Descent of Musk
The seductive smell of grievance
Those were the riots that were. There wasn’t a second week of disturbances, or even a second weekend and thirty town centres weren’t simultaneously wrecked. As anticipated, those now going to prison are an assortment of stupid boys, ancient hooligans and sad drunks. Those who incited them are, with a few exceptions, beyond the reach of the law.
That this has happened should be no surprise, for the reasons I pointed out in my last post. It has nothing to do with “legitimate concerns” and everything to do with persistently, often elaborately and over time identifying two groups - boat arrivals and Muslims - as being the source of almost all our problems. And we know who was loudest in this identification, so I don’t think the tag “the Farage Riots” is entirely wide of the mark.
Even so there are some puzzles here. We’ve got used to the grievance mining and conspiracy theorising used to bump up the figures for stations such as Talk TV and GBNEWS, the YouTube followerships for numerous grifters (left and right) and the various emissions of Professor Spode, late of Kent University. I’ve tried to keep readers in touch with the well—financed eruptions on the fringes of the conservative world and their connections in other countries.
But what on God’s good earth has motivated one of the world’s richest men to move from electric vehicles, neural implants and space rockets into trying to provoke violence on the streets of an ally of his own nation? That requires some explanation.
I should start by admitting that I have never liked Elon Musk. His resort back in 2018 during the cave rescue in Thailand to calling someone he disagreed with “that pedo guy” sat badly with me. In the subsequent court case in the US Musk explained that in the South Africa of his youth it was a commonly used expression of disapprobation and not to be taken literally. It being America, Musk won his case; but as the gobby former footballer Joey Barton recently found out at the hands of TV presenter Jeremy Vine, British courts take a dimmer view of that kind of accusation. I remember thinking at the time that Musk sounded unpleasant and maybe even a little uncontrolled. But a wannabe big player on the political far right? No. Why would he go there?