I'm PJ Evans, the writer of this show.
And here's our story on the Boston Dynamics
escaped robot turned Senator of the United States.
- Good morning, Chuck, it's good to be on with you.
Happy Independence Day to you
and all your listeners or viewers.
to two lifelong Democrats in the small town
of
His father worked for the state government
doing inspections for the Department of Health.
His mother was a public school teacher
and a middle school principal.
Cotton was raised on the family's cattle farm
(cow mooing)
just a few miles out from his high school,
where he excelled in academia, but not basketball.
- Tom's always been a good leader,
but couldn't shoot a lick.
- [PJ] and in the fall of 1995
Cotton arrived in Cambridge,
ready to fight a majority of the student body.
The lengthy brace-faced Cotton was a noticeable
speck of red in a sea of blue.
He wrote for the Harvard Crimson as an outspoken opponent
of the widespread liberal rhetoric on campus.
Here's just a piece of one article
from 1998, written by Cotton.
Of course, Tom Cotton was writing about Bill Clinton.
He has since changed his tune.
At least when the exact same actions
and rhetoric come from a Republican.
And it's fine.
- You are supporting the policies
of a man who wants to grab women by the pussy.
(audience cheering)
- It would seem that you've uncovered
that we have a lot of people here
who are not supportive of Donald Trump.
(audience cheering)
- [PJ] In another article for the Harvard Crimson,
Cotton argues against affirmative action.
He urges universities to look at the
instead of the color of their skin.
He goes further on affirmative action writing,
After college Cotton went to
graduating in 2002.
He worked in law firms and picked up a clerkship
with a federal appeals court judge.
After his stint with the judge Cotton worked for a law firm
in an effort to pay off his student loans.
But something had been brewing in him
since the attacks on 9/11.
He could live out a comfortable life in law,
or join the Army and act on his pent-up rage.
Cotton served with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq.
He spent nearly five years on active duty
as an infantry officer, receiving a bronze star medal,
combat infantry badge, and Ranger tab.
Cotton left the Army in 2009 and went to work
for the management consulting firm McKinsey.
Yeah, that McKinsey.
At this point in time, Cotton had gone to Harvard,
served in the Army, and worked for one of
the most prestigious consulting firms in the country.
It's clear what his next step would be.
In 2013 Cotton ran for House.
His campaign was backed by deep pocketed donors
like the Koch brothers,
the Club For Growth, and Americans For Prosperity.
- [Announcer] Tom Cotton left his law practice
and volunteered for infantry in Iraq.
Now he's volunteering to serve in Congress,
to overturn Obama's healthcare takeover.
Cotton, conservative for Congress.
- [PJ] He won.
In the House, Cotton was an outspoken voice
against the Obama administration,
and he advocated for cutting food stamps
from the farm bill, calling food stamp recipients,
At the time, one in six Arkansans
relied on food stamps to survive.
Cotton only spent a few months in the House
before announcing his run for Senate in August of 2013.
Cotton defeated incumbent, Mark Pryor,
a well-known name and heir to an Arkansas political dynasty.
In the Senate, Cotton's war on the Obama administration
took a cruel and inhumane turn,
when President Obama nominated long-time friend
and former White House lawyer, Cassandra Butts,
to be the United States ambassador to the Bahamas.
Cotton put a hold on her nomination
and didn't allow the Senate to take it up.
Cotton told Cassandra that he was blocking her nomination
because he knew she was Obama's friend,
and knew it would inflict a special pain on Obama.
She spent
and then suddenly died of leukemia.
Nice one, Tom.
Cotton's stint in the Senate can best be described as
seeking out the most conservative position
and standing on the right of that.
In 2016, he said the United States
Nevermind the fact that
were incarcerated
in jails and prisons across the country.
A 500% increase over the last 40 years.
CNN notes,
Just minutes after Trump won the 2016 election
Cotton was on national TV fluffing his resume
for the new administration.
- Do you agree with him that torture works,
and waterboarding, and much worse would be a good idea?
- Well waterboarding isn't torture.
- [PJ] When Trump took office in 2017,
Cotton was no longer the most
bombastic lawmaker in the room.
Former Trump strategist, ex-chairman of Breitbart,
and the recently arrested on fraud charges, Steve Bannon,
told The New Yorker,
Cotton has voted in line with Trump over 87% of the time
during his career in the Senate,
according to FiveThirtyEight.
And following the murder of George Floyd,
Cotton disputed the existence of systemic racism,
Cotton said.
In the protests that followed Floyd's death
Cotton wrote an incendiary op-ed in the New York Times
urging the military to be brought in
to deal with protests against police brutality.
Send in the troops, the headline read.
the column continued,
by apparently turning the troops against your own people.
The New York Times later stated,
the piece did not meet their standards
and they should've never published it.
- I will say my op-ed didn't meet the Times standards,
it far exceeded their standard.
- [PJ] In July of 2020, Cotton targeted school curriculums
proposing a bill that would ban
the 1619 Project from schools.
The 1619 Project was started by
the New York Times in 2019.
According to its website it,
Cotton threatened to cut school funding
for schools who teach it in their curriculum,
which is ironic when you consider about a year later
Cotton introduced legislation
protecting free speech on college campuses.
Huh, go figure.
Cotton, no stranger to openly supporting
the prison industrial complex
and ignoring the existence of systemic racism said,
In the criticism that followed, Cotton explained
he was only relaying what he believed
were the views of the founding fathers.
- Of course, slavery is a evil institution
in all its forms, at all times,
- [PJ] In September of 2020, Trump shortlisted Cotton
as a potential Supreme Court nominee,
after the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
In an effort to sit as a judge,
Cotton quickly fired off a tweet,
but it didn't work.
Trump ultimately went with right wing,
anti-reproductive rights, Catholic crusader,
Amy Coney Barrett.
It's worth noting, Cotton, along with every other
spineless Republican Senator, blocked Obama's nomination
of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in 2016, a
But as we've recently found out,
Cotton's hypocrisy apparently has no bounds
because with a Republican in office,
just weeks out from the election,
he's flip-flopped on this position,
and feels fine to fast track a Supreme Court nomination.
- You really don't think there is any hypocrisy at all
in saying, we need to give voters,
because, I mean, you can parse the 2014 election,
the 2018 election any way you want.
But you stated a pretty firm principle
in 2016 about Merrick Garland.
It's wrong to deny voters a chance to weigh in.
You don't see any hypocrisy between
that position then and this position now?
- Chris, the Senate majority is performing
our constitutional duty and fulfilling the mandate
that the voters gave us in 2016, and especially in 2018.
- [PJ] Despite carrying himself
like a slow-paced Boston Dynamics robot
with a kindly Southern drawl,
Cotton holds power, power no other politician
in the Trump landscape has been able to grasp.
The appeal to both the Republican establishment
and Trump's base.
Steve Bannon once asked
That guy, Tom Cotton.
So until the folks at Boston Dynamics
eventually turn their creation off
and stuff him back in the warehouse where he came from,
he'll continue computing.
Executing with precision, just like his predecessor,
only Cotton has all of the intelligence,
and none of the dumb.
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