He’s being called the world’s richest pub bore. The first-ever billionaire troll. The man who has everything but still wants more, primarily Keir Starmer’s head on a platter. It’s Elon Musk, who over the past week has taken a break from reaching for the stars to lounge about in the gutter of social-media chatter and invective. He’s gunning, with every tweet, for Starmer’s government, which he accuses of facilitating a ‘rape genocide’ in the UK. Britain’s perma-online right are cheering his fit of oligarchic pique, while our liberals fret that this rude plutocrat will lay waste to our democracy. Both sides need to chill: Musk is neither our saviour nor our destroyer.
He’s going hard on the ‘grooming gangs’ scandal. That’s the euphemistic name given to the rape and degradation of thousands of poor and working-class girls by bands of sick blokes from mostly Pakistani Muslim backgrounds. Like everyone else with a working moral compass, Musk is horrified. He’s especially horrified that so many social workers, local officials and cops turned a blind eye to this industrial-scale debasement of vulnerable girls, all because they didn’t want to rock the ‘race relations’ boat. They elevated multicultural calm over the safety and dignity of the poor: an unforgivable dereliction of the state’s duty to guard its citizens from harm. Essentially, Musk roars, ‘rape gangs were allowed to exploit young girls’.
That Musk seems to be finding out about these gangs for the first time is striking. This social scourge has been known about for years. The Times, our newspaper of record, no less, covered it in depth for 15 years. The BBC covered it too. There have been numerous inquiries. And it has made its way to the US, with broad commentary in both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. I wrote one of the Wall Street Journal’s pieces, more than 10 years ago, in which I said this atrocity was fuelled by the ‘moral cowardice of modern-day politicos more concerned with appearing right-on than doing what is right’. How is it possible Musk saw none of this?
His frantic tweeting about the rape gangs, and the headlines he’s generating, is being held up as proof that the freshly liberated X is the best place to find out the truth. In fact, it suggests the opposite. That this hyper-online dude glued to his laptop in his opulent Texas home has only just discovered that thousands of girls in 21st-century Britain were exploited by Pakistani gangs is a testament to how blind and unworldly one can become in the circus of internet outrage.
I resent the idea that Musk ‘drag[ged] this into the light’. Britain’s working classes have been hotly discussing this horror for years, in pubs, at work, with cab drivers. They didn’t need a billionaire to make the scales fall from their eyes, though I’m sure they’re glad the scales have finally fallen from his. ‘You don’t hate the legacy media enough’, Musk thunders, yet it was the legacy media that uncovered this atrocity and he didn’t notice because he was too busy sharing memes about pregnant men. The true lesson of Musk’s Damascene conversion to rape-gang awareness is not that everyone should get on X but that people should get off it. Tweet less, read more. Fewer memes, more conversations. That way, truth lies.
He’s now tweeting with all the zeal of a convert. He’s raging against the Starmer government. When Home Office minister Jess Phillips rejected the proposal for a government-led inquiry into the rape gangs of Oldham, he branded her a ‘rape genocide apologist’ and said she should be locked up. He has called on King Charles to dissolve parliament, ‘in the interests of his subjects’. A foreign billionaire pleading with a monarch to kill the parliament us plebs voted for just seven months ago? He’s bringing out my inner Cromwell. He even put up a poll asking if ‘America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government’. At the time of writing, 67 per cent of respondents have said ‘Yes’, burnishing the impression that rabble-rousing X is every bit as mental as woke Twitter was.
Britain’s influencers are either weeping or cheering over Musk’s brutish intrusions into our political life. Labour officials and depressed liberals accuse him of taking a wrecking ball to our democracy, which is rich coming from the people who’ve spent the past eight years trying to overthrow the vote for Brexit, the largest democratic vote in the entire history of this sceptred isle. Musk’s juvenile pleas for King Charles to push aside Sir Keir are nothing compared with the monthly marches of these champagne autocrats where they agitated for the destruction of millions of freely cast ballots.
Some in our wet, woke circles seem angrier about Musk’s tweets than about the thing he’s tweeting on: the mass exploitation of poor girls. The New European rages against his ‘dangerous lies’. ‘How does Starmer solve a problem like Elon Musk?’, asks the New Statesman. I’m spitballing here, but maybe he should solve the rape-gangs failures first? Labour’s Harriet Harman says the ‘litmus test’ of our times is how we respond to this ‘global bully’. No, the litmus test is where one stands on the rape-gangs scourge, and whether one is more interested in protecting the ideology of multiculturalism than in protecting girls from rape. That’s the test Labour and its minions across the country failed catastrophically. Musk’s tweets are hurting your feelings? Boo hoo. I’ll save my tears for the girls who were physically, mentally and spiritually hurt by your scandalous lack of care and twisted ideological priorities.
Alongside this Musk Derangement Syndrome, this sick attempt to deflect from the matter at hand, there is another weird and worrying phenomenon: Musk Devotion Syndrome. Britain’s online right is gushing over Musk’s Starmer-bashing. They’re swooning over their foreign hero for ‘raising awareness’ of rape gangs, as if Britons had been stewing in benighted ignorance before the sainted Elon delivered us into the light. Some on Britain’s right are getting into their Curtis Yarvin sh*t. Yarvin is an American neo-reactionary blogger who says we need a ‘monarch’ to come and ‘reboot’ our lost, woke nations. Maybe Musk will do that for us, some Brits squeal.
There’s the pungent whiff of desperation to this swarming around a new saviour. Recognising, perhaps, that their politics of identitarian grievance and reactionary neo-monarchism is unlikely to connect with everyday Britons, the new right instead marshalls Musk as a kind of battering ram against a government that they hate. It is alarmingly undemocratic. To rally behind Musk’s oligarchic fury with Britain, behind his imperious cries for the jailing of MPs and the kingly dissolution of parliament, is to abandon entirely the democratic belief that ordinary people have both the capacity and the right to shape and correct their nation. The online right is now as one with the woke left in their haughty impatience with the masses.
