As pro-Palestinian protesters blocked major U.S. transportation infrastructure on Monday, from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge to the entrance to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, one Republican senator joined Fox News to call for Americans “to take matters into their own hands.”
Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) joined Fox’s midday news programming and was asked for his thoughts.
“Well, I feel very deeply for all those people who are trying to get to work or trying to pick up a kid. Very worried about the diversion of police resources where it needs to be stopping crime and cities like San Francisco, where firefighters are having to go there when they might have calls for fires out,” Cotton began, adding:
I have to say, Sandra, I agree with you that you have to get to these are these, criminals early? If something like this happened in Arkansas on a bridge there. Let’s just say I think there’d be a lot of very wet criminals that have been tossed overboard, not by law enforcement, but by the people whose, road they’re blocking. If they glued their hands to a car or the pavement. Well, probably pretty painful to have their skin ripped off, but I think that’s the way we’d handle it in Arkansas. And I would encourage most people anywhere that get stuck behind criminals like this, who are trying to block traffic to take matters in their own hands. There’s only usually a few of them, and there’s a lot of people being inconvenienced. It’s time to put an end to this nonsense.
Anchor Sandra Smith replied, “Clearly, Senator, as we watch this together, and to your point about the way different cities and states can react to this, you’re obviously saying that in your state you would deal with this much differently. As you heard from Paul Mauro, speaking from a law enforcement perspective, they know that there’s cameras on them. They know, that they can’t obviously hurt somebody. And the removal of these protesters, there’s obviously a very delicate balance to dealing with this. And the longer it goes on. It would appear the longer it’s going to take to resolve it.”
“Yeah, Sandra, that’s what I’m saying. I sympathize with law enforcement having to deal with this, but I think it’s time for private citizens who are the ones being inconvenienced here when they’re confronted with these protesters just to solve matters of their own before the police even show up,” Cotton replied, doubling down on his call for vigilantism.
“Look, most of these people could be easily removed from the streets. And you’ve seen videos, probably on the internet, of that being done in certain places. Those are always the most popular people on the scene, or the private citizens who took matters into their own hands,” Cotton continued, concluding:
But it’s exactly this kind of radical activism, this anti-Semitic, pro Hamas activism, that are blocking streets and calling out police and firefighting resources. But you have Democrats like Joe Biden trying to restrain Israel, even after it’s been attacked with 300 drones and missiles from Iran, or after October 7th by space, the worst atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust. They’re worried about this radical wing of their own party doing this kind of thing now and doing it all through the summer, as you said earlier, and maybe even at their convention this summer as well. It has to end now, and we can absolutely not tolerate this kind of criminal activity. If you want to march around on a sidewalk or in a public park and wave a flag in support of terrorist groups, that’s one thing. But to block the flow of traffic on major highways, that is a crime and it has to be stopped immediately.
Cotton has long been comfortable with protests being put down by any means necessary. In June of 2020, he penned an op-ed for the New York Times titled, “Tom Cotton: Send In the Troops.” In the piece, Cotton advocated for using the military in U.S. cities to end the Black Lives Matter protests gripping the country. The op-ed sparked controversy and led to turmoil within the Times’s editorial teams.
Watch the clip above via Fox News.
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