How the far-right is targeting educators and marginalized communities - Prism Reports

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After receiving death threats and having his home address published on X in Oct. 2025, Rutgers University history professor Mark Bray knew it was time to get his family out of the country. He immediately booked a flight to Spain for later in the week and hunkered down with his family, taking safety precautions like keeping the blinds closed.

“Doesn’t it feel like we’re under attack?” one of his young children asked him.

Bray is the author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” a book published shortly after the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which brought together fascists, Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and far-right militia groups. During the rally, white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. deliberately drove his car through a crowd of anti-fascist counterprotestors, killing local paralegal Heather Heyer and seriously injuring dozens of others.

The professor has long been the target of harassment. After his book was published, Bray received a bomb threat and two intimidating visits from the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI). He was also placed on what at the time was the new Professor Watchlist, created by the right-wing organization Turning Point USA (TPUSA) to surveil educators thought to be leftist.

While TPUSA was not able to get Bray fired in 2017, the group targeted him again last year, starting a petition to get Bray removed from Rutgers. Far-right influencers espousing antisemitic, Islamophobic, and neo-Nazi rhetoric, including Milo Yiannopoulos, Jack Posobiec, and Andy Ngo, also began posting about Bray on social media. The renewed campaign against Bray coincided with a White House event in which President Donald Trump promised “very threatening” steps against “antifa activists.”

“I received an anonymous death threat from someone saying they would murder me in front of my students,” Bray said, noting that even though TPUSA’s petition only received 100 signatures, Fox News still did a segment on it. “They’re interviewing TPUSA members on campus, who claim they don’t feel safe with me there. I’d been working there six years and they never raised a peep.”

Given that much of the federal government seemed to operate in unison with far-right influencers, Bray found it deeply alarming that the day of his family’s flight, an airline representative informed Bray just before boarding that their reservations had been cancelled. According to Bray, the representative offered little explanation. With their kids sobbing, Bray and his partner arranged a new flight for the following day. This time, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents took Bray out of the security line and held him in a closed room, where he was searched and interrogated—not about any suspected crimes, but about his writings and political associations.

Eventually, Bray and his family made it to Spain. They remain overseas, certain that it’s unsafe for them to return to the U.S.

Educators on “high alert”

Anti-fascist educators are just one segment of an ever-growing list of people facing unprecedented levels of surveillance and threats by the Trump administration and the right-wing groups the president has empowered. The list also includes trans people, immigrants, Muslims, Latinos, Black people, and the dissenters and allies organizing against an escalating array of government policy, media disinformation, online fear-mongering, stalking and harassment, and armed violence by federal agencies and right-wing groups.

On Sept. 22, 2025, Trump issued an executive order declaring “antifa”—or anti-fascists—a “terrorist organization,” building on centuries of U.S. settler-colonial opposition to communism, anarchism, and Black and Indigenous liberation movements. Never mind that anti-fascists are not actually a single organization. Rather, they are people who resist fascism and white supremacy, actions that have long been targeted by the U.S. government and that rile Trump’s MAGA universe, both which have characterized opposition to state violence as “terrorism.”

Trump’s “antifa” executive order was issued in response to the Sept. 10, 2025 assassination of Charlie Kirk, the founder of TPUSA. Though mainstream media often refers to Kirk as a “conservative,” Kirk’s own words made clear he was an avowed white supremacist and an advocate for violence against Muslims, trans people, and other marginalized groups. After his killing, neo-Nazi groups were quick to capitalize on the situation “to entice new recruits with promises of vengeance and racist camaraderie,” as reported by The Guardian.

More broadly, Kirk’s organization—focused on turning education into an indoctrination of far-right values and mythologies—was central to spreading the idea that universities turn students into “communists, terrorists, and sympathizers.” Right-wing “intellectual freedom centers” have also sprouted up at universities nationwide to counter what the far-right alleges is an inherent liberal bias.

But a closer look at how universities respond to violence and harassment displays a clear double standard. Disproportionately, students, staff, and faculty are punished for speaking out against far-right violence. At least four tenured professors have been fired or forced out of their jobs for voicing support for Palestinians in the face of genocide, including two from public universities. Dr. Rupa Marya, a doctor and clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco, was also fired without a hearing for speaking out against Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. Many more untenured professors, academic workers, and students have also been swiftly fired, suspended, expelled, pushed out, investigated, imprisoned, and threatened with deportation for speaking out.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, following Kirk’s shooting, over 40 workers and students in higher education were terminated or expelled for being “insufficiently respectful towards Kirk,” including instances where people noted Kirk’s embrace and proliferation of neo-Nazi rhetoric. Many of these students and workers were fired or driven out after targeted harassment campaigns and threats of violence, all tactics that first put Kirk’s organization on the map. TPUSA effectively created a pipeline to funnel money towards grooming conservative activists and blacklisting and harassing educators in an effort to stigmatize and criminalize resistance and opposition to white supremacy, patriarchy, fascism, impoverishment, and environmental devastation.

