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By Marisa Hirschfield ‘27
On April 24th, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens spoke about free speech, journalism, and Israel to approximately one hundred attendees gathered in Guyot Hall. The event, entitled “Writing About Israel as a Columnist and as a Jew,” was co-sponsored by a variety of campus organizations, including B’Artzeinu and the Center for Jewish Life. I attended in my capacity as a Writing Fellow for Princetonians for Free Speech, a contributor to the event.
Stephens began by outlining how Western media gets the Israel narrative wrong, framing Israel as the more powerful adversary in a two-sided conflict. “Most of the media treats the Israel story as a Goliath versus David story in which Israel is Goliath because the Palestinians loom smaller. Expand the frame and what you see is a country that is surrounded by current enemies and historic enemies and very hostile populations.”
The pro-Palestine movement on college campuses was a focal point of the event. Stephens called out what he sees as the liberal hypocrisy of the movement. “If your values are progressive, but you are objectively siding with the most fundamentalist, totalitarian, misogynistic and homophobic movement in the world, something is the matter with your thinking.”
Stephens also advised that protestors be wary of the backlash their actions might elicit, drawing a historical comparison to student politics in the Weimar Republic. “When the left in Germany trashed universities in the 1920s, it paved the way for the most extreme right. Be careful that through radicalism, you don’t invite a form of reaction that will be much more terrifying.” He cautioned that the movement for Palestinian freedom could lead to “handing all of our enemies a golden political opportunity.”
Already in response to pro-Palestine protests, the Trump administration has frozen upwards of $11 billion in university federal funding. Stephens took a strong stance against these funding cuts, seeing them as “bald attacks on university life” rather than genuine attempts to curb anti-semitism. “I think that many universities are broken institutions, but the place to fix them is within the university, not with the heavy hammer of withholding federal funds.”
During the Q&A section of the event, an audience member asked Stephens to define the boundaries of appropriate speech about Israel. Stephens responded that, except for pre-established First Amendment restrictions, “all speech about Israel is permissible.” He shared that he has no problem with chants which paint Israel as a genocidal state, as long as he is able to respond. “I have a right to call it anti-semitic,” Stephens said. “It doesn’t mean I’m censoring that speech. I am making an effort to describe that speech as I see it.”
The columnist expressed that it is acceptable to find fault with Israel on the basis of policy, but he voiced his concern about more extreme beliefs. “What I’m worried about is that there is a strain on the left that no longer sees Israel as mistaken on policy [but] sees Israel as fundamentally illegitimate as a state.”
Despite his criticisms of leftist activism, Stephens noted that his speaking engagements have more often been cancelled by far-right groups that reject his support of a two-state solution than far-left ones.
Marisa Hirschfield ’27 studies History and Creative Writing and is a PFS Writing Fellow.
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Feroce and his co-founders believed that the chapter, while certainly not the only conservative group on campus, would fulfill a unique need. “There’s a lot of conservatives on campus, a lot of groups,” Feroce notes. But, he added, many of them are focused primarily on “academia and intellectual thought.” The mission of TPUSA, however, as evidenced by Wold’s lecture, revolves around common sense and plain speech. This is a mission, Feroce argued, that would “fill a space for students on campus” and appeal to an untapped group of conservatives seeking to express themselves.
Princeton spent $240,000 on congressional lobbying in the first three months of the year, the second-highest spending total of any quarter in recorded history. The University’s Lobbying Disclosure Act filing shows lobbying efforts spanning issues including scientific research, financial aid, immigration issues, and the recently increased endowment tax.
The increased spending comes after the Trump administration cut hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants to the University, investigated Ivy League institutions over allegations of antisemitism, and ended a program sponsoring active-duty service members in graduate studies.
On April 15, 2026, Yale President Maurie McInnis announced, in an open letter to the Yale community, the issuance of a blockbuster fifty-page report by a special committee of ten Yale faculty that called for reform across many aspects of Yale’s policies and educational practices. The report dealt extensively with PFS’s core issues of free speech, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity. But it also addressed other issues, such as affordability, admissions policies, political homogeneity, governance, grade inflation, the impact of technology on learning – all those issues that contribute to the decline in trust in higher education.
