KISS frontman and guitarist Paul Stanley denounced pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel student protesters demonstrating at universities across the country.
Stanley, a Jewish man, went on to encourage students who disagreed with their respective institution’s policies to find another place to receive an education which reflected their values more accordingly.
“Students at private universities have no right to demand anything other than their safety and the education that was paid for,” Stanley wrote in a Friday X post. “Those who have strong issues with where or how their chosen institutions invests its coffers or any other beliefs that lead to disruption on campus should be told to find a place of learning whose policies line up with theirs or face expulsion.”
“Outside agitators and misguided students disrupt and take away from those who seek an education and the ultimate reward and celebration of reaching graduation,” he concluded.
Last year, Stanley waded into the online political discourse by giving his opinion on medical gender transitions for minors.
“There is a BIG difference between teaching acceptance and normalizing and even encouraging participation in a lifestyle that confuses young children into questioning their sexual identification as though some sort of game and then their parents in some cases allow it,” Stanley wrote to X last May. “There ARE individuals who as adults may decide reassignment is their needed choice but turning this into a game or parents normalizing it as some sort of natural alternative or believing that because a little boy likes to play dress up in his sister’s clothes or a girl in her brother’s, we should lead them steps further down a path that’s far from the innocence of what they are doing.”
The KISS frontman later walked back his comments in another post.
Protests kicked off at Columbia last week as some students created a Gaza encampment. University President Minouche Shafik later called on NYPD to disperse the crowds of protesters across campus. Over 100 people were arrested.
Similar protests at New York University, Yale, and other universities have also started since then leading to other instances of police presence on campus to disperse demonstrators.
On Wednesday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state troopers to disperse crowds of protestors at the University of Texas at Austin (UTA) and arrest those refusing to comply with authorities.
Some lauded the Texas governor’s move while critics took issue with his decision, warning Abbott may be infringing on First Amendment rights. Others have drawn similarities to police presence at universities with the 1970 Kent State University shooting in which four students were killed by national guard members as students demonstrated against the Vietnam war.
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