Bari Weiss's Shitty Publication

'The Free Press' Smears Keir Starmer, brown-noses Elon Musk, and screws up every detail in a decades old scandal.

by Ben Cohen

I’ve tried to keep an open mind about Bari Weiss’s publication The Free Press. It’s the darling of Substack and proof that independent media can thrive in America. I agree with Weiss on some things, particularly when it comes to antisemitism and the left’s inability to see it. But her contrarian model has its limits.

The claims

Take this extraordinary article written by Washington Examiner columnist Dominic Green. Titled ‘The Biggest Peacetime Crime—and Cover-up—in British History’, Green claims that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was complicit in the coverup of “the grooming and serial rape of thousands of English girls by men of mostly Pakistani Muslim background over several decades”.

The piece is, to put it bluntly, an affront to journalism and a reminder that contrarianism for the sake of contrarianism is a dead end.

The historic context

The crimes Green is referring to absolutely did happen. Beginning in the late 1990s, thousands of mostly white, mostly working class girls in the north of England were groomed by networks of Pakistani, Afghani, and Bangladeshi men. The girls were routinely raped, beaten and forced into prostitution. The crimes went unpunished for years due to a number of reasons, one being institutional fear of being labeled racist. Reported the NYTimes:

In 2011, The Times of London published a series of investigative articles on the sexual exploitation of girls by criminal gangs in England’s north and Midlands from 1997 onward. One detective at the time, chief inspector Alan Edwards, told the paper: “Everyone’s been too scared to address the ethnicity factor.” The cases came to be known as the “grooming gangs” scandal.

In 2014, the findings of a yearslong official investigation into such abuse in the northern English town of Rotherham set off a national reckoning. At least 1,400 children, some as young as 11, were found to have been groomed for sexual exploitation between 1997 and 2013, while the local authorities looked the other way for years. Similar gangs were also found to be operating in other towns and cities in England.

Green, who is British, contends that the British establishment “hoped that they had buried the story after a few symbolic prosecutions in the 2010s” until Elon Musk “read some of the court papers and tweeted his disgust and bafflement on X over the new year.”

According to Green, Musk’s bravery means “Britain now stands shamed before the world” and Starmer exposed for his “triangulating complicity”. Green states that as director of the Crown Prosecution Services (CPS) between 2008 and 2013, Starmer failed to bring “major cases to court,” and shamefully “dropped its prosecution of a grooming and rape gang in Rochdale”.

Musk, a notorious purveyor of far right conspiracy theories, called Labour minister Jess Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” a “witch” and demanded she be imprisoned for rejecting a request from the local government in Oldham for a national public inquiry. Musk also called for the jailing of Keir Starmer:

The story, if true, could destroy the Starmer government and support the right wing/alt thesis that Britain is a “failed model of multiculturalism”.

Starmer's Record

Was Starmer really responsible “for the institutional failure to protect some of Britain’s most vulnerable children”? Did Jess Phillips block a public inquiry in order to safeguard her own seat in an area with a significant Muslim population?

A serious media publication would have investigated Musk’s claims and looked carefully into Jess Phillips and Keir Starmer’s record on this issue. But The Free Press is not a serious publication and is content to publish evidence free drivel to bolster their brand.

Green does actually hint at the truth in his piece, but it is severely minimized in favor of the narrative he knows The Free Press readers pay to read. Here is the key sentence:

As director of the Crown Prosecution Service, or CPS, between 2008 and 2013, Starmer secured some successful convictions against the rape gangs.

So rather than being complicit in covering up the crimes, Starmer actually successfully prosecuted them. Starmer’s role was so crucial that a 2013 parliamentary report published under a Conservative government praised his work supporting the victims:

As Michelle Goldberg notes in the Times:

Starmer’s history on this issue is far from shameful. As The Financial Times reports, it was Starmer “who began the prosecutions of the Rochdale grooming gang” during his final year in the prosecutor’s office, “shortly after the scandal in the Greater Manchester town became the first to come to light.” Additionally, The Financial Times said, his office overhauled the way it “investigates sexual abuse to ensure more perpetrators are brought to justice,” making it easier to revisit old cases.

This was of course omitted by Green who chose instead to focus on the cases Starmer chose to drop:

In 2009, the Starmer-led CPS dropped its prosecution of a grooming and rape gang in Rochdale, despite having DNA evidence and hours of testimony on video. When Nazir Afzal started working as a Crown prosecutor in 2011, one of his first actions was to reopen the case and reverse the CPS’s decision. In 2012, Afzal secured the convictions of nine men, eight of them of Pakistani background and one of Afghan background.

Afterward, Afzal said that “white professionals’ oversensitivity to political correctness and fear of appearing racist may well have contributed to justice being stalled.”

What Green does not mention is that Keir Starmer publicly admitted the CPS had got it wrong in 2009, supported Nazir Afzal in re-opening the case, and then radically reformed the CPS’s approach to sex-abuse cases. As Afzal himself noted:

“Keir left in 2013, the CPS having gone from being dire at doing sex-abuse cases to having the highest conviction rate in our history. That wouldn’t have been possible without the support, resources and the protection I was given by Keir, at a time when it would have been easier to give up”.

The Phillips Controversy

So what about Jess Phillips, a politician who once ran a domestic abuse refuge before becoming a Labour MP? Her crime, according to Musk and Green was that she refused a public inquiry into the scandal in favor of one commissioned locally. Once you dig into the story, it becomes clear that Phillips had good reason to favor a local inquiry. Reported the BBC:

Phillips defended the government's decision not to hold a national inquiry, arguing that local inquiries, such as one held in Telford, were more effective at leading to change.

"What I saw happen in Telford is the exact opposite of what I have seen happen because of the national expert inquiry for the last two years since it came out - I saw change happen," she said.

"When people say it's the council marking their own homework, it isn't. It is an independent inquiry led locally and it's the only model I've seen work and I've worked in this field for 15 years".

Notably, the previous Conservative government refused a national inquiry for the same reasons.

Rather than being a “rape genocide apologist”, Phillips, who has extensive experience working with victims of sexual abuse, did what she thought would lead to change in the places where the abuse actually happened.

So other than Starmer helping prosecute the rape gangs, Jess Phillips doing absolutely nothing wrong, and no evidence anywhere of a widespread coverup by the British establishment of a scandal that was widely covered over a decade ago, Green’s article is 100% accurate.

The Free Press's motivations

The Free Press gained huge amounts of notoriety after it was handpicked by Elon Musk to publish selectively “leaked” Twitter files. The story turned out to be a journalistic dud, but Weiss’s publication gained a huge new audience and started bringing in millions of dollars in revenue. The lesson, it seems, is that pleasing Elon Musk is highly lucrative.

Green’s piece hails Elon Musk as a hero willing to speak truth to the woke elites. The truth is that Musk is a dangerous conspiracy theorist with far-reaching geo-political ambitions. The real story isn’t Keir Starmer’s imaginary complicity in a horrific, decades old crime, it is Elon Musk’s naked attempts to interfere with British democracy.

Musk has already toppled the US government by inciting racial tensions and spreading conspiracy theories. If the UK doesn’t watch out, they could be next. The Free Press could cover that story if it were a serious publication. But their readers want edgy, anti-woke screeds that stick it to the libs, so Bari Weiss is just giving them what they want.

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