On a drizzly day in late October, a strange looking truck pulled over on a dirt road in Hinesburg. The truck had electronic billboards attached to three sides that displayed the smiling face of a young woman. The neighbors knew the face well — it was Eva Frazier, whose family lived on the road. Eva was a top student at nearby Champlain Valley Union High School, from which she graduated in 2022. Eva has long been passionate about social justice issues and was involved in CVU’s chapter of Amnesty International. She is also a competitive swimmer. Eva is now a sophomore at Harvard.

The truck with the illuminated billboards had a different description of Eva, who is 19. It showed her face under the banner, “Harvard’s Leading Antisemite.” The truck, which was paid for by the right-wing group Accuracy in Media, had traveled from Cambridge, Ma., where it had spent several weeks circling Harvard Yard displaying the faces of numerous Harvard students beneath the same banner. This was an effort to dox students and faculty who were allegedly sympathetic to Palestinians or who had expressed any opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza. "Doxxing" is publicizing personal information about someone without their permission. 

This doxxing effort is part of a national campaign to suppress pro-Palestinian speech that is led by Canary Mission, a shadowy group linked to Israel. Canary Mission now lists Frazier on a website of people that it claims “promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews.” This campaign against students and faculty has received national media attention but its work in Vermont has not been documented until now.

The pressure campaign against universities may have claimed its biggest prize with the resignation on Jan. 2 of Harvard President Claudine Gay. She stepped down after a monthlong backlash following her testimony in Congress about antisemitism on campus, and allegations advanced by right-wing activists that some of her scholarly work had been plagiarized, which Harvard’s governing body refuted.

Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik celebrated Gay’s resignation, calling the former Harvard president “morally bankrupt” and vowing “this is just the beginning.”

Gay’s defenders included Boston University professor and bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi, who wrote on X that Gay was a target of “racist mobs.” 

Harvard Professor Albert Guzetti said of the campaign against Gay, “This recalls the worst days of McCarthyism.”

Eva Frazier refuses to be silenced. On this Vermont Conversation, Eva talked about her experience getting doxxed and speaking out for Palestinian rights.

Frazier said that the doxxing campaign’s “larger goal is to silence all students, and especially people who are thinking about being vocal or visible about support for Palestine.” 

The attacks on her and her friends have had the opposite effect. “It is even more important to continue to advocate for justice in Palestine especially as genocide in Gaza continues,” she told The Vermont Conversation.

James Bamford, an award winning investigative journalist, recently wrote an expose for The Nation, “Who is Funding Canary Mission? Inside the Doxxing Operation Targeting Anti-Zionist Students and Professors.” He explained that Canary Mission “is a very well organized, well financed operation run by a foreign country to intimidate Americans.”

Frazier believes that Gay was forced to resign by “far-right activists and leaders… [who want] to suppress free speech, hurt higher ed and really wage a war against DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) and affirmative action.”

Frazier said that the attacks on free speech serve a larger purpose. They are “a distraction from the tens of thousands of civilian lives that have been lost in Gaza.”