'Right-wing moral hypocrisy' on full display as GOP co-opts familiar playbook

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U.S. President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer (not pictured) hold a bilateral meeting at Trump Turnberry golf course in Turnberry, Scotland, Britain, July 28, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

President Donald Trump and the Republican Party are carrying out what The American Prospect deems the most "extreme such attack in American history," on free speech and academic freedom, a hypocritical counterattack on all things filed under "woke" and
"cancel culture."

"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," writes Ryan Cooper, adding, "unsurprisingly, many of the most frenzied erstwhile critics of illiberalism on campus are either silent or participating in the attack."

The article cites the most recent example taking place in a Texas A&M University classroom in which a student in a young adult lit class complained about being taught basic gender and sexuality.

“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," the student said. "I don’t want to promote something that is against our president’s laws, as well as against my religious beliefs."

In response to the professor's defense that what they were teaching was perfectly legal, the student hit back, saying, "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.”

"The whole thing was a setup," Cooper writes.

The video went viral and not only was the professor fired, but the dean and department heads were, too. "The university Board of Regents said it would conduct a review of the entire university curriculum, for all 79,114 students," Cooper reports.

And though Cooper notes this hypocrisy is nothing new, citing the late conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk's "Professor Watchlist" of those he declared biased against conservatives, the reporter claims there's one massive difference.

"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," he explains.

"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," he adds.

What the right is doing here, Cooper argues, is "far more aggressive" attacks on academia than the red scares of the late 1910s, 1940s, and 1950s, and "genuinely not far from the Nazi approach to higher education."

The Nazi purge of independent thought, especially by Jewish scholars, left the country in intellectual ruins.

"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)," Cooper notes.

In the meantime, the author has a suggestion: "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."

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