Tommy Robinson Won’t Be Coming to the U.S.

It’s funny how conservatives always want the rules they put on all of us to be different for them. 

Plans for a fundraising trip to the U.S. are off for English Defence League (EDL) founder Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson after he was not granted a visa in time to meet with Republican members of Congress in Washington, DC this week.

According to the Guardian, Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum, which invited Yaxley-Lennon to the United States, said he applied for a visa at the US Embassy in London, but reaized it will “take a while for him to be allowed to travel here. Yaxley-Lennon is currently out on bail on a contempt of court charge, and has a long string of criminal convictions in Britain. He has also been denied entry into the United States in the past and was jailed in 2013 after pleading guilty for attempting to enter the country by using a passport in someone else’s name for a visit. Anti-Muslim actvist Pamela Geller has claimed that that she was involved in “sneaking Yaxley-Lennon into the country,” but it is not apparent that she was investigated or prosecuted for such an attempt.

A former member of the neo-fascist British National Party, Yaxley-Lennon founded the English Defence League in 2009, and the group is best known for staging violent demonstrations against Islam. It was believed he could have made more than £1 million ($1.2 million USD) from this trip, and that prompted British lawmakers from both major parties to write to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urging him to ban Yaxley-Lennon from visiting.

Fifty-five British lawmakers from both major political parties recently wrote to the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, requesting that Washington ban Yaxley-Lennon from visiting. They said they were concerned he would use a US visa to launch a fundraising tour. Curiously, this comes just after PayPal banned him from using their platform, saying he did not fit within the company’s user guidelines and would never be able to use their services again. “We do not allow PayPal services to be used to promote hate, violence, or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory,” the company said in a statement.

Yaxley-Lennon and Gavin McInness, founder of the neo-fascist Proud Boys, are slated to visit Australia in December for a five-city speaking tour, although there is an effort to prevent them from entering that country as well.

It is possible Yaxley-Lennon could be granted a US visa at a later date, according to Daniel Pipes.