I know the smart thing to do is say nothing, but: I’m sorry I read the tweets in that accent given the subject matter. Jesse asked if I could do an Elon impression, I said “yes” — first rule of improv, “yes and!” — even though the truthful answer would have been “no”. I can’t do South African, and it came out as this cartoonish-y New Zealand-ish thing, which was the wrong vibe for such a serious topic. Bad call on my part, I’m sorry.
Neither of you did anything wrong. There are people here that are taking Elon's tweets very seriously, despite the fact that they are in incredibly bad faith, stupid, misinformed, and obviously just some cynical political ploy. Elon's posting here doesn't deserve any special treatment.
That's also been the tone of the show forever. Jesse and Katie have cracked jokes over serious stories for years and no one here has a problem with it when it's about gender or woke shit. If the first half of the pod was just a dry recounting of the story that would be very strange.
I think you're missing the point. Elon's tweets are, well... Elon tweets. And pointing that out is worthwhile. My frustration (and the frustration of many) is that Jesse seemed to be using the fact that Elon tweeted soma dumb shit about it as a reason to dismiss the issue entirely as "old news", which (based on what I've seen) is an unwise characterization.
I understand, but that's a very naive reading of what he's doing. "Yeah I understand he's only doing this for partisan interest AND he doesn't know anything about what he's talking about AND none of what he's saying is relevant to his attacks on Labour AND most of what he's saying isn't true, BUT we need to take what he's saying incredibly seriously" is silly and belies a shallow partisan understanding of politics that I just cannot stand.
Also, he spent a good chunk of the pod talking about the background here. "Dismiss the issue entirely" is absurdly uncharitable to Jesse, if anything he felt he had to overcommunicate here because he probably feels he has to walk on eggshells for his own audience.
I'm not taking anything Elon says on Twitter seriously. I'm taking British feminists like Julie Bindel seriously when they say this topic is worth bringing to light and that it isn't just a matter of "it was handled back when it happened, no need to talk about it now" - that latter characterization is what I'm referring to as "dismissing the issue" on Jesse's part. From what I've read, it's simply not true.
Indeed. The underlying issues of integration are worse than ever. Dismissing these symptoms just makes it worse.
Just last year we had Muslim riots because social services tried to take a child away from their parents, and a case of a Pakistani father torturing his daughter to death before fleeing the country to Pakistan with the rest of his family.
Could these things have nothing to do with religion or ethnicity? Perhaps. Is that statistically likely? Not really.
I would say Jesse gave it the appropriate gravity, as best as he could.
the jokes were jokes. They were offensive to me because they just weren't funny. but I don't get offended by subject matter of jokes. just make it funny.
What irked me is the contention that this matter is completely settled.
if it were completely settled then it would not have set of a complete shitstorm in the UK.
if someone were to come out and tweet that Catholic priests molested kids in the US, there would be a collective shrug because we had a thorough exhaustive truth and reconciliation over many years. Now comedians use it as a punch line. That's closure.
contrast that to the UK where some people even there weren't aware of the full scope of this abomination.
to the extent that there is more to uncover and more people to hold accountable, that is a net good. Elon's ham-fisted tweeting style deserves criticism, his potential motives deserve examination, but all that pales in comparison to decades of crimes that are still happening today.
to say the matter is settled as Jesse did is just fucking stupid.
we are still examining the Tulsa race massacre to this day. never let governments off the hook man.
video below, proper placement of Elon's tweets. 30 seconds, side issue, appropriate criticism, but overall theme is welcoming more sunlight as the disinfectant.
My husband (British) and I (American expat with British citizenship) listened to the episode a bit nervously, because we’re both big fans of Jesse *and* Jeff both, and think very highly of their intelligence and integrity— and hoping they’d see past the many layers of social media bs surrounding the issue.
Overall we thought they did a good job— as my husband said, “for Americans”. 😆 What he means, of course, is getting mostly to the facts, especially from a distance.
Side note, however - there are good reasons to be against Jess Phillips’ decision, even if you believe her stated justification for it. How often is it really a good idea for insular organisations to investigate themselves? And if you don’t think British local councils are insular, I got a bridge to sell you…
Was going to say (not this eloquently) the same - Jesse doesn't 'dismiss issues' often, particularly of gravity. In fact he's one of the very few journalists who's integrity in the written word, and background gathering, I trust.
That point was never made, nor was it implied. But it is worth pointing out this has been investigated extensively. Elon set up back the progress of such investigation in popular discourse because unfortunately he has a huge reach and cab effect the news cycle. I think this comment pretty well misses the point of this show. You can debate the importance of Elon's influence, but to pretend the host were trying to dismiss the story as yesterday's news is willfully ignorant
I agree with you that the tone of this podcast is irreverent and often (but not always) makes fun of, “internet bullshit,” - or just bullshit. Yes, typical targets are gender and woke bullshit because so much of that stuff is, well, bullshit.(But, not all of it, IMO.)
However, the raping of young and vulnerable girls is not bullshit, nor should anyone create an atmosphere of joking around it, even if the hosts were not making jokes ABOUT the topic itself. I don’t think I’m being a buzzkill by mentioning this - nor is anyone else.
So should there never be jokes on this show? I really don’t understand why this is offensive but joking on an episode about October 7th or one about suicide isn’t.
Yes, that's exactly what I said!! There should never be ANY jokes EVER on this show. It's so nice when someone understands what I ACTUALLY meant, especially when I came nowhere near actually writing that!! Thanks for reading my mind and clarifying my intention. I'll do better next time.
Good lord. First of all, they've covered plenty of serious stories on the pod. Second, this is like a non-sequitur - Elon's meltdown was just about bashing Keir Starmer and Jess Phillips. No one has been able to say a single thing they did wrong here, but people just keep bringing up how horrible the crimes were. Obviously, yes, but the story here is the cynical and moronic involvement of Elon Musk. I have to come to the conclusion that these kind of comments are just because people are mad at Elon?
Ad-hominem is something unrelated to a debate, like a personal attack. I was directly addressing the tweets, which are what is being debated, therefore it is not an ad-hominem attack. But good job using debate terminology?
That's what I just said. Personal attack, although that's not the only thing that can be an ad-hom (that is notably the first thing I get if I type "ad-hominem" into Google, lol). What is going on in these comments today. His tweets are moronic, which is what I said?
I can’t tell if you’re still joking here, but in case you’re not - the SA accent is not the problem. The general joking and laughing about the mass rape of young girls is. “Oh, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a bunch of cab drivers!” was bad enough, but “yowza” and “check please” made my skin crawl. What were you thinking? Do you really think lightening the mood is the tack to take here?
Unbelievable response. Do you feel that is a fair summary of the podcast? Jokes were not being made while Jesse was describing the story, are you being serious right now?
If you wanna start litigating when people get to make jokes about what, you will not like the end result. Nothing is sacred. No one here is confused as to how horrific these events are. Humor is still extremely important and we forget that at the peril of our very souls. And I mean that!
The joke was very meta, in the sense that the funny part was precisely how inappropriate it would be to make such jokes given the underlying subject matter.
Worked for me anyway, I found myself chuckling in public at that point. But I'm something of a sucker for meta humor.
When I listen to the honest descriptions of what happened to those poor girls, I was absolutely enraged and wanted to commit violence on the men that did that to them. But as much as that affected me, and no way it was I put off by Jesse and Jeff doing what they always do; if all of a sudden they have to take a serious tone due to how *you* feel about this issue, then they've set a standard for everybody else to demand they do the same for *their* issue.
Yeah, I also took it— at face value— as gallows humor. Even as a little kid I found Michael O’Donoghue funny on olde-tyme SNL, so I’m comfortable with morbid humour- but it’s not for everyone.
Also, but… the situation of a comedian being invited on a show for a discussion of horrific crimes, is just f**king funny. Like “tough crowd” times a million
Ok, let me do little throat clearing: we all fuck up - I certainly do, probably routinely. Which is to say that I’m not going to put you (or Jesse or this podcast) in the rubbish bin just because I thought the jokes and voices around the gang rape topic was in incredibly poor taste.
HOWEVER, coming in here to apologize for bad accents is kind of missing the point - and I have to believe you know that. Additionally, framing this topic as an opportunity for improv - you can’t be serious. I mean, come on. I think that’s where the problems started.
On the other hand, a big credit to you for coming in at all to offer what you did in the way of an apology. I think that’s great.
Jesse and Jeff you did a great job. Please ignore the audience comments. To try appease the mob is going to drag this show down. I think most the people listen do still appreciate even handed and nuance criticism. Don't take the road of the free press or the fifth column
I appreciate you and your appearance on the show. Apologizing seems unnecessary. This exact kind of humor is completely fine with most of these people about other serious topics. This is not a new vibe to the pod at all. This just bothers them this time cause it's about their virtue bugaboo.
Katie and Jesse have made jokes during segments about 10/7, war, pedophilia, and other very serious topics. The jokes were not about the horrific abuse. They repeatedly noted how terrible it was. It would be extremely out of character for the pod if they went completely somber while talking about dumb tweets just because those dumb tweets were about something awful.
I write this not wanting to pile on, because I am a huge fan of Jesse and I know he absolutely meant no harm whatsoever, but those are broad topics, and the difference is that this is so specific and so recent. Just to thought-experiment this: What if they were talking about Daniel Pearl right after his execution? What if they were talking about Rwanda right after the massacre occurred? What if they were talking about the death of Chista McAuliffe right after the Challenger explosion, Elizabeth Smart right after she was rescued? And when it's so specific (which includes limited in scope), when is it okay to make a joke about it? It's not often that something this horrific is the topic of conversation, but when it is, it's shocking to hear people joke-not-joke about it. Again, not piling on! Just giving perspective!
This is not recent. What are you talking about? The first story was over 20 years ago, the first convictions over 10 years ago. The tweets were recent. That's true.
On this show, the worse an accent is, the better. According to this measure, Katie is the greatest impressionist ever and that's one reason we love her.
I do love Katie. I'm not 'offended' by the accents here or otherwise, but full honesty, it's not my favourite thing by either of the hosts (or guests) and I generally just skip ahead.
I hate the accents. They’re not funny, all they do is distract from the topic at hand. If this is Jesse’s idea of humor then he’s a disgrace to the Jewish people.
I am so over the accents. I really wish Jesse would stop pushing Katie and the guests to do them. It's like fingernails on a chalkboard to me (yes, I'm Gen X and get this reference 😄).
Did I laugh at the old timey car horn sound? No. 😞😬 But did I think for a second either you or Jesse were being disrespectful of the subject or the victims? Definitely no.
Also your discussion of Liv and Uncle Brian hit the vibe of our future AI FB BFFs perfectly! The future appears to be stupid, hilarious and menacing! Where racism will be obsolete because we can all say some of our best AI friends are (coded to be) black! Yay!
Haha I can't quite tell if this sarcastic, but you all don't need to apologize. The audience would have been pissed either way when it came to this topic. They are interpreting it willfully with bad faith.
Hi, Jeff! Jesse did you a gross disservice by inviting you on his podcast to color commentate a breezy story about thousands of little girls getting gang raped.
Honestly, I thought it was overly jocular given the subject matter, but both of you stated how horrific the topic was, and I believe that to be true. Regardless, this is a genuinely kind response to some backlash about it.
Don't apologize. You and Jesse clearly thought about how to best present on a topic that is at once terrible and is being shamelessly used by Musk to obviously distract from the H1B mess, etc. You chose awkward, self-aware humor to do so---it seemed like out of exasperation. I appreciated it because what do you do but try to laugh bitterly when others so obviously don't give a shit and are cynically using the pain of others for their own ends (Musk)?
The rubes around here or twitter are extremely easy to manipulate---they're upset because this is exactly what the tone and content of the episode pointed out. Put the word child/youth in front of just about anything, especially when it comes to bad things about immigrants/minorities, and Americans completely lose their minds.
Most of J&K commentary on political issues is the boilerplate good liberal take and completely inoffensive (let's say neutered, like Chait). Calling this issue/discussion out as internet bullshit was actually somewhat adversarial towards the most vocal and conservative portions of their listenership and very welcome.
the rape of thousands & thousands of girls is not internet bullshit. the organized & systemic abuse of white & sikh girls by pakistani muslim rape gangs is worse than hillsborough. when did ppl stop calling hillsborough a scandal? when did the public get a *complete* inquiry? keir starmer gave a speech listing national scandals for which the gov't was to blame. you know what he listed? or, to put it plainer, do you know what he left out? the worst one. by far. who gives a shit about post office businesses going under when we've accepted regular anal gang rape of 11 year old kufar girls as 'not worth questioning'?
Thank you. So many people in these comments seem to have missed this. Elon is exploiting and misrepresenting a tragedy to further his own political agenda, and acting like he "discovered" a story that Julie Bindel broke over a decade prior.
Right? This was BARPod commentary about Elon's bullshit that required the dark background details to make sense. People who are actually offended about the way this was presented need to grow up
I'm a pretty humorless feminist and I thought it was fine. You were not joking "about" rape. But the grooming gang scandal isn't exactly "old news" - one reason it's in the public consciousness atm is that there was a major conviction in September.
I’m gonna take the opposite view here and say it’s (generally) good that Elon is highlighting this *unfathomably evil* scandal, which I don’t believe, based on what I know, has been fully investigated or dealt with.
It’s a bit weird that the takeaway from this segment is “well, the press did technically report on it and people were technically arrested, so the matter is basically settled and Elon shouldn’t endanger people by irresponsibly amplifying it”.
The issue is whether the things he is saying about the scandal are accurate. You only have to look at the discussion on X to see Americans trying to make this the next Pizzagate and the far right suggesting all Pakistanis be deported. Far from starting a serious conversation about child protection, Musk has convinced an army of people who had never even heard of Rotherham two weeks ago that nothing has been done and that everyone in a position of power in England is colluding in a far-left paedophile conspiracy. When Andrew Tate is complaining about grooming gangs, you know that this isn't about people trying to confront evil. If you want to see just how ignorant the commentary on this from the US has been, try doing a search for "Rotterdam grooming gangs" on X.
You can either claim that the grooming gangs were well-reported before Musk or claim that the people who have joined the conversation after Musk's posts were previously unaware of them. The two are pretty much mutually exclusive, unless you believe that Americans should have no interest in British news at all. It is a once-in-a-decade news story.
They were not previously unaware of them, they were previously uninterested in them as there didn't appear that there was any more political hay to be made.
As for Americans who may not have known about it, no offence but who cares? Are you interested in what the British public thinks about US school shootings? Hopefully not and nor should you be.
I suspect "unaware" is the likely option in many cases, and so did Andrew in his comment above. Either way, the "who cares" argument doesn't bite: If someone doesn't care, Elon's tweets won't make him care either.
US school shootings have claimed some 300 casualties over the last 20 years, and this includes both killed and wounded (see https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/a01/violent-deaths-and-shootings ), yet they have been medially all-present all over Europe ever since Columbine (arguably particularly popular among schoolkids themselves). So it's a good illustration, but not of the point you're trying to make.
Incidentally, the two situations are rather different: Overhyping school shootings inspires more of them, whereas overhyping grooming gangs has good chances of reducing their number.
Actually the point I was trying to make went entirely over your head. What difference does awareness of US school shootings among the British public make to the problem of school shootings in the US?
Anybody who didn't know about this before doesn't matter as their opinion makes no difference. That's my point.
In the case of school shootings, the effect is minor, not least because the UK doesn't influence the US as much as vice versa (except for cinema perhaps). In the case of the grooming gangs, it has a good chance of forcing the UK government (even a Labor one) to act, as it makes them look like the utterly craven losers they are.
Even within the UK, it strengthened the "something must be done" faction, as you can tell from JKR's twitter (to my knowledge she has been avoiding the topic previously).
"If someone doesn't care, Elon's tweets won't make him care either."
Surely we've seen enough moral panics at this point to know this isn't necessarily the case. In the right social circumstances, people can go from not giving af to absolute obsession, and very quickly. Elon tweeting (particularly as he's basically a proxy for Trump atm) is definitely one of those circumstances.
to the extent that the Western world was unaware of this is an indictment of the political and media establishment of the Western world.
you should not be upset that there is fresh outrage when the original outrage was at best inadequate. Unless you're concerned that the "wrong side" might suffer political consequences for this abject horror.
I would argue that there is much more to discover.
we should pick this scab until we get to the bone.
anyone who wants to silence this needs prayer for their souls.
oh by the way, the rapes are still happening. so it's not over.
The Rotherham stuff was pretty heavily covered in right-wing American media around the time of the prosecutions in ~2014, for what it’s worth. I don’t think it ever really hit mainstream American media beyond a few mentions. Neither Trump nor Musk were involved in right wing American politics at the time, of course.
I don't think that's fair to Americans. I am sure there are lots of US scandals I have no idea about. School shootings are a popular talking point in the UK because it can bring the left and right together in feeling smug.
Polygamist cults are one example, I went down a rabbit hole after watching HBOs Big Love (which was not available here, I got a bootleg copy) I had no idea idea about that disgusted stuff and I doubt most Brits do either.
I'm not trying to dunk on my fellow Americans. But Americans seem to be less interested in international affairs than Europeans.
It makes some sense. We have a large country with a shit ton of our own media. We don't necessarily have to reach outside our borders to find interesting stuff.
My favorite recent example of smug British gun reporting is a BBC reporter covering the Palisades fire walking around with a raging inferno as a backdrop and finding exploded munitions from peoples burnt down homes while saying in so many words "you wouldn't have to worry about this in jolly old England!"
The Pelicot rape case in France was all over American media even though most Americans couldn’t point on a map to the region of France where it happened. Bizarre depravity of the crime plus bravery of the victim equals a human interest story - it’s hard to see why the Rotherham story didn’t land, based on the same criteria.
Deeply disturbing turn of events of progressives down playing the mass rape of poor little girls just because the perpetrators are pakistani muslims. I would say it’s shocking but it’s really not
They are not mutually exclusive at all. I am saying that the grooming gangs story was well reported in the UK and there was no cover-up by the UK media (although the Guardian didn't cover itself in glory rejecting Julie Bindel's story in the 00s. That tells us nothing about what Americans should do, other than not claim otherwise.
Also, unfortunately, child abuse scandals are not once-in-a-decade news. The 2010s also saw scandals in the Catholic Church and the BBC come to national attention in the UK.
Thank you for being a voice of sanity on this thread. It’s truly maddening to see people who didn’t pay any attention to British news and government until this story was tweeted by Musk over a decade after the fact suddenly start shouting about cover ups.
Not mutually exclusive in the slightest. The vast majority of Americans I am sure, admittedly without polling in front of me, can not name the current Secretary of State. And don't even know who he (or she) is or what they look like. That is not because his nomination, confirmation, and tenure were not well-reported.
I think they prefer "Administrative Assistant of State," but beyond that, why would I care about the secretary? Surely most of the decisions are made by State, not their secretary!
The stories were reported. I'm not British nor live there, but I knew about them. There's no reason to think they would be front page news in the US even if it was all going down right now.
There have been massive abuse scandals in Japanese and Korean pop culture the last few years. No doubt the average American (or even well-informed one) knows anything about them. Doesn't mean it's a cover up
It is amazing to see all these people who are like “I am smart. I don’t fall for propaganda. I do my own research” immediately be taken in by this. It’s so fucking transparent!
Elon has only amplified this whole thing outside of the US. There isn't a single person in the UK that didn't know about the grooming gangs 10 years ago. Unfortunately it's become a political football, and Starmers recent comments have only made it worse.
The issue isn't that Elon shared a story the issue is that he called for individuals to be jailed based on spurious reasoning.
Your "summary" of their takeaway only has negative connotations because you are intuition pumping the idea of somebody being dismissive when talking about rape. When in reality a somber, truthful timeline of the reporting is a good thing.
I do not think BARpod was being dismissive in talking about rape, I think they were being dismissive in acting as if the matter was well-covered and well-investigated, of which it was neither. Certainly not in proportion to the magnitude of the scandal, which I think is still not fully understood.
I don’t care about Elon tweeting about if people should be in jail. Oh well.
Why don't you care about influential people, like Elon, saying people should be jailed based on spurious reasoning? Seems like most people would offer that is bad, and people shouldn't do it. Seems like your just playing team sports.
I don't know a lot about this scandal other than this episode, I normally wouldn't be opposed to additional reporting or investigating on a crime, but why should that include Elon's antics?
I don’t care about it because Elon doesn’t have the power to put people in jail.
I’m not playing team sports. Millions of people saying millions of irresponsible things daily. Elie Mystal and Keith Olbermann, to pick two examples, tweet inflammatory, irresponsible nonsense constantly (in my opinion). Oh well.
I would prefer that all people be sober and responsible at all times, including Elon. But I don’t expect that to happen and I think any attempts to require people to do so will always backfire.
He tweeted one single fake document, which though fake fairly accurately summed up Police and CPS attitude to rape victims. I've posted this elsewhere in the thread and I'll post it again here because in 4 minutes it gives a snapshot of how officialdom treated rape victims.
I certainly share your disinterest in tweets generally, but I find myself forced to acknowledge that Elon has an outsized platform (and not just by virtue of owning the literal platform itself), so what he says about it does, in fact, shape public opinion. I don't like it any more than you do, but I think to fully grapple with this scandal and Elon's role in it, we do have to acknowledge that what he tweets to 212 million people can have a real impact in the world.
I feel like the correct position here is "Elon shouldn't be tweeting about jailing people, that's an irresponsible thing for him to do, and also this scandal was horrific beyond imagining (both what was done to the girls and the way the government handled it) and it's not a bad thing for more people to know about it."
Is there room for a middle ground there? Because most of the anti-backlash comments I'm seeing here are focusing almost exclusively on Elon's irresponsibility and framing this story as being all about him, which is the *exact thing people are frustrated about Jesse doing in the podcast* lol.
If somebody said that they think it’s a disservice to focus on Elon, I might be sympathetic to that argument. I think it’s difficult given his prominence and his antics, but I could be sympathetic.
