Meet the New Conservative Cancel Culture, This Time With Government Informers Professors who speak wrongthink in class are being summarily fired.
by Ryan Cooper
September 12, 2025
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 Blueag9/Creative Commons
A professor who taught about gender and sexuality at Texas A&M University was fired after a student recorded a classroom exchange and complained to the school administration.
It’s kind of hard to remember these days, but one of the loudest themes in 2010s prestige journalism was worrying about Free Speech on Campus and the dread Cancel Culture. A new censorious leftism was supposedly building thanks to woke social justice warriors doing things like protesting the fascist Milo Yiannopoulos when conservative campus groups would invite him to deliver a speech.
Outlets from the center-left to the far right published a bulging container ship–sized load of this stuff. Here’s Bari Weiss in The New York Times whining about a protest of Christina Hoff Sommers at Lewis & Clark College. Here’s Conor Friedersdorf in 2015—in one out of about an Avogadro’s number of Atlantic articles—complaining about a micro-controversy over sandwiches in the Oberlin dining hall. Here’s Ben Shapiro in 2017 complaining that people get mad at him when he gives campus speeches arguing that transgender people do not exist and white people are the most victimized racial group.
It should go without saying that while left-wing social media mobs have gone way too far on occasion, most of these incidents were hugely exaggerated, especially in the monomaniacal focus on wealthy private schools. There are almost 4,000 credentialed colleges and universities in this country, yet almost all of these articles focused on a small handful of Ivy League or elite liberal arts schools (because that’s where elite reporters went to school).
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But now, it’s Donald Trump and the Republican Party who have the whip hand, and they are setting up, without exaggeration, a fully totalitarian attack on campus free speech and academic freedom writ large. Not only is it a thousand times worse than the most exaggerated caricature of wokeness gone mad, it is the most extreme such attack in American history. And unsurprisingly, many of the most frenzied erstwhile critics of illiberalism on campus are either silent or participating in the attack.
The most recent example happened in Texas, at its A&M University. A student recorded herself complaining in class about being taught basic gender and sexuality in a young adult literature class. “I’m not entirely sure this is legal to be teaching, because according to our president there’s only two genders, and he said that he would be freezing agencies’ funding programs that promote gender ideology … I don’t want to promote something that is against our president’s laws, as well as against my religious beliefs,” she recorded herself saying.
When the professor replies that what she’s teaching is not illegal, and the student has a right to leave if she wishes, the student makes clear what is going on. “I’ve already been in contact with the president of A&M and I actually have a meeting with him in person to show all of my documentation.” In short, the whole thing was a setup.
After the video went viral online, including being posted by a state Republican legislator who is such a shameless blowhard that even his fellow Texas GOP legislators hate him, the professor was fired, the dean and the department head were removed from their posts, and the university Board of Regents said it would conduct a review of the entire university curriculum, for all 79,114 students.
The playbook here is similar to the right wing’s caricature of the “woke mob,” except that the right-wing mob has the full backing of state and federal governments.
This is nothing new. The right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, who was tragically assassinated by an unknown culprit on Wednesday, was eulogized by Ezra Klein in The New York Times for “practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.” Except another thing Kirk did was maintain a “ Professor Watchlist” of academics who are biased against conservatives—that is, if they teach or say anything that offends the right—precisely so that right-wingers could send them hate mail, death threats, or conduct sting operations like that at A&M. Naturally, nonwhite and female academics are greatly overrepresented on the list.
The playbook here is similar to the right wing’s caricature of the “woke mob,” except that the right-wing mob has the full backing of state and federal governments. Individuals everywhere are deputized to film any professor saying anything that would offend conservatives, guaranteeing that a deluge of harassment from government officials and online threats will follow. An example is being made: Offend the regime, you will be fired, your career will likely be ruined, and you may be physically harmed. It’s as if President Obama were religiously reading Tumblr in 2013 and sending FBI agents to investigate anyone who committed a microaggression against furries.
And what’s happening in Texas is just one small part of the right’s attacks on education. Trump has illegally frozen about $6 billion in federal research grants as part of an explicit attempt to seize control of hiring, admissions, and curriculum policies. Harvard is fighting this in court (and winning so far), but Columbia capitulated in an attempt to get $400 million in funding back; it agreed to pay $220 million in fines over several years, and a MAGA commissar is now in charge of Middle East studies, non-tenure-track hiring, and curricular changes.
All this is far more aggressive than previous attacks on American academia. The red scares of the late 1910s and the 1940s and ’50s are probably the closest comparison, but while both featured the firing of professors, they did not involve openly politically motivated defunding of great swaths of the most elite universities, including scientific research. JD Vance laid out the plan explicitly in a 2021 speech. “Universities … control the knowledge in our society … research that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country,” he said. “If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country, and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”
This is genuinely not far from the Nazi approach to higher education. As Richard J. Evans writes in The Third Reich in Power, Nazis attempted to purge German universities of all independent thought whatsoever, particularly Jews and the academic fields supposedly associated with Jews, like relativity and quantum mechanics, as well as anyone remotely anti-Nazi. That led numerous world-class academics—including Albert Einstein—to flee to America. “By 1934, some 1,600 out of 5,000 university teachers had been forced out of their jobs, a third because they were Jewish, the rest because they were political opponents of the Nazis,” Evans writes. Even elementary school teachers were forced to teach regime propaganda on every subject, with the constant worry that if they put a toe out of line, they would be caught by omnipresent informers or ratted out by their students.
The result was the total destruction of Germany’s intellectual pre-eminence. Before the Nazis, Germany was the undisputed world champion of science; it has never regained that position (though it ironically might just have the opportunity now, if it wanted to spend heavily to attract American academics purged by Trump).
So far as I can tell, the Times has published just one article on the Texas A&M story, while The Atlantic and Weiss’s The Free Press have published none at all. On the contrary, Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold is doing some breathless “reporting” by wandering around the Columbia University bookstore and posting a supercut of all the wrongthink books she found, including Reckoning With Slavery, Discourse on Colonialism, and How Democratic Is the American Constitution? “A bookstore employee told me the Qur’an is required reading for all freshman,” she complained on Twitter/X. Apparently reading and understanding one of the most important books in human history—there are nearly two billion Muslims out there—is now unacceptable.
It’s not exactly a secret that Bari Weiss is an outrageous hypocrite. Before she was making a career pretending to flip out about the dearth of campus free speech, as a student she was attempting to get Palestinian professors at Columbia purged for criticizing Israeli apartheid. Under the second Trump term, as David Klion points out at The Guardian, The Free Press has been the outlet where disgruntled conservative insiders at Columbia and NPR have published embarrassing private discussions, which played a major role in both institutions being defunded. “The pattern is clear: if you work at a liberal institution and you want the Trump-controlled federal government to step in and discipline it, Bari Weiss is there to help.”
A big bonfire of banned university books—perhaps at a glitzy conference sponsored by The Free Press, the Heritage Foundation, and Elon Musk’s X—would be the logical next step.
At any rate, there is a consistent principle here: right-wing moral hypocrisy. Conservative notions of free speech boil down to “I get to say what I want, and you get to shut up, or be persecuted by the state.” We should remember this the next time conservatives are crying crocodile tears about liberal freedoms.
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