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By C.J. Atkins
Amidst a public health catastrophe that’s already taken 150,000 lives in this country and a national anti-racist uprising which has mobilized millions, the extreme right is methodically planning its next steps, ensuring its political survival no matter the outcome of the November 3rd elections. Whether or not Trump prevails and wins a second term, the Republican Party is preparing for a future after him. And in Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, it’s possible they might have found their next frontman.
Cotton has earned widespread condemnation from the liberal media, Black leaders, and left commentators in recent weeks thanks to his back-to-back provocative attacks on Black Lives Matter demonstrators and the reporters and scholars behind the New York Times’ 1619 Project. Unless you’re a Washington watcher, Cotton might be someone who’s passed under your radar. But now that he’s put himself front and center in the so-called “culture wars,” he deserves some fresh scrutiny.
When protesters demanded an end to systemic racism and police violence in June, Cotton urged Trump to show BLM no mercy; he said to “Send in the Troops” in a controversial NYT op-ed. After that, Cotton picked a fight with Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Times journalist who jumpstarted a national conversation around the central role that slavery and its legacy played in the founding of the United States and its subsequent history.
Almost as if his only goal was to poke at his ideological opponents and rile up the GOP’s racist base, Cotton filed a bill that would ban federal funding for any educational curriculum that drew on the Pulitzer Prize-winning materials of the 1619 Project. Talking to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette about his bill earlier this week, Cotton said doing more to integrate slavery and the oppression of Black Americans into school history classes is “left-wing propaganda” and “revisionist history at its worst.”
The comment that critics believe really showed Cotton’s true colors, however, was when he called slavery “the necessary evil upon which the union was built.” Generations of untold human suffering was apparently the price to pay to build “the greatest and noblest country in the history of mankind.” It’s the same...
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