But that isn’t want the people I was responding to said. They were saying actually Elons behavior was good.
I still find it so weird that Elon has so little self-awareness about the limits of his knowledge. I guess it’s more true that he just doesn’t care to act more judiciously.
Question is, I wonder if the extra attention brought to the issue because of his tw**ting is worth the bs that immediately followed. Honestly don’t know.
There absolutely was a conspiracy of silence, but not in the usual sense. It was the confluence of people in power acting cowardly for various reasons. Sort of a conspiracy-by-simultaneous-ass-covering.
I mainly agree with Sully’s take, although like almost every take I’ve seen, there are some assertions I would take with a grain of salt:
It's a pretty typical phenomenon among people who have wild success in one area to assume that means they must just be generally competent and knowledgeable about everything. Definitely not limited to Elon (movie stars have been opining on politics as if their opinions are well-thought out for ages), though he's undoubtedly the most prominent example of it in our current times.
Right. He's spent his entire adult life being told by established voices that what he thinks or wants to do is insane. "No one lands rockets, it's far too complicated and a waste of time." "There hasn't been a successful new American car company in decades." etc. As it turned out, for a lot of those things in the technological realm, Elon was right and literally everyone else was wrong. It's understandable (if not excusable) that years of this could cause him to err towards trusting his gut in things completely outside his expertise.
The same overhyping was done to various Catholic child-grooming cases, for the same reasons: the mainstream media is underreporting it, so let's overreport it to make a difference. And in many cases, it worked! So you have a tradeoff between solving the problem and staying unbiased. I'm not surprised that a lot of people choose the former; so would I in most such situations.
It was something like a running gag in German media for the 2000s; priesthood would only ever be mentioned in the context of pedophilia. (Arguably it was not a news-heavy decade.) I don't know how big the numbers actually were in Germany, but I suspect they were comparable with the much underexposed -- until now -- British rape gangs.
You seem to regard rape as only serious if it can be used for a political agenda? Everything you’re citing has been a very serious topic of discussion in women’s groups and by people campaigning against violence against women and children for literal decades. Maybe you just choose to ignore it until there’s a boogeyman you like the look of?
Two things can definitely be true: more people need to care about ending violence against women and girls AND Elon Musk can be using the topic and these victims for his own political gain, which should be of deep concern for people who care about democracy.
Hopefully makes it to Jesse - posting on a reply up the chain.
Jesse, love your reporting. This is the worst you’ve ever done. You started with Elon is an idiot/psycho/ignoramus and then backed into why that is true.
1. Making this a story basically about Elon and not about the story itself is an absurdity in itself. I don’t care what anyone is saying about a story of this magnitude, even if they’re the richest person in the world, what they’re saying is meaningless in comparison. I don’t know why the focus of this would ever be Elon.
2. You’re blowing up the reach of this story and how it was covered by a factor of about 20 (I believe probably in an attempt to dunk on Elon). I was aware of this story in 2013. Mainly because I like the work of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sam Harris, and Douglas Murray, and they all have been on this beat since around then. Yes, this was absolutely covered in the news. Even being able to pull 40+ headlines from major newspapers from the period does not mean that it was covered appropriately. For instance, Trump can send out a random bullshit tweet, and you could most likely find 40 headlines from major news outlets covering it a week later. This was a story about potentially 10s of thousands underage rape victims involving potentially over 1M perpetrators over a period of decades (Julie Bindels estimates). This should have been headline news for years with hundreds if not thousands of headlines about it. It should have been the biggest story the UK has potentially ever seen. The investigation should have been tracked on a daily basis for years in a manner that made the Mueller Investigation look like uncovered nonsense no one cared about. The idea that if even be willing to wager (potentially inaccurately) that the Mueller Investigation had more coverage than the ORGANIZED rape of thousands of underage children by a hundreds of thousands of men I think highlights the issue. A story can have coverage while still being woefully under-covered. As Bindel herself, as well as Harris, Ali, Murray, etc. have all indicated, they have ran into countless roadblocks both in researching the story as well as reporting the story as well as reactions to their reporting. To say this story was properly covered I think is an admission you know nothing of the topic. I have read Prey by Ayaan. I have also read the NYT review of Prey, it proceeds to undermine every claim Ayaan makes about exactly this topic saying it is basically entirely unfounded. That was in 2021. I have read Strange Death of Europe by Murray which addresses this topic again. I have also read the reviews by The Guardian and NYT who basically claim he’s nitpicking data and stories and the issue doesn’t actually exist. Again, this was the ORGANIZED rape of thousands of children. If this story was as widely covered as you seemingly believe it to be, these reviews would have seen by the public (let alone the editor), as someone nitpicking figures over The Holocaust, or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the Killing Fields in Cambodia, or how many died during 9/11. I’m not trying to compare total scale between these, I’m trying to compare the tact people utilize when addressing them and the reaction a reader has to someone addressing them entirely inappropriately. One of the NYT reviews on Prey says basically “Ali suggests Muslim men are one of the greatest threats to women to be assaulted, but in reality the greatest threat is men the women know”. When addressing this issue, who in their right mind would ever wrote such a thing? That is pure lunacy.
3. In your own story you again say how fully this has been covered, then go on to say how fully it has been addressed, and then never close the circle on again by Bindel’s estimates there could be 1M people involved - you report ~100 went to jail (0.01%), you say it’s been covered since ‘07-‘13 - it is now 2025 (18 years later) where are the reforms, where are the procedural changes, where are the people in jail, where is the restitution for the thousands of families?, you say they’re working on it right now - again it is 2025, this is one of the most serious things that have happened in decades, almost certainly a top 10, what the fuck have people been doing for the last 18 years if that’s the case?
Ultimately, yes Elon Musk could be 100% wrong on every specific thing he said. Who gives a shit in comparison to what has actually happened? I have no idea if Keir Starmer is to blame for anything, I have no idea on any of the people Musk mentioned specifically, believe Bindel also defends one of the ones mentioned just as you have. Who gives a shit? Maybe that is a 1min addendum at the end of the story if you like, just to set the record straight. That isn’t the god damn story itself, that’s a fucking footnote. The story is how did a first world country ALLOW (because yes they certainly did allow) thousands of children to get raped and why were they all raped by a very specific demographic. The specific demographic should have no more interest than in figuring out why it was that specific demographic so that you can stop it from ever occurring again, and ignoring that is exactly what happened will 100% certainly make sure you misdiagnose the problem, just like purposefully ignoring ANY variable that has an almost 100% hit rate amongst offenders will make sure you misdiagnose the issue.
I wish Katie was here on this episode to call out Jessie’s absolutely ridiculous and stupid butthurt about it because he’s mad at ol chuddie Elon breaking it instead of him
I don’t know the person. But I’d imagine they’re talking about the play acting as if this story got anywhere close to sufficient coverage and that it wasn’t blocked at every turn, in research, in distribution, in response. Or, the acting as if it is being handled and has been handled with attention and care.
By Jesse’s own reporting ~100 people have been put in jail. By Julie Bindel’s reporting on this, which seems like a fair source because Jesse cites her frequently in this story, there are potentially 1M men that are involved in this organized rape of children. That is a 0.01% incarceration rate.
Further, by Jesse’s own reporting this story broke in 2007 (mainly by Bindel - by the way, reporting it had already been going on for decades), and by Jesse’s own reporting, they’re still discussing how to respond, what procedures to implement, new laws to make, oversight to be had, etc. Yet he acts like it is being
…yet he acts like this issue is being sufficiently addressed and appropriately handled. To be clear 2007 was 18 years ago. 18 fucking years ago, for a scandal that had already been going on for decades. A scandal that was the organized rape of potentially tens of thousands (again Bindels estimate) children by 1M people inside England. That also included law enforcement in every way but explicitly stating, ALLOWING the rapes to continue. And I am not being hyperbolic by using allowing, that is the most accurate way to describe what happened. Law enforcement many many many times was approached by a rape victim and they turned them away without doing anything. Many rape victims families went to law enforcement saying grown men had their children, they knew where their children were, and that they were being molested, and law enforcements response was “if they’re over 13 there is nothing we can do about it”. The age of consent in England has been 18 since the 1800s. Citing 13 as an age where the child could consent to being sexually abused was a way for them to not have to handle the issue.
Many will say law enforcement was stuck between a rock and a hard place, the perpetrators being mainly (like almost entirely) Pakistani immigrants. I do not care how heavily you weight that consideration, if you find it incredibly important, or think it is meaningless (like me), doesn’t matter. The second you choose a side between those considerations, you are ALLOWING the other to occur. If that is something you care about, you can argue a response of if law enforcement reacted in a heavy handed manner than they would have misidentified many immigrants and ultimately had a (in practice) racist reaction. Ok, fine. I would choose potentially ALLOWING many grown ups to be misidentified 100,000x over before allowing the continued rape of children. That seems like a very very very very easy choice to make. Then again I might be strange thinking the rape of children is literally worse than murder and potentially THE worst thing a person could do.
100% it did. Bannon's instructions; 'flood the airwaves with one ludicrous and inflammatory statement/threat after another'. How quickly did people lap that up and turn away from the H1b backlash? They chose Greenland and Canada, Panama, but oh so quiet about China, Russia. The astonishing thing isn't that it was done at all, but that there are so many bored, obtuse and greedy people in the world that it worked. Another four frikking years of this shit.
Moral of the story: Jesse happily turns into a podcast bro just riffing on serious stories if his guest is someone who works that way. This story *really really* needed Katie or Helen or Julie not whoever this TV comedy writer is (someone British would be great!). This story might need them more than any other story on the podcast ever.
Yeah, I don’t think the episode would have had a different opinion or perspective exactly. I just think it would have been wise to have a British guest (with knowledge of the history/context) to talk about the topic.
Completely agree! And I think they could have helped particularly with discussing to what extent this is still happening and if what has been done has been enough. I legitimately can’t tell where things currently stand, though it does seem clear that changes have happened to some extent.
Also, about the dynamics in British politics since it doesn’t seem to have mapped onto the left-right divide of US politics (aka both parties ignoring or not taking action when in power at various times). That’s the strongest point in my mind against Elon, that this seems like a failure of British politicians and institutions as a whole, but he’s wielding this against politicians he doesn’t agree with politically. But I could be wrong.
Exactly. The way he's basically sunk Nigel Farage over Farage's dislike of Tommy Robinson (who is heavily involved in the grooming gangs issue) is perfect evidence of his power. His tweet that Farage doesn't have what it takes may have real consequences in the current political climate, beheading the Reform party, and the speed with which it's happened and his need for everyone - even ostensible allies - to march to his beat or get shoved under a bus, in a country he's not even associated with, is incredibly worrying.
I quite enjoyed the ep, and don’t even want to tone police Jesse and Jeff, BUT I would have loved to have the takes of one of those women - especially Julie Bindel who has written about the story since the beginning. A British voice would have been great. (Not least to teach Jesse how to say Derbyshire, which is a great big county and not a tiny village).
Yes. I really didn’t understand Jesse’s goal in addressing this story, unless it was just to take potshots at Musk and/or make his guest host uncomfortable.
Ultimately it just came across as making light of one of the most awful stories of the century thus far. He really needed an editor here.
Jesse’s goal was to say profoundly stupid shit without someone there who knows his faults on a personal and professional level to challenge him. No offense to the guest, actually it was offensive to him by Jesse to include him in this so he can handwave it away and say boom covered
It’s the context tone of the jokes made that would be substantially different. Jesse was so gleeful that he could roast Elon he totally got out over his skis.
Holy moley, what is going on in the comments here. Do people here legitimately believe what Elon has been doing is a) fair, b) necessary, or c) anything more than a cynical political ploy? The idea that this story hasn't been covered in the press until now is ridiculous and if you think that you should maybe rethink where you get your news from.
Certainly feels that way in the comment section. The moment any story doesn't follow the free press style line these "heterodox" commentators lose their shit.
Despite liking some stuff they have done in the past, it's nothing more but a right-wing culture war rag right now. If you think otherwise, please read their last 5-10 articles and get back to me. There are legitimate scandals that have faced right-wing parties across the globe in the last year that they have ignored and have instead devoted 100% of their time and space to dunking on absolutely inane left-wing culture war nonsense. They purport to cover policy but it is only in service of boosting the right wing. Their "election" section they had last year was 50 articles bashing Dems and maybe 1 you could reasonably say was anti-Trump. Some of the writers they brought on have produced some articles for them that I'd put up there as some of the worst pieces of opinion writing I've ever read (and I can provide links to those). But holy cow do the people they've brought on think of it as some bastion of nonpartisan journalism.
It's trash, throw it in the dumpster. Having yet another right-wing publication focused on culture war issues is fine, but please do not sanctimoniously tell me it's something it's not.
They aren’t their comment section, though. I don’t agree with every column they print, but they do publish some interesting stuff.
My main critique is that they used to be better at separating out the fact reporting from the punditry, or at least it seemed that way. If I start reading a FP article and the tone gets too OTT, I just stop reading it.
I hate to tell you this, but it already is. The audience here is mostly way to the right of the hosts, they just enjoy hearing a couple of liberals making fun of woke stuff. There's a tantrum every time the podcast takes aim at the right.
People from Britain are saying it wasn't covered up because they were there ten years ago when it was massively covered in the media and investigated by law enforcement and inquiries.
Quibbling over the meaning of cover up to suddenly mean "people in power didn't receive consequences for their missteps" is a bit of a stretch considering that's how every political shitstorm has ended for decades now. Was the banking crash of 2008 covered up or did people in power just make sure they were safe like they always fucking do?
Musk is trying to install the government of his choice overseas. He has picked this issue at random as a wedge to help him destabilise another country. Is that ok?
I think essentially everyone agrees the financial crisis was under prosecuted and a horrible blemish on the integrity of our society and justice system.
It's baffling to me that anyone would defend the lack of accountability here by pointing to the scandal that was the lack of accountability in the financial crisis.
It's not a defence. Why did you read that as a defence, Dave?
I'm just saying that "a lack of accountability means cover up" is shifting the goal posts to a previously unknown definition of cover up because it's now becoming clear that the cases were reported, investigated and prosecuted, and then an inquiry was held (into why it was covered up for so long) and the findings were published two years ago.
For what purpose would you bring up the financial crisis if not to use it as a defense of the handling of this situation, El? Stop arguing in bad faith.
If you ask normal people (well, those that were old enough at the time) whether people believe the crimes of the financial crisis were covered up, overwhelming majorities would say yes! If I recall properly only one person (a midlevel banker) went to prison. Many people think the crimes were covered up and made to go away!
I feel like you're proving my point, but instead you think it's supporting some opposite point.
Again I ask this comment section, who *in government* was prosecuted or held accountable! This whole "well we eventually got around to investigating and prosecuting the rapists, so you have no basis to complain" position is so frustrating to me.
I think the issue between us is that your definition of "not a cover up" involves people in power getting in trouble? And mine doesn't. We can both be right.
It's really disappointing that you've taken such a dim view of my intentions instead of approaching this conversation with a stranger with curiosity.
No one has been able to explain how the Labour party (and specifically Keir Starmer and Jess Phillips) have enabled anything. You're just saying garbage like that like it's true. Again, I think the issue may be you're getting fed bad information and treating it as truth.
I think the whole point of the podcast was “nothing to see here, Elon is just dredging up old S for his own cynical benefit”.
I don’t know his motives, neither does Jesse, but I think it’s entirely possible that Elon feels this is an atrocity of the first order. That it hasn’t been thoroughly investigated, that all culpable parties have not faced a full Truth and Reconciliation inquiry. From top to bottom. From the Guardian refusing to run the story, to every MP, every local official who turned a blind eye.
This is an abomination of the First Order. The kind of thing we would have a Presidential Apology 50 fucking years after the event.
But because these were white trash sluts they think they can do this on the Down Low?
Fuck them.
They have a Cultural Rot that runs deep.
I hope this blows up in their face and i hope every fucking demon who preys on young children are scared for their very lives despite their hoards of enablers.
So yeah, forgive me if I give zero shits about Elon’s tweet misfires or his meltdown.
CSA was thoroughly investigated in 2022. Only the nonces themselves got consequences (if they weren't already dead by the time the authorities looked into it), the people in charge who protected them (as fucking always), just got to shake their heads and say lessons will be learned.
I do hate whataboutery but do you not find it suspicious that the only rape gang we're talking about is politically convenient to puppet master Musk, while the dozens of others that were investigated at the same time are not being discussed at all?
“That damn dirty chud should have kept his mouth shut on the child rape ring because we enlightened intellectual Internet world citizens all knew about it already and did I mention he’s a CHUD???????”
It's not so much him talking about a news story, it's his leveraging of child rape to stick it to his political enemies and to call for regime change in another country.
Thanks for your part in turning this message board into every other fucking ridiculous algorithm driven knee-jerk hate machine as everywhere else.
I don't think it's that confusing. A lot of commenters here have an anti-woke mind virus and they will reflexively support anything they think seems like it's sticking it to leftist cultural orthodoxy.
I didn't think Jesse needed to spell out that it is bad to use this story as a cynical plot to attack your political enemies who are barely even related to it. And the people here who are pretending like they don't think that's what Elon's doing aren't doing the exact same cynical maneuver. Like oh yeah you sincerely think Elon fucking Musk is only drawing attention to the story because of his innate sense of justice. Give me a break
Jesse is clearly projecting that he wish he was the one to break the story. He literally said towards the end of the segment that to think of the poor journos and their effort they put into writing about it that no one outside of the UK knew. The journalists, not the rape victims
Jesse is not qualified nor professional enough to even cover this story on the show. He acts as “squicked” out about child abuse ad he did about with his overblown RFK horse shit. It’s embarrassing
Agree. I don't get the comments along the lines of "Jesse is bad to criticize Elon because this is about raping kids, not about [insert less bad thing here, like running red lights or financial fraud]" Elon could not give the slightest rat's ass about English girls getting raped. He's stirring up shit politically, that's all, and I think it makes most sense to meet him at his level.
Describe the last inquiry on this, including when it was, who was involved, what its recommendations were and what has/hasn’t happened. Then compare/contrast to what more/new inquiries would do, and explain why more inquiries are a better idea than implementing the recommendations of the already completed inquiry.
Not only would it be a useful exercise for you, but you’d be at least 10x better informed than Elon Musk.
I had actually been wondering what was going on with Elon and why this story was suddenly making the rounds again, so it was a welcome opportunity to get caught up. I’m Scandinavian and this horrific story was widely reported here, so much that “the Rotherham scandal” will still get referenced, the scandal in particular being how authorities failed the victims.
I dont blame anyone who missed this story being horrified all over again, but with Trump stirring up shit with Denmark it’s hard to not feel incredibly disconcerted by the world’s most powerful men completely unabashedly trying to destabilise Europe. It’s a paradigm shift.
I was in Scandinavia at the same time that the Rotherham grooming gangs scandal hit the front pages too, I wasn't even in Britain which is why this is such a crazy fucking time. Did the American press not bother their arses covering this story?
And all the shit with Denmark and Greenland is genuinely disturbing. The news here can't stop theorising what will happen if there's a war or a trade war between the US and DK. That's a scary turn of events right there.
Why not let Musk help destabilise the UK and install the far/alt right party of his choice?!? What could go wrong?
I mean "Labour refusing to investigate further" is ridiculous and just means your understanding of this issue is from Elon Musk and GB News and the Free Press. Are we being serious here?
It was already investigated….10 years ago when it happened. Lots of people went to jail. You’re shouting at the top of your lungs how stupid, uninformed and manipulable you are.
If you can't see how Trump threatening allies' sovereignty is disturbing to international order, particularly given Putin's and Xi's aspirations, and particularly to the people living in those countries, I don't know what to tell you.
The American public generally is incredibly ignorant of anything that occurs outside their borders. They only notice something when a famous American points it out.
I'm not defending Elon, but let's leave him to the side for the moment. There's a reason folks like Julie Bindel and Louise Perry are saying "finally!" with all this recent coverage of the rape gangs - and it's that (contrary to how Jesse paints it) there *were* efforts to suppress the story, and there *are* people who still need to be held accountable. Jesse's failure to engage at all with those voices is a bit shocking.
did Jesse really say that there wasn’t a cover-up?
There were *famously* efforts to suppress the story, the subsequent cover-up and inaction by authorities is what made the headlines. Like that is specifically what made this such a huge scandal worldwide (or at least Europe-wide). But Elon makes it sound like there was a subsequent cover-up of the cover-up.
He did not say there was no cover up and provided several examples of how police looked the other way or even arrested the victims or their defenders instead of the perps.
The timing is off though. The "finally!" part of this happened years ago. Elon is just pulling this up because he wants to hurt the Labour government (despite their leaders not being involved with the either the crimes or the cover-ups).
And does he not say that in the podcast? Did you listen to the podcast?
I'm sorry, who are you worried about Elon Musk being "fair" to - the Pakistani rapists, or the British government who didn't bother trying to stop them? And why would you think it might not be necessary to bring this to more people's attention? It's a pretty fucking big deal.
Musk may very well be doing this to distract people from his retarded remarks on H1B visas - but is that any reason to once again sweep the mass rape of British girls back under the rug? Because you don't like the guy who is bringing it to light?
This is exactly the sort of comment that is causing the problem. The current British government, who Elon is blaming, came into power in July 2024. If you don't know that kind of basic fact about British politics, don't comment about who is to blame.
The problem of the wrong people being blamed is not caused by the rapists. It's possible for there to be both a scandal revealed in the 2010s AND a problem of false accusations being made by Elon Musk (and you) in 2025. We do not have to choose to only care about the former and ignore the latter.
He is attacking Keir Starmer and Jess Phillips and the Labour party!!! He doesn't give a shit about this otherwise, he learned about it 5 minutes ago. How have those people enabled any of the incredibly messed up shit that happened??
