{"text":[[{"start":6.48,"text":"Here are some images that are seared in the mind: a knife-wielding refugee, a Black man from Sudan, straddling his bloodstained white victim; immigrant children pulled from burning homes as a mob of balaclava-wearing white men rampage through the streets chanting “foreigners out!” And one more, perhaps the starkest, from a newspaper headline, six black letters on a white background: pogrom."}],[{"start":31.682,"text":"The Times used the word to describe the riots that followed the near-fatal stabbing of Stephen Ogilvie in Belfast last week. Claire Hanna, MP for Belfast South and Mid Down, also used it, saying: “What you’re seeing is a race-based pogrom.”"}],[{"start":46.56,"text":"Hanna added that the violence was being exacerbated by “negative actors online” — a reference in part to Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, an anti-immigrant rabble-rouser with no connection to Northern Ireland, who urged his followers out on to the streets “after yet another invader attack on our people”."}],[{"start":67.97,"text":"But Robinson’s 2mn followers on X are dwarfed by those of his most powerful booster, Elon Musk (240mn), whose many posts amplifying both Robinson and the protests garnered an estimated 64mn views. “Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!!” he wrote on June 9, as the violence got under way."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":89.04,"text":"What prompts a Silicon Valley mogul to take time out from his inexorable rise to the status of the world’s first trillionaire (a milestone he reached three days later, on June 12) to post repeatedly, in incendiary fashion, about a riot taking place in a distant land against the backdrop of complex local issues? What does Musk stand to gain? The question is at first confounding. But a closer look at historical events, some recent, some in the more distant past, hints at an answer."}],[{"start":118.705,"text":"The word “pogrom” enters the English language in the 1880s. It comes from the Russian word for thunder, and emerges from the aftermath of the assassination of Alexander II. On March 13 1881, members of the revolutionary group Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) threw a bomb into the tsar’s carriage in St Petersburg. The first explosion left the monarch unhurt. When he stepped out to inspect the damage, the group detonated a second bomb that ripped off his legs and tore through his stomach. In The Story of Russia, Orlando Figes describes how Alexander was carried by sleigh to the Winter Palace, where he died of his injuries. As Figes writes: “It is hard to think of a more momentous turning point in Russian history.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":164.64,"text":"Two decades earlier, Alexander had embarked on a series of radical reforms. Beginning with the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the tsar wanted to transform his country from a feudal autocracy into a more liberal, economically energetic European society. But his so-called Great Reforms had alienated many. The peasants, whose liberation from bondage was supposed to improve their lot, did not feel the economic benefits of reform. Conservatives, meanwhile, feared the steady erosion of their power, while reformers believed the changes weren’t radical enough."}],[{"start":198.606,"text":"The new tsar, Alexander III, wasted no time reconsolidating autocratic power, sending his father’s reforms into screeching reverse. Someone had to take the blame. Not just for the assassination in St Petersburg that day, but for the perceived mess of liberalisation. It couldn’t be the conservatives, who never wanted reform in the first place; nor the reformers, who made up a significant portion of the elite; and certainly not the Russian peasantry, on whose labour the whole empire depended."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":229.015,"text":"Instead, the blame was placed on a group of people whose position in Russian society was already precarious, whose status as “outsiders” had made them useful scapegoats for rulers across Europe for centuries, whose rights within the Russian Empire were already severely curtailed: the Jews."}],[{"start":244.56,"text":"In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, mobs rampaged through the shtetls of southern and western Russia, raping, looting and murdering Jews. These pogroms were locally organised, seemingly an organic outpouring of rage. In reality, they were often encouraged and sometimes supported by those in power. The pogrom continued as a pervasive tool of authoritarian control into the 20th century, until the final fall of tsarist rule."}],[{"start":273.37,"text":"Historical parallels tend sooner or later to hit the buffers of detail. In many ways, the riots in Belfast last week were nothing like the pogroms that marked the dying decades of tsarist Russia. There was mob violence, yes, terrifying for those caught up in it. But it came in response not to a political assassination of a ruler of a vast empire, but to a seemingly random act of brutality by a presumably disturbed individual. The Police Service of Northern Ireland said there was no indication the attack was terrorist-related."}],[{"start":304.259,"text":"The unrest was quickly brought under control, and leaders from across the political spectrum have condemned the violence and called for calm. Despite the horrific scenes, no one was killed, although 42 police officers were injured. And yet, recent events across the UK make it hard to dismiss the violence in Belfast as a one-off."