Drexel University associate politics and global studies professor George Ciccariello-Maher said he was placed on administrative leave for his outrageous tweets connecting the Las Vegas shootings to white supremacy. No, he wasn’t put on leave because of his tweets, but apparently because he received so many death threats that the school thought his being there was a security risk.
The morning after the Vegas massacre, Ciccariello-Maher took to Twitter, thinking we all wanted to hear his views. Here are his tweets:
1. It’s the white supremacist patriarchy, stupid.
2. But liberals will drown out all discourse with a deafening chorus screeching “gun control.”
3. To believe that someone who would shoot down 50 people wouldn’t circumvent any gun law you pass is the height of delusion.
4. But liberal escapism means talking about easy questions and proposing easy non-solutions rather than talking about who kills and why.
5. White people and men are told that they are entitled to everything. This is what happens when they don’t get what they want.
6. The narrative of white victimization has been gradually built over the past 40 years.
7. It is the spinal column of Trumpism, and most extreme form is the white genocide myth.
8. Yesterday was a morbid symptom of what happens when those who believe they deserve to own the world also think it is being stolen from them.
This guy has a history of getting in trouble for tweets.
He first came into the national spotlight when he tweeted, “All I want for Christmas is white genocide,” on Christmas Eve last year.
In March 2017, he showed his contempt for U.S. soldiers and said, “Some guy gave up his first class seat for a uniformed soldier. People are thanking him. I’m trying not to vomit or yell about Mosul.”
As if this guy wasn’t obnoxious enough, now after this latest tweet furor, he’s written an op-ed for The Washington Post to complain “Conservatives are the real campus thought police squashing academic freedom.”
Last week, I sent a string of relatively uncontroversial tweets in the aftermath of the Las Vegas massacre, in which I sought to answer a question about mass shootings in the United States: Why are these crimes almost always carried out by white men? “It’s the white supremacist patriarchy, stupid,” I tweeted, before then diagnosing a sense of double entitlement — as white people and as men — that, when frustrated, can occasionally lead to violent consequences.
“Uncontroversial?” Only in your mind, buddy!
Also, with everything you hear in the media, you might be surprised to learn that as of today, white men only make up 57% of mass shootings (51 of 90 mass shootings since 1982). That is a majority, to be sure, but it’s not vast, and I’ll bet you thought it was higher. Ninety-eight percent (88 out of 90) of mass shootings were committed by men, so 58% (51 of 88) of the male mass shootings were committed by white males, but white males make up about that percent of all men.
My argument was not new, but rather reflects decades of research on how race and gender function in our society. To be both white and male is to be subject to a potent cocktail of entitlement to economic and political power, and to dominate nonwhite and female bodies. When that entitlement is frustrated, it can lead to what the criminologist Mike King calls “aggrieved whiteness,” an ambient furor based on the idea that white Americans have become oppressed victims of politically correct multiculturalism.
For his “decades of research” he cites a broken link. For the “aggrieved whiteness” he cites the Abolition Journal, a far-left group whose manifesto says it seeks “the abolition of patriarchy, capitalism, heteronormativity, ableism, colonialism, the state, or white supremacy” and its purpose is to provide some “legitimacy within the dominant value practices of academia” – i.e. to give liberal professors like Ciccariello-Maher something to cite to make it look like there are legitimate studies that say what liberals want them to say. Oh, also, they say they employ “peer review” but that “academics on the opposite side of our struggles” are not their peers, so only fellow comrades check their work.
In my view as a researcher and professor of politics, these tweets were neither provocative in tone nor controversial in content. Rather, the insight they provided felt all the more pressing now that President Trump has brought this aggrieved whiteness into daily headlines. As a scholar and teacher, giving context and depth to contemporary debates is an important part of what I do, and it’s a calling I take seriously. But more and more, professors like me are being targeted by a coordinated right-wing campaign to undermine our academic freedom — one that relies on misrepresentation and sometimes outright lying, and often puts us and our students in danger.
