California fires: WSJ editorial board

An unusually well-written explanation:

California’s Climate Time for Choosing

Sacramento tilts at reducing temperatures while its cities burn from failure to adapt to a variable climate.

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By 

The Editorial Board

Updated Jan. 10, 2025

The Los Angeles wildfires are awful to behold, and perhaps they are bad enough to cause some rethinking by California’s political class. Instead of trying like Don Quixote to change the climate, they could spend their money on mitigating and adapting to the effects of climate change.

Democrats blame the L.A. blazes on the changing climate, which is a convenient excuse as citizens rage against the failures of state and local government. The evidence doesn’t support the climate explanation since (among other reasons) California has had a dry climate and Santa Ana winds, even with hurricane-force gusts on occasion, for centuries. If the Democrats who run the state believe their own advertising, why not spend money in useful ways rather than on a green-energy transition to nowhere?

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Start with water, which has become a political flashpoint after fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena neighborhoods ran dry. Donald Trump in particular is blaming Gov. Gavin Newsom for scrapping his first-term plan to ease fish protections to let more water flow from the north to farmers and cities in Southern California. He’s half right.

Mr. Trump has a point that Democrats in Sacramento have badly mismanaged water. The state never has enough to go around because much of the Sierra Nevada snowpack—one of the state’s largest natural reservoirs—gets flushed out to the Pacific Ocean rather than stored for dry years.

Farmers received only 50% of their allocation this past year despite two wet winters. Mr. Trump is right that the species protections he cited are largely to blame, and Democrats refuse to take on the environmental lobby.

But increasing water flows from northern California wouldn’t have helped firefighters in L.A. since the problem there was an overwhelmed local water system.

The region’s water infrastructure was built more than a century ago to fight house fires, not conflagrations like this week’s. Water tanks were filled to capacity before the fires, but three that supplied the Palisades were quickly tapped out. Huge demand caused a loss of pressure, which made it harder to pump water uphill to refill the tanks.

As a result, firefighters had to rely on massive tanker trucks—powered by good ol’ diesel fuel—to deliver hundreds of thousands of gallons of water. A nearby reservoir that was undergoing repairs might have helped maintain pressure somewhat longer had it been full. It’s also possible larger pipes and tanks could have helped firefighters at the margin.

But renovating the water system to bolster its firefighting capacity is costly. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the local municipal utility, is struggling merely to maintain its sprawling system. Its 7,337 miles of pipes on average are more than 60 years old. Most older water systems in California also aren’t equipped to fight wildfires.

If fires are going to be more common, then overhauling water systems will be essential. But governments have limited resources and need to set priorities. And California’s politicians—state and local—prefer to spend money on income transfers and green subsidies that buy votes rather than infrastructure that pays off in the future.

Democrats have in particular given priority to reducing CO2 emissions over mitigating the effects of a variable climate. The state’s renewable-energy mandates have forced Pacific Gas & Electric Co. to spend heavily on wind, solar and battery power, at the expense of upgrading its aging power lines that have sparked some of the state’s most catastrophic fires.

Mr. Newsom has lately increased spending for wildfire mitigation, including tree thinning, though it may be too little, too late to prevent new and raging fires. Given the hurricane-force gusts, it’s hard to know whether more fire breaks and brush clearing might have reduced the damage from the Los Angeles fires. Even so, the state spends more on “fighting” climate change than preparing for it.

The Governor’s budget last year included $2.6 billion for “forest and wildfire resilience”—far less than the $14.7 billion provisioned for zero-emission vehicles and its “clean energy” transition. California’s $100 billion bullet train and offshore wind turbines will do nothing to prevent fires or protect communities. Rooftop solar subsidies are no consolation for people who lose their homes.

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More broadly, nothing California does to subsidize EVs or punish fossil fuels will have any effect on global temperature. Its CO2 emission reductions are dwarfed by increases elsewhere, including emissions from fires. Their climate policies are pure political virtue signaling to please the climate lobby.

