Josh Hawley, terrorist sympathizer since the Oklahoma City bombing

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Tuesday marks the 27th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, the violent attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that killed 168 people and injured 680 others. The domestic terror attack was carried about by two white supremacist, anti-government, right-wing extremists in the Michigan Militia.

As the nation reeled in horror at the specter of homegrown and deadly political terrorism, one teenager in Missouri decided to step up to defend the terrorists: 15-year-old Josh Hawley, who would go on to become a U.S. senator who is using his vaunted position to achieve the aims of those terrorists from the inside. Hawley wanted to explain the terrorists, and to defend the mindset of the militia movement that led the two men, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, to murder.

“Many of the people populating these movements are not radical, right-wing, pro-assault weapons freaks as they were originally stereotyped,” Hawley wrote. “Dismissed by the media and treated with disdain by their elected leaders, these citizens come together and form groups that often draw more media fire as anti-government hate gatherings.”

He described these militia members as “Feeling alienated from their government and the rest of society.” That alienation, he said, leads them to “become disenchanted and slip into talks of ‘conspiracy theories’ about how the federal government is out to get them.” And by the way, he continued, the Los Angeles police detective whose racism was exposed during the OJ Simpson trial, Mark Fuhrman, should be called a racist. “In this politically correct society, derogatory labels such as ‘racist’ are widely misused, and our ability to have open debate is eroding,” he wrote.

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Seems like 15-year-old Josh Hawley has a lot in common with Sen. Josh Hawley, the man who raised his fist in solidarity with the terrorists who swarmed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, leading to the deaths of five people.

That same day, Jan. 6, Hawley went on to vote to throw out Pennsylvania’s election results. He was one of the eight Republican senators attempting to subvert the voters and the Constitution. Seven Democratic senators called for an ethics probe of both Hawley and Sen. Ted Cruz over their apparent enthusiasm for the insurrection.

Hawley responded to that with yet another column, this one claiming he was the victim of cancel culture for what he called “representing the views of my constituents and leading a democratic debate on the floor of the Senate.” He insisted he was defending the “basic principles that join all Americans together—the right to speak freely, to debate openly, and to address our differences graciously without fear of being silenced or punished for dissenting views.”

A little over a year later, the same Hawley who seemed to imply that the violent attack on the Capitol was somehow addressing differences “graciously” is still pandering to the extreme conspiracy theorists. Hawley twisted Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s experience as a judge and member of the Sentencing Commission to imply that she was somehow a protector of pedophiles, that she was somehow complicit in the sexual abuse of children.

That’s another conspiracy theory that nearly resulted in mass bloodshed when a North Carolina man shot up Comet Ping Pong restaurant in northwest Washington in December 2016 because he was convinced that the restaurant was a hub of child sex slavery. Edgar Maddison Welch is one of those “alienated from society” people Hawley empathized with as a teen. He, by some miracle, didn’t harm anyone when he fired three shots inside the restaurant, surrendering after he found no evidence that children were being held at or trafficked from the pizzeria. He was sentenced to 36 months of probation by Jackson, the same judge Hawley has tried to smear. Coincidence?

It’s all enough to make you wonder how many white hoods Josh Hawley keeps hidden way in his closet.