Balderdash

Links - 25th August 2026 (1 - Hamas Attack Oct 2023)

2026-08-25T09:23:00.000+08:00

Gazans stoke ‘revolution’ against Hamas - "Gazans are preparing for public protests against Hamas in what is being touted as a grassroots “revolution” against the terror group. The movement, which appears to have been started by Gazans in exile, is calling for surviving residents in the enclave to gather en masse. “You will not break our spirits, nor will our resolve falter,” the group’s Facebook page says, reportedly referring to Hamas, which still governs the streets of Gaza. “We are coming, we are coming, today or the day after tomorrow, and you are destined to fall and depart, gathered in the depths of hell and its darkness.”... a UN investigation reported that Hamas and police units in Gaza had beaten, maimed and publicly executed dozens of Palestinians in the Strip in the last two years... Frustration and anger among Gaza’s two million population have been rising steadily over the failure of Israel and Hamas to agree on terms for phase two of Donald Trump’s September 2025 peace plan – the outline of which was agreed by all parties at the outset. Phase two would see Hamas disarm, Israel withdraw from the Strip, a new technocratic Palestinian government put in place and the start of Gaza’s reconstruction."
Damn Mossad!

Anti-Hamas ‘revolution’ faces brutal crackdown - "In advance of the protests, a fatwa was issued by the Association of Palestinian Scholars, an influential Palestinian group, warning that demonstrators would be accused of collaboration with Israel, a crime punishable by death under Hamas rule... He claimed friends had been summoned to Al Ahli Arab Hospital, also known as the Baptist Hospital, where they were questioned by Hamas security officials about suspected involvement in the demonstrations. “They were told explicitly by al-Qassam Brigades operatives, Hamas police, and internal security officers that if they post anything supportive of the protests on Facebook or offer any help to protesters, they will be executed under ‘revolutionary conditions’ and treated as collaborators with Israel; no trial, no process, just immediate death,” he wrote on X this week. He alleged that some were subsequently interrogated, threatened and placed under house arrest inside the hospital itself. He said: “That hospital is now a central hub for Hamas’s intelligence, militancy, and internal repression.”... Last year, protesters against Hamas took to the streets for several days in a row, with the Iran-backed terror group accused of beating a man to death and leaving him on his family’s doorstep in a warning against any further protests against its rule in Gaza. Uday Al Rabbay was kidnapped shortly after taking part in the protest. His body, covered in blood, was returned to his family’s home days later."
Damn Zionists forcing Hamas to kill protesters! They're also spreading the myth that Hamas uses hospitals, which makes them legitimate military targets

BBC sacked me after I criticised Hamas coverage - "A former BBC presenter sacked for criticising its coverage of Hamas has accused the corporation of making him a “scapegoat” to stop others speaking out against bias. Sean McGinty, 61, claimed bosses had “made an example” of him after he publicly condemned the BBC for not calling the group “terrorists” in the wake of the Oct 7 attacks on Israel. The corporation, which does not refer to Hamas as a terror group despite them being proscribed in Britain, dismissed him for gross misconduct in 2024 after finding he had broken its social media policy, which bars staff from posting anything that undermines its impartiality or reputation. Mr McGinty, who stands by his comments and earlier this year lost a tribunal claim for unfair dismissal, has accused the BBC of having a “metropolitan” bias and a “toxic culture”. He also alleged that his sacking showed the corporation had a “two-tier” approach to discipline because six BBC Arabic journalists who appeared to justify or celebrate the Oct 7 attacks were not dismissed... In 2024, a report by Trevor Asserson, a lawyer, found the BBC breached its own editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times during the height of the Israel-Hamas war. Last year, Michael Prescott, a former standards adviser to the BBC’s board, set out multiple failures on the part of the broadcaster to uphold standards of accuracy and impartiality in a dossier which contributed to the departure of Tim Davie, the then director-general, in March... Mr McGinty said the BBC’s role as a public service broadcaster was being undermined by “metropolitan bias”, which included one instance when a producer refused to let a caller who had concerns about the impact of migration on public services to go on air in the run-up to the 2016 Brexit referendum because she was “racist”."

Jews are no longer safe in Britain, so I left - "my sense of British identity has been chipped away over many years, crisis after crisis, wave after wave of anti-Jewish hate. For many British Jews, the Corbyn years were deeply destabilising and traumatic. The reaction to October 7, particularly the willingness of so many people to excuse, minimise, or even celebrate anti-Jewish violence, only intensified that feeling. You begin to realise that you no longer feel fully at home in the country you were born into, and that your acceptance was never quite as secure as you were led to believe. This is not a political debate, as many seem to think. A friend of mine was physically attacked for being visibly Jewish. I was verbally accosted in the street in Islington for wearing a Star of David necklace. For more than a year and a half, I watched demonstrations where flags and symbols associated with organisations that openly advocate the murder of Jews were displayed on the streets of British cities. Reports of assaults, stabbings, arson attacks, and other acts of anti-Jewish violence became distressingly familiar. Each new incident reinforced the same uncomfortable reality: Jews were being targeted because they were Jewish. As a visibly Jewish person, I found myself questioning my safety whenever I left the house. At the same time, I found myself feeling increasingly isolated. I began noticing the subtle but unmistakable looks people would give me when they realised I was Jewish. Conversations with friends often left me feeling misunderstood. Questions about Israel and Zionism were framed with suspicion. I was being asked to justify my identity rather than explain it. It was exhausting. This atmosphere seeped into everyday life. I encountered anti-Jewish abuse on dating apps and social media, including death threats, for identifying myself as a Jewish Zionist. I watched the BBC and others repeatedly frame Jewish fears as matters for debate rather than realities to be understood. I saw celebrities I had once admired spread anti-Jewish messages that left many Jews feeling isolated and unsafe. I watched a Jewish event at the British Museum postponed because organisers feared protests. Gradually, the sense of comfort and belonging I had once felt as a British Jew was eroded. What disturbed me most was the unwillingness of so many British institutions to confront Jew-hate. Too many politicians, universities, media organisations, and cultural figures responded with a mixture of cowardice, indifference, and, in some cases, the legitimisation of anti-Jewish racism. I watched Jewish concerns minimised or treated as matters for debate. My existence and lived experience are not up for debate. British Jews are both Jewish and British. Yet increasingly, we are expected to prove our loyalty, justify our existence, and defend our right to belong. I do not want to fight for my right to be British when I was born and raised in Britain. Secure minorities do not have to continually prove that they belong. That is conditional acceptance."
It is racist and Islamophobic to expect Muslims to denounce Islamist terrorism, but Jews who don't denounce "Zionism" are guilty of abetting "genocide"

Where are the world's most war-damaged cities? - "the German capital Berlin was hit by 67,607 tonnes of TNT over five years of bombing. This, coupled with intense street fighting in the closing stages of the war, destroyed 80% of the city centre...But Berlin was a spread-out city, built mostly of stone and brick. As a result, Britain’s RAF Bomber Command failed to inflict the damage intended because the concentration of flammable buildings was not as great as it was in the German city of Dresden. That crowded, baroque city, with its high tally of wooden buildings, was incinerated on the night of 13 February 1944 in a man-made firestorm that destroyed 90% of the city centre. Perhaps surprisingly, though, the city that suffered the most war damage – in terms of the percentage of buildings destroyed – is the German city of Jülich. Built on a crossing of the River Rur in what is now the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Jülich was considered one of the main obstacles to the Allies’ plan to occupy the Rhineland. Not wishing to take any risks, the Allies bombed the city on 16 November 1944 and destroyed 97% of it. The remaining 3% was smashed during three months of fighting that ended on 23 February 1945, when the Allies finally managed to cross the Rur."
Terrorism supporter logic: the Nazis were the victims in World War II and the Allies committed genocide

The Logic of Third-Worldism - "There is a circulation of ideas, a movement of currents across the Atlantic, and the Western Left is absorbing them in parallel... Some believe that I overestimate the return of Third-Worldism as an ideology, and they insist that voters care about material issues such as wages, jobs, and housing. They are not wrong... however, the political energy that is now forming is not purely economic. It blends genuine social grievances with an ideological reflex rooted in post-colonial and anti-imperial narratives. This matters for anyone working in foreign policy. Mass movements often reshape the strategic environment long before institutions notice. Public moods travel across borders, and narratives migrate faster than officials can respond. Foreign policy is forced to operate inside a new cultural atmosphere that emerges from social perception rather than elite decision-making. Ortega y Gasset helps clarify what is unfolding. His revolt against the masses was not about class conflict but about a psychological orientation seeking a permanent sense of historical mission. This is precisely the structure that animates most populist movements, but even more so the contemporary Western Left. Social democrats can govern through economic policy, but that technocratic mode does not generate the symbolic energy needed to sustain a movement. The activist Left, therefore, seeks a new revolutionary cause. This is why the post–October 7 moment has been so significant. The anti-Israel mobilization has given the contemporary Left a fresh revolution. It provides a straightforward narrative and a sense of participating in a global struggle, which restores the immediacy and certainty that Ortega described. I joked on X that CBS tried to set up a debate between Ben Shapiro and Hasan Piker on capitalism, and Hasan reportedly refused unless the topic became Israel. The episode looks absurd, but for many activists, Israel is not a separate issue. It has become the central lens through which economic critiques are interpreted. It is, in fact, the narrative par excellence that anchors their worldview. As I said before, the contemporary Left is being absorbed by a new wave of Third-Worldism that treats anti-Israel politics as the core axis of moral meaning. Gaza has become the central symbol because it fuses every theme the activist Left needs: victimhood, colonial injustice, racial hierarchy, and global resistance. This is why figures like Greta Thunberg shifted from climate justice to Gaza without hesitation. Climate politics offered urgency but not a revolutionary antagonist. Gaza provides both. Jeremy Corbyn’s return through “Your Party” also makes this shift unmistakable. He appears vindicated because the worldview he always represented has moved from the margins to the emotional core of the Western Left. Britain and the United States, despite their differences, show the same dynamic. Both cultures carry a frontier spirit and impulse, a desire for moral purpose and transformative struggle, and contemporary Third-Worldism channels that impulse differently by offering a global narrative of oppressor and oppressed. Traditional social-democratic politics, which depends on institutional work and economic programs, cannot compete with that kind of moral immediacy. What rises in its place is a movement drawn toward distant conflicts that promise symbolic redemption. But at the end of the day, the transformation is not essentially about Israel. It is about identity. The Left is rebuilding its sense of self around moral purity, a very common theme. Gaza becomes the arena where this identity is enacted and affirmed. Class politics and policy commitments demand continuity and discipline, but identification with global victims delivers instant “meaning” or “sense of history”. In Europe, where the political tradition differs from the United States and the American Right still carries its own sense of historical revolt, the deeper force animating the Left is its persistent need for a cause that promises transformation. Marcuse already saw that once the Western working class ceased to be the historical agent of change, the revolutionary imagination would migrate toward groups and struggles outside the West. Anti-colonial movements, students, and racial minorities became the new carriers of world-historical meaning. That trend continues today. When domestic politics feels exhausted, the Left looks outward for a struggle that can restore transcendence. This pattern has deep historical roots. Figures such as Ho Chi Minh, Messali Hadj, and Nguyen An Ninh were radicalized not in Hanoi, Algiers, or Saigon but in Paris, where they entered a revolutionary milieu. The French Communist Party and its orbiting organizations reframed global liberation as an extension of European ideological battles, turning anti-imperialism into a reflective surface for Western moral aspiration. But this is where I see the significant and great rupture, it is one thing for anticolonial leaders to fight for independence within their own historical conditions, and quite another for Western activists to adopt those struggles as lenses through which they interpret their own societies. In the former case, grievance arises from lived experience and political necessity. In the latter, it becomes a way of reimagining the West from within, using foreign conflicts to supply meaning where domestic political narratives have faded. The logic of Third-Worldism is then to lift an external struggle out of its own setting and elevate it into the central source of political purpose. The distant battlefield becomes a metaphysical stage where the self is purified. This allows the Western activist to assume the posture of righteous witness while remaining detached from the institutional, economic, and cultural demands that anchor political responsibility in their own world."
As Richard Dawkins observed, the retreat of Christianity has opened the way to worse

Daniel Sugarman on X - "Israel's brief detention of Sumud flotilla influencers led to international headlines and state condemnations. 3 weeks ago, ten members of the Sumud Land Convoy were captured & imprisoned in Libya while on their way to Gaza. They're still there. No headlines. Little outrage."

Max ✡︎𓂆🇮🇱🇨🇦🏳️‍🌈 ⚣🤍 on X - "I love that absolutely nobody cares that Libya is doing to the gaza sex and drugs flotilla crew exactly what the Global Sumud Flotilla org lied about Israel doing. They’ve been kidnapped, beaten, and held in a Libyan jail for three weeks and nobody gives a shit"
Juliet Moses on X - "It really is extraordinary that after the Gaza Flotilla members cosplayed at being “kidnapped” by Israel, and they achieved their objective of getting attention through sensationalist international headlines, 10 members from Spain, Poland, the USA, Argentina, Uruguay, Portugal, Tunisia and Italy really have been kidnapped by the Libyan Arab Armed Forces and detained for weeks in apparently very poor conditions and no one cares."

Heidi Bachram on X - "The remaining Flotilla members held for a month by Libyan militias have been released. They were held at black sites cut off from contact. This militia is notorious for torture, forced confessions, executions and hostage taking. Yet no 24 hour coverage or enquiries. We know why."
Eyal Yakoby on X - "It’s insane that flotilla members were held in Libya for over a month and there was not a word said about them. They were held in Israel for less than 72 hours and it was nonstop coverage."

NizNellie3 on X - "🚨 Well, well, well. Looks like University of Chicago's professor Eman Abdelhadi, who publicly celebrated the October 7th massacres by Hamas, who calls for student uprisings in the name of Palestinian resistance, and who was recently charged with two counts of aggravated battery against a government employee at an ICE facility, along with two misdemeanor counts of resisting or obstructing an officer... is the sister of Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. This is the same genius professor who after the October 7th terrorist attacks stated, "I hope nothing is ever the same. Let PALESTINE break this country wide open. Let it be reborn or crumble under the weight of its own contradictions. Long live the student intifada." The University of Chicago was given $530 MILLION in federal funding last year. She's still employed. "F*** the University of Chicago. I work at one of the biggest employers in Chicago. A place with thousands of people I could potentially organize. This is where I need to build power." Radicalism runs in the family. H/T and all the praise @TradeUnionJake for the incredible work. 🫡"

Meme - Nazi Hunters: "UNRWA: "Over 660,000 children in Gaza are getting back to school!" So, let me get this s

traight... Before the war, there were only 625,000 school-age kids in Gaza. And yet, after supposedly being wiped out so hard by an Israeli child- targeting genocide, it somehow resulted with additional tens of thousands more kids?!? Truly fascinating shit! Gaza is the only place on earth where genocide always comes with perks like population growth."
Save the Children: "All schools in Gaza have been closed for 625,000 students for 6 months."
UNRWA: "Over 660,000 children in #Gaza have been out of school for more than two years. All they want is to get back to the classroom - even if that's just a tent. UNRWA team members are working non-stop to provide learning, play and counselling for children, scaling up operations every day."

Meme - *Flashy sign "Stop the Genocide!"*
*

Crying white hipster man donating money to crying white man at booth with Palestine flag*
*Crying white man at booth passing money to smug hijab woman with one leg in air with handbag full of money*

Jonah Platt on X - "This is legit INSANE. Israel offers 1000s of work permits to provide economic opportunity to Palestinians (whose own gov doesnt)—thousands then massacre Israelis (incl their very employers!) on 10/7 starting a 2-yr war, & the complaint is Israel isn’t giving them jobs??"

LoLNothingMatters on X - "It's a well-observed feature of every genocide through history that victims were extremely upset at being denied the opportunity to work for people trying to murder them."

Meme - *Oct 7*
Arab Man: "Filthy Jews, they deserve it."
*Mumbai Terror Attack*
Arab Man: "Filthy Hindus, they deserve it."
*ISISI* (sic - it should be ISIS)
Arab Man: "Filthy Christians, they deserve it"
*Gaza*
Arab Man: "You don't have to be a Muslim to support *Palestine* just be a human"

Nova Festival survivors face torrent of abuse - "Survivors of the Nova festival massacre on October 7 are facing a torrent of online abuse from bots believed to be manned by Iran... They pointed to social media posts calling for the death of survivors, denying their experiences and labelling them with racist, sexist and other highly offensive slurs. Conspiracy theories have abounded ever since the massacre, suggesting that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) fired on its own citizens to justify a ground assault on Gaza. “The phenomenon ranges from complete denial – claiming the attack was a staged event involving ‘crisis actors’ and fake blood – to posts and comments that shift blame onto the IDF,” the report states. The organisation believes Tehran is behind the campaign of abuse... What may have been initially promoted by bots has now become widespread and peddled by real users."

Meme - "I knew Israel was genocidal when they paused war to facilitate 1.6 million polio vaccines to Gazan children last September."

Meme - "ISRAEL IS EXPECTED TO:
- Stop a war they didn't start
- Free hostages they didn't take
- Aid those who want to kill them
- Make peace with those who don't want it
- Be the perfect victim and never fight back"

Corey Walker 🇺🇸 on X - "It's not surprising at all, but I'm happy that leftists are outright moving the Overton's Window and proclaiming they believe Oct. 7 was both good and justified. Now, we can stop pretending they do not support Jihadist terrorism. Moreover, it is quite insane to argue that Oct. 7 is justified as an act of war, but Israel responding is unjustified. Hamas has stated they would do Oct. 7 again and again. Leftists are now on the record of saying they believe repeating those attacks would be morally justified. Further, those killed on Oct. 7 were disproportionately those who lived in left-wing kibbutzes. They invited Palestinians into their homes, and in return those same Palestinians drew maps detailing their homes and helped Hamas locate hiding spots to kill more Jews. Leftists routinely now say that Sept. 11th was justified, so we cannot be surprised they are not trying to recast Oct. 7 as a "liberation" effort."

Trisha Posner on X - "Incredible: Jew-hatred with a license. The American Psychological Association is now pathologizing Zionism as a “mental illness” via their “Decolonizing Therapy” racket — while glorifying Hamas, whitewashing Oct 7 as strikes on “military targets,” and letting members call Jews “psychotic.” HHS is investigating — and every decent person should demand they shut this poison down. Jewish therapists harassed? Reports buried? Enough. The APA is the same organization that has given a greenlight to pediatric “gender affirming care” so I guess I’m not surprised that they are on the radical progressive side of any Israel or Jewish matter. #Antisemitism #APA #JewHatred"

Meme - "I have the exact same amount of empathy for Palestinians that they had for the Oct 7 victims.
Now should this be offensive? You wouldn't think so since it's an exact equivalence, but this could actually get you fired some places."

Meme - "ISRAEL KEEPS GETTING WHAT IT WISHES FOR GAZA *Propserous beachfront*
AND GAZA KEEPS GETTING WHAT IT WISHES FOR ISRAEL *ruined bombed out Gaza beachfront*"

Israel's mental health time bomb - "The study found post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the general population had increased by 70 per cent in the wake of the October 7 attacks and subsequent conflict. The underlying rate of diagnosis is running at “three to four times” the level it was before the pandemic in 2018 and is showing no sign of slowing, according to Clalit’s data, which stretches to June this year... Clalit’s data, like that of the other Israeli health care providers, does not include active military personnel. Those cases are treated within the military and data on them is restricted. Nevertheless, last year a study published by the National Center for Traumatic Stress and Resilience at Tel Aviv University which tracked individuals serving in combat roles over six years, found that approximately 12 per cent of those who witnessed combat reported severe PTSD symptoms, rendering them unfit for duty."

Rafael Medoff | Facebook - "THE SLOW WHEELS OF JUSTICE
One of the most troubling episodes from the pro-Hamas protests in the autumn of 2023 occurred when several hundred extremists blocked traffic on the San Francisco Bay Bridge. It was a classic case of how innocent people can be harmed when fanatics decide that their cause is more important than anything else in the world—including the lives of innocent bystanders. Among the vehicles impeded were three trucks connected to the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) health system, transporting organs that needed to be delivered within thirty minutes because they were due to be transplanted later that day. The four-hour traffic delay forced postponement of those operations. Seventy-eight Hamas supporters were arrested on the bridge. Despite the fact their actions endangered lives, the San Francisco district attorney charged them only with misdemeanors. As a result, they were all able to perform community service instead of jail time. They were not required to pay compensation to the motorists whose lives they harmed in various ways. To make matters worse, instructors in UCSF’s mandatory six- week unit on “Justice and Advocacy in Medicine” subsequently pointed to that outrageous protest as something medical students should admire. Medical students in that required first-year course were taught that the blocking of the bridge by the Hamas supporters was an example of “direct action,” comparable to “civil disobedience in protest of unjust laws and practices,” which is intended to interrupt “business as usual” in order to “pressure targeted decision-makers.” It took nearly three years, but thanks to reporting by the Washington Free Beacon, the House Committee on Education and Workforce last week held a hearing on the imposition of radical views on University of California medical students. “These classes are filled with propaganda,” said committee chair Tim Walberg (R-Michigan). “They do not prepare medical students to become qualified, skilled physicians. They are focused on topics that have nothing to do with medical science—because they seek to make medical students not into competent doctors, but into far-left activists.” Forced into the hot seat, UC San Francisco chancellor Sam Hawgood announced at the hearings that the “Justice and Advocacy in Medicine” was being canceled because some parts of it “did not meet our standards for relevance and scholarship.” It’s a shame that it took years of pressure by journalists and Congress to reach that outcome. Still, as the old saying goes, “The wheels of justice turn slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.”"

Links - 24th August 2026 (2)

2026-08-24T17:05:00.000+08:00

Meme - Bruce Orrell: "This street sign tells a vindictive story. Evelyn Buck was a former Reeve, Councillor and Mayor of Aurora. Her service to the community was honoured with a street named after her. In his first term as Mayor, Tom Mrakas installed the rainbow crosswalk on Yonge at Wellington. Ms Buck - entrenched in her beleifs voiced her opinion. While not a popular opinion in today's world, it is still a personal opinion. To punish this former Mayor, Mayor Mrakas decreed that the street signs with her name should be emblazoned with a rainbow. Punishment for having a differing opinion."
"Evelyn Buck Lane"
It's no surprise that left wingers love censorship and dismissing criticism as harassment

From Great Depression to Great Credit Crisis: similarities, differences and lessons - "The Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Credit Crisis of the 2000s had similar causes but elicited strikingly different policy responses. While it remains too early to assess the effectiveness of current policy, it is possible to analyse monetary and fiscal responses in the 1930s as a natural experiment or counterfactual capable of shedding light on the impact of current policies. We employ vector autoregressions, instrumental variables, and qualitative evidence for 27 countries in the period 1925–39. The results suggest that monetary and fiscal stimulus was effective -- that where it did not make a difference it was not tried. They shed light on the debate over fiscal multipliers in episodes of financial crisis. They are consistent with multipliers at the higher end of those estimated in the recent literature, and with the argument that the impact of fiscal stimulus will be greater when banking systems are dysfunctional and monetary policy is constrained by the zero bound."
We keep being told that Keynesianism is rubbish, and that fiscal stimulus / Keynesian stimulus is useless and doesn't work

TIL that during the 1970 World Cup qualifiers, members of the Australia national team consulted a witch doctor preceding their game against Rhodesia. Australia won but didn't pay the witch doctor, so he cursed their team instead. After that, Australia failed to qualify for the World Cup for 32 years : r/todayilearned - "In 2004, a new witch doctor was hired to reverse the curse and Australia have qualified for every World Cup ever since"

Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 on X - "Voltaire – the fake antidote to Rousseau He is the most entertaining man of the eighteenth century and the most seductive trap in Western intellectual history. He seems like the cure for Rousseau. He is the other half of the disease.
1. Where Rousseau is emotional, Voltaire is rational. Where Rousseau weeps over the noble savage, Voltaire mocks. He is the master of devastating wit, precise irony, surgical ridicule. Candide dismantles every naive optimism in ninety pages with the efficiency of a guillotine – which is fitting, since the guillotine is partly what his work made possible.
2. His great weapon is mockery. Écrasez l’infâme – crush the infamous, meaning the Church, tradition, inherited authority. He crushed it. With wit, elegance, and devastating precision. He was right that the Church was corrupt, that the aristocracy was parasitic, that the old order was indefensible in many of its particulars. Being right about what to demolish is not the same as knowing what to build.
3. Voltaire is the demolition crew without an architecture firm. He tears down, magnificently. He offers no replacement – only rubble, and the advice to cultivate your garden. Private. Disengaged. The conclusion of Candide: after every horror, every injustice, every system failure – grow vegetables. This is not wisdom. This is elegant surrender dressed as philosophy.
4. His irony is a solvent. It dissolves corruption, yes – but it dissolves everything, including the things worth keeping. A civilization marinated in Voltairean irony learns to mock every claim to authority, every appeal to tradition, every invocation of duty. This feels like freedom. It is actually vulnerability – a society that has learned to be ironic about everything is defenseless against the person who believes something earnestly enough to act on it. Robespierre was not ironic. He was a true believer. He won.
5. Rousseau gave the revolutionary the emotional fuel: the pure victim, the corrupt oppressor, the righteous rage of nature against civilization. Voltaire provided the intellectual solvent: he dissolved the legitimacy of every institution that might have contained that rage. Together they cleared the ground completely. Robespierre arrived and found no Church, no tradition, no inherited authority with enough credibility to resist him. He simply moved into the vacuum and filled it with the General Will and the guillotine.
6. And when he wasn’t playing "champion of liberty", he was on the payroll of kings, literally. He spent years at Frederick the Great’s court and corresponded adoringly with Catherine the Great, flattering both in print as enlightened monarchs of the age. While he was writing these letters, Frederick and Catherine were carving up Poland – dismembering a European nation, erasing it from the map and subjugating an entire people in one of the great crimes of the eighteenth century. Voltaire knew. He didn’t care. Écrasez l’infâme — crush the infamous — unless the infamous is paying well and lives in a palace in Berlin or St. Petersburg.
7. The contemporary Voltaire is everywhere: the late night host who dismantles everything with devastating wit and proposes nothing. The enlightened cynic who sees through every institution, trusts nothing, builds nothing, and considers this sophistication – while cashing checks from the very system he mocks. The fake antidote doesn’t kill you. It leaves you without defenses when the real disease arrives. Rousseau is the fire. Voltaire is the man who dismantled your fireplace and called it progress – and then went to warm himself at the tsar’s. Together they produced the French Revolution, with the Terror, and the template for every ideological catastrophe that followed. The most dangerous intellectual partnership in Western history wasn’t a conspiracy. It was two men who despised each other and destroyed the same thing from opposite ends, leaving the ground perfectly prepared for those who came after them with a plan"

Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 on X - "The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment – the real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire
The French Enlightenment and the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment happened simultaneously, in the same century, reading the same books, arguing about the same questions. They reached completely opposite conclusions. One produced the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. The other produced the guillotine. This is the most important civilizational fork in modern history.
1. The French Enlightenment begins with the assumption that human beings can be improved by reason – that if you strip away the corrupting institutions of Church, tradition, and inherited authority, the natural goodness underneath will organize itself into a just society. This sounds like progress. It is a fantasy with a body count. Every attempt to implement it has required, at some point, a Committee of Public Safety to handle the people who turned out not to be naturally good enough.
2. The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment begins with the opposite assumption: human beings are what they are, not what they could be if properly enlightened. Hume grounds morality in human nature as it actually operates – sympathy, habit, sentiment, the slow accumulation of social trust. Smith shows that self-interest, properly channeled, produces collective benefit without a planner. Neither man is building a utopia. Both are building with the actual material available.
3. Burke is the direct refutation, written in real time. He published Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790 – before the Terror, predicting it precisely – because he understood that institutions are not obstacles to human flourishing, they are its precondition. They contain accumulated wisdom — the knowledge of the dead — that cannot be recovered once destroyed. Pull society apart to improve it and you don’t get the General Will. You get Robespierre.
4. The American founders read Burke, Hume, Smith, and Montesquieu – the Frenchman who looked at England and understood what France was missing. They built a system that takes human nature as given — self-interested, power-hungry, tribal — and constructs institutions to contain those tendencies rather than assume they disappear once the right people are in charge. Checks and balances are not a design flaw. They are what you build when you don’t believe in philosopher-kings.
5. 1776 versus 1789. Same Enlightenment, same century, same vocabulary of liberty and reason. One produces a constitutional republic that has survived two and a half centuries of stress, civil war, and upheaval. The other produces, in sequence: the Terror, Napoleon, 1848, the Commune, and eventually — via Marx, who was a Frenchman in spirit if not in birth — the entire catastrophe of the twentieth century. The difference was not intelligence or intention. It was the starting assumption about human nature. Get that wrong and everything that follows is wrong with it.
6. The guillotine is not the Revolution’s failure. It is its logical conclusion. If man is naturally good and the system is corrupt, then whoever seizes the system in the name of natural goodness is licensed to do anything. The General Will cannot be wrong. Those who resist it are not opponents – they are enemies of nature itself.
7. The real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire was never a better French philosopher. It was a different civilizational tradition – one that builds with human beings as they are; that treats inherited institutions as repositories of wisdom rather than obstacles to progress; that distributes power rather than concentrating it in whoever currently claims to know the General Will. That tradition was built in Edinburgh, London, and Philadelphia. It is currently under sustained assault — from exactly the same ideas, in exactly the same form, with exactly the same confidence — that Burke watched demolish France in 1789. He was right then. He is right now."
This is why left wingers hate the Anglo Enlightenment so much

Thread by @PalmerLuckey on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "We need a bit more shame. People used to avoid certain self-interested behaviors to avoid shame, private and public. Law and customs assumed this. Now, 38% of Stanford students claim to be disabled. 40% of young women (under 35) claim mental illness, and SSI disability payments have gone up 400% in a single generation. It isn't good for anyone, least of all people who are actually disabled, when everyone looks the other way as friends and family and peers con the system with a level of shamelessness no architect of our safety net ever imagined could be possible in America. When everyone is disabled, nobody is. I have talked about this before, but this particular rant is brought to you by a situation where a bunch of exclusive merch at a local anime convention was sold out because a bunch of scalpers registered for ADA compliant disability badges (they don't have to prove anything in California) and walked in ahead of the people who had been camping out since 4 AM. No shame."

Maga Conservative Dr Ken Dabb on X - "Tyler’s mom: “Tyler did it.”
Tyler’s dad: “Tyler did it.”
Tyler’s boyfriend: “Tyler did it.”
Law enforcement: “Tyler did it.”
The evidence: “Tyler did it.”
Tyler: “I did it.”
Candace Owens: “it wasn’t Tyler, everyone else is lying. Something just feels off to me”"

Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 on X - "Aristotle wrote the operating system Western civilization ran on for two thousand years – and quietly abandoned in the twentieth century, around the same time all the catastrophes we have been describing began.
1. His central question is not “what are your rights?” It is “what are you for?” Eudaimonia — flourishing, not happiness — is the answer: the full realization of what a human being can become. The moment a civilization stops asking this question and starts asking only about rights, equality, and safety, it has already chosen administration over life.
2. Virtue is not a rule you follow. It is a habit you form – through practice, through the right environment, through a community that models and rewards excellence. This is why negative selection is so catastrophic in Aristotelian terms: it doesn’t just promote the wrong people. It corrupts the very mechanism by which virtue is transmitted across generations.
3. Man is a political animal – not in the sense that man should be governed, but that man is constituted by his community. You cannot flourish alone. But the corollary is equally precise: the polis exists for man’s flourishing, not the other way around. The moment the state becomes the end and the citizen becomes the means, you have not just bad government – you have the inversion of the natural order.
4. Aristotle catalogued the corruptions of every form of government: monarchy becomes tyranny, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, polity becomes mob rule. The pattern in every case is identical – the rulers stop ruling for the common good and start ruling for themselves. This is not a modern insight. It is the oldest political observation in the Western tradition. Every system contains the seed of its own corruption. The question is always: who is it for?
5. Phronesis — practical wisdom — the ability to judge particular situations correctly, without a rulebook. The bureaucratic state destroys phronesis systematically, replacing judgment with procedure, wisdom with compliance, the experienced man with the certified one. This is Aristotle’s explanation for why the credentialed class produces so many wrong decisions with such complete confidence.
6. He identified the middle class as the foundation of the stable republic – the ballast that prevents the ship from capsizing toward oligarchy above or mob rule below. Not as a sociological observation. As a structural necessity. Destroy the middle class and you have not just inequality – you have the preconditions for every tyranny he ever described.
7. The West replaced Aristotle with procedure, utility, and rights. It gained a framework for managing conflict but lost the vocabulary for saying what a good life is. The system can optimize for GDP, equality of outcome, measured safety – but it cannot tell you what you are for. Aristotle could. Every civilization that forgot that question discovered, eventually, that someone else was happy to answer it for them."

Glenn Beck on X - "Trump just took America one step further towards REAL freedom. For years, the EPA has decided, "for your own good," that it must reduce emissions on diesel trucks, even if their method of doing so will limit your truck to going only FIVE mph when it gets too cold. And if you try to remove that limit, they'll ARREST you in an armed raid. Trump just pardoned a group of mechanics who committed that crime of daring to think THEY owned the trucks they purchased. Imagine you're on a dark northern road. It's 30 below and your EPA-mandated DEF system fails due to the cold. Your truck then drops to 5 mph. The engine is fine, but a federal climate sensor failed, so you're no longer permitted to drive your own vehicle at a speed that would keep you alive. When local mechanics stepped up to keep rigs running safely in subzero blizzards in Alaska four years ago, 30 ARMED EPA agents ran a tactical raid on the veteran-owned shop over engine modifications. This forces a basic question: When you hand over your hard-earned money, who actually owns that property? Because if they can lock your hood and strand you in a blizzard, you don't own that truck. You're just making the payments while they keep the keys. Thank you, President Trump, for righting this grave injustice and once again reducing the power of the weaponized bureaucracy."

Meme - ">"history is written by the victors"
>sea-peoples arrive
>causes the collapse of a the bronze age
>refuses to write anything
>leaves"

Meme - "*Venus fly trap* WHY WOULD A FLY EVER LAND ON THIS?
*mouse trap* MICE SHOULD BE ASHAMED TO GET CAUGHT IN THAT...
*Bear trap* COME ON, BEARS! IT'S SO OBVIOUS!
Wow the Horse Archers are retreating!"

Man 'driven mad by mother' jailed for stabbing pregnant partner - "A man who repeatedly stabbed his pregnant partner after pressure from his disapproving mother “tipped him over the edge” has been jailed for 18 years. Babur Raja, 41, admitted attempted murder, attempted child destruction, possession of a knife in public and the wounding and assault of two passersby after the attack in Sutton Coldfield town centre on 4 March. At his sentencing hearing at Birmingham crown court, his barrister said Raja’s conservative Muslim mother “literally drove him mad” in the run-up to the attack by forcing him to choose between her and his partner, Natalie Queiroz. Jane Humphryes QC said the family turmoil led to a temporary mental illness, or adjustment disorder, leaving him with little memory of what he had done. She said: “His mother had not been happy he was in a relationship with a white woman, and told him he must leave her or she would not be in contact. “This man of impeccable character is driven literally to distraction, forced by his own mother to choose between her and his chosen partner and their unborn baby.” The court heard that Queiroz’s breast implants probably saved her life during the frenzied assault. Benjamin Aina QC, prosecuting, said that if Raja had plunged his knife 2mm further into Queiroz’s abdomen, her unborn baby would have died."
Damn racist white people who disapprove of miscegenation!

More Americans Are Aging Alone. One Woman Told Us What It’s Like. - WSJ - "Amy Kant initially thought she should name a power of attorney about 10 years ago after caring for a dying friend. She still hasn’t appointed someone to do it. The 65-year-old is single with no children, and bound up in that choice over who should make financial decisions on her behalf are other big questions that are often intensified when aging alone. How to handle eldercare? Estate planning? Where will she live in her later years? “It all falls on me,” she said. Kant had long cherished the freedom that came with being single. She prided herself on doing headstands in yoga and walking 5 miles a day. But lately being single has felt like a struggle, and not just because of the weighty financial decisions hanging over her head. Back surgery and a heart valve replacement in the past few years have turned her condominium outside Boston into a recovery ward. She spends most of her time at home these days recovering from heart surgery complications, with friends stopping by. She finds solace painting in a spare bedroom she turned into a studio, but knows she will eventually have to move to a smaller place that’s easier to get around in.Kant is among the millions of Americans learning to navigate aging alone. Roughly 10% of the more than 125 million adults ages 50 and older in the U.S.—or at least 12.5 million people—are solo agers who live alone and have neither a spouse nor a child, according to an AARP analysis of census data. It’s a growing demographic hitting both genders, driven in part by climbing divorce rates among older Americans and a rising number of adult children becoming alienated from their parents. Kant didn’t set out with a master plan. In her 20s and 30s, she chose lower-paying nonprofit jobs to give priority to her art. She remembers how friends envied her freedom; while they were tied down with dinner duty, their kids’ homework, and college savings, Kant spent her evenings painting and didn’t think twice about going out on weeknights. She eventually earned her M.B.A. By her 40s, she was working as a fundraiser, maxing out traditional retirement account contributions to ensure her financial stability in later years. When she transitioned to independent consulting for organizational development in her 50s and 60s, she used a solo 401(k), a retirement-savings vehicle for self-employed people. In her 40s she considered adoption but ultimately decided against it. Then in her 50s, after her own mother died, she went through a period of regret that she had decided against single motherhood... A longtime college friend serves as her healthcare proxy, and Kant maintains a spreadsheet of friends to coordinate visits when she’s ill. Still, she understands the boundaries of a chosen family. Her friends have their own households to manage; some have already died."

