1/ I'm still shocked to my core at how powerful the Alt Right has become in the US. @therealroseanne's tweet about Tommy Robinson brings it home. Reading his Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Rob…) he seems to have followed the alt-Right playbook. We need to start paying attention...
2/ He has moved away from 'crude' ultra nationalism (familiar to the 1930s fascists) to nativist pro-white anti-Muslim activism which looks just like Trump and the alt-right. He's cleverly increased his international profile, like his more respectable ideological cousin Farage.
3/ He built support from the fertile ground of the alt-right Breitbart crowd in USA. Now we see the result. He used to be a minor figure in our politics, ridiculed and then ignored (such that his English Defence League collapsed).Now he's getting support from major US celebrities
4/ And Robinson has been quite clever about this. He's set himself up as a 'guerrilla reporter' like the Brett O'Keefe character in Homeland (and @realalexjones in real life), reporting on grooming criminal trials involving Muslim men. It's great for him. He can't lose.
5/ He reports and makes the argument that the 'mainstream media' aren't reporting, even though he knows that there are reporting restrictions during a UK trial which prevent them reporting more than the basic facts, which means most of the media just stay away until it's over
6/ So he reports to his followers through social media, and he makes out he is the lone voice of reason in a country too terrified of offending Muslims to report 'the truth', which anyone who reads our newspapers will know is nonsense (e.g. the Guardian theguardian.com/commentisfree/…)
7/ And then he gets arrested, which to his followers - and especially through the Breitbart/@therealroseanne/@Nigel_Farage distortion lens - appears that he is being 'silenced' by the 'authorities' which is total rubbish but in today's filter bubbles it doesn't matter
8/ He is given a suspended sentence a few months ago for doing this and potentially prejudicing a trial before it's done. Great for him. He knows that he can now report again and get arrested, put in prison for a bit and in his followers' eyes he becomes a free speech martyr
9/ Meanwhile, he is playing to an international audience - the same international audience who tuned in en masse for the Alfie Evans case (look at the replies to @therealroseanne's tweet - Alfie is there repeatedly. And soon he will hook the ultimate alt-right fish, Trump himself
10/ It's frightening because you can see the direction of travel. It can only strengthen extremists like Tommy Robinson who can suck energy from their powerful US cousins. And so a fringe figure becomes an important one. Scary. /end
11/ We now know more about what Tommy Robinson did. We know that he *admitted* to a contempt of court in relation to his 'reporting' of the trial, which included statements which could have prejudiced the jury and led to a mistrial or retrial. More here thesecretbarrister.com/2018/05/25/wha…
12/ But the thread still stands. Robinson 'won' even if he is prison. It doesn't matter how many withering put-downs are doled out to his supporters - their narrative won't be dislodged. In fact, the more disdainful and mocking the put downs, the more it strengthens their resolve
13/ Because the Master Narrative of an Islamic take-over of (formerly) Great Britain (reproduced below from @hugorifkind's excellent piece) has built into it a useful protective framework which prevents all mainstream media being trusted as they're part of the mass-appeasement 
14/ And - whilst it is interesting and important that Robinson admitted to the contempt of court, the concern of his supporters is that they see him being imprisoned *for reporting*. See the highly influential Drudge Report tweet and coverage 👇
15/ We know from @BarristerSecret and others that Robinson appears to have flagrantly breached the terms of a previous suspended sentence by reporting again on a grooming trial in a highly prejudicial manner - putting the whole trial at significant risk.
16/ I imagine that it will take more than a careful explanation of the UK's criminal court system to dislodge that narrative - and our reporting restrictions which will sound pretty weird to Americans anyway. The point is that this all fits into the Master Narrative nonetheless
17/ The worst part is that Robinson appears to have done this all for self-interested reasons. If he cared about securing convictions for the defendants then he wouldn't have risked derailing the entire trial for his ranting broadcasts. This is a fundamentally selfish exercise.
18/ It's the (alleged) victims who would suffer if the trial was derailed. Meanwhile, Robinson has hugely increased his international profile and will probably be back as soon as he leaves prison as a 'citizen journalist' or whatever he now says he is, with more money and profile