The rape-gangs discussion is starting to feel more fatalist than populist. It is inflaming a doomerist view of Britain as a fallen, f**ked nation. All is not lost, though. It never is. I could walk to my nearest bus stop right now and encounter someone who knows more about the rape gangs than Musk does, and who has known about them for at least 10 years longer. It is this groundswell of knowledge, sense and democratic anger we should be tapping into, not the rage of a faraway billionaire.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
That Musk seems to be finding out about these gangs for the first time is striking. This social scourge has been known about for years. The Times, our newspaper of record, no less, covered it in depth for 15 years. The BBC covered it too. There have been numerous inquiries. And it has made its way to the US, with broad commentary in both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. I wrote one of the Wall Street Journal’s pieces, more than 10 years ago, in which I said this atrocity was fuelled by the ‘moral cowardice of modern-day politicos more concerned with appearing right-on than doing what is right’. How is it possible Musk saw none of this?
His frantic tweeting about the rape gangs, and the headlines he’s generating, is being held up as proof that the freshly liberated X is the best place to find out the truth. In fact, it suggests the opposite. That this hyper-online dude glued to his laptop in his opulent Texas home has only just discovered that thousands of girls in 21st-century Britain were exploited by Pakistani gangs is a testament to how blind and unworldly one can become in the circus of internet outrage.
I resent the idea that Musk ‘drag[ged] this into the light’. Britain’s working classes have been hotly discussing this horror for years, in pubs, at work, with cab drivers. They didn’t need a billionaire to make the scales fall from their eyes, though I’m sure they’re glad the scales have finally fallen from his. ‘You don’t hate the legacy media enough’, Musk thunders, yet it was the legacy media that uncovered this atrocity and he didn’t notice because he was too busy sharing memes about pregnant men. The true lesson of Musk’s Damascene conversion to rape-gang awareness is not that everyone should get on X but that people should get off it. Tweet less, read more. Fewer memes, more conversations. That way, truth lies.
He’s now tweeting with all the zeal of a convert. He’s raging against the Starmer government. When Home Office minister Jess Phillips rejected the proposal for a government-led inquiry into the rape gangs of Oldham, he branded her a ‘rape genocide apologist’ and said she should be locked up. He has called on King Charles to dissolve parliament, ‘in the interests of his subjects’. A foreign billionaire pleading with a monarch to kill the parliament us plebs voted for just seven months ago? He’s bringing out my inner Cromwell. He even put up a poll asking if ‘America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government’. At the time of writing, 67 per cent of respondents have said ‘Yes’, burnishing the impression that rabble-rousing X is every bit as mental as woke Twitter was.
Britain’s influencers are either weeping or cheering over Musk’s brutish intrusions into our political life. Labour officials and depressed liberals accuse him of taking a wrecking ball to our democracy, which is rich coming from the people who’ve spent the past eight years trying to overthrow the vote for Brexit, the largest democratic vote in the entire history of this sceptred isle. Musk’s juvenile pleas for King Charles to push aside Sir Keir are nothing compared with the monthly marches of these champagne autocrats where they agitated for the destruction of millions of freely cast ballots.
Some in our wet, woke circles seem angrier about Musk’s tweets than about the thing he’s tweeting on: the mass exploitation of poor girls. The New European rages against his ‘dangerous lies’. ‘How does Starmer solve a problem like Elon Musk?’, asks the New Statesman. I’m spitballing here, but maybe he should solve the rape-gangs failures first? Labour’s Harriet Harman says the ‘litmus test’ of our times is how we respond to this ‘global bully’. No, the litmus test is where one stands on the rape-gangs scourge, and whether one is more interested in protecting the ideology of multiculturalism than in protecting girls from rape. That’s the test Labour and its minions across the country failed catastrophically. Musk’s tweets are hurting your feelings? Boo hoo. I’ll save my tears for the girls who were physically, mentally and spiritually hurt by your scandalous lack of care and twisted ideological priorities.
Alongside this Musk Derangement Syndrome, this sick attempt to deflect from the matter at hand, there is another weird and worrying phenomenon: Musk Devotion Syndrome. Britain’s online right is gushing over Musk’s Starmer-bashing. They’re swooning over their foreign hero for ‘raising awareness’ of rape gangs, as if Britons had been stewing in benighted ignorance before the sainted Elon delivered us into the light. Some on Britain’s right are getting into their Curtis Yarvin sh*t. Yarvin is an American neo-reactionary blogger who says we need a ‘monarch’ to come and ‘reboot’ our lost, woke nations. Maybe Musk will do that for us, some Brits squeal.
There’s the pungent whiff of desperation to this swarming around a new saviour. Recognising, perhaps, that their politics of identitarian grievance and reactionary neo-monarchism is unlikely to connect with everyday Britons, the new right instead marshalls Musk as a kind of battering ram against a government that they hate. It is alarmingly undemocratic. To rally behind Musk’s oligarchic fury with Britain, behind his imperious cries for the jailing of MPs and the kingly dissolution of parliament, is to abandon entirely the democratic belief that ordinary people have both the capacity and the right to shape and correct their nation. The online right is now as one with the woke left in their haughty impatience with the masses.
The rape-gangs discussion is starting to feel more fatalist than populist. It is inflaming a doomerist view of Britain as a fallen, f**ked nation. All is not lost, though. It never is. I could walk to my nearest bus stop right now and encounter someone who knows more about the rape gangs than Musk does, and who has known about them for at least 10 years longer. It is this groundswell of knowledge, sense and democratic anger we should be tapping into, not the rage of a faraway billionaire.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
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