Bloodthirsty Tom Cotton just can’t help himself. He loves the warm glow of a camera’s lights and the hot blood of an American citizen he disagrees with meeting headfirst with a policeman’s baton.

This weekend, he was on ABC News, once again spitting mad at the protesters on campuses across the country who are calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

“These students on campuses deserve our contempt. They also deserve our mockery,” Cotton said.

The senator keeps insisting that these are violent mobs attacking Jewish students. That’s not true. What’s actually happened is that the protesters themselves have generally been remarkably peaceful. Purposefully or not, government and university authorities have been escalating these situations by bringing in riot police with military gear.

There is no mystery about what happens when you call in the cops, to say nothing of the National Guard. They rampage in and make mass arrests, and things get heated. In video after video, the students pose no violent threat, but they break rules and laws by refusing to disperse. Authorities arrive in riot gear to what amounts to a sit-in. They manhandle teenage girls with nothing in hand but protest signs, they pin their knees on the necks of undergraduates. At the University of Indiana, the cops had a sniper set up on the roof of a campus building. What could go wrong?

There have now been several instances of professors being thrown to the ground like ragdolls. Same as it ever was: Rightwing reactionaries and authoritarians, beyond any particular ideological commitments, seem most comfortable enacting extralegal violence on professors and students.

Demagogues like Bloodthirsty Tom always run the same playbook, insisting that the citizens who take the beating are less than human. They are “fanatics and freaks.” The protests are “disgusting cesspools.” If they oppose the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians, that just shows they support Hamas.

This way of speaking is not new. You can almost hear Orval Faubus gearing up to get them shouting once again, insisting that the “civil wrongs” protesters were nothing but “communists.” As compared to the “warm red blood of patriotic American citizens,” of course, even if they were the ones taking the law into their own hands by violent means. Replace “Hamas” with “communists” and you can hardly tell the difference.

Senator Sicko says that vigilantes should “take matters into their own hands.” Protesters should be thrown off bridges, and worse: “It would probably be pretty painful to have their skin ripped off. But I think that’s probably how we would handle it in Arkansas.”

Again, this type of rhetoric is part of a very old tradition. “If any demonstrator ever lays down in front of my car, it’ll be the last car he’ll ever lay down in front of,” said George Wallace, former Alabama governor, in 1968.

In his comments on ABC Sunday, Cotton again whined that authorities haven’t sent in enough cops or replayed Kent State by sending in the National Guard. He said that President Joe Biden should immediately deport anyone at the protests who is not an American citizen. He once again whined that Biden has made even nominal efforts to suggest humanitarian limits on Bibi Netanyahu‘s war.

Cotton added that student protestors have gluten allergies, so that’s one more reason to hold them in contempt.

He made the bizarre claim that discrimination against Muslim people was a non-issue on campus, and that it would be offensive to Jewish students to say otherwise. Such a curious twist of illogic perhaps reveals that Cotton thinks some students of some backgrounds are human beings who deserve to feel safe on campus — others, less so.

Finally, like an uncontrollable tic, Cotton continued with the despicable canard that any protest against Israel’s actions in Gaza was inherently antisemitic. There is no point in rehashing here how offensive, ahistorical and flat-out stupid this claim is. But I would like to point out that rightwing Zionist Christians in the U.S. are themselves interested in Israel only as an instrumental means to a theological end that might strike many Jews as…kind of antisemitic?

I couldn’t tell you what Cotton’s eschatological worldview is, but his allies in this cause — like state Sen. Bart Hester (R-Cave Springs) back in Arkansas — have stated their beliefs explicitly: Jews going to the Holy Land helps to hasten Christ’s return, followed by mass conversion; Jews who don’t convert will then be subject to an eternal torture so ineffably brutal it can only be described by metaphors of fire. These are the first guys who want a close reading of the slogan “From the River to the Sea.” 

To zoom out a little, Cotton insists that school administrators should have brought in authorities with guns and riot gear on the very first day of the protests. This is not just grandstanding — it’s a demand that the power of official violence immediately confront peaceful protestors and quash them. It is an insistence that the role of the authorities is to turn peaceful situations into violent situations. To decrease safety and increase chaos.

And why? Because they were breaking campus rules or local laws. The offense itself is not violent; it is merely trespassing. Cotton would rather see blood shed on campus than some tents on the lawn.

Among the most surreal video clips to surface from the campus protests are scenes of apparent frat boys threatening vigilante violence or even seemingly working as inebriated allies with the police. I say this with no malice toward frat boys, it’s just true: If you have ever spent time on a campus, you are aware that frat boys as a whole are a lot more violent and destructive than the protesters. For whatever reason, that doesn’t get Cotton’s blood pumping, and we don’t send in the cops or the troops to rough them up.

These details are just details. Cotton wants you to know who the enemy is. He wants blood. And he wants you to want blood, too.

“What’s underneath it all,” Cotton told ABC News, “is a hatred for this country.”

Sounds familiar.

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