US cash turned Tommy Robinson into the poster boy of UK far right

Robinson was suddenly flush with US funds that transformed him from rightwing agitator to self-styled “citizen journalist”, with slick videos and a vast social media following that helped his Unite the Kingdom demonstration draw 110,000 protesters to the streets of London on Saturday.

Money from one man – US tech billionaire Robert Shillman – ties Robinson to a Who’s Who of far-right influencers with millions of followers online. Among them was US conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was murdered in Utah last week.

Robinson’s reinvention for the social media age, which expanded his heavy focus on Muslims allegedly involved in child sexual abuse, was the result of his “Shillman fellowship” in 2017 to rightwing Canadian website Rebel Media – now called Rebel News – to the tune of about £85,000 over a year.

Shillman, who calls himself “Dr Bob”, citing his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is said to be a key figure in the transatlantic “counter-jihad” movement. He has invested in about 20 fellowships, working with Rebel News and rightwing thinktank the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC), where the aim is “to promote freedom and to expose the lies of the radical left, the Islamist movement, and their allies in the media”.

Shillman “fellows” at Rebel News included Katie Hopkins, the former reality TV star, who made a documentary on “the mass slaughter of South Africa’s whites” in September 2018, long before the conspiracy theory was repeated by Donald Trump in the White House. The idea of a white genocide in South Africa based on attacks on farmers has been repeatedly debunked. Soon after, Rebel News brought in a new Shillman fellow, Laura Loomer, who is now a powerful conspiracy theorist with such proximity to Trump that she is referred to as the president’s “de facto national security adviser”.

Shillman, a former board member of Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces, hosts a pro-Israel podcast and also funds fellowships through the DHFC thinktank. Its founder, David Horowitz, was an anti-Muslim ideologue described as the “intellectual godfather” of the Trump administration in an obituary when he died in April this year. Another DHFC Shillman fellow was Raheem Kassam, a former Ukip adviser who set up the UK arm of Breitbart News, where Steve Bannon was chair. Bannon, who spoke at Robinson’s rally , once reportedly called him “the backbone of this country”.

At about the same time Shillman’s money was flowing to Robinson, Hopkins and Loomer, he paid more than $200,000 towards the legal fees of Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders in his successful defence against allegations of hate speech directed at Muslims and Moroccans. Wilders spoke at two “free Tommy” rallies in 2018 and Robinson visited him in the Netherlands.

Shillman also championed Kirk, funding speaking tours of the US and backing his non-profit Turning Point USA. Its British offshoot, Turning Point UK, held a vigil in London on Friday after Kirk was shot dead while speaking at a university in Utah.

Robinson – whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – ended his fellowship shortly before Rebel News took on Hopkins, another leading light of Britain’s right wing, who also spoke at the rally . The DHFC also promoted far-right US commentator Candace Owens, who is married to former Turning Point UK chair George Farmer. Owens, who has 7 million followers on X, received the Annie Taylor award for courage from the DHFC for opposing political correctness, before it cut ties with her for suggesting Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.

The Middle East Forum (MEF), a rightwing thinktank that promotes US interests in the region, paid for the stage outside the Old Bailey in 2018 and sent staff to support Robinson. The MEF and the DHFC also invited Robinson to speak in the US in 2018 but he was denied a visa.

More recently, Robinson – who claims he is penniless – is said to have received funds for legal fees from Elon Musk and Tristan Tate, the brother of the toxic masculinity influencer Andrew Tate, though Musk has never confirmed the payments.

Musk, who revived Robinson’s social media fortunes by reversing a Twitter ban when he bought the platform in 2022 and renamed it X, has earned millions of dollars by reinstating and promoting polemicists such as Robinson, according to the US Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit promoting online safety. Robinson, who has 1.5 million followers on X, still regularly features on Rebel News with its editor-in-chief, the self-styled “rebel commander” Ezra Levant, who runs online fundraisers for Robinson, the former leader of the English Defence League. Joe Mulhall, research director at the anti-fascism organisation Hope Not Hate, who tracks far-right groups, said: “Ezra Levant was the one who turned round and first professionalised Robinson’s content, and paid for him to be able to do that, but also made clear that there was no opportunity that should be lost in terms of making money.

“So Rebel Media was really fundamental to that. And the Tommy Robinson who calls himself a journalist did not exist before Rebel Media.”

Speaking about the broader cohort of influencers funded by Shillman and supported by the rightwing thinktanks, Mulhall added: “The long tail of that scene, I think, is its huge influence on politics, even in the White House.”

Shillman declined to comment, and the DHFC and Robinson did not respond to requests.

Photograph by LNP