But the state can do more to mitigate the harm from future fires and better use its natural water supply to cope with dry years. It’s time for Democrats to choose which is more important: Their climate obsessions or citizens.

California fires: Shellenberger

 https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1878171577336090996

Michael Shellenberger

@shellenberger

As a new wave of fire and high winds threaten Los Angeles, the media is reporting that California’s elected leaders are not to blame and that right-wing influencers and Donald Trump are spreading misinformation and politicizing a tragedy. Racial and gender quotas through DEI aren’t to blame. No, Mayor Karen Bass didn’t cut the Fire Department’s budget. No, Gavin Newsom didn’t cut CalFire’s wildfire prevention budget. And no, there wasn’t any way to prevent these fires or the fire hydrant water from running out. Climate change made the disaster inevitable due to “whiplashing” rain levels. They’re all lies. The Fire Department had made DEI such a priority that the city’s Deputy Fire Chief dismissed concerns that women would not be able to carry a man out of a fire by saying, “He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.” Newsom did indeed reduce CalFire’s wildfire prevention budget by $150 million in 2020. If California had elected leaders who cared about the people and were competent, they could have prevented the catastrophic fires from destroying 14,000 homes and businesses and forcing nearly 200,000 people to evacuate. Climate change is not responsible for the disasters and there is no change in the rain pattern. As always, nuance is required. The offhand remark by the Fire Chief is not proof that DEI contributed to the inadequate response. The disaster is decades in the making. LA’s leaders have known that the city was unprepared for catastrophic wildfires since the Bel Air Fire of 1961, which occurred when Karen Bass was a child and Gavin Newsom wasn’t alive. LA’s fire budget had actually increased by about $50 million compared to the last budget, reported Politico, Time, and the LA Times. And Newsom increased the CalFire budget after 2020 and increased land treated for wildfire prevention by 90,000 acres. But these facts are either wrong, misleading, or both. The attitude toward vulnerable men expressed by the deputy Fire Chief is deeply alarming and anathema to firefighter ethics. That the disaster was decades in the making makes the inaction by California political leaders even more inexcusable. The City Council in November approved $53 million to raise salaries, but that funding is completely irrelevant to the millions Bass cut, which her fire chief last month said had “severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires.” And while funding for wildfire prevention increased recently, it wasn’t enough, and Newsom was caught overstating how much land was treated by 690%. The amount of irresponsibility and incompetence displayed by Newsom and Bass is so extreme that insiders are coming forward and speaking out publicly. The owner of the Los Angeles Times went on national television to call it “crazy that we don’t elect leaders with competence.” And LA Fire Chief Kristen Crowley went on CNN, CBS, and Fox to denounce Bass. “Let me be clear,” she said, “the $17 million budget cut… did absolutely negatively impact…. We do not have enough firefighters….We need 62 more fire stations. We've had a 55 percent increase in overall call volume since 2010 and we’re doing it with less firefighters.” As I reported yesterday, over half of all fires that the LA Fire Department puts out are started by the homeless, who may well have started some of the fires ravaging LA. Gavin Newsom spent $24 billion of taxpayer money to increase homelessness by 40% since he took office. Karen Bass ran on a promise to force the homeless inside into shelters but has not done so. Every hour that passes, more information emerges of the corruption, incompetence, and failure. A major reservoir in Pacific Palisades, an epicenter of the fires, was out of commission for minor repairs when disaster struck. Had it been in operation, water pressure would have lasted longer during critical hours, and many homes may have been saved. Yesterday, a leaked LA government memo revealed that Bass had intended to cut an additional $49 million, on top of the $17.5 million already cut, from the fire budget. “I was also directed to develop a plan as part of a budget reduction exercise, and that could equate to 48.8 million,” the LA Fire chief told CNN. “I rang the bell that these additional cuts could be very, very devastating for our ability to provide public safety. That would have resulted to 15 fire stations closing down and potentially the elimination of over 300 firefighters.” The date of the memo is January 6, which is four days after the National Weather Service warned of danger, two days after Bass flew to Ghana on a vanity junket, and one day before the start of the Palisades fire. And LA Fire Department insiders say the head of the city’s Department of Water and Power, who Bass hired, knowingly left fire hydrants remain broken for months, and was the person responsible for draining the emptied reservoir. The response from the news media is that critics of all of this should shut up. “We’re on fire,” editorializedthe LA Times. “Maybe this is not the time for your political hot take.” Why are the LA Times and others in the media defending Bass and Newsom? In large measure because they officially endorsed them. More than that. They actively campaign for them. The hyper-partisan turn of California media two decades ago predated the more recent hyper-partisan nature of the national media. That Democrats had total, supermajority control over the state for 20 years made California media super-authoritarian. The LA Times, in particular is a radical Left publication. It has for years adamantly opposed hospitalizing homeless mentally ill people or requiring homeless addicts to go inside. In both 2020 and in 2021, the LA Times editorial board called for defunding the police to divert funding to social services. For the LA Times, Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass, who visited Cuba at least eight times, expressing admiration for its system of socialist dictatorship, aren’t Left-wing enough. For the media and California’s politicians, the problem is we the people. We complain too much. Our taxes aren’t high enough. We’re causing too much climate change. We get too much in the way of police and fire fighting. And most of all, we spend too much time listening to right-wing influencers who only spread misinformation. We need to sit down and shut up. Like LA’s radical Left deputy fire chief, the media and California’s politicians believe, deep down, that if the people of Los Angeles have to be rescued from fires, then that’s just proof that they got themselves in the wrong place.

Trump Inherits A Deeply Damaged Economy

https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/trump-inherits-deeply-damaged-economy 

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

There is finally some optimism in the land. Unfortunately, good vibes are not enough to fix the deep structural problems that now afflict the U.S. economy, from inflation to a weak job market to a small-business sector that is barely hanging on, in addition to a tapped-out consumer and egregious financial problems in government itself.

To be sure, the U.S. economy still shines on the world stage. But that is simply because most everywhere else is in worse shape. The structural problems are global, owing to the explosion of public-sector debt, bureaucratic overhang, and regulatory impositions over these last five years. The United States might be the least bad but that observation alone doesn’t cause the problems to disappear.

In that context, a leading and brilliant economist in China, Dr. Gao Shanwen, admitted in a Washington, D.C forum that the growth rate of 5 percent is likely not real and actual growth in China is closer to 2 percent. He was promptly disciplined by the Chinese Communist Party on his return and no longer allowed to speak publicly.

This has become a pattern worldwide: the silencing of economists who dare to dispute obviously fake numbers. In the United States, however, there is at least the freedom to speak. Where are the problems and what is the reality?

For starters, U.S. inflation has been accelerating since September 2021. It is now running 3 percent in real time, or 50 percent above the target. This continued pain follows four years of the worst inflation in at least 40 years and probably much longer. By some measures, what we’ve been through equals or exceeds the pain of the 1970s. The only difference this time is that the bean counters in government have gotten better at hiding it.

How much purchasing power of the dollar has been lost? By official measures, the total in this inflationary wave is 22 cents, but industry numbers in food, cars, housing, and services such as insurance and transportation generate numbers nearly double that. No one knows for sure, and calculating large indices depend on the methodology of weighting and calculation of mitigating factors. Add in new fees and shrinkflation and you can generate even worse numbers.

Even if inflation ended today, the damage of the last four years will be with us for many years. Sadly, that is not happening. You know it just from being out shopping or looking carefully at the bills you are paying through autopay. Everything is still rising.

Why is this? Did the Fed and Congress not embark on an anti-inflation drive starting two or three years ago? Yes, but Congress did what it always does: spent more money, which creates more debt, which the Fed then monetizes and thus creates more money. The Fed initially worked to sponge up the excess with higher interest rates but reverse coursed last year with a new quantitative easing campaign.

The low point in the money stock came in November 2023. That reversed toward easing. As of today, there is more than $1 trillion in new U.S. dollars sloshing around the country and the world than existed 14 months ago. This combined with rising velocity (pace of spending) pushes inflation in the opposite direction.

