Barnard Columbia Socialists

Who is Tommy Robinson? Most know that he is one of the speakers invited by the Columbia University College Republicans this year to come speak on our campus, and that he holds far-right political views. Robinson—whose real name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon—might not be as familiar to Americans as other right-wing provocateurs like Mike Cernovich, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Ann Coulter. In fact, some on campus may not be aware of his political views at all, and thus see little reason to see his invitation by the College Republicans as worthy of protest or outrage. In the United Kingdom, however, and all across Europe, Robinson has led, been a part of, and supported some of the most prominent far-right, Islamophobic, and anti-migrant movements of the last decade. We should not regard him as an “ordinary” political activist whose views are acceptable within mainstream political discourse.

On Thursday, March 23, the Columbia University College Republicans and the Columbia Political Union are hosting the widely discredited right-wing ideologue Charles Murray to speak at Columbia University. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Charles Murray is a white supremacist who, as “a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has become one of the most influential social scientists in America, using racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.”