David Burck is not a politician. Where a seasoned statesman might have reached for a carefully crafted talking point, Burck offered direct, nuanced answers to The Jerusalem Post’s questions.

Maybe this is what will resonate with voters in Florida’s Republican Primary on August 18.

While Burck’s bid to represent Florida’s 22nd Congressional District may seem to have come out of nowhere, he has spent nearly two decades in public service.

He joined the US Marine Corps’ Military Police in 2008. He served for five years before returning to civilian life and joining the West Palm Beach Police Department as a municipal police officer.

His jump from law and order to political life came in response to the 2020 riots, which began in protest of the police killing of George Floyd.

“I saw what was happening, and I felt this calling, which is what’s got me really involved in the political space,” Burck told the Post on Wednesday. “I felt this real need to figure out what the problems are.”

He said he “realized this was just an outgrowth of the culture war, the riots that happened in 2020.

“And that’s how I got involved with Turning Point USA,” Burck said.

“I feel like the same thing is happening right now with the antisemitism and the disdain for Israel,” he continued. “Is this just a kind of a continued outgrowth of the leftist rot that’s been happening in the West?”

Regarding Turning Point USA, Burck detailed how he began fundraising for popular conservative voice Charlie Kirk, whom he described as a dear, close friend. Kirk was assassinated in September of last year.

Local issues are rarely confined to the communities they affect and are often shaped by geopolitical forces far beyond the attention of the average worker, Burck said.

A key point of his campaign is tackling the cost-of-living crisis in Florida, a crisis partially shaped by the Strait of Hormuz closure.

While acknowledging that members of the “donor class” view US President Donald Trump’s Memorandum of Understanding as a catastrophic move that hands billions of dollars to a regime that funds regional instability, Burck said that the average working American is more likely to focus on the financial realities affecting them and their families.

Drawing on his military background and his understanding of negotiations involving the Islamic Republic, Burck said he regarded the deal as less than ideal.

He added that, as someone attentive to the needs of his community and the local economy, he can understand why others view the situation as untenable.

Balancing these two realities, Burck could only say that Iran should not be understood as a good-faith actor in negotiations, but Trump had earned enough trust that one should assume he had some greater outcome in mind.

“I definitely have to trust the president’s judgment on it. He’s obviously been a fantastic leader in making these gut calls, making very instinctual [decisions]. He is driven largely by his instincts, and his instincts are saying this is going to be overall beneficial,” Burck reconciled.

“If we’ve learned one thing throughout this, it’s that President Trump makes these calls, and largely they work out. Don’t know how, but it’s the grace of God,” the statesman said.

“He just wills it into existence ... He did it when he was indicted ... when he was facing all these felony counts ... back when he was running against Hillary [Clinton] in 2016; he just somehow bends reality to whatever he conceives it to be,” he continued.

Still, Burck said the US would need to negotiate the nuclear issue with “real teeth.” He said that Iran has previously misled the international community about its missile capabilities and pointed to what he described as its growing military reach into Europe.

He also questioned whether a country so rich in oil had any legitimate need to enrich uranium for the sole purpose of civilian energy production.

Warning that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose a serious risk to global security, Burck said that this was a risk that Trump was no doubt keeping in mind when it came to the MoU.

He went on to say that had a neighboring country attacked the US as Hamas did on October 7, or as Hezbollah did on October 8, America would have “100% responded in kind.”

Part of Americans’ detachment from the situation, he said, was the fact that Iran’s threats felt too far and the US was privileged enough not to live under the constant threat of attacks.

Another key point that has already drawn criticism is Burck’s position as a free speech absolutist.

In 2023, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation aimed at strengthening penalties for hate crimes against the Jewish community in Florida, a move that some critics contrast with Burck’s broader approach to speech protections.

His position has prompted criticism in parts of the Florida press, where some commentators have accused him of being an antisemitism apologist because of this approach.

Burck strongly refuted this accusation, levied by journalist Grayson Bakich, telling the Post of his love for the Jewish community and, as a Christian Zionist, for Israel. He also discussed his experiences attending Shabbat alongside his Jewish friends.

