Toxic troll Elon Musk is making Rupert Murdoch look like Walt Disney: David Behrens

Not only was this the very definition of being racist but it was an oddly precise calculation from someone who probably couldn’t add up the numbers on his benefit cheque without using his fingers. I mean, I’m not being patronising, but…

At the same protest in Liverpool, someone who’d come from Bradford railed: “We’re not Far Right, but…” and then claimed “the community isn’t integrated and certain parts of it think they can do what they want.”

In Hull, another clump of knuckle-draggers made their dubious point by looting phones from the O2 shop while a woman emerged with swag from the nearby branch of Lush. It looked like the nearest she’d been to a bar of soap for weeks.

Some of the anarchy was potentially deadlier. In Rotherham, a baying mob chanting “save our kids” set their own kids a fine example by bringing them to watch as they lit fires outside a hotel full of asylum seekers. They behaved like Neanderthals, speaking in monosyllables and making flames because it was the only thing they knew how to do.

How on earth was such a ragbag army mobilised and for what purpose? For the clues you have only to look back to January 6, 2021 when supporters of Donald Trump, defeated and in denial, laid siege to the cradle of American democracy. Fed by politically-charged misinformation, the very stupidest in society fulminated against imagined injustice by behaving in the only way they know how: violently.

Spot the similarity? This week’s insurrection was our version of the Capitol riots. Racists and extremists suddenly saw their squalid little lives and festering prejudices validated by lies posted on social media. They believed that being part of a crowd would give them herd immunity. Many didn’t even bother to cover their smirking faces .

They were smirking no more when they were bundled into court in handcuffs and police published their mugshots to preserve their ignominy for posterity.

These people did not act on their initiative for they have none. Someone had to fan the flames of hate – and do so without getting their fingers burned.

The Reform UK leader Nigel Farage – 21 per cent of whose voters told pollsters that they actually supported the unrest – said it was “a reaction to fear, to discomfort, to unease that is out there shared by tens of millions of people”.

But fear of what? Certainly this has nothing to do with the horror in Southport that brought a simmering hatred to the boil. No, Farage is referring simply to immigration in general; to nebulous ‘unease’ at the thought of those seven out of eight corner shops being kept open by newly-arrived Britons willing to do jobs that no-one else wants. That smouldering hotel in Rotherham; those boarded-up shops in Hull are the living manifestation of the ideals on which Reform was built.

Farage went on to peddle conspiracy theories about ‘two-tier policing’ in which some protesters are placated while others are beaten back. He chose to ignore the rather simpler reality, which is that protests that become violent are policed as riots; those that don’t are not.

Yet Elon Musk, most toxic of all the social media trolls, chose to believe Farage, mocking the prime minister as ‘two-tier Keir’ and warning that civil war in Britain was inevitable. That’s rich, coming from a publicly-declared Trump supporter.

Musk is a 21st century Citizen Kane, a demagogue who not only owns his platform but seeks insidiously to colour the content of its discourse. As such, he makes traditional media owners like Rupert Murdoch look like Walt Disney.

His refusal to fact-check what he or his company publishes underlines the need for social media to be marginalised by broadcasters, politicians and other legitimate opinion formers. The fewer intelligent people who use it, the less likely it is that undiscriminating types take it seriously.

But the most shameful distortion of these last few days has been the hijacking of what should have been a time of national mourning for three little girls in Southport, by hoodlums who claim to have children at heart.

And I’m not being judgmental, but… it’s those people, not the invented targets of all their bile, that Britain would be better off without.