Elon Musk’s Race War Hobby
He doesn’t like brown people and he isn’t trying to hide it.
BECOMING THE WORLD’S FIRST TRILLIONAIRE and then immediately losing $240 billion in a matter of days would keep most people pretty busy. But Elon Musk isn’t most people, so he had time to spare on more important things—like trying to incite a race war in the United Kingdom.
Less than a month ago, Musk was all over the tragic case of Henry Nowak, the 18-year-old stabbing victim in the English city of Southampton. Police briefly handcuffed Nowak in his final moments on suspicion of a racially motivated assault based on a false report by his killer, a man of Indian background. (Nowak’s small wounds were not easily visible in the dark, and his fatal bleeding was almost entirely internal.) In several viral posts with nearly 70,000 shares and more than 300,000 likes, Musk asserted that “official police policy [in England] requires them to be racist against Whites” and made wildly inaccurate statements about the story.
In fact, the murderer was arrested within eighteen minutes of the police arriving on the scene (and has received a sentence of twenty-one years to life). Also, the story was extensively reported in the British media.
It’s hard to say to what extent Musk’s posts—the replies to which were predictably full of racist and antisemitic comments, as well as calls for “revolution”—contributed to the riots which erupted in Southampton the day following the release of the bodycam footage, and which left eleven police officers injured. But just days later, a watchdog group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), explicitly singled out Musk’s “instrumental” role in provoking riots in Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, following a brutal knife attack by a Sudanese asylum seeker.
The outrage was triggered by a shocking viral video of the assault: The victim, Stephen Ogilvie, was hospitalized with serious injuries to his face and eyes; 30-year-old Hadi Alodid has been charged with attempted murder, and Ogilvie’s family has appealed for calm. But what followed was also shockingly brutal. According to news reports, dozens of masked thugs rampaged through neighborhoods with large immigrant communities, smashing windows, torching homes and cars, and forcing residents to flee for their lives. Riot police had to use water cannons to keep rioters from reaching a hotel housing asylum seekers outside the city. Several immigrant hospital nurses on their way from work were harassed by people demanding proof of their authorization to work. Rioters hurled bricks and incendiary devices at the police, injuring a dozen officers.
According to data from the CCDH, Musk’s posts on X following the knife attack—and his boosts of posts by his two favorite British racial agitators, former soccer hooligan Tommy Robinson (a.k.a. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) and parliament member Rupert Lowe, whose far-right Restore Britain party considers Nigel Farage’s Reform UK too moderate—had a total of 64 million views. (Robinson’s and Lowe’s posts unboosted by Musk had an additional 51 million.) The trio’s rhetoric included not only calls for “millions and millions” to be deported, but the explicit message that violence may be necessary. Musk shared a post, from a large account with the expressive username “Inevitable West,” featuring a video clip of himself telling Robinson, “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.”
Musk’s next British cause was the “Rape Gang Inquiry Report” released by Lowe, a result of his purported investigation into the “grooming gangs” scandal which first made news in the 2010s but which became an obsession of Musk and his allies just last year.
The grooming gangs—consisting mainly of men of Pakistani background who sexually abused and often trafficked girls as young as 11 across several British towns—were very real. So is the scandal of these crimes being often swept under the rug by local police, social workers, and officials—sometimes because they feared appearing racist, though also because the girls (most of them from poor and dysfunctional homes) were often viewed as juvenile delinquents rather than victims. There is also general agreement that the official inquiries over the last fifteen years have been inadequate. But even the online magazine Unherd, ideologically eclectic but with a conspicuous “politically incorrect” identity, has criticized Lowe’s report as a “missed opportunity” because of its failure to acknowledge reforms, its uncritical promotion of dubious claims such as a minimum of 250,000 victims nationwide (extrapolated from the estimate of 1,400 victims in Rotherham, the epicenter of the initial scandal, and supposedly stretching all the way back to the 1950s), and its framing of the problem as Islamic “ideological warfare” against white Christian England.
The Lowe report repeatedly hammers the point that the root of evil is mass immigration, abetted by misguided British progressives who championed “diversity and multiculturalism.” Some claims in the testimonies of alleged survivors cited in the report seem custom-made to reinforce this point—for instance, that a mother who called the police to report her daughter missing and “mentioned a history of abuse by Asian men” was told, “You can’t describe them as Asian men because that’s racist. You should just be glad your child is being taught a different culture.” While there are well-documented reports of police negligence in these cases, mostly from the late 1990s to early 201 0s, this story fits too neatly into the sarcastic right-wing trope of migrant crime as “cultural enrichment.” In general, the Lowe report makes no mention of any attempts to verify any of the testimonies. While no one likes questioning accounts of horrific child abuse, some of the claims in this document—extreme torture, rape by dogs, absences unnoticed by seemingly well-adjusted families—seem to warrant at least some skepticism, especially given that some them come from people who admit a history of drug abuse.
The problems are real. But Lowe’s bogus report is intended, first and foremost, to flog the narrative of a white Christian West under attack by brown Muslim invaders. Unsurprisingly, it’s being exploited by American rightists for the same purpose (and as a distraction from Trump administration scandals). And, of course, Musk—author of no shortage of Trump administration scandals himself—is right in the middle of it.
As the grooming gangs fiasco demonstrates, the grievances Musk and his far-right friends are fanning do, in many cases, reflect real failures of mainstream politics.
It’s likely true, for instance, that refugees from war-torn countries, often with a history of severe mental trauma, have been admitted to the United Kingdom with too little screening and too little mental health assistance.1 It’s true, as some British police officials now acknowledge, that flat-footed “anti-racism” initiatives in many police agencies have contributed to perceptions of “two-tier policing” favoring minorities.2
A better and more honest conversation on this subject would be welcome. But at this point, only the terminally naïve could think that Musk is interested in such a conversation. What he mainly seems to be interested in is making it okay to be racist.
Musk’s racist rabble-rousing has recently prompted some very intemperate pronouncements on the desirability of his murder. Beyond the moral enormity of murder, on which we can all hopefully agree, it seems obvious that an ideologically motivated assassination of Musk would unleash far more rage among his supporters than even his worst posts could. But the fact that the more-or-less-trillionaire owner of a major social media platform is cosplaying a James Bond villain obsessed with brown invaders and “white genocide” really should scare us all. The only thing we can do is get more effective at countering disinformation with facts and hate with decency—without avoiding difficult issues in ways that allow the Elon Musks and the Rupert Lowes to exploit them.
It’s not worth stopping to ask why a South African-Canadian-American tech magnate cares so much about policing and immigration policy in the United Kingdom. The answer is too obvious.
The claim that the police allowed Henry Nowak to die because they were too focused on his alleged racism is completely false, since the mistaken belief that he was a drunk racist hoodlum only delayed medical intervention by about three minutes; but that assumption did cause the dying teenager to be treated with appalling callousness, and it’s quite plausible that police trainings emphasizing racial sensitivity contributed to this situation.