 Hello everyone, welcome to Free Media, I'm Amber Duke. And I'm Robbie Suave. After anti-Israel protesters blocked traffic on several of the country's most iconic bridges yesterday, Senator Tom Cotton encouraged frustrated drivers to take matters into their own hands and throw protesters in the water. Let's watch. I agree with you that you have to get to these criminals early. If something like this happened in Arkansas on a bridge there, let's just say I think there'd be a lot of very wet criminals that have been tossed overboard, not by law enforcement, but by the people who rode their blocking. 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 the way we'd handle it in Arkansas and I would encourage most people anywhere that gets stuck behind criminals like this who are trying to block traffic, to take matters in their own hands. There's only usually a few of them and there's a lot of people being inconvenienced. It's time to put an end to this nonsense. He unexpectedly was derided by his opponents, including MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, who blamed Cotton's comments on, that's right, President Trump. I will tell you if a senator of either party or a member of Congress of either party said we need to throw people off the bridge, we need to rip their skins off their hands. In any time before Trump, that senator would be apologizing this morning. Now, won't even leave them are. Those are the quaint. He'll probably raise more money on it. Yeah. Well, that's that. Hey, I said we should rip skin off of people and kill them by throwing them off the Brooklyn Bridge. Send $25 Tom Cotton for Senate right now. It's the world we live in. Can you believe the left wing media that angry or no, I'm more conservative than Tom Cotton probably. I don't know what his ACU writing is. This is nothing to do with ideology, but that's how they'll play it. So they're suggesting that violence is conservative. So Tom Cotton suggesting it's what Donald Trump suggesting. It's what those people that use violent rhetoric are suggesting. It's just not. It's the opposite of being conservative. All right. So I like most people, I assume, find protesters who block traffic, who obstruct bridges to be incredibly obnoxious and not doing their cause much good regardless of what they're protesting. They could be protesting like, get Robbie another TV show or something. And I'd be like, would you get out of the street here in people's way? So I think this is bad. I think obviously you don't have a right to do it. The police do get to come and move you out of the way of the road or the bridge or whatever. That said, I don't think Tom Cotton, and it was one thing to lament that people might take matters into their own hands. He did, though, say at one point, I encourage people to take matters into their own hands. And I think that is not good advice. Yeah. It's a little too far. I mean, the idea of someone being thrown off of a small bridge is funny, right? Like they do a kiddie pool. Yeah. Like the idea that they'd get thrown into a creek or something, obviously if you throw someone off the Golden Gate Bridge, they will probably die. It's like a 99% chance of them dying. So that's not great. But I understand what he's getting at, right? I mean, this is the type of protest that is not just inconvenient for some people, but really is a matter of life and death. When you have emergency vehicles that are unable to get across these bridges or get through roadways, you have women who might be in labor. There's been cases of individuals missing their parole hearings and then getting thrown in jail because they weren't able to get there on time because of these protesters. So this is not a small matter when people block roadways like this. This is actually very serious, and we absolutely should be encouraging law and order where these people are handled by police officers because it is illegal to do this. But because we have such feckless leaders in so many of these cities that won't handle these protesters themselves, it seems almost inevitable that you're going to have these clashes between civilian and protester because people are going to get fed up with this kind of behavior. Yeah. And it's also like not my responsibility or any driver caught in that situation to like respond to it themselves. I mean, I'm obviously a libertarian. I want minimal government intervention. I'm unwilling and uncomfortable having to pay for like a lot of government services, but the bare minimum government services of like maintaining order on their public roads. Like that's what we pay them to do. Like it's not my job to get the protester out of the way. It literally is the job of the government, like one of the minimum things it's doing if it owns the public road. Now, if we were to privatize the roads, you could have the owner of the road deciding what the policies are going to be. And, you know, paying for their own security services and that would probably be great in my own little Robbie fantasy land I aspire to have. But if we have a public road, we have a public bridge, it should be left to the authorities to handle that and they should handle it to your point because people do get caught in traffic. You