Breitbart (12/25/16) finds a hook to push the “white genocide” canard.
A “Twitter controversy” broke out on Christmas Day after leftist Drexel University professor George Ciccariello-Maher tweeted out, “All I Want for Christmas Is White Genocide” to his 11,000 followers. The tweet–since deleted–was a play on the white supremacist myth of a “White Genocide,” a canard that whites are under threat from interracial dating and diversity.
Online Nazis (sometimes euphemistically referred to by their prefered marketing descriptor, the “alt-right”) quickly pounced. The faux Twitter outrage was further stoked by the far-right online tabloid Breitbart (12/25/16), which ran the story without any of the essential context (though it took the opportunity to denounce Venezuela’s “communist government,” for some reason). Before one could catch up to the substance of the “controversy,” it was asserted to be a controversy as such.
Much like George Hamilton is famous for being famous, “Twitter backlash” stories are often controversial for being controversial. So long as enough people are tweeting outrage—regardless of their motive or Nazi status—the story becomes one through sheer assertion. Someone is “under fire,” “provoking outrage,” causing “backlash”—no matter if this fire or outrage or backlash is merited, or sincere. What matters is there’s controversy, and this must be breathlessly covered.
In an effort to “both sides” the issue, corporate media indulged racist concern trolling over what, as anyone familiar with the term knows, is a white supremacist panic. Those stoking the outrage, namely Breitbart and hordes of online Nazis, know that the term means interracial relationships and diversity programs, not an actual genocide. Rather than investigate the outrage, its motives and its proper context, most media outlets—and, initially, Ciccariello-Maher’s employer Drexel University themselves—reflexively framed the issue as a leftist professor literally calling for genocide, without noting the cynical origins of the controversy.
As FAIR has noted several times before, headlines matter as much if not more than article text. 60 percent of Americans don’t read past the headline, and the same percentage share articles on social media without actually clicking on them. People’s impressions are formed by how issues are framed—how they are initially presented—and from scanning these headlines one is given the impression Ciccariello-Maher is a pro-genocide zealot:
- “What Is White Genocide? Race War Debated After Drexler Professor Tweets, ‘All I Want For Christmas Is White Genocide’” (IBT, 12/26/16)
- “Pennsylvania Professor Under Fire for ‘White Genocide’ Tweet” (Reuters, 12/26/16)
- “Pennsylvania Prof Under Fire for ‘White Genocide’ Tweet” (ABC/AP, 12/26/16)
- “Professor Under Fire for Tweet That Appeared to Support ‘White Genocide’” (LA Times/AP, 2/26/16)
- “Drexel Professor Slammed for ‘White Genocide’ Christmas Wish” (Fox News, 12/26/16)
- “Drexel University Professor Under Fire for ‘White Genocide’ Tweet” (New York Daily News, 12/26/16)
- “Uproar After Pennsylvania Professor Calls for ‘White Genocide’ in a Christmas Wish Tweet” (Daily Mail, 12/26/16)
It isn’t until three or four paragraphs down in most of these articles that they explain what “white genocide” actually means and the satirical nature of the tweet is dissected.
But the dubious attempt at balance didn’t stop with the headlines; the articles themselves were sometimes embarrassingly tone deaf. International Business Times (12/26/16) put on its Serious Journalism face to write this line:
It’s unclear if he was calling for the mass killing of whites.
Except it wasn’t unclear. Anyone who can take four seconds to google what “white genocide” means knows Ciccariello-Maher was not calling for the killing of one billion people. Common sense and the most basic due diligence are thrown out of the window in the interests of false balance.
The AP stoically reported:
A Drexel University professor has been summoned to a meeting with school officials after he tweeted a Christmas Eve message that appeared to support “white genocide.”
Appeared to whom? Most of the Nazi trolls know what the term meant, and thus understood the irony of it. Breitbart is in the outrage exploitation business, and likely didn’t actually think he was calling for gassing whitey. So to whom did this “appear”? Probably not the AP reporters, who went on to explain its satirical purpose. A meta-outrage sets in: AP’s journalists are not misinformed about what the tweet meant, nor can they identify a specific party who is legitimately confused, so they simply assert that it may, perhaps, “appear” to support killing millions of people.