In other words, our continued problems are a direct consequence of political pressure put on Congress and the Fed as we moved toward the 2024 election. As usual, the party in power chose money printing and spending as a method of election manipulation through the creation of the illusion of prosperity. The incoming administration is now holding this bag. There is absolutely nothing that the incoming president or Congress can do to reverse the damage. It can only hope to generate wealth effects from dramatic deregulation and tax cuts as a means of mitigating inflation. Even under the best of conditions, the problem will be with us for another year at least.

Another headline issue concerns the job market, which is more broken than is being reported. Both the employment-population ratio and the job participation rate have been falling for six months. This is after failing to fully recover from March 2020 lockdowns. They now stand at levels more commonly seen in the early 1980s before it became more common than not for women with young and school-age children to be in the workforce.

Something dramatic has changed. There are undoubtedly many factors at play but among them is that many people had their lives so fundamentally disrupted and never adapted to the gradual reopening of 2022 and beyond. Many more disabled people are out of work and living off government welfare while many older people simply gave up.

(Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker)

It’s hard to say whether such structural changes are permanent. Some of them seem to be owing to the unavailability of childcare for women of childbearing age. There is a cultural shift at work too, with two-income households turning back to become one-income households homeschooling the kids. No question that the U.S. educational system is deeply stressed and parents and teachers are bailing out at rates never before seen. This undoubtedly affects the job market.

The actual data on job creation over four years seems in a constant state of flux as revisions keep coming in, always in the direction of downgrading and correcting exaggerations over the last four years. The nativity of the demographics also raises questions, as nearly all job creation has benefited not native born but foreign-born workers. Whether and to what extent mass deportations of undocumented workers will affect all these numbers is an open question.

Regardless, the hiring market in white collar professions has grown extremely tight. The Wall Street Journal reports: “There are still plenty of jobs for people looking for hands-on services work, including in the healthcare and hospitality sectors. It’s a much tougher slog for office jobs, where bosses are aiming to be leaner and in some cases replacing workers with AI. ... To date, the labor market has been weakening primarily due to less hiring—not widespread layoffs. But once companies decide to reduce payrolls, job cuts often snowball quickly, which could spark a much faster jump in the unemployment rate.”

As for other data points such as retail sales and factory orders, those have been overreported for many years simply because it is not routine for them to be adjusted for inflation. Once you perform those calculations with official or more realistic estimates of prices, we observe economic activity as flat or falling during the whole of the Biden years. This might have worked to keep spirits high but reality is going to dawn in the coming months as national media and agency data collectors are more forthcoming about what is really going on.

Then you have the problem of government finance. Gross federal debt as a percentage of gross domestic product remains at levels not seen since the Second World War. This is an intolerably dangerous situation that puts everything at risk, crowds out private investment, and forever tempts the central bank into dealing with this problem with more money printing.

(Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker)

This cannot last. Elon Musk formed, with Trump’s blessing, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to deal with it, offering up the possibility of cutting $2 trillion from federal spending immediately, without touching entitlements. There is reason to doubt that this is possible but I’ve noticed that in the weeks before the inauguration, talk of such draconian cuts seems to have died down a bit. That is seriously worrying.

There is simply no chance for a major restart of American productivity without dealing with the budgetary crisis. Business as usual cannot work. And yet everything about Washington is designed to forestall such dramatic actions. It is far easier for anyone taking power to look the other way, even inventing new ways to spend money, than to deal with the crisis the way any household would.

The regulatory problem is screamingly obvious. The Biden administration has tangled up multiple sectors in a plethora of mandates and impositions to the point that many have been nonfunctioning by design. This is something that the Trump administration can actually do, and one hopes the de-tangling efforts will be immediate and drastic.

These are all very serious issues that confront the Trump administration. Another factor too: national media is going to be far more willing to call a spade a spade than it was under Biden. Maybe this is good but it does not bode well. Six months in, the Trump administration could find itself dealing with a backdated recession that could foil many of its attempts to entrench tax cuts.

