The Ballistic Ignorance of Elon Musk

We're in for another few years of stupid opinions about sexual violence from overpromoted failsons demanding we take them seriously. None of these men actually care about protecting women.

If there’s anything positive to be said for Mr Elon Musk’s attempts to impose his questionable opinions on everyone else in the entire world, it is this: all over the planet today, little children as young as six or seven can look at the example being set here and dream that their ideas could be critical to international policy one day.

And that day is today. Why wait? A quick glance over Musk’s stream-of consciousness on the platform formerly known as Twitter is all the evidence you need that the tyranny of maturity is over.

No longer will any of us who wish to be leaders of men be obliged to grow up and learn things. No longer will we be subjected to woke ideas like manners or bedtime or please try for a just a moment to understand that other people matter. If you’re rich enough, you probably don’t even have to potty-train anymore. That’s what power means now. It means you can regress as loudly and violently as you like, and the rest of us have to put up with it.

Late on New Year’s Day, Musk went on an extended rant on a social media site that used to be quite fun before he bought and wrecked it. He kept up this bromide for days, posting thousands of tweets, in the course of which he accused the British Prime minister of facilitating Islamic rape gangs and called for members of a foreign government to be jailed.

What presumably happened here is that Musk stayed up late huffing the attention fumes, wandered down the dank alleys of UK far-right discourse, and came out with a head full of gibbering folk devils. He has now decided that he and he alone can save Britain from 'rape genocide.

What the neo-feudalist hell. For anyone unfamiliar with this story, the actual truth is horrible enough: some years ago, organised gangs of men were found to be grooming and raping girls and young women in Northern English towns including Rotherham. Many of the girls were from the foster system, and most of them were white, while most of the men involved were of South Asian descent. The details are ugly and damning to every one of the succession of institutions who did nothing to protect these girls. A national enquiry confirmed that there were systemic failures by local police and welfare groups. What there wasn’t was a government conspiracy to cover up these crimes in the name of eventually destroying the white race.

Musk appears to think that he has tapped a fresh seam of controversy here, but these events- and the firehose of falsehoods that surround them - are more than a decade old. For most of that time, the far right narrative has been that exclusively Muslim men are preying exclusively on white girls with the active assistance of the authorities, because of ‘multiculturalism’ or, lately, ‘white genocide’. This is a lie. An extensive national enquiry proved that there were plenty of fuck-ups here, but no cover-up.

But Musk chose to fan up a new flamewar, and members of Tory grandee Robert Jenrick, for many years a single-issue anti-migrant wingnut, took the opportunity of not being the most unreasonable man in the room for once and said the quiet bit out loud: “Importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women, brought us here.”

That is a racist lie.

It’s not even an original racist lie.

It’s the same racist lie that has been instrumentalised for centuries whenever paranoid old men want to whip up moral panic to demonize an outgroup. The idea that any given minority group poses a unique threat to women and children is a perennial prejudice. It’s a prejudice that does double duty. Firstly, it associates the out-group with rape and violence, which means that anyone attacking the outgroup can claim that actually, they’re protecting the innocent. They’re the good guys. Secondly, it provides cover for the awful things that in- group men do to ‘their’ women.

We can’t let these migrants abuse our women. That’s our job.

Versions of this story have been weaponised for centuries to justify lynchings, massacres and wars of conquest. Lately, the wingnut fringe has been rehashing it as the ‘Great Replacement’, a fictional plot to stop white men from breeding with white women. This dastardly scheme is attributed variously to communists, feminists and Jews, although nobody has let me in on it yet. I’m just saying. You’d think they’d at least send a card.

Anyway. Untold numbers of highly divorced men have noticed that women, many of whom happen to be white, seem quite reluctant to have babies with them. Why could that be? The only logical conclusion is that there’s vast, secret international race-war being conducted covertly by world governments to bring about ‘white genocide’ - which must be a relief, because otherwise some of these guys might actually have had to do some work on themselves.