During an interview last week on The Joe Rogan Experience, the world’s most popular podcast, Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, brought the discussion around to one of his occasional preoccupations: immigration in Britain and Ireland. The language he used to frame the issue was notable for its invocation of a sort of nerd-reactionary fantasy of the cultures of “these islands”, and the threat presented by foreign migrants.
“These lovely small towns,” he told Rogan, “in England, Scotland and Ireland, they’ve been sort of living their lives quietly. They’re like hobbits, frankly. In fact, JRR Tolkien based the hobbits on people he knew in small town England, because they were just, like, lovely people who like to smoke their pipe and have nice meals and everything’s pleasant. The hobbits in the Shire. But the reason they’ve been able to enjoy the Shire is because hard men have protected them from the dangers of the world. But since they have almost no exposure to the dangers of the world, they don’t realise that they’re there, until one day, a thousand people show up in your village of 500, out of nowhere, and start raping the kids.”
The disorienting seamlessness of the transition from a frankly idiosyncratic analysis of The Lord of the Rings (which the literary critic Harold Bloom might have called a “strong misreading”) to an apocalyptic fantasy of the destruction of small town life in contemporary Britain and Ireland is remarkable. A feverish vision is conjured, in the listener’s mind, of phalanxes of swarthy paedophiles descending, like Tolkien’s ravening Orcs, on the bucolic villages and towns of Britain and Ireland, hell-bent on defiling and destroying everything that is precious and innocent and native to this northern European (and indigenously non-swarthy) archipelago.
[ Muddled Earth: JRR Tolkien’s tortured relationship with IrelandOpens in new window ]
It’s a recognisable version, of course, of a familiar rhetorical move, one that has served any number of right-wing political agendas over the years: western civilisation under threat from advancing hordes from the east and the south, undermined from within by a treacherous and cosmopolitan left. That view draws energy both from paranoiac conspiracy theories and from actual, and actually horrifying, instances of violent crime, including rape.
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Musk went on to allude to a recent high-profile case of alleged child sexual assault in this country, involving a 10-year-old girl who went missing from Tusla care. The suspect, in his 20s and originally from Africa, came to the country seeking international protection some six years ago. His application was denied, and he was subject to a deportation order, which had never been enforced, at the time of the alleged sexual assault.
The basic outline of the alleged crime was one around which the anti-immigrant movement could easily rally its followers. And so it was that a furious storm gathered on social media, and on the Telegram messaging service; initially peaceful protests outside the Citywest IPAS centre, where the alleged assault was thought to have occurred, turned into riots, with masked and hooded protesters throwing firebombs at police, and targeting the residents of the centre. The suspect was no longer a resident, his asylum application having been denied, but of course the suspect was only ever a useful pretext for an attempt to portray all migrants as a threat to public safety, and to intimidate them on that basis.
The message, as always, was brutally simple and effective: get them out. And the “them” here was not child sexual abusers per se, a category of deviants among whom the sons of Éireann have, famously, long been exceptionally well represented. (I will pause here simply to note that I do not recall, amid any of the many revelations of industrial-scale child abuse by Irish priests, any riots breaking out in front of bishops’ palaces, any burnings of parochial houses.) The “them” was simply foreigners and, in particular, non-white foreigners.
There are deep complexities here, and any number of exacerbating factors. An apparently dysfunctional immigration system. A housing crisis and rising homelessness. A growing number of Irish people, many of them very young, who feel their basic needs are not being met by the State, who feel increasingly alienated from the representatives and institutions of power, and who are being offered a satisfying scapegoat in the form of foreigners, migrants, and in particular those housed by the State in IPAS centres.
You will not be surprised to hear that none of those complexities were of interest to Musk, nor to his interviewer, Joe Rogan. In that exchange, right before he started talking about hobbits and “the Shire”, about beautiful little English, Scottish and Irish towns being invaded by hundreds of child rapists, Musk invoked the iconic old logo of RKO Pictures, a gigantic tower sitting on top of the world, broadcasting radio waves in all directions. The internet, he said, was until recently like a version of that tower, and it was hijacked by Silicon Valley engineers who happened to also be “far-left activists”, and who used it as what he called an “information superweapon” to broadcast their ideology far and wide.
This is, needless to say, a wildly ahistorical interpretation of Silicon Valley’s past, and of an American media landscape long dominated by corporations and their billionaire owners; but as an unintended illustration of Musk’s own political project, it’s extremely vivid. Twitter, or X as it has become since he bought it in 2022, is now a highly potent information superweapon for the extreme right. As anyone who has looked in on it in recent years will tell you, it has handily overtaken Stormfront dot org as the internet’s pre-eminent forum for white nationalism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
Musk’s increased interest in Ireland, and in exploiting horrific crimes such as the alleged rape of a 10-year-old as a means of inflaming anti-immigrant sentiment, is – to use a word of which he himself is famously fond – concerning. The language he uses in that Tolkien riff manages to be both laughably twee and violently reactionary: note, in particular, the invocation of “hard men” protecting the Shire from the dangers of the world.
According to a report published this week by the Hope and Courage Collective, a body that monitors far-right activity in Ireland and mobilises communities against the rise of anti-immigrant violence, there have been at least 38 arson attacks on buildings linked to asylum seeker accommodation since 2018. The people who set these buildings on fire, endangering the lives of residents – often families with very young children – presumably believe that they are protecting their country from all kinds of dangers. This is what it means to be a hard man, and to act in defence of the shire. Such fantasies, in all their violence and stupidity, are fuel for the fire that is spreading through the public life of this country.
