Tag: Sen. Hawley

Josh Hawley hits a new low for hypocrisy

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If they decide to make flip-flopping an Olympic sport, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley needs to hop on the next plane to Tokyo.

Hawley just attacked President Joe Biden for attacking Facebook. Yes, this excruciatingly annoying preppy man who has staked his repulsive young political career upon crusading against social media — through the use of social media — has decided it’s not cool for Biden to get in Facebook’s face. Really.

In the past week — publicly and without apology — the Biden administration has pressed Facebook (among other social media) to stop facilitating the spread of misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. On Friday, Biden claimed Facebook was “killing people.” The company fired back with a dismissive response telling Biden “to move past the finger-pointing.” Continue reading.

‘Inherently un-American mindset’: Sen. Josh Hawley’s home state paper has a dire warning about the GOP’s path

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In honor of Independence Day, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial board, known for its deep criticism of its own Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), published a piece warning the Republican Party about the dangers of its path. 

While many people have different perspectives on the true meaning of patriotism and independence, the publication aimed to stress the importance of preserving the nation’s “fundamental principles”; the same principles Republicans are eroding with their partisan policies.

“For all their faults (particularly on matters of race), America’s founders were able to look past the authoritarian systems of monarchy and empire in their time, and envision a form of government in which the people ruled themselves, via their elected representatives. Inherent in that radical idea was the expectation that citizens whose preferred candidates failed to win elections would accept the judgment of the constitutional process. Democracy may well be, as Winston Churchill put it, the worst form of government except for all the others, but it is the only legitimate form of government, warts and all.” Continue reading.

Grievance, rebellion and burnt bridges: Tracing Josh Hawley’s path to the insurrection

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From his teenage writings to his incendiary support for false 2020 election claims, the Missouri senator is staking out a place in today’s far-right Republican Party

LEXINGTON, Mo. — Joshua Hawley was 13 years old, living comfortably as the son of a bank president, when his parents gave him a book about political conservatism for Christmas.

Hawley became enamored with the ideology. He began writing columns for the local newspaper that seethed with resentment against the political power structure. Even domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of a federal building, killing 168 people, sparked him to speak up for groups that express anger toward the government.

“Many of the people who populate these movements are not radical right-wing pro-assault weapons freaks as they were stereotyped in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing,” he wrote.

‘We’re Hosting You’: WaPo Reporter Knocks Down Hawley Whining About Being Silenced During Interview

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“Don’t try to censor, cancel, and silence me here!” Hawley loudly complained during a Washington Post live stream promoting his latest book.

Josh Hawley is a United States senator, published author, and frequent guest on Fox News, the most-watched U.S. cable-news network. Despite this, he has complained for months now that he is one of the biggest victims of so-called “cancel culture” and has been “silenced” by the “woke” mob.

And, of course, most of the time he has delivered these complaints on large public platforms with large audiences, something one reporter threw back in his face on Tuesday after he accused her of trying to “censor” and “cancel” him during a chat.

The Missouri senator was invited onto The Washington Post’s live stream on Tuesday to discuss his latest book, The Tyranny of Big Tech. (The Republican lawmaker had already been mocked recently for urging his supporters to buy the anti-“Big Tech” book on Amazon via promotions on Twitter.) Continue reading.

Josh Hawley brutally mocked for railing against big tech while using big tech to promote his book

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Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, one of the most stridently Trumpified Republicans in the U.S. Senate, has been railing nonstop against corporate America — especially big tech — for, as he sees it, promoting “woke” liberalism. And his new book, due out on May 4, is even titled “The Tyranny of Big Tech.” But the far-right Republican is being mocked and ridiculed unmercifully for using big tech to slam big tech.

HuffPost reporter Ed Mazza explains, “Hawley, one of the ringleaders of the January 6 attempt in Congress to overturn the election results based on lies and conspiracy theories, complained on Tuesday about a vague conspiracy against his anti-tech book by ‘corporate media and the woke mob.’ Just one problem: He made that gripe on Twitter — via an iPhone — with a link promoting the book on Amazon.com.”

In early January, Hawley announced that he would contest the results of the 2020 presidential election. And before Congress met to certify those results on January 6, Hawley infamously raised his arm in solidarity with a mob of Trump supporters gathered outside the U.S. Capitol Building — which was violently attacked that day. Hawley’s critics, from liberals and progressives to Never Trump conservatives, denounced him as the face of insurrection. Continue reading.

Josh Hawley Loves To Accuse Others Of Doing What He Actually Did

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The Missouri Republican says it’s Democrats who use mobs and tell big lies and try to overturn elections. Weird!

A Democratic proposal to add seats to the Supreme Court is nothing more than an attempt to “overturn the results of past elections,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told HuffPost on Thursday.

That’s a weirdly provocative way to describe increasing the number of Supreme Court justices, but it’s just the latest example of Hawley, who helped former President Donald Trump try to overturn the results of the 2020 election, accusing someone else of doing something that Hawley himself actually did.

Trump used the same sort of rhetorical appropriation to twist the term “fake news” from a description of wholly made-up viral articles into a derisive catchall for any story that reflected poorly on him. Hawley seems to be trying to pull this trick with anything anyone says about him. Continue reading.