Was the Russian Revolution Jewish? | The Jerusalem Post - "A hundred years after the Bolsheviks swept to power, historians and contemporaries still struggle to understand the prominent role played by Jews."
I'm told that this can't be true because later Communists persecuted Jews (by this kind of logic, the Bolsheviks couldn't have been Communist because they persecuted the Mensheviks) and that pointing out that many early Bolsheviks were Jews is promoting a Nazi conspiracy theory. Time to shut the Jerusalem Post down

Israel's top court says non-Orthodox Jews can claim citizenship - "The Law of Return grants citizenship to anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent, while religious law requires one to have a Jewish mother"
I'm told that Marx wasn't Jewish. Looks like Israel is wrong in how they define Jews

Jack Seiden on X - "People talk about billionaires controlling politics, but it seems to really be the high-school squabbling among the staffer/campaign world that’s tearing apart our politics."
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 on X - "Glad to see people finally waking up to the power and importance of the staffer class. They're young, they're extremely online, they're radicalized, they're unaccountable, they're invisible, and they're incredibly powerful."
Evan Barker on X - "The entire Democratic Party is being held hostage by the staffer class, on every extreme, out of touch issue. Often consultants/donors are one in the same This is literally what my book (coming out in 2.5 weeks) is about and I expose it all:"

Basic Optimism | Facebook - "Nobody announces decline. It doesn't come with a headline. It comes as a series of things you quietly stop expecting. You stop expecting the ER to be fast, the wait is 14 hours now, and it always is. You stop expecting the metro to be safe after dark, so you and every woman you know just stopped taking it. You stop expecting streets to look "first-world," until a shopping cart grill on the pavement doesn't even register as strange anymore. You stop expecting the bridge to get fixed, it's been closed for three years and nobody's coming. You stop expecting your tax bill to buy you more than it bought your parents. You just adjust. Don't take your phone out. Don't wear jewelry. Don't walk alone. You do it automatically now, the same instructions they'd give you in a warzone. Your kids play around the tents, because that's just where the playground is now. None of this arrives as a collapse. It arrives as a thousand small "that's just how it is now" moments, until one day the thing that used to work simply doesn't, and no one can say exactly when it stopped. The West is turning into the third world. You might not see it yet. But once you do, you can't unsee it."

facts about on X - "The Erdoğan story starts with a sandwich. Before his election, during Ramadan, Erdoğan appeared at a press conference and made a point of eating a sandwich in public. To outsiders, it looked meaningless. In Atatürk’s Turkey, it meant everything. Atatürk built the modern Turkish republic after the Ottoman collapse as a deliberate shield from the caliphate and clerical rule. He abolished the caliphate, secularized the courts and education system, and tried to keep political Islam out of state power. So a hardline Islamist could not simply walk into national politics and say: I am here to bring political Islam back. He had to look moderate. Secular enough. Democratic enough. Safe enough. That is why the sandwich matters. In Islamic tradition, "Taqiyya" means lying or concealing one’s beliefs under pressure. The concept is often used more broadly: hide the final objective, Lie or say what the system needs to hear, gain power, then change the system from within. One can break any rule of Islam for the goal of spreading Islam. The sandwich was Taqiyya. And Erdoğan’s later record shows the direction of travel. He did not destroy Atatürk’s republic overnight. He hollowed it out gradually - weakening secular institutions, tightening control over the press, jailing critics, intimidating opposition figures, and turning elections into a tool for consolidating power. Abroad, the pattern is just as clear. Turkey still occupies Northern Cyprus. It repeatedly bombs Kurdish forces in Syria and Iraq, including Kurdish-led fighters who helped defeat ISIS, while allowing its border to function as a corridor for jihadists entering Syria. Then there is Hamas. Erdoğan has hosted Hamas leaders, defended Hamas as a “liberation” movement, and positioned Turkey as one of its safest political homes outside Gaza. And this is still a NATO country. A NATO country that bought Russia’s S-400 system. A NATO country removed from the F-35 program because of that risk. A NATO country that hosts Hamas, bombs America’s Kurdish partners, cracks down on journalists, occupies part of Cyprus, and presents itself as a patron of Muslim Brotherhood-style political Islam. Yet NATO has no clean mechanism to expel a member that stays inside the alliance while drifting toward the other camp. That is why selling Turkey F-35s - or anything close to that level of Western military technology - would be insane. You do not hand the crown jewels of Western airpower to a leader who treats NATO like a shield, not a shared civilization. And Keeping American nuclear bombs on Turkish soil under this political trajectory is even more insane. Atatürk built a republic to keep political Islam from capturing the state. Erdoğan learned how to pass through its front door holding a sandwich, and now he plans to do the same with NATO."

Impoverished sociology (Arday)

2026-08-24T13:29:00.000+08:00

Impoverished sociology | Ian Pace | The Critic Magazine

"Jason Arday’s resignation from the position of Professor of Sociology of Education at Cambridge closes one phase of an extraordinary controversy over plagiarism, fantastical biographical claims, and university governance. Less attention has been paid to the scholarship underlying his appointment...

Rather than adjudicating Arday’s biography, I shall examine the scholarship of his first monograph, drawing upon my own work in musicology, cultural sociology and the sociology of popular music.

Arday’s Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain: Uncorking the Champagne Supernova, published by Routledge in 2020, is a sole-authored monograph whose title promises a sociological reassessment of a defining cultural formation and trope within recent British history, but viewed through the experience of a Black British sociologist from a family of post-war migrants. It addresses Britpop and New Labour, Stephen Lawrence and the Macpherson Inquiry, institutional racism, national identity and multiculturalism.

I want to consider not only whether this meets generic standards of academic competence, but also whether it satisfies recognisably sociological criteria of the kind developed by many key figures through the history of the discipline. What social object does the book investigate: a media slogan, political project, musical movement or retrospective myth? By what method does one person’s memory become evidence about “multi-ethnic Britain”? Does Arday define his concepts, test alternative explanations and connect cultural representation with institutional discrimination through identifiable social mechanisms?

These are not politically partisan tests. Personal testimony can illuminate social life, as many classic studies demonstrate, but sociology must explain how memories were selected, what their evidential limits are, what other material supports them and what might count against the interpretation offered. Arday calls the book autoethnographic, but that term does not remove the obligation to connect individual experience with institutions, history and patterned social relations. Questions of racism demand especially careful distinctions, reliable evidence and scrupulous attribution. The central difficulty is not that the book is politically committed or autobiographical, but that the sociology repeatedly fails to arrive.

Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain does take an interesting sociological question as its starting point. How could Britain, in the 1990s, simultaneously celebrate Britpop, Euro ’96, New Labour and the growing international perceptions of “Cool Britannia”, while also living with the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the Macpherson Inquiry and growing recognition of institutional racism? How could one optimistic national story overlap with another of exclusion, ostracization and discrimination? Viewed historically, this asks how nations remember themselves, whose experiences become representative, and which disappear from public memory.

The question was, however, not new in 2020. Even before the 1990s, Paul Gilroy, in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987), had considered in depth the contradictions between British post-imperial national identity and postcolonial diversity. Stuart Hall treated British and Black British identities as historically constructed, internally contested and continually renegotiated. Bhikhu Parekh, in a book on multiculturalism and the report on The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, asked how common citizenship and shared institutions might coexist with cultural plurality.

Compared with these accounts, Arday’s opposition between national celebration and minority exclusion appears conceptually much flatter.

The cultural history was equally well established. Historian Richard Weight, in his 2013 book Mod!, had traced the revival of 1960s imagery, Mod nostalgia, fashion, journalism, Britpop and New Labour’s rebranding of Britain, and the fashioning of the cultural narrative of Cool Britannia. Arday largely assumes that readers know what Cool Britannia is, rather than analysing the construction of the mythology, who did it, and what social functions it served. John Harris, in his 2003 book The Last Party, used interviews and archival journalism to reconstruct relations among musicians, the music press, record companies, celebrity culture and Blair’s political project. Harris starts with reconstruction before drawing conclusions, whereas Arday asserts the moral significance at the outset and organises the history around what will serve that a priori interpretation.

Rupa Huq, in her 2006 book Beyond Subculture, had already challenged white, guitar-centred accounts of youth culture by bhangra, post-bhangra, rai, hip-hop, electronic dance music and club culture. Other studies had addressed Britpop’s Englishness, class, masculinity and nationalism, popular music and British national identity, Black British popular music (and its exclusions from some historical narratives) and the Asian Underground, while many academic journal articles cover these and other related subjects. Nearly all of this work is absent from Arday’s bibliography.

One need not endorse all of this literature uncritically; only a few writers incorporate into their reasoning rather obvious facts about the UK population being 80-90 per cent white during the periods considered. Nonetheless, beyond such blind spots, there is a level of methodological, historical and cultural awareness, and accumulated knowledge, in most of them which exceeds anything in Arday’s book.

Thus the distinctive element of Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain is therefore narrower: Arday’s experience as a Black working-class teenage Oasis fan who encountered both cultural belonging and racial exclusion. But this autobiography is repeatedly presented as if it could sustain wide-ranging social claims which it cannot in any sense support.

At every level, the book contracts the scope announced by its title. “Cool Britannia” becomes largely Britpop; “multi-ethnic Britain” becomes predominantly one Black autobiographical perspective; and a purported sociology of musical culture becomes a small set of symbolic examples.

The actual cultural corpus is very small and dominated by music. Film, theatre, literature, visual art (and the Young British Artists), architecture, design and publishing receive little or no sustained treatment; television is represented mainly by a discussion of Desmond’s, and New Labour’s wider cultural project is barely considered. Yet contemporary representations of Cool Britannia, including the classic 1997 Vanity Fair article, “London Swings! Again!”, encompassed not only Oasis and Blur but Damien Hirst, Terence Conran, Norman Foster, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, football, restaurants, design and London’s international branding.

Arday makes little effort to reconstruct Cool Britannia as an object of sociological inquiry. The book rarely considers the origins of the term (beyond a short mention of the Vanity Fair article at the outset, also included in the blurb), how it circulated and developed in the media, how it was appropriated by New Labour, why it resonated internationally (for example in writings in Italian, French and German), or for that matter some of the more pejorative responses to it.

A proper sociological study of Cool Britannia would not just assume and name cultural products but examine how government, media, galleries, designers, advertisers and publicists produced and circulated a new image of Britain. Arday largely assumes the formation rather than reconstructing it, using culture primarily as a backdrop for autobiography and political polemic.

The second half of the title would suggest a sustained investigation of Britain’s different ethnic, religious and migratory populations, different histories of migration and settlement, different forms of cultural production, and different understandings of Britishness. The book instead compresses plural phenomena into strikingly broad categories. ‘Multi-ethnic Britain’ consists here essentially of one autobiographical Black perspective with some very generalised references to “ethnic minorities”. The clearest indication of this narrowing is the near-absence of British Asian culture, despite its centrality to debates about British identity during the 1990s. Black Britain, meanwhile, is itself presented with little sustained differentiation by origin, generation, region, religion, class or gender. The subtitle promises plurality but the sociology tends to homogenise.

Music ostensibly organises the book. The subtitle comes from Oasis, the three main chapters are each named after songs (The Stone Roses’ “Love Spread”’; Oasis’s “Don’t Look Back in Anger”; and the Verve’s “Bitter Sweet symphony”). Britpop generates the historical framework, and musical taste is used to explore issues of race, belonging and identity. Yet Arday criticises Britpop-centred histories while reproducing one. A sociology of popular music would go beyond artists and songs to examine scenes, audiences, institutions, technologies, venues, labels, forms of sociability and cultural hybridisation — not merely use performers as symbols. There is almost none of this in Arday’s book.

What there is instead is a rather ossified history revolving around Oasis, Blur, the Verve, Skunk Anansie, and the Spice Girls...

Trip hop, the music and cultural world of Massive Attack, Tricky and Portishead, is also absent. This emerged from a multiracial Bristol scene shaped by Jamaican sound-system culture, hip-hop, sampling and electronic production...

Nor is there meaningful treatment of jungle, drum and bass, house, techno, rave or garage: musical worlds shaped by Caribbean Britain, pirate radio, clubs, independent labels, new technologies and racially mixed audiences. Equally absent are British Asian musical movements, above all bhangra and the Asian Underground, work which explored migration, diaspora, hybridity and new forms of British identity. Together, these scenes challenged both rock authenticity and simple racial binaries, and used repetition and hypnotic styles to create deindividualizing experiences which were utterly characteristic of the period.

Arday simply provides a sociology of Britpop which is punctuated by a handful of figures as tokens of representation. Readers learn remarkably little about how musical cultures functioned, intersected, or reshaped British social life in one of the most culturally innovative decades.

No book can cover everything, and all books show a bias towards sources from some disciplines more than others. Arday reads predominantly within one critical tradition. Gilroy, Hall, Parekh, Heidi Mirza, Avtar Brah, CRT and critical multiculturalism are legitimate sources; the problem is the near absence of political science, alternative sociologies, cultural history, popular-music studies, media research and competing interpretations of New Labour. Literature appears less as material against which to test an argument than as support for conclusions already reached.

The impression is of predetermined conclusions and then the marshalling of whatever literature best reinforces this. But a strong form of sociology (or indeed most disciplines) would be continuously testing its arguments, and seeing if they can be defended against rival explanations at their most convincing. For all the many differences between Durkheim, Weber, Parsons, Mills or Bourdieu, all recognise that explanation requires consideration of alternatives. The explanatory power of concepts or interpretations emerges when they can be distinguished from others.

Arday shows little curiosity of this type. The various politically and symbolically loaded and semantically complex phenomena which are fundamental to his book, like Blair, New Labour, Cool Britannia, or for that matter race, function mostly as rhetoric for assertion of dogma, not critical exploration, leaving not just an incomplete bibliography but an incomplete sociology.

One of the deeper problems with Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain is that the book never properly explains how it proposes to move from individual experience to the generation of sociological knowledge. The research object continually shifts, and the cultural corpus is never properly defined; nor is it explained whether the materials used are illustrative, representative or exhaustive. Arday intermittently describes the book as autoethnographic. The scholarly status of autoethnography remains contested, but the term cannot denote autobiography merely ornamented with sociological language. In my own work I have defined its defensible form as critical self-reflection and contextualisation of one’s own practices and experiences: the self becomes an object of inquiry, not a privileged source of unquestionable truth. Documentation and recollection provide materials for analysis; they do not themselves constitute analysis. Serious autoethnography must test interpretations, consider alternatives, adverse evidence and interpretations that do not flatter the narrator.

Arday instead treats memory as a transparent window onto Britain. Encounters with racism become evidence for the character of an era; musical preferences become evidence about national identity. The transitions are asserted rather than demonstrated. There is also little consideration of whether later convictions have reshaped earlier recollections. Most importantly, there is little evidence of the difficult form of self-criticism that autoethnography should demand: entertaining explanations that do not flatter the narrator, evidence that cuts against the preferred story, or the possibility that later convictions have reshaped earlier memories.

Wright Mills’s sociological imagination connected biography with history through institutions and social structure. Arday supplies biography but seldom constructs that bridge: he does not establish how typical his experiences were, how they varied across populations or what evidence might qualify them. What is missing is an explicit account of representation: under what conditions can individual experience illuminate wider social processes, and where do the limits of such generalisation lie?

The same problem governs the wider argument. The Macpherson Inquiry, which unquestionably transformed public discussion of policing and institutional racism. But the existence of institutional racism does not establish the character of every institution, interaction, or a whole historical period; nor does it explain how the cultural rhetoric of Cool Britannia related to continuing racial inequality. Did it conceal, legitimate or reproduce racism and exclusion, reshape institutions or simply coexist with inequalities whose causes lay elsewhere? Each of these claims requires different kinds of evidence. Arday simply uses the inquiry as a licence for subsequent generalisation, so that concepts such as Britishness, exclusion and institutional racism function less as analytical tools than as conclusions. Assertion repeatedly substitutes for analysis...

Arday is most engaging when writing about first discovering Oasis as a Black teenager in South London; discovering and negotiating ideas about “authentic” Blackness; experiencing both belonging and exclusion within the same cultural moment. Such material might have supported a distinctive memoir and, with sufficient self-criticism and contextualisation, a sociology of musical identity.

But that would have been a considerably more modest book than the one advertised. A small body of personal recollection is required to sustain wider conclusions about culture, politics, racism, national identity and multi-ethnic Britain, which it cannot. At every level its scope contracts: Cool Britannia becomes a thin account of Britpop; multi-ethnic Britain becomes largely one man’s retrospective autobiography; sociology proceeds without a defined object, corpus or method. Even this restricted account is repeatedly assembled from earlier scholarship insufficiently distinguished from Arday’s own.

The controversies surrounding Arday have exposed a wider and uncomfortable possibility: that universities and publishers may scrutinise some antiracist or EDI scholarship with less scholarly rigour (about which Arday has himself been dismissive) than other research, fearing that ordinary questions about evidence, method and attribution will themselves be represented as politically suspect. However, in fields concerned with race, gender or sexuality, the gravity of the subject demands more exacting scholarship, not less.

Here it is relevant to consider Critical Race Theory (CRT), directly evoked by Arday in a range of his writings, and which has fed into many anti-racist programmes. Emerging from American legal scholarship and Derrick Bell’s critique of the outcomes of desegregation, influential strands of CRT became suspicious of traditional ideals of neutrality, objectivity and colour-blindness. While such suspicions can sometimes reveal the exercise of power in the guise of neutrality, in weaker academic applications such arguments can become self-sealing: disparities are proof of structural racism, scepticism is proof of privilege, requests for corroboration can be dismissed as products of “white” or “Eurocentric” epistemology. Arday sometimes treats ordinary evidential objections as manifestations of hegemonic research norms rather than questions to be answered.

There is no progressive purpose served by shielding defective evidence from examination, or using claims of racism (or sexism) to insulate careless argument or unattributed borrowing. Such processes serve to discredit rather than strengthen antiracist scholarship — insulting those scholars in such fields who do marry their political commitments to historical knowledge, methodological rigour and self-criticism, and scrupulous citation.

The problems with Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain go well beyond falling short of its ambition. It does not define its central objects, its cultural range is extremely narrow, it homogenises diverse ethnic populations, it ignores some of the decade’s most socially and musically consequential movements, it treats autobiography as self-validating evidence, and it derives large parts of its argument and language from other writers without adequate acknowledgement.

Judged as sociology, the book is intellectually threadbare, methodologically indefensible and textually compromised. The sociology does not simply fail to arrive in the book — there is no evidence that Arday really began his journey towards it."

Links - 24th August 2026 (1 - Mark Carney)

2026-08-24T09:31:00.000+08:00

Mario Zelaya on X - "If Pierre Poilievre had:
> said "Make America Great Again"
> went another country & said “it’s good to be home”
> went to China & said he was "setting us up for the New World Order"
> bought condos from wealthy donors so they don't "lose money"
> got caught on his hands and knees with Ghislaine Maxwell
> negotiated a majority
> passed a law allowing cabinet to secretly spy on Canadians
> led the country to be the only G7 in a recession
> bragged about sending money to people who can't afford to eat
> missed 100 out of 136 question periods
> spent nearly a $1 million on airplane food in 1 yr
> reappointed someone who couldn't recall flying business class
> failed to deport 23 of 24 identified IRGC operatives
> allowed 577,739 deportation orders to sit unenforced
> rammed a spy bill with secret amendments
> had a 86 yr old defense board with the US suspended
> proposed a debt sovereign fund
> got additional tariffs from the US for not stopping forced labour imports
> quietly removed "forced labour" from Global Affairs' diplomatic goals
> sealed Health Canada vaccine injury records until 2040
> took 4 different positions on Iran strikes in 96 hours
> begged the US to let Canada back into trade talks
The legacy media would call it the greatest political collapse in Canadian history. But it's Carney, so they call it leadership instead."

No Canadian P.M. has ever been more personally enmeshed with the U.S. | National Post - "In his address to last weekend’s Liberal convention, Prime Minister Mark Carney once again emphasized the need for Canada to rethink its dependence on the U.S. “A good number of our historic strengths, which came from our close ties with the U.S., have become our weaknesses,” Carney said in French to the Montreal crowd. He said that even if Canada gets over the “initial shock” of the trade war launched by U.S. President Donald Trump, it should “never forget” the lessons. “We need to take care of ourselves,” he said in French. It’s not a new argument from the prime minister, who has often outlined his plan to steer Canada away from U.S. trade and political influence. This time last year, Carney said in a campaign speech that Canada’s integrated relationship with the U.S. was “over” and that Canadians must “fundamentally reimagine our economy.” But the paradox of the claim is that it’s coming from a figure who is more personally enmeshed with the United States than any other prime minister in Canada’s history. Half of Carney’s children live in the U.S. His wife was recently working for a U.S. company. Almost all of his multi-million dollar portfolio is in U.S. assets. He is Canada’s only prime minister to receive his undergraduate degree from a U.S. university. And one of his last acts before entering politics was to help move one of Canada’s largest corporations to a new home on U.S. soil. In late 2024, just a couple months before Carney entered politics as a candidate for the Liberal leadership, Carney oversaw the relocation of Brookfield Asset Management from its Toronto headquarters to one in New York City. The move was justified at the time as a means to secure more U.S. capital, and to potentially score Brookfield a spot on the S&P 500 stock index. Carney was serving as Brookfield’s chair. In a letter dated Dec. 1, 2024 and later circulated by the Conservative party, he urged shareholders to support the move out of Toronto... four months after his swearing-in as prime minister, Carney first disclosed the details of a personal investment portfolio that he had placed into a “blind trust” to be managed at arm’s length throughout his time in office. The trust contains 567 entities. And according to an analysis by Monique Kasonga at the Investigative Journalism Foundation, 91 per cent of them are American. Just three Canadian companies were among the holdings: the oil and gas firm Canadian Natural Resources, the railroad company Canadian Pacific Kansas City and the clothing brand Lululemon. A heavy American presence can also be seen within a list of 25 companies that Carney submitted to the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, citing them as entities over which he had once held an “oversight role.” It’s mostly a list of green energy companies. Eight of the 25 are U.S. firms, more than the number of Canadian entities listed by Carney. The most recent known job held by Carney’s wife Diana Fox Carney was with a U.S. firm. In May 2021, the New York City-based Eurasia Group announced Fox Carney’s appointment as a senior adviser... The Carneys have four children, and two of them are known to be U.S. residents who studied at Yale and Harvard. And if the Carney children are favouring U.S. universities, they’re following in the footsteps of their dad, whose own undergraduate degree came from Harvard University in 1987... He’s also the first since Pierre Trudeau to have an American university of any kind on his resume (the elder Trudeau got a master’s degree at Harvard in the mid-1940s). For all the other prime ministers of the past 50 years, any non-Canadian education was reserved to post-graduate work at a school in the U.K. Kim Campbell studied at the London School of Economics in the 1970s. John Turner attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. Jean Chrétien, Brian Mulroney, Paul Martin and Stephen Harper all studied at Canadian universities and law schools."

Dimon disputes Carney’s middle-powers strategy: “It’s a fantasy” - "JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon challenged the economic logic behind Prime Minister Mark Carney’s middle-power strategy during the Council on Foreign Relations’ CEO Speaker Series in a conversation presided over by CFR President Michael Froman. “When Mark Carney said the powers should get together, it’s a fantasy,” Dimon said. “They did that. It’s called Europe.”... Carney’s version is strategic autonomy through coordination. Dimon’s rebuttal is that coordination without growth becomes bureaucracy with a flag. Dimon argued that Europe already ran the experiment Carney is describing and has not kept pace with the US. “The GDP of Europe has gone from 90% of America to 70%,” he said. “And in our view, it will probably continue to erode over time because of high taxes.” World Bank data show the EU’s GDP at $19.5 trillion in 2024, compared with $28.8 trillion for the US, putting the EU at roughly 68% of US output, close to Dimon’s current comparison. Froman pushed back lightly during the exchange, saying it had become difficult to attend CFR events without hearing Europe “dumped on.” Dimon replied that his point was serious. “But Europe, this is a serious problem,” Dimon said. His critique moved from GDP share to fiscal and capital-market structure. He said he was “not against social safety nets,” but argued that European systems are “high and ineffective.” He added that many countries carry debt near 100% of GDP and said slow growth makes that debt burden more dangerous. Tax data support part of the contrast he drew. The European Commission said EU-27 member states collected €7.1 trillion in taxes in 2024, up 5.6% from 2023, while the EU tax-to-GDP ratio rose from 39.0% to 39.4%. The OECD put the US tax-to-GDP ratio at 25.6% in 2024, well below the OECD average of 34.1%. Dimon’s larger argument was about investment. He said Europe has “poor tax structures that stop investment,” and added that capital formation “generally drives growth.”"
Moral superiority in pretending you're superior to the US is priceless. But of course, if Americans think they are superior, they are ignorant jingoistic fascists

JayGen 𝕏 er🇨🇦 on X - "Even CBC is calling out Carney’s creative accounting. They’re subtracting the Canada Pension Plan from our national debt to make the numbers look better. Suddenly our debt-to-GDP drops to just 10%. That’s not fiscal responsibility. That’s straight-up bogus accounting. You can’t use pension funds to pay government debt. Every serious economist knows it. The CBC panel didn’t hold back: “subtracting the Canada Pension Plan to calculate our national debt is totally bogus!” While they cook the books:
• $67+ billion deficit this year
• Interest payments already $54 billion+ and climbing fast
• Tent cities exploding in Edmonton and across the country
• Another $100 million heading to Palestine on top of $400 million already sent
Canadians get the bill. Carney gets the creative math. This isn’t “building Canada strong.” This is hiding how badly they’re breaking it. #cdnpoli #CarneyFail #LiberalFail #DebtTrap #CanadaFirst"

Mark Carney really is a WEF Davos man | Financial Post - "The political ideology of our prime minister and his government cannot be adequately defined by the traditional right-left vocabulary of capitalism versus socialism. Rather, it is best described as corporatism or stakeholder capitalism as espoused by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Davos elites. That philosophical approach to the economy may be unfamiliar to most Canadians, but it influences how Mark Carney is governing the country and it has important implications for democratic accountability and individual prosperity. It is not a conspiracy to say the WEF has exercised enormous influence over western governance during the past five decades. It operates quite openly, even if many people are unaware of its existence. Its founder, Klaus Schwab, once boasted about “penetrating” Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, more than half of whose members went through WEF leadership programs... physician and scientist Robert W. Malone outlines the WEF’s three underlying assumptions. 1. The major problems facing humanity are global and therefore require international co-ordination. 2. Such co-ordination is best achieved through a co-ordinated network of leaders from business, labour, government and civil society. 3. Private companies are instruments of public purpose and should be accountable, not only to shareholders, but more broadly to “stakeholders,” whose interests are mediated by the leadership class. Malone points out that while corporatism shares with fascism the belief that organization of the economy should be co-ordinated by various elites, it is not fascist: it is internationalist rather than nationalist and not violent, militarist or racist. It does align comfortably with the Chinese Communist Party in its support for elite planning, the role of private enterprise in advancing public objectives, and the preference for technocratic management over elected decision-makers. But it rejects proletarian ideology and extensive state ownership and envisages a key role for large corporate participants. Corporatism’s assumptions counter the historical liberal worldview based on consent of the governed, institutional accountability and rule of law. It differs from the free enterprise market economy where companies are accountable to shareholders who focus on profitability rather than external managerial direction that takes into account broader societal objectives. The problems with the noblesse oblige WEF model are therefore both philosophical and practical. It undermines democratic and constitutional governance by empowering unaccountable actors with self-serving and ideological agendas and by imbedding bureaucratic structures that are hard to dismantle by normal electoral means. And, instead of market discipline, it relies on technocratic and state judgment to pick winners and losers and imposes a costly regulatory burden that increases risk and drives away capital. The effect is to undermine productivity and weaken economic performance. Europe, which is both culturally and intellectually receptive to the WEF, has implemented these principles in binding legislation through the EU Commission. Not surprisingly, the EU’s prioritizing of welfare, climate action and regulatory intrusion in the marketplace has caused its GDP per capita to fall significantly behind the U.S. Although Liberals hate to hear that Canada has lagged its southern neighbour for similar reasons, the data are irrefutable. There are many Canadian examples of corporatism, some of which preceded Carney’s government. In 2019, the Canada Business Corporations Act (CBCA) was amended to codify the Supreme Court’s BCE case, which decided that directors owe a fiduciary duty, not only to shareholders, but also to employees, pensioners, creditors, consumers, governments and the environment. Once the judiciary and the state adopted stakeholder capitalism, the media quickly followed, making it conventional wisdom. Mark Carney’s 2021 book, Value(s), is a paean to stakeholder capitalism, including the adoption of ESG (environmental, social and governance) reporting. His recently proposed sovereign wealth fund, to be financed by $25 billion in government debt, is classic corporatism in the form of industrial policy. It combines state and private capital from corporations, financial institutions and pension funds who together will select investments designed to advance currently favoured societal objectives. Although Carney is now talking up resource development, he conditions his support on incorporating sustainability, emissions reduction, Indigenous partnership, climate compatibility and international environmental commitments. This is not the “Drill, baby, drill” that has made the U.S. the world’s largest producer of oil and gas. Carney supports a rules-based international order and co-operation among middle powers and multilateral institutions on economics and climate policy. He has an affinity for UN, WHO, IMF and central bank co-ordination. He is orienting Canada toward Europe and diversifying away from the U.S. and he has pushed for Canada to be part of a coalition of democratic middle powers rather than overwhelmingly tied to the American “hegemon.” It may not be a pure WEF blueprint, but it is heavily influenced by stakeholder capitalism, ESG finance, climate-conscious industrial policy and multilateral institutionalism. That it differs fundamentally from core U.S. values may appeal to Canadian nationalists, but it won’t be as democratically accountable or as economically successful."
To Protect Democracy, globalists want to transfer power to unaccountable, unelected global institutions

Meme - "Carney vs. Carney
You cannot "live within the lie" of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination. January 20th, 2026
Canada, like Mexico, is open to deeper integration, including options for Fortress North America in selected sectors. May 9th, 2026"

Chris Warkentin on X - "Mark Carney promised Canadians he would build at speeds not seen in generations. Now, in a sharp rebuke, Canada's Federal Housing Advocate reported that it would take over 1,000 years - a millennium - to restore housing affordability with Mark Carney’s plan. Justin Trudeau may have been the drama teacher, but maybe it's Carney who's best at theatre!"
Pierre Poilievre needs to resign! All he knows is to whine!

Terry Newman: Carney's quest to 'Make America Great Again' | National Post - "It sounded to me like Carney may have been softly conceding that during moments of great uncertainty — like the Brexit referendum — the establishment (including himself) often gets the politics and the long-term consequences wrong... Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg referred to Carney as “the high priest of project fear” and suggested that his “reputation for inaccurate and politically motivated forecasting has damaged the reputation of the Bank of England.” Lord Lamont, a Vote Leave spokesperson, also criticized Carney, saying: “The governor should be careful that he doesn’t cause a crisis. If his unwise words become self-fulfilling, the responsibility will be the governor’s and the governor’s alone. A prudent governor would simply have said that ‘we are prepared for all eventualities.’ ”... He said that Canada is focused on what it can control, citing international partnerships that make Canada “a much stronger, more resilient, more independent country.” This isn’t just good for Canada and all Canadians, he told the room, “it’s also good for the United States, because a stronger Canada is a better ally.” At this point, I experienced whiplash. Carney had previously said repeatedly that Canada’s relationship with the U.S. — one “based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military co-operation — is over.” In New York, he tried to shove his past comments down the memory hole, saying that the two countries had differences “over the centuries” that have always been worked out thanks to shared values and common interests. He highlighted just how intertwined and dependent the two countries are on each other, calling it “mutual strength.” Then came the kicker. He told the room: “Let’s be absolutely clear. Canada strong will help make America great again.” This was followed by a little bootlicking of his American audience. He wished the U.S. a “happy birthday,” and called it “the most dynamic, resilient and inventive country the world has ever seen,” with values that should “continue to serve as guides to its future and the future of the rest of the world.” He continued: “That future should include a new partnership with Canada,” one “that re-imagines co-operation in specific sectors that are deeply challenged by global competition.” The Canada of today, he told the audience, is different from the Canada of the past, claiming that the country is “predictable and reliable in a world that’s anything but.” Really? Was telling Canadians that “our old relationship with the United States … is over” something that a “predictable and reliable” country would do? I don’t think so. The fear drummed up against Canada’s neighbour and most important trading partner worked great for Carney politically — but how much has it cost Canadians?"

Eric Paquet on X - "Our globalist ideologue Prime Minister, with his endless word salads and empty slogans: “So when we’re building physically, we are building inclusively and sustainably in solidarity… these same values must hold when we build virtually.” The reality:
• Honda’s $15 billion Ontario EV and battery plant is now frozen amid slowing EV demand and market reality.
• Stellantis’ NextStar battery mega-project in Windsor has been mired in construction chaos and subsidy fights — despite billions in taxpayer handouts.
• EV supply-chain projects tied to GM, Ford, Umicore, and others have delivered delays, layoffs, restructuring, and scaled-back ambitions after massive public subsidies.
• More than a dozen major Canadian energy projects — worth an estimated $176 billion — have been cancelled or paralysed by crushing regulations, endless permitting delays, carbon taxes, and open political hostility toward the sector.
• The Liberals’ much-hyped “Build Canada Homes” promise has generated far more press releases than actual homes, while housing affordability keeps getting worse.
Canadians were promised nation-building, green prosperity, affordable housing, and economic renewal. Instead, we got endless subsidies, bureaucratic chokeholds, ideological lectures, stalled projects, fleeing investment, and falling productivity. At some point, slogans stop being competence and become a pathetic substitute for results. But sure “Elbows up”.
“Outside of its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector.” ✍️ Ronald Reagan, 40th president of the United States"
The far left still hate him, because he's not destroying the country as fast as they'd like

Mark Carney took a private flight from Ottawa to Toronto so that he could pretend to go grocery shopping in Brampton while wearing a $5,000.00 suit. His wife wore Chanel. We’re in a recession. : r/CanadianConservative

Meme - Shaughn.SGT(ret) @PrairieVeteran: "Look at these national media headlines. These ARE NOT Twitter headlines. When we say Carnage is doing the same thing here as he did in the UK, we are called crazy and liars. But read the headlines. Sound familiar to what is being said here? He has expensive tastes. Very expensive. And he want YOU to pay for it. Remember he almost bankrupted the UK. Were they better off when he left?"
"Carney claims Bank's 'staggering' expenses bill is justified
Fury as Bank of England spends nearly £100,000 on staff summer PARTY
Cost of Carney's Egypt summit flight ballooned to $736K with no air force plane available
Austerity? Not for Bank of England boss Mark Carney who has racked up £30ok in foreign travel expenses in three years
Carney's in-flight menu includes fine wine, braised beef and 'luxury' butter: Canadian Taxpayers Federation
Carney criticized for nearly $200K spent on in-flight meals including "luxury Normandy buttercups"
Carney's Toronto cabinet meetings cost $530,000
Bank of England trio's expenses hit £100k for three months
Bank of England governor Mark Carney under fire for £50,000 expenses bill in three months"

Mario Zelaya on X - "‼️ BREAKING: Liberal MPs are now telling reporters that Carney is a dick
He yells at them
Has a “short fuse”
A bad temper
A habit of dressing down members of his own party
He lost Guilbeault
And 14 MPs hate his policies but are terrified so they begged & hid their names"
We already knew about his temper from the Brits, but left wingers prefer to hate on PP. At least the report comes from The Toronto Star, so they need to go through more cope to dismiss it (it will probably be along the lines of @mario4thenorth is "far right" and unreliable, even when he's not the primary source)

Thread by @TrendPolCa on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "BREAKING: New reporting from @althiaraj reveals growing internal tension within the Liberal caucus, with MPs alleging that Prime Minister @MarkJCarney is tightly centralizing power and reacting harshly to internal dissent. 👇🧵
According to Liberal MPs speaking anonymously, @MarkJCarney has adopted a strict top-down management style. One MP stated that the Prime Minister "yells" and "punches down at caucus all the time," reportedly telling members, "If you don't agree with our agenda, I don't want to hear it".Several MPs have reportedly faced sharp rebukes when raising regional or policy concerns: @JaimeBattiste (Nova Scotia) received a "stunning rebuke" after raising concerns regarding changes to the Indian Act. @DougEyolfson (Winnipeg) was told not to bring concerns regarding Alberta's healthcare bill to the PM. @IaconoMP (Laval) faced pushback over requests for a riding visit. In an effort to prevent further leaks—such as an email sent by 13 MPs regarding climate strategy—Caucus Chair @j_maloney has instructed Liberal MPs not to speak with journalists or put their concerns in writing to the Prime Minister. The tightening control extends beyond caucus meetings. The report highlights that Carney has bypassed local riding associations by appointing candidates instead of holding open nominations. Additionally, proposed changes to freedom of information laws could restrict public access to internal emails and text messages — Toronto Star"
The left wingers screeching about how evil Doug Ford is for his secrecy will have some interesting cope

Meme - "On May 28, Mark Carney told an American audience that Canada has the second fastest growing economy in the G7. The next day, it was announced that Canada is in a recession. HE HASN'T TAKEN A SINGLE QUESTION FROM THE MEDIA SINCE THEN. SOURCE: Blacklock's Reporter, June 1, 2026"

Pierre Poilievre on X - "BREAKING: Mark Carney is the ONLY leader in the G7 to lead his economy into a RECESSION. All other G7 countries face the same tariff and global problems, yet none are in a recession. Excuses, speeches, buzzwords, and signing ceremonies do not grow the economy. Canada is the only G7 country in recession because of Carney Liberals hiking industrial carbon taxes, kept anti-development laws, and doubling Trudeau’s deficit."
The cope is to blame Trump of course

Mario Zelaya on X - "Carney: ✅ Harvard degree ✅ Oxford PhD ✅ Head of Bank of Canada ✅ Head of Bank of England ✅ Economic Advisor to Trudeau ✅ Chairman of Brookfield ✅ “Economic genius”
The Result: 😖 We are the only G7 country in a recession That’s what makes this egregious."
"Qualifications" are more important than performance or achievements, after all

The Food Professor on X - "So let me get this straight... Canada is in a recession—the only G7 country currently in one. Unemployment is up. Inflation is rising. Food insecurity is at a record high. Yet the highest proportion of Canadians since 2017 now say the country is on the right track. That's either a remarkable display of optimism—or a sign that many Canadians aren't getting the full economic story from the news they consume."

Links - 23rd August 2026 (2 - Jason Arday)

2026-08-23T17:56:00.000+08:00

Meme - Socialist Workers PArty: "RIP Jason Arday. Jason Arday was tragically found dead at home on Friday just a week after resigning from the University of Cambridge after a relentless campaign of racist public scrutiny from right wing figures and the press. A vigil has been called on Monday 17th of August at 6pm in London's Trafalgar Square."
Craig Bannon: "Look at how different these posts are"
"Socialist Worker: Hurrah! Ann Widdecombe is strictly dead. Ann Widdecombe is strictly dead ... Ann Widdecombe, former Tory MP and sometime television personality, made one ..."
The cruelty is the point

Meme - Dr lain Overton @iainoverton: "I've been teaching journalism at Universities for over 15 years. If I found that any of my former students had been part of a media hounding that led to the suicide of their subject, I'd be sick to the stomach. Those who were involved in the assault against Arday should be deeply ashamed."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "Dr Overton was managing editor of Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a key value of which is "We deal plainly and truthfully with each other and what we uncover. We reveal the truth even when it is uncomfortable." He resigned after false accusations in the McAlpine affair"
"never take lectures on journalism from a journalism lecturer."

Yeerk.P on X - "Completely disgraceful and disgusting to implicate Arday's students who spoke out against him as being in some way responsible for his suicide- this is a new low within this whole shameful episode and if you are currently employed at a university you should resign" Meme - Arday in Superman T-shirt with cape and shorts (knockoff Superman outfit): "I can fly!"
DEI: "AND I WILL sHow THE world!"
*DEI pushes him off tower at Cambridge and he looks down worried as he's about to plunge to his death*

Meme - Morgoth @MorgothsReview: "He would have been treated differently if he were a white man" *Henry Nowak being handcuffed as he was bleeding to death after being accused of racism by his killer*

NewsCord on X - "In 48 hours, the British press has felt the full weight of public contempt for its moral bankruptcy. Five outlets. Five likely record-breaking IPSO complaint counts. The Spectator, The Telegraph, the Daily Mail, The Times and The Sun. IPSO now has a choice: act as a regulator, or confirm what the public already suspects: that it exists to shield the press, not hold it to account. The numbers speak for themselves. People are done with a press that picks its victims, ruins their lives, and answers to no one. This was never news. It isn't news now. It should never have been classed as news."
Jesse Singal on X - "Jason Arday appeared to have lied, seriously, about his childhood disability. It's disgraceful to attempt to punish journalists for having investigated that, especially given the damage lies like his do to families whose kids are *actually* autistic and nonverbal."
We are told that we need to be kind. So all of Arday's victims need to shut up, since the left, which keeps claiming "empathy" is good, proclaims that empathy for Arday's victims is cruel and racist
The press treated all of Arday's "achievements" as news, and if they hadn't, they would've been racist. But when it turned out he'd lied about them, suddenly those same claims are no longr newsworthy

John McWhorter on X - "No engagement with the arrant lies, the massive plagiarism, the airy public addresses. Kendi thinks all of that is okay if you're Black (and have dreadlocks) and that Arday was still a legitimate academic seized upon because of his color. Kendi thinks Blackness exempts one from amassing data, drawing connections, and presenting novel insights. You're the real thing in just showing racism exists, despite that this is a rote exercise. We don't have to be actually smart, and in fact shouldn't (too "Western"). We are authentic in eternally "contesting." That take is deep if you (have dreadlocks and) changed your name to Kendi. Note that he seems not to have worked out at the Atlantic, and publishes this soapbox performance art somewhere you're a little surprised a public "intellectual" of his status would choose. I wish Arday were alive. But this take on Arday as lynched is performance art. American academia should hesitate to embrace it."

Clown World ™ on X - "Of course this is the angle. Jason Arday faced serious plagiarism allegations, and somehow the story is now that the MEDIA “lynched” him for reporting on it. "

Mara Accettura on X - "To all the people crying over the cruel treatment of Jason Arday, I would like to remind you that @jk_rowling has been persecuted, humiliated threatened and vilified over an opinion for *years*. Where were you?"
It's only harassment if it threatens the left wing agenda

Matt Harrington on X - "For nearly a decade the left has mercilessly harassed @jk_rowling without the slightest concern about whether she might be experiencing mental distress."

Maarten Boudry on X - "I was invited to write a piece about the Jason Arday scandal three weeks ago, by a magazine I've written for before. But I declined, and with hindsight I'm glad I did. Mostly, I already felt sorry for the guy, and felt that his case was too pathetic. His lies were so outrageous and childish that he obviously had serious mental issues. I also believed I had little to say beyond what had already been said, and in general I don't like writing about viral stories while they're still unfolding. There would be plenty of time later, once the dust had settled, to deal with the abysmal state of our universities and the extent of their ideological capture, which is the real story, not one guy's fabulism and fraud. To be honest, I also couldn't bring myself to personally dislike Arday. I saw his talk on Paul Simon(s Graceland (also one of my favorite albums), and though it was extremely shallow for an academic talk, you could see that he was charming and knew how to hold a crowd (about as far from autistic as you can get). In fact, when I called Arday a "troubled man", some people accused me of being too sympathetic to him, and perhaps they were right. Let's not forget he defrauded students, reported journalists to the police, etc. (see here: https://x.com/LouiseMensch/s tatus/2085799583985119449 ). I was mostly angry with Cambridge, which had pushed Arday into the limelight in the first place. So I was already bending over backwards. And then I get this from academic colleagues: that I "bullied a scholar to death", participated in a "witch hunt" and was "kicking a dead man". Honestly, fuck you and the horse you rode in on. You are exactly what's wrong with academia. Your kind of people put a vulnerable fabulist on a pedestal, and exposed him to international media coverage, simply because you wanted to flaunt your own virtue and cleanse off your "whiteness". This tragic affair is 100% on Cambridge University and all the racially obsessed DEI ideologues who participated in the charade, not on the journalists and academics who finally exposed the fraud and the lies, despite the serious legal threats and the huge reputational costs. Calling this a "witch hunt" or "lynching" or "bullying to death" is absolutely despicable, and an insult to everyone who has ever been a victim of these crimes."

Louise Bagshawe on X - "No, no, how about no. STOP casting this wicked man Jason Arday as a “victim” who was “exploited”. This foul excuse for a person literally tried to PUT IN JAIL two of his truthful critics. He stole academic achievement from @Cambridge_Uni undergraduates he refused to supervise, told them their work was perfect and then they got lower grades. When they complained they were called racist. Their appeals were denied. Jason Arday is a wicked, despicable man who made false criminal complaints to @metpoliceuk who took them seriously and spent multiple months criminally investigating a journalist for doing his job. Jason Arday hurt others, defrauded, hurt undergraduates and tried to put both a fellow academic and a journalist IN JAIL for telling the truth. STOP EXCUSING HIM. STOP MAKING HIM THE VICTIM. Jason Arday is the aggressor and imo needs to be prosecuted for making knowingly false reports of harassment to the police trying to jail a journalist and an academic for telling the truth."

Zainab Usman on X - "Prof. Jason Arday was cleared of plagiarism charges. Then the media continued digging into every aspect of Arday’s life, publishing more than 180 articles in 9 days. Until he killed himself because few will be able to survive such an onslaught. What happened to him was wrong."
Wilfred Reilly on X - "Jason Arday was not "cleared of plagiarism charges," unless you mean "in university Kangaroo court two years ago." Cofnas and others documented something like 180 instances of obvious plagiarism. The man also claimed he was the 2nd best ultra-runner in the world and that he could not talk until age 11."
Deborah Morgan on X - "Pink News alone has published 950 articles about JK. Rowling - every one of them umremittingly hostile. Can you explain your silence about that onslaught?"
Trans Nepo Baby on X - "Arday lied about his life, his acheivements, his work history, his sporting record, and his disabilities. He copied others' work. He was a shitty tutor and accused students of racism when they called him out. When journalists and academics questioned him, he set the police on them, and sent lawyers' letters. He was a fucking horrible person. What happened to him was his own fault, by his own hand."
Lee Cheng on X - "You killed him by supporting and encouraging his lies."

BBC News (UK) on X - "Calls for public inquiry into Jason Arday 'witchhunt'"
Chris Newton on X - "Yeah, let's investigate the people who exposed how rotten the system is rather than investigating why the system is so rotten. Ridiculous people."

Dr. Ellen Walker on X - "Jason Arday had a wife and two children. Whatever the academic controversy, it is a mere triviality beside the human cost. He and his family did not deserve the relentless barrage of scrutiny and hostility from the British press over the past few weeks."
Jacob Shell on X - "Every comment like this, always from an academic, has replies turned off. Somehow academia has become among the least interested professions in, you know, having discourse."

Dr Nafeez Ahmed on X - "The pig's head incident is yet another example of how The Guardian's reporting was irresponsible and misleading. The problem is that the Guardian's "verification" checks did not establish what its reporting implied..."
Alex Campbell on X - "Why did he throw away the bullets rather than keep them [wouldn't have taken much storage space] or take photo? What about invisible knifeman who threatened him in his Cambridge office but didn't appear on CCTV? For an 'investigative journalist' your gullibility is astonishing!"
Dr Umb on X - "You are reaching Trumpian levels of incoherence in your effort to rehabilitate the late Mr Arday, thus proving you are still a crank."
Adam Sellers on X - "This is such a huge cope. The Guardians investigation DID establish that nobody left a pig's head at his parents’ home. Arday claimed the police investigated this - they did not. Arday claimed this specific pigs head was traced to a specific butchers - the butcher didn’t sell it."
Douglas Coombes on X - "It's a shame Arday had not yet invented the camera phone, it would have been handy to record all these events."
Oz Katerji on X - If you had even one sliver of evidence about the pig's head, you would present it. That would be journalism. You have none, and instead are attacking the guy who tried to find evidence only to be told by everyone Arday himself had cited that there was none."

Melissa Chen on X - "Interesting thing about social media is that you can also see how an international audience responds to a story, free from the narrow, self-reinforcing lens of Western media and activism. This screenshot of the News Agents post is a perfect example. Look at the flood of laugh reacts. Every black person (or non-white person) I’ve encountered from outside the UK has reacted with the same mix of incredulity and amusement that Jason Arday is treated as an untouchable saint by the British left. Minorities outside the West often possess straightforward cultural confidence that many Western ones lack. They're able to evaluate people like Jason Arday on competence and whether claims match reality, and not on racial symbolism or institutional utility. And they find the whole thing just laughably pathetic. Just read the comments! They have absolutely no problem calling out the fraud because it does not threaten their identity. They have no ideological investment in protecting the narrative that every black academic must be treated as unassailable. Meanwhile, figures in the UK such as Diane Abbott or Kehinde Andrews derive their status and moral authority from promoting racial grievance, so questioning Arday's elevation means admitting that “representation” can come at the expense of standards. In other words, their entire worldview would collapse. For people whose public identity and career incentives are built around the idea that the system is structurally stacked against them in every domain, recognizing the truth about Arday is too costly to maintain. The whole world is just laughing at the British left."

Claire Lehmann on X - "If you break the warranty in a publishing contract by doing fraud or plagiarism, the publisher can sue you for the advance they paid you + all associated costs. Those who are blaming media coverage for Arday's death are conveniently overlooking his likely legal troubles."
Nocturnal Field Recordings on X - "I expect they'll be demanding publishers be arrested for him killing himself if they read this tweet."
JJ on X - Getting an opportunity to earn based on lies is also a crime under the 2006 fraud act"

Ameer Kotecha on X - "This is frankly disgraceful language from the Chancellor of Cambridge, Chris Smith. Labelling critics as racists. Zero self-reflection of Cambridge’s primary role in this sorry saga. A Labour grandee and (inevitably) member of the North London dinner party set - Islington’s ex-MP - showing his true colours"
Absurdipolitical on X - "Isn't this prejudging the results of their wonderfully 'independent' inquiry that they are conducting into themselves?"

Richard Hanania on X - "The truth about those who defend Jason Arday: they don't see academia as a serious profession. The concern for truth means nothing to them. It's all a game, which is why academia has become such a joke in the first place."

Narinder Kaur on X - "And..he was kind. He didn't deserve this"
Basil the Great on X - "He reported a journalist to the Police for asking some questions"

Colin Wright on X - "Progressives insist we must collectively administer genius-affirming care to midwit academics who identify as brilliant, otherwise they might kiII themselves. Sound familiar?"

Richard Dawkins on X - "I am bewildered, and not very impressed, by the visceral, naked, irrational hatred spat out by some defenders of Jason Arday. If a Cambridge professor is accused of being an unqualified charlatan, the accusation might be racially motivated. On the other hand it might not, depending on the evidence. The correct question to ask is not, ”What is the colour of his skin” but “Is it in fact true that he is an unqualified charlatan?” Please examine the evidence before leaping to the assumption of racism. As for the idea that journalists “piled in on him” and “hounded him to his death”, most attacks were against Cambridge University. Jason himself was widely regarded as an unfortunate victim of foolish promotion way beyond his ability to cope. In appointing him to a professorship for which he was manifestly unqualified – in ludicrously describing him as “the best in the world” – certain senior members of the university showed a level of patronising condescension towards black people that could fairly be described as racism, while at the same time making him tragically vulnerable to such attacks as came his way."

Frank Lechner on X: "Dawkins and Arday" - "@RichardDawkins ' bewilderment at Arday's posthumous defenders is itself bewildering. Why be "bewildered . . . by the visceral, naked, irrational hatred spat out by some defenders of Jason Arday"? Why tell them, "Please examine the evidence before leaping to the assumption of racism"? A more parsimonious account of the Arday posthumous "defense" is that it reflects the same political project at work in his ascent, too predictable to be "bewildering." In that project, evidence matters less than useful results. (For example, did anyone ever care to examine the evidence presented in Arday's articles, or question, until very late in the. day, whether evidence backed his athletic and charitable claims?) The "hatred" Dawkins notes may be "visceral," but it is not "irrational." Until opponents of Arday's defenders take that into account, their response will be too weak to effect reform in UK higher education."

Peter Jukes on X - "The Guardian investigation was unbalanced, took its framing from the far right, and - probably more than any publication - your abandonment of this lovely man left him completely alone and bereft"
Leo Gibbons on X - "When The Guardian did their investigation I felt a bit of relief that this story - which was legitimate, newsworthy, and which raised important questions about standards and culture in academia - wasn’t being going to be dismissed or pigeonholed as a right-wing culture war story, and instead we were going to have a rare moment on consensus that actually, plagiarism and fraud is bad, enabling fantasists is bad, and trying to silence journalists is bad. It felt like a victory for old school non-woke liberal culture, which prioritises honesty, integrity and academic standards over (minority) identity. The Guardian were still willing to expose Arday as the liar and fantasist he was, even though he was a celebrated black academic. It felt like a moment in the vibe shift. However, we’ve now got culture war warriors like Jukes, putting together a very strong rearguard action on behalf of the woke side of the debate. And it’s a strong effort!"

Committee for Academic Freedom on X - "STATEMENT: The Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) was troubled to see academics smeared from the stage at last night’s vigil for Jason Arday in Trafalgar Square. As reported by several national media outlets, Diane Abbott MP claimed that “other professors” had waged a three-year “vicious campaign” against Arday because they “just didn’t believe that a black man should be a Cambridge professor”. That is a serious, categorical imputation of racist motive, and those familiar with the controversy could reasonably have understood Abbott’s remarks as referring to a small, identifiable group of academics known to have raised concerns about Arday’s work. Unfortunate though it is to revisit those events at such a desperately sad moment, we feel obliged to restate what the factual record — much of it established publicly long before Abbott’s remarks — shows about one of those academics whom CAF is supporting. David Harris, Professor Emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University, first raised concerns about Arday’s doctoral thesis and subsequent peer-reviewed publications in May 2023. A sociologist with a longstanding interest in how ideas from the critical theory tradition are used in empirical educational research, Harris encountered Arday’s work amid the publicity surrounding his appointment as Professor of Sociology of Education at Cambridge two months earlier. Harris privately raised concerns with Arday about what he called “puzzling similarities” in reported data, repeated passages and possible failures of attribution. His covering email concluded simply: “I would welcome any response.” This was not, in other words, a “vicious campaign”, but an emeritus professor engaging closely with another scholar’s published work, identifying apparent problems and asking that they be examined. Several of Harris’s concerns subsequently resulted in corrections to Arday’s published work. When it emerged last month that Arday had reported Harris to the police for harassment, CAF warned of the chilling effect of invoking the law against awkward scholarly criticism, exposing academics who test published claims or raise questions about research integrity to allegations of criminal wrongdoing and prolonged police investigation. That same chilling effect arises when Harris’s scholarly scrutiny is retrospectively recast by a senior parliamentarian as racial animus before a large public gathering and amplified through the media. The scholarly community has traditionally governed its own standards, and its ability to continue doing so depends upon academics being free to ask difficult questions about one another’s work, even where those questions may prove embarrassing or reputationally damaging. Without that freedom, the processes through which scholarship corrects itself and academic standards are maintained cannot properly function. In those circumstances, CAF will be writing to Ms Abbott asking her to withdraw or correct her remarks and making clear the seriousness with which we regard them. Should those remarks cause him serious professional or reputational harm, including any loss of academic title, status or institutional privileges, we will ensure that he receives appropriate specialist advice on any legal remedies that may be available to him."

The Tragic Story of Jason Arday - The New York Times - "Part of the issue here is that universities increasingly want to hire stars who have amazing personal stories and big followings that can gain the institution positive media coverage... Cambridge is one of the world’s most elite universities. But it also has a reputation for being very white, privileged and a little stuffy. So critics say Arday’s backers thought his hire could potentially help change Cambridge’s image. Not only had they hired a Black scholar but also a young scholar who had this remarkable life. It provided a counterpoint to how many people thought about Cambridge at the time... Cambridge was first alerted to possible plagiarism three months after he was hired. They didn’t deal with these allegations swiftly, which isn’t unusual. What is unusual is how actively they defended Arday. They said he was facing several issues at the time he wrote those papers that had influenced his work, including direct and indirect racism. Cambridge then got alerted by a very respected academic industry publication to issues in Arday’s doctoral thesis. But the university continued to defend him, saying at one point that he was the victim of a vile campaign. So these latest allegations didn’t come out of nowhere. They’ve been circulating inside Cambridge for three years. Cambridge could have easily done its own investigation, but it didn’t...
Another concern of other professors my colleagues and I spoke to was that this was a position that typically goes to people who are very senior. By thrusting Arday into that position pretty early in his career, and by heavily promoting his personal story with all its flaws, they argue, the university set him up for intense scrutiny — and ultimately for failure. That’s not to say that he wasn’t pushing these things himself. But without the Cambridge brand and without that extensive media coverage, his story might have looked very different. And arguably had Cambridge dealt with it earlier, this would not have all blown up in this very public and tragic way... Arday’s defenders would say that Black academics are subjected to disproportionate scrutiny; they’d cite former Harvard president Claudine Gay, who was accused of plagiarism for much more minor infractions. But the media is also fascinated by fabulists. Remember George Santos, Jayson Blair or — to give another U.K. example — “The Salt Path”? And this story came with an extra layer of culture war issues around neurodiversity, D.E.I., higher education. It was always going to make for an explosive mix...
At Cambridge, scholars say they’re worried it’s done immense damage to diversity efforts, to the reputation of the university, to their own reputations, and to the recruitment of faculty and students in the future. Experts on developmental delays worry that the story of Arday’s remarkable trajectory has given families false hope and false expectations of what’s possible with a relatively extreme diagnosis."
Left wingers claim Cambridge should've done more to defend him, but they already destroyed their reputation doing so. Left wingers want to burn everything down to push the left wing agenda

The Racialist State

2026-08-23T13:05:00.000+08:00

The Racialist State

It is hard to overstate the hope that followed the fall of apartheid in South Africa in 1994. The newly elected African National Congress was well positioned to move the country into a new era of equality and prosperity for all citizens. South Africa not only had abundant natural resources at its disposal but also boasted a well-developed industrial economy and the continent’s top university system.

After nearly a half-century of apartheid, however, South African leaders argued that formal equality wasn’t enough. Instead, as the argument went, a transitional period of redress for nonwhites was required. These efforts included affirmative action, land reform, and “black economic empowerment,” among others. For example, the government bought white-owned farms and distributed them to black South Africans, many of whom lacked the skills and knowledge to run them successfully. As a result, once-profitable farming operations fell into disrepair and underuse, weakening both economic productivity and food security.

South Africa created a dense system of race-based policies across employment, procurement, land rights, and licensing. The country embedded racialism throughout the political, educational, and economic systems, making identity central to how the government, schools, and businesses hired employees, enrolled students, prioritized benefits, bid on contracts, and assessed the success of initiatives.

Today, the hope that followed the fall of apartheid has all but evaporated. South Africa now struggles—literally—to keep the lights on. Power outages are so common that many middle-class families buy generators. Suburban homes regularly feature tall security gates and electric fences to fend off violent thugs. The number of truck hijackings along the nation’s highways are “high even by global comparisons,” according to one scholar. Those who can afford it pay for private security to keep themselves and their loved ones safe.

Corruption is rampant. South Africa’s race-based procurement model shows “systemic signs of corruption and political interference,” according to the World Bank and the OECD. President Cyril Ramaphosa boasts an estimated net worth in the hundreds of millions as of 2015. Former president Jacob Zuma has faced a litany of corruption, fraud, racketeering, and money-laundering allegations.

Predictably, the measures deemed necessary in the aftermath of apartheid have become permanent. For many of the country’s leaders, the question is no longer whether racial redistribution is permissible; instead, the question is how extreme the racial redistribution will be. Race has been reinforced as a continual site of social conflict, instead of fading into the background of a multiethnic society.

Three decades later, the South Africa model is being replicated in an unlikely place: California. The state’s leaders have increasingly embraced a radical, race-based vision of politics that echoes South Africa’s post-apartheid experiment in racialized government.

For much of the twentieth century, California was a refuge for those fleeing the racism and discrimination of the Deep South. During the Great Migration’s second wave, black families set up in Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco, seeking middle-class jobs and a better life for their children. California was seen by many as a utopia, with stunning physical beauty, abundant economic opportunity, and a political culture that embraced individualism and meritocracy, rewarded risk taking, and upheld the equality of all people under the law. That era is over.

This City Journal investigation—based on an extensive review of government records, reports, and legislation, as well as interviews with leading legal scholars—reveals that during the past 15 years of one-party rule, California Democrats have worked tirelessly to import South Africa’s post-apartheid playbook to the Golden State.

During the administration of Governor Gavin Newsom, California’s racialist project has kicked into high gear. Race is becoming an organizing principle of public policy, shaping everything from education and data collection to bureaucratic decision-making and wealth redistribution. South Africa sorted its citizens by race to deny rights, and now California does the same to distribute benefits.

The road between Pretoria and Sacramento is shorter than you would think.

In September 2022, Newsom signed Executive Order N-16-22, which revolutionized the workings of the state government. Newsom ordered state agencies to create or update their strategic plans to “more effectively advance equity.” When agencies “identified disparities,” the governor instructed them to respond by changing their organizational “mission, vision, goals,” and more.

What this meant, in practice, was that California would increasingly conduct government business on the basis of race. The order encouraged bureaucrats to adopt “inclusive practices,” help “disadvantaged business enterprises” access federal infrastructure dollars, and administer state programs through a racial equity lens. In other words, the executive order effectively enshrined the principle that California’s government would prioritize citizens based on the color of their skin.

Newsom’s order echoed talking points from post-apartheid South Africa.

In California, the governor emphasized the need to “address[] disparities for historically underserved and marginalized communities.” In South Africa, the government sought to “remove discriminatory barriers of the apartheid past.” Both created a permanent bureaucracy devoted to the racial transformation of society: South Africa launched the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Commission to “enhance the economic participation of black people”; Newsom’s executive order established a Racial Equity Commission to develop a whole-of-government “Racial Equity Framework.”

Newsom’s executive order was predicated on the notion that racial disparities are presumptive evidence of systemic discrimination. That notion is increasingly embedded across California government: Newsom stacked the Racial Equity Commission atop a sprawling, preexisting DEI infrastructure that had already metastasized across public institutions. It is not an exaggeration to say that California’s public institutions—from state government down to school classrooms—have been infected by racialist ideology.

Take, for example, the California Arts Council, a state grant maker that distributes funds to local art projects. In 2021, CAC published a training deck to help its members identify “the relationship between government, white supremacy culture, and racial equity practices.” CAC’s racial equity page defines “racial equity practices” as “closing the gaps so that race no longer predicts one’s success,” and claims the “power elite” in the American colonies—and apparently the modern U.S.—“constructed white supremacy (and construct it still) to define who is fully human and who is not.”

The California Water Boards make the state’s racialist ambitions even more explicit. “Providing the same resources, support, or treatment does not guarantee that everyone will have fair or equal outcomes,” a racial equity page published on CWB’s website reports. Instead of colorblind equality, CWB promotes an “equity approach,” in which “individuals and groups receive different resources, opportunities, support, or treatment based on their specific needs.” From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

Institution after institution, agency after agency, the effective message is the same: the United States of America is rotten with racism, white people are oppressors, the government must equalize outcomes, and wealth redistribution is justified to achieve that end. This is what the racialist project demands.

In 2021, the California State Board of Education approved a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum “as a guide” for high schools. That same year, the state legislature enacted a high school ethnic studies graduation requirement. The model curriculum was based, in part, on the “pedagogy of the oppressed” developed by Marxist theoretician Paulo Freire, who argued that students must be educated about their oppression in order to attain “critical consciousness” and defeat their oppressors.

R. Tolteka Cuauhtin was co-chair of the committee tasked with developing the new curriculum. As one of us reported in 2021, Cuauhtin has argued that the United States was founded on a “Eurocentric, white supremacist (racist, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous), capitalist (classist), patriarchal (sexist and misogynistic), heteropatriarchal (homophobic), and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe.”

Cuauhtin also developed a “mandala” that accuses whites of committing “theocide” against indigenous tribes and replacing their gods with Christianity. The solution, according to Cuauhtin and since-cut material from a draft curriculum, is to “name, speak to, resist, and transform the hegemonic Eurocentric neocolonial condition” through “transformational resistance,” with the ultimate goal being to “decolonize” American society.

The model curriculum encouraged teachers to lead students in a series of songs and affirmations. One of those affirmations, “In Lak Ech,” encouraged students to chant “Tezkatlipoka”—a god whom the Aztecs worshipped with human sacrifice—asking for the power to be “warriors” for social justice. Then, students would chant to the gods Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totek, searching for “healing epistemologies” and “a revolutionary spirit.” Finally, the chant would climax with a request for “liberation, transformation, decolonization,” as students shout “Panche beh!” (In 2022, the California Board of Education and Department of Education removed the chant after a nonprofit and three parents sued the state for violating the First Amendment.)

The state’s updated model curriculum is still riddled with left-wing propaganda. The curriculum includes a sample Native American Studies lesson, for example, that hopes to “inspire” students to take “critically conscious action” and teach them to “identify counterhegemonic truth telling.” A University of California–approved course outline appended to the curriculum recommends that students study Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and examine issues like the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

While California doesn’t require school districts to adopt the state’s model curriculum, the very existence of an ethnic-studies requirement allows school districts to import racialism to the classroom. In San Francisco, for example, the local school district approved an ethnic studies curriculum that described Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther who murdered a cop, as a “political prisoner,” targeted “white male privilege,” and asked what “white males need to give up (or relinquish) in order to make a more equitable society.”

None of this has anything to do with ensuring children are proficient in reading and math or are prepared to enter the workforce following graduation. Rather, the point is to create foot soldiers for the racialist revolution.

The May 2020 death of George Floyd, and the ensuing “summer of love,” served as a flashpoint for California’s racialist revolution. Not wanting to let a good crisis go to waste, Democrats seized the moment to push radical policy proposals that previously would have been unachievable, including the creation of the first statewide reparations task force in United States history.

In September 2020, Newsom signed A.B. 3121. The bill created a nine-member Reparations Task Force to investigate the effects of slavery and racial discrimination on people of African descent living in California and the United States more broadly. In 2021, the task force began its work, with meetings beginning in June and continuing into 2023.

It is worth pausing to note some important context: the California Constitution of 1849 explicitly prohibited slavery, and when California entered the Union in 1850, it did so as a free state. California was never a slave state.

Nevertheless, the task force pushed ahead. At a September 2022 meeting, the task force provided an update on community feedback it had received so far. One significant trend was “acknowledgment” that the “Black Community” had been “Exploit[ed] by ‘whitey.’” Another respondent called for “the redistribution of wealth, number one, bar none.” Mary Frances Berry, the Geraldine Segal Professor of American Social Thought Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania, submitted testimony for another meeting calling for just that: “The reparatory justice movement is needed to bring about a redistribution of the wealth in the United States and to repair the damage that corporate capitalists and federal and state government have done to individuals, groups, and communities in the past and present,” she said.

In June 2023, the reparations task force released its final report, a 1,000-page doorstop of a document featuring a long list of recommendations. It amounted to a comprehensive vision for the South Africanization of California.

The task force recommended, among other things, the creation of a reparations agency; compensation packages; subjecting all state laws to “racial impact” analysis; criminal-justice reforms; investments in housing and education; and initiatives to address health disparities and wealth gaps. It also recommended that the state legislature formally apologize “for the atrocities committed by California state actors who promoted, enforced, and facilitated the institution of chattel slavery and its ongoing legacy of systemic discrimination.”

For cash reparations, the task force suggested payouts not only to individuals who descended from enslaved people but also to anyone with a descendant who was black in America prior to the beginning of the twentieth century—even if that ancestor had been a free person. Since “discriminatory policies made no distinctions between” slaves and their descendants, the task force reasoned, “compensatory remedy must do the same.”

The report called for a “down payment” on cash reparations, which would give the government time to settle on a final compensation scheme. The task force emphasized the need to communicate to the public that this “initial down-payment” was just “the beginning of a process of addressing historical injustices, not the end of it.” Preliminary calculations indicated cash payouts could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars for some black residents; a conservative estimate put the total cost at $500 billion. For context, the entire California budget totals about $350 billion.

The report made a host of other recommendations to remake California. The task force called for the creation of a state agency to oversee existing government agencies, including the Department of Justice. It called for free tuition for postsecondary students, eliminating standardized test requirements for state-university graduate programs, and instituting single-payer health care. It urged the implementation of rent control in formerly redlined areas, adding green spaces in black neighborhoods, and greater investment in “food justice” initiatives for the black community.

The task force also demanded a “right to return” for black Californians whose ancestors had been displaced from neighborhoods or communities by the government. The task force elsewhere pointed to a case in Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles County, which served as an example of this “right” in practice. In the 1920s, a black-owned beachfront property had been seized by Los Angeles County via eminent domain. In 2022, the county returned the land to the heirs of the former owners, who then sold it back to Los Angeles County for $20 million.

In September 2024, Newsom signed an official apology. “The State of California accepts responsibility for the role we played in promoting, facilitating, and permitting the institution of slavery, as well as its enduring legacy of persistent racial disparities,” Newsom said in an accompanying statement. “Building on decades of work, California is now taking another important step forward in recognizing the grave injustices of the past—and making amends for the harms caused.”

The governor didn’t stop there. In October 2025, he signed S.B. 518, which established California’s Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery. This permanent state agency is responsible for administering and verifying eligibility for reparations programs. Newsom also signed legislation earmarking up to $6 million in funding for the California State University system to study ways to verify descendant status, apparently to determine eligibility for future reparations payouts.

When reviewing the demands made by the California reparations task force, an obvious question comes to mind: Are all these proposals legal? Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project and an adjunct fellow at Manhattan Institute, seemed to have doubts.

“I don’t think California’s legislators have been terribly committed to pretending to use racial proxies [as other states do],” Morenoff said. “By and large, the California legislature doesn’t play that game. They are very transparent in telling you what they are doing: ‘We are creating a benefit for a particular race’. . . . I always work with the rule of thumb that if the California Legislature is in session, someone is proposing some insane identitarian proposal that is obviously unconstitutional. And I can’t think of a single instance where I’ve been proven wrong.”

California’s Democratic legislators have now set their sights on gutting the legal constraints that hold back the racialist revolution—most notably, Prop. 209, which bans racial discrimination in public programs. On June 9, 2026, California Democratic State Assemblyman Corey Jackson was speaking at a state hearing on ACA 7, a proposed constitutional amendment that would limit the scope of Prop. 209.

During the hearing, Jackson received some pushback from Republican State Senator Steven Choi, who argued that the “dark age” of discrimination was over. “The Constitution of the United States, [the] California Constitution, specifically states that no person shall be treated differently,” Choi said.

Jackson, who did not respond to our request for comment, suggested that existing protections weren’t enough: “What we’re saying is we don’t care what the constitution says.”

Despite all the progress that California’s racialist revolutionaries have made during the Newsom administration, progressive activists outside government, and Democratic legislators inside of it, want to go further.

The California Budget & Policy Center published a paper in April 2021 outlining how the state could use tax policy to pursue “racial equity.” The center argued in its summary of the paper that “[c]enturies of racist policies, from enslavement, land theft, and genocide,” among other policies, are responsible for “American Indian, Black, Latinx, and Pacific Islander Californians” being “less likely to have high incomes than white and Asian households.”

The solution, according to the group, is to use ostensibly race-neutral means to raise taxes on whites and Asians in order to funnel the money to preferred races. State Senator John Laird and Assemblywoman Mia Bonta both spoke at the California Budget & Policy Center’s annual conference this year.

In November 2026, the California Budget & Policy Center may get its wish. This fall, Californians will vote on a proposed “billionaires tax,” which would impose a one-time, 5 percent tax on anyone with a net worth above $1 billion. The tax would be retroactive, with significant anti-avoidance provisions. California has about 200 billionaires, most of whom are white or Asian.

If the proposal passes, it will be disastrous for California. It will result in a drain of human capital, as well as major capital flight to other jurisdictions, significantly reducing the state’s tax base. This would be especially devastating at a time when taxpayers are already fleeing California in large numbers.

Every year of the Newsom administration, California has suffered a net migration loss. Between 2020 and 2024 alone, the state experienced a net domestic migration loss of more than 1.4 million people. The mere proposal of a billionaires tax has prompted the state’s wealthiest residents to look elsewhere: Pirate Wires spoke to about 10 percent of the state’s billionaires and found that “[a]lmost all of them have either purchased property out of state or are in the process of buying property out of state now.”

To understand where all this is going, consider today’s South Africa. Since 2011, GDP per capita in South Africa has declined, infrastructure has deteriorated, and the unemployment rate is the highest in among G20 countries. The South African experiment also demonstrates that once a government chooses the racialist road, it must walk down it further and further.

Since 1994, roughly 20 percent of freehold farmland formerly owned by whites has been transferred to or purchased by blacks. The government, however, doesn’t feel this is enough. By 2030, South Africa wants to bump that figure up to 30 percent. The nation’s government has also debated constitutional changes that would allow land expropriation without compensation.

Back in California, state Democrats are pushing A.B. 801, known as the California Community Reinvestment Act. If passed, the bill would create new obligations for state-chartered banks, credit unions, fintech firms, and mortgage lenders. Assemblymember Mia Bonta, the bill’s sponsor, said that it is “[d]esigned to narrow the racial wealth gap,” benefitting “historically underserved communities” and “communities of color.”

Last year, California’s Legislative Black Caucus introduced a suite of bills aiming to further the racialist revolution, including one that would prioritize higher education admissions for descendants of slaves and another that would “allocate a portion of Home Purchase Assistance funds to first-time home buyers who are descendants of American chattel slavery.”

On and on it goes. These measures are far more than the ad hoc diversity trainings common during the era of “peak woke,” or toothless symbolic announcements. These policies and proposals represent a concerted effort to strip wealth from whites and Asians and redistribute it to favored racial groups.

