Cawthorn singled out the likes of Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Green, Matt Gaetz and Donald Trump as “America First Patriots” who “had my back” after “the Uni-party coalesced to defeat an America First member.”
I am on a mission now to expose those who say and promise one thing yet legislate and work towards another, self-profiteering, globalist goal. The time for genteel politics as usual has come to an end. It’s time for the rise of the new right, it’s time for Dark MAGA to truly take command. We have an enemy to defeat, but we will never be able to defeat them until we defeat the cowardly and weak members of our own party. Their days are numbered. We are coming.
I’ll go out on a limb and wager that Cawthorn's goal is more about soothing his wounded ego than accomplishing any policy. But Dark MAGA is a real part of the extremist right which, believe it or not, thinks Trump and Trumpism has been too kind and gentle.
From the Institute for Strategic Dialogue:
The basic narrative of Dark MAGA, elaborated and dissected best in a GNET article by Hampton Stall and Daniel Grober, is that Trump should return in 2024, but that his first presidency was too ‘soft’. He gave too much leeway to his enemies, and this time needs to harden his heart and “embrace the villain role”. More violence is needed, exemplified by supercut videos of every time Trump said ‘death penalty’ in his speeches.
Dark MAGA, though, is not a good faith, grassroots movement. It is an attempt by a fractured right-wing extremist movement to reunite various factions in a way that the ‘alt-right’ had some success in doing until the disastrous (and murderous) Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
…The goal of those promoting Dark MAGA is partly to unify the disparate alt-right under a new banner, and partly to launder much more sinister and extreme narratives and iconography into the MAGA movement, thus introducing more mainstream conservatives to the ideas, imagery and people who populate white nationalist and accelerationist movements. As Stall and Grober put it, “Neo-Nazi iconography sits squarely next to red MAGA hats and Odinistic depictions of Donald Trump.”
