Earlier this month, a colleague sent me a story from Campus Reform, a right-wing website I know well. As someone who studies the strategies and politics of the contemporary right, I am familiar with its usual fare: breathless “exposés” of campus decadence, liberal overreach and the alleged persecution of conservatives. The formula is predictable. But this particular story stopped me cold.

It claimed to cover a recent meeting of our American Association of University Professors chapter at Yale, in which faculty from several other universities joined us over Zoom to discuss the settlements that the Trump administration had sought to impose on their institutions. A core tenet of academic freedom is protection from unlawful government coercion, a principle that faculty across the political spectrum hold dear. The meeting was widely publicized and open to all, with nearly 70 professors in attendance on Zoom and in person.  

Yet the Campus Reform story presented the meeting as a clandestine event with a sinister agenda. The headline read, “Yale AAUP leads panel to prepare for a Trump admin-led Title VI investigation.”

That description was entirely false. There was no discussion of preparing for a Title VI investigation. 

But the real surprise came from the accompanying image. The site appeared to have taken a photograph originally published by the News, where I was shown standing at a podium introducing the discussion, and replaced it with an altered, possibly AI-generated version.

In this fabricated scene, the room was dimly lit and on the projection screen appeared several AI-created graphics, including an image of Donald Trump and a slide that displayed the fabricated title text from the headline. Nothing in the picture was real.

Much of the article mirrored the News’ story and included quotations invented, mischaracterized or taken out of context, as well as false claims. There was no mention that the image was AI-generated. Readers are left to believe that Campus Reform had been present at the meeting and conducted original reporting.

That alone would have been strange enough. But what truly caught my attention was the byline. The author is a recent Yale graduate who wrote for the News, won a major prize from the English Department and interned for several prominent journals. By every measure, she had the beginnings of a serious literary career.

So how does someone like that end up attaching her name to a distorted, AI-padded article on a right-wing propaganda site?

When I attend conservative conferences for my research, I often ask participants what drew them to these movements. Their stories are usually about experience and belief. But this case felt different and far more transactional. It reveals how wealthy outside groups on the right are reshaping the political terrain of higher education.

The literary, news and media worlds are contracting. For young writers, breaking in often means years of unpaid internships, endless pitching and uncertain prospects. Campus Reform, by contrast, offers something more immediate. The website is a project of the Leadership Institute, founded in 1979 by right-wing political operatives, which now brings in nearly $45 million annually from deep-pocketed conservative donors.

Campus Reform’s business model appears simple: scrape stories from student newspapers and university press releases, attach modified images with menacing faces and darkened rooms and repackage them as evidence of “liberal bias.” Writers are not expected to report or investigate. Campus Reform will pay them and give them a byline simply for feeding the machine.

To be sure, there is a long tradition of conservatives who came of age at Yale, including many prominent figures in the current administration. Historically, conservative students might have gravitated to a right-leaning journal, a legislative office, or a think tank, hoping to develop an intellectual foundation for their ideas. That is not the legacy in which Campus Reform operates.

Conservative strategists seem to understand that their agenda on higher education, including defunding universities, intimidating international students and privatizing loans, has little public support. 

What remains for them is spectacle. They rely on the invention of enemies, the creation of crises and the fabrication of offenses that can be used to mobilize outrage. It is fair to call it a grift, not only because it exploits young writers but because it deceives the movement’s own donors and audience, feeding them falsehoods and generating illusions as if they were news. Attaching such stories to a byline associated with a lauded Yale English major provides a credibility such an article would otherwise lack.

I laughed at the AI version of myself standing in a darkened room before a fake slide with a fake headline. But the laughter stops quickly. That same week, a professor at Rutgers was reportedly fleeing the country with his family after receiving death threats following a smear campaign by the local Turning Point USA chapter.

The grift is not harmless. What looks like a silly little campus sideshow of students churning out manufactured stories for clicks and donor dollars is actually a microcosm of a broader right-wing project. It is a politics that has abandoned ideas altogether and replaced them with simulation.

And for one Yale graduate, that is apparently where a writing career now begins.

DANIEL MARTINEZ HOSANG is Professor of American Studies and President of the Yale Chapter of the American Association of University Professors. He can be reached at daniel.hosang@yale.edu.