Even the crowd attending the past week’s Conservative Political Action Conference didn’t buy Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley’s phony act. Despite the privileged elitist’s best effort to pose as a populist everyman — American as apple pie, served with a heavy dollop of white nationalism — just 3% of attendees of the far-right annual conference supported Hawley as the next Republican presidential nominee. It’s a fitting snub for a man whose blind ambition led him to betray his oath as well as the Constitution that he both studied and taught.
Missouri’s junior senator, widely condemned by members of both parties for his supporting role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, delivered a strange speech filled with revisionist history and them-versus-us rhetoric at the four-day conference of conservatives in Florida. Hawley painted himself as a warrior fighting against an “unprecedented alliance of radical liberals and the biggest, most powerful corporations in the history of the world” intent on destroying America. Or at least, Hawley’s version of America.
Standing beneath a large sign bearing the theme of this year’s conference — “America Uncanceled” — Hawley told his audience of self-declared “patriots” that the history of systemic racism in America is false. “All of that is a lie,” he said. America is the nation that “liberated slaves,” he told the crowd. He conveniently omitted hundreds of years of legalized oppression, a Constitution that counted Blacks as three-fifths of a person, and a whole Civil War.
Hawley continued to embarrass his distinguished alma maters, Stanford and Yale, as well as the people of Missouri, by directly calling for “a new nationalism, a new agenda to make the rule of the people real in this country.” This after his own shameless attempt to overturn the will of the people just a few weeks ago.
But it appears that even the most fervent conservatives see Hawley as the pandering fraud he is, tied with the likes of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz for most despised and least respected.
Two straw polls were taken to measure who conference attendees supported as the next Republican presidential nominee. Donald Trump won the first with 55%. In the second, which did not include Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis won. Way at the bottom, tied with Cruz and Fox News host Tucker Carlson at just 3%, was Hawley.
Ironically, Three Percenters is also the moniker of one of the anti-government militias linked to the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. But that’s certainly not where any politician wants to be polling.
It’s a harsh blow to a man who allowed his own personal ambitions to damage American democracy and, hopefully, end any chances of him reaching the White House. Hawley started his speech by defiantly telling the audience, “I’m not going anywhere.” In terms of higher political office, it certainly appears that is true.
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch
