Elon Musk urges Brits to “fight back” against their political enemies

Just days after the killing of Charlie Kirk, Elon Musk joined other right-wingers in ratcheting up his rhetoric. In a bizarre, downright dystopian, and often factually inaccurate virtual speech to a massive far-right anti-immigrant rally in London on Saturday, Musk urged attendees to “fight back” against their political enemies.

Despite American officials’ bipartisan condemnations of political violence in the wake of Kirk’s killing, Musk and others on the right, including President Donald Trump, have baselessly blamed “the left” for the killing, even calling for “retribution” and “civil war.” Musk continued to stoke tensions in his virtual appearance Saturday, again claiming, “the left is the party of murder, and celebrating murder.” He later added, “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back, or you die.”

Musk’s broad pronouncements were generally lacking in specifics or evidence, and he seemed to be throwing out a word-salad of right-wing paranoia to see what stuck. (Consider, for example: “A lot of the woke stuff is actually super racist, it’s super sexist, and often it’s anti-religion but only anti-Christian.”)

But his main gripe seemed to be with immigration, which is the main concern of the rally’s organizer, Tommy Robinson, an anti-immigrant, Islamophobic activist who has served multiple terms in prison. Musk said he was drawn to speak at the event due to what he sees as “a destruction of Britain—initially a slow erosion, but a rapidly increasing erosion of Britain, with massive uncontrolled migration, a failure by the government to protect innocent people, including children who are getting gang-raped.” With that, Musk seemed to be reviving arguments he has previously made, including some false accusations he made about the British government’s response to a real child sex abuse scandal, as my colleague Anna Merlan explained earlier this year:

Musk has also promoted virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric from the UK, reposting a British Twitter user’s complaint about a sprawling child sexual abuse scandal in which gangs of men in the north of England and the Midlands sexually exploited children for at least a decade. Sometimes referred to as the Rotherham scandal, the perpetrators were overwhelmingly British-Pakistani men who exploited white girls; Andrew Norfolk, the journalist who uncovered the scandal in 2011, told the BBC recently that the case “was a dream story for the far-right,” adding, “They had no interest in solutions, they were interested in exploiting the situation.”

At the Saturday rally, Musk painted a picture of London as a hellscape that’s “filled with crime” and “often doesn’t feel like Britain at all.” While some crimes, like rape and drug trafficking, have been on the rise in London, several others, including knife crimes and burglaries, have recently fallen, the BBC reported last month. Overall crime in London has increased by more than 30 percent over the past decade, according to the BBC. But the reasons are complex: The UK government has noted in recent years a rise in crimes after the lifting of Covid lockdowns, and researchers have found welfare cuts have also led to increases in crime.

Musk also repeated the false claims he has made about Democrats in the United States, claiming that the UK’s center-left Labour government is importing voters through illegal immigration. All this, he said, requires the dissolution of Parliament and a vote to install a new government. Otherwise, he claimed earnestly, “there’s risk of this genuine risk of rape and murder and the destruction of the country and and dissolution of the entire way of life.”

The fact of the matter is that net migration to the UK decreased almost 50 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to official statistics, and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is seeking to further reduce immigration to the UK. But research has not found a causal link between increased immigration and crime in the UK.

Adding to the irony is that so much much of what Musk warned about is a problem on the right itself. Despite his condemnation of “so many on the left that are just trying to crush debate, and put people in prison just for talking,” that’s exactly what right-wingers, including members of the Trump administration, have been doing after Kirk’s killing, as Merlan chronicled this week. On top of that, some in the crowd Musk was speaking to turned out to be violent themselves: London’s Metropolitan Police said in a statement that more than two dozen people were arrested and twenty-six officers injured, including four seriously. The police called the event “a very challenging day that saw disorder [and] violence directed at officers.”

In a post on X Sunday, Starmer said that while officials welcome peaceful protest, “we will not stand for assaults on police officers doing their job or for people feeling intimidated on our streets because of their background or the colour of their skin.” All this is coming just days before Trump is due to visit the UK.

Update, September 14: This post has been updated with more context on crime and immigration in the UK.