Is anyone here who is questioning Musk’s motives also minimizing the horrific crimes detailed here? Or the necessity that those who ignored it or facilitated the coverup be exposed and prosecuted, if called for? I don’t see that happening. Do you?
Yeah - everyone here who is spazzing out about Elon Musk are also continuing to be absolute spergs when people are trying to explain to them that normal people are shocked and upset about the rapes!! And....GASP - we are MORE shocked and upset about the rapes than we are about Elon Musk's tweets!
Plennnnty of people here are way more obsessed about the tweeting. They apparently can't give a shit about something truly obscene.
Not defending Musk per se, but I think what Musk is doing is being mischaracterized.
To hear the critics talk, he’s dredging up an old stale story because he’s an idiot who just found out about it.
But it seems like the story is very much live, given a major report was released only a couple years ago, some prosecutions are ongoing, and whether all appropriate actions have been implemented is an ongoing debate. And of course Keir Starmer was in a role during the prosecutions that is relevant, and he’s the Prime Minister.
The issue with Musk’s tweets is the hyperbole, the “complicit in genocide” crap, not that the issue should be totally off-limits as an issue in 2025 UK politics.
I have been provided 0 evidence that anything Keir Starmer and Jess Phillips have done was wrong. I'm not saying the story is dead, but Elon is explicitly using it to attack them here in a completely unjustified way.
He's also very explicitly been using the story to defend Tommy Robinson, which I notice a lot of commentors here are omitting, likely because Tommy Robinson is actually a piece of shit criminal and is associated with some pretty heinous crimes (notably armed violence & football hooliganism).
I don’t think that makes 2022 ancient history. Plus the new guy was the head of CPS at the relevant time for questions of whether or not the rape gang cases were investigated and prosecuted with sufficient vigor.
It doesn't make it ancient history, but it does mean that using the 2022 report as justification for attacking the current government seems a bit of a stretch.
How is this well said? We have a flood of uninformed Americans freaking out about a scandal that’s more than 10 years old, demanding a second inquiry of a brand new government at the behest of the last government who are actually to blame for not carrying on with enough of the last inquiry’s recommendations, and then blaming the current government for the actions of local governments they weren’t part of.
I totally agree - it's depressing how ill-informed some of the comments from some American listeners are: I guess I expected Barpod listeners would be smarter ...
Was reading through them incredulously and thought exactly the same thing, thanks for saying it better than I would have. How his maniacal tweets can be taken as anything other than a ketamine-induced wet dream meant to distract, straight out of the Bannon playbook, is beyond me.
I legitimately think that if people didn’t hear about it five or ten years ago, they think it was not well-covered, instead of examining their own habits of only paying attention to U.S. news stories. I first heard about it maybe 4 years ago and that was already late. Elon is bringing it up now to try to use it to call the Labor Party MPs pedophiles.
Yeah that's 100% the impetus behind it. He found out about it 5 minutes ago and thinks he can use it to his political advantage. I think he may have been right but at this point he's gone so far (especially with the Tommy Robinson stuff) I'd imagine he's probably pissing a good chunk of Britain off and might just end up negatively polarizing a bunch of people into supporting Labour who were otherwise on the fence.
Sadly, the answer to your question seems an emphatic yes. Sad to see the message board seems to be dominated by a minority faction that can be quite deluded.
I know! Having a bunch of people who were blissfully ignorant of the grooming scandal WHEN THE STORY ACTUALLY BROKE OVER TEN YEARS AGO lecturing Britons who’ve already been through the outrage cycle on this is legitimately insane. We’re in the policy stage of this now - you know, the hard part where we try to raise prosecution & conviction rates for grooming and rape.
Guess what. When the story is “Britain has a problem with victim-blaming its working class, see also Hillsborough” no-one cares. But if you can lie and say the victims were ignored because they were white, suddenly some very loud Americans care…
Yup, all of this. And going on and on about the race angle, and completely dismissing class and misogyny which are why it was ignored for so long, does all the victims a disservice.
I also wonder why so few people are curious about the police corruption angle - historically, West Yorkshire police are the most corrupt force in the UK (see also Hillsborough).
Sorry if people are upset about the systemic rapes and subsequent cover up of teenaged and younger girls. I hope it doesn’t hurt your sensibilities too much.
Can you help me understand your perspective by pointing to specific statements in TFP piece that you consider to be false, misleading, or a gross exaggeration?
The entire article? Here, I'll pull some parts out of the dumpster for you:
Subhead "The serial rape of thousands of English girls went on for many years. Few in power cared. Then Elon Musk started tweeting." is literally false. Again, this was a news story 10 years ago, maybe one of the most covered news stories in Britain. What Jesse said in the pod is right, this is an absurd statement.
The story has a 10 year time jump from describing when the scandal broke to 2024, in an effort to link it to the current Labour government. It barely mentions what happened from 2014 - 2024, which is key context here.
The section starting with "In 2009, the Starmer-led CPS..." is just another Free-Press-ism at work. Starmer did not tell them to drop the case, and then he was the one who appointed Nazir Afzal to work on this (which the article doesn't mention). The Free Press would know this if they reached out to Nazir Afzal, since he has vehemently and publicly talked about how important Keir Starmer was in reforming CPS - https://x.com/dominicgrieve_/status/1874808573831577835. Again, Keir Starmer is widely seen as being doggedly focused on this despite internal pushback, but the Free Press instead attempts to tie him to the grooming scandal in a really gross way.
Several instances of bizarre exaggerations or false claims including "Elon Musk has changed the Conservatives’ political interest", "Starmer has yet to address the Labour Party’s historic role in this mess", and most hilariously "But now that Musk has said the unsayable about the unspeakable", a ridiculous thing to say about one of the most covered news stories in Britain, ever.
Then the vapid sourcing, the appeals to irrelevant authority, the effuse praise of Elon Musk... do I need to continue?
I was really disappointed with this episode as a British subscriber. Musk has acted like an idiot and it may have been used as a way to get away from the H1B SNAFU but this episode absolutely needed a British contributor like Helen Lewis because the characterisation of the whole scenario was very shallow and it's evident neither party was really understanding of the issue in any depth. I also found the funny accents misguided. BARPOD often makes me laugh but in this case it just felt distasteful.
1) Sharing in-depth original reporting on a crazy Internet story
2) Addressing news of the day/research/events using the body of knowledge Katie and Jesse have on particular topics such as trans issues, journalism, etc.
My least favorite is when there is a significant world event with an Internet angle that is outside of their realm of expertise, but they cover it anyway. Always feels shallow, as you said, and a real misunderstanding of what is great about the show. I don’t think anyone would’ve had an issue if this was not covered or if it was a 5 minute segment that had a general disclaimer that they have limited understanding of the situation, but here’s a few things that people are saying that we know are not true.
Great point. I think a better process would have been to acknowledge Elon's antics but to advise it would be returned to at a later time with an expert guest.
At this point I wish Katie (and Helen) would just join the Reflector boys and do a show that way. For now I’ll stick around for her. Do it for her
Jesse lately has been only of two moods: 1) smug superiority over any subject to the point of dismissal and refusal to listen and 2) annoying, craven “it dependsing” about anything any rational person would want to hear a stance on, probably for the sake of maintaining neutrality for future employers/publishers
I agree. I used to love them both, but I've realized over the past year maybe that I'm sticking around for Katie. I don't enjoy Jesse without her, unfortunately. Also, how great is Reflector?!
Reflector is absolutely amazing for truly covering so many issues from a naturally centrist angle. It's actually astounding how nuanced their reporting is.
You nailed it with 1&2. When he is out of his depth on a topic he is a very bad podcast host, and it seems to me that outside his niche well researched reporting beats he’s kind of clueless and credulous.
It really is quite frustrating how many of the recent "internet bullshit" episodes have Jesse sneering and calling the subject matter stupid, then he gives himself the opportunity to talk about something actually serious and important and he acts like this. Unbecoming.
Id like more crazy internet and less current events it always seems surface level . Give the story time to develop and dig deeper, I can get surface level any where
As a fellow Brit I thought they did well by avoiding getting into the background too much. They explained how egregious it was without going into why and I get it. The why is extremely complex and a result of a myriad of intertwined factors. They wanted to discuss the journalism/social media aspect more and I was okay with that.
Yeah this was a weird one for me. Personally, I would have expected to find myself annoyed by the humor and to feel like they were making light of the situation, knowing myself. In fact it hit me as almost the opposite. Almost like the events were so obviously terrible that there was no need to belabor the point, which, regrettably, is true.
Right! I don't understand why some folks seem to think "Elon is being dumb, therefore there's nothing to this story". Two things can be true at once - Elon is being dumb, but there are legitimate outrageous things worth covering here. The lack of a knowledgeable voice here was glaring.
You beat me to it. My comment says much the same thing. It’s also so irritating to have the two tier policing thing just dismissed out of hand. Ffs those of us who live here know that it’s a real problem. It is so irritating hearing two Americans pontificating as if they know what’s going on over here. So painful.
That ‘two tier policing’ was really the topic within this story I thought they were going to hone in on, and is partially why this story never goes away. or at least just jump off from it into meta “why he is doing this”.
Bari Weiss did a much better job of this on Honestly with Julie Bindel and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. As a Brit, I agree this was painfully uninformed and smug. Losing patience with this podcast, tbh!
I'm fine with dark humour so for me they get a paddy on that but as a Brit stories like this show our cultural differences across the pond. It's almost impossible for Americans to understand this case and the cultures and institutions surrounding it
With respect to the grooming gangs, something not covered on this episode was coverage of what government officials/police lost their jobs and/or were prosecuted for their behavior and conduct. It's clear that local policing and prosecuting *failed* in the past -- I don't think that's in dispute. So to me, criticizing the British government to deferring to local counsels seems very legit, and I don't get the credulousness presented here that using local counsel investigations is the appropriate and unassailable method to move forward with.
Who was held accountable? Given the coverage in this episode I assume it must be extensive. But I personally just don't find it persuasive to say simply "journalists covered this story, therefore there was no cover up". Who, in government, lost their jobs?
Did it receive 1% of the attention that abuse scandals in the Catholic Church received? Did it even receive as much attention as Canada's nonexistent unmarked mass graves?
In the UK? Yes, it did receive a lot of coverage. I don't know a single person who hasn't heard about Rotherham. I bet most don't know about the Canadian graves - that story was not covered extensively here.
But even thinking of it as "Rotherham" is an issue. It's NOT a Rotherham issue, it's a nationwide issue and it's a cultural issue in the Pakistani-British community. They really underplayed just how nationwide the issue was. Basically every town and city in the north of England has had a similar scandal now.
My question would be whether the entire set of victims of grooming gangs put together received as much attention as the Gisele Pelicot story, to which I suspect the answer is no.
In the American media? No. But Americans not being especially interested in foreign news stories more than 10 years ago before “commentariat globalisation” isn’t such a surprise.
Yes, “who was held accountable?” and “what has actually changed?” are the key questions and it’s not clear they have great answers. The most important one is “could this happen again?”
It seems to me that people never really get held accountable in these situations because it tends to be put down to institutional problems. In this case institutional sexism and unwillingness to tackle culturally sensitive issues and a lack of understanding of how grooming works. As someone who has worked in this area in the last 15 years I would say that this scandal completely changed the game in terms of how safeguarding is looked at. It also really helped the general public understand how these things work. I’ve had lots of conversations with people who are discussing potentially vulnerable girls and Rotherham is referenced. It was the top item on the news for weeks, in the newspapers every day for months and Rotherham was a shorthand for grooming in general conversation for YEARS. The people who were making the decisions were certainly hauled over the coals and their testimonies in front of select groups and enquiries played on the news, but I would guess the worst that would have happened to them would be they had to retire early under a cloud. That’s just the way the system works in our country. Institutions tend to be held accountable rather then individuals. This is something I think about a lot and I’m not sure how I feel about it. In terms of what has changed, I would say the way agencies approach safeguarding and police services deal with vulnerable young girls is unrecognisable from before this scandal was dragged out into the light. Have attitudes towards white forks changed within working class Pakistani communities in small northern towns? Probably not. Could this happen again? I’m sure it is happening but it will never again happen in the way did with people acting with impunity and the police sitting on their hands etc. Protecting really vulnerable girls is really complex and at times can feel almost impossible but we now have a framework with which to understand what is happening and the language to name it.
This seems extremely important. Safeguarding has changed massively since the time of the scandal. I get the impression that schools in England are now much better at safeguarding than schools in the US. It's bizarre to see people claiming nothing has changed since the Rotherham scandal, particularly when it comes from people who are not in the UK.;
Undoubtedly more to do and this is a problem that is not solved easily but the most important change has been a better understanding of what a victim looks like. Who knows maybe all this will move the needle and more money will be found from somewhere else to put something else into action so the government can move on from this. It would be good to see something positive come out from this cynical move.
I think that's wishful thinking. My wife is a midwife in East London, and the amount that the Jewish and Muslim communities are treated with kid-gloves compared to the traditional London population is absurd and enraging.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. Can you expand on what “safeguarding” means in this context and how it changed? Not sure if it’s because I’m a Yank or because I don’t work in the field but I’m not familiar with the term.
“Safeguarding” is the practices and processes in institutions and their staff around protecting vulnerable people - think children in schools/medical settings, disabled people, elderly people in care homes.
That does not answer his question. I am interested in the answer also, and am somewhat "in the field" in the U.S. He said, "...in this context and how it changed."
FWIW, this is a brief overview of the overall timeline. One thing of note is that this definitely isn’t something that’s been done with for 10 years, inquiries and reports have been ongoing. On the one hand, you can’t say it’s been totally ignored. On the other, it’s not like Musk is dredging up ancient history.
There was a national enquiry that was published in 2022. Local councils commission independent reports, they don't investigate themselves. People did lose their jobs.
So a report was published 2 years ago. That means done and dusted, anyone who brings it up as a problem is an asshole?
What concerns me is that sure, maybe some people were punished for very clear acts of specific wrongdoing, but this wasn’t just about specific failures: this was a pervasive culture of treating avoiding the appearance of racism as far more important than investigating horrific organized mass rape of children. No, sticking a ringleader in jail for 3 years and firing a few local officials does not fix that.
Next time a Pakistani rapes a white girl, will that get investigated vigorously and punished harshly… or will we just find out that the gangs still exist but are better at hiding, and cops are still scared to arrest people that are the wrong color?
No, they should implement the reports recommendations. Which is happening at the moment, what are you feelings on the Tories wanting to stop or amend the bill?
If the full report is publicly available I’d certainly appreciate a link to it.
To the extent I know fuck all about it, it seems like your attitude is that I should remain ignorant, because talking about it is like, unfair involvement in British politics or something.
I’d also question whether this is being treated with appropriate urgency if implementation is still being actively debated by any political party 10 years after the fact.
Why do you need the report? You know so much about it already
"this was a pervasive culture of treating avoiding the appearance of racism as far more important than investigating horrific organized mass rape of children. No, sticking a ringleader in jail for 3 years and firing a few local officials does not fix that"
According to this you know the cause, the sentences of the convicted, his role in the attack and who was fired. It's hard to tell somebody something when they act like they know it all already while showing such a shocking level of ignorance.
Meanwhile you’ve refused to provide any examples of appropriate punishments or actual policies that have changed.
I’m actually going to go read the report recommendations.
What I will not retract is that I’m bothered that you, and most of Musk’s critics on this issue, seem more worried about gate keeping the discussion than you are about whether this is actually a solved problem.
The IICSA report barely touches on the Pakistani grooming gangs, instead focusing on clerical schools and foster homes. That there has been no such inquiry on the grooming gangs (despite more than 20 years of history) is the problem that Musk is trying to bring attention to.
The reports reccomendation included mandatory reporting, something which various official agencies have been pushing for years, the same agencies that failed to tackle the grooming gangs.
Identifying the problem was never the issue, everybody knew it was happening. What the report didn't reccomend was that in the future if the police find an 11 year old girl in a house with the same men that have just gangraped her, they don't arrest the girl. How is mandatory reporting going to fix that level of moral failure.
Fair. But at the same time, the title of the episode, and the general take of the hosts, is also a bit disingenuous. “Ha ha ha, Musk is an asshole idiot who doesn’t realize this is a 10 year old story”. When reports are still being released and sentences are still being handed down and players with a hand in the events are in the current government.
Of course, even if it were ancient history, Canada recently blew up over 100+ year old disturbed soil at residential schools, so that rings hollow as an argument anyway.
Can you please show me who lost their jobs? Was anyone prosecuted? Was there reporting on this (meaning individual accountability either by job loss or prosecution)?
I think this was pretty well covered in the mainstream media over the past decade, and rightly so there was massive public outrage. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem the public outrage was converted into real world consequences for those who either failed to or actively avoided investigating. Maybe this was due to the time taken with various enquiries or lack of government will. What we need now is the recommendations to be implemented swiftly so this can’t happen again.
I had to stop listening. Unbelievable to pick this topic for a "good laugh". The industrial scale rape of thousands and thousands of young women and children over decades. Sure, let's have a good giggle... 🤬
Yeah, Im at the 10:30 mark and had to come here to see if it was being addressed. The hosts' bad accents can be grating at the best of times, but this was a terrible topic to hear them fumble and giggle through.
I usually love Jeff’s audio dispatches but recently he’s been doing these irritating Simpsons-esque voices that are on the verge of making me quit listening.
8:41 mark and same. It’s reminiscent of Katie and Jesse scoffing at transgender females in women’s bathrooms a few years ago. They’ve gotten quieter about that now there’s evidence of male teenagers and men abusing these policies to sexually harass and/or film women and girls.
Basically when a topic involves children, you can trust Jesse to be clueless.
I don't agree - I think this is no different than the zoophile episode or Katie making fun of her encounters with paedophiles.
In my opinion, it would be very off-brand for Blocked and Reported to do an after-school-special-style episode. It's obvious that real people were harmed and there are plenty of places where you can read about just the facts without the humourous style.
Then perhaps tackle a different load of internet bullshit when the comedy writer is the guest? One that doesn’t involve the ongoing organised rape and torture of thousands of girls and young women?
I just think that maybe - given the facts of the story and how the narrative of the women was excluded or laughed at - waiting until there was a woman in the room in full possession of the facts might have been the way to treat this. (Like they did the Jacob Blake episode or the Hannah Barnes episode or any of the other “after-school special” episodes they have done.)
There's plenty of episodes that touch on serious topics which mix lots of morbid humour in. Israel/Gaza episodes are a good example - thousands of people died. The Brian Thompson shooting, self-immolation, etc.
Respectfully, I think the idea that a woman needed to be in the room is exactly the kind of identity-focused appeal that the podcast (correctly) pushes back on.
In my opinion, there's a contingent of Blocked and Reported listeners who only apply this level of scrutiny when the topic is related to women. My suspicion is that a story about the abuse of young boys by, for example, the Catholic Church would not cause this level of anger. Just an observation.
That’s a good point and I love how the podcast handles things usually.
Your comment made me think and try to listen again. Then I realized what happened for me…
I watch a lot of standup and you can have two comics talk about the exact same thing and one will nail it and the other will bomb. The one who nails it is insightful and has something else… sometimes empathy or whatever. Sometimes an amazing delivery style.
For me, I just don’t think their humour worked. It missed something and sounded immature.
(And it’s reminded me that I am not funny either bc I repeated something once that I thought was funny… and it was, if delivered by someone else… but I am not and people were super offended. Ugh)
Have they even done an episode on the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal? I suspect the listeners, who include Catholics, know more about it than Barpod.
In defense of Jesse, I’m someone who laughs or giggles when I’m in pain or discomfort, or am talking about a difficult topic. It doesn’t have to do with something being funny, it more so feels like a nervous tic
Jessie...time and again...you prove yourself to be the most credulous person on the internet. The fact that these cases are still ongoing, while folks are getting longer prison sentences for tweets than rapes - is an abominable sign of a failing culture. Take a page from Triggernometry and talk to folks actually impacted by these cases.
Unsure what you mean? Do you think the entire scandal is about only what these particular 7 men did?
A single successful prosecution is a drop in the bucket. This scandal is about ongoing abuse of tens of thousands of girls, with cases starting as early as the 1970s (but with numbers burgeoning from the 90s to today). No one has claimed that there have never been *any* investigations or prosecutions, but that the *vast majority* of the abuse was covered up and ignored by police & government.
Wikipedia is not a great place to get info on this case. It looks like it's been edited a lot recently, so maybe it's now better than it was, but when I read it a few months ago it was way off the mark.
I'm not disputing the sentences, I'm making a general point that wikipedia is not a good source on this issue and has until very recently presented it as an overblown moral panic.
I'm sorry. From the context, I assumed you were the person I had just replied to, reading the reply but forgetting that I was responding to a comment that mentioned sentencing. Instead, it appears you interjected without even finding out what was being discussed.
It is a discussion board. It is for everyone to participate. Your comment to LCDR was unclear. If you meant it to be an untouchable private conversation, you should have reached out to LCDR personally instead of exposing yourself to hurtful, triggering requests for clarification by the unwashed mob.
I’m 11 minutes in and can’t help thinking about how Jesse is so careful to use preferred pronouns for men with special identities, so as not to upset their delicate sensibilities, but finds the ongoing grooming, raping, pimping and even murder of young girls to be a bottomless source of hilarity.
12 minutes in and Jesse’s summary is a load of crap. It wasn’t “men befriending girls on the street”. It was (and is) boys around their own age acting as honeypots, befriending them & grooming them, then passing them to older “boyfriends” (eg their older brothers, uncles, fathers) who sexually exploited them for fun & profit. It is multigenerational family networks of men running intricate sex grooming and literal sexual enslavement operations. JFC Jesse, have you seriously even looked at the court documents in this?
53) You, Mohammed Karrar, prepared her for gang anal rape by using a pump to expand her anal passage. You subjected her to a gang rape by five or six men (count 30). At one point she had four men inside her. A red ball was placed in her mouth to keep her quiet.
