This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.

“The nascent pogroms at Columbia have to stop TODAY, before our Jewish brethren sit for Passover Seder tonight. If Eric Adams won’t send the NYPD and Kathy Hochul won’t send the National Guard, Joe Biden has a duty to take charge and break up these mobs.”—a Monday tweet from Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton

What do you suppose gets Sen. Tom Cotton out of bed every morning? Is it the birthday cakes topped with ice cream that he chows on a daily basis? The lines of racist questions he reserves for Asian tech CEOs and Muslim judicial nominees? Or is it the clear, bloodthirsty pleasure he takes in repeatedly calling for the National Guard to attack law-abiding protesters—Bill of Rights and the lessons of Kent State be damned?

Doubtless you are aware by now of the anti-war and pro-Palestinian campouts that kicked off at Columbia University last week, on the same day that its president testified at yet another one of these congressional hearings meant to heap terrible PR on elite college campuses. The protests have only spread to other schools since then, in large part because Columbia University’s president, Nemat Shafik, elected to suspend all the participants and have them arrested by the New York Police Department for trespassing. (Shafik cited “clear and present danger,” although the NYPD, not exactly known for being favorable to protesters, undercut that claim by stating that “the students that were arrested were peaceful” and “offered no resistance whatsoever.”)

The suspensions and arrests of at least 108 students spurred outrage from a significant portion of Columbia and Barnard College’s faculty and student bodies. Solidarity gatherings then popped up not just at neighboring schools like New York University—whose students were also violently dispersed by the NYPD—but out as far as the University of New Mexico, California State Polytechnic University, and even Sciences Po Paris, an international Columbia affiliate.

© Slate