Listening to Tommy Robinson

What did I learn by giving the right-wing activist my ears for 90 minutes?

“Have you ever actually listened to Tommy Robinson?”

I was sitting in my friend’s kitchen, discussing the many depressing trends in society.

Tommy Robinson is a British anti-Islam campaigner, a nationalist agitator with a history of hooliganism, violence, and other crimes.

“If you actually listened to him speak”, continued my friend. “You see he’s not the simple thug the media make him out to be. He’s very articulate.”

I put my coffee cup down to better consider the idea.

“Very articulate. Very clever.” said my friend.

“Very dangerous.”

I was convinced I should find out more.

Half in the spirit of engaging with the arguments, and half in the spirit of not wanting to underestimate him, I queued up a podcast where I could hear Tommy Robinson speak about his views at length. It was Robinson’s second appearance on Jordan Peterson’s podcast, released Aug 29th 2025.

I am mindful of the risks of listening to controversial figures, without applying a protective salve of condemnation, but here’s a report of what I think I learnt from the exercise. I won’t have much to say about Tommy Robinson’s politics. There are plenty of people with strong views who would like to help you make your mind up if you have any doubts on that score.

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First of all, Tommy Robinson is indeed very articulate.

He tells a story about what is happening in the UK which weaves together public events (like the Southport murders) with his own biography and his own inflection about why things like this happen.

Jordan Peterson said he invited Robinson on the podcast to put to him a series of accusations. He does do this, providing Robinson with the excuse to justify himself and express his sense of being persecuted for his views.

I found myself thinking “I’m looking forward to fact-checking this”. I did fact-check some of it, too, but then I’m unusually invested in getting to the bottom of things: I have a professional interest in fact-checking, a disposition to disbelieve Tommy Robinson, and the heavy knowledge that I’m going to write about listening to him here. So not only is my fact-checking unrepresentative of his typical audience, I think it misses something fundamental.

That fundamental thing is that if you are disposed to believe Tommy Robinson (and Jordan Peterson, for that matter), they both appear completely reasonable. They are figures of scorn and ridicule for many, but if you are someone who has listened to them and endorsed their line of argument then that ridicule must seem to seriously miss the point.

Robinson presents himself as a wronged truth teller. The message he is selling incorporates his mischaracterisation by the mainstream, including the scorn and ridicule heaped on him. He uses this to help him tell his story.

I don’t know how typical this of the man, or whether it was a product of Peterson’s questions, but Robinson’s exposition of his values was phrased as a series of rebuttals - a sort of inoculation against the accusations which the mainstream media make against him. “They say I’m a racist” says Robinson, and then explains the multi-ethnic membership of the EDL. “They say I’m far right”, says Robinson, and then uses the accusation to explain away one of his assault charges as him fighting a Nazi who wanted to join his organisation¹.

(Robinson litters his talk with mention of “the evidence”, often in the negative: “You can’t find any evidence I did that”, “Nobody has proved I said that”. He’s obviously someone who has spent a lot of time in the court of public opinion, as well as the real courts, so perhaps the fixation with the evidence is understandable, but it does tend to make him sound more guilty: pleading “You can’t prove I did that” rather than “I didn’t do that”.)

Listening to Tommy Robinson I thought about what makes him so articulate. Rhetorically, he offers a message which hits both the epistemological and the moral. He makes arguments, evokes the evidence, but is also clear about what he values and what he thinks is right and wrong, making appeals to abstract principles which we probably all endorse, even if we reject how he applies them. An example would be fairness of treatment, in Robinson’s world something violated when some people in the UK are prosecuted for hateful speech (“Facebook crimes”) but others are not.

The edifice reminds me of listening to conspiracy theories. It is a whole world view, which you can’t pick apart by disproving individual claims. I am not saying that fact-checking Robinson is pointless, but it certainly isn’t sufficient. His moral account of the truths will resonate with some regardless of whether individual facts are disproved or not.

Like other conspiracy theorists, and like Peterson, Robinson mixes the commonly agreed, the plausible and the value-laden so seamlessly that it is hard to pick the precise point at which he moves from saying something you might agree with to something you definitely reject.

Another feature shared with Peterson is the tone of grievance - a large part of the discussion is taken up with either Peterson or Robinson complaining about being misrepresented in the media, or suppressed by the platforms on which they try to share their work. Robinson has a long history of legal troubles which he uses as the backbone for his personal story, a hero’s narrative of the “They tried to stop me” genre. Peterson even claims at one point that his videos being taken down from YouTube prove how right he is “If you’re over the target people get annoyed”.

These complaints point to a third strand of the rhetoric here. As well as constructing an epistemological and moral story, it is also an economic one. Peterson and Robinson have plenty of chances to promote their podcasts, films and social media profiles. Both have at their command detailed statistics on their reader, listener and viewer numbers. Both feel the pain when YouTube de-lists or de-prioritises their content, and celebrate the new regime at X. Outside of the establishment engine for getting paid for your opinion, they are forced to be more explicit, and more deliberate, about their monetisation strategy.

In conclusion, I learnt a lot from the exercise.

In the future I won’t underestimate Tommy Robinson, but I’ll also keep independent fact-checking close whenever I hear him again.

