“You know who else should be on trial for the UK’s far-right riots? Elon Musk”, writes Jonathan Freedland, who used to be a liberal, in the Guardian, a newspaper whose very name was once universally understood to mean “Guardian of our Liberties”.
Mr Freedland writes,
Of course, it’s good that so many of those responsible for a week of terrifying far-right violence are facing an especially swift and severe form of justice – but there’s one extremely rich and powerful suspect who should join them in the dock. If the UK authorities truly want to hold accountable all those who unleashed riots and pogroms in Britain, they need to go after Elon Musk.
Freedland then accurately describes the way that pogroms throughout history have started:
In 1144, it wasn’t Southport but Norwich, and the victim was a 12-year-old boy called William. When he was found dead, the accusing finger pointed instantly – and falsely – at the city’s Jews. Over the centuries that followed, the defamatory charge of child murder – the blood libel – would be hurled against Jews repeatedly, often as the prelude to massacre.
There are differences, of course, starting with the fact that, so far and thankfully, these riots have not killed anyone – although given the attempts to burn down buildings with people inside, that seems more a matter of luck than mercy. But the common element in events nearly a millennium apart is that lies can wreak havoc when they spread. And that spreading now takes seconds.
So Mr Freedland describes a phenomenon that has recurred throughout history, citing an example that occurred 862 years before Twitter existed. He observes that this phenomenon has taken place yet again, but with the blessed difference that this time (when Twitter was present) no one was killed – and concludes that Twitter made it worse.
That does not make sense. Not only did the Norwich pogrom that Mr Freedland cites happen before the coming of Twitter, it happened almost exactly three centuries before the coming of Gutenberg’s printing press, with its terrifying ability to spread unvetted commentary right across Europe in mere weeks. “And that spreading now takes seconds”, frets Mr Freedland, but on these islands at least, the correlation between the speed of propagation of information and the frequency and severity of race riots and pogroms has been negative. As has been the correlation between these things and the freedom of the press.
Why?
As I said in this post and this one and thi… tell you what, rather than list all the times I have made this point over the last quarter century, I will jump straight back to this post I did for the “Biased BBC” blog after the Black/Asian riots in the Lozells district of Birmingham in October 2005:
Inter-communal riots started by rumour of rape. The pattern is age-old. Equally familiar to history is the fate of the innocent man cornered by a mob and killed not for anything he had done – so far as is known the man who was stabbed was simply returning from a night at the cinema – but for having the wrong coloured face. Cold comfort it may be to his relatives, but modern liberal democracies are by historical standards rather good at preventing riots or nipping them in the bud when they do occur.
Why is this? One reason may be that literacy and a free press ensure that we have many sources of reasonably accurate news to hand. Most people in the West nowadays simply have a more accurate picture of the world and are less susceptible to false rumours. When the rumours of crimes turn out to be true we are also able to be reminded that the actions of one member of a group are not the actions of all. Say what you like about the mainstream media, it is notable that those groups most cut off from it are most prone to riot.
But the press cannot calm the storm if it is not trusted – and it will not be trusted if it leaps to proclaim the race of white rioters yet mumbles this sort of evasive pap about “youths” and “people” when the rioters are Muslim. Did I say “will not be”? Sorry, I was mentally still in 2005. “Will not be trusted” has now become “is not trusted”. The distrust is rational. 2005’s bad habit of occasionally resorting to concealment has become 2024’s raging addiction to it. That is why for the last several years Samizdata has had a whole tag for “Deleted by the Woke Media”. Just as it did during the Birmingham riots of 2005, concealment of the identity of Birmingham rioters in 2024 feeds the very paranoia that it intends to dispel.
Let us return to Mr Freedland’s Guardian article:
“This was individuals, acting individually and anonymously,” says Joe Mulhall of Hope Not Hate, which has long monitored the far right. All of them were doing their own thing, but the overall result was collective movement in one direction, “like a school of fish”.
What gave the phenomenon scale were the “super-sharers”, big-name figures with large online followings who act as “nodes” for the dissemination of lies.
Perhaps Hope Not Hate’s Mr Mulhall was too shy to state that his organisation is run by a Chief Executive whose expertise in these matters is not merely theoretical:
Nick Lowles, chief executive of Hope Not Hate used Twitter on Saturday night to claim there had been reports of an acid attack in Middlesbrough.
