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Robin Simcox’s connections to anti-Muslim conspiracy theories raise concerns across the Atlantic
The Government that brought you the Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities’ report – which effectively claimed to find no evidence of institutional racism in the UK – has just awarded a top counter-extremism post to a man with alarming ties to far-right networks promoting anti-Semitism, racism, white nationalism and anti-Muslim conspiracy theories. A range of experts, including a former senior State Department official under John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, have spoken out against these theories.
- The new Lead Commissioner for the UK Government’s Commission for Countering Extremism (CCE) recently spoke at an American anti-immigrant hate group that regularly circulated anti-Semitic, white nationalist materials.
- He also promoted racist conspiracy theorists, including a proponent of the ‘Great Replacement’ ideology which inspired recent far-right terror attacks, Byline Times can exclusively reveal.
- The new Government appointee even has close ties to a senior Trump administration official with a history of promoting anti-Muslim conspiracy theories. A former advisor to then US Secretary of State John Kerry (currently US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate in the Biden administration) has now spoken out about the danger of falsely equating British Muslim community organisations with the Muslim Brotherhood.
- The Home Office, however, has doubled down – refusing to condemn the appointee’s shocking affiliations and endorsements, while insisting on his “wealth of expertise”.
Robin Simcox, former Margaret Thatcher Fellow at the Heritage Foundation – a right-wing think-tank in Washington DC which had close ties to the Trump administration – was appointed to the post of interim Lead Commissioner by Home Secretary Priti Patel on Wednesday 31 March for an initial six-month period. His job is “to advise on how to tackle extremism in all its forms, including on the future role of the commission and on how government could further harness innovative thinking within the academic and think-tank sector on tackling extremism.”
As a long term research fellow at the influential Henry Jackson Society think tank, Simcox was brought into the organisation along with then associate director, Douglas Murray, and worked alongside Raheem Kassam, who went on to be the editor of Breitbart London, and one of the closest associates of Steve Bannon, campaign manager for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election.
But Simcox has a long track record of working closely with organisations and individuals which have promoted far-right extremism. He did not respond to questions about his affiliations, and the Commission declined to comment.
Speaking to the Heart of the White Nationalist Anti-immigrant Movement
In November 2019, Simcox spoke at a panel event organised by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a far-right Washington DC think-tank founded by the late eugenicist and white supremacist John Tanton.
The CIS is a Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) designated “hate group” due to “its repeated circulation of white nationalist and antisemitic writers in its weekly newsletter” over a ten year period, as well as its hiring of discredited ‘race scientist’ Jason Richwine who believes that Hispanic immigrants have lower IQs than “native whites”.
“It is mind-boggling that the UK Government would appoint a man to head its Commission for Countering Extremism who interacts with hardline anti-immigrant organisations and apparently promotes completely discredited claims about the supposed infiltration of Muslim institutions by radical Islamists”
Mark Potok, former senior leader at the SPLC for 20 years, now Senior Fellow at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right
The SPLC – a civil rights law firm which tracks extremist groups in the US – found that the CIS had published and disseminated over 2,000 articles promoting white nationalist extremism, including over 1,700 from the alt-right platform VDARE consisting of anti-black, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic commentary as well as Holocaust denial. VDARE is well-known for its support for white nationalism and scientific racism. Other anti-Semitic materials distributed by the CIS included articles by white supremacist Holocaust denier John Friend, a piece describing Jews as “predators” published by what the ADL calls a “virulently anti-Semitic website, Rense.com”, an article by William Regnery who founded the anti-Semitic journal The Occidental Quarterly, as well as pieces by prominent anti-Semite Kevin MacDonald who believes Jews are genetically driven to destroy Western societies.
The CIS has a long history of anti-Semitism according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which documents how in 2013, CIS fellow David North appeared on the anti-Semitic radio show of John Friend. The previous year, CIS circulated an article to its members by Virgina Abernathy who serves on The Occidental Quarterly’s editorial board; and in May 2012, CIS legal analyst Jon Feere provided quotes for the American Free Press, a conspiracy-oriented anti-Semitic newspaper run by long-time anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, Willis Carto.
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The panel event addressed by Simcox was to discuss a new report published by the CIS promoting the idea of a link between refugees and Islamist terrorism. The event was hosted and chaired by CIS executive director Mark Krikorian, who has contributed articles to Tanton’s racist journal, The Social Contract (TSC), which regularly publishes white nationalist literature and is edited by gay-bashing white supremacist Wayne Lutton.
Byline Times spoke to Mark Potok, a former senior leader at the SPLC for 20 years and now Senior Fellow at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR) which hosted Simcox’s predecessor, former Lead Commissioner Sara Khan, at a major conference in 2019.
“No person who takes the demonising propaganda from the CIS seriously should have anything to do with counter-extremism work. The reality is that the CIS is part of a right-wing extremist set of institutions organised by a racist activist to oppose immigration in virtually all instances,” said Potok.
While the group poses as an impartial and scholarly analyst of immigration, he said, “It is neither. In fact, while the CIS has produced an enormous amount of ‘studies’ relating to immigration, the bottom line is that the organisation has never found any aspect at all of immigration that is positive. The reality is that the CIS is a key part of a set of organisations set up by John Tanton, a racist and eugencist who almost single-handedly built the American anti-immigration movement around a core of rancid white nationalism.”
The CIS was founded by John Tanton in 1985 as a project of his Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Tanton was a supporter of what he called “passive eugenics”.
From 1984 to 1995, Tanton’s FAIR received funding from the Pioneer Fund, a neo-Nazi eugenics foundation founded in 1937 to support research into “white intellectual superiority” and “race betterment.” Tanton also raised funds for CIS over two decades and was integrally involved in establishing its structure and direction, including Krikorian’s appointment, with numerous interlinkages between CIS and TSC staff. CIS researcher Jason Richwine heavily cited racist Pioneer Fund-backed scientists in his controversial PhD dissertation on race and IQ.
Promoting a ‘Great Replacement’ Theorist
If Robin Simcox’s participation in a CIS event wasn’t enough, his own direct endorsement of anti-Muslim conspiracy theories raises further urgent questions.
In a 2017 report for the Heritage Foundation where he was Margaret Thatcher Fellow, titled The Trump Administration Must Investigate the Muslim Brotherhood’s U.S. Activities, Simcox cites as authoritative sources various organisations and networks that promote discredited racist conspiracy theories. Most prominent among them is Dr Lorenzo Vidino, whom Simcox cites to support the idea that an American Muslim civil society group, the Council for American and Islamic Relations (CAIR), is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Yet according to Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative, Vidino is an American academic with direct ties to far-right hate groups in the US who advocates the racist ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory – the view that ‘native’ white populations are being replaced by non-white immigrants. In 2005, when asked if Europeans were witnessing “the end of Europe” by FrontPage magazine (the far-right publication of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black activist David Horowitz), Dr Vidino said: “Europe as we knew it 30 years ago is long gone. Demography doesn’t lie: in a couple of decades non-ethnic Europeans will represent the majority of the population in many European cities and a large percentage of them will be Muslim.”