You’re not a populist and you have no integrity
Josh Hawley (R-Yale/Stanford) is attacking WOKE capital because people have criticized him for such inoffensive views as “it’s good when Donald Trump urges state legislators to steal elections on his behalf and it’s good when followers of Donald Trump ransack the capitol to try to stop the ratification of election results”:
Hawley’s role will gain media scrutiny next week, when he introduces a plan to break up “giant woke corporations,” pegged to Major League Baseball’s withdrawal of the All-Star Game from Atlanta to protest Georgia’s new voting restrictions.
In explaining this, Hawley uncorked a vile rant on Fox News on Thursday night:
“What’s happening in Georgia is what they tried to do to those of us who stood up for election integrity [LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL–ed.] back in January. Anyone who has said that our elections need to be free, they need to be fair, we need to consider election reform, they try to cancel you.And now the woke corporations are trying to do the same thing to Georgia. And they’re going to try to do it to anybody, any state, any person who stands up for election integrity.When it comes to these corporations, they’ve gotten big, and powerful, because government has helped them, because government has subsidized them, because government has looked the other way. And it’s time to bust them up.”
These corporations, Hawley added, want to “tell you what to think.”
The smarmy, unctuous, phony piety animating this claim to stand for “election integrity” is really something. Hawley is referencing his lead role in the campaign to subvert President Biden’s electors in Congress.
Hawley has insisted he was merely “representing” constituents concerned about the 2020 election. In fact, he actually misled them with extraordinary cynicism, by sustaining the deception that the outcome was questionable and might be reversed.
After those lies inspired the violent assault on the Capitol, Hawley took scalding criticism, which he has now tossed into the Right-Wing Media Victimization Machine, magically converting it into an effort to “cancel” him.
Obviously, Hawley won’t do anything to actually threaten corporate interests, because he’s fanatically committed to upward wealth redistribution and deregulation, and he will also continue to favor disenfranchising voters and preemptively claiming that criticisms of his support for vote suppression and sedition are CANCEL CULTURE because right-wing economic views are massively unpopular. It’s a very old game and the only thing distinctive about Hawley is the unusually high level of greasy smarm.