Tommeh

Tommy Robinson didn’t uncover grooming gangs – he exploited them. By the time he swaggered into the story, smartphone in hand and martyrdom complex fully inflated, the truth was already out. Victims had already spoken. Investigative journalists – most notably Andrew Norfolk at The Times – had already exposed the pattern of abuse and institutional cowardice in places like Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford. The Jay Report had been published. Trials had been concluded. Convictions had been secured. Robinson wasn’t a whistleblower – he was a latecomer with a grudge and a platform, not a truth-seeker but an opportunist.

When he wasn’t endangering trials by ignoring court reporting restrictions – as he did in Leeds in 2018, risking a mistrial and retraumatising victims – he was repackaging the suffering of young girls into grist for his anti-Islam mill. He cherry-picked the ethnicity and religion of a subset of offenders and used it as proof that the real threat to Britain wasn’t paedophiles or safeguarding failures, but Muslims. He framed child abuse as a cultural pathology, not a criminal one. In doing so, he deliberately ignored the elephant in the room – that the vast majority of child sexual abuse in the UK is committed by white men.

There have been grooming gangs involving white British men. There have been rings operating out of care homes, schools, churches, even Parliament. Where was Robinson then? Nowhere. No livestreams. No rallies. No fundraising videos. He never campaigned outside a court when the abuser wore a dog collar or a House of Lords pass. His outrage isn’t rooted in justice – it’s tribal. His cause is not child protection – it’s identity politics for the far right. Dressed in a Union Jack and pretending to care, he’s weaponised real suffering to advance a paranoid worldview where everything bad comes from “them” and everything righteous flows from “us”.

And now, in a final act of farce, he’s being funded by Elon Musk – the world’s richest edgelord. Musk has decided that throwing money at reactionary provocateurs is somehow a defence of free speech. In reality, it’s a war on accountability. Musk didn’t bankroll whistleblowers, investigators, or victims. He threw his weight behind a man whose antics could have collapsed a child abuse trial. That’s not dissent. That’s sabotage. Free speech doesn’t mean you get to play chicken with the justice system and then cry censorship when you’re held to account. But that’s the game now – the rules don’t apply to the chosen few.

Musk has increasingly aligned himself with a particular strain of politics – the kind that cries victimhood from a position of immense power. The kind that equates responsibility with repression. By funding Robinson’s legal battles, Musk isn’t levelling the playing field. He’s backing a loud, divisive figure whose only talent is self-promotion and whose entire narrative depends on cherry-picked grievances. This isn’t some principled stand for liberty. It’s the globalisation of grievance culture – a bizarre alliance between tech billionaires and far-right rabble-rousers, united by a shared belief that truth is whatever they say it is, and consequences are tyranny.

So let’s call this what it is. Robinson is not a journalist. He’s not a campaigner. He’s a carnival barker in a culture war, flogging outrage to an audience desperate for someone to blame. And Musk is not a saviour of speech. He’s a rich man playing politics with other people’s trauma. Together, they make the perfect pair – one shouting nonsense, the other paying to keep the mic switched on. And the real victims? Still overlooked. Still politicised. Still waiting for justice to be more than a talking point on someone else’s YouTube channel.