Conservative activist Charlie Kirk expressed concern that the Trump administration’s sweeping crackdown on universities and pro-Palestinian protesters in the name of combating antisemitism violates the United States’ “free speech tradition.”
Kirk, one of President Donald Trump’s most loyal supporters, issued the rebuke on Wednesday, with his unease capturing a growing tension within the GOP over differing viewpoints on the definition of antisemitism, how to combat hate against Jews, and what constitutes support for Israel.
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Kirk’s concerns come as the Trump administration experiences increasing criticism that its efforts to withdraw federal funding from universities accused of greenlighting antisemitism and moves to revoke visas and deport international students charged with supporting Hamas are reminiscent of McCarthyism, constituting an infringement on free speech rights enshrined in the Constitution.
“Racism and antisemitism are both evil and must be opposed,” Kirk said, repudiating former U.S. ambassador to Israel David Friedman’s celebration of how Trump is cracking down on antisemitism. “But a government organized around jailing, impoverishing, or silencing people based on ‘racism’ is what our enemies wanted. We should not repeat their mistakes just because some keffiyeh-wearing communists are protesting on campuses.”
Kirk argued that the Trump administration’s justification of targeting students and universities for alleged antisemitism could lead down a dangerous path of censorship where the government could justify retribution for “all kinds of speech.” Republicans are exercising power to police speech now that could be turned on them later, Kirk warned,
“If you don’t like a person’s opinion that doesn’t mean they are an antisemite,” he said in a post to X. “But once ‘antisemitism’ becomes valid grounds to censor or even imprison somebody, there will be frantic efforts to label all kinds of speech as antisemitic — the same way the left labeled all kinds of statements as ‘racist’ to justify silencing their opposition.”
The debate comes as over 1,400 international students and recent graduates have reportedly had their legal statuses revoked by the State Department amid the Trump administration’s effort to purge pro-Palestinian protesters it believes crossed the line into pro-Hamas activity from academia. Leading institutions, including Harvard, have seen billions in federal funding pulled due to their refusal to comply with the administration’s demands to ramp up efforts to combat antisemitism. Many universities have joined those facing deportation in arguing that the administration has gone too far, saying that the demands impede constitutional rights.
Earlier this week, a coalition of ten Jewish organizations released a joint statement agreeing that antisemitism in U.S. culture has become “visible, chilling, and increasingly normalized” and that hate against Jews “requires urgent and consistent action.” But they added a scathing criticism of the Trump administration’s strategy in combating antisemitism to their statement.
“In recent weeks, escalating federal actions have used the guise of fighting antisemitism to justify stripping students of due process rights when they face arrest and/or deportation, as well as to threaten billions in academic research and education funding,” the organizations wrote. “Students have been arrested at home and on the street with no transparency as to why they are being held or deported, and in certain cases with the implication that they are being punished for their constitutionally-protected speech.”
Kirk reiterated concerns that the Trump administration could be exercising powers to police speech unconstitutionally as he slammed Friedman, whom Trump tapped as the U.S.’s top diplomat to Israel during his first term in office, for extolling the use of broad government authorities to “rein in anti-semitism.”
“We’ve cut off hundreds of millions of dollars to the most elite, but at the same time the most antisemitic universities on campus, we have begun deporting illegal aliens who hate Jews and advocate for the destruction of Israel. … A government can do more in two months [to target antisemitism]than any [pro-Jewish] organization could do in its lifetime,” Friedman said in a video clip highlighted by Kirk.
“The government … has the power to rein in antisemitism in a much more effective way,” Friedman continued. “And you know, people say, ‘Well, you know, the governments are not in the business of changing the way people think.’ That’s true. But you know, to my thinking, most people who are, you know, antisemites, most of these people running around—we’re not going to win their hearts and minds because they don’t have hearts and they don’t have minds. So you know, how are we going to—there’s no reason to think we’re ever going to convince them. But we can deport them, we can put them in jail. We can make their lives miserable. We can cut off their funding, and that’s what the Trump administration is doing for the first time.”
Kirk responded, “I have to disagree with Amb. Friedman here.”
“America’s free speech tradition is our birthright. We should never get rid of it,” he said. “The First Amendment and our strict freedom of speech is one of America’s greatest rights and sets us apart from every other country in the world. One of the central promises of Trump’s 2024 campaign was to restore and protect American freedom of speech.”
The conservative activist’s statement follows Harvard president Alan Garber’s letter to the Trump administration on Monday, issuing a similar argument in support of free speech.
“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Garber wrote as he rejected the White House’s list of demands for how his university should combat antisemitism.
Former Harvard President Lawrence Summers compared the Trump administration’s agenda to the days of McCarthyism in comments to the New York Times.
“This is what Joe McCarthy was trying to do magnified ten- or 100-fold,” he said, adding that “it runs directly against the university’s role in a free society.”
The national debate over how to target antisemitism has opened a divide in the GOP, as exemplified in the debate between Kirk and Friedman.
Other leading figures in Trump circles, including Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, have attracted criticism from fellow Republicans in recent days for spouting viewpoints they consider antisemitic.
In March, the debate hit close to the White House when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard came under fire from certain factions of the Republican Party for tapping Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, who has criticized Israel’s war in Gaza, to be DNI’s deputy director. His nomination was abruptly pulled after the blowback, per the New York Times.