Piss off with your "Grooming Gang" fakery!

Rupert Lowe MP

Nobody needs to tell me that the “grooming gang” issue in the United Kingdom is “different than Epstein.” I have never conflated the issue with “Epstein,” nor have I claimed there is nothing that differentiates the issue from Epstein — despite social media naggers telling me for the past several days that I have somehow conflated “grooming gangs” with Epstein. Because again, I have never done anything remotely like this. The real idea behind their little talking point, I gather, is that I should for some reason support the promulgation of demonstrably fake statistics relating to the purported prevalence of “grooming gangs,” since I should realize it’s so very different than Epstein. And whereas I am correct about Epstein (at least according to this latest wave of weird mini-consensus, which would’ve been RADICALLY different a year ago), I am terribly ignorant about “grooming gangs,” because I just don’t appreciate how incredibly different these issues are.

OK. For one thing, I have never claimed to have deeply examined every conceivable aspect of the “grooming gang” phenomenon. Yes, I have occasionally followed it over the years with varying levels of interest, but I’ll freely admit it’s not something I have spent day after day intensively contemplating, reporting on, or researching. That said, if the almighty algorithms are going to be jiggered into blasting comically fake statistics about “grooming gang” prevalence onto my feeds, and it’s being widely demanded that I join a furious clamor for some sort of dramatic transatlantic reckoning, I think I’m entitled to formulate a few tentative thoughts on aspects of the issue that I have examined, which relate to other areas of interest I have considerably greater pre-existing knowledge in. So here’s what I’ve just got done examining:

1. I’ve read the “Rape Gang Inquiry Report” issued last week by Rupert Lowe, a Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom who got booted out of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, and is now on some sort of one-man rightoid wrecking crew mission. He gets massively amplified by his benefactor Elon Musk, who previously denounced Farage for whatever petty reasons happened to be bouncing around in Musk’s politically-addled brain sometime in early 2025. Lowe’s new minor party, “Restore,” nearly cost Reform UK a victory in the all-important Makerfield by-election last week. Prime Minister-in-waiting Andy Burnham still would have won for Labour, even if the Restore splinter votes were numerically combined with Reform, but it would’ve been significantly closer, and it’s likely that Restore will be a legitimate spoiler in other constituencies in the future. Lowe’s outfit was running Facebook ads in Makerfield touting his “Rape Gang Inquiry,” so there’s absolutely no doubt that this is a straightforwardly political document — as in, timed to specifically coincide with a nationally consequential by-election. Americans enthusiastically passing around the “report” as though it’s some impartial, professionally-conducted assessment of “grooming gang” phenomena are total dupes, but of course most Americans have no clue about the intricacies of UK political affairs — understandably enough. So they take this “report” to be some sort of officially-sanctioned, methodologically-rigorous blockbuster investigation of hidden “grooming gang” truths. My sense is that the Report’s composition and release was actually just as much geared toward an American audience as it was to a British one, if not more so — as evidenced by the manic Musk dissemination, and his American hangers-on leaping feverishly to join the Twitter/X outrage parade.

2. I’ve read the “National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse” issued in June 2025 by Baroness Casey of Blackstock, who was commissioned to conduct the report by outgoing UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who resigned yesterday under circumstances that are so extremely British in their procedural peculiarity.

3. I’ve read assorted transcripts from a 2019 trial in Bradford, England having to do with alleged “grooming gang” activity. The transcripts were published by an organization called “Open Justice UK.”

Having read these documents, am I permitted to articulate public views on anything pertaining to the “grooming gang” matter? Hard to say anymore. There’s a section of loud online nitpickers who love to pronounce themselves OG GG analysts, so if you haven’t been deeply immersed in the material on a full-time basis since at least 2010 or so, you should just shut up and give thanks to Musk and Lowe for bequeathing us this awesome public service. Well, whatever. I have intermittently read about Grooming Gang controversies for enough years now that nobody needs to snidely “educate” me, as though I’m just now hearing about the concept for the first time, because I’m a dumb-dumb American who can’t possibly know stuff about the mysterious foreign land of Great Britain.

