Prof blames 'Trump and trumpism' for Scalise shooting
A Central Connecticut State University professor is blaming the politically-motivated shooting of House Majority Whip Steve Scalise on President Trump and “trumpism.”
“Donald Trump is corrupt, dishonest, and stupid. Intellectually feeble and mentally unstable people drawn to political extremism have and will be inspired or driven by Trump and trumpism to say and do horrible things,” associate professor of political science Jerold Duquette wrote in a blog post Thursday. “Yesterday, a left wing extremist was driven by Trump and trumpism to try to kill people.”
[RELATED: Profs mock Scalise support for Second Amendment after shooting]
Duquette also argues that Trump’s nomination for president by the Republican Party represented a surrender “of the GOP’s intellectual, ethical, and moral standards” and a victory for “incivility, anti-intellectualism, and extremism,” asserting that “with the help of left wing extremists (and apparently the Russians), that victory was magnified in the 2016 general election, giving us the most extreme and uncivilized national political leadership we have ever had.”
The professor claims that the Republican leadership is “going through the motions” with its condemnations of the Wednesday shooting, arguing that “they lack the moral and intellectual authority to make this condemnation useful.”
Moreover, he complains that “bloviating profiteers in the rightwing media” are further weakening the “credibility” of conservatives by “using this incident to fuel the right wing alternate reality propaganda machine.”
[RELATED: Harvard pushes list calling conservative website ‘fake news’]
Duquette elaborates on his views in the comment section of the post, claiming that “violent rhetoric is far more common and acceptable on the right than on the left,” and that “Trumpism IS CLEARLY facilitating terrible things,” though he provides no support for either contention.
“Its [sic] very easy to link Trump and trumpism to yesterday's perpetrator because we have lots of evidence that his rage was specifically directed at Trump and the GOP,” he declares, conceding that while “this reality does not reduce the culpability of any perpetrator of violence in the abstract...the really scary thing is that the normalization of Trumpist incivility may make it eventually possible for violent extremists to mount successful insanity defenses in court.”
Duquette did not immediately respond to Campus Reform’s request for comment.
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