Sen. Tom Cotton encourages drivers to drag Gaza cease-fire protesters from blocked roads

• Sen. Tom Cotton doubled down on comments encouraging people stuck in traffic caused by cease-fire protests to "take matters into their own hands" and forcibly remove the demonstrators from the roads.
• On Monday, traffic stalled on the Golden Gate Bridge and in cities including Chicago, Seattle and New York as protesters planted themselves on the roads to draw attention to the war in Gaza.
• Cotton spurred controversy in 2020 for similar incendiary rhetoric that encouraged the federal government to send in military troops against George Floyd protestors.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., on Tuesday doubled down on earlier comments encouraging people stuck in traffic caused by cease-fire protests to "take matters into their own hands" and forcibly remove the demonstrators from the roads.

Cotton posted a video on X on Tuesday showing people dragging protesters off the roads by their legs and their jacket hoods, tossing them to the curb to let cars through.

"How it should be done," the senator wrote in the post.

On Monday, traffic came to an hourslong standstill on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and in major cities including Chicago, Seattle and New York as demonstrators planted themselves on the roads to draw attention to the war in Gaza.

"If something like this happened in Arkansas, on a bridge there, let's just say I think there would be a lot of very wet criminals that had been tossed overboard not by law enforcement, but by the people whose road they're blocking," Cotton said in a Fox News interview on Monday.

"If they glued their hands to a car or the pavement, well, probably pretty painful to have their skin ripped off but I think that's how we would handle it in Arkansas and I would encourage most people anywhere that