The College Fix

‘Identity politics has moralized […] the Left, painting conservatives as evil rather than wrong’

A professor of politics at the University of Buckingham conducted a poll shortly after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump … and found that over a staggering 70 percent of “hard-line lefties” wished the shooter had succeeded.

The Daily Mail reports that while one-third of Democratic voters who concurred with the statement “white Republicans are racist” said they “slightly agreed” that they wanted Trump dead, almost three-fourths “strongly agreed.”

Eric Kaufmann, director of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science, conducted the “snap” poll on July 18 and said the results “could be explained by ‘woke moral absolutism.'”

“Identity politics has moralized the outlook of the Left, painting conservatives as evil rather than wrong,” Kaufmann said, adding that the Left “is more prejudiced against the Right than vice versa.”

Kaufmann further claimed the poll results show a “growing partisan asymmetry” in the U.S. where progressives “are more likely to unfriend, refuse to date or otherwise discriminate against conservatives than the other way round.”

This highlights an attitude among lefties that conservatives are ‘evil rather than wrong,’ [Kaufmann] says.

As a result, they use ‘catastrophizing language around ‘white supremacy’, ‘fascism’ and ‘danger’,’ he says.

‘Given our new politics of identitarian sacredness and moral absolutism, we should not be surprised to see a rise in political extremism,’ he warns.

MORE: Kaufmann: LGBT identification linked to social pressure

As reported by The College Fix, several academics expressed displeasure that the assassin missed the former president on July 13. Rutgers University’s Tracy Budd had said “Let’s hope today’s events inspire others” and “They shot his wig. Sad.”

Bellarmine University English professor John James posted on Instagram “If you’re gonna shoot, man, don’t miss,” while the University of British Columbia’s Karen Pinder wrote “Damn, so close. Too bad.”

Others were not as direct. The University of Virginia’s Sethunya Mokoko claimed the shooting was “theatrics” designed to gain voters’ sympathy.

USC’s Shaun Harper, who opined that Trump could have claimed “And the Blacks, they love me because they know the terrifying sound of gunshots,” ended up having his article on Forbes’ website deleted.

And NYU’s Ruth Ben-Ghiat worried Trump would use the assassination attempt to open up the “authoritarian playbook” akin to Castro, Mussolini, and … Hitler.

Professor Kaufmann (pictured) only recently began his stint at U. Buckingham after far-leftists “had poisoned the experience” for him at Birkbeck, University of London. “I was also repelled by cancel culture and attracted by the chance to help build Buckingham as the only ‘free speech university’ in Britain,” he said.

MORE: Media, academics in overdrive pushing post-assassination-attempt narratives

IMAGES: Shutterstock.com; The Agenda With Steve Paikin/YouTube

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