Central to this work is TPUSA’s Professor Watchlist, which often targets Black educators. University of Virginia professor A.D. Carson, who appears on TPUSA’s list, told Prism he feels “desensitized” to this targeting due to the extensive racism he has experienced in academia. However, months after Kirk’s shooting, he and many other Black professors remain on “high alert” for violent reprisals due to their work.

Many student organizers face similar threats. Tariq and Kristina Khan, who, like Bray, were targets of an early TPUSA campaign, described how members of the organization put up pictures of Black student organizers and called them “primates” and “monkeys.” A grad student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2017, Tariq and his wife supported anti-racist events on and off campus. TPUSA campaigned to have Tariq kicked out of the university, and the couple and their children received violent threats. Kristina is still shocked that the man behind the organization who harassed her family and threatened her kids would later gain so much power under the Trump administration.

“[One of the craziest things is] after this campaign against us, the people harassing us got an invitation to the White House,” Kristina said. “Trump invited them for his free speech event.”

Rhetoric leads to violence

College harassment campaigns rebranded by right-wing activists as a fight for free speech are just one facet of a larger movement that often leads to mass violence against marginalized groups.

“It’s jaw-dropping how much violence our community faces,” said Juan Ortiz, an artist, activist, and educator from El Paso, Texas. A member of the Mexican-American community, Ortiz has citizenship but works closely with many who do not. Ortiz is also the co-founder of Casa Carmelita, a community space and resource center supporting bi-national mutual aid efforts in Ciudad Juaréz, Mexico and El Paso.

“[Latino communities on both sides of the border] have a reputation of standing up for ourselves,” Ortiz said.

In 2019, El Paso became the site of one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history when a white supremacist and anti-immigrant gunman opened fire outside a Walmart, killing 23 and injuring 22 with the express goal of targeting Latinos. An ardent Trump supporter, the shooter also applauded the mass shooting at a mosque in New Zealand earlier that year and helped to spread the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which, according to Political Research Associates, posits that “Jewish financiers such as George Soros are sponsoring the immigration of predominantly-Muslim peoples to Europe and America in order to socially engineer the demographic decline of the white population.”

The lead up to the El Paso shooting demonstrated the synergy between the Trump administration and the far right. Trump has repeatedly described immigration from Mexico as “an invasion” and a threat. According to Ortiz, about a week before the shooting, far-right influencer Andy Ngo falsely claimed on his podcast that the Latino community of El Paso were planning an attack on border agents. Then, one of the nation’s leading conspiracy propagandists—Alex Jones—picked up Ngo’s false claims and uplifted the allegation on his far-right radio and internet conspiracy website, Infowars. The segment was viewed by the gunman, who then made his way to El Paso.

“This all happened in the span of a week,” said Ortiz, who told Prism the mass shooting was “a direct result of the rhetoric.”

According to data from the Cato Institute, murders motivated by right-wing ideology are over five times more common than those motivated by left-wing beliefs, which doesn’t even account for racist or transphobic killings by police and prison guards. Hate crimes have doubled since 2015, with a spike after Trump’s first election in November 2016. Similarly, in the week after Trump’s second electoral victory in November 2024, Black and Latino people across at least 30 states received anonymous mass messages threatening them with enslavement on plantations or deportation.

After the shooting in El Paso, Latinos continued to face threats of violence. Ortiz and his community were stalked by an armed Trump supporter who showed up at memorials for the shooting victims. Right-wing militia “border vigilantes”—who have long detained migrants at gunpoint and handed them over to Border Patrol—targeted day laborers and other workers, looking for people who appeared Latino. When militia collaboration with federal immigration agents was made public, only one member was arrested and given a less-than-two-year sentence for impersonating law enforcement.

Monica Muñoz Martinez, a historian at Brown University, refers to the entanglement between law enforcement and far-right militias “a culture of impunity.” This impunity is one feature of the overlap between the government and far-right groups. To fill posts in his administration, Trump frequently recruits ideologues and policy advocates who have helped engineer the rise of the far right. A prime example is Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest policy advisers. Miller, an outed white supremacist, is known as the “architect” of Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign.

