According to the feverish visions of some in the US at the moment, England has undergone a radical transformation. Gone are all those entrancingly acerbic dowager duchesses, curtseying maids, wizards and crumpets. Right now, asylum-seeking grooming gangs are roaming the North unchecked, while in Londonistan, the Metropolitan Police takes its instructions from Mullahs. Communist judges are throwing middle-aged mothers into prison for having senior moments on Facebook; busts of Winston Churchill are festooned with pride flags; and Keir Starmer is rarely seen upright, preferring to take the knee wherever possible.
To the presumed horror of the English tourist board, Elon Musk has joined in, taking a break from trying to set off nuclear bombs on Mars by putting a metaphorical one under the discourse here instead. According to him, the UK is now beset by “two-tier justice” and “civil war is inevitable”. Over the past fortnight, he has sent out a stream of posts and memes, deriding various attempts by Starmer and his Director of Public Prosecutions to strike fear into the hearts of would-be miscreants, by telling them of the grave consequences they face for carrying out riots or inciting them online.
And it is the latter that has got Musk especially worked up. Communications offences in UK law have long included sending “grossly offensive” and “indecent” messages, as well as obscene and threatening ones. Last year’s Online Safety Act also criminalised knowingly false messages intended to cause “non-trivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience” without “reasonable excuse”. Meanwhile, the Criminal Justice Act generally requires that racial or religious hostility be treated as aggravating factors in criminal conviction, resulting in heavier sentences than otherwise. Pleading guilty also means the decision can be faster than when guilt has to be established at a trial.
Accordingly, there have been some swift and draconian-looking judicial decisions over the past few days for Musk to highlight for his avid followers, contrasting them with apparently lenient criminal cases involving immigrants to the UK. “It’s 2030 in the UK, & you’re being executed for posting a meme…” goes one typically restrained post. Retweets have included memes merging the British police with the SS, and one jokily showing Starmer as a Nazi — a bit unfair when you remember it was the Conservatives who brought in the Online Safety Act in the first place.
Another meme, comparing a photo of an extremely blonde woman surrounded by black men in their underwear with another of a white policeman in the midst of Muslim community leaders, went out with the words: “Found this pic of the British justice system.” Immediately underneath, he wrote: “This meme could get you 3 years in prison in the UK (actually)”. One assumes Musk is partly worried about his business model: also according to the Online Safety Act, Ofcom now has the power to fine him 10% of a year’s worth of “qualifying worldwide revenue” for what users get up to on X.
Soberly raised, there are various angles one could use to attack the moral legitimacy of giving someone three months in prison, say, for the use of two emojis on Facebook — a brown face next to a gun — or for writing “blow the mosque up with the adults in it” in an online community group. You could question the use of aggravating factors in sentencing about speech. You could argue that illegality should depend on establishing a causal link between a particular post and an instance of violent unrest, rather than just positing a vague counterfactual. Many racist posts on social media during times of rioting are caused by the riots rather than the other way round, yet the system doesn’t reflect this.
Alternatively, you could argue that the fast-paced, vaguely dispersed, algorithm-triggered and impulsive nature of most social media messaging means it often doesn’t meet the bar for traditional notions of intentional harm or threat. Hitting two emojis and pressing “send” into the universe looks importantly different in this respect, say, to writing a letter, addressing it to someone, and putting a stamp on it. But Musk doesn’t seem interested in discussing such complicated matters, preferring instead to flex what his former spouse Talulah Riley calls his “naughty Twitter fingers” instead.
It’s not that the vision of the UK being projected around the world at the moment has no truth behind it. As Carl Jung said of projections generally: “It frequently happens that the object offers a hook to the projection, and even lures it out.” The UK unambiguously has two-tier policing, at least in one sense: it has aggravated offences and non-aggravated ones. We also have a judicial system focused on maintaining public order and so likely to engage in example-setting, and politicians across the board who agree that visibly harsh sentences have a generally deterrent effect.
After a decade of institutionally adopted white guilt in many quarters, it is indeed possible that sometimes the judiciary punishes white offenders disproportionately relative to other ethnicities for the very same crimes — though cherry-picking individual decisions to compare them, as Musk and others are doing, is a terrible way to establish this as true. What does seem clear is that elements of the establishment are markedly more at ease castigating white working-class people than non-white ethnic groups, including where speech inciting racial and religious violence is concerned.
For instance, pro-Palestinian marches last year, though mainly peaceful and engaged in legitimate political protest, included instances of nakedly antisemitic speech that provoked few outraged op-eds on the Left about harms to British Jews. But then again, some subsequently overbearing criminal prosecutions prompted few objections from the normally free-speech-loving Right either, with many of them exaggeratedly describing the protests in their entirety as “hate marches”. People often say they want neutrality, but it’s tempting to conclude they just want a system that doesn’t enable their political enemies to succeed — and that’s not the same thing.
And the same apparently applies to Musk too. He didn’t seem such a big fan of free speech when his employee Martin Tripp spoke to a journalist about environmentally and financially damaging waste-management practices at the Tesla plant in 2018. Back then, Musk accused Tripp of “sabotage” and personally instructed others to hack his phone and emails, while a Tesla spokesman falsely claimed that Tripp was intending to come to the factory to commit a mass shooting.
Equally, although the billionaire has this week complained on X about British judges sending citizens to prison for fighting the police, in his conversation with Donald Trump on Monday, he decried various cases in the US where insufficiently substantial sentences had been handed down for attacking cops. He also seemed to understand the principle of general deterrence, at least by broad analogy: for in the same conversation, he said: “It’s worth emphasising to listeners the immense importance of whether the United States President is intimidating or not intimidating, and how much that matters to global security… because there’s some real tough characters out there.”
But while Musk is busy conjuring exaggerated phantasms of Britain, what fantasies are we projecting upon him? Progressives who once lauded him as an ecological revolutionary, marshalling tech to save humanity, now see him as a pantomime villain who must be stopped at all costs. This week, for instance, former Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf called him “one of the most dangerous men on the planet” responsible for “the most wicked evil possible” in amplifying “far-Right white supremacist ideology”. As usual, this sort of hyperbolic overstatement produces defensive overcompensation from the Right, with some conjuring up a noble warrior saving liberal values and the West, one shitpost at a time. No mention tends to be made of the way his platform’s algorithms continue to monetise polarisation and forever culture wars on a scale of which Putin would be proud.
In the three-part BBC documentary broadcast about him last year, his evidently affectionate ex-wife Riley was more realistic, recalling how financial success made a sudden difference to how people responded to Musk: “Elon went from being ridiculed, to suddenly his word was gospel.” Now, she reported, “everyone listens to everything he says… I’ve had people say to me ‘oh I met Elon and I could tell he was a genius because he seemed a bit distracted and he was clearly thinking great things’, and I’d be thinking, really? He probably just didn’t like you or he was probably a bit bored.”
The unpalatable truth for those who would idolise Musk is that he’s as limited, self-interested, and hypocritical as the rest of us. The unpalatable truth for those who demonise him is that they are too. In fact, we are all “two-tier”, though it would be good if our justice system was not. Reality will always outstrip Manichean projections, whether about the world’s richest man or the state of the UK.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/