}],[{"start":324.551,"text":"In July 2024, a 17-year-old went on a knife-wielding killing spree at a children’s dance class in Southport, Merseyside, murdering three girls and injuring 10 others. The attacker was initially reported on social media to be a Muslim immigrant. By the time it emerged he was in fact born in Cardiff to Christian parents from Rwanda, anti-immigrant riots had broken out, not just in Southport but across England and Northern Ireland."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":349.899,"text":"In June 2025, mobs roamed the streets of Ballymena, Northern Ireland, after two Roma teenagers were charged with the attempted rape of a girl. (The charges were later dropped.) A week of violence left 63 police officers injured; many among Ballymena’s Roma population left town."}],[{"start":367.075,"text":"And so, to this summer. A week before the violence in Belfast, another mob was on the rampage through the streets of Southampton on England’s south coast. The cause: the release of footage from the murder of Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old finance student who had been stabbed by Vickrum Digwa, a British-born Sikh. When police arrived at the scene, Digwa falsely accused Nowak of racist abuse. Instead of arresting the attacker, police initially handcuffed the victim. He later died."}],[{"start":396.821,"text":"These apparently disparate events all feature one obvious commonality: race. In each case, the riots were sparked by an act of violence in which the victim(s) were white and the attackers were not. The context: these events were focused largely in ethnically diverse working-class neighbourhoods, communities where resources are stretched."}],[{"start":416.16,"text":"To see the work of distant hidden hands behind events is what conspiracy theorists do. To blame Musk and his handful of favourite British agitators for the violence is oversimplistic. It’s like blaming the Russians for Brexit or Trump. Sure, Vladimir Putin enjoys the chaos of it all. And, sure, the Kremlin stirred the pot with a troll farm or two. But the point is: there was a pot to stir. To focus on the agitators risks blinding us to the very real and often locally specific issues at play."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":445.52,"text":"For example, in Belfast last week, graffiti next to one burnt-out house read, “local homes for local people”. That slogan echoed posters that appeared in neighbourhoods in south Belfast a year earlier. “For over six decades,” the posters read, “[we] have welcomed people from all religions, backgrounds and cultures. These individuals and families have integrated into our neighbourhoods and become a valued part of our shared community. We remain proud of this spirit. However, recent and alarming numbers of local residents are now unable to find housing near their families and where they were raised. This is not acceptable.”"}],[{"start":480.528,"text":"This suggests that, whatever the wrongs of the riots, and whatever role social media played, scarcity of housing was a key factor. As was the complex legacy of the Troubles: the violence in Belfast took place largely in Loyalist areas. To identify Musk as the cause of the riots is to airbrush the messy reality. Comforting, but ultimately deluding."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":500.91,"text":"And yet, to ignore a clear pattern of behaviour from Musk and some of his friends in America would also be wilfully obtuse. In 2024, during the Southport riots, Musk warned the UK was slipping into civil war. When the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, pushed back against this incendiary intervention, Musk doubled down, accusing the authorities of “one-sided” action against protesters, echoing far-right accusations of “two-tier policing” in Britain."}],[{"start":530.122,"text":"When protests erupted in Southampton, the US vice-president JD Vance posted on X: “Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies”, adding the victim would still be alive “if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants”."}],[{"start":550.105,"text":"The question we should be asking here is: what do Musk and Vance and others hope to achieve by such obviously incendiary rhetoric? Perhaps the issues of shrinking resources — in housing, healthcare, policing and education — and the interests of the world’s richest man are connected after all."}],[{"start":567.75,"text":"At the start of this decade, just before the pandemic hit, Musk was worth $28bn. Not bad for an immigrant from South Africa who says he arrived in North America aged 17 with $2,000. But in the past six years, Musk has seen a 40-fold increase in his wealth, estimated at $1.1tn. By comparison, average wages in the US and the UK have remained largely flat in that time, with any small increases wiped out by much larger increases in the cost of food and housing. To sum up: in the US, UK and across western Europe, in the most prosperous nations on Earth, the people at the bottom of the ladder are worse off, while at the top of the tree, Musk and others especially in Silicon Valley, have become so rich that we need enormous charts to even begin to comprehend their wealth."