Brendan O'Neill: The British elites’ crazy rage against Elon Musk

The great and the good of the UK are blaming Musk for the riots. This is total madness.

I always knew Britain’s liberals were secretly illiberal. That our chattering classes who genuflect at the altar of ‘human rights’ would happily snatch away the rights of anyone who says something offensive online. That these dwellers of the leafy suburbs who weep over the jailing of dissidents in China will chortle over the sacking or blacklisting of dissidents at home, whether it’s women who think you can’t have a knob and be a lesbian or ex-Muslims whose criticisms of Islam are a tad too salty. And yet even I’ve been shocked by their frothing rage against Elon Musk in recent days. By their priestly demands that X be censured and possibly even wiped from the web. It’s one of the most batshit things I’ve seen in ages.

It’s not enough to call this a ‘mask-off moment’. It’s more like the phoney liberals have ripped their masks to shreds and stomped them into the dirt for good measure. Their rage is linked to the riots currently rocking the UK. Musk’s own tweets, they say, not least his chatter about Britain being on the road to ‘civil war’, have helped to whip up the mayhem. Worse, his ‘free-speech absolutism’, as one ‘liberal’ magazine snottily refers to it, has meant that every tosser with a smartphone has been able to tweet their inflammatory views on the riots and even to spread misinformation. In essence, says a writer for the Guardian, Musk has been ‘leading from behind on UK thuggery and race riots’.

Got that? The reason Britain is going to shit is not because of any internal rot but because a billionaire in Texas said ‘civil war’ on the internet. Glad we cleared that up. Even worse than the great and the good’s shameless deflection tactics – where they try to pin the blame for their own failures on a foreigner with money – is their tinpot solutions to this supposed problem. It might be time, says that sexagenarian Marxian in a leather jacket, Paul Mason, to ‘pull the plug’ on X entirely. Yesteryear’s tyrants smashed up printing presses and chased booksellers out of town – today’s want to switch off a website on which no fewer than half a billion souls regularly share their thoughts and feelings.

They really have taken leave of their senses. Musk’s ‘horrific version of Twitter’ is ‘a bit like Paris under Nazi occupation’, says Peter Jukes of Byline Times, the preferred publication of rich liberals who’ve been in a state of red mist since the plebs voted for Brexit eight years ago. Just like Paris in the 1940s, says Jukes, some are fleeing Musk’s X, while others are sticking around to ‘work for liberation’. The narcissism of it. Imagine thinking that keeping your X account open so you can continue spouting bollocks in your echo chamber is as brave as when Parisians stayed in Paris to resist Nazi rule.

Any mention of the Nazis is usually a reliable sign of madness. And so it is with the outburst of Muskphobia among Britain’s influencers. Musk’s antics on X led ‘straight to’ rioting in the UK, says Will Hutton of the Observer (my italics). Do they really believe this? Do they really believe the reason that young shirtless fella looted the Greggs in Hull is because Elon Musk said ‘#TwoTierKeir’ on X? Apparently they do. And there’s only one solution. ‘Pass a bill closing down Twitter in the UK’, says barrister and arch Remoaner Jessica Simor. That she said this on Twitter at least provided us with fleeting comic relief amid the elite’s lunacy. Does she know she can deactivate her account? Can someone tell her?

It’s the haughtiness of Britain’s influential haters of Musk that is most irksome. Alastair Campbell accused Musk of talking ‘utter shite’ about Britain and its riots. That’s big talk from the undisputed king of shite, the man whose BS about Iraq helped to start a war in which tens of thousands of Arabs perished. Look, I know Musk’s words hurt liberals’ feelings, but at least they don’t hurt people’s lives and limbs.

‘Elon Musk’s menace to democracy is intolerable’, pronounced Edward Luce of the Financial Times. That’s the paper that regularly made the case for overthrowing the largest democratic vote in British history. ‘Democracies can no longer ignore’ the threat posed by Musk’s X, says Luce. I don’t like the term dogwhistle, but this is a tyranny dogwhistle, isn’t it? It’s a nod and a wink at ‘democracies’ to clamp down on the ‘menace’ of unfettered online speech. Lewis Goodall of The News Agents – a podcast hosted by ex-BBC staff for whom the BBC wasn’t quite wanky enough – wonders if ‘unmediated platforms’ like Musk’s X are ‘beyond redemption’. ‘Should we stop using it?’, he wonders. Please, yes.

Unmediated platform – there it is, the true dread of the cultural elites, the real fear that lurks behind their pseudo-radical posturing against the billionaire owner of X. It’s the relatively unfettered nature of X since Musk took over, its transformation into a platform where you can mostly say what you want, that truly horrifies the illiberal liberals. They cannot believe there exists a platform on which anyone – even people who didn’t go to Oxford, who didn’t vote Remain and who don’t think people with penises can be women – can say things. That their dread of Musk is at root a dread of freedom of speech was made clear by Alan Rusbridger, former editor of the Guardian. The problem with X is its ‘free-speech absolutism’, he said. This means – brace yourselves – that ‘anything goes’. Speech on X can be ‘hateful, inflammatory, racist and / or plain untrue’, says a clearly bewildered Rusbridger. Yes, mate, that’s free speech. It means all speech is free. Even deeply offensive speech. Even speech you don’t like. The clue is in the name.

The reason the ‘anything goes’ culture on Twitter so horrifies these people is because they fear the impact it will have on the little folk, those who aren’t as clever as us. Marina Hyde at the Guardian let slip the snobbery of the Musk-bashers. Her column this week takes aim at Elon Musk, Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox, whom she accuses of stirring up the street violence. But its closing punch, its main wallop, is aimed at the riff-raff who lurk in the comments sections of newspapers – ‘that section of the British public that is never happier than when some blatant grifter is making a fool out of them’, as she puts it. Doesn’t that just sum up the elitism of the censorious worldview? It isn’t only the speech of the powerful these people fear, but also the response of the ‘fools’, the gullible, those uneducated swimmers in the sewer of internet commentary. The fear of free speech is always – always – a fear of the masses.

Let’s be honest about what is going on here: yesterday’s gatekeepers of thought and opinion are incensed that the internet age has chipped away at their old-world authority. They cannot believe they no longer enjoy a monopoly of information and ideas. They are horrified that there now exists a platform – numerous platforms, in fact – on which everyone can express themselves without requiring the moral approval of Will bloody Hutton. They hate Musk’s freewheelin’ X because it confirms the unstoppable rise of ‘unmediated’ media on which people can publish whatever commentary they want without having to get subbing notes from Alan Rusbridger. That there exists a popular publishing platform that is beyond the reach of both their moral judgement and their punitive interventions shakes them to their core.

They are exactly like the priestly elites who feared the emergence of the printing press. Those panicked old monks likewise damned the unwieldy new world of publishing for having ‘no sense of propriety’ and for ‘hawking books to every Tom, Dick and Harry’. They likewise believed that mass printing was not ‘democratising learning… but debasing it’. Plus ça change…. The new clerisy might be secular and woke, rather than godly and conservative, but it shares with its forebears a feverish anxiety over the liberty to speak. It isn’t Musk they fear so much as what he has facilitated – a world in which one can speak even when one’s ideas offend the ruling class.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.