Catching up with George Ciccariello-Maher, expert on “white supremacy”

Last Christmas Eve, George Ciccariello-Maher, a previously obscure professor at Drexel University and an enthusiastic booster of chavismo, made national headlines with a tweet reading: “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide.” On Christmas Day, he referred fondly to the “massacre of whites,” explaining that, in his view, the mass murder of about four thousand caucasians during the Haitian Revolution “was a good thing.” Those who looked further into his Twitter feed discovered that earlier in the month he’d proudly boasted: “Sorry, I’m not ‘alt-left,’ just an actual communist.”

When the media got wind of all this, George blamed the fuss on “white supremacists.” If George had written such a thing about pretty much any other identity group, you can be sure he’d have been fired instantly and condemned by Drexel’s administration in the strongest possible terms; instead, the university issued a tepid press release slapping him on the wrist and promised an investigation. In response, George went on the offensive, describing his bosses’ action as a “chilling” and “frightening” reaction to “harassment” by outsiders. When leftist commentators and George’s academic colleagues stood up for him, blaming the media attention on right-wing bigots, the powers that be at Drexel withdrew their plans for an investigation,

In January we devoted a week to George’s case, which provided a perfect example of the double standards that currently rule the ivory tower roost. These days, a public declaration of even the mildest moderate or conservative opinion by a professor can lead to major trouble – to charges of having sown discord among students, caused them emotional distress, committed “microaggressions” against them. A biology instructor who makes even the most innocuous statement of fact about differences between the sexes can find his career in danger. But to express enthusiasm for the massacre of white people is fine – as Drexel’s president ultimately pronounced, George was simply exercising his First Amendment rights.

In March, George’s Twitter feed once again put his name in the headlines. On a plane, he saw a fellow passenger giving his first-class seat to a soldier in uniform. “People are thanking him,” wrote George. “I’m trying not to vomit or yell about Mosul.”

Now George is back in the news. On the morning of October 2, the day after the mass killing in Las Vegas, he took to Twitter again. So far, nobody knew anything of substance about the killer or his motives, but George had all the answers. “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,” he wrote. “It is the spinal column of Trumpism, and most extreme form is the white genocide myth. The narrative of white victimization has been gradually built over the past 40 years. White people and men are told that they are entitled to everything. This is what happens when they don’t get what they want.”

On the far-left TV show “Democracy Now!”

Once again, the authorities at Drexel distanced themselves from George’s views, saying that their thoughts and prayers were with the survivors. There’s no reason to believe, however, that they’ll go any further this time than they did last Christmas. As far as they’re concerned, George has all the right in the world to spread his poison. What is appalling is that this man is responsible for teaching young people, and that the ranks of American university faculties are full of people who share his reprehensible views and have rushed to his defense for expressing them.

Posted on October 9, 2017October 8, 2017 by usefulstooges 0

Drexel’s hypocrisy on Ciccariello-Maher

This week we’ve been looking at the tragic ordeal of Drexel University professor George Ciccariello-Maher. Taking to Twitter this past Christmas Eve, he made what he later defended as an innocent joke – to be specific, he said that all he wanted for Christmas is the genocide of whites (what could be funnier?) – and, inexplicably, all kinds of people actually got upset. For a minute there, it looked as if poor George might actually lose his job as a punishment for his charmingly humorous tweet. How could the students at Drexel survive without his wit?

As it turned out, however, Ciccariello-Maher had nothing to worry about. After all, as an incendiary far-left ideologue, he was – so far as his profession was concerned – on the side of the angels. We’ve already seen the vigorous defenses of him by writers at Slate and elsewhere. In addition, over 9,000 people signed a petition telling Drexel “that racist trolls deserve no platform in dictating academic discourse, let alone the off-duty tweets of academics.” Unsurprisingly, then, only four days after promising an investigation, Drexel backed down. University president John A. Fry and provost M. Brian Blake signed their names to a statement describing Ciccariello-Maher’s “joke” as an example of “protected speech” and declared that he was in the clear. Such episodes, affirmed Fry and Blake, “both test and strengthen Drexel’s fundamental dedication to the principles of academic freedom and freedom of expression.”