Newsom’s ambivalence may be the only thing holding California’s racialist revolution back. The governor has vetoed a handful of reparations bills backed by the state’s Legislative Black Caucus, in some cases citing budget and legal constraints. He probably knows such proposals are unpopular with voters.

But with the creation of California’s Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery, Newsom has built a permanent government agency with an explicit mandate to administer reparations programs. This agency will outlast Newsom’s governorship, allowing his successor to continue the racialist revolution.

We reached out to Newsom’s office for comment on this story. In an after-deadline response, an official suggested that we were not journalists and did not answer our questions about the state’s policies.

California’s racialist revolutionaries seem incapable of grasping a simple truth: all these heavy-handed policies will not work. No matter how much wealth is seized, no matter how much government spending is redirected to favored racial groups, outcomes in the real world will never look the same as a Census table. These policies failed in South Africa, and they will fail in California, too.

The revolutionaries also refuse to recognize another obvious fact: rather than being the racist nightmare they make it out to be, America has had formal legal equality among the races for more than 60 years, not to mention a robust welfare state and decades of affirmative action policies.

The effort of California leaders to forge a racialist state offers two warnings. The first is for Californians. If you believe that citizens should be treated as individuals, rather than as stand-ins for their group identity, then it’s time to punish politicians at the ballot box. If their incentives don’t change, their actions won’t, either.

The second warning is for the rest of America. Blue states take cues from California. What starts in the Golden State often ends up in other state legislatures—and sometimes on the floor of Congress. Americans should reject racialism in California for the same reason they should reject it anywhere: because all men are created equal.

Links - 23rd August 2026 (1 - Get Woke, Go Broke)

2026-08-23T09:05:00.000+08:00

Why Captain America, Fantastic Four, Mandalorian & Grogu And Supergirl All Bombed The Same Way - "Two quotes from Monday’s episode of The Town, and together they explain the last eighteen months of franchise filmmaking. While talking about the biggest losers of 2026, which includes James Gunn and Kathleen Kennedy, Puck’s Matt Belloni, on Lucasfilm: “They played it absolutely safe and it’s blown up in their face.” Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw, on why he passed on Supergirl in the show’s box office draft: “I just figured, clearly incorrectly, that the floor on a superhero movie was still like 250, 300. This movie is not going to sniff two.”... Marvel, DC, and Lucasfilm have now all run the same play and gotten the same result, because the thing that used to make “safe” profitable no longer exists. The floor was the fanbase. The floor is gone. Look at the shape of these runs, not just the totals... That shape means the same thing every time: general audiences show up once on brand recognition, do not come back, and there is no fanbase underneath to catch the fall. For decades, the fanbase was the safety net that turned mediocre franchise entries into $600 million grosses. Every one of these movies fell straight through where the net used to be. Shaw’s number is worth sitting with. The floor on a superhero movie used to be $250-300 million, not because the movies always earned it, but because a core audience showed up out of loyalty and habit no matter what. That was the subsidy every studio quietly built its budgets on. That subsidy is dead, and it did not die by accident. We have documented the erosion for years. Star Wars lost as much as 85% of its audience, and the fix made it worse. The Mandalorian’s own Nielsen ratings dropped nearly 40% before anyone thought putting it in theaters was the answer. Marvel’s Disney+ era trained its audience that nothing is essential. And after a decade of franchises lecturing the customers, the customers did the one thing studios never modeled. They left. “Playing it safe” was never the disease. It is the last symptom. Safe means programming for an audience you assume is still in the seats. These studios kept making the safe play for a fanbase that had already walked out of the building. Here is where the usual defense falls apart. The reflex answer to every bomb is “just make good movies.” Fine. Thunderbolts was the well-reviewed one, sitting at 88% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and 93% from fans, and it could not even manage the front-loaded opening the others got. If quality were the variable, Thunderbolts performs. It did not. Same story with The Mandalorian & Grogu. Belloni himself stipulates “the movie was fine. Favreau did a good job.” Fine did not matter. Two decently made, well-reviewed (at least by fans) franchise entries produced the same outcome as the maligned ones because the problem was never just one bad movie. It is the burned relationship underneath all of them. You cannot review-score your way out of a decade of alienating your own base. The kill shot for every excuse — superhero fatigue, theaters are dying, streaming ate the business — is that the overall market is healthy. As noted on the same episode of The Town, the box office is up roughly 15% this year and on pace for the first $10 billion domestic year since 2019. Look at what is actually winning. Obsession just crossed $400 million and became Focus’s biggest movie ever, an original horror film from a YouTube director. Likewise, Backrooms is nearing $350M. Project Hail Mary is a big hit that, per the same episode, “reasserted [Ryan Gosling’s] primacy as a star who can get movies made almost on his own.” The Michael Jackson biopic is heading to $1 billion. Audiences did not stop going to movies. They stopped showing up out of obligation. Originals and star vehicles are thriving in the same marketplace where legacy IP is dying, because they never had a subsidy to lose. They were built to earn every ticket. That is the new rule for everyone now: every franchise film performs like an original. The brand gets you one weekend. The movie has to do the rest, and “safe” earns nothing. Which brings us to the two biggest bets on the calendar, because Marvel and Lucasfilm have answered the same crisis with opposite plays. Marvel’s answer is Avengers: Doomsday, the biggest safe play ever constructed, nostalgia stacked to the ceiling. Lucasfilm’s answer is Star Wars: Starfighter, an actual movie-star vehicle with new characters, fronted by the guy the industry just crowned a winner of 2026... The floor does not come back on its own. You rebuild it one earned ticket at a time."

Hollywood Does A 180: Studios Now Courting The Very Fans They Shunned - "For the better part of a decade, Hollywood had a message for its core audience: this isn’t for you anymore. Star Wars didn’t need you. Star Trek didn’t want you. Marvel figured you’d show up regardless of what got made. Who knows what happened to Doctor Who (we know). And if you objected, you weren’t a customer with a complaint, you were the problem. And they blamed you. A “toxic” fan. A review-bomber. A relic waiting to be replaced by the fabled “modern audience.” Except the modern audience never showed up. The old one left. And now — billions in write-downs, canceled shows, and franchise-low openings later — the very same studios are tripping over each other to win back the exact fans they spent years lecturing... Lucasfilm responded to the sequel trilogy backlash not by examining the movies but by branding the audience toxic. Alex Kurtzman’s Star Trek made sure you knew it wasn’t your father’s Trek, and that this was the point. Marvel flooded Disney+ with content aimed at everyone except the fans who built the $30 billion machine, then reached for “review bombing” as the all-purpose excuse every time an audience score cratered. The playbook got so predictable that South Park turned it into a Panderverse punchline. Even Bob Iger eventually admitted, back in November 2023, that Disney’s creators had “lost sight” of the job — entertain first, message second. It was the closest thing to a confession the industry produced during the entire era. Then the confessions stopped mattering, because the numbers started talking. Star Wars went nearly seven years without a single theatrical release after The Rise of Skywalker. Read that again: the biggest movie franchise ever created spent the better part of a decade afraid of theaters. And then when it came back, 85% of the fans didn’t return. On the streaming side, The Acolyte burned through a reported $180 million and got canceled after one season. Marvel’s decline is documented on a spreadsheet. The Marvels: $206 million worldwide, the lowest-grossing MCU film in history. Captain America: Brave New World limped to $415 million. Thunderbolts couldn’t crack $400 million even with reviews on its side and the “New Avengers” rebranding; proof the brand itself no longer sells tickets. Disney’s live-action pipeline delivered Snow White: roughly $205 million worldwide against a reported quarter-billion-dollar budget... Star Trek hasn’t been in theaters since 2016’s Beyond ($343 million). Section 31 arrived as the worst-reviewed Trek project ever made, Discovery and Lower Decks are gone, and Paramount+ spent two years contracting. Box office and Nielsen don’t lie, don’t apologize, and don’t care about your press release. The audience didn’t organize a boycott. They just quietly stopped showing up, the most expensive silence in Hollywood history. Enter David Ellison, who bought Paramount and immediately started doing the unthinkable: courting the shunned. As we broke down, the receipts are everywhere: a storytelling-first mandate, Bari Weiss installed atop CBS News, DEI programs formally scaled back. And it’s Star Trek, of all franchises, serving as the proof of concept. Per our insiders, the Trek reboot in development is being built on Wrath of Khan and Next Generation DNA, the exact eras the Kurtzman regime treated as baggage... A former Disney employee revealed after the layoffs that DEI has been quietly toned down since Trump won. A leaked Netflix mandate showed the streamer ramping up faith-based programming for the viewers it once ignored, just as we first reported. And then there’s Lionsgate, suddenly the most popular girl at the dance. Disney and Paramount are at war over its legacy IP library, Netflix is circling despite the denials, and Disney’s interest, as we reported, is explicitly about winning back males and families. Look at what that library actually is: John Wick, The Hunger Games, Saw, The Expendables. Meat-and-potatoes, male-skewing, four-quadrant IP. Three of the biggest companies in entertainment are bidding billions for the privilege of programming to the demographic they spent ten years calling toxic... the next regime will not be built on telling the fanbase to get lost. Don’t wait for the apology tour. It’s not coming. What you’ll get instead is investor-call language. “Underserved audience segments.” “Broadening our appeal.” “Four-quadrant storytelling.” “Returning to our franchise roots.” Translate any of it and it reads the same way: we were wrong, you were the customer, please come back. The tests are already on the calendar. Star Trek’s 60th anniversary and the direction of the reboot. Star Wars: Starfighter in 2027. And whatever emerges from DC once Paramount–WBD closes. Here’s the thing about trust: it’s a lagging indicator. It takes years to burn and even longer to rebuild, and the audience Hollywood shunned has heard pretty words before. They never stopped wanting Star Wars, Star Trek, Superman. They stopped believing Hollywood wanted them... the case that Hollywood’s message-first era is ending just got firmer, as GLAAD’s new study reports declining LGBTQ character counts in studio films for a third straight year."

Meme - ""Star Trek was always woke!" Here's Picard telling Worf to fit in or fuck off when he abandons his post to commit a revenge killing and then tries to hide behind the customs of an alien race. Please explain how this aligns with modern multiculturalism."
"Do you wish to resign?"

David Ellison’s Paramount Has The Receipts On Woke Hollywood As Fans Declare Independence (Exclusive) - "David Ellison and Paramount brass are sitting on internal data and analytics tracking the audience shift around “wokism” and DEI-driven content, hard numbers confirming what moviegoers have been declaring at the box office for the better part of a decade. Hollywood’s messaging-first era isn’t just unpopular. Per the data, it’s measurably, quantifiably over. In other words: Ellison has the receipts. You don’t need a leaked deck to see the pattern. The public numbers tell the same story the internal data does. Supergirl just delivered James Gunn’s DCU its Yorktown... Now the flop is being blamed on the fans. Right on schedule. And so is the backlash to The Odyssey. Marvel post-Endgame has shed audience at a rate that would have been unthinkable in 2019, with Nielsen data and box office numbers revealing that brands like Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Pixar have lost as much as 75% of their audience... Doctor Who: the same playbook, the same result. A legacy institution was retooled around messaging, and the audience walked. The pattern isn’t subtle. Per sources, Paramount’s data says the same thing the grosses do. That’s why you’re seeing figures like former X-Men ’97 showrunner Beau DeMayo speak openly about feeling like he was a DEI hire. It’s also why voices on YouTube are now saying flat-out that woke culture destroyed Supergirl and is destroying cinema. Hollywood, sources stress, is very aware of the influence that Cosmic Book News, Nerdrotic, WDW, Film Threat, The Critical Drinker and others now carry. The influencer-shill screening model is collapsing in real time. Supergirl‘s screenings arguably hurt it, and The Odyssey quietly canceled its own influencer screenings. YouTubers who also shilled have been forced to change their tune... what works globally is rooted in the 1980s. Think Top Gun: Maverick. Think Michael. Big, earnest, crowd-pleasing tentpoles built for the entire world, not for a faction on BlueSky and Threads. It’s already happening. As Cosmic Book News reported, Danny McBride’s G.I. Joe movie is being taken seriously. Not comedic. Rooted in the comics... that’s the same template Ellison is applying to Star Trek: take the franchise back to what made Wrath of Khan through The Next Generation work. No lectures. No deconstruction. Optimistic, adventure-driven storytelling that made Star Trek a global institution in the first place. And now William Shatner just said he would come back. On the DC side, sources point to the Absolute Universe as proof the same energy sells right now. Absolute Batman is moving on the order of 500,000 copies a month, and sources tell us Absolute has revitalized DC the same way The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen revitalized DC in the ’80s. It doubles down on the themes and aesthetic Zack Snyder explored on film. Ellison and De Luca, we’re told, are very well aware of Frank Miller’s influence and how it extends into the worldwide phenomenon. It’s no coincidence the receipts run through Snyder, either. The first five SnyderVerse DC films grossed nearly $5 billion, compared to Marvel’s first five at $2.3 billion. And as Snyder himself just reminded everyone, the 2017 Wonder Woman he co-wrote and shepherded deliberately avoided political agenda, which is precisely why boys could love the character as much as girls did. That’s the model. It always was. Meanwhile, Gunn’s DCU is going the other direction... He’s well-liked in Hollywood, we’re told: a Democrat, but a centrist, who genuinely loves movies, understands tentpole filmmaking, and is filmmaker-friendly. This isn’t a culture warrior with an axe to grind. It’s a studio boss looking at the numbers. That distinction matters. When the data on the audience shift is coming from a centrist Democrat who wants to make crowd-pleasing movies, not from someone with a political agenda, the “toxic fandom” spin has nowhere left to hide."

Meme - JDPD @JDPD11618: "The main character in Dustborn uses her powers to cancel, bully, hoax, manipulate and gaslight others because they don't share her beliefs. You are the advocates of hate speech, harassment and threats. Pax is not a hero, she is a sociopath and you not recognizing this is insane."
Red Thread Games @RedThrea...: "A message from Red Thread to our community."
"To our community: Since we first announced Dustborn, we've read your comments and listened to your feedback, hopes and wishes for the game. Over the past four years, our team has poured their hearts into telling a story that's deeply meaningful to us; a story about the power of words, about building a world where everyone can feel safe, about love, friendships. ...and robots, of course. We expected Dustborn to spark conversation and debate, and looked forward to engaging with our players in a positive and constructive fashion. Unfortunately, that conversation has been drowned out by a tidal wave of hate and abuse. We welcome thoughtful feedback and respectful criticism. We embrace discussion and debate. But we have zero tolerance for hate speech, harassment, and threats of any kind. Those who engage in such behaviour will be removed from our community. To everyone else: thank you for coming on this journey with us. Your support means everything, and your constructive feedback continues to push us to learn and evolve. Together, let's continue building a world where everyone can feel valued and empowered to share their stories"

Kabrutus on X - "This is the most cringe opening I've ever seen in a video game ever. Did they suggest that people who don't want politics in their entertainment are... fascists?"

Former Team Lead For World Of Warcraft Mark Kern Explains How ESG Influences Video Game Developers And How The Industry Will Suffer - "“It’s very profitable. There’s an entire industry built up around DEI initiatives, consultancy, [and] sensitivity reading, [which] has plagued novels for a long time. I have many writer friends who were basically edged out of their publishing houses and went independent because of stuff like this.” “It’s a very profitable industry,” he reiterated. “It’s financially motivated and it’s as old as time. Consultancy is a very profitable business. There are huge firms on Wall Street that do this. And it’s exactly that. You create a problem, you go in and you say you’re going to solve it, but actually just move the deck chairs around the Titanic because if you actually solved it they would rehire you. And then you have a recurring business stream. And this is as old as time.” Kern then brought the conversation to Sweet Baby Inc.’s narrative consulting business, “The real question I have is why writing? Why are are these game companies hiring writers? It is the smallest portion of your game team. It is the cheapest part of your budget. It makes no sense to outsource it unless you’re after a specific expertise that you do not have in-house. And what is that expertise that is marketed by Sweet Baby Inc.? It’s wokeness. ‘We sell wokeness.’ Why is wokeness valuable to that company? “And for that you got to get into where I was: CEO level game companies, how games are funded, ESG, and why that matters to your credit score, and why that helps get your game funded when you can check boxes on hiring firms like this,” he said. Later in the interview, while discussing Sweet Baby Inc.’s involvement with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and how the game likely lost Warner Bros. upwards of $100 million, Kern said, “It’s not that gamers are upset about, ‘Oh, hey, we have some diversity in the game.’ It’s actually the way they go about it with pure tokenism, with phoning in weak characters instead of creating strong new characters.” “And more importantly it’s about a vindictiveness to destroy the past, to destroy the IP, to ignore the source material, and to tear apart these beloved characters in some sort of fitful rage that we don’t understand that is very disingenuous,” he continued. “And I think that is the tremendous reaction to Suicide Squad.” He then shared his opinion on how this will affect the way games are financed, “This is going to have an immense financial impact. The way games are funded, you don’t use your own money. Even EA. Games are hugely expensive to make. They are upwards of $250, sometimes $600 million for certain live games. It’s incredible how expensive they are.” “And to do that your CFO is your best friend,” Kern explained. “You’re counting on your CFO to get you tax breaks, to put studios in regions which are financially favorable, and you will borrow the cheap money. You will get the cheap money to do it.” He continued, “Even EA does this. I worked with EA. We were putting together a deal where they were taking bailout money from the banks in the last financial crisis that we had and they were applying that cheap towards games. Same thing with Covid money. They’re applying that cheap money towards games. And what has been the cheapest money while interest rates were still low a couple of years ago? It was ESG financing. And so they’re going to take this money and they’re going to put it into games.” However, Kern notes this landscape is changing, “But now that they don’t have that money anymore because ESG is either being diminished or rebranded because the returns on investment have been so poor on Wall Street for ESG funds that that source of revenue is drying up.” “This woke machine cannot continue in the way that it is now for AAA gaming,” he asserted. However, he believes it might be too late for many of the studios that bought in, “Unfortunately, it’s so entrenched that you’re not going to see much of an ability to course correct because the studios are so infected. They’re going to shut down. And this is truly the rise of AA gaming or what some fans call S-tier gaming like Helldivers, like Palword, [and Last Epoch]. Really incredible success stories in a period where game companies are experiencing significant losses.” “The bleeding will continue, and no one’s going to wake up from it, unfortunately. It’s going to be a total nose dive,” he concluded."

Activision And Blizzard Attempt To Rebrand "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" To "Inclusive Growth" - "This rebrand comes in the wake of a number of major corporations completely ditching their DEI departments including Tractor Supply, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, and Jack Daniels following pressure from their costumers led by Robby Starbuck. In fact, a Wall Street Journal report at the end of June revealed that diversity policies do not lead to growth and that a study by McKinsey back in 2015 has not been replicated and the firm’s methods to determine its results are being questioned... gamers have organized themselves against diversity signaling with various Steam curator lists, the largest created by Brazilian gamer KabrutusRambo called Sweet Baby Inc. detected. It has over 425,000 followers. He’s also launched an entire website to expose DEI in games called DEIDetected. Gamers pushing back against this have had numerous wins. Those wins include Warner Bros. Discovery taking a $200 million impairment charge on ‘Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.’ Surgent Studios began laying off employees after gamers did not purchase Tales of Kenzera: ZAU. Remedy Entertainment’s Alan Wake 2 has still not broken even nearly a year after its release and their financials do not look like those of a healthy company. Sales for Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn are terrible and the developer, A44 Games began laying people off months before the game even released realizing the game was already dead. Activision’s rebrand comes in the wake of a report in May from Grummz that Activision was placing DEI officers on all of its projects. He shared that bonuses and reviews for Activision employees “depend on how hard you DEI.” He also detailed that “DEI Officers are installed on every dev team to ensure THE MESSAGE.” Furthermore, Kern relayed, “Of all the AAA Studios out there, my dev friends and contacts who have come forth tell me that Ubisoft and Activision are the very worst.” To top it off, Grummz shared an internal document that he alleges was sent to Activision employees last week that details all the diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives the company engaged in over the last year. He claims that this is just “one of MULTIPLE DEI emails sent out weekly in a deluge of propaganda.”... There are also some suspect bullet points that appear to indicate the company is engaging in quota-based hiring and contracting... While the document claims that XP Equity is open to all employees, on the company’s Diversity & Inclusion website, a brief overview of the program makes it clear it has a certain focus on individuals based on their race, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age, and disability. The overview states, “Mentoring proves to build skill, networking, and confidence. The XP Equity Mentoring Program is a program open to all Activision employees with special focus on supporting individuals who are part of diverse groups (including race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, etc.) within our employee population.”"
From 2024

5 Ways The Legend of Korra Went Wrong
Rax on X - "You can tell how much LoK was written in the "Girl Boss" Era. One of the reoccurring themes is to have the previous male characters turned into losers while the females take all of the spotlight. Aang ended up a shitty Dad, Sokka just died off and the writers didn't seem to care, Zuko just sits around and then loses his fights. They did the same thing to Luke Skywalker and Han Solo. Somehow it never clicked into any of these dip shit writers brains that defiling beloved characters doesn't have new characters gain a following. Aang becoming a shitty Dad who neglected his kids while Katara somehow let it happen, but she's too busy being a Korra cheerleading cameo character rather than who she actually was. Korra is an abomination constructed from a dead era of trash reddit writers"
Dave Greene on X - "For some reason modern Millennial (female) writers find successful older men threatening."

Isaac Young on X - "The interesting thing about woke culture is that’s it’s constantly stuck in the hand-off phase. Psychologically, this is akin to young writers breaking into their skills with fanfic, written or otherwise fantasied in their heads. You’ve yet to really come into your own, and you’re playing in the older generation’s sandbox to figure out how everything works. Usually this terminates around high school or college, and the talented writers then make their own original IPs. You’re not supposed to stay in the sandbox. You’re supposed to explore and grapple with the world in your art, and this is where creativity emerges. But Progressives are constantly trying to reboot everything. They refuse to leave the sandbox, and while you can say this is due to financial reasons, as a cultural experience, it’s like watching artists trying to imbibe the creative fire of past generations and failing each time. Yes, you updated the franchise with your more Progressive fanfic characters, and yes you turned the older cast into skinsuit sycophants, but each time it never sticks. Not a single woke reboot successfully passed down the torch to where we could move onto a new cultural vogue. The new discourse never takes shape. It’s like the opposite of the refusal of the call in the Hero’s Journey. A world of origin stories that terminate at the origin and go nowhere. Progressives desperately want the fire of the past—and the status it derives—but the Muses aren’t choosing them."

Fandom Pulse | Facebook - "Avengers: Doomsday star Simu Liu on Hollywood's retreat from DEI casting, on Threads: "Put some Asians in literally anything right now. The amount of backslide in our representation onscreen is f---ing appalling. Studios think we're 'risky.'" He followed that with The Copenhagen Test on Peacock. Critics gave it 71%. Audiences stopped watching after week one. It's now canceled. Liu is still in Avengers: Doomsday as Shang-Chi, releasing December 18. Does Marvel franchise cover protect actors whose solo work audiences reject?"

Links - 22nd August 2026 (2 - Antifa)

2026-08-22T17:43:00.000+08:00

KGW News on X - "Powell's Books begins layoffs amid financial struggles, cites slow Portland recovery"
Andy Ngo on X - "I remember how @Powells Books banned my book about Antifa & Portland from being sold in its physical stores. They even closed early when Antifa rioted outside with that demand. The management didn’t want the public to read & learn about what was causing the decline of the city."
"Book banning" is only bad when the books push the left wing agenda

Andy Ngo on X - "In August 2020, a conservative working-class activist named Aaron "Jay" Danielson was assassinated in downtown Portland by Antifa gunman, Michael Reinoehl. Danielson was falsely called a "fascist," like how Charlie Kirk and everyone who supports Trump are. At first, Antifa propagandists like Robert Evans said a white supremacist killed a black man, but when the Antifa mob learned who had been killed, they announced it, celebrated and held a dance party in the street. It remains one of my most disturbing and vivid memories from covering the 2020 BLM-Antifa riots in Portland while undercover. The local press then smeared Danielson's legacy, calling him "far-right" and suggesting he deserved to be killed. His impromptu memorial by the shooting location was destroyed by Antifa."

The Pleb 🌍 Reporter on X - "Professor A. W. Peet of the University of Toronto likes to cosplay as an ANTIFA terrorist on the weekends He's spotted with a "all cops are bastards pin" and two other famous Antifa pins on his bag These are the radicals in our Universities brainwashing the youth"
Shaughn.SGT(ret) on X - "We're seeing a LOT OF EDUCATORS being revealed now. It's no wonder why our kids are so messed up."

Andy Ngo on X - "For the liars who say there is no way to join Antifa, show them these screenshots from Portland’s Rose City Antifa:"

Grummz on X - "Antifa is just an idea...
- Which recruits members
- Screens them
- Host private servers on Discord and else where for vetted members to chat.
- Seems to have endless money for bricks and riot gear.
- Spring up overnight in perfectly timed and coordinated riots.
Sure, that all seems random and organic to me..."

Mike Jackson on X - "ANTIFA is not a real group y’all, they just have a flag, official colors, uniforms, local chapters, meeting places, email signups, and clear directives for “members.”"

Lomez on X - "When @Nero tried to speak at Berkeley in 2017, Antifa started a riot, burned the campus, maced random Trump supporters, beat them, and ultimately got the event canceled due to the violence. CNN responded by calling Milo an extremist who was rallying "white supremacists.""

Andy Ngo on X - "Last year, an Antifa terror couple were convicted for carrying out a bombing to target @michaeljknowles and students attending his speaking event in Pittsburgh. Brian and Krystal DiPippa are members of the Torch Antifa Network. The network justified the attack, saying it was to stop “transphobic hate speech.” The words echo the Charlie Kirk assassin suspect."

Meme - *World War II American soldier raising Confederate flag*
Soyjak with Soviet star: "Wow, look, guys, it's Antifa."
*Crying soyjak with covered face and Antifa flag*

Cam Higby 🇺🇸 on X - "🚨WATCH: Resident of the building next to the Portland ANTIFA encampment reacts to the tents being removed “For the past 4.5 months, we the people haven’t been able to walk down the sidewalk without threats, violence and beatings [from ANTIFA].” “For the residents here, it’s been 4 months of hell”"

Wall Street Apes on X - "Liberal posted “I see any children dressed up in some MAGA type of costume like this little worm, I'm going to be giving them my special Fentanyl laced candy. Antifa action!” This is what we’re dealing with. Liberals who threaten to kill kids for wearing a MAGA hat…."

Young Bob on X - "Antifa thugs are outside a Southampton shopping centre, harassing anyone who supports mass deportations and mocking the death of Charlie Kirk. These people are the real face of so-called “tolerance” on the left."

Wall Street Apes on X - "BOMBSHELL: Washington State Democrats are using homeless NGOs to funnel money to Antifa 🚨 It’s so deep, the people seen protesting with Antifa are even working inside social services approving the money (HOLY CR*P) “If it sounds far-fetched, take it from someone inside the homeless sector here — It's the same faction of people who link up and protest and you know — hey're often the same people we see working inside Social Services” (Seattle) “The connection between the homeless industrial complex and the tie-in to Antifa, it's there clear as day.” “What we saw is beyond shocking”"

Wall Street Apes on X - "WOW 🚨 Democrat states are giving grant money to NGOs, that money is then funneled into ‘The International Antifa Defense Fund’ to pay legal fees for protesters arrested Once arrested, cases are assigned to radical left judges who settle cases for millions, which funds Antifa. Andy Ngo “Antifa is unique in a way in that Antifa encouraged their supporters to get arrested, to be violent, get arrested, get it captured on camera.
- One, for propaganda purposes
- but two, to get individuals to become party to lawsuits. Lawfare against police departments and cities
And in liberal jurisdictions, the Democrat-run city council will vote to settle, settle, settle. $1 million, $10 million, $20 million, no problem. Cities across America have settled. So those who were arrested for rioting. Get rewarded with money. So the funding comes from all these places.” “There's also an international element as well, which I've been discussing a lot in the capital here. The International Antifa Defense Fund, which takes money from donors all over the world — A lot of it's from the state, Oregon, Washington. It's run completely by Democrats. They can decide how to disperse grant money and they give it to people on the radical left”"

Andy Ngo on X - "The terror Antifa propaganda site "It's Going Down" has officially announced it will be shutting down. This coincides with the Trump administration’s crackdown on organized crime within Antifa networks. Over the years, "It's Going Down" has posted numerous claims of responsibility for domestic terrorist attacks, including an attempt by an Antifa militant to derail a train, which led to the website being mentioned in a federal criminal complaint. The website has also posted manuals on carrying out crimes and evading detection for terrorist attacks."

Andy Ngo on X - "Did you know that Antifa groups have held conferences in the U.S.? The Torch Antifa Network has chapters across the country. Rose City Antifa, in Portland, is part of it."

Nick Sortor on X - "🚨 EXCLUSIVE: Portland Police aren’t just shielding Antifa—they’re actively WORKING AGAINST DHS agents I caught them multiple times taking videos from leftist “protestors” to launch investigations into DHS agents who use pepper spray on rioters PULL FEDERAL FUNDS FROM PORTLAND! While Portland Police allow Antifa terrorists who attempt to blind DHS agents to hide behind them, they’re also trying to undermine DHS’ ability to defend themselves. I’m not sure this police department is even salvageable at this point."

Nick Sortor on X - "🚨 EXCLUSIVE: I took the first known video of the inside of the Antifa safehouse located FEET from ICE Portland, catching leftist militants UNMASKED This is the safehouse where vioIent Antifa terrorists, like @KatieDaviscourt’s attacker, flee after they commit crimes. Portland Police allow them to harbor criminals there, and do NOTHING about it. An FBI raid should be the next step here. As well as the storage unit down the street, which houses THOUSANDS of dollars in goods, paid for by unknown sources."

Andy Ngo on X - ""She's literally running behind you guys" @nicksortor captured the moment a riot suspect outside the Portland ICE facility ran to @PortlandPolice for cover. PPB have been recorded recently assisting riot suspects, i.e., after they're pepper-sprayed."

Andy Ngo on X - "Portland Antifa tactics revealed: In order to hide riot supplies and potentially weapons from @PortlandPolice during sweeps of their illegal encampment outside @ICEgov, Antifa have rented a nearby storage space to stash their supplies. @Tommy4Trump420 caught them transporting supplies to their secret base inside the South Waterfront Heated Storage business. This is in addition to their Antifa safehouse at 677 South Lowell St., Unit #152."
DC_Draino on X - "FBI might want to rake a look at this. Democrats say Antifa doesn’t exist, but here they are transporting riot weapons and evidence to a secret location."

Andy Ngo on X - "“There have been no bombs dropped in Portland or exploded in Portland in recent memory,” wrote @lizzzyacker @lrmongeau @joel__odom for the Oregonian “fact check” of the Antifa roundtable. They don’t include any of the bombs used by rioters in 2020. Mostly peaceful bombings."

Andy Ngo on X - "The @PortlandPolice did nothing about this attack and attempted robbery of @hunnybadgermom and @KatieDaviscourt. They took their time to respond, and by then, the violent Antifa man had simply walked away and escaped."

Andy Ngo on X - "Here’s what I’ve unfortunately witnessed and learned in Portland: If you are labeled “right-wing” and are a victim of Antifa/far-left violence, @PortlandPolice will not help you nor arrest your assailants. If you attempt to defend yourself, you will be arrested, prosecuted and likely convicted. In 2017 I testified at the trial of conservative independent journalist @LaughAtLibs , who was charged with nearly two-dozen felony and misdemeanors for brandishing a legally owned gun in self-defense when a violent BLM-Antifa mob pursued him in downtown in 2016. Police treated Michael Strickland like a terrorist and a Portland judge convicted him of the charges. He was imprisoned. It is anarcho-tyranny under the power of Democrats who have control of nearly every institution and government in the state."

Secretary Marco Rubio on X - "Today, building on @POTUS’s historic commitment to uproot Antifa’s campaign of political violence, the Department of State is designating four Antifa groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists. The United States will continue using all available tools to protect our nation from these anti-American, anti-capitalist, and anti-Christian terrorist groups."
Andy Ngo on X - "Thank you, Sec. Rubio. The four Antifa groups sanctioned so far are among the most violent in Europe. One of the accused terrorist members is an Italian woman (Ilaria Salis) who escaped prosecution in Hungary by gaining diplomatic immunity by becoming a Member of the European Parliament for the Greens and Left Alliance party. Hungarian prosecutors accused her of being part of Antifa Ost/Hammerbande, which jumped and beat people in Budapest with weapons."

Andy Ngo on X - "Far-left extremist Antifa anarchists in Philadelphia are holding a letter-writing support event for Rodney Hinton Jr. They call him a "black freedom fighter." Hinton Jr. was arrested on May 2 in Cincinnati, Ohio, for allegedly striking and killing a random traffic detail officer with his car as revenge for his armed son being killed by police. His son, Ryan Hinton, was killed after brandishing a gun at police during a stolen vehicle investigation. The support event requires attendees to wear masks."

ANDY NGO REPORTS: No prison time for pedophile Portland Antifa member who pleaded guilty to stabbing black conservative at 2020 riot - "A Portland Antifa member who spent years in prison for a child sex crime conviction pleaded guilty this morning to stabbing a black conservative livestreamer during the 2020 BLM-Antifa riots. Blake David Hampe, 46, pleaded guilty in a sweetheart deal to felony second-degree attempted assault. He will serve no prison time, instead getting three years of probation. The charge is downgraded from the original felony second-degree assault charge. A felony charge of unlawful use of a weapon was dropped in the plea deal. On July 25, 2020—during the height of the nightly far-left rioting in downtown Portland—Hampe was recorded on video stabbing Andrew Duncomb. Duncomb was hospitalized and narrowly survived being paralyzed as the blade pierced inches from his spinal cord. Hampe had his face covered with a helmet and goggles during the attack and nearly escaped. This reporter witnessed him being captured by a protest crowd who mistook him for being a right-winger following the stabbing. After he was booked into jail, Hampe’s $250,000 bond was covered by a far-left bail support group. The case dragged on for nearly three years with multiple trial dates pushed back. During this time, Antifa extremists in Portland intimidated Duncomb for his participation in the case by targeting him at his place of employment. In March this year, Antifa harassed him at a grocery store and successfully had him fired as security over false claims he is a white supremacist. Despite Hampe failing to show up to several court dates, the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office under Mike Schmidt offered him the sweetheart resolution deal. Hampe was active in the Portland Antifa militant circles for several years and has been witnessed by this reporter at multiple direct actions in 2019 and 2020 where he wears clothing featuring children’s cartoon characters. He had a particular hatred for the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. immigration and border officers. His past criminal history appears to shed light as to why... In an account he operates on Reddit under the username, “br0k3nr0b0t,” Hampe posted about his diaper fetish"

Antifa Whistleblower: "They Call You Fascist So They Can Kill You" - "A former Antifa foot soldier has ripped the mask off the far-left’s violent underbelly, revealing how the self-styled “anti-fascists” weaponise slurs not to fight tyranny, but to justify murder—labelling foes “fascists” as a license to “dehumanise” and assault them without remorse. The interview from Steven Edginton’s documentary “‘They’re Getting Ready for War’: Ex-Antifa Reveals Inside the Far-Left,” lays bare Antifa’s radicalisation pipeline: a toxic brew of bullying, arming up, and ISIS-style self-justification that’s morphed from street theater to outright terror prep. ‘Andrew’, who ditched the extremist group after witnessing their descent into “self-radicalisation,” outlined the fascist slur’s lethal intent: “They don’t kill you because you’re a fascist, they call you a fascist so they can kill you.” He further unpacked the psychology: "It is like calling a Nazi or a Fascist as a way to just dehumanise them, so you can do whatever to them. You could assault them. It's funny to them. They laugh about it." "How is this different than a group like ISIS?" The ex-member pondered. He also confirmed a shift in targets, noting “Originally they were trying to bully and threaten like what they would consider right wing extremists like Proud Boys or Christian Nationalists that show up to protest or events… That’s not the target anymore. Now, the target is anyone that doesn’t agree with them.” Andrew’s wake-up call came amid casual chats turning apocalyptic, as he explained that “Socially when I’m not at a meeting, I’m just hanging out with people I know, more and more they talk about acts of violence. They talk about guns or going to gun ranges. And it scares me.” “They feel as though their under threat. Well, we’re gonna be genocided or put in prison or Nazis have taken over America. So we have to act now to stop it,” he continued, urging that “They’re getting ready for war.”"

Andy Ngo on X - "The Intercept is again running cover for an Antifa terrorist attack. Five members of this cell have already admitted to being part of a group that carried out a shooting on an ICE facility near Fort Worth. This article calls it a "noise demonstration." Daniel Rolando Sanchez Estrada is not charged for having a literal Antifa insurrection zine, he's charged for allegedly conspiring with one of the defendants to hide and destroy evidence showing her involvement in the shooting. Part of the evidence destruction included hiding the extremist texts."

Andy Ngo on X - "Mark Bray, an American financier of Antifa and an assistant professor at @RutgersU, calls for mass (violent) criminality to save him and his co-conspirators in Antifa. "Only mass antifascism, legal or not, can save us," he wrote. Bray is an open advocate of Antifa violence and announced is he fleeing to Europe (likely Spain) after the U.S. government took steps to treat Antifa as domestic and foreign terrorists."
Andy Ngo on X - "Wow. @cbc’s @jayme_poisson interviewed Mark Bray without disclosing to listeners that he is a financier of Antifa. And worse, she allowed him to say without evidence that White House staff are showing Trump fake AI videos of rioting in Portland to influence his decision-making."

