From the September Print Edition of Byline Times
As the worst race riots in living memory, mainly targeting migrants and Muslims, the violence that spread across several towns and cities in the UK this summer was newsworthy in itself. But the volume of attention it received from key figures across the Atlantic seemed disproportionate.
Social media played a key role in the disturbances. The owner of the X(-rated) site we used to call Twitter, Elon Musk, had already helped to lay the groundwork for the riots by reinstating the accounts of Andrew Tate and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’) – the loudest purveyors of false information about the tragic killing of three young girls in Southport on 29 July, with incendiary claims that the suspect was a Muslim asylum seeker.
As the rioting spread, leaving more than 100 police officers injured and leading to more than a thousand arrests, Musk continued to comment with something akin to jubilation – claiming that “civil war is inevitable”.
The owner of SpaceX and Tesla directly attempted to intervene in UK politics by echoing the far-right justification for the riots, claiming that they were the result of “two-tier Keir” policing. His trolling did not stop with the Prime Minister.
He went on to describe the former First Scottish Minister Humza Yousaf as a “racist scumbag” and – among the thousands of other US-based accounts focused on British Muslim public figures – he was joined by Canadian psychologist and darling of the ‘alt-right’, Jordan Peterson, who described London Mayor Sadiq Khan as “the worst of the lot”.
Soon, British Conservative politicians, who had been eerily quiet during the riots themselves, joined the chorus defending Musk and his platforming of ‘hate speech’.
Read the analysis of Adam Bienkov, Nafeez Ahmed and Kyle Taylor into the preconditions and planning of Britain’s summer riots in the September edition of Byline Times. Available in most stores or digital edition online now.
Former Prime Minister Liz Truss praised X and its