May 13, 2021
Mind Your Logical Fallacies
David Pakman - Jen Psaki takes a Newsmax "reporter" out for a little ride.
COVID-19 Update
World
USA
Vaccination Scorecard
America is finally winning its fight against the coronavirus
America’s battle against the coronavirus is going great.
The big picture:
By the numbers:
New Cases: 750,383 (⬆︎ .47%)
New Deaths: 13,880 (⬆︎ .42%)
USA
New Cases: 35,816 (⬆︎ .11%)
New Deaths: 841 (⬆︎ .14%)
Vaccination Scorecard
Total Vaccinations: 154 million (⬆︎ .39%)
Total Eligible Population: 55.0%
Total Population: 46.4%
We're continuing to get some rather mixed signals. Seems like the world out there is hot and dangerous, while things here in USAmerica Inc are simmering down pretty substantially, though there are some real trouble spots keeping the numbers up, and the medicos keep advising high caution.
Axios:
The big picture:
For the first time in a long time, nobody needs to cherry-pick some misleading data to make it seem like things are going well, and the good news doesn’t need an endless list of caveats, either. It’s just really good news. We’re winning. Be happy.
By the numbers:
- The U.S. averaged fewer than 40,000 new cases per day over the past week.
- That’s a 21% improvement over the week before, and the first time the daily average has dipped below 40,000 since September — eight months ago.
- New cases declined last week in 37 states. Not a single state moved in the wrong direction.
- The U.S. is finally winning its battle against COVID-19 thanks almost exclusively to one weapon: the vaccines.
- More than 107 million Americans have gotten both doses of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, and the vaccination drive in the U.S. has been underway for nearly six months. All of that real-world experience has confirmed that the vaccines are highly effective, and it has produced no new safety concerns.
- 99.7% of hospitalized coronavirus patients are unvaccinated, the Cleveland Clinic said this week — more real-world evidence that the vaccines prevent the type of serious infections that were killing over 3,000 Americans per day just a few months ago.
- Almost 60% of American adults have gotten at least one shot, and roughly 45% are fully vaccinated. The next step: vaxxing the 12- to 15-year-olds.
- Demand seems to be slowing, but continuing to get more shots into more arms is essential to cementing America’s progress — and the safe return to work, school, restaurants and travel that can come with it.
Today's Tweet
Certainly, an investigation is in order, right? The least they can do is analyze those Republicans to see if they had any bamboo fibers on them.
I think Liz Chaney should demand a recount and just claim she won and refuse to relinquish her post.
— Dawns Husband Resists ! 🔬🔭⚗️ (@DFreeman_59) May 13, 2021
The DumFux News Effect
Foxitis: an ideological infection of the brain.
And it's not at all surprising that the guys who love to bitch about liberals being "woke" are the ones yelling at everybody to wake up.
The Death Of Irony, Part ∞
May 12, 2021
Today's Tweet
If there's a god, then I'm already goin' to hell - so I went ahead and laughed - how much worse can an imaginary being make an imaginary place?
Anyway - what we do for love.
Getting the perfect engagement photo isn’t easy...wait for it. 😏😜😂 pic.twitter.com/wygCtxZd6y
— Fred Schultz (@fred035schultz) May 11, 2021
The Cheney Thang
Proving again that it seems the women are the only ones with balls these days.
Liz Cheney, last night - about 10 hours before the House GOP Conference voted her out of her leadership position:
(Another courageous Republican making a heart-felt declaration to an empty room - she at least has been a bit more consistent in her opposition. Not much, but more than most)
And then, from his safe space behind the microphone at CBS News, Jeff Flake jumps in pretending he actually has the balls to speak truth to power.
“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” — George Orwell
Near the beginning of the document that made us free, our Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”
There you have it. From the very beginning of America, our freedom has been predicated on truth. For without a principled fidelity to truth and to shared facts, our democracy will not last.
On Wednesday, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) will most likely lose her leadership post within the House Republican Conference, not because she has been untruthful. Rather, she will lose her position because she is refusing to play her assigned role in propagating the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Cheney is more dedicated to the long-term health of our constitutional system than she is to assuaging the former president’s shattered ego, and for her integrity she may well pay with her career.
No, this is not the plot of a movie set in an asylum. Ladies and gentlemen, this is your contemporary Republican Party, where today there is no greater offense than honesty.
It seems a good time to examine how we got to a place where such a large swath of the electorate (70 percent of Republican voters, according to polling) became willing to reject a truth that is so self-evident.
This allergy to self-evident truth didn’t happen all at once, of course. This frog has been boiling for some time now. The Trump period in American life has been a celebration of the unwise and the untrue. From the ugly tolerance of the pernicious falsehood about President Barack Obama’s place of birth to the bizarre and fanatical fable about the size of inauguration crowds, to the introduction of the term “alternative facts” into the American lexicon, the party’s steady embrace of dishonesty as a central premise has brought us to this low and dangerous place.
I don’t know what will happen to Cheney politically after Wednesday. For me, I knew that I couldn’t support Trump’s election or reelection after his seminal falsehood about Obama’s birth certificate, to say nothing of the cascade of untruths, from the trivial to the consequential, that followed daily. I had hoped that, over time, my Republican constituents would feel differently about the former president, or at least value a Republican who pushed back, and that I could stand for reelection in 2018 with a reasonable chance of surviving a Republican primary. It soon became apparent that Republican voters wanted someone who was all in with a president that I increasingly saw as a danger to the republic. That could not be me, so I spoke out instead and didn’t stand for reelection.
When I became an unwitting dissident in my party by speaking in defense of self-evident truths, I assumed that more and more of my colleagues would follow me. I remain astonished that so few did. Congresswoman Cheney, I know how alone you must be feeling. But just know that history keeps the score, not Kevin McCarthy or Elise Stefanik.
In January 2018, three years before the Capitol insurrection, I said the following on the Senate floor:
“Mr. President, let us be clear. The impulses underlying the dissemination of such untruths are not benign. They have the effect of eroding trust in our vital institutions and conditioning the public to no longer trust them. The destructive effect of this kind of behavior on our democracy cannot be overstated.”
Three years later, it’s clear that I didn’t know the half of it. The destructive effect of the president’s behavior — and the willingness of Republican elected officials to indulge, excuse, defend, justify and, in many cases, just roll with it — has taken a devastating toll.
It is elementary to have to say this, but we did not become a great nation by believing or espousing nonsense, or by embracing lunacy. And if my party continues down this path, we will not be fit to govern.
Cheney has proved her fitness, and today it seems that adherents to the “big lie” will cast her out. Hold your head high, congresswoman. Those of us who believe in American democracy and who live in objective reality are grateful that you have chosen to take a stand for truth — self-evident truth — regardless of the consequences.
