This week on Blocked and Reported, Jesse is joined by comedian and writer Jeffrey Maurer for a very light subject: grooming gangs. Plus, Meta’s failed AI bots and new free speech policies.
Revealed: conspiracy of silence on UK sex gangs
Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham
What is Keir Starmer's record on prosecuting grooming gangs?
The Biggest Peacetime Crime—and Cover-up—in British History
Meta scrambles to delete its own AI accounts after backlash intensifies | CNN Business
Mark Zuckerberg’s Political Evolution, From Apologies to No More Apologies - The New York Times
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.
Oh, wow, you're right! I knew it was a strongly Pakistani neighborhood, so assumed. And apologise for spreading fake news.
But this is a case of the news not actually explaining what is going on, with vague allusions to "communities" which actually hurts more than it helps, as people like me are left to fill in the blanks. Doesn't excuse my accidental smearing, but we have to talk to each other like grown-ups.
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.
It's. Still. Happening. "Now" is pretty recent.
thank you, yes, and that's exactly why such a huge portion of discourse about this whole thing is so INSANE. It's literally happening right at this very instant and very little is being done about it while people debate if the reason its happening is X or Y.
Such bullshit sensitivities are out of place.
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).
You think the American public being upset about domestic UK policy can impact it? More so than the outrage of thr British public over the last 10 years? This (Musks tantrum) has been hardly covered in the UK, my husband didn't know anything about it.
Let's imagine this is true. You think ill-informed far right US outrage over something happening in another democratic country will impact its domestic policies in a way it otherwise wouldn't and this is a *good* thing?
Not to mention the motivation for this is purely, obviously, laughingly political.
As we saw with the Mauritius shenanigans, Starmer cares a lot about how he is viewed overseas.
American opinions absolutely cross the pond. DEI ideology has thoroughly infiltrated every layer of elite society in the UK.
and you're wrong. seems like they still care
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/04/grooming-gangs-scandal-cover-up-oldham-telford-rotherham/
Ah yes, Sam Ashworth-Hayes, not a politically motivated agenda there at all. (insert huge mother-fucking eye roll).
Yes, if someone is reporting about an atrocity that hurts your side, it’s bad.
But if it hurts the right people, then you join in the outrage.
Sam-whoever-Hayes and Elon are bad messengers. We don’t trust them.
So even if it involves literal kid fucking, let’s keep that quiet.
Political tribalism has taken us to an absolute moral abyss.
Jesus fucking Christ.
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.
There are a lot more international neighbors nearby to be concerned about for Europeans 🤷♂️ although to your point yeah I would guess that most Americans, when they pay attention to the news, do it in a very local (10 o'clock local network news etc.) or very national, most people in Delaware don't care that much about what's happening in Tennessee.
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.
... Seems to me you are obviously dodging my question. You edited your other comment to to add additional examples of random people who you think tweet inflammatory nonsense, but you aren't willing to say yes/no/I don't know about Elon.
I literally answered your question lol. Who cares if I added a 2nd example, I thought it was helpful (and they are not “random people”).
Anyway, we’re going in circles. Good luck with everything.
Good luck to you as well.
My point is that you are using "I don't care" as a thought terminator. It's a cudgel to beat down criticism of Elon. I doesn't really mean anything. You "care" enough about inflammatory nonsense to recall several individuals and use them as an example in a unrelated comment.
I don't think you answered the question, or at least the first one. I think you are obfuscating. When I ask you if Elon spreads inflammatory nonsense. You retreat to: well all types of people spread, all types inflammatory nonsense. I could specify, and ask that if given his frequency, and popularity do you think that Elon is a particularly prominent in his inflammatory nonsense.... But I do think that you understood what I meant the first time.
Elon has a right to say whatever the hell he wants and so do I and the curious lp and that's the answer. No one is forced to listen to Elon or me or you
I agree with some of Elon’s tweets and disagree with others. Some of his tweets are histrionic or inflammatory, and others are not. Hope this helps.
Oh well.
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
The problem with the non-existent instructions from the Home Office is that it locates the problem at a much higher level of government. It's used to suggest an orchestrated conspiracy.
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.
Exactly this.
I actually think that this story is a perfect example of the failures of the show lately. It was lazy and missed the greater point, and additionally made obvious substantive mistakes that would be found if one did a serious look at the situation. There are countless examples in British media where it is absolutely clear that a significant amount of the public didn't understand the depths of the situation. This is reminiscent of the Pulse Nightclub shooting, where there -exists- coverage showing the shooter didn't realize the nature of the club he attacked, but a significant amount of people, probably the majority, think the club was targeted because it was a gay club.
This story also highlights another failure of Jesse's (and Katie's): a misunderstandingof the word 'grooming'. Again, they think that it only relates to the act of pedophilic preparation of children, but grooming - as experts in the topic will tell you - ALSO relates to the grooming of those children's families, or the grooming of institutions, preparing the way for the end goal of reaching children or, even doing so innocently but still preparing that same way. For example, an organization that dismantles safeguarding or encourages secrets between adults and children, can be said to have been groomed.
They rightly are repulsed by the conflation of homosexuality (particularly gay men) and pedophilia, and we all should be. But this has blinded them to the fact that "groomer" and "grooming" are appropriate terms to use when discussing the destruction of safeguarding protections for children.
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?
Public inquiries in the UK are very often a non-response; a way of kicking problems into the long grass - nothing changes and they can cost millions in lawyers fees.
Apathy. Sad
Labour suggested a different type of inquiry that leads to better outcomes for victims.
Ok, so the people who have the most to lose will conduct the inquiry. Ok
But why should there even be an inquiry? If the matter had been litigated as Jesse suggested? Case closed?
Do you think Labour is being pressured by a high profile tweet that stoked fresh outrage?
And the greater outrage is the manner in which elon brought attention to this outrage? Not the outrage itself?
If they did nothing wrong, what do they have to lose? They would only look like heroes who stamped out this scourge, no?
The Tulsa race massacre took decades for full investigation. It was memory-holed.
Governments move slow and should not be trusted when they say “we’ve already investigated all there is to investigate “
I do not think a coming minister for a foreign power publically calling for the imprisonment of MPs, one of which happens to be the PM, is not outrageous.
We understand each other’s positions now.
actually Elon is not a "minister" (or secretary as we call them).
his "department" of DOGE isn't a real department. Congress has to vote on that.
it has no actual authority. he has no actual authority.
this is him tweeting out of his ass. as as per usual, people get more worked up over words than actual crimes.
the fact that his tweets have caused such a shit show in the UK are a sign that maybe y'all haven't sorted your shit out. Elon isn't doing this. ongoing resentment in the UK is driving this.
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.
Ad hominem. Name calling. Please.
If it was adequately investigated, then why are MP’s proposing to re-open the inquiry.
You’re so trusting in government that you feel this was all thoroughly exposed and all involved parties were held to full account?
"If it was adequately investigated, then why are MP’s proposing to re-open the inquiry?"
Do we really need to clarify this? Politics, that's why.
You were apparently also born yesterday
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.
Oh no, please retract it! How will I live with an intellectual such as yourself thinking poorly of me!
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.
That's terrible. However, it's odd if lenient sentencing in England shocks people from a country where Jeffrey Epstein served 13 months after having been investigated for offences against 36 girls.
That was also horrible, and widely (and publicly) criticized. One relevant difference is that Epstein only pled guilty to one crime with a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison. Whether more or stronger charges should have been brought, or whether he should have been taken to trial, is of course a very valid question (the judge apparently rolled her eyes at the plea deal).
Choudhury pled to 6 counts of rape, a crime which carries up to life imprisonment, each.
"Man with 36 victims only sentenced for one crime" doesn't strike me as less shocking than "man with one victim convicted of six counts of the same crime". Chowdhury's sentence was also widely and publicly criticised. The Attorney General unsuccessfully tried to increase it at appeal. All this was before the issue of grooming gangs was widely recognised.
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/local-news/six-years-for-paedophile-is-long-1015378
I’m not comparing the magnitude of the crimes, just the magnitude of what the authorities ultimately charged him with (they “investigated”, 36 cases… did they have enough to hope for a conviction on the others? I genuinely don’t know). Obviously, Epstein’s crimes were much more than a one-off and it eventually caught up with him. I suspect Chowdhury was also not a one time offender - did he ever face further punishment? The other men involved also escaped punishment.
Anyway I don’t want to go too far this particular rabbit hole, I just wanted to verify that “guy gets 3 years for leading a gang rape” wasn’t complete BS. Somewhat out of context in the debate (as you note, this was before the grooming gang scandal really blew up, also he was not the “ringleader” of one of the “rape gangs” necessarily) but a real thing that happened.
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.
Yes, Julie Bindel is critical of the IICSA report https://archive.ph/ubDgp
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.
This is not a good excuse for making a comment that ignored what you were replying to.
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.
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?
I don’t have the original but it’s referenced in this GB piece at about 1minute in:
https://x.com/GBNEWS/status/1878175689993605587
Found it. Hideous case. Looks like the motive may have been financial. Perhaps "local business" would be more accurate than "community project". https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/feb/26/woman-offered-safe-haven-to-troubled-girls-then-pimped-them-out
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.
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.
Why? If you think preferring accuracy on a highly emotive issue indicates bad motives, then what's the point?
Let me give a concrete example. When you listened to Jesse's detailed examination of the Jacob Blake shooting, why did you not think "this doesn't matter, the inaccurate reporting was drawing attention to the issue of unjustified police shootings"? Why did you not think "Jesse is more interested in WHO is talking about the police, not misuse of deadly force"? Why are you okay with accuracy and context (or as Jesse calls it "nuance") when talking about police shootings in the US, but not about grooming gangs in the UK?
Are you seriously asking me to explain, TO YOU, why I subscribe to this podcast? Do you think that's any of your fucking business, Andrew?
Do you think I need to justify it to you, a malcontented nerd who is peeing your little pants because Elon did problematic tweets? You, a person who seems genuinely seems more upset about THAT, than what happened to those girls?
I just wondered what you get out of it, given that you seem at odds with its entire ethos.
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 don’t think religious-with-a-side-of-ethnic bigotry is any better or worse than racism. Intent matters, but in this case the intent is the same: I will treat you as subhuman because you are not One Of Us.
I didn't say it was better or worse, I said it mattered. These men chose non-Muslim girls precisely because they don't think non-Muslim girls are even human. You may disagree, but I think it highlights an aspect of Muslim beliefs that is really terrible and it shouldn't be filed away as yet another straightforward example of racism.
In that case I agree with you - I thought you were trying to be dismissive of the notion that these were hate crimes. I don’t get the sense that anyone in this thread would really push back on the notion that these men were part of a pretty toxic belief system.
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.
JFC I love BARpod and will keep listening, but I couldn’t listen to this. If your point is Elon is resurrecting an old story fine then summarize the story and address his recent comments. Don’t yuck it up as you go through the horror of what happened. I think the question is, was anybody in the police department or government or other agencies held accountable for this multi year horror ??? My guess is no. If not, then it deserves all the attention it’s getting and more until people lose their jobs, pensions, etc., for being moral cowards and throwing young girls to the wolves.
Yea many were held accountable - which is covered in he pod.
People receive longer prison sentences for social media posts in the Uk. Justice was not even close to served
“Many” were not held accountable
Not going to lie - kind of disappointed with Jesse's and guests take that this is so yesterdays news, what's the big deal. To the girls, now women and their families, this is not yesterday's news. Not to mention we don't know that this is still not occurring. Jesse kept making it sound like this ended "years ago" - but did it really ? He commented in a mocking sort of way about two tier Keir, but let's be real about where the UK is & where so much of Europe is, when it comes to differing standards. It has become the norm, for differing approaches and responses when it comes to Muslim Immigrants - especially the men. They are allowed to harass and assault women & young girls, and all over Europe - if caught, are receiving different sentences...you know because as good liberals, we know they can't be held responsible for "not knowing" it's wrong to assault and rape women & girls. So along comes Jesse wanting to bring nuance and highlight the complexity of the issue, which I hope was his intent...and instead of that we got something along the lines of "do we really have to keep talking about this issue? It's ugly, it gross, it's horrific & some publications wrote a few articles about it back in the day when it first became public & Elon is on the bad people list so enough already. " Well clearly the issue is not resolved & I don't care if Elon is on the naughty list or not. The world continues to look the other way when it comes to abusing kids. The world continues to look the other way when it comes to sexualizing & demeaning girls & women. The world continues to have double standards for different communities & just because some people object to the messenger, doesn't mean the message and the intention behind the message is wrong. The UK, Europe, Australia, Canada & the US need to be honest about the failures when it comes to playing politics with the youth
Sentences of Rotherham offenders are here. The "two tier" stuff is nonsense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal#Summary_of_convictions
I can appreciate you see it differently. But when a country is passing laws, opening investigations and citing/fining and jailing its citizens for "mean tweets" or social media posts whilst also excusing and not holding accountable actual criminal acts....yeah to me that is two tier laws & enforcement. I'm all for equity in the application of the law. Create good law and equally apply it regardless of status. Can attorneys (in the case of American law) use mitigation such as hx of abuse r violence, chemical dependency and/or mental health factors to bring down the sentence time- sure have no issues with that and I've helped on cases to do so. But that's not what the UK is doing and has done is pretend babies can give consent because they feared being called out as a racist & that's not equity, that's just plain gross stupidity.
You appear to have got all your information about the UK from the least reliable sources. Nobody is passing laws against mean tweets. While the UK does not have the same free speech protections as the US, laws against incitement have existed for decades. The same sentencing guidelines are used regardless of ethnicity, and nobody has provided any evidence that they are being applied inconsistently. I gave a link showing the sentences given to convicted Rotherham offenders, you have apparently ignored that.
The uk locks up 10 people per day for social media posts, and they regularly receive longer sentences than violent criminals
Citation needed.
According to Julie Bindel a number of the victims are critical of the length of sentences handed out https://archive.ph/ubDgp
https://substack.com/@sullydish/note/c-85483713?r=f091r&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Rightly so. But sentences for rape are still longer than for incitement and still in line with sentencing guidelines that apply regardless of ethnicity.
Now post how many people are serving 5+ years for benign social media posts
Why don’t you?
0?
I stopped listening at 10 minutes in. What. The. Fuck. Don’t do your stupid fucking accents about raping children! My god.
Jessie, did you run this past katy or do you know any women that would have thought this was ok? Jesus.
Congratulations on making it 10 minutes in. My patience ran out at 5. Unbelievable crassness to try to extract some laughs out of the rape of 1000s of young girls and women. I am so close to cancelling my membership.
Jesse, let's play the deaths and rapes of Israelis for laughs. Or the thousands of dead people in Gaza. Just so crass!
Poor working class white girls are at the bottom of the ladder in the UK. And they were absolutely betrayed by the government and the people that should have protected them.
I didn’t like the accents but I never do. This is not the first episode with retarded accents. They weren’t even making fun of the actual news story. They were making fun of Musk.
I don’t think comments like the one I’m replying to were made in good faith. I think some here will just defend musk no matter what.
I loathe elon musk and have for over a decade. But, as they say, “a stopped clock is right twice a day.” I don’t have a problem with elon stirring up awareness of this topic. Julie Bindel was talking about it a few months ago on a podcast (i think it was an episode of The Unspeakable) and how it was mostly ignored when she started reporting on it over a decade ago. I only heard about it because of her so when Elon started tweeting about it I thought, “good. Awareness.”
The accents were so atrocious I couldn’t even understand the quotes between the hosts giggling about them. I always hate Jesse and Katie doing the accents - it’s funny for about 10 seconds, but always turns painful. But this is about the subject of raping children and their decision to use these accents while trying to quote tweets about this entirely tragic situation is offensive and people defending the decision by pretending the entire story is about elon-fucking-musk are disingenuous.
God bless Julie Bindel - as early as 2004 she was drawing attention to the rape and grooming of young girls in Northern England, starting with the presumed murder of Charlene Downes, a 14-year-old girl in Blackpool, one of the most depressed places in the country. She was giving blow jobs for fast food. Bindel is an old-school working class feminist, and somehow she’s the problem in so many people’s minds. Everyone has failed these girls - it’s the deep vein of classism in the UK. Nobody’s priority has been their protection because they simply aren’t viewed as worth the time or money, first by an austerity Tory government, and now by a Labour government facing all sorts of problems that connect more with the general public, like NHS waits and fuel prices, than however many teenage girls who were abused. And deep down, a lot of people still believe these girls are slags who at best wanted it, at worst couldn’t have been too deeply scarred by it. https://www.thetimes.com/article/sex-grooming-scandal-inside-a-seaside-town-nc8k2d7hrts
Her conversation with Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the Honestly podcast was informative. They both had different takes and Elon and the role of Islam and generalized misogyny that challenged the listener. I was very familiar with both before (including on this issue-read Prey when it first came out), but still learned so much even when they got a little spicy (very respectfully) over Elon.
when you are more upset about the possibility of people you don't like benefitting from this outrage or reporting it for the selfish reasons than the actual kid fucking, you may have lost the plot.
because God forbid politically motivated actors exploit a tragedy for personal gain. Like, none of the people from "my tribe" would ever think to do such a thing.
Or, maybe, just maybe, some atrocities are so foul that I will worry about the people from the "wrong tribe" benefitting after I've made sure every person even tangentially responsible for the atrocity is held to full account. including the people who wanted and still want the conversation to end.
Dunno, I'm able to be outraged that no cops have faced any penalties beyond a written reprimand and also think Musk is being unhelpful and basically full of shit. The UK certainly has problems with holding public employees accountable, they really don't. I wouldn't say the US does this well either. That said, saying Jess Phillips should be put in prison isn't the correct take and seeing the ignorant boob who would say such a thing driving public discourse isn't something I'm a fan of.
I agree that Musk is a bad tweeter.
Jesse is also a bad tweeter.
Being a bad tweeter, while deserving of criticism, is orders of magnitude less severe than KID FUCKING! Or enabling kid fucking.
They don’t deserve the same fucking podcast.
“Well, these guys were fucking kids, and these guys covered it up, a few people went to jail, some got fired, maybe a few people have yet to be fully held accountable, but the matter’s pretty settled, BUT ELON AND HIS TWEETS!? What’s up with that guy amirite??”
A-fucking-men!
100% this!
This was like listening to the Car Talk brothers host an episode about the Holocaust because they wanted to slam Volkswagen.
This is the best comment.
Katie, if you're reading this, please please pretty please revisit this topic at a later date with some input from Julie Bindel. I feel sure I've seen her state that this is still going on. The most grating thing for me was hearing the crimes continually referred to as happening in the past. The story here isn't Elon tweeted, the (Barpod) story is the Guardian refusing to publish Bindel's article all those years ago, and since then what I would describe as very squeemish handling by left/centre left UK media outlets. See also the Times (UK) recent reporting on the APPG (group of MPs) in their 2018 definition of Islamaphobia asserting that referring to 'grooming gangs' is islamaphobic, and the subsequent take up of this definition (one muslim anti-hate group is quoted in the Times as saying this definition went too far).
Bit the bullet and listened to this episode. It will be my last as a primo.
Genuinely, how dare you treat the sexual torture and rape of working class girls like this? This isn’t a crazy ‘DEI gone wrong’ story and it’s certainly not a time to do ‘funny’ accents.
I‘ve long suspected Jesse has a huge blindspot when it comes to misogyny, this episode makes me fear it’s something more malign.
God forbid Jesse hurts the feelings of crazy men with gender feelings but this is ripe for mockery?
I genuinely hope you read these comments and self reflect on this episode.
More than anything, I hope you do your fucking research next time.
For what it's worth, I too am offended but not by the episode, but by your comment.
As is your right
Oh jeez I am bracing myself for a jocular Good White Men conversation about how it's just like weird y'know to be so concerned about this local story about a few thousand kids getting raped. Please BARPod prove me wrong!
Wait til you get to the fake accents.
Ok I listened finally and am not offended or upset but this was just a boring, low-content-density episode. When you put outrage at large scale gang rape of children and outrage at Elon Musk choosing to talk about it for his own mysterious and perfidious purposes up next to each other, the latter looks pretty damn silly.
Ugh. Jesse. Please don’t. I can’t imagine I’d want to listen to this “comedian” talk about telling jokes… hearing him do wacky-voice to describe serial rape is massively off-putting. How could it possibly have seemed like a good idea to put this guest and subject matter together on an epi that already lacks Katie? Lord, where’s Helen Lewis when you need her?
At eight minutes in, I’m not really getting the impression that Jesse believes any of this actually happened.
What? Absolutely not what I heard at all. I hear horror that this shit happened but also horror that Elon is making hay of these girls suffering
That was my impression at eight minutes in. I did not continue to think that as the episode went on, but it was not an auspicious beginning.
This is the worst episode ever - this is still going on, you’ve really not done your homework - you are using a story about the mass rape and torture of children and you keep framing this as girls having ‘sex’
The Labour Party have been complicit in this including Andy Burnham in Manchester. lThe coverage in the Uk has been terrible and you quote the BBC journo as is that’s not captured by the same DEI ideology as gender… Elon has done the UK a favour. The Jay report was terrible, had limited scope and did not
Join any of the dots. The Free Press are correct and you are not. Hate your tone on this it’s just so inappropriate. You are another outlet that offers your readers “nothing to see here” shame on you. Either do your homework and be reporters or pick another’funny’ subject. I’ll be unsubscribing.
How is Andy Burnham complicit? He didn't become Mayor of Manchester until 2017. If you wanted to illustrate how an old story is being used to blame people who had nothing to do with it, this is a good illustration.
Look at Raja Miah and if you think organised systemic gangs like these, deeply embedded in family networks, often connected with drugs and making money off the girls just go away you are deluded. Look at the work of Maggie Oliver an ex Manchester Detective who resigned and see what she says about Keir.
You didn't answer the question so I assume you are just spreading more politically motivated lies.
That is not a good way to defend a false accusation of complicity in rape.
How have Keir Starmer and Jess Phillips been complicit in this? That is specifically who Elon Musk is calling out, how are they complicit in this?
And to add, Alexis Jay's report is one several and was done under a Conservative government. I don't understand your point. And your first sentence is gross, they absolutely described it in detail in the pod, come on. Lets not make shit up.
Jess said an inquiry was up to the council so effectively saying 'please mark your own homework and btw pay for it yourself.. She sat on the recommendations from the Jay review for months why was this not a priority given her role as safeguarding Minister?
As head of the CPS Keir said neither the Saville case nor the Al Fayed case 'came across his desk' when he was there... Really? There are questions to be asked that an inquiry would answer including exonerating Starmer.
They don't want a national inquiry that gets to the bottom of the scope, timeline, police failures, political collusion in Labour-held Northern towns. it's always been small local reviews, giving the appearance that it is 'contained'. Labour don't want to look at the national picture across many towns for many years. The Labour Party are beholden to the muslim vote in many constituencies, so why rock the boat?
Starmer spoke in detail about what happened with the Saville case at the time. I don't recall anyone disputing this until he became leader of the opposition. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLUoOhvlg0E
Agree fully! Just an absolute train wreak!
I just started the episode but only made it 5 minutes in and had to stop. This is really not the topic to try to be funny around and practice your bad accents on. We are talking about rape of young children and women on an industrial scale in the UK over decades.
Jesse, this is to put it blunt, ****ing awful! 🤬
Skipping this one - selfcare!
Probably a good decision. From time 35:00 on all the sex crime stuff is over and the rest is much more entertaining.
I love Jeff (I'm a paid subscriber to his Substack). I love Jesse. I love them both together. Unfortunately this was the wrong topic for them to handle together. A rare misfire. Still hope to see them work together in the future.
💯 I saw their one night comedy show in Chicago last year and enjoyed myself.
Same
Exactly!
For anyone who wants to read Julie Bindel's work on this, her substack is here: https://juliebindel.substack.com/
And some of her posts:
Rochdale victim: ‘I was groomed at 14, then the courts came for my children’
https://juliebindel.substack.com/p/rochdale-victim-i-was-groomed-at
Pimping gangs: How did the press represent the phenomenon in the early days? https://juliebindel.substack.com/p/pimping-gangs-how-did-the-press-represent
A small sample of my writing over the past 15 years on so-called grooming gangs https://juliebindel.substack.com/p/a-small-sample-of-my-writing-over
the "nothing to see here folks" vibe is really gross.
you can still read articles about First Nations children dying in Canadian residential schools, Tulsa race massacre, or Tuskegee all within the last month. Things are still being uncovered.
as for this being UK business, well I do remember UK protesters up in arms about Police brutality in the US during the "reckoning".
but systematic kid fucking enabled by all levels of the government, media, religious and community organizations?
that one we should just swoosh under the rug?
fucking gross man. shame.
I live in the UK. Yes, there is a problem with two tier policing. Yes, I wish Elon Musk would please shut up and stop making it all about him. No, he isn’t the main person to have pointed out the problem. He just likes making everything all about him. Maybe if you want to talk about UK matters, you should have somebody from the UK on your podcast. I cannot emphasise how irritating it was for me to listen to this. Neither of you have a clue what’s actually going on here because you’re not here. Where is Helen?? Oh and if you want somebody to pronounce South African English, you can ask me. That was also painful. Derbyshire is pronounced dar like car. Not dur like fur. End of rant.
Slave morality
On the bright side, the worst episode of 2025 is in already the rearview…
I hope they take this as a challenge.
Another Bully XL episode would be interesting.
I just read a story about how cane corso dogs are becoming popular due to the XL bully ban. Cane corsos are absolutely terrifying and there is no reason for them to exist.
Completely disagree, I will argue with you and Kathleen about this probably 😂 Cane Corsos are an incredible historic breed - if they attack people it's because they are not being treated properly by their owners.
If you miss Katie as much as I do, listen to her on the latest episode of Ask a Jew! (I’m not holding my breath for Jesse to go on, because I know he hates Jews.)
https://open.substack.com/pub/askajew/p/dont-blame-jews-for-bird-flu-with?r=y4an&utm_medium=ios
“because I know he hates Jews”
What the actual fuck man
It’s a joke. Relax.
I love how the whole pervert for nuance things hits a brick wall for this audience when it comes to criticizing someone like musk. People seem to land in the realm of well he was directionally right and brought attention to a bad thing so what's the big deal. You think it would be obvious to a fan of this podcast as to why facts and nuance matters. Unfortunately for most of the audience (or at least the show commentors) their perversion for nuance can't overcome their partisan and cultural biases. I am glad the audience has yet to drag down the quality of the show, but it is really trying drag into cesspool that is all the other heterodox podcasts.
I thought the criticism of Musk was completely without nuance. like there was no reason for someone like him to draw attention to this other than for selfish reasons.
very flattened critique I thought. no attempt to steelman his position.
like maybe he feels this was a complete abomination that hasn't been fully exposed and those responsible haven't been held to full account. maybe a full reckoning is in order?
why wasn't this a bigger outrage?
Or no, just keep your mouth shut this case is closed, we don't want the people we don't like to benefit from this politically.
it's inconvenient when kids get raped and our side suffers. just keep it quiet.
yeah, fuck that.
Really? He cares so much that he does zero due diligence in researching the topic beyond a cursory look and then attacks individuals attempting to right the situation with baseless accusation? And your take away from the show was well they just don't want to talk about because it gives ammunition to wrong people? Again, really? You can't see how musk seizes on these morally infuriating stories for political talking points? The fact he neglects crucial facts and attempts to smear individuals wrongfully and pushes his anti immigrant messaging doesn't offend you sensibilities? But Jesse and what his face making light hearted commentary between serious talking points that actually digs into the facts of the case does? Again, I think the free press is the outlet you should set up camp at
Nice dig at the end.
It’s the same pejoratives used by the people initially disturbed by this cover up.
“Racist” “ far right”, now “free press comment section”
Dismissive ad hominem pejoratives don’t help your case.
Again, as I’ve stated, multiple things can be true:
-elon is a douche
- elon is shit at twitter with many ham-fisted posts, incidentally, so is jesse.
-child fucking scandals that involve multiple levels of society including the highest levels of government and media cannot be over-investigated. The more sunlight the better.
A massive truth and reconciliation endeavor should start yesterday.
This is not racist or anti-immigrant. These attacks have zero power.
The fact that certain MP’s are against this is telling.
Was there an official Apology from the parliament?
I would just qualify your reference to the audience: I too am glad that a small but loudest segment of the audience has yet to drag down the quality of the show (i.e. push it to the right or to be more like The Free Press).
You’re literally all over this comment section down playing the mass rapes of poor working class girls. It’s disgusting.
They’re bad rapists, Brent.
This insulting and wilfully misses the point of the show. No one engaged apologetics for the rapists. No one. The point is to show the attempt to use this moral outrage for political personal elevation by musk. If you care about the victims that should sicken you. This why the victims families are condemning musks actions. Again the reactions of the commentors are way off base and you should be asking what is the trigger for you all in this situation
Is the tone deaf note because these are two bros talking about the abuse/rape of girls? I tend not to be super sensitive about these things but … it’s not sitting well with me.
You can have ESL but child abuse is child abuse regardless of who points it out.
This is not a subject for levity
This is BaRPod. Every horrible thing J&K have ever talked about has been a subject for levity. I mean Katie couldn’t even keep it serious when Jesse was talking about his (then recently) deceased mom. This is how they roll on the pod, and it’s strange to see some listeners suddenly surprised by it.
ETA: this is also what allows them to be so funny; there’s no boundary they won’t trample over.
Thank you, normal person saying a sensible thing.
Yeah but none of it was funny.
Too soon?
No shit, right??
It can be simultaneously true that Elon is a narcissistic provocateur who just likes to stir shit and doesn’t actually care about child safeguarding, and that this rape gang scandal was handled terribly by multiple governments in part due to fear of appearing racist and there still hasn’t been justice for a lot of these girls. This isn’t about taking sides. Everybody sucks here. And that includes Jeff for making light of rape and treating this as reason for stupid voices.
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.
Thank you. "Who gives a shit compared to what has actually happened?' is exactly the point.
And yet, and yet - actual British men are here in this thread, still fussing and spouting like teapots about Elon's tweets. No wonder all those girls got raped, they've got fuckall kind of men to protect them .
Wow. Everything you just said. Yes. Yes. Yes.
I came here to say this but you already did. Jesse really screwed the pooch on this one.
I cannot understand how anyone can read through the comments critical of this episode and conclude "wow, people are really mad that Jesse made fun of Elon." You are either hard-of-reading or being disingenuous to miss that the objections are about Jesse's shallow and dismissive understanding of the situation, the bizarrely jocular tone that he set, and imprudent choice of guest for the topic.
`"wow, people are really mad that Jesse made fun of Elon."'
Other commenters aren't making this point. Just like the podcast episode, they're pointing out or being surprised that you're, so easily, being manipulated and riled up by Elon.
Terrible things in the world happen to children and teenagers. This one happened decades ago (there's no evidence that this is ongoing) and there's nothing you can do to change what happened. The UK dealt with this.
If you do care about the immediate well-being of children, there are a few hundred thousand of them in Gaza who are freezing and starving. Consider a donation and a call to your representative to pressure Israel to allow in more aid and a promise to protect that aid.
Or just continue to be upset about something you cannot possibly influence, does not need your input or emotions on, and ignoring actual child suffering.
Note: `you' refers to basically all of the critical commenters around here.
The person being easily manipulated is you. You have no idea about the UK or Israel and yet here you are spewing nonsense, wrapped around in fake care. You don't care about any of that. Why didn't you mention true famine happening in Sudan or the Yazidi sex slaves? Why aren't you calling your representatives to pressure for more aid to Sudan and curbing those horrible practices? You must not care about children suffering. However I do wonder why did you pick Israel specifically. Perhapsit's been pommeled into your head by the media but you never heard of Sudan? You precisely the thing you complain about, gullible and easily manipulated.
For the record, the UK didn't deal with it. And people can choose to be upset about what they want as evidenced by your selective care.
My government is providing weapons, material, and political cover for the immense amount of suffering the Palestinians are undergoing. Israel cannot do what it is doing without our acquiescence. We have no such power over those other atrocities.
Your argument is contextually ignorant. The suffering of Palestinians is tragic but you refuse to address the cause of the Hamas atrocities and not one mention of the hostages including YOUR fellow Americans. Israel gets aid which is about 15% of its budget and all spent on American goods but Israel is an independent sovereign state and will survive without the US aid. The US benefits from Israel relationship as well. Your understanding of aid and COGAT and Hamas is non existent it seems.
Your selective outrage is notable and is intellectually dishonest. The US has significant influence in global affairs and could play a role in addressing various crises. The bias is evident where you ignore the reality of US foreign policy and its impact.
I listened to about 15-20 minutes of the episode much earlier today, then went out for the day.
Since then, I’ve been mulling whether I want to post my disappointment and, yes, even disgust at the tone of jokiness in those minutes I heard.
In as much fairness as I can muster, I don’t think Jesse or the guest were making fun of the gang rapes (or the California fires very early in the episode) - but, Jesus Christ, neither of those topics should even be a gauzy background for making jokes at all. I was actually kind of shocked to be honest. I’m glad to find that many others felt the same way.
It’s clear that the phrase “do better” has become a bit of a joke but, wow, is it appropriate here. I kinda think this episode should be taken down though I do admit that would be extreme.
I’m not seriously contemplating canceling by subscription, but the thought did cross my mind.
I waited a day to post a comment after listening to see if I changed my opinion on it after listening to more reporting on it.
I thought this was a good episode, well explained and fair.
I'm not sure it was a good story for the podcast, on one hand you have the journalism and social media aspect which are very Barpod and I like hearing Barpod takes on these issues, on the other hand you can't discuss it without going into the background which is extremely complex and horrific. Tricky balance and I thought you covered it well.
"ou can't discuss it without going into the background which is extremely complex and horrific."
That sounds wise to me. It sounds like it's a pretty big and complex thing. It would probably need a longer, more serious look at it.
I thought they were wise not going into the racial, class and gender aspects too much. Then I looked at the comments.
Not sure if ignoring gender, class and racial issues, on a problem that at its core is gender, class and racially based, is that wise.
Really? May I ask why? You know a lot more about this topic than I do
I think I'm only remaining subscribed so I can hear the apology for this shit. Then I'm fucking off. This is absolutely shameful.
Same.
Will be doing the same thing.
Katie is going to groom and rape Jesse after this abomination of an episode.
just wait until mama gets home.
you thought she tore him a new one over his shit tweeting (as if Jesse has any room to criticize the quality of Elon’s tweets).
wait ‘til she hears this gem.
I think Jesse was a Catholic Bishop in a past life.
Irish accent:
“Hey, whattya dredgin’ up old dirty laundry fer? We took care of that troublesome priest years ago”.
I for one, am grateful that Elon brought this back to light. I have no recollection that this got the “reckoning” it deserved.
If we had to have a “reckoning” for slavery and Jim Crow in 20-goddamn-20 (!), we can have a rehashing of this abject atrocity that happened recently. Sorry if that upsets you Jesse.
I don’ think it’s possible to blow this outta proportion.
I don’t think that some inelegant tweets from Elon is worth mentioning in comparison to the pure evil he’s trying to make sure doesn’t get memory holed.
yes Elon is a douche. yes, jesse doesn’t like Elon. so fucking what?
if you don’t like the free world fully examining this because Elon brought it up or he isn’t uber careful with everything he tweets, then fuck you. Big picture is important here.
besides, apparently it’s still a problem:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/grooming-gangs-taskforce-arrests-hundreds-in-first-year
Exactly!
Jesse acting like it all over and everything is now sunshine & roses for those working class girls is infuriating.
Well fuck you, too.
Ya, sorry. We should be more forgiving of pedos and their enablers.
Sorry, I went overboard.
Oh wait, you’re mad at my parody of an Irish accent.
Whoops.
Sorry Mr. O’Connell
He’s all over this comment section all but simping for rapists
I know, what the fuck is going on?
this is "how to be a normal human 101". why is this so hard?
I'm really starting to wonder why I subscribe to this podcast.
This is a two minute clip of a Parliamentary committe questioning Chief Constable David Crompton.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRXH_ZvxSBY
A year after this he was suspended over comments he made about the Hilllsborough disaster. The BBC and Guardian rallied to his defense and how the evil tories were scapegoating him.
Anyone want to guess if any of the officers were ever identified?
But yeah Jess Philips and Keir Starmer are the real victims here.
What on earth does this have to do with this story???? This is a complete non-sequitur about the Hillsborough disaster, which happened 36 years ago, and is completely unrelated to either the grooming cases or anyone in power in the Labour party now.
Go on google and search UK media reporting on the Grooming scandal, then compare it to the amount of media coverage of 'partygate' and whether Boris Johnson had a birthday party during lockdown.
The most coverage the grooming scandal has gotten in the UK has occurred in the last few weeks since Elon musk started tweeting about it. Also in that time the UK establishment has decided that the real victims are Jess Philips and Kier Starmer. I'm not being facetious look at the Guardian or BBC online.
People may hate to admit it but Musk's intervention has caused international scrutiny of the grooming scandal that it wouldn't otherwise have gotten.
I mention the Hillsbourough disaster because if you watch the video, you'll ask yourself why he wasn't fired on the spot. Well he was fired a year later for comments he made about something completely different. What he offered in evidence before the committee was completely fine.
That claim about media coverage simply isn't true. Just Google "grooming gangs UK before:2024", particularly if you pick the "news" tab. There were other child abuse scandals coming out at the same time that may have slightly diminished its coverage, but it was well covered.
Yes it was reported but the amount of coverage was miniscule compared to something like 'Partygate'.
Also the level of public knowledge of the scandal was extremely poor.
The UK's top political podcast 'the rest is politics' gave a breakdown of the grooming scandal.
https://x.com/i/status/1877455365752893898
Saying '90 girls were groomed and paid for sex in two northern towns'. That was their understanding of what happened, not children being abducted and gang raped, while the police schools and social services looked on and did nothing.
Here's Alison Pearson's article from the Telegraph.
https://archive.li/UBfdC
In your link, Rory Stewart says “The numbers are absolutely staggering. … potentially in Rotherham, 1400 children were abused. In Rochdale 230 children were abused”.
Your other objection seems to be to acknowledging that the grooming gangs were engaged in grooming.
The clip is from the Chief Constable being questioned re grooming gangs.
But what does it have to do with anything?
I'm not entirely sure, that'd be something Paul could maybe explain further? But my guess is that he thinks the Chief Constable did not do a great job in handling the grooming gang cases or in being questioned about them. Perhaps Paul then used the CC leaving his job for comments about Hillsborough as another example of him not doing a great job.
Paul seemed very confident his point was obvious and I wondered if I missed something. Obviously not!
When you watched the clip, did you get the impression that he ever had any intention of identifying the policemen who when a 11 year old girl was raped, arrested her rather than the rapists .
I'll pop in late to say this...
I already cancelled my subscription, mainly I thought the episodes got more shallow or banter-y, and because I think Jesse is increasingly condescending and dismissive.
If I hadn't, then this episode would have made me cancel. I went in to it blind and I did not make it through, to say the least. This was such a tone deaf discussion! Why not talk to someone with a smidgeon of insight not limited to bad accents and comments on not liking hearing about the subject?
I'm guessing most of the mid talk comments come from a place of feeling uncomfortable with the subject, but I also thought the "Oh goodie, more rape quotes"-comments and the corresponding giggles were REALLY off. A long talk of years of police and social workers covering up systemic rape of young girls, just to make the point that Musk is being reductive and bad on twitter, because if there was an article then there's no cover up. Despite articles being rejected for years for touching on the subject. And he absolutely is wrong, but in this case he is not alone to be.
I just don't get why you would make this episode at all in this way.
2025: make B&R have Katie again (always).
I was pretty disappointed by the Rotherham segment, to be honest. I'd really like to see you engage with someone more knowledgeable on the subject (like Louise Perry) and really stress test your hypothesis that there's absolutely no reason to be up in arms about these crimes *now*, because they were all dealt with back then. There are many good-faith and competent voices out there who believe there is reason to be angry and that there were concerted efforts to suppress the story. You should talk to one of them.
Like, yes, Elon is shooting his mouth off with no nuance and no filter, and getting basic facts wrong. OK. But might it behoove you to dig a little deeper into why prominent British feminist voices are *even so* glad he's bringing attention to his story? Just feels like you allowed your distaste for Musk to convince you there's "nothing to see here".
What basic facts were wrong? The basic facts are pakistani muslims can’t integrate and raped tens of thousands of little girls and police covered it up to placate sad souls like yourself.
I love the idea of Jesse criticizing anyone for beclowning themselves online when they have some clout and voice when he does the exact same shit (on a smaller scale) regularly.
Yea Musks online presence is super cringe, but so is Jesse’s.
So… I’m honestly a little surprised by the vehemence of the comments here. To me, the immature edginess, irreverence, and borderline-trollishness have always been a part of Blocked and Reported’s brand as a podcast. There have been a fair number of moments where one of the hosts have said something that made me cringe, but I’ve always viewed it as in service to the general subtext of the podcast, which is that we all need to chill the fuck out and stop acting like words are violence. And it’s always been done with that winking acknowledgement by the hosts that these jokes are indeed inappropriate. I mean, there have been jokes about the holocaust, pedophilia, suicide, bestiality was a running gag for a long time.
Was some of the episode in bad taste? Sure. But what podcast did people think they were listening to that this episode is somehow a shock and now you suddenly need to cancel your subscription?
There is a big gulf for me between "Jesse's girlfriend is a horse! Lols!" and two men giggling over tweets about raped children.
There are plenty of subjects that Katie and Jesse have treated seriously. Katie cried on the episode about the dog in Brooklyn and they nearly had an on-air fight about Jesse's attitude to single sex spaces. Both of them did a whole episode chastising Graham Linehan for his poor taste. When it suits them, they treat topics reverently.
For me, it’s the hypocrisy, e.g. virtuous Jesse being ever so careful never to offend the likes of Alejandra Caraballo with a misplaced pronoun, but wacky accents and fun in a story involving *ten of thousands* of working class girls being brutally raped and abused in horrific ways? Not a problem!
If he was blasé about all potentially offensive things, perhaps that would be different. But he’s very selective not to upset middle class (males) people of his social circle/class.
Yes, good point. This podcast has never offended the likes of Alejandra C.
Reality offends Alejandra C. Alejandra C taking offence is as reliable as the tides or the rising sun. And yet, Jesse still feels it is important to try to coddle his sensitivities.
LOL Alejandra Carabello is one of the most frequently ridiculed people on the show. Who the fuck are you and all these people who claim to be primos but seem to know nothing about it?
Literally What are you talking about? They criticize and make fun of the Idiocy of AC and other trans activists all the time.
exactly.
I liked Norm's take on hypocrisy: https://youtu.be/ljaP2etvDc4?si=yp8yq66NCs8AVG-f
the jokes weren't that funny. number one rule, be funny.
laughing like a school girl at the word "reep" was pathetic.
but the change in tone to super serious when framing Elon's transgressions was the kicker for me. like "we've just recapped the horrific rapes that were covered up by all levels of government, we had a few laughs, but Elon posted some bad tweets and that's totally unacceptable!"
I think it was the glibness of this very serious topic that bothers people. I don't know that they've been this glib over a really bad thing before (I don't recall every episode)
I bet this also hits hard for Brits who are much more likely to have known about this. Now a couple of Americans are kicking it around in a joking fashion. I can see their point.
But yes, you're right that the "words are violence" thing is stupid and the pod has always been against that.
Speaking as a Brit I wasn’t too annoyed about the tone of this (although I do think the accent thing is boring and unfunny). The whole grooming gang story is so incredibly complex and multifaceted that it’s almost impossible for Barpod To cover it in any sensible way. I do think it’s quite useful for someone to point out how incredibly stupid Elon Musk has been, How totally ignorant he is of the things he comments on. Generally speaking, I like hearing the American perspective on things happening in Britain but it seems obvious to me that Musk is using this story to nod to religious and racial hatred beloved of the far right. Because of this it's probably worth remembering that the vast majority of Muslims in this country are decent people who wouldn’t dream of acting in this way.
No, this was over the line, continuously, and I’m baffled and I’m disappointed.
I'm less annoyed by the jokey jokey shit (it is part of the brand, as you say), though I understand why some people find it grating. I'm just more annoyed by the substance of the coverage. To hear Jesse tell it, the *real* story here is about how Elon Musk is an asshole - not about the horrific rapes, and, YES, cover-ups that occurred. The episode needed someone with a modicum of expertise of this subject.
Interesting. The anger about the jokiness is actually something i personally understand a little better. I mean, it’s perfectly fine to disagree with the angle of the coverage! God knows, I don’t always agree with Jesse and Katie or the angle with which they approach an issue, and there have been some times I’ve finished an episode feeling annoyed at them. But isn’t it possible to disagree without treating it as a moral transgression?(Not saying you are personally doing this, some in the comments clearly are.)
Some of what I’m seeing just reminds me of the people who said that you shouldn’t talk about woke excesses because “that’s missing the main story about X injustice.”
Clearly the rapes are a bigger story than anything Elon has tweeted about them. I didn’t think Jesse and/or Jeff said anything to the contrary. But Elon putting out tweets calling for the jailing of public officials IS a story, even if it’s not the main story. And unlike the rapes themselves, that story actually falls into the B&R wheelhouse, and makes sense for them to cover. Musk blaming a government that only came into office six months ago (and not the conservatives who ran the British government for 14 years, until July) and calling for ministers to be put into jail, is exactly the sort of dumb overreach and internet brain-rot that Jesse & Katie have always called out. And all the people who are saying ‘it’s fine if Musk is overreaching, because he’s bringing awareness to X’ are echoing the ‘ends justify means’ thinking that gave us so many cancellations.
I’ve seen a few people on these threads suggest that he should have included a certified British person like Helen Lewis. These people are… totally correct, she would have been a much more appropriate guest for this topic. But if you look over at Helen Lewis’s Substack notes, her thoughts on this are basically the same as Jesse’s. In fact, so similar that I wonder if he talked to her beforehand to get her insight. So I think people are mistaken if they believe a British perspective actually would have led to different results.
Yes, since this whole ordeal is not a new story to people who pay attention, the real news THIS week is how Elon Musk is such an asshole for his comments on the matter.
Funny how the audience reacts this way whenever the shows subject is of the of certain political persuasion. Must just be coincidence
Yeah, I left that out of my comment, but definitely noticed that the outrage seems selective. That’s not to say people aren’t expressing a genuine feeling, but it seems like a lot of listeners are fine with the show being edgy until it gives that treatment to something they believe.
I agree but a lot of these comments are coming from obvious fanboys or Musk who can broach no criticism of their hero.
Love Jesse, and Jeff, too, but huge mistake to take a comedic approach to this episode. Kind of inexplicable, really, as I know Jesse is a smart, compassionate person. Why this, Jesse?
They don’t ever not take a comedic approach though? Even episodes about dead dogs and cancer moms
They've taken the comedic approach to discussions of the Holocaust, 10/7, Jesse's recently dead grandma, and endless other sensitive topics. Haven't heard virtually any complaints until now.
I am disheartened to report that Jeff Mauer calling a dungeon master a dragon master means he is not, in fact, a real one
If it isn’t too much to ask, could one of you good primos please reply with a timestamp for when the grooming gang discussion is over and they move on to Zuckerberg? I’m sensitive to discussions of rape, and from the reactions I’m seeing in the comments, I don’t think this will be a good or entertaining bit for me to tune into. A timestamp could help someone else in this thread with the same sensitivity, too. Thank you.
Did a quick search of the transcript for Zuckerberg because I also don't want to listen to the first half, and it looks like Housekeeping is at 35 mins or so, and then it's Zuck/Free Speech after that. But FYI, at 38 mins there is a mention of the word rape, and I think a little joke about how in some accent RIP and rape sound similar. Looks clear after that!
Thank you so much. I always feel a little vulnerable asking, so I appreciate it :)
Glad to help! I completely understand.
I stopped listening and really wanted to hear the rest. It’s not like I was super angry or anything - just a bit surprised and couldn’t on this topic. So, thank you, Claudia. That was kind of you.
(I also feel a bit bad for Jessie and I’m not sure where to add this comment so I’m tucking it in Dorothy’s little section. If you’re listening Jessie -I think you are great and you’ve been very brave and empathetic over the years. )
Not listening to- reading!
Awesome you asked.
I worked with victims of grooming gangs in the UK and I think the tone of this podcast was fine. They weren’t joking about the case; they were joking about their discomfort with negotiating with the gravity of the topic within the context of a generally lighthearted podcast with a comedian. The research on this was far better than most mainstream outlets which feels very respectful.
honest question, in your opinion the matter is closed, all those involved have been held accountable, all system and protocol issues examined, no further need for national truth and reconciliation?
seems like what I'm reading from British press is this is debatable.
seems to me that if a significant portion of the population feels this is unresolved it's the government's duty to continue the examination.
In the US, we're still investigating atrocities that occurred 100 years ago and learning what there is to learn.
It’s an ongoing issue but the investigation led by the Children's Commissioner was really exhaustive and thorough. The issue has been discussed ad nauseam in the press since 2011 - that’s going on 14 years! And unfortunately it’s an issue that is continuously and disgustingly being exploited by bad actors - Musk is just the most recent in a long list of ne’er do wells with their own agendas who exploit the already well-and-truly exploited.
What is also missed in the discourse is that the majority of child sex abusers in this country are white British men. British Pakistani men, while overrepresented in these kind of grooming gangs, are vastly outnumbered by white British men who tend to be lone abusers. Black, mixed race, and Asian girls are over represented amongst victims across big cities like London where I worked.
The key thing is that people like Musk don’t give a shit about the disgustingly low rates of charges and convictions of perpetrators of CSA (less than 1% - rapists basically have a mandate to act here) unless they get the opportunity to slag off their opponents (his characterisation of Jess Phillips is as vile as it is off-base) or stick it to immigrants. Aside from the fact that the schmendrick *IS* an immigrant, it makes me prefer that it’s never discussed again if this is the way it is being abused.
Your comment is the one that should be highest voted on this topic. Completely agree that this whole subject is being used by people who don’t give a monkey’s about any of the victims, and are otherwise completely unmoved by conviction rates for CSA.
Watching this sub get manipulated by Musk’s dead cat bounce in response to the HB-1 visa furore is sobering.
I agree with your concerns on how bad actors exploit this issue.
I full heartedly disagree with your take that this is a disincentive to investigate further.
many more people need to go to jail. many more people need to lose their jobs.
this is probably going to make the top 10 list of abominable evils perpetrated by a Western nation over the last century, an you're worried about the inconvenience of bad actors making hay with this.
misplaced priorities in my opinion.
you know what gives these bad actors more power? continually trying to downplay this.
That's how we end up with fascism. Liberal elites continue to downplay their mistakes and the public ends up so fed up they turn to megalomaniac demagogues.
So nothing will happen and the uk will continue to import rapists
What shall we do about the homegrown ones?
It's complicated. Yes, this story is old. However, unless you're British or you follow a lot of independent media, you very likely never knew about this story (more like stories, since it went on for years in many towns). I think it's good that more people are aware of the issue.
Jesse seems very confident that the abuses were publicized and addressed years ago; were they though?
They have been in the media before, but most of the perpetrators and the police and community leaders who ignored/covered up the abuse have largely escaped consequences. There have been a handful of well-publicized prosecutions, though, so we’re all supposed to think it’s all right now, nothing to see here.
My perception from outside the UK is these stories were covered, but remained niche local crime stories, and the media mostly euphemized or didn't mention a lot of what makes these crimes and the way the authorities dealt with them particularly awful.
ETA: also, because of the way news cycles work, they may become prominent for while, but then when they disappear from the cycle again it may give the impression that the problem is being taken care of, and that it's old news now.
"My perception from outside the UK is these stories were covered, but remained niche local crime stories, and the media mostly euphemized or didn't mention a lot of what makes these crimes and the way the authorities dealt with them particularly awful."
This simply isn't true. You can search the BBC archives and find hundreds of stories coving the grooming gangs going back to the early 2010s. There was a BBC drama in 2017 about the scandal. There have been many radio programmes specifically about this,and the scandal was also featured in many topical radio and TV shows. This is JUST on the BBC - I chose it because it is the most trusted and most visited news source in the UK, with more than half the UK population using its service every single day.
Newspapers also reported widely. It is very shameful how long it took many of them to report on this and why. Julie Bindel would be a great guest to explain the beginnings of the news aspect of the scandal - how the Guardian wouldn't publish her, for example, back in 2006.
But it is false to say in 2025 that this wasn't widely covered in great depth by mainstream media in the UK.
Yes.
I don't think this episode was as awful as some fellow listeners, but Jesse almost immediately describing it as something that occurred in the past made me question his understanding here. Still a fan of the show and I enjoy Jeff, but not right for this topic. I understand the desire for silliness around discussing horrific events were this a private conversation, but not here. It's too grave a subject for either Internet bs or culture wars. Grooming gangs are being used as a culture war topic in the wider world, but I feel this episode also kind of used it this way to get digs in at various people. Even where that is justified (Musk knowing fuck all and throwing his weight around) it still feels egregious?
First time writing a comment like this, I have a lot of time for the show and hosts. It doesn’t hit close to home or anything I just thought this was way too sloppy. And obligatory Elon is dumb and bad.
Poor handling of the issue. Why not have Julie Bindel on? The guest that you’ve had on before (!!!) that actually could speak about the contemporaneous coverage and current resurfacing of the issue.
You’ll make the effort to have a relevant guest when it’s some YA or GC episode but not this?
I get this show is a lighter take on issues as they manifest online - when it isn’t and you’re fully capable of not cracking jokes and doing acting like a couple of school boys. Disappointing.
I would guess that right now Bindel is in pretty high demand since she is the person who actually broke the story decades ago.
This was the most disappointing -- and laziest -- episode ever. It was just a regurgiated google search. It didn't address the real question, which is why Musk's tweeting had such an impact and why people who I tend to believe, such as Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, Douglas Murray and even Julie Bindel herself, believe that this is a legitimate story to talk about now. If Musk had tweeted about George Floyd no one would have blinked because it was so massively covered around the world. Obviously these tweets had an impact for some reason. Why was that? And I'll admit that I am an American who has no recollection of reading about this before Musk started tweeting. For whatever reason it didn't have the resonance in the American media as the French rape case or the Canadian graves story. For all I know Jessie may be right that this story isn't worth discussing now, but simply saying this was previously covered doesn't prove that.
Are you seriously complaining that a person of power is using their platform to highlight an issue to the world that not many people know about because it comes from Elon musk lol
Yeah, too bad some hipster Substack didn’t break the story about child rape instead of the bad Twitter man obviously sub stack knew about the child Rape before it was cool
He's saying to an audience of millions that the PM should be executed and Parliament dissolved because he just heard about a scandal from one to two decades ago and is now declaring it the greatest political scandal and coverup in history of the Western world. and somehow blaming it on the new liberal government instead of the conservative government that was in power for the last 10 years.
If he had said "wow, I’m just learning about this and it seems like there needs to be a greater reckoning to reopen these cases" that would be different.
Crying about how the “right” type of person didn’t globalize news about literal child rape is ridiculous. Jesse is literally huffing and puffing about how the poor uk journalists didn’t get attention because the big bad chud opened the story up to the world instead of some other random journalist who didn’t have a global platform to announce it on
Do you know who DID know about it? The entire adult population of the UK.
It's not breaking news just because your stupid media didn't bother covering it until now.
What’s your point? I didn’t hear about it until Elon made a big deal about it. Crying about muh dang dirty chuds breaking the story instead of some random other journalist dog DIDN’T is stupid
The point is that you're incredibly ill-informed, which is entirely your own fault, and rather than addressing that and how you're being played by a billionaire, you and a whole lot of others around here would rather petulantly revel further in your ignorance by insisting that this is a big, ongoing, pressing deal.
How is hearing about this story from a popular source being “played by a billionaire?”
Musk is clearly attempting to resurrect this story because of his desire to meddle in British politics and to divert attention from the H1B fight within the MAGA coalition.
Rather than infighting we can now just all go back to inveighing against the wrong kind of immigrants and left-of-center governments, which distracts from discussion surrounding H1B reform that could be be very, very detrimental to Tesla/SpaceX and by extension Musk's finances.
It is commendable still of Musk to use his platform to raise awareness of this horrifying issue that was mostly only known within the UK unless you’re a die hard world news hound
It sounds like you’re saying Musk signal boosted the story of child rape gangs “in bad faith”
Raise awareness? Right, this country has a real problem imagining widespread abuse of minors. Have you been to an airport and seen all of the anti-human trafficking signs or forgotten pizzagate?
Your new found awareness of this issue is doing exactly nothing to help the decade's old situation but does detract from other issues. Also, you needed to be minimally engaged with the world to know about this issue, which happened to our closest ally and had original reporting in our native language.
I told you reasons I believe he dug this up. Elon is a political actor, we don't need to adhere to debate bro rules here.
It would be commendable of Musk to raise awareness to an underreported issue.
It’s not commendable to post inflammatory tweets that get basic facts wrong for his own political gains. If anything he’s going to start harming the situation by being so careless and closely associated with it.
I hope that the end result of this attention is better investigation/prosecution, but let’s be clear that that’s merely a by-product, and that Musk wielding this as a partisan wedge is as bad as any left-wing counter-polarized downplaying.
You are truly pathetic and embarrassing. Downplaying mass rapes just to stick it to Elon
It's not breaking news.
Pakistani immigration would be entirely shut down if they did anything about it
The Free Press has some great coverage of this story including having Julie Bindel on the Honestly podcast. Uncharacteristically I think the takes on this podcast were not researched well enough. I missed Katie’s presence.
Zuck: "I started social media to promote free speech" ... No you didn't, Facebook's origins are in ranking the attractiveness of students on campus and being a directory of basic info. Absolutely wild that he's trying to claim noble intentions from his fucking about as a 20 something nerd.
Saying you'd like to shtup a girl from your calculus class IS certainly free speech, Ben
Facebook itself was very pro-speech, but in a weird way. They were really about bringing transparency even the expense of privacy. At least in the beginning, they fought for this in ways that, as a corporation, weren't necessarily in their best interest and certainly wasn't the easiest and safest way to go. I'd give Zuck some credit for free speech in his own way and what he's doing now seems like a more mature approach to the way the company started.
I just finished the rape gangs portion of the episode. I don't think there's a problem with Musk giving this some publicity. It's really horrible and truthful attention on it is probably a good thing.
But if he lied about stuff or was wrong about stuff that isn't good. He should retract or correct his statements in that case.
I can also see why Brits would get annoyed that a bunch of Americans who previously knew nothing about this start parachuting in and pretending it's brand new.
It's 10 years since it blew up with media coverage, investigations, scandals etc. The conservatives have run England since before then, up until the elections last year. The (Free Press) explanation that its a huge liberal woke coverup he's exposing is crazy, versus he's a Twitter addicted who just learned about it.
I believe the councils running the areas in question were Labour-led, rather than Conservative. In particular, individual councillors who made a lot of the decisions were Labour and had good relationships with Pakistani communities they didn’t want to sever.
Bingo.
That's what I mean by him being wrong about stuff. And it sounds like he was definitely wrong about this being some new and shocking thing.
But sort of in his defense I can there being a woke angle in that the police were unwilling to act out of fear of appearing racist. That's not good.
I wouldn't be surprised if Musk read that detail and decided the whole thing was a woke coverup.
I believe the characterisation that the police were afraid to act or reluctant to act because they might look like racists may have been a fact in some small number of these cases but, as Brits have learned over more recent times, the extraordinary misogyny of the large city police forces in the UK has meant that crimes against women have been downplayed. These children were largely ignored because they were thought to be worthless, working class scum. Disgusting, depraved prostitutes. These attitudes within the British police have been exposed of late and hopefully attempts to get rid of the culture, and the people involved continue.
The problem is There is just absolutely no chance that Elon Musk will ever correct the record on what he gets wrong. He doesn’t admit he’s wrong, ever. And he has millions of credulous followers and also broadcasts his stuff to the rest of us who don’t want to hear it too.
If this was the overall thesis of the episode then I would have no problem.
this is the best take so far.
except for Brits getting annoyed. fuck them. They marched in the streets about george floyd and Gaza, which, is fine, but don’t get protective over your own skeletons.
So, on the repeated sentiment that it's weird for anyone (including Elon) to bring the grooming gang thing up now since it's something that happened a long time ago...
1) Aren't grooming gangs still happening?
2) Aren't the people who presided over the response still in government, aside from Starmer?
3) Haven't the press and the authorities shown a sort of protectionism of the identity group of the perpetrators of crimes in sort of a similar way to this day? They arrest people for likes and retweets that might stoke an anti-Islamic sentiment over there, aren't they continuing to lay the groundwork for more issues to crop up in insular communities like this?
4) This is an immigration story that probably informs a lot of negative feelings about current immigration policy?
I feel like we're a little too eager to call this "old news." But I'm an American, maybe I'm off here. I love you My file, don't hurt me.
it's not old news. they're just now starting to do what they should have done decades ago
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/grooming-gangs-taskforce-arrests-hundreds-in-first-year
a grand total of 400 cops on this.
It's not weird to bring it up because it's old, it's weird to say that until now it was a secret.
Fair! It wasn't a secret, but I don't think it was common knowledge, at least in America.
"England's prime minister"? For fuck's sake, Jesse, this shit is not hard.
It could be moderately hard if you're not from the UK, to be fair.
Nah, not that hard, especially as so much Barpod content is UK based and Singal has been in the UK at meet-ups.
I completely agree it's his responsibility as a journalist to get it right (particularly as the type of journalist who likes to talk about that responsibility a lot) but there's nothing intuitive about how political power is devolved within the UK.
If you played that CGP Grey video about the difference between the UK and Great Britain to the average man on the Clapham omnibus, I don't think they'd be exactly nodding along to it all.
I used to hear "Southern Ireland" all the time from intelligent, newspaper-reading English people, for instance.
I learned yesterday, that King Chaz is not the Head of the Church of Scotland. Also that there was a Church of Scotland. I still dont know how that all works.
I looked it up and it turns out the head of the Church of Scotland is none other than our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. Must be awkward when a journalist wants a statement from the church about something.
TiL!
It’s Presbyterian, so no head. Why wouldn’t Scotland have a church-it’s not a Catholic country, so it would likely have a national church.
I think that’s unfair-the average man, or woman(Stan), understands there are four countries and none of them are synonymous with the UK. The English don’t really do that anymore, although the may talk of themselves as “English” rather than British because white native Brits tend to cleave to their ethnic identity.
It is hard, most people in TUKoGBaNI don't even know all the proper nomenclature for our crazy 4 countries in one but not really.
Definitely a mistake, fair to be annoyed. But… we Americans often use the terms ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ interchangeably. Obviously that’s not reflective of reality, but it might have been more of a slip into common American shorthand, rather than Jesse not actually knowing the difference.
After this, you need to put an end to all “funny accent” shit all together. It was never funny to begin to waste minutes of time waiting through chortling about funny voices when trying to hear a quote about a subject being covered and this made it worse. Just cover the fucking subject matter and comment on it when appropriate
These “things that happened a long time ago,” according to Jesse, are still happening and not being dealt with properly. That’s part of the present scandal.
This is was a big miss in my opinion, the joking tone was just inappropriate, but Jesse also missed on why this is coming up again. He says that it ended in 2013, but there are those in the Brit press (rightly or wrongly) who claim that it continues to this day and the authorities are still avoiding it. Elon is a clown when it comes to intl affairs and should be more cautious, but that shouldn’t be grounds to make comedic content of a truly dreadful affair. This was my first episode since joining as a member; not a great start. Had to turn it off like others after 10 mins. Jesse should have taken more time to understand the mood in Britain over this and not simply turn it into an Elon story
This was a weird one, for sure. The lame attempts at “humor” was a rare mis-fire. For the record, it’s obvious that Jesse doesn’t find anything about child rape funny, but it sure came out that way. After all this debate on this message board, I’ve come to see it this way: Jeff Maurer is a consistently hilarious and brilliant social - political satirist. Jesse was all a twitter (if you will) to be sharing a mic with Jeff, so he brought out his “do funny accents” routine. But: this routine, or bit, works great with Katie (because she’s so awful at it and It IS funny.) But it was and probably always will be a big fat dud with anyone else. But Jesse, overcome with bro-like affection for the professional comedic talents of Jeff, and a desperate need for approval, got lazy and kept asking for “funny” accents. And it wasn’t funny. At all.
This is a good analysis of why Jesse was determined to ham it up, and why it fell so flat. If they’d kept it to a few attempts at Elon’s accent, I think it would have been fine. But the increasingly zany jokes and chortling… man, what the fuck.
Is the Free Press going to sue BARpod for violating its trademark on having a shit puddle comments section?
lol
Holy shit. I love this podcast but they made Elon seem like the sensitive one in this.
How?
Comparatively, but I was stretching it. It was just jarring to hear the topic discussed with so much giggling and funny accents.
HAHAHA remember when all those Jewish women got raped on October 7th?
HAHAHAHAH that was SO FUCKING FUNNY HAHAHAHAHA Don't get me wrong I'm taking this VERY SERIOUS subject on with EXTREME seriousness but isn't it SO FUCKING FUNNY??!?!?!
That's what it feels like listening to two Jews heartily laugh about Christian girls being raped.
Disgusting.
The people complaining about Musk publicizing this story are doing so for personal or ideological reasons; it has nothing to do with Judaism. Bari Weiss is being criticized elsewhere in this thread for drawing attention to it, and quite frankly, Jews have more reason than most to worry about the mass immigration from Muslim countries that has led to a devastating rise in antisemitism across Europe as well as this despicable series of crimes. Jesse has been very clear that he doesn’t feel an attachment to Israel or Israelis; his casual episodes following 10/7 were a very tough listen for those of us who were sickened and shocked by Hamas’s brutality on 10/7.
It's called reading the room.
Also, as a side note, Jeff is not Jewish.
You are an utter cunt.
Lots of Love
A white Northern English Christian girl.
What makes you think the victims were Christian? Isn’t it pretty likely many of them were non-religious? Aren’t you just assuming their religious affiliation so you can ham-handedly make this about Jews despite Jesse and Jeff’s ethnic background not being the slightest bit relevant?
Jeff apparently isn't even a Jew but the name Benjy Shyovitz is literally poking me in the eye
Maurer isn't even Jewish but it says something that that's where you went with this.
I don't think it even occurred to Jesse that the victims were Christian is significant. I don't know that it *is* significant.
But I do wish people wouldn't fall all over themselves to exonerate Islam/Muslims in these situations. We can't understand and therefore prevent these things unless we are able to discuss it clearly and without bullshit.
Muslim immigration into Europe has had serious downsides.
I don't remember the episodes after that attack having shitty Austin Powers impressions so something's different.
Maybe it's not appropriate to inject humor into this discussion. I could see that. But I don't think Jesse and Mauer's religion have (or the girls religion) have any meaning.
But I can understand if you think they're being too glib about such a grave subject
Your comment is disgusting since it's not what happened.
I like that you had to come back and reply to the same comment again the next day you fucking loser lmao
Jeff Maurer isn’t Jewish, as far as I know. Not sure why you’re assuming he is?
It would literally take you 3 seconds to Google it and find out it's an Ashkenazic name like I did. Hope that helps.
You can also Google what he writes on his sub stack about his religion, which is this:
'My wife and I plan to raise our son in our faith tradition, which is: lapsed. I’m a lapsed Christian, she’s a lapsed Jew. We will teach him about our traditions, which include sleeping in on weekends and eating whatever the hell we want.'
Fyi, Maurer is also a German surname
Even worse, he doesn't even care about his own people. Thank you for the correction.
Too soon?
Disheartening to hear men so casually discuss the mistreatment of women. I can't imagine Jesse and Jeff acting this way if a woman were present. This ain't it, chief.
Thought experiment:
Instead of UK it’s Israel
Instead of Paki men it’s Orthodox settlers
Instead of low class white girls it’s Palestinian girls.
And then Bibi’s government says: “we’ve fully investigated this atrocity and all the involved parties have met full consequences”
How charitable are you now to the government’s inquiry??
Cities would be burning. Please stop the bullshit.
You forgot the part where Elon swoops in a decade after the events have been uncovered, pretends to break news while fucking up basic facts, and targets individuals who have been righting the wrongs of the past.
Your comment here display that you don't understand the basic premise of the show. No one is trying to coverage of this topic. The issue here is that someone with massivs just misled tons of people on the basic facts in the most self serving and now folks tryin to correct the record. There is nothing helpful about this and you care about tradgedy it should piss you off. It makes sense that the focus is on Elon and tweets shaping the discourse. This is a podcast about internet bullshit.
OK. then insert between "Palestinian girls" and "bibi's government" :
---"inquiries are made, reported in media, but conservative papers avoid it, Hareetz is all over it though, Bibi serves as main prosecutor"
"AOC just discovers story years later and tweets about it, stoking fresh outrage, many in Israel are calling for more investigations"---
go!
dude, does this look like problem fucking solved to you?
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/grooming-gangs-taskforce-arrests-hundreds-in-first-year
this is from 2024!!!
and more investigation is out of the question?
"nothing to see hear folks, we have it all under control, just trust your government leaders, go back to your social media, but don't post anything offensive because we'll be at your door!"
the fact that they assign even one police officer to investigate offensive posts in the setting of one of the top 10 government-enabled human tragedies in the last 100 years shows the moral rot in British society.
You miss the part where I guess AOC in this scenario undermines the prior investigations on the subject, attacks the investigators themselves, and uses the topic for self promotion and to push their preferred political narrative. In your thought experiment, would it then be warranted for some to do an episode of a podcast criticizing AOC's contribution to this story? Or would your take still be well at least people are talking about it now!
let's say I have a painful papercut on my left hand. really hurts.
but then let's say I have a gaping festering wound further up my left arm. the wound doesn't hurt as much because the nerve endings are dead.
Which one am I going to focus on more?
Elon's grating tweets are paper cuts man.
sometimes the paper cut alerts us to the festering wound, if only by dumb chance.
I agree, Elon should shut the fuck up at this point. whatever good he did dredging this up (which I think is good. more needs to be dredged up.) has been done. he is a hinderance now.
but he is not deserving of an iota of opprobrium relative to the vast swaths of British institutions and society responsible for the actual scandal.
I think that's what drives this defensiveness. the knowledge that this thoroughly and completely humiliates the entire British identity.
