In what may (or, frankly, may not) be the most terrifying thing you’ll see all week, US President Donald Trump has openly flirted with the concept of throwing a proverbial brick through the 1st Amendment of the United States Consitution, after he released a terrifying statement on his Truth Social platform this morning, announcing that any universities, colleges, or schools that are found to be allowing “illegal protests” to take place will be subject to an immediate cut of all their federal funding and “agitators will be imprisoned.”
“All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests,” the sitting US president wrote in his Truth Social announcement early this morning. “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.”
No information has been made available to explain or define what constitutes an “illegal protest” under this new order.
This announcement does come on the heels of announcements from Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Education (ED), and the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), confirming a potential impending stop of $51.4 million in contracts between Columbia University and the US federal government.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stated that Columbia’s failure to stop antisemitic protests on its campus was the reason behind the announcement.
In a statement on the matter, RFK Jr. said, “In recent years, the censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture have transformed our great universities into greenhouses for this deadly and virulent pestilence. Making America healthy means building communities of trust and mutual respect, based on speech freedom and open debate.”
This new announcement regarding “illegal protests” comes straight from the same man who, as one of his first acts as president following his inauguration in January, issued blanket pardons for more than 1,500 individuals who were convicted of crimes related to their participation in the infamous January 6th Capitol insurrection, during which a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the nation’s Capitol building in an effort to overthrow a United States presidential election and overturn Donald’s loss to Joe Biden — many of whom were convicted of violent crimes against law enforcement officials.
Featured image via DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Marianique Santos