Flake bailed on this mess, deciding not to stay and fight when his consultants showed him the numbers on his re-election chances for 2018.
And until his swan song parting remarks that he tries to ennoble by quoting his speech from the floor of The Senate (a speech he made to an empty room, btw), he kept his mouth shut, voting with McConnell and for everything Trump supported for way more than the last year of his tenure in the Senate.
Now he's hiding behind what's happening with Liz Cheney, seeing it as an opportunity to breathe life back into his justifiably moribund political career.
When you white-feather your ass out of harm's way, acting like you're just exercising a little discretion so you can live to fight another day - sorry not sorry, Jeffy - but you get no points here when you refuse to go down swingin' in a do-or-die fight.
Fuck that guy.
COVID-19 Update
World
USA
Vaccination Scorecard
They Haven’t Gotten a Covid Vaccine Yet. But They Aren’t ‘Hesitant’ Either.
Much has been said about people opposed to or skeptical of coronavirus vaccines. But there’s another group that has yet to get shots, and their reasons are more complex.
It had been weeks since Acy Grayson III, owner of Let It Shine, a home improvement outfit he runs out of his own home in the suburbs of Cleveland, had vowed to get a Covid vaccine.
Appointments were available.
But Mr. Grayson, who never knows how long a job will take or when a new one will come along, had found it hard to commit to a time and a place. The mass vaccination site where appointments weren’t required was off his beaten path. He didn’t know that a nearby church, Lee Road Baptist, had been dispensing vaccines on Fridays — but the truth is, even if he had, it is unlikely he would have made the short trek to get one there, either.
“I know you’re trying to find out the reason people aren’t doing it,” Mr. Grayson said on a recent afternoon. “I’m going to tell you. People are trying to take care of their household. You don’t have much time in the day.”
The slowdown in vaccinations across the country has often been attributed to a blend of misinformation and mistrust among Americans known as “vaccine hesitancy.” But Mr. Grayson belongs to an overlooked but sizable group whose reasons for remaining unvaccinated are not about opposition to the shots or even skepticism about them.
According to a new U.S. census estimate, some 30 million American adults who are open to getting a Covid vaccine have not yet managed to actually do so. Their ranks are larger than the hesitant — more than 28 million who said they would probably or definitely not get vaccinated, and than the 16 million who said they were unsure. And this month, as the Biden administration set a goal of 70 percent of adults getting at least one dose by July 4, they became an official new focus of the nation’s mass vaccination campaign.
In addition to “the doubters,” President Biden said at a press briefing last week, the mission is to get the vaccine to those who are “just not sure how to get to where they want to go.”
If the attention has centered on the vaccine hesitant, these are the vaccine amenable. In interviews, their stated reasons for not getting vaccines are disparate, complex and sometimes shifting.
They are, for the most part, America’s working class, contending with jobs and family obligations that make for scarce discretionary time. About half of them live in households with incomes of less than $50,000 a year; another 30 percent have annual household incomes between $50,000 and $100,000, according to an analysis of the census data by Justin Feldman, a social epidemiologist at Harvard. Eighty-one percent do not have a college degree. Some have health issues or disabilities or face language barriers that can make getting inoculated against Covid seem daunting. Others don’t have a regular doctor, and some are socially isolated.
Technically, they have access to the vaccine. Practically, it’s not that simple.
“Hesitancy makes a better story because you’ve got controversy,” said Tom Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “But there’s a bigger problem of access than there is of hesitancy.”
Socioeconomic disparities in vaccination stem partly from the scarcity of supply in the first phases of the vaccine rollout, when Americans lacking the time or ability to scour the internet for appointments lost out: Counties that rank high in a C.D.C. index of “social vulnerability” had lower vaccination rates on average by early April, a New York Times analysis shows. But over the last month, even as supplies have exceeded demand, that disparity has grown.
For some socially vulnerable counties — characterized by high poverty rates, crowded housing and poor access to transportation, among other factors — low vaccination rates correspond to a high proportion of residents who are reluctant to get vaccinated. The lowest overall vaccination rates are found in counties with both high hesitancy and high vulnerability, with the majority in the South and the Midwest.
But in plenty of disadvantaged places with low vaccination rates, hesitancy is not the full explanation.
In fact, among Americans who said they were willing to get the vaccine, the higher a person’s income, the more likely the person was to be vaccinated, according to Dr. Feldman’s analysis of the census data.
In that group, 93 percent of adults in households earning between $150,000 and $199,000 a year had been vaccinated as of April 30; while only 76 percent of those earning less than $25,000 a year had gotten at least one shot.
“It helps break this question down of attitude versus access,” Dr. Feldman said. “With people who have not been vaccinated, some are disinclined, but others are facing structural barriers.”
In the Bedford Heights neighborhood of Cleveland where Mr. Grayson and his fiancée, Renea Carnes, live, about 40 percent of adults have had at least one shot, according to an analysis of Ohio Department of Health data. Nationally, about 60 percent of adults have had one shot.
Neither Ms. Carnes’s mother or adult daughter, who live with the couple, have been vaccinated. Like some other Black Americans, family members said they had concerns about the safety of the vaccines when they first came out. But Mr. Grayson said he had come to believe that vaccination was safe after observing enough people getting a shot without incident. And Ms. Carnes, a hospice nurse, had her second shot last week. The issue for many in their circle, she said, was not hesitancy but opportunity.
“If there was someone standing here right now who was saying ‘I have the vaccine for Covid,’” Ms. Carnes said, “everyone in the house who doesn’t have it would be getting it right now.”
“What might help this situation,” added Mr. Grayson, “is if it was like Domino’s Pizza and you could call someone and say, ‘Can I get my shot?’ And they come give it to you.”
Vaccine haves and have-nots
If the nation’s public health system was ever to offer a pizza delivery-style vaccine service, now might be that moment. On Tuesday, Mr. Biden said Uber and Lyft, two of the country’s largest ride-sharing services, would provide free rides to vaccination sites from May 24 until July 4. Experts say that the collective risk posed by the highly infectious coronavirus has created a rare moment when public health resources are actually being aimed at communities that have long had higher rates of poor health.
A data analysis by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, for instance, suggests that vaccinating more residents of the Austin ZIP codes hardest-hit by Covid early on in the vaccine rollout would have prevented hospitalizations and deaths across the whole city. In Austin, as in many other areas, there was a large degree of overlap between ZIP codes with the highest social-vulnerability ranking and the highest incidence of Covid.
“Putting more resources into protecting high-risk populations can be life saving and beneficial to us all,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, the epidemic modeler who conducted the study with a postdoctoral fellow, Kaitlyn Johnson.
