The cultural Right was in a furor recently — whether sincere or feigned — first over Drexel University Professor George Ciccariello-Maher’s Christmas Eve tweet that “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide,” and then over Drexel’s Dec. 29 decision not to fire him.
The real outrage, though, is that Drexel wasted both Cicciarello-Maher’s time and that of its overpaid administrators in calling him on the carpet about this manufactured controversy at all.
And when I say “manufactured,” I mean exactly that. Aside from a few gullible mainstream conservatives and liberals on the margin who weren’t in on the joke, the whole thing was every bit as contrived as the GamerGate “controversy” over “ethics in gaming journalism” (which was actually a harassment campaign cynically organized and coordinated by juvenile gamers on 8Chan as a way to score one against the hated “Social Justice Warriors”).
In this case White GenocideGate was a fake outrage campaign organized by members of the so-called “alt right” online community centered on Breitbart.com. Although they call themselves the “alt right,” they’re actually an assortment of neo-reactionaries, “race realists,” “men’s rights activists,” outright white supremacists and neo-nazis who like to engage in organized channer-style harassment campaigns against the cultural Left.
Their outrage was entirely cynical because the term “white genocide” is something made up by people like…