On Saturday, a gunman opened fire on the campus of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, killing two students and wounding nine more. The shooter escaped, and students sheltered in place overnight as authorities tried to track down a person of interest who had appeared in a low-quality security camera video. One suspect was apprehended, but on Sunday, authorities released him. On Monday, the shooter still had not been identified or apprehended—but that didn’t stop a host of conservative influencers from insisting on social media that the perpetrator must have been a disgruntled leftist. Why? Because one of the two victims, 19-year-old Ella Cook, a sophomore from Alabama, was president of the campus Republicans. (The other was identified as Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, an 18-year-old freshman from Virginia whose political beliefs thus far have not been reported on.) Cook’s tragic death was enough to whip the conspiracy machine into high gear. Early Monday morning, Elon Musk reposted to his 229 million followers a since-deleted tweet blaming the left for the shooting. He commented, “The murderous indoctrination needs to stop now.” The theory about the targeting of Cook seems to have gained significant traction from an X account with the handle @AutismCapital, which announced to nearly a million followers that “the police explicitly claimed it was likely a targeted attack to [Cook’s] family and that when he came in the room he looked specifically for her first before he fired?” The post didn’t mention that there has been no credible reporting about the shooters’ motive or his actions before he fired the first shot, only rumors on social media. After this, Katherine Boyle, a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, reposted that tweet and added her own thoughts in a post to her 95,000 followers: “Now young men and women like Ella know they can be killed for their political beliefs on a college campus, even if they’re not provocateurs or influencers or public officials, just normal young people participating in a student club.” Shaun Maguire, a partner at the firm Sequoia Capital with 295,000 followers, also retweeted the post from @AutismCapital, commenting, “To the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and now to the tragic murder of Ella Cook, it’s impossible to shake the feeling that we’re not getting the truth fast enough from law enforcement and our media … when it doesn’t fit their narrative.” Far-right influencer and Trump favorite, Laura Loomer, tweeted to her 1.8 million followers, “Jewish and Christian conservative students and faculty targeted at Brown University and they want you to think western civilization isn’t under attack.” She also repeated an unconfirmed rumor that the shooter had shouted “Allahu akbar,” Arabic for “God is great,” before opening fire. Vickie Palladino, a conservative New York City councilwoman, posted to her 38,000 followers, “Very clear now that the attack at Brown was perpetrated by a leftist activist and targeted Republicans. The people who openly celebrated Charlie Kirk’s murder en masse and faced exactly zero consequences for it have been emboldened to kill more conservatives.” The tweet has since been deleted. Raw Egg Nationalist, a British far-right influencer, put his own spin on the leftism-run-amok theory. He implied in a post to his 309,000 followers that the shooting occurred because the left had not been sufficiently punished for conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s murder. “I hate to say it, but it’s true: Charlie Kirk’s murder has shown the left they can get what they want by killing right wingers,” he wrote. “They killed the most important young right winger in America, a surrogate son to the president, at basically no cost to themselves. Just one person arrested. No reprisals or even real threat of reprisals. Of course, there are going to be more murders.” Another unproven narrative making the rounds was that the attack was an act of antisemitic terrorism because the venue was a study session for a popular lecture class that happened to be taught by a Jewish professor. “Prof Rachel Friedberg, whose class at ⁦@BrownUniversity⁩ was targeted last night by a shooter, taught at Hebrew University and advised the Knesset on immigration to Israel, among other credentials,” Naomi Wolf, the feminist writer turned Covid conspiracy theorist, posted to her 489,000 followers. “I wonder who the shooter was and what could have possibly motivated him?” In response to the shooting, President Trump offered only a few terse words. “Brown University, great school,” he said. “Great, really, one of the greatest schools anywhere in the world. Things can happen.” Meanwhile, Trump took to social media to opine about the murder of film director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle, which occurred the day after the shooting at Brown. The president baselessly suggested that the Reiners’ progressive politics contributed to their untimely deaths. The murder was “reportedly due to the anger [Reiner] caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial. “He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump.” Reiner’s son Nick, who has struggled with drug addiction, was arrested on suspicion of murder on Monday.

