Elon Musk and the phoney far-right narrative of ‘protecting’ women

Musk has no authority to dictate the political agenda on girls’ and women’s rights in Britain, or anywhere else, writes Jonathan Este

Elon Musk has reposted Andrew Tate, who police in the UK have linked to an epidemic of misogyny and violence against women, and supported far-right actors, including Tommy Robinson, while accepting a job in the administration of Donald Trump, a man found liable for sexual abuse.

Across the 2000s, a series of child sex exploitation cases affected British towns, including Telford, Rochdale, Oxford and Rotherham, scarring the lives of hundreds of children. In 2011, Times journalist Andrew Norfolk reported that networks — so-called “grooming gangs” — of largely British Asian men of Pakistani heritage had trafficked and raped hundreds of mainly girls and young women.

These facts are widely known in the UK and have been the subject of multiple investigations. The 2014 Jay report found that authorities had been slow to act, sometimes out of fear of being accused of racism.