Josh Hawley (r) should ask for his money back.

….Senator Hawley graduated from Rockhurst High School in Kansas City. After graduating from Stanford University in 2002 and Yale Law School in 2006….

On the 4th of July:

Josh Hawley @HawleyMO
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.”

Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Patrick Henry never said that. This is a line from a 1956 piece in The Virginian that was about Patrick Henry, not by him.
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Context is written by people who use Twitter, and appears when rated helpful by others. Find out more.
4:45 PM · Jul 4, 2023

People noticed:

Of Course Josh Hawley Tweeted a Fake Quote to Push Religious Propaganda
The senator from Missouri celebrated the Fourth of July by falsely claiming the United States was founded “on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
BY BESS LEVIN
JULY 5, 2023

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….he’s apparently also the kind of guy who uses fake quotes to make shit up about the United States’ founding to push religious propaganda. On an American holiday no less!

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…As has been noted, Hawley received degrees from both Stanford and Yale, but one needn’t have attended some of the highest-ranked schools in the country to know that the United States was obviously not founded “on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” In fact, one would pretty much only need to know, like, the absolute most basic facts about the US to not make such a blatantly false claim about this nation. Of course, Hawley is not really as much of an idiot as his tweet suggests—and actually, one might argue that he knows exactly what he’s doing….

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And:

Why Josh Hawley’s fake historical quote matters
Josh Hawley pushing a fake historical quote was cringeworthy, but more important was the theocratic point he was eager to make — on the Fourth of July.
July 5, 2023, 7:00 AM CDT
By Steve Benen

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What Hawley should’ve realized before promoting the quote is that Henry didn’t say it. The line was reportedly published instead by a white nationalist publication in 1956 — more than a century and a half after the founding father’s death.

On the surface, it’s obviously unfortunate to see a senator — a graduate of Stanford and Yale — make a mistake like this, especially as so many other Republicans also fall for fake quotes.

But let’s not brush past the underlying point the Missouri Republican was trying to make by way of a made-up line: Hawley seems certain that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, with members of one faith tradition — his own — enjoying exalted status over others.

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….more important than the senator’s sloppy error is the fact that a prominent Republican senator thought it’d be a good idea to tout an inherently theocratic vision on the Fourth of July.

Maybe those elite schools should ask for their degrees back.

Previously:

Fascist pig blows his dog whistle again…loudly (July 4, 2023)