American magazine attacks Elon Musk for raising the issue of grooming gangs in the UK, resorts to his character assassination to shield Labour Party
American magazine ‘The New Yorker’ is aghast at Elon Musk for highlighting the prevalence of grooming gangs in the United Kingdom.
In the hopes of shielding the incumbent Labour government in the UK from further scrutiny, the magazine published a hit piece targeting the Tesla CEO on Thursday (9th January).
The vicious piece was titled ‘Elon Musk’s latest terrifying foray into British politics.’ For the unversed, Elon Musk had raised the issue of police complicity in aggravating the menace of grooming gangs targeting white girls in the United Kingdom.
Elon Musk has weaponized a scandal about the rape of young girls in impoverished English towns. But “protecting vulnerable children, or prosecuting rapists, or enacting legislative change, is not what Musk is after,” Sam Knight reports.https://t.co/knqyX2GIrB
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) January 12, 2025
The Background of the controversy
Musk had also launched a scathing attack on Britain’s current Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who was the Director of Public Prosecutions at the Crown Prosecution Service between 2008 and 2013.
Starmer was responsible for approving police requests to charge suspects in serious crimes like rape. Musk said that when the “rape gangs” were exploiting young girls, Starmer headed the CPS and allowed the crimes to take place.
In the UK, serious crimes such as rape require the Crown Prosecution Service's approval for the police to charge suspects.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 2, 2025
Who was the head of the CPS when rape gangs were allowed to exploit young girls without facing justice?
Keir Starmer, 2008 -2013
On 3rd January, he tweeted, “Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years. Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.”
His scathing comments came against the backdrop of the denial of a government-led inquiry into Oldham grooming gangs.
Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 3, 2025
Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.
Meanwhile, Starmer commented on the issue and claimed that Musk was spreading lies and misinformation. “Those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible, they are not interested in victims, they are interested in themselves,” he said.
“Child sexual exploitation is utterly sick, utterly sick, and for many, many years, too many victims have been completely let down. Let down by perverse ideas about community relations or by the idea that institutions must be protected above all else, and they’ve not been listened to, and they’ve not been heard,” he added.
Speaking out on rape torture gangs is not "jumping on a bandwagon of the far right".
— Andrew RT Davies (@AndrewRTDavies) January 6, 2025
Starmer must retract and apologise. pic.twitter.com/zTtvQNzv1Y
The New Yorker jumps in to attack Elon Musk
At the very onset, the American magazine made outlandish claims about the Tesla CEO. It accused Musk of ‘weaponising a national scandal’ and ‘making calls to overthrow a government.’
The New Yorker fixated on the ‘non-recent’ and ‘complicated’ nature of the story of Oldham grooming gangs to suggest that Musk had no in-depth knowledge about the issue at hand.
It also attempted to pass off Pakistani perpetrators as ‘men of South Asian descent.’ Thereafter, the New Yorker began to dissect different tweets of Musk to deviate public discourse from the grooming gangs to his ideology.
While accusing the Tesla CEO of ‘amplifying anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim tropes’, it attempted to pass off the systematic cover-up of grooming gangs in the UK as some form of divine failure.
“…Musk has suggested that a mighty woke coverup has been at work, rather than acknowledging the truth, which is sadder and harder to bear: that these crimes took place in plain sight, that many of the girls—poor, desperately vulnerable, often young teens and even pre-teens—were regarded as sex workers or sluts, rather than children, and that almost no one cared,” the article claimed.
The New Yorker was shrewd enough to not point out how the law enforcement authorities did not act against the grooming gangs for fear of not being labelled ‘racist.’
It did not highlight how the predominantly ‘Pakistani and Muslim origin’ of these heinous criminals prevented lawmakers and police alike to not burst the bubble of ‘diversity and multiculturalism’ and thus causing injustice to the actual victims.
The American magazine instead attacked Elon Musk for his alleged ‘crassness and ignorance’ and for daring to speak on decade-old cases of child sexual exploitation in ‘deindustrialized English towns.’
The New Yorker alleged that the billionaire entrepreneur was not seeking the ‘truth’ but wanted ‘disorder and proof of his power’ instead.
“But the hard graft of protecting vulnerable children, or prosecuting rapists, or enacting legislative change, is not what Musk is after,” it brazened out.
It also attacked the Conservative Party for not conducting a national inquiry into the grooming gangs in the past 14 years so that the magazine could avoid questioning the incumbent Labour Party government.
The grooming gangs of the United Kingdom
Investigations into cases of child sexual abuse in the UK revealed that grooming gangs comprising mostly British-Pakistani men have been sexually exploiting children across cities in the country. In 2023, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak established a task force led by the National Crime Agency to address the grave threat posed by these gangs.
Rochdale, Rotherham, Oxford, Telford, Leeds, Birmingham, Norwich, Burnley, High Wycombe, Leicester, Dewsbury, Middlesbrough, Peterborough, Bristol, Halifax, Newcastle, Huddersfield, and Hull are some of the regions in the United Kingdom where the Islamist grooming gangs sexually exploited children. Last year in November, twenty men were found guilty of raping young girls in the UK and were sentenced to over 219 years in prison.
In 2022, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse published its final report, in which it described the sexual abuse of children as an “epidemic that leaves tens of thousands of victims in its poisonous wake”. The inquiry looked into child abuse by organised groups following multiple convictions of sexual offences against children across the UK between 2010-2014.
Professor Alexis Jay, who led the inquiry and uncovered the massive scale of grooming gangs in the UK, has said that she felt “frustrated” that none of the 20 recommendations put forward by the inquiry had been implemented more than two years after its conclusion.