Elon Musk: Neo-Feudal Prince
9th January 2025
In a surreal cascade of events, the internet personality Andrew Tate has launched a political party. He has done this seemingly in response to a resurgence of interest in the scandal of Britain’s predominantly Pakistani Muslim “grooming gangs”, as these are euphemistically known; a fact made somewhat ironic because Tate himself, a self-declared Muslim convert, is alleged by Romanian authorities to have himself used the “loverboy” method to recruit young women into sexual exploitation.
I’ll spare you further analysis of his proposed programme for the “BRUV Party”, aka Britain Restoring Underlying Values, save to say that “BBC Punishment” merits an essay on its own. But his foray into politics is perhaps less a serious proposal than a symptom of the accelerating collapse of legitimacy across almost all of mainstream British institutional politics. More profoundly still, the shake-up now underway isn’t just of political parties or ideologies, but of the mechanisms themselves: a tectonic shift, in which ancient forms of power are re-emerging, and the terms of political engagement are suddenly radically up for grabs.
Mary Harrington has a great future ahead of her as a writer of science fiction.