Elon Musk constantly publishes falsehoods about “grooming gangs”
The report, which piqued Musk’s interest earlier this week, said Protection Minister Jess Phillips rejected a request from a city councilor for a government-led inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham, a town near Manchester in the north England, one of which was the areas where allegations of abuse by grooming gangs were made.
While Musk and his allies claim this is part of a larger government cover-up, Phillips actually wrote in a letter that “it is solely for Oldham Council to decide to commission an investigation into local child sexual exploitation , and not for the government to intervene.” The previous Conservative-led government also rejected Oldham’s calls for a government-led inquiry in 2022.
Musk called for Phillips to be jailed, calling her “a rape genocide apologist.” Both Musk and Phillips did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Musk is also using the report to once again call for Starmer to be removed as prime minister.
“Starmer was complicit in the rape of Britain when he was director of public prosecutions for six years,” Musk wrote on X on Friday morning in a post that is now pinned to the top of his timeline. “Starmer must go and he must be prosecuted for his complicity in the worst mass crime in Britain’s history.”
Starmer, in his role as Director of Public Prosecutions, actually launched the prosecution of a gang of groomers in Rochdale over a decade ago and introduced new rules designed to allow sexual abuse cases to be prosecuted.
Starmer and the British government press office did not respond for comment, but the health minister did Wes Streeting told the BBC that Musk’s comments were “misjudged and certainly misinformed.”
Musk also brought a number of right-wing US figures into the conversation, including accounts such as Chaya Raichik, who runs TikTok’s fiercely anti-LGBTQ account Libs, anti-transgender activist Riley Gaines, right-wing commentator Ian Miles Cheong and Der in Disgraced former US national security adviser Michael Flynn.
US Senator Mike Lee also spoke out, writing on X: “Does Britain need to be liberated?”
“Yes,” Musk replied.
Bill Ackman, a hedge fund manager and Trump supporter, repeated Musk’s narrative almost verbatim in a post
In a post on Friday morning, Musk called on King Charles to dissolve the British Parliament and order a general election. Although the monarch in the United Kingdom dissolves Parliament before a general election, this only occurs at the request of the Prime Minister, and the monarch’s power is essentially nothing more than a rubber stamp.
