Cotton, seen as a possible 2024 presidential candidate, made the comments in an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette while attacking the New York Times 1619 Project’s effort to make slavery a focal point of American history for U.S. schools.
“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,” Cotton said.
reuters.
Okay, Senator Cotten, I’ll agree with the evil part. Yes, it was evil. Now, I’d like to focus on the second part of your statement that you just made – with your mouth, right now, in front of all these people.
Why was it necessary?
Please explain to us why it was necessary? Why was slavery necessary, Sen Cotton? Oh, I’m attacking you? That’s not what you said? Really, we’re going to go there?
And I am not making this up:
“This is the definition of fake news,” Cotton wrote on Twitter. “I said that the Founders viewed slavery as a necessary evil.”
Sen Cotton
No they did not. They did not view it as necessary. They perhaps didn’t have the courage to get rid of it, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and propose that they did not think necessary? Besides, they didn’t have some sort of magical foresight. They wouldn’t know what was necessary or not at that point.
And then there’s this:
In response, Hannah-Jones tweeted: “You said, quote: ‘As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built.’ That ‘as’ denotes agreement.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who launched the 1619 Project
Which of course is the very definition of not-fake news, that is reporting what people actually said, in context, factually.