In 1963, historian Richard Hofstadter published his landmark work "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life." There and in his seminal essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," Hofstadter expressed great concerns about how American conservatives had become increasingly hostile to learned knowledge and genuine expertise.
Half a century later, his analysis about the deep hold that anti-intellectualism holds over the American conservative movement is more true than ever. If anything, that tendency has evolved and expanded over that time period. The right-wing in America has created an expansive network of think tanks and lobbying groups dedicated to destroying public education. These same forces have also targeted colleges and universities. Here, conservatives are trying to remove funding from programs and research that they view as dangerous and anathema to their agenda.
Intellectual freedom is also under assault because the ability to freely engage new ideas and questions in search of truth is threatening to a right-wing movement based on distorting reality. Right-wing elites such as the Koch brothers are also (quite literally) purchasing academic departments, faculty members and research centers in order to advance their right-wing, libertarian agenda from within colleges and universities.
This assault on American higher education also involves targeting for harassment, persecution and eventual dismissal those individual faculty members deemed too "radical," "liberal" or "activist". This witch hunt is conducted by the right-wing media, student "advocacy" groups who dishonestly claim that conservative students are somehow persecuted by "liberal" professors, and a reactionary mob mentality mobilized by the right-wing echo chamber.
George Ciccariello-Maher is one of the most recent victims of this new McCarthyism in the age of Trump. Over the course of a year beginning in December 2016, Ciccariello-Maher, then a professor at Drexel University, made several comments online about the relationship between toxic white masculinity and mass shootings. He also mocked the obsession with "white genocide," an alarmist term for demographic change shared by such right-wing provocateurs as Tucker Carlson of Fox News.
In response, Ciccariello-Maher received hundreds of death threats and other menacing messages directed against him and his family. The right-wing smear machine and its mob also embarked on a campaign to get him fired from his position at Drexel. Although he had tenure, he was eventually placed on administrative leave and later resigned. Ciccariello-Maher accepted a position at New York University earlier this month.
How did the forces which elected Donald Trump come crashing down on one university professor? Why is there such a deep fear and aversion to discussing the obvious connections between toxic white masculinity and mass shootings? How does the right-wing echo chamber anchored by Fox News target academics and teachers? Should liberals, progressives and others in the reality-based community attempt to engage Fox News viewers by exposing them to new ideas?
I recently spoke to George Ciccariello-Maher. This conversation took place before he had accepted his new position at NYU. A longer version of this conversation can be heard on my podcast, which is available on Salon’s Featured Audio page.
Why do you think Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election?
That's a really great question. It has a lot of moving parts. You have people saying, "It was whiteness, it was racism that got Trump into the White House." You have other people saying, "No, no, it was the economic questions. It was the disillusionment with Clintonite neoliberalism." These are both very wooden and mechanical analyses that do not understand the ways in which, for example, that economic disaffection and the very real abandonment of many white and black Americans by Clintonite neoliberalism can give rise to very different dynamics.
Those abandoned in the black community are not going to become white supremacists. But in the context of rural America, those who are suffering the impact of things like NAFTA and neoliberal capitalism, given the power of right-wing talk radio, evangelical Christianity and a number of other forces may turn to white supremacy, overt white racism and Trump for answers.
We have to engage why the white working class is so compelled to ally with white elites and not with black and brown people from the same class background who they should have solidarity with. What makes poor whites so easily compelled to the "psychological wages of whiteness"?
Another problem with the American news media -- and public discourse more generally -- is that those people who have actual expertise on race, the color line, American politics and society more broadly rarely get an opportunity to appear on national TV. As I am fond of saying, "Racism is not an opinion." Yet in these conversations all opinions are treated as equal.
I'm currently on forced administrative leave from my university for tweeting what were really straightforward analytic points about white mass shooters in the United States. [These are] conclusions and observations that are well grounded in research, findings that have had seen thousands of pages of academic and other literature dedicated to them. In other words, white male entitlement and how potentially explosive and dangerous it is. This is not controversial. There are disagreements about some of the dynamics surrounding white men and mass shootings. But my conclusions are not that controversial. Yet my comments were enough in this moment to be turned into a call for violence and harassment against me.
You cannot decouple white masculinity in America from gun culture and white supremacy. Why do you think people of a certain ideological orientation, racial background and gender identity are incensed by the idea that white masculinity is linked to guns?
When I sent those tweets about the Vegas shooting, I wasn't claiming to speak precisely as to what had happened. What I knew is that a white man had done this. The question was, "Why is this predominantly the case?" That's the question I was trying to answer in connecting race and masculinity together.
Consider how, with the Las Vegas mass shooting, this man was verbally abusive to his partner in public on a constant basis. This is a public display of overt patriarchal control. He had also been losing money for the past two years and was desperate to maintain his status financially through gambling. Ultimately, we're talking about a sense of status that needs to be protected, that needs to be superior to that of others, [and] to which one feels entitled. If that falls away, if that is frustrated, then you have the explosive reaction which we saw in Las Vegas and elsewhere with mass shootings by white men.
