Tom Cotton wants to 'mobilize vigilantes' against protesters: analysis

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) has drawn a great deal of criticism for an April 15 tweet in which he promoted violence against protesters who are opposed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's military policies in Gaza.

On X, formerly Twitter, the GOP senator posted, "I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands. It's time to put an end to this nonsense." But he later replaced "take matters into your own hands" with the longer "take matters into your own hands to get them out of the way."

Liberal opinion writer Paul Waldman, in an MSNBC column published on April 17, warns that Cotton has a long history of encouraging violence against protesters he disagrees with.

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On June 3, 2020, the New York Times published an op-ed by Cotton that called for then-President Donald Trump to "employ the military" against protesters who were holding demonstrations following George Floyd's death in Minneapolis.

"Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., must have trouble tracking his views on public protest," Waldman writes. "In a 2020 New York Times op-ed, the Arkansas Republican senator called for the military to be mobilized to crush the 'orgy of violence' he said was engulfing the country during the protests following George Floyd's murder. In fact, the overwhelming majority of those protests were peaceful."

Waldman adds, "Four years on, Cotton has decided that law enforcement and the military are insufficient tools to deal with protesters. It's time to mobilize the vigilantes."

After the April 15 tweet, Waldman notes, Cotton went on Fox News and doubled down on promoting violence against demonstrators — saying, "If something like this happened in Arkansas on a bridge there, let's just say, I think there would be a lot of very wet criminals that have been tossed overboard, not by law enforcement, but the people whose road they're blocking.”

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The MSNBC columnist laments that Cotton and other Republicans are fine with right-wing protests — for example, truckers who were opposed to pandemic restrictions — but are "increasingly advocating violence as a response to liberal activism."

Waldman warns, "The prevailing belief on the right is that even nonviolent liberal protest is inherently illegitimate, and if it inconveniences you in the slightest, you should meet it with force…. Yes, sometimes protests get out of control. But the answer to that is for anyone who commits a crime to be punished — not by a mob or a self-appointed crusader wielding his car as a weapon, but by our legal system. If we abandon that, the fallout will be far worse than being stuck in traffic."

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Paul Waldman's full MSNBC column is available at this link.