In the days following the murder of MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk, his friends and allies have called for revenge against all kinds of groups, including trans people and the so-called radical left, even as the motivations of the alleged shooter, who was reportedly raised in a Republican household, remain far from clear. Now, some of those same rightwing figures are homing in on another target: colleges and universities, which they blame for radicalizing both the alleged shooter and, more broadly, people they accuse of celebrating Kirk’s death. > “These universities should not receive a single American tax dollar.” Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old Utah man who is accused of shooting Kirk, reportedly attended just one semester of college at Utah State University in 2021. He later enrolled at a technical college, where he was a third-year electrical apprentice. Those facts make it clear that traditional higher education factually could not have played a meaningful role in what led him to allegedly shoot Kirk. But that logic hasn’t mattered to figures like MAGA activist and Trump confidante Laura Loomer, who tweeted on Sunday that it was “time to defund American universities. You don’t need to go to college. Charlie Kirk didn’t go to college.” (At 18, Kirk dropped out of an Illinois community college after one semester to dedicate his time to activism, with funding from Turning Point co-founder Bill Montgomery; after high school, Kirk unsuccessfully applied to West Point.) In her tweet, Loomer tagged Harmeet Dhillon, an Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Department of Justice, who responded, “I’m on it. And all the other haters at our American funded schools.”  Dhillon is one of the Trump-appointed officials who has been deeply involved in the push to try to expose, embarrass, or fire anyone speaking ill of Kirk or seeming to celebrate his murder. She praised actions taken against faculty members at Clemson University, where one person has been fired and two instructors suspended after making what the university called “inappropriate” remarks about Kirk following his death.  Dhillon called Clemson’s actions “a good start,” adding, “Federal funding for higher education is a privilege, NOT a right. The government is not obligated to fund vile garbage with our tax dollars.”  This general line of argument—that federal funding should be pulled from universities whose employees say things Trump and his allies don’t like—has animated the administration’s long-standing attacks on higher education. But since Kirk’s death, it’s been widely repeated in a new context. Take Representative Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who issued a press release on Monday calling on the Department of Education to cut off “every dime of federal funding to any elementary, secondary, or post-secondary school who refuses to remove or discipline staff who glorify or justify political violence.”   “This is why these universities should not receive a single American tax dollar,” tweeted Lara Logan, a former CBS journalist turned conspiracy theorist, while reposting a report about a University of Michigan professor accused of celebrating Kirk’s death. “They preach hatred of this country, which is Marxist doctrine. It is helping to destroy this country from within—wake up.”  Other figures, like Federalist editor-in-chief Molly Hemingway, called for what could credibly be described as affirmative action to make schools more conservative. “All public universities should be required to have minimum 50% of their staff be conservative professors by spring 2026,” she tweeted. “In each department.” When a journalist on the site asked if she supported affirmative action, Hemingway responded, “No, I want to remove the left-wing oppression that has destroyed American universities.”  Beyond calls to defund colleges and universities, other figures have said that such institutions need more surveillance and campus activism from conservative students. The group includes longtime sting video maker James O’Keefe, who said his company O’Keefe Media Group “will be distributing hidden cameras nationwide to those who are witness to abuse in their school and who are willing to expose it.” O’Keefe added that he would host a livestream this week “where we will put campus corruption on blast and issuing a clear call to action: it’s time to rip the rot out of America’s education system.”  American higher education has long been depicted on the right as a hotbed of Marxism. Yet Kirk’s organization Turning Point USA itself could not have been created without institutes of higher learning; it was explicitly created to promote conservative views in high school, college, and university campuses—and it has thrived on many. Kirk himself said earlier this year that he thought his messaging was working, tweeting that he felt college students were becoming more conservative, even if the institutions themselves remained more liberal.  The right’s renewed pledge to attack universities is just one piece of what the White House has said will be a government-wide push to dismantle “radical” organizations following Kirk’s murder, which Trump has repeatedly blamed on the “radical left.” In practice, this appears to mean threatening left-leaning organizations with defunding and investigation. Speaking on Monday as a guest host of Kirk’s podcast, Vice President JD Vance also threatened to “go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence.” 

