Recently, several media elites including Katie Couric have called for Trump supporters to be subjected to “deprogramming” even though newly-inaugurated President Joe Biden has promised to “heal” and “unite” the American people as he governs for the next four years.
As CBN News reported, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson during an appearance on MSNBC said that there are “millions of Americans — almost all white, almost all Republicans — who somehow need to be deprogrammed.”
Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family responded in a tweet that millions of Americans weren’t crazy to support a candidate who upheld conservative values.
“Despite calls from the likes of @katiecouric and others, those who supported former President Trump don’t need to be ‘deprogrammed’ in Orwellian fashion. It wasn’t crazy to support a candidate who championed so many of our deeply held convictions.”
The term “deprogramming” that’s being used by American liberals is raising eyebrows because it has also been used to describe the way communist China has rounded-up millions of Muslim Uyghurs, putting them into “re-education” concentration camps with forced labor.
Now, Georgetown University Law Professor Jonathan Turley is calling out a Smith College professor who has gone beyond calls for “deprogramming” and instead likened Trump supporters and Republicans to Nazis. She says, like the Nazis, they should be dealt with harshly, including Nuremberg-like trials and the complete eradication of the Republican Party.
Instead of embracing President Biden’s calls for unity, Turley noted in his blog that Loretta Ross, a professor who teaches women’s and gender studies at the school, wants retaliatory action against Trump supporters in Congress, universities, and even those with “regular jobs.”
In an article posted on the website CounterPunch, Ross advocates that there should be no offer of unity to Trump supporters and the Republican Party should not continue to exist. It should also be noted that the drawing accompanying the article appears to show Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) in a suit with a red tie giving a Nazi “Heil Hitler” salute.
“Republicans are no longer entitled to exist as a legitimate political party because this authoritarian backlash has been building since new Civil Rights laws were passed in 1964 and 1965 in response to white racist violence captured on TV that required the National Guard to quell. Then-President Lyndon Johnson predicted that most white people would flee the Democratic Party to join the pro-segregationist, anti-feminist, and anti-gay revanchist political movement of George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan,” Ross wrote.
“Every undemocratically selected Republican president since the 1960s (by an electoral college designed to be disenfranchising) has failed to repudiate this neo-fascist wing of their party,” she claimed.
“I’m through giving Republicans the benefit of the doubt after 50 years,” Ross declared.
The Smith College professor also goes one step further. As Turley points out, “Ross shows no concern for free speech or academic freedom as she calls for identifying and condemning anyone who is viewed as complicit with Trump over the last four years so that they can be ‘treated with the same public condemnation that the Nazis received after World War II’.”
Turley warns that such views can be seen almost daily on social media and have become common at universities across the country.
“What is unnerving is that such views are now common on the Internet and increasingly common at universities. Many professors who send me such columns admit that they are afraid to speak out. There is a rising level of intolerance at universities. In over 30 years of teaching, I have never witnessed the level of intimidation at colleges and universities that we have today. Indeed, these columns are meant to normalize such calls for curtailing free speech and academic freedom,” he wrote.
“It is an effort not just to retaliate but use the chilling effect of such threats to silence others (including effectively barring opposing viewpoints from being published). Rather than denounce such views as inimical to our intellectual mission, some professors are rushing to prove their own bona fides by denouncing colleagues or dismissing free speech values. They are afraid and I cannot blame for that fear. However, silence or passivity in the face of such calls will come at too high a price for our colleges and our country.”
Turley, a Georgetown University law professor, also noted Ross appears to have totally recoiled from Biden’s pleas for healing and unity.
“As for calls from people like President Joe Biden for reconciliation and healing, Ross balked at the very notion. She calls for supporters to be denied jobs, media opportunities, publishing contracts, and all other opportunities. What is particularly chilling is her use of a statement from philosopher Karl Popper: ‘In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.’ Thus, intolerance of opposing viewpoints is now tolerance. It is that easy,” he concluded.
