Josh Hawley is an idiot. Except that none of his base will care.
《Hawley wrote: “Patrick Henry: ‘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. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.’”
The problem? Henry never said that. The quote is false. Made up.
Instead — as Hawley’s readers pointed out in a fact-checking Community Note appended to his tweet — the line is from a 1956 piece in a magazine, The Virginian, that was about Patrick Henry. Not by him. It appeared in another magazine, The American Mercury, as a Henry quote later that year and apparently took off from there.
The kicker? As historian Seth Cotlar of Willamette University pointed out, The Virginian was “virulently antisemitic (and) white nationalist magazine.” The American Mercury, for that matter, was also an “antisemitic rag.”
That ugly provenance comes through in the piece that originated Hawley’s quote. “There is an insidious campaign of false propaganda being waged today,” the magazine complained, “to the effect that our country is not a Christian country but a religious one — that it was not founded on Christianity but on freedom of religion.”
“I’d like to put a plug in for this thing called “Google,” Cotlar pointed out. “If you type in a quote from a Founding Father you’re thinking of tweeting out, in a matter of seconds you can quite easily discover if it’s for real or not.”
Good advice for us all.》
https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/editorials/article277023863.html
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