The president of Saint Louis University’s Student Government Association (SGA) is facing calls for impeachment after leveraging his position to force the resignation of a vice president who criticized his support of Hamas and history of anti-semitic comments.
Nikolay Remizov, a junior at SLU, alleges that Marquis Govan abused his power by demanding that Remizov resign from his SGA role as vice president of international affairs, after Remizov exposed Govan’s pro-Hamas and anti-semitic posts on social media.
Marquis Govan, who ran for the student government’s chief position on a platform of “radical love” and being “a voice for all SLU students,” posted an image of two Hamas terrorists standing atop a tank, waving a Palestinian flag, to his Instagram story two weeks ago.
Nikolay Remizov, who served as vice president of international affairs, shared a screenshot of Govan’s story in the SLU Jewish Student Association (JSA) group chat.
Several other members of the JSA group chat chimed in, sharing a post on X in which Govan states that “things will get worse” due to “an increasing population of orthodox [J]ews,” and recounting a since-deleted post in which Govan allegedly expressed that “Orthodox Jews have got to be the root of evil.”
Shortly after learning that Remizov had criticized his anti-semetic posts, Govan sent a text message calling the vice president’s criticism “appalling” and “intolerable,” giving him a three hour time frame to meet within, or face “further action.”
According to a written complaint by Remizov to the Internal Affairs Committee, Govan presented two choices: he could either face impeachment, public shaming through an op-ed in the campus paper, and possible expulsion from the university; or resign from SGA for a period of one week.
Remizov, an international student from Russia, couldn’t afford to take the risk of losing his full-time student status, and complied with the resignation demand. If expelled, he would have no choice but to return to Russia and join the military.
In a statement to the University News, Govan denied ever issuing any threats, claiming to be a victim of racism: “None of that is true. I also think that a part of a layer is that one of the common machinations of anti-black racism is to always construe black men as being aggressive, unruly and threatening.”
Govan doubled down on his victim story, telling the campus paper that “it is never okay to construe the narrative that black men are somehow aggressive or threatening for a movement.”
Govan (20 years-old) went on to state that he forgives Remizov (18) “because of their [sic] youth and how young they [sic] are.”
[EDITOR’S NOTE: It appears that, in accordance with his radical leftist ideals, Govan used they/them pronouns in order to avoid assuming Remizov’s gender. To clarify, Remizov does not identify as “non-binary.”]
The New Guard reached out to Govan seeking an explanation of his stance on Hamas and the countless lives that have been taken at the hands of the terror organization since it initiated its offensive three weeks ago. He did not respond.
University officials were also reached for comment, but declined, citing student privacy policies.
SLU President Fred Pestello initially declined to make a public statement on the Israel-Hamas War until his silence was called out by a Young America’s Foundation and SLU alumnus, Dylan McCloskey.
The following day, Pestello released a milquetoast condemnation of Hamas on the university’s website.
American college students and university administrators must take a hardline stance against terror and in support of Israel and the Jewish people. Those who get behind and defend terrorist organizations, while they do have the right to free speech and expression, are truly misguided and wrong.