The Researcher on X - "Kris Goldsmith is a veteran and ANTIFA. He is also a member of the progressive globalist democracy cult. He outed himself when he mention disinformation dingbat NATO Nina Jankowicz. This guy is a propagandist just like Nina. His role is to normalize ANTIFA and radicalize people by claiming there are fascist white supremacists everywhere. That is why they call Trump supporters fascists, racists, Nazis, authoritarians, autocrats, etc. The democracy cult has to make us the enemy so that their radicalized brainwashed cult will rise up. It has nothing to do with fascism. It’s about the globalist progressives doing anything they have to do to defeat “populists”. Also notice how he mentioned that they were working with DHS. That goes along with Michael Loadenthal, the ANTIFA police who worked to round up J6ers, being funded by and working with Mayorkas, DHS and the FBI."

The Oregonian on X - "Conservative media personality reports assault at Portland protest, slams police as ‘antifa’"
Andy Ngo on X - "Conservative media personality? She was on the ground for months risking injury to capture footage while you cowards stayed inside your nearby secured office writing pieces to support the local Democrat regime. You cowards don’t even put a name to the hit pieces and lies you write. Meanwhile, you refer to violent Antifa camera people who participate in violence, conspiracy and rioting as “journalists.”"

EXCLUSIVE: RCMP “aware” of Antifa website with instructions on rail sabotage - "The RCMP said it is aware of an Antifa-affiliated website instructing adherents to commit crimes by sabotaging domestic rail infrastructure in British Columbia. In a comment to True North, the RCMP said it is aware of what it called “anarchist” and “anti-authority” organizations believed to be behind a string of attacks targeting rail networks across British Columbia... the RCMP confirmed it is monitoring a self-professed “anarchist” website B.C Counter INfo that provides how-to guides for radical protesters, including on acts of potentially deadly railway sabotage. The website text offers something approximating a criminal “how-to” guide for sabotaging rail infrastructure in British Columbia. It instructs readers on specific methods to disable or damage track circuits, including cutting cables, attaching wires, or tampering with power supplies—actions that constitute mischief, property damage, and potentially sabotage under Canadian law. The guide also encourages strategic thinking to evade detection and maximize disruption, which could amount to conspiracy to commit a crime and obstruction of justice. It even references using burning vehicles to destroy tracks, which would involve arson, endangering safety, and possibly terrorism-related charges. According to police and court records, dozens of track circuits in B.C. were tampered with in the months following federal approval of the Pacific Rim Gas Transmission Project in 2020... In several cases, rail safety systems were deliberately disabled, forcing trains to stop and prompting broader concerns about public safety. Anonymous online communiqués posted at the time claimed responsibility for the disruptions, framing them as part of a wider campaign against resource extraction in Western Canada. These statements invoked both Indigenous land-defence actions and anarchist movements, situating rail sabotage as a tactic of anti-capitalist resistance. The RCMP investigated the incidents under the federal Critical Infrastructure Protection framework. Unlike the Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa—where many participants continue to face criminal proceedings—no charges were laid in connection with most of the rail disruptions."

The fall of Jason Arday

2026-08-22T13:19:00.000+08:00

The fall of Jason Arday - New Statesman

"It is some irony that in a Protestant country which professes to have no truck with saints, we remain stubbornly hagiographical in temperament, elevating exemplary figures and saddling them with a symbolic freight, only to recoil when they crumble under it. This habit of mind, and its inevitable flare-ups, reveals something fundamental about the contemporary state of the country. And this includes the Jason Arday affair, which is so much more than the story of a fallen academic – or, as Arday once referred to himself, of a modern “Icarus”. It is, in a more interesting sense, an English story: a parable of our national institutions and national temperament, our credulity and our cruelty.

Arday’s own biography, as it was narrated in interviews and now in his new memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, due to come out this month, functioned for a time as a fable of self-cultivation...

What follows takes us on to the familiar ground of the classic Bildung, a tradition running from Victorian self-help manuals to such modern descendants as Tara Westover’s Educated, in which preliminary hardship gives on to great things...

Having left school with two GCSEs, in physical education and textiles, Arday entered higher education conspicuously late before eventually completing a doctorate in education at Liverpool John Moores University. His thesis, “An Exploration of Peer-Mentoring Among Student Teachers to Inform Reflective Practice Within the Context of Action Research”, was a desultory, workaday work, which argued that reciprocal mentoring among trainee teachers fostered more reflective professional practice than traditional hierarchical models. Put differently, peers often prove better teachers than superiors. Curiously, the memoir is taken up almost entirely with the struggle to obtain a PhD, with the thesis itself being given short shrift. One of its many scenes of studied poignancy recounts the young Arday, aged 18, asking his mentor, the sports lecturer Sandro Sandri, the childlike question, “What’s a PhD?”

From there, Arday’s public life expanded into what might now be called a portfolio career. Traditional scholarship was accompanied by an ever-growing catalogue of civic endeavours: charity fundraising through endurance running, educational advocacy, work with the campaign group the Black Curriculum, an appearance as an Olympic torchbearer, and a dependable presence on the radio and literary festival circuit. The memoir pushes the mythopoeic narrative even further, recounting a violent assault in early adulthood, a brain tumour during his doctoral studies and charitable work installing water pumps in Brazilian favelas.

It was on the strength of this accumulated biography, rather than his scholarship stricto sensu, that Arday, aged 37, was appointed professor of sociology of education at Cambridge in 2023, becoming the youngest black professor in the university’s history. Beyond the ivory tower, his profile continued to rise. His agent secured an advance of “1.4 million” – whether sterling or dollars remains oddly unclear – for his memoir after a ferociously contested pre-empt. By then, Arday – black, autistic, working class, the son of immigrants – was something of a totemic figure. His life seemed proof that, given enough determination and enlightened institutional support, even the hardest start could be overcome...

Here, seemingly, was the perfect allegory of national decline: one of the two ancient citadels of British learning had lowered its drawbridge to a jumped-up intruder who turned out to be an imposter. For conservatives, the affair confirmed what they had been saying all along: that universities had disingenuously come to treat lived experience as a kind of epistemic authority in its own right, often at the expense of more mundane measures of scholarly standing...

A rather pretzelled defence was mounted by some progressives, though to little avail. One version held that Arday was an interloper, and that the establishment had finally closed ranks to keep him, and his sort, out. The UK, on this account, remains a peculiarly closed society, its elite institutions guarded by invisible sentries of pedigree. But this does not quite ring true. As Perry Anderson observed in the pages of the New Left Review some 60 years ago, Britain’s governing class has, in fact, proved remarkably adept at incorporating outsiders. Indeed, few national elites have proved so porous; all the better to entrench itself through multiple historical periods.

Time and again, Britain has preferred absorption to exclusion. The story is familiar enough: from the émigrés of Mitteleuropa, who found a place at the heart of British intellectual and cultural life in the mid-century – Nikolaus Pevsner, Friedrich Hayek, Lucian Freud – to the ease with which individual black and brown Britons have risen to the highest levels of politics, from Rishi Sunak and Nadhim Zahawi to Kwasi Kwarteng. Arday’s ascent likewise sits awkwardly beside the popular image of impenetrable institutions. His progress through higher education was extraordinarily rapid. Publishers, broadcasters, universities and agents competed for his attention. Far from being put off by his unconventional background, they were drawn to it.

A second progressive refrain holds that people from minority backgrounds are picked over endlessly, and that Arday was subjected to this treatment in its most extreme form. This, too, is hard to square with what actually transpired. Arday’s frictionless rise suggests that very few of his claims, academic or otherwise, were ever seriously questioned. Quite remarkably, they were accepted at face value until the very end. Again and again, the scepticism you might expect from academics simply failed to emerge. If there is a lesson here, it is that British institutions can be oddly naive when the story in front of them is one they badly want to believe.

A more persuasive response came from within Cambridge itself. Priyamvada Gopal and a number of Arday’s colleagues shifted attention away from his lies and fantasies towards the institution that had raised him up. They called for an independent inquiry into how a scholar at such an early stage of his career had ended up in one of Cambridge’s most prestigious chairs, and questioned why the university had been so keen to hold up his appointment as proof of its own broad-mindedness. They also saw something that Arday’s board of electors apparently did not: that the inevitable backlash would fall upon black academics tout court; that they would be left carrying the can for an institutional failure not of their making. Nor would the damage stop there. It would spread to Britain’s already battered universities, which are already struggling with job cuts, shaky finances and growing public distrust.

The deeper failure, undoubtedly, lies in the transmutation of the modern university into that curious hybrid: part research institution, part property developer, part international corporation, part media brand. It speaks the language of metrics, rankings and, above all, “impact”. The successful academic is now unmoored from the anchoritic ideal of old. They are, by turns, a broadcaster, event organiser and inveterate email correspondent – and, in Arday’s case, a fundraiser, campaigner and moral exemplar besides. The old compact between teachers and students has given way to an altogether more ramshackle affair of sprawling bureaucracies, speculative property portfolios, ever-expanding managerial hierarchies and a small caste of superstar academics whose public personas often matter rather more than their scholarly oeuvres.

Technological change has played a part. The professor of journalism Jeff Jarvis has argued that the age of print created what he calls, after Lars Ole Sauerberg, the “Gutenberg parenthesis”: a civilisation in which intellectual authority was conferred through institutions devoted to publication, criticism and the gradual accumulation of reputation. The university was among the chief custodians of those conventions. Our post-print age rewards rather different qualities. Universities have come to compete for personalities as much as ideas. Their staff lists now include broadcasters, public intellectuals and actors alongside career scholars – for example, Angelina Jolie at the LSE, Brian Cox at Manchester and Alice Roberts at Birmingham. Celebrity trumps authority. The Arday affair, then, is a singularly vivid symptom of a wider cultural transformation.

Two more developments have enabled the Arday scandal. The first is the uncritical importation of American intellectual fashions into British institutional life. Diversity, equity and inclusion programmes have arrived together with assumptions about race that sit uneasily with recent British history. This is not to deny the persistence of racism. Britain has never been innocent of it. But neither has it been America. Race has undoubtedly mattered here; but class has counted for more. These days, the median hourly pay gap between black and white workers in Britain is about 6 per cent, compared with roughly 22 per cent in the US. Young black Britons are likewise substantially more likely than their white British peers to enter higher education and, on average, outlive them.

The Arday affair illustrates the perils of ignoring these British peculiarities. In an institutional culture anxious to advertise its emancipated worldview, routine scepticism can easily come to be mistaken for racial prejudice. The upshot is a paternalistic impulse that sits uncomfortably close to what George W Bush once called “the soft bigotry of low expectations”. The human rights lawyer Jacqueline McKenzie’s well-intentioned intervention – “Not sure many of us can write a PhD even with copied paragraphs” – captured the problem perfectly. To be sure, undertaking a doctorate might be a difficult enterprise for some people. Scholarly sprezzatura is unevenly distributed. But the question at hand is whether the ordinary standards of scholarship should apply to everyone without fear or favour. To say otherwise is to mistake solidarity with condescension.

A second, related shift has been the retreat of the left. As organised labour declined and the unions lost their clout, identity politics moved into the space they left behind. The aim was no longer to close the gap between classes, let alone do away with class altogether. Instead, Britain learned to celebrate the exceptional stories of those few who had managed to escape the circumstances of their birth. The exceptional life, after a fashion, became a political programme. As the commentator Ash Sarkar argues in her 2025 book Minority Rule, the language of collective solidarity gradually gave way to an exhausting contest over symbolic injury, an Olympics of victimhood in which representation came to matter more than material politics. Institutions found it easier to put different faces in their prospectuses and professorial chairs than to tackle the harder questions of wealth and educational inequality. Arday’s appointment, therefore, came to mean far more than an ordinarily academic appointment. It was made to stand for race and autism, social mobility and reparative justice.

This is where the real injustice lies. Outstanding black British scholars, whose achievements need no embellishment, will now have to work under a cloud of suspicion they did nothing to create. At the same time, the conservative iconoclasm unleashed by the Arday affair risks doing wider damage to British universities, which remain one of the country’s great sources of soft power and export earnings. For generations, our universities have punched well above the UK’s shrinking geopolitical weight, drawing ambitious minds from around the world. Whether they can keep doing so will depend on their willingness to defend time-honoured standards.

What’s more, the fallout will not stop at the university gates. Every perfectly avoidable institutional failure gives fresh ammunition to those who already distrust higher education in particular and public institutions in general. Rather as the Cambridge Five became a permanent byword for the fallibility of the British establishment, the Arday affair seems destined to outlive the particulars of the case. It will be remembered not simply as an academic scandal but as an emblem of the defining neuroses of our age."

Links - 22nd August 2026 (1 - Migrants: US)

2026-08-22T09:34:00.000+08:00

Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge | Facebook - "Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz and Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz came to the United States looking for something painfully ordinary: the chance to stay alive. They worked. They raised three daughters. They tried to build a future in Overland, Missouri. They weren’t asking for luxury. They were asking for tomorrow. Then ICE tore their family apart. Nixon was driving to his roofing job when a group of agents emerged from an unmarked car, surrounded the van, and pulled him out. There was no warrant. It didn’t matter. ICE detained Nixon, caged him, and he was deported him to Guatemala. Glendy remained behind with their children, trying to keep a roof overhead while pursuing her asylum case and living with the constant fear that she would be next. Eventually, survival became impossible. She gathered the children and returned to Guatemala so her family could be together again. That decision became a death sentence. On July 20, the couple disappeared after traveling to register a motorcycle. Days later, they were found in a sugarcane field. Their hands and feet had been bound. They had been gagged. They had been beaten. They had been shot to death. Their 14-month-old daughter was found beside her mother’s body, dehydrated and crying. Two parents gone. Three little girls left without them. No government official pulled the trigger. The people who murdered Nixon and Glendy bear responsibility for the killings. The United States government bears responsibility for forcing this family back into the conditions they had fled. Those are different acts. They are not unrelated acts. This is what disappears inside political slogans. Deportation is discussed as if it’s an administrative procedure. A statistic. A policy objective. A number on a press release. But every deportation lands somewhere. Every removal has a destination. Sometimes that destination is hunger. Sometimes it is persecution. Sometimes it is a sugarcane field where a toddler is left crying beside her murdered parents. There is a particular cruelty in pretending outcomes exist in isolation from the decisions that made them possible. Governments make choices. Those choices alter the trajectory of human lives. Sometimes they alter whether those lives continue at all. Supporters of mass deportation often speak as though the government’s responsibility ends the moment an airplane touches down. Reality doesn’t respect that convenient fiction. Returning someone to a place consumed by violence does not erase the danger. It delivers them back into it. Rolando Pérez Paz, Nixon's brother, is now raising the couple's three daughters. He's had difficulty explaining to them why their parents aren't coming back. "If immigration hadn't picked up my brother, my sister-in-law would still be alive," he told St. Louis Public Radio, "and the children wouldn't be going through this sorrow. Unfortunately, immigration — the government — doesn't see that. It makes no difference to them." Three little girls will spend the rest of their lives without their mother and father. One of them will never remember their faces except through photographs and stories told by relatives trying to explain an absence no child should have to understand. Every politician who promises millions of deportations should be required to answer a simple question. What, exactly, do you believe happens after people are sent back? Because sometimes the answer is waiting in a sugarcane field. And history has a habit of remembering not only who pulled the trigger, but who decided that sending people back into the line of fire was an acceptable price to pay. A candlelight vigil for Nixon and Glendy is planned for 6 p.m. on August 2 at Overland City Hall in Missouri for anyone who wants to show up rather than just read about it."
Left wing logic - you need to let the whole world into your western country because if you deport those who come in illegally and they're murdered, you're the murderer. Of course, they'll find a way to blame the western country when they let in the sort of people who murdered them and they murder people in the western country

Jack Hopkins on X - "ICE grabbed a roofer in Missouri with no warrant. His wife self-deported so her kids wouldn’t lose both parents. Both found bound and shot in a cane field. Their 14-month-old was crying next to her mother’s body, dehydrated. Not a side effect. The point. Enough of this bullshit."
Liberals Are Cool | Facebook - "White supremacy does not want you to follow rules or do things 'the right way'. They want you dead or living in fear of dying for the simple crime of existing. These parents were killed by white supremacy. These parents were killed by pro-lifers who only want white children in the world."
Comments: "So you're saying the US is safer for minorities than their home countries?"
"If it's supposed to be the USA's duty to help these people, why is that we tried to save millions in Iran from persecution and torture, that we are now seen as monsters? See, we just can't win. Just make people deal with their own stuff."
"So what you're saying is that there are a lot of criminals and horrible people in these other countries and we should definitely be vetting them and ensuring they come in legally?"
Apparently Guatemalan gangs are white supremacists now
Left wingers claim that white people not wanting to be minorities in white countries is proof that minorities are badly treated in white countries. When really minorities are badly treated in non white countries... while left wingers demand white countries become non white.
Left wingers implicitly proclaim that non white countries are shitholes because they claim everyone who flees them needs to be let into white countries because their home countries are dangerous

Libs of TikTok on X - "SAY HIS NAME: Cooper Whiteside Connecticut cop was just kiIIed along with his girlfriend, Brittany Islami, when illegal alien Melissa Ramirez crashed into them while driving drunk. Ramirez's blood alcohol level was TWICE the legal limit. Connecticut has sanctuary policies that blocks cooperation with ICE. This is who Democrats are working to protect."

ALX 🇺🇸 on X - "I was positive we went through this a few months ago but apparently it needs to be repeated.
A retard’s guide on how to not get shot by ICE:
-Do not put the car in Drive.
-Do not accelerate towards people.
-Do not attempt to physically assault law enforcement.
Is this complicated?"
Left wing logic: if you can't attack law enforcement, that's fascism, and if law enforcement defend themselves against people trying to kill them, they are acting as judge, jury and executioner

Jennifer Bendery on X - "NEW from me: A senior Trump official is using his govt social media account to smear sitting federal judges, sparking accusations he's putting their safety at risk as judges already face a spike in threats. This “puts a bullseye” on em, one judge told me."
Thread by @Vermeullarmine on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "I’ve lost count of the district judges who have impugned the motives and even legitimacy of the elected president and his administration. Comity isn’t a one-way street and it’s not something that judges are unilaterally owed by right. Frankfurter understood this (from a different but related context): if judges want comity, they have to give it as well."

CBS News on X - "Ohio's GOP governor calls Trump's plans to deport Haitians a "mistake": "You'd be sending people … back to hell."
Auron MacIntyre on X - "Haiti is hell because Haitians live there. If you move them to the US you don’t make the Haitians more like Americans. They make America more like Haiti"
How ignorant. Doesn't he know about magic dirt?

Ethiopian migrant allegedly kills 3 St. Paul apartment workers over parking - "An Ethiopian migrant allegedly murdered three employees at his St. Paul apartment building after becoming enraged over a $65 parking deck contract, days after Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was rebuked for defending the pardon of an illegal immigrant sex offender. Police recovered nearly three dozen 9mm shell casings from the management office after Tsegaab Ademassu Binessu, 30, allegedly went on a rampage over apartment parking contract policies. Authorities said he later complained about the U.S. immigration system. Binessu, who the local FOX affiliate said had been employed as a truck driver until recently, became angry after trying to cancel his parking contract shortly after renewing it because he was considering joining the U.S. Navy. Adam "AJ" Wilwerding, 43, Nansi Fuentes Zambrano, 25, and Dena Silcox, 56, were found dead Monday after Binessu allegedly told an employee who answered the phone that he was coming to the office... He was detained while driving one of the victims' cars and reportedly complained to investigators about the American political system and his inability to bring his wife and children from Ethiopia to the United States, which the local FOX affiliate said contributed to his divorce. Binessu also reportedly complained he was being treated differently because of his race and immigration status... "So, he allegedly shot three women to death," Benson said. "Will Gov. Walz warn us not to judge this man over his ‘worst day,’ or whatever his recent excuse was for pardoning & defending that child sexual abuser?""
Clearly, if there were open borders, those 3 people would still be alive, so those who oppose open borders are murderers

Acyn on X - "Homan on ICE Shootings: All goes back to the DEMs who tell people to evade ICE… There will still be more bloodshed unless they shut their mouth and let ICE enforce the laws."
K(sad trombone noise enthusiast) on X - "So we are at the point of the fascist street violence where the head of the secret police is threatening, more extrajudicial murders in the street if we do not comply. You’re never voting this out."
Left wingers are openly proclaiming that they're following the Hamas strategy. They're such terrible people. But then, they support Hamas, after all
Nobody is above the law - unless it pushes the left wing agenda
Since Obama gave Homan an award, he must be a fascist too

Meme - *Bike Fall*
US: "I bomb other countries"
US: "refugess from the countries I bomb come to my country"
US: "look what refugees did to me"
"So you agree we can deport anybody from a country we didn't bomb. Awesome."
Comment (elsewhere): "If you were bombed by china would you try to flee to china for safety?"
When left wingers say that refugees are (trying to) destroy(ing) the US. Why are they so racist and xenophobic?
Weird how non-Western countries don't have this problem because they don't sign up to human rights conventions

Meme - Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib: "Flock - a private surveillance company worth $8.4 billion - contracts with ICE and CBP to turn out neighborhoods into mass surveillance zones. Their Al-powered license plate readers performed 20 billion scans of cars EVERY MONTH. That should terrify everyone."
"Be aware. These folks come in and say it's about public safety, but it's not. Flock is turning our communities into mass surveillance communities" - Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "Flock has no contract with ICE and ICE has no direct access to their platform or data. Local agencies own/control the data. Indirect access has occurred when local police run queries for federal purposes just as it could for any other system local law enforcement controls"
Left wingers are always spreading misinformation

Meme - "If ICE agents are going out to murder illegals why do they only shoot the ones assaulting them with cars or weapons.? Odd coincidence isn't it."

Meme - "WE REMEMBER HER. Today marks six months since Renee Good attacked an ICE agent with her vehicle in Minnesota. The agent was able to defend himself and survived the attack. Renee died in the commission of a federal crime."

Meme - "DEAR DEMOCRATS. JUST COMPLY WITH ICE THE SAME WAY YOU TOLD US TO COMPLY WITH SHUTDOWNS, MANDATED VACCINES, AND MASKS."

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick on X - "The Trump admin's latest strategy to mass generate removal orders is diabolical:
- Take a huge group of people with hearings scheduled in late 2026 or 2027.
- Send them a physical letter rescheduling their case to next week.
- Order those who inevitably miss court deported."
PoIiMath on X - "In my city, I can get an order to appear in court next week for the crime of not mowing my lawn. If I miss that court date, they can put out a warrant for my arrest. I'm not sad that illegal immigrants suddenly have to live by the same rules as citizens."

seanmack on X - "We know this is criminal. When will someone be held responsible? He was leaving in 3 days
From FB
Juan Jairo Coronilla Duran was three weeks into a tourist visa when ICE pulled his car over in Florida. And he was two days away from getting on a plane back to his family. His wife found out from the news. This is the third ICE-related death in a single week. A man in Maine with a valid work permit and Social Security number. A father of three in Houston who owned a small business. Now a tourist with a plane ticket in his pocket. These are not immigration statistics. These are people who had lives, families, and plans — until they crossed paths with ICE. ICE cannot be reformed."
Left wing logic - if you run from law enforcement and get killed by traffic, law enforcement murdered you. They outdo themselves each day.

Meme - Mexicans: "Reconquista! This land belongs to us Mexicans! We are indigenous! This was our ancestors land! No Human is illegal!"
Native American 1: "There are too many Mexicans"
Native American 2: "I'm joining ICE"
Channel 5: "Inside ICE's all-Native American tracking unit known as the Shadow Wolves."

Meme - *Democratic Donkey holding Illegal Aliens as fuel and lighting the Riot fire in Los Angeles*
*Donald Trump putting out fire with the National Guard*
Unhinged Democratic Donkey: "HE'S ESCALATING TENSIONS!"

Meme - "ODD HOW IF ICE SHOOTS SOMEONE THE LEFT DOESN'T BLAME THE GUN"

Meme - *Laughing man getting out of car*
"MILLIONS OF PEOPLE GO HOME EVERY DAY SAFELY. When they don't try to run over ICE agents with their car. Bad decisions lead to bad outcomes."

Meme - Lance Gooden: "Hospitals are turning American citizenship into a business. Advertising birth packages in Mexico to create anchor babies is a slap in the face to every American. Congress must act and END birth tourism once and for all!"
"Birth Packages in South Texas. Natural $3,950. C-Section $5,525
havemybabyinTEXAS.com"

Clown World ™ 🤡 on X - "A 33 year old Canadian woman on the Jersey Shore boardwalk repeatedly confronted and then slapped a teenage girl for wearing sweatpants that said Trump and ICE. She fled the scene but was identified through surveillance footage and turned herself in on July 13, charged with simple assault, endangering the welfare of a child, harassment and obstruction. She is now in ICE custody, and her husband is publicly pleading for her release"
Coffee and Grit on X - "Trump has really done a great job showing us how many psychopaths we have walking among us."
More proof that Trump is a fascist, because you're not allowed to criticise him!

Meme - "IF YOU TURN THIS INTO A WEAPON *Joan Sebastian Guerrero's White Kia Rio* THEN THIS WILL HAPPEN *bullets in windshield in front of driver*"
Left wingers still claim that he was fleeing, not attacking ICE. I guess he was so traumatised that he fled in reverse gear

Kim "Katie" USA on X - "🚨 ICE shot and killed a man in Biddeford, Maine who tried to run them down with his vehicle. When are these people going to stop trying to kill federal agents?"
Kim "Katie" USA on X - "🚨 Eyewitness says the driver was told multiple times to stop by ICE agents. He then put the car in drive and DROVE AT THE ICE OFFICER. There you have it, direct eyewitness confirms the suspect weaponized his vehicle. Source: @PressHerald"
Zack on X - "You might wonder why left leaning creators never advise to comply with police and not resist arrest The answer is simple: they want ICE to kill more people They might pretend to be sad but they are actually happy because now they have another martyr for their narrative"
Wilfred Reilly on X - "Correct. A BLM leader, who I knew from Occupy the Hood back in the day, once frankly admitted this to me. Hamas calls it "the CNN strategy.""
On Lorenzo Araujo
Left wingers are terrible people and encourage human sacrifice to push the left wing agenda

Threads - "“It’s wild that we’ve managed to convince ourselves that the man framing your house is more dangerous than the people poisoning your water, bankrupting your healthcare system, or stealing public money.” Justice for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo #FuckICE"
When left wingers proclaim that they exploit illegal immigrants

Vince Langman on X - "PSA: You have a 0% chance of being shot by an ICE agent if you:
1. Don't try to shoot at them
2 Dont attack them when they're doing their jobs
3. Don't resist arrest
4. Don't try to run them over with your car.
Number 4 is probably to most important one! You're welcome!"

Greg Price on X - "NYT: President Trump doesn't allow people to claim asylum at the southern border and it's led to a drop in illegal border crossings.
Mamdani: "They are legally entitled to... in terms of international obligations.""
Bonchie on X - "The left-wing assertion is that anyone, from anywhere should be allowed into the United States, but also, Gaza is for Palestinians, Somalia is for Somalians, so on and so forth. It’s not incoherent, though it appears to be. It’s all part of the plan."

Tim Walz Protects a Child Rapist from Deportation - "Governor Tim Walz protected a child rapist from deportation. I guess we can’t have enough evil child rapists in this country, and Timmy is on the case. Tou Lue Vang claims he is sorry for abusing a 10-year-old two decades ago. According to the New York Times, a three-person Minnesota panel, including Gov. Tim Walz, granted a pardon to an immigrant convicted of sexually abusing a child. The pardon will now help Vang as he fights deportation... Democratic governors have long faced scrutiny for pardoning immigrants with criminal records who have served their sentences, in an effort to slow or halt their deportations"
Time to accuse Republicans of being pedo protectors because Trump is a pedo because left wingers say so

Rapid Response 47 on X - ".@GovTimWalz responds to the deportation of a convicted child sex abuser he pardoned: "Did that make us any safer?... Did it improve the idea that we can't all be judged by our worst day?" Walz is one seriously sick, depraved individual."
Robby Starbuck on X - "The guy he’s talking about REPEATEDLY raped a 10 year old little girl. So yeah @Tim_Walz, it DID make little girls in America safer to deport him after you tried to pardon him. I have a 10 year old daughter myself. Your words here make you profoundly evil. Absolutely disgusting."

Homeland Security on X - ".@GovTimWalz on why ICE shouldn’t have deported this child rapist: “we can’t all be judged by our worst day.” For Tou Lue Vang this wasn’t just one “worst day” — it was YEARS of repeatedly sexually assaulting a girl starting when she was 10. Just disgraceful."
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 on X - "Of all the days he spent raping the kid, which one does Tim Walz technically think was the worst?"

Meme - "So, hundreds of ICE agents coming to your neighborhood is an invasion, But milfions of illegals isn't?"

Meme - "2023 *arrested Trump*
Liberal white woman: Good, nobody is above the law!
Now *police & ICE leading illegal immigrants away*
Liberal white woman: FASCISM!"

Meme - "CLINTON SIGNED MASS DEPORTATION LAW IN 1996. Two months later... 85% OF DEMOCRATS VOTED TO RE-ELECT HIM. Today many riot against the laws their party passed. HYPOCRISY HAS NO EXPIRATION DATE."

Links - 21st August 2026 (2 - General Wokeness)

2026-08-21T17:33:00.000+08:00

Wilfred Reilly on X - "Western prey morality is invoked by China, the various Arabs, Russia, India and Nigeria, etc ONLY in the context of exploiting useful idiots. Can anyone truly be mad enough to believe that these legendary historical rivals and ruthless current peers actually just care about "minority representation inside the USA," or "queer environmental justice," or wotever?"
Frank Adams on X - ""Can anyone truly be mad enough to believe that these legendary historical rivals and ruthless current peers actually just care about "minority representation inside the USA," or "queer environmental justice," or wotever?" The lefty kooks pretend to believe it to effect their goals."

TheBlaze on X - "Democrat Rep. Rashida Tlaib: “The political structures that we are surrounded by were built on slavery and genocide and oppression. Look at this room, motherf******. We aren’t going anywhere. Now we’re in Congress and every corner of the United States.”"
Justine Bateman on X - "These people are ridiculous. They have lost all tethers to a sense of self. Their entire identity now relies on this treasonous hate of America. They make up fantasies of how horrible America never was to justify their need to "fight tyranny." They have no identity but this. And they cling to it with a death grip, because they have nothing else. None of it is true. Not the fantasy about America about which she is shrieking, not her identity of believing herself to be some "hero" in a movie about an oppressive government, and not the resulting congress-free, senate-free, President-free, childish (and completely chaotic) future she sees for this country. She is an infant. She and others like her will not get their way. Not even close. If you have a modicum of common sense, it's time to let your line in the sand about tolerance be made known. Myself, I have a limit to tolerance. I have a limit to patience. I know there is a limit to free speech. If your plan is to tear down the United States of America, if your plan is treason, I will not tolerate you, I will have zero patience for you, and I will not defend your right to free speech. @FBI @FBIDirectorKash"
We're still told that left wingers don't hate their countries

Facebook - "Suicidal empathy strikes again.
These far-left activists spent their lives championing open borders, defund the police, racial justice, Antifa causes, injection safe sites, and every progressive policy imaginable.
• Benjamin X Rowe: LGBTQ+ activist and far-left punk rock concert organizer. Randomly shot and killed by a Black male while walking down the street.
• Ryan Carsen: Injection safe site activist and self-described Antifa. Randomly stabbed to death by a Black male.
• Josh Kruger: LGBTQ+/HIV+/injection safe site/racial justice activist. Killed by a Black male during a home invasion.
• Ted Lawson: Democratic Party County Secretary, BLM activist, voter rights activist. Randomly murdered by a 15-year-old Black male.
Rest in Peace to all of them. No one deserves to be murdered, regardless of their politics. But their ideology left them vulnerable to the very realities they refused to acknowledge. They championed the groups and policies that ultimately took their lives. This is what suicidal empathy looks like. Ignoring patterns doesn’t make them disappear. Prioritising everyone else over your own safety has consequences. The left keeps learning this lesson the hard way. #conservative #fyp #Crime #rip #lgbt"

Covfefe Anon on X - "It's bad to give attention to stupid liars like David French but his attempt to meme the phrase "magic blood" is a great demonstration of the cargo-cult thinking on the left that leads to a "search for a thought-terminating cliche" "Magic dirt" rhetorically wounds them because it exposes the stupidity of the trick they're trying to play - that by simply declaring people "American" that you meaningfully change those people. This wound causes them to search for a counter-cliche to dismiss it "Magic blood" is his attempt at this but it plainly fails because every person alive has an instinctive understanding of the importance of heredity - their encapsulated, bounded thinking that merely tries to stay in tune with the progressive egregore - that thinks of nothing other than "how do I conform to the beliefs of a 'Good Person'" has a lot of trouble with this idea because it has to reconcile Children are like parents in appearance and temperament and capability Somehow this stops being true when you are dealing with groups I guess they square this by... pretending there are no group differences? Which is actually absurd and something literally no one believes and no one has ever believed - not even leftists like this guy but it serves as a patch - a way of avoiding thinking about the extremely obvious implications of other things he believes Leftism constantly requires absurd levels of mental handicapping like this - inserting absurd falsehoods to avoid thinking about the consequences of other falsehoods - those falsehoods are then abandoned in other contexts which demonstrate that they don't actually "believe" them - to the extent that they can be said to believe *anything* outside of "I am a Good Person for having Correct Beliefs""

Stand Up To Marxism on X - "Across the West "progressive" governments, are following the exact same playbook.
1. Flood the country with immigrants from the Global South.
2. Indoctrinate children through education to criticize or hate their own country and heritage.
3. Erase or downplay the nation's traditional history and heritage, replacing it with a multicultural narrative.
4. Implement draconian speech restrictions, hate speech laws, and content moderation.
5. Promote gender ideology, self-ID policies, and youth medical transitions in schools and institutions.
6. Push aggressive climate policies, net-zero targets, and green regulations (often raising energy costs).
7. Reform criminal justice toward leniency, reduced policing, and focus on systemic explanations for crime.
8. Impose DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) mandates across government, education, and corporations.
9. Expand welfare programs, redistribution, and identity-based social benefits.
10. Favor supranational governance (EU-style integration, global pacts) over national sovereignty.
11. Undermine or de-emphasize traditional family structures, religion, and national identity.
12. Support expansive abortion/reproductive rights and related social policies framed as equity.
13. Destroy all sense of national identity and demographic cohesion.
Why? Progressive ideology is derived from Critical Social Justice, critical theory (Neo-Marxism) and postmodernism that views Western civilization, traditional institutions (family, nation, religion, merit), and historical majorities as sources of oppression requiring complete deconstruction and equity-based remedies. Universal human rights and diversity are elevated above particular national or cultural continuity."

X-Men Were Never Created As A Civil Rights Allegory Confirms Marvel Writer - "The most repeated piece of X-Men lore ever told is a myth, and it just got debunked by one of the men who built the franchise. John Byrne, the legendary artist behind the Dark Phoenix Saga and Days of Future Past, sat down with The New York Times this week to promote his new alternate-reality hardcover X-Men: Elsewhen. Along the way, he casually detonated the origin story fans have been repeating for fifty years: that Stan Lee created the X-Men as a metaphor for the civil rights movement, with Professor X as Martin Luther King Jr. and Magneto as Malcolm X. According to Byrne, that framing came later, and Stan simply went along with it. Byrne tells the Times that anyone who actually reads the earliest issues will see a very different template. “Xavier is F.D.R. and Magneto is Hitler,” he says, pointing out that early Magneto is even draped in Nazi trappings. Per Byrne, fans persuaded Stan Lee that he had been writing a racism allegory all along, and Stan’s response was essentially “Sure, why not?” That should sound familiar. It is the same pattern that produced every “the X-Men were always political” argument you have seen online for the past decade. The mutant metaphor did not start as a statement about race, and it did not start as a statement about LGBTQ identity either. It started as a superhero book about outsiders, and readers poured their own meaning into it. It’s not something limited to a small segment of the population; it’s something that all fans can relate to. That’s the point. Byrne even cites the late Marvel writer and editor Roger Stern on the real appeal: the fans saw themselves in the X-Men because the X-Men were outsiders who only hung out with their own kind. So the claim that the book was activist by design from issue #1 is fan mythology that certain types of fans found convenient to ratify... Byrne’s answer is the one nobody arguing online wants to hear: it meant whatever the readers decided it meant, and Stan Lee was happy to take the credit."

Marvel's X-Men Movie Writer Confirms It: The X-Men Are For Everybody - "Lee Sung Jin — the Beef creator reuniting with his Beef director Jake Schreier, who helms the mutant reboot after Thunderbolts* — tells Deadline that he and co-writer Joanna Calo (The Bear) are starting from the one thing every version of the franchise that ever worked started from. “We’re thinking about these characters and what makes them tick,” Lee said. “What parts of them feel universally relatable, and leading with that first before we start thinking about plots and world stakes and all that.” Universally relatable. Leading with that first... Notice what “feeling othered” means in that framing. It’s not a demographic checkbox. It’s the most universal feeling there is, that every kid who ever ate lunch alone, every adult who ever walked into a room and felt like the odd one out. That’s why the theme is “relevant today in 2026”: because it’s relevant to everybody, in any year... This isn’t theory. Marvel just ran the experiment on its own animated series. X-Men ’97 Season 2 stripped out the Season 1 agenda messaging — the latest sign of Marvel’s retreat from its message-first era — and told a universal story instead. The results: a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, a 10/10 three-episode premiere, and a 10/10 Apocalypse episode that plays like a gut punch instead of a lecture. Critics themselves called it less preachy. For everybody. Character first. Watch what happens."

