A visiting professor at the University of California Berkeley compared President Donald Trump's supporters to Germans who turned a blind eye to the Holocaust.
Joyce Carol Oates, an author and English professor, said Trump's supporters treat the coronavirus pandemic with "indifference," much like Germans who submitted to Nazi rule, in a tweet on Thursday.
"[F]or many pro-T***p Americans, the pandemic is like the Holocaust to many Germans: they knew what was happening but adjusted to living with it in indifference or, in some cases, profiting from it," Oates tweeted. "[O]nly if affected personally do people seem to care."
for many pro-T***p Americans, the pandemic is like the Holocaust to many Germans: they knew what was happening but adjusted to living with it in indifference or, in some cases, profiting from it. only if affected personally do people seem to care. https://t.co/bigFUkXMsC
— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) November 19, 2020
Oates, an outspoken atheist and ardent opponent of religion, came under fire for a 2013 tweet in which she linked the "predominant religion" of Egypt—Islam—to the country's high rates of sexual harassment and rape.
Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014 before moving in 2016 to Berkeley, where she's offered creative writing courses to students. Over her six-decades-long career, she has written more than 70 fiction and nonfiction books as well as short stories and poetry. She has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist five times.