Column

Our New Gamergate GOP

Republicans like Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene are Trumpism’s terrifying new torchbearers

Jessica Valenti
GEN
Published in
3 min readNov 4, 2020

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Photo illustration; Photo courtesy of the Committee on Arrangements for the 2020 Republican National Committee via Getty Images

Madison Cawthorn’s first public statement as an incoming North Carolina congressman didn’t thank voters or lay out a road map for what he’ll accomplish in Washington, D.C. Instead, the youngest Republican ever elected to Congress tweeted, “Cry more, lib.”

Say hello to the new generation of the GOP, extremists who seem more at home in a Gamergate Reddit forum than the Capitol building. And no matter who wins the presidential election, the left has to be worried about the intensifying encroachment of political right-wingers whose radicalism has moved from the margins to the mainstream.

Cawthorn, for example, has been accused of sexual assault by multiple women, swooned over his visit to Hitler’s home in Germany — a trip he said was on his “bucket list” — and created a website where he attacked a reporter for working “for non-white males, like Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males running for office.”

And Cawthorn wasn’t the only extremist who won last night: QAnon believer Marjorie Taylor Greene, won a House seat in Georgia. QAnon is a conspiracy cult that believes Democrats are part of a Satanic pedophile cult that eats…

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Published in GEN

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Jessica Valenti
Jessica Valenti

Written by Jessica Valenti

Feminist author & columnist. Native NYer, pasta enthusiast. I write about abortion every day at abortioneveryday.com