}],[{"start":617.46,"text":"This turn of events is not unexpected. At least not to Musk. When he and Peter Thiel (a supporter of JD Vance before he became vice-president) co-founded PayPal around the turn of the millennium, there was a book that attained almost cult-like status among the small group of early internet entrepreneurs with dreams of conquering the world. Published in 1997, The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg (father of former Brexit opportunities minister Jacob Rees-Mogg) predicted new computer technology would lead to an unprecedented transfer of wealth and power away from national governments and traditional institutions to a small handful of people. These “sovereign individuals” who gained control of the new technology would rival “the gods in Greek myth”."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":664.72,"text":"The authors write about the crisis this transition would precipitate: “We expect a nasty reaction, particularly in the wealthy countries where the ‘national economy’ brought high income to unskilled work in the twentieth century”. They predict “an intense and even violent nationalist reaction . . . suspicion of and opposition to globalization, free trade . . . hostility to immigration, especially of groups that are visibly different . . . popular hatred of the information elite, rich people, the well-educated . . . ” Davidson and Rees-Mogg weren’t wrong. But their dark prophecy wasn’t a warning. They describe the coming turbulence as the most exciting time to be alive."}],[{"start":702.48,"text":"Everywhere there is rage. Since Musk bought X in 2022, it has dramatically scaled back content moderation. When Musk uses his platform to fan the flames, he is trying to channel that anger, and to shape a world view."}],[{"start":715.378,"text":"The police bodycam footage of the arrest of Henry Nowak shows the victim of a stabbing lying handcuffed on the ground. Before he dies, Nowak pleads with officers, saying “I can’t breathe”. The video is shocking, a terrifying echo of the script that was written in 2020 in the US with the death of George Floyd, a Black man fighting for breath as he’s pinned to the ground by a white officer. The Nowak murder appears to shine a light on a world in which victims are treated as perpetrators because of their ethnicity, in which the liberal establishment is literally killing white people with Orwellian woke doublethink."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":756.48,"text":"Hampshire police, whose officers carried out the arrest, are rightly investigating what went so terribly wrong. But crucial context is missing. In 2018, the same Hampshire force mounted an undercover investigation into one of its own Serious and Organised Crime Units. They bugged their office for a month, documenting sustained racist abuse by more than a dozen white officers against a single Black colleague. The details are sickening. Perhaps the tragic circumstances of Nowak’s death resulted from a confused reaction to that scandal. But the idea, three decades after the murder of Stephen Lawrence, that police in the UK are institutionally racist against white people is palpable nonsense."}],[{"start":799.071,"text":"When I type “Belfast violence” into X, I’m fed an avalanche of videos almost exclusively of Black people committing violence against white people. Filtered out are the equally shocking cases of racist violence committed in the opposite direction. This is the power of the algorithm. Fear and rage sell. Nuance does not. If you control which stories people see, and which they don’t, you can shape their view of the world. That’s why Musk bought X."}],[{"start":826.617,"text":"The world Musk wants you to see is a world in which the beneficiaries of decades of economic and social liberalisation are not billionaires in Silicon Valley (as one might otherwise reasonably suspect), but immigrants working multiple low-paid jobs (possibly for a giant tech company) in order to pay their rising housing costs. In other words, Musk’s support for Robinson and Rupert Lowe’s new far-right Restore Britain party, his incendiary rhetoric about immigrants, is not ideology — or not just ideology. It’s deflection."}],[{"start":857.158,"text":"Alexander III discovered that pogroms were a useful tool to deflect anger away from himself and the establishment and protect the old order. Musk and his friends are doing something subtly different: channelling fear of immigrants into rage against the establishment. Unlike the tsar, Musk doesn’t want to preserve the old order. He’s part of a Silicon Valley movement that wants to replace it."}],[{"start":881.069,"text":"It is useful to be aware of this. But those who want to preserve our imperfect system, where power and sovereignty rest with democratic nation states, not sovereign individuals, would do well to focus less on incendiary tweets. They should look to the real causes of unrest, the gaping chasm of wealth inequality, and figure out how to fix it."}],[{"start":901.543,"text":"Gabriel Gatehouse is author of ‘The Coming Storm: Inside America’s Radical New Politics of Paranoia’"}],[{"start":907.881,"text":"This article has been amended to clarify that Elon Musk said he arrived in North America with $2,000 aged 17. He first landed in Canada, not the US as originally stated."}],[{"start":919.92,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning"}],[{"start":929.68,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1782264781_6113.mp3"}