And I look at that Madison Cawthorn clip and videos that look like they could be stripped from a jihad playbook. If it sounds like a domestic terrorist and it acts like a domestic terrorist and it's putting out videos that, to Malcolm's point, look like they could be stripped from a jihadist playbook, swapping in a word or two, it's domestic terrorism!"

But what stands out to me almost even more than Cawthorn’s fascist hysteria and religious calls for violence is that it was met with almost no condemnation, let alone aghast outrage by Republican Party leadership.  There was some, but it was minimal, most especially considering how antithetical Cawthorn’s words were to American democratic principles.  Yet they served the purposes of today’s GOP well enough, so might as well enable him and leave the door open for more.

The bad news is that too many in the Republican Party hear those words and get whirling dervishly wound up by them.  The good news is that those words are so antithetical and abhorrent to the foundation of America that they likely trouble far more people on both side of the aisle.