“Tom Cotton and Hawley coming / We’re finally on our own...”

Tom Cotton is a genuinely bloodthirsty bobble-throated slapdick from Arkansas. Just in the past two weeks, he has advocated vigilante violence against protesters who might delay his commute to the Capitol from his Beltway pied-à-terre. And now, along with Missouri senator Josh (Haulin’ Ass) Hawley, Cotton has recommended sending the National Guard to the Columbia University campus. From Politico:

“The nascent pogroms at Columbia have to stop TODAY, before our Jewish brethren sit for Passover Seder tonight,” Cotton wrote on X. “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.”...Cotton’s calls for sending the National Guard to the college campus are reminiscent of when the Arkansas Republican penned an op-ed in The New York Times nearly four years ago pushing for the use of military force against thousands of people who protested police brutality across the country in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. The 2020 opinion piece sparked an immediate backlash from readers and employees at the newspaper and led to the resignation of James Bennet, the Times’ editorial page editor, and a lengthy editor’s note atop the piece stating that it “fell short of our standards and should not have been published.”

Forgive me for wondering if things in the yard at Columbia are really as bad as Cotton would like them to be. If New York mayor Eric Adams, whose approval ratings have sunk into Middle-earth, can’t find a reason to take the quick-fix option of busting heads, you have to wonder what need there is for the National Guard. (All the arrests thus far have been peaceful, which must disappoint Hawley and Cotton greatly.) Journalist Tom Scocca took a stroll by the war zone. He wrote about it for his newsletter and he mentioned that what he saw was a bunch of people sitting around on the lawn.

The students are sitting around on the lawn. Yet Hawley and Cotton were fantasizing about oiling the triggers for a new Kent State. Cotton was holding forth about “nascent pogroms at Columbia....” The bloodthirsty mobs of Columbia don’t exist. No one anywhere, including the people warning about the mobs, is acting as if they do. But the vision of incipient violence has them in its grip anyway.

Cotton clearly has a bad jones for violence against his fellow citizens. He should probably seek help for that. Meanwhile, Senator Haulin’ Ass joined Cotton in a matinee performance of Bad Historical Analogy Theater.

Hawley (R-Mo.) in his own post brought up President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1957 order for the National Guard to protect the “Little Rock Nine” in Arkansas after the Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate schools. “Eisenhower sent the 101st to Little Rock. It’s time for Biden to call out the National Guard at our universities to protect Jewish Americans,” Hawley said on X Monday.

You will note that many of the voices calling for a severe crackdown are doing so for the purpose of curtailing what might happen. But the real fanatics, like Cotton and Hawley, are fairly slavering for violence to happen so that they can luxuriate in the breaking of heads. Jesus, these really are the mole people.

Headshot of Charles P. Pierce
Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.