Reports are coming in of acid being thrown out of a car window at a Muslim woman in Middlesbrough. Absolutely horrendous,” Mr Lowles wrote.
The post was seen by more than 100,000 people. The post was flagged by Twitter with a community note which said: “The reports of an acid attack have been denied by local police.”
Thank God and Elon Musk for that Community Note. Its presence counteracting the false rumour irresponsibly spread by Lowles may well have literally saved lives.
I do not think the world has quite taken in what a force for good Twitter/X Community Notes are. They are not perfectly immune from being gamed, but their decentralised nature gives them more protection against becoming vehicles of disinformation themselves than the traditional press had even in the days when most journalists were not subservient.
If Twatter needs to be persecuted and its comminications controlled, then so do the telephone companies, and Royal Mail, and anybody who manufactures paper, pens, pencils.
How *DARE* humans communicate with other humans!
Fun story about disinformation:
If you watch American politics, you’ve seen Kamala’s VP pick was my Minnesota governor, Tim Walz.
Walz has, for years (and several political campaigns) claimed to be a war vet – someone who fought for our country. He really wasn’t. In fact, he was a high-ranking enlisted guy who took the bennies and pay during peacetime, and then quit prematurely within a week of being notified that his unit would be called out to active duty. (He was demoted for quitting, but kept claiming the higher rank for years, too.)
Our local (uber-progressive) paper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune – the Strib (or The Red Star if you were conservative) helped Timmy along by quashing this story for years, even calling it a lie and disinfo. They did it so well that Kamala’s vetters missed it, and she picked him.
Now it’s all exploding. He has a rather huge Stolen Valor problem that is just . . . fun . . . to watch.
And the most delicious part of this explosion is that the Strib may well have taken down Kamala’s campaign all on its own by lying for so long that Kamala got bushwacked by it.
Censorship has its dangers.
It’s not just the censorship, it’s also the euphemisms that have arisen in attempts to hide or deny the censorship.
When Auntie Beeb and the Grauniad refer to “Asians” in the context of knife attacks, rape gangs and other civil disturbances, they are seldom referring obliquely to members of the Cantonese community or a travelling circus of Mongolian lion tamers.
It is so widespread and obvious that an automatic substitution takes place between the media’s anodyne “Asians” and “Muslims of Pakistani origin”.
But let’s not inflame things by stating the bleeding obvious.
Obviously.
RE Walz, you might be right, but I think it important to realize that you and I read rather different sources of information than most people. I have heard him, and Walz is a very good speaker, and he will do very well in rallies, something that up to now has been Trump’s domain.
If you want to know how this election will go you merely need to look at Kamala’s web site. There are absolutely no policy positions. Just rainbows and pretty pictures and platitudes. Under any normal situation the press would open them like a can of tuna. I mean it is so ridiculous the flip flops it would be laughable were it not so serious. One might ask, “surely the American people are not so easily fooled”. But unfortunately, for many of them, they absolutely are. And the press will do what they did for Biden in 2020. They will bury this story from the voters who matter like it is a laptop with toxic information on it.
The openness of X is a wonderful bright spot in an ocean of censorship, and we will see what happens in debates. But you can already see how this is shaping up as a do-over of 2020.
I’m not sure what will happen, but coronating Kamala from the voterless smoke filled back rooms looks like a very good move, though it says something that they still have the audacity to call Trump a threat to democracy. And it says something about the American people that they are apparently oblivious to the fact that a coup d’etat just happened right in front of their eyes, and they didn’t notice.
Apologies to the Brits for this American hijacking the conversation about what is a very serious situation in Britain. Regarding the matter of free speech, it is the same tired argument over and over — “I’m in favor of free speech, as long as it is speech I agree with”.
I know that, and I understand your point, but, after several years that have been a drought of political happiness (for me), this has been a fun week, and I’m hanging on to that.
I just can’t believe that a national political operation picked Timmy. The country just can NOT be as stupid as my Minnesota cohort, which venerates the Chinese model.
The Guardian and the rest of the left used to say that they were against “economic freedom”, which they put in scare quotes, but were strongly in support of Civil Liberties – thus drawing on the (false) distinction J.S. Mill made between freedom to produce and trade and such things as Freedom of Speech (Mr Mill supported both economic and civil liberty – but he made a distinction between them).
The modern left is now consistent – it is no longer just in favour of lots of government spending, high taxes and lots of economic regulations, it is now openly supporting the crushing of what is left of Civil Liberties – such as Freedom of Speech.
