Right-wing provocateur Christopher Rufo could help shape President-elect Donald Trump’s plan for higher education, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal.

Rufo—a leading actor in right-wing culture wars, from the moral panic surrounding “critical race theory” to the hoax about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio—reportedly “has an invitation to Mar-a-Lago, where he will present the president-elect’s team with a plan to geld American universities by withholding money if they don’t pull back on diversity measures.”

A spokesperson for JD Vance told the Journal that the vice president-elect sees Rufo as “a leading voice in the movement to restore merit and excellence” to higher education, who “recognizes schools and universities exist to equip American students to face tomorrow’s challenges, not to indoctrinate them with the fringe beliefs of the far left.”

To see such lofty aims in action, one can look at how the New College of Florida has transformed since Governor Ron DeSantis appointed Rufo and other conservative activists to the school’s board of trustees in 2023 in his “war on woke.”

Under its new leadership, New College has undergone significant changes, most recently hiring a number of “ideologically aligned rightwing faculty and staff for a range of positions,” per The Guardian, including conservative commentator and comedian Andrew Doyle, who will teach a course on “wokeness.”

The overhaul of New College and Rufo’s actions as trustee have been met with resistance and sharp criticism from students and faculty. One such critic, a visiting history professor, was threatened by Rufo and later dismissed after co-writing an op-ed against the new administration, in what the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression called “a clear violation of the public college’s First Amendment obligations.”

According to the Journal, Rufo’s top concerns include ending race-based affirmative action at universities “with which the federal government does business” and defunding colleges “that continue to engage in DEI practices” in an effort to “recapture” them from the left—stances that resonate with president-elect’s thinking on higher ed.

Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, once wrote about how Israel is key to a necessary “American crusade”—and the Geneva Conventions should be thrown out the window.

The Guardian has reported that in his most recent work, The War on Warriors, Hegseth wrote that the U.S. military should completely disregard the international human rights treaties, which outline rules for how to treat civilians during war time.

“The key question of our generation—of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—is way more complicated: what do you do if your enemy does not honor the Geneva conventions. We never got an answer. Only more war. More casualties,” Hegseth wrote. “If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals feel better about themselves, aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?! … Who cares what other countries think?”

In his 2024 book, American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free, he wrote, “If you love America, you should love Israel.”

He goes on to liken his support for Israel to the Crusades, writing, “Our present moment is much like the 11th Century. We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must.… Arm yourself—metaphorically, intellectually, physically. Our fight is not with guns. Yet.”

Hegseth’s nomination aligns perfectly with President-elect Trump’s right-wing makeover of the federal government. And it doesn’t hurt that, like Trump, Hegseth has a serious allegation of sexual assault from 2017 hanging over his head.

Elon Musk admitted that X (formerly Twitter) is throttling link-based posts, essentially stifling news articles on the social media platform.

In a reply to a post Sunday from technology investor and writer Paul Graham, Musk confirmed that X’s algorithm deprioritizes links, telling him to “just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply. This just stops lazy linking.”

Graham was not convinced, replying, “If I write a new essay and tweet a link to it, that’s ‘lazy linking,’ but if I tweet that I’ve written a new essay and then put the link in a reply, that’s somehow better?”

Musk didn’t reply to Graham, and later retweeted a post from user DogeDesigner explaining the change. A host of replies from other users to Musk’s reply, as well as Graham’s post, showed that this change is disliked by many X users, particularly in the technology and programming fields that Musk and Graham are a part of.

The fact that Musk replied at all is due to Graham’s standing in the venture capital and tech world (and probably his 1.2 million followers). Musk routinely ignores journalists, particularly critics, on X in favor........

© New Republic