So your argument is they should focus on attempting to deep dive into the events of the actual story rather than the internet bullshit angle that spreading like wildfire at the moment? And you think them not doing this is evidence that they think the story should be downplayed and dismissed? Do you see a bit of a comprehension issue here on your part?
around the 9-10 minute mark this guy has a proper take on Elon's tweets.
to the extent that they raised much needed awareness, good, but he's not helpful at this point and should shut up.
https://youtu.be/qngLeibyuyY?si=hyA4SahVNbIV4dAC
that is the proper take in my opinion. not "this matter is closed it shouldn't have even been brought up".
that's the kind of thing pedo enablers say.
Not sure who you're quoting there, but I think you have constructed quite bull shit straw man in your head.
Anyway, if you don't value analyzing the internet discourse surrounding news events and prefer instead to only listen to outlets that focus exclusively on covering the events themselves, then fine, totally your prerogative. They're plenty of great outlets covering this topic and they absolutely should listening to. However, if that is your take, which it sounds like it is to best that make your take sensible, you are clearly listening to wrong the podcasts. This podcast is a podcast about internet discourse and the bull shit that ensues from said discourse.
However, I also suspect what you are really looking for is not thoughtful analysis on this case itself, but analysis that uses the moral outrage to fuel your political priors. Facts and nuance be damned, just make sure it is directionally in the right direction
I am quoting, or paraphrasing, Jesse Fucking Singal. in the podcast.
he said "this has been litigated". it didn't need to be brought up. case closed.
that is not a fucking strawman.
you accusing me of having political priors is the strawman.
oh I see, the side I don't like wants this to be investigated, because it helps them politically. not because the problem still exists, that only half measures have been taken, symbolic gestures made to placate the masses.
of course, I see.
but the side I do like doesn't want this probed any further, because their intentions are good and wise and pure. not because it might hurt them.
my side good, always, motivated by the best of intentions.
wow, such a pervert for nuance you are.
Oh that was jesse singal quote. Somehow missed that. Or the actual resembles nothing of your paraphrased attempt.
I can tell this is fruitless effort because your willfully misinterpreting the hosts, as well the critiques you are presented with. I can tell you this line argument is only persuasive to someone has already bought hook line and sinker into narrative you have spun here. Folks who care more about narrative than facts and nuance. Unfortunately that is good number of people in this comment section
Correction, the co-host stated “this was litigated a decade ago”
Jesse agreed.
Later Jesse stated this happened, past tense, a decade ago.
I dispute that characterization.
My position is that it is still happening,
That only half measures have been implemented, and that only a fraction of the individuals have been held accountable.
Apparently many in the UK agree that more needs to be done.
That Jesse could put his umbrage over what he sees as “internet bullshit” on the same level as ongoing sexual brutalization of girls is appalling.
I agree with the video above (which you didn’t watch) that more needs to be done and Elon’s tweets are not helping. That’s a very different message from this podcast.
See, we can both agree that Elon’s tweets suck.
Yay. Now leave me alone I’m exhausted with this.
`Cities would be burning. Please stop the bullshit.'
Soldiers working at Sde Teiman prison who committed rape and murderer are defended and basically acceptable to Israeli society. The US populace is seemingly unconcerned about Palestinians dying because hot pokers were shoved up their asses.
Bibi would never even have to attempt to deny any such scenario you've outlined.
Ya got me. Prisoner abuse is totally the same as 250,000 raped girls enabled by the government.
Maybe I should be quiet and listen.
250,000? You are disconnected from reality.
I see. What is the official estimate?
Oh, you can’t find a reliable estimate?
Hmm.
Sounds like no more investigation is needed.
So you just threw out that some preposterously large percentage of the (largely) white, underage population in the UK was raped?
Not all at once man.
This has been going on for decades.
This is an estimate that has been proposed.
Maybe further investigation is warranted no?
No matter what the political fallout is.
Seems like more people are afraid of who will benefit politically than wanting to get a full accounting of the horror.
That “preposterously large percentage” comes from an estimate given in the debates in the UK parliament (UK independence Party, although years earlier a Labour MP had similarly given an estimate “in the 100s of thousands”, possibly up to a million).
The truth is we don’t know, because of the extent of the cover-ups that occurred at the local level. I speak of tens of thousands in these discussions because, given the known cases, the timespan, and the number of communities involved, that’s a fairly safe *minimum*. I want to think, and truly hope, that 250K is a hugely inflated number, but it’s not entirely out of the range of possibility given what we do know.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/pearson-rotherham-sarah-champion-elon-musk-tommy-robinson-b1203915.html
It's only a possibility if you believe that what happened in Rotherham was not unique.
The only way you can get to such widely high numbers is by assuming that similar gangs exist throughout the UK and were similarly not impeded for decades---something for which there is simply no evidence.
Also, the article points out how terribly wrong Musk was and is on this---him saying there were millions of rapes---again a reminder that the people and persons trying to rile you up about this may not be the most reliable or doing it for the best reasons.
Maybe bring on Julie to cover this one instead?
Oh man, I already know I’m going to hate this one. Love you guys, but I do hate when this topic comes up.
Jessie Singal has musk derangement syndrome and it is impairing his ability to do good
LOL “He died for our dinner.”
The episode gets so much better after the Elon/ rape segment for anyone thinking they want to skip the whole thing. Skip to minute 38 instead and enjoy some Jesus Shrimp.
I'll let the 5 minutes I heard in the beginning be enough. Had my fill of B&R and Jesse for now.
Lots of comments here about Americans not being aware of British news. Can I ask if people in the US are aware of the Labour MP (and friend of Jess Phillips) Jo Cox being murdered by the far right in 2016? That seems relevant when people claim that those whipping up hatred against Phillips, based on false claims, are doing some kind of public service.
I’m an American and I remember this. 2016 was strange, dark times.
Just because it was eventually brought to the light doesn't mean there wasn't a cover up. In this instance there clearly was, for years.
It's not an ongoing cover up, though, as has been implied by our new social media overlord.
That's fair enough, I just thought the nuance was lost there.
I always assumed that Jeff was not part of why I found (and still find) Last Week Tonight so smarmy and heavy-handed with the ill-placed non-sequiturs, and blamed that on John Oliver himself, but I don’t think I can anymore.
John Oliver is indigestible by now. You have to marinate in a certain media bubble to enjoy it.
Can one same point to a single joke thet made that was made at the expense of the victims? Or point to where they actually downplayed the tragedy of the events? The comments on here are insane
you are correct. but the fact that they were trying to make it funny was cringeworthy. Like a lot of forced "Last week tonight" type jokes.
it wasn't great comedy.
and then when the tone turned uber serious when discussing Elon's transgressions. like that was by far the worst of it.
very poorly done segment.
Fine than don't listen to it. This is a light hearted jokey show and they absolutely did so with enough to care to not downplay the seriousness of accusations. This tact was warranted because it showing that musk is using tragedy to drum up moral outrage for political ends. Obviously that offends your sensibilities and made all the points fly right over your head. But coming in here pretending like the whole poinnt was to engage rape apologetics because we are suppose to hate musk is so narrow minded and insulting and frankly dumb. People are willfully missing the points of this show to play up the moral outrage and run defense for their side. Musk is not doing any favors for discourse, as is evidenced that he knows next nothing about the investigations, is singling the individuals who have attempted to right the situation with baseless accusations and is being condemned by investigators and the families of victims a like. If you don't want facts to get in the way of your moral outrage than set up camp at the free press
I will listen to whatever the fuck I want to listen to. And I will call out crap content when I hear it.
Your emotional defense of the content of this podcast might suggest some parasocial tendencies. Seek help.
Your entitled to you opinion and yes you can listen to whatever you want. Just like people have the right criticize your opinions.
My emotional reactionisn't from an attachment to the host. Trust me, I criticized them plenty in the past. My reaction is to the audience dynamics that often inherently exert a lot of pressure on the creators because they are audience supported. What I am calling is the red pilled bias of the audience and the frequency with which you all get into tizzy when their content doesn't feed your desired anti left, anti establishment narrative. Your criticism is full of holes and the bs is what I am calling out.
No, you are misstating my position as “anti-left/establishment”
These are bullshit straw man attacks.
I don’t expect content creators to meet my needs.
I create my own happiness.
And call bullshit when I see it.
I understand that sometimes that is inconvenient for people who see more virtue in towing the party line.
It’s an acceptable trade off for me.
"I understand that is inconvenient for people who see more virtue in towing the party line." Haha yes of course, because lord knows this podcasts shies away from criticizing the left. Anyway, don't let me stop you from call bs as you see it. But don't think immune from bias and hypocrisy
No one is immune from bias and hypocrisy
Lots of arguing strongly about this episode from different sides. But one thing I think we can all agree on: this guest isn’t funny and doesn’t bring anything interesting.
Wrong.
Thousands and thousands of girls since the 80s are raped and ignored by the police and government, but you're right @jessesingal, it's a SUPER bummer that Elon brings attention to it
Absolutely sincere question: I see the rage in the comments but from what I understand of the grooming gangs issue:
- The authorities dropped the balls massively more than 2 decades ago.
- They finally got their act together 1 decade ago and put new processes in place to prevent it happening again as much (as much as they could, sexual exploitation is an endemic problem everywhere unfortunately).
- The only reason we're talking about it is that an insanely rich, brilliant but troubled man is having a personal beef with the prime minister of the UK and decided to unearth the issue.
It seems to me that the truly worrying thing is that last point, the amount of power that a single unelected and kinda mentally unstable man is able to wield on the current discourse of society. He's accountable to no one and seems to act mainly on whatever has pissed him off last, which is already how social media work. Do we need a king of social media to lead us?
Am I missing something? The tone may have been off but the point that podcast was making seemed valid to me. Admittedly, I'm not British so there may be more to the story but right now I don't get the virulence of the reactions...
The latter is of course what the story is. Is there a sort of Euro vs US divide going on here, with regards to the fury? I thought this was a once-in-lifetime-level story worldwide, but it seems to have never reached the US, which honestly is embarrassing to US media.
I think the implied “oh so you don’t care about the rape of socially vulnerable children” discourse going on is disappointing and reminds me of the most rabid of the free palestine nuts.
You put it exactly right, the violence of the reactions seems weirdly hysterical, full of hyperbole about children abuse. The story is done, has been done for a while and people react as if it was ongoing.
I feel like I'm witnessing a satanic panic or a new pizzagate scandal among listeners of the pod, which really surprises me. Is Musk that influential or is it something in the air with the last american election?
The abuse is ongoing. Whether the failure of authorities to support the victims (and even recognise them as victims) is something that's been sufficiently addressed, I don't know, but I suspect not. Whether portions of the UK media have addressed their failure to run the story when they should have, and not as fully as they would have had it not had the racial element, I very, very much doubt (Another comment here highlights channel 4's reissuing this week of a docu series about a specific case of a *fake* grooming scandel, which is at best confusing in the context).
Jesse, much as I love him, made it sound like it all happened 10 years ago, in one large town and surrounding areas, and has all been fully addressed. With more organised gangs now being prosecuted (hopefully that's a sign the authorities are now better at dealing with it), we now know this is happening in towns and small cities across the north of England in particular, but also in the midlands, and south.
As others have said, this would definitely have been a good episode to bring in a UK co-host.
Which agency do you work for? Are you involved with any of the safeguarding changes?
Ah, if there are very recent prosecutions then yes the podcast could have been clearer, I did not get that from their conversation at all.
I still feel it's natural to focus more on Elon's role in all that, it's about internet bullshit after all, but clearly the subject was at least not prepared enough. Helen Lewis would have done a much more thorough job.
it did reach the US, but the Elon people screaming about it on Twitter were probably not following international news a decade ago.
Elon was idiotic in his response, but he isn’t responsible for re-igniting the issue it has come up again in UK in response to many of the perps being sentenced. It is a topic in UK press (for good or bad) and Elon just amplified an existing topic.
This might be a bit nitpicky but I am getting annoyed by people claiming that you have to see Musk's tweets on Twitter (as Maurer does). You don't. Mute him. It just works.
Yes! I find it very easy to ignore Elon and simply not thinking about him at all for days at a time. Elon Derangement Syndrome is incredibly tedious and appears to be making some people lose all sense and perspective entirely.
Yes, especially the people who start digging up decades-old stories and agitating for a sitting PM to resign over them because it’s all they know about any of it.
Read the fucking room, Jesse. Seriously.
There's more than one room, just some people are very loud.
Let Jesse BE the Twitter drama and have Katie DISCUSS the Twitter drama.
This was a disgusting podcast. Shameful.
They were so poorly informed on this story getting multiple things factually wrong, and incredibly unfunny as well.
This was without a doubt the worst episode of BARpod.
I also can’t believe Katie would allow two jeering males to make such a boorish, flippant episode about the systematic rape of girls on her podcast, I’m actually super disappointed no one realized this was incredibly bad.
Something being sad isn't a fact to be realized, it's an opinion based on perspective. No one here is confused as to the fact that young children went through terror and pain. Some of us just don't need to advertise how distraught we are about it because it's redundant to do so. If you want to rend your clothes in anguish, that's understandable, but don't then demand that others who have exactly the same degree of connection to these girls as you, do the same. Humor has no sacred idol.
Your reply has no relationship to my criticism, did you reply to the wrong comment?
I feel like I'm losing my mind seeing so many Americans seemingly just refusing to believe it when UK people explain that this really has already been a massive story here for well over a decade. There is nobody in the UK who wasn't already far too aware of it. There was even a BBC drama and follow-up documentary about in 2017, which was in itself a huge deal.
Just to illustrate further, this scandal single-handedly radicalized my own mother in about *2013* and sent her down a horrible right-wing rabbit hole that she's still plummeting through to this day.
It's one of the bleakest stories imaginable, but that's precisely why what Musk is doing is such a fucking disgrace. There is further justice that needs to be served, and I'm sure more grim details will continue to energe for years to come, but Musk's intervention is just insanely unhelpful and stupid. He's a moron and a cretin, and so are all of his fans.
yeah no, i believe you, but i personally didn't know about it.
What i don't understand is, how is Musk's intervention, unhelpful and stupid, affecting anything in the UK?
He's making it a partisan political issue, purely because he's decided he hates Keir Starmer. Politics here is ugly enough as it is, as it is in most places these days, but having the richest fuckwit ever to walk the Earth barge in and pour petrol on it all (probably from the toilet in Mar-a-Lago) just makes things even worse. It's the only thing it can do.
You are overestimating his influence, he is a private citizen of another country
Not at all! He's the reason we're talking about it! There haven't been any significant recent revelations. There wasn't anything useful to be added for the time being. It was just him learning about it for the first time years after the fact and confusing that for it only now coming to light at all. Because he's a baby-brained twit who still hasn't quite grasped object permanence. It's not good when extremely stupid yet rich and powerful people can set entire countries' political agenda for the week with a single tweet while sitting on a toilet in Florida.
So people in US just learned about this, no impact on UK. People in UK already knew about it, also no impact. I am just not seeing it, can't understand the rage. It will be forgotten by the next week. Not to mention people have agency and shouldn't be this susceptible to manipulation from someone's twitter
Of course it's going to have an impact on the UK when the richest man in history pours petrol on what is already an extremely grim scandal so that he can use it to to undermine the government, even if that government only came to power last July, many years after this stuff happened. Why on earth would it not? You can argue that it shouldn't, that we should all ignore him, but in the real world that actually exists he's going to dominate headlines when he does this shit.
He's quite open about being hell-bent on toppling the UK government. He can't do that, because that's not how UK politics works when you have an enormous majority in parliament and another four and a half years to go before there needs to be another election, but it still makes everything stupider and more poisonous.
You guys are in charge of your own government, not Elon musk or any viral tweet. If people are so easily influenced, that's in my opinion on them, not some dum dum twitter poster no matter how rich
No, he can't possibly undermine the gov, that's all in people's heads
It's embarrassing the UK, and rightfully so. So
they're all squirming around. As they should.
I genuinely cannot express in words how little, for me, this has to do with wanting to avoid embarrassment for the UK. I've never in my life even believed that the UK should exist.
Mae'r enw defnyddiwr yn cyd-fynd
Cyd-fynd efo beth?
eich neges... as in "username checks out" my Welsh is only Duolingo level, sori!
Popeth yn iawn! Pob lwc efo'r dysgu!
Diolch :)
This is weird to me if so. I'd never think the scandal would reflect poorly on a random brit. Maybe I am simply immune to a concept of a national embarrassment at this point as a Russian person.
And UK people here are presumably indulging in listening to a podcast about embarrassing bullshit happening in US, so kind of hypocritical of them
What's weird to me is how offended the Brits are that it's once again making headlines. Everyone knows about George Floyd but somehow the knowledge of this didn't spread to America widely (yes it was covered but it wasn't widespread) and therefore it's the Americans' fault who didn't know. What? Maybe if it got the George Floyd treatment from the get-go, we wouldn't be here now.
Really hard for me to comprehend their reactions. Is there such thing as a self conscious nation?
And I still fail to understand how Musk has any capacity to "undermine" UK gov. Yeah ok there will be some headlines, but according to commenters here and apparently Jesse, it's all has been sufficiently covered already and all guilty parties are punished
Me neither. Apparently people (and governments?) are not capable of deciphering for themselves and interpret everything said by Elon as word of God and must be acted upon.
Not all guilty parties have been punished and many got away with a slap on the wrist.
maybe it has something to do with underlying political dynamics, or more specifically "hate facts" having to do with Muslims, making it that much harder for Labour to win?
Perhaps but why is it all blamed on Elon? I simply don't understand. To me it seems, that they would prefer to sweep it under the rug, in true British fashion to avoid the prolonged "unpleasantness." It's probably why it got the treatment it did back then and never truly resolved and the Muslim fundamentalist communities have gotten bolder.