Meme - "According to the Southern Poverty Law Center
The Nation of Islam a black supremacist hate group has 50,000 members
Which is More than...
The KKK, The Aryan Brotherhood and the Patriot Front COMBINED"
Naturally, left wingers were pretending this was false

Meme - Retard Finder @lfindRetards: "Incredible stuff here after the terror attack in Paris earlier. One short paragraph separates the confessed motive from "The motive for the attack remains unknown.""
""It is Allah who commanded me," the man lying on the floor says. Nunez said the man had been detained by an off- duty police officer. pay tribute to him, it was a courageous act," he added. The motive for the attack remains unknown, Nunez said, adding that police could not verify the identity of the attacker, whose declarations were "incoherent" while he was being arrested."

"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats." - Aldous Huxley : r/JordanPeterson

I don’t want police writing ‘racism essays’, I want them catching criminals - "you’re stuck in a boardroom listening to an audio recording of a fairytale. “The Witches of Glum” is nominally about a beautiful witch called Gwendolyn and an ugly witch called Groga, but it’s also a trick, used to expose officers on police diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) training programmes as the prejudiced human beings that they must surely be. (Spoiler alert: the beautiful witch is in fact evil, while the “disfigured” witch is good. Clever, eh?) And you can all too easily picture the glee if and when you “fail” any part of the subsequent questionnaire. Because the DEI brigade needs you to come across as bigoted and biased in order to feel good about themselves. If only this were the most ludicrous aspect of the DEI courses being imposed upon officers across England and Wales, courses that are costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of pounds and taking them away from their duties. But documents obtained by The Telegraph through a freedom of information request prove otherwise. Over at Surrey Police, for example, it turns out that officers have been told to write 500-word “reflections” on how they feel about the force’s stance on racism. While you’re at it, why not get them to copy out “I must not be racist” a hundred times on lined paper? Then there are the officers at Northamptonshire Police, who are being taught that Brexit is behind a rise in far-Right hate, and those at City of London Police who are planning to host a “listening circle” about Gaza. While the DEI dons are in their cosy little circle, passing around a plate of Digestives and enjoying their moral superiority, ethnic minorities are being abused and attacked by far-Right extremists. Little old ladies are being mugged at knifepoint, and hard-working shopkeepers like my local newsagent are being raided by shoplifters almost daily. They’re unfazed by the new CCTV system he paid an arm and a leg for, he tells me, knowing the police don’t have the time or the resources to follow up on footage – what with that three-day conference on pronouns to attend and the weekly LGBTQ binaural beats sessions. There is no place for racism, sexism or indeed any form of discrimination in policing, and it’s right that officers should be held to the highest standards of fairness and professionalism, but being made to write or chant the right words will never change a racist’s attitudes or behaviour (it’s possible it may even reinforce it). Meanwhile, branding a non-racist one of the most disgusting words in the English language isn’t just offensive – to borrow one of their favourite terms – but unacceptable."

Basil the Great on X - "WOW. A student at the Oxford Union tells Tommy Robinson he is lucky they've put security on for him otherwise their Pro-Islam supporters outside would beat him to death This is the Oxford Union, how far it has fallen as an institution when this is the sort of argument made"
Ben Shapiro on X - ""You're lucky we Muslims in here are nice, because if we weren't, our co-religionists outside would burn you to death" isn't an amazing argument"

Je Suis Non-binary: Coming Out in Support of Free Speech - "Charlie Hebdo... Now I was in an office surrounded by some of the most left-wing people you can imagine, all of us committed to ideas I had supported for years. Seeing them so unconcerned about free speech and the murder of fellow journalists, I felt rage and sadness — and on top of that, I felt so alone... though my devotion to activist movements remained a constant, my life was moving away from academia. I had taken up a profession that also concerned itself with power and language — but always in pursuit of truth, backed up with data and based on more than one source. Ironically, my journalistic work was more rigorous than my academic work ever had been... Authoritarian demagogues generally don’t like their policies to be questioned or ridiculed. Journalists are murdered all over the world for exposing abuses of power, and satirists who joke about the wrong people or ideologies disappear behind bars or appear on hit lists. Truth and questioning are the first things to go in a repressive society, even when they are delivered in a way that makes people laugh. An uncensored press and a culture of satire are great indicators of the level of rights and freedoms that people have within a society. I had always believed these things were at the core of left-wing beliefs. They promote accountability for the powers that be, expose corruption and wrongdoing, and give a voice to the powerless. It turned out I was wrong. That Wednesday in the winter of 2015, when those 12 editors died, it seemed everyone around me saw something entirely different than I did. I scrolled through my social media feeds with a sinking heart. In post after post, my left-wing activist friends were using their ideas about power and language to the maximum, calling out anything that reeked of Islamophobia in the responses to the attack and stifling the debate around it into a black-and-white issue. It was completely well-intentioned, but completely off the mark. Only one satirist dared make a statement about it, a short, biting video that still feels relevant today. He was branded a racist — not that he cared, but he was one of the very few who took that risk. In a sea of right-wing xenophobia, protests in the Muslim world, and social justice activists more concerned with Islamophobia than protecting the freedom of the press, I ached for solidly nuanced left-wing critiques. But there weren’t any. It was clear to me that the free speech I wholeheartedly believed in — so much so that it had gotten me into several professional conflicts — now belonged to the opposite side of the political divide from the theories that had helped me finally understand my gender. And maybe it always had. At that point, I recognized that social justice is, at its very core, unequipped to support a free press... Let me say something here that probably won’t make me many friends: I believe that it should be the left, not the right, which stands in support of showing the Muhammed cartoons. For the good of all of us. Freedom of speech is fundamental to the success of a diverse society and essential for the freedom of everyone in it, including Muslim people. You cannot build a better world by employing the same repressive tactics used by the fundamentalist regimes you say you want to abolish... the left has now seemingly instituted a hands-off policy when it comes to defending free press and satire. Nobody dares even to make a joke about anything remotely related to the issue anymore, and anybody who wears a “Je Suis Charlie” t-shirt is now supposedly a right-wing asshole... Women who work to end marital captivity or stop female genital mutilation are being silenced because of their supposed “Islamophobia”, and advocates are refusing to discuss anti-LGBT sentiments in non-Western countries unless it’s to place the blame solely on the shoulders of the West. And yet another desperate situation is unfolding now that will haunt us into the future. I shudder to think how the radical left can impact our stance toward the unlucky, liberal-minded people of Afghanistan, now trapped under Taliban rule after the US and its NATO allies have gone. My heart breaks when I think of Afghan women and LGBT people being abandoned by progressive movements afraid to come to their aid for fear of being labeled “colonialist.” Will we look back on this in a couple of decades and find ourselves on the right side of history with this kind of reasoning? I just can’t imagine that. I think the left is making a massive mistake here. One I cannot support anymore... I asked them about the “Je Suis Charlie” demonstrations that were planned for that evening. Would they go? No, they said, they didn’t want to “play into the hands of right-wing people.” I felt my throat close up with disappointment. I hadn’t expected to be so alone with my grief. I decided to go anyway, even if I was alone. But I hid my face from any photographers because it was best not to be seen there. Not many things make you feel lonelier than the fear I had that evening. It felt like going back into the closet. I don’t ever want to feel like that again, and I want others to know they aren’t alone either. I have come to realize that this is bigger than journalism, bigger than being non-binary"
From 2022. Left wingers don't want to abolish fundamentalist regimes. They just want to abolish Christianity

Christina Aguayo News | Facebook - "BLM and the Democrats were in favor of Body cams, until it proved that the vast majority of complaints lodged by BLM, Dems and anti-Police agitators were false...
🔹A trial in Rialto, California, found an 88% reduction in citizen complaints against officers wearing cameras, alongside a 59% drop in use-of-force incidents.
🔹In Phoenix, Arizona, complaints against cops wearing body cams dropped by 23%, while those against officers not wearing cameras rose by 10.6%.
🔹A multi-site study involving nearly 2,000 body cam wearing officers reported a 93% drop in complaints, attributing it to behavioral changes by 'suspects' that de-escalated volatile situations.
🔹In Las Vegas, body cameras led to fewer use-of-force reports and citizen complaints, with no significant change in arrest rates.
🔹A comprehensive review of 30 studies confirmed a 16.6% average drop in complaints
The drop in complaints undercut the democrats and BLM who accused police officers of brutality without any evidence. The 'he said-she said' narrative was ditched for video evidence that overwhelmingly favored police officers."

Kamala Harris settles in Point Dume, a nearly all-White community - "Despite a career-long commitment to combating racial disparities in housing and touting the importance of living among Black people, former Vice President Kamala Harris’ new California mansion is situated in a neighborhood with virtually no racial diversity. Harris’ new 4,000-square-foot property, which reports indicate she acquired for $8.15 million, is located in the exclusive seaside community of Point Dume and includes ocean views, multiple wine fridges, private golf greens and enough parking to accommodate five vehicles. Point Dume is situated entirely within Census tract 8004.08, which the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey estimated was just 0.2% Black and roughly 94% White as of 2019. Harris' choice of neighborhood may surprise longtime observers given past comments she has made about the importance of living among other Black Americans."

Andy Ngo on X - "A black author who got a $2 million plus crime novel book deal has been accused by his own book agent of suspected AI-use to write the story. He says this is racism and an attempt to stop black authors from shining."
Author Whose $2 Million Book Deal Was Derailed by AI Concerns Says He’s Innocent - WSJ - "“Definitely innocent!!!” Jerry Falade, a graduate student at Southern Methodist University, said in an Instagram story early Tuesday. “They CAN’T and WON’T stop this Black boy’s light from shining!!” he wrote in another. Fourteen publishers had bid on the U.S. rights for Falade’s crime novel, “Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body,” and he ultimately signed a two-book deal with Macmillan’s Minotaur Books imprint worth more than $2 million. HarperCollins Publishers landed the U.K. rights. Soon after the deals closed, Falade’s agent at Europa Content notified the publishers in a letter that he could no longer support the book after concerns were raised about the author’s possible AI use... Falade said none of the editors he met with during the book-sale process asked about AI usage. He also said he hadn’t consented to having his manuscript run through AI detection software and found it “very suspicious” that much of the coverage of his situation has focused on the growing capabilities of that software. He said he has retained legal counsel... Falade said the claims against him are part of a historical pattern of diminishing the intellectual contributions of people of color. He wrote that in the past such authors were accused of plagiarism, while now “If you’re a Person of Color and you secure a lucrative deal in history, someone, somewhere, will accuse you of using AI.” Meanwhile, he wrote, white authors “brag about using AI all the time.”"

Trevor Phillips: ‘London liberals are only now realising how hated they are in Britain’ - "As chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Phillips helped to shape the Equality Act 2010, which included protections from discrimination for people undergoing gender reassignment. He says he failed to anticipate the strength of the trans movement in subsequent years. “It never occurred to us for one second that anybody would think of sex as anything other than biologically determined,” he says. “It was an oversight on our part that you would get the rise of a movement based in fantasy. We never imagined that there would be people peddling the fantasy that you can just make up what sex you are. And it never occurred to me that people who make decisions on these things would be engulfed by this fantasy. “The problem is that the grown-ups in the room have turned into cowards, and they are all running away from the fantasists,” he adds. “When I was a student, one of the things we fought for was that women could operate independently of men. Now, according to this new fantasy world, the one thing women cannot do is decide when they want to be separate from men. It’s not just outrageous, it’s insane.” He also disagrees with politicians making their race or sex the most important thing about them, singling out Rachel Reeves for repeatedly talking about being the first female chancellor, and his “good friend” David Lammy for drawing attention to the fact that he was the first black deputy prime minister. “When they [highlight their race or sex], the rest of the country is going, ‘What is wrong with you?’” he says. “It’s not just that you are drawing attention to these things, it’s that you are saying, ‘If you don’t think this is the most important thing about Rachel Reeves or David Lammy, you are a sexist and a bigot and a racist.’ There is a lot of work to do for the governing classes to reconnect with the country, and for that we need a bit of humility.”"

Le Marxisme Moderne

2026-08-21T17:08:00.000+08:00

Brivael Le Pogam on X

Tout le monde pense que le monde libre a gagné en 1989, à la chute du mur de Berlin. 

C'est faux. 

Et c'est exactement pour ça que le monde est aujourd'hui en feu.

Ce qui est tombé le 9 novembre 1989, c'est un appareil. 

Une économie planifiée, un empire militaire, un mur de béton. Ce qui n'est pas tombé, c'est l'idée. L'idée que le monde se divise en oppresseurs et en opprimés. L'idée qu'il existe une égalité finale à atteindre, par tous les moyens. L'idée que tout ce qui existe (la famille, la nation, le mérite, l'héritage) est une structure de domination à abattre. 

Cette idée-là n'était plus dans le bâtiment quand le bâtiment s'est effondré.

Il faut reprendre la chronologie, parce que tout est dans la chronologie :

Le communisme économique avait un défaut fatal : il était réfutable. Il promettait l'abondance, il produisait des famines. Il promettait l'émancipation, il produisait des barbelés. Budapest 1956, Prague 1968, L'Archipel du Goulag publié à Paris en 1973, les boat people de 1979 : à chaque décennie, le réel envoyait sa réfutation. Les boat people étaient une réfutation flottante, visible depuis les plages.

Alors l'idéologie a fait ce que fait tout organisme menacé : elle a muté.

La mutation a un nom, et j'en ai raconté la généalogie ici : la French Theory. 

Foucault a déplacé la guerre du terrain des faits, où le communisme perdait à chaque fois, vers le terrain du savoir lui-même. 

S'il n'y a pas de vérité, s'il n'y a que des rapports de pouvoir déguisés en savoir, alors plus aucune famine, plus aucun mur, plus aucun goulag ne peut réfuter quoi que ce soit. 

La French Theory n'a pas enterré le marxisme. 

Elle l'a rendu irréfutable.

Et la mutation a des dates. Toutes antérieures à 1989.

1934 : l'École de Francfort, chassée d'Allemagne, s'installe à Columbia. La critique de l'économie devient critique de la culture. 

1964-1965 : Marcuse, exilé allemand devenu professeur américain, remplace le prolétariat défaillant par un nouveau sujet révolutionnaire (les minorités, les étudiants, les marginaux) et écrit noir sur blanc que la tolérance doit être accordée aux mouvements de gauche et refusée à ceux de droite. 

Octobre 1966 : le débarquement a une date précise. Université Johns Hopkins, Baltimore. Derrida, Barthes, Lacan présentent la pensée française aux campus américains. 

1967 : Rudi Dutschke lance le mot d'ordre, la longue marche à travers les institutions. 

1968 : les révolutions de rue échouent partout. 

Qu'importe. La révolution ne passera plus par la rue, elle passera par la salle de classe. 

1975-1985 : Yale, Berkeley, Columbia absorbent la théorie, qui devient le système d'exploitation des humanités. 

1987 : Allan Bloom publie The Closing of the American Mind pour donner l'alerte. Un million d'exemplaires vendus. 

L'université le traite de réactionnaire et passe à autre chose. 

L'Amérique avait son Aron, elle en a fait la même chose que nous du nôtre.

Puis arrive le 9 novembre 1989. 

Le Mur tombe. L'Occident célèbre. Fukuyama avait déclaré la fin de l'Histoire dès l'été, avant même la chute. On démantèle les missiles, on encaisse les dividendes de la paix, on déclare le match terminé.

Nous avons célébré notre victoire sur une adresse vide. L'idéologie avait déménagé vingt ans plus tôt. Nous avons gagné contre les chars et perdu contre les chaires.

Pendant ce temps, l'autre empire communiste faisait la lecture inverse. Pékin avait écrasé Tian'anmen dans le sang cinq mois avant Berlin. Sinistre, mais lucide sur un point : la Chine savait que la guerre était idéologique. 

Elle a choisi : abandonner l'économie marxiste, garder le contrôle du récit. L'Occident a fait l'exact opposé : il a gardé le marché et absorbé l'idéologie. Trente-cinq ans plus tard, regardez qui construit des centrales et qui déboulonne ses statues.

Vous voulez la preuve que c'est le même logiciel ? Faites la table de correspondance. 

La lutte des classes est devenue la lutte des identités. 

Les koulaks sont devenus les privilégiés. 

L'autocritique maoïste est devenue le privilege checking. Les commissaires politiques sont devenus les DEI officers. 

Le samizdat est devenu le compte shadowbanné. 

La nomenklatura a quitté Moscou pour Davos et Bruxelles. 

Et le paradis ne s'appelle plus la société sans classes : il s'appelle l'équité, l'égalité des résultats. 

Exactement ce que je décrivais ici il y a quelques semaines.

On me dira : il n'y a pas de Goulag. 

C'est vrai. C'est même tout le génie de la version 2.0. 

Le communisme dur devait briser les corps parce qu'il ne tenait pas les esprits. 

Le communisme mou tient les esprits : il lui suffit de briser les carrières. 

Pas de camps, des services RH. 
Pas de procès de Moscou, des excuses publiques. 
Pas de Sibérie, la mort sociale. 
Demandez aux émigrés du bloc de l'Est installés en Occident ce qu'ils ressentent en traversant une université américaine en 2026. 
Ils reconnaissent l'odeur.

Et voilà pourquoi le monde est en feu. 

Une civilisation a passé trente-cinq ans à enseigner à ses propres enfants qu'elle était le problème. Résultat : elle ne sait plus défendre ses frontières, transmettre son héritage, ni même nommer ses ennemis. 

Quand la présidente de Harvard, devant le Congrès, répond que condamner un appel au génocide « dépend du contexte », vous voyez le logiciel tourner en production. 

Et les prédateurs du dehors lisent cette faiblesse comme un livre ouvert : Moscou teste, Pékin patiente, l'islamisme avance dans les rues de nos capitales. 

Le feu extérieur n'est que la conséquence du désarmement intérieur. On ne brûle bien que les maisons qui se sont vidées de leurs défenseurs.

Le Mur n'est pas tombé. Il s'est déplacé. Il ne sépare plus l'Est de l'Ouest : il passe désormais à l'intérieur de chaque institution occidentale, entre ceux qui construisent et ceux qui déconstruisent.

La première guerre froide s'est gagnée avec des missiles et du PIB. La seconde se gagnera avec des écoles, des médias libres et des modèles d'IA. Celui qui écrit les valeurs dans les machines écrira le prochain 1989.

Cette fois, ne nous trompons pas de victoire. Au travail.

Links - 21st August 2026 (1 - Jason Arday)

2026-08-21T09:42:00.000+08:00

Meme - Basil the Great @BasilTheGreat: "Spare me the faux outrage. If Jason Arday had been an anti-immigration right wing activist who said the trans cult was a lie Owen would have hounded him online personally and not lost a wink of sleep over his health. You're one of the biggest c*nts on the internet Jones"
Owen Jones @owenjonesjourno: "Jason Arday has been found dead. The obsessive media focus on this one man - as if it was one of the biggest scandals in history - was disproportionate beyond belief. Push notifications, top headlines, constant investigations. And now he is dead."

The Truths That Failed Jason Arday - The Atlantic - "Arday was billed as a once-in-a-generation talent, whose research in his field—the sociology of education—was “the best in the world,” according to Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge’s faculty of education. He claimed to have received a book advance of 1.4 million in unspecified currency for his memoir... What I propose is that the public give Arday a courtesy in death that he was often denied in life: Let’s treat him like a person... like a flawed human being who should still be alive but is not. That requires being honest about who Arday was, not despite his tragic death but because of it. After all, it was systemic, ritualized dishonesty—his own and others’—that undid him. Here is the truth about Jason Arday: A preponderance of evidence suggests that he was a serial fabulist and unrepentant plagiarist who successfully conned a British academic aristocracy so blinded by do-gooder racial neurosis that it was unable to spot lies that would have been obvious to any Joe Schmo. (Arday denied intentional misconduct and suggested that his apparent plagiarism was a result of his autism, which he said meant that he tended to learn through imitation.) As evidence of those seeming lies mounted, the powerful institutions that had made him continued to back him, doubling down and raising the stakes. Simon & Schuster stood by its author—or perhaps more accurately, stood by its product. Even as the evidence of fraud became all but undeniable, the publisher did not merely declare that it would press forward with Arday’s book; it had the audacity to tout “the professionalism and integrity he has brought to every stage of the publication.”... I have written, in this magazine and elsewhere, about what it is like to be the beneficiary of affirmative action in elite spaces. I have seen, firsthand, the way a specific kind of white progressive treats Black men who have overcome obstacles... It is a look that says, How far you’ve come, and how kind I am for helping you go further.
Copes include Cofnas is lying, Cofnas is responsible (apparently he forced Arday to plagiarise; also this ignores how Martyn Hammersley and David Harris found the same thing), he was cleared of plagiarism multiple times (if "experts" say the sky is green, it is), plagiarism is not worthy of execution (we should ask Arday why he executed himself, then), he already got cleared of plagiarism (weird how Cambridge said it was taking another look), that you haven't seen his PhD thesis so you can't comment (it's available online though), that he had selective mutism so he wasn't lying (Arday claimed he was totally mute though), that others plagiarised too and nothing happened to them so this is proof of racism (even pretending they all plagiarised as much and they all had as much academic merit as him, this ignores his other lies including university affiliations), everyone lies so his lies don't matter (apparently everyone lies as much as him) and that the media scrutiny was disproportionate (without the media scrutiny the establishment would've covered it up as they tried to for so long).
The author tries to impugn critics by accusing them of racism, then claims Arday didn't get a second chance (when he had many). He also doesn't mention Arday sending the police and lawyers after critics, and making false formal complaints of racism (as per the NYT)

Daniel Friedman on X - "Arday could not admit to being a plagiarist and a fabulist because he had taken a $1.4 million advance from Simon & Schuster to write a memoir of his true story. If he admitted it was all lies, he’d have to give the money back. The week he killed himself, it was discovered that numerous anecdotes in the memoir were lifted from the TV show “Spartacus: Blood and Sand.”"

Bo 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 🇵🇱 on X - "Absolutely mercenary decision to release the book once Arday had been exposed. I note that the family's statement (still repeating the misinformation and relentless scrutiny lines) was issued via Simon and Schuster. His children may benefit from the profits but this traps them in their father's lies too. (Of course there are also the much broader issues about Cambridge and the cult of DEI)."

Richard Hanania on X - "We've seen grifters in academia before. But Arday was on another level. Some did bad research, others plagerized or lied about their lives. He dominated in every category. He's the Wayne Gretzky of academic conmen. May he be an inspiration for reform."
Sadly, his suicide just means the establishment will be able to make reform even less likely

Jason Arday and the Scourge of Professional Minority Academics - "Beware always of false dichotomies. Arday was both “a culture war pawn” (and quite a willing one) and a “fucking human being.” In fact there are a lot of fucking human beings around, billions of them, so it’s hard to know how that changes anything. Suicides are solely responsible for their own deaths and do not become special put-upon victims the moment they take their own lives. That is an important line to hold, and not only because some of what follows will be critical of Arday: Nobody should be constructing suicide as a means of farming sympathy or of striking back at one’s critics, because suicide in most cases is a profoundly anti-social and destructive answer to one’s problems. Particularly for a father of two children, as Arday was, killing oneself represents a seriously selfish and narcissistic act. I was a professor for many years in the United States, and I’ve had abundant experience with diversity hires and their enablers... I doubt that very many people will be surprised to discover that (predominantly white) antiracist academics and (predominantly white) antiracist administrators feel compelled to fill their institutions with strange effete diversity tokens who tell lies about themselves that are microcosms of the bigger lies they collaborate to tell about Western society and culture."

University of Cambridge whistleblower who reported alleged bullying wins employment tribunal - "A University of Cambridge whistleblower who alleged bullying of female staff inside the university’s Institute of Astronomy has won a tribunal against his employer... After the tribunal in Bury St Edmunds, Employment Judge Graham found serious failures in the university’s handling of complaints by Evans, with 11 of 14 alleged detriments upheld against the university or individual respondents including the vice-chancellor. The investigation into Evans was found to be “contrary to natural justice”. The tribunal ruled it was “baseless (as nothing had been provided to support it) and it had been filed in retaliation … and was therefore likely malicious and vexatious”. “By contrast, a number of the claimant’s detailed concerns or complaints were dismissed out of hand without a proper process,” it said. The tribunal also concluded that senior figures at Cambridge relied on correspondence and processes prepared for them by HR or administrators. The vice-chancellor attended the tribunal in person in June and claimed that she had drafted a response to Evans “with the assistance of” the then university registrary, Emma Rampton. The tribunal rejected Prof Deborah Prentice’s evidence. “We find that it was written solely by Ms Rampton and then presented to the vice-chancellor as a fait accompli. Professor Prentice had very little to do with it, save for putting her name to it.” “Ghostwriting was a consistent and a concerning theme throughout this matter,” the tribunal concluded. “In one example the person being complained about drafted the response to the claimant rejecting his complaints against them.” Evans, who last year stood to be the University of Cambridge’s chancellor on an anti-bullying manifesto, has said the tribunal judgment raised questions about the vice-chancellor’s fitness for office. “Never rains but it pours for Cambridge,” he said. “Cambridge University has lost the whistleblowing tribunal, with vice-chancellor Deborah Prentice among the respondents found to have retaliated against a whistleblower. That comes on top of serious concerns about her leadership during the Jason Arday crisis. Taken together, these events raise a fundamental question: is Deborah Prentice actually in control of the university she is supposed to lead?”"
Clearly, Prentice should've done more to protect Arday and her announcement of an independent review into his hiring is credible

Jason Arday scandal turns spotlight on publishers - "Sources inside the publishing industry said that they were not surprised publishers were going ahead with the memoir even while claims Arday has made about his life are being questioned. “There is so much that’s taken on trust when you write a memoir,” said Catherine Taylor, whose 2023 memoir about her childhood, The Stirrings, won the TLS Ackerley prize for autobiography. “Nothing that I put there about my own personal experience was ever fact-checked.” The only time a publisher will query a memoir, according to Taylor, is when material may be libellous or inflammatory. If a book doesn’t raise any red flags to a lawyer, she said, then no investigation will be done. A literary scout, speaking anonymously to protect professional relationships, agreed that the publishers didn’t “particularly care whether the details of the memoir are true or not as long as the margins of it are good and it’s a conversation piece”... Roger Kreuz, an academic who researches plagiarism, said accusations like those made against Arday are a lot more common in academia than many realise. “It’s almost never publicised because nobody benefits from having it publicised,” he said. What has changed is that accusations of plagiarism are now becoming a “political weapon”, he said, citing the resignation of Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, in 2024. Plagiarism is the “mortal sin” of academia, he said. “Maybe you’re an unfaithful spouse. Maybe you kick your dog. People can overlook those things, but when it comes to plagiarism, that’s the one line you can’t cross,” he said. One senior book editor who spoke on the condition of anonymity suspected that publishers overlooked due diligence on Arday’s memoir because he was a “star”. “He’s a Black professor at Cambridge. He’s gorgeous-looking. He’s young. It’s the full package,” they said. Publishing lists are so “pale and stale” that the editor suspected “everyone just went, oh brilliant, this solves the problem because we don’t have enough Black authors.” The publishing industry, they said, was unwilling to invest in the structural issues that led to this lack of diversity, but just hoped for “these miracle people to come along… He’s a PR dream. Well, he was.”"
With Gay and Arday, if the institutions had not tried to cover up the plagiarism, the consequences wouldn't have been so severe. As is often the case, it's not the lie that gets you, but the coverup.
This also suggests that when academia proclaims that plagiarism is a mortal sin, they don't really believe what they say

Jason Arday claimed he was paid ‘1.4 million’ by publisher for memoir - "Arday said Simon & Schuster had offered 1.4m for the book in a “pre-empt”, a type of deal in which a publisher is so keen on a book they put in a high offer to take it off the table before it can go to auction. Arday did not specify whether the 1.4m figure was in pound sterling or US dollars. Simon & Schuster did not respond to a request to comment on the sum. While it is a high figure, publishing sources said it would be plausible if Simon & Schuster US and UK teamed up to buy the book and sought worldwide rights – meaning they could sell the book into other regions as well as the UK and US. After the deal was signed, it was rumoured to be a seven-figure sum. One senior publisher said it was an utterly mad number, but that “madness sometimes happens”, so it was conceivable. They said a book such as Arday’s would normally be expected to sell about 5,000 copies, so with £2 of royalty per copy, that equates to an advance of £10,000, not 1.4 million dollars or pounds... Pulling the book at this point would be a “pretty massive decision”, one publisher said, if only for logistical reasons: Simon & Schuster has “probably printed the book already, probably paid the author, and may have started shipping the book all over the world”, so “actively withdrawing the book now is both extremely difficult and quite expensive”. In a statement before Arday’s resignation, Simon & Schuster said: “We have worked closely with Professor Jason Arday on Great and Unfortunate Things since acquiring it and can speak to the professionalism and integrity he has brought to every stage of the publication. “Great and Unfortunate Things is Arday’s memoir of overcoming remarkable challenges and responding to adversity with resilience. It is told through his own recollections and those of the people closest to him.” Arday “worked closely with his co-writer, as well as our editorial and legal teams, to carefully research, write and corroborate the narrative”, they added. The book is co-written by Eve Claxton. In comments reported by the Bookseller in April, Kris Doyle, the nonfiction publisher at Simon & Schuster UK, said: “I can promise you’ve never read a story like this – even the viral news headlines don’t do it justice.”... When asked to share information about the book’s fact-checking process, Simon & Schuster said: “We do not comment on our editorial processes.” In the acknowledgements section of the book, Arday credits Iman M’Fah-Traoré with checking the book. The publisher did not respond when asked whether it had contracted Traoré rather than Arday hiring her independently... The problem facing Simon & Schuster has echoes of that faced by Penguin following the infamous Salt Path scandal, where Raynor and Moth Winn were accused of fabricating large chunks of their story... Signing a contract for a memoir, writers promise that they have the “right to tell the story and that it’s true”, one British publisher said. Any publishing house was “relying on that warranty”."
Looks like Simon & Schuster doesn't mind having its reputation destroyed too
Weird how racism is definitely not a factor behind people questioning the Salth Path authors

Jason Arday's Fairy Tale Is Over - The Atlantic (aka "Icarus in the Faculty Lounge") - "Great and Unfortunate Things, which Arday co-wrote with Eve Claxton, is still scheduled to come out next week from Simon & Schuster. The story that it tells should not be taken at face value; it differs notably from other versions of his life that Arday has shared in public and in private, including in the original proposal he sent out with his agent. But the book is also, in a way, very honest and quite telling: It provides a vivid portrait of a man who was always manifestly ill-equipped for academia yet found a way to reach its upper levels. This is not someone else’s cruel assessment of Arday’s tragic and improbable career. It’s his own... Even his speech therapist wasn’t optimistic that he’d ever learn to talk. (At one point, she also physically abused him, the memoir says.)... As one might expect, his thesis defense did not go smoothly. One examiner was suspicious of his work: “I am struggling to see that there is any original contribution here,” she said, according to the book"... Is that really true? I reached out to the book’s fact-checker to ask whether this and several other stories from the book had been verified, but she did not respond. Even asking that question places me on the wrong side of Arday’s moral ledger. Again and again, the book acknowledges his “impossible” success, yet his indignation at anyone who ever doubted him remains a running theme throughout the book. These are Arday’s villains—the Ivan Dragos and the Clubber Langs of academia, who dared to wonder whether his work was really so original, or questioned whether he did it on his own. He swallowed his “feelings of offense,” he says in reference to one lecturer who insisted on drilling him about subject material in person, “but I have never forgotten them.” When you succeed against pretty much insurmountable odds,” Arday writes in the book, “it weirdly makes people question your credibility.” Is it weird? I don’t think it’s weird. When you keep succeeding against insurmountable odds, the facts of your surmounting will be bound to get a second look. Arday’s record of public statements includes plenty that would seem to be exaggerated, if not completely false... the most disturbing inconsistencies arise from Arday’s book proposal, a copy of which was obtained by The Atlantic. That document, from 2024, cites several accolades of which no proof exists online. The proposal also lays out many of the same events as the memoir but with slightly different dates and details: The boys who beat him up were not his age but four years older; his suicide attempt happened before, not during, the pandemic. And whereas the book describes Arday as having survived two brain tumors, the proposal says he had a bout of testicular cancer. No reference to that illness appears in the memoir. Nor does the book describe the time that Arday, then a teenager, was struck by a car and spent several months in a coma. According to the book proposal, the doctors told his parents that he would never recover, and suggested taking him off life support “as an act of mercy.” Through all of this, he was aware of everything that was going on, because he had locked-in syndrome. “As I will describe to readers in the book,” Arday wrote in the proposal, “these months afforded me another profoundly different way of perceiving the world.” The book doesn’t describe any of this, nor that he awakened “miraculously” from the coma, nor the full year he spent “relearning everything—how to walk, to talk.”... Then there is the prophecy—the revelation Arday was given in Brazil, that he would suffer greatly and also do great things. According to the proposal, this occurred in 2005, not 2006, and the message came not from a local aid worker in her 30s but from “an elder in the small town where I had been assigned, who was well-known in the area for predicting people’s futures.” (Later in the proposal, he calls this person a “shaman woman.”)... By his own account, Arday rose to fame as a scholar and a writer despite staggering limitations; he became an academic who can read only a single page of academic text an hour and cannot comprehend what is happening at work 90 percent of the time... There’s a moment near the end of Great and Unfortunate Things when Arday’s confidence begins to waver. He’s filling out his application for the professorship at Cambridge, and just then, as he draws to the brink of destiny, doubts begin to fill his mind. “What if I have completely overestimated my capabilities?” he writes. “What if my story ends up being a cautionary tale like Icarus about flying too close to the sun?” What if."
If what Arday said at one point contradicts what he said at another point, clearly the media is racist and evil for pointing out the inconsistency. But some left wingers will still claim there's no proof he lied

Prof Ian Pace on X - "Some people have said that everything to do with Arday was just about plagiarism allegations. But that is to remove from the equation a highly publicised memoir released this month. How could it not be legitimate for media to scrutinise the biographical claims in this?"
Someone pointed out that when a memoir is coming out, the publishing house contacts the press to drum up publicity and the press will write about it. Of course, since the journalists refused to take his lies at face value, they are racist and guilty of harassment and lynching

The most unfortunate thing - "By Jason Arday’s own account, he experienced a lot of bad luck in his life... Unpicking the truth, or otherwise, of these claims has become a national sport over the last four weeks. Arday’s biggest piece of bad luck, though, is unquestionable. It was a gigantic misfortune for the questions about his life and career to come to prominence in the summer, when parliament is closed and the news agenda is a vacuum... Arday was a perfect silly season story. It was — and I am sorry to say this now that Arday is dead, but it is true — very funny. There was a childish brazenness to his exaggerations and inventions... If he had been less amusing, he’d have attracted less attention. But it was also (another misfortune) a serious story. It fell plum into the narrative of DEI-run-amok: Arday was significantly underqualified for his job at Cambridge, which was thrilled to have appointed the youngest black professor in its history. The story also raised questions more broadly about academic standards in the humanities, regarding both Arday’s education (Liverpool John Moores, which awarded his doctorate, confirmed that he had received just one in-person supervision while writing his PhD, which was later found to have substantial signs of plagiarism) and the education he provided to his own students. There was the issue of police overreach. When Jack Grove of the Times Higher Education Supplement submitted a routine journalistic query to Arday, Arday reported him to the police — and the police pursued the journalist, pressuring him to abandon the story. There was legal chill. Arday retained the specialist defamation firm Carter Ruck and threatened reporters with the possibility of libel action. And yes, there was racism: Cofnas is a “race realist” who considers black people intellectually inferior. But it would not have fallen to Cofnas to break the story of a “DEI cover-up” if there hadn’t been a cover-up. Arday’s self-mythologising was not harmless. He hurt the academics whose work he plagiarised. He hurt the discipline he belonged to. He hurt the early career lecturers who were competing with him for jobs, but couldn’t match his fantastical legend. He hurt the families of non-verbal children who believed the story of his unprecedented late acquisition of language, and either blamed themselves for lacking the patience and love of Arday’s mother, or blamed their children for their failure to blossom. (For whatever reason, that’s the part that made me angriest.) Arday’s fall did receive a vast amount of coverage, and some of that was racially inflected. In a different month, there would have been less of it. But I’m not sure I can say the coverage was overall disproportionate. The Salt Path scandal, for example, was very extensively reported, and that does not have nearly the same serious implications as the Arday story (medical misrepresentation and general non-fiction ethics aside). Should I, for example, have not reviewed his book? Should I have silenced my doubts about his medical history? I would have been failing to do the basics of my job in either case. Academic plagiarists don’t usually make headlines, but Arday was not any old academic. He was a star, who had done the media rounds on his appointment to Cambridge. He was publishing a high-profile memoir with celebrity blurbs: Kathy Burke called it “a remarkable book by a unique and extraordinary man”. He had chosen the spotlight. Genuine entertainment, genuine importance, genuine public interest: put those things together, and in the absence of anything else to capture popular attention, a story is likely to run and run. Until, on Friday, Arday apparently killed himself. The obvious party to blame, for some, is journalism. The writer Matt Haig published an Instagram post calling on Andy Burnham to change the law so journalists would face “consequences” for “the reckless damaging of people’s mental health via the media”. (Incidentally, I once wrote a critical piece about Haig which he flagged up to his followers, who then subjected me to one of the more vicious and unpleasant pile-ons I have been through. But I suspect my mental health isn’t the kind that counts here.) Press regulation advocates have used it to renew calls for Leveson 2, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Arday had already used the law to suppress journalism. Authoritarianism is in the air. Being at the centre of a media storm is isolating and horrible. Arday had lost his job, lost his credibility, and even those he might have banked on as supporters were abandoning him: The Guardian’s Afua Hirsch wrote a column that was probably more brutal than anything from The Telegraph or The Spectator, which accused Arday of gulling his defenders and exploiting his autism as a cover for his actions. Ostracism is deeply destructive. I don’t think that Arday’s life was beyond redemption (if the Winns could survive The Salt Path, he could survive this), but I can understand why he might have believed it was. There are other things that can be hard for a human to bear. Losing face, for example. In 1969, the sailor Donald Crowhurst disappeared during a round-the-world race. He had been woefully underprepared for the challenge, but desperate to succeed: he had pinned both his family’s finances and his own reputation on completion... It was suicidal in the first place for Crowhurst to enter the race (after his disappearance, entry criteria were tightened to exclude overambitious amateurs like him). But what killed him, in the end, was his own psychological inability to turn around and acknowledge his errors. Suicide is a complex and terrible kind of violence. The most palatable way to interpret it is as a rational reaction to a suffering so great, only oblivion can end it. But the act of suicide affects everyone the suicidal person is connected to: Arday’s decision to kill himself has inflicted unimaginable pain on his family, and especially his children. Suicide can be an act of revenge (“They’ll be sorry…”). It can be an act of control: think of criminals who kill themselves rather than face the judgement of the courts. It is also rarely a simple response to an obvious trigger. While I take seriously what Louis Appleby says about how the strain of being the world’s main character will have affected Arday, I’d also point out that the majority of the coverage was about the institutional issues rather than Arday personally.

