Candace Owens Tells Viewers They Have to Back Harvard in Fight With Trump: He’s ‘Trying to Suppress Speech’
Controversial podcaster Candace Owens went viral this week with many on the left, who typically deride her outlandish commentary, sharing her take on President Donald Trump’s attacks on Harvard University.
“I never thought that I would see a day where I would be rooting for a university above Donald J. Trump and his administration. But I don’t recognize his administration right now. I don’t recognize what’s happening,” Owens began, adding:
I have a theory. I do. We were kicking around some theories earlier, me and the team, and we were going, how could Trump be such a free speech enthusiast and being allowing these things to happen? Going after colleges, universities, trying to suppress speech. While pretending that you’re not suppressing speech, while pretending you’re fighting DEI. It’s so messy, it’s so obvious. Everyone knows what you’re doing.
People who are still trying to grift, I guess, I suppose, are not willing to challenge you on this, which is ridiculous, because when you are out of office, we are gonna have to live with these consequences. Our children are going to have to grow up in this America, okay? So when you threaten our speech, it’s not worth it so that we can have pom-poms and go hurrah for a couple of years, then go, okay, well. Yeah, now it kind of stinks because, oh, we’re getting arrested for wrongthink.
We’ve got David Friedman, yeah! Arrest him! Arrest Tucker Carlson and Candice Owens! Get him! I love it! And if you think it’s gonna stop with college campuses, you’re out of your mind. So you better buck up and root for Harvard University in this fight.
Owens was referring to Trump pulling billions in federal funding from Harvard University while accusing the school of enabling anti-Semitism on its campus. Owens’s commentary was from a longer clip she published in mid-April, but was widely shared this week, including by progressive news site the Tennessee Holler. Trump also continued his attack against Harvard this week, taking to his Truth Social platform on Thursday and writing, “Harvard is an Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institution, as are numerous others, with students being accepted from all over the World that want to rip our Country apart.”
Owens, who has been widely accused of promoting anti-Semitic tropes and Holocaust-era revisionism, has also been highly critical of Israel’s war against Hamas.
Other voices on the right have raised similar concerns as Owens over the government cracking down on speech on campus, related to the Israel-Hamas war. “Deporting somebody because they wrote an op-ed critical of Israel—I think that’s probably in the grey area,” said MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk this week, in an interview with Mark Halperin. Kirk later added:
I would say that we run a little bit of a problem if we are going to say that the criteria to get your visa revoked is writing an op-ed. Now that might be an exaggeration by somebody, right? And the op-ed was not even critical of America, which it was critical of a foreign country. And again, I’m very pro-Israel as I say this. And let me tell you why. I actually think it creates more anti-Israel hostility and anti-Semitism when it looks as if such a strong hand of the government is gonna come in.
Watch the clip above.
