Photo via Senate Democrats/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0), Natureofthought/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
January 25, 2021, 1:59 pm
Senator Josh Hawley, who gained name recognition for giving a raised fist to Trump supporters in the process of assaulting the Capitol on January 6, is all the way on the “cancel culture” train and won’t shut up about how silenced he is. His latest highly-visible opinion on how he and people just like him are being “muzzled” by people not approving of insurrections against a democratic election process is an op-ed in the New York Post tabloid.
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Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who must be sick to death by now of having to say this, pointed out that being published in one of the most widely-distributed tabloids in the nation is hardly being muzzled.
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“You were given prime space to say this in a billionaire-run rag that specifically amplifies right-wing views, part of an entire subsidized industry of right-wing outlets,” she wrote. “You’re not ‘muzzled,’ Hawley. You’re just deeply unpopular, and aided insurrection.”
Hawley took office at the start of 2019 after getting boosts from Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, plus $10 million, in the 2018 election to defeat the incumbent Clair McCaskill. He hadn’t been in the news much since then, except for accusations that he misappropriated public funds for his campaign. He didn’t become a well-known name until he declared his intentions to object to the certification of the Electoral College votes on January 6.
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After the photo of him giving the raised fist salute—popularized by Black Civil Rights activists in the ’60s—to insurrectionists went viral, Hawley was quick to claim he was being “canceled” for inciting a violent mob that ended in the death of five people.
He and several other perpetually annoying Republicans have stuck by this line no matter how many times people point out that it’s rich to claim you’re being “silenced” when you get to speak on the Senate floor and have major national media outlets amplify your opinions.
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In his op-ed, Hawley tries to claim that the U.S. now has a “social credit score” just like the one actually implemented in China by the government. There is no such thing in the U.S., but Hawley seems to think that private businesses making decisions that protect their bottom line, something that Republicans often defend as their corporate right, is the same as China’s social credit score program.
“Taking that cue, a corporate publishing house then canceled a book it had asked me to write,” he wrote. “Ironically enough, the book is about political censorship by the most powerful corporations in America. (And will be published by an independent publishing house.) Now corporate America is canceling my political events, because two parties are apparently one too many for their taste.”
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It’s amazing to claim to have been censored because one company canceled a book while sneaking in the fact that it was swiftly picked up by a different company.
“Listening to them, you’d really think some Conservatives interpret the right to free speech as ‘I have the right to be liked, accepted, and popular no matter what I say, who I endanger, or how much I lie,'” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a follow-up tweet.
*First Published: January 25, 2021, 1:59 pm
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