In a way we should welcome the frankness of the left, of the Collectivists – as it makes clear that such things as the British Labour Government are not misguided friends, they are foes. They wish to crush what is left of our liberties – and they openly say so.
Is Jonathan Freedland a “liberal”?
Well as far back as the 1920s some people who called themselves “liberals” supported the Marxist tyranny that had taken over Russia and created the Soviet Union, it was the worst tyranny on the planet (at that time) and they supported it.
Why?
Because they had, already, redefined the words “liberty” and “freedom”. The “New Liberals” in Britain (people such as “we are all socialists now” Sir William Harcourt – who forced out Gladstone in the 1890s, and pretended that Gladstone parted on good terms with the men who had betrayed him and betrayed the idea of LIMITED government) and the “New Liberalism” of Professor (later President) Woodrow Wilson in the United States, reminds me of some Imperial Roman coins.
The Imperial Roman coins that have “libertas” – on the back. The Roman Empire was a military dictatorship where even mild dissent (or imagined dissent) could be punished by the Emperor ordering death. But it has its own “freedom”.
The loaf of bread over the word “libertas” gives the game a way – liberty (freedom) no longer meant the right to keep and bear arms as it had done under the Republic (imagine what Mr Freedland thinks of the right to keep and bear arms) or Freedom of Speech (freedom of dissent – freedom of “Hate Speech” i.e. opinions that do not agree with the narrative of those in power) – liberty (freedom) now meant free bread and other free goods and services for the urban mob.
That is what the modern international establishment mean by “freedom” or a “free country” – they mean free food, medical care and-so-on – and not just for the inhabitants of a few places (most Roman citizens lived in rural areas and did not get any benefits), but for everyone.
That is what Johnathan Freedland and the others mean by “freedom” – not freedom to dissent (let alone the right to keep and bear arms or anything like that), but rather free food, free medical care, and so on. Good and services from the state – NOT rights AGAINST the state.
The Soviet Union established the first free health service, to cover a whole country, in the world (the NHS came 20 years later and, contrary to modern claims, was probably inspired by the Soviet system established in the 1920s) – that is the sort of thing what the Guardian (and the rest of the international establishment) mean when they use the word “freedom”.
The Roman Emperors would nod in agreement – especially that favourite of modern academics, the Emperor Diocletian – he of public ownership of factories, price controls, Covid lockdown style limits on freedom of movement, a Secret Police, and so on.
As the Guardian, so the country.
For a while the articles in the Guardian were all left-leaning but you could have a quality debate in ‘Comment is Free’. But BREXIT was a hot topic and when Remainers lost the Referendum something seemed to break and no dissenting opinion could be entertained.
And now you can argue that in the absence of dissenting opinion (free speech anyone?) the Guardian is drifting closer and closer to authoritarian spite rather than reasoned discourse. And since The Powers That Be like the Guardian, for mirroring their opinions, that’s a concern.
Paul,
I remember Chris R Tame say, in about 2003, that the Left was in the process of turning its back on liberty in all it’s forms.
Censorship always backfires, as the OP shows.
There are already Common Law principles against threats against specific people and behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace. These are quite sufficient in dealing with mayhem, regardless of the medium of communication.
Starmer was a fan of lockdowns. Authoritarianism is his default stance. It is what he is. None of his reactions surprise me, although I hadn’t expected the turn of events to be this rapid.
The next few years are going to be hard to bear for genuine liberals.
As an aside, the Liberal Democrats have had nothing to say in this. What’s the damn point of that party? Is it a coffee club?
Paul, trying to be generous to Freedland, he possibly is one of those modern liberals who claims that freedom is an empty abstraction without a minimum of capacities and opportunities, such as food, shelter, etc.
It’s crucial that classical liberals deal with this point.
That’s the kernel of how we end up with the “Four Freedoms” of which FDR spoke. It eroded the core of what Jefferson wrote in the Declaration. And opened the floodgates to endless expansion of spending, tax and the administrative state.
Fraser Orr: there was no coup d’etat because those pulling Biden’s strings, i.e. those really in control, are now pulling Kamala’s strings.
In other words, the powerful people in the shadows haven’t been ousted.
’Most people in the West nowadays simply have a more accurate picture of the world and are less susceptible to false rumours.’
