Sen. Tom Cotton launches new racist attack ad to support Trump

A GOP senator is wading into the presidential election, using racist language in ads attacking Joe Biden.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) announced Wednesday on Twitter that his leadership PAC, the Republican Majority Fund, will run digital ads in swing states and on the New York Times’ website opposing the likely Democratic presidential nominee.

The spots use a racist term to describe the coronavirus, repeat a debunked claim about Joe Biden, and mock the former vice president for stuttering.

“China’s lies spread the China virus across the world,” a narrator says, “putting the health and jobs of the American people at risk.”

The minute-long ad then says that Biden “doesn’t know what day it is” and that he is “so clueless” that he “called the China travel ban ‘xenophobic.'”

Biden had actually repeatedly criticized “Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering,” without mentioning the travel ban.

Cotton and other Republicans have continued to use “China virus” and “Chinese virus” for the novel coronavirus.

Public health experts warn against naming viruses after geographic locations because it unfairly stigmatizes people for things over which they have no control and can lead to racist and xenophobic actions against them. And that has happened in recent months, as Asians and Asian Americans have been the targets of increasing numbers of hate crimes since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cotton, who has no major opposition in his 2020 Senate reelection race, is already under fire for recent pronouncements on the protests throughout the country in response to the killing of George Floyd, a black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis.

Last week the New York Times published an op-ed piece by Cotton in which he demanded that U.S. troops be deployed against protesting Americans to “restore order.”

The op-ed was widely criticized, as was the New York Times for publishing it.

Cotton also provided his thoughts on who the people protesting police violence are, tweeting a call for “no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.”

On Monday, he told Politico Magazine that he does not believe “you can paint with a broad brush and say there’s systemic racism in the criminal justice system in America.”

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.