Elon Musk’s Latest Terrifying Foray Into British Politics

 https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/elon-musks-latest-terrifying-foray-into-british-politics

It is genuinely hard to find the words to describe the crassness, the ignorance, the potential violence wrapped up in each one of Musk’s interventions. The sudden fixation of the world’s richest man on child sexual exploitation in deindustrialized English towns—much of which took place more than a decade ago—has forced British people like me, who follow the news, who live here, who think they actually care about such things, to check that we are not out of our minds. So we have remembered the voluminous reporting, in all forms—official, journalistic, conspiratorial, dramatized-for-television—that have documented these awful stories for the past fifteen years. We have remembered that reliable data on sexual abuse, particularly toward children, is notoriously hard to compile. (Last November, the Labour government published the first-ever British statistics to include the ethnicity of perpetrators, which showed that seven per cent of offenders in 2023 were “Asian,” roughly in line with their share of the population.) We have remembered that Starmer did a decent job as a public prosecutor. We have remembered that in 2014, Alexis Jay, a Scottish academic and former social worker, led a shocking inquiry, which documented the abuse of some fourteen hundred girls in the town of Rotherham alone. Jay subsequently steered a seven-year national independent inquiry into child sexual abuse—with fifteen strands of investigation—that included interviews with more than seven thousand victims, from all corners of Britain. We have remembered that political will has been lacking. In 2022, Jay’s monumental work made twenty recommendations, none of which were enacted by the previous Conservative government.

But the hard graft of protecting vulnerable children, or prosecuting rapists, or enacting legislative change, is not what Musk is after. “The truth is a concept that Elon Musk clearly has very little interest in,” Andrew Norfolk, a recently retired investigative reporter for the Times of London, who covered the grooming-gang cases for years, told his old newspaper this week. What Musk craves is disorder and proof of his power. Since endorsing Donald Trump’s bid for the Presidency on X, in July, he has stepped up his digital incursions on behalf of right-wing parties and causes in democracies from Argentina to Germany. During last summer’s riots in the U.K., following the deaths, by stabbing, of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class near Liverpool—which were inflamed by online misinformation identifying the alleged killer as a Muslim immigrant (he wasn’t)—Musk tweeted, “Civil war is inevitable.”