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What has happened over the last few days has been nothing short of extraordinary. Tech mogul Elon Musk has engaged in a vocal critique of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Britain’s Labour Government (see British Conservatives Have Worst Election in 190 Years; Labor’s Keir Starmer Is the New Prime Minister – RedState) over its incredibly ham-handed handling of substantiated reports that rape gangs victimized tens of thousands of British girls for years and the gangs were protected by police and local authorities because of fear of ethnic turmoil; see Rotherham and the failure of multiculturalism – RedState, Silencing The Other – RedState

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A series of utter horrific revelations we learned of young girls being returned to their rapists by police and of fathers being arrested for trying to rescue their daughters.

This is the background:

Britain now stands shamed before the world. The public’s suppressed wrath is bubbling to the surface in petitions, calls for a public inquiry, and demands for accountability.

The scandal is already reshaping British politics. It’s not just about the heinous nature of the crimes. It’s that every level of the British system is implicated in the cover-up.

Social workers were intimidated into silence. Local police ignored, excused, and even abetted pedophile rapists across dozens of cities. Senior police and Home Office officials deliberately avoided action in the name of maintaining what they called “community relations.” Local councilors and Members of Parliament rejected pleas for help from the parents of raped children. Charities, NGOs, and Labour MPs accused those who discussed the scandal of racism and Islamophobia. The media mostly ignored or downplayed the biggest story of their lifetimes. Zealous in their incuriosity, much of Britain’s media elite remained barnacled to the bubble of Westminster politics and its self-serving priorities.

They did this to defend a failed model of multiculturalism, and to avoid asking hard questions about failures of immigration policy and assimilation. They did this because they were afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic. They did this because Britain’s traditional class snobbery had fused with the new snobbery of political correctness.

All of which is why no one knows precisely how many thousands of young girls were raped in how many towns across Britain since the 1970s.

What we do know is that the epicenter was the postindustrial mill towns of England’s north and Midlands, where immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh settled in the 1960s. White locals say the grooming and rapes began soon after. In Rotherham, the rundown Yorkshire city where the scandal first broke, local police and councilors were notified about systematic grooming and sex abuse by 2001. The first convictions did not occur until 2010, when five men of Pakistani background were jailed for multiple offenses against girls as young as 12 years of age.

These men targeted the most vulnerable girls—the poor and the fatherless, children in care homes—with candy, food, taxi rides, and drugs. They raped the girls, passed them around family and friendship networks, pimped them into similar networks in other cities, then discarded them as they reached the age of consent.

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Starmer was the chief of the Crown Prosecution Service during the height of this scandal, and he did nothing. That, along with his weakness and fecklessness as prime minister, made him vulnerable, and so he’s feeling particularly stung by Musk publicizing what is illegal for a British citizen to bring to light.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday condemned “lies and misinformation” that he said are undermining U.K. democracy, in response to a barrage of attacks on his government from Elon Musk .

The billionaire Tesla CEO has taken an intense and erratic interest in British politics since the center-left Labour Party was elected in July. Musk has used his social network, X, to call for a new election and demand Starmer be imprisoned. On Monday he posted an online poll for his 210 million followers on the proposition: “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.”

Asked about Musk’s comments during a question session at a hospital near London, Starmer criticized “those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible,” particularly opposition Conservative politicians in Britain who have echoed some of Musk’s claims.

Musk often posts on X about the U.K., retweeting criticism of Starmer and the hashtag TwoTierKeir -– shorthand for an unsubstantiated claim that Britain has “two-tier policing” with far-right protesters treated more harshly than pro-Palestinian or Black Lives Matter demonstrators. During summer anti-immigrant violence across the U.K. he tweeted that “civil war is inevitable.”

Recently Musk has focused on child sexual abuse, particularly a series of cases that rocked northern England towns in which groups of men, largely from Pakistani backgrounds, were tried for grooming and abusing dozens of girls. The cases have been used by far-right activists to link child abuse to immigration, and to accuse politicians of covering up the “grooming gangs” out of a fear of appearing racist.

Musk has posted a demand for a new public inquiry into the cases. A huge, seven-year inquiry was held under the previous Conservative government, though many of the 20 recommendations it made in 2022 — including compensation for abuse victims — have yet to be implemented. Starmer’s government said it would act on them as quickly as possible.

Musk also has accused Starmer of failing to bring perpetrators to justice when he was England’s director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013.

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The whole issue of Musk chastising Starmer and his government and the degree to which Musk is working with Trump’s permission came up Monday night on BBC Newsnight. My apologies for not knowing the participants, and chyrons don’t seem to be known to BBC, but I couldn’t help but think of this Monty Python skit while watching.

The horror at the highest levels of the government, the incendiary language we have seen from Elon Musk, and there’s going to be, as I understand it, a hard-headed assessment: Is it just the view of Elon Musk, or is it the view of the wider administration and the incoming President Donald Trump? If it’s the latter, then there may well be some very, very, very serious questions about the nature of our ongoing security partnership with the United States. 

John Henry, the Defense Secretary, was saying that the UK-US security relationship is the closest we’ve got in the world. We’re a member of the Five Eyes Group, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. Can you have that level of sharing everything if this sort of stuff is endorsed by the next president of the United States? The answer to that question, to some degree, does Trump agree with this, don’t know that one yet.

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I’m at a bit of a loss to understand why Musk dragging Starmer would be something that could cause Britain to reconsider its security relationship with the US (remind me again exactly how that relationship approaches one of equality) when Starmer’s Labour Party sent activists to campaign for Kamala; see The British Are Coming! Labour Party Flirts With Foreign Election Interference by Campaigning for Kamala – RedState.

On the one hand, I don’t take the harrumphing on BBC all that seriously. It is best understood as a way for Starmer to complain without having to further demean himself by begging Trump to make Musk stop being mean to him. What is good social media fun in the US is moving toward a political crisis in the UK, which is something Trump may or may not want.

The second-order problem is to what degree Musk can act as a free agent while holding an ex officio role in the Trump administration. Are all of Musk’s X utterances reflective of Trump’s policy preferences? And if not, how does anyone tell them apart?