Haters

No doubt there are good reasons to be wary of President Trump. There were good reasons, indeed, to be wary of President Obama and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, but this level of viciousness and vitriol should have no place in our community, especially coming from a university professor:

A history professor at California State University, Fresno, appears to have advocated for the death of President Donald Trump on Twitter.

Tweets from an account purportedly operated by Professor Lars Maischak call for Trump to “hang” in order to “save American democracy,” and say the only “cure” for racist people is a bullet to their head. The account is not verified, although the bio and interactions between the user and other Twitter users indicate it belongs to the professor.

“To save American democracy, Trump must hang,” Professor Lars Maischak appears to have tweeted in February. “The sooner and the higher, the better. #TheResistance #DeathToFascism.”

“Has anyone started soliciting money and design drafts for a monument honoring the Trump assassin, yet?” the user wrote in another tweet a few days later, along with the hashtag “TheResistance.”

And in another: “#TheResistance #ethniccleansing Justice = The execution of two Republicans for each deported immigrant.”

The user has also said “mercy towards racists” is a “fatal weakness” of Americans.

“#TheResistance Mercy towards racists was always the fatal weakness of good Americans,” he tweeted. “1865, 1965, they left too many of them alive.”

There's more in this vein from the good professor at the link. It would be amusing were it not so pathetic that one of the biggest criticisms of President Trump by his opponents is that he is "a hater" yet so much of the protest against his administration has been characterized by much more hatred than Mr. Trump has ever displayed.

I'm sure there are individuals who despise President Obama and the Democrats, and I'm sure some of them issued disgusting tweets, but I can't imagine that had a prominent intellectual, a university educator, tweeted something this obscene about Mr. Obama or his supporters he'd be permitted to keep his job. Nor should he have been.

Vengeful rhetoric which encourages murder and violence should be condemned by all decent people on the left and on the right, and those who employ such language in our politics should be marginalized as mentally disturbed cranks, even as we pity them for allowing the corrosive acid of hatred to eat away at their hearts.