Josh Hawley's anti-cosmopolitan speech at the National Conservatism Conference

Josh Hawley, US senator from Missouri, delivered the final address at the recent National Conservatism Conference in Washington DC. He's been criticized by Jews for over-using the term 'cosmopolitan' as a pejorative.

By Carolyn Yeager

THIS SPEECH, GIVEN A WEEK AGO TUESDAY, HAS ATTRACTED a lot of attention—especially in the Jewish Press. After reading about it there, I found the transcript and read it for myself. Now I needed to know more about his family background. Exactly who is Joshua David Hawley? Who were his parents? Turns out they aren't mentioned on his Wikipedia page or, I soon found out, on any other page online.

“Hawley was born in Springdale, Arkansas, but soon moved to Lexington, Missouri.” As though as a baby he decided on his own and moved himself to Lexington. I find the unwillingness to disclose anything about his parents or siblings' ethnicity or occupations to be suspicious Then somewhere else I saw that his second son is named Elijah, which is Hebrew for "Yahweh is God." Aha! I thought, but also vaguely recalled that that name came up rather frequently these days, and indeed, it turned out that Elijah has become very popular for some reason. In 2018, it was the 7th Most Popular Boys Name in the United States! So it doesn't suggest anything more than that. And Joshua is an Old Testament name too, as is David.

Josh Hawley is a whiz—a first-term senator at the age of 39, previously the state's attorney, a proven vote-getter in Missouri and an unapologetic Christian Conservative. He has for some time now impressed me as extremely confident, a take-charge kind of guy. His speech at the Nat-Con Conference was given in a strong, self-assured voice. In spite of my concerns about his pro-Israel positions, I liked everything about the speech and thought it showed we had a winner coming up who could possibly follow Trump as a presidential candidate in 2024. That's really my concern--where do we go, in the United States, from here? How do we keep the pro-nationalist momentum, begun by Trump, going? How do we defeat the continuing, well-financed and media-supported threat from the radical Left?

Hawley seems like a real possibility, but if he's completely tied to the Jewish agenda, which his votes so far show him to be, and even a crypto Jew or “Jew for Jesus,” then the blush is certainly off the rose. In his speech, he did refer to Jesus as a “Jewish rabbi who taught that the call of God comes to every person, and the power of God can work through each, so that every human being has dignity, and standing, and can change the world. And so [at that time in history] the idea of the individual was born.”

Interesting, but not my favorite part of his speech! The parts I liked were the many references praising home, nation and patriotism as opposed to cosmopolitanism and globalism. Hawley used the word 'cosmopolitan' six times in his speech, and that has been pointed out by Jews as an allusion to the perceived-to-be antisemitic word “rootlessness” (which he did not use). He used the words global/globalization five times.

This caused the ever watchful Anti-Defamation League to call out Hawley, charging him with being careless with his language.

“While there’s nothing outwardly anti-Semitic in the Senator’s speech, we can understand why some are concerned about his use of the phrases ‘cosmopolitan elites’ and ‘money changing on Wall Street,’ which have a history of being used to demean Jews and may resonate with extremists. We hope the Senator will be more careful with his words in the future.”

The liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who is Jewish, wrote:

“If you’re Jewish and the use of ‘cosmopolitan’ doesn’t scare you, read some history.”

Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of the Atlantic, tweeted: “Rootlessness is also a cause for concern,” meaning, I think, that one word easily leads us to think of the other.

Hawley responded to the criticism with his own tweets:

“The liberal language police have lost their minds”

and that he was using the term “cosmopolitan” as “a person whose primary allegiance is to the community of human beings in the entire world” rather than to a “specifically American identity.”

Hawley's speech

I'm not the only one who was struck by the similarities in Hawley's words and phrases to the speeches and writings of Adolf Hitler and other National Socialists from the 1920's and 30's. Though this is the kiss of death today, I'm going to list the ones in Hawley's speech that stood out to me. You can read the full transcript here.

1. government as a project bound to a particular place, practiced by citizens loyal to that place and loyal to the way of life they share together.

2. our shared way of life. The common affections and common loves that make our way of life possible.

3. the great divide of our time is between the political agenda of the leadership elite and the great and broad middle of our society.

4. This class lives in the United States, but they identify as “citizens of the world.” They run businesses or oversee universities here, but their primary loyalty is to the global community.

5. our elites distrust patriotism and dislike the common culture left to us by our forbearers.

6. The cosmopolitan elite look down on the common affections for things like place and national feeling and religious faith – like family and neighborhood and church

7. foreign competitors get to make the goods, and we just buy them. And then they buy up American companies with the profits.

8. marriage rates are falling, birth rates are falling, life expectancy is falling while an epidemic of suicide and drug addiction ravages the working class.

9. our citizens need work. They need jobs in the towns and communities where they live, not just in the cities on the coasts.

10. an economy driven by money changing on Wall Street ultimately benefits those who have the money to start with, and that economy will not support a great nation.

11. we must work to raise up a generation united in a common love for our distinctive achievements as a people. And that means we must teach our children who we are, without apology. [real history -cy]

12. Horatius looked over his shoulder to the hills of Rome, and glimpsed his own home there, and knew it was worth defending.

This is all so powerful and good that we may have to overlook some of our dislike of Christian Zionism and the Zionist project in Israel, and work with those allies who share our desire for our own homogeneous nation state in which we can be one people living on our own land, making our own laws, sovereign and strong. Is this still possible? I don't know but it bears watching out for, at least.

It's no secret that Orthodox Jewish communities largely support Donald Trump and the Republicans, unlike the reform and secular Jews. The First Amendment is very important to them because it gives them the religious freedom they value above all else. Any law circumscribing their religious practices is anathema to them. Just so should any law circumscribing what we can say or write (i.e. 'hate speech') be anathema to us. This is where Jewish allies become questionable in upholding what must be our non-negotiable interests. I think if we keep love for and increase of our own people (as do the Orthodox Jews) uppermost in mind, and are not waylaid by “humanitarian” arguments that would contradict that love/favoritism for our own, as we have done to our detriment in the past, we can manage to maneuver through the minefields that will come up. This is a big “if” considering our past performance. But I will say that young Sen. Hawley, who we certainly need to know more about, has not held back on his clearly nationalistic language in this speech.

[I discussed this topic on my podcast spot on Radio Aryan this week: https://www.radioaryan.com/2019/07/the-daily-nationalist-joshua-hawley-dn.html ]