Here come the troops
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 104
THE WORST THING WE READ™
Tom Cotton Is Still On Message
FIVE YEARS AND one week ago, in the midst of the George Floyd demonstrations, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton published an op-ed in the New York Times under the headline "Tom Cotton: Send in the Troops." Today, with President Donald Trump unlawfully deploying the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles to support his anti-immigrant raids, Cotton published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal under the headline "Tom Cotton: Send in the Troops, For Real."
Through those intervening years, as this newsletter has covered at length, Cotton's Times op-ed was transformed from a piece of speech—a sitting United States senator using a leading national newspaper to call for military violence against protesters—into an object of discourse about speech. The Times staff and readers quickly and strenuously objected to the decision to publish the op-ed; opinion editor James Bennet (who had not, he said, read it before his section published it) lost his job; over time, Bennet became a martyr in the eyes of the people who believed the social change of 2020, especially those social changes that involved junior employees feeling free to criticize actions taken by senior employees, had clearly gone too far and needed to be rolled back.
