Eight months. That's how long an O'Keefe Media Group journalist spent embedded inside the private Signal chats of a New Jersey Antifa network called NJ BURN — long enough to watch members plan a blockade riot at Port Newark-Elizabeth, discuss road spikes and tire-slashing attacks on New Jersey police vehicles, explore "Ukrainian-style" protest tactics, and celebrate the assassination of Charlie Kirk in writing. Long enough to compile a list of names.
Those names include a Rutgers University imaging director, a Princeton Theological Seminary field education director, a Princeton doctoral candidate, a Rutgers graduate student in education, an OpenAI engineer, a T-Mobile AI executive, and a board member of both the National Lawyers Guild and the ACLU.
The Academics
Zainab Tanvir serves as Imaging Director and Assistant Teaching Professor at Rutgers University's neuroscience imaging facility. She was identified as a participant in NJ BURN's Signal chats. After O'Keefe's investigation went public, her Rutgers faculty page disappeared.
Amanda Marie Dominguez is a doctoral student in Rutgers' Graduate School of Education. Her listed research interests include "language justice," "social justice," and "equity." She was also identified in the NJ BURN network.
Reverend Shannon Smythe is Field Education Director at Princeton Theological Seminary and sits on the leadership board of the Palestine Justice Network. She was identified in the chats.
Aditi Rao is a doctoral candidate in Princeton's Classics department. Her university bio lists commitments to "decolonization, demilitarization, and abolition." Also identified.
These are people who advise dissertations, write recommendation letters, and shape the intellectual framework of students at two of the most prestigious universities in the country.
The Wider Network
The academics are not alone. Woojin Ko is an engineer at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Belkcacem Mouffouk is an AI leader at T-Mobile. Cres Vellucci co-founded the National Lawyers Guild and sits on the board of directors of the ACLU Sacramento chapter. All three were identified in the same Signal chats.
The organizational web extends further — into Princeton Graduate Student United, Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest, and Middle East advocacy networks affiliated with the Presbyterian Church USA. This isn't a collection of lone radicals with edgy hobbies. It's an embedded infrastructure.
What They Were Talking About
NJ BURN is not an idea. It is a Signal network with a membership list, meeting records, and an operational agenda. Inside those chats, members discussed a planned blockade riot at Port Newark-Elizabeth — the same network was active during the confrontations at Delaney Hall immigration detention center. They discussed road spikes. They discussed slashing the tires of New Jersey police vehicles. They discussed legal support infrastructure for criminal defendants.
And when Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September 2025, they celebrated it in writing. Members also expressed hope that earlier assassination attempts on President Trump had succeeded.
James O'Keefe posted the findings on X on June 16, 2026. "What we uncovered proves ANTIFA is not just an idea," he said. "It is a network of real people organizing." The people in this particular network hold positions at institutions charging $60,000 a year in tuition while shaping the intellectual development of young Americans.
The Response
President Trump declared Antifa a domestic terror organization in September 2025. That designation changes the frame. The people identified in these chats are not merely academics with controversial politics — they are allegedly members of a network the federal government classifies as domestic terrorism.
After the investigation dropped, NJ BURN members began scrubbing their digital footprints, bleaching themselves from the Lizzy Port Protest Signal chats in real time.
Rutgers University did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Princeton University did not respond. The New Jersey Office of the Secretary of Higher Education said it "declines to comment." Three institutions, zero answers.
Zainab Tanvir's Rutgers faculty page disappeared. The university won't say why. When the explanation for a faculty page's disappearance is the disappearance itself, the institution has already told you everything you need to know about how seriously it takes the question.
Parents are paying Rutgers and Princeton tuition so their children can be educated by people who participated in Signal chats celebrating the murder of a political figure, planning attacks on law enforcement, and discussing riot infrastructure. The universities know. They're not commenting.
That's not a scandal. That's a hiring practice.