know, I mean, what if you're in the middle of the desert and your AC stops working or you're running out the gas on your car or something like that. Gas prices are expensive enough. So it's just, you know, this I put in the same category of like the climate protestors who are throwing soup at paintings. Because that doesn't harm anyone, but it's just like, what good are you doing for your cause? Like who's saying, oh, you did something like unreasonable and destructive and it's a nuisance to other people. And now I'm more sympathetic to your cause. I like, I don't understand where that comes from. I think in this case with the Palestinian protesters, they're trying to like make you feel the suffering that they think is going on over there, but it just seems totally counterproductive to me. Yeah, I completely agree. And to your point about people getting stuck in these kind of things, I mean, there was an incident outside of D.C. in Virginia, I think it was two or three winters ago, where there was this massive storm and people got caught on 95. And you basically had people who were transporting food, like in tractor trailers, having to hand out loaves of bread to people because they were there for like eight hours, essentially at risk of starving where they had children who were going hungry. So it's really does affect people pretty intensely. And I just don't buy this idea that you have to subject yourself to the same conditions of other people in order to feel sympathy for them. So that's the fundamental flaw in their logic, these pro-Gaza protesters. I'm also shocked that people are so surprised by Tom Cotton of all people saying this. I mean, this is the man who basically set the New York Times newsroom ablaze by simply suggesting that the National Guard go in to put down riots in the summer of 2020. He wrote an op-ed for them. The newsroom revolted. You had people posting on Twitter that he was putting black staffers' lives in danger, which was kind of confusing because I don't think New York Times staffers should be joining riots anyway. And presumably if they weren't in the riots, sending the National Guard wouldn't put their lives in danger. But that was what they claimed because, of course, these people are afraid of free speech. So I mean, this is not out of the norm, I guess you could say, for Senator Cotton by any means. And now, of course, Governor Hockel in New York, right, the New York Democratic authorities are using national state guard troops in the subway system along the lines of what Tom Cotton suggested and there's been no newsroom revolt. I do think, you know, going to Morning Joe's point at the end there, I do think it's incumbent on everyone. Republican officials included to avoid violent rhetoric, to try to de-escalate hostilities in our society if we possibly can. Yet, was the op-ed racist or inflammatory that he wrote about how to handle the rioters the best? I don't think so. Did I agree with the proposal? No, not really. Here, do I understand the frustration where he's saying how we all feel about wanting to get people out of the way on the bridges? Yes. Do I think it's good for a public official to really say, yeah, you should shove them out of the way? I mean, it's not good for you. You're going to get arrested if you do that. So I think this is true for all of our elected officials that they've started to sound to me almost like, well, this isn't a surprise. Reality TV personalities. I mean, Donald Trump was one. And it's fun for them, and it's entertainment. It's a celebrity. But maybe it's not good to be leaning into that so much. There is kind of a delineation between saying, you should do this versus if you do it, I understand why you did it. I'm probably not going to fault you for it. For example, if someone continued to drive through the protesters, obviously you're not trying to run somebody over to kill them. But if you're in an emergency situation, and sometimes these protesters will come up to your car and try to break in. They've thrown people out previously and beat them up. If I see a bunch of a swarm of people coming out my car, I'm going to obviously try to get out of there in whatever way I possibly can. So I just think that there's, like you said, encouraging. There's a line between encouraging and saying, I understand, do what you have to do kind of thing. But telling people to rip skin off of people's hands is just kind of gross. Yeah. And I think I've said that in one of our previous segments. Telling people to do something that could get them in legal jeopardy to get the person you're telling to do is never a good idea. And it's something that happens way too much. Nobody willfully puts yourself in an environment where you're going to commit a crime. But we can call on our experts and our police and our professionals to handle the situations and hopefully make the roads safe and clear for everyone to use the way they should be. Defend yourself if you need to, but hopefully. Self-defense. Yes. Not aggression. Yes. Self-defense. Yeah. All right. Thanks for watching Free Media. You can find more content like this at Reason TV's homepage on YouTube and at Reason.com. 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