A day after encouraging members of the public to “take matters into their own hands” to deal with peaceful protesters, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) is doubling down on his endorsement of mob violence.
The Arkansas Republican shared a video on X on Tuesday morning of climate protesters who were blocking a road in France being grabbed and tossed on the side of the road by angry drivers. “How it should be done,” he captioned the video.
Cotton was apparently unfazed by backlash he received over comments made a day earlier, when he said protesters who blocked part of the Golden Gate Bridge would’ve been tossed off the bridge if it had happened in Arkansas.
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“I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands to get them out of the way. It’s time to put an end to this nonsense,” he wrote on X about protesters criticizing the U.S. response to the Israel-Hamas war.
Cotton, who famously penned an op-ed in 2020 calling for troops to be deployed to crush nationwide protests, also suggested in comments to Fox News that protesters blocking the road should have their hands “glued … to a car or the pavement,” noting that it’d be “probably pretty painful to have their skin ripped off.”
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough was among those to express disgust at Cotton’s comments, saying, “Here we have a guy, Tom Cotton, that went to Harvard, undergrad and law school, served in the military, who is talking about throwing people off the Golden Gate Bridge, ripping their skin off. We had a United States senator go on a network, national network, suggesting that Americans rip skin off of people’s hands because they’re aggravated and take matters into their own hands.”
While some commenters cheered Cotton’s latest endorsement of vigilante violence on, many others reminded him that what he’s pushing for is actually assault in the eyes of the law.
“Here’s a United States Senator, advocate of assault and battery. Nice Tom,” one person wrote.