Here’s what I’m not doing:

• Making any sweeping statements about “grooming gangs” whereby I entirely accept, or entirely dismiss, the totality of claims around this multi-faceted subject. That would be very stupid. The relevant source material spans multiple decades, jurisdictions, criminal investigations, committee reports, and so on. With such a mammoth record to pore through before making anything close to a comprehensive assessment, how could one responsibly spout off a simple binary generalization? It almost reminds me of when I used to get badgered by self-righteous trolls to declare a childlike Good Guys vs. Bad Guys moral assessment of World War II. Really? You’re going to reduce the deadliest conflict in human history to a comforting little Disney Movie nostrum? Well, I’m never going to do that. And although the “grooming gang” matter is of course wildly dis-analogous in a million different ways to WWII, it’s analogous in the narrow sense that I would also not blithely reduce it to a simple cartoonish morality tale.

• I’m not claiming to be comprehensively well-versed on every conceivable aspect of “grooming gangs.” And neither should you, if, for instance, you’ve never read the 2020 Home Office report, the Heal Reports pertaining to South Yorkshire (2006), the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee report (2014), and what I’m sure are an enormous slew of other reports/materials/transcripts/articles that 99% of the people who so confidently opine on the topic have also never read.

• I am not claiming that no girl in England has ever been raped by a person who is a Muslim. That would be idiotic.

Here’s what I am doing:

• Reacting to a political controversy that was just ignited by way of the Rupert Lowe “report” brouhaha, and the giant social media amplification thus engendered, thanks to the gamified algorithm shenanigans of the richest man on Earth, our first Trillionaire overlord, Musk. (No, that does not mean there is not also organic interest in the issue. Of course there is. Please spare us the tedious nitpicks.)

• Observing that dimwit American politicians and “influencers” are spouting provably fake statistics from the Lowe/Musk report, and in so doing, propagating the latest chapter in their ongoing marvelous Pedo Panic odyssey. Case in point: Nancy Mace, fresh off her decisive defeat in the South Carolina GOP gubernatorial primary, after getting hilariously nuked by Trump, has decided to light up Twitter/X with shrieking proclamations that 250,000 girls have been “r*ped by a gang of Muslim men in the UK” — so if you’re not running around with your hair on fire about this in June 2026, you’re a bad person. Moreover, if you deem other political issues relatively more important than this one, you’re also a bad person, and probably support MUSLIM PEDO RAPE GANGS. The bloated Congressman Randy Fine has similarly chimed in, after what I’m sure was a very careful study of the underlying source material, to declare as fact that “250,000 Christian British girls” have been found raped. Which he spins into some kind of implicit “pro-Israel” point about Muslim “invaders.” Because, of course, absolutely everything has to ultimately collapse into the perpetual proxy battle over Israel. “Zionists” and “anti-Zionists” could figure out a way to make Peanut Butter vs. Jelly a proxy dispute about Israel.

• If this “report” is going to be blasted into everybody’s faces, I think I’m entitled to note that its marquee claim, which leads the “Executive Summary” and has been circulated furiously across the internet — including by numb-nuts elected officials — is complete statistical hogwash. The report states: “250,000 young white girls have been subjected to repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, pregnancy, forced Islamic conversion, and lifelong trauma. The true number is probably higher.” There is no valid empirical basis for this sensational claim, which if you’ll notice, is deliberately weasel-worded to start with. We don’t even know what the claim precisely is — almost certainly by design. What are they saying? That a minimum of 250K young white girls were raped by Muslim predators? Or that a minimum of 250K young white girls were subject to an impossibly wide array of diverse victimization: some raped, some “trafficked,” some impregnated, some forcibly converted to Islam, and some afflicted with general “trauma”? Because if they believed it could be credibly alleged that there are over 250K straight-up rape victims, the authors of this report would surely jump at the chance to come out and explicitly say that. But they don’t. They instead make this infinitely loose claim that’s almost impossible to parse with any precision, but which is inflammatory enough that it gives ample ammunition for dunces like Mace and Fine to twist the statement into a factual-sounding assertion that 250K+ girls were brutally raped. Which is not even what the report asserts, if you actually read it carefully, which is of course not what the authors are looking for anyone to do. NOTE: If there were a valid evidentiary basis for the claim that 250K+ girls were raped, or even just more generally “victimized” in some way, I would have zero problem acknowledging this. I am in no way constrained in my ability to theoretically acknowledge such things, should there be rational reason to do so; I am not hobbled by some emotional bias in favor of exonerating Muslims, nor do I feel some need to lecture the White Working Class why they should love living in proximity to Pakistanis. Likewise, I am not addled by some vengeance crusade to extirpate all Muslims from the West. I am pretty much agnostic on the matter, normatively speaking, for better or worse. I am also not analytically hobbled by some freakish hatred for rape victims. Not to get too boilerplate, but I have always genuinely thought that bonafide rape is a serious crime and should be treated as such. Which is not well-served by diluting “rape” to mean “sex acts that a participant contemporaneously perceives as consensual, but later deems to have been grooming or trafficking or something.” I don’t know why it’s suddenly so shocking to say that a sexual situation can be ill-advised, or even genuinely harmful in certain respects, without necessarily having to be rape. I don’t know, I guess I’m a stickler for the English language, and keenly attuned to how “concept creep” can infiltrate words and phrases that once would have had a commonly-understood definitional correlate, but now get systematically over-extended by activists/politicians/cops and whomever else wants to commit Language Genocide to advance a particular pet cause.