Absolutely spot on. On my local Facebook on Tuesday, we had people claiming there were gangs of moped riders with baseball bats roaming the area, beating up ethnics. And they were roundly laughed off the page! No one believed a word.
Know why? No pics or video. On Facebook, someone’s dog craps near your front door and the owner doesn’t poop scoop and there’s Ring doorbell footage a go go! Or video shot by the outraged householder leaning out of the window.
People simply aren’t as volatile and gullible as this idiot suggests, any more. They notice trends. And that’s the real reason for the desire to throttle social media.
😂
I am not an American, but my take on the Biden/Harris imbroglio is that the Democrat ptb realised that if they arranged things so that Biden won the election, nobody would believe them and trouble (for them) would result.
Whereas now, if they arrange things so that Harris wins – as they probably will – it’s a bit of a surprise but not downright incredible, so they get away with it.
Musings:
Is anyone else choking on the thought of Kamala as Commander in Chief?
Is that why Walz may have appeared an attractive option, at least superficially?
Walz was also a teacher. Did that make him a twofer? Military and education creds. Public sector unions are a significant component of the Dem base?
Or, did the other potential VP candidates bail?
This is a good opportunity to ask bobby’s opinion of Tim Walz.
In particular, i wanted to ask how it is that he got re-elected, when he should have been held responsible for the 2020 riots.
Also, is it true that he bailed out of further debates in 2022 because his first debate did not go well for him?
@bobby b
I know that, and I understand your point, but, after several years that have been a drought of political happiness (for me), this has been a fun week, and I’m hanging on to that.
Ah, sorry to rain on your parade. I think the weeks leading up to and including the R convention were a great source of political happiness. And the subsequent events were just jaw dropping in their mendacity. But I still think Trump is in with a decent shot. It really depends what happens the next few weeks.
Definitely watch the Biden people. They are PISSED and who knows what they might do. They care far more about their own vindication and getting vengeance on their assassins than they do about what is right for the country. So it would not surprise me at all if they are working to undermine her (and Pelosi in particular) right now. Subtly no doubt, since I am sure they have threatened him with the 25th. But I am sure they do NOT want her to win.
Fraser Orr
Re Joe Biden subverting Harris
Any thoughts about the deal they struck? What are they using for leverage? Allowing him to serve out his term with dignity? What about pardoning his family?
@Exasperated
Any thoughts about the deal they struck? What are they using for leverage? Allowing him to serve out his term with dignity? What about pardoning his family?
I don’t think it was complicated. “Mr President, you can go easy or you can go hard. If you don’t go, every elected official will come out calling for you to go. If you still don’t go, it’ll be the 25th. So, please, Joe, you’ve been a distinguished politician for fifty years. Bow out with dignity. And we will make sure to praise you and say ridiculous things like ‘Biden deserves to be on mount Rushmore’. We’ll contribute to your Presidential library, we’ll give you and your children lots of gigs and sinecures and name lots of things after you. So go with dignity. That, or we will destroy you, ruin your reputation and destroy your family.”
As to pardons I fully expect Biden to do that to everyone while still President but after the election.
I think the phrase is “all hat, no cattle.”
You have to understand Minnesota – well, the Twin Cities – to understand Walz.
It’s the most progressive place I know, and that includes Portland, Seattle, San Fran, etc. (The cities dominate MN politics because they contain about 55% of the state population.)
We are the home of Ilhan Omar, Mondale, Humphrey, and a number of other notable progressives. We don’t have a “Democrat” party – we have what’s called the DFL – the Democrat-Farmers-Labor Party – which is usually to the left of basic Democrats. Lately, it has been overrun by the DSA – the Democratic-Socialists of America. That’s even more progressive than the DFL.
Cue Tim Walz. Ex-high school football coach in Nebraska, fired for a rather egregious DWI, moved to MN, teacher and assistant football coach, long-term member of the Minnesota National Guard (I’ll leave his served-in-peace-quit-when-war-loomed saga to other sources. Let’s just say it is problematic.)
Walz has long been a Sinophile. Not the Confucian type – a lover of Communist China specifically. Many trips, some financed by the Chinese government. From Wikpedia: “The Wall Street Journal, citing local media reports, reported that one trip to China doubled as his honeymoon in 1994, and he planned his wedding date to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.”
Note that he was celebrating the crackdown, not the student movement. He’s very pro-CCCP.
He’s a loud and hostile bully at times. The local paper – the Strib, which is the only paper, really – is run by an ex-staffer and good friend of Walz’s.
