“McCarthyist Environment”: Colleges Are Censoring Professors for Trump

College professors are facing censorship and self-censorship as Donald Trump’s administration emboldens state lawmakers to increase scrutiny and surveillance on college campuses, The New York Times reported.

Universities in several states, including Texas, Ohio, and Florida, have adopted new rules requiring professors to share their syllabi in publicly searchable databases. While those guidelines have been celebrated by administrators and conservative activists for increasing transparency, they have also gifted online trolls with easy targets for their vitriol—particularly in departments that trigger conservatives, such as gender studies and Middle Eastern studies.

The recent surge in surveillance was born from the work of groups such as Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, said Dr. Isaac Kamola, a political science professor at Trinity College in Connecticut. TPUSA has spent over a decade developing a “watch list” directing angry mobs at professors who used the wrong words in class.

“Everybody is walking on eggshells,” Dr. Kamola told the Times. “Faculty are walking on eggshells. Administrators are walking on eggshells. Students are walking on eggshells. And what you get is the opposite of free speech.”

At an annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Dr. Dan Royles, a historian, advised “minimum compliance” with new rules. Royles and his panel discussed how to signal to LGBTQ+ students that their classes would cover topics pertaining to queer history without using keywords conservatives might use to target them.

“None of this is happening in good faith and we shouldn’t treat it as such,” Royles said.

Emboldened by Trump’s anti-woke crusade against higher education, conservative lawmakers are hoping to crack down on universities’ liberal tilt—or what others might call free speech.

PEN America’s Jonathan Friedman told the Times that while the new rules may seem innocent enough, “publishing syllabi when it is coupled with this McCarthyist environment is really dangerous.”

While Friedman acknowledged that conservative professors had faced social and career backlash from the left in recent years, “nowhere in that was a serious effort to use the power of government,” he said.

“The stakes of this are simply much higher,” he added.

After a student complained that their professor, Dr. Benjamin Robinson, had shared pro-Palestinian views and criticized the university, administrators at Indiana University cited a law meant to promote “intellectual diversity” to reprimand Robinson.

Robinson told the Times that the law’s vagueness was “utterly chilling,” and established a “hostile, suspicious relationship between faculty members and their students.”

January 6 insurrectionist, far-right activist, and Republican Senate candidate Jake Lang was arrested in Minneapolis after destroying a “PROSECUTE ICE” ice sculpture that was outside the Minnesota state Capitol on Thursday.

“President Trump, we support you. We support ICE. Our country was made for Americans, not for Somalis,” Lang says in a video he posted to social media, before awkwardly kicking some of the ice blocks down to spell a new message. “Pro-ICE baby! America first, America only! We’ll see ya here, February 7th, Saturday, 12 noon, outside the Minnesota state Capitol!”

Lang was later arrested by local police.

“They are charging me with a felony for $6000 in damage I’m being taken to Ramsey County Jail in Minnesota,” he wrote on X.

This arrest is yet another hurdle for Lang, as the prominent far-right influencer was booed and jeered out of his own event last month in Minneapolis. Lang has a history of antagonistic and confrontational action, hence his participation in the January 6 riot. Now it seems like he may actually face some repercussions.

Lang, a white supremacist who is particularly focused on the so-called “great replacement theory,” is running to replace Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Florida. He was accused of assaulting law enforcement with a deadly weapon and engaging in physical violence on restricted grounds at the Capitol on January 6, before President Trump pardoned him.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s deposition in the Epstein probe will remain outside of the public eye, thanks to the machinations of House Oversight Chair James Comer.

Comer refused to grant Clinton a public hearing Thursday, claiming that open committee meetings are “more for entertainment than substance.”

“She has moved the goalposts millions of times throughout the entire process, then fires out an email attacking me today, accusing me of moving the goalposts, and she’s the one trying to move the goalposts again,” the Kentucky Republican told Fox News.

Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, agreed to a closed-door deposition earlier this week after their names and images were featured prominently in the Justice Department’s latest Epstein files document dump, though the couple has since insisted that the hearing be made public.

“For six months, we engaged Republicans on the Oversight Committee in good faith. We told them what we know, under oath,” the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee wrote on X Thursday. “They ignored all of it. They moved the goalposts and turned accountability into an exercise in distraction.

