Jack Hibbs, a far-right anti-LGBTQ pastor, conspiracy theorist, and Christian nationalist, posted a video on his YouTube channel earlier this week in which he lashed out at the protests that have sprung up on college campuses around the country in opposition to the ongoing war in Gaza.
Hibbs, an ardent Christian Zionist whose own support for Israel is riddled with antisemitism, declared that these campus activists have no First Amendment right to protest because, by virtue of protesting, they are proving that they are not even real Americans.
“This morning, I turned on the news and I watched the idiocy of the news media—from channel to channel to channel covering Columbia University and NYU—say the same thing: ‘You know, they’re just expressing their First Amendment rights. This is the First Amendment in action,'” Hibbs sneered. “Those are the words of fools. Fools!”
“We’ve got people who I believe have forfeited their rights to the First Amendment,” Hibbs declared. “They don’t have the First Amendment [right] to do what they’re doing on over 220 university campuses.”
“If I went to Moscow and did what they’re doing, I know what would happen,” he continued. “I’ve seen how the police and how the military deal with people on the streets and it ain’t pretty. That’s why it doesn’t happen there!”
“That’s not your First Amendment right to shout, ‘Fire’ in a theater,” Hibbs insisted. “Neither is it your First Amendment [right] to say that you’re using the First Amendment to speak your opinion when you’re not even an American. You say, ‘Pastor, I was born and raised here.’ Just because you were born here doesn’t mean you’re an American. That’s ridiculous. You don’t even know what ‘American’ is if that’s what you think.”
“Being an American is to choose the U.S. Constitution as your governing document,” he claimed. “You’re an American because you’ve chosen to bring your life under the rule of the U.S. Constitution. People on these university campuses, they don’t even know what the Constitution is. So when they say, ‘It’s my First Amendment right to say, “Death to America, Death to Israel,'” you don’t have the right to do that because you’re not an American, and you are actually somebody who, yourself, you have no constitutional rights. We don’t recognize them because you’re not an American.”
Hibbs argument makes no sense, of course, given that the First Amendment is part of the Constitution, meaning that all Americans who live “under the rule of the U.S. Constitution” have a fundamental right to freedom of speech and to protest.