On Tuesday afternoon, a federal judge in New York’s Northern District heard opening arguments in the case of Momodou Taal v. Trump. Neither party was present in the courtroom—in large part because Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has been trying to find Taal for days, reportedly staking out his home and entering his university’s campus. Taal, a British-Gambian doctoral student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, sued the administration on February 15 to challenge Trump’s executive orders curtailing free speech and seeking to deport pro-Palestinian activists, which have been paired with a wave of attacks by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers—in some cases masked and hooded—on graduate and undergraduate students. At 12:52 a.m. on Friday—within five days of Taal’s lawsuit—Taal’s lawyers received an email “inviting” their client to “surrender to ICE custody.” At 7:00 p.m. the following day, Trump’s lawyers filed a brief informing Taal that the State Department had already revoked his visa, without his knowledge, on March 14—the day before Taal filed his lawsuit. Days later, ICE agents arrived on Cornell’s campus attempting to find and seize him. Over the past two weeks, the Trump administration has targeted at least eight foreign academics in America for deportation, often sending officers to snatch them off the street or in their homes, retroactively changing what they’re charged with, and shipping them halfway across the country, far from their families lawyers—increasingly in apparent defiance of court orders against their rendition. Members of the commentariat like venture capitalist Paul Graham have mused that “the students ICE is disappearing seem such a random selection.” But experts and people close to the cases say it’s not random at all. The scholars in question are immigrant academics—Gambian, Palestinian, Korean, and Turkish—targeted for pro-Palestinian social media posts, op-eds, and participation in last year’s campus-based opposition to the continuing slaughter in Gaza. Momodou Taal knew this was coming for months. “Given my public exposure, if he were to deport student protesters, I think I would be at the top of the list as a target,” he told Mother Jones in January. But, Taal said in a recent Intercept podcast appearance, his personal stakes pale in comparison to those of Palestinians in Gaza, where the number of known dead has passed 50,000—as the US continues shipping bombs and warplanes to Israel, and as Israeli officials threaten a full-scale military takeover of the territory, “I know it’s a very frightening moment,” Taal said in that Intercept appearance, “but for me, this is the time to double down.” Taal’s lawsuit, filed with fellow Cornell doctoral student Sriram Parasuram and Mukoma Wa Ngũgĩ, a Cornell literature professor, asserts that Trump’s late January executive orders cracking down on campus speech violate both Taal’s right to political expression and the rights of those around him to hear it.  “It’s quite calculated and deliberate,” Taal told me on Thursday. > Suing the president “is the only form of redress many of us have, in this > moment, as a form of protection.” ICE agents, usually plainclothed and sometimes masked, are accosting students in the streets, using what even former House Rep. Ron Paul calls “Gestapo” tactics. Trump’s executive orders conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, Taal said, have “clearly placed a target upon many people’s backs.” Taal recommends that students in his situation “lawyer up”—because the Trump administration, he said, is not acting alone: right-wing groups such as Canary Mission, an online doxxing platform that collects the personal information of anti-Zionist students and professors, have claimed credit for some students’ detentions. Suing the president, Taal said, “is the only form of redress many of us have, in this moment, as a form of protection.” Yunseo Chung, a Korean undergraduate at Columbia University who has been a legal permanent resident of the US since she was seven years old, filed suit on Monday for a temporary restraining order to prevent her deportation. Her case went to court on the same day as Taal’s, and her order was quickly granted; Taal’s own request for a temporary restraining order was denied by a New Jersey judge a day after it was filed. “I think the stakes in all these cases are the same,” said Abed Ayoub, the executive director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), whose lawyers are representing Taal. While each case has its nuances—some students have been detained, others have not; some are on green cards, others on visas—“what we’re seeing is an attack on the First Amendment rights of folks in this country to express themselves,” Ayoub said. Chung’s suit accuses the Trump administration of a “larger pattern