“So let’s stop the games,” she continued. “If you want this fight, [Representative James Comer], let’s have it—in public. You love to talk about transparency. There’s nothing more transparent than a public hearing, cameras on. We will be there.”

Responding to Clinton, Comer told Fox that the closed-door deposition had already been agreed to, and that the video, audio, and transcript of the deposition would be made available to the public afterward.

“The deposition is for substance. This is a serious investigation. The purpose of the investigation is to get justice for the victims, and why the government failed the victims, and who the bad guys were and if they can be held accountable,” Comer said. “The Clintons are trying to play the victim card. The victims of Epstein are the victims, not the Clintons.”

But Comer’s vehement defense for Donald Trump—who, like Clinton, was prominently named and photographed with Epstein—practically gave the forty-second president and his wife an out.

During an earlier interview Thursday with podcaster Benny Johnson, Comer claimed that photos of the president with Epstein, his entourage, and his victims did not amount to wrongdoing.

Military lawyers have taken over prosecutorial duties in the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis due to mass resignations by protesting lawyers who represented the bureau.

Judge Advocate General Corps attorneys replaced civilian prosecutors as criminal and immigration cases surge in light of increased ICE activity in Minnesota, Politico reported Friday.

The move was first announced last month, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the military to identify a pool of 40 judge advocate general officers, 25 of whom he said would serve as special assistant U.S. attorneys in Minneapolis.

“Ideally have significant experience in criminal prosecution, civil litigation, administrative law, immigration law, general litigation, or other related fields,” reads the email request, obtained by CNN.

Those individuals have largely been tasked with prosecuting some 16 protesters charged with resisting and impeding federal agents enacting Donald Trump’s immigration agenda in the area, officially referred to as Operation Metro Surge.

Further still, the military has involved itself in offering replacements among America’s judiciary, reported Reuters. On Thursday, the Justice Department swore in 33 new immigration judges, many of them temporary installments with military backgrounds, in order to catch up on work left behind by a slew of judges fired by the administration.

At least 14 staff members at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis quit their posts in protest after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed 37-year-old local mother Renee Nicole Good in early January. In the weeks since, employees at the state legal office have claimed that they are overwhelmed by the legal challenges to Operation Metro Surge, and that fruitless attempts to get ICE to comply with the law and court orders have pushed them to a breaking point.

As a result, workloads have piled up and cases have been backlogged. The overwhelming stress leaked through the cracks Tuesday, when a lawyer volunteering with the short-staffed office begged a judge to put her in contempt of court so that she could “get 24 hours of sleep.”

“The system sucks, this job sucks, I am trying with every breath I have to get you what I need,” said attorney Julie Le when pressed as to why the government had failed to follow judicial orders. Le has since been removed from the temporary position and has gone back to her normal job with ICE.

Republican Senator Tim Scott says the AI-generated clip President Trump posted depicting Michelle and Barack Obama as monkeys is “the most racist thing” he’s seen from the administration.

“Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” said Scott, the longest-serving Black senator in U.S. history and perhaps the most prominent Black conservative—and Black Trump supporter—in all of Congress. “The President should remove it.”

It is not fake, and Trump has yet to remove it as of this writing. Trump initially posted an election-denialism MAGA brainrot video on Truth Social late Thursday. At around the 59 second mark of the video, a short clip of the Obamas’ heads superimposed on chimp bodies appears, mouths agape while the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” plays in the background. The clip has a watermark from the same account that made the AI-generated video of Trump dropping shit on No Kings protesters from a fighter jet.

The White House too has acknowledged the clip and insisted that it couldn’t have been racist because the full clip depicts multiple Democrats as animals from the Lion King movie—never mind that the Obamas are the monkeys.

“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Politico. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

Is that supposed to make this better? The current president of the United States—who spent years falsely claiming the first Black president was not an American—posted a clip that is so absurdly, undeniably racist that it really doesn’t matter what’s in the rest of the clip. The outrage isn’t fake; Trump has just done so many casually reprehensible things that this is just another day for him.