“I’m a Bill of Rights absolutist. I think that I’m very weary, cautious, when it comes down to enacting anything that infringes slightly upon any of those Bill of Rights, because anytime you see more power [given] to the government, it just never goes the way that it was originally intended,” he said.

As an example, he offered the instance of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court trials that followed September 11, which became part of America’s national security policy.

“That has become this amorphous surveillance state where it was used against President Trump in 2016, and it just continues,” Burck said.

“The Fourth Amendment continues to get trampled and violated ... I’m cautious about it feeding any more ground to the government,” he added.

The Post raised questions about where national security concerns should come into play. Since Hamas’s October 7 attack, US college campuses, including in Florida, have seen demonstrations and expressions of support for the terrorist group that carried out the assault, which also included the killing and abduction of American citizens.

Burck asserted that it was both the right and the obligation of educational institutions to shut down demonstrations clearly supporting terrorist organizations.

“They have that ability to do that just as quickly as they’ll shut down anything that’s Right-leaning, like when they barred Kirk or Ben Shapiro from coming to speak on campus,” Burck said.

Though Washington has embraced Doha as a close ally, despite its ongoing support of terrorist organizations across the Middle East, Burck was clear that he felt Qatar was behind much of the campus unrest.

“Qatar is not a good actor. They’re playing both sides. They’re giving money to these American universities to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said. “So, when we see this come up, [we know] why no one’s calling it out.”

Qatar was the largest foreign source of gifts and contracts to American universities in 2025, delivering funding exceeding $1.1 billion, the US Education Department confirmed in February.

Eventually, Burck said, these students, groomed with Qatari resources, would become legislators and the center of “corporate and cultural spheres of influence,” which, he added, is what made Kirk’s work so necessary.

“It’s education outside of your typical channels, and I think it’s an honest and earnest dialogue. I think that’s maybe the nice way of looking at it, hoping that people will be good actors when they have a conversation,” Burck said.

His admiration for Kirk was evident in both what he said and how he said it. While he criticized New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s support for Democratic congressional candidates Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won their party primaries in NYC on Tuesday, he was also clearly willing to challenge figures within his own political camp.

“What’s happened in the wake of [Kirk’s] passing is that you’ve got all of these bad voices that have just been sucking up the attention,” he noted.

“They’re coming out, and they’re saying stuff that is extremely toxic for our movement ... like general bad life advice, bad policy advice, bad framing for young people. I hate it,” Burck continued.

“I really hate to see it, because [Kirk] was loved by the youth, and he was giving sound life advice. It wasn’t like a doomer, black pill approach [extreme pessimism]. He was a happy warrior. Now it’s all doom or black pill stuff,” Burck said.

With Kirk now gone, Burck said he felt a responsibility to carry forward what he described as involvement in the ongoing “culture wars.”

The US and Israel are the only two pillars of Western civilization still standing, according to Burck.

“Throughout the course of human history, we’ve objectively never had it so good,” he said. “We’re at an existential kind of point in the West as a whole as we go away from the ideas that have made us great, and we see it in Europe, and we’ve seen it here bubbling domestically in the United States,” he went on to say.

“I just feel like if I didn’t do my part to try to stem that tide in any way, shape or form, I’d be failing my son, the future generations out of the West, and America specifically,” Burck maintained.

“I think it’s high time for us to definitely codify our relationship even more with Israel; we need it. Europe is a rump of itself, it’s a husk, and it’s not going to get any better. And really, the only true Western ally that we have left is Israel,” he said.

While he had not yet had the privilege of visiting Israel, Burck said, he was looking forward to the situation calming down enough that he could cross it off his bucket list and visit along with his wife and 14-month-old son.

“I need to go look as a believer in Christ. I want to get out there, and I’ve heard so many great things,” he said.

“We need to keep this relationship thriving. I think that we’re going to work through this. I can understand why the people of Israel feel betrayed right now, but you know, Donald Trump’s done so many fantastic things for Israel, and I don’t think that he would do anything that would put Israel at a disadvantage,” the statesman said.

“Personally, I don’t believe so. I think this is just a part of the process of negotiating with the terrorist regime and the largest state sponsor of terrorism. I feel like Israel and the United States are just kind of like the two last vestiges of the best of the West.”