This is what a respectability cascade looks like

Why Rotherham is now ‘A Big Deal’

An audio version of this essay – read by me – is available below the paywall.

A tweet from an anonymous British twitter user:

The left pretending there’s ‘always been coverage’ of the scandal is particularly sick. The Charlene Downes case would have been forgotten if it wasn’t spammed on 4chan as an infographic for years on end. Anons preserved information like medieval monks copying transcripts.

He’s referring, of course, to Rotherham. These decades-old atrocities are back in the news cycle thanks largely to the efforts of Elon Musk, who retweeted a particularly awful account of what was done to one girl. That excerpt was from sentencing remarks written eleven years ago, and the Rotherham phenomenon can be traced back as far as the 1960s, concurrent with the earliest waves of mass immigration from Pakistan to Northern England.

Which is to say that we’ve known about Rotherham for a long time now, but the vast majority of people didn’t know the scale of it, nor the grotesque details, because the media coverage was both sparse and sanitised. The Twitter user I quoted above is exactly right about this, and I thought his phrasing was insightful: “anons preserved information like medieval monks.” There is a real possibility that the Rotherham scandal could bring down Keir Starmer, or even the progressive British establishment as a whole, and it is thanks to anonymous people on the internet.

Of course there has been some excellent journalism published in mainstream outlets – not least from MMM guests Julie Bindel and Charlie Peters – and yes, Musk’s intervention is key. But the details that are currently radicalising the British public were largely discovered and disseminated by diligent, anonymous social media users who combed through court documents, academic papers, and serious case reviews, compiling the information into Twitter threads and Substack posts that attracted very little attention.

This point is worth underlining for international readers: Rotherham has been a focus of the British Online Right for years and years, along with a (lamentably small) subset of journalists who write under their real names. It’s hard to overstate how maddening it is to know the very worst details about what happened to these girls – ground into kebab meat, kept in dog cages, branded like cattle, the list goes on and on – and to also know that any normal person would look at you like you were a maniac if you ever raised the subject. The gruesome details were usually printed in the media (all of those links are to mainstream sources), but the phenomenon was never treated like A Big Deal. It was relegated to minor news reports, and appeared in opinion sections only in the form of warnings against racist stereotyping. Normal people received the establishment signal, loud and clear: here is something you should ignore. And so they did.

Until, all of a sudden, it became A Big Deal. The Free Press is now describing this as “the biggest peacetime crime – and cover-up – in British history”, which is a fair characterisation. What was once the preoccupation of a few weirdos in Britain (including yours truly) is this week attracting the attention of social media users across the world, and they are agog. The American Billionaire Bill Ackman suggested that Britain ought to be sanctioned. I saw another American insist that, if he lived in Britain, he would simply jump into the channel and swim away.