Tom Cotton: Republicans Condemn Fringe Right as Democrats Tolerate Omar, Schiff, Schumer, Swalwell, Waters

Republicans condemn “conspiracy theories” from their own fringe while Democrats support their own extremists, said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) on Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

Marlow invited Cotton’s remarks on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), given recent news media focus on the representative from Georgia.

Marlow said, “I’m kind of confused about what’s going on with the Marjorie Taylor Greene stuff. I’m not into Marjory Taylor Greene. It seems like she said some really nutty stuff and I don’t dig it, but is she really the person who’s running the Republican Party, because I’ve turned on MSNBC and CNN, and that’s kind of what I’ve heard.”

Cotton replied, “Let me start by telling a story I told in my book Sacred Duty. Anyone who’s been to Arlington National Cemetery knows that the planes fly over into Reagan National [Airport] every couple of minutes, and when I performed funerals there, you might have had ten or 15 planes fly over always, in the same North and South path, but on the morning of 9/11, it was a little different.”

Cotton added, “Soldiers had just finished the 9:00 a.m. funeral, they hitched their horses to one of the cemetery’s hitching posts, and they saw a plane flying a very different path, and they watched it slam into the Pentagon, which is just a couple hundred yards away from the cemetery.”

“That happened. Islamic terrorists flew that plane into the Pentagon and they flew planes into the Twin Towers. It wasn’t a hoax. It wasn’t an inside job. Republicans cannot indulge claims that it didn’t happen, and just like we shouldn’t accept conspiracy theories that mass murders at schools were false flags or that a Jewish space laser caused wildfires in California — what did that was ill-advised liberal environmental policies — our party stands with Israel [and] we stand for the U.S.-Israel alliance. We shouldn’t tolerate antisemitic tropes.”

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Cotton contrasted Democrat and left-wing focus on Greene with their acceptance of and praise for figures like Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Adam Schiff (D-CA), Eric Swalwell (D-CA), Maxine Waters (D-CA), and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

Cotton remarked, “Make no mistake, plenty of Democrats do and say outlandish things, too. Ilhan Omar has made multiple antisemitic statements. Maxine Waters urged mobs to attack Trump administration officials. Eric Swalwell cavorted with a Chinese spy. Chuck Schumer threatened two Supreme Court justices [if] they didn’t rule the way he wanted. I don’t see MSNBC and CNN and the liberal media calling them out for it.”

“But just because Democrats and the media accept that doesn’t mean we should,” Cotton added. “We want to win elections. We see the consequences, right now, of losing elections in the Senate when Chuck Schumer is jamming through a two-trillion-dollar giveaway to liberal special interests, and the next up is amnesty. The DREAM Act is coming down the pipe.”

Cotton went on, “The way to stop this woke Democratic agenda is to win elections, and we will win elections with strong credible conservatives who stand up for America. If our party tolerates conspiracy theories, then we’re only going to lose elections and America is going to be much worse for it.”

Cotton stated, “What the Democrats proposed to do, to reach into the minority and decide who the minority party is going to put on committees is unprecedented, and if they go down that path, then mark my words, Republicans in two years, we’ll go down the same path. Should Ilhan Omar, who’s made multiple antisemitic statements, be sitting on the Foreign Relations Committee? Should Eric Swalwell, cavorting with a Chinese spy be sitting on the Intelligence Committee?”

Cotton added, “This is a very dangerous precedent that the Democratic majority in the House wants to set when they’re on the precipice of losing that majority next year. What Democrats and the liberal media want to do is to leverage a fringe of extremist statements and violence from the right against mainstream conservatives in a way that they would never do on the left.”

Cotton recalled, “Remember, it was a Bernie Sanders supporter who showed up in Alexandria, Virginia, and shot Steve Scalise, almost killed him, and tried to commit mass murder against congressional Republicans, and would have done so if it hadn’t been for the bravery and quick action of Capitol police officers who were there at that ballpark.”

“When it was discovered that that was a Bernie Sanders supporter, it was out of the news within 24 hours, not something that could be discussed, and frankly a lot of Republicans didn’t discuss it either because he was plainly a crazy person, and there was not an effort by Republicans writ large to leverage that kind of extremist violence or extremist rhetoric … against mainstream Democratic liberals,” concluded Cotton.