After releasing 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos from immigration detention, the Department of Homeland Security is now trying to deport his family as fast as possible.

The agency filed a motion Wednesday to end asylum claims and expedite deportation proceedings for Liam’s family, immigration lawyer Danielle Molliver told MPR News. She described the DHS’s latest motion as “retaliatory.”

Last month, federal immigration agents used Liam as bait to try to arrest someone in the child’s house. They detained both Liam and his father, who had been bringing him home from school. While images of Liam surrounded by masked federal agents ignited a national firestorm, the father and son were moved to a processing facility in Texas for deportation. A federal judge ordered them to be freed, finding that there wasn’t enough probable cause to detain them. The family had entered the U.S. legally and applied for asylum upon arrival.

“It’s really frustrating as an attorney, because they keep throwing new obstacles in our way. There’s absolutely no reason that this should be expedited. It’s not very common,” Molliver said. A hearing for Liam’s case is scheduled for Friday, but Molliver has requested more time to respond.

There have been mounting reports that asylum cases are being routinely dismissed by immigration judges, and lawful asylum-seekers are being taken into ICE custody for expedited removal.

ICE attorneys at immigration hearings are increasingly asking judges to dismiss asylum cases, and the Trump administration has instructed judges to grant quick dismissals. At the same time, the Trump administration has purged dozens of immigration judges and sought to recruit so-called “deportation judges” to help ramp up the government’s soft ethnic cleansing.

Liam’s father, Adrian Conejo Arias, told MPR News that the family still lives in fear of being deported. “The government is moving many pieces, it’s doing everything possible to do us harm, so that they’ll probably deport us. We live with that fear too,” Conejo Arias said during an interview conducted in Spanish and translated by MPR News.

Progressive Analilia Mejia is on the verge of a huge upset win in a special election in New Jersey’s 11th congressional district to replace Mikie Sherill, elected governor of the state last year.

Meijia, who helped run Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, is leading Tom Malinowski in the Democratic primary by less than 500 votes as of this writing, upending a race in which the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent tons of money. AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, dumped $2.3 million into the race to attack the early frontrunner Malinowski, an odd course of action considering that it had supported Malinowski in the past.

Malinowski’s crime in AIPAC’s eyes was supporting conditions on aid to Israel, a position that is gaining traction among House Democrats as public polling shows increasing numbers of Democrats and Americans opposing Israel’s massacre of Gaza. Mejia, endorsed by leading progressives including Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is on the verge of capitalizing on AIPAC’s gamble.

Mejia’s stance on Israel goes even further than Malinowski, as she has called Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide and pledged not to make any visits to Israel on AIPAC’s dime. Three days after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Mejia said, “Every fiber of my being is horrified beyond words at what is furthering in Gaza. Yet again we see how oppression & dehumanization leads to despair & unthinkable destruction.”

Two weeks later, Mejia called for a ceasefire in Gaza, well before many other Democrats. But Israel and Gaza wasn’t even a central issue in her campaign, taking a backseat to cost-of-living issues. That’s not unlike New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign last year. He too ran a campaign centered around affordability, and his pro-Palestinian stance resulted in millions of dollars spent against him to no avail.

Will Mejia eke out an upset win over Malinowski? If so, it would show that AIPAC, long feared on Capitol Hill, is losing its touch.

President Trump is holding hostage billions of dollars in funding for a New York infrastructure project, and won’t release it unless he gets New York’s Penn Station and Washington, D.C.’s Dulles International Airport named after him.

The Hudson Tunnel project is a plan to construct new and improved rail tunnels connecting New York City and New Jersey, expanding service along the country’s busiest rail route. Trump froze funding for that and $18 billion worth of other important projects in a spiteful move meant to kneecap a blue city during the government shutdown in October.

It was last month that Trump offered Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer the deal of a lifetime: Name Penn Station and Dulles Airport—two iconic northeast travel hubs—after him, and he’d unfreeze the funding for the Hudson Tunnel project. Schumer rejected that offer immediately, according to Punchbowl News. With no name change and no funding, the committee leading the tunnel project may have to lay off around 1,000 workers and stop the project.