The Biden administration has allocated $6 billion to a network of health centers that serve low-income populations, created a task force on health equity, offered a tax break to businesses that give employees paid time off to be vaccinated, and earmarked $330 million to pay social service organizations in local communities to facilitate vaccinations.
But because of public health’s frayed infrastructure, experts said, it may take time to hire health workers, commandeer mobile vaccination units and forge connections with community groups to do needed outreach. Nor is it clear how enduring the effort to vaccinate willing-but-hard-to-reach populations will be.
State and local public health officials have argued that a one-time infusion of cash will not allow them to manage a vaccination campaign that will almost certainly require booster shots, or to address the underlying reasons that some residents remain unvaccinated.
If the country doesn’t reach high levels of vaccination, experts say, the virus is likely to continue circulating in pockets. That may mean a concentration of cases, hospitalizations and deaths in low-income, disproportionately nonwhite populations.
“My concern is that as we get close to 70 percent vaccinated nationally, we are seeing significantly lower vaccination rates for historically disenfranchised communities that are at higher risk,” said Dr. Luis Daniel Muñoz, a community organizer in Providence, R.I.
The existence of vaccine hesitancy, some community organizers say, can be used as an excuse for low vaccination rates. And the diffuse nature of America’s public health system has left some wondering who, if anyone, is accountable for ensuring equal protection from Covid.
“The president has said he wants this to happen, but who is the onus on to do it?” said Keisha Krumm, executive director of the Greater Cleveland Congregations, a coalition of faith communities that has held vaccine clinics at its member churches. “Who is it that, if we don’t get Cleveland to 80 percent vaccination, you’re fired?”
New vaccination site: the parking lot
Vaccine historians say there is no playbook for vaccinating so many adults with a day job — or, as in the case of Yesenia Guzman, 43, of Mexico, Mo., those who work a night shift.
Ms. Guzman, who works from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. at the same pig farm where her husband works the day shift, said they have both remained unvaccinated because they cannot afford to take time off work if they have side effects. They hope to schedule vaccines during the two days they usually get off after working two weeks straight, she said, “We just haven’t figured out when.”
Only about half of U.S. adults get the influenza vaccine which is distributed each year. And health officials who serve low-income populations said they have been forced to turn vaccine-willing patients away because of packaging that requires them to vaccinate six to 10 people at a time or risk wasting a dose.
“I’m going to see patients this afternoon for diabetes and tell them, ‘Hey, do you mind coming back Saturday for this vaccine clinic we’re running?’ and they’re not going to come,” said Dr. Chad Garvin, associate medical director of a community health center in Cleveland.
As public health departments close down mass vaccination clinics because of low turnout, they are seeking new ways to reach people. In Austin, a group of vaccinators that distributed fewer doses than expected at a school festival set up shop in a nearby El Rancho grocery parking lot to offer shots to shoppers. After the store manager learned what was happening, almost three dozen workers went out to be vaccinated.
“Everyone wanted to get vaccinated,” said Karim Nafal, the store’s owner, “but didn’t know how or where.”
And in Cleveland, the alliance between the church group, volunteer vaccinators and the city’s public health department led to Mr. Grayson getting a vaccine on a recent morning. Hired to do a paint job at the Lee Road church, he was told that vaccines were available down the hall if he wanted one.
“Come on,” Mr. Grayson urged two unvaccinated co-workers, who also offered up their arms. “It’s right here.”
New Cases: 716,369 (⬆︎ .45%)
New Deaths: 13,424 (⬆︎ .40%)
USA
New Cases: 34,904 (⬆︎ .10%)
New Deaths: 743 (⬆︎ .12%)
Vaccination Scorecard
Total Vaccinations: 153.4 million (⬆︎ .39%)
Total Eligible Population: 57.4%
Total Population: 46.3%
I get the point about disparities. What I don't get is why people seem unable to inconvenience themselves when they know there's a need to get this shit done, and they're asked to do just a little something for themselves and their families and their neighbors - on their own.
But here comes the Big Cop Out - the Great American Rationalization Festival - people doing the minimum (or less than that if they can), feeling safe in the assumption that others will do the work so they don't have to.
Wait til you get to the part about Vaccination Delivery - like Domino's.
At first blush, I'm gettin' really fuckin' sick of some of this libertarian shit, but digging deeper, there's plenty of room for indulgence too, as (eg) way too many people feel the need to be more worried about their jobs than about getting the vaccination thing done.
As usual, it's complicated.
Here's NYT, trying to make some sense of it:
They Haven’t Gotten a Covid Vaccine Yet. But They Aren’t ‘Hesitant’ Either.
Much has been said about people opposed to or skeptical of coronavirus vaccines. But there’s another group that has yet to get shots, and their reasons are more complex.
It had been weeks since Acy Grayson III, owner of Let It Shine, a home improvement outfit he runs out of his own home in the suburbs of Cleveland, had vowed to get a Covid vaccine.
Appointments were available.
But Mr. Grayson, who never knows how long a job will take or when a new one will come along, had found it hard to commit to a time and a place. The mass vaccination site where appointments weren’t required was off his beaten path. He didn’t know that a nearby church, Lee Road Baptist, had been dispensing vaccines on Fridays — but the truth is, even if he had, it is unlikely he would have made the short trek to get one there, either.
“I know you’re trying to find out the reason people aren’t doing it,” Mr. Grayson said on a recent afternoon. “I’m going to tell you. People are trying to take care of their household. You don’t have much time in the day.”
The slowdown in vaccinations across the country has often been attributed to a blend of misinformation and mistrust among Americans known as “vaccine hesitancy.” But Mr. Grayson belongs to an overlooked but sizable group whose reasons for remaining unvaccinated are not about opposition to the shots or even skepticism about them.
According to a new U.S. census estimate, some 30 million American adults who are open to getting a Covid vaccine have not yet managed to actually do so. Their ranks are larger than the hesitant — more than 28 million who said they would probably or definitely not get vaccinated, and than the 16 million who said they were unsure. And this month, as the Biden administration set a goal of 70 percent of adults getting at least one dose by July 4, they became an official new focus of the nation’s mass vaccination campaign.
In addition to “the doubters,” President Biden said at a press briefing last week, the mission is to get the vaccine to those who are “just not sure how to get to where they want to go.”
If the attention has centered on the vaccine hesitant, these are the vaccine amenable. In interviews, their stated reasons for not getting vaccines are disparate, complex and sometimes shifting.
They are, for the most part, America’s working class, contending with jobs and family obligations that make for scarce discretionary time. About half of them live in households with incomes of less than $50,000 a year; another 30 percent have annual household incomes between $50,000 and $100,000, according to an analysis of the census data by Justin Feldman, a social epidemiologist at Harvard. Eighty-one percent do not have a college degree. Some have health issues or disabilities or face language barriers that can make getting inoculated against Covid seem daunting. Others don’t have a regular doctor, and some are socially isolated.
