Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) has filed a counter-complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee in response to an ethics complaint filed against him and Senator Ted Cruz over their refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election and thus their role in the U.S. Capitol insurrection.
Politico reports: “Hawley's counter-complaint comes after Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) — joined by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio.) — wrote to the Ethics committee last Thursday requesting an investigation of Hawley and Cruz (R-Texas), who led Republican efforts in the Senate to challenge President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory.”
Hawley also posted a screeching op-ed about “cancel culture” in the New York Post on Sunday night, writing, “The alliance of leftists and woke capitalists hopes to regulate the innermost thoughts of every American, from school age to retirement. And they've trained enforcers of the woke orthodoxy to monitor dissent or misbehavior. A ‘Karen' who cuts the wrong person off in traffic 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. Everyone knows it can happen to them, so everyone shuts down. The circle of trust narrows. Conversations — too easily recorded — shift to encrypted messaging apps. For now. Until those get banned too for interfering in efficient social credit markets.”
Hawley went after big tech which shut down Trump and Parler for incitement of violence and white supremacist organizing: “…if ever our political organizing were impeded by censorship — say, by the big tech giants — we could build our own platforms. But the left and the corporations are challenging all of this now. Your “conservative” social platform isn't worth much when Amazon can shut it down.”
Hawley's full screed is here.
In related news, the Kansas City Star reports that Hawley defended anti-government militias as a journalist in high school: “He used the early platform to opine on politics, culture and those he believed had been unfairly maligned by the media — among them anti-government militias and Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman. Hawley warned against depicting all militia members as domestic terrorists after the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people, including 19 children. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who carried out the attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, had ties to the Michigan Militia.”
Read the full story here.
