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Musk’s grooming gangs posts and the Great Replacement Theory [1]
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Date: 2025-01
As 2024 turned into 2025, and people across the globe woke up to hangovers and the dreaded return to work, the world’s richest man was sharing a conspiracy theory from 5,000 miles away.
In the first week of the year, Elon Musk sent dozens of posts on X (formerly Twitter), the social network he has owned since 2022, alleging complicity by the UK Labour Party in ongoing child sexual exploitation by Muslim men.
Musk’s posts include claims that a “quarter million little girls were – still are – being systematically raped by migrant gangs”, that the “snivelling cowards who allowed the mass rape of little girls are still in power”, and that the Labour Party “opposes a national inquiry on the mass rape of little girls in Britain for one reason only: it will show they are complicit.”
He has targeted individual British politicians, calling safeguarding minister Jess Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” and claiming prime minister Keir Starmer is responsible for the “rape of Britain”.
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I’ve spent close to a decade investigating far-right movements and misogyny in the UK, the US and Europe. Musk’s online activity this week could be easily dismissed as the postings of a bored billionaire who has become fixated on the politics of a country he knows little about. But it’s more than this, it is a clear and frightening demonstration of how today’s far right operates: individual influencers disseminating disinformation across international networks, underpinned by a conspiracist ideology focused on a so-called ‘white genocide’.
This latest row is part of a broader pattern of US and UK far-right extremists weaponising the very real harms done to women and girls, in order to attack democracy, whip up racist hate, and push a genocidal narrative into the mainstream.
Here’s how it happened – and why.
A mass safeguarding and justice failure
To understand Musk’s attacks, we first need to revisit the horrific child sexual exploitation that took place across numerous towns and cities in the UK during the 2000s and 2010s.
The issue hit the headlines in 2010, when five men were sent to prison for grooming teenage girls in the northern English town of Rotherham, followed by a series of arrests for similar crimes in Rochdale, a town an hour away on the outskirts of Manchester.
The arrests and subsequent convictions revealed a clear pattern of sexual exploitation, abuse and rape across the region, which had gone ignored for years. Ignored in part because, rather than seeing them as victims, police treated the girls as criminals, or as consenting to the abuse.
In 2014, a report commissioned by Rotherham Borough Council and headed by professor Alexis Jay, revealed that between 1997 and 2013 more than 1,400 children had been sexually exploited by gangs of mainly Asian males in the town, alongside multiple safeguarding and police failings.
These findings, as well as other child sexual abuse scandals, including those where white men were the perpetrators, led then-home secretary Theresa May to launch the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in 2014, which Jay was appointed to lead in 2016 after previous chairs stepped down.
Similar crimes were investigated in Oldham, Oxford, Telford, Bristol and other cities and towns across the UK. A recent Channel 4 News report exposed grooming and exploitation in Barrow-on-Furness, a northern port town. The details in all cases are extremely distressing.
This potted history tells us two important things. The first is that for years, groups of mainly white working-class girls were raped, exploited and trafficked by gangs of predominantly South Asian men across a range of English towns.
Second, the police and social services catastrophically failed to protect victims, often due to misogynistic and classist stereotypes that blamed the girls for the abuse perpetrated against them.
The 2014 Jay report noted that a reluctance to be seen as racist played a part in safeguarding and policing failures in Rotherham. Similar conclusions were reached in Oldham, while in other localities fears of racism were not found to be a factor.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/far-right-elon-musk-grooming-gangs-britain-keir-starmer-tommy-robinson-great-replacement/
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