Activists and commentators are furious that the New York Times gave the column width to Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, who has been advocating the violent overthrow of the protesters if necessary.

While that move is illegal and a clear violation of the Constitution and Cotton's oath of office, he took to Twitter to encourage murdering protesters instead of arresting them.

"No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters," Cotton tweeted this week.

From the moment that protests against racist police violence started to spread from Minneapolis to the rest of the country (and the world), after a white police officer named Derek Chauvin killed an unarmed black man named George Floyd in a gruesome incident captured on video, it's been clear that Donald Trump thought this was exactly the Hail Mary he needed to win re-election. Trump has been desperate for a way to distract the country from the soaring death rate of the coronavirus pandemic (now at 108,000 and counting) and the 40 million left unemployed in the resulting economic collapse. He believed that a racist and sadistic backlash against the protesters was just the ticket.