• Nor do I harbor some bleeding-heart liberal bias in favor of mass immigration. For that matter, I have no desire to accommodate virtually any “liberal” sensitivities, or guard against the transgression of liberally-oriented taboos, because I sooooo need to “virtue signal” to all my colleagues at the Ford Foundation, the Martha’s Vineyard wine party circuit, or the Democratic Party. I honestly could not give less of a shit about placating such people. I have no particular investment in what the proper levels of immigration to the United Kingdom should be, or frankly to the United States, because it’s just not an issue that viscerally animates me in terms of personal political preference. You can deride me for failing to have strong a political preference on this policy question, but that won’t change whether or not I can consciously perceive one in my own mind — and that’s what happens to be relevant for establishing my own ideological basis for discussing “grooming gangs” and related matters. I also have zero problem acknowledging that there could be legitimate problems with the assimilation of Muslim populations in the UK, and elsewhere in Europe, that are distinct and “different” from whatever assimilation dynamics exist in the US. I have always fully accepted that in a pluralistic society, having a political preference for more restrictive immigration policy, including around Muslim immigration in particular if you want, is a position that people are entitled to hold, and need not make one “racist.” And even if there is some racial undertone to why one holds this position — alright. So what. At a certain point, get over it. You’re never going to eradicate every last trace of conscious or subconscious racial bias in how people formulate their political/social/cultural opinions. You’re not even required to aspire to eradicate such racial biases. That said, an inordinate number of people who are especially exercised about these matters definitely don’t shy away from declaring open animus towards Muslims, Pakistanis, etc. as a driving factor in their political views, especially online. I personally don’t relate to this in terms of my own inclinations, but I’m also not going to throw a fit about it, because I’m not on a quest to socially-engineer everyone’s “bad” beliefs out of their brains, and yeah, I agree that “multi-culturalism” as a kind of state religion can often be cringeworthily hollow. But I have no reason to inhibit myself from carrying out as impartial an evaluation as I can on “grooming gangs,” due to some pre-existing political commitment to any particular ideological dispensation regarding Muslim immigration to the UK, or even whether Muslims perpetrate sex crimes at a greater frequency than non-Muslims. They well may! The true facts wouldn’t bother me one way or another. Honestly. I’ve also been to Muslim enclaves in the UK, namely Birmingham, and can attest that it can be a bit of a strange scene. I happened to go in October 2023 when there was a big protest action happening after Oct. 7, so maybe my experience was a bit skewed by unfolding events, but yeah, I did get the impression that Muslim populations there are quite a bit more insular — politically, culturally, religiously, yadda yadda — than what might be expected among comparable demographics in the United States. No problem at all acknowledging this! I’m not hiding my secret neuroses.

