Paul Krugman has lost it.
Yes, the Nobel prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist has been declining toward hackery and absurdity for years, between his notorious pronunciation that the internet would have no impact on the economy, his promise that markets would “never recover” if President Trump won election, and his blog post blaming Sarah Palin for the attempted assassination of a Democratic congresswoman. Nonetheless, many on the Left have continued to view Krugman as a legitimate writer and thinker. But after his latest insanity, even liberals might stop taking him seriously.
In a Monday Times column entitled “Trump, Tax Cuts and Terrorism,” Krugman hit a new low. He opens the piece by directly blaming Republicans for terrorism. Its first line reads: “Why has the Republican Party become a systematic enabler of terrorism?”
Krugman says the GOP is an “enabler” of terrorism because, in the wake of the tragic mass shooting carried out by an apparent white supremacist in El Paso, Texas, most Republicans continue to support Trump. Krugman writes that Trump “has arguably done more to promote racial violence than any American since Nathan Bedford Forrest, who helped found the Ku Klux Klan.”
Basically, anyone who disagrees with Krugman’s party is fine with terrorism, or something. And Trump is a Nazi.
This is absurd on many levels. For one, Trump immediately denounced the violence in a presidential address, and directly condemned white supremacy and violence by name. His speech did contain some silliness about video games causing violence, but as my Washington Examiner colleague Tiana Lowe noted, Trump largely did “what a leader must do — name and shame the enemy and the evil empowering their violence.”
So while there are certainly fair criticisms to be made of the president’s record on race, the argument that he is in anyway to blame for this violence, much less that his supporters condone it, is completely unsubstantiated and patently absurd. In fact, Krugman’s disturbing accusations white wash the horrible crimes of the El Paso shooter (who I will not name) by blaming his horrendous actions, in part, on other people.
Krugman doesn’t stop there. He goes on to essentially argue that many Republicans are racist “economic radicals” who value money over human life:
This is disgraceful, absurd, and insulting. In the wake of the El Paso shooting, elected Republicans and conservative commentators across the board have almost all vigorously denounced white nationalism and violence. Have they, at times in the past, overlooked the unsavory views of some people on the conservative fringes or defended questionable comments by Republican officials? Certainly. But the implication that anyone in the conservative mainstream condones racist violence is intellectually dishonest and untrue.
This latest batch of absurd, bad-faith smears reveals what we already knew about Krugman: He just can’t accept the fact that millions of well-intentioned, intelligent people disagree with him on complex matters of public policy and politics. The liberal economist thinks anyone who disagrees with him is both racist and bought off, such a sell-out that they value conservative economic policy over the lives of their fellow Americans.
Krugman’s worldview is, at its core, deranged. And his latest proclamation about the GOP will prove just as wrong as the rest.