We don’t disagree with Drexel’s decision. Freedom of speech is a paramount American value. What’s deplorable is the university’s utter lack of consistency – its absolute hypocrisy – on this question. As Lukas Mikelionis pointed out at Heat Street, “While Drexel insists on granting free speech privileges to its professors, the faculty has been applying a different set of rules for their students.” For example, Drexel students aren’t allowed to post items on campus that, in the university’s own words, “may be viewed as demeaning or degrading to a person or group of persons.” Among the kinds of student behavior that Drexel views as actionable harassment are the telling of “denigrating jokes” or “written or graphic material” that “shows hostility or aversion toward an individual or group.” Even “inappropriately directed laughter,” whatever that may be, is considered a kind of harassment. Mikelionis further noted that Drexel is “one of the few universities in the country that expects trigger warnings in classes. According to the policy, ‘It is expected that instructors will offer appropriate warning and accommodation regarding the introduction of explicit and triggering materials used.’”

So Ciccariello-Maher’s career is safe. Indeed, all this fuss will probably end up having been a plus. His name recognition in the academy has skyrocketed, and he’ll now be able to label himself as a victim of today’s McCarthyites. On January 3, his latest book, Building the Commune, received a glowing review at Venezuela Analysis, a website that claims to have been providing “continuous, nuanced, grassroots-based reporting analysis from the ground” in the Bolivarian Republic while “the international media” has been “projecting a hysterical narrative of Venezuela’s catastrophic collapse.” Venezuela may be going down the tubes, but for Ciccariello-Maher everything’s coming up roses.

Posted on January 27, 2017January 16, 2017 by usefulstooges 2

Ciccariello-Maher: the comrades weigh in

“All I want for Christmas is White Genocide.” With that Christmas Eve tweet, George Ciccariello-Maher, a Professor of Politics and Global Studies at Drexel University in Philadelphia, started a firestorm of controversy. Plenty of conservative, moderate, and libertarian professors have gotten themselves in hot water because of public statements that might have sounded eminently reasonable or commonsensical to the general public but that, in the eyes of their academic confreres, were crying out for censure. The difference with Ciccariello-Maher is that he earned his instant nationwide notoriety as the result of a statement that put him at the very extreme edge of the far left. For faculty members around the country, this made him not a pariah but a hero.

At Current Affairs, a self-identified “left-wing policy journal,” Amber A’Lee Frost began her defense of Ciccariello-Maher with a simple confession: “I do not like George Ciccariello-Maher.” She met him, she recalled, “probably through some ridiculous ultra-leftist Facebook group,” and found him “very rude and condescending.” And she went on:

He felt the need to “warn” me about my more “problematic” friends, which I consider a sort of sexist paternalism. I didn’t like his politics, which I found shallow and histrionic, or his passive aggression, which I found cowardly.

campus_view_-_drexel_university_-_img_7303 — Drexel University

But Frost asserted that “none of this matters, because George is under attack.” She proceeded to join him in blaming the public outrage over his tweet on “right-wing media opportunists.” “The hysteria of reactionaries,” she wrote, “is nothing new.” Drexel’s criticism of Ciccariello-Maher constitute “a ridiculous breach of both academic freedom and free speech.” Bizarre statements in an era when the academy is famous for its hysterical readiness to crush faculty and students alike who have been accused of saying or doing things perceived as violating left-wing orthodoxy. It is a well-known fact that many university campuses – and Drexel is assuredly one of them – have long since ceased being free-speech zones. Has Ciccariello-Maher ever criticized that? Has Frost?

