Opinion: Josh Hawley holds forth on manhood and courage, lol

Let’s dispense with the obvious.

When most people think of Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) — if they think of him at all — they probably conjure images of two moments, both of which occurred on one of the worst days in American history.

That was, of course, Jan. 6, 2021, when the U.S. Capitol was stormed by a mob of election deniers seeking to halt the certification of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States. Many of those insurrectionists are now facing prison terms for sedition and other crimes.

Opinion Columnist

Robin Abcarian

In the first memorable image, a fist-pumping Hawley walks past the insurrectionists on his way to vote against certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. You guys are awesome, his body language says. I am with you all the way.

The second image is a clip of Hawley fleeing that very same mob after it breached the Capitol. In that one, he is also pumping his arms, but that’s because he’s running away at a fast clip. When it was shown during one of the House Jan. 6 Committee’s hearings, spectators burst out laughing.

Now, I’m not suggesting Hawley was wrong to run, but in doing so, he revealed himself as a coward, a hypocrite and a phony. Not to mention shameless.

On Tuesday, Hawley’s book “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs” was released by the conservative publishing house Regnery, coinciding with his 2024 reelection campaign. On Wednesday, Hawley tweeted that his book had “triggered” the left, so “get your copy now.”

Hawley posing as an expert on courage is as credible as Donald Trump posing as an expert on marital fidelity.

Among the many regrettable things in Hawley’s book is his un-ironic use of the metaphor of running when describing how to behave like a man:

“Running towards the monsters of your life requires courage.”

“Run toward the darkness that threatens your family.”

“If your life is relentlessly about you, you will never run towards danger.”

“Manhood,” which reads like a Sunday sermon, is an extended rant about how American men need to rediscover their manliness by modeling themselves on biblical figures such as Adam and Abraham. Since we are, in Hawley’s view, witnessing “the collapse of American manhood,” blame must be assigned. A culprit must be found.

Aaaaand, no surprise here, it’s the “woke left!” that’s turning men to mush. Not to mention “the liberal elite,” “the educated elite,” “the cultural elite” and all of the other godless folks who control American business, academia, the media and Hollywood.

“To a remarkable, historically unusual extent,” Hawley writes, “America’s cultural institutions are now dominated by a small, homogenous class of individuals who graduated from the same coterie of elite schools and share the same Epicurean, mostly atheistic world view they learned there.”

I guess intellectual dishonesty is to be expected from a man who poses as a blue-collar hero but doesn’t bother to mention in biographical passages that his father was a banker, or that he attended a private prep school, Stanford University and Yale Law; clerked for Supreme Court…