Technically, they have access to the vaccine. Practically, it’s not that simple.
“Hesitancy makes a better story because you’ve got controversy,” said Tom Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “But there’s a bigger problem of access than there is of hesitancy.”
Socioeconomic disparities in vaccination stem partly from the scarcity of supply in the first phases of the vaccine rollout, when Americans lacking the time or ability to scour the internet for appointments lost out: Counties that rank high in a C.D.C. index of “social vulnerability” had lower vaccination rates on average by early April, a New York Times analysis shows. But over the last month, even as supplies have exceeded demand, that disparity has grown.
For some socially vulnerable counties — characterized by high poverty rates, crowded housing and poor access to transportation, among other factors — low vaccination rates correspond to a high proportion of residents who are reluctant to get vaccinated. The lowest overall vaccination rates are found in counties with both high hesitancy and high vulnerability, with the majority in the South and the Midwest.
But in plenty of disadvantaged places with low vaccination rates, hesitancy is not the full explanation.
In fact, among Americans who said they were willing to get the vaccine, the higher a person’s income, the more likely the person was to be vaccinated, according to Dr. Feldman’s analysis of the census data.
In that group, 93 percent of adults in households earning between $150,000 and $199,000 a year had been vaccinated as of April 30; while only 76 percent of those earning less than $25,000 a year had gotten at least one shot.
“It helps break this question down of attitude versus access,” Dr. Feldman said. “With people who have not been vaccinated, some are disinclined, but others are facing structural barriers.”
In the Bedford Heights neighborhood of Cleveland where Mr. Grayson and his fiancée, Renea Carnes, live, about 40 percent of adults have had at least one shot, according to an analysis of Ohio Department of Health data. Nationally, about 60 percent of adults have had one shot.
Neither Ms. Carnes’s mother or adult daughter, who live with the couple, have been vaccinated. Like some other Black Americans, family members said they had concerns about the safety of the vaccines when they first came out. But Mr. Grayson said he had come to believe that vaccination was safe after observing enough people getting a shot without incident. And Ms. Carnes, a hospice nurse, had her second shot last week. The issue for many in their circle, she said, was not hesitancy but opportunity.
“If there was someone standing here right now who was saying ‘I have the vaccine for Covid,’” Ms. Carnes said, “everyone in the house who doesn’t have it would be getting it right now.”
“What might help this situation,” added Mr. Grayson, “is if it was like Domino’s Pizza and you could call someone and say, ‘Can I get my shot?’ And they come give it to you.”
Vaccine haves and have-nots
If the nation’s public health system was ever to offer a pizza delivery-style vaccine service, now might be that moment. On Tuesday, Mr. Biden said Uber and Lyft, two of the country’s largest ride-sharing services, would provide free rides to vaccination sites from May 24 until July 4. Experts say that the collective risk posed by the highly infectious coronavirus has created a rare moment when public health resources are actually being aimed at communities that have long had higher rates of poor health.
A data analysis by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, for instance, suggests that vaccinating more residents of the Austin ZIP codes hardest-hit by Covid early on in the vaccine rollout would have prevented hospitalizations and deaths across the whole city. In Austin, as in many other areas, there was a large degree of overlap between ZIP codes with the highest social-vulnerability ranking and the highest incidence of Covid.
“Putting more resources into protecting high-risk populations can be life saving and beneficial to us all,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, the epidemic modeler who conducted the study with a postdoctoral fellow, Kaitlyn Johnson.
The Biden administration has allocated $6 billion to a network of health centers that serve low-income populations, created a task force on health equity, offered a tax break to businesses that give employees paid time off to be vaccinated, and earmarked $330 million to pay social service organizations in local communities to facilitate vaccinations.
But because of public health’s frayed infrastructure, experts said, it may take time to hire health workers, commandeer mobile vaccination units and forge connections with community groups to do needed outreach. Nor is it clear how enduring the effort to vaccinate willing-but-hard-to-reach populations will be.
State and local public health officials have argued that a one-time infusion of cash will not allow them to manage a vaccination campaign that will almost certainly require booster shots, or to address the underlying reasons that some residents remain unvaccinated.
If the country doesn’t reach high levels of vaccination, experts say, the virus is likely to continue circulating in pockets. That may mean a concentration of cases, hospitalizations and deaths in low-income, disproportionately nonwhite populations.
“My concern is that as we get close to 70 percent vaccinated nationally, we are seeing significantly lower vaccination rates for historically disenfranchised communities that are at higher risk,” said Dr. Luis Daniel Muñoz, a community organizer in Providence, R.I.
The existence of vaccine hesitancy, some community organizers say, can be used as an excuse for low vaccination rates. And the diffuse nature of America’s public health system has left some wondering who, if anyone, is accountable for ensuring equal protection from Covid.
“The president has said he wants this to happen, but who is the onus on to do it?” said Keisha Krumm, executive director of the Greater Cleveland Congregations, a coalition of faith communities that has held vaccine clinics at its member churches. “Who is it that, if we don’t get Cleveland to 80 percent vaccination, you’re fired?”
New vaccination site: the parking lot
Vaccine historians say there is no playbook for vaccinating so many adults with a day job — or, as in the case of Yesenia Guzman, 43, of Mexico, Mo., those who work a night shift.
Ms. Guzman, who works from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. at the same pig farm where her husband works the day shift, said they have both remained unvaccinated because they cannot afford to take time off work if they have side effects. They hope to schedule vaccines during the two days they usually get off after working two weeks straight, she said, “We just haven’t figured out when.”
“I’m going to see patients this afternoon for diabetes and tell them, ‘Hey, do you mind coming back Saturday for this vaccine clinic we’re running?’ and they’re not going to come,” said Dr. Chad Garvin, associate medical director of a community health center in Cleveland.
As public health departments close down mass vaccination clinics because of low turnout, they are seeking new ways to reach people. In Austin, a group of vaccinators that distributed fewer doses than expected at a school festival set up shop in a nearby El Rancho grocery parking lot to offer shots to shoppers. After the store manager learned what was happening, almost three dozen workers went out to be vaccinated.
“Everyone wanted to get vaccinated,” said Karim Nafal, the store’s owner, “but didn’t know how or where.”
And in Cleveland, the alliance between the church group, volunteer vaccinators and the city’s public health department led to Mr. Grayson getting a vaccine on a recent morning. Hired to do a paint job at the Lee Road church, he was told that vaccines were available down the hall if he wanted one.
“Come on,” Mr. Grayson urged two unvaccinated co-workers, who also offered up their arms. “It’s right here.”