Chris Rose on X - "Jason Arday was on a six figure salary. He was in the top 0.08% of taxpaying earners in the UK. Why can’t his family pay out of Jason's estate? If you want to know how easily people fell for his lies, just look at the people donating to this grift.
Jason Arday also received a seven figure advance for his book. The family can easily afford a funeral."

Claire Lehmann on X - "The press interest in Arday can be explained by the fact that ~40% of British journalists went to Oxbridge. It's an elite protecting its own status. If Cambridge can no longer tell the difference between fraud & excellence then the status of an entire elite class is in question."

Links - 20th August 2026 (2 - Prostitution)

2026-08-20T17:50:00.000+08:00

Brothel owner shares wildest customer request and most one client spent in one night - "De Noire has seen it all during her time working at the brothel, from drunks running around naked and promising to have sex with all the workers, to two male clients who paid for a threesome but ended up in a twosome, with the female worker left with nothing to do... "I think, the dog fantasy," the brothel manager said confidently, detailing how one of their regular clients, a 'completely normal guy' with a wife, comes in with a dog costume and role-plays as, well, man's best friend. Rather than having sex in the brothel, 'he's basically just a dog' who gets bossed around by one of the workers, the manager shared. She explained: "Sometimes there's a customer and she's f***ing him and he's just there staring, like a dog. "Sometimes he licks the customer, sometimes he chews on the shoes of the customer... Then after the eight hours is done, he just packs up everything and goes home to his wife." While this might be off-putting for some, people like the man-dog is why De Noire loves her job. She added: "That's why I like to work there, people can get so creative and play around, it's amazing!""

1 woman in custody, 1 other wanted after man allegedly drugged and robbed - "a man contacted a woman on LeoList. Two women then arrived at the victim’s address in the Front Street West and John Street area. Police allege the man ingested an unknown substance given to him by one of the women and lost consciousness. The women then allegedly stole the man’s personal belongings and fled the residence. Investigators were able to identify one of the suspects and, on May 28, arrested 27-year-old Natalia Lis Pardinas Da-Hora of Mississauga. She is facing charges of possessing a scheduled substance for trafficking, administering a noxious thing and intent to endanger life, robbery and possession of proceeds of property obtained by crime over $5,000. Police are still searching for a second woman, who is described as being in her mid-20s, having a thing build with black hair. She was last seen wearing a beige top and bottom. She also has tattoos on both shins and the name ‘Cassie’ under her left chin... Investigators believe there may also be other victims and are asking them to contact police as well."
Toronto police ID second suspect accused of drugging man - "Police say they continue to search for 19-year-old Sarah Kehttab"

POISONOUS PRETTIES: Oldest profession rife with doping scams | Toronto Sun - “The problem is that the drugs being used by fake escorts are becoming increasingly dangerous.”

Crime against sex workers ‘almost doubles’ since law change | Irish Independent - "Crime against sex workers has almost doubled in the two years since new laws were implemented, campaigners have said. Ireland adopted the “Nordic Model” on March 27 2017, criminalising the purchase of sex, not the selling of sex, which the Government says is aimed at tackling trafficking and protecting vulnerable people in prostitution. Sex worker organisations have railed against the change since it was implemented, saying the new laws make workers more vulnerable."
From 2019

I Ditched My Banking Job to Be a Sex Worker - "a Conservative politician dismissed the idea that anyone would willingly become a sex worker. Speaking to NDP MP Laurel Collins after she urged Parliament to consider decriminalizing sex work, Conservative MP Arnold Viersen said, “I do not think any woman in this country ever chooses this as a job. This is something that they are trafficked into.”... Nearly four years ago, I purposely left a comfortable nine-to-five corporate finance career for the opportunity to be a sex worker. At the time, I had spent six years working in the finance industry, taking on roles in both banking and asset management... While I craved financial stability and security, I also craved wiggle room for personal growth, creativity/expression, and self-care. As a 20-something at the beginning of my career, the two seemed mutually exclusive. If I wanted to advance in my career, I could not count on room for a fulfilling personal life. I could not plan to travel, take a Spanish class, improve my health and fitness, and finally master the stock market. Hell, I could barely catch up on laundry. There were so many days at the office I’d catch myself fantasizing about what it might be like to have a random Tuesday afternoon free. How it might feel to have a leisurely lunch, or walk my dogs without having to rush... After only four weeks of dipping my toe into the sex work industry, I quit my job. I was quickly falling in love with my newfound career, and I couldn’t imagine spending another day under fluorescent lighting, wondering what I might do if I had more agency over my time. I discovered that the relationship building model I loved so much in finance, is the absolute core of sex work, but at a much deeper level. Sex workers are emotional labour chameleons. It’s our job to take nervous, vulnerable or stressed individuals and make them relaxed and comfortable. We offer friendship, support and love in a society that’s so clearly over-worked, burnt out, and in need of tenderness. Sex workers are also full-blown entrepreneurs. So many of the skills that I learned studying business and in my finance roles transferred to sex work. Many of us have created a brand, identified a niche market, designed and directed our own content creation, maintain social media presences, answer all our own emails and customize the experiences we provide to suit our clients. Additionally, many of us do our own web-design, SEO, and monitor our analytics. Not only has sex work allowed me to expand on my administrative skill set in a way that my finance roles couldn’t, it’s taught me how to truly connect with another person on an emotional, spiritual, and physical level. It’s made me into a better partner, and friend, and, because it’s proven to be more lucrative, allowed me the flexibility and freedom to spend more time on myself. Of course, every job has downsides, and it’d be amiss not to mention them. Not unlike many other careers high in emotional labour (therapists, counsellors, etc.) this kind of work can, at times, be mentally draining. I’m still working on finding balance between providing emotional/physical care to my clients, and recharging my own batteries. The overwhelm of administrative work can also be challenging, and like any other entrepreneurial venture, time management is key. I think collectively, many of us agree that the worst downside is the stigma."

Thread by @FrankDeScushin on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Seattle sees rising prostitution on their streets. Drugs play a role, but so does the City Council repealing its prostitution loitering law in the name of racial equity after George Floyd died. Because St. George died in Minneapolis there's now more prostitution in Seattle. "The prostitution loitering ordinance has a discriminatory legacy that impacted primarily people of color..." said Councilmember Andrew J. Lewis, a cosponsor of the legislation."

Criminalizing prostitution leads to an increase in cases of rape, study finds - "A recent study published in the Journal of Population Economics sheds light on the unintended consequences of Sweden’s ban on the purchase of sex. The research indicates that the regulation, aimed at curbing prostitution, may have led to an unexpected increase in rape offenses... For his study, Ciacci utilized data from the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, spanning from 1997 to 2014. This period allowed for the analysis of crime rates before and after the introduction of Sweden’s sex purchase ban in 1999... The primary outcome of the research suggests that instead of decreasing sex-related offenses, the ban coincided with a substantial increase in the number of reported rape offenses. Specifically, between 1997 and 2014, the study estimates a rise in rape incidents by approximately 44% to 62% following the implementation of the ban... These outcomes challenge the anticipated benefits of criminalizing the purchase of sex as a means to protect individuals from exploitation and reduce sex-related crimes. The study’s implication is that while the intention behind the law is to decrease demand for prostitution and thereby reduce harm, the actual effect might have been to displace behaviors into more harmful and non-consensual acts of sexual violence."
The feminist cope is that prostitution is rape, so this isn't worse

21 charged in sexual-exploitation bust – Brandon Sun - "According to McCallum, police aren’t aware of anyone selling sexual services relating to this investigation being hurt, but that the exchange of money or drugs with someone in a vulnerable position can be considered exploitation"
Car thefts causing concern in Winnipeg
Keeping people safe!

The Secret Life of a Bay Street Hooker - "She is witty, insightful and self-revealing by turns. In other words, good value for money... “You’re retired,” he teases her, and they both have a good laugh. The joke, of course, is that she’s working as they speak. What she doesn’t mention is that she has two children, a boy and a girl under the age of 10, who are at home right now with her ex‑boyfriend (their father)... she decided to go back to school and enrolled in the undergrad program at York, where she majored in history. (She would later complete a master’s degree in the same subject.) Her favourite historical figure was Louis XIV. She loved the stories of life at court in Versailles—the opulence, the decadence, the shameless promiscuity. “I remember reading about the lives of his mistresses and thinking, ‘That’s the life.’ ” Her transformation into “Chloë” did not occur in a seedy nightclub or dark back alley. There were no pimps or oily strip club managers involved in her evolution from good girl to what she calls “the H word” (hooker). Instead, it occurred in a thoughtful, austere sort of way: in a lecture hall at York. It was there that she first encountered the works of Michel Foucault... One regular, an engineer, often books theatre tickets. Another sometimes takes her out to lunch during the week just to catch up (for this, she doesn’t charge). Occasionally, if a client is single, he will even take her as his date to a wedding or a work event. If anyone asks how they met, she responds truthfully: “On the Internet.” Many keep in touch with her on a daily basis, sending affectionate texts and e-mails and sharing the details of their lives, just as they would in a normal relationship. “They really do think of me as their girlfriend,” Chloë says. “And I see them as the men I’m dating.”... According to Chloë, none of her married clients are interested in leaving their wives. If anything, she says, they are protective of their marriages, preferring a clear-cut arrangement with a hooker to the risk and drama of a full-blown extra-marital affair. “It’s a myth that men talk about their marital problems with escorts,” she says. “If they do talk about their marriages, it’s generally to say that they aren’t having sex at home.” Even if they are, it may not be the kind of sex they’re after. There are some things most men want, she explains, but aren’t comfortable asking of their partners. Asked to elaborate, she looks coy, then lowers her voice and tells me that she does “a lot of anal work” with her clients. This is an erogenous zone most women overlook in men, she says: “I have a little strap-on I sometimes like to put on, and they’re totally into it. I’ve only ever had one client turn me down.”"

High-end escort swallows the hard truth that men are getting worse in bed
To think that men get criticised for not understanding the difference between fantasy and reality

Thread by @moghilemear13 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "THE MECHANISMS OF WHORING AND GAMBLING《嫖赌机关》
One of the most romantic, charming books I’ve read also has one of the crudest names possible. Written by Shen Hongyu, a late Ming opera singer, only a few copies survive today, preserving a magical moment in Chinese history. It’s a guide to the brothels and casinos of the 江南 region, full of joie de vivre with a clear recognition of the humanity of those on the edges of society, fleshing out a late Ming milieu built on desire, fulfillment My fave excerpts below w/ Prof. Yuming He’s translations
The book opens with a poem coyly titled 论人该嫖 “One Ought to Whore”, meditating on both the transience of life and the joys of the moment, using classic imagery of brothels and romantic encounters (e.g. willow lanes). Next, the author provides the aspiring patron with Five Do’s and Three Don’ts. It’s not enough to have money - one must also be a caring and charming lover. And even in the world of brothels- loyalty, geniality, and modesty were still the mark of a desired patron. The author goes into details of each of the Do’s and Don’ts - explaining the what, how, and why. Here’s Three, Take Time, and Four, Have Skills. Lovers must invest time into the relationship, and focus on shared pleasure - no place for selfish lovers in the brothel!
Shen next lists ideal characteristics for men and women, many shared. “Morality” is an interesting one to see. These lists share much in common with marriage matchmaking - which isn’t surprising as Shen also favors marrying courtesans. Only "Suzhou style" needs explanation. As one of the centers of high culture in the Ming Dynasty, Suzhou “style”, including mannerisms, habits, and tastes were highly sought after and mimicked by performers all across the country - here Suzhou style is compared to the mythical utopia of the Peach Blossom Spring
After the sections above, the book flips to assorted tips as well as warnings against things such as “ghosting”. The below segment is told from the POV of the woman ghosted, and the man in question is undoubtedly the scoundrel here - an admonition to not act this way. Lastly, some misc. pieces of advice throughout:
LANGUAGE: Shen warns scholar-patrons to avoid the markers of literary Chinese, 之，乎，也, to avoid “scaring the hoes” Additionally, he cautions against repetition - don’t use the same pickup lines with all the girls!
ETIQUETTE: Sex is not something to rush into - everyone should be comfortable and situated first - and let everyone relax a bit before trying for another go!
PARTING AND REUNITING: This one spoke to me personally, having had both experiences. But the emphasis on reuniting after parting is what stood out to me - it’s about how to reunite on good terms too.
MODESTY: Shen warns against trying to impress people with feats of drinking or singing - those with ability will moderate themselves, and won’t rush to be the first to perform.
KNOWING YOUR PARTNER: The theme of shared pleasure is consistent throughout - and Shen reminds the reader here that you have to understand their likes and dislikes first to be a desired lover.
POOR BEHAVIOR: Finally, two cases of frowned-upon behavior - excessive begging/pleading for sexual favors / and those who ghost as soon as they get what they want. Certainly not behaviors praised today either, but delightful to see the same in the Ming.
I hope you enjoyed this window into the milieu of the late Ming - it’s a short but magical time in Chinese history full of joie de vivre and romance. These passages read to me as shockingly modern, and I hope they can help us reflect on our own hangups in love too. I have the full pdf but translation is slow, I’ve used many of Prof. He’s translations with a few of my own, but as I work through it I’ll add more to this thread. The most famous copy preserved today was actually taken by the KMT to Taiwan, and sits in Taipei‘s Museum!"
The good professor's book is Home and the World: Editing the "Glorious Ming" in Woodblock-Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Andy Ngo 🏳️‍🌈 on X - "Seattle — A trans activist and prostitute spoke up against a proposed law banning street prostitution and open drug abuse in certain city areas where the activities have become endemic. The prostitute says the law will “kill” people. The committee voted to approve the ban, moving the vote to city council next. Leftist protesters tried rioting in response."

Man hires prostitute - and his daughter turns up - "Titus Ncube, a married father-of-three, collapsed to the floor with shock while his daughter, 20, fled the hotel in tears. Mr Ncube, from Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, said he was having marital problems and decided to rent a room in a local hotel, followed by a prostitute."

Emil O W Kirkegaard on X - "My thanks to Guardian et al for promoting our work on race differences in sexuality. Our survey of prostitutes is getting many more reads now. Currently sitting at the 94th centile of interest score for science papers published that year."
Racial Differences in Sexuality: A Sex Worker Survey - "Racial differences in sexuality are difficult to study due to the privacy of sexual intercourse and the questionable validity of self-reports. We use a novel method to study racial differences: surveying sex workers. We surveyed 129 American female sex workers. We asked them to rate the ethnicities with whom they had had intercourse on thirteen traits and behaviors for five different racial groups: Blacks, Hispanics, Whites, East Asians, Indians, and Jews. The largest reported differences between Blacks and Whites include Blacks having larger penises (d = 1.23, p < .001), that they preferred buttocks over breasts (d = 2.38), and that they preferred doggy-style over missionary (d = 1.42, p < .001). Compared to Blacks, Whites were rated as being particularly interested in kinky sex (d = 0.70, p < .001) and kissing (d = 0.85, p < .001) as well as being faster to ejaculate (d = 0.97, p < .001)."

Herbertstraße - Wikipedia - "In the 1970s, police added barriers and signs advising youths and women against entering: the former for reasons of protection against harmful influences, the latter because prostitutes would actively seek to chase away any women who entered, thus causing trouble"

Japan’s perspective on whether sex work is cheating - "A Japanese TikTok user has perhaps stumbled upon an intriguing cultural norm regarding sex work in his country. A content creator behind an account called Takashi asked members of the Japanese public the simple question, “Does prostitution count as cheating?” Granted, while the sample size of about 20 is small, the consensus seems very clear. It’s a resounding “no” over the course of two videos that canvassed men and women on the moral dilemma... Japan legalised escort services in 1998, although it remains illegal to sell vaginal sex. Paying for non-coital services or sexual acts not legally defined as “intercourse” is generally allowed."

Nearly half of 130 businesses in Yuhua Place linked to massage & beauty parlours - "According to reports, Yuhua Place has around 130 shops, many of which occupy units on the second floor of shophouses. Of these, close to half are involved in massage, beauty, or related services. Retail shops make up about 15 per cent of businesses in the area, while around 10 per cent are food and beverage outlets, according to Shin Min. The remaining units include tuition centres and clinics. The increase in massage parlours has been observed over the past few years... Li, the owner of a sundry shop in the area, told Shin Min that there have been occasional disputes between massage workers and housewives."

Students found engaged in prostitution more than three times will face expulsion : r/VietNam - "Here in ‘Nam we believe in third chances…"

No charges in Layton massage parlour leak - "The Ontario Provincial Police aren't laying charges in a leak about the 1996 visit to a massage parlour that found NDP Leader Jack Layton inside. The police force was investigating the information leak about the 1996 incident at the request of the Toronto Police Service, whose officers raided a suspected bawdy house posing as a massage parlour in 1996. One of the officers found Layton inside. Layton said he wasn't aware it was a bawdy house and never went back. He was never arrested or charged. Serving officers are sworn not to leak information to the public. But a retired officer involved in the visit let a reporter see his notebooks from the investigation in the final days of the election campaign that saw the NDP more than double its seats in the House of Commons and become the Official Opposition. CBC News has learned a private investigator was scouring police and court records the week before the election, looking for information on Layton... Toronto police spokesman Mark Pugash told CBC News that the force is doing an internal review on procedures related to retired officers keeping their police memo books, which are police property. The notebooks contain officers' notes, suspicions and evidence that, at the time recorded, have not been tested in court. "We're going to see if any changes [in policy] need to be made," Pugash said. Pugash told CBC News that a retired officer is beyond the reach of the Ontario Police Services Act, which governs discipline issues. The Toronto police will take no further action, now that the OPP have ruled out any criminal breach of trust. A provincial police spokesman confirmed to CBC News that it was a former Toronto police officer who gave an interview to a reporter about the raid. "But the investigation also determined there weren't grounds to lay criminal charges," said spokesman Dave Ross... Both Layton and his wife, NDP MP Olivia Chow, said he did nothing wrong... Chow said in a statement she had been aware of her husband's appointment and the massage clinic was registered with the City of Toronto."
From 2011

Will the BBC apologise for its role in the Jason Arday story?

2026-08-20T13:04:00.000+08:00

Will the BBC apologise for its role in the Jason Arday story? | The Spectator

"The BBC’s coverage of the Jason Arday scandal is something of a scandal itself. The corporation spent years uncritically promoting the myth of Arday. Prior to July 2026, the broadcaster produced at least 11 radio programs (totaling nearly six hours of Arday content), four news articles and two TV interviews championing the academic and repeating his false claims.

When the initial story broke about his plagiarism and lies, the BBC doubled down on its defense of the academic. The first article which I would say features real criticism of the former professor was published on August 6, a day after he resigned, more than two weeks after the original Arday exposé was published on Substack and six years after the BBC’s first hagiographic piece about the late academic.

In that time journalists across the world published revelations detailing Arday’s long history of lies and exaggerations, from publications as diverse as the Telegraph and the Daily Mail to the Guardian and the New York Times. For weeks, the BBC ignored them all.

Following Arday’s death, the corporation has returned to its less-than-impartial reporting of the matter. Throughout the saga, the BBC has spent more resources smearing Arday’s exposer, the former Cambridge academic Nathan Cofnas, and participated in a genuine witch hunt against him. Even in articles detailing accusations of plagiarism against Arday, it is clear that the real enemy of the story was the infamous “race realist” Cofnas.

The BBC’s first use of Arday that I can find was from 20 June 2020, when he joined The Moral Maze to discuss racial justice (what else?). Introduced as the Assistant Professor of Sociology at Durham University, Arday argued that teaching children Shakespeare is as important as teaching them about black suffragettes and indigenous figures, and told white people they must acknowledge their privilege.

In November 2020 he was interviewed by Newsnight about racism in academia (you will see a pattern emerge here), and four months later he featured on Radio 4 to discuss “health and social barriers he has faced and overcome throughout his life.”

BBC News interviewed Arday in November 2021, again about racism in academia. He claimed: “If someone asked me what the blueprint is to become an academic, I’d have to say that if you are black or Asian it is ‘how much can you suffer?’ whereas if you are white there is actually a blueprint about getting into academia.”

In February 2023, when Arday was promoted from Durham to become Cambridge’s youngest black professor, the BBC had its first opportunity to fact-check the new professor’s claims about his life story. However, the corporation had found a new star. He ticked all of the BBC’s favorite boxes – diverse, disabled, and a vocal “anti-racist.” Its interview uncritically repeated Arday’s claims that he was nonverbal until age 11, and couldn’t read or write until 18. It featured the near-comically unbelievable line: “Although he could not speak, the young Jason fervently questioned the world around him. ‘Why are some people homeless?’ he remembers wondering. ‘Why is there war?’”

We now have evidence that Arday could speak as a young boy. Two former classmates told the Guardian that they remembered him speaking, joking and singing at primary school. As for his claim that he could not read or write before 18, Arday left secondary school aged 16 with two GCSEs, qualifications that necessarily involve reading and writing.

In his glowing interview, the new professor admitted that in his attempts to become an academic, “everything I submitted got violently rejected.” He continued: “The peer review process was so cruel, it was almost funny.”

Arday’s appointment led to a flood of BBC interviews across its radio, TV and online news arms. Within a six-week period, the corporation interviewed him five times.

The BBC’s next puff piece was a TV interview which repeated Arday’s lies about his youth and featured the now-infamous clip of his boss at Cambridge, Professor Hilary Cremin, holding his hands lovingly. The same claims were repeated in a BBC World Service interview, and on Radio 1Xtra’s If You Don’t Know podcast.

In the latter interview, Arday claimed his mother used music to elicit speech out of him. She apparently played the young boy Enya, and used Gaelic, Greek and Roman mythology to teach him language. A more honest moment came in the interview when the presenter said “I don’t know a lot about sociology,” and Arday replied: “Neither do I.”

Days later the corporation interviewed him again, this time for 44 minutes on the World Service’s Outlook program. Here, Arday recounted another anecdote from his mother. He said that when he was nine (and still nonverbal) she explained the concept of war to him, including “why war happened.” She could see the distress on his face as he tried to comprehend the suffering caused by war. His mother then played him Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun,” which, he said, gave him a “sense of a feeling that people may have felt experiencing war.” He claimed the experience helped him later learn to speak.

Arday told the BBC’s Mobeen Azhar that during his childhood he practiced snooker “seven hours a day for eight years.” Azhar accepted the claim without challenge.

Arday said when he was 18 he set himself a target of raising a million pounds for charity by the time he was 40. “I got to 30, I reached that target through doing a series of crazy marathons, and fundraising events. Subsequently I set up soup kitchens around London, and as we stand I’ve raised just under five million pounds for charity,” Arday said.

There is no evidence for any of this. In 2010, a 24-year-old Arday raised just over £6,000 on Justgiving, and wrote that he aimed to raise “£250,000 before the age of 50.” The Telegraph investigated Arday’s claims about his fundraising, and found no evidence for his grandiose claims.

In September 2023, BBC News ran a piece which should be described more as PR than journalism, describing Arday’s donation of a book advance to neurodivergent charities. Two months later BBC Radio 4 ran yet another piece featuring Arday talking about race.

The BBC’s next programs with Arday were presented by the academic himself. First, he edited the Today program, following in the footsteps of figures including Stephen Hawking, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Theresa May and Richard Branson. In 2025, he produced four 14-minute segments about loneliness for Radio 4.

This was nothing short of a six-year propaganda campaign by the BBC on Jason Arday’s behalf. Not one critical question was asked by a BBC presenter (the only challenge I heard from anyone was in his very first appearance on the BBC in The Moral Maze, when Melanie Phillips argued with him about BLM), and many of his false claims were repeated as gospel.

The corporation was by no means the only organization to create the Arday legend, but it certainly contributed. The BBC is not a niche outlet: its journalism reaches millions of people in Britain and around the world, with the World Service giving its coverage a truly global audience. One BBC video alone promoting Arday attracted nearly half a million views online. Across the roughly 15 pieces the corporation produced featuring Arday, the cumulative reach will have been substantial, helping to turn an obscure academic into a near-household name.

During my years working for mainstream conservative media outlets, including the Telegraph, the Sun and GB News, nearly all of my work went through an editor or editors, and a lawyer. We would fact-check claims endlessly. The BBC failed to do so.

Meanwhile, in May 2023 emeritus professor at Plymouth Marjon University, David Harris, emailed Arday raising concerns about plagiarism in one of his articles. Cambridge’s youngest black professor responded by accusing Harris of racism and bullying. When Harris raised the issue with another academic, who in turn informed Arday’s boss, Hilary Cremin (of BBC fame), Arday’s article was withdrawn but Cremin said he had the department’s “full support.”...

The BBC responded to Cofnas’s explosive blog about Arday with silence for 11 days. Finally, on 1 August, a headline appeared on BBC News’s website reading: “Cambridge professor at center of plagiarism row defends his work.”

In those 11 days, journalists at national newspapers debunked or seriously challenged a series of claims by Arday, including around his fundraising activities, and that he had run 30 marathons in 35 days, partly with a broken leg. They also raised questions over his account of running 600 miles in six days, which he later revised to 12 days, while WaterAid disputed his claim of carrying out humanitarian work for the charity in South America.

The second paragraph of the BBC’s article was not about Arday, but instead focused on Cofnas’s views on race and the fact he was “sacked from his Cambridge role in 2024,” as if that fact held any relevance. The third paragraph suggested critics of Arday could have “been motivated by racism.” Incredibly, the BBC then repeated Arday’s claims about his childhood yet again without reservation.

The next article was published on 5 August, with its headline: “University of Cambridge professor at center of plagiarism row resigns.” The original version of the article was 600 words long, with 30 percent of it consisting of direct quotes from Arday defending himself. The BBC repeated its attacks on Cofnas in two paragraphs. There was no description of the lies Arday had told about his background.

A day later the BBC updated the piece to feature more quotes and information, including the fact the Met police had investigated a THE journalist “over an allegation of harassment after he emailed questions to Arday.”

In the following week, the BBC published several critical pieces on the now-former professor. Even the Guardian, which is presumably read by many BBC journalists, had published a lengthy investigation into Arday on August 1, casting serious doubt on a number of claims about his career and biography. One BBC piece stated that “Jason Arday’s appointment in 2023 was hailed at the time as a progressive moment,” though it ignored the fact that the Corporation itself had done the hailing.

BBC Verify, a unit dedicated to debunking disinformation, employs around 60 journalists and has an annual budget of more than £3 million ($4 million). Since Nathan Cofnas’s original Substack post, BBC Verify has published investigations into whether Google’s new AI tool could generate misinformation, how heatwaves have altered Britain’s landscape and false claims that sunscreen causes cancer; they failed to investigate Arday.

On 14 August the Metropolitan police announced Jason Arday’s death. We have since seen BBC articles with headlines including: “Calls for public inquiry into Jason Arday ‘witch hunt,’” “Cambridge chancellor criticizes ‘racist feeding frenzy’ around Jason Arday” and “Cambridge vice-chancellor heckled at Arday vigil.”

The first of these articles reverted to the BBC’s pre-August 6 reporting, largely ignoring the mounting evidence that Arday had made false claims about his career and biography, while repeating its attacks on Cofnas. Rather than examining the substance of the claims that had led to Arday’s resignation, the BBC gave prominent space to those accusing the media of having subjected him to a “witch hunt.”

It is ironic that the BBC is now giving so much airtime to those criticizing the media for scrutinizing an academic, when the Corporation itself did so much to put him in the spotlight. The BBC has neither apologized for its role in promoting the Arday myth nor acknowledged its failure to scrutinize his claims more closely. Instead, it has given a platform to attacks on mainstream media outlets that were simply doing their job as journalists.

Jason Arday’s death is a tragedy. As many have pointed out, he was let down by institutions that should never have thrust him into such prominence without properly scrutinizing his claims. The BBC must now confront its own role in that failure."

Links - 20th August 2026 (1 - General Wokeness [including Smithsonian])

2026-08-20T09:38:00.000+08:00

Rapid Response 47 on X - "White House Domestic Policy Council Director @vincehaley: "They view the Smithsonian, in the words of the Director, as a 'prime tool of social justice' ... The effect of this kind of ideological capture is to abolish American identity.""

Flopping Aces on X - "Nothing says “we’re a serious national history museum for families” quite like putting a sadomasochistic crotch harness and a “trans nonbinary” chest binder on display while a six-year-old’s diary entry about praying every night for her penis to grow sits nearby. That’s not some rogue progressive art gallery in Brooklyn. That’s the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The same place that decided Mickey Mouse carries the “vestiges of longstanding traditions of blackface minstrelsy,” the ukulele is a tool of American imperialism, and the Wild West was just white people turning Indigenous subjugation into dinner theater. They also spent 20% of the Benjamin Franklin exhibit asking visitors whether he conducted electric shock experiments on slaves ... with literally zero evidence ... because apparently one of America’s greatest minds needed to be retroactively smeared to make the narrative work. Meanwhile, they elevated Angela Davis, the Marxist who ran for vice president on the Communist ticket and was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list after an armed courthouse takeover that got a judge murdered. Rational thinking and hard work? Those are now listed in their official museum toolkit as symptoms of “White Supremacy Culture.” Christopher Columbus is a murderer, slaver, and thief. The Pilgrims were colonizers. Thanksgiving is a National Day of Mourning. And if you’re a parent walking your kids through this place expecting actual American history, the White House report basically suggests they should post a warning label at the entrance: “Exhibits prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country.” This is the flagship. This is what they chose to do with one of the most important civic institutions in the country. And they’re shocked that someone finally wrote it all down in a 162-page report."

Thread by @RapidResponse47 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "In accordance with @POTUS's "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History" order, a new report exposes how the Smithsonian turned the Nat'l Museum of American History into a vehicle for Radical Left propaganda and degeneracy. Here are some of the worst examples...
The museum also featured video clips of drag queens, images of nude women, and a magazine promoting "female masturbation." It's sick, explicit content pushed on visitors of all ages at an *American history* museum."

End Wokeness on X - "Rep. Gill: "Is it important to be polite?"
Smithsonian Director Hartig: "Yes, sir"
Gill: "The Smithsonian lists politeness as an attribute of white supremacy""

Identifying and Addressing Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture – Equitable Teaching - "This resource guide highlights characteristics of white supremacy culture, as outlined by Dr. Tema Okun, that can be pervasive in organizations and institutions...
Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture
Perfectionism
One Right Way
Paternalism
Objectivity
Sense of Urgency
Defensiveness
Denial
Quantity over Quality
Worship of the Written Word
Either/Or Thinking & the Binary
Power Hoarding
Fear of Open Conflict
Individualism
Right to Comfort"

Expecting people to be on time is part of 'white supremacy culture': Duke Medical School - "Duke Medical School claims it is “white supremacy culture” to expect people of color to be on time in a strategic plan for creating an “anti-racist workforce.”... “Some identifiable characteristics of this culture includes perfectionism, belief that there’s only one right way, power hoarding, individualism, sense of urgency and defensiveness.”... According to an article published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, “timeliness” is a product of capitalism and “professionalism… centers productivity over people, values time commitments, accomplishes tasks in a linear fashion, and often favors individuals who are white and Western.” An article from the UCLA Law Review, published in 2023, calls professionalism a “racial construct.” “It is that the standard itself is based on a set of beliefs grounded in racial subordination and white supremacy. Through this analysis, professionalism is revealed to be a racial construct,” the article said."

African American museum removes controversial graphic defining whiteness - The Washington Post - "The graphic, found in the “Whiteness” section of the Smithsonian museum’s “Talking About Race” portal, described 14 categories of “white dominant culture, or whiteness,” including history, religion, family structure and justice. Hard work, self-reliance, respect of authority and “the nuclear family — father, mother, 2.3 children is the ideal social unit” were listed as attributes of white culture. The chart also included the phrases “win at all costs,” “woman’s beauty based on blonde, thin — ‘Barbie’ ” and “heavy value on ownership of goods, space and property.”... The chart came from a 1978 book, “White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-Racism Training” by Judy H. Katz, according to the museum. It lists about 50 attributes white people used to describe their culture. These attributes, it said, “have been normalized over time and are now considered standard practices in the United States. And since white people still hold most of the institutional power in America, we all have internalized some aspects of white culture, including people of color.”"
7.2: Defining Whiteness and White Supremacy - "Scholar, activist, Chicana feminist Elizabeth Martinez explicitly defines white supremacy as a system that promotes privilege and power of whiteness for white people through institutional entities... a lot of scholarship in Ethnic Studies doesn’t always use the words white supremacy. For example, they might talk about white elitism, white as dominant, etc. Even if scholarship does not explicitly name white supremacy as that, everything that helps to perpetuate the maintenance of white dominance is a part of the system of white supremacy... talking about whiteness has been a way to explain that the construction of whiteness is constantly created and re-created in order to try to maintain superiority. Further, whiteness operates within a system and also works representationally."
On Whiteness: Positionality, Sacrifice, and Collective Responsibility - "Whiteness equals white supremacy and domination."
This left winger was claiming it was "the third time this week that I've seen high-profile conservatives on social media conflating white culture with white supremacism. I don't think these influencers are that stupid; I think they're deliberately distorting the NMAAHC's message to attack the Smithsonian." As usual, "this is not happening, and it's good that it is". Left wingers are ignorant and/or dishonest

Visegrád 24 on X - "Homeschooling is legal in Brazil but a judge has just sentenced two parents to 50 days in prison for “intellectual neglect” because their 11- and 15-year-old daughters, accomplished pianists and polyglots, received no classes on gender theory, sex education, tolerance, diversity and Afro-Brazilian culture. The court argued that they would suffer in their personal lives and interactions with people of their own age from not knowing the Brazilian funk music style, which romantizes crime, life in favelas and is hyper-sexualized. Apart from being accomplished pianists, the two girls speak Portuguese, English and Latin. They also read 30+ classic books per year. The judge was particularly worried when he heard that one of the daughters is particularly fond of Christian music and doesn’t know what funk music is. The judge accused the parents of using their daughters as tools in an “ideological war”"
Comment (elsewhere): ""judge accused parents of using daughters as tools in an ideological logical war” Every Accusation is a Confession"

Michael Smith | Facebook - "If you recognize the left's arguments as generalization fallacies, you aren't wrong. Against illegal immigration, you hate all immigrants. Don't want first graders reading porn from the school library, you want to ban books. Disagree with a black elected official on policy, you are obviosuly a racist. Bastiat nailed this tendency over a century and a half ago: "We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.""

