Nicholas De Genova is currently the chair of the Comparative Cultural Studies Department at the University of Houston, but he first made his mark as an America-hating academic when, as an assistant professor at Columbia University in the spring of 2003, he spoke at a rally against the just-launched Iraq War, calling for “a million more Mogadishus.” De Genova was referencing the horrific carnage that resulted from a 1993 American military action in the Somali capital where 18 Americans and hundreds of Somalis perished.

The professor later attempted to clarify his remarks in a letter to the Columbia Spectator, writing that “imperialism and white supremacy have been constitutive of U.S. nation-state formation and U.S. nationalism,” rejecting “all forms of U.S. patriotism” and declaring his desire to see “the defeat of the U.S. war machine.” De Genova added, “my rejection of U.S. nationalism is an appeal to liberate our own political imaginations such that we might usher in a radically different world in which we will not remain the prisoners of U.S. global domination.” In short, he wished for the defeat and downfall of the United States on the world stage.

In the nearly two decades since his infamous statement at that anti-war rally, De Genova has not backed away from controversy—though his extreme and violence-abetting statements appear to have aided, rather than injured, his academic career.

In an article published in Spectre in June 2020, De Genova claimed that policing exists to enforce white supremacy. “In short,” he declared, “policing in the United States is inextricable from the perpetration and perpetuation of racism.”

Later in that same piece, De Genova blamed police racism for the violent rioting and looting that occurred in the wake of George Floyd’s death and condoned the rioters’ destructive actions: “Confronted with the obscenity of law enforcement that repeatedly proves itself to be nothing less than torture and murder, the enraged response of aggrieved racially oppressed communities repeatedly finds itself with no other option than rioting and other forms of defiance toward the law.”  Professor De Genova goes on to claim that “most of what have been branded as ‘riots’ have, in fact, been veritable urban insurrections, albeit largely spontaneous insurgencies against the systemic violence of the racial state.” 

In another recent article, De Genova slanders President Trump as a white supremacist and a fascist, writing “Trump’s signature slogan, ‘Make America Great Again’—becomes inseparable from a retreat into internecine racial tribalism: in short, white nationalism. And white nationalism, invigorated by an ethos of civil war, spells fascism.”

As a Marxist, De Genova believes that capitalism—the economic system that has enabled America to grow into the most powerful nation on earth—is inherently evil. He writes of the “endemic and irreconcilable struggle of capital, vampire-like, to cannibalize the creative energies of human life, and the struggle of human life against its objectification and alienation.” 

De Genova has also repeatedly made anti-Semitic remarks praising anti-Israel suicide bombers and bizarrely stating that “the heritage of the victims of the Holocaust belongs to the Palestinian people. The state of Israel has no claim to the heritage of the Holocaust.”

For his ardent desire to see the American military and American power go down in flames, De Genova belongs atop the list of the Top Ten America-Hating Professors.