Trump Leans on This Disturbing Figure to Threaten Public Universities

Right-wing provocateur Christopher Rufo could help shape President-elect Donald Trump’s plan for higher education, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal.

Rufo—a leading actor in right-wing culture wars, from the moral panic surrounding “critical race theory” to the hoax about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio—reportedly “has an invitation to Mar-a-Lago, where he will present the president-elect’s team with a plan to geld American universities by withholding money if they don’t pull back on diversity measures.”

A spokesperson for JD Vance told the Journal that the vice president-elect sees Rufo as “a leading voice in the movement to restore merit and excellence” to higher education, who “recognizes schools and universities exist to equip American students to face tomorrow’s challenges, not to indoctrinate them with the fringe beliefs of the far left.”

To see such lofty aims in action, one can look at how the New College of Florida has transformed since Governor Ron DeSantis appointed Rufo and other conservative activists to the school’s board of trustees in 2023 in his “war on woke.”

Under its new leadership, New College has undergone significant changes, most recently hiring a number of “ideologically aligned rightwing faculty and staff for a range of positions,” per The Guardian, including conservative commentator and comedian Andrew Doyle, who will teach a course on “wokeness.”

The overhaul of New College and Rufo’s actions as trustee have been met with resistance and sharp criticism from students and faculty. One such critic, a visiting history professor, was threatened by Rufo and later dismissed after co-writing an op-ed against the new administration, in what the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression called “a clear violation of the public college’s First Amendment obligations.”

According to the Journal, Rufo’s top concerns include ending race-based affirmative action at universities “with which the federal government does business” and defunding colleges “that continue to engage in DEI practices” in an effort to “recapture” them from the left—stances that resonate with president-elect’s thinking on higher ed.

Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, once wrote about how Israel is key to a necessary “American crusade”—and the Geneva Conventions should be thrown out the window.

The Guardian has reported that in his most recent work, The War on Warriors, Hegseth wrote that the U.S. military should completely disregard the international human rights treaties, which outline rules for how to treat civilians during war time.

“The key question of our generation—of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—is way more complicated: what do you do if your enemy does not honor the Geneva conventions. We never got an answer. Only more war. More casualties,” Hegseth wrote. “If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals feel better about themselves, aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?! … Who cares what other countries think?”

In his 2024 book, American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free, he wrote, “If you love America, you should love Israel.”

He goes on to liken his support for Israel to the Crusades, writing, “Our present moment is much like the 11th Century. We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must.… Arm yourself—metaphorically, intellectually, physically. Our fight is not with guns. Yet.”

Hegseth’s nomination aligns perfectly with President-elect Trump’s right-wing makeover of the federal government. And it doesn’t hurt that, like Trump, Hegseth has a serious allegation of sexual assault from 2017 hanging over his head.

Elon Musk admitted that X (formerly Twitter) is throttling link-based posts, essentially stifling news articles on the social media platform.

In a reply to a post Sunday from technology investor and writer Paul Graham, Musk confirmed that X’s algorithm deprioritizes links, telling him to “just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply. This just stops lazy linking.”

Graham was not convinced, replying, “If I write a new essay and tweet a link to it, that’s ‘lazy linking,’ but if I tweet that I’ve written a new essay and then put the link in a reply, that’s somehow better?”

Musk didn’t reply to Graham, and later retweeted a post from user DogeDesigner explaining the change. A host of replies from other users to Musk’s reply, as well as Graham’s post, showed that this change is disliked by many X users, particularly in the technology and programming fields that Musk and Graham are a part of.

The fact that Musk replied at all is due to Graham’s standing in the venture capital and tech world (and probably his 1.2 million followers). Musk routinely ignores journalists, particularly critics, on X in favor of his fans and other right-wing accounts. He has frequently disparaged mainstream or “legacy” media outlets in favor of unverified accounts on X, and proudly spreads misinformation on the platform as long as it serves his worldview and political ends.

At times, Musk has shown favoritism on the platform and banned journalists on X when they run afoul of his beliefs, making his claims of being a free speech advocate look hypocritical. Several news outlets, such as NPR, The Guardian, and Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia have all quit X amid increased criticism from European officials.