So Walz is a good fit for the progressive side of Minnesota. That’s the side that still revels in the riots, that considers them to have been fair payback for decades of racism and hate. To them, the riots and damage that Walz let happen are recommendations for Walz. That the biggest economic losers from the riots were the Blacks means little to them.
“As to pardons I fully expect Biden to do that to everyone while still President but after the election.”
Ahh, yes, of course, I overlooked that the pardons need to be after the election. I just thought that he was taking a risk not to do sooner, rather than later. If he had a stroke or worse, in the interim, he can trust his colleagues to follow through.
I’m wondering if that’s still true.
He’s not running, so he has no fear that a pardon would hurt his chances. To the extent that a pardon would hurt Harris’s campaign, I wonder if he’s all that concerned.
So I wouldn’t be surprised to see Hunter, at least, pardoned soon. (Note that Biden can only pardon Hunter from federal charges. I don’t know if he faces any state charges, but if he does, Biden cannot pardon him from those.)
Thank you, bobby.
So Black Minnesotans lost the most from the riots, but i am still puzzled: surely* urban progressive Whites lost much more than rural conservative Whites — and yet urban progressives kept voting for Walz??
* on 2nd thought, not so sure about the progressive bit: maybe the urban Whites who lost the most were not progressive to start with?
SG: ” surely* urban progressive Whites lost much more than rural conservative Whites — and yet urban progressives kept voting for Walz??”
Yep. I think it’s a guilt thing. Urban progressives tend to be “sorry for being white, I understand why you burned my stuff!” people. Plus, white well-off urban progressives tend to be well-insured. It’s the poorer people who actually incurred uncompensated losses, along with the loss of much of their own business community, and of places at which they can buy food, etc.
Also, I should note, they burned out the big police precinct center that supplied the protection for much of South Minneapolis, which is quite Black. That was then closed forever by Walz and the Mpls mayor. Police protection remains spotty in a large part of the city. And the urban progs see that as a win. (We have a huge “defund the police” contingent here, including much of the city council.)
TPTB have tried to retaliate against Elon Musk. The material he has disseminated on Harris is very damaging to her campaign.
You probably have seen the AI ad, but he doesn’t even have to go to that much effort. Compiling and posting her speeches makes a mockery of her.
Discovered Joys – the Guardian and the international establishment generally, are not just “drifting towards” authoritarian spite – they are already there, they support tyranny. They really do – they are not going rotten, they are rotten.
Jonathan Pearce – Chris Tame was correct.
As for being generous towards Mr Freedland and the others – they would ruin your life without a second thought, indeed they would enjoy ruining your life.
Perhaps there is a very nasty reason why I can recognise evil (the pleasure people take in the suffering of other people) in some people – because I have lot of evil in myself (and I do have a lot of evil in myself).
“It takes one, to know one” – perhaps.
But, please (please) believe me, these people are evil – they seek to harm other people because they enjoy doing so, they get a kick out of it.
They may not always have been evil – they may once have resisted this passion in themselves and been good people.
But they are evil NOW – and they will seek to harm anyone who opposes them, and they enjoy the suffering of “right wingers”.
Freedland is remarkably non-specific as to exactly what Musk has done to merit charges. As far as I can tell, by declining to ban users who advocate restricting immigration, he is tacitly advocating violence against immigrants. But that’s obviously so fucking stupid it can’t really be his argument, can it?
george m weinberg.
Mr Musk opposes the leftist agenda of tyranny – that is why he merits charges, merits them from the leftist totalitarian point of view (which Mr Freedland now represents – whatever he may have represented in the past).
“The issue is never the issue” (Saul Alinsky and his followers) – if the left can further the cause of tyranny by supporting unlimited immigration, to smash traditional society, they will do that. But they do NOT give a damn about immigrants – or their children or their children’s children. They, to the left, are just a means-to-an-end.
Mr Freedland does not respect followers of Islam – privately he despises all they care about most, but they are (he believes) USEFUL.
The left do not respect Islam – they want to USE Islam as a weapon to help destroy Western society, they see Muslims simply as tools – they do not care about them as people.
I suspect that intelligent Muslims, and there are many intelligent Muslims, understand this very well – and have their own long term plans for their “friends” the left.
I know it will be very late for you, but the Musk/Trumpathon (8:00 EST) could be epic.
Now if only Musk can guide Trump and keep him sane.