Britain’s Tommy Robinson was prevented from speaking to Columbia University in the United States — via Skype — after Alt-Left activists and students hijacked the engagement.
The Rebel Media contributor was due give a talk at the university titled ‘The Fall of Europe — Mass Immigration’ on October 10th, after receiving an invitation to speak from Republican students, according to George Osborne’s Evening Standard.
The Columbia University College Republicans club had advertised Robinson as “an important political figure in England and Europe”, who had “championed the notion that radical Islam is incompatible with Western values and the freedoms we currently enjoy”.
Antifa activists and Alt-Left students took exception to the planned talk, organising to shut it down on Facebook, first attempting to block the entrances to the auditorium where it was due to take place and, when this failed, storming the auditorium in order to disrupt it.
According to the Campus Reform website, the activists tried to portray the talk as some sort of attack on their free speech.
“When Colin Kaepernick is out of a job, when the President of the United States calls Black Lives Matter a terrorist organization, where is our free speech?” shouted one through a megaphone.
Robinson was forced to abandon his talk — which he now says he will upload as a piece to camera — and instead attempted to field questions from the activists, but an exchange of views was for the most part impossible, with protestors occupying the stage with signs, shouting over him, and generally dominating the proceedings.
“I’m very depressed with how the event [went]. I realise free speech is dead,” commented College Republicans President Ari Boosalis.
“People were disrespectful, they were flipping off, they were not willing to have a conversation, all they wanted to do was yell ‘white supremacy!’ and call me a white supremacist. The protesters never wanted to be challenged.
“This was not free speech, they didn’t allow him to talk for the first 15 minutes. Even then, they were rude, they were flipping him off, they didn’t want to have a conversation,” he said, concluding that “Columbia failed. The Columbia administration failed.”