Tom Cotton Hungry For A War He Won’t Fight Himself

He’s not a good human being.

San Francisco’s Monday morning commute was snarled for hours after protesters shut down Highway 101 on the Golden Gate Bridge. They stopped their vehicles and blocked all southbound lanes around 7:30 a.m. In theory, this was supposed to somehow convince the U.S. government to end military support to Israel, but in reality, all they achieved was annoying strangers and hardening normal people to their cause.

Protest spokesperson Riley Hugo said, “A lot of the money that is going from individuals who are working really hard, we don't want that money going to Israel anymore.”

Public sentiment has been moving in the direction of conditioning military support to Israel. It’s a complex diplomatic situation that doesn’t benefit from people blocking traffic on major thoroughfares. That’s not actually a protest so much as violent coercion. It’s why I bristle when people compare these tactics to the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. specifically promoted non-violent resistance. The Montgomery Improvement Association coordinated a 15-month long bus boycott. They didn’t impede bus traffic. This wasn’t simply noble. It helped build political capital among potential allies. It also reduced the risk of people getting killed — although Dr. King was the target of racist death threats and attacks.

Martin Luther King Jr. Didn’t Just Have A Dream. He Radically Promoted Peace.

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Dr. King wrote in his book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story:

In my weekly remarks as president, I stressed that the use of violence in our struggle would be both impractical and immoral. To meet hate with retaliatory hate would do nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe. Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love; we must meet physical force with soul force. Our aim must never be to humiliate the white man but to win his friendship and understanding.

There’s nothing here that would support interrupting private events and screaming insults at people.

On the subject of ‘violence begets violence’

This is still America and not the People’s Republic of Stephenstan. The protesters aren’t obligated to take my advice. They’re free to pursue methods that generate press but few positive results. Those who break the law in the process might face jail time, but it’s their choice. Unfortunately, that’s not sufficient for Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, who suggested Monday on Fox News that what the protesters in San Francisco needed was some Arkansas justice.

"If something like this happened in Arkansas on a bridge there, let’s just say that there would be a lot of wet criminals that would have been tossed overboard, not by law enforcement, but by the people whose road they are blocking,” he said.

They are not “criminals” yet, as they haven’t been arrested, charged, and convicted of a crime, but while Cotton’s Harvard Law degree might look nice hanging in his office, it has little impact on his blood lust.

“If they glued their hands to the car or the pavement, well … probably pretty painful to have their skin ripped off,” he said. “But I think that is the way we would handle it in Arkansas.”

Yes, deliberately stranding people on a bridge is illegal, and preventing emergency personnel from performing their duties could indirectly lead to people’s deaths. It’s dumb-ass performative posturing. However, Cotton — you know, the sitting U.S. senator — is promoting mob violence. Maybe Arkansas bridges are more like those Home Depot numbers that people put over a small pond in their backyard, but hurling someone off the Golden Gate Bridge is straight-up murder.

“I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands to get them out of the way,” Cotton posted on social media. “It’s time to put an end to this nonsense.”

Of course, Cotton conflates opposition to Israel as active support for Hamas. It’s a shameless method of defaming the people with whom you disagree. Today’s terrorist sympathizers are yesterday’s “commies.”

Cotton’s posts are still up on Elon Musk’s $44 billion blog, despite clearly advocating for violence. Liberals who use the site often write “wyt” instead of “white” to avoid having their accounts locked, but “X” is now the town square for white supremacists.

Prior to the actual MAGA insurrection on January 6, Cotton compared protesters in Portland, Oregon, to Confederate traitors. During an appearance on Fox & Friends in July 2020, he claimed that “these insurrectionists in the streets of Portland are little different from the insurrectionists who seceded from the Union in 1861 in South Carolina and tried to take over Fort Sumter.” Cotton does not have an established history of opposing the Confederacy and has even justified slavery as a “necessary evil.”

His moral relativism is consistent with how white conservatives have operated throughout U.S. history. Slavery is objectively evil, and enslavers were terrified that their human “property” would violently rise up against them. However, vigilante violence is only acceptable when maintaining the white male Christian hierarchy.

Some might think that Monday’s Golden Gate blockade angered Cotton past the point of reason, but I suspect his response was coldly calculated. He’s previously endorsed the use of military force against civilians. He posted on Twitter in June 2020: “No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.” Shay Khatiri at The Bulwark pointed out that “no quarter” specifically means “killing enemy combatants rather than taking any prisoners.” U.S. citizens — even those openly breaking the law — are not “enemy combatants.” The January 6 insurrectionists, even after storming the Capitol, were still entitled to due process instead of summary execution. (And, no, Ashli Babbitt wasn’t “executed.”)

The New York Times foolishly let Cotton expand further on his Red Dawn fantasies in an op-ed stuffed with unsubstantiated lies. The Times’ useful idiot division helped Cotton launder a false narrative that U.S. cities nationwide were under siege by “cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa.” Republicans might talk a lot about “law and order,” but they’re not interested in the court scenes and dramatic “chung-chungs.” They want to wage war against the marginalized and stamp out dissent.

Back in 2020, Cotton called for the “10th Mountain, 82nd Airborne, 1st Cav, 3rd Infantry—whatever it takes to restore order.” Now, he’s all in for extrajudicial mob violence. He doesn’t care that order was eventually restored to the Golden Gate Bridge, and the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office — what Republicans consider an unwashed hippie commune — will charge the 26 people arrested with conspiracy, false imprisonment of the drivers trapped on the bridge during their pointless demonstration, and vehicle code violations.

The whole reason there was unrest in Minneapolis and Waukesha, Wisconsin in 2020 is that many desperate people felt that the system would never truly protect and serve them — quite the opposite, in fact. When white people are inconvenienced, the system usually responds. No meaningful police reform was passed after George Floyd’s murder, yet Republican-run states passed multiple voter suppression bills after Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election.

There’s no evidence that the Golden Gate Bridge would’ve been cleared for traffic any sooner if civilians had started attacking protesters — or outright shooting them, considering there are far too many guns in this country. You’d just have a bloodbath. Cotton shared a video Tuesday of a large man forcibly moving much-smaller protesters out of traffic. “How it should be done!” he crowed, seemingly unaware that the large man only prevailed because the protesters didn’t fight back. That is the autocrat’s vision of order — the weak in constant submission to superior violence — but it’s not democracy.

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