Fresno State Reports Own Professor for 'Trump Must Hang' Tweet

Virulently anti-Trump professors — by which I mean “most professors” — feel pretty invincible. After all, when a video recently surfaced of a professor comparing the election of Trump to a terrorist attack, the student filming it got punished.

So imagine Fresno State professor Lars Maischak’s surprise last week when his tweet demanding President Trump be hung was reported to law enforcement by Fresno State’s president:

Though Maischak did not respond to Campus Reform’s initial inquiry on the matter, he did try to clarify his comments on Twitter, saying that while he “did not intend to harm Mr. Trump” nor “wish for anyone else to harm Mr. Trump by way of an assassination,” he does think “given the nature of [Trump’s] regime, that he will be held accountable for his crimes in a court, and that historical precedent suggests that a death sentence is inevitable, if democracy prevails.”

Now, however, Campus Reform has been informed that university President Joseph Castro promptly alerted multiple federal agencies to the tweets after becoming aware of them, and has been in “regular contact with federal authorities” over the past several days.

“President Castro said that the university alerted the FBI, Secret Service, and Homeland Security as soon as it became aware of the comments made by Dr. Maischak on Twitter,” Director of Communications Kathleen Schock told Campus Reform. “He went on to say that the university been in regular contact with federal authorities. There are no other details we can disclose about those communications.”

The tweet in question from Maischak’s now apparently deleted Twitter account read:

To save American democracy, Trump must hang. The sooner and the higher, the better. #TheResistance #DeathToFascism

I spend a lot of my time reporting some crappy news about school administrators. President Castro’s decision to adhere to the law is a welcome change and should be applauded.

It can be argued that Maischak didn’t spell out his desire to assassinate the president — that’s for the investigators to decide. However, his claims that he doesn’t want someone else to assassinate Trump rings hollow considering what he also expressed last week:

.@calstate won’t fire Prof @LarsMaischak who said two Republicans should be executed for each deportation https://t.co/isqLtifEwG #maga pic.twitter.com/j8z2vvkrNK

— The Rebel (@TheRebelTV) April 11, 2017

This does undermine his “just making an observation” defense. Whoops.

President Castro’s decision to report this to the authorities was the right one for the country and for his campus. The school is also conducting its own investigation, as it should.