Donald Trump fanboy Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) gained notoriety when he openly supported the deadly riots at the Capitol on January 6 and refused to certify the 2020 election. But that’s not even the worst bit of information about him.

Here’s what is, according to Refinery 29:

While he has served as a mouthpiece for Trump’s dangerously far-right ideologies and, in short order, became the GOP’s star mascot. That, however, has gone decidedly south now that a story published by The New York Times that featured excerpts of interviews involving old friends from school and academic advisors has come to light.

Some of what these people had to say is pretty creepy.

According to writer Sarah Midkiff, in her story for Refinery 29 regarding the interviews:

“Some of it is expected, some of it is terrifying, but one piece of information is particularly bizarre.”

Apparently, Hawley’s far-right thinking has always been there, long before he ever had anything to do with Trump.

“I do think there was something reflexively present in Josh from early on that aligned with that kind of thinking,” Dr. David Kennedy, Hawley’s former college advisor said in reference to his former student’s meteoric rise within the Republican Party.

Midkiff then touches on something more disturbing:

“But in one memory recounted by a former Stanford classmate, Hawley appeared to have been unhinged long before the rest of us knew it. According to his classmate, he had a sepia-toned poster of a shirtless male cradling a newborn placed directly above his bed in his dorm.”

While that’s strange enough as it is, she notes it gets even stranger.

That classmate said that when others asked Hawley about the poster, he allegedly said it represented his “fervent stance against abortion.”

Josh Hawley at Stanford: “Above his bed he hung a sepia-toned poster of a shirtless male model cradling a newborn; when asked by classmates, he said it reflected his fervent stance against abortion.” Said poster:https://t.co/rTMANXTMnd pic.twitter.com/2lerwOKVkE

— Josh Barone (@joshbarone) March 8, 2021

According to The Independent, the poster was a hot commodity in the UK during the 1980s, having sold millions of copies. It was meant to represent the arrival of the “new man,” someone who was masculine and sensitive.

Apparently, that’s not how Hawley viewed the poster. Instead, he saw it as exemplifying his pro-life ideals. And he even wrote about this stance in a series of columns for the Stanford Review, a conservative student newspaper.

There’s nothing terribly shocking about this since Hawley, who’s also on the Senate Judiciary Committee, had announced he won’t support any Supreme Court nominee who didn’t publicly denounce Roe v. Wade.

“I will vote only for those Supreme Court nominees who have explicitly acknowledged Roe v. Wade is wrongly decided,” he told The Washington Post last year. “By explicitly acknowledging, I mean on the record and before they were nominated.”

Hawley has also defended Missouri’s attempts in 2019 to pass draconian laws, noting they were a “direct response to the extremism” of abortion bills approved by states with a Democratic majority.

But now back to that bizarre poster. A spokesman for Hawley told The New York Times that he doesn’t remember the poster but added that the senator is “proudly pro-life.”

Quite obviously the poster isn’t the most worrisome part of this weird story. Instead, the idea that this man, and far too many Republicans just like him, think it’s okay to rule over women’s lives and tell them what they can (or can’t) do with their bodies is the most worrisome part.