The primary threat to free speech and expression across America’s colleges and universities comes from “a coordinated right-wing campaign,” argues George Ciccariello in a Tuesday-published Washington Post op-ed.
Ciccariello’s byline describes him as “a tenured associate professor of politics and global studies.”
The morning after October 1’s mass murder attack in Las Vegas, Ciccariello concluded via Twitter that that “white supremacist patriarchy” was to blame. He also criticized “liberals” for pursuing “gun control” rather than condemning what he described as “white entitlement”:
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Ciccariello describes himself as “diagnosing a sense of double entitlement [among white men], that, when frustrated, can occasionally lead to violent consequences.”
Such a racial analysis is grounded in “decades of research on how race and gender function in our society,” writes Ciccariello, describing his perspective as “neither provocative in tone nor controversial in content”:
To be both white and male is to be subject to a potent cocktail of entitlement to economic and political power, and to dominate nonwhite and female bodies. When that entitlement is frustrated, it can lead to what the criminologist Mike King calls “aggrieved whiteness,” an ambient furor based on the idea that white Americans have become oppressed victims of politically correct multiculturalism.
Reaction to his tweets from The Daily Caller, Breitbart News, FrontPage, The Blaze, The College Fix, and Fox News prompted the formation of a “resentful” right-wing “outrage machine” maintaining a “coordinated onslaught” against “anti-racist academics” such as himself, writes Ciccariello.
Ciccariello claims to have received “hate mail” and “death threats” from right-wing person. He simultaneously dismisses left-wing agitation against free speech and expression:
At the same time that the right-wing media smears professors like myself, decrying our tenure and demanding our heads, they breathlessly chronicle the supposed intolerance of the left when confronted with provocative campus tours by Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, Charles Murray, Ann Coulter and others.
Such alleged intimidation, writes Ciccariello, amounts to an undermining of his “academic freedom.” The “real snowflakes,” writes Ciccariello, are right-wing persons “easily triggered by anti-racism and feminism.” Ciccariello concludes that he will “take all necessary legal action to protect [his] academic freedom” and “tenure rights,” adding that he will work with the “Campus Antifascist Network.”
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