WASHINGTON — Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri recently gave an interview to HBO/Axios during which he repeated his theory that liberal policies and "the left" are to blame for a supposed increase in online porn viewership, a claim he also made last week at a conservative conference in Florida.
In a clip released yesterday by Axios, journalist Mike Allen asked a smiling Hawley about his “new big issue” — masculinity and “the left’s attack on the men of America.”
“What the left is doing is attacking America,” Hawley told Allen, who asked him to elaborate on remarks he made in his National Conservatism Conference speech. “They are saying that America is systemically oppressive and that men are systemically responsible.”
Allen then asked Hawley, a religious conservative who has argued that “separation of church and state” should mean that the state cannot prevent churches from intervening in politics, to share his definition of "a man."
“A man is a father, a man is a husband, a man is someone who takes responsibility,” Hawley stated, apparently excluding anyone single and/or childless from his definition.
“As conservatives," he continued, "we have to call men back to responsibility. We have to say that spending your time not working — and there are more and more men who are not working — spending time on video games, spending your time watching porn online while doing nothing is not good for you, your family or this country.”
Allen then asked Hawley how exactly liberals push people “to watch Pornhub more.”
“What I mean, literally, is that I think the liberal attack, the left-wing attack on manhood, says to men, ‘You’re part of the problem,’” Hawley equivocated. “It says that your masculinity is inherently problematic, it's inherently oppressive.”
When pressed on precisely what the left has done that has led to more porn consumption, Hawley cited a “policy of deindustrialization” that he claimed has left millions of men "idle," presumably leaving their idle hands to do the devil's work.
“You have 16 million men, Mike, who are idle, who don’t have anything to do,” he continued. “Partly that’s their own responsibility, but also it’s partly because jobs have dried up in many cities across America and rural areas, too. I think you put together lack of jobs, you put together fatherlessness, you put together the social messages that we teach our kids in our schools, and you gotta control that and its effects.”
Since 2002 — the senator’s entire adult life — both the Senate and the House of Representatives of the Missouri state legislature, responsible for passing laws concerning economic policy and education in his state, have been controlled by Hawley’s own Republican party.