No matter. Frost went on about “solidarity” and the “shared struggle for dignity, liberation and rights” among those involved in “the work of left politics.” And she concluded: “We at Current Affairs stand with George Ciccariello-Maher without qualification or reservation, and we believe he would do the same for us. We’re with you, comrade. Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

At the wacky far-left rag Counterpunch, Mike King was even more supportive, describing Ciccariello-Maher as “a colleague, co-author and personal friend” who “has always excelled at exposing and challenging injustices in sharp, uncompromising terms that highlight hypocrisy with passionate and often blunt wit.” In a true Alice-through-the-looking-glass moment, King charged that we live in a time of “insidious” McCarthyite “Red-baiting” by purveyors of “overt racism” such as Fox News and Breitbart – bigots who were now seeking “to undermine a vibrant anti-racist voice and celebrated decolonial writer while further legitimating fantasies of institutionalized anti-white bias and persecution.” At Slate, Matthew Dessem blamed the dust-up over Ciccariello-Maher’s white-supremacist tweet on “the internet’s worst people.” As for Ciccariello-Maher’s statement that the massacre of whites during the Haitian Revolution was a good thing, Dessem sought to explain it this way: “In context, it seems clear that he was tweaking white supremacists for their repurposing of the term white genocide, which is disingenuously invoked nowadays to pretend that uncontroversial things like interracial dating are as threatening as the slaughter that took place in Haiti in 1804. But Ciccariello-Maher’s tweets were as good a reason for a witch hunt as any, and what better time to hunt witches than Christmas?”

So what happened to Ciccariello-Maher? We’ll wrap up tomorrow.

Posted on January 26, 2017January 16, 2017 by usefulstooges 2

George Ciccariello-Maher: joking about genocide

His name: George Ciccariello-Maher. Until recently, as we saw yesterday, he was climbing smoothly up the academic ladder, thanks to a canny habit of churning up precisely the right kind of politically correct hogwash – much, if not most, of it in praise of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela.

Then, this past Christmas Eve, he sent out the following tweet: “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide.”

That would likely have been enough to win him the attention he ended up receiving. But that was just part of it. On Christmas Day, he also took to Twitter to praise the “massacre of whites.” Just in case you wondered which massacre of whites he was referring to, he offered the following: “To clarify: when the whites were massacred during the Haitian Revolution, that was a good thing indeed.” (Just to clarify further, the number of whites slaughtered in that revolt was somewhere in the range of 4,000.) All this, moreover, came only a couple of weeks after Cicariello-Maher had issued this confession, also via the same social network: “Sorry, I’m not ‘alt-left,’ just an actual communist.”

toussaint_louverture — A contemporary rendering of Toussiant L’Ouverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution

When challenged by one of his Twitter followers about his genocide tweet, Cicariello-Maher pretended he’d been kidding: “LOL I was hacked I swear.” But then the word spread. Others checked out his Twitter feed. The genocide tweet went viral. It got the criticism it deserved. He deleted it and blocked his account.

But it was too late. Reacting to the public outcry, his employers at Drexel University weighed in with a statement acknowledging faculty members’ “right…to freely express their thoughts and opinions in public debate,” but added that his comments were “utterly reprehensible, deeply disturbing, and [did] not in any way reflect the values of the University.” The press release added that Drexel was “taking this situation very seriously” and that it had already arranged a meeting with the good professor “to discuss this matter in detail.”

When contacted by Inside Higher Ed, Cicariello-Maher, not sounding remotely contrite, defended his tweet as a “satirical” commentary on “an imaginary concept, ‘white genocide.’” Climbing on his academic high horse, he sneered: “For those who haven’t bothered to do their research, ‘white genocide’ is an idea invented by white supremacists and used to denounce everything from interracial relationships to multicultural policies….It is a figment of the racist imagination, it should be mocked, and I’m glad to have mocked it.” (Presumably Inside Higher Ed didn’t ask him whether he also considers the massacre of whites during the Haitian Revolution imaginary.) Instead of being moved to apologize, he added insult to injury, attributing the widespread fury over his tweet to “white supremacists.” Because if you take offense at a tweet about white genocide you obviously must be a white supremacist.

