Josh Hawley celebrates the 4th by tweeting a bogus quote from Patrick Henry that 30 seconds of googling could have told him was both fake and from a white supremacist magazine, which is probably where he found it
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) marked the Fourth of July by tweeting theocratic propaganda through a fake quote incorrectly attributed to founding father Patrick Henry — and there’s a dark implication to why he did it, wrote MSNBC’s Steve Benen.
“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,” stated the quote Hawley posted. “For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.”
In reality, Henry never said that. This quote was falsely attributed to him in a 1956 article from The Virginian, an anti-Semitic and white nationalist magazine, and was later picked up by similarly racist publications like The American Mercury.
“On the surface, it’s obviously unfortunate to see a senator — a graduate of Stanford and Yale — make a mistake like this, especially as so many other Republicans also fall for fake quotes,” wrote Benen. “But let’s not brush past the underlying point the Missouri Republican was trying to make by way of a made-up line: Hawley seems certain that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, with members of one faith tradition — his own — enjoying exalted status over others.”
POS