Moments like this remind us that Trump is an egotistic, withering old billionaire first, and president second. His name is still very much his brand, and he wants to plaster it everywhere he can—from the Kennedy Center to TrumpRx, to Trump coin, to Penn Station and Dulles. And like a petulant child, he’ll dangle a landscape-changing project in front of Democrats until he gets his way.

The nation’s top spy agency is already prepping for election season.

The FBI called on officials from all 50 states to attend a briefing on midterm election “preparations,” reported Crooked Media’s Matt Berg. The meeting is expected to take place in late February, though exactly what the meeting will be about is still unclear.

Berg obtained an email that was issued to various state officials earlier this week offering specifics. He acquired the note via a public records request.

“Dear Chief Election Officials,” the email begins. “To prepare for the 2026 US midterm elections, your election partners at the FBI, DOJ, DHS, USPIS, and the EAC would like to invite you to a call where we can discuss our preparations for the cycle, as well as updates and resources we can provide to you and your staff.

“The call will be on Wednesday, February 25 (2-3pm EST) and will be for Chief Election Officials,” it continues. “You may designate a proxy to attend in your place if you are not available. On Wednesday, March 4, we will hold a similar call for members of the EAC’s Local Leadership Council.

“We look forward to speaking with you in support of the 2026 midterm elections,” it ends.

The note is signed by Kellie Hardiman, who refers to herself as the “FBI Election Executive.”

A top state election official described the note to Berg as “the strangest thing in the world.”

Another unidentified state official told NBC News that the message was “unusual and unexpected,” especially considering Hardiman was a relative unknown prior to her mass email, as was her position.

“No one has heard of this person—and we’re all wondering what an ‘FBI Election Executive’ is,” said the official, who was granted anonymity by the outlet to speak candidly.

Hardiman titled herself as an intelligence analyst in a 2024 interview with the fashion blog The Style That Binds Us, specifying that she had spent her entire 20-year career at the FBI in that role.

A spokesperson for the FBI was unwilling to explain Hardiman’s letter, telling Berg that the “FBI has no comment.”

The note has only served to ramp up tension over the upcoming midterm elections. Earlier this week, Trump told former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino during an interview that Republicans should “take over and nationalize” elections in several states.

“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” Trump said. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many—15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

President Donald Trump shared a wildly racist video of former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes during a late-night posting spree on Truth Social.

In yet another erosion of America’s and Trump’s authority on the world stage, the president shared a video on Truth Social late Thursday that ended with a short clip of the Obamas’ laughing heads superimposed on the bodies of apes, while the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” plays in the background. The video bore a watermark tag of the same account behind the AI-generated video of Trump dropping a massive load of shit on protesters from a fighter jet.

Most of the 62-second video was actually focused on a conspiracy theory that voting machines in certain battleground states had been rigged to favor Joe Biden. It was only the final seconds that contained racist drivel.

The Bulwark’s Tim Miller hit back at speculation that Trump hadn’t meant to share the racist clip. “It was intentional and Trump has been making racist attacks on the Obamas for like 20 years now hope that clears it up for you,” he wrote in a post on X.

Ben Rhodes, a former speechwriter for Obama, wrote on X: “Let it haunt Trump and his racist followers that future Americans will embrace the Obamas as beloved figures while studying him as a stain on our history.”

California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press office also slammed the video. “Disgusting behavior by the President. Every single Republican must denounce this. Now,” a post on X read.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed concerns about the video Friday morning. “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” she wrote in an emailed statement to Variety. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

Leavitt also shared the full video, which depicted Hillary Clinton as a boar and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries as a meerkat—but those two were noticeably absent from the clip Trump shared.

After roughly 12 excruciating hours, Trump deleted the post on Friday. But the damage has already been done.

Trump normally uses his Truth Social account to post presidential proclamations, appeals to foreign leaders, or screeds against his enemies. But on Thursday, Trump shared a video of a dog being summoned by a can of whipped cream, and another clip of Bruce Lee from Enter the Dragon (1973). He also endorsed “a true friend, fighter, and WINNER,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has become something of a model leader for those on the contemporary right after he systematically weakened his country’s free press, replacing it with a state-controlled propaganda machine.

This story has been updated.