The deep fears stoking British fascism

Musk aims to radicalise Reform's base and degrade our democracy

I don’t usually do trigger warnings, but this edition of Conflict & Democracy needs one: we are going to be talking about gang rape, genocidal thought and fascism, and if you’re one of the many people justifiably freaked out by Elon Musk’s attack on British democracy, I apologise for adding to your anxiety. Here goes…

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“If someone cracks a whip across your mother’s face, would you say to him ‘Thank You! He is after all a human being’? One who does such a thing is not a man—he is a brute!”

Those are the words of the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, in his 1929 pamphlet Those Damned Nazis. He continues:

“How many worse things has the Jew inflicted upon our mother Germany and still inflicts upon her! He has debauched our race, sapped our energy, undermined our customs and broken our strength…The Jew is the graphic demon of decay.”

I found the quote in Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism. It you can stomach it, here’s an English translation of the original pamphlet, hosted at Calvin University.

I’m starting with Goebbels – not with Musk, Farage and Robert Jenrick – because I want to make a point about how fascist ideology works. It’s a point that liberals and social democrats, today as in the 1930s, just can’t seem to get their heads around:

Fascism is an appeal to the subconscious, and thus has sex - and sexual violence – as its ever-present theme.

Anyone trying to fight it purely at the level of logic, reason and evidence is going to lose, warned Reich. Anyone too squeamish to listen carefully to what fascists actually say – how they appeal subliminally and sub-textually to fantasies of rape, cuckoldry and ritual murder – will never understand the tsunami of hate they can unleash. (Again, if you can stomach it, here’s a summary of how that worked for Nazi anti-Semitism).

Fast forward to 2025, the assault on British democracy and the Labour government that Musk has instigated, and the collusion with it by the Tory leadership, and we are most definitely going to need “mass psychology” to fight back.

Musk’s crazed outbursts…

In the past 7 days Elon Musk, using his giant reach on the platform X, has:

• Claimed that Labour minister Jess Phillips is a “rape genocide apologist” and should be jailed

• Claimed the Keir Starmer deliberately organised a cover-up of “Pakistani rape gangs” while head of the CPS

• Claimed that former PM Gordon Brown “sold” the victims “for votes”

• Offered support and money to the Reform Party and intimating that it should ally with jailed fascist leader Tommy Robinson

• Called for Robinson to be freed from jail, where he is serving a term for the crime of contempt, to which he pleaded guilty

• Claimed the UK is about to experience a civil war

• Called on the King to dissolve parliament and annul the elected government - ie to stage an anti-democratic palace coup

• Reposted extreme Islamophobic and racist messaging from X accounts linked to the far right

• Called for Nigel Farage to be replaced as leader of Reform UK, after he refused a rapprochement with Robinson.

And he is not done with these gratuitous libels yet. Much of his output is delusional and factually wrong – and seems to be the product of Musk’s self-radicalisation and ignorance.

But it has initiated a pile on against Starmer by the right-wing press, which in turn has set the agenda of broadcasters and – most disgracefully – triggered a post by Robert Jenrick, the Tory shadow justice secretary, claiming that the grooming gang scandal is the direct result of immigration policy.

My #1 piece of advice to progressives who are rightly fearful of the outcomes – in terms of radicalisation, incitement and potential violence – is do not engage publicly with Musk or his supporters. There is a ton of research that shows nothing can be gained from doing so.

Neither facts nor logic are much use against the hard-core supporters of the far right. Fascism is a “political religion”, co-created in real time out of people’s fears and fantasies, and – as I outlined in How to Stop Fascism– impervious to reason.

But it is time for a public discussion among progressive parties and organisations about our strategy in the face of this attack – in particular because the Labour front bench, which is bound by the Nolan principles and by its duty to run law enforcement impartially, cannot effectively both govern and run a party-based fightback.

In the past 24 hours Starmer has come out fighting, defending Phillips in robust terms, pointing out the damaging nature of Musk's lies and correctly identifying the far right nature of the attack. There was more in the Sun today, while Gordon Brown has issued a strong, legally-worded refutation.

But we, collectively, as a civil society, will have to do more than this. Because Musk, the US MAGA movement and their allies among the thousands of Brits who joined violent racist riots last summer, are not finished.

Why the grooming gang issue is back

The issue around which the far right has suddenly mobilised has been in the news for more than a decade: the grooming and rape of vulnerable girls and young women by gangs of men, leading to numerous high-profile trials.