The Republicans Who Want American Carnage

[Nevilledog]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/columbia-national-guard-tom-cotton/678163/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/u2DJ8


Tom Cotton has never seen a left-wing protest he didn’t want crushed at gunpoint.

On Monday, the Arkansas senator demanded that President Joe Biden send in the National Guard to clear out the student protests at Columbia University against the Israel-Hamas war, which he described as “the nascent pogroms at Columbia.” Last week, Cotton posted on X, “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.” He later deleted the post and reworded it so that it did not sound quite so explicitly like a demand for aspiring vigilantes to lynch protesters.

This is a long-standing pattern for Cotton, who enjoys issuing calls for violence that linger on the edge of plausible deniability when it comes to which groups, exactly, are appropriate targets for lethal force. During the George Floyd protests of 2020, Cotton demanded that the U.S. military be sent in with orders to give “no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters,” insisting unconvincingly in a later New York Times op-ed that he was not conflating peaceful protesters with rioters. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who had raised a fist in apparent solidarity with the mob that assaulted the Capitol on January 6 before fleeing through the halls to avoid them once the riot began, echoed Cotton’s call for deploying the National Guard to Columbia. (Both men, as it turns out, are in favor of some quarter for “insurrectionists” who happen to be on the right side.)

What Cotton and Hawley are doing is simple demagoguery. When Donald Trump was inaugurated president, he spoke of an “American carnage” that he would suppress by force. Trump’s attempts to apply the maximum level of violence to every problem did not solve any of them. Migration at the southern border surged in 2019 until a crackdown in Mexico and the coronavirus pandemic brought it down; Trump’s presidency ended with a rise in violent crime (another likely pandemic effect, among other factors) and with widespread civil-rights protests.

The protesters at Columbia and other college campuses around the United States are voicing opposition to U.S. support for Israel’s war against Hamas, which began in retaliation for a Hamas raid that killed some 1,200 Israelis last October. Since then, more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, about 2 million displaced, and many driven to the brink of starvation. No sympathy for Hamas or anti-Semitism is necessary to believe, as I do, that Israel’s conduct here has been horrifically disproportionate; the U.S. government itself has acknowledged substantial evidence of human-rights violations by Israeli forces as well as by Hamas. There have been documented instances of anti-Semitic rhetoric and harassment surrounding the protests; a rabbi associated with Columbia University urged Jewish students to stay away, and the university’s president, Nemat Shafik, recommended that students not living on campus attend classes remotely for the time being. In the same way that the Israeli government’s conduct does not justify anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitic acts of some individuals associated with the protests do not justify brutalizing the protesters. As of this morning, the National Guard had not been called in, but hundreds of students participating in demonstrations across the country have been arrested.

*snip*

[SWBTATTReg]

1. Gee whiz, cotton...I didn't include the normal honorific to address you, since you're advocating, IMHO,

lining up people against a wall and shooting them. Good God, and you are a member of Congress? You're pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. hawley of course is a joke too. A pathetic one and a coward too. Remember him running away when the 1/6 mob invaded the Capitol?