What were the specific tweets that generated the right-wing firestorm of hatred against you?
Back in December of last year, I was mocking the idea of "white genocide." The people who incited the firestorm against me knew exactly what I was doing. Instead they claimed that I was some type of self-hating white person bent on murdering and killing off white families. There were commentators and hosts on Fox News and elsewhere, such as Tucker Carlson, who drove this witch hunt. Of note, Carlson also created the right-wing website the Daily Caller, and it was that very site which targeted me and then handed the story over to Fox News. A few days later, Tucker of course invites me back onto his show. It is clear how perverse and inbred the whole right-wing rage machine is.
You send off the tweets and then what happens? Phone calls? Emails? Efforts to get you fired?
It begins on Twitter. Then the hate mails start. If you’re a college or university faculty member like myself, maybe you’ll get an email from an administrator or your chair saying, “We’re receiving all these messages.” These things begin to grow and in the worst case scenario what happens is that Fox News makes this into a story and runs with it for days. These faux-scandals and witch hunts are not about just reporting the news. It is about creating, inventing and amplifying this fake news. That’s when the real death threats begin because you now have people watching Fox News, getting all riled up and sending off threatening emails or phone calls.
For those who are new to these concepts, how would you define "whiteness" and its relationship to politics and society? Social scientists, historians, philosophers and others who study the global color line use that language differently than the general public. That divergence is one of the reasons you and others have been singled out for harassment.
"Whiteness" is a category of political privilege which has no specific content beyond that. What do I mean by that? There is such a thing as white people: We choose to group them together under the category of "white." This category has shifted over time. There are groups, for example, the Italians, the Irish and the Jews, which have been promoted into "whiteness" in the United States during the 19th and through to the second half of the 20th century. For example, a white person from Norway has absolutely nothing in common with a white person from California. These are not shared cultural or ethnic or linguistic communities of any kind; they are just structures of racial privilege based on skin color. The idea of whiteness and its superiority over other groups needs to end. Whiteness also needs to be abolished as a category itself.
Whiteness is an invention that cannot be separated from the domination, subordination, violence against and attempted control of nonwhites. To be proud of whiteness is to be proud of white supremacy.
You’re not saying anything of substance when you say "I’m proud of being white." Where is your "white" culture? What is it?
"Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity." Do you think that statement has aged well?
"Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity" is usually associated with the journal Race Traitor, and is perceived in a similar way to my claims about white genocide. We are not advocating for the literal destruction of any actual people or groups. Treason to whiteness means betraying this dedication to whiteness. It means specifically for white working-class and poor people to understand that this is a category of privilege and to betray their solidarity with rich white people who don’t give a shit about them, and to attempt to build a different kind of world without whiteness.
You decided to go on Fox News to rebut the attacks against your character and scholarship. I would describe Fox News as right-wing political theater. You can't win. What was your game plan?
I actually don’t think we can refuse these spaces entirely. I don’t recommend that people go on Fox News. However, we always need to take seriously the possibility of provoking and introducing new narratives and ideas in those spaces, which may reach the white working class and other viewers.
On Fox News -- and Tucker Carlson's show in particular -- the format is to bring on the liberal punching bag of the day. Many of these folks are from academia and are underprepared and ill-equipped to deal with what’s about to happen. They use jargon, they are easily shaken, they’re confused, they’re actually thinking they can talk to this man and his peers. You didn't fall into that trap. What was your strategy?
If you are talking about Tucker Carlson, there are very clear guidelines about how to confront someone like him. First of all, you can’t be passive. You need to be more aggressive and push your argument and talk over them if you need to. The second thing is you need to understand that you are not going to convince him or any other right-wing host. The final thing is to know what they are going to say -- it’s not that hard to figure out what their line of attack would be. If you go on Fox News with some liberal assumption about the media being neutral or rational, then you’re just bound to lose.
I actually didn’t predict just how absurd it would be. I didn’t predict that Tucker would sit there with his punchable face, staring at the screen and acting like he couldn’t read basic English. So in many ways I actually almost overestimated him and his tactics. But this is also a strategy to make intellectuals look as though they are detached from everyday America by simply repeating over and over again that what you’re saying is nonsense.
What are your worries or concerns about America under Donald Trump?
These have not been easy years. These are not going to be safe years for people who are engaging in radical criticism of the existing order and attempting to mobilize people to fight against it. We cannot expect safety moving forward, because that will lead us away from the path of resisting this resurgent white supremacy. We need to be more proactive and more aggressive and more combative when it comes to fighting it. We are going to look back on this decisive moment in a couple of decades and the question will be, "Did we stand up for what is necessary and right?"
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