Whether it’s due to Musk’s disdain for media outlets that criticize him or an attempt to keep users from browsing away from X, the tech CEO’s deprioritization of links has not only ruined the utility of a platform once prized for making it easy to follow news sources but has also increased the spreading of false information. It’s little wonder that competitors such as Bluesky, itself created by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, have grown exponentially since Donald Trump’s election.

In recent days, Republican politicians have taken to the airwaves, threatening blue states that fail to comply with the Trump administration’s draconian immigration policies with the withdrawal of federal funding.

Fox News’s Mark Levin suggested Sunday to Donald Trump’s prospective “border czar” Tom Homan that “federal funding” would be a “very, very powerful weapon” for the incoming administration.

“If you have a governor who says, ‘I’m not gonna cooperate, I’m gonna block you,’ well then, federal funds should be slashed to that state, and I mean hugely so,” Levin said. “These states, much like the Confederacy, they want to go on their own, they want to do their own thing. To me, you got a powerful weapon among others, which is, OK, no federal funds. Boom.”

“And that’s going to happen. I guarantee … President Trump will do that,” Homan replied.

Also on Sunday, Fox host Maria Bartiromo asked Representative Marjorie Taylor Green if “sanctuary states and sanctuary cities will lose their federal funding” under Trump. Greene replied, “If they use their police officers and their resources to harbor and protect illegal criminal aliens, then absolutely. Those sanctuary states and cities are in danger of losing their federal funding.”

And just a few days earlier, Senator Lindsey Graham told Fox News’s Hannity, “Sanctuary cities, you’re on notice, we should cut all your money off.”

Per Mother Jones’s Isabela Dias, law enforcement agencies and Democratic officials nationwide are increasingly “speaking out about their plans to thwart” Trump’s plans for mass deportation, which he intends to conduct via a national emergency and the deployment of the military.

In anticipation of the new administration’s immigration agenda, Democratic attorneys general “are preparing briefs and analyses and even identifying courts in which to file their lawsuits,” as well as “preparing to fight Trump over withholding federal funding from local law enforcement agencies in an attempt to induce them into carrying out deportations,” according to Politico.

The threats from members of the supposed party of “states’ rights” echo Trump’s first-term vow to defund sanctuary cities, which Politifact deems a broken promise as his efforts were “limited to Justice Department funds, and even those attempts [were] thwarted by courts.”

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, right-wing grifter and loyal Trump attack dog, appeared on Fox News on Sunday to lay out her vision for which parts of the federal government will stay and which parts will go after the Department of Government Efficiency is done with its work.

“It’s all over,” said the far-right representative, who is set to chair a new congressional subcommittee to work with DOGE. “Every single government department program, grant program, contract, it is everywhere.… We’re going to have to go into all kinds of buckets. And that’s how I’ll be separating things on the Oversight subcommittee on DOGE. We’ll be looking at everything from government-funded media programs like NPR that spread nothing but Democrat propaganda; we’ll be going into grant programs that fund things like sex apps in Malaysia, toilets in Africa, all kinds of programs that don’t help the American people.” 

Greene’s ire is badly misplaced but unsurprising. NPR has been a punching bag for Rush Limbaugh–adjacent conservatives for years, even though it receives only 1 percent of its funding directly from the federal government. Billionaire Trump surrogate and X owner Elon Musk even went so far as to briefly classify NPR as “state-affiliated media,” after which the outlet stopped posting on X. The “sex apps in Malaysia” Greene mentioned is likely referring to the app known as JomCare, meant to offer harm-reduction services to gay men. As for the “toilets in Africa,” she may be referring to broad cuts to USAID funding.  

While Greene is particularly outspoken in her bigotry, her rhetoric is merely echoing what Trump has been saying the entire campaign, and it’s why he appointed Musk and Vivek Ramswamy as co-chairs of DOGE, which as a reminder, isn’t a real government agency. They want to root out the “enemy within”—and that just happens to be anyone or anything that isn’t MAGA-core.