May 11, 2021
Today's Radical Asshole
Josh Hawley presents as a perfect example of how it happens - how a young man (a child of high privilege) can become radicalized seemingly "overnight", superimposing his fantasies of victimhood on an existing ideology, and eventually doing great harm to the very institutions that were put in place to protect people like him from people like him.
But it's a scam. Hawley and his fellow plutocrats-in-waiting aren't populists - their loud protestations belie them in light of their positions of power and privilege.
Their claims of being victimized by "the powers that be" are designed to throw fog on the public discourse and keep the rubes het up over bullshit synthetic "issues" while guys like Josh Hawley grab and consolidate power.
They're the same phonies this world has had to deal with for 40,000 years.
WaPo: (pay wall)
Joshua Hawley was 13 years old, living comfortably as the son of a bank president, when his parents gave him a book about political conservatism for Christmas.
Hawley became enamored with the ideology. He began writing columns for the local newspaper that seethed with resentment against the political power structure. Even domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of a federal building, killing 168 people, sparked him to speak up for groups that express anger toward the government.
“Many of the people who populate these movements are not radical right-wing pro-assault weapons freaks as they were stereotyped in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing,” he wrote.
Twenty-six years later, those far-right rumblings reached a crescendo during another deadly attack on a federal building — this time with Hawley at the center of the action.
As a U.S. senator, Hawley had led the charge to object to the 2020 election on the false premise that some states failed to follow the law, bolstering the baseless claims from President Donald Trump that the election was stolen and should be overturned. Hawley had said the ascent of Joe Biden to the presidency “depends” on what would happen on Jan. 6, the day of a pro forma congressional vote to affirm the election. He had been photographed that day pumping his fist in the air as some Trump supporters were gathering on the grounds outside the U.S. Capitol.
Later, as rioters ransacked the building and several senators huddled in a secure room, fearing for their lives and trying to persuade their pro-Trump colleagues to withdraw their efforts to undermine democracy, Hawley remained combative in pushing the very falsehoods that had helped stoke the violence.
At 41, the freshman senator had become a face of a movement built on the lie that the 2020 election was fraudulent.
“You have caused this!” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) erupted at him, referring to the events building up to the storming of the Capitol, according to a person familiar with the exchange, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Over the course of his rapid rise in politics — from law school professor to state attorney general to his 2018 election to the Senate — Hawley has followed two parallel paths, each reflecting a different political persona.
On one, he has pursued elite privilege, even relative to other senators, commuting to a private high school, attending Stanford University and Yale Law School, clerking at the Supreme Court, and working for a powerful Washington law firm, all while courting liberal professors and establishment Republicans who enabled his ascent.
On the other, he has expressed sympathy with some of the country’s most far-right, anti-government extremists, demonstrating a willingness to see the world through their grievance-infused prism even after horrific attacks — from Oklahoma City in 1995, when he was 15, to the Capitol attack in 2021.
In the wake of Jan. 6, Hawley has made clear that he is committed to just one of those personas. It is the one that propelled him to promote Trump’s baseless election claims and help inspire an insurrection — and it has made Hawley an instant star in today’s far-right Republican Party.
Now, former friends and supporters — a middle school classmate, a law school professor, a conservative columnist who promoted him and the Republican stalwart who recruited him to run for the Senate — say they are shocked that he has become a different politician than they expected, describing themselves as victims of political deception and personal betrayal.
“I feel very responsible for Josh Hawley being in the Senate. I feel terrible about it,” said former senator John C. Danforth (R-Mo.), who recently called his encouragement of Hawley’s Senate run the “greatest mistake of my life.” He added, “Josh Hawley played a central role in creating if not the darkest day in American history, one of the darkest days in American history.”
Hawley declined to comment for this article. In an interview last week with Washington Post Live, which he scheduled to promote his just-published book, he stood by his decision to challenge the electoral college results. “In terms of having a debate about election integrity, I promised my constituents I would. I did. And I don’t regret that at all,” he said. Hawley condemned the actions of Jan. 6 as those of a “lawless criminal mob” and said that he considers President Biden to have been legitimately elected.
To combat criticism that he is an elitist, Hawley has urged people to examine the place where he grew up. “I come from a town called Lexington, Missouri,” he said in his maiden Senate speech. “It’s a place that reflects the dignity and quiet greatness of the working man and woman. These are the people who explored a continent, who built the railroads, who opened the West.”
That, however, is a simplistic description.
A racist legacy
Lexington, a city of 4,700 by the Missouri River in a region still known as Little Dixie for its historical ties to the Confederacy, prides itself as a place rich in history.
But the history long told in Lexington, including during Hawley’s childhood, focused almost entirely on the story of Whites who backed the Confederacy, including a battle in which Union forces were defeated. Nowhere in town is there a commemoration of the fact that it was also here that thousands of Blacks were enslaved in the 19th century, the largest such concentration in Missouri, according to Gary Gene Fuenfhausen, president of Missouri’s Little Dixie Heritage Foundation.
“That’s not something we talked about,” said Mayor Joe Aull, who was superintendent of schools when Hawley was a student. “I just never really heard it mentioned.”
Lexington’s lack of recognition of its role in slavery has meant that the city did not have the kind of introspection about inequality that might have broadened Hawley’s outlook, according to his former classmates.
“It’s a small town. There’s a lot of ignorance and a lot of people that don’t leave the county and see the world,” said Patrick Keller, who went to school with Hawley. “He had an insular life in this small town.”
Hawley has said he was politically influenced by a Christmas gift from his parents when he was 13 years old, a book by a conservative columnist.
“I read George Will religiously,” Hawley later wrote about the columnist, whose work has long appeared in The Washington Post. He also was influenced by listening to Rush Limbaugh, the fiery conservative radio star, according to a classmate.
Andrea Randle, who went to school with Hawley from second to eighth grades and served with him in student government, initially was impressed. She recalled that, when she was one of a handful of Blacks at Lexington Middle School, he worked with her on an initiative for a middle school graduation ceremony that was designed to include people from all backgrounds.
“I thought he was being inclusive,” she said. Only later, like a number of other key figures in Hawley’s life, would she decide that she had been misled.
By the time Hawley completed middle school, his parents decided that he needed a more elite education and transferred him to Rockhurst High School in Kansas City, a Jesuit institution. As Hawley commuted to the school, he began his sideline as a conservative columnist for the Lexington News. His first column was titled “A Younger Point of View.” The following columns, which ran in 1994 and 1995, were called more grandly “State of the Union.” He said little in any columns about youth; he opined almost entirely about national political matters. The newspaper’s former editor said in an interview that he didn’t change a word, sending the columns directly to the typesetter.
In his column on the Oklahoma City bombing, which has received new attention after the Kansas City Star recently reported on it, Hawley wrote approvingly about an analyst who said that “the majority of these people who feel the U.S. government is involved in a ‘conspiracy’ against its citizens are average, middle-class Americans. … 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.”
