A pro-Palestinian activist from Greater Pittsburgh is at the center of a recent lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio.
Guy Christensen, aka YourFavoriteGuy on TikTok — who has been variously described by critics as a “baby-faced, keffiyeh-wearing 19-year-old from Pennsylvania,” a “grifter,” and an “antisemite” and by supporters as an “anti-war activist” and a “resistance fighter” — was expelled from The Ohio State University without a hearing in May after outcry over a since-removed video in which Christensen defended the fatal shooting of two Israeli officials in Washington, D.C. The ACLU says OSU’s actions violated Christensen’s First and Fourteenth Amendment rights. The organization filed a complaint naming three OSU administrators on Sept. 17.
“He did not call for violence; he did not incite violence; he didn’t threaten, certainly, to perform any violence himself. He just said, ‘I do not condemn this gunman,’” David Carey, ACLU of Ohio’s managing legal director, tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “This case is ultimately not about a protest. It’s just about Guy voicing his political opinions … and, essentially, OSU expelled him for those.”
Christensen has been vocally pro-Palestine since at least November 2023, when he published an essay while still in high school questioning Israel’s policies regarding Palestinian and Israeli Arab citizens. His TikTok following has since ballooned to 3.5 million followers, and he continues to post leftwing and pro-Palestine content in spite of what he describes as TikTok’s “censorship” of certain topics. Even before coming under criticism for his video about the D.C. shooting, Christensen says opponents impersonated him and called in fake bomb threats to Pittsburgh-area synagogues, leading police to “surround” his family’s home in Pittsburgh’s northern suburbs.
Following the D.C. video, pro-Israel outlets and right-leaning tabloids including the New York Post criticized Israel, and, after discovering Christensen was an OSU student, activists and members of the OSU community began pressuring the university to intervene. Eventually, the issue caught the attention of U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), who urged the Capitol Police to investigate Christensen as a “threat.” Christensen clapped back with a scathing video denouncing Torres as a “Zionist scumbag” and “AIPAC millionaire” and has continued to criticize Torres.
The long-running Israel-Palestine conflict is a “sensitive issue,” Carey acknowledges, and Christensen holds “strong opinions.” “But the blowback of that included calls from antisemitism watchdog groups for Guy to either be expelled or investigated. They started tagging the FBI on posts about him. Senior department of justice officials started to suggest that they might be investigating him,” Carey says.
Christensen in an Oct. 11 video Credit: YourFavoriteGuy / TikTok
Part of the issue with Christensen’s expulsion, per the ACLU, was that he never sought to associate himself with the university, where he had recently completed his freshman year.
“He keeps a separation between his online presence and his student life to the extent possible,” Carey tells City Paper. “One of his online critics figured out where he went to school and posted that information online. And subsequently there was a sort of letter writing campaign … demanding that he be punished, expelled, or investigated.”
“OSU initially suspended him, and they told him that he could expect a meeting with them, where he would be able to explain his side of the story. He scheduled that meeting per their instructions. Before the meeting could take place, though, they decided to expel him” for being a safety risk, Carey says. “He’s being punished for political opinions that he voiced outside of the school context on his own TikTok page.”
Christensen, Carey says, is not seeking to re-enroll at OSU (“He’s no longer at Ohio State. He doesn’t wish to be after they treated him this way,” Carey says). Instead, the ACLU is seeking an injunction to have Christensen’s expulsion and the reasoning behind it expunged from his records so Christensen can “move on.”
Christensen has kept a video condemning the D.C. shooting up on his TikTok page and has continued to condemn Israel’s actions amid a fragile ceasefire brokered in part by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration. His videos and Substack posts continue to receive many thousands of interactions, with some 800,000 views on a recent TikTok concerning the ceasefire as of presstime. As for the lawsuit, the ACLU says the parties involved are in the discovery phase, with a preliminary hearing scheduled for Jan. 12, 2026.
“Agree or disagree with what Guy Christensen says, he has to be allowed to speak his political opinions,” Carey says. “At a university, if anything, they should be more permissive and more protective of their students’ rights to engage in vigorous political debate.”
“In a time when free speech rights are under pressure,” Carey adds, “it’s important for everyone not to comply in advance.”
This article appears in Election Guide Oct. 8-14, 2025.
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