This week, Madison Cawthorn, a Republican U.S. House candidate for North Carolina who recently spoke at the Republican National Convention, published a video to his supporters falsely claiming that Mexican cartels on the southern national border are kidnapping tens of thousands of U.S. kids and then selling them on “the sex slave market.”
“Tens of thousands of our children are going missing every year,” he continued, “and it’s because of cartels like MS-13 coming into our country and doing harm.”
The fact-checkers at The Asheville Citizen-Times called his claim a “discredited” and “debunked” one “promoted by the extremist conspiracy theory movement” known as QAnon. QAnon believers think that a Democrat-run “deep state” is trying to stop Republican President Donald Trump from exposing an international child sex trafficking ring.
Though Cawthorn visited the border wall at a July 30 event, the added, “Cawthorn did not provide the source of his information or respond to questions about why he went to the border wall some 1,500 miles from his district, who paid his expenses, or how he knew the organizers.”
According to The Gaily Grind, the Polaris Project, an anti-trafficking organization that operates the National Human Trafficking Hotline, said in a statement to AVL Watchdog, a website that tracks news in Asheville, it “has not seen a trend in reports that would suggest this is happening.”
The Polaris Project said that child trafficking victims usually know their traffickers as “a family member, family friend, or other relationship with the child” and that kids sold into sex slavery are sometimes runaways that become “easy prey for traffickers promising safety and shelter.”
Indeed, if tens of thousands of U.S. kids were being kidnapped from the U.S. border and sold into sex slavery, the media or President Trump might have mentioned it.
In the past, Cawthorn has lied about being accepted into the U.S. Naval Academy before a car crash left him in a wheelchair—the academy actually rejected him before his accident. He also deleted an Instagram post referring to Adolph Hitler as “the führer” (“leader” in German) and calling his visit to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest home in the Alps, a “bucket list” destination.