Not only were you both involved in the commercial sexual exploitation of GH, you also used her for your own self-gratification. You both raped her when she was under 13.
When she was very young, although it is not clear whether she was under 13, you both raped her at the same time (oral and vaginal/anal). It happened on more than one occasion
What you just said is exactly how Jesse described the situation. Befriending and grooming, then passing along to other men. He most certainly did not leave it at befriending. I'm confused as to what you are criticizing him for?
He says the girls met the men on the street and the men befriended them with candy. Nothing about the intergenerational networks used to lure girls in from the schools themselves. He makes it sound like individual adult men just lured the girls (who were out “on the street”, tsk tsk) with candy and then turned to pimping, ignoring the insidious nature of *communities* of men acting in concert to bring in and abuse the girls.
"The victims were girls between the ages of 11 and 16, and the men in question would befriend them on the street, offer them presents, buy them candy, give them affection, and the girls would then think that these significantly older men were their boyfriends. Over time, the boyfriends would give them alcohol and sometimes drugs and would introduce them to a larger group of men who would use them for sex and often sell them to other groups, like basically pimping them out."
It’s increasingly looking like it was a “community project” in some areas. One news report speaks of a woman who set up a fake rape crisis centre & hotline to locate vulnerable girls to lure into exploitation, and she worked with taxi companies in the area.
Jesse describing what happened to these girls as "used them for sex" instead of "drugged and raped children" was terrible. Completely downplaying what these girls went through and the way their communities were terrorised by these gangs.
But, yes, god forbid someone doesn't use she/her pronouns for an internet lunatic.
Yeah, I’m not sure I’m quite as peeved as most commenting here (I have never seen 99% of these names before, but choosing when to comment is entirely their right), but this is quite difficult to look past.
Jesse doesn’t give a F what pronouns anyone else uses. Why are you policing what he says? You’re the only one doing the scolding for incorrect word usage around here.
Sorry, are you new around here? lol because Jesse absolutely caters to preferred pronouns, and he doesn't hide his annoyance when Katie doesn't use crazy people's PPs.
Founding episode primo (or whatever it was called on the prior platform, I can’t even remember). Jesse does not tell Katie or anyone else what probouns to use. This idea that he policies other people’s speech is entirely within your head.
Sorry to break the news but you’re the scold now. The idea that using whatever pronouns pop into my head instead of autistically insisting on sex based one’s even when they don’t make sense to my brain is “catering” is too-online anti-woke nonsense, frankly.
Nowhere in my above comment did I say Jesse tells people what to say. But as someone who has listened to almost every BARpod episode more than twice, I can say with confidence that Jesse has on more than one occasion in the last nearly 5 years insisted Katie be respectful of someone's preferred pronouns and or chastised her for when he deemed she wasn't being respectful. 🤷🏼♀️ I distinctly remember an episode in 2024 or '23 where Katie put her foot down and told Jesse she wasn't going to call a predator "she" because the alleged behavior was uniquely male.
Musk derangement syndrome is a thing now, I guess. He draws attention to a massive crime against women, but somehow he’s the asshole? He could save a kitten from a tree and there’d be a dozen think pieces about how he’s contributing to the overpopulation of cats.
He would never save a kitten from a tree. He’d see someone dumb on Twitter tweet that liberals in Fakelandistan hadn’t saved the kitten from a tree 10 years ago and would go crazy about it with no actual investigation or curiosity to see if it was true..
I had no animus against Musk until he started supporting the far right in my country. It isn't a public service to draw public attention to a great crime if it's done to blame the wrong people. Do you think the people calling Jesse a Nazi on Bluesky are drawing attention to the evils of the Third Reich?
You are commenting on the wrong podcast if you want to find an audience who will be fooled by the claim that somebody spreading lies about a scandal is just "calling attention" to it. And, yes, Musk is supporting the far right. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c7ve4m1q42vo
And so what if he is? You are still more upset about WHO is talking about the mass rapes and HOW they are talking about it, than you are about the horrifying fact that Pakistani gangs raped thousands of British girls. Who gives a shit about that, as long as no one is talking about it for the wrong reasons, hmmm?
Have you considered running for public office in Britain? Seems like you’re exactly the kind of person they want!
I think I may be done with the Jesse + guest episodes (unless it's Helen Lewis). The quality is just so much lower than the normal J+K episodes. Especially if Elon Musk is a main character.
Katie overall has much better judgment in her choice of guests and matching her guests to stories. Jesse does better, more varied work and is more likeable when he pairs himself with a female guest, and he should do that more often.
Yeah he is so much more likeable when he with a woman. It’s like he turns into a different person when he is trying to be cool around another man. I couldn’t even listen to the end of this episode. It felt like when you have a male friend who is really sweet and funny and then you see them with the arsehole friends they act like you’re not even friends
I'm starting to think a better arrangement for the show would for Katie to be host/producer and Jesse reporter/correspondent, rather than switching off those roles. It would play to both of their strengths.
I don’t think I’ve made it through a single episode when Jesse interviewed a guest. Shoot, even Joe Rogan couldn’t make him sound interesting. He NEEDS Katie
I think the problem is that Katie is naturally funny and Jesse is not. So he thinks he needs to provide humor to his episodes. Which..... doesn't work. Jesse is earnest and smart and dedicated.... but he isn't entertaining.
This take is always insane to me! I think Jesse is hilarious, way funnier than Katie! Normally I don't like unfavourably comparing one to the other but this take is so unpopular I make an exception.
Humor is certainly subjective, but I'd agree with Purrfur that Katie is much more naturally funny than Jesse. Katie's humor definitely seems less forced. This is especially noticeable in some of the live show and "Jesse + guest" episodes, where Jesse appears to have a self-imposed quota for jokes. Sometimes his awkwardness helps them land, but often they fall flat.
I know I am an common voice on this topic here in the comments. I just think my sense of humour is really similar to his. The times Katie has cracked me up have been the times that she has cracked Jesse up too.
I think he’s really funny when he’s with Katie and Helen but I find the way he is on these episodes with another man so grating. It’s like he’s not being himself. In this one you could tell he felt weird about the way that other man was handling it but he was just going along with it. I’m not against using humour on these episodes but if you don’t do it right it’s awful to listen to. We needed some of Katie’s black humour. This was unlistenable to me
Nobody on the American right gave a single shit about this for the previous ten years while it was being exposed, investigated and allegedly covered up under a Conservative government, and then six months after a centre left government is voted in they’re suddenly convinced Britain needs a regime change to set this injustice right. This is pure, cynical partisan opportunism and if you think Elon cares about the victims or setting any injustice right you’re a complete rube. The *only* reason he’s interested is because he thinks he can damage the Starmer government with it.
I first heard about this scandal ~a decade ago and since then the *overwhelming* majority of people I’ve seen talk about it in any context are conservative and none of them are progressive
It was a terrible decision to open this by reading tweets about girls being raped in wacky accents while chortling about how funny it is. A real low point for this podcast.
It's so jarring to be hearing about children dying while the two of you do hacky bits about British names and the Queen. It was just awful.
Jesse, if you read these comments, the Rotherham case is *still* significant for several reasons (will post in both the comment section and the Open Thread):
1. In addition to being an obviously-terrible sex scandal—it was a series of anti-white hate crimes. Pakistanis targeted British girls specifically because they were white. The media downplayed this fact, and many prominent journalists, academics, and Labour party leaders lied about the demographics of the perpetrators for years (some of them claimed race had nothing to do with the scandal).
2. Fears of racism stalled the investigation. Fears of racism undermined and continue to undermine the entire British justice system.
3. The story did not receive an appropriate amount of coverage. The British media reported on George Floyd's death more than the Rotherham rapes.
4. While Pakistanis were allowed to get away with rapes for decades, Brits could get arrested for voicing naughty opinions about minorities.
5. To give you some perspective about the extent of the scandal: Rotherham has a population of only ~100000. More than 1400 girls were raped. It will take a long time for Rotherham to recover from this.
6. There are many more active rape gangs across Europe. This is the tip of a massive iceberg.
Pakistanis did not target British girls because they are white. They were targeted because they were without parents, without carers and were non-Muslims.
(I'm not denying these crimes are partially religiously motivated. But survivors claimed the attackers would frequently harass their victims for their skin color.)
Thanks for showing me that. I have to say that although they all reached the conclusion that these were racially based crimes the description that was given of what motivated these people to me looked religiously based. There were racial insults of course, but it seemed to me that the hatred of whites was because they weren’t Muslims. Maybe I’m just confused.
I kind of hate to say that but it doesn't really surprise me that much. There seems to be a tendency among Muslims to dehumanize those not of their faith.
If you’re non-Muslim and from a dysfunctional, deprived background in Rotherham, you are almost certainly white. There are barely any black or non-Muslim Asian people there. It’s a depressed Northern town, not London or even Leeds.
I’ve read in government reports that yes, Asian girls were being abused, too, but it took a different form than these gangs.
I could be mistaken, but why are the Wikipedia numbers so far off? Wikipedia claims the population was ~100000 in 2011 (when the rapes happened) (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham).
There's the town of Rotherham, and then a larger Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham. I think the numbers differ depending on whether they're for just the town or the larger area. The Borough had a pop of 248,175 at the 2011 Census, and the town 109,691. (provided wiki is accurate for the page you linked and this one! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Borough_of_Rotherham)
Saw the hosts of this one and immediately knew I did not want to listen to them talk about the sexual torture of white working class girls enacted by Pakistani men. No chance these two are giving a decent take.
They didn't downplay the rapes. Which I was also concerned with, given the podcast title. But, in an effort to reflexively oppose anything Elon Musk does, accepted credulously any accounts opposing him.
Per Jesse, at ~26:50 "Elon seems to be interpreting this as 'Ah-ha, they are trying to cover up the Muslim rape gangs' but that's just not a credible interpretation of this" and then proceeds to just accept everything stated by government officials and the BBC as conclusively ending the inquiry -- despite presenting no evidence that government/police were sufficiently investigated, fired or prosecuted for those responsible for enabling this scenario.
It's just flatly a "I assume good intent and behavior by my political allies in everything they do and say" scenario and in this case, political allies means anyone opposing Musk. It's Jesse's go-to with most things Musk related.
I don't think Jesse at all fully conveyed the scale of the problem in the UK and the extent to which the cultural and political issues that enabled this have not at ALL been fixed. There is no free speech in the UK.
Not mentioning the horrifying scale, which conservatively is in the thousands of victims, is downplaying it.
I think they even mentioned the report that found 1,510 victims, since they mentioned the time period 1997-2013. But I don’t remember them mentioning a victim figure.
They really did downplay it though. When Trump is brought up Jesse starts seething. When mass rapes are brought up he starts chuckling and doing goofy accents
I worked with victims of Child Sexual Exploitation in London for a decade and contributed to the inquiry after the Rotherham scandal. I also trained professionals on how to identify and respond to signs of CSE. One thing I reinforced every training session was that the conspiracy of silence has as much to do with class as race. The working class girls were seen as ‘chavs’ and sluts who were asking for it, even by professionals. Had the victims been middle-class or private school girls (less vulnerable to grooming so unlikely), the police response would have been very different.
Police in the US have routinely dismissed, and even arrested, trafficked minors forced into prostitution because to socioeconomic prejudice. It happens everywhere in the West.
I mean, exploited girls were referred to as ‘child prostitutes’ until relatively recently! I can’t quite believe the same mistake was made with ‘child porn’, although thankfully it’s being replaced with CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material).
YES. Look at Hillsborough as well - there is a very old institutional conviction that the underclass is to blame for its own misfortune. Add that to typical sex crimes needing “perfect victims” to avoid victim-blaming, and the girls exploited in Rotherham (underage drinkers/drug takers, apparently willing running away to be with “boyfriends,”) were already fighting an uphill battle to be believed.
Seeing this get warped into an anti-immigration campaign is incredibly depressing. It’s ALWAYS about what works for the powerful, the victims are just getting used AGAIN.
I know the smart thing to do is say nothing, but: I’m sorry I read the tweets in that accent given the subject matter. Jesse asked if I could do an Elon impression, I said “yes” — first rule of improv, “yes and!” — even though the truthful answer would have been “no”. I can’t do South African, and it came out as this cartoonish-y New Zealand-ish thing, which was the wrong vibe for such a serious topic. Bad call on my part, I’m sorry.
Neither of you did anything wrong. There are people here that are taking Elon's tweets very seriously, despite the fact that they are in incredibly bad faith, stupid, misinformed, and obviously just some cynical political ploy. Elon's posting here doesn't deserve any special treatment.
That's also been the tone of the show forever. Jesse and Katie have cracked jokes over serious stories for years and no one here has a problem with it when it's about gender or woke shit. If the first half of the pod was just a dry recounting of the story that would be very strange.
I think you're missing the point. Elon's tweets are, well... Elon tweets. And pointing that out is worthwhile. My frustration (and the frustration of many) is that Jesse seemed to be using the fact that Elon tweeted soma dumb shit about it as a reason to dismiss the issue entirely as "old news", which (based on what I've seen) is an unwise characterization.
I understand, but that's a very naive reading of what he's doing. "Yeah I understand he's only doing this for partisan interest AND he doesn't know anything about what he's talking about AND none of what he's saying is relevant to his attacks on Labour AND most of what he's saying isn't true, BUT we need to take what he's saying incredibly seriously" is silly and belies a shallow partisan understanding of politics that I just cannot stand.
Also, he spent a good chunk of the pod talking about the background here. "Dismiss the issue entirely" is absurdly uncharitable to Jesse, if anything he felt he had to overcommunicate here because he probably feels he has to walk on eggshells for his own audience.
I'm not taking anything Elon says on Twitter seriously. I'm taking British feminists like Julie Bindel seriously when they say this topic is worth bringing to light and that it isn't just a matter of "it was handled back when it happened, no need to talk about it now" - that latter characterization is what I'm referring to as "dismissing the issue" on Jesse's part. From what I've read, it's simply not true.
Indeed. The underlying issues of integration are worse than ever. Dismissing these symptoms just makes it worse.
Just last year we had Muslim riots because social services tried to take a child away from their parents, and a case of a Pakistani father torturing his daughter to death before fleeing the country to Pakistan with the rest of his family.
Could these things have nothing to do with religion or ethnicity? Perhaps. Is that statistically likely? Not really.
"we had Muslim riots because social services tried to take a child away from their parents"
Did we? Where? If you mean Harehills, the family in conflict with social services there were Roma and unlikely to be Muslim.
I would say Jesse gave it the appropriate gravity, as best as he could.
the jokes were jokes. They were offensive to me because they just weren't funny. but I don't get offended by subject matter of jokes. just make it funny.
What irked me is the contention that this matter is completely settled.
if it were completely settled then it would not have set of a complete shitstorm in the UK.
if someone were to come out and tweet that Catholic priests molested kids in the US, there would be a collective shrug because we had a thorough exhaustive truth and reconciliation over many years. Now comedians use it as a punch line. That's closure.
contrast that to the UK where some people even there weren't aware of the full scope of this abomination.
to the extent that there is more to uncover and more people to hold accountable, that is a net good. Elon's ham-fisted tweeting style deserves criticism, his potential motives deserve examination, but all that pales in comparison to decades of crimes that are still happening today.
to say the matter is settled as Jesse did is just fucking stupid.
we are still examining the Tulsa race massacre to this day. never let governments off the hook man.
video below, proper placement of Elon's tweets. 30 seconds, side issue, appropriate criticism, but overall theme is welcoming more sunlight as the disinfectant.
https://youtu.be/qngLeibyuyY?si=gGEtJO8niz6BAn8I
My husband (British) and I (American expat with British citizenship) listened to the episode a bit nervously, because we’re both big fans of Jesse *and* Jeff both, and think very highly of their intelligence and integrity— and hoping they’d see past the many layers of social media bs surrounding the issue.
Overall we thought they did a good job— as my husband said, “for Americans”. 😆 What he means, of course, is getting mostly to the facts, especially from a distance.
Side note, however - there are good reasons to be against Jess Phillips’ decision, even if you believe her stated justification for it. How often is it really a good idea for insular organisations to investigate themselves? And if you don’t think British local councils are insular, I got a bridge to sell you…
Andrew Sullivan has an insightful take here as well: https://open.substack.com/pub/andrewsullivan/p/the-price-of-orthodoxies-13c?r=k8dz0&utm_medium=ios
Was going to say (not this eloquently) the same - Jesse doesn't 'dismiss issues' often, particularly of gravity. In fact he's one of the very few journalists who's integrity in the written word, and background gathering, I trust.
1) rape gangs aren’t real; 2) they’re real but they’re not that bad (we are here); 3) you’re racist for not accepting rape gangs
That point was never made, nor was it implied. But it is worth pointing out this has been investigated extensively. Elon set up back the progress of such investigation in popular discourse because unfortunately he has a huge reach and cab effect the news cycle. I think this comment pretty well misses the point of this show. You can debate the importance of Elon's influence, but to pretend the host were trying to dismiss the story as yesterday's news is willfully ignorant
I agree with you that the tone of this podcast is irreverent and often (but not always) makes fun of, “internet bullshit,” - or just bullshit. Yes, typical targets are gender and woke bullshit because so much of that stuff is, well, bullshit.(But, not all of it, IMO.)
However, the raping of young and vulnerable girls is not bullshit, nor should anyone create an atmosphere of joking around it, even if the hosts were not making jokes ABOUT the topic itself. I don’t think I’m being a buzzkill by mentioning this - nor is anyone else.
They didn't make jokes about the topic. Do you think Elon's bullshit is worth taking seriously?
I know they weren’t making jokes about the topic. I said that.
I don’t take ANYTHING to do with Musk seriously or at face value.
So should there never be jokes on this show? I really don’t understand why this is offensive but joking on an episode about October 7th or one about suicide isn’t.
Yes, that's exactly what I said!! There should never be ANY jokes EVER on this show. It's so nice when someone understands what I ACTUALLY meant, especially when I came nowhere near actually writing that!! Thanks for reading my mind and clarifying my intention. I'll do better next time.
Is it ok if Ms Pat makes jokes about young vulnerable women being abused? Who can make jokes about tragedy? https://youtu.be/MIVXFb79Dk0?si=Lee7yRkYhmeKqX9-
Sweetie, respectfully, preferred pronouns, gender identity, and "woke shit" are not even on the same plane as child RAPE and MURDER.
Good lord. First of all, they've covered plenty of serious stories on the pod. Second, this is like a non-sequitur - Elon's meltdown was just about bashing Keir Starmer and Jess Phillips. No one has been able to say a single thing they did wrong here, but people just keep bringing up how horrible the crimes were. Obviously, yes, but the story here is the cynical and moronic involvement of Elon Musk. I have to come to the conclusion that these kind of comments are just because people are mad at Elon?
"Sweetie, respectfully" sounds like the start to a clapback tweet that would be roundly mocked on BarPod usually....
Nobody said they're "on the same plane" or is downplaying the crimes
yeah, the "sweetie' thing is God awful. Just no.
calling people stupid and misinformed isn't bad faith at all.
you missed racist, islamophobic, anti-woke, Free press reader, anti-immigrant among your ad hominem invectives.
Ad-hominem is something unrelated to a debate, like a personal attack. I was directly addressing the tweets, which are what is being debated, therefore it is not an ad-hominem attack. But good job using debate terminology?
Ad hominem is an attack on the individual, not the argument.
The individuals are stupid and misinformed.
Not the arguments.
There’s a difference.
You fail to engage with the substance of the arguments when you name call.
That's what I just said. Personal attack, although that's not the only thing that can be an ad-hom (that is notably the first thing I get if I type "ad-hominem" into Google, lol). What is going on in these comments today. His tweets are moronic, which is what I said?
Why do progressives love downplaying rapes just because it’s by pakistani Muslims?
There's a difference between downplaying rapes and not lying about them for political advantage.
I can’t tell if you’re still joking here, but in case you’re not - the SA accent is not the problem. The general joking and laughing about the mass rape of young girls is. “Oh, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a bunch of cab drivers!” was bad enough, but “yowza” and “check please” made my skin crawl. What were you thinking? Do you really think lightening the mood is the tack to take here?
Unbelievable response. Do you feel that is a fair summary of the podcast? Jokes were not being made while Jesse was describing the story, are you being serious right now?
I gave actual quotes from the segment.
Devoid of their context, though. That's not good faith.
Are you familiar with the concept of gallows humor?
Thank you
If you wanna start litigating when people get to make jokes about what, you will not like the end result. Nothing is sacred. No one here is confused as to how horrific these events are. Humor is still extremely important and we forget that at the peril of our very souls. And I mean that!
The joke was very meta, in the sense that the funny part was precisely how inappropriate it would be to make such jokes given the underlying subject matter.
Worked for me anyway, I found myself chuckling in public at that point. But I'm something of a sucker for meta humor.
When I listen to the honest descriptions of what happened to those poor girls, I was absolutely enraged and wanted to commit violence on the men that did that to them. But as much as that affected me, and no way it was I put off by Jesse and Jeff doing what they always do; if all of a sudden they have to take a serious tone due to how *you* feel about this issue, then they've set a standard for everybody else to demand they do the same for *their* issue.
Yeah, I also took it— at face value— as gallows humor. Even as a little kid I found Michael O’Donoghue funny on olde-tyme SNL, so I’m comfortable with morbid humour- but it’s not for everyone.
Also, but… the situation of a comedian being invited on a show for a discussion of horrific crimes, is just f**king funny. Like “tough crowd” times a million
Jeff, with all due respect…seriously??
Ok, let me do little throat clearing: we all fuck up - I certainly do, probably routinely. Which is to say that I’m not going to put you (or Jesse or this podcast) in the rubbish bin just because I thought the jokes and voices around the gang rape topic was in incredibly poor taste.
HOWEVER, coming in here to apologize for bad accents is kind of missing the point - and I have to believe you know that. Additionally, framing this topic as an opportunity for improv - you can’t be serious. I mean, come on. I think that’s where the problems started.
