Maybe it’s time for Josh Hawley to get out of the history business.
Missouri’s senior senator on Tuesday decided to celebrate July 4 with another bit of online trolling. He took to Twitter to celebrate that great American patriot Patrick Henry. His tweet took the form of a quote.
Hawley wrote: “Patrick Henry: ‘It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.’”
The problem? Henry never said that. The quote is false. Made up.
Instead — as Hawley’s readers pointed out in a fact-checking Community Note appended to his tweet — the line is from a 1956 piece in a magazine, The Virginian, that was about Patrick Henry. Not by him. It appeared in another magazine, The American Mercury, as a Henry quote later that year and apparently took off from there.
The kicker? As historian Seth Cotlar of Willamette University pointed out, The Virginian was “virulently antisemitic (and) white nationalist magazine.” The American Mercury, for that matter, was also an “antisemitic rag.”
That ugly provenance comes through in the piece that originated Hawley’s quote. “There is an insidious campaign of false propaganda being waged today,” the magazine complained, “to the effect that our country is not a Christian country but a religious one — that it was not founded on Christianity but on freedom of religion.”
“I’d like to put a plug in for this thing called “Google,” Cotlar pointed out. “If you type in a quote from a Founding Father you’re thinking of tweeting out, in a matter of seconds you can quite easily discover if it’s for real or not.”
Good advice for us all.
Anybody can be fooled by a false quote online, though. But we’re noticing a pattern. It’s only been a couple of weeks since Hawley decided to celebrate Juneteenth with a distorted history of slavery. “Today is a good day to remember: Christianity is the faith and America is the place slavery came to die,” Hawley wrote on Twitter.
We’ve already written about why that statement was so wrongheaded. And we find it remarkable that Hawley, an honors history major at Stanford University, keeps getting this wrong. It’s sloppy work by the senator.
The problem, we suspect, is that in both cases Hawley was less interested in truly celebrating freedom — the ostensible reason we celebrate Juneteenth and Independence Day in the first case — and instead wanted to make a spectacle of himself with right-wing tweets he knew would attract attention. He was peacocking.
Hawley isn’t the only rabble-rousing senator from this region, of course. But his colleagues managed to play it straight. “Happy Independence Day! Wishing everyone a safe 4th of July,” Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas wrote on Tuesday. Sen. Eric Schmitt, Hawley’s fellow Missourian posted a quote from the Declaration of Independence — we know that one is accurate at least — and concluded with “Happy Birthday America!”
It’s so easy to be normal and nice. Hawley picked a different path.
As we wrote after the Juneteenth debacle, Hawley chose to be mean-spirited and pugnacious instead of joyfully, humbly commemorating America’s declaration of independence: “The senator could have celebrated that accomplishment with millions of other Americans, including many of his own constituents. Instead, he had to make it about his thing — a chance to own the libs.”
Well, he did it again. And he’ll keep doing it. This is who Josh Hawley is: a politician who craves attention, even bad attention — perhaps especially bad attention — because maybe it will bring him the power he craves. Or at least more appearances on right-wing podcasts and media outlets.
Hawley won’t change. But the least he could do is get his facts straight.