• However, I’m sorry, but if you simply don’t care that this “report” sponsored by the world’s richest man — which is clearly designed to influence American political attitudes as well as British — contains, at the very top, in what basically amounts to a thesis statement, an outlandishly nonsensical statistical extrapolation about the alleged prevalence of “grooming gang” activity, then you simply do not care about what is true versus untrue, and you only care about advancing your political prerogatives when it comes to immigration/Islam/racial stuff — or whatever else is motivating your passionate interest in “grooming gangs.” You are entitled, I guess, to not care what is true vs. untrue, and to believe that advancing your political and propaganda interests is of paramount priority, but that’s never been my M.O. on this or any other subject, and never will be, for as long as I remain sentient.

I frankly don’t even remember why I broke up the above paragraphs into bullet-points, because this thing I’m writing now had no pre-ordained organization. So anyway, back to the core question: why are we being told that “grooming gangs” are suddenly of such enormous transatlantic concern as of June 2026? As lots of online commenters will gladly remind you, it’s certainly not because the “grooming gang” issue is remotely “new.” It’s been a controversy for many years, off and on. Voluminous materials have been produced for all to sift through if they really want, with or without a splashily exciting Lowe/Musk “report.” Here’s a reason why this came up again in June 2026: the sponsors of the “report” are demanding various political and legal action. And they’re demanding this on the basis of completely fabricated statistical claims, designed to exaggerate the prevalence of the purported threat. Am I supposed to be in favor of empirically indefensible threat inflation now? Nope. Never. Never will I agree to that tradeoff, on this or any other issue.

If you would like a full explanation of why the “250,000 raped girls” figure is completely fake, please read this guy’s Substack, which goes through the fakeness of the figure in admirably meticulous detail. And before anyone chimes in with the standard brainless rebuttal, please just see this tweet:

I’m not saying there is “no problem” regarding the treatment of British girls by Muslim men. I’m saying that the way in which the purported problem is being represented in the form of the newly-published “report,” and ensuing social media commotion, is 100% fakery. If you don’t care about propagandistic fakery, or you actively support the dissemination of propagandistic fakery, I can’t help you.

This particular bit of propagandistic fakery is of special interest to me because it’s so emblematic of the statistical chicanery that is rife throughout the modern “trafficking” industry, with all its endless NGO makework oufits, government subsidies, law enforcement collaboration, unanimously uncritical bipartisan political support, and so on. The amount of sheer statistical fakery these organizations and their “partners” get away with is truly astounding. Take, for instance, the annual proclamations of “Human Trafficking Awareness Month” — the reason why January is obviously everyone’s favorite month.

Wow! 25 million people are being “human trafficked” around the world at any given moment? Seems bad. Especially since we are told that “human trafficking” is “modern-day slavery.” Therefore, it would seem that 25 million people, many of whom are reportedly in the United States, are languishing in conditions of literal enslavement, right under our noses. In order to learn more about this dire predicament, why don’t we dig a little deeper into the source for the statistic?

As I wrote in 2023: “Well, here’s the methodology for the 25 million figure the State Department endorses to be used across the federal government. It’s produced by something called the “Minderoo Foundation” in conjunction with the UN. You might as well generate statistics using seances and telepathy.”

Some convoluted amalgamation of “probabilistic surveys” conducted by some goofy-ass NGO? That’s what we’re basing our confident quantitative declarations on — that millions of people are being human-trafficked, sex-trafficked, and/or enslaved all around us? And then these gargantuan numbers, which have little to no hard evidence underlying them, are what routinely get printed on official materials of government agencies, eagerly touted by lavishly endowed philanthropic ventures, and “virtue signaled” by multinational corporations, as though they’re just conveying established facts to the general public? Wow, interesting.

I could go on forever about the phony Trafficking Stats industry, but the point is I have a long-standing and pre-existing interest in the chronic misuse of these bogus hokum figures, and the absurd methodology behind them. So the “250,000 girls raped and/or trafficked by Muslims” claim is just the newest right-wing manifestation of this oft-observed trend. Notice that Low IQ elected officials such as Nancy Mace, as well as like-minded online influencers, have taken it upon themselves to declare that all 250,000 of these purported English girl victims were outright RAPED by the Muslim pedo groomer gangs, when the Report itself deliberately clutters up the statistic with a bunch of other stuff that need not include rape, by any stretch, and in fact could be extremely vague imputations of victimization that would bear no resemblance at all to anything a rational person would consider rape. Here’s the claim again: “250,000 young white girls have been subjected to repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, pregnancy, forced Islamic conversion, and lifelong trauma.” They are purposely conflating victims of “pregnancy” with victims of “rape.” HUH? Not to mention victims of “trauma.” No truth-seeking “inquiry” or “report” would do this. You know who would do it? A group of political operators looking to make a political point, perhaps at the behest of their trillionaire patron?

