"Agitators Will be Imprisoned"

Yet More Fascist Insanity and Vapid Reporting in the Mein Trumpf Years

File this under “More Fascist Insanity” and “Vapid and Uncritical Reporting.”

Okay, so go read the following brief, matter of fact report from the vapid and bloodless daily online political journal POLITIC0:

Bianca Quilantan, “Trump threatens to deport, imprison foreign students for ‘illegal protests,” Politico, March 4, 2025: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/04/trump-students-college-protests-00210193?:

‘President Donald Trump on Tuesday threatened colleges’ federal funding for allowing “illegal protests” and said American students will be expelled.

“All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

The social media post comes after a federal task force on antisemitism last week announced it would visit 10 college campuses that had antisemitic incidents since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel. The institutions include: Columbia University, George Washington University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, Northwestern University, the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Minnesota and the University of Southern California.

Several of these institutions had high-profile anti-war protests in the months following the attack and faced intense scrutiny from Republicans in Congress.

Trump has already signed an executive order directing the Justice Department and attorney general to take “immediate action” to prosecute antisemitic crimes like vandalism and intimidation as well as investigate “anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities.”

The Departments of Health and Human Services, Education and the General Services Administration on Monday also announced a comprehensive review of Columbia University’s federal contracts and grants because of an ongoing Title VI investigation into the school.

All schools that receive federal funds must comply with Title VI, a federal law that bars discrimination based on shared ancestry, ethnic characteristics or national origin. Schools who violate the law could be at risk of losing funding.

Columbia is at risk of losing $51.4 million in federal contracts for “ongoing inaction in the face of relentless harassment of Jewish students,” according to a press release that said the government is considering “stop work orders” for those contracts. The task force also said it will conduct a comprehensive review of the more than $5 billion in federal grant commitments to Columbia.

“Institutions that receive federal funds have a responsibility to protect all students from discrimination,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement. “Columbia’s apparent failure to uphold their end of this basic agreement raises very serious questions about the institution’s fitness to continue doing business with the United States government.”’

That’s it. Very Joe Friday “just the facts, ma’m.”

So, umm, …some significant questions and issues POLITICO did not address:

+ What exactly does the wannabe fascist strongman for life Trump mean by “illegal protests”? He did not specify what makes protests “illegal” in his statement.

+ And what is meant by Mein Trumpf’s claim that “American students will be expelled”? Does that refer to students who are US-American citizens or just to students enrolled in US-American universities?

+ “Expelled” by who? By the White House and, if so, on what authority? Trump thinks he or one of his officials have the authority to expel students from US colleges and universities? Really?

+ How is it illegal and deportation-worthy to agitate? Merriam-Webster defines “agitator” as follows: “one that agitates: such as (a) one who stirs up public feeling on controversial issues/political agitators; (b) device or an apparatus for stirring or shaking.” We can rule out (b) so Trump is obviously talking about (a). Okay, by definition, just about every political and movement spokesperson ever has engaged in conduct that merits incarceration or deportation according to Trump. What country is Trump sending Steve Bannon, Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, and Alex Jones (and/or other virulent right-wing agitators) to? Does Trump wish to incarcerate or deport himself? Who has does done more to agitate public feeling and hatted than Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump in recent years? Who on Earth is a bigger AGITATOR than the orange-spayed president of the United States his own self right now?

+ Does Trump believe that non-citizens are prohibited from the public expression of political opinions while on US soil, or perhaps just on US academic campuses?

+ Does Trump wish to make it illegal to wear masks on college campuses? Just during protests? How would he outlaw masks? How does “No Masks” match up with public health protocols? Should someone worried that they might be infectious with the flu or a cold not be allowed to attend a protest because they are wearing a mask to protect others on campus?

+ It seems likely that the Trump sees masks as on obstacle to the identification of the “agitators” he wants to imprison and/or deport but is this also related to his past hostility to covid restrictions and to his sickening (both literally and figuratively) appointment of his fellow anti-science pandemo-fascist and sociopath Robert Kennedy, Jr. to head the US Department of Health and Human Services?

+ The campus protests that Trump is so agitated about were not and are not in fact anti-Semitic. They have not really been “antiwar.” They were and are anti-racist, anti-ethnic-cleansing, and anti-genocide actions directed against the sadistic, racist, mass- murderous, and genocidal US-Israel assault on Gaza — an assault that has killed at least 50,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and that continues now under Trump, who now calls for the full expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza and insanely claims that he will build a “new Riviera” atop the bones of the territory’s former inhabitants. Jewish student activists have played prominent roles in these anti-genocide and anti-ethnic cleansing protests from coast to coast.

+ None of the universities and colleges that Trump is targeting for funding withdrawal are remotely “anti-Jewish,” “leftist,” or “anti-American.” Indeed, with the possible exception of some Christian fundamentalist colleges that are on board with MAGA and harbor anti-Jewish sentiments, there is no such university or college to be found anywhere in the United States.

+ While all of the ten schools that the federal task force has gone after have cracked down on anti-Zionist and anti-genocide student protest, the Trump administration’s targeting of Columbia is particularly ridiculous. That university has undertaken draconian measures to crush student protests against the US-Israel crucifixion of Gaza. As the liberal left Nation reported a month ago:

‘Three Columbia graduate students sued the university for its crackdown on pro-Palestine protesting. The New York civil suit—brought by Catherine Curran-Groome, Aidan Parisi, and Brandon Murphy—identified over 30 violations of long-standing protocols, including two occasions when then-president Minouche Shafik summoned the NYPD to mass-arrest demonstrators standing against Israel’s war on Gaza … For one, [attorney James] Carlson says that inviting law enforcement—who were armed with guns, sledgehammers, batons and flashbang explosives—to terrorize students in April of last year, infringed on Section 444.f. of the University Statutes, which obligates the university president to consult with “a majority of a panel” established by the Columbia senate’s executive committee, prior to inviting police on to campus. On April 19, the day of the first mass arrest, the executive committee did “not approve the presence of NYPD.” According to the suit, Shafik overrode the senate yet again to facilitate the second wave of arrests on April 30…Aside from allowing NYPD on campus for the first time in 50 years, the lawsuit asserts that Columbia breached New York’s landlord tenant laws for attempting to evict Curran-Groome and Parisi with only a 24-hour notice, rather than the 30-day period stipulated in New York State law…Another violation that the lawsuit identifies is the university’s choice to subject students to “interim suspensions” without due process rights. Rather than disciplining students through the University Judicial Board, which, according to Carlson, is designed to conduct transparent and fair hearings, Columbia inappropriately opted to use the Center for Student Success and Intervention, which he says was created in 2021 to handle “offenses like plagiarism and theft.”’