Tom Cotton has never seen a left-wing protest he didn’t want crushed at gunpoint.On social media this morning, Atrios posted this garbled take on Republican responses to the current campus unrest:
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.... 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.
He's right -- the police can shoot protesters. So why would Cotton and his allies want the National Guard brought in to do something cops could do just as easily?
The point of calls for the deployment of the National Guard or the military, or calls for vigilante jutice against road blockaders, is escalation and intimidation. I'm not saying that these people don't want their enemies harmed. But intimidation all by itself can be immensely satisfying to Republican voters.
Who's the emblematic modern Republican? A guy walking into a 7-11 or a Walmart or a state park open-carrying an AR-15. Some people who do this actually engage in violence, but most don't. They just want to intimidate. They want to show us who's boss.
Years before Cotton (or Donald Trump) held office, they pasted stickers like this one on their pickup trucks and SUVs:
The vast majority of people who've displayed a sticker like this never harm a liberal. But they want you to know that they'd like to, and they could.
Their anthem is "Try That in a Small Town."
Cuss out a cop, spit in his faceWhy does Jason Aldean sing, "I recommend you don't / Try that in a small town"? Republicans know that acting like a law unto yourself can get messy. Many of the January 6 insurrectionists are in prison. Kyle Rittenhouse and George Zimmerman were acquitted, but the driver who killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville received two life sentences. And excessive force by the police and military can end badly for the perpetrators, as Derek Chauvin and (for a while) Lieutenant William Calley learned. America is still a nation of laws, at least some of the time.
Stomp on the flag and light it up
Yeah, ya think you're tough
Well, try that in a small town
See how far ya make it down the road
Around here, we take care of our own
You cross that line, it won't take long
For you to find out, I recommend you don't
Try that in a small town
But intimidation can provide many of the satisfactions of actual violence without the legal complications. I suspect Kelly Hayes wouldn't agree with my interpretation of these messages, but I think what she says here is relevant:
They want right-wing speech to be protected on campus and people protesting genocide to be ground under. Some people call this hypocrisy, but it's much more sinister than that. These double standards are about HIERARCHY. They're about how the right wants to order the world.
— Puff the Magic Hater (@mskellymhayes.bsky.social) Apr 24, 2024 at 10:33 PM
It's about who gets to do harm and who harm can be visited upon without consequence. That's what they are outlining when they demand "protection" for some and violence against others. They are outlining the world they want, including who should be victimized at will.
— Puff the Magic Hater (@mskellymhayes.bsky.social) Apr 24, 2024 at 10:34 PM
They know we're not there yet. They're not allowed to hunt liberals and progressives at will. The current campus unrest might end without even a single protester death. But they savor the prospect of putting us in our place.
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