My friend John McWhorter is a calm, rational, reasonable guy. So I was truly shocked when he implied some weeks ago that he wished someone would assassinate Donald Trump. I thought maybe John just got carried away in the moment. But in this clip from our most recent conversation, you’ll see him apologize for making the statement without quite taking it back. When even a moderate centrist like John, who is usually so mindful of his language, feels license to talk like this about Trump, we must be in a very dark place as a nation.
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John is lucky Trump is a republican. If he had made a similar remark about President Biden he would be arrested.
I am a long time listener and subscriber to the Glenn Show and find both Glenn and John to be highly engaging and thoughtful on many wide ranging topics. It is difficult for me to reconcile what John said about hoping for the assassination of DJT with what I thought I knew about his character. Glenn is right to call him out on this, and John's pseudo-apology ("I shouldn't have said that in public") leaves me wondering if I had his measure wrong all these years. His hatred of DJT is well documented, but I have never heard him rise to this level of openly vengeful and incendiary rhetoric. It's one thing to discuss the possibility of such an act being perpetrated; it's quite another to suggest that it should happen. I don't want to live in a society where people with differing policy views are targeted for assassination and the brightest intellectuals of our time are suggesting this is acceptable rhetoric. It is not acceptable rhetoric for a civilized democratic society, and it doesn't matter whether you are in public or with your closest friends discussing politics in your living room. I hope that John will find the moral clarity to recognize this error and correct it.