Free Speech Is The West’s Greatest Asset. It’s Also Our Greatest Vulnerability.

Free speech is America’s greatest protection against tyranny. It also creates one of our greatest vulnerabilities to foreign enemies. Our challenge is to defend that freedom without letting our enemies turn it against us.

The First Amendment protects free speech for good reason. Once government gets to decide which opinions are allowed, every other freedom becomes less secure. But the same openness that lets Americans criticize the government, organize movements, and argue for radical ideas can also be exploited by enemies who would never permit that freedom at home.

In America and the West, people are free to fund nonprofits, organize protests, build campus movements, and use social media to shape public opinion, even against the country’s own institutions. You wouldn’t be allowed to use those same tools to undermine the regime in China, Iran, Russia, or North Korea. Those governments keep a tight grip on their universities, media, and public square.

That asymmetry is how a free society becomes vulnerable. Every society produces fringe ideas. That’s normal. But potentially harmful ideas usually remain harmless as long as they stay fringe. They become dangerous and divisive when someone gives them money, legitimacy, and a way to spread.

Right now, self-destructive beliefs that once remained on the fringe are growing in popularity across America and the West. Some of these ideas surely started organically. But that doesn’t mean these ideas are spreading at this scale on their own. They can also be magnified by foreign money flowing into the universities, nonprofits, and platforms that shape the worldview of millions of Americans.

Take energy. Radical activists push to block pipelines, shut down nuclear plants, and eliminate coal in the name of saving the planet, while China keeps burning cheap coal to power its economy. Taken to its extreme, this agenda, dressed up as climate virtue, becomes a form of industrial self-destruction while handing our competitors a massive economic advantage.

Or take immigration. Done right, legal and controlled with real integration, it’s a strength. Done wrong, an unchecked open-borders policy is a recipe for national self-destruction. No rational state would allow indiscriminate migration on a scale that destabilizes its own society. Yet many Western constituencies now treat basic self-preservation as something shameful.

We don’t need to prove that foreign money is the main driver of every self-destructive belief spreading through America. The vulnerability itself is the problem. Hostile governments don’t need to invent these ideas from scratch. They only need to find the radical ideas already capable of tearing us apart and fund their growth. Adversaries who have spent decades studying how to weaken America would be foolish to pass up such an obvious opening. Why spend trillions trying to beat America militarily when a fraction of that can get Americans to do the work for them?

What can we actually do about this?

Not censorship of Americans. That would be the most dangerous response. Americans have every right to argue and protest against America itself. That’s part of the deal free speech gives us. If we answer foreign manipulation by giving the government the power to police what Americans believe, we expose ourselves to something worse than foreign influence: a government powerful enough to turn against its own citizens. The First Amendment has to stay fully intact.

The better answer is to extend a principle America already accepts: foreign money should not be allowed to shape American public life from the shadows. Foreign nationals already can’t donate to American elections. FARA requires certain foreign agents to register and disclose their activities here. Those laws exist because America understands that foreign money can be weaponized, and that foreign influence can be restricted or exposed without touching any American’s right to speak.

We should apply that same logic more broadly to nonprofits, universities, and advocacy groups that shape American culture and politics. The distinction should stay simple: ordinary commerce is fine. Foreign money financing domestic influence is not.

Foreigners can buy products, hire American companies, or pay full price for their own children’s education here. That is foreign money exchanged for real goods and services, and it’s not the problem. The problem is foreign governments, foreign nationals, or foreign-controlled groups endowing chairs, funding programs, or financing research in ways aimed at shaping our culture, our politics, or how young Americans are educated.

If Americans want to fund radical climate activism or open-border movements, that’s their right. The First Amendment protects them. Americans are free to be wrong and free to be radical. But the First Amendment does not require us to let foreign adversaries bankroll our national self-destruction.

Perhaps a broad restriction is too blunt an instrument. We would welcome any narrower solutions that actually work. At the very least, full transparency about which foreign governments, foreign nationals, and foreign-controlled entities are funding our nonprofit institutions would be a good first step.

But transparency alone may not be enough. According to the Department of Education’s 2025 foreign-funding disclosures, Qatar was the largest foreign source of reportable gifts and contracts to American universities, including Harvard and Carnegie Mellon, with China third. Qatar alone accounted for more than $1 billion. That fact is already public, since federal law requires universities to report large foreign gifts and contracts. Yet the money keeps flowing anyway. At some point, transparency must be followed by real restrictions on foreign money flowing into causes designed to reshape American society.

America does not need to become less free to protect itself. It needs to stop being naive. Our enemies understand that free speech in an open society can be used against it. We are under no obligation to give them the tools to turn our freedom against us. If we want free speech to survive, we need to defend not just our right to speak, but the society that makes that right worth having in the first place.

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Rabbi Elie Feder, PhD, and Rabbi Aaron Zimmer host the “Physics to God” podcast.