President Trump has made a post on Truth Social saying federal funding will be cut to universities which allow “illegal protests” on their campuses, obliquely referring to pro-Palestine demonstrations against Israel’s genocidal atrocities.
“All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests,” Trump said. “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!”
Elise Stefanik, Trump’s nominee for ambassador to the UN, made it clear that this was the Trump administration taking a position on “anti-Israel hate.”
“Antisemitism and anti-Israel hate will not be tolerated on American campuses,” tweeted Stefanik with a screenshot of Trump’s Truth Social post.
Excuse me?
“Anti-Israel hate will not be tolerated”
Is the Trump administration working to outlaw protest and criticism of a foreign nation? https://t.co/SvjNaAOQJi
— Mel (@Villgecrazylady) March 4, 2025
Trump’s declaration follows a completely insane statement from health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr which makes the targeting of pro-Palestine protests much more explicit.
“Anti-Semitism — like racism — is a spiritual and moral malady that sickens societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues,” said Kennedy. “In recent years, the censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture have transformed our great universities into greenhouses for this deadly and virulent pestilence. Making America healthy means building communities of trust and mutual respect, based on speech freedom and open debate.”
Leaving aside Kennedy’s ridiculous claim that antisemitism “kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues” in modern times and all the weird mental contortions he’s performing to turn this into a Health and Human Services issue, conflating pro-Palestine protests with antisemitism and then claiming it needs to be eliminated as a “pestilence” squarely contradicts Kennedy’s asserted support for “speech freedom and open debate.”
Kennedy’s bat shit crazy remarks align with an accompanying statement from Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, who says, “Americans have watched in horror for more than a year now, as Jewish students have been assaulted and harassed on elite university campuses. Unlawful encampments and demonstrations have completely paralyzed day-to-day campus operations, depriving Jewish students of learning opportunities to which they are entitled.”
It's so perfect that RFK's first big initiative to "Make America Healthy Again" is cracking down on "anti-Semitic" political speech. Especially after we had to sit through all his melodramatic lectures about how he was joining the GOP because it was the new Party of Free Speech https://t.co/1xryFAuPZU
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) March 4, 2025
They are using the completely fictional narrative of “antisemitism” on university campuses to stomp out protests against Israeli atrocities in the United States. They couldn’t be more transparent about it. Which is why civil rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) immediately released statements denouncing this move by the Trump administration.
“It is disturbing to see the White House threatening freedom of speech and academic freedom on U.S. college campuses so blatantly,” said Cecillia Wang, legal director of the ACLU. “We stand in solidarity with university leaders in their commitment to free speech, open debate, and peaceful dissent on campus. Trump’s latest coercion campaign, attempting to turn university administrators against their own students and faculty, harkens back to the McCarthy era and is at odds with American constitutional values and the basic mission of universities.”
“Today’s message will cast an impermissible chill on student protests about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” says FIRE. “Paired with President Trump’s 2019 executive order adopting an unconstitutional definition of anti-Semitism, and his January order threatening to deport international students for engaging in protected expression, students will rationally fear punishment for wholly protected political speech.”
There's a massive distortion of free speech doctrine being circulated to justify the Trump Administration's punishment of universities that allow "illegal protests" against Israel.
It's obviously a 1st Am violation to condition funding on holding or rejecting certain views. https://t.co/QqqHl85dp0 pic.twitter.com/ldlkLLSN9Q
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 4, 2025
If you support freedom of speech you now have an ethical obligation to oppose Israel, even if you didn’t before.
Western governments’ support for Israel is the biggest threat to free speech in our society today. Civil rights are being stomped out throughout the western world to protect Israeli information interests, and speech is being suppressed in support of Israel more aggressively than with any other topic. We’re not seeing this level of all-out warfare against free expression on any other frontline — not Russia, not vaccines, not “election security”, not on any kind of ideological front. The west’s support for Israel is the number one threat to free speech in the west today, and nothing else comes anywhere close.
Trump’s latest announcement about “illegal protests” against Israel on university campuses is just the latest escalation in what has been an ongoing assault on all criticism of the Zionist entity. We’re seeing journalists and activists persecuted and fired for opposing Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza, protests violently shut down by police, new laws shoved through at alarming speed to help target pro-Palestine demonstrators, massive amounts of social media censorship across all major platforms — all while the mainstream press commit extremely egregious journalistic malpractice with obfuscations in their reporting and punditry designed to spin Israel’s abuses in a positive light.
Even if you’ve never cared about Israel before, you should be opposing it if you care about the existence of free speech in your society. Hell, you should be aggressively resisting this war on speech even if you support Israel. When civil liberties are being snuffed out one by one with increasing brazenness in defense of a foreign state, then everyone who claims to stand for freedom has an obligation to stand against it.
Source: Caitlin Johnstone
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