While some outlets eventually caught up to the scam (USA Today, Slate, Jezebel and, ultimately, IBT), by that point the damage was done: A college professor’s SEO legacy as an advocate of genocide was permanently imprinted on the internet. The knee-jerk, reflexive desire to “cover the controversy” rather than critically investigate it is precisely the radical centrism the Nazi trolls and their right-wing media allies were exploiting. Fake outrage long enough and it becomes real outrage, as corporate media get played by white supremacists on the altar of objectivity.
Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org. You can find him on Twitter at @AdamJohnsonNYC.
Jumping at shadows and crying wolf all at once, complicated by 60% of people apparently being fine with no verification. People were reactionary before the internet, but I don’t remember such extremes.
Cue Serling monologue.
Sure I get it, but it wasn’t a smart thing for that prof to do.
At this moment in time, a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on. Why stoke the fires only to claim you’re smarter than everybody who fell for your joke? There are unbalanced, low information people, already jacked up and this just fuels the fire. They won’t all get the correction memo, and some will be telling the story of that tweet for years to come. Not helpful.
That feels like shooting the messenger though, when in theory everybody should be perfectly free to voice opinions, provided people are (a) able to have the tools for discerning opinion from fact, and (b) honestly willing to exist in a culture that allows differing opinions. Self-editing is still a kind of censorship, and you just know the people who most need to consider doing so never in a million years would (cough cough president-elect). I want to believe there’s a broader net for this, like improving education standards in general.
Self-editing isn’t censorship. C’mon.
Having the right to say something doesn’t mean it is smart to say it. If we don’t learn to be strategic, we can count on worse than Trump in the future.
Tell me how this tweet got us any further on the path to awakening a few of those we had better awaken, soon, or we’re toast. I can live without the adolescent need to say whatever cute thing crosses my mind if I can have climate change addressed, and reproductive rights. And that’s not going to happen if all the people who thought they’d take a chance on Trump dig in. .
But not being free to express one’s First Amendment right to free speech would be letting the terrorists win.
this professor was being a total douche and got smeared for it. there’s nothing wrong with that. fuck him.
Notice the person writing this left out the follow-up tweet that clarified where the guy stood on “white genocide.”
“To clarify: when the whites were massacred during the Haitian Revolution, that was a good thing indeed.”
When white people, including innocent children, were massacred in Haiti, it was a good thing. Clearly this is justifiable rhetoric for some people…
but all of this is ok as long as it’s white people being targeted — you can be as racist and offensive as you like when that’s the case. turn the tables – white genocide doesn’t exist, fine. but imagine had the professor took a “satirical” shot at the “black lives matter” movement which is fundamentally flawed, as it has no tangible end goal.
If you are “imagining” a comparison scenario to illustrate a point, doesn’t the imagined scenario have to bear some kind of similarity to the real-world situation you are comparing it with, in order to have any relevance whatsoever as an example?
In other words, what the hell are you comparing by imagining a satirical shot at Black Lives Matter over organizational details, with a statement taken out of context and misrepresented, imagining white genocide? I don’t get the comparison, in any sense.
Do I have to be a dog to get it?
There is a double standard here which I bet most readers outside of the states could see pretty easily. Ironically suggesting on throwaway social networking genocide against whites while actual genocide is conducted by whites elsewhere (such as via militarized police forces with no logical checks and balances), the idea that these are somehow one and the same, really screams out the kind of bias lacking any self-awareness.
I’m of the mind that George Carlin was right and everybody needs to be able to learn how to take a joke. I’m also of the mind that collegiate safe spaces unintentionally present the same exact thing as segregation. I think it is deeply disturbing that more people seem willing to punch left against throwaway quips online rather than actually tackle the issue insinuated by said quip. This whole ethos where saying a mean thing is somehow on par with or worse than actually doing said mean thing is really ignorant and lazy. What could possibly be accomplished other than filtering speech? And when we allow mere speech to be filtered, who sets the controls? This is all very dangerous.
One should not tweet while drunk or high on cocaine.
SEO legacy damaged? Hahaha give me a break. If anything, GCM surely enjoyed as hell the increased visibility this little episode brought to his persona. Before this, most of the country (and the world) didn’t even know who he was. I’m sure a person like him, with such an attention-whore personality, is delighted with the fact that he is both a “national and international” story in news rooms all over the world.