He also shot back at his employers, calling their statement “worrying” because, by calling his tweets “reprehensible,” they had effectively caved in “to the truly reprehensible movements and organizations that I was critiquing.” Drexel’s press release, he added, had sent “a chilling message” and set “a frightening precedent” by suggesting that “untenured and temporary faculty” were subject “to internal disciplinary scrutiny” and allowing outside “harassment” to dictate university policy. Of course, colleges like Drexel routinely demonize, censor, and punish faculty and students who diverge from the lockstep PC line; for the likes of Ciccariello-Maher, however, such official condemnation is only “chilling” and “frightening” when the targets are extreme leftists such as himself. “White supremacy is on the rise,” he warned, “and we must fight it by any means. In that fight, universities will need to choose whether they are on the side of free expression and academic debate, or on the side of the racist mob.”

Fortunately for Ciccariello-Maher, many of his fellow academic leftists were eager to stand up for him. We’ll get to that tomorrow.

Posted on January 25, 2017January 16, 2017 by usefulstooges 1

George Ciccariello-Maher, tenured radical

Until just a few weeks ago, George Ciccariello-Maher had a dream career in the academy. In 2010, after studying government and political science at St. Lawrence University, Cambridge, and Berkeley, he had neatly settled into a sinecure at Philadelphia’s Drexel University, where he was Associate Professor of Politics and Global Studies.

cicbook2 — One of Ciccariello-Maher’s books

He’d published precisely the kind of stuff you need to produce in order to attain such an exalted position: in addition to articles for such far-left journals as Monthly Review and Radical Philosophy Review and for such equally “progressive” general-audience outlets as The Nation, Salon, and Counterpunch, he’d written a couple of book-length billets-doux to chavismo entitled We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution (2013) and Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela (2016). He also had a third tome – ready to be published this year – with the delectably postmodern title of Decolonizing Dialectics. As if all this weren’t impressive enough, he was co-editor of a new book series called Radical Américas. And most of this stuff bore the colophon of the today’s top academic publisher, Duke University Press, which may well be responsible for the dissemination of more pretentious, politically radical gibberish than any other such establishment on the planet.

As indicated by his choice of book topics, Ciccariello-Maher was especially enamored of Venezuela – or, more specifically, of what Hugo Chávez did to it. His several articles on the subject in Jacobin Magazine (self-described as “a leading magazine of the American left”) have offered little in the way of original reporting, acute observation, or incisive analysis, but have made up for those failings by being fervently on the right – which is to say, the left.

His formula: one part glib mockery of hard-working, middle-class Venezuelans who were justifiably alarmed to see an economically illiterate socialist ideologue dragging their country’s economy into the toilet (and whom Ciccariello-Maher ridiculed, perversely, for their excellent, unaccented English); one part equally glib enthusiasm for working-class chavistas rooted not in any real concern for or understanding of their specific plight but, rather, in his own coldblooded ideological imperatives and in an inane romantic association of their role with that of the sans culottes in the French Revolution of 1789 (without a trace of irony, Ciccariello-Maher praised these revolutionaries as “proudly violent”); all tossed lightly and mixed in with plentiful admiring references to Frantz Fanon, whose 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth, with its sympathy for underclass violence and the wholesale destruction of bourgeois values and wealth (not to mention bourgeois men and women) influenced such heroes of the earth’s wretched influenced (among others) Che Guevara and Black Panthers leader Eldridge Cleaver and is one of the founding texts of today’s pernicious academic postmodernism.

In short, Ciccariello-Maher had made splendid use of his sympathy (faux or not) for the downtrodden peasants of Venezuela to make a lucrative career for himself in the academia norteamericana. But then he did something that put all of it at risk.

He sent out a tweet.

More tomorrow.

Posted on January 24, 2017January 16, 2017 by usefulstooges 1

Useful Stooges