“Women with advanced degrees should leave the United States immediately.”
That’s how one left-wing TikTok influencer responded to a recent minor change in education policy from the Trump administration in a video that has since received more than 370,000 views. It’s not just her; all across social media, progressive voices with millions of followers are spreading an engrossing narrative about the president that has the pesky downside of being totally, utterly untrue.
In these influencers’ telling, President Donald Trump is “demoting” people with certain advanced degrees in female-dominated industries, such as nurse practitioners, and officially deeming their degrees “unprofessional.” They unironically insist that this is part of a concentrated effort to “quietly” legislate women back into “being barefoot, pregnant, [and] sitting in [a] gilded cage managed by” their husbands. Others add a particularly nasty twist, implying that the Trump administration is specifically trying to get rid of “mandated reporters” to enable more child abuse.
These videos have received tens of millions of cumulative views and thousands upon thousands of concerned comments from Americans, including many teachers and nurses, who now feel insulted by the Trump administration or worry that their degrees and careers are being invalidated. Yet literally none of this is happening.
As is usually the case with a good conspiracy theory, it all started with a tiny grain of truth. As part of the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed into law in July, the Department of Education is implementing new limits on how much graduate students can borrow. The idea here is to stop graduate programs from jacking up prices and expecting students to pay ever more each year with the quasi-blank-check that is federal graduate student loans.
In doing so, the department has internally relabeled some degrees as “professional” degrees that will be subject to a $200,000 borrowing limit, such as law and medical degrees. Other degree programs will be subject to a $100,000 borrowing limit.
“The definition of a ‘professional degree’ is an internal definition used by the Department to distinguish among programs that qualify for higher loan limits, not a value judgement about the importance of programs,” the Department of Education clarified in a press release. “It has no bearing on whether a program is professional in nature or not.”
That’s right: Despite the viral misinformation, the Trump administration is not declaring nurse practitioners, teachers, or other female-dominated jobs “unprofessional” — or even doing anything that will affect anyone currently in these roles. These new caps won’t even affect most future students, as 95% of nursing students borrow under the $100,000 limit anyway, according to DOE data.
And, funnier still, the Trump administration is making these changes with the goal of increasing access to these programs by curbing costs! Not in some secret effort to enact The Handmaid’s Tale, as one viral TikTok suggested.
That’s right: A minor policy tweak meant to expand educational opportunity to female-dominated advanced degrees has been retold to the masses as a dystopian attack on women’s rights. And millions of our fellow citizens completely believe it.
A LEFT-WING INFLUENCER’S PRO-CCP PROPAGANDA FALLS APART ON CAMERA
It’s not just this one story. From the absurd viral claim that Trump was “reinstating segregation” to the alarmism over an essentially nonexistent threat to legal gay marriage, panic over fake stories and baseless narratives regularly spread like wildfire across the internet, while much of the Left either actively participates in the hysteria or turns a blind eye. Is it any wonder we see a rise in left-wing political violence and support for it when such dystopian rhetoric is routinely invoked?
For years, liberal media outlets and Democratic politicians warned about the rise of “fake news” and “misinformation” online. And while these concerns were often overwrought or twisted into justification for censorship, it’s absolutely true that right-leaning Americans regularly fall for hoax stories and false narratives. But an even bigger misinformation echo chamber is dominating social media, and if we don’t get it under control, it’ll continue to drive American politics off a cliff.
Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.