Alright, so again, why are the pushers and propagators of this report so keen on getting everyone worked up about “grooming gangs” in June 2026? The authors tell us why. They are demanding specific political and legal action. For one thing, they want the Modern Slavery Act 2015 — the British version of all-purpose “trafficking” law — to be more zealously enforced, so as to put more people in prison. They can certainly take inspiration from their American counterparts on this score, with all the wildly inventive new ways that “trafficking” law now gets applied here by state and local authorities. (Stay tuned for more on that in a subsequent article.) So a key purpose of this latest surge in “grooming gang” fury is to strengthen “trafficking” law, which in my humble opinion, is a total sinkpit of incoherent nonsense, and a nightmarish threat to civil liberties that is only growing more extreme by the day. In practice, it hands vast unfettered powers to prosecutors to punish whomever they want, whenever they want, for whatever they want, given the boundless conceptual elasticity of “trafficking,” which has no stable definition, and is hugely susceptible to whatever the latest moral mania is, and whatever political pressures may commensurately arise. Elon Musk and Rupert Lowe demand that “a comprehensive Childhood Sexual Exploitation Act must be enacted at once.” Why do they want this, you ask?

This new statute should create a specific offence of “organised group-based child sexual exploitation” – understood as participation in networks that groom, traffic, or exploit children for sexual purposes, whether or not each individual act can be separately proven – with mandatory minimum sentences and aggravating factors for racial or religious motivation.

They want to lower the government’s burden of proof for throwing people in prison, of course. That’s one of the great joys of “trafficking” law in the United States, and why prosecutors are so very effusive about how wonderful these laws are. Because “trafficking” charges can encompass such a wide range of variegated conduct, individual acts of wrongdoing don’t have to be proven so much anymore. Ghislaine Maxwell, for example, was convicted partly on the Maurene Comey-devised theory that she participated in the “grooming” of victims — that is, engaged in conduct that no one involved need have contemporaneously perceived as sexually violative in any way, and which could include such things as friendly gestures, jokes, and the giving of gifts. So long as sexual misconduct of some sort could be alleged to have been committed somewhere down the line, any “grooming” which might be retroactively asserted to have occurred in the lead-up now carries grave criminal liability. Including, in Ghislaine’s case, activity with females who would have been legal adults in her native England, where the age of consent is 16 (just as it is in numerous US states.) But that doesn’t matter for the Feds, because for their purposes, 18 is the no-exceptions age of consent for anything to do with federal “trafficking” law — superseding states whose legislatures have decided the age of consent ought to be lower. So that’s the kind of paradigm Rupert Lowe, Elon Musk, and all these rightoid Twitter/X warriors want swiftly imported to the United Kingdom. Good luck with that! Aren’t these guys always complaining about the erosion of civil liberties in the UK — oftentimes with good reason? Well, they want to accelerate that process ever-further, under the auspices of newfangled “trafficking” enforcement.

Rupert and Elon explain that their desired law “must reverse the presumption that a child can ever consent to sexual activity with an adult, especially in a grooming context.” This is stated as though there is universal consensus as to what “a grooming context” even is, which there emphatically isn’t. One of the most cutting-edge new innovations in “grooming” theory is that there exists something called “Adult Sexual Grooming,” meaning behaviors that the term “grooming” was first coined to describe — habituation by adults of genuinely vulnerable children to become receptive to illicit sexual acts — now applies just as squarely to adults “grooming” fellow adults. So expect that to be coming soon to a criminal codebook near you.

