Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine. My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting from AS220 in Providence, Rhode Island. On Christmas Eve, George Chikerell Omar, a professor of political science at Drexel University, tweeted, All I want for Christmas is white genocide.

On Christmas, he doubled down with,

to clarify, when the whites were massacred during the Haitian revolution,

that was a good thing indeed.

In response, Pepe the Frog-aligned Internet creatures

from the white supremacist alt-Right made him a target,

and George, the father of a young child, received a deluge of death threats.

Perhaps even more concerning was the response from Drexel's administration, which almost immediately

released a statement calling his tweets, utterly reprehensible, deeply disturbing, and stating that they

do not in any way reflect the values of the university. As George has noted, it's obvious that he

wasn't calling for the murder of all white people. Rather, as he wrote, white genocide is an idea

invented by white supremacists and used to denounce everything

from interracial relationships to multicultural policies. George, welcome to The Dig.

I'm glad to be on. Thanks for having me, guys. So I guess let's begin with the facts that the people

who attacked you either cynically ignored or ignorantly didn't understand.

What's white genocide and what did you tweet?

Well, I think the first thing to be said is that white genocide is actually not a thing.

And so this is an essential part of the story as it unfolds.

So white genocide is a paranoid conspiracy theory held by white supremacists who on the one hand

believe in race as a biological reality and believe that whites are under existential threat

by multicultural policies and by intermarriage.

And every time a sort of mixed baby is born

...