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Ian Hislop has been praised for his removal from Elon Musk following the controversial figure’s explosive row with Sir Keir Starmer.
Starmer is embroiled in a war of words with tech billionaire Elon Musk, which erupted after the Tesla mogul criticized the Labor government for rejecting a national inquiry into the grooming gang scandal.
The British Prime Minister slammed Musk for “spreading false information” after he launched into a social media tirade, in which he accused Home Secretary Jess Phillips of being a “genocide apologist of rape” who “deserves to be in prison”.
Wednesday (January 8), Do I have news for you panelist Ian Hislopwho publishes a satirical magazine Private detectiveappeared on Andrew Marr’s LBC show and questioned Musk’s intrusion into British politics.
“It is riddled with contradictions, and at some point I hope even its supporters will start to notice that sentence after sentence makes no sense,” he said.
“So when Musk claims to be an advocate for women and girls, and then calls Jess Phillips a ‘wicked witch,’ I mean, what is that on the scale of medieval misogyny?”
Hislop complained that “it’s impossible to avoid” Musk’s misinformation because “he has enormous power” due to his wealth.
He also said that the X/Twitter owner’s reach is facilitated by “people who have been convinced for the last five years that the mainstream media hasn’t covered any stories and that the only people who have noticed anything “What’s going on in the world is people sitting in their rooms and messaging each other.”
Hislop noted that journalists currently “spend half their time reporting stories that are not true.”
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“It’s an incredible feat of deception,” he told Marr, adding that the problems began when Musk called British diver Vernon Unsworth – who helped rescue a Thai football team and his trainer of a cave system in 2018 – of pedophile.
“I think he said to himself from then on: ‘I can say whatever I want, it doesn’t have to be true – it’s better if it’s not true – and no one will stop me,’ and that’s what happened,” Hislop said.
A clip of Hislop’s interview went viral – ironically on Musk’s own social media site – with one user commenting: “Ian Hislop hit the nail on the head” and another saying: “Hislop crystallizes everything brilliantly what we need to know about Musk. »
Another Hislop fan said he “did it perfectly”.
Hislop’s comments come after Reform MPs including Nigel Farage and Lee Anderson were accused of profiting from the “spread of hateful rhetoric” shared on Elon Musk’s social media site.
Farage, Anderson and MP Rupert Lowe all declared thousands of payments from the company in their recent parliamentary register of interests, via billionaire Musk’s ‘Creator’ income scheme.
The system allows premium users with more than 500 verified subscribers to “monetize” their accounts on the controversial site, which has become increasingly toxic since its takeover by the Tesla mogul in 2022.