Visegrád 24 on X - "Residents in Brooklyn, New York City, are being forced to listen to the amplified Islamic calls to prayer from nearby mosques, starting as early as 5:00 AM."
Megan Basham on X - "This should not be tolerated in the United States. This call is not neutral. It declares “Allah is the Greatest…There is no god but Allah … Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.” That is a message of domination and conquest. They can set alarms on their phones to remember when to pray. They can play their call to prayer in their mosques. This should not be inflicted upon American citizens in an American city."
Time to ban church bells rung at 8am because that intimidates and oppresses non Christians and sends the message that they live in a Christian country

Meme - justinfalsetto: "Uhuh. You're speaking to a person that went to school for 4 years to get a degree in political science. What you think the word "conservative" means, and what it actually means, aren't the same. What you think "liberal" means, isn't accurate. You are just some dumb girl, saying dumb things, to someone objectively smarter than you and literally an expert in what you are arguing about. That's a perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Look it up. And read a fucking book, one time."
patrioticbaddie: "What is a woman?"
justinfalsetto: "Only the dumbest people alive would ask that. Maybe look around you. Who else is asking that question? Are they all white men who think you aren't even qualified to exist? That's who you're people are. You vile fucking idiot. You thought that they would respect you? Because you saw it was a shorter line to the front? Everyone you know is ashamed of you. Token Aunt Jemima."
patrioticbaddie: "I love how you couldn't answer. I rest my case"
"Liberals sound so smart bragging about their college degrees until you ask them what a woman is…" - her elsewhere

Tanya on X - "“Don’t like gay marriage? Don’t marry the same sex.”
“Don’t like abortion? Don’t get one.”
“Don’t like gender ideology? Then don’t transition.”
This is a lazy, morally bankrupt argument of a culture that’s traded truth for comfort. We now act as if every serious issue can be reduced to personal taste, just like picking the flavor of our favorite ice cream. We act as if whatever we believe has no implications outside of ourselves. You would never say:
“Don’t like child abuse? Don’t abuse your kid.”
“Don’t like racism? Don’t be racist.”
“Don’t like drunk driving? Then don’t do it.”
Why not? Because we all instinctively understand that some things are just wrong, and not just for you and me, but for everyone, because these things they hurt people, they corrupt innocence and truth, they distort reality, and they destroy the moral foundation we all depend on to live in a functioning society. The idea that all moral issues are private choices is a lie. These things don’t stay in our bedrooms or at clinic or in our heads. They seep into our schools, the media, law, culture, and to the next generation. Everyone pays the price for the lies we choose to accept."

Woke Dem candidate too scared of offending Muslim voters to publicly support gay rights - "A super-woke Democrat running for Congress in Washington state has admitted she’s too scared to come out in support of LGBTQ+ rights because it might upset Muslims, even though they account for a tiny fraction of her district. Melissa Chaudhry, 34, who is running for a second time in Washington’s 9th congressional district after losing her 2024 bid, made the glaring admission in an interview with a local Seattle-based newspaper. Chaudhry, who took her Muslim Army veteran husband’s last name and wears an Islamic headscarf, or hijab, was asked why she had nothing on her campaign website about LGBTQ+ rights, despite insisting she supported their cause. “Because a lot of Muslims do not feel that way, unfortunately,” Chaudhry said in her interview with the Stranger last month. Only 41% of American Muslims believe homosexuality should be accepted by society, compared to 57% of Christians and 82% of Jewish people, according to a 2025 report from the Pew Research Center. The Seattle metropolitan area, which makes up much of Chaudhry’s district, is only around 2% Muslim, according to the Pew Research Center’s “Religious Landscape Study.” In contrast, Seattle has one of the largest LGBT+ populations in the country, with approximately 17% of adults identifying as such, according to the latest US Census. Despite that, Chaudhry insisted she “was careful about her Muslim constituents” in her interview. Chaudhry’s campaign did not respond immediately to requests for comment, and in the wake of the interview, she has rushed to do damage control in the face of criticism from LGBT+ activists. “Our community is not expendable. LGBTQ+ rights are not optional. They are foundational to any candidate seeking Democratic support,” wrote Andrew Ashiofu, chair of Washington Stonewall Democrats, on Facebook earlier this month, prompting a lengthy response from Chaudhry. “If you are queer, and you are wondering if you and your rights are safe with me, I assure you from the bottom of my heart, you are, you have always been, and you always will be,” she wrote. Chaudhry also insisted that she supports her sister, who is “in a homosexual relationship, happily and committedly so,” and is friends with a “disabled lesbian woman, her partner, and their autistic son,” in her response. But her reply drew short shrift from Ashiofu. “I decided not to respond. She’s throwing blame on other people and saying she has LGBTQ+ friends. That’s the same thing as a racist saying, ‘I have black friends,” he told the Stranger."
Damn straight white Christian cis men!

Dan Burmawi on X - "The Western mind, after centuries of moving away from barbarity and cruelty, can no longer comprehend evil without attaching a tangible cause to it. When a mass shooter opens fire, the default assumption is that he must be mentally ill. When rebels take up arms, the explanation is that they must be oppressed. Violence is never seen as an end in itself, it is always framed as a reaction to something external, something rational, something the West can diagnose and fix. That is why Hamas and other terrorist organizations are so disorienting to the Western imagination. Their actions are too grotesque, too irrational, to fit neatly into Western categories of cause and effect. So Westerners scramble for explanations they can live with: “occupation,” “colonization,” “oppression.” They manufacture a tangible reason that makes sense to them, even if it has little to do with the truth. But if we look at history, cruelty has never required a tangible reason. Entire empires conquered, enslaved, and slaughtered not out of desperation or defense, but simply because they could. Vikings did not need oppression to justify raiding monasteries and enslaving villagers. Mongols did not need colonization to rationalize leveling entire cities and piling up skulls. The Aztecs did not need occupation to demand thousands of human sacrifices every year. The idea that cruelty must always have a logical, material cause is a uniquely modern, uniquely Western invention. Islamic terrorism does not operate by those rules. The engine behind jihad is not material grievance, it is spiritual ambition. The reason is not socioeconomic oppression, it is theological conviction. The suicide bomber is not trying to relieve poverty; he is trying to buy salvation. The jihadist who slits throats on video is not traumatized; he is reenacting Muhammad’s example, convinced that every drop of blood shed brings him closer to paradise. Jihad is not a cry for help. It is not the desperate rebellion of the oppressed. It is a religious performance, a soteriological act, a path to redemption."

Meme - Tradwife: "My father died in 9/11"
Hijab woman: "What does that have to do with me?"
Black woman: "My ancestors were slaves"
Tradwife: "What does that have to do with me?"

Gabbar on X - "Just found out that in 2021, the UN tried to declare food a human right, two countries voted against it. The United States and Israel."
Comment (elsewhere): "The hardest truth for anyone who thinks this supports their narrative.. The image implies that the UN was creating the idea that food is a human right in 2021 and that the U.S. and Israel simply opposed that concept. In reality, the right to food had already been recognized in international human rights documents decades earlier with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). The resolution bill that was labeled “The Right to Food” in 2021 didn’t try to make food a legal right, because it already was. It didn’t try to enforce free food for everyone. It just tried to expand upon the already existing law by adding in “food sovereignty” which would reduce availability of food to some regions that cannot effectively grow crops and livestock for themselves. Which would allow enemy nations to create artificial scarcity in nations they wanted to wipe out. So, yes. Everyone should have been against that."

Richard Hanania on X - "In 2023, my book The Origins of Woke argued that wokeness was largely a legal phenomenon. Get a Republican president in office who focuses on changing civil rights law, and things would turn around. Book reviews were very skeptical of this. People talked about woke as a religion. These were true believers who were going to do whatever it took to push DEI. Here we are two years later, and we got a president who followed my suggestions. What happened? A new paper from professors at Princeton and Columbia show that I was correct. Trump came into office, signed a few executive orders, and DEI commitments among corporations in securities disclosures filed with the SEC collapsed. Moreover, the fall was especially pronounced among federal contractors, who have most contact with the government and its rules. The affirmative action regime in contracting is something I discussed extensively in the book. You could've predicted this from The Origins of Woke. Read my new book for insight into what's coming next."
This assumes that just because corporations stop talking about it means they've stopped doing it, and that they won't start talking about it again once a left wing President comes into power

Leo Kearse - see me on tour! Links in bio on X - "It's very revealing that "freedom of expression" is now considered to be a "right-wing" position. By inference, the left stand for state censorship and intrusion."

Wilfred Reilly on X - "If I'm reading correctly between the lines here, Philly/PA just made it legal to give somebody with. Sleeping with a new lover while HIV-+ or full-blown, not telling them this, and passing on the disease are all now legal. Apex example of suicidal empathy here: AIDS carriers might feel BAD if they had to tell."
Кеннеди on X - "Really frustrating see the activists gays shift from "we're just like you!" to "not only are all the worst stereotypes about us true but we celebrate them and you're a bigoted if you don't like it!" Republican wine moms from the 90s were right about everything"
Mike'sIdLaidBear on X - "They mandate masks to walk on the beach but draw the line at wearing a condom before shooting a load of HIV in someone’s bloody hole."

Meme - Woman 1: "But Lisa, you know l am straight"
Woman 2: "So is spaghetti until it gets wet"
"Always loved this joke by lesbians. Negates consent and reduces women's sexuality to cooking metaphors and women themselves into objects. Well done feminists lol"
Weird. We're told sexuality is immutable

Meme - "r/libsofreddit
Apparently it's white supremacist to not want black babies aborted. Huh. Never knew that. Thanks angry twitter user.
Hasan Kwame Jeffries @ProfJeffries: The worst kind of white supremacist is the white supremacist who isn't even white. So, on behalf of Black mothers, Black sisters, Black fathers, and Black sisters everywhere: FUCK YOU! Lil bytch ass.
FactPost @factpostnews: "GOP Ohio Gov. nominee Vivek Ramaswamy claims "a Black baby is probably safer in the inner streets of Chicago than in the womb of his own Black mother""

Visegrád 24 on X - "Outrage in France after the LFI politician Yazid Arifi holds a speech in which he says it's time to:
- Realize the West is finished
- De-Westernize France
- Destroy Western strongholds from within
- Strengthen Islam in France
- Decolonize France's security forces"
Corey Walker 🇺🇸 on X - "The West is going to allow itself to be destroyed because it can't get over its own colonial guilt. People like this should be deported. No sane nation would allow the growth of a cancerous political faction in their own borders whose stated goal is the destruction of the state. Western openness is being taken advantage of by nefarious actors who seek the replacement of our political order with one of their own. Leftists who cheer this on believe our replacements atop the political order will be as kind and generous with us, and they are signaling that they will not."

Dr. Maalouf ‏ on X - "Nadia was kidnapped, raped and sold by ISIS. Her brothers were murdered for refusing to convert to Islam. Her mother was killed for being too old to be a sex slave. Her event to share her story was canceled in Canada because the local Muslim community deemed it “Islamophobic.”"

Links - 19th August 2026 (2 - Climate Change)

2026-08-19T17:59:00.000+08:00

Meme - Normal person: "It's cold today"
Soyjak: "Yeah that's just weather"
Normal person: "It's hot today"
Soyjak: "That's catastrophic anthropogenic climate change"

Andy Burnham faces Labour civil war as energy crisis looms - "On the same day that he celebrated winning the Makerfield by-election, the Conservatives snatched from the SNP the erstwhile Labour seat of Aberdeen South by making the by-election a referendum on the future of North Sea oil and gas. Labour came into power with a manifesto pledge not to “issue new licences to explore new fields” but Reform UK and the Conservatives argue it is idiotic to run down Scotland’s North Sea energy sector while importing energy from Norway. Mr Burnham has said he has “something of an open mind” on North Sea drilling but a change of policy would open up warfare within Labour. The recent King’s Speech recommitted the Government to not issuing new licences to explore new fields. A radical change of direction would delight trade unionists who want to preserve well-paid jobs in oil and gas and be welcomed by business leaders and lobby groups that argue Britain is missing out on tax revenues by leaving these energy sources untapped. But Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband – a leading contender to be Mr Burnham’s Chancellor – has made the push to clean energy a personal crusade. Labour still faces significant competition on the Left from the Greens, and Mr Burnham will not want to look weak on climate change. But he also knows that floating voters will not give Labour a second chance at the next election if energy costs climb yet higher and the country looks even more vulnerable to its foes. At the very least, there will be hopes he will wholeheartedly support gas extraction from the Jackdaw field, east of Aberdeen. Champions of extraction claim it could meet 6% of the country’s gas needs and warn of the risk of shortages in the winter. The industry also wants the windfall tax replaced with a new pricing mechanism. If he fails to deliver on this in the autumn Budget, then he can expect cross-party claims he is consigning Scotland’s economy to swift decline. He would love it if scientists and engineers unlock plentiful and affordable supplies of clean energy during his time in Number 10. But if he presides over successive winter heating crises, then his prospects for staying in post may melt away."

Sander Tordoir on X - "There are two narratives doing the rounds. “Germany deindustrialised itself by pursuing the stupid green transition. China’s distortions have little to do with it.” And in the next breath: “China’s export surge is simply because Germany needs lots of clean technology.” Aha."
berenklauw on X - "Yeah, this is actually accurate and what happened. If you look at China they never even entertained the idea that they could have a "transition" to green energy. Coal has always been their mainstay and they've been very open about that. Germany by contrast keeps shutting coal...."
This is like saying it's a contradiction to say that a drug addict chooses to buy drugs even if his dealer doesn't push the product and that the drug dealer gets rich off selling his product

Jake Boys | Facebook - "A group of climate activists from a collective called Scientist Rebellion walked into the Porsche pavilion at Autostadt, a car attraction in Wolfsburg, Germany. Dressed in white lab coats, they were there to protest carbon emissions and demand the country move faster on cutting transport pollution. To make their stand, they took out superglue and stuck their own hands firmly to the concrete floor. Several declared they would stay put, some on hunger strike, until their demands were met. The staff had a simpler plan. They agreed they had a right to protest and just left them to it. And that is when the protest started to unravel. Within just a few hours, the activists took to social media to complain. The glue was hurting their hands. They were cold. They were hungry. They needed the bathroom, and said staff had refused to bring them bowls to relieve themselves. In one especially memorable moment, some complained that they couldn't order their own food and had to eat what Volkswagen provided, an odd grievance from people who had announced they were on hunger strike. Then the workday ended. Rather than negotiate, the staff simply switched off the heating, turned off the lights, and went home, leaving the activists glued to the floor in the cold and dark. The group then complained about that too, about the darkness, and about security guards doing their rounds with "bright torches." The whole demonstration collapsed in under 48 hours. The leader was the first to leave, after his glued hand swelled up and doctors warned of possible blood clots."
From 2022

Veterans For The Conservative Party of Canada | Facebook - "To those fools who go on about how Carney is more "Conservative". Everything being pushed under his administration is to further his fanatical passion for "green". So let's waste a bunch of money studying something that anyone with a lick of common sense knows is impractical and costly! Zero emission light armoured vehicles???
From Blacklock's Reporter:
DND commissioned a $1.2 million study on the feasibility of zero emission light armoured vehicles. Managers said they remained committed to meeting climate targets despite research indicating green military technology is non-existent, too costly or impractical. “The current mandate from the Treasury Board in the Greening Government Strategy is for the department to reduce emissions from operations to net zero while continuing to provide Canada with effective operational capability,” management wrote in a notice to contractors. “To decarbonize operations, it is expected the national safety and security fleet departments will use more environmentally friendly technologies and low carbon fuels when available, affordable, compatible and operationally friendly.” “The scope of work for this contract is to employ industry experts to conduct a digital feasibility study for a solid state, hydrogen-powered light armoured vehicle with a maximum weight of 45,000 pounds,” said the notice Digital Feasibility Study. The department acknowledged there “are currently no zero emission platforms” in armoured vehicles, but that a report was due in 18 months. Results should be “generic enough to be shared with the public, Canada’s allies and partners,” said the notice. “This study is intended to be academic in nature.” The Army would never meet climate targets if it kept running on diesel and gasoline, said the notice. “Without the ability to operate and be sustained using alternate fuels, the Canadian Army has no pathway to procure and field zero emission platforms,” it said. The department under a 2018 Defence Energy And Environment Strategy proposed sweeping initiatives like installing wind farms on Army bases and encouraging staff to bicycle to work. “We have a responsibility to show leadership in environmental and energy sustainability as well as an obligation to manage assets efficiently on behalf of Canadians,” it wrote. “An effective and efficient approach to collective energy and environmental management is paramount.” Most targets lapsed without comment including a proposal to “use clean power at all bases” by 2025 and mandate a minimum 30 percent electric vehicle quota. “Defence continues to encourage carpooling, bike sharing, transit and multiple-use opportunities,” said the Strategy. Use of battery electric motors by the military was deemed costly and impractical in a 2019 report by a Crown agency, Defence Research and Development Canada. “The purchase of hybrid vehicles would be difficult to justify on cost alone,” said the report Feasibility Of Hybrid Diesel-Electric Powertrains For Light Tactical Vehicles: “It is not clear the fuel savings would compensate for the increased up-front costs over the lifespan of the vehicle.” Feasibility noted while the U.S. Army experimented with hybrid vehicles since 1998, “it is cost prohibitive” and impractical. “The issue of reduced battery capacity at low temperatures is well known,” wrote researchers. “To make this problem worse, unlike lead-acid, lithium-ion batteries have problems charging below zero degrees Celsius.”"

Alberta oil costs to rise to uncompetitive levels under MOU: report | National Post - "Conditions in the federal-Alberta memorandum of understanding to approve a new oil pipeline will raise costs on the province’s oil production that make it uncompetitive with other exporting jurisdictions, a new study by economist Jack Mintz finds. The higher industrial carbon tax requirement will also add $1 billion per year to the cost of producing electricity in Alberta by 2040... Mintz, the study’s author and an economist at the University of Calgary, said that the Trudeau Liberal government’s orthodoxy of taxing carbon had already hamstrung Alberta’s oil and gas industry without appreciably contributing to the global mitigation of climate change. “The Trudeau government was narrowly focused on calculating the impact of emissions in the country, and didn’t take into account the impact we could be having elsewhere in the world,” with exports displacing higher-carbon sources, said Mintz. Mintz said that things have improved under Prime Minister Mark Carney, but stressed that the numbers are still uncompetitive under Carney... The report says investors generally make decisions on expectations of tight margins, and without the policies, Alberta would be relatively competitive with U.S. producers, but the five-to-15 per cent increase in costs will make Alberta an uncompetitive high-cost jurisdiction. Mintz said that, left unchanged, the carbon tax will have the biggest impact on Alberta’s electric power industry, raising household electricity bills and slowing the development of AI data centres and other new industries. The study doesn’t directly calculate the impact of the $20-billion Pathways carbon capture project but Mintz says it will almost certainly weaken Alberta’s market position even further. “There’s no gain at all, from the producers’ point of view,” said Mintz. “Even if producers get (carbon capture) subsidies from the government and breaks on their carbon tax payments … there’ll still be a leftover cost,” said Mintz."
Left wingers are still apoplectic that Carney is not destroying the country as fast as Trudeau was

If Canada wants to be an energy superpower, we need to act like one | Financial Post - "The world is short on reliable energy and long on instability. Tankers edge through choke points like the Strait of Hormuz. Wars threaten pipelines and power grids. Markets flinch with every headline. As authoritarian regimes rattle sabres and weaponize supply chains, the global appetite for energy from stable, democratic, responsible producers has never been greater. Canada checks every box: vast reserves, rigorous environmental standards, rule of law and a commitment to Indigenous partnership. We should be leading the race, but instead we’ve effectively tied our own shoelaces together... we’re limiting where energy can leave the country. Bill C-48, the so-called tanker ban, prohibits tankers carrying over 12,500 tons of crude oil from stopping or unloading crude at ports or marine installations along B.C.’s northern coast. That includes Kitimat and Prince Rupert, two ports with strategic access to Indo-Pacific markets. Yes, we must do all we can to mitigate risks to Canada’s coastlines, but this should be balanced against a need to reduce our reliance on trade with the U.S. and increase our access to global markets. Add to that the Impact Assessment Act (IAA) which was designed in part to shorten approval times and add certainty about how long the process would take. It has not had that effect and it’s scaring off investment. Business confidence in Canada has dropped to pandemic-era lows, due in part to unpredictable rules. At a time when Canada is facing a modest recession and needs to attract private capital, we’ve made building trade infrastructure feel like trying to drive a snowplow through molasses... Canada is the most stable of the world’s top oil producers, but we are a puzzle to the rest of the world, which doesn’t understand why we can’t get more of our oil and natural gas to market. In recent years, Norway and the U.S. have increased crude oil production. Notably, the U.S. also increased its natural gas exports through the construction of new LNG export terminals, which have helped supply European allies seeking to reduce their reliance on Russian natural gas."

Climate change becoming a major driver of child marriage across Asia and the Pacific
All the world's ills are due to climate change, and if you disagree, you're a climate change denier!
I wonder what else relevant about Bangladesh would be causing child marriage...

Chris Martz on X - "The New York Times reports that east coast beaches could disappear within 25 years. Oh wait, never mind, this was written 30 years ago. 🔗"
If you don't Trust the Experts, you're a Denier

Andy Mck on X - "China is installing much more renewable capacity than coal vs the past and they will de carbonise faster than us."
Andrew Neil on X - "This is typical of how Western Greens depict such a rosy picture of China’s energy policy. You wonder if Beijing bots are at work. Here’s a corrective: China is producing a massive oversupply of solar panels. Hence the dumping on every major market. Let’s not forget that very Chinese silicon smelter (silicon a key component of panels) has its own coal-fired power station. Chinese oversupply of EVs is gargantuan even though China buys more EVs than any where else and is dumping the rest abroad. EV battery packs are made using coal-generated electricity and charged on a coal-dominated grid. Yes China has added unprecedented solar and wind capacity last year. But its strategy is abundant energy of all types — which is why it also hit a 10-year high of new coal plant construction and remains the world’s top coal consumer, with fossil fuels supplying over 87% of its primary energy. End of"

John Lee Pettimore on X - "Contrary to common impressions, there has been no absolute worldwide decarbonization. In fact, the opposite is true. Absolute cuts in carbon emissions in large economies such as the EU (-23%) and the US (-9%) were far outweighed by massive increases in the world’s two largest industrializing nations: China (emissions rose 3.3 times) and India (threefold). Emissions also rose sharply for Middle Eastern hydrocarbon producers (Saudi Arabia’s about 2.3 times) and other smaller emitters. Between 1997 and 2022, annual CO₂ emissions from fossil fuel combustion, processing, extraction, flaring, and pipeline leakage rose from about 25.5 billion tons to about 39.3 billion tons (a 54% increase). So, contrary to what many would like to believe, we are not making progress. Yet trillions have been spent—trillions of taxpayers’ money. For what? Food for thought on a snowy winters day."
Clearly, the West needs to slash emissions even more to compensate

Hospitals in England declare critical incidents as machines and IT fail in heat - "Doctors have set out the disastrous impact extreme heat is having on the NHS in England, with radiotherapy machines and MRI scanners failing, critical IT systems stalling and cooling units that serve entire hospitals breaking down. The hot weather has also prompted a surge in admissions and people arriving at A&E, causing severe overcrowding in some places and exacerbating heat-related pressures on infrastructure. “Lots of people, especially older patients, are turning up having collapsed or with dehydration,” one physician said. “In terms of inpatients, the conditions are awful due to overcrowding. Very few places have air conditioning and staff are really struggling.” Older patients in one geriatric ward had been forced to endure temperatures as high as 35C, a second doctor said. Even wards with built-in air conditioning were affected, as some units were shut down to prevent them from being damaged by the extreme heat. Another doctor said their workplace was “unfit to cope”, with patients and staff experiencing “awful conditions” in sweltering wards, clinics and corridors. NHS staff were also navigating the challenge of providing care while sleep-deprived. Like much of the UK population, many have struggled to sleep this week. Some medics were unable to work because their children’s schools had closed. Several NHS trusts in England have declared critical incidents as a direct result of the extreme heat. One hospital had done so after its machines failed in multiple areas, a doctor said. Labs used for testing were affected and two linear accelerator machines, used to treat cancer patients, had stopped working amid the high temperatures... The doctor also said their NHS trust had faced “major issues” with IT servers overheating on Wednesday. “We thought we were going to lose everything, so we were all asked to turn off non-essential computers and electrical equipment, including lights.” In Portsmouth, the Queen Alexandra hospital declared a critical incident after extreme heat caused cooling units to fail, leading to “elevated temperatures” across the hospital. The failure of the cooling units affected the hospital’s digital systems and critical clinical services, including operating theatres, cardiac catheter laboratories and diagnostic scanning facilities, Portsmouth hospitals university NHS trust said... The London ambulance service said it had recorded the highest number of life-threatening emergencies in a single day in its history, driven by the extreme heat."
Clearly, installing air conditioning will make the problem worse. In fact, they need to ban air conditioning to solve the problem

GOLDSTEIN: Do the math, Liberals — we need fossil fuels | Toronto Sun - "Article content Computer science and artificial intelligence pioneer John McCarthy famously said that, “he who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.” He meant that when dealing with complex systems, decisions must be based on hard numbers and data, as opposed to ideology and emotion. That explains how Canadian energy policy became a train wreck under the Justin Trudeau Liberals, starting in 2015 when they took power. They subjected Canadians to a decade of propaganda about how the age of fossil fuels was ending, supported by government-subsidized environmental lobbyists, while a succession of Liberal environment ministers spouted absolute nonsense about how Canada was coming ever closer to achieving its farcical greenhouse gas emission reduction targets. They refused to do arithmetic, were doomed to talk nonsense, and subjected Canadian taxpayers to the consequences. A report by the Fraser Institute released this week based on the latest government data demonstrates just how much nonsense there was. It notes that between 1995 and 2024, despite earmarking more than $200-billion of federal taxpayers’ dollars to reduce Canada’s use of fossil fuels, they accounted for 76.3% of Canada’s domestic energy consumption in 2024, essentially the same as the 76.8% recorded almost three decades ago, in 1995. In terms of Canadian energy production, fossil fuels accounted for 88% of the total in 2024, up from 83.3% almost a quarter century ago in 2000. As for the endless Liberal hype about how wind and solar power are growing by leaps and bounds when it comes to energy production, in 2024 they accounted for 0.8% of total energy production compared to 88% for fossil fuels, 5.1% for hydro, 3.9% for nuclear and 2.2% for biofuels. In Canada’s three largest energy-consuming sectors of the economy — transportation, industry and residential construction — fossil fuels in 2024 supplied 98.7% of the energy consumed by the transportation sector, 74% by the industrial sector and 50.6% by the residential sector. Article content Every Canadian province relies on fossil fuels for most of its energy needs — 89.7% in Alberta; 84.1% in Saskatchewan; 78.7% in Ontario; 76.2% in B.C.; 73.7% in Nova Scotia; 72.6% in Manitoba; 69.6% in P.E.I.; 66.4% in Newfoundland and Labrador; 61.1% in New Brunswick and 54.6% in Quebec. It’s also vital to the rest of Canada that Alberta remains a part of Confederation, since it contributes 70.2% of Canada’s total energy production, according to the Fraser Institute study. Just three provinces, Alberta (70.2%), British Columbia (15.8%) and Saskatchewan (5.1%) produce 91.1% of Canada’s energy. No other provinces comes anywhere close to those numbers... Article content It’s significant that at long last Trudeau’s successor, Mark Carney, has dismantled some, but not all, of Trudeau’s economy-killing restrictions on energy production in Canada after a decade of utter stupidity in policy making. That’s assuming he actually believes in building new pipelines and fast-tracking new energy infrastructure “at speeds not seen in generations,” despite his pre-political life as the world’s leading corporate spokesman for higher carbon taxes. Had Canada had a wiser government over the past decade, as opposed to one that refused to do arithmetic and was thus doomed to talk nonsense, things could have been different today. We could, for example, be exporting our vast natural gas resources to global markets today beyond the current trickle, enabling other countries to replace their coal-fired electricity with cleaner burning natural gas — the single most effective thing we could be doing to help lower global greenhouse gas emissions, while simultaneously boosting our economy."

Australia’s ‘sun tax’ warning for Britain’s solar panel owners - "For years, solar panel owners in countries across the world received generous payments for exporting electricity they did not use back to the grid. The reasoning was simple. If governments wanted to meet their net zero targets, incentives were required to encourage homeowners to make a significant upfront investment in green technology. But as solar panels became more widespread, countries with the sunniest climates started to notice a problem. When solar power generation peaked in the middle of the day, demand for electricity was at its lowest. This placed the energy grid under significant strain as excess power pushed up voltages to levels that threatened network blackouts. In Australia, a crude solution was devised by the national energy market body. At certain times of the day, rather than paying solar panel owners for their excess power, they would be charged instead. Called the “sun tax”, it was hoped that the intervention would encourage solar panel owners to shift their demand to off-peak times to dodge the fees, alleviating pressure on the network. While Britain might have worse weather and fewer rooftop solar installations than Australia, there is growing concern that our energy network might soon suffer from the same frailties. In April, Britain’s National Energy System Operator (Neso) warned that it would be forced to use “more tools, more often” to keep power networks stable when sunny weather caused surges in energy generation... Australia leads the world in rooftop solar due to the rapid pace of solar installations across the country since the early 2010s, which were initially encouraged by generous government subsidies. Today, more than four million homes – roughly four in 10 – have solar panels. As early as 2017, the national body responsible for setting rules in the national electricity market, the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC), expressed concerns about the impact of surging solar power on the grid. Gabrielle Kuiper, an energy expert, said: “Around 10 years ago, people were really worried. They talked about reverse flows through substations or the potential for the grid to fall over.” In 2021, the AEMC decided to act, proposing new powers for network providers to introduce what it called “two-way pricing”. This would better reward solar panel owners who released energy to the grid at peak time but would also penalise those who did so at times when more electricity was not needed. As well as shifting consumer behaviour, the charges were intended to provide money for grid upgrades so that the network could handle more solar power in the future. Heidi Douglas, of consumer group Solar Citizens, said: “The only thing you could do to avoid the charge was to shift your demand – put your washing machine on or cook a roast dinner in the middle of the day. But that obviously was not convenient for the majority of people.”... Last year, the number of solar panels installed fell to its lowest level since 2018, according to Australia’s Clean Energy Regulator... The Government says that it has no plans to introduce a “sun tax” in Britain. But former energy secretary Ed Miliband has openly praised Antipodean energy policies in the past and he describes Chris Bowen, the Australian climate minister, as a “friend”. While the sun tax in Australia was proposed by the independent AEMC and not the national government, solar export payments in Britain are assured by the “smart export guarantee”, a government-backed scheme. Currently, suppliers must always pay solar panel owners for excess energy they release back to the grid. But Labour has looked to Australia for inspiration in a number of policy areas in the past two years, most recently announcing it would introduce a ban on social media for children aged under 16... Britain’s shift to solar comes at the same time as Neso’s warning that gluts of solar power and “low demand” periods were making the grid more difficult to manage. There are also signs that Britain is already moving in the direction of a “sun tax” to manage periods of excess solar energy, according to Jason Howlett, of trade body Energy Storage Association... Despite strongly pushing solar power, the Government has been less ambitious about rolling out batteries to store surplus supply. Under updated housing rules, developers building new homes will almost always have to install solar panels but batteries have not been mandated in the same way. The warning signs are clear and a lack of battery storage combined with surging solar exports to the grid could at some point force the Government to reconsider its commitment not to introduce a sun tax."
Climate change hystericists still claim that solar energy is "free" - because they ignore system costs (not to mention capital costs). And of course they are ignorant or lying about Australia's tax for overloading the grid

Professor’s Death Leaves Behind Hard Questions for Cambridge on Race and Hiring

2026-08-19T13:47:00.000+08:00

Professor’s Death Leaves Behind Hard Questions for Cambridge on Race and Hiring - The New York Times

"When Cambridge University interviewed Jason Arday for one of the most prestigious sociology positions in the world, he was an early career scholar and underqualified, by the school’s own standards.

Cambridge’s requirements, reviewed by The New York Times, called for “an outstanding research record of international stature” and a “proven successful track record” supervising Ph.D. students. Dr. Arday had a modest publication record and had bounced from one university to the next — not staying long enough to oversee a full three-year-or-more doctorate.

Cambridge hired him anyway in 2023, making him, at 37, the university’s youngest Black professor at a time when the school was under pressure to diversify. In doing so, Cambridge thrust him into the international limelight, giving him a platform at one of the world’s elite universities to champion academic diversity and making him a target for critics...

Questions about Dr. Arday’s career are unlikely to end with his death, however, because they were as much about Cambridge as they were as about him. The centuries-old alma mater of Isaac Newton, William Wordsworth and kings and queens, Cambridge now faces deep scrutiny about its decision-making, even from its own faculty.

While Dr. Arday was underqualified for his job, he had a remarkable story...

If, in hindsight, elements of Dr. Arday’s story seemed too good to be true, Cambridge ignored repeated warning signs. A review of internal Cambridge documents and interviews with former colleagues and associates shows that, in addition to passing over more experienced candidates for the job, administrators gushed publicly about Dr. Arday’s scholarship and privately disregarded complaints about his work. They declined to investigate plagiarism concerns and accused his critics of a “vile campaign” to discredit him.

Dr. Arday’s claims about not speaking were false, a former classmate and a speech professional who worked with him told The New York Times. His supposedly remarkable trajectory from nonverbal preteen to Ph.D. had no precedent in medical literature, experts in developmental and speech delays say. That should have set off alarm bells for the Cambridge hiring committee, which included a child psychiatrist who had done research on autism, experts said...

Dr. Arday, for his part, had worked hard to silence any questioning of his credentials. When a journalist for Times Higher Education, a respected academic industry publication, asked about plagiarism last year, a prominent British defamation law firm helped kill the article, the journalist said. Dr. Arday later reported the journalist to the police.

When a scholar from another university questioned his work, Dr. Arday turned the tables and filed a racism complaint with the other school, according to someone with direct knowledge of the complaint...
Dr. Arday never squarely addressed the questions of plagiarism and fabrication.

But what is clear from interviews and public records is that elements of the story would have been easy for Cambridge to check...

Dr. Arday has claimed that before age 11, he could understand language but not speak. In 2022, before interviewing with Cambridge, he said that he had been educated exclusively in a special-needs school “with other pupils that had very severe learning difficulties and physical disabilities.”

In his memoir, published on Tuesday, he gave a different account, saying he attended a mainstream school but spent time sequestered alone in a classroom, again without speaking.

Both tales are false, according to people who knew Dr. Arday as a child and spoke with The Times before his death.

A speech professional who worked closely with the young Dr. Arday recalled him having a language delay but speaking with both children and adults.

One former schoolmate, Jonathan Stewart, recalled Dr. Arday cracking jokes and putting on playful accents in a minivan on the way to church activities as children.

While nonverbal children can certainly learn to speak, even at a late age, the rapid development described by Dr. Arday has no precedent in clinical literature, three experts on autism and speech said.

“In over 40 years of practice and being very acquainted with literature, I’ve never heard of that happening,” said Stephen Camarata, a speech science expert with Vanderbilt Health’s Developmental Disabilities Lab. “It just stretches credulity.”

An established chair at Cambridge, a permanently funded position that comes with prestige and research support, is among the academic world’s most sought-after jobs.

Dr. Arday applied for an established chair of education at Jesus College, one of Cambridge’s oldest institutions, dating to the 15th century. The university advertised internationally for the job and convened a panel of nine experts to review the candidates.

The panel selected four finalists, inviting them to Cambridge for two days of interviews. Dr. Arday was up against three more senior scholars, including two women of color, according to a person familiar with the hiring process.

Dr. Arday’s published papers and his thesis had dozens of grammatical errors, along with identical quotes attributed to different people.

At Cambridge, the finalists were asked to submit just one piece of research, according to the person familiar with the process.

It is not clear which piece he submitted, or whether members of the hiring panel reviewed Dr. Arday’s speeches and interviews. If they had, they would have found elements of his story that stretched belief, like the marathon claim, or were demonstrably false, like his public assertion that he had been on the British television series “Seven Up.” (Dr. Arday’s spokesman recently said that the assertion should not have been taken literally.)

Experts said that Cambridge’s hiring panel was well equipped to question Dr. Arday’s very public claims about his childhood. Some committee members had published papers about teaching students with learning disabilities and about inclusion in education.

One influential member of the hiring panel, the child psychiatrist Paul Ramchandani, had published a paper on music therapy for children with autism. Given his expertise, he would have been in position to question Dr. Arday’s assertion that he learned to speak at 11 and read at 18, said Howard Shane, the director emeritus of the Center for Communication Enhancement at Boston Children’s Hospital.

“That should raise a red flag,” he said in an interview early this week. “There’s no question about that.”...

The committee hired Dr. Arday, in a decision that the education department chair described at the time as unanimous. Cambridge’s lengthy hiring announcement highlighted his remarkable personal story, which garnered media coverage on both sides of the Atlantic.

Cambridge had so few Black professors that it was under pressure from faculty and students to diversify. It had set modest targets for increasing applications from people of color for academic posts.

On the BBC, the education department chair, Hilary Cremin, told Dr. Arday that he was “the best in the world in terms of the research you do.”...

Three months after Dr. Arday’s hiring, two British scholars, Martyn Hammersley and David Harris, privately wrote to Cambridge, alerting administrators to potential plagiarism in one of Dr. Arday’s papers.

Dr. Cremin, the department chair, replied that she had met with Dr. Arday, and that he had agreed to address concerns in the paper. She also mentioned his “ongoing experiences of direct and indirect racism,” along with “significant health issues” that had affected his work on the paper in question, according to an email, which was first reported on a former professor’s newsletter and the academic integrity website Retraction Watch.

Dr. Harris, whose work has challenged whether racism is ingrained in society, responded by suggesting that Cambridge also review Dr. Arday’s other papers and his thesis. “Prof Arday badly needs critical friends, in my view, not sycophants,” he wrote.

He never got a reply, he said.

