During a wide-ranging interview on ABC’s This Week, Sen, Tom Cotton (R-AR) took a blowtorch to the antisemitic protesters on college campuses, brutally mocked them as establishing “little Gazas”, and schooled host Jon Karl when he tried to twist mockery of the encampments into mockery of Gaza itself.
Watch the exchange, as aired on ABC This Week on Sunday, May 5th, 2024:
TOM COTTON: They're spray painting buildings with vile, antisemitic hate. (Biden) said, well, we shouldn't have antisemitism or hate speech in the abstract, or Islamophobia. Where are the encampments, Jon, on campuses spreading Islamophobia? Why is Joe Biden so equivocal? Why does he have to draw moral equivalence between thousands of students who are setting up Little Gazas all across America…
JON KARL: Can I…can I ask you…
COTTON: …engaging in hate speech- engaging in hate speech against Jews, assaulting Jews, disobeying the law, and some fictional encampment that’s spreading Islamophobia?
KARL: Can I ask you, you just three or four times now just used the phrase “little Gazas”. What do you mean by that?
COTTON: Well, they call themselves the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. They’re little. They’re little Gazas.
KARL: I mean, are you…? It seems like you're mocking the situation in Gaza. This is a place that the World F---
COTTON: A lot of these people do -- these people do deserve to be mocked.
KARL: No, no, no. Gaza. I'm talking about, you know, Gaza, you know…
COTTON: With… No. On college campuses.
KARL: We had the World Food Program has just now said that there is an outright famine in parts of Gaza. Tens of thousands of people have died. You're using this phrase “little Gazas” --
COTTON: Which is 100% the fault of Hamas. Just like every civilian casualty in Gaza is 100% the fault of Hamas. Yet Joe Biden for seven months has leaned on Israel, has pressured Benjamin Netanyahu, has told him to stand down when they get attacked by Iran, has said they can't go into the last holdout where Hamas has its final terrorist battalions. But no. These students on campuses? They deserve our contempt. They also deserve our mockery. I mean, they're out there in their N95 masks in the open air. With their gluten allergies, demanding that Uber Eats get delivered to them. They should not have been allowed to fester on campus for two weeks when these liberal administrators and liberal politicians refuse to send in the police to clear them out the very first day they set up their tents.
As soon as Cotton began mocking the protesters living within their “little Gazas”, one could see Jon Karl’s brow begin to furrow. One imagines a similar strained expression over at The New York Times, as staff got wind of Cotton’s op-ed calling for a military response to the violent protests raging throughout America’s cities.
When Karl finally found his angle, the asinine suggestion that Cotton’s mockery of the protester tent cities was a mockery of Gaza itself, it got quickly shot down with even more mockery, forcing Karl to move off the subject and on to speculation over the 2024 Republican presidential ticket.
The interview covered such subjects as funding for Ukraine, the campus protests, the 2024 presidential campaign and January 6th. On each of these issues, Karl’s hysterics were quickly and promptly shut down. There was ample opportunity here to have a broad-ranging discussion of multiple issues. Instead and surprising no one, Jon Karl chose to perform Regime Media.
