University of California, Riverside, professor and former CNN show host Reza Aslan called talk radio pioneer Rush Limbaugh “evil” just hours after Limbaugh announced that he is suffering from advanced lung cancer. Aslan flexed his writing skills by adding that Limbaugh is a “curse upon this nation,” “a purveyor of hatred and racism,” and “indirectly responsible for the mass suffering of countless people.”

Reza Aslan, a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, said that the world would be a “better place” without Rush Limbaugh just hours after Limbaugh announced that his cancer diagnosis.

“Ask yourself this simple question: is the world a better place or a worse place with Rush Limbaugh in it?” Aslan wrote in a tweet on Monday.

Aslan quickly received criticism from Twitter users. In response, Aslan said that he was merely posing a “philosophical question” when he asked if the world would be better off if Limbaugh was dead.

“1. I am not “celebrating” anyone’s diagnosis. I’m posing an important philosophical question,” Aslan wrote in a follow-up tweet. “2. Rush is not “my adversary” – he is a curse upon this nation, a purveyor of hatred and racism who’s at the very least indirectly responsible for the mass suffering of countless people.”

But Aslan did not stop there. When criticized by a follower for his remarks on Limbaugh, Aslan took it a step further, writing that a “monkey eating its own shit” is more valuable to society than Limbaugh.

“A monkey eating its own shit is better than him,” Aslan tweeted. “The fact that a despicable racist evil human being is sick changes nothing about his nature as a despicable, racist, and evil human being.”

CNN canceled Aslan’s show Believer in 2017 after he posted a series of profane anti-Trump tweets. “This piece of shit is not just an embarrassment to America and a stain on the presidency. He’s an embarrassment to humankind,” Aslan tweeted about Trump.

Aslan deleted his tweet calling Covington Catholic student Nick Sandmann a year after he posted it, claiming that his wife asked him to do so.