Today, xenophobic violence is no longer concentrated on the borders. According to Ortiz, people across the country “are experiencing a level of violence like what we were experiencing in [Trump’s] first term.”

In a country-wide deportation campaign that seems designed to terrorize Latinos and Black migrants in particular—regardless of citizenship or legal status—federal immigration agencies are operating as snatch squads, targeting hospitals, schools, and even daycare centers. To recruit new hires to carry out this work, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is using white supremacist and anti-immigrant ads, several of them featuring images taken from white Christian nationalist and neo-Nazi publications. These same agents now also routinely brutalize anyone documenting or protesting their activities, shooting to death community members who are unarmed or fully restrained, such as Silverio Villegas González, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti.

Detention centers have become equally deadly during Trump’s second term. In January alone, six people in ICE custody died. In one case, officials claimed a Cuban immigrant died by suicide, though a medical examiner later declared the man’s death a homicide.

A war on bodily autonomy

A third campaign of the far-right’s violent agenda tied to the Trump Administration is the war on bodily autonomy. For decades, the effort to ban abortion has been a unifying priority for white Christian nationalists and the Republican Party. Today, almost four years after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, 41 states have total or partial abortion bans in effect, making pregnancy and childbirth nearly two times more deadly than for those living in states where abortion is legal and accessible

In tandem, the Trump administration and Republicans nationwide have intensified their attacks against trans people. While trans people have always faced explicit physical violence, “the number of people who experience that as a very likely or possible threat has expanded significantly in the recent past,” said Milne, a nonbinary therapist and community organizer in Richmond, Virginia who is using a pseudonym for safety reasons.

Many of Milne’s clients are nonbinary and trans, communities that have long faced hate crimes, harassment, and other forms of violence. These threats loom so heavily in the lives of trans people that Milne said it’s “a profound part of trans culture.” Milne themselves is intimately familiar with right-wing violence. They protested at the 2016 “Unite the Right” rally and dodged the car driven into the crowd by James Alex Fields Jr.

“The car ran right past me before it hit all the people and killed Heather Heyer,” said Milne, who explained that when they think of that day—even nine years later—they experience what they can only describe as “an internal freeze.”

“My mind kind of goes blank,” they said. “I know what it sounds like when a car hits people and it sounds like bowling pins when they get knocked down, and that sound is forever in my brain.”

Trump’s second term has only worsened things for trans people. Within the first days of his second presidency, he introduced a series of anti-trans executive orders that sought to ban gender-affirming care for youths and trans athletes from participating in girls and women’s sports, among other efforts. Today, 689 anti-trans bills are under consideration nationwide.

Aided and legitimized by high profile Democrats and mainstream press such as The New York Times, the Trump administration also effectively spreads rhetoric to imply that supportive parents are “abusing” their trans children by providing them with access to gender-affirming care. This rhetoric is then enforced by depriving young trans people of gender-affirming care by, in part,

restricting the use of Medicaid and threatening to defund hospitalsthat don’t comply.

The Trump Administration and far-right movements have also turned public schools into a battleground, endangering young trans people. Many public school teachers who are trans or who show support for trans students have been fired or pushed out of their jobs in Texas, Missouri, Georgia, Florida, New York, Oklahoma, and more. Other educators have reported receiving death threats. In at least one case at the University of Oklahoma, TPUSA and Fox News were involved in the campaign.

“It’s a very clever strategy to focus on trans kids,” explained Milne. “It’s analogous to the way that they have limited abortion access by regulating it to death in the name of protecting women’s safety.”

Once operating on the fringes, members of the far right and MAGA movement are now represented in all three branches of government, where their ideologies shape public policy that leads to violence against marginalized groups and resistance movements. This violence is enacted both through laws and administration officials pushing the bounds of what is considered lawful. Trump’s criminalization of resistance has also emboldened fascist movements across the U.S. and around the world—including countries such as Argentina, now run by Trump admirer, Javier Milei.

Yet amid all the violence, there is still cause for hope. Ortiz said he finds it particularly inspiring that people nationwide have “self-organized,” forming mutual aid groups, ICE watches, and carrying out anti-detention work. Even Milne, who finds it difficult to be hopeful about the future, pointed out a silver lining to surviving the first Trump administration and the rise in white supremacist violence.

“It was a horrible experience. I wish it never happened,” they said. “I don’t want to say it made me tougher, but [ultimately] I guess I feel more prepared.”

Editorial Team

Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor

Lara Witt, Top Editor

Rikki Li, Copy Editor