Elon Musk is a man of tremendous gifts, to put it mildly. He recently caught a rocket between some chopsticks, for crying out loud. But insight into the mood of British politics is clearly not one of those gifts.
Having only just learned about Britain’s shameful, grotesque, never-ending grooming-gangs scandal, declaring that Jess Phillips should be in prison for failing to back a full national inquiry into it, Musk has now turned his ire on his erstwhile ally, Reform leader Nigel Farage.
This new disagreement seems to have escalated rather quickly.
Musk has recently become a vocal supporter of hard-right grifter Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), who is currently in jail for contempt of court – specifically, for repeating false allegations against a Syrian refugee, in breach of an injunction.
He admitted in court to doing so. But Musk, along with many right-wing X personalities, seems convinced by Robinson’s more public claims that he is actually a political prisoner, with the contempt charges merely an excuse to jail him for exposing grooming gangs, radical Islam and the like.
Farage, meanwhile, has been keen to draw a bright line between himself and Robinson, despite clamour among some Reform-aligned figures for a more conciliatory approach. And with very good reason. Indeed, the most charitable description of Robinson is that he’s a serial liar with a messiah complex.
Yesterday, Farage tried to smooth over the rift with Musk, saying freedom of speech is all about disagreeing with people amicably, before adding that, at Donald Trump’s inauguration, he intends to ‘explain to [Musk] that perhaps things aren’t quite as they look’ where Robinson is concerned.
Musk took issue with this and has since tweeted that Farage ‘doesn’t have what it takes’ to lead Reform. Reminder: it’s been less than three weeks since Farage posed with Musk at Mar-a-Lago, as the billionaire was tipped to make a record-breaking donation to his party.
Despite some predictable noise online, with Farage dubbed a snob and a phoney by various right-wing influencers, this row says far more about Musk than it does about Farage. If you think that Farage has alienated the British voting public, by distancing himself from a figure who is supported by 11 per cent of them, you have been spending far too much time on the internet.
Musk is rather typical of the Very Online right, among which he is now a towering figure, in that he seems to believe any old nonsense he reads on social media, provided it conforms to his own particular, and increasingly conspiratorial, worldview.
Just before Christmas, he shared a video made by an Iranian German techno DJ, asserting that the Magdeburg car attacker was an Islamist terrorist, despite him being a strident ex-Muslim who believed the German state was responsible for the ‘Islamification of Germany’. It’s one thing not to trust the mainstream media, but quite another to believe a random raver implicitly.
As for Robinson, his growing support on sections of the right suggests he has also been a beneficiary of this credulous new climate.
One can fairly argue that Robinson’s prison sentence was extreme, especially given the slap on the wrist that can greet even violent offences these days. The attempts to censor him – online and off – over the years have certainly been illiberal, stupid and counter-productive, in that they have helped burnish his image as a silenced truth-teller.
But Robinson isn’t in prison for telling the truth – he is in prison for repeating proven untruths, knowing that prison would be the outcome. As for the notion that he’s a hero for exposing grooming gangs, he’s also the man who nearly collapsed the Huddersfield grooming-gang trial, during one of his earlier forays into contempt of court.
Labour MP Ann Cryer was raising the alarm about grooming gangs, and being smeared as a bigot for doing so, years before Robinson founded the English Defence League. Whistleblowers like Maggie Oliver were also able to doggedly campaign on this issue without succumbing to stalking and menacing journalists, and falsely accusing their partners of being paedophiles, as Robinson did to the Independent’s Lizzie Dearden and her boyfriend in 2021. (She had asked Robinson for a comment on a story she was writing, in which former members of his inner circle had accused him of misusing donations from his supporters.)
Whatever else one thinks about Nigel Farage, he’s dead right not to confuse deranged chatter on social media for actual public opinion – or a BS merchant for a martyr. The Very Online rightists of X are now every bit as mental and out of touch as the wokesters of Twitter used to be.
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