They are the victimisers who clothe themselves in the garb of victimhood. “Free speech” is their mantra, but it is nothing more than a political ploy, a ruse, a term the far right wilfully abuse to spread hatred. The arrest and jailing for contempt of court of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – not “Tommy Robinson”, a name he revealingly took from another football hooligan when he founded the far-right English Defence League – has quickly been mythologised by the international far right as yet more martyrdom. It is victimisation of brave truth-tellers, they screech, by an establishment at war with western culture.

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I am heavily restricted in what I can write about Yaxley-Lennon. That’s because I too could be in contempt of court for fatally undermining the right of people to a fair trial. Yaxley-Lennon already had a suspended sentence for this offence, and was warned he would go to jail if his behaviour again risked the collapse of a trial. He is no martyr to freedom of speech, just a career criminal with a history of mortgage fraud, football hooliganism and assault whose craving for publicity put a critical court case at risk.

And here is the wider point: the obsessive tactical misuse of “free speech” by an ascendant far right. Roseanne Barr, a once celebrated US comedian, has had her primetime ABC show dropped because of a gratuitously racist tweet. “Alt-right” campaigners abound on social media screeching about yet another assault on freedom. But Barr remains entitled to spray her bigotry across social media, and to keep retweeting self-pitying justifications for her behaviour, and ABC is entitled not to give her a show. US far-right types such as Richard Spencer hold “free speech rallies”, while Yaxley-Lennon held a “day for freedom” in Britain. When Katie Hopkins was fired by a leading radio station, her far-right supporters again construed it as an attack on free speech.

There is a chasm separating the right to free speech and the privilege of being given a platform to make your views known. No one has a right to a platform. If I offer you a megaphone, and then take it back off you, you can continue to say what you like, just not with my megaphone. The vast majority of people do not have regular TV slots, or newspaper columns, or radio shows – that does not mean their freedom of speech is under assault. Yes, I would argue that platforms are not fairly distributed: the vast majority of Britons support renationalisation of utilities, for example, or higher taxes on the rich, but those opinions are not adequately represented in the media. But that is a separate argument from freedom of expression.

If student unions refuse to provide a platform to those they deem bigots, that is not an attack on freedom of speech. They are simply telling the bigots: you may have the legal right to say things we find offensive or even disgraceful, but that does not mean we are compelled to provide you with the advantage of amplifying such bigotry to our audience. It is striking that when the bigotry of a far-right figure is verbally challenged, their apologists will screech that freedom of speech is under attack. For the far right, “freedom of speech” means “the right to say hateful things without being challenged”.

But those on the far right do not believe in freedom at all. They call for the banning of mosques, banning of burqas, mass deportation of migrants and refugees, clamping down on civil liberties. They portray their opponents as traitors. Condemning the likes of Yaxley-Lennon instantly brings threats of violence on social media: recent messages I’ve received include “Owen Jones your get what’s coming to you very soon you prick”, “Until one day one of us bumps into you I can’t wait”, “I hope someone fills your jaw you little prick”, “Remember places, traitors’ faces, you will pay for crimes”, ad infinitum..

They know that the struggles of women, ethnic minorities and LGBTQ people have shifted attitudes. Once-acceptable prejudices that rationalised overt discrimination and persecution have been driven from the mainstream. The cry of “free speech” is simply a ruse to turn back the clock and in doing so justify stripping away hard-won rights and freedoms from women and minorities. The far right surfs the backlash, claiming that people are oppressed because they are white in societies where minorities are more likely to be in poverty, in low-paid jobs and underrepresented in politics and the media. It feeds on the grievances of white people who are oppressed and exploited but not because of their whiteness, but because of their class.

Those in this new far-right wave claim to be at war with the mainstream media, but they are, in part, bastard children of it. The mainstream press endlessly propagate myths, distortions, half-truths and outright lies about Muslims, immigrants, refugees, LGBTQ people, women and benefit claimants. A few years ago, courageous reporter Richard Peppiatt resigned from the Daily Star in protest at being asked to write lies about Muslims. “The lies of a newspaper in London can get a bloke’s head caved in down an alley in Bradford,” he wrote. Polls show Britons drastically overestimate the number of Muslims and immigrants, the level of teenage pregnancies and so forth. Why? Because of dishonest media coverage that provides fertile recruitment grounds for the far right.

Ah, let’s just debate them and defeat them that way, cry some self-identifying liberals. I spend much of my existence debating with people who, say, oppose nationalising the railways or raising taxes on the rich. These are legitimate perspectives. Bigotry is not. To debate bigotry is to legitimise hatred based on lies, as though it was like any other political perspective, to agree or disagree with as you see fit. We know where radicalisation can lead. There are the hate crimes that happen in our communities and streets every day. Then there is the murder of Jo Cox, the MP, by Thomas Mair, a neo-Nazi terrorist who gave his name to court as “death to traitors, freedom for Britain”. Darren Osborne, a terrorist who ploughed his van into a mosque, was partly radicalised by far-right social media. Anders Breivik, a Norwegian neo-Nazi terrorist slaughtered dozens of young socialists because of the far-right trope that the left were accomplices in the Islamisation of Europe.

The far right has always embraced the discourse of victimhood and persecution. Its cynical embrace of “free speech” is a dishonest ruse to propagate hatred, nothing more. If it managed to seize power, it would swiftly strip away the rights and freedoms of those it deemed treacherous opponents. Freedom of speech is precious indeed. Just don’t be deceived by a resurgent far right for which it is a rhetorical device to attack democracy, and nothing more.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist