Will David Vance make good on his promise to publish ‘Free Voices’ and disagreement on AltNewsMedia?

After what felt like an unnecessarily protracted affair, Tommy Robinson has now been jailed for contempt of court due to his reckless actions outside a Leeds's courthouse in 2018.

With a tad of naivety, I hoped that having Robinson’s wrongdoing conclusively demonstrated in an open court would go some way towards taming the conspiracies and misinformation propagated by some of Robinson’s more zealous fans. Alas, this was not to be and I made peace with the fact that I would spend eternity dealing with proudly ignorant #FreeTommy fans via my twitter timeline.

Criminal activity aside, one other deeply worrying aspect of this whole sorry affair has been certain figures within Robinson’s camp who have made it their duty to spread misinformation and engender false narratives about state persecution.

Not only has this muddied the water, it has almost certainly helped inform a dangerous hostility towards actual journalists and law enforcement, as can be seen here. Also, I’ve no doubt that many of my fellow working-class Brits who earn a modest living have chipped in financially towards Robinson’s endless appeals for his legal costs. Well, why wouldn’t you if what he’s saying about state persecution is true?

But almost nothing Robinson and his camp have said on this issue is true, meaning that donors to his endless legal battles have effectively been conned by a criminal whose ego and persecution complex is so strong that he is incapable of apologising for almost causing the collapse of several trials for child rape.

This brings me to a wonderful piece of work by Damo over on his blog titled: ‘Contempt and Conspiracy – The Case Against Tommy Robinson'.

Damo dismantles the more popular conspiracies surrounding Robinson’s conviction whilst also taking to task some of Robinson’s most egregious propagandists. I can’t recommend it highly enough (or anything that he writes for that matter).

One of the more energetic drummers for Team Tommy and the Persecutions is a man called David Vance. When David isn’t engaging in hash tag demagoguery, he appears to run the platform AltNewsMedia. Which brings me to a rather interesting situation.

David has recently declared via his Twitter feed that AltNewsMedia ‘isn’t afraid to let free voices have their way’, even for those he doesn’t 'always agree’ with. And on that principle David published an article that was deemed too controversial for Tommy Robinson’s platform, ‘TR News’—and subsequently removed.

I must confess to a tad of scepticism regarding David’s commitment to platforming ‘free voices’, especially those that he disagrees with. But I’m very pleased to see Damo has put these claims to the test with the below email shared via his Twitter page:

Now, a cynic may view David’s claim to publish such pieces to be an empty virtue-signal. But I hope to be proved wrong as much as I look forward to re-reading Damo’s excellent piece on AltNewsMedia in the near future.

Stephen Knight is host of The #GSPodcast. You can listen to The Godless Spellchecker Podcast here, and support it by becoming a patron here.