25-year-old Republican congressional candidate deletes vacation pictures of ‘Hitler retreat’

Cawthorn won the Republican primary for North Carolina’s 11th district in June.

By World Israel News Staff

Madison Cawthorn, 25, a GOP congressional candidate from North Carolina, has removed pictures on social media of a trip he took to a Nazi retreat visited by Hitler at least 14 times, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports.

The pictures came down on Monday on Cawthorn’s Instagram account. They showed a 2017 vacation he took with his brother to the Eagle’s Nest on Kehlstein mountain in the Berchtesgaden Alps. According to Wikipedia, Hitler didn’t like visiting the spot as he was afraid of heights.

There remains some question if Cawthorn shares racist views or not as he referred to a “supreme evil” in his post. His comments said in part, “Strange to hear so many laughs and share such a good time with my brother where only 79 years ago a supreme evil shared laughs and good times with his compatriots.”

However, JTA reports that on Monday the feminist website Jezebel said Cawthorn is “following the playbook of other, more successful far-right Republicans in recent years, attempting to rebrand his extreme views … as squarely in the mainstream of the Republican Party.”

Cawthorn won the Republican primary for North Carolina’s 11th district in June.

According to the Jezebel expose, Cawthorn named his real estate company SPQR (a Latin acronym for “the Senate and the Roman people”), which is popular with white nationalists. The writer of the Jezebel piece, Esther Wang, also says she spied two Betsy Ross flags in videos of his home. She says the flag has been “appropriated by some extremist groups.”

“Which is not to say that the Betsy Ross flag or the use of the phrase SPQR automatically brands someone as a white nationalist, or even someone with an affinity towards the ideas animating white nationalist movements,” Wang says.

Cawthorn is facing Democrat Moe Davis to fill the seat vacated by Mark Meadows, who has become President Donald Trump’s chief of staff.

Davis is considered the underdog in the heavily Republican district.