Professor Ridicules Without Rebutting Republican Congressman

A source, and sometimes target, of these dispatches, Professor Martin Kich of Wright State University, used the academe blog maintained by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) to denigrate conservative U. S. Representative Louis Gohmert, R-Texas, but without quite answering what he viewed as the congressman’s misstatements.

His source was an article in The Daily Kos, which, arguably, took the quotes out of context. Here are the sound bytes Kich and Kos objected to:

• “It is deeply grieving that so many of our nation’s college students and college graduates have been indoctrinated with the notion that socialism is so much better.”

• “You will see an effort to say: Look, there is so much student debt, why don’t we tell these students that if you go to the location we tell you, if you take the job we tell you, then we will start forgiving your debt, as long as you do what we tell you?”

• “Like with DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals], President Obama, like any good totalitarian monarch, spoke that he wanted this law.”

• “And I think that also a piece of the real truth is: Who are these DACA recipients.”

I’ve actually covered Rep. Gohmert frequently. One of his trademarks is that he will often make tongue in cheek statements in order to draw attention to serious points. For example, I’ve seen him call for safe spaces for conservatives and come out for an end to hate speech against Israel.

For instance, in many ways, we don’t know who the DACA recipients are. We recently ran a story on a survey that showed many of them don’t go to college or want to, contrary to popular belief. Yet and still, what Kich objects to most seems to be that Rep. Gohmert gets reelected with three-quarters of the vote.

Actually, that might make it a good district to move to.

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