On the other hand, a big credit to you for coming in at all to offer what you did in the way of an apology. I think that’s great.
Ok, I’ll get off my fucking high horse now. 🤷🏻♂️
Oh boy, lots of sanctimony in these comments. Just what I love about this podcast!
lol wow
Jesse and Jeff you did a great job. Please ignore the audience comments. To try appease the mob is going to drag this show down. I think most the people listen do still appreciate even handed and nuance criticism. Don't take the road of the free press or the fifth column
Amen!
I appreciate you and your appearance on the show. Apologizing seems unnecessary. This exact kind of humor is completely fine with most of these people about other serious topics. This is not a new vibe to the pod at all. This just bothers them this time cause it's about their virtue bugaboo.
It bothers people because it’s about the sexual torture of thousands of working class girls - this isn’t some woke pronoun BS issue.
Katie and Jesse have made jokes during segments about 10/7, war, pedophilia, and other very serious topics. The jokes were not about the horrific abuse. They repeatedly noted how terrible it was. It would be extremely out of character for the pod if they went completely somber while talking about dumb tweets just because those dumb tweets were about something awful.
Katie and Jesse joke about:
Antisemitism
The Holocaust
Pedophilia
Sexual harassment
Yet this is the first time I’ve seen a comment section like this.
I write this not wanting to pile on, because I am a huge fan of Jesse and I know he absolutely meant no harm whatsoever, but those are broad topics, and the difference is that this is so specific and so recent. Just to thought-experiment this: What if they were talking about Daniel Pearl right after his execution? What if they were talking about Rwanda right after the massacre occurred? What if they were talking about the death of Chista McAuliffe right after the Challenger explosion, Elizabeth Smart right after she was rescued? And when it's so specific (which includes limited in scope), when is it okay to make a joke about it? It's not often that something this horrific is the topic of conversation, but when it is, it's shocking to hear people joke-not-joke about it. Again, not piling on! Just giving perspective!
This is not recent. What are you talking about? The first story was over 20 years ago, the first convictions over 10 years ago. The tweets were recent. That's true.
Elon Sensitivity Syndrome. He doesn't have any, but his fans sure do.
I happen to despise Elon, so [loud buzzer sound].
On this show, the worse an accent is, the better. According to this measure, Katie is the greatest impressionist ever and that's one reason we love her.
I do love Katie. I'm not 'offended' by the accents here or otherwise, but full honesty, it's not my favourite thing by either of the hosts (or guests) and I generally just skip ahead.
I love this show, but I do think the accents are a bit played out.
Plus they are so awful they go from bad, through so bad it’s good, right back to just embarrassing … seriously, y’all. Give it a rest
I hate the accents. They’re not funny, all they do is distract from the topic at hand. If this is Jesse’s idea of humor then he’s a disgrace to the Jewish people.
Katie's 'British journalist in a mask' impression was hilarious and I will always stand by it
I am so over the accents. I really wish Jesse would stop pushing Katie and the guests to do them. It's like fingernails on a chalkboard to me (yes, I'm Gen X and get this reference 😄).
Thanks for writing here, Jeff!
Did I laugh at the old timey car horn sound? No. 😞😬 But did I think for a second either you or Jesse were being disrespectful of the subject or the victims? Definitely no.
Also your discussion of Liv and Uncle Brian hit the vibe of our future AI FB BFFs perfectly! The future appears to be stupid, hilarious and menacing! Where racism will be obsolete because we can all say some of our best AI friends are (coded to be) black! Yay!
Haha I can't quite tell if this sarcastic, but you all don't need to apologize. The audience would have been pissed either way when it came to this topic. They are interpreting it willfully with bad faith.
Hi, Jeff! Jesse did you a gross disservice by inviting you on his podcast to color commentate a breezy story about thousands of little girls getting gang raped.
Honestly, I thought it was overly jocular given the subject matter, but both of you stated how horrific the topic was, and I believe that to be true. Regardless, this is a genuinely kind response to some backlash about it.
Don't stress it man. You were fine. Thank you for guest hosting and adding your perspective! Glad to have you on the podcast
Don't apologize. You and Jesse clearly thought about how to best present on a topic that is at once terrible and is being shamelessly used by Musk to obviously distract from the H1B mess, etc. You chose awkward, self-aware humor to do so---it seemed like out of exasperation. I appreciated it because what do you do but try to laugh bitterly when others so obviously don't give a shit and are cynically using the pain of others for their own ends (Musk)?
The rubes around here or twitter are extremely easy to manipulate---they're upset because this is exactly what the tone and content of the episode pointed out. Put the word child/youth in front of just about anything, especially when it comes to bad things about immigrants/minorities, and Americans completely lose their minds.
Most of J&K commentary on political issues is the boilerplate good liberal take and completely inoffensive (let's say neutered, like Chait). Calling this issue/discussion out as internet bullshit was actually somewhat adversarial towards the most vocal and conservative portions of their listenership and very welcome.
the rape of thousands & thousands of girls is not internet bullshit. the organized & systemic abuse of white & sikh girls by pakistani muslim rape gangs is worse than hillsborough. when did ppl stop calling hillsborough a scandal? when did the public get a *complete* inquiry? keir starmer gave a speech listing national scandals for which the gov't was to blame. you know what he listed? or, to put it plainer, do you know what he left out? the worst one. by far. who gives a shit about post office businesses going under when we've accepted regular anal gang rape of 11 year old kufar girls as 'not worth questioning'?
Elon's exploitation of the case in the internet bullshit at issue here. This was not a story about the Rotherham rape scandal.
Thank you. So many people in these comments seem to have missed this. Elon is exploiting and misrepresenting a tragedy to further his own political agenda, and acting like he "discovered" a story that Julie Bindel broke over a decade prior.
Right? This was BARPod commentary about Elon's bullshit that required the dark background details to make sense. People who are actually offended about the way this was presented need to grow up
If it helps, I’m Australian and didn’t hear a shred of New Zealand. Just an American with a speech impediment. Sorry.
I'm a pretty humorless feminist and I thought it was fine. You were not joking "about" rape. But the grooming gang scandal isn't exactly "old news" - one reason it's in the public consciousness atm is that there was a major conviction in September.
Lots of people only listen to this podcast for the terrible impressions. Thank you for ticking this box on this episode 🙌
As someone who has always matched vibe and topic perfectly, I simply don’t understand… ;)
This made me smile
I’m gonna take the opposite view here and say it’s (generally) good that Elon is highlighting this *unfathomably evil* scandal, which I don’t believe, based on what I know, has been fully investigated or dealt with.
It’s a bit weird that the takeaway from this segment is “well, the press did technically report on it and people were technically arrested, so the matter is basically settled and Elon shouldn’t endanger people by irresponsibly amplifying it”.
The issue is whether the things he is saying about the scandal are accurate. You only have to look at the discussion on X to see Americans trying to make this the next Pizzagate and the far right suggesting all Pakistanis be deported. Far from starting a serious conversation about child protection, Musk has convinced an army of people who had never even heard of Rotherham two weeks ago that nothing has been done and that everyone in a position of power in England is colluding in a far-left paedophile conspiracy. When Andrew Tate is complaining about grooming gangs, you know that this isn't about people trying to confront evil. If you want to see just how ignorant the commentary on this from the US has been, try doing a search for "Rotterdam grooming gangs" on X.
You can either claim that the grooming gangs were well-reported before Musk or claim that the people who have joined the conversation after Musk's posts were previously unaware of them. The two are pretty much mutually exclusive, unless you believe that Americans should have no interest in British news at all. It is a once-in-a-decade news story.
They were not previously unaware of them, they were previously uninterested in them as there didn't appear that there was any more political hay to be made.
As for Americans who may not have known about it, no offence but who cares? Are you interested in what the British public thinks about US school shootings? Hopefully not and nor should you be.
I suspect "unaware" is the likely option in many cases, and so did Andrew in his comment above. Either way, the "who cares" argument doesn't bite: If someone doesn't care, Elon's tweets won't make him care either.
US school shootings have claimed some 300 casualties over the last 20 years, and this includes both killed and wounded (see https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/a01/violent-deaths-and-shootings ), yet they have been medially all-present all over Europe ever since Columbine (arguably particularly popular among schoolkids themselves). So it's a good illustration, but not of the point you're trying to make.
Incidentally, the two situations are rather different: Overhyping school shootings inspires more of them, whereas overhyping grooming gangs has good chances of reducing their number.
Actually the point I was trying to make went entirely over your head. What difference does awareness of US school shootings among the British public make to the problem of school shootings in the US?
Anybody who didn't know about this before doesn't matter as their opinion makes no difference. That's my point.
In the case of school shootings, the effect is minor, not least because the UK doesn't influence the US as much as vice versa (except for cinema perhaps). In the case of the grooming gangs, it has a good chance of forcing the UK government (even a Labor one) to act, as it makes them look like the utterly craven losers they are.
Even within the UK, it strengthened the "something must be done" faction, as you can tell from JKR's twitter (to my knowledge she has been avoiding the topic previously).
then why do we care about any news outside of our county/state/country by your logic?
"If someone doesn't care, Elon's tweets won't make him care either."
Surely we've seen enough moral panics at this point to know this isn't necessarily the case. In the right social circumstances, people can go from not giving af to absolute obsession, and very quickly. Elon tweeting (particularly as he's basically a proxy for Trump atm) is definitely one of those circumstances.
to the extent that the Western world was unaware of this is an indictment of the political and media establishment of the Western world.
you should not be upset that there is fresh outrage when the original outrage was at best inadequate. Unless you're concerned that the "wrong side" might suffer political consequences for this abject horror.
I would argue that there is much more to discover.
we should pick this scab until we get to the bone.
anyone who wants to silence this needs prayer for their souls.
oh by the way, the rapes are still happening. so it's not over.
The Rotherham stuff was pretty heavily covered in right-wing American media around the time of the prosecutions in ~2014, for what it’s worth. I don’t think it ever really hit mainstream American media beyond a few mentions. Neither Trump nor Musk were involved in right wing American politics at the time, of course.
I, an American, wasn't aware of that. That's certainly not to my credit.
But Americans are unusual in that there is less interest in foreign news than most other countries.
I don't think that's fair to Americans. I am sure there are lots of US scandals I have no idea about. School shootings are a popular talking point in the UK because it can bring the left and right together in feeling smug.
Polygamist cults are one example, I went down a rabbit hole after watching HBOs Big Love (which was not available here, I got a bootleg copy) I had no idea idea about that disgusted stuff and I doubt most Brits do either.
I'm not trying to dunk on my fellow Americans. But Americans seem to be less interested in international affairs than Europeans.
It makes some sense. We have a large country with a shit ton of our own media. We don't necessarily have to reach outside our borders to find interesting stuff.
My favorite recent example of smug British gun reporting is a BBC reporter covering the Palisades fire walking around with a raging inferno as a backdrop and finding exploded munitions from peoples burnt down homes while saying in so many words "you wouldn't have to worry about this in jolly old England!"
The Pelicot rape case in France was all over American media even though most Americans couldn’t point on a map to the region of France where it happened. Bizarre depravity of the crime plus bravery of the victim equals a human interest story - it’s hard to see why the Rotherham story didn’t land, based on the same criteria.
If we could enact a moratorium on "people commenting on stuff they don't know about that happened in other countries", I'm for it.
Deeply disturbing turn of events of progressives down playing the mass rape of poor little girls just because the perpetrators are pakistani muslims. I would say it’s shocking but it’s really not
They are not mutually exclusive at all. I am saying that the grooming gangs story was well reported in the UK and there was no cover-up by the UK media (although the Guardian didn't cover itself in glory rejecting Julie Bindel's story in the 00s. That tells us nothing about what Americans should do, other than not claim otherwise.
Also, unfortunately, child abuse scandals are not once-in-a-decade news. The 2010s also saw scandals in the Catholic Church and the BBC come to national attention in the UK.
Sorry, forgot one. Prince Andrew's involvement in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal also came to light in the 2010s.
Thank you for being a voice of sanity on this thread. It’s truly maddening to see people who didn’t pay any attention to British news and government until this story was tweeted by Musk over a decade after the fact suddenly start shouting about cover ups.
Not mutually exclusive in the slightest. The vast majority of Americans I am sure, admittedly without polling in front of me, can not name the current Secretary of State. And don't even know who he (or she) is or what they look like. That is not because his nomination, confirmation, and tenure were not well-reported.
Ridiculous comparison
I think they prefer "Administrative Assistant of State," but beyond that, why would I care about the secretary? Surely most of the decisions are made by State, not their secretary!
;-P
Who cares? What does the secretary of state do, answer the President's phone?
The stories were reported. I'm not British nor live there, but I knew about them. There's no reason to think they would be front page news in the US even if it was all going down right now.
There have been massive abuse scandals in Japanese and Korean pop culture the last few years. No doubt the average American (or even well-informed one) knows anything about them. Doesn't mean it's a cover up
It is amazing to see all these people who are like “I am smart. I don’t fall for propaganda. I do my own research” immediately be taken in by this. It’s so fucking transparent!
Elon has only amplified this whole thing outside of the US. There isn't a single person in the UK that didn't know about the grooming gangs 10 years ago. Unfortunately it's become a political football, and Starmers recent comments have only made it worse.
In the words of Elon Musk: True
Or the word, rather
The issue isn't that Elon shared a story the issue is that he called for individuals to be jailed based on spurious reasoning.
Your "summary" of their takeaway only has negative connotations because you are intuition pumping the idea of somebody being dismissive when talking about rape. When in reality a somber, truthful timeline of the reporting is a good thing.
I do not think BARpod was being dismissive in talking about rape, I think they were being dismissive in acting as if the matter was well-covered and well-investigated, of which it was neither. Certainly not in proportion to the magnitude of the scandal, which I think is still not fully understood.
I don’t care about Elon tweeting about if people should be in jail. Oh well.
Why don't you care about influential people, like Elon, saying people should be jailed based on spurious reasoning? Seems like most people would offer that is bad, and people shouldn't do it. Seems like your just playing team sports.
I don't know a lot about this scandal other than this episode, I normally wouldn't be opposed to additional reporting or investigating on a crime, but why should that include Elon's antics?
I don’t care about it because Elon doesn’t have the power to put people in jail.
I’m not playing team sports. Millions of people saying millions of irresponsible things daily. Elie Mystal and Keith Olbermann, to pick two examples, tweet inflammatory, irresponsible nonsense constantly (in my opinion). Oh well.
Would you agree that Elon also tweets inflammatory, irresponsible nonsense constantly? And do you prefer people not do so?
I would prefer that all people be sober and responsible at all times, including Elon. But I don’t expect that to happen and I think any attempts to require people to do so will always backfire.
He tweeted one single fake document, which though fake fairly accurately summed up Police and CPS attitude to rape victims. I've posted this elsewhere in the thread and I'll post it again here because in 4 minutes it gives a snapshot of how officialdom treated rape victims.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRXH_ZvxSBY
Oh well.
I certainly share your disinterest in tweets generally, but I find myself forced to acknowledge that Elon has an outsized platform (and not just by virtue of owning the literal platform itself), so what he says about it does, in fact, shape public opinion. I don't like it any more than you do, but I think to fully grapple with this scandal and Elon's role in it, we do have to acknowledge that what he tweets to 212 million people can have a real impact in the world.
(Btw, love the Zach Woods avatar!)
I feel like the correct position here is "Elon shouldn't be tweeting about jailing people, that's an irresponsible thing for him to do, and also this scandal was horrific beyond imagining (both what was done to the girls and the way the government handled it) and it's not a bad thing for more people to know about it."
Is there room for a middle ground there? Because most of the anti-backlash comments I'm seeing here are focusing almost exclusively on Elon's irresponsibility and framing this story as being all about him, which is the *exact thing people are frustrated about Jesse doing in the podcast* lol.
If somebody said that they think it’s a disservice to focus on Elon, I might be sympathetic to that argument. I think it’s difficult given his prominence and his antics, but I could be sympathetic.
But that isn’t want the people I was responding to said. They were saying actually Elons behavior was good.
I still find it so weird that Elon has so little self-awareness about the limits of his knowledge. I guess it’s more true that he just doesn’t care to act more judiciously.
Question is, I wonder if the extra attention brought to the issue because of his tw**ting is worth the bs that immediately followed. Honestly don’t know.
There absolutely was a conspiracy of silence, but not in the usual sense. It was the confluence of people in power acting cowardly for various reasons. Sort of a conspiracy-by-simultaneous-ass-covering.
I mainly agree with Sully’s take, although like almost every take I’ve seen, there are some assertions I would take with a grain of salt:
https://open.substack.com/pub/andrewsullivan/p/the-price-of-orthodoxies-13c?r=k8dz0&utm_medium=ios
It's a pretty typical phenomenon among people who have wild success in one area to assume that means they must just be generally competent and knowledgeable about everything. Definitely not limited to Elon (movie stars have been opining on politics as if their opinions are well-thought out for ages), though he's undoubtedly the most prominent example of it in our current times.
The “if I don’t personally do it, it must be easy” assumption 😄
Right. He's spent his entire adult life being told by established voices that what he thinks or wants to do is insane. "No one lands rockets, it's far too complicated and a waste of time." "There hasn't been a successful new American car company in decades." etc. As it turned out, for a lot of those things in the technological realm, Elon was right and literally everyone else was wrong. It's understandable (if not excusable) that years of this could cause him to err towards trusting his gut in things completely outside his expertise.
The same overhyping was done to various Catholic child-grooming cases, for the same reasons: the mainstream media is underreporting it, so let's overreport it to make a difference. And in many cases, it worked! So you have a tradeoff between solving the problem and staying unbiased. I'm not surprised that a lot of people choose the former; so would I in most such situations.
Wait, what? Priests abusing children was very real and widespread - and covered up - for decades. I would not call it overhyped at all.
It was something like a running gag in German media for the 2000s; priesthood would only ever be mentioned in the context of pedophilia. (Arguably it was not a news-heavy decade.) I don't know how big the numbers actually were in Germany, but I suspect they were comparable with the much underexposed -- until now -- British rape gangs.
Not even close!
You seem to regard rape as only serious if it can be used for a political agenda? Everything you’re citing has been a very serious topic of discussion in women’s groups and by people campaigning against violence against women and children for literal decades. Maybe you just choose to ignore it until there’s a boogeyman you like the look of?
Two things can definitely be true: more people need to care about ending violence against women and girls AND Elon Musk can be using the topic and these victims for his own political gain, which should be of deep concern for people who care about democracy.
Hopefully makes it to Jesse - posting on a reply up the chain.
Jesse, love your reporting. This is the worst you’ve ever done. You started with Elon is an idiot/psycho/ignoramus and then backed into why that is true.
1. Making this a story basically about Elon and not about the story itself is an absurdity in itself. I don’t care what anyone is saying about a story of this magnitude, even if they’re the richest person in the world, what they’re saying is meaningless in comparison. I don’t know why the focus of this would ever be Elon.
2. You’re blowing up the reach of this story and how it was covered by a factor of about 20 (I believe probably in an attempt to dunk on Elon). I was aware of this story in 2013. Mainly because I like the work of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sam Harris, and Douglas Murray, and they all have been on this beat since around then. Yes, this was absolutely covered in the news. Even being able to pull 40+ headlines from major newspapers from the period does not mean that it was covered appropriately. For instance, Trump can send out a random bullshit tweet, and you could most likely find 40 headlines from major news outlets covering it a week later. This was a story about potentially 10s of thousands underage rape victims involving potentially over 1M perpetrators over a period of decades (Julie Bindels estimates). This should have been headline news for years with hundreds if not thousands of headlines about it. It should have been the biggest story the UK has potentially ever seen. The investigation should have been tracked on a daily basis for years in a manner that made the Mueller Investigation look like uncovered nonsense no one cared about. The idea that if even be willing to wager (potentially inaccurately) that the Mueller Investigation had more coverage than the ORGANIZED rape of thousands of underage children by a hundreds of thousands of men I think highlights the issue. A story can have coverage while still being woefully under-covered. As Bindel herself, as well as Harris, Ali, Murray, etc. have all indicated, they have ran into countless roadblocks both in researching the story as well as reporting the story as well as reactions to their reporting. To say this story was properly covered I think is an admission you know nothing of the topic. I have read Prey by Ayaan. I have also read the NYT review of Prey, it proceeds to undermine every claim Ayaan makes about exactly this topic saying it is basically entirely unfounded. That was in 2021. I have read Strange Death of Europe by Murray which addresses this topic again. I have also read the reviews by The Guardian and NYT who basically claim he’s nitpicking data and stories and the issue doesn’t actually exist. Again, this was the ORGANIZED rape of thousands of children. If this story was as widely covered as you seemingly believe it to be, these reviews would have seen by the public (let alone the editor), as someone nitpicking figures over The Holocaust, or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the Killing Fields in Cambodia, or how many died during 9/11. I’m not trying to compare total scale between these, I’m trying to compare the tact people utilize when addressing them and the reaction a reader has to someone addressing them entirely inappropriately. One of the NYT reviews on Prey says basically “Ali suggests Muslim men are one of the greatest threats to women to be assaulted, but in reality the greatest threat is men the women know”. When addressing this issue, who in their right mind would ever wrote such a thing? That is pure lunacy.
3. In your own story you again say how fully this has been covered, then go on to say how fully it has been addressed, and then never close the circle on again by Bindel’s estimates there could be 1M people involved - you report ~100 went to jail (0.01%), you say it’s been covered since ‘07-‘13 - it is now 2025 (18 years later) where are the reforms, where are the procedural changes, where are the people in jail, where is the restitution for the thousands of families?, you say they’re working on it right now - again it is 2025, this is one of the most serious things that have happened in decades, almost certainly a top 10, what the fuck have people been doing for the last 18 years if that’s the case?