As a result, Hawley concluded, they become “disenchanted” and believe “ ‘conspiracy theories’ about how the federal government is out to get them. … Those militias and ‘hate’ groups about which you read with your morning coffee are symptoms that mustn’t go unnoticed.”
In another column, which continues to upset Blacks who grew up with Hawley, he wrote that affirmative action programs designed to combat centuries of racism were a “perverted racial spoils system,” claiming that the slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. would find it “repulsive,” even though King had said that such programs were essential before equality could be achieved.
A mentor is disturbed
As a history major at Stanford, Hawley met professor David Kennedy, who suggested a number of books on the American presidency for Hawley to read. Kennedy said in an interview that he was astonished when his student returned a couple of weeks later and made clear that he had read and absorbed the volumes.
Kennedy became Hawley’s academic adviser and oversaw his thesis, which became a book, “Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness.” Kennedy wrote in the preface that Hawley had “an unusually questing intelligence, a breadth and depth of learning well beyond his years, and an intolerance for conventional thinking.”
In an interview, Kennedy said Hawley was one of the best students he had ever taught, but, like many others who helped enable Hawley’s rise, he now has deep regrets, saying he is “quite disturbed” about the senator’s role on Jan. 6.
“I think he is a thoughtful, deeply analytical person,” Kennedy said. “What I understand far less well is his particular political evolution. I had no inkling really just how conservative he was. I blame myself. The feeling on my part is that I simply was not paying attention to what he was doing in the arena of student culture where he was moving.”
Hawley became president of a conservative group called the Freedom Forum and wrote for a conservative magazine, the Stanford Review. In a letter published by the magazine that foreshadowed his strategy of using race and sexual orientation as political weapons, Hawley in 1999 mocked Democrats whose “self-righteous pronouncements on racial oppression and gay rights activism seem oddly out of place, like disco music at a swing dance.”
After Stanford, Hawley spent nearly a year in London teaching at the exclusive St. Paul’s School, an institution that says it is for “gifted boys.” Then Hawley, who had written in one of his Lexington News columns that people educated in the Ivy League were “elitist,” attended Yale Law School. He became president of the Yale chapter of the conservative Federalist Society.
He then won a succession of coveted clerkships, first for Michael McConnell, a U.S. Court of Appeals judge, and then for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. during the Supreme Court’s 2006-07 term. That led to work at a Washington law firm then known as Hogan & Hartson and next at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, where Hawley was co-counsel on the Hobby Lobby case, in which the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 in 2014 that certain corporations could not be required to pay for insurance covering contraception, a major victory for conservatives.
Hawley returned to Missouri with an eye toward laying the ground for a political career. His availability caught the attention of Thom Lambert, a University of Missouri law professor. Lambert aggressively recruited Hawley and his wife, Erin, to teach in Columbia.
Lambert, who said he is a gay evangelical Christian, said that after Hawley spent several semesters teaching at the university, he became alarmed that Hawley began making pronouncements that didn’t square with his background in constitutional law but instead appeared designed to attract political support. Lambert was especially shocked in 2015 when Hawley, then a candidate for attorney general, weighed in on a Kentucky case in which a county clerk was arrested for refusing to give a same-sex couple a marriage license or to allow her deputies to do so, citing her religious beliefs. Hawley said it was “tragic” that the clerk was arrested, and he promised to protect such government officials if he were elected.
“This is the moment when I realized, I’m not sure I know this guy,” Lambert said. “He was trying to establish his credentials as a religious-freedom warrior. This is where I thought, you’re kind of lying here. You’re misrepresenting how the Constitution works.”
A broken promise
Hawley won the race with the help of a television ad in which he blasted politicians who he said are “just climbing the ladder, using one office to get another.” The ad showed several men climbing ladders labeled “attorney general” and “U.S. Senate.”
But within months of winning the office, Hawley prepared to do exactly what he had mocked: climb the ladder to become a senator. He needed a way to explain to voters why he was breaking his promise. A fortuitous encounter provided a path.
Danforth, the former senator from Missouri, had delivered a speech years earlier at Yale, and Hawley sat next to him later at a small dinner. Now Danforth, who also had served as Missouri’s attorney general, was looking for a candidate to run against Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill.
A moderate establishment figure, Danforth by this time had emerged as one of Trump’s harshest critics, and he believed that Hawley could bring a principled vision to the Republican Party.
“You have the training and the ability to be a leading voice for the constitutional order, not only in Missouri but nationally,” Danforth wrote to Hawley in a letter co-signed by three other former Missouri Republican senators.
With Danforth’s letter helping provide an excuse, Hawley broke his vow against “climbing the ladder” and announced his Senate candidacy in October 2017.
Hawley, an evangelical, had seen how Trump captured the presidency in 2016, in part by winning the White evangelical vote by 80 to 16 percent.
So, when Hawley spoke before a group of ministers in Kansas City in December 2017, he sounded like a different person than the one who had written five years earlier that there were “distinct missions of church and state — is it really the role of government, for instance, to promote ‘Christian values’ or refurbish America’s Christian heritage?” The state, he had written, should not be used “to convert non-believers.”
But in his 2017 speech, he advocated going into “the public realm and to seek the obedience of the nations, of our nation … to transform our society to reflect the gospel truth and lordship of Jesus Christ.”
The speech drew a rebuke from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which is dedicated to upholding the separation of church and state. The foundation wrote to the former constitutional law professor that his remark “stands in glaring defiance of the very Constitution that you swore an oath to uphold.”
Tying himself as closely as possible to Trump, Hawley beat McCaskill, 51 percent to 46 percent, and headed to Washington.
‘What’s with Hawley?’
Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had played a crucial role, helping to fundraise for Hawley’s campaign. But the incoming senator would not say that he supported McConnell having another term leading the party. McConnell asked Danforth for an explanation.
“What’s with Hawley?” he asked, according to Danforth. (A McConnell spokesman, asked about the call, responded that “McConnell never solicited Hawley’s support for his leadership election and he ran unopposed.”)
Danforth said he called Hawley, who told him, “I’m going to go to Washington, and I’m not going to be part of the establishment, and I’m not going to be pushed around. I’m going to be independent, and I’m going to speak for the people.”
Danforth told The Post that Hawley’s “response was so aggressive that it struck me as strange.” Nonetheless, he remained supportive, dining with the senator-elect and writing a warm congratulatory note. But Hawley shut him off. He didn’t respond to Danforth’s letter, and the two have not spoken since their post-election meal, Danforth said.