Haha "unpleasantness", didn't even occur to me. Elon is a deflection then.
When Muslim men flooded Moscow in the early 90s, I witnessed some shitty things, not surprised at how they are treating women, especially girls.
Totally. We left USSR before the collapse so I didn't see that. Would be curious to learn what you've seen.
Yet another fresh example of how women are treated as cattle was last night's "victory" celebration in Gaza. Men and boys with guns. Not a woman in sight. As one Palestinian woman observed "we are only equal when you count bodies." The Brits brought this on themselves and instead of addressing it head on and saying yes we fucked up and continue to do so, they deflect with Elon or bring up American school shootings. What a shame really. Hope it gets stopped before it's too late.
I know, and I feel bad pointing out those were Muslim men. For instance Tatar Muslims are completely different culturally. I've known many, I even dated one. It's specific subsets that are worse. I can't imagine it'd change any time soon
Fundamentalism and culture are the problem.
Best friend made a friend in палатка she worked or a tech school she went to, who had an alcoholic mother and a little sister, must have been 13 or 12 then. Mother hit the bottom by then, no father. She had a bunch of those men move in to their 2 bedroom khrushevka, sleeping with her, with that little sister. Little sister eventually got pregnant, couple years after that and had a baby, but I lost touch. The older sister got married and moved out really fast. It wasn't uncommon, they were taking advantage of those drunks and their families/apartments. Those men had families back where they came from too. Gross.
Best friend had this older Azerbaijanian man, палатка owner, rent her an apartment for a while. There was some violence involved too. She wasn't sharing details because I didn't approve of the situation. Good times.
I have no other reaction, but oh my God.
It is crazy the number of people in this thread who say, since they somehow never heard of it in the past decade, it was therefore never investigated by press or law enforcement, and it was covered up specifically by the labor party since they control government and must be destroyed.
How would you compare the column inches that something like 'partygate' got to the grooming gangs? Incidentally a lot of British people on this thread claim that it all stopped 10 years ago, which isn't true.
from what I'm reading, many of those convicted are now free. having served their terms or released early.
I don't think anyone has been deported.
The best deterrent would be deportation, but no, let's just say we have everything under control while rapes still happen and Pakistani men can exploit the loopholes of the British legal system to avoid what would probably be certain death in a less tolerant country.
Helen Lewis did not appreciate Louise Perry contributing to the “media undercoverage” narrative: https://substack.com/@helenlewis/note/c-85465989?r=oe7j0&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
I really liked Jeff’s bit about Myanmar and the John Oliver segment, and I’d like to hear more on that. This Rolling Stone headline shows the direction that segment went:
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/john-oliver-facebook-hate-speech-myanmar-728235/
Jesse mentioned putting a link to his piece about Politifact in the notes; I didn’t see it in the notes but found it online here: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/why-would-i-possibly-trust-bill-adair
This is fucking nauseating.
Saw the episode and thought ‘this will be terrible and uninformed,’ and now I’m looking at the comments and I’m not feeling positive. I try not to judge something before I’ve listened to it but accents, jokes… I think I now understand why people need trigger warnings.
Just listening and oh my goodness, the tone is so wrong. Why does Jesse have this guy on on to talk about one of the most horrific stories of sexual violence in the UK? How is Jeff in any way qualified to talk about this?
They should have gotten Helen Lewis on to talk about this with Jesse; seems like she would have some good insights.
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://static1.squarespace.com/static/599c3d2febbd1a90cffdd8a9/t/5bfd1ea3352f531a6170ceee/1543315109493/Islamophobia+Defined.pdf
2018 report that defines Islamophobia so broadly it includes pointing out that there are muslim rape gangs.
this was used to silence Suella Braverman in 2023.
this is well after 2014 when Jesse suggested the matter had been litigated.
oh look, the grooming gangs taskforce is at it, doing good work in it's first year!
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/grooming-gangs-taskforce-arrests-hundreds-in-first-year
that's 20 - fucking 24 !!!
400 cops assigned to this task force. HOW MANY ARE ASSIGNED TO POLICING OFFENSIVE TWEETS?
yeah, cased closed in 2014 Jesse. nothing to see here folks.
fucking vomit man. I never thought this podcast would even tangentially enable the enablers of pedophilia, um excuse me, Minor Attracted Personhood.
the left will learn the hard lessons the Catholic church did. you may think you have the moral authority, and that you are untouchable, but when you fuck with kids, you get fucked up.
the pain is coming.
pull off the band-aid now please. because the right wing backlash will be horrendous.
I'll just add my opinion that I also think this was a very bad episode, Jesse & guest had a weak understanding of the issue and treated the matter trivially. The accents were a bad idea.
I found it telling that Jesse and Jeff completely ignored Zuck's last point regarding bullying other countries into changing their regulations to suit American political culture, preferences, whims, etc. I'm probably overly sensitive to this at the moment, but as a Canadian I am aghast at Trump's recent threats towards the sovereignty of other countries, particularly my own, and bitterly disappointed at the seemingly muted response and lack of pushback from large portions of the population of our closest (?) ally. Zuck's final comment about bullying other countries seems vaguely like American imperialism to me and our good liberal hosts didn't even notice. That particularly American delusion of their own exceptionalism seems alive and well.
How do you feel about other countries doing this to the US? The EU, Canada for example.
I'm not sure in what context this would occur. Certainly not in a Canadian context, the US is too large. If we're taking Facebook as an example, I don't believe the EU regulating their own market is comparable to the US trying to bully the EU into reducing their regulations to be in line with US ones. If Facebook or another American company wants to make money in a foreign market, they should comply with the rules of that market when selling there. They can use different products, standards, etc. in home markets.
Do you have an example of this conduct?
This is like someone from Britain going crazy saying that they - in 2025 - had never heard of priests in Boston molesting kids and the media and government had swept it entirely under the rug and never done any investigation or prosecution, refused to publicize it and it was solely the Democrats fault that it was never investigated.
British Musk would be saying Joe Biden should be jailed for his covering up Boston and congress disolved.
Best friend of the pod Helen Lewis making this point
https://substack.com/@helenlewis/note/c-85465989
"Ah yes, the grooming gangs story was confined to the unseen backwaters of …. the Times front page. On multiple occasions. This one is from 2012."
I honestly don't think anyone in Boston would care if anyone from Britain was saying any of this
They would if it was Elon Musk and his propaganda was being repeated across the entire English-speaking world. “Thick skinned” is not how I would describe most Americans in response to foreign criticism!
My impression from living in USA for 15 years now is that people here don't care what anyone outside of US thinks. This is compared to living in um Europe I guess. It's not about being thick skinned at all. It's about being unbothered by the outside world. Which begs the question, why do you care what people outside of UK think?
People in the US are losing their minds over foreign criticism. I see it all the time - the glee over Trump threatening to go into Greenland is a good example. It makes no sense at all, but there’s a general sense that smooth Europeans need to be shown who’s boss.
And that’s just the very online people. If normie Americans had as much commentary as non-Americans do in term of volume, they’d likely be demanding a war.
Incorrect, no one cares, it's all only in relation to Trump. I didn't know about the scandal, no one in my American family has,band I am not even natural born American and my sister lives in UK. People here do not consume foreign news, meanwhile you are on this podcast chat that is made in USA and are oh so painfully aware about what people think. This is just my perspective, no offense.
No offence taken, we’re taking about different things. Have a smashing day.
I’m nowhere near as offended by the “wacky” accents or obnoxious attempts at humor as most of the people in these comments but I agree that this was one of your worst episodes ever. This is the most exasperated I’ve felt listening to BARPOD since your Citibike episode from summer 2023.
Oh god don’t bring that one up!
Have to say, I found the tone of that really off. From the accents onwards it was kinda not great. For me anyway.
IDK what happened but I have a feeling when Katie returns she's going to ask Jesse why he "ignited a Civil War" over here.
Because he's addicted to twitter and he feels Elon ruined it.
This episode basically made me feel justified in skipping the Chicago live show even though I’m local.
I think Jesse and his guest did a great job with this one. The comments here, however, have me concerned. It’s as if musk can do no wrong.
We’re becoming The Free Press and if that continues I’m out.
Hardly any of these comments are about musk, the vast majority are questioning the tone of the episode given the subject matter
Katie is going to tear into Jesse on the next episode. Just wait. He'll probably start the episode off with an apology.
I hope not. If the hosts start cringingly apologizing based on the pearl-clutching and offense-seekkng displayed here in the comments, I really will have to rethink continuing my subscription.
Being angered by something like the last episode isn't "pearl clutching" or "offense-seeking". Writing that is lazy, incorrect and reductive.
I'm just wondering if I listened to the same episode as some of the people here. I can't see how it's inappropriate to make fun of Elon Musk and his use of these horrific crimes to grift for his own self-interest. It's disgusting and I can't quite understand why people are more angered about this episode than about that.
Think you are lost in your personal warped online world if this is your take.
Jesse apologized at 2: 55 on the latest episode. Looks like it's time to ponder your subscription, mate.
Nah, I think I'm good for now. A little disappointed in the semi-apology but Katie's continued "rep" jokes have convinced me the show will remain as offensive as ever, so I'll stick around a little longer. The comments here make me sad though so I'll probably give those up for a bit instead.
Also regarding "having to listen to Elon's tweets" - no, you don't, you can block him, or leave that damnable and ridiculous site and not deal with it. I feel like people like Jesse and Jeff are finally, finally discovering what it's like to be a teenager who doesn't like pop music and has to go out of his way to create spaces and ways of doing things where you aren't subjected to it. I survived, you will too, members of team urban elite default Democrats!
Jesse needs more (other) friends.
Increasingly feels like taking the over on a Barpod-Free Press schism would be the right move. At least on Jesse’s end (Shellenberger, etc.). Honestly, can’t blame him.
Shellenberger is a ghoul. He lurks in the Tenderloin at night licking the toes of passed out fent addicts.
I appreciate the vividness of the imagery. Can’t wait to see the ai image of it
So - this isn't grooming, it's classic pimping. It's what happens in America just the same. Except in America the victims are mostly black and Latina, but they're recruited into sex work at similar ages with similar methods. Would we call American sex work the product of "Black Grooming Gangs"?
If you read some of the court documents of the (few) prosecutions, it is particularly brutal abuse and torture on the level you might see in war zones. Girls had to have hysterectomies because the abuse was so brutal. One girl’s tongue was nailed to a table as part of her torture. Younger sisters would be abducted to blackmail the elder girl to continue to accept abuse. At least one family died when the abuser burned their house down. It often started with grooming, but quickly moved to the most violent and horrific abuse imaginable.
It’s both. The victims were mostly very young when first approached. “Grooming“ rightly refers to the men posing as actual boyfriends to these girls. Of course they were never boyfriends, and over time they morphed into pimps. We can think of grooming as a tool that pimps use.
Regarding the racial dimension, a black pimp in the United States will typically recruit black girls. Both perpetrator and victim come from a similar milieu. Whereas in England, the pimps were emboldened by a cultural difference that discourages pimping out women of their own background but frames white, non-Muslim girls as unworthy of protection and perhaps not quite fully human.
[lightly edited to fix some gibberish from dictation in the first couple of sentences]
That's how a lot of girls get into prostitution - they're "boyfriend" convinces them. It's potentially the main way it happens
Indeed, and this was one of the problems. If it was recognised at all that these girls were having sex with multiple adult men it was framed as "prostitution".
When this was discussed on Reddit the other day a girl from the north of England said that as a white teenage girl, she got propositioned by white English men in this exact way, all the time. Offered booze, lifts home from school, etc.
In my experience of England this feels intuitively true.
If you have Jeff Maurer on you should start the show with a copyright expired song. I don't make the rules.
Honestly, with "Elon" in the title I'm going to have to skip this episode. I'm neutral on Musk but it seems he breaks their ability to be nuanced on whatever topic he's involved in.
Plus the 1,000+ comment section suggests this was probably a shit show of an episode that will be hard to listen to. The Jesse and Guest episodes seem to flop a lot.
Essentially Jesse hates Elon for pissing in his sandbox (twitter). So much so that he decided to bring a comedian on to discuss the organised mass rape of children in the UK.
Just to push back on the faux-outrage, I thought the tone and jokes were fine, the whole vibe of this pod is dark humor, people need to unclutch their pearls, the pod has joked about much darker stuff than this and hands didn’t fly to throats nearly as fast. Honestly…buncha church ladies.
That said, the coverage of the event was Jesse’s standard partisan credulousness and its yet again tiresome.
OTOH, Jeff was a fun guest and funny and I hope he can see clear to coming back and forget our poor behavior. The fact a *comedy writer* doing comedy felt the need to apologize at B&R should embarrass us all. It’s the online equivalent to heckling a stand-up for doing material you think is too dirty. FFS.
Lol are people really mad about this? Y'all must just not be familiar with BARPod. I think they did a fine job presenting the story -- the story was about Elon's dumbass tweets and his outsized influence. The dark rape stuff (which happened a decade ago) was just the background, and it was told in a considerate and respectful way.
The funniest part of all of this is how pissed off Katie is going to be bc of all the people who unsubscribe though lmao. MY MONEYYYYY
I'm sorry why do you think the grooming gangs were stopped a decade ago?
People seem to have forgotten what this show is about, which is internet bullshit. That is why the focus of the episode Elon's tweet and how they were incredibly misleading, self serving and actually unhelpful for the cause. This was not meant to be an in depth investigation of the event, but just to provide the context that elon and others completely neglected and show the bs they're spewing.
The fact that people see this as a dismissal of the seriousness of the story, or think that the takeaway message is that people shouldn't be talking about this story is ludicrous. It would be great for another podcast to a deep dive into the events of that dark story for folks who are unfamiliar (not the FP who also botched the story), But this is not the podcast for that sort of deep dive. This is a podcast on internet bullshit and the discourse that stems from such bullshit. Again, this is why they angle they chose made sense. You didn't need a deep dive to shoe how musk fucked this story. He did so in the most basic, cursory ways. It is amazing people on here supposedly care about that event deeply support musk in this. It should give you pause when the victims families condemn musk's tweets.
And I get many of you were clearly offended that they used a humorous tone because you saw that as downplaying, but if you actually listen to their words there was a lot tact as to not down play the events. Given that is the general tone of the show and that they have used similar humor when discussing other heavy topics in the past, I am fairly skeptical of this claim. But if it offends you then I understand not listening. This also might just be the wrong podcast for you. And if it offends you because of their criticism of musk and the FP, than it is definitely wrong podcast for you
I definitely took the segment as being about Musk and his “internet bullshit.” Because that’s the Barpod beat. Unfortunately, to get to the “internet bullshit,” they had to explain what Musk was going on about.
Speaking as an American female, I’m aware of the UK grooming gangs and the atrocities they’ve committed on girls. I’ve listened to Julie Bindel talk about it. The Triggernometry guys have covered it too. It’s horrific.
So while I get that the joking was a way to get through providing the horrific background story, I understand why so many folks are upset.
I actually agree on the FP criticism. For whatever reason, I’m less interested in what the FP offers. Probably because I don’t care about what some of the regulars have to say about current events.
To be clear, I can understand how some can find the tone distasteful. It am not going to critique someones personal sensibilities and i get why some might not like the episode because of the. I take issue with all those willfully misinterpreting the hosts points and words because their sensibility were offended. I find the vast majority of the criticism on this episode to be off base. I think some of this because they can't past the jokey tone and some of this is because it doesn't align with people's ideological alliances.
I see most of the comments are devoted to the beginning of this podcast but the bombshell of the end about the Myanmar military and the responsibility of most of the killing there, which in the US media were largely blamed on hate speech on Facebook, was one of those unsettling moments where my whole understanding of something was upended.
I know the Myanmar controversy caused many to leave Facebook and declare it an immoral company and most likely there were problems with the way the company handled all of it. However the assessment that most of the killings were not associated with any of the activity on Facebook both makes perfect sense and shows how easily it is to be mislead by the way information is prioritized.
This was a powerful and thought provoking episode. There is no reason to apologize at all for any of it. Thanks for being willing to discuss these difficult issues!
The part of the podcast I liked the least. Maurer was definitely downplaying how disliked the Rohingya are by a substantial portion of other Burmese people and how, while they may not have liked the amount of persecution they faced, were clearly OK with it happening and thought it best that Rohingya people be forced to leave as they don't believe they're actually Burmese.
Also people outside of Rangoon use facebook, as the economic refugees I knew in Thailand who expressed anti-Rohingya sentiment let me know.
Oh, and finally, occasionally the military does things to be slightly more popular in Burma. Aung San Suu Kyi clearly understood this when she decided that politically (putting things in the best possible light) she should offer support and cover for the military.
Those 4-5 mins weren’t worth the rest of the episode, what it did show though that there was an interesting episode these two could’ve made covering that and other issues in the John Oliver writers room
I haven’t even made it that far in the episode this one was a tough listen , I’ll give it a go again on my commute tomorrow
Jeff and Jesse together are a very annoying combo
This episode almost seems like a long Tim Heidecker sketch about podcast bros doing a hilarious series on Japanese prisoner abuse in WWII. Conceptually funny, but goes on way too long and makes you think "wtf is wrong with the people who wrote this?"
Gregg Turkington as "funny guest"...or even better, Neil Hamburger.
Speaking as someone who knows doctors from New Zealand and has watched such a doctor deliver a terminal diagnosis, I can confirm that it does sound kind of ridiculous.
It's good that there is something to lighten the mood at such a difficult time, I guess?
