Senator Josh Hawley Is Still Pretending To Be The Victim
Disgraced Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) wrote an opinion piece in the New York Post accusing the left of censorship.
The left apparently has damaged Sen. Josh Hawley’s social credit, but he’s not going to go down without a fight.
In recent years, cancel culture was a buzzword being thrown around in all facets of life i.e. business, politics, music, comedy, and social media.
The social context Hawley hints at in his article is bizarrely comparable to the very real social credit system of China which affects individuals and businesses.
Of course it might be hyperbole, but cancel culture throughout the years has been complicated and not just one-sided as Conservatives would lead people to believe. While it did destroy careers for some — it has presented hurdles for others.
For example, Aziz Ansari was “cancelled” after a tale of sexual abuse which originally appeared on Babe, but the more the story went on — the more it sounded like an awkward date between two people who’d just been told what sex was. Conservative outlets weren't too bent out of shape over the allegations. And Ansari went on with his tour where he reflected on it strictly from his POV; and Master Of None could possibly return for a season 3.
Compare that to conservatives collectively losing their minds and deciding that, because the Dixie Chicks disagreed with the “War on Terror”, they weren’t going to get any air time. They were blackballed for over a decade.
Why Sen. Hawley changed his tune and the real fake news
Last year, U.S. Rep. Scott Perry joined a “Stop the Steal” rally in Harrisburg. Later, he appeared on Fox Business Network to blast Pennsylvania’s election, calling it a “horrific embarrassment” referring to votes counted post-election, illegitimate votes. He also references the possibility that “100,000 votes” for Joe Biden mysteriously showing up which alludes to yet another conspiracy that Republicans couldn’t be present in the room where votes were being counted. That turned out to be false, and that same allegation even had to be deleted from Trump’s lawsuit (which didn’t stop Rudy Giuliani from asserting the false claim again, admitting it was removed from the allegations, and amending it to present it again.)
Instead of citing their concerns for administrative procedures, eight Congressmen in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania said they wanted to ensure the integrity of Pennsylvania’s vote which was a far cry from the widespread voter fraud.
Senator Josh Hawley was along for that joyride until he most likely realized he’d have have to answer to contributing to the baseless claims of election fraud. He conveniently went on record to suggest that he too didn’t have an objection President Joe Biden’s win over Donald Trump right up to the insurrection at the Capitol. He told the New York Post,
“I think there’s no votes for that, I mean, at all,” Hawley said of potentially overturning Biden’s win.
But if Sen. Hawley wanted to run with legitimate concerns to fulfill his duties to his constituents; it certainly wasn’t a good idea for him to run that argument parallel to Trump’s assertion that the elections were rigged and being stolen which resulted in the “Stop The Steal” campaign and consequently, the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Sen. Hawley did not make it crystal-clear that his inveighing wasn’t pro-overturning the election results.
Hawley also made it clear he believed Facebook and Twitter were responsible for interfering with the elections in favor of Joe Biden. But there were never any investigations launched into the profiles and information being presented on Twitter and Facebook. He rehashes this again in his opinion piece.
It’s speculative and Sen. Hawley could’ve tapped a third-party to conduct a study by compiling data consisting of algorithms, posts, user engagement, user and group activity, violation reports, whether user profiles are authentic, and plenty of other variables to make a case against Facebook and Twitter.
But he never did.
Incidentally, researchers at Northeastern University in Boston did and discovered,
Eighty percent of all content from suspect sources was shared by less than 1 percent of the human tweeters sampled in their study. Those users were disproportionately politically conservative, older and more highly engaged with political news.
You can read the results of the study here, because there are caveats and it’s easy to misrepresent a study. But the point is that: Sen. Hawley merely publicly suggested these falsehoods. And he had a large enough platform to make it clear that he wasn’t going to attempt to overturn the election results unlike his colleagues.
Censorship
Sen. Josh Hawley makes use of the word censorship. And that word has lost all of its meaning including “Orwellian” which the senator also used.
Censorship and cancel culture go together like peanut butter and jelly. He calls it the muzzling of America and goes as far to defend Karen's on the internet who “gets followed home on a livestream and shamed into crying for mercy as her license plate is broadcast to an online hoard eager to hound her out of a job”.
But Josh Hawley has proven to be the kind of person to conjure up things that never happened, look away from the entitled and privleged individual who he admits was driving recklessly; and he’d turn his neck 180 degrees if it meant he didn’t have to witness the person hurling the ’n’ word and trying to run the person off the road.
Hawley targeted the woke mob after a publishing house dropped his book deal and other businesses planned to stop donating to him.
But these were the results of his actions and side-stepping responsibility for the events leading up to the insurrection. He’s throwing stones and hiding his hands behind his back.
He’s on the New York Post and still on Twitter, one of the tech giants he lambasted, crying that he’s being muzzled and censored. He’s not. People simply don’t like his actions, words, and behavior. He’s can’t handle being reprimanded the same way Karen’s of the world can’t handle the blowback.
There are instances of the mob mentality taking it too far and public opinions forming before the facts are known. But this is not one of those times.
He throws Amazon into the mix — accusing them and other liberal organizations of censoring him.
But apps such as Parler ran into the same problem that’s plagued YouTube during its first few years: content moderation is extremely difficult with millions of users uploading posts every second; and it exemplifies why free speech shouldn’t and can’t be a free-for-all on YouTube, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