It’s a difficult problem inherited by an administration for whom public expectations could not be higher.

*  *  *

Identity vs competency

 

Stephen Miller

@StephenM

·

2h

When you orient every level of society around social agendas, political agendas, ideological agendas, racial agendas, gender agendas — everything but merit, competence, performance and the national interest — it will always end in catastrophe.

British media failure

 

Matt Goodwin

@GoodwinMJ

Today, a number of prominent journalists criticised my suggestion that the UK media class has failed to sufficiently cover the rape gangs scandal, which will go down as one of the biggest scandals in our history So, I decided to take a closer look at the data. Trust me, you'll want to read until the end First, the boring bit. How did I do it? I used something called Lexis, a database researchers use to search content across UK newspapers Every good researcher out there knows how to use it so they can duplicate my work and check One of my critics today said my use of "grooming gangs" in my initial numbers was misleading because much of the coverage in UK newspapers uses "grooming gang" not "gangS". OK then, let's use that And let's just look at articles that are specifically about this scandal and don't just mention it in passing What did I find? Let's look at the years 2011-2025 because before that, even though the rape gangs scandal goes back decades, there was NOTHING in UK media. Nothing. They didn't touch it AT ALL --despite widespread rumours pushed by groups like the BNP and EDL 2011 is a crucial year because it's when renegade and HERO Andrew Norfolk, at The Times, started to write the first early pieces, despite abuse & harassment First, let's look at ALL UK newspapers In 2011-2025 there were 4,659 articles specifically focused on the "grooming gang" phenomenon Wow Sounds a lot right? Remember the number. "Grooming gang" = 4,659 But now let's compare that with how much coverage the media class gave to other scandals and terms "white privilege" = 6,146 "anti-Muslim" = 17,152 "post office" and "horizon" =20,274 "extreme right" = 21,252 "Islamophobia" = 23,461 "Greta Thunberg" = 22,717 "expenses scandal" =25,585 "Stephen Lawrence" = 29,808 "anti-racism" = 34,484 "Windrush" = 35,515 "George Floyd" = 38,824 "Black Lives Matter" = 59,338 "Grenfell" = 71,422 "Britain" and "racism" = 75,693 "Net Zero" = 141,367 "far right" = 231,540 "racism" = 382,069 I could go on. I think the numbers speak for themselves. Relative to other scandals and amid a strong liberal bias in parts of the media class, the mass rape of young, working-class white girls & women just wasn't a priority Yes, there were newspapers that broke the story and pushed it, like the Times in 2011 But even there, the 440 articles built around "grooming gang" between 2011-2025 is dwarfed by, say, the 2,868 on "Islamophobia", the 3,202 on Stephen Lawrence, the 2,603 on George Floyd, or the 5,524 on BLM My point is not to bash individual newspapers but to say that relative to other race-related stories and debates, the rape gangs scandal --ARGUABLY THE BIGGEST SCANDAL IN OUR HISTORY-- has received very little coverage from the media class I'd give you the numbers for liberal progressive papers like The Guardian/Observer but frankly they're absurd Oh ok then Between 2011 and 2025 the Guardian had 113 articles on the grooming gang phenomenon compared to 3,325 for "Islamophobia" What about the BBC? We can look at BBC News 24 and BBC Radio 4 There were 357 specific mentions of the "grooming gang" scandal in BBC News/Radio 4 transcripts Meanwhile, there were 7,537 for "George Floyd", 3,219 for "Stephen Lawrence", 7,416 for "Black Lives Matter", and 2,259 for "Islamophobia" You get the picture. I won't keep going But what I will say is this. These girls were never a priority in Media Land Relative to other scandals they were at first ignored and then downplayed Too many of the middle-class, Oxbridge-educated, socially liberal if not radically woke progressive elites who control the parameters of what they think is our national "debate" routinely steer clear of scandals and issues that violate tightly-controlled taboos around immigration, multiculturalism, "diversity" in all its forms, and which are backed up with alarmist narratives about the "far right" and "Islamophobia" to warn others off from asking difficult questions or challenging the elite consensus in Westminster and London This HAS to change As I wrote in my Substack this morning,

