In interview with student paper, ‘white genocide’ prof remains defiant, offers no contrition

In a recent interview with his college’s student newspaper, Drexel University’s George Ciccariello-Maher offers not a bit of remorse for his past repugnant social media comments — in fact, he remains defiant.

The associate professor of politics and global studies perhaps is most (in)famous for his Christmas Eve 2016 tweet “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide.”

With that he may have tried to do himself one better; a year before he had tweeted that a school police officer should be “put up against a wall” and done “like Old Yeller.”

The “genocide” tweet, Ciccariello-Maher reiterates to The Triangle, “was [merely] an intervention” into the context of white supremacists such as Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos:

I’m trying to intervene in pressing public debates, and after the election of Trump, one of the pressing debates was about this sort of bizarre coalition that had brought Trump to power which consisted of many groups but also included far-right, white nationalist, Nazi and fascist groups.

When you look at some of the keywords of these far-right, white supremacist groups, one is this phrase “White Genocide.” It’s a reference to a completely made up idea that white people are not only victims but somehow actively being genocided.

Ah, yes. Right.

The response to a question about his “Old Yeller” tweet is even, er, better:

“Of course,” he says, “these are not tweets that call for any kind of violence. If you look at them they don’t, they don’t in any way. They, in one sort of half-satirically and one in a straightforward reference to the Black Panther Party, talk about transforming the society that we live in.”

Come again? “Put [the cop] up against the wall […] then do him like Old Yeller” is not a call to violence?

“Doing” Old Yeller means shooting and killing him. Not to mention, if the prof really didn’t mean it in that context, after the tweet came to light why did he allege that his Twitter account was hacked … followed by claiming he didn’t know what Old Yeller’s ultimate fate was?

Ciccariello-Maher also is among those academics currently making use of the “being targeted” tactic — that reporters at outlets like The College Fix (or “Campus Fix” as he calls it) are “attacking” him … allegedly (and unfairly) taking what he says “out of context” with the resultant controversy leading to physical threats and demands that he be fired:

I think I’ve sent something like 30,000 tweets, and the idea that people expect that a single tweet in particular will set off some kind of media frenzy is really not a reality. Because people are tweeting constantly and people are engaged in conversation, often they’re speaking to other people about a specific context, and then the media will jump in and seize upon it.

The bigger question we need to understand is the actual machinery behind what’s going on right now. We’re living in a moment in which organized and coordinated groups are attacking professors. And I was sort of, maybe, on the early end of this in this year. There are cases in the past, many cases. But we’ve since had more than a dozen cases of groups like Campus Reform, Turning Point USA, The Campus Fix [sic] and all these websites — Breitbart — and then up into Fox News targeting professors and looking for anything.

So, we may be talking about my tweets for example, but my good friend and comrade Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor at Princeton was attacked for a graduation speech and was on Fox News four days in a row, leading to death threats against her and her family. There are many cases like this; Tommy Curry at Texas A&M was targeted for a podcast that was four years old, Johnny Eric Williams at Trinity College in Connecticut was targeted for reposting someone else’s words just recently, and he was suspended by his university despite the fact that, of course, he had done nothing whatsoever.