George Mason University calls cops on student for article criticizing Trump | Hacker News Reader

George Mason University calls cops on student for article criticizing Trump

thefire.org

20 pointsinverted_flag15 comments

The secondary headline adds some valuable context:

GMU student Nicholas Decker’s Substack essay “When Must We Kill Them?” earned him a visit from the Secret Service

That's a pretty stupid title.

Crazy that a university would call the police when one of their students makes explicit death threats against the president. For people who struggle to understand why that isn't acceptable, imagine that the president was currently someone you didn't hate.

> Crazy that a university would call the police when one of their students makes explicit death threats against the president

What was the source that misinformed you into believing that this contained an explicit death threat against the president? I'd like to keep a record of sources that fabricate a narrative of violence.

I read the substack post, and maybe we just have different ideas of what "explicit" means. Maybe to you couching the title in terms of a question made it less clear. To me it's all summed up in the closing:

> The future is not certain. It may be that the present administration should flinch, and turn back in face of lighter action. I fondly hope that that may be the case. But if it comes, we must awaken from this ignorant dream. This evil will not pass without blood, sweat, toil, and tears. So harden your hearts, and be prepared to die.

What do you think that means? You can disagree with what the Trump administration is doing, I disagree with them, but that isn't how democracy works. We're three months in and we have people talking about (charitably) violent revolution or (uncharitably) assassination of political opponents. People who honestly believe that large numbers of (insert minority/identity) will soon be rounded up in put into camps.

The last time I heard that it was the right wing saying that Obama was using FEMA to set up camps for them.

Sometimes we lose elections, and sometimes the consequences are dire. Ask anyone who lived through the war in Vietnam, or had to fight for Civil Rights, or the Depression. Elections matter, the things we're seeing are a relatively mild example of why they matter, but it's still not an excuse to immediately revert to violence because you're managing to whip yourself into a social media mediated frenzy.

To get back to that closing statement from the author, phrased another way: "If they don't do what we want, we'll kill them." Imagine it's people on the right wing saying that about a Democrat, regarding guns or abortion, etc. They care about that every bit as much as we care about the rule of law and due process for immigrants.

> Imagine it's people on the right wing saying that about a Democrat, regarding guns or abortion, etc.

I don’t have to imagine that because I was alive during the Obama administration.

Look up United States v Bagdasarian to see how close you can get to an explicit threat without violating the law.

There's no question of whether Decker violated the law, he didn't, but he did enough to warrant an investigation and certainly enough to make GMU cover its ass. That's all we're talking about here, the question of legality was settled before this article was published.

you could quote a lot but the line in context of the entire article takes a lot of mental gymnastics to brush off:

> If one head is cut off, another would take its place.

Do you think that line is a reference to a mythical creature which regrows its heads and is a commonly used colloquialism, or an explicit threat to use a guillotine?

Feels like you just looked for something that sounded bad and didn’t actually understand the context at all.

Except neither the essay nor title make explicit death threats against the president.

https://nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/when-must-we-kill-them

I actually still wouldn't care

consider the Seal of the Commonwealth of Virginia, where GMU is located

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_and_seal_of_Virginia

according to that, Virginia is now banned in Lamar County (Paris) TX

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/18/texas-bans-v...

You wouldn't get a Lady Liberty anymore if the seal was designed today, too woke.

During the prior couple of US election cycles, anyone could without fear juxtapose Democratic lawmakers and liberal actions with the existence of the 2nd Amendment. In fact there is a celebrated strain of 2nd Amendment support based on ensuring government is afraid of the people.

So this is just bs.

It is interesting how passionately people are sitting out actual protest.

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