Over the weekend Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) clapped back at North Carolina Republican congressional candidate Madison Cawthorn after he made racially tinged comments and accused the Black senator of attempting “to ruin white males.”
According to NBC News, Cawthorn, who is seen as a rising star in the GOP, recently launched a campaign attack website accusing one of his critics of going “to work for non-white males, like Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males running for office.”
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“It just really personally saddens me that somebody who is so clearly racist is a nominee of a major party, and I think it’s a disrespect of the entire community,” Booker told HuffPost in an interview Sunday. “It’s really unfortunate.”
Earlier that week, Cawthorn’s campaign put up a website lashing his Democratic opponent, Moe Davis. The campaign alleged that a Pulitzer Prize-winning local journalist, Tom Fiedler, worked with Davis allies.
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Cawthorn, 25, is a white GOP candidate whom President Donald Trump and national Republicans have applauded and who spoke at the Republican National Convention in August. His comments were made against Fiedler, a political journalist and university dean who now works for a local news organization in North Carolina. Cawthorn argued Fiedler “advocates” for Davis, the Democratic candidate in North Carolina’s 11th congressional district.
“The syntax of our language was unclear and unfairly implied I was criticizing (New Jersey senator) Cory Booker,” he said in a statement on Twitter following backlash. “My intended meaning was, and is, to condemn left-wing identity politics that is dangerous and divisive. I have condemned racism and identity politics throughout my campaign.”
But Booker said he took the attack from Cawthorn’s campaign personally because he spent time in the district when he was younger.
“My dad worked in that district. My dad is from Hendersonville, North Carolina, and I know the grace and goodness of that district,” he explained.
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