Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, took to Twitter on Sunday to call what he identified as “fake news” after criticism after a newspaper interview where he spoke about the founding fathers and how they viewed slavery as a “Necessary evil”.
Cotton was interviewed in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and spoke about a bill he sponsored that seeks to deny federal funds to schools that incorporate the New York Times’ controversial ‘Project 1619’ into their curriculum.
Cotton told the newspaper: “We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact in the development of our country because otherwise we cannot understand our country.” 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 road to its final extinction. “
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The quote was picked up by critics on social media who called the senator for what they said seemed like a justification for slavery.
Cotton then turned to Twitter in an attempt to clarify his comments. He replied to Teagan Goddard, the editor of Political Wire, who tweeted: “Cotton says slavery was a necessary evil.”
Cotton called the tweet the “definition of fake news.”
“I said that * the Founders saw slavery as a necessary evil * and described how they put the evil institution on the path to extinction, a point Lincoln frequently made,” Cotton tweeted.
He also replied to Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times correspondent who won the Pulitzer Prize for her essay in The 1619 Project, who wrote: “If slavery is a heritable, generational, permanent slavery based on the race where it was legal To rape, torture and sell human beings for profit, they were a “necessary evil” as @TomCottonAR says, it is difficult to imagine what cannot be justified if it is a means to an end. “
Cotton replied that “describing the * Founders’ opinions *” is not an endorsement or an attempt to justify. He continued: “No wonder Project 1619 cannot understand the facts correctly.”
Multiple historians have criticized the series of articles for multiple inaccuracies, including the argument that the American Revolution was fought not to achieve independence from Britain, but to preserve the institution of slavery.
In a previous statement, Cotton called the project “a racially divisive and revisionist account of history that denies the noble principles of liberty and equality on which our nation was founded.”
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“Not a single penny of federal funds should go to indoctrinate young Americans with this left-wing junk,” he said.
Fox News’ Bradford Betz contributed to this report.
