Do you ever feel that you’re not fully up-to-date with the opinions of Steven Yaxley-Lennon (aka “Tommy Robinson”)? Well fear not, because the embattled free-speech warrior, who the “mainstream media” has fought to silence – last seen, er, speaking to the Oxford Union in June – has a new podcast on Spotify!
According to the blurb, “after years of censorship, deplatforming, and being shut out of major platforms, Tommy Robinson is back with a new podcast featuring long-form conversations with some of the world’s most interesting, influential, and controversial figures… Expect honest debate, challenging perspectives, untold stories, and conversations that many platforms once tried to silence.”
Well. In the intro video, Robinson exhorts viewers to “be the media” and “spread these people’s voices” – people like his first interviewee, Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a Dutch far-right commenter with tradwife looks and millions of social media followers who self-describes as a “shield-maiden of the far right”.
Vlaardingerbroek is a former lawyer and philosophy student who has discovered that it’s possibly more lucrative to join the European right-wing content circus, and whose right to enter the UK was revoked in January, with her presence being deemed by the home secretary as “not conducive to the public good”.
Suggested Reading
Tommy Robinson and the dark art of turning words inside out
Her posts on X tend to use definitely-not-nazi-adjacent language like “acknowledging the ethnocultural continuity of Europe’s peoples as crucial for the preservation of Europe, we demand an immediate and total halt to immigration and the creation of a comprehensive European Remigration system.”
So what Big Topics do Tommy and Eva get into? Following some mutual adoration, the first half of the conversation focuses on Vlaardingerbroek’s “journey” – her political awakening among the liberal elites of Amsterdam, her protests against Covid and the “prison” of lockdown. There is also some light conspiracising about Davos and the World Economic Forum, before segueing into an advert for a definitely-not-nazi-adjacent clothing brand called “Iron Trinity”.
We then get into the real ideological meat of the chat, as Vlaardingerbroek reminisces about the talk which really made her internationally famous – her speech at CPAC Hungary, the right-wing conference, in 2024. Titled “The Great Replacement is not a theory – it’s a reality,” it was removed by YouTube for hate speech but remained on X, where it reached tens of millions of views, in part thanks to being amplified by Elon Musk.
In case you’re not familiar with it, “The Great Replacement” is the idea that white Europeans are being replaced physically, culturally and politically by nonwhite people, and that this immigrant “conquest” is being covertly abetted by elite figures. Originally explicitly-antisemitic, it evolved over the years and now tends to be framed in anti-Islamic terms.
In France, its substance was adopted by mainstream conservative figures, including Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. The 2019 Christchurch attacker, who killed 51 people at two mosques, titled his 74-page manifesto “The Great Replacement” and published it minutes before the attack. Months later, a shooter in El Paso posted a manifesto alluding to the “great replacement,” framing a “Hispanic invasion of Texas” as justification and expressing support for the Christchurch shooter.
In 2022, a gunman in Buffalo killed ten people at a supermarket in a majority-Black area. His manifesto closely paralleled and in places duplicated the Christchurch text. The Great Replacement theory also directly underpins much of the current UK far-right rhetoric around the need for “remigration” and the “threat” posed to “Christian values” by specifically non-white and Muslim immigration.
Suggested Reading
‘I photographed the Tommy Robinson march – here’s what I saw’
So what we have here is the world’s largest audio company happily offering a platform to someone who has been banned from the UK to openly peddle as fact a theory which is a known far-right and neo-nazi talking point. This does not, overall, feel great.
Meanwhile, Tommy proves quite the game interviewer, willing to chime in throughout with helpful facts and stats to support Vlaardingerbroek’s points and present himself as the figurehead of a mainstream movement whose time has come.
He scoffs at the “mainstream” media’s assessment of attendances at his marches, claiming they had attracted crowds in the “millions”. He declares support for the Austrian far-right activist Martin Sellner, who advocates a wholesale ban on non-white immigration and has admitted to “previously” being a neo-nazi.
Robinson also cites known misinformation about the average numbers of children born to Muslim families in both France and the UK. He claims that “25 children were assaulted or raped by migrants just in hotels,” a figure with no known source. He tells Vlaardingerbroek that migrants in one hotel committed “12 attacks… one every day over 12 days,” again unverifiable.
He also makes sure to continue the grift, openly courting corporate sponsors for his Unite the Kingdom rallies and his Urban Scoop “news” network. Brands that are willing to be associated with his views have the opportunity to connect with an audience of “potentially millions worldwide” while supporting “independent media, future events, and the protection of free speech.” After all, these “fitness holidays” he keeps going on – not to mention the hayfever medication which, he says, explains his sniffles and twitchy countenance – don’t pay for themselves.
Spotify, of course, has endured previous controversies around its approach to what it considers acceptable. In 2017, the platform removed dozens of white-power bands from its roster, saying it does not tolerate content that favours hatred or incites violence and removes such material once alerted.
In January 2020 it removed user-generated playlists glorifying Hitler after they were flagged by the Auschwitz Memorial and the Times of Israel. Still, though, a September 2022 Anti Defamation League investigation found violent, extremist music remained prevalent while the platform largely declined to act. A study in October 2024 by GNET (Global Network on Extremism and Technology) concluded that xenophobic and hateful music and playlists persist, indicating more needs to be done.
Spotify’s former chief executive Daniel Ek said in 2022 that “we don’t take on the position of being content censor”. His successors, Alex Norström and Gustav Söderström, are yet to offer their perspective on what is and isn’t a viable revenue stream for the business.
The company’s “Platform Rules” around acceptable content offer few concrete indicators as to whether peddling racist conspiracies is in fact allowed – but they do specifically state that “promoting or glorifying hate groups and their associated images and/or symbols” is prohibited. Whether or not this might cover using language explicitly associated with actual neo-Nazis, remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, Tommy Robinson is promising to post new interviews on a weekly basis with other fearless truth-seekers from the hard right, all delivered to eager listeners by a company which made €4.5bn in revenue in Q1 2026 alone. Who needs BBC radio when you can get the “truth” delivered to you in podcast form?
Most popular
Pakistan’s solar miracle – how the hell did they do it?
Andy Burnham v London
Meet Young Bob, the teen Christian nationalist star of the UK’s hard right
A history of Brexit in 256 disasters