And BTW, is Adam Johnson really playing dumb, and pretending to “not know” why the story of Ciccariello is associated with Venezuela? Well, I will use a quote here, and one not precisely coming from an al-right ultra-right wing web page:
“Ciccariello-Maher is a shameless shill for the Bolivarian regime in Venezuela. He supported Chavez’s repression of local anarchists a few years back and he rationalized Maduro’s indiscriminate deportation of Colombian immigrants last summer. No one who supports petrol populism should be taken seriously by left communists, much less communisateurs, yet many of them do (perhaps on account of their shared love of riot porn). To be honest, I really hope he was on the take from the government in Caracas. Otherwise, why would he sell his word so cheap?”
And sorry boys and girls, but FAIR commenting section does not not allow URL’s. inclusion. I’m sure you can do your own googling to find out who said that. Rest assured, it was a guy “supporting George Ciccariello-Maher right to freedom of speech”.
White flight to farcical fantasy
Make that “White flights of farcical fantasy”
Better?
I would change only one word of the final sentence in this important article;
“the altar of objectivity” to read: “the alt-r of objectivity” …
Calling for the genocide of any group of people is, in a word, EVIL. This half wit is not part of the solution, he is part of the problem. He should lose his job for it. Imagine if he had “joked” about the genocide of black people, Asians, or Jews, would it have been as funny then? Every person who goes online and writes something like this is just throwing gasoline on the fire. Maybe that was his intent anyway. Anyway I agree, FUCK him. He is a POS.
Wow. If fair is peddling fake news what are we supposed to do? Luckily calling people Nazis has the same effect as comparing some famous person like Obama to Hitler himself. People’s eyes just glaze over.
So… he said he wanted “White Genicide” clearly using the words White Genicide, but in his cool hip Nazi Trolling lexicon he meant something else; that, if we (the non-hip cool readers that he in fact was trolling) had just looked it up on Google we would have understood.
Really?
I would suggest his irony was obvious because the only people who own the means of production for genocide are rich white people. The notion that people in the United States might ever be subjected to a widescale white genocide are about as likely as my successfully crowdfunding for a nuke to take out the Vatican. But the real point is that of the people bothered by anybody just suggesting white genocide, few if any seem remotely bothered by any other color of actual, real-world genocide. Like, where are the Breitbart op/eds upset over what the Palestinians are undergoing?
ya, thanks for the re-education. At first I assumed that wishing for white genocide was kinda hateful, but after reading your article I can appreciate how Marxist class warfare ideology appears light-hearted when the rhetoric is humorously nuanced with race, sex and gender identity politics. I think I get it now:
Genocide in the tens of millions of a presumed privileged ruling class across the globe over the last century is not that funny, but wishing for the genocide of a “white privileged” ruling class over the next century is a virtual knee slapper … and if you don’t get the joke you’re probably – no definitely – a NAZI troll and a member of the KKK!
Moreover, if “white supremacists” had just done a little more googling, they would get that professor funnybone couldn’t possibly mean “gassing whitey” over CHRISTMAS [I mean jeepers – that’s not even doable!] – we must presume that he meant exterminating – peaceably – over many years … [Google news alert!] – wait, (this just in after scrolling to next tweet): “To clarify: when the whites were massacred during the Haitian Revolution, that was a good thing indeed.”
humph… ya well anyway … funny stuff – comrade.
I think the same standards need to be applied to all people, or you will not be fair and accurate. This is not really that hard to figure out. When you say its a “good thing” that a certain group is murdered and you look forward to their genocide….it’s NOT a joke. If someone says “All I want for xmas is a Jewish genocide”….it would rightfully be taken seriously.
You are not a white supremacist, racist, nazi, or “alt-right” person, if you are disgusted with what this Professor said. He also said: “when the whites were massacred during the Haitian revolution, that was a good thing indeed.”
Then he says it was satire. No, it is not satire. George Ciccariello-Maher is an Anti-White Racist. He is against White European Americans of Christian backgrounds.
Either Freedom of Speech applies to all or you need to apply the same standards regarding hate speech. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
It is a sad day in our nation that someone like George Ciccariello-Maher is able to teach in our schools. He is a self professed “radical”, which is not something we need around our kids, whether it is right or left wing radicals.