There Are No Illusions Left About What Tom Cotton Really Wants

This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.

“The nascent pogroms at Columbia have to stop TODAY, before our Jewish brethren sit for Passover Seder tonight. If Eric Adams won’t send the NYPD and Kathy Hochul won’t send the National Guard, Joe Biden has a duty to take charge and break up these mobs.” —Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, in a Monday tweet

What do you suppose gets Sen. Tom Cotton out of bed every morning? Is it the birthday cakes topped with ice cream that he consumes on a daily basis? The lines of racist questions he reserves for Asian tech CEOs and Muslim judicial nominees? Or is it the clear, bloodthirsty pleasure he takes in repeatedly calling for the National Guard to attack law-abiding protesters—Bill of Rights and the lessons of Kent State be damned?

Doubtless you are aware by now of the anti-war and pro-Palestinian campouts that kicked off at Columbia University last week, on the same day that its president testified at yet another one of these congressional hearings meant to heap terrible PR on elite college campuses. The protests have only spread to other schools since then, in large part because Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, elected to suspend all the participants and have them arrested by the New York Police Department for trespassing. (Shafik cited “clear and present danger,” although the NYPD, not exactly known for being favorable to protesters, undercut that claim by stating that “the students that were arrested were peaceful” and “offered no resistance whatsoever.”)

The suspensions and arrests of at least 108 students spurred outrage from a significant portion of the faculty and student bodies at Columbia and Barnard College. Solidarity gatherings then popped up not just at neighboring schools like New York University—whose students were also violently dispersed by the NYPD—but at schools as far as the University of New Mexico, California State Polytechnic University, and even Sciences Po Paris, an international Columbia affiliate.

What, then, was Cotton’s unsolicited counsel? It was, basically, to “send in the troops”—no matter that it was this very kind of escalation that had helped inspire further resistance in the first place. Worse still, Cotton cynically invoked “nascent pogroms at Columbia” and the start of Passover as justification for deploying the National Guard, even though plenty of Jewish students and professors participated in these campouts, and nothing about those peaceful gatherings even remotely shares any resemblance with actual pogroms. (Frankly, it’s a bit rich for Cotton to say he cares so much about antisemitism when he’s time and again refused to speak out against fellow Republicans, like Donald Trump, who’ve embraced prominent antisemites.)

The recent rise in American antisemitism, on campus and off, is very real. But Cotton and his ilk are much less interested in addressing that than in demonizing protesters (many of whom are themselves Jewish) angered by Israel’s brutal ravaging of Gaza and pushing Columbia University to divest its endowment, and any other investments, from Israeli-linked businesses and institutions.

The situation has only been worsened by the glaring spotlight shined on the school by national media outlets, which Columbia students say have misrepresented the events of the past week and presented constitutionally protected gatherings as violent takeovers. This cheap hysteria has allowed observers to conflate the campus demonstrations with the horrific antisemitic incidents that did occur in New York City over the weekend, as some groups of nonstudent bigots took advantage of the confusion to parrot anti-Jewish slogans. The Columbia student protesters and Jewish Voice for Peace condemned these incidents, but the resulting agitation helped to further a narrative of out-of-control antisemitism in American institutions of higher learning. A right-wing media narrative took off about a Yale Jewish student being “stabbed” in the eye—even though video evidence demonstrated unambiguously that no such thing had happened. Meanwhile, the Columbia students and faculty have continued peaceful protests as well as negotiations with the administration, while Jewish students have referred to their involvement in pro-Palestinian actions as an extension of their faith.

Cotton wasn’t alone in his hysterical call to arms. Columbia assistant professor Shai Davidai has also repeatedly demanded that the National Guard come to campus in a video that … showed students peacefully praying in the campus encampment, thus spurring commentators from across the ideological spectrum to express their skepticism. Commentary editor-in-chief John Podhoretz claimed, “If you think the National Guard shouldn’t be sent in, you don’t give a shit about Jewish kids.” (Many Columbia Jewish students disagree with that assessment.) Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, whose organization has disingenuously characterized protests against Israeli militancy as antisemitism, relied on his own errant stats to likewise request National Guard assistance. House Speaker Mike Johnson also claimed Wednesday that there may be an “appropriate time” for the National Guard to arrive.

Although Columbia’s administration did threaten on Tuesday night to call the National Guard on the encampment, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has thus far maintained that there is no need to escalate in such a manner. Cotton has upped the ante by demanding that protesters on student visas be deported. (He’s a real font of good ideas, this guy.)

It’s worth remembering the time the hawkish lawmaker made the case, in a 2020 New York Times op-ed, that the government should likewise “send in the troops” to quell racial justice protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death. It was an odd, violent screed in which Cotton called for “no quarter” in the context of a military incursion, which literally constitutes mass killing and a war crime—and it was undercut by ample documentation that police forces were far more responsible for fomenting street violence that summer than any unruly rioters were. This spurred much internal dissent at the Times, and the paper later stated that the op-ed had not been properly vetted or edited, leading the section editor (who admitted to not having even read the piece prepublication) to resign.

In the years since, some pundits have attempted to claim that the backlash was an overreaction to a simple expression of opinion. But just a scanning of Cotton’s words outside newsprint should be more than enough to dispel any notion that the far-right senator is interested solely in law and order. Last week, after pro-Palestinian protesters blocked highways in major cities, Cotton tweeted out a lie that these dissenters were “pro-Hamas” and “encouraged” those stuck in the ensuing traffic to “take matters into your own hands”—before editing the tweet to add that people should “take matters into your own hands to get them out of the way.” Back in 2020, the country saw a rash of vigilante drivers purposefully ramming into peaceful anti–police brutality protesters. So there’s not really much ambiguity as to what Cotton wants vigilantes—or the troops—to do, especially as cops clad in riot gear have begun to descend on other universities.