Well it doesn’t speak well to your ability as a researcher and professor of politics that the tweets weren’t provocative in tone nor controversial in content to you.
Ah, yes, we were all PRESSING for your wonderful “insight!” This guy is so self-important!
This time, the outrage machine geared up as it often does, with a minor conservative media outlet — in this case, the Daily Caller — chopping my tweets up into a misleading mishmash that transformed a nuanced diagnosis of white male frustration into an attack on white people in general. When the Daily Caller posted the article to Facebook, moreover, the intention was clearly to incite: “Absolutely unforgiveable” (sic) read the post, which by now has been shared nearly 2,000 times and commented upon more than 3,000 times.
It’s not a misleading mishmash of your tweets, the Daily Caller put them in the order of how you wrote them. Most are embeds, but the ones without an embed like your aside about liberals and gun control have links to the tweets. As for the last two tweets in your thread, I can’t explain why they didn’t quote or embed the second to last one but I can’t imagine you object to it being characterized as “The professor linked this ‘white victimization’ to Trumpism.” And the last tweet they quoted verbatim, with no embed. Not sure how this is a misleading mishmash. If reading the tweets verbatim in the correct order did not get your point across, maybe they weren’t as nuanced as you thought (is it even possible to be nuanced on Twitter?)
By the way, how is saying “White people and men are told that they are entitled to everything. This is what happens when they don’t get what they want“ not “an attack on white people in general?”
Hate mail and death threats began to roll in. “I will beat your skull in till there is no tomorrow.” “Soon all you p‑‑‑‑‑s will get exactly what you deserve.” “Do the world a favor, and kill yourself … I’ll help you find death sooner than later.” One called me a “pig f‑‑‑er like Obama,” adding homophobic slurs for good measure. Many called me a “cuck” — a favorite racial and sexual insult of the alt-right — while others urged me to move to North Korea or Venezuela. One “love note from a WHITE American” wrongly identified me as a “greasy South American a‑‑hole.”
Name-calling is dumb but no big deal, but I absolutely condemn threats of violence from anyone toward anyone. Sadly this has become a part of daily social media life. People can call and petition the school to suspend the professor, but death threats are beyond the pale. It is sad that the university felt it was unsafe. Unfortunately this has also happens to conservatives, so this is in no way evidence that leftist professors are the only ones being targeted with threats.
Conservative speakers routinely have their events canceled due to safety concerns, like Ben Shapiro, Milo Yiannopoulos, David Horowitz, and Ann Coulter.
He goes on to talk about how the story went viral:
From there, the contagion was rapid, with Stephen Bannon’s Breitbart News and even Milo Yiannopoulos’s own website running their own cribbed copies of the same story. Then came FrontPage, the Blaze, the College Fix and the campus mercenaries at Turning Point. Soon, the manufactured story had hit the conspiratorial fringes of Infowars and online forums across the right: from “blue lives matter” to those preparing for the inevitable rapture.
Finally, the story crossed the mainstream-fringe barrier at its most permeable point: Fox News. Fox claimed that not only do I blame Trump for the Las Vegas massacre, but that I even somehow blame the victims. Threatening emails increased to a flood. An invitation to appear on Tucker Carlson’s show arrived in short order, only confirming the insular nature of the machine, which amplifies to a furious roar the same small group of voices. I declined.
HA! I think he declined because last time he was on Tucker’s show he got creamed!
I am by no means the first, and will not be the last target of this kind of smear campaign by conservatives aimed at academics. In every case, it is the same right-wing media outlets leading the charge, and campuses are increasingly the target. Universities and colleges have become the perfect target for such crusades: Purportedly hotbeds of multiculturalism, “safe spaces” and political correctness, campuses represent everything the resentful right is afraid of. At the same time that the right-wing media smears professors like myself, decrying our tenure and demanding our heads, they breathlessly chronicle the supposed intolerance of the left when confronted with provocative campus tours by Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, Charles Murray, Ann Coulter and others.
