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After many people on Twitter vilified Tom Cotton for reportedly calling slavery a “necessary evil” in a recent interview, the Republican senator clarified his remarks in a social media post of his own.
“This is the definition of fake news,” the Arkansas Republican wrote in a Twitter TWTR, -3.51% post on Sunday. “I said that *the Founders viewed slavery as a necessary evil* and described how they put the evil institution on the path to extinction, a point frequently made by Lincoln.”
Cotton was referring to an interview he gave to the Arkansas Democratic-Gazette, in which he criticized the New York Times’ proposed school curriculum under its 1619 Project that would highlight American slavery, rather than American independence, in U.S. history lessons.
“Curriculum is a matter for local decisions, and if local left-wing school boards want to fill their children’s heads with anti-American rot, that’s their regrettable choice. But they ought not to benefit from federal tax dollars to teach America’s children to hate America,” he told the paper.
So Cotton introduced legislation last week to ban using federal tax dollars to teach this in the country’s classrooms. His legislation calls the historical reinterpretation “a distortion of American history,” and the senator called the 1619 Project “left-wing propaganda” and “revisionist history at its worst” in his interview with the Arkansas Democratic-Gazette.
“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country,” he told the Arkansas Democratic-Gazette. “As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.”
“ “As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.” ”
Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter who created the 1619 Project, tweeted in response to his interview that: “If chattel slavery—heritable, generational, permanent, race-based slavery where it was legal to rape, torture, and sell human beings for profit—were a ‘necessary evil’ as @TomCottonAR says, it’s hard to imagine what cannot be justified if it is a means to an end.”
The “necessary evil” quote was seized upon by other critics on Twitter, and the interview went viral over the weekend, and led Tom Cotton’s name to trend on Monday.
Cotton responded to Hannah-Jones’s tweet by calling the 1619 Project “debunked” and writing that, “Describing the *views of the Founders* and how they put the evil institution on a path to extinction, a point frequently made by Lincoln, is not endorsing or justifying slavery.” He added, “No surprise that the 1619 Project can’t get facts right.”
Cotton also drew criticism last month for a New York Times op-ed entitled “Send In the Troops,” where he called for “an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers” and stop an “orgy of violence” to de-escalate the protests across the nation in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
Times staffers revolted over the paper’s decision to publish Cotton’s column, with dozens of reporters, columnists, editors and producers tweeting: “Running this puts black @nytimes staff in danger.”The Times later said that it made a mistake in publishing the column, and opinion-page editor James Bennet resigned.