@elonmusk

has done Britain a favour by forcing us to reckon with a truly NATIONAL scandal that has for too long been ignored and pushed to the side by political, media, and cultural elites in wider society This past week, we have been pushed into a new era in which millions of people up and down this country are either learning about the rape gangs crisis for the first time or hearing shocking new details they did not know before and can scarcely believe And millions of people are now asking some enormous questions. How did our country let this happen to our children? Why was it overlooked? Why did so many people stay silent? Is it still happening today? What can we do to stop it? Who is pursuing the truth in media? Who is naming and shaming? And why does the UK media class fall over itself when a single American man dies in Minneapolis while seemingly not giving a shit about the thousands of CHILDREN who have been abused, raped and harassed here in Britain? The people have tuned into this scandal, in other words. They have taken notice and they are watching. The only question now is whether the media class has bothered to notice and will actually get on top of this scandal and push it to front of the agenda or continue to ask ridiculous questions like it did for much of today, deflecting from its glaring failures to instead obsess about Elon Musk. Find the truth and tell us the truth. That's your job.

Matt Goodwin’s newsletter goes to a community of 66,100 subscribers from 173 countries. Like our stuff? Then for the equivalent of buying us a pint a month become a paying supporter. Help us make a difference while gaining access to the archive, exclusive posts, events, discounts, comments, go Live with Matt every Friday, and know you’re supporting independent writers who are challenging the broken status-quo and giving voice to the Forgotten Majority. You can also join us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X and Facebook.

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Ever since a global debate erupted this week about Britain’s utterly shameful rape gangs scandal, much of the legacy media class has blamed just one man.

Elon Musk.

From one newspaper to another, from one television channel to another, members of the legacy media class have lined up to denounce and condemn Musk while saying next to nothing about the actual issue he has been highlighting.

Rory Stewart, that oracle of British politics who assured us Kamala Harris would be swept to power on a tidal wave of public support, rushed onto his podcast for liberal centrists to denounce Musk as, wait for it, “a genuine fascist”.

That’s right.

The one man in the world who does not stop talking about the importance of free speech, science, and evidence is, apparently, a “genuine fascist”.

The Guardian, meanwhile, branded Musk the 'world’s richest pub bore’, while a visibly puzzled New Statesman asked, “why is Elon Musk tweeting about Britain’s grooming gangs?”, clearly at a loss as to why anybody would care about this issue.

Paul Mason, a radical leftist and former editor at Channel 4, issued a list of instructions under the title ‘How to Stop Fascism’, declaring that Musk is ‘staging a concerted attack on British democracy’, while former editor and journalist David Yelland complained that the billionaire was using “Islamophobic dog-whistles”.

Somebody called James Ball, a rather unhinged editor of a rather strange rag called The New European, sought to spark a moral panic by suggesting that Musk’s criticism of Labour MP Jess Phillips’ failure to support a national inquiry into the rape gangs risked “getting Jess Phillips killed”.

And ITV’s Anushka Asthana asked: “Why is Elon Musk obsessed with British politics?”, while actually recruiting somebody from the ‘Centre for Countering Digital Hate’ (yes, the same one that was recently revealed to be planning to “kill” Elon Musk’s platform) to speculate about why people believe in “conspiracy theories”.

Sorry, but am I the only person who finds this utterly ridiculous? Am I the only one who sees the glaring hypocrisy? And am I the only one who finds this outrageous?

Because, as I said at the Reform party’s conference on Friday, I have a message for the legacy media class —the people who have spent the last week endlessly complaining and catastrophising about Elon Musk rather than focusing on what he is talking about — the shocking rape gangs scandal and the failure of the state to deal with it.

And my message is this. “If you’d been doing your job, if you’d been pursuing the truth, if you’d been looking at what is actually happening in this country then we would not need Elon Musk to intervene in our national debate!”

