In their own words: Madison Cawthorn and Mark Robinson’s remarks draw backlash

Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson and U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn are unapologetic about voicing their beliefs, even when they might seem reckless or hurtful.

Between the two of them, the North Carolina Republicans have taken shots at people ranging from foreign dignitaries and presidents to minority groups.

Robinson has described the LGBTQ community with words like “filth” and said his marriage to his wife is superior to a same-sex marriage.

Cawthorn attacked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy this month despite Zelenskyy becoming revered around the world for how he’s conducted himself during the Russian invasion of his country.

Cawthorn has told Congress that the military should only be giving President Joe Biden the middle finger and Robinson has called Biden “incompetent and incontinent.”

Here are some of their remarks:

Ukraine-Russia war

▪ “Remember that Zelenskyy is a thug. Remember the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and it is incredibly evil and it has been pushing woke ideologies.” -Cawthorn

President Biden

▪ “The sons and daughters of America are not foot soldiers for your party’s inept, geriatric despot. They are not expendable pawns to be dispatched at the whims of an idiot, tossed carelessly around the world to God-forsaken caves and bloody sandboxes. They are Americans worthy of honor and dignity. The only salute from them that Joe Biden deserves involves one finger.” -Cawthorn

▪ “Joe Biden is an incompetent, incontinent nitwit who has ruined everything he has touched from Afghanistan to where you stand.” -Robinson

▪ “Joe Biden can’t unify anything. He is inept and unhinged.” -Cawthorn

▪ “The economy is declining faster than Joe Biden.” -Cawthorn

Threats

▪ “Call your congressman and feel free, you can lightly threaten them and say, you know what, if you don’t start supporting election integrity, I’m coming after you, Madison Cawthorn is coming after you, everybody’s coming after you.” -Cawthorn

▪ “If our election systems continue to be rigged and continued to be stolen then it’s going to lead to one place and that’s bloodshed. And I will tell you, as much as I am willing to defend our liberty at all costs, there’s nothing I would dread doing more than having to pick up arms against a fellow American.” -Cawthorn

▪ “A few weeks ago, ol’ barbed wire Joe — that’s what I called him, I called him ‘barbed wire Joe’ — the man all but stole the election and then ran up to Washington, D.C., and immediately put up barbed wire, which, by the way, they were against that barbed wire to protect our nation on the border, and they were against National Guard troops in your city to protect it against those thugs that were burning it up last summer, but they put both in Washington, D.C., to protect what appears to be a fraudulent election for an even more fraudulent president.” -Robinson

LGBTQ rights

▪ “Now I’m not saying you don’t have a right ... to call yourself a transgender. You can call yourself whatever you want to call yourself. There’s some people in this room that heard me say this: If you want to call yourself a cocker spaniel, I don’t care. Go down to the seamstress, get them to sew you a cocker spaniel suit and run around here, do your business on fire hydrants, do whatever you want to do. It’s America. But when I see you, I’m going to say there’s that crazy man in that cocker spaniel suit. You’re still a man. There are two genders. God made male and female. Those folks that want to blur those lines. You go blur them at your house. Go blur them at the world that you made because in the real world there’s male and female and that’s how we’re going to operate and that’s how I believe we need to operate in North Carolina.” -Robinson

▪ “The male gender will not be running on the girls track team, or be on the weightlifting team, or the basketball team. You can make your own team and put yourself over there somewhere. We’re not going to change all this around because you’re inflicted with a problem and don’t know what gender you are. That’s your problem. Go deal with it.” -Robinson

▪ “Everything that God made serves a purpose. I don’t care how ugly it is. Let’s get a little ugly. I want you to think about what the cows leave behind. It don’t get no uglier than that. But you think about what could be done about what the cow leaves behind. Why is the grass in that cow pasture so green? Why is it so lush? Could it be that ugly stuff the cow left behind? See, God created that. He made that for a purpose. Everything he made from the foul odor that the cow left behind to the decaying body of every living creature to the maggots that eat those dead bodies to the flies that fly around what the cow left, God made all those things for the purpose. Would someone please explain to me the purpose of homosexuality?” -Robinson

▪ “If homosexuality is of God, what purpose does it serve? What does it make? What does it create? It creates nothing. Someone asked me in a classroom one time, we were talking about it and they said, this fellow was a homosexual and he looked at me and said, so you think your wife and you, you think your sexual relationship is superior to my husband and our homosexual relationship. Yes!” -Robinson

▪ “There’s no reason anybody, anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth. And yes I called it filth. And if you don’t like that I called it filth, come see me and I’ll explain it to you.” -Robinson

Antisemitism

▪ “It is absolutely amazing to me that people who know so little about their true history and refuse to acknowledge the pure sorry state of their current condition can get so excited about a fictional “hero” created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic Marxist. How can this trash, that was only created to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets, invoke any pride?” -Robinson, on the movie, “Black Panther.”

Winning the election

▪ “Cry more Lib.” -Cawthorn

Black Lives Matter

▪ “The trouble is the Biden administration seeking to turn this country into a socialist hell-hole. The trouble is Antifa that wants to roam the streets and beat you into submission. The trouble is Black Lives Matter that claims to care about the lives of Black people but it has turned a blind eye while violence in Black communities is taking lives in Black communities at a genocidal rate. They turned a blind eye. That’s where the trouble is and that’s where we’ve got to run toward.” -Robinson

COVID

▪ “Forcing our children to wear a mask is nothing short of psychological child abuse, period.” -Cawthorn

▪ “You know COVID is the virus, but you know what the real virus is? The real virus is Democrats. The real virus is totalitarian leftist thugs that have used this virus to browbeat the American people and have used it for political purposes.” -Robinson

Congress

▪ “The sexual perversion that goes on in Washington. I mean, being kind of a young guy in Washington where the average age is probably 60 or 70, and I look at all these people, a lot of them that I, you know, I’ve looked up to through my life, always paid attention to politics, guys that, you know, then all of a sudden you get invited to, hey, we’re going to have kind of a sexual get-together at one of our homes, you should come. And I’m like, what did you just ask me to come to? And then you realize they’re asking you to come to an orgy. Or the fact that you know, there’s some of the people who are leading on the movement to try and remove addiction in our country, and then you watch them do you know, a key bump of cocaine right in front of you. And it’s like, this is wild.” - Cawthorn

For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Under the Dome politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it at https://campsite.bio/underthedome or wherever you get your podcasts.

This story was originally published March 20, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "In their own words: Madison Cawthorn and Mark Robinson’s remarks draw backlash."

Danielle Battaglia

McClatchy DC

Danielle Battaglia is the D.C. correspondent for The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer, leading coverage of North Carolina’s congressional delegation and elections. She also covers the White House. Her career has spanned three North Carolina newsrooms where she has covered crime, courts and local, state and national politics. She has won two McClatchy President’s awards and numerous national and state awards for her work.