Home State Paper Roasts Hawley For Lying Tweets

From the Kansas City Star editorial board:

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. 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. The kicker? As historian Seth Cotlar of Willamette University pointed out, The Virginian was “virulently antisemitic (and) white nationalist magazine.”

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. 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.

Read the full editorial.

“It’s so easy to be normal and nice. Hawley picked a different path.”

Read more at: https://t.co/8KexZDy62z https://t.co/BWIzYyY7NK

— Katherine Stewart (@kathsstewart) July 5, 2023