It was educational to hear Robinson position himself as for non-violence, for anti-racism, anti-homophobia. Even if you think his actions might belie that positioning, the act of endorsement is something. I feel even less inclined to see much value in characterising the entire right-wing as “fascist” and assuming that will persuade anyone (least of all anyone who is on the right).²

Listening to Robinson filled me with doubts about how to properly handle conspiracy theories and hate speech. His rhetorical judo at using suppression of his views - whether by legal means or commercial platforms - to play the injured party, presenting it as evidence of his correctness seems to put a higher cost on any suppressing action. (full disclosure: my instinct is pro-free speech anyway. I’d rather let people show their true colours in public than invest in more centralised arbitration on what is allowed)

Most importantly, what I take away is that these people sound reasonable. Robinson is reviled in the British media even more than Peterson, but he doesn’t just speak in grunts, or slurs, he makes arguments, evokes evidence and moral standards. I’m not signed up to his view of the world, but I can see why some people are.

Ultimately, I am less interested in celebrities like Peterson and Robinson - who seem compelled on their particular trajectories by the logic of both their personalities and the platforms to which they cater - than in the people who respond to them, the people who sign up, follow and are persuaded to some degree. How can you reasonably engage with this audience?

The numbers of people who are exposed to Robinson and persuaded by him will only increase without ready access to an alternative story. Because, at the heart, Robinson is talking about values - about a vision of what is happening in the UK specifically, and the wider West generally - his account will keep winning converts unless there is a counter-story which also talks about values and advances a positive story as an alternative to his vision.

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Keep reading for references and further reading on inoculation theory, using AI intelligently, and epistemic infrastructure.

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Inoculation theory - updates

Last week I wrote about inoculation theory of misinformation.

Since then I have been told about other meta-analyses which support the value of inoculation training in raising discernment (one, two), and also independent studies which use the same methods developed by the “misinformation as a virus” researchers but produce different findings:

Graham et al (2023) find no increase in discrimination, but a generalised increase in skepticism among their participants. Dickinson et al (2025) find the opposite: training increases discrimination.

The jury, it seems is still out. More from your loyal correspondent when he has it.

References:

Graham, M. E., Skov, B., Gilson, Z., Heise, C., Fallow, K. M., Mah, E. Y., & Lindsay, D. S. (2023). Mixed news about the bad news game. Journal of Cognition, 6(1), 58.

Dickinson, R., Makowski, D., Van Marwijk, H., & Ford, E. (2025). Bad News: Testing Gamified Inoculation Against Misinformation. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/7xgbt_v1

PODCAST: Deep Background: Using AI as a Co-Reasoning Partner with Mike Caulfield

This from the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast shows off Mike Caulfield’s perspective on LLMs as aids for education (and for fact-checking / research specifically). He takes a line on both why and how to engage with language models which is neither boosterish nor denialist. Highly recommended.

(Full disclosure: Mike recommends this newsletter at the end of the podcast, which was a pleasant surprise and, you’ll have to trust me, I heard only after I had made the independent decision to recommend the podcast here).

Link: Deep Background: Using AI as a Co-Reasoning Partner with Mike Caulfield

PODCAST: How blogging went legit, with Substack CEO Chris Best

Interesting, not just on the specific business history of Substack, but about the idea of creating new “epistemic infrastructure”

The Internet wiped out a lot of the business models that supported great media and culture. What replaced them in the first iteration—the attention land-grab—was phenomenally successful for the platforms and created a lot of value, but with a fundamental flaw: the incentives imposed on the company, then imposed on the network, created a bad mimetic evolutionary landscape. The networks we spend time on drive us nuts.

AND

If we frame Substack as epistemic infrastructure, it becomes interesting to ask: what properties do you want that infrastructure to have? Independence is one. If you have an opinion or a perspective that’s outside consensus, you should still be able to share it.

Freedom to publish is part of it. But another part is whether there’s a countervailing reward for being out of consensus but right — or even just out of consensus but interesting. That can be valuable too. One way epistemic infrastructure fails is if the punishment for independence always outweighs the reward. Then you get stagnation. We’ve seen that dynamic at different ideological poles. What we need is infrastructure that robustly supports independence.

Link: How blogging went legit, with Substack CEO Chris Best

PODCAST: Building institutions that bend towards truth, with Clara Collier of Asterisk Magazine

The theme of epistemic infrastructure is picked up in this other edition of the Complex Systems podcast.

Along the way, it contains some details about how a US reporting system for people who experienced adverse side effects of vaccination got swept up in panic about vaccine hesitancy and suppressed by Facebook, after pressure from the government. A bad look!

Link: Building institutions that bend towards truth, with Clara Collier of Asterisk Magazine

LINK: https://stopcitingai.com/

Passive aggressive flip-off, or deftly phrased media literacy intervention? You be the judge, and decide whether to send this link to the next person who copy/pastes a chatGPT response to you as an answer to a question:

https://stopcitingai.com/

…And finally

Back in 2015 this series, which illustrates Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand” in the style of Dr Seuss, was brilliant and charming. Now, in the age of generative AI, I wonder how it would land. Something like these images is now trivially easy to create, independent of any artistic skill, but I suspect that not only would the images not be as good, but no AI would come up with the perfect exactness of the choice to combine these two source materials.

Artist: Dr FaustusAU

Link to full series: https://www.deviantart.com/drfaustusau/gallery/54031345/red-right-hand

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Comments? Feedback? Help navigating trade-offs around freedom of speech? I am tom@idiolect.org.uk and on Mastodon at @tomstafford@mastodon.online

1. Fact-checking some of this after listening I found out that Peterson’s list of accusations against Robinson is selective. He covers some (such as this assault charge), but others are omitted, I don’t know why (these include embezzlement accusations, assault of a policeman, stalking/harassment of a journalist, and gambling debts

2. “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.” wrote George Orwell in 1946 (in “Politics and the English Language”).