of attempted US government repression of constitutionally protected protest activity and other forms of speech,” and asserts that the federal government aims to “retaliate against and punish noncitizens like Ms. Chung for their participation in protests.” Taal’s asserts that Trump’s executive orders prohibit noncitizens from “engaging in constitutionally protected speech” that the Trump administration “may subjectively interpret as expressing a ‘hostile attitude” to its interests by deploying the threat of deportation. That threat, Taal says, casts a frighteningly broad net. “It’s important that people recognize that it could be anyone, and that they need to rise up, and escalate, and refuse this to be normalized,” Taal said Thursday. Chung and Taal are now two of many. Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of Palestinian nationality, and a Columbia graduate student until December of last year, is also suing the president for the right to have his immigration case heard near his home in New York; he was arrested by ICE at his Manhattan residence on March 8 and, after initially being imprisoned in a New Jersey immigration detention facility, was remanded to an ICE “processing center” in Louisiana, where he is still being held. His fellow Columbia graduate student, Ranjani Srinivasan, fled the US for India on March 11 after ICE came knocking at her door. International students and professors Badar Khan Suri of Georgetown University in Washington, DC, Rasha Alawieh of Brown University in Rhode Island, Alireza Doroudi of the University of Alabama (who has not publicly engaged in pro-Palestine activism), and Rumeysa Ozturk of Tufts University in Massachusetts have also been seized in the past two weeks. Chilling footage of Ozturk’s arrest swept the internet Thursday: six masked individuals in civilian clothes surrounded the graduate student on a sidewalk in Somerville.  “Hey ma’am,” one said, and grabbed Ozturk’s wrists. She screamed as several others surrounded her. > “It’s important that people recognize that it could be anyone, and that they > need to rise up, and escalate, and refuse this to be normalized.” “Can I just call the police?” Ozturk asked in the surveillance video. “We are the police,” one masked, hooded person responded. They handcuffed her and dragged her away. In a Thursday press conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended Ozturk’s abduction. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa,” he told reporters Thursday. Ozturk’s “lunatic” behavior appears to consist only of co-authoring one student newspaper op-ed, exactly one year before she was detained, asking her university to acknowledge a student government resolution calling for divestment from Israel. She has not been charged with any offense, but was painted by Rubio as “a social activist that tears up our university campuses”—and was forcibly disappeared. Rubio’s State Department, meanwhile, has issued new guidance calling for extensive screening of student visa applicants’ social media for any posts that “demonstrate a degree of approval” of what it calls “terrorist activity.” Ayoub, of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, says the recent spate of ICE abductions echoes the Nixon era: In 1972, the Nixon White House deployed an extensive surveillance program against Arab communities in the United States—scrutinizing the visa status of anyone who appeared to have an Arabic last name—ostensibly to screen out terrorists. In practice, Ayoub said, the policy inevitably led to unjust detainments, deportations, and even disappearances: “A number of our community members just disappeared,” he said. “There was no social media, and nobody walked around with a cell phone. So people just disappeared, and you wouldn’t hear from them until six, seven months later.” More than 150,000 people were investigated. “Before all of this started,” Ayoub said, “I was warning people that we will see the same: people just picked up and moved to a location where we’re not going to hear from them, because this is the practice of what happened before.” Then, as now, he said, those in power were “banking on not everybody being upset, on people buying into the ‘threat to national security’ type of language.” But it’s no longer as easy for authorities to move in darkness; this time, people are organizing. The same day that footage of Ozturk’s arrest was released, more than one thousand people rallied on her behalf in Somerville, and protests in support of Mahmoud Khalil have been taking place across the country since his arrest almost three weeks ago. The Trump administration, Ayoub said, is “betting on the idea that not many are going to come out and defend the students, or support the students, or defend their right to express their opinions in this country. But that, I think, is where they’re mistaken.”