Photo via the White House, Office of Senator Josh Hawley
January 27, 2021, 11:11 am
It seems that Senator Josh Hawley’s habit of defending violent groups of people who think the government should work for them and no one else started at a surprisingly young age.
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According to The Kansas City Star, Hawley had a regular column in his local paper, The Lexington News, in 1995 and used it to defend militia members after the infamous Oklahoma City bombings.
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In his column, he warned people not to think badly of militias or assume all members are domestic terrorists just because Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who killed 168 in the bombing, had ties to one in Michigan.
“Many of the people populating these movements are not radical, right-wing, pro-assault weapons freaks as they were originally stereotyped,” he wrote.
In addition to urging people not to stereotype people who now love to brag about openly carrying assault weapons in public spaces, he encouraged readers to sympathize with their plight.
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“Dismissed by the media and treated with disdain by their elected leaders, these citizens come together and form groups that often draw more media fire as anti-government hate gatherings,” Hawley said. “Feeling alienated from their government and the rest of society, they often become disenchanted and slip into talks of ‘conspiracy theories’ about how the federal government is out to get them.”
That sounds a lot like how many marginalized groups are treated in the U.S., but they don’t tend to bomb government buildings and kill 168 people or even storm the Capitol.
Hawley, of course, was the senator who was photographed giving the raised fist to those who were in the process of storming the Capitol on January 6. This photo, as well as his unwavering support for Donald Trump as he tried every possible avenue to overturning the 2020 election, may have derailed a once promising right-wing political career.
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Undeterred, Hawley is now aggressively pushing his new book, picked up by a conservative publisher after the original company dropped it, in which he claims in his published book that he and other far-right figures are being censored. It’s only a matter of time before he calls the news of his old column the work of “cancel culture.”
Regardless, many people seem unlikely to forget about this.
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Oklahoman here. We won’t let him forget.
— MissDebbie(@
)
(@WaylandDebbie) January 26, 2021
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*First Published: January 27, 2021, 11:11 am
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