Ultimately, yes Elon Musk could be 100% wrong on every specific thing he said. Who gives a shit in comparison to what has actually happened? I have no idea if Keir Starmer is to blame for anything, I have no idea on any of the people Musk mentioned specifically, believe Bindel also defends one of the ones mentioned just as you have. Who gives a shit? Maybe that is a 1min addendum at the end of the story if you like, just to set the record straight. That isn’t the god damn story itself, that’s a fucking footnote. The story is how did a first world country ALLOW (because yes they certainly did allow) thousands of children to get raped and why were they all raped by a very specific demographic. The specific demographic should have no more interest than in figuring out why it was that specific demographic so that you can stop it from ever occurring again, and ignoring that is exactly what happened will 100% certainly make sure you misdiagnose the problem, just like purposefully ignoring ANY variable that has an almost 100% hit rate amongst offenders will make sure you misdiagnose the issue.
This reporting was a tragedy in itself.
I wish Katie was here on this episode to call out Jessie’s absolutely ridiculous and stupid butthurt about it because he’s mad at ol chuddie Elon breaking it instead of him
lol Jesse jealous of Elon “breaking” a Julie Bindel story from 2006, sure man.
Yeah he was that petty
This. I am unsubscribing over this insane revisionism.
What revisionism?
I don’t know the person. But I’d imagine they’re talking about the play acting as if this story got anywhere close to sufficient coverage and that it wasn’t blocked at every turn, in research, in distribution, in response. Or, the acting as if it is being handled and has been handled with attention and care.
By Jesse’s own reporting ~100 people have been put in jail. By Julie Bindel’s reporting on this, which seems like a fair source because Jesse cites her frequently in this story, there are potentially 1M men that are involved in this organized rape of children. That is a 0.01% incarceration rate.
Further, by Jesse’s own reporting this story broke in 2007 (mainly by Bindel - by the way, reporting it had already been going on for decades), and by Jesse’s own reporting, they’re still discussing how to respond, what procedures to implement, new laws to make, oversight to be had, etc. Yet he acts like it is being
Whoops. Pressed send by accident.
…yet he acts like this issue is being sufficiently addressed and appropriately handled. To be clear 2007 was 18 years ago. 18 fucking years ago, for a scandal that had already been going on for decades. A scandal that was the organized rape of potentially tens of thousands (again Bindels estimate) children by 1M people inside England. That also included law enforcement in every way but explicitly stating, ALLOWING the rapes to continue. And I am not being hyperbolic by using allowing, that is the most accurate way to describe what happened. Law enforcement many many many times was approached by a rape victim and they turned them away without doing anything. Many rape victims families went to law enforcement saying grown men had their children, they knew where their children were, and that they were being molested, and law enforcements response was “if they’re over 13 there is nothing we can do about it”. The age of consent in England has been 18 since the 1800s. Citing 13 as an age where the child could consent to being sexually abused was a way for them to not have to handle the issue.
Many will say law enforcement was stuck between a rock and a hard place, the perpetrators being mainly (like almost entirely) Pakistani immigrants. I do not care how heavily you weight that consideration, if you find it incredibly important, or think it is meaningless (like me), doesn’t matter. The second you choose a side between those considerations, you are ALLOWING the other to occur. If that is something you care about, you can argue a response of if law enforcement reacted in a heavy handed manner than they would have misidentified many immigrants and ultimately had a (in practice) racist reaction. Ok, fine. I would choose potentially ALLOWING many grown ups to be misidentified 100,000x over before allowing the continued rape of children. That seems like a very very very very easy choice to make. Then again I might be strange thinking the rape of children is literally worse than murder and potentially THE worst thing a person could do.
Before listening to this episode I somehow knew a comment like this would be the top comment.
100% it did. Bannon's instructions; 'flood the airwaves with one ludicrous and inflammatory statement/threat after another'. How quickly did people lap that up and turn away from the H1b backlash? They chose Greenland and Canada, Panama, but oh so quiet about China, Russia. The astonishing thing isn't that it was done at all, but that there are so many bored, obtuse and greedy people in the world that it worked. Another four frikking years of this shit.
Moral of the story: Jesse happily turns into a podcast bro just riffing on serious stories if his guest is someone who works that way. This story *really really* needed Katie or Helen or Julie not whoever this TV comedy writer is (someone British would be great!). This story might need them more than any other story on the podcast ever.
Would have really liked if they'd invited Julie Bindel or Helen on. Or Sarah Ditum!
Amen. Julie Bindel would have torn him a new one!
Helen and Sarah both wrote on this, generally in line with the episode’s criticisms of Musk:
https://open.substack.com/pub/helenlewis/p/the-bluestocking-351-woodchippers?r=aa8u&utm_medium=ios
https://open.substack.com/pub/sarahditum/p/tox-report-73-brain-rot-is-non-partisan?r=aa8u&utm_medium=ios
Yeah, I don’t think the episode would have had a different opinion or perspective exactly. I just think it would have been wise to have a British guest (with knowledge of the history/context) to talk about the topic.
Completely agree! And I think they could have helped particularly with discussing to what extent this is still happening and if what has been done has been enough. I legitimately can’t tell where things currently stand, though it does seem clear that changes have happened to some extent.
Also, about the dynamics in British politics since it doesn’t seem to have mapped onto the left-right divide of US politics (aka both parties ignoring or not taking action when in power at various times). That’s the strongest point in my mind against Elon, that this seems like a failure of British politicians and institutions as a whole, but he’s wielding this against politicians he doesn’t agree with politically. But I could be wrong.
Exactly. The way he's basically sunk Nigel Farage over Farage's dislike of Tommy Robinson (who is heavily involved in the grooming gangs issue) is perfect evidence of his power. His tweet that Farage doesn't have what it takes may have real consequences in the current political climate, beheading the Reform party, and the speed with which it's happened and his need for everyone - even ostensible allies - to march to his beat or get shoved under a bus, in a country he's not even associated with, is incredibly worrying.
💯
Louise Perry would be another good one.
Ugh no. Ms “actually birth control is bad?” She’s awful!
Weird way to sum her up tbh
She’s trying to tell Helen Lewis what was and wasn’t covered in UK media on this story, and then blowing up when Lewis politely corrects her.
I quite enjoyed the ep, and don’t even want to tone police Jesse and Jeff, BUT I would have loved to have the takes of one of those women - especially Julie Bindel who has written about the story since the beginning. A British voice would have been great. (Not least to teach Jesse how to say Derbyshire, which is a great big county and not a tiny village).
Unfathomably stupid choice
Tone is really off on this one 😟
It did seem a crazy choice of topics given the guest but I think Jesse really just wanted to get his shots in on Elon.
Yes. I really didn’t understand Jesse’s goal in addressing this story, unless it was just to take potshots at Musk and/or make his guest host uncomfortable.
Ultimately it just came across as making light of one of the most awful stories of the century thus far. He really needed an editor here.
Jesse’s goal was to say profoundly stupid shit without someone there who knows his faults on a personal and professional level to challenge him. No offense to the guest, actually it was offensive to him by Jesse to include him in this so he can handwave it away and say boom covered
I couldn't agree more. This guy was awful.
A Don Pardo impersonation? I'm considering going No-Primo over that shit.
I think you’re kidding yourself if you think Katie is *less* likely than Jesse to joke about serious topics. Come on now.
It’s the context tone of the jokes made that would be substantially different. Jesse was so gleeful that he could roast Elon he totally got out over his skis.
You should look up Helen’s take on this before you jump to that conclusion.
Holy moley, what is going on in the comments here. Do people here legitimately believe what Elon has been doing is a) fair, b) necessary, or c) anything more than a cynical political ploy? The idea that this story hasn't been covered in the press until now is ridiculous and if you think that you should maybe rethink where you get your news from.
This article in the FP that Jesse calls out specifically (https://www.thefp.com/p/muslim-grooming-gangs-cover-up-keir-starmer-elon-musk) is fucking embarrassing and I see people here pulling talking points from it like it's somehow neutral journalism. Give me a fucking break.
I really hope the B&R community doesn't drift towards The Free Press.
Certainly feels that way in the comment section. The moment any story doesn't follow the free press style line these "heterodox" commentators lose their shit.
I think they are relatively low in number, but high in representation on the message board.
Substack comments : Blueskee : : Reddit comments : Elon's twitter?
Despite liking some stuff they have done in the past, it's nothing more but a right-wing culture war rag right now. If you think otherwise, please read their last 5-10 articles and get back to me. There are legitimate scandals that have faced right-wing parties across the globe in the last year that they have ignored and have instead devoted 100% of their time and space to dunking on absolutely inane left-wing culture war nonsense. They purport to cover policy but it is only in service of boosting the right wing. Their "election" section they had last year was 50 articles bashing Dems and maybe 1 you could reasonably say was anti-Trump. Some of the writers they brought on have produced some articles for them that I'd put up there as some of the worst pieces of opinion writing I've ever read (and I can provide links to those). But holy cow do the people they've brought on think of it as some bastion of nonpartisan journalism.
It's trash, throw it in the dumpster. Having yet another right-wing publication focused on culture war issues is fine, but please do not sanctimoniously tell me it's something it's not.
Agreed. I stopped subscribing in October. They used to be interesting, but now they’re just another boring partisan outlet.
I don't think I've done a 180 so fast on a publication. Maybe not the authors so much but the people who devoutly seem to read it...
They aren’t their comment section, though. I don’t agree with every column they print, but they do publish some interesting stuff.
My main critique is that they used to be better at separating out the fact reporting from the punditry, or at least it seemed that way. If I start reading a FP article and the tone gets too OTT, I just stop reading it.
I hate to tell you this, but it already is. The audience here is mostly way to the right of the hosts, they just enjoy hearing a couple of liberals making fun of woke stuff. There's a tantrum every time the podcast takes aim at the right.
Yeah what the actual fuck.
People from Britain are saying it wasn't covered up because they were there ten years ago when it was massively covered in the media and investigated by law enforcement and inquiries.
Quibbling over the meaning of cover up to suddenly mean "people in power didn't receive consequences for their missteps" is a bit of a stretch considering that's how every political shitstorm has ended for decades now. Was the banking crash of 2008 covered up or did people in power just make sure they were safe like they always fucking do?
Musk is trying to install the government of his choice overseas. He has picked this issue at random as a wedge to help him destabilise another country. Is that ok?
I think essentially everyone agrees the financial crisis was under prosecuted and a horrible blemish on the integrity of our society and justice system.
It's baffling to me that anyone would defend the lack of accountability here by pointing to the scandal that was the lack of accountability in the financial crisis.
It's not a defence. Why did you read that as a defence, Dave?
I'm just saying that "a lack of accountability means cover up" is shifting the goal posts to a previously unknown definition of cover up because it's now becoming clear that the cases were reported, investigated and prosecuted, and then an inquiry was held (into why it was covered up for so long) and the findings were published two years ago.
For what purpose would you bring up the financial crisis if not to use it as a defense of the handling of this situation, El? Stop arguing in bad faith.
If you ask normal people (well, those that were old enough at the time) whether people believe the crimes of the financial crisis were covered up, overwhelming majorities would say yes! If I recall properly only one person (a midlevel banker) went to prison. Many people think the crimes were covered up and made to go away!
I feel like you're proving my point, but instead you think it's supporting some opposite point.
Again I ask this comment section, who *in government* was prosecuted or held accountable! This whole "well we eventually got around to investigating and prosecuting the rapists, so you have no basis to complain" position is so frustrating to me.
Here's someone making the same point but not bringing up the financial crisis as their example: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/12/grooming-shipman-chilcot-for-all-the-post-inquiry-never-agains-the-default-is-inaction
I think the issue between us is that your definition of "not a cover up" involves people in power getting in trouble? And mine doesn't. We can both be right.
It's really disappointing that you've taken such a dim view of my intentions instead of approaching this conversation with a stranger with curiosity.
They didn't defend the lack of accountability. They distinguished between that and a cover-up.
totally the same.
people in power not receiving consequences for not regulating bad mortgages = people in power not receiving consequences for enabling kid fucking.
yep, totally the same.
No one has been able to explain how the Labour party (and specifically Keir Starmer and Jess Phillips) have enabled anything. You're just saying garbage like that like it's true. Again, I think the issue may be you're getting fed bad information and treating it as truth.
I never said Starmer or Phillips did anything.
Did those names appear in any of my posts?
Ok then you’re not responding to the entire point of Elon’s meltdown or the podcast?
And what is the reason for Labour blocking an investigation? If Starmer did such a great job, why not open it up?
I think the whole point of the podcast was “nothing to see here, Elon is just dredging up old S for his own cynical benefit”.
I don’t know his motives, neither does Jesse, but I think it’s entirely possible that Elon feels this is an atrocity of the first order. That it hasn’t been thoroughly investigated, that all culpable parties have not faced a full Truth and Reconciliation inquiry. From top to bottom. From the Guardian refusing to run the story, to every MP, every local official who turned a blind eye.
This is an abomination of the First Order. The kind of thing we would have a Presidential Apology 50 fucking years after the event.
But because these were white trash sluts they think they can do this on the Down Low?
Fuck them.
They have a Cultural Rot that runs deep.
I hope this blows up in their face and i hope every fucking demon who preys on young children are scared for their very lives despite their hoards of enablers.
So yeah, forgive me if I give zero shits about Elon’s tweet misfires or his meltdown.
I think he gets the big picture right.
I wrote it late at night so maybe it was hard to parse.
What I'm saying is that there are times (more often than not), where things are not covered up but no one in power gets in trouble.
Ok you prefer like for like.
Look: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/oct/20/what-is-the-child-sexual-abuse-inquiry-and-why-did-it-take-seven-years
CSA was thoroughly investigated in 2022. Only the nonces themselves got consequences (if they weren't already dead by the time the authorities looked into it), the people in charge who protected them (as fucking always), just got to shake their heads and say lessons will be learned.
I do hate whataboutery but do you not find it suspicious that the only rape gang we're talking about is politically convenient to puppet master Musk, while the dozens of others that were investigated at the same time are not being discussed at all?
“That damn dirty chud should have kept his mouth shut on the child rape ring because we enlightened intellectual Internet world citizens all knew about it already and did I mention he’s a CHUD???????”
It's not so much him talking about a news story, it's his leveraging of child rape to stick it to his political enemies and to call for regime change in another country.
Thanks for your part in turning this message board into every other fucking ridiculous algorithm driven knee-jerk hate machine as everywhere else.
I don't think it's that confusing. A lot of commenters here have an anti-woke mind virus and they will reflexively support anything they think seems like it's sticking it to leftist cultural orthodoxy.
I didn't think Jesse needed to spell out that it is bad to use this story as a cynical plot to attack your political enemies who are barely even related to it. And the people here who are pretending like they don't think that's what Elon's doing aren't doing the exact same cynical maneuver. Like oh yeah you sincerely think Elon fucking Musk is only drawing attention to the story because of his innate sense of justice. Give me a break
Yep. The heterodox tendency to critique Woke excesses (justified) is turning into something else. Something not good.
Jesse is clearly projecting that he wish he was the one to break the story. He literally said towards the end of the segment that to think of the poor journos and their effort they put into writing about it that no one outside of the UK knew. The journalists, not the rape victims
Jesse is not qualified nor professional enough to even cover this story on the show. He acts as “squicked” out about child abuse ad he did about with his overblown RFK horse shit. It’s embarrassing
Agree. I don't get the comments along the lines of "Jesse is bad to criticize Elon because this is about raping kids, not about [insert less bad thing here, like running red lights or financial fraud]" Elon could not give the slightest rat's ass about English girls getting raped. He's stirring up shit politically, that's all, and I think it makes most sense to meet him at his level.
Indeed. The people who originally sounded the alarm about this were labeled “far right”.
“Anti-woke mind virus” sounds less inflammatory. Could work.
The last thing we want is the people we don’t like politically benefiting from the cover up and enabling of kid fucking.
Wouldn’t want that!
You sound like you just found out this happened.
I just found out that there are still calls for massive inquiries, that many people may still be culpable, and that the crimes are still going on.
Yes, that is upsetting Amy.
Describe the last inquiry on this, including when it was, who was involved, what its recommendations were and what has/hasn’t happened. Then compare/contrast to what more/new inquiries would do, and explain why more inquiries are a better idea than implementing the recommendations of the already completed inquiry.
Not only would it be a useful exercise for you, but you’d be at least 10x better informed than Elon Musk.
I had actually been wondering what was going on with Elon and why this story was suddenly making the rounds again, so it was a welcome opportunity to get caught up. I’m Scandinavian and this horrific story was widely reported here, so much that “the Rotherham scandal” will still get referenced, the scandal in particular being how authorities failed the victims.
I dont blame anyone who missed this story being horrified all over again, but with Trump stirring up shit with Denmark it’s hard to not feel incredibly disconcerted by the world’s most powerful men completely unabashedly trying to destabilise Europe. It’s a paradigm shift.
I was in Scandinavia at the same time that the Rotherham grooming gangs scandal hit the front pages too, I wasn't even in Britain which is why this is such a crazy fucking time. Did the American press not bother their arses covering this story?
And all the shit with Denmark and Greenland is genuinely disturbing. The news here can't stop theorising what will happen if there's a war or a trade war between the US and DK. That's a scary turn of events right there.
Why not let Musk help destabilise the UK and install the far/alt right party of his choice?!? What could go wrong?
It was 100% covered in the US press. This is all very surreal. Elon Musk bet on the stupidity of American public and turned out to be 100% correct.
Jesus Christ.
Kid fucking is disturbing.
Labour refusing to investigate further is disturbing.
Trump trying to buy Greenland is business.
What in the actual fuck man?
I mean "Labour refusing to investigate further" is ridiculous and just means your understanding of this issue is from Elon Musk and GB News and the Free Press. Are we being serious here?
Seems like the British press is reporting that Kemi wanted a full inquiry and Labour MP’s are opposed to said inquiry.
In the States we’re still investigating the Tulsa race massacre.
But i’m glad to hear that this matter has been fully investigated and that all politicians involved have been exposed and held to full account .
I should just learn to be more credulous and trusting of authority.
My mistake!
It was already investigated….10 years ago when it happened. Lots of people went to jail. You’re shouting at the top of your lungs how stupid, uninformed and manipulable you are.
The disturbing bit was when he threatened to use military force to carry out this business deal.
Yeah, we best not to get disturbed by trump’s word vomit.
That has not been an effective strategy for countering his agenda.
Now Russia is saying "Awesome, let's SHARE Greenland, Donny" fml
If you can't see how Trump threatening allies' sovereignty is disturbing to international order, particularly given Putin's and Xi's aspirations, and particularly to the people living in those countries, I don't know what to tell you.
Oh please. Europe destabilized itself.
The American public generally is incredibly ignorant of anything that occurs outside their borders. They only notice something when a famous American points it out.
I'm not defending Elon, but let's leave him to the side for the moment. There's a reason folks like Julie Bindel and Louise Perry are saying "finally!" with all this recent coverage of the rape gangs - and it's that (contrary to how Jesse paints it) there *were* efforts to suppress the story, and there *are* people who still need to be held accountable. Jesse's failure to engage at all with those voices is a bit shocking.
Um, to the contrary I saw Bindel being like “wtf get out of here, you arseholes, I covered it 15 years ago.”
And sorry but I don’t care about the opinion of Ms “birth control is bad actually”.
did Jesse really say that there wasn’t a cover-up?
There were *famously* efforts to suppress the story, the subsequent cover-up and inaction by authorities is what made the headlines. Like that is specifically what made this such a huge scandal worldwide (or at least Europe-wide). But Elon makes it sound like there was a subsequent cover-up of the cover-up.
He did not say there was no cover up and provided several examples of how police looked the other way or even arrested the victims or their defenders instead of the perps.
The timing is off though. The "finally!" part of this happened years ago. Elon is just pulling this up because he wants to hurt the Labour government (despite their leaders not being involved with the either the crimes or the cover-ups).
And does he not say that in the podcast? Did you listen to the podcast?
Shocking. It's shocking, I tell you.
I'm sorry, who are you worried about Elon Musk being "fair" to - the Pakistani rapists, or the British government who didn't bother trying to stop them? And why would you think it might not be necessary to bring this to more people's attention? It's a pretty fucking big deal.
Musk may very well be doing this to distract people from his retarded remarks on H1B visas - but is that any reason to once again sweep the mass rape of British girls back under the rug? Because you don't like the guy who is bringing it to light?
This is exactly the sort of comment that is causing the problem. The current British government, who Elon is blaming, came into power in July 2024. If you don't know that kind of basic fact about British politics, don't comment about who is to blame.
Mate, it’s rapists causing the problem, not Elon Musk, and not my comments.
Then why is Elon Musk using this to attack the Labour party? You haven't answered this fundamental question here.
You seriously are so enraged at Elon Musk attacking the Labour Party, and NOT even bothering about the subject matter of mass rape?
What is wrong with you?
The problem of the wrong people being blamed is not caused by the rapists. It's possible for there to be both a scandal revealed in the 2010s AND a problem of false accusations being made by Elon Musk (and you) in 2025. We do not have to choose to only care about the former and ignore the latter.
Elon musk is the right hand man of the world’s most famous rapist. If he cared about rape he’d want nothing to do with trump.
I didn't know he was friends with Diddy!?
yeah ur 100% right this comment and the likes are the problem, not the rapes.
not the inability of politicans around the world incapable of taking respoinsitiblty for their previous positions.
comments on the internet are worse then gang rape. I agree with you Andrew Old.
Nobody is saying that the lies about the rapes are worse than the rapes, just that it is possible to object to both.
you can prove me wrong, if you tell me one time you didnt align with your poltical party.
you've gone so far you are in favor of covering up child rapes dude.
wake up.
2019.
"This is exactly the sort of comment that is causing the problem"
was your comment. not "one of the problems" etc.
and also but why object? even if this case was handled 100% correctly by the uk governemnt, is not worth it to remember the crimes and victims?
do you object when we have memorials for the holocaust, because the case is done^?
I dont think you are evil, I thin you are worse.
