Prof blasts 'coordinated' groups like Campus Reform

A Drexel university professor who made headlines by tweeting “All I want for Christmas is White Genocide,” is now criticizing “organized and coordinated groups” like Campus Reform for their coverage of professors.

George Ciccariello-Maher, an assistant professor of political science, told The Triangle that it is vital to note that conservative outlets are “targeting professors and looking for anything.”

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“The bigger question we need to understand is the actual machinery behind what’s going on right now,” he told the publication.

“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,” he added.

Ciccariello-Maher also defended Trinity College professor Johnny Eric Williams who was put on leave after appearing to endorse the notion that first responders to June’s congressional baseball shooting should have let the GOP lawmakers “fucking die.”

Williams later maintained that his comments were not related to the shooting and that he was targeting white supremacy.

“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,” Ciccariello-Maher said.

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Similarly to Williams, Ciccariello-Maher also defended his own comments in December, arguing that his call for a “white genocide” was a satire that was mocking white supremacists.

Ciccariello-Maher's tweets drove away some students and donors, according to Drexel Provost Brian Blake, and the "the nearly unmanageable volume of venomous calls" the university received caused the school to "consider turning off its phones" for several days.

“The threats and the discipline are a response to this organized attack that emerges, this kind of online mob that is whipped up,” he told The Triangle.

“You can never predict, I think, quite when that mob will emerge, and like I’ve said, there’s been dozens of cases since mine, and it’s becoming a really worrying and generalized phenomenon, the way that — professors in particular — but people across the side are being attacked by these organizations.”

When asked for a comment from Campus Reform, Ciccariello-Maher said that he does not “speak to mercenaries.”

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