Hawley made a striking declaration about his view of Americans in a June 2019 article in Christianity Today, titled “The Age of Pelagius.” He said Pelagius, a Greek scholar born about the year 350, had said individuals had freedom to be whatever they chose. “It’s the Pelagian vision,” he wrote. “Liberty is the right to choose your own meaning.”
Hawley found such liberty abhorrent.
He said it meant that an individual could “emancipate yourself not just from God but from society, family, and tradition.” He said those seeking this liberty became elitists.
This was too much for his onetime hero, George Will, who viewed individual liberty as an essential American trait. Will had been helpful during the Senate campaign. He had been urged to write about Hawley by Danforth, his longtime friend and the godfather of Will’s daughter. Will came to Missouri, rode with Hawley on a campaign bus and wrote a column praising the candidate as “an actual, not a pretend, conservative.”
But Will gradually concluded that his assessment had been wrong. He wrote a column in January 2020 ridiculing Hawley’s attack on individualism. As the two feuded, the senator fired off a Trump-like tweet at the man he once revered: “I’m told NeverTrumper and ex-Republican George Will attacking me again today for talking about working people. Oh George. Don’t you have a country club to go to?”
Will said in an interview that he found the tweet “surpassingly dumb.” He later condemned Hawley’s effort to reject the presidential election results and create a “synthetic drama” on Jan. 6, writing that the senator from Missouri, along with Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), must be “forevermore shunned. … Each will wear a scarlet ’S’ as a seditionist.”
The feud with Will — like the one with Danforth and other former key backers — demonstrated how separated Hawley had become from the establishment Republicans who had helped him win the Senate seat.
He moved further to the right, distancing himself from yet another mentor, Chief Justice Roberts. He pilloried last year’s 6-to-3 ruling by the Supreme Court extending civil rights protections to gay and transgender people. It was a decision written by Trump nominee Neil M. Gorsuch and supported by Roberts, for whom Hawley had clerked. But Hawley declared that “it represents the end of the conservative legal movement.”
Hawley then zeroed in on an issue that Trump had turned into a racial flash point: efforts to educate leaders about the history of racism to promote diversity in the workplace.
Under “critical race theory,” companies and government entities have examined the institutionalized racism that has marginalized minorities to low-level positions. Trump had issued an executive order, supported by Hawley, that prevented federal contracts from having such diversity training.
The senator, in a Nov. 30 tweet, echoed his column against affirmative action, written 25 years earlier. “Corporate liberals … love critical race theory and all the other warmed-over Marxist garbage,” he wrote. “They sell out working Americans and sneer at them at the same time. That’s the New Left.”
Kimberlé Crenshaw, a UCLA law professor who coined the phrase “critical race theory,” said in an interview that Hawley is attacking her concept as a means of “race baiting.”
“He walks in the footsteps of many demagogues in America’s historical past, whose trajectory into the center of power has been through racialized scapegoating,” Crenshaw said.
A classmate reaches out
Andrea Randle, who had worked with Hawley on the middle school graduation ceremony, thought of her childhood friend after hearing about the killing of George Floyd, who died last year after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes.
Randle said in an interview that she hoped Hawley could once again work with her, believing he could join the fight for racial justice. She sent him an email with the subject line: “Old Ally from Lexington.”
“Hi Josh,” she wrote on May 31, 2020. “I know you remember me. We grew up together in rural Lexington, ran student council & sang in honor choir. … You were always going to move on to do great things. … The death of George Floyd will be forever etched in every memory & in history. I haven’t seen where you have spoken out about it.”
Urging Hawley to be a leader on the issue, she wrote: “I know the young man who looked into the future & created an 8th grade commemoration … for our small little class of 98 lead[s] with empathy. America needs him desperately right now.”
Randle said Hawley never responded, which deeply disappointed her. “I was hoping he would be on the right side of history of this,” she said.
A month later, Hawley went on Fox News and attacked the Black Lives Matter movement as “Marxist” and belittled its efforts to fight for justice in the aftermath of Floyd’s death. He said it has “hatred for the United States of America” and that “the organization is trying to hijack any movement towards justice for George Floyd, for instance, they’re trying to hijack that conversation away towards their own political Marxist agenda.”
To Randle, Hawley’s dismissal of a group dedicated to civil rights for Blacks and his call to abolish affirmative action are rooted in what she said is his lack of empathy concerning the legacy of slavery in Lexington. She concluded that her initial impression of him as an inclusive person was wrong.
“It just doesn’t seem like that person he was is the person he is today,” Randle said. “It’s disappointing and disheartening. This denial of facts, the denial of the people who are marginalized in our culture, that there are historical systems in place that are still keeping people down. That he won’t even acknowledge it is just kind of crazy to me.
Andrea Randle, who had worked with Hawley on the middle school graduation ceremony, thought of her childhood friend after hearing about the killing of George Floyd, who died last year after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes.
Randle said in an interview that she hoped Hawley could once again work with her, believing he could join the fight for racial justice. She sent him an email with the subject line: “Old Ally from Lexington.”
“Hi Josh,” she wrote on May 31, 2020. “I know you remember me. We grew up together in rural Lexington, ran student council & sang in honor choir. … You were always going to move on to do great things. … The death of George Floyd will be forever etched in every memory & in history. I haven’t seen where you have spoken out about it.”
Urging Hawley to be a leader on the issue, she wrote: “I know the young man who looked into the future & created an 8th grade commemoration … for our small little class of 98 lead[s] with empathy. America needs him desperately right now.”
Randle said Hawley never responded, which deeply disappointed her. “I was hoping he would be on the right side of history of this,” she said.
A month later, Hawley went on Fox News and attacked the Black Lives Matter movement as “Marxist” and belittled its efforts to fight for justice in the aftermath of Floyd’s death. He said it has “hatred for the United States of America” and that “the organization is trying to hijack any movement towards justice for George Floyd, for instance, they’re trying to hijack that conversation away towards their own political Marxist agenda.”
To Randle, Hawley’s dismissal of a group dedicated to civil rights for Blacks and his call to abolish affirmative action are rooted in what she said is his lack of empathy concerning the legacy of slavery in Lexington. She concluded that her initial impression of him as an inclusive person was wrong.
“It just doesn’t seem like that person he was is the person he is today,” Randle said. “It’s disappointing and disheartening. This denial of facts, the denial of the people who are marginalized in our culture, that there are historical systems in place that are still keeping people down. That he won’t even acknowledge it is just kind of crazy to me.
”‘Thanks Josh!’
After the electoral college vote giving Biden the presidency, McConnell wanted to head off the possibility that a single senator could force a vote in Congress on certifying the results. His prime concern was that Hawley would “breach the dam,” as an associate put it, and prompt other senators to follow him. He declared that “the electoral college has spoken” and urged senators to accept the result.
Hawley went ahead anyway.
