While discussing his proposed bill that would reduce federal funding for any school that includes The New York Times's 1619 Project in its curriculum, the Republican Senator from Arkansas claimed that the Founding Fathers viewed the enslavement of millions of African people as a "necessary evil."
“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise, we can’t 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 course to its ultimate extinction,” Cotton said in an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.