Why would I say "one of the problems" when I was talking about the specific problem of the wrong people being blamed?
He is attacking Keir Starmer and Jess Phillips and the Labour party!!! He doesn't give a shit about this otherwise, he learned about it 5 minutes ago. How have those people enabled any of the incredibly messed up shit that happened??
Is anyone here who is questioning Musk’s motives also minimizing the horrific crimes detailed here? Or the necessity that those who ignored it or facilitated the coverup be exposed and prosecuted, if called for? I don’t see that happening. Do you?
Yeah - everyone here who is spazzing out about Elon Musk are also continuing to be absolute spergs when people are trying to explain to them that normal people are shocked and upset about the rapes!! And....GASP - we are MORE shocked and upset about the rapes than we are about Elon Musk's tweets!
Plennnnty of people here are way more obsessed about the tweeting. They apparently can't give a shit about something truly obscene.
Not defending Musk per se, but I think what Musk is doing is being mischaracterized.
To hear the critics talk, he’s dredging up an old stale story because he’s an idiot who just found out about it.
But it seems like the story is very much live, given a major report was released only a couple years ago, some prosecutions are ongoing, and whether all appropriate actions have been implemented is an ongoing debate. And of course Keir Starmer was in a role during the prosecutions that is relevant, and he’s the Prime Minister.
The issue with Musk’s tweets is the hyperbole, the “complicit in genocide” crap, not that the issue should be totally off-limits as an issue in 2025 UK politics.
I have been provided 0 evidence that anything Keir Starmer and Jess Phillips have done was wrong. I'm not saying the story is dead, but Elon is explicitly using it to attack them here in a completely unjustified way.
He's also very explicitly been using the story to defend Tommy Robinson, which I notice a lot of commentors here are omitting, likely because Tommy Robinson is actually a piece of shit criminal and is associated with some pretty heinous crimes (notably armed violence & football hooliganism).
Tommy Robinson also nearly torpedoed one of the trials of the pimps by disobeying a court order. He is vile and a danger to society.
Are pakistani muslims a danger to society?
Some of them are. I will never tar an entire ethnic group with a broad brush, though.
"A couple of years ago"? We've had a change of government since then.
I don’t think that makes 2022 ancient history. Plus the new guy was the head of CPS at the relevant time for questions of whether or not the rape gang cases were investigated and prosecuted with sufficient vigor.
It doesn't make it ancient history, but it does mean that using the 2022 report as justification for attacking the current government seems a bit of a stretch.
Well said.
How is this well said? We have a flood of uninformed Americans freaking out about a scandal that’s more than 10 years old, demanding a second inquiry of a brand new government at the behest of the last government who are actually to blame for not carrying on with enough of the last inquiry’s recommendations, and then blaming the current government for the actions of local governments they weren’t part of.
I totally agree - it's depressing how ill-informed some of the comments from some American listeners are: I guess I expected Barpod listeners would be smarter ...
Exactly. Perspective. Elon’s dumb tweets are the lesser of two evils here.
Was reading through them incredulously and thought exactly the same thing, thanks for saying it better than I would have. How his maniacal tweets can be taken as anything other than a ketamine-induced wet dream meant to distract, straight out of the Bannon playbook, is beyond me.
I legitimately think that if people didn’t hear about it five or ten years ago, they think it was not well-covered, instead of examining their own habits of only paying attention to U.S. news stories. I first heard about it maybe 4 years ago and that was already late. Elon is bringing it up now to try to use it to call the Labor Party MPs pedophiles.
Yeah that's 100% the impetus behind it. He found out about it 5 minutes ago and thinks he can use it to his political advantage. I think he may have been right but at this point he's gone so far (especially with the Tommy Robinson stuff) I'd imagine he's probably pissing a good chunk of Britain off and might just end up negatively polarizing a bunch of people into supporting Labour who were otherwise on the fence.
Labour are doing astonishingly badly, so it's likely the other way around. There is a _lot_ of simmering anger about this in the UK.
George Floyd was covered more in us media than the mass rapes of poor school age girls by Muslim colonizers
Yeah the FP commentariat is leaking
Why do you shitlibs and progressives love down playing rape when your willing to crash out over the tiniest microaggressions
Are you lost?
Sadly, the answer to your question seems an emphatic yes. Sad to see the message board seems to be dominated by a minority faction that can be quite deluded.
I know! Having a bunch of people who were blissfully ignorant of the grooming scandal WHEN THE STORY ACTUALLY BROKE OVER TEN YEARS AGO lecturing Britons who’ve already been through the outrage cycle on this is legitimately insane. We’re in the policy stage of this now - you know, the hard part where we try to raise prosecution & conviction rates for grooming and rape.
Guess what. When the story is “Britain has a problem with victim-blaming its working class, see also Hillsborough” no-one cares. But if you can lie and say the victims were ignored because they were white, suddenly some very loud Americans care…
Yup, all of this. And going on and on about the race angle, and completely dismissing class and misogyny which are why it was ignored for so long, does all the victims a disservice.
I also wonder why so few people are curious about the police corruption angle - historically, West Yorkshire police are the most corrupt force in the UK (see also Hillsborough).
He tries to influence European politics in the last few weeks. His rage bait seems to work.
Yeah it is crazy how he can just create a weeks-long news cycle in Britain just through sheer force of posting.
Thank you Mr gaussian for being the one voice of reason in this thread
Mr. Bell Curve
The prince of the exponential family, no doubt.
Sorry if people are upset about the systemic rapes and subsequent cover up of teenaged and younger girls. I hope it doesn’t hurt your sensibilities too much.
I didn't find it ridiculous at all.
Can you help me understand your perspective by pointing to specific statements in TFP piece that you consider to be false, misleading, or a gross exaggeration?
The entire article? Here, I'll pull some parts out of the dumpster for you:
Subhead "The serial rape of thousands of English girls went on for many years. Few in power cared. Then Elon Musk started tweeting." is literally false. Again, this was a news story 10 years ago, maybe one of the most covered news stories in Britain. What Jesse said in the pod is right, this is an absurd statement.
The story has a 10 year time jump from describing when the scandal broke to 2024, in an effort to link it to the current Labour government. It barely mentions what happened from 2014 - 2024, which is key context here.
The section starting with "In 2009, the Starmer-led CPS..." is just another Free-Press-ism at work. Starmer did not tell them to drop the case, and then he was the one who appointed Nazir Afzal to work on this (which the article doesn't mention). The Free Press would know this if they reached out to Nazir Afzal, since he has vehemently and publicly talked about how important Keir Starmer was in reforming CPS - https://x.com/dominicgrieve_/status/1874808573831577835. Again, Keir Starmer is widely seen as being doggedly focused on this despite internal pushback, but the Free Press instead attempts to tie him to the grooming scandal in a really gross way.
Several instances of bizarre exaggerations or false claims including "Elon Musk has changed the Conservatives’ political interest", "Starmer has yet to address the Labour Party’s historic role in this mess", and most hilariously "But now that Musk has said the unsayable about the unspeakable", a ridiculous thing to say about one of the most covered news stories in Britain, ever.
Then the vapid sourcing, the appeals to irrelevant authority, the effuse praise of Elon Musk... do I need to continue?
Thank you. I don't agree with how you are interpreting a lot of that but that's all a very legitimate perspective.
I was really disappointed with this episode as a British subscriber. Musk has acted like an idiot and it may have been used as a way to get away from the H1B SNAFU but this episode absolutely needed a British contributor like Helen Lewis because the characterisation of the whole scenario was very shallow and it's evident neither party was really understanding of the issue in any depth. I also found the funny accents misguided. BARPOD often makes me laugh but in this case it just felt distasteful.
My 2 favorite types of bar pod stories are:
1) Sharing in-depth original reporting on a crazy Internet story
2) Addressing news of the day/research/events using the body of knowledge Katie and Jesse have on particular topics such as trans issues, journalism, etc.
My least favorite is when there is a significant world event with an Internet angle that is outside of their realm of expertise, but they cover it anyway. Always feels shallow, as you said, and a real misunderstanding of what is great about the show. I don’t think anyone would’ve had an issue if this was not covered or if it was a 5 minute segment that had a general disclaimer that they have limited understanding of the situation, but here’s a few things that people are saying that we know are not true.
Great point. I think a better process would have been to acknowledge Elon's antics but to advise it would be returned to at a later time with an expert guest.
At this point I wish Katie (and Helen) would just join the Reflector boys and do a show that way. For now I’ll stick around for her. Do it for her
Jesse lately has been only of two moods: 1) smug superiority over any subject to the point of dismissal and refusal to listen and 2) annoying, craven “it dependsing” about anything any rational person would want to hear a stance on, probably for the sake of maintaining neutrality for future employers/publishers
I agree. I used to love them both, but I've realized over the past year maybe that I'm sticking around for Katie. I don't enjoy Jesse without her, unfortunately. Also, how great is Reflector?!
Reflector is absolutely amazing for truly covering so many issues from a naturally centrist angle. It's actually astounding how nuanced their reporting is.
You nailed it with 1&2. When he is out of his depth on a topic he is a very bad podcast host, and it seems to me that outside his niche well researched reporting beats he’s kind of clueless and credulous.
It really is quite frustrating how many of the recent "internet bullshit" episodes have Jesse sneering and calling the subject matter stupid, then he gives himself the opportunity to talk about something actually serious and important and he acts like this. Unbecoming.
100% agreed, bad choice of topic if this is their angle.
That roughly covers my feelings on the subject .
Id like more crazy internet and less current events it always seems surface level . Give the story time to develop and dig deeper, I can get surface level any where
As a fellow Brit I thought they did well by avoiding getting into the background too much. They explained how egregious it was without going into why and I get it. The why is extremely complex and a result of a myriad of intertwined factors. They wanted to discuss the journalism/social media aspect more and I was okay with that.
I also didn't have a problem with the humour.
Yeah this was a weird one for me. Personally, I would have expected to find myself annoyed by the humor and to feel like they were making light of the situation, knowing myself. In fact it hit me as almost the opposite. Almost like the events were so obviously terrible that there was no need to belabor the point, which, regrettably, is true.
I felt the same.
Fair enough, agree to disagree.
Right! I don't understand why some folks seem to think "Elon is being dumb, therefore there's nothing to this story". Two things can be true at once - Elon is being dumb, but there are legitimate outrageous things worth covering here. The lack of a knowledgeable voice here was glaring.
You beat me to it. My comment says much the same thing. It’s also so irritating to have the two tier policing thing just dismissed out of hand. Ffs those of us who live here know that it’s a real problem. It is so irritating hearing two Americans pontificating as if they know what’s going on over here. So painful.
That ‘two tier policing’ was really the topic within this story I thought they were going to hone in on, and is partially why this story never goes away. or at least just jump off from it into meta “why he is doing this”.
Bari Weiss did a much better job of this on Honestly with Julie Bindel and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. As a Brit, I agree this was painfully uninformed and smug. Losing patience with this podcast, tbh!
I'm fine with dark humour so for me they get a paddy on that but as a Brit stories like this show our cultural differences across the pond. It's almost impossible for Americans to understand this case and the cultures and institutions surrounding it
With respect to the grooming gangs, something not covered on this episode was coverage of what government officials/police lost their jobs and/or were prosecuted for their behavior and conduct. It's clear that local policing and prosecuting *failed* in the past -- I don't think that's in dispute. So to me, criticizing the British government to deferring to local counsels seems very legit, and I don't get the credulousness presented here that using local counsel investigations is the appropriate and unassailable method to move forward with.
Who was held accountable? Given the coverage in this episode I assume it must be extensive. But I personally just don't find it persuasive to say simply "journalists covered this story, therefore there was no cover up". Who, in government, lost their jobs?
Did it receive 1% of the attention that abuse scandals in the Catholic Church received? Did it even receive as much attention as Canada's nonexistent unmarked mass graves?
In the UK? Yes, it did receive a lot of coverage. I don't know a single person who hasn't heard about Rotherham. I bet most don't know about the Canadian graves - that story was not covered extensively here.
But even thinking of it as "Rotherham" is an issue. It's NOT a Rotherham issue, it's a nationwide issue and it's a cultural issue in the Pakistani-British community. They really underplayed just how nationwide the issue was. Basically every town and city in the north of England has had a similar scandal now.
The burden of proof that it is widespread is on you.
I mean... how many do you want? The phenomenon is documented in dozens of cities. About 20 have had Wikipedia pages created.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telford_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_child_sex_abuse_ring
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_child_sex_abuse_ring
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derby_child_sex_abuse_ring
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcastle_sex_abuse_ring
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keighley_child_sex_abuse_ring
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_child_sex_abuse_ring
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_child_sex_abuse_ring
Wiki articles aren't proof. Anything can be written into a wiki article.
Only five of those are towns or cities in the north of England.
My question would be whether the entire set of victims of grooming gangs put together received as much attention as the Gisele Pelicot story, to which I suspect the answer is no.
In the American media? No. But Americans not being especially interested in foreign news stories more than 10 years ago before “commentariat globalisation” isn’t such a surprise.
Yes, “who was held accountable?” and “what has actually changed?” are the key questions and it’s not clear they have great answers. The most important one is “could this happen again?”
It seems to me that people never really get held accountable in these situations because it tends to be put down to institutional problems. In this case institutional sexism and unwillingness to tackle culturally sensitive issues and a lack of understanding of how grooming works. As someone who has worked in this area in the last 15 years I would say that this scandal completely changed the game in terms of how safeguarding is looked at. It also really helped the general public understand how these things work. I’ve had lots of conversations with people who are discussing potentially vulnerable girls and Rotherham is referenced. It was the top item on the news for weeks, in the newspapers every day for months and Rotherham was a shorthand for grooming in general conversation for YEARS. The people who were making the decisions were certainly hauled over the coals and their testimonies in front of select groups and enquiries played on the news, but I would guess the worst that would have happened to them would be they had to retire early under a cloud. That’s just the way the system works in our country. Institutions tend to be held accountable rather then individuals. This is something I think about a lot and I’m not sure how I feel about it. In terms of what has changed, I would say the way agencies approach safeguarding and police services deal with vulnerable young girls is unrecognisable from before this scandal was dragged out into the light. Have attitudes towards white forks changed within working class Pakistani communities in small northern towns? Probably not. Could this happen again? I’m sure it is happening but it will never again happen in the way did with people acting with impunity and the police sitting on their hands etc. Protecting really vulnerable girls is really complex and at times can feel almost impossible but we now have a framework with which to understand what is happening and the language to name it.
This seems extremely important. Safeguarding has changed massively since the time of the scandal. I get the impression that schools in England are now much better at safeguarding than schools in the US. It's bizarre to see people claiming nothing has changed since the Rotherham scandal, particularly when it comes from people who are not in the UK.;
Undoubtedly more to do and this is a problem that is not solved easily but the most important change has been a better understanding of what a victim looks like. Who knows maybe all this will move the needle and more money will be found from somewhere else to put something else into action so the government can move on from this. It would be good to see something positive come out from this cynical move.
I think that's wishful thinking. My wife is a midwife in East London, and the amount that the Jewish and Muslim communities are treated with kid-gloves compared to the traditional London population is absurd and enraging.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. Can you expand on what “safeguarding” means in this context and how it changed? Not sure if it’s because I’m a Yank or because I don’t work in the field but I’m not familiar with the term.
“Safeguarding” is the practices and processes in institutions and their staff around protecting vulnerable people - think children in schools/medical settings, disabled people, elderly people in care homes.
That does not answer his question. I am interested in the answer also, and am somewhat "in the field" in the U.S. He said, "...in this context and how it changed."
FWIW, this is a brief overview of the overall timeline. One thing of note is that this definitely isn’t something that’s been done with for 10 years, inquiries and reports have been ongoing. On the one hand, you can’t say it’s been totally ignored. On the other, it’s not like Musk is dredging up ancient history.
https://news.sky.com/story/amp/grooming-gangs-scandal-timeline-what-happened-what-inquiries-there-were-and-how-starmer-was-involved-after-elon-musks-accusations-13285021
It’s almost as if “it’s complicated” would have been right at home here.
Musks tweets stirring up outrage, kinda good, kinda bad.
Instead of “case closed ancient history, musk is a piece of shit, how’s that for nuance?”
Right!!
There was a national enquiry that was published in 2022. Local councils commission independent reports, they don't investigate themselves. People did lose their jobs.
So a report was published 2 years ago. That means done and dusted, anyone who brings it up as a problem is an asshole?
What concerns me is that sure, maybe some people were punished for very clear acts of specific wrongdoing, but this wasn’t just about specific failures: this was a pervasive culture of treating avoiding the appearance of racism as far more important than investigating horrific organized mass rape of children. No, sticking a ringleader in jail for 3 years and firing a few local officials does not fix that.
Next time a Pakistani rapes a white girl, will that get investigated vigorously and punished harshly… or will we just find out that the gangs still exist but are better at hiding, and cops are still scared to arrest people that are the wrong color?
No, they should implement the reports recommendations. Which is happening at the moment, what are you feelings on the Tories wanting to stop or amend the bill?
Joking, you clearly know fuck all about it.
If the full report is publicly available I’d certainly appreciate a link to it.
To the extent I know fuck all about it, it seems like your attitude is that I should remain ignorant, because talking about it is like, unfair involvement in British politics or something.
I’d also question whether this is being treated with appropriate urgency if implementation is still being actively debated by any political party 10 years after the fact.
Why do you need the report? You know so much about it already
"this was a pervasive culture of treating avoiding the appearance of racism as far more important than investigating horrific organized mass rape of children. No, sticking a ringleader in jail for 3 years and firing a few local officials does not fix that"
According to this you know the cause, the sentences of the convicted, his role in the attack and who was fired. It's hard to tell somebody something when they act like they know it all already while showing such a shocking level of ignorance.
Meanwhile you’ve refused to provide any examples of appropriate punishments or actual policies that have changed.
I’m actually going to go read the report recommendations.
What I will not retract is that I’m bothered that you, and most of Musk’s critics on this issue, seem more worried about gate keeping the discussion than you are about whether this is actually a solved problem.
By the way, the ringleader of the gang rape that got 3 years is this guy:
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/local-news/pervert-sentenced-after-raping-12-year-old-1003364.amp
Raped a 12 year old girl 11 times while holding her hostage for over a day, and invited multiple other men over who raped her too.
He was sentenced to six years and only served 3.
Here's the report from 2022 from Professor Alexis Jay (its title is "The Report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse" - so covered more than just grooming gangs): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/iicsa-report-of-the-independent-inquiry-into-child-sexual-abuse/the-report-of-the-independent-inquiry-into-child-sexual-abuse-section-1-and-section-2-parts-a-to-j-accessible
Jay had also done an Independent Report in 2014, commissioned by Rotherham Council, looking at child sexual exploitation in Rotherham: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/26/rotherham-abuse-report-blatant-failures-of-care-system-condemned
https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/279/independent-inquiry-into-child-sexual-exploitation-in-rotherham
The IICSA report barely touches on the Pakistani grooming gangs, instead focusing on clerical schools and foster homes. That there has been no such inquiry on the grooming gangs (despite more than 20 years of history) is the problem that Musk is trying to bring attention to.
The reports reccomendation included mandatory reporting, something which various official agencies have been pushing for years, the same agencies that failed to tackle the grooming gangs.
Identifying the problem was never the issue, everybody knew it was happening. What the report didn't reccomend was that in the future if the police find an 11 year old girl in a house with the same men that have just gangraped her, they don't arrest the girl. How is mandatory reporting going to fix that level of moral failure.
I get you, I want to make a longer comment but don't have time at the moment. I do understand what you are saying now.
It’s not just that musk “brought it up” it’s the way in which he did it. I feel like a lot of people are being disingenuous in this comment section.
Fair. But at the same time, the title of the episode, and the general take of the hosts, is also a bit disingenuous. “Ha ha ha, Musk is an asshole idiot who doesn’t realize this is a 10 year old story”. When reports are still being released and sentences are still being handed down and players with a hand in the events are in the current government.
Of course, even if it were ancient history, Canada recently blew up over 100+ year old disturbed soil at residential schools, so that rings hollow as an argument anyway.
Can you please show me who lost their jobs? Was anyone prosecuted? Was there reporting on this (meaning individual accountability either by job loss or prosecution)?
Well, certainly nobody in South Yorks police.
“The police watchdog's eight-year investigation criticises the South Yorkshire force's approach to the abuse of more than 1,400 girls in the town
None of the 47 officers investigated were sacked due to the findings.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-61881000.amp
I think this was pretty well covered in the mainstream media over the past decade, and rightly so there was massive public outrage. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem the public outrage was converted into real world consequences for those who either failed to or actively avoided investigating. Maybe this was due to the time taken with various enquiries or lack of government will. What we need now is the recommendations to be implemented swiftly so this can’t happen again.
Well, some of the whistleblowers who advocated for investigation & prosecutions were fired or demoted.
Do you have links to those stories (genuinely requesting)?
Jayne Senior & Sara Rowbottom, off the top of my head
Not the story to do silly fucking accents about.
I had to stop listening. Unbelievable to pick this topic for a "good laugh". The industrial scale rape of thousands and thousands of young women and children over decades. Sure, let's have a good giggle... 🤬
Yeah, Im at the 10:30 mark and had to come here to see if it was being addressed. The hosts' bad accents can be grating at the best of times, but this was a terrible topic to hear them fumble and giggle through.
Ten minute club.
I usually love Jeff’s audio dispatches but recently he’s been doing these irritating Simpsons-esque voices that are on the verge of making me quit listening.
8:41 mark and same. It’s reminiscent of Katie and Jesse scoffing at transgender females in women’s bathrooms a few years ago. They’ve gotten quieter about that now there’s evidence of male teenagers and men abusing these policies to sexually harass and/or film women and girls.
Basically when a topic involves children, you can trust Jesse to be clueless.
9:35 and im like what the actual fuck
Omg. Yes! I stopped listening at 10 minutes in. What. The. Fuck. Don’t do your stupid fucking accents about raping children! My god.
I don't agree - I think this is no different than the zoophile episode or Katie making fun of her encounters with paedophiles.
In my opinion, it would be very off-brand for Blocked and Reported to do an after-school-special-style episode. It's obvious that real people were harmed and there are plenty of places where you can read about just the facts without the humourous style.
Then perhaps tackle a different load of internet bullshit when the comedy writer is the guest? One that doesn’t involve the ongoing organised rape and torture of thousands of girls and young women?
I just think that maybe - given the facts of the story and how the narrative of the women was excluded or laughed at - waiting until there was a woman in the room in full possession of the facts might have been the way to treat this. (Like they did the Jacob Blake episode or the Hannah Barnes episode or any of the other “after-school special” episodes they have done.)
There's plenty of episodes that touch on serious topics which mix lots of morbid humour in. Israel/Gaza episodes are a good example - thousands of people died. The Brian Thompson shooting, self-immolation, etc.
Respectfully, I think the idea that a woman needed to be in the room is exactly the kind of identity-focused appeal that the podcast (correctly) pushes back on.
In my opinion, there's a contingent of Blocked and Reported listeners who only apply this level of scrutiny when the topic is related to women. My suspicion is that a story about the abuse of young boys by, for example, the Catholic Church would not cause this level of anger. Just an observation.
That’s a good point and I love how the podcast handles things usually.
Your comment made me think and try to listen again. Then I realized what happened for me…
I watch a lot of standup and you can have two comics talk about the exact same thing and one will nail it and the other will bomb. The one who nails it is insightful and has something else… sometimes empathy or whatever. Sometimes an amazing delivery style.
For me, I just don’t think their humour worked. It missed something and sounded immature.
(And it’s reminded me that I am not funny either bc I repeated something once that I thought was funny… and it was, if delivered by someone else… but I am not and people were super offended. Ugh)
People hated the Israel stuff, because it's not what they are good at!
Have they even done an episode on the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal? I suspect the listeners, who include Catholics, know more about it than Barpod.
Especially if the point is that this isn't new news, then there's no rush to report the news that the news isn't new.
Jesse is really happy to have every disgusting quote read and laughed at, maybe thinking he's keeping the mood from being too serious?
In defense of Jesse, I’m someone who laughs or giggles when I’m in pain or discomfort, or am talking about a difficult topic. It doesn’t have to do with something being funny, it more so feels like a nervous tic
They did the accents regarding Elon’s tweets. It’s not like Jesse did them while he was describing the story. What’s the issue?
They're both great but I think these two got a little too excited.
Jessie...time and again...you prove yourself to be the most credulous person on the internet. The fact that these cases are still ongoing, while folks are getting longer prison sentences for tweets than rapes - is an abominable sign of a failing culture. Take a page from Triggernometry and talk to folks actually impacted by these cases.
I don't think Jessie's the one being credulous here. Your comments about sentencing have been cut and pasted without due care: https://www.cps.gov.uk/cps/news/operation-stovewood-seven-men-jailed-total-106-years-sexually-abusing-two-young-girls
Unsure what you mean? Do you think the entire scandal is about only what these particular 7 men did?
A single successful prosecution is a drop in the bucket. This scandal is about ongoing abuse of tens of thousands of girls, with cases starting as early as the 1970s (but with numbers burgeoning from the 90s to today). No one has claimed that there have never been *any* investigations or prosecutions, but that the *vast majority* of the abuse was covered up and ignored by police & government.
I said very specifically that I was referring to your comments about sentencing. I just picked a news story emphasising that sentencing has not been universally lenient. If you want more examples, look at the last column in this table. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal#Summary_of_convictions
Wikipedia is not a great place to get info on this case. It looks like it's been edited a lot recently, so maybe it's now better than it was, but when I read it a few months ago it was way off the mark.
Are any of the sentences incorrect?
I'm not disputing the sentences, I'm making a general point that wikipedia is not a good source on this issue and has until very recently presented it as an overblown moral panic.
You replied to LCDR’s comment, not mine, I did not make a sentencing comment. You seem to be getting jumbled up here.
I'm sorry. From the context, I assumed you were the person I had just replied to, reading the reply but forgetting that I was responding to a comment that mentioned sentencing. Instead, it appears you interjected without even finding out what was being discussed.
It is a discussion board. It is for everyone to participate. Your comment to LCDR was unclear. If you meant it to be an untouchable private conversation, you should have reached out to LCDR personally instead of exposing yourself to hurtful, triggering requests for clarification by the unwashed mob.
I’m 11 minutes in and can’t help thinking about how Jesse is so careful to use preferred pronouns for men with special identities, so as not to upset their delicate sensibilities, but finds the ongoing grooming, raping, pimping and even murder of young girls to be a bottomless source of hilarity.
12 minutes in and Jesse’s summary is a load of crap. It wasn’t “men befriending girls on the street”. It was (and is) boys around their own age acting as honeypots, befriending them & grooming them, then passing them to older “boyfriends” (eg their older brothers, uncles, fathers) who sexually exploited them for fun & profit. It is multigenerational family networks of men running intricate sex grooming and literal sexual enslavement operations. JFC Jesse, have you seriously even looked at the court documents in this?
From one case:
53) You, Mohammed Karrar, prepared her for gang anal rape by using a pump to expand her anal passage. You subjected her to a gang rape by five or six men (count 30). At one point she had four men inside her. A red ball was placed in her mouth to keep her quiet.
Not only were you both involved in the commercial sexual exploitation of GH, you also used her for your own self-gratification. You both raped her when she was under 13.
When she was very young, although it is not clear whether she was under 13, you both raped her at the same time (oral and vaginal/anal). It happened on more than one occasion
(Count 28).
Dear God....
What you just said is exactly how Jesse described the situation. Befriending and grooming, then passing along to other men. He most certainly did not leave it at befriending. I'm confused as to what you are criticizing him for?
He says the girls met the men on the street and the men befriended them with candy. Nothing about the intergenerational networks used to lure girls in from the schools themselves. He makes it sound like individual adult men just lured the girls (who were out “on the street”, tsk tsk) with candy and then turned to pimping, ignoring the insidious nature of *communities* of men acting in concert to bring in and abuse the girls.
From the transcript:
"The victims were girls between the ages of 11 and 16, and the men in question would befriend them on the street, offer them presents, buy them candy, give them affection, and the girls would then think that these significantly older men were their boyfriends. Over time, the boyfriends would give them alcohol and sometimes drugs and would introduce them to a larger group of men who would use them for sex and often sell them to other groups, like basically pimping them out."
Yup. Makes it sound like just individual bad apples.
The networks were involved from the start, men recruited their sons/nephews at school with the girls to start the grooming.
I disagree. I think Jesse was quite clear that it wasn't individuals acting alone.
Your point is that it was more systematic and a sort of family business than just randos?
It’s increasingly looking like it was a “community project” in some areas. One news report speaks of a woman who set up a fake rape crisis centre & hotline to locate vulnerable girls to lure into exploitation, and she worked with taxi companies in the area.
Holy shit. That's really beyond the beyond
Which news report?
Are you trying to use sockpuppets? Because it appears to everyone else a if you’re responding to yourself.
That is obviously not what ABC is doing.
Jesse describing what happened to these girls as "used them for sex" instead of "drugged and raped children" was terrible. Completely downplaying what these girls went through and the way their communities were terrorised by these gangs.
But, yes, god forbid someone doesn't use she/her pronouns for an internet lunatic.
Yeah, I’m not sure I’m quite as peeved as most commenting here (I have never seen 99% of these names before, but choosing when to comment is entirely their right), but this is quite difficult to look past.
I normally don’t comment much, but this was a singularly awful episode.
If this had been about Tavistok, the treatment of the underlying scandal and Musk’s rhetoric about it would have been completely different.
but according to his thesis, it’s OK to laugh about now because it was so long ago.
And after all, it’s not like the men did something really bad like misgendering the girls!
Jesse doesn’t give a F what pronouns anyone else uses. Why are you policing what he says? You’re the only one doing the scolding for incorrect word usage around here.
Sorry, are you new around here? lol because Jesse absolutely caters to preferred pronouns, and he doesn't hide his annoyance when Katie doesn't use crazy people's PPs.
Founding episode primo (or whatever it was called on the prior platform, I can’t even remember). Jesse does not tell Katie or anyone else what probouns to use. This idea that he policies other people’s speech is entirely within your head.
Sorry to break the news but you’re the scold now. The idea that using whatever pronouns pop into my head instead of autistically insisting on sex based one’s even when they don’t make sense to my brain is “catering” is too-online anti-woke nonsense, frankly.
Nowhere in my above comment did I say Jesse tells people what to say. But as someone who has listened to almost every BARpod episode more than twice, I can say with confidence that Jesse has on more than one occasion in the last nearly 5 years insisted Katie be respectful of someone's preferred pronouns and or chastised her for when he deemed she wasn't being respectful. 🤷🏼♀️ I distinctly remember an episode in 2024 or '23 where Katie put her foot down and told Jesse she wasn't going to call a predator "she" because the alleged behavior was uniquely male.
Yep. Jesse gets increasingly antsy every time Katie lays down that she’s not playing along with nonbinary bullshit.
Musk derangement syndrome is a thing now, I guess. He draws attention to a massive crime against women, but somehow he’s the asshole? He could save a kitten from a tree and there’d be a dozen think pieces about how he’s contributing to the overpopulation of cats.
He would never save a kitten from a tree. He’d see someone dumb on Twitter tweet that liberals in Fakelandistan hadn’t saved the kitten from a tree 10 years ago and would go crazy about it with no actual investigation or curiosity to see if it was true..
Why are you all over the comments downplaying systemic rapes by colonizers?
I had no animus against Musk until he started supporting the far right in my country. It isn't a public service to draw public attention to a great crime if it's done to blame the wrong people. Do you think the people calling Jesse a Nazi on Bluesky are drawing attention to the evils of the Third Reich?
Calling attention to a horrific scandal and mass rape of young girls is "supporting the far right"??? Seriously dude?
You are commenting on the wrong podcast if you want to find an audience who will be fooled by the claim that somebody spreading lies about a scandal is just "calling attention" to it. And, yes, Musk is supporting the far right. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c7ve4m1q42vo
And so what if he is? You are still more upset about WHO is talking about the mass rapes and HOW they are talking about it, than you are about the horrifying fact that Pakistani gangs raped thousands of British girls. Who gives a shit about that, as long as no one is talking about it for the wrong reasons, hmmm?
Have you considered running for public office in Britain? Seems like you’re exactly the kind of person they want!
How have you ended up subscribed to BARPOD if you think it's sinister to object to internet bullshit?
Sweet pea, I’ve been a Primo subscriber and member of the Barpod community since 2020.
You can seriously sit the fuck down if you think I shouldn't be commenting here Andy.
Elon Meowsk
I despise Elon Musk but yeah, to make this story about him is missing the point so grandly that I have to assume it’s intentional.
He certainly is. This is an old and well covered story. The idea that he is an honest truth teller is just silly.
I would say you have Musk Derangement Syndrome if you think anything said here on this show is evidence of MDS.
I think I may be done with the Jesse + guest episodes (unless it's Helen Lewis). The quality is just so much lower than the normal J+K episodes. Especially if Elon Musk is a main character.
Even before listening, I can tell that Helen would have been a much better guest for this topic. Not sure what Jesse was thinking.
She would have been terrible for this. She is a mass rape apologist
huh?
Care to elaborate with some proof?
Helen Lewis would have been 100x better for this topic especially
Jesse's guests usually end up being podcast bros whose style is just off the cuff jokes on stories, not actually discussing them.
Katie overall has much better judgment in her choice of guests and matching her guests to stories. Jesse does better, more varied work and is more likeable when he pairs himself with a female guest, and he should do that more often.
Yeah he is so much more likeable when he with a woman. It’s like he turns into a different person when he is trying to be cool around another man. I couldn’t even listen to the end of this episode. It felt like when you have a male friend who is really sweet and funny and then you see them with the arsehole friends they act like you’re not even friends
I'm starting to think a better arrangement for the show would for Katie to be host/producer and Jesse reporter/correspondent, rather than switching off those roles. It would play to both of their strengths.
I don’t think I’ve made it through a single episode when Jesse interviewed a guest. Shoot, even Joe Rogan couldn’t make him sound interesting. He NEEDS Katie
I think the problem is that Katie is naturally funny and Jesse is not. So he thinks he needs to provide humor to his episodes. Which..... doesn't work. Jesse is earnest and smart and dedicated.... but he isn't entertaining.
This take is always insane to me! I think Jesse is hilarious, way funnier than Katie! Normally I don't like unfavourably comparing one to the other but this take is so unpopular I make an exception.
I don't really think one is better than the other. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
But I think Katie is generally funnier. And Jesse is more earnest and thoughtful.
Humor is certainly subjective, but I'd agree with Purrfur that Katie is much more naturally funny than Jesse. Katie's humor definitely seems less forced. This is especially noticeable in some of the live show and "Jesse + guest" episodes, where Jesse appears to have a self-imposed quota for jokes. Sometimes his awkwardness helps them land, but often they fall flat.
Katie just has a natural talent for being funny and snarky.
Jesse and most other people (myself included) lack that talent
I know I am an common voice on this topic here in the comments. I just think my sense of humour is really similar to his. The times Katie has cracked me up have been the times that she has cracked Jesse up too.
Hey, it's good that someone likes Jesse's humor!
*uncommon.
I think he’s really funny when he’s with Katie and Helen but I find the way he is on these episodes with another man so grating. It’s like he’s not being himself. In this one you could tell he felt weird about the way that other man was handling it but he was just going along with it. I’m not against using humour on these episodes but if you don’t do it right it’s awful to listen to. We needed some of Katie’s black humour. This was unlistenable to me
Really? I thought that the other guy felt awkward but was humouring Jesse...
Jesse puts much more thought into being funny, but Katie's natural timing and delivery are better.
You may like his neuroticism as a sense of a humor - to each their own. He's only funny when he has Katie to bounce it off her.
I find Jesse to be funny and entertaining enough.
Oh my god the one thing that would improve this podcast is a producer constantly in Jesse’s ear to remind him he’s not funny
Oddly enough this whole concept (a podcaster with someone constantly shout-whispering "YOU'RE NOT FUNNY" in his ear) is very funny
He can get some killer jokes in sometimes (but usually with Katie). I wish I had examples at hand.
which might be fine if they were.... ever entertaining a single time.
I always skip Jesse plus guest.
Agree completely. Katie really carries the show IMO.
Nobody on the American right gave a single shit about this for the previous ten years while it was being exposed, investigated and allegedly covered up under a Conservative government, and then six months after a centre left government is voted in they’re suddenly convinced Britain needs a regime change to set this injustice right. This is pure, cynical partisan opportunism and if you think Elon cares about the victims or setting any injustice right you’re a complete rube. The *only* reason he’s interested is because he thinks he can damage the Starmer government with it.
it seems like Elon people in America think this is just coming out instead of being covered, reported and investigated I think at least by 2014?
Julie Bindel covered it in 2006. But it didn’t get broad attention until about half a decade later.
Which, notably, is under Labour, so this is very much a cross-party shame.
This isn’t true at all and you realistically don’t know anyone on the American right
I first heard about this scandal ~a decade ago and since then the *overwhelming* majority of people I’ve seen talk about it in any context are conservative and none of them are progressive
What are you talking about? The right has been discussing it for a long time. It's from them that I learned about it initially.
If you don't believe me you can read some of these
https://www.breitbart.com/search/?s=rotherham#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=rotherham&gsc.page=1
It was a terrible decision to open this by reading tweets about girls being raped in wacky accents while chortling about how funny it is. A real low point for this podcast.
It's so jarring to be hearing about children dying while the two of you do hacky bits about British names and the Queen. It was just awful.
This episode is pure Elon derangement syndrome.
Jesse, if you read these comments, the Rotherham case is *still* significant for several reasons (will post in both the comment section and the Open Thread):
1. In addition to being an obviously-terrible sex scandal—it was a series of anti-white hate crimes. Pakistanis targeted British girls specifically because they were white. The media downplayed this fact, and many prominent journalists, academics, and Labour party leaders lied about the demographics of the perpetrators for years (some of them claimed race had nothing to do with the scandal).
2. Fears of racism stalled the investigation. Fears of racism undermined and continue to undermine the entire British justice system.
3. The story did not receive an appropriate amount of coverage. The British media reported on George Floyd's death more than the Rotherham rapes.
4. While Pakistanis were allowed to get away with rapes for decades, Brits could get arrested for voicing naughty opinions about minorities.
5. To give you some perspective about the extent of the scandal: Rotherham has a population of only ~100000. More than 1400 girls were raped. It will take a long time for Rotherham to recover from this.
6. There are many more active rape gangs across Europe. This is the tip of a massive iceberg.
Pakistanis did not target British girls because they are white. They were targeted because they were without parents, without carers and were non-Muslims.
According to a survivor of the event, you are mistaken: https://x.com/triggerpod/status/1875250016056701345
(I'm not denying these crimes are partially religiously motivated. But survivors claimed the attackers would frequently harass their victims for their skin color.)
Thanks for showing me that. I have to say that although they all reached the conclusion that these were racially based crimes the description that was given of what motivated these people to me looked religiously based. There were racial insults of course, but it seemed to me that the hatred of whites was because they weren’t Muslims. Maybe I’m just confused.
I don't blame you for your confusion, especially given the media coverage of this case.
You aren't. The victims were chosen because they were not Muslim, not because they were white.
In a place where all the Muslims are brown and almost all the non-Muslims are white, this feels like a distinction without much of a difference.
I think intent matters.
I kind of hate to say that but it doesn't really surprise me that much. There seems to be a tendency among Muslims to dehumanize those not of their faith.
It's the worst "normal" religion.
If you’re non-Muslim and from a dysfunctional, deprived background in Rotherham, you are almost certainly white. There are barely any black or non-Muslim Asian people there. It’s a depressed Northern town, not London or even Leeds.
I’ve read in government reports that yes, Asian girls were being abused, too, but it took a different form than these gangs.
And usually the Asian girls were non-Muslim Asians, because how wonderful it is to import ethnic hatreds from the rest of the world!
Bullshit and you know it.
Rotherham has a population of 270000.
I could be mistaken, but why are the Wikipedia numbers so far off? Wikipedia claims the population was ~100000 in 2011 (when the rapes happened) (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham).
There's the town of Rotherham, and then a larger Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham. I think the numbers differ depending on whether they're for just the town or the larger area. The Borough had a pop of 248,175 at the 2011 Census, and the town 109,691. (provided wiki is accurate for the page you linked and this one! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Borough_of_Rotherham)
Saw the hosts of this one and immediately knew I did not want to listen to them talk about the sexual torture of white working class girls enacted by Pakistani men. No chance these two are giving a decent take.
To anyone who has listened: am I wrong?
They didn't downplay the rapes. Which I was also concerned with, given the podcast title. But, in an effort to reflexively oppose anything Elon Musk does, accepted credulously any accounts opposing him.
Per Jesse, at ~26:50 "Elon seems to be interpreting this as 'Ah-ha, they are trying to cover up the Muslim rape gangs' but that's just not a credible interpretation of this" and then proceeds to just accept everything stated by government officials and the BBC as conclusively ending the inquiry -- despite presenting no evidence that government/police were sufficiently investigated, fired or prosecuted for those responsible for enabling this scenario.
It's just flatly a "I assume good intent and behavior by my political allies in everything they do and say" scenario and in this case, political allies means anyone opposing Musk. It's Jesse's go-to with most things Musk related.
He clearly hates musk and it stops him from being level headed regarding him.
I don't think Jesse at all fully conveyed the scale of the problem in the UK and the extent to which the cultural and political issues that enabled this have not at ALL been fixed. There is no free speech in the UK.
Not mentioning the horrifying scale, which conservatively is in the thousands of victims, is downplaying it.
I think they even mentioned the report that found 1,510 victims, since they mentioned the time period 1997-2013. But I don’t remember them mentioning a victim figure.
Here’s The Guardian citing that report: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/feb/20/rotherham-sexual-abuse-victims-rises-to-1510-operation-stovewood
They really did downplay it though. When Trump is brought up Jesse starts seething. When mass rapes are brought up he starts chuckling and doing goofy accents
Nailed it.
It was a great take, accurate and fair. It wont please everybody because the cases were so complex and multifaceted.
Not wrong
I worked with victims of Child Sexual Exploitation in London for a decade and contributed to the inquiry after the Rotherham scandal. I also trained professionals on how to identify and respond to signs of CSE. One thing I reinforced every training session was that the conspiracy of silence has as much to do with class as race. The working class girls were seen as ‘chavs’ and sluts who were asking for it, even by professionals. Had the victims been middle-class or private school girls (less vulnerable to grooming so unlikely), the police response would have been very different.
Police in the US have routinely dismissed, and even arrested, trafficked minors forced into prostitution because to socioeconomic prejudice. It happens everywhere in the West.
I mean, exploited girls were referred to as ‘child prostitutes’ until relatively recently! I can’t quite believe the same mistake was made with ‘child porn’, although thankfully it’s being replaced with CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material).
Class is such a massive thing here. I’m Australian, it befuddles me.
Class is just as much a thing in Australia, its just not acknowledged as explicitly.
Class is also a massive thing in Australia. Just less openly spoken about.
We’ve had PMs with bogan accents. That would never fly here!
YES. Look at Hillsborough as well - there is a very old institutional conviction that the underclass is to blame for its own misfortune. Add that to typical sex crimes needing “perfect victims” to avoid victim-blaming, and the girls exploited in Rotherham (underage drinkers/drug takers, apparently willing running away to be with “boyfriends,”) were already fighting an uphill battle to be believed.
Seeing this get warped into an anti-immigration campaign is incredibly depressing. It’s ALWAYS about what works for the powerful, the victims are just getting used AGAIN.