He announced on Dec. 30 that he would challenge the results, prompting some other senators to follow his lead. Hawley defied McConnell despite the fact that more than 90 federal and state judges had rejected lawsuits seeking to overturn the outcome and Trump’s attorney general, William P. Barr, had dismissed allegations that there was widespread voter fraud.
After the electoral college vote giving Biden the presidency, McConnell wanted to head off the possibility that a single senator could force a vote in Congress on certifying the results. His prime concern was that Hawley would “breach the dam,” as an associate put it, and prompt other senators to follow him. He declared that “the electoral college has spoken” and urged senators to accept the result.
Hawley went ahead anyway.
He announced on Dec. 30 that he would challenge the results, prompting some other senators to follow his lead. Hawley defied McConnell despite the fact that more than 90 federal and state judges had rejected lawsuits seeking to overturn the outcome and Trump’s attorney general, William P. Barr, had dismissed allegations that there was widespread voter fraud.
The next day, McConnell tried again to head off Hawley, overseeing a conference call that was supposed to include all Republican senators. McConnell said the Jan. 6 vote was the most consequential of his life, and he asked why Hawley was going forward with an effort doomed to fail. The plan was for Hawley to explain himself and for Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) to rebut his assertions, according to a person familiar with the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.
The senators waited for Hawley to respond but heard no reply. They did not realize, as Politico first reported, that Hawley had not dialed in as expected. Hawley then sent a fundraising letter that said he wouldn’t give in to “the Washington and Wall Street establishment.”
Two days after the teleconference, Toomey tweeted that Hawley and others “fail to acknowledge that these allegations have been adjudicated in courtrooms across America and were found to be unsupported by evidence.”
Trump, however, encouraged Hawley, tweeting, “Thanks Josh!” The senator then went on Fox News, where anchor Bret Baier asked about his plans to challenge the electoral college results. “Are you trying to say as of January 20 Trump will be president?” Baier asked.
“That depends on what happens on Wednesday [Jan. 6]; that’s why we have the debate,” Hawley said.
“No it doesn’t,” Baier responded, saying that most experts believe Congress does not have the right to overturn the certification.
A few days later, on Jan. 6, the president praised Hawley during his incendiary speech to supporters. Around that time, Hawley passed by a crowd of protesters at the Capitol and raised his fist in solidarity. Shortly thereafter, as he and other senators were on or near the Senate floor, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.
Senators were rushed to the safety of a secure room in an adjoining Senate office building. At that tense moment, fearing that their lives were at risk if rioters found them, a number of senators gathered in the secure room to discuss whether they could shut down the effort to challenge the election results. One senator recalled that every time he looked over, he saw Hawley “standing by himself in a corner,” according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, confirming a detail first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Romney, in a floor speech directed at Hawley and others, tried one last time to stop the challenges.
“Those who choose to continue to support [Trump’s] dangerous gambit by objecting to the results of a legitimate, democratic election will forever be seen as being complicit in an unprecedented attack against our democracy,” said the senator from Utah, who declined to comment.
Hawley insisted he would proceed with his challenge to the Pennsylvania results. The Senate defeated his effort by a vote of 92 to 7.
Hawley later said that “it is a lie that I was trying to overturn an election,” and he has consistently condemned those who stormed the Capitol. But he has stood by his claim that Pennsylvania’s vote was unconstitutional and wrote that he was reflecting constituent “concerns about election integrity.” He did not point out that such concerns exist largely because Hawley, Trump and their allies stoked them with false claims.
‘We love Josh Hawley’
Hawley’s position has increasingly taken hold in the party, where leaders at every level have embraced the false claims of election fraud. Trump remains the most popular figure in the country among GOP voters, and lawmakers who opposed the electoral college challenge have been booed at home and faced withering criticism from local party officials.
Hawley raised $3 million in the first quarter of this year, according to federal records, and he has audaciously cast himself as the person best suited to redefine the GOP.
On April 17, in his first public appearance in Missouri since the events of Jan. 6, Hawley traveled to Ozark, a city in the state’s southwestern corner where he is building a new home, and strode into his fan base at Ozark High School, home of the Tigers. He was swarmed by several hundred people who had gathered at a Lincoln Day dinner fundraiser for Christian County’s Republican Party.
“We love Josh Hawley because he stands up for Missouri’s values,” said Wanda Marteen, 78, who organized the event. “The first thing, the big thing he stood up for, is the election. We feel like it was fraudulent.”
Most of the speech amounted to an outline of his effort to remake the Republican Party and possibly seek the presidency. Hawley blasted what he called “the giant woke corporations” that opposed a Republican-backed Georgia voting measure, said Democrats would “effectively cancel women’s sports” by allowing transgender athletes and argued that they back legislation “that would effectively close Christian colleges and universities.”
Five days after his Ozark speech, Hawley became the lone senator to vote against the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act, designed to combat discrimination against Asian Americans. It was in some respects an unlikely position for someone eyeing a presidential campaign, but to Hawley, it made sense. It was, he said, “dangerous” to broaden the federal government’s ability to prosecute hate crimes.
Hawley had taken his stand. Once again, he was defiant, beckoning others to follow.
Hawley’s position has increasingly taken hold in the party, where leaders at every level have embraced the false claims of election fraud. Trump remains the most popular figure in the country among GOP voters, and lawmakers who opposed the electoral college challenge have been booed at home and faced withering criticism from local party officials.
Hawley raised $3 million in the first quarter of this year, according to federal records, and he has audaciously cast himself as the person best suited to redefine the GOP.
On April 17, in his first public appearance in Missouri since the events of Jan. 6, Hawley traveled to Ozark, a city in the state’s southwestern corner where he is building a new home, and strode into his fan base at Ozark High School, home of the Tigers. He was swarmed by several hundred people who had gathered at a Lincoln Day dinner fundraiser for Christian County’s Republican Party.
“We love Josh Hawley because he stands up for Missouri’s values,” said Wanda Marteen, 78, who organized the event. “The first thing, the big thing he stood up for, is the election. We feel like it was fraudulent.”
Most of the speech amounted to an outline of his effort to remake the Republican Party and possibly seek the presidency. Hawley blasted what he called “the giant woke corporations” that opposed a Republican-backed Georgia voting measure, said Democrats would “effectively cancel women’s sports” by allowing transgender athletes and argued that they back legislation “that would effectively close Christian colleges and universities.”
Five days after his Ozark speech, Hawley became the lone senator to vote against the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act, designed to combat discrimination against Asian Americans. It was in some respects an unlikely position for someone eyeing a presidential campaign, but to Hawley, it made sense. It was, he said, “dangerous” to broaden the federal government’s ability to prosecute hate crimes.
Hawley had taken his stand. Once again, he was defiant, beckoning others to follow.
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