Isn’t this the sort of thing that can get you a visit from the Secret Service?
The Daily Caller reported:
Professor: ‘Trump Must Hang,’ Republicans Should Be Executed For Each Immigrant Deported
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.”
To save American democracy, Trump must hang. The sooner and the higher, the better. #TheResistance #DeathToFascism https://t.co/DSsV53sbO2
— Lars Maischak (@LarsMaischak) February 18, 2017
#TheResistance Has anyone started soliciting money and design drafts for a monument honoring the Trump assassin, yet?
— Lars Maischak (@LarsMaischak) February 19, 2017
He didn’t like the internet’s reaction:
https://twitter.com/LarsMaischak/status/850816408501895168
https://twitter.com/LarsMaischak/status/850818376872058881
https://twitter.com/LarsMaischak/status/850819017015083008
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Isn’t this the sort of thing that can get you a visit from the Secret Service?
It can, but only to make sure you aren’t planning to act on your own advocacy. Advocating the president’s assassination, or any other crime, is of course absolutely protected by the first amendment, and the Secret Service has a duty, while performing its due diligence, to avoid doing so in a manner that will have a chilling effect on such speech.
However, describing the professor as having “advocated for the death” is in my opinion a heinous crime — not against the US but against the English language. One can advocate (verb) anything one likes; one can be an advocate (noun) for that thing; but one cannot advocate for it without doing violence to the language akin to that done by saying “I could care less” when one clearly couldn’t.
His Twitter account says he is “Teaching American History with a German accent”. How strange. I would think that a German, of all people, would have some understanding of the meaning of “fascism” but he clearly does not. Apparently he, like many the the so-called students at our colleges, believes that fascism means “Any political belief that differs from my own!”
As Orwell pointed out in 1946, that’s pretty much what it had come to mean by then too: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.”