Josh Hawley has become the poster boy for blurring fact and fiction in the era of Donald Trump: the Republican senator from Missouri will forever be remembered as having raised a manly fist in solidarity with January 6 protesters at the US Capitol then, hours later, having been caught on security camera fleeing the rioting mob he helped to incite.
But even for a public figure known for his use of trolling imagery to foment culture wars, Hawley’s current record is impressive. His local Missouri newspaper, the Kansas City Star, has had to call him out twice in almost as many weeks for his egregious distortion of the facts.
Earlier this week, Hawley reframed Independence Day on Twitter as a great Christian event, quoting the founding father Patrick “Give me liberty, or give me death!” Henry as saying that America was founded “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.”
Nice quote. But as the editorial board wearily pointed out in its second Hawley column, “the quote is false. Made up.”
It actually came from a piece about Henry published in 1956 by a white nationalist magazine, the Virginian. The magazine used the founding father as a vehicle with which to promote its vision of the US as a Christian nation.
Such a slew of sloppy history from a history graduate got the Star’s editorial writers thinking. What is it with the rabble-rousing senator and fake history?
“The problem, we suspect,” they wrote, “is that in both cases Hawley was less interested in truly celebrating freedom and instead wanted to make a spectacle of himself with right-wing tweets. Hawley won’t change. But the least he could do is get his facts straight.”
This was the editorial board’s second time addressing the subject of Hawley’s loose relationship with historic truth.
The first incident came on Juneteenth, the federal holiday commemorating the emancipation of all enslaved people in the US. Hawley marked the day by commenting online that “Christianity is the faith and America is the place slavery came to die”.
Wrong, thundered the Star’s editorial board. Noting that Hawley has opposed the movement to rename US military bases named after Confederate leaders, it said that “slavery flourished here for more than two centuries. It is no exaggeration to say that America’s economic might was built on a foundation of enslaved labor.”
That the Star had to give Hawley an elementary lesson in US history is in itself surprising given that the senator was a history major at the elite Stanford University. “The senator wasn’t just factually wrong, he was offensive,” the board concluded.
