Marco Rubio accuses Democratic donors of financing campus protests

Democratic donors may be supplying on-campus occupations, according to U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio.

The Miami Republican on Fox News Sunday repeated a desire that President Joe Biden revoke visas of foreign nationals who voice sympathy for Hamas.

“Joe Biden, very early on, should have said, as I asked him to do back in October: ‘If you’re in the streets of the United States, and you’re here as a visitor on a visa — you’re not an American, you’re here on a visa or you’re here to teach or you’re here to go to school — and you’re out there chanting on behalf of Hamas and Hezbollah and these terrorist groups who by the way also hate America, we should revoke your visa,” Rubio said.

“If you are here in this country as a visitor on a visa, and you are defacing statues of George Washington, ripping down American flags, and putting up Palestinian flags, you should have your visa revoked and eliminated.”

He said Biden failed to act early on that situation, resulting in the widespread and often violent protests on campuses across the country. The Senator also suggested a political reason behind the President’s reluctance, and it’s visible at the encampments themselves.

“There’s a bunch of major Democratic donors who are behind the groups that are funding all this,” Rubio asserted. “I saw the other day, I think it was in UCLA, thousands of dollars of plywood that they were using as barricades against the police.

“They’re committing acts of violence, not just acts of antisemitism, acts of violence, of vandalism, threatening people. I saw another video of a Jewish student who had to shame the police into escorting him so that he could go into an area of the university where he had every right to be because of these zombies, these antisemitic left-wing nut cases that the President should have been very firm about.”

The same day Rubio made those pronouncements, POLITICO published a report tracing funding behind some of the larger protests to megadonors supporting Biden, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and hedge fund manager George Soros.

Rubio said the protests resulted in a more significant division in the U.S. about support for Israel, stressing his belief the U.S. ally should have the right to wage war on Hamas however it chooses.

“That’s why everything in America is in chaos, from our border to our campuses, because we have a weak, feeble President who cannot communicate and refuses to take a strong line on this because he’s afraid of people voting against him in November who support these crazy ideas.”

Since terrorist attacks on Oct. 7 by Hamas, Israel has responded with attacks on Gaza that have displaced more than a million people. The retaliatory strikes have drawn criticism from some U.S. leaders who have been longtime supporters of Israel, including Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer.

But Rubio said the war has also displaced Israeli citizens, but that hasn’t earned the same international attention.

“They talk about displaced people. There are 80,000 Israelis right now that are displaced from the north,” Rubio said. “I saw them. They are living in hotels. Their kids are going to school online and in conference rooms at hotels. They can’t go north because Hezbollah is attacking them in northern Israel.”