This columnist pulls the mask off far-right Sen. Josh Hawley as he tries to play the victim

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During a Thursday-night appearance on Fox News this week, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri railed against the “woke corporations” that have been speaking out against Georgia’s new voter suppression law. Georgia-based companies like Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola have been among the law’s outspoken opponents, and Major League Baseball has decided to move its 2021 All-Star Game from Georgia to Colorado because of the law — all of which infuriates Hawley. Liberal Washington Post opinion writer Greg Sargent is vehemently critical of Hawley’s comments in his Friday column, stressing that although the far-right Republican senator promotes himself as a populist, there is nothing populist about voter suppression.

On Fox News, the-far Hawley complained, “What’s happening in Georgia is what they tried to do to those of us who stood up for election integrity back in January. Anyone who has said that our elections need to be free, they need to be fair, we need to consider election reform — they try to cancel you. And now, the woke corporations are trying to do the same thing to Georgia. And they’re going to try to do it to anybody, any state, any person who stands up for election integrity.”

Hawley was trying to paint himself as a victim. But as Sargent points out, the far-right Missouri senator was being very anti-democracy when he refused to honor the results of the 2020 presidential election — and he is being just as anti-democracy now by supporting voter suppression in Georgia. Continue reading.

Josh Hawley’s CPAC speech burned to the ground by hometown paper in brutal editorial

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On Saturday, The Kansas City Star editorial board scorched Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) for his far-right speech at the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida — and in particular, his insinuation that historians, academics, and politicians who want to highlight the role of slavery and white supremacy in American history hate our country and culture.

“Part of pushing back against liberals, he told the crowd, ‘is reclaiming our history and saying it is good and we are proud to be Americans. We’re proud to have come to live in a country that started with nothing and became the greatest country on the face of the Earth. We’re proud to live in a country that liberated slaves,'” wrote the board. “Seriously? This is the very first thing for which we need to stand up and take a bow? Because it seems to some of us that no one should ever have tried to own other human beings to begin with.”

“We didn’t so much start with nothing as we stole what was here before we got here from Native Americans,” wrote the board. “And when we did end slavery, after a war in which the Confederacy — whose heroes Hawley defends — fought to preserve it, we were awfully late coming around. And then did everything possible, through Jim Crow laws, to keep things as inequitable as they had been. This doesn’t mean we hate America; it means we recognize reality, and see the need to learn from it.” Continue reading.

Josh Hawley isn’t on the ballot, but he’s still a factor in Missouri’s Senate race

Democrats are seeking to tie Hawley to GOP Sen. Roy Blunt

Missouri Democrat Scott Sifton’s video launching his Senate campaign opened with an image of his state’s Republican senator — but not the one who’s up for reelection next year. 

“When he raised his fist and betrayed our democracy, Josh Hawley showed us who he really is,” Sifton, a former state senator, says in the video as a widely shared image of Hawley greeting supporters of President Donald Trump outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 dissolves into scenes of rioters, fired up by Trump’s and Hawley’s false claims of election fraud, smashing their way into the building. 

The video then pivots to GOP Sen. Roy Blunt, who is up for a third term in 2022, with Sifton saying that Blunt “was too weak to stand up to his party’s lies, he showed us who he is too.” Continue reading.

By Blocking Biden’s DHS Nominee, Hawley Is Picking a Bigger Fight over Immigration

Alexander Mayorkas is eminently qualified to lead the rudderless department, but objections over policy have delayed his confirmation.

Of all the agencies and departments damaged during the Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security sustained perhaps the greatest and most prolonged assault. It has been nearly two years since the department had a Senate-confirmed secretary (Kirstjen Nielson), so it would stand to reason that senators would be anxious to confirm a nominee to bring order and legitimacy to that post. But already some Republicans are balking at confirming President Biden’s choice, Alejandro Mayorkas. Sen. Josh Hawley objected to bringing Mayorkas’ nomination to a quick vote, which required unanimous consent, and several Republican senators on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voiced concerns about Mayorkas during confirmation hearings this week.

This is an amazing turn of events given Mayorkas’ background: He’s been a federal prosecutor and deputy director of the Department as well as director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, having been previously confirmed by the Senate three times. He is also an immigrant, who knows from personal experience the privilege of citizenship. His parents fled communism in Cuba, bringing him to America as a child, where he learned first-hand the opportunity this country offers, in President Reagan’s words, “to anyone with the will and heart to get here.”

But Mayorkas the man is not the actual target of senators like Hawley, though they may try to tarnish him personally to achieve their objectives. Their opposition is to the Biden administration’s vision for a new era in immigration policy and enforcement. Even Sen. Hawley has admitted as much, saying, “Mr. Mayorkas has not adequately explained how he will enforce federal law and secure the southern border given President-elect Biden’s promise to roll back major enforcement and security measures.” Translation: After four years of the Trump administration’s cruelty, incompetence, and disregard for the equal protection of the law, the Biden administration’s plan is thoughtful, measured, and in line with the values for which this nation is known. And Hawley can’t stand it. Continue reading.