In the media’s most recent anti-Elon hit piece, Wired magazine takes issue with Musk’s flurry of posts calling attention to child rape gangs in the UK. It’s a weird hill for a publication that pretends to champion women’s rights to die on. But when it comes to the legacy media’s hatred for Musk, there are clearly no bounds.

The child rape gang scandal has been part of British public consciousness since journalists, most notably Andrew Norfolk at The Times, began covering it in the mid-2000s. The details of these stories — 12-year-old girls gang raped, murdered, and effectively sold into sex slavery in their own towns and under the nose of the authorities who spent the past decades “raising awareness” about human trafficking in third-world countries — defy belief.

Much of this went on under Tony Blair’s Labour government, which stood from 1997 to 2007. This at least partly explains why the British media, which is dominated by the strongly leftwing BBC, ignored so much of the story for so long. But the issue recently burst into flames after GB News ran reporting that the new Labour government is refusing to commission a national inquiry into how thousands of British children were milled into an organized, systemized and commercialized machine of mass rape over the course of decades.

Given all this, you naturally, almost viscerally, have to ask yourself how could the government not stand up such an inquiry? Who would say no to such an investigation — and why?

Musk began posting on X about the scandal on January 1, when he re-posted a speech by Norfolk describing one occasion when British police walked in on two drunk, naked 13-year-old girls in a room with seven Pakistani men — and arrested the girls for disorderly conduct. This was not an isolated case. Family members of girls who came forward were either stonewalled or, in some cases, arrested for “wasting police time.” Fathers were arrested in the act of rescuing their daughters from scenes like the one described above.

While it’s called a “scandal,” the phenomenon of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of British girls being hooked on hard drugs, including heroin, and raped by multiple men, sometimes dozens in a day, is closer to an atrocity. Yet, relative to the scale of these crimes, so little was done. And what was done — the ringleader of one of these gangs received a 2.5 year sentence — was flagrantly, almost audaciously light-handed.

Much of the failure has been chalked up to a notion that authorities were afraid of “inflaming racial tensions” — British-speak for not wanting to call attention to the fact that the gangs were made up of men of Pakistani origin. But, as the British-Pakistani prosecutor in one of the trials attested, tensions or not, that is now an established fact.

For Wired, none of this matters. In its piece, “Elon Musk Is Posting Nonstop Falsehoods About ‘Grooming Gangs,” the onus is placed on Musk and the “far-right” who, the publication claims, are victimizing someone (it’s not clear who, exactly) for political gain. In the first paragraph, Wired writes that Musk “has feverishly spent the past few days boosting disinformation and divisive rhetoric.” The piece then explains that Musk flew into action after a story from a “right-wing” publication.

The term right-wing or a variant, namely “far-right,” appears in almost every paragraph of the story. There’s a reason for that. At its core, the piece is largely an attempt to show that this is all just one big moral panic manufactured by the right, which is how the issue has been positioned by the British establishment.

Near the top, the article claims that Musk’s “three-day posting binge” on the rape gang issues “comes just months after anti-immigrant riots roiled the UK, fomented by far-right activists who spread misinformation about a knife attack.” This, in itself, is a strange claim to make since the alleged misinformation — that the attacker, who murdered three girls ages six, seven and nine at a Taylor Swift-themed dance workshop last year, was motivated by Islamism — turned out to be largely accurate.

Wired also works hard to deflect criticism — again, why? — directed at British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who was the country’s top prosecutor for six years while these crimes took place. Instead of providing evidence, conducting an investigation or citing facts, the Wired piece offers a quote from Starmer’s health secretary accusing Musk of being “misinformed.” That’s it. There’s no attempt to substantiate the statement, there’s not even an interrogation of the role Starmer may or may not have played in this sad affair.

The most risible claim in the piece is buried (as it so often is) in the middle. There, Wired claims that “Musk is also pushing the narrative that organized child sex abuse is carried out almost exclusively by Muslim men, when a 2020 UK government study found that was not the case.” To support this claim, Wired links not to the study in question, which is already strange, but to a BBC article which reports the opposite of what Wired is suggesting.

In addition to a glancing reference to the 2020 government study, the BBC article cites an academic study that concluded the “known perpetrators [of the rape gangs] were of Pakistani heritage.” It references the Manchester police identifying men convicted in another case as “British Pakistani.” And it cites a separate inquiry showing that the abusers in a case from Telford are of “southern Asian heritage.” (British code for Pakistani.)

The BBC report also notes that one reason the British government doesn’t have conclusive evidence on this score is that, as a 2022 study found, there was “widespread failures by the police to record the ethnicity of perpetrators.” And here we are, ouroboros-style, back at the beginning of this shameful episode asking how, in a country where virtually every form you fill out asks for your race, that can possibly be the case. Was it that the police simply didn’t notice? Did they not care? Or were they instructed to look the other way for fear of rousing “racial tensions”?

Wired would rather its readers not ponder such irrelevancies. For good reason: this is the way narrative control works. In the face of a revelation that could be catastrophic to their ideological or financial interests, those in power — and sufficiently skilled in the dark arts of Bernaysian propaganda — don’t attempt to prove the lie (in this case, that there is no such thing as Pakistani rape gangs in the UK). Instead, they throw enough sand into the audience’s collective eye that we’re no longer so sure of something we previously knew to be a fact.

Create a crack, drive a wedge — this is a tried-and-true methodology. Wired has put it to good use. The crack, for better or worse, was created by Elon’s mere involvement in the issue. The wedge, the idea that this is a far-right conspiracy theory rooted in racial animus, is now being driven in.

In Wired’s case, it wasn’t a particularly well executed exercise in deflection. But it was fast, and speed counts for a lot. Though others, including the New York Times, have taken up the mantle, this issue is too grotesque, too much of an enormity — something approaching a crime against humanity — and has arrived at too much of the wrong time, where online control of speech is concerned, for even the narrative masters of the media to manage. But that won’t stop them from trying.

—Ashley Rindsberg