That’s right.

And you can watch the viral clip, which I should say has been shared by Musk, here:

Because here’s how I see it.

If the media class in this country had actually done their job over the last thirty years, by taking the widespread rumours of “Asian rape gangs” seriously, by taking the testimony of their victims seriously, and by taking the pursuit of truth seriously, then we would never have needed Elon Musk to highlight what’s been going on.

But the media class didn’t do this, did they?

Far from it.

Instead, for much of the last thirty years, members of this insular, London-based, left-leaning, and typically Oxbridge-educated class chose to put their heads in the sand.

With the notable exception of a few courageous journalists such as Andrew Norfolk at The Times (who began reporting around 2011) and, more recently, Charlie Peters at GB News, most “journalists” looked the other way, either because of political correctness or fears they might be called “racist”.

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Inside the SICK Grooming Scandal

November 8, 2023

Read full story

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Many went along with the hard left narrative, cultivated by a loose alliance of “anti-racist” groups, Labour politicians and academics, which says that if you dare talk about the “rape gangs” then you must be “far-right” or “Islamophobic”.

At the same time, many in London’s status-obsessed and insecure media class never saw reporting on the plight and abuse of white working-class girls as fashionable enough to warrant their attention or risk losing social status among their fellow media elites —especially given that the story involved challenging tightly-controlled liberal taboos around immigration, multiculturalism, and the compatibility of Islam, none of which would go down well at dinner parties in Chelsea and Pimlico.

Sure, there was a flurry of media reporting around the time of the Alexis Jay report, one of the first serious reports on the scandal, in 2014, which conservatively estimated 1,400 girls had been raped and abused in the single town of Rotherham.

But before this there was next to nothing about the scandal which has been going on for decades while in the aftermath the media class just moved on, never bothering to connect the local dots in what we now know is a truly national scandal of enormous proportions —and one that is almost certainly still going on today, in many towns and cities across these islands.

In fact, such is the general disinterest among the media class that even this year, when journalist Charlie Peters went to Sheffield Crown Court to watch the sentencing of seven men guilty of child sexual abuse offences, he was the only journalist in the room.

He sat there, alone, as one victim of a rape gang gave her impact statement. Standing in front of the Muslim rape gang that abused her, she said she was first targeted in the primary school playground when she was just 11 years old. She was 13 when she was raped the first time. By the time she turned 16 she’d been abused by over 150 men.

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We can deport them -so why don't we?

May 22, 2024

Read full story

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People in the legacy media will deny this, of course. They’ll huff and puff about some article that appeared a few years ago, or a one-off television documentary. But even today, while writing this article, when I searched “grooming gangs” in BBC iPlayer the only thing to comes up is a documentary about a young girl who “lied about being trafficked and raped by a vicious grooming gang”. Oh, and a documentary about Andrew Tate.

Meanwhile, prominent journalists continue to let the mask slip, accidentally revealing their inner contempt for the white girls who were raped and abused.

Such as Times journalist Sathnam Sanghera who, in a now deleted tweet, referred to the abused white girls, in quotes, as “innocent white women”, implying they are not, suggested the rape gangs scandal is somehow rooted in white racism and Britain’s imperial past and, even more shockingly, used the debate to promote his own book!

It’s precisely attitudes like this that allowed the rape gangs scandal to be ignored by the media class in the first place and for so long. Children being systematically abused by organised rape gangs? No, it’s just a racist white underclass in some faraway town I’ve never heard of struggling to come to terms with the loss of Empire.

The real victim here, Sanghera seems to imply, are once again “brown men”. It’s classic radical progressive narcissism of the highest order.

The blunt reality is that compared to other scandals that easily captured the full attention of the media class because they reflect the liberal bias of this class —from the Grenfell and Windrush scandals to the Black Lives Matter protests and the murder of a single American named George Floyd— the much bigger scandal of industrial-scale rape gangs here in Britain was routinely downplayed and ignored by legacy media. It just sits firmly outside of what is considered acceptable and fashionable discourse among London’s media elite.

