Josh Hawley: 1995 vs. 2021

I want you to read this statement from Senator Josh Hawley and just take a guess where it is from — or at least what context he’s writing it in:

In this politically correct society, derogatory labels such as ‘racist’ are widely misused, and our ability to have open debate is eroding.

The most likely candidate for where it’s from would likely be his 1/24/2021 New York Post article “It’s Time To Stand Up Against The Muzzling Of America.” Actually, it’s a 1995 article from The Lexington News, which gave the then-fifteen-year-old Hawley a column in his local newspaper. The topic in question is not freedom of speech, but standing up for Lost Angels Police Detective Mark Fuhrman (keep speaking truth to power Josh) known for making various racist remarks.

The Fuhrman Tapes, the recordings of thirteen hours worth of interviews given by Fuhrman from 1985 until 1994 which brought his racism to life during the OJ Simpson trial, contained some pretty dead giveaways that Hawley might have missed. The racial slur “nigger” is used by Fuhrman forty times (or roughly once every twenty minutes) during these tapes — examples include:

That we’ve got females …and dumb niggers, and all your Mexicans that can’t even write the name of the car they drive.

If I’m wrestling around with some nigger, and he gets me in my back, and he gets his hands on my gun. It’s over.

People there don’t want niggers in their town. People there don’t want Mexicans in their town. They don’t want anybody but good people in their town, and anyway you can do to get them out of there that’s fine with them. We have no niggers where I grew up.

We stopped the choke because a bunch of Niggers have a bunch of these organizations in the south end, and because all Niggers are choked out and killed — twelve in ten years. Really is extraordinary, isn’t it?

There is going to be a massacre in the future in [sic] they know that. There is the Rolling 60’s, nigger group they went into a sporting good store and stole 50 Uzis, 3,000 rounds.

I used to go to work and practice movements. Niggers. They’re easy. I used to practice my kicks.

He grew up in school with all blacks, and every time a nigger looked at him, he’d jump them cause he figured they were going to jump on him, so he might as well start the fight right now and get it over with.

And of course:

Commander Hickman, was a dickhead. He should be shot. He did that for one thing. He wants to be chief, so he wants the city council, and the police commissioner, and all these niggers in L.A. City government and all of ’em should be lined up against a wall and fuckin’ shot.

Now, the debate regarding what things are technically allowed under the concept of free speech but also hamper the debate a society with free speech is supposed to create is a complicated one that I will not get into here. I will say that, like Hawley, I do tend to air on the side of absolute freedom of speech whenever possible. However, while Fuhrman does have the free speech to say that “the city council, and the police commissioner, and these niggers in L.A. City government . . . should be lined up against a wall and fuckin’ shot” I would not say it’s encouraging the “free debate” Hawley warns is eroding.

Now compare that to what Hawley writes a quarter century later in The New York Post:

For those who still believe in free speech and the First Amendment, this is the time to take a stand.

The main difference between then and now is Hawley’s martyr is no longer a detective who wants “niggers” to “be lined up against a wall and fuckin’ shot” but himself:

They tried to reprimand me this month because I didn’t [conform]. On behalf of the voters of my state, I raised a challenge to the presidential electors from Pennsylvania after that state conducted the election in violation of the state constitution. Maybe you agree with me. Maybe you don’t. But whatever your view, corporate America’s rush to cancel those it dislikes should trouble you.

Hawley’s second column reads like a man angerly ranting about criticism, and that might cause some to write it off as a pity piece and move on. However, the agenda underneath what Hawley is saying is surely something that must be looked at in further detail.

I have commonly pointed out just how hard it is to get a consistent definition of “cancel culture.” If a man is expelled from a university for being accused of rape, that’s cancel culture, if a man is shot in the back seven times for being accused of rape, then that’s justice.

But here’s the question nobody seems willing to answer: How do effectively end “cancel culture” without engaging in the same “cancelling” of its supporters that you rail against? As I keep pointing out, it seems rather odd how anyone who doesn’t accept the mainstream narrative on “the new McCarthyism” is considered a communist. Seriously, that’s what Josh Hawley wrote in The New York Post:

Everyone knows what a credit score is. But social credit scores are new. They’re the latest corporate import from Communist China, where government and big business monitor every citizen’s social views and statements.

I don’t think Hawley knows what McCarthyism was.

Hawley has picked fights non-stop since he first got into office. He went after Walmart because one employee called him a sore loser, and he went after the NBA for not engaging in his anti-China propaganda. (Once again, remember, it is the man calling all enemies communists who is the victim of the new McCarthyism.) These are not “cancel culture,” because — well because Josh Hawley is seen as the small man and his enemies are considered big. Just as no transphobe is ever accused of “trying to cancel trans people,” because “the trans agenda” is seen as having the power in the country.

Of course, just as Hawley tried to convince his readers a quarter century ago that an LAPD detective was powerless to the forces of “political correctness”, Hawley now warns that a sitting Senator is being silenced by “cancel culture.” Both of these ideas are the same, attempts to convince you that the big bad liberals are going to burst down your door and arrest you for using a naughty word. Never once is it mentioned that it is the politically incorrect or those who have been cancelled that always seem to have a disproportionate amount of power.

Those reading Hawley’s old words with surprise simply do not know who Josh Hawley is. Josh Hawley has been doing this game since he first entered the Senate, although even I did not expect for it to date back as far as it does.