I’m sorry, “supposed” intolerance? Try actual violence! How convenient – this article documents the crazy protests and violence against all those mentioned speakers and more. (See above for whose speaking arrangements were canceled due to threats.) Are people coming into your classroom, standing in front of you and shouting and chanting so you can’t speak? Do they physically block the doors to your building so you can’t go in and teach? Because that’s what leftists do to conservative speakers.
Also, there is a big difference between an outside speaker and a professor. A professor represents the school, an outside speaker does not. In many cases it is the students who invite the conservative speaker. It’s telling that they have to invite someone from the outside – it’s because there are no conservative voices on the inside on the faculty or in the administration. One recent study found of the faculty who had party registrations, Democrats outnumbered Republicans 11.5:1 – that means a whopping 91% are Democrats, and only 9% are Republican! Meanwhile, the American public is 36% conservative, 34% moderate, and only 25% liberal. Conservative speakers are being brought in to provide an alternative voice that would otherwise not be heard!
And things aren’t letting up. While noteworthy cases such as Saida Grundy and Zandria Robinson in 2015 gave a glimpse of what was to come, the months since Trump’s election have seen a generalized assault on anti-racist academics. In May, Tommy Curry at Texas A&M was targeted for a years-old podcast; Princeton’s Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor was forced to cancel public events after threats following a commencement speech; and Johnny Eric Williams at Trinity College was targeted and suspended reposting someone else’s words on Facebook. Increasingly, leftist professors are being targeted for “things they never really said.” As Princeton’s Eddie Glaude has put it, when the right is so easily triggered by anti-racism and feminism, they make it perfectly clear who the “real snowflakes” are.
He cites liberal professors, well here are some conservative professors I can cite who’ve been harassed: John McAdams, Keith Fink, Thomas Klocek, Robert Lopez. Maybe if more than 9% of college professors were conservative I could cite more, but alas.
Conservative students are the ones more likely to get threats.
Caught in this wave of right-wing threats and provocations, many universities are scrambling to keep up with the coordinated onslaught. In the best of cases, university administrations and departments have publicly condemned threats against faculty and made clear that they do not cave to intimidation campaigns. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has even responded to our cases with new guidelines urging universities to resist the targeted online harassment of their faculty.
Heh, kind of funny he talks about schools “publicly condemned threats against faculty and made clear that they do not cave to intimidation campaigns” when they didn’t protect their faculty members and students from BLM campus take overs and caved to intimidation campaigns.
In response to such illegal threats of violence, Drexel has chosen to place me on administrative leave. Earlier in the week, I asked my students to explain the relation between white masculinity and mass killings, and they offered in a few short minutes of class discussion far more insight than any mainstream media outlet has offered all week. But now, their own academic freedom has been curtailed by their university, and they are unable to even attend the classes they registered for.
The scary part is, this is normal and taught in schools. The tweets is shocking to us, but totally normal to them and in fact taught, as he admitted in this article. Notice the discussion wasn’t IF there’s a relation, that was assumed and the discussion was about how it is.
By bowing to pressure from racist internet trolls, Drexel has sent the wrong signal: That you can control a university’s curriculum with anonymous threats of violence. Such cowardice notwithstanding, I am prepared to take all necessary legal action to protect my academic freedom, tenure rights and most importantly, the rights of my students to learn in a safe environment where threats don’t hold sway over intellectual debate. Alongside organizations like the Campus Antifascist Network, I will continue to challenge white supremacists in an effort to make Drexel and all universities safe space for an intellectual debate among equals.
Ironically, he condemns threats of violence affecting a university’s curriculum but then he goes on to say he supports ANTIFA, an organization that carries out violence!
Hmmm, I wonder whom he defines as an “equal.” Any conservatives? Or are some people more equal than others?
Ciccariello-Maher, get off your high horse and more importantly – get off Twitter!
H/T Rare
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