“They Lie and People Die”: Carnegie Mellon Professor Claims Trump Assassination Attempt was “Staged”

From Jonathanturley.org.

There are a lot of Professors that have weird ideas that the rest of us consider wrong or even unhinged – so it’s not surprising how many young people have weird ideas, too.

Smart people can be really stupid.

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Carnegie Mellon University Professor Uju Anya has joined the ranks of academics spreading the conspiracy theory that the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump was “staged.” As for the killing and wounding of bystanders, Anya explained that “that’s exactly what they do.” We previously discussed other academics who have spread this conspiracy theory. However, few are willing to go as far as Professor Anya in explaining how the other victims were used to make the staging more plausible. Anya declared:

“It was staged. Like a stupid Tubi movie set in the Bronx with palm trees in the background. They lie, and people die. That’s exactly what they do

…That’s the record. Whatever ‘attack’ on him they set up to stoke his followers’ fears and sentiments threat and persecution has now cost lives.

…And people died behind this farce. Actual people’s lives gone for them to stage this stupid show. People dying doesn’t make the attack any less staged. Someone who thought the attack was real could’ve killed others trying to prevent harm. Also, someone could’ve shot the shooter to hide the plot.”

The faculty bio states that Anya is an Associate Professor of Second Language Acquisition. She describes herself as

“a scholar of language learning and Black experiences in multilingualism. My primary fields of inquiry are critical applied linguistics, critical sociolinguistics and critical discourse studies examining race, gender, sexual and social class identities in new language learning through the multilingual journeys of African American students.”

Likewise, in a now since-deleted Threads posting, Professor of Psychology at San Diego Mesa College Inna Kanevsky also fueled the baseless conspiracy theory. She posted

“‘He took a bullet for his country!’ No he didn’t. He took it, like everything else he took and keeps taking, for himself. For his own personal aggrandizement.”

Professor Anya has long been a controversial figure including her wish that Queen Elizabeth would die a long “excruciating” death. She later doubled down on the hateful statements.

She also tweeted out crude remarks about the 2022 elections: “contrary to all these major media outlets, the red wave coming is my period on Friday.”

So these and other faculty believe that Trump enlisted a kid who was thrown out of his high school shooting club as a bad shot to wing him at 130 yards from a sloped position. The conspiracists also decided to kill or wound some supporters to make the staging look real. In our age of rage, this all makes sense to these professors.

I agree with Professor Anya that such political statements are protected speech. However, her unhinged and hateful commentary exposes the radicalism of many faculty in higher education today.