It must stink to be hated by your hometown paper. Just ask Josh Hawley. The MAGA senator went to school in Kansas City, Missouri. Decades later, the local paper, The Kansas City Star, repeatedly pounced on him for his misdeeds. When he played a role in inciting the Jan. 6 riot, they slammed him in an op-ed. When footage emerged of him fleeing the Capital as it was overrun with Trump supporters, they did the same thing. And when he shared a fake Patrick Henry quote? You better believe they did it yet again.
On July 4, Hawley rang in the holiday by claiming the Founding Father once said this: “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.”
Henry never said that. Worse, the fake quote first appeared in a virulently anti-Semitic white nationalist magazine from 1956.
The mistake earned Hawley the expected social media mockery. And, as per Raw Story, it also netted him another torching from The Kansas City Star.
“The senator could have celebrated that accomplishment with millions of other Americans, including many of his own constituents,” wrote the paper’s editorial board. “Instead, he had to make it about his thing — a chance to own the libs.”
The board said 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.” They then accused him of “peacocking.”
The Star accused Hawley of being a politician who “craves attention” to the point that he’ll happily accept “bad attention,” too. Perhaps, they argued, Hawley thinks even “bad attention” will “bring him the power he craves.”
In the piece, the board also included one of Hawley’s online critics, historian Seth Cotlar of Willamette University, who informed him that Google is his friend.
“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,” Cotlar said.
If the writers at The Kansas City Star are correct, then Hawley must be thrilled that he’s once again been dragged by his hometown paper.
(Via Raw Story & Kansas City Star)
Source: https://uproxx.com/viral/josh-hawley-dragged-hometown-paper-fake-patrick-henry-quote/