But what about the real English children, you ask? Shouldn’t the “presumption” indeed be reversed, such that they could never consent to sexual activity with an adult? The current “presumption” seems obviously awful and wrong! Well, OK. I agree that on its face, the statement “children can’t consent to sexual activity with adults” seems intuitively correct. But when you get down in the weeds, as is unfortunately necessary in the legal field, what this would functionally mean is the British importation of American-style statutory construction, whereby if, say, a 17-year-old tells her friends, parents, and police that she consented to sexual activity with an adult, that can’t be taken into account for any purpose, because it’s automatically a “statutory” crime, and no mitigating factors may be considered. What both parties might have perceived as consensual conduct becomes, for the purposes of criminal law (and public perception) — “rape.” In England, when a person below the legal age of consent (like age 14 and 15) engages in statutorily illegal sexual activity with another person, the judge can take into account factors like whether there is evidence that the activity was consensual, in terms of determining what kind of punishment is appropriate. In the United States, this is strictly forbidden in most contexts. Without arguing that it’s “good” for a 15-year-old to engage in any sexual activity with anyone ever, if it does happen, I fail to see why it can’t be considered “bad,” but also that factors such as consent (or lack thereof) couldn’t also be taken into account to evaluate the severity of offense, and the punishment thereby warranted. Seems pretty commonsense to me. But not Lowe and Musk, who are really super eager for American-Style Justice to be thrashed down on the streets of South Yorkshire. OK.

The duo also implore Parliament to enact “the harshest possible sentences” for these offenses, so that’s another muscular American intervention for ya — max sentences doled out as indiscriminately as possible, till you eventually get an oversized beastly prison state like ours, which at one point in the 2000s had ballooned to Gulag-surpassing levels. “The overarching legislative objective should be to recognise organised sexual exploitation as a form of structural criminality,” the authors write. “This requires a shift in both legal doctrine and institutional culture.” I have no idea what “structural criminality” means. It sounds like a “reverse woke” slogan where you have to take twelve courses in “intersectionality” jargon to apprehend the approximate meaning. Meanwhile, as the rest of us labor in definitional ambiguity, prosecutors skirt right past the confusion and arrogate sweeping new powers to themselves — they’ll worry about the interpretative nuances later.

Although these Musk-fantasized statutes are purportedly intended to “eradicate” the scourge of adults preying on children, get ready for much child-on-child prosecution coming down the pike. Here’s a fairly mind-bending stat from the 2025 Baroness Casey report, on which the Musk/Lowe report builds. Among the matters investigated in the report are the population-wide ages of “Perpetrators of Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation,” which is another way of saying “grooming gangs,” I suppose, or at least the kind of conduct that could be categorized as “Grooming Gang”-related. The report states:

In 2023, 39% of suspects were between the ages of 10 and 15 at the time an offence took place (reflecting child-on-child offending), while 18% were between the ages of 18 and 29 (57% were under 18 and 43% were 18 or older). The most common age range for suspects was 14-15 (20%).

Got that? Apparently children as young as ten are now being classified as child sex offenders in these extremely necessary and I’m sure methodologically flawless government statistics. A majority of all sex offenders are under the age of 18? Does this not seem strange to anyone? Does it not seem like children are actually being stigmatized, and potentially subjected to criminal repercussions, under the banner of supposedly protecting… children? Just another paradox that I guess we can sweep quietly under the rug while the Social Media Warriors enjoy their Righteous Fury Circle-Jerk.

Finally, what I find most blatantly objectionable about this garbage “report” — which is really saying something, since so much of it is so painfully shambolic — is the sleazy underhanded incorporation of “Satanic Panic” revival nonsense. Because that’s really an awesome phenomenon we should all be super eager to re-introduce in 2026. The investigative protocols the “report” authors employ are so preposterously lax (by design) that they don’t even bother troubling themselves with any irksome formalities like, gee I don’t know, corroborating a single detail of the wild and sensational claims before hurling them outward for mass online consumption. So we get reported, as though proven fact, and with unflinching credulity, the following kinds of “rubbish,” based on anonymized interviews with wholly unknown persons:

Efforts to conjure a Satanic Panic 2.0 are already well underway, and it’s incredibly heinous, given the catastrophes that piled up the last time this stuff was allowed to proliferate unchallenged — a lot of innocent people spent a lot of time in prison. Also, a lot of families were destroyed, reputations ruined, and needless crazy-making political hysteria unleashed. But have no worry, because the Musk/Lowe social media gang now want to groom us all into thinking it’ll be for the best. To use another favorite Britishism — piss off!

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