And now, in response to Elon Musk doing what our own journalists should be doing —highlighting the truth, asking who was responsible for this grotesque failure, and asking why politicians are not doing more—the very people that spent the last thirty years downplaying and ignoring the rape gangs now have the audacity to blame Musk for being “divisive”, “irresponsible”, and, apparently, launching the Fourth Reich.

Much like we saw in the aftermath of Brexit, when a significant part of legacy media tried to have us believe that the people’s revolt was caused by the bogeymen Vladimir Putin and Dominic Cummings, and much like we saw after the immigration protests last summer when many of the same people tried to have us believe the unrest had been caused by Nigel Farage, once again, today, more than a few members of this class are pointing at a fictitious bogeyman in the hope it will distract us not only from the underlying issue but from their glaring failures.

Let me remind you. It was the media class in this country, not Elon Musk, that fundamentally failed this country and our children by refusing to pursue the truth, hold authorities to account and get to the bottom of this story. So, instead of obsessing over Musk let me ask that same media class a few questions.

When will we be getting a BBC Verify episode on why so few British Muslims and their representatives have spoken out about the rape gangs, why the victims are overwhelmingly white and why the rapists are overwhelmingly Pakistani Muslim?

When will we be getting the Channel 4 primetime studio discussion and focus group on what ordinary British Muslims and Imams think about this scandal?

When will we get the full Grenfell-style national media treatment on why so many public sector officials covered this scandal up, from police officers to social workers?

When will we get the extended philosophical discussion on BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze or the Today programme about why so much sexual violence in Europe today is coming from organised gangs of young Muslim men from the Middle East and Africa?

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And when will —oh, I don’t know— Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel, Rory Stewart, Alastair Campbell, James O’Brien and others like them devote just one of their podcasts and shows to explaining why, for example, 1 in 73 Muslim men over the age of 16 in towns like Rotherham have been convicted of child grooming offences? When are those discussions happening? Or are we still going to be told all this is “Islamophobic”?

Perhaps somebody in legacy media could come back to me on that. Because what I see happening out there in the national debate is not a serious attempt among journalists, columnists, and influencers to engage and reckon with what is one of the biggest and darkest scandals in our entire history but, instead, endless attempts to obfuscate, downplay, distract, play down, and blame the likes of Elon Musk rather than do what journalists are supposed to do —namely, get to the truth.

Why did this happen? Why was it overlooked for so long? Who failed these children? Why do they still have jobs and, in some cases, why are they still in parliament? These are basic but fundamental questions dozens of journalists in this country should be investigating and answering.

I mean, could you imagine for a moment the national uproar among the media class if it was revealed that organised gangs of white working-class men were driving into predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods, hanging outside Muslim primary schools, and grooming, abusing, and raping young Muslim girls and women? Could you imagine the response from the left-leaning media class in this country? Indeed.

So my view is this.

If Britain’s legacy media class does not want to continue to haemorrhage public trust and confidence, if it does not want to continue to be outflanked by new media like the YouTube shows, the Substacks, GB News, and more, and if it does not want the rapidly emerging national populist revolt in this country to reshape and realign the entire system then I would politely suggest it spends less time blaming the likes of Elon Musk for highlighting what is actually happening in this country and more time doing it’s actual job. I look forward to your response to my questions.

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Lesley Snell

4d

I applaud Musk and am grateful for his interventions . Legacy media have been omitting the truth, telling us lies,and trying to control the narrative for decades. Rather like the uniparty, we no longer trust or believe anything they say at face value . Free speech is under attack as never before in this country

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Susan

4d

And front page Sunday Telegraph’s lead story is ‘Net Zero Drive will raise cost of holidays’ and not until page 11 does a story on grooming appear.

I have never been so incensed and have written to my MP ( Labour unfortunately) to ask him to raise why we are not having a robust enquiry. I await wooly nonsensical toe the party line reply as he did with the Heating Allowance debacle