#750: John Hawkins

John Hawkins is a wingnut loon and global warming denialist most famous for running the website Right Wing News and regularly contributing screeds to various rightwing outlets, including Townhall and PJ Media. His global warming denialist tropes are mostly the expected distortions, lies and Gish galloping – as well as the strawmen, of course (some of which are dealt with here). But then, his political screeds are really much the same. Hawkins rarely argues for anything. Instead he makes lists. Many of the lists involve attempts to characterize liberals. For instance, in an attempt to list some main reasons to dislike liberals, Hawkins pointed out e.g. that “whether you’re talking about cop killers, terrorists, radical Islamists or dictators, all you have to do is say, ‘I hate America,’ and liberals start to sympathize with you,” that “liberals think black Americans are inferior to whites, which is why the worst, most crime-ridden places to live in America are inevitably run by liberals. That’s acceptable to liberals because they don’t think black Americans deserve any better,” that “the same people who voted Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama into office think they're smarter than tradition, the Founding Fathers and God Himself,” and that “liberals have been big supporters of slavery, Indian massacres, the KKK, eugenics, fascism, communism and Jim Crow laws. Then, down the road, after liberals finally join everyone else, they try to claim that conservatives still support all the practices that we fought liberals on from the beginning.” (No, he doesn’t understand “liberal” – any position taken by the Democratic party a hundred years ago must apparently be liberal because the name of the party taking them was called “Democratic”).

He did, however, receive some negative publicity when he said that “a white woman voting for Barack Obama is like a black woman voting for the KKK.”

Here is a list of what he deems to be the 25 most influential conservatives in America. It can be interpreted as showing more than one thing, but we prefer to interpret it as Hawkins being a loon rather than something about conservatives in general.

Diagnosis: Hawkins, the doughty snower, is behind several virtual (literal?) massacres of strawmen. Now, I am sure strawman bashing is a cherished pastime on the other side of the political spectrum as well, so send us some good cases and we’ll cover them. But to bolster his candidacy Hawkins makes sure to be a staunch denialist as well.