The experience that jumps to mind is one in which a senior white New Zealander was supervising me as a was seeing a Maori who came into the ER (in Australia) for what has documented as “lower limb weakness” and was triaged as being of low acuity. It turned out that the patient had actually woken up in the middle of the night to find he was paralyzed below the waste, having had perfectly normal function when he went to bed. After investigations, it was eventually determined that this person, who came into the ER previously for chest pain and was sent home after a negative chest X-ray, was in fact suffering from advanced lung cancer which had eaten away one of his vertebrae, leading it to collapse and crush his spinal cord.
They were both New Zealanders, so I think their weird casualness and funny accent was probably a comfort.
My dad's lung cancer started to get at his neck vertebrae and his hands got paralysed. It's shit, isn't it?
These circumstances didn't stop him telling his doctor "so a patient is told by a doctor they've got terminal cancer 'oh god doc! How long have I got?' 'Ten' 'Years? Months?' 'Nine. Eight..'"
He said it made his doctor laugh so that's the main thing.
It's too bad so many people apparently stopped listening during the first segment. The stuff after was great, especially the dunking on Facebook's AI profiles.
And Casey Newton. He's like a crossover villian for me: a symbol of over-the-top wokeness here, and a symbol of utterly credulous AI hypesterdom on the AI/tech Substacks I follow (e.g. Gary Marcus). I tried listening to the NYT "Hard Fork" podcast, and I could have maybe stuck with it if it was Kevin Rouse and someone else. But Newton is just... how is this man a huge figure in tech journalism? He comes off like he doesn't understand anything he's covering.
So yeah, for anyone who's thinking "fuck this episode" because of the Musk segment, just skip ahead to where they start talking about Facebook, it's much better.
I am baffled so often by Casey Newton!
I am not at all tech-savvy and I’m definitely more woke than lots of people around here. I listen to hard fork because one of my all time fav stories was when the AI fell in love with Kevin Rouse. So I’m probably the target audience for hard fork.
And I don’t mind Casey actually (I am easily charmed by joviality and dad jokes) but I’m SO OFTEN wondering how did he get so far on just dad jokes??? It does seem like he knows so little about his area of expertise… I guess we all know these types of people at our workplaces… but I’m always fascinated by them!
That was my same reason for listening to Hard Fork, Kevin's "a chatbot told me to leave my wife" story was the first real eye-opener for how unpredictable this technology was. And I'm also more woke-sympathetic than many around here (opposed to the tactics, but share a lot of the beliefs). I learned about that side of Casey Newton from here; never picked up on it from Hard Fork.
What put me off him is the degree to which he just buys what the tech hype cycle is selling, even though he should know better. He doesn't seem to have expertise himself, but he sure knows lots of people with expertise. But he'll swallow all this stuff about "scaling laws will get us to super-intelligence", which is just so dumb on so many levels... and then he'll not only swallow it but write articles attacking the people who don't swallow it. His recent article going after what he calls the "AI is fake and is sucks" crowd was the last straw for me. Straw-man city, from a guy who doesn't understand the technology and has chosen to believe the likes of Sam Altman above independent critics. (Examples here; I have an unhinged rants in both comments sections: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/hard-forked-casey-newtons-distorted/ and https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/casey-newton-strikes-out/)
I'll still read Kevin's articles though, he's good (if also a bit wide-eyed, but at least he knows what he doesn't know)
https://archive.ph/2025.01.06-202422/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/06/the-police-have-always-ignored-grooming-gangs/
This article is so good and important for the simple point that Elon is just the next man to use abuse against girls and women for his own political gain. Not because he cares. I understand people on here thinking that any attention on violence against women and girls is good. And I agree the subject needs more attention. But we pretend Elon is a hero at our peril.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/society/2025/01/tommy-robinson-elon-musk-grooming-scandal
And watch what Julie Bindel has to say about this subject on - yes! - the Honestly podcast. Then wonder if Jesse should have ran it by his pal Helen Lewis before inviting a comedy writer on to get some chuckles out of this one.
Fuck’s sake, lad. You don’t make it easy, do you?
Thank you for linking this artice, it summs up the situation perfectly, I wish it was the top comment.
looking forward to next episode where you do this same engery and try to inject humor towards people in california losing their homes.
really.
and btw jesse if u are incaple of knowing, being raped as a child is worse then losing your muliti million dollar home.
you know B&R has done something wrong when the Red Scare ladies approach a topic more sensitively than them
The sanctimony and pearl-clutching in these comments are wack.
very poor choice of words Eh.
rapes are still happening.
claims of "islamophobia" are still being thrown.
this is not sanctimony.
Made it to housekeeping and shut it off. This episode really sucked and so did their coverage of that scandal.
This comment section... Far right really appeals to many of you, doesn't it? 🤡
I don't think Douglas Murray lurks in the BARpods, but his weekly column hits pretty close to how many felt listening to Jesse and Jeff: https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-things-worth-remembering-the-dangers-of-multiculturalism-mark-steyn
Good thing I'm already familiar with the story of Musk's tweets on grooming gangs! I was too impressed by such accurate renditions of SA and British accents - so much so that I completely failed to comprehend the words.
For anyone looking for background on the grooming gangs from a UK (centre-left, mainstream press) perspective, and why it's very much still a live issue, I thought the New Statesman did a pretty good job on their podcast.
https://pca.st/episode/2b5935c3-eab7-41c6-bfdc-d3f4936dc755
And if you want a perspective where the presenters are more horrified about the gangs than they are Elon Musks twitter there's this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDh85cohwms&pp=ygUYc3BlY3RhdG9yIGdyb29taW5nIGdhbmdz
I don't get it. If somebody who wasn't Elon Musk went on a tweet storm about Catholic sex crimes or Matthew Shepard, would everyone be complaining about discussing old news?
If a wealthy, powerful, and influential liberal figure (having trouble coming up with a left equivalent to Musk) wakes up tomorrow morning and tweets that Pope Francis should be jailed because of crimes that occurred under Popes Benedict and John Paul II, then yeah we should all laugh at that person and acknowledge they’re being crazy. Likewise, if said liberal celebrity wakes up and calls for the governor of Wyoming to be jailed over Matthew Shepard’s murder.
Musk just discussing this topic would be completely reasonable. Calling for the leaders of a major world power to be arrested for things that happened before they were in office is pretty deranged.
The story appeared because Labour denied a judicial enquiry into mass child rape in Oldham. The then leader of Oldham council is now part of the British cabinet. Jess Philips the minister responsible said the council should hold it's own enquiry, however the police and social services have refused to give evidence in front of non judicial enquiries.
Depends if he was calling for regime change in another country at the same time?
It probably doesn't depend on that, actually. At least not if the regime in question is American.
I don't think anyone who was shortly about to be in the British cabinet would publicly call for the removal of a US president, let alone his jailing? Do you think someone who was about to be part of foreign country's administration would get away with zero outrage if they tried it? I'm having a hard time imagining it.
Private citizens, sure. They say a lot of shit. But Musk holds/is about to hold political power so the rules of diplomacy are different for him.
if the regime in power were GOP, you bet your ass they wouldn't.
Ohhhh - yeah let's ignore it because we don't want to disturb British politics!
Hey, heeeeeey! I didn't say that we should ignore it.
I said the big reaction is because he called for regime change in other countries.
What if Elon said Catholic sex crimes in Boston had been covered up by the media and government and law-enforcement, they had never acknowledged them or done anything about them or investigated or written about them. And that Joe Biden should be arrested because he directed the cover-up and silence"
That's the equivalent of what he's saying about this issue.
He could say "I don't think this huge huge scandal I somehow just learned about from a decade ago was properly investigated and handled by all the different levels of government"
Great episode - Jeff is a fantastic co-host and commentator. I found myself gawfing through the rape gang coverage - not sure there's really a fun way of presenting that stuff - & my opinion of Elon Musk sinks ever-lower. Horrible events does not mean you should actively shit post wrong information about it.
The Zuck part was interesting, because after attempting to delete all my meta data since apparently AI's are taking over, listening to his six changes made me go, "huh I guess I really don't disagree with that."
I mean call him an opportunist and a capitalist - he his - but the last ten years on social media have been exceedingly stupid and policed by the most insufferable of us. I'm sure social media will still cascade us down into awful places, but I find it somewhat refreshing that at least they're doing away with the insulting our intelligence part of their policies.
My favorite part of the episode easily was Jeff’s descriptions of Zucks appearance
“Guy at line of studio 54 who is not getting in”
“Will ferrels Greek cousin”
“A cherubs weed dealer”
“Willy wonka doing amateur porn”
He tweeted one fake story, everything else was based on facts. Also the idea that the CPS were dragging their heels on prosecuting the gangs isn't outlandish. Just that starmer would have never put it in writing.
Late comment, but as to Musk's motives, put the pieces together:
* Musk's dad Erol had a baby with his stepsister
* A few months after, when the cave diver guy who looked a bit like Musk's dad dissed Musk, he freaked and called him a 'pedo'.
* Prone to addiction and an obvious walking knot of trauma.
* Gets triggered and obsessed by stories of child rape and grooming.
* Said about his dad, "Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done."
* Fantasies of escape to another planet.
It's all right in the open.
I don't know about Casey Newton, but the claims of the original October, 2018 NY Times article by Paul Mozur are that the Myanmar military had an office that worked in shifts to cultivate or take over seemingly non-military social media accounts with an aggregate 1.3 million followers. These accounts then pushed misinformation to stoke fear and insecurity that only the military could "solve." The article never claimed that facebook stoked Rwanda-style neighbor-on-neighbor violence. However, it does convincingly make the case that the military itself believed social-medial misinformation was a useful enough tool that they invested resources to harness it.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't know why if it never happened, Facebook said that it did: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46105934
Hi Jesse,
I love your work. I think you're missing the significance of the rape gang story (I'm not interested in Musk's involvement).
Suppose there's some companies that specialize in excavating toxic waste. The credentialed professionals employed by those companies are well paid because we trust them to handle this difficult and dangerous job correctly.
Then suppose it turns out they've spread the toxic soil all over by selling it as clean fill. They were given special authority in order to reduce a public hazard but they have increased the hazard.
In this hypothetical, every company should be shut down and every employee should lose their job.
The people who failed to act against the child rapists had degrees and letters after their names. They were given authority in the belief that their qualifications enabled them to show high moral courage.
It may be that the obedience and conformity that earned them their degrees actually made them morally weaker than the average person. The characteristics that qualified them for their jobs may be the same ones that caused them to come to the aid of the rapists and participate in the continued subjugation of the victims.
Every social worker, prosecutor or administrator whose actions or inactions had the effect of collaborating with rapists should lose every benefit they got from that employment.
I had a client who worked in a correction facility for teens in California. She reported that it was less humane because they were short staffed. She also reported there was an incompetant administrator paid several times what the workers earned only because of her educational status.
It is reasonable for productive working people to demand that someone who claims a higher qualification should be held to a higher level of liability. They should be at elevated risk of job loss, fines or imprisonment when they engage in criminal behavior.
In the U.K. as in the U.S., folks in the top quintile are accustomed to trumpeting the presumed shortcomings of others and obfuscating their own. It will benefit all of society if those who engaged in criminal or negligent behavior bear the responsibility.
I think you missed the whole point episode. The focus was on Elon and how he misled people on this story. It was not an in depth retelling of the events. It provided contexts elons missed and showed how his contribution has been unhelpful. It did not warrant an in depth retelling because Elon fucked up the most basic aspects of the story. I would point people towards the reporters who extensively wrote on this case if folks are truly interested. Not Elon who disparaged those reporters, not the free press that wrote a self serving story that kissed elons ass and neglected basic facts. But this podcast was about the internet bullshit angle, which is Elon and his horrendous tweets and all that stemmed from said tweets. It is astonishing that the commentors can't grasp this
I want to talk about the Meta AI thing - because I am 100% serious in saying that there is a phenominal use case for this that will be a net benefit to society.
It's crowding out relationship scammers from the platform.
If Zuck can hook memaw and pawpaw on an relationship chat bot instead of them talking to a scam callcenter in Nigeria or Laos, and keep them from draining their retirement savings to send to the new "love of their lives"?
That will be a service to humanity. This kind of thing would be an amazing tool for people in the early stages of dementia. Dad going senile? Has no friends? Loves posting on facebook, but can't really leave the house because he's on oxygen for his COPD and is too weak to move on his own without assistance?
Set him up with some chatbot friends that will interact with him in a way that he's familiar with. Get him a nice widow bot for a love interest so scammers can't get their hooks into him because he already has a "relationship".
Keeping people engaged with the world, even if it's virtual, is the best thing you can do for someone who is on the decline.
I read that a phone network in the U.K. is deploying AI “grandmas” to try to combat phone scams - they talk for hours to the scammers, wasting their time and hindering them from calling real people. https://www.trendwatching.com/innovations/meet-daisy-the-chatty-ai-generate-grandma-fighting-phone-fraud-for-o2-customers?hs_amp=true
Amazing. I love this.
Oh, that’s definitely gonna happen and in fact it’s here. There are already AI “friends” and AI therapy. Nightmarish dystopia? Maybe. Maybe not. When our elders, when WE, reach a certain age or level of mental decline, many of us just want to talk. A lot. ALL the time. If an AI can handle a lot of that need, is that terrible? Yes, abandoning our parents, our friends, our neighbors, strangers, will always be a moral crime, but if an AI can keep us “happy” for the 8 hours a day a friend or family member isn’t available to hear us prattle on non-stop, is that a bad thing?
I think if setting Japanese care home residents with robot dogs is ethically acceptable, so is your use case.
APPROVED. ✅
I have a friend at work going through a divorce late in life . He literally was telling me how much he liked the phone feature for ChatGPT because otherwise he’s super alone .
I usually skip the guest episodes (I was having a little bit of hope they wouldn't return since it has been a while since the last) but reading the comments here I'm pretty sure I'm gonna like it. When a certain set of commentors here get offended it's usually a good sign!
Is this community really getting a "Chud Vs Woke" dynamic now, where one side loves something by virtue of the other side hating it? I miss how the comment sections used to be.
Fuck I hope not. Depressing.
I think it's ok but I wish there had been a Brit involved in presenting this particular news story.
Lesbian-owned vape shops in Austin? I wish.
Well, “lesbian” owned, at any rate. I would love to go into the “woman owned woman run” local bookstore, but I have a feeling I’m going to go in, see something by Andrea Long Chu or Gretchen Felker-Martin prominently featured, and then walk right back out.
Bookwoman? Most likely. They’re old timey feminists but a quick peek at the IG makes me think you’re definitely going to meet someone who looks like the personification of a Cursed Cancellations story.
I muted Elon some time ago. I don't see his tweets ever.
Really didnt like the grooming gang part. That was peak shitlibbery!
I just have one thing to say to Elon, the richest man in the world, the head of several important and ground-breaking companies: Sir, please take a step back and fuck yourself in the face. Thanks.
I will pay an additional $5 per month to never have Jeff Maurer on the show again. Thank you.
Was he too smug and not funny enough to keep working for John Oliver?
LOL that’s probably a good guess
Musk “discovered” the 2-tier accusation. He’s not promoting anything in the UK imho as a yank. It’s already well known. That said, if you look at how the police have treated pro-Palestinian protesters and the conservative protesters it’s clear that they are treated differently. Maybe this is brought up in the episode, because I’m not finished listening to it, but there was a conservative protest over two tier policing where the police blocked protesters from leaving on all sides and then proceeded to arrest them. There’s an Asian vlogger who documented it. I’ll post as a reply if I find the video.
Serious question:
how many three part documentaries have been done on channel 4 detailing the thousands of raped girls and government coverup?
https://www.thetimes.com/culture/tv-radio/article/accused-the-fake-grooming-scandal-review-a-truly-shocking-deceit-cm9vznjdw
awful to be sure. but this one case of CSE hoax is on the same level as 1000's of actual cases with the government's enabling?
or did channel 4 go to the same journalism school as Jesse. where Elon's dumb tweets get the same level of opprobrium as kid fucking and cover up of kid fucking?
I hate it when I am empathetic with Musk..... But here goes. First, I'm not making a counter claim against Jesse's points that Musk amplified inaccurate portrayals of who did or didn't do what when. When it comes to researching accuracy, fairness, the facts, and the scientific evidence, Jesse is more than dogged. He's more than a dog. In fact he's like a pack of dogs: a blood hound and a sight hound to locate the Misinformation, several tree dogs to chase it up the tree and trap it, and kill dogs to, well you know, finish it off.
So ... This podcast was the first I had ever heard of this sex trafficking ring It seems like it was for Musk too. I find it unbelievable that I had never heard of this. I am an avid reader of all things 'news.'. This has included the FT and the Economist
There haven’t been many developments around these things for a few years, this isn’t new ground being broken. In Britian it was a huge huge story for years a decade ago.
Channel 4 in the UK released a new documentary miniseries on the 7th that covers "the fake grooming scandal" https://www.channel4.com/programmes/accused-the-fake-grooming-scandal
Holy buckets, I was under the impression that BarPod was not a news or serious podcast. They analyze and laugh at HOW media covers the issues. I understand the New Yorker tendency to laugh at terrible tragic things,. Clearly this was a win on the Facebook story, but felt tone deaf and worse for the Elan story.
Can Jesse bring in a real Kiwi, Richie Hardcore (check out his interview on The Unspeakable) who teaches kids , mostly boys, of all cultures about breaking cycles of abuse and masculinity. Richie runs an MMA gym and is working on a masters degree in counseling. He’s very Heterdox and is writing a book I think.
Clearly a Freudian slip with Elon’s name spelling.
Chunk from The Goonies WAS Jewish. That’s why he compared the size of those bullet holes to matzah balls. Come on Jeff, you can do better.
"Everything. OK, I'll talk! In third grade, I cheated on my history exam. In fourth grade, I stole my uncle Max's toupee and I glued it on my face when I play Moses in my Hebrew School play."
The name of this podcast should be changed to Katie and the Nonce
Hey now Katie totally missed the mark re prostasia. She took the activists' claims at face value, claims that were untrue (eg group therapy being useful for pederasts), the exact thing they regularly excoriate MSM for doing vis trans reporting.
Had to turn this off after the first 5 minutes.
I am stunned by all the snowflakes in the replies. Am I at the wrong podcast?
Not sure exactly what you mean, but I'll wade in anyway to a fellow lover of the Chickadee--the supreme R2D2 of birds. Where the failure was for me is that they simply weren't funny--it felt like the same kind of same side humor Jeff & Jesse critiqued in the earlier episode about subsequent writers for John Oliver's show. It's why so much of 'late nite' comedy has clapter rather than belly laughs.
It felt trite and obvious. Of course, not everyone hits every time--and when you joke about something so horrific you better nail it. Even when you are dear, dear Jesse that so many of us admire.
I don't come to BARpod for clapter.
I finally stopped the episode and actually went back and watched someone do this unbelievably well to remind myself it can be done--J & J just felll from the high wire. It happens even to the greats (not that my mediocre ass would know).
Patrice O'Neal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnJ1Q5rHv8k is SO MISSED. Hilarious, insightful, and fucking funny regardless of your politics. If only he were here to help us navigate these choppy waters. He's not, but I'll continue to seek his successors.
I'd listened to Douglas Murray on this topic right before I started B & R, and no less than Simon Schama (a historian whose work I generally love) made a similar joke about this topic earlier that fell flat.
We all fall off the high wire--even the man whose special on the French Revolution showed how its excesses almost guillotined Thomas Paine in the name of Liberty.
I will continue to appreciate the work of Jesse and Jeff (peripherally), but I do hope they aim higher than the current writers of John Oliver when they do comedy on deadly serious topics.
I'd also love to be a fly on the wall when Katie listens to this ppening.
Stunned?? Who’s the snowflake now?
Victoria Antoinette Derbyshire: her surname is pronounced in the UK like car, not her. You two.
He's not a proper football fan, that Jesse.
They knew it was a place though, even if Jesse called it a hamlet. That’s pretty impressive for a pair of Seppos!
It's probably only because of the Shire in the Lord of the Rings though
As an Australian married to a South African, that accent was a weirdly perfect blend of both, plus kiwi. Well done I guess?
The part about Burma was mindblowing. Wow.
The Soy Boyz are back!
Always a pleasure to have Jeff Mauer around!
Still miss Katie though.....
I really hope this epsiode succeeds where The Free Press's reporting has failed.
What were the failings of the FP’s story?
https://open.substack.com/pub/thebanter/p/bari-weisss-shitty-publication
Here's a decent summary courtesy of Ben Cohen
Hmm, I wonder if an article titled "Bari Weiss's Shitty Publication" is going to be an impartial, objective analysis of the FP's coverage?
Try reading it and see?
I did, it was exactly as terrible as the title indicated it would be. Including ending with this ridiculous bit of hyperbole:
"Musk has already toppled the US government by inciting racial tensions and spreading conspiracy theories. If the UK doesn’t watch out, they could be next."
Musk is absolutely trying to interfere in British and European politics and his money will go a lot further in the UK than it does in the US. The stuff he retweets definitely "incite(s) racial tensions and spread(s) conspiracy theories". I guess it's toppling the US government part that's the hyperbole.
I read that. The jabs at Starmer and Phillips were a very small part of Green’s article. Ben misses the forest for (two of) the trees. Also, his rebuttals are by no means the end of the discussion. I think it’s likely true that Green was unfair to Starmer and Phillips, but that’s not a reason to accept Phillips’ explanation uncritically, and definitely not a reason to dismiss the whole article and the FP itself. From other things he says, it’s pretty clear Ben doesn’t like Elon and doesn’t like what he believes the FP’s politics to be. He dismisses the Twitter Files as “a journalistic dud,” linking to another piece of his in which he mocks Musk and Taibbi for not knowing what the First Amendment is—completely missing the point, which is that suppression of speech is wrong even if it doesn’t technically violate the Constitution.
Anyway. All this is to say I think Ben is extremely wrong and is trying to discredit an entire article and the outlet that published it based solely on a couple details over which reasonable people can disagree, and his own political biases. I’m not saying the Green article is flawless and unbiased. Only that Ben’s excessively vitriolic reaction to it misses the mark.
Implying that the current UK government (elected in July) is involved in a cover-up which actually happened over a decade ago and mainly involved police and local councils is not a minor flaw in an article.
People more in the know have mentioned it several places throughout the comment section and I think it's important to add.
It's not a simple question of which party was in government at the time.
Majority of these Northern English towns have been Labour strongholds for decades, so the local governments and councils were often Labour led during the period these atrocities occured.
And where do you think MPs start their political carriers if not in local government?
I did not say it was about which party was in government. Even where Labour councillors were to blame, that does not imply that somebody who became Labour leader years later was part of a cover-up.
Ben Cohen's criticism is that since Keir Starmer prosecuted the gangs after the story broke in the media in 2012, his earlier non-prosecutions in 2009 are not probative as to whether he should shoulder criticism? And since, in 2013 he said he got it wrong in 2009, that's indicative that he's blameless?
That's dumb. I don't find Ben Cohen particularly insightful, he has an ideological axe to grind, he cherry picks and uses slight of hand to deflect issues he's engaging with (implying that Elon's comments on Jess Phillips are the things at issue, not the statements in the FP article, in his own write up).
If we are accepting that the CPS got it wrong, because Starmer said so, then we also have to accept that Starmer was the one who changed the CPS's approach to child abuse prosecutions. It's hard to believe anyone would be blaming him personally if he hadn't gone on to be prime minister.
I mean, as someone who has asked in these comments to no avail on "who was held accountable" for the failures, Keir Starmer apparently not prosecuting a case with affirmative DNA evidence in 2009, and not only not facing career consequences but winding up prime minister is disheartening.
Changing policies post-hoc to cover one's ass -- even if the policy changes are good -- is not the end of the inquiry! But it seems like that's all Ben Cohen wants to engage with.
He didn't change the policies to cover his ass. He changed them to pursue convictions, and did so successfully. My point is that it's hard to blame him for the failures of the CPS, without giving him credit for the successes, which in turn messes up TFP's "cover-up" angle.
How is one to distinguish "doesn't prosecute until its a national media story, and then changes policies to prosecute" from ass-covering or success?
I feel like I'm just staring into the void here. Is it a rorschach test where if you like Starmer it's good, and if you're skeptical of the political motivations and distrusting of someone who failed to prosecute child rape until it becomes a media story it's bad?
The first Rotherham grooming gang convictions were 2010. Here's the BBC local news: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-11696508 People usually date Rotherham becoming a national story to Andrew Norfolk in 2011. There were improvements over time (other child abuse scandals played a role). At the time, he appeared to be a willing participant in, and strong advocate of, those improvements. The claim he was forced into it by the press is not supported by contemporary sources or the timeline of events.
This is helpful context, thank you. Something Ben Cohen would have benefitted from including in his piece.
Thanks.
I can't say I'm familiar with his work in general but the gratuitous Elon Musk dick-riding in Green's article really jumped out at me as something that makes it hard to take their story seriously. I'm sure he does have an ideological axe to grind against Elon Musk. So do I.
Okay, then you sought out an outlet that provided you support for your preconceived conclusions and didn't evaluate the arguments on the merits?
(I am using ideological in a broader sense here than Elon -- Ben is bad about this across other topics)
I lived in the UK at the time the story broke (by The Times) and am familiar with it in general. I wasn't a Labour voter and have no strong feelings on the issue, other than that Elon Musk should stay in his lane.
Ben Cohen's piece was offered to me by substack's algorithm (I didn't seek it out) and I linked it mainly to avoid having to spend hours producing my own summary of the issue.
I should make clear that unlike Ben Cohen this is the first piece of TFP reporting that I had any objection to.
Interestingly enough I actually also was suggested Ben Cohen's piece earlier this week due to Substack's algorithm, even though I don't like Ben. Read it at the time anyway and came away with the bad-taste-in-my-mouth reaction that I get from his writing. Kind of funny to hear you say you also were recommended it.
Personally, I think Elon jumped on this story as a good pivot away from the H1B immigration mess he got himself in on Twitter earlier this month. I think that's his motivation for ringing this bell so loudly -- since "mass rape is bad" is a pretty easy topic. That said, I don't really have feelings that he should "stay in his lane", since I generally think people should be able to talk about whatever they want.
I think it's bad that because Elon Musk is extremely rich, I'm forced to hear his dumb opinions on things he hasn't looked into and doesn't understand, via the great big megaphone he's purchased. That's all.
I would echo the last sentence. I had no issues with TFP before this.
Ben Cohen isn’t really a reliable source of info. Might as well listen to Elon.
I was just checking in to see if I was the only cringing at the accents. Guess not. I will expand a bit only to say that accents-as-gags is not terribly funny. I know that the point is that they're terrible, but just read stuff plz.
Speaking of, Bill Burr on Elon Musk: 😂
https://youtu.be/nVDN_bino2U?si=sI007sIJGkOg6o_3
Musk's claims make more sense when you realise the unspoken part of his claim re birth rates is "*white people* are going to go extinct"
That's great
Why does Maurer’s AI black lady sound like Taika Waititi’s Korg from Thor?
Thank you! I have been wracking my brain trying to figure out where I’ve heard that accent before
"Elon Musks Discovers The Grooming Gangs Of The UK."
Exactly how many Elon Musks are there?
Immaculate conception does not refer to the virgin birth. It refers to Mary’s conception - she was “immaculate,” free of the original sin and thus suitable to carry the son of God. This is a really annoying pet peeve of mine.
Amazing, balanced view. Good work Jesse.
What the hell did I just listen to? I'm also pretty indifferent to the lack of fact checking (never saw any evidence that it was happening in the first place) but "it's just like the Obama administration talking to the auto industry"? I wasn't aware that President Obama was personally handed a copy of every end-user's car keys... or does Maurer have information he'd like to share with us?
I straight up don't share the "genocide is beginning" hysteria and find most of his announcement boring, but you two seem too damn copacetic considering the implications.
1) There's no real barrier between Trump (the president, not even the executive branch)
2) Cuckerberg declared war on the European Union supposedly with the backing of the US government.
3) Political content will be boosted by the algorithm, as if Tartarians, Annunaki, and melted stone weren't enough. Presumably there'd be even more AI-generated trash to go with it.
4) All the free speech crap is nonsense; Trump, Zuckerberg, and the state of Texas are not well known as principled defenders of free speech. Nearly guaranteed that the opaque moderation policies will be selectively enforced.
Say what you will about Elon Musk, but he's probably a less malevolent actor than Cuckerberg (being a twisted idealist) and Twitter has a much narrower reach that Meta and he didn't bend a knee.
Y'all's ignorance of Facebook and what its further enshittification means really shows.
Jesse and Jeff, please watch this and comment.
10:20 mark in particular. thank you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDh85cohwms
The grooming gangs story sounds horrible, but almost too perfectly designed to get a reaction. How do we know this isn't being sensationalized like Jordan Minnesota in the 1980s? I was particularly skeptical of the claim, repeated in the podcast, that medical professionals had examined a girl and determined she had been raped over 50 times. Of course it's easy to believe that truly horrible things happened to some girls and that people would try to cover this up, but once a girl has been assaulted by so many people, is it really possible to tell the number with such specificity?
I fully admit I hadn't paid attention to the story before listening to the podcast, so I'm coming from a place of ignorance. I just found the discussion in the podcast to be a lot less convincing than most of the incidents you guys discuss. Usually you guys are on the side of the skeptics, debunking stories that sound too convenient for the authors' motivated reasoning. Well, "scores of girls raped because police fear being called racist" just sounds too good to be true for an anti-woke liberal like me, even though it reinforces my priors!
These are not claims, there have been numerous court cases and convictions of men which describe what happened, and the events are truly awful.
No, it's not being sensationalised, it's worse than reported. Doesn't need a debunk, this is all a matter of public record.
This would have been a great episode to share with a normie... alas, grooming jokes and accents.
Facebook's filters were comically bad.
I use Facebook, rarely, for two things: High School Class reunion stuff (my class of 1980 is very close, and we do a lot of reunion events), and for some specialized hobbies, like repairing old typewriters.
I'd write a post for the Selectric typewriter group, and it would go into a black hole, and I'd have to figure out what word got it pulled. Typewriter parts have odd names like "operational shaft assembly" and "type ball" and removing these words would let the post go through. A lot of gun cleaning products like "CLP Cleaner" are used on typewriters, and mentioning these would get the post black-holed.
But, especially considering the advanced age of many typewriter enthusiasts, Facebook is the best of all the other worse options for a forum. So we just try several times to guess what the censorbot is hanging up on and try to work around it.
I'm glad Zuck finally realized there's a problem and is dropping the censor bots. I suspect it just never affected his bottom line bofore.
I hope it means that posts talking about tv shows dont have to say "when Buffy d*es" anymore and censor this fact of life word for fear of their post being deleted.
Good attempt at the South African accent, I’m no expert but Rob Van Vuuren’s comedy character on his tour, Blessings and Kombucha, is a brilliant satire of the wellness guru and some good examples of some dialects. https://youtu.be/XSJ0FuctTe0?si=-Ieitqyj27vKIWnf
The American right has been talking about Muslim Rape Gangs for literal years now….. oh wait! They go so well with all the immigrant caravans every election cycle!
Alternate views on the grooming gangs, and Elon Musks discussion of them are available.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDh85cohwms&pp=ygUYc3BlY3RhdG9yIGdyb29taW5nIGdhbmdz
Wow flight of the conchords, that's a blast from the past. One of the best shows of the 2000s by far, miss those guys
we will see how strictly FB adheres to its policy of no US gov't interference when the Greenland invasion starts, military law is declared, and FB cannot allow any posts critical of the administration.
This will happen in weeks, not months.
lol
disturbing that 3 people like your "lol" response, where no one likes my comment. Betting markets only discuss purchasing Greenland. The goal is invasion, and discussion of purchase is only to get turned down & provide flimsy justification for invasion.
Donald Trump Jr went down very well during his recent visit to Greenland. If Trump pulls off annexing Greenland it'll be so funny.
The Facebook story is pretty wild. They made bots that expose themselves.
I got accused of being a Boomer or a a Fed for referencing FB on something.
No, she wasn’t a Fed when i got the invite from her in 2006.
If you read into that, you could pick out important detains…..
On the UK stuff, I think both Elon and TheFP’s focus is really more about the rest of The West having missed the story when it happened.
That is horrible stuff, and that the pols responsible for having downplayed it are now coming to the fore….should bother the hell out of people.
There’s a parallel with the AMIA bombing in Argentina. I was in high school when it happened, and only vaguely remember small news bits. The Kirchners probably knew about what happened, why it happened, and who was responsible….but they slow-walked investigations to keep the truth from coming out. Meanwhile, fawning adoration from a portion of western thought leaders.
Then the Econ professor with the crazy hair releases the report and the world doesn’t care.
Chunk from The Goonies IS JEWISH! Has Jeff even seen the movie?
I mean, this is the country that tolerated decades of Jimmy Saville so I guess we shouldn't be surprised.
We didn't know the full truth about that demon until he was dead.
that's how they roll I guess.
Do the names Mike Gaetz, Michael Jackson and Jeffrey Epstein mean anything to you?
Ooh, I love jeopardy! I’ll go with:
“3 people who wish they wished they lived in the UK as a pakistani man.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal#Criminal_proceedings_and_convictions
Bingo. You've got it now.
It IS how the UK rolls.
CSA free for all. It doesn't matter which colour, creed, race: if you want to abuse a child continually just make it inconvenient or embarrassing for the authorities to stop you.
It's not a Labour/Conservative thing, it's a men can rape whoever they want thing.
Yeah, so maybe a massive truth and reconciliation endeavor is in order to root out this moral rot, correct?
Do you mean like a Independent Inquiry of Child Sexual Abuse with this case and many others in its scope?
We could get a professor to head it and she could take eight years to compile 19 reports on 15 different cases.
She could even call one of the reports the Truth Project like you've suggested here and make sure thousands of survivors and victims are fully heard.
I like the way you're thinking!
I also have some VERY good news for you. Theresa May thought you might have this idea once you understood the scale of the problem so ten years ago, she actually got it started and even better news, it was completed two years ago.
Hurray! People power!
yeah, I got some bad news for you. from my read of the level of anger surrounding this in the UK, ya got more work to do.
your country is not getting of that easy on this one. sorry. this is 10/10 evil that will be in the cultural awareness for generations.
seems like a lot of people are still very angry and rightly so.
the perception exists that there hasn't been enough outrage, enough exposure, enough accountability, enough conversation. and to the extent that lack of awareness exists, you need more. that's an indicator of the inadequate level of fact finding, transparency, and meting out consequences. "heads will roll" as we say.
your standing and reputation on the world stage is also taking a huge hit.
honestly, you needed that abject worldwide humiliation. it's therapeutic.
this will get worse before it gets better.
stiff upper lip and all.
A second ago they were ass tweets that don't mean anything, shouldn't be taken seriously, and now they're going to usher in a brand new age of men not being allowed to rape whoever they want?
I don't think I understand your position at all.
I don't really care about elon's tweets that much to be honest. yeah, he's lame I get it. small potatoes man.
I think you have bigger fish to fry and worrying about tweets that ruffle feathers is a deflection.
I am first.
Also, there are no good billionaires.
There are no good poor people.
(See how absolutely retarded it sounds?)
that is a dumb comparison.
There are no good dumb comparisons
except yours
There are no bad thought terminating clichés
Also, there are good billionaires.
Nope!
Not even KWEEN Taylor Swift?
I feel like I understand why bros like to trigger liberals.
Are there good millionaires? What's the cutoff for being "good?"