{"id":10,"date":"2026-05-22T15:50:53","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T15:50:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=10"},"modified":"2026-05-22T15:50:53","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T15:50:53","slug":"elon-musks-british-fever-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=10","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk\u2019s British fever dream"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

In November 2014, several hundred protesters marched through London\u2019s West End before gathering in front of the old US embassy on Grosvenor Square. They were there to vent anger at a police killing that had taken the life of a black teenager, Michael Brown, nearly 5,000 miles away in Ferguson, Missouri. Their arms raised in the air, they chanted, \u201cHands up, don\u2019t shoot!\u201d, echoing a slogan of the then-nascent Black Lives Matter movement in America.<\/p>\n

Read more The joy of Jilly Cooper\u2019s naked snobbery<\/a><\/p>\n

For the British Left in the \u201cpeak-woke\u201d era, America was less a concrete place than an imaginary polity: not a constitutional republic with an admirable history of overcoming its shortcomings, but a hellhole of racist, capitalist tyranny that delighted in killing men who looked like Michael Brown and George Floyd.<\/p>\n

Nowadays, the mirror image is taking shape on the American Right and spreading through the influence of Elon Musk: an imagined Britain lorded over by Comrade Starmer and his totalitarian minions, bent on enabling migrant and minority criminality and silencing patriots who dare to resist.<\/p>\n

For Musk & co., the case of Henry Nowak \u2014 the Essex student allegedly stabbed to death by a Sikh man, Vickrum Digwa, late last year \u2014 epitomizes this state of affairs. Digwa claims he acted in self-defense after Nowak racially abused him; Musk\u2019s crowd are insisting that, for this reason, the police withheld medical aid to Nowak as he bled to death on the pavement. In other words, they are constructing a reverse mythos around Nowak well before the complexities are fully understood, and with the same ideological frenzy that characterized the British Left\u2019s understanding of American conditions in an earlier era.<\/p>\n

With \u201cpost-woke\u201d hindsight, it\u2019s easy to mock the British Left\u2019s imaginary America, where cops beholden to \u201csystemic racism\u201d snuffed out black lives for the kicks. But to the Britons who took up BLM, their Manichaean picture of the United States was no joke \u2014 it lent an epochal importance to their local causes.<\/p>\n

As one observer noted at the time, the Metropolitan Police officers assigned to escorting the London protesters \u201cseemed in no mood to hassle anyone\u201d. They kept a polite distance and ensured that everyone could exercise their freedom of speech and assembly. Indeed, most of the London police wouldn\u2019t have been carrying guns \u2014 a fact that lent a ludic aspect to the importation of the BLM slogan.<\/p>\n

Even so, the London progressives seemed to identify, at an intense emotional level, with the racial oppression suffered by black folks in the American Midwest. \u201cThe London Metropolitan Police move around this city like an occupying force,\u201d one white trade unionist complained to Vice<\/i>. Just like in America, with its \u201csystem that is predicated on the oppression of black people \u2014 institutionalized racism\u201d.<\/p>\n

The London protesters couldn\u2019t have known that less than a year later, the Obama Department of Justice would exonerate the police officer who killed Brown after \u201cthe most definitive account yet of the shooting\u201d, as The New York Times <\/i>reported. The testimony of some 40 witnesses belied the claim that Brown had innocently raised his arms; and the DOJ, like a Missouri grand jury earlier, couldn\u2019t contradict the officer\u2019s assertion that he was put in reasonable fear after Brown \u201cleaned into his patrol car, punched him, reached for his gun, and then, after running away, turned and charged at him\u201d, as the Times <\/i>put it.<\/p>\n

When, half a decade later, another racially charged police killing took place \u2014 George Floyd\u2019s in Minneapolis \u2014 the entire UK establishment recalled that America is a terribly, terribly racist place. They took the knee, published columns, tabled a Black Lives Matter resolution in the House of Commons, and so on. With his bureaucratic piety, Keir Starmer intoned that Floyd\u2019s death had \u201cshone a light on racism and hatred experienced by many in the US and beyond\u201d.<\/p>\n

The upshot was more \u201cHands up, don\u2019t shoot!\u201d protests in front of police officers without guns, and vandalism targeting the Cenotaph and Churchill\u2019s statue at Westminster. Americans moved on; the cult of Floyd didn\u2019t survive subsequent scrutiny of his life; and the Democratic Party quietly concluded that police officers are good and necessary, actually, and that defunding their departments is a dangerous \u2014 not to mention unpopular \u2014 thing to do.<\/p>\n

Yet the tendency of America and Britain to fantasize and jump to conclusions about each other didn\u2019t go away. It merely shifted in direction, geographically and politically. Over the past year or so \u2014 ever since Musk decided that no one had heard of the grooming-gangs scandal until he<\/i> publicized it \u2014 American Right-wingers have come to develop a picture of Britain that is no less distorted than the one that the UK Left entertained of the United States.<\/p>\n

In the US Right\u2019s imaginary Britain, all-too-real crises are similarly magnified to monstrous scale. This Britain isn\u2019t a constitutional democracy, blessed with an ancient and robust tradition of rule of law, in which individual and institutional actors sometimes make mistakes and sometimes act badly, even as society as a whole attempts to uphold freedom and justice. No, this Britain is a conspiracy writ large \u2014 against its white citizens, by Leftist authorities in cahoots with malevolent foreigners.<\/p>\n

Musk\u2019s treatment of the Nowak case is telling. As I write on Thursday, the Tesla and SpaceX boss has published no fewer than four X posts or reposts on the case in a matter of two hours: several asking why the likes of Starmer and Angela Rayner, who took the knee for Black Lives Matter, have failed to do the same for Nowak, or even to mention his name. Another post asserts that the killing of \u201cthis innocent English boy\u201d was \u201caided by police\u201d.<\/p>\n

Musk also pledged to fund a wrongful death suit against \u201cthese disgusting excuses for law enforcement\u201d \u2014 that is, the police officers who initially responded to the scene. Musk\u2019s framing of the case, hourly amplified to his quarter of a billion<\/i> followers, seems to rest upon accounts offered by those such as Tommy Robinson, who insists that the police \u201cleft [Nowak] to die because they heard the word \u2018racism\u2019\u201d. Replied Musk: \u201cUnconscionable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet this simplistic telling \u2014 oi, you were racist, mate? Then I guess we\u2019ll let you bleed!<\/i> \u2014 is being cast into doubt as the alleged killer\u2019s trial unfolds at Southampton Crown Court.<\/p>\n

Nicholas Lobbenberg, the prosecutor, noted that the police did initially handcuff Nowak \u201cand started giving him first aid when he then collapsed\u201d, as the BBC summarized his statement. \u201cShortly afterwards,\u201d the prosecutor told the court, \u201cHenry became unconscious, then police began to set to work to give him first aid and summon an ambulance, a doctor flew in by helicopter but there was nothing that could be done to save Henry and he was declared dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

The prosecution\u2019s account still leaves many questions unanswered, not least why the police handcuffed Nowak. But what we know so far \u2014 first-aid application, a physician flown in \u2014 makes it hard to believe that police \u201cleft [Nowak] to die\u201d because they thought he was a racist.<\/p>\n

The far more plausible interpretation is that the police initially misunderstood what was happening as they were trying to make split-second decisions amid a chaotic scene. Is it possible that progressive police training played some role in their decision-making? Maybe. The responding officers should face questioning about all of this, and no doubt will. And if ideology was a factor in their conduct, they should face consequences, and reforms must be instituted.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s just the thing: very little of this has been carefully examined and analyzed, while already, Musk and his local allies like Robinson are jumping to a stark conclusion: white lives don\u2019t matter in modern Britain. Much as, a decade or so ago, British progressive activists and too many in the liberal establishment permitted a similarly ideologized lens to distort their perception of justice, race, and policing in America.<\/p>\n

Will the reductive passion plays and martyr cults of the racial Right prove any less destructive \u2014 of institutions and truth procedures \u2014 than did those of the Left? Either way, Musk won\u2019t be the one paying the price.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In November 2014, several hundred protesters marched through London\u2019s West End before gathering in front of the old US embassy on Grosvenor Square. They were there to vent anger at a police killing that had taken the life of a black teenager, Michael Brown, nearly 5,000 miles away in Ferguson, Missouri. Their arms raised in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-online-right"],"yoast_head":"\nElon Musk\u2019s British fever dream - \u0421ity Flow Journal<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=10\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Elon Musk\u2019s British fever dream - \u0421ity Flow Journal\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In November 2014, several hundred protesters marched through London\u2019s West End before gathering in front of the old US embassy on Grosvenor Square. 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