Back in the United States, in Pennsylvania, professor George Ciccariello-Maher has resigned from Drexel University, after receiving months of death threats and online harassment by white supremacists and right-wing media outlets. Ciccariello-Maher faced the torrent of criticism for tweeting about white supremacy, the U.S. military and how “Trumpism” was helping fuel the high numbers of mass shootings carried out by white men across the United States. This is Ciccariello-Maher, speaking after suspected shooter James Paddock, a 64-year-old white man, killed 59 people, including himself, in a mass shooting in Las Vegas in October.
George Ciccariello-Maher: “I think this is a question that we all need to grapple with: When you see these cases of sort of mass—this shocking mass brutality, what is it that makes white men so prone to this kind of behavior? And what might be going on today in our country, in which people are stoking a sort of victim complex among white men? You know, what might be happening today to encourage this kind of behavior and to radicalize these kind of actions? And I was immediately subject to a torrent of sort of abuse and threats from right-wing media outlets.”
This fall, George Ciccariello-Maher was banned from campus after speaking out about the mass shootings, in a move Drexel said was for the professor’s own safety. On Thursday, Ciccariello-Maher wrote on Facebook that his situation was “unsustainable” and “Staying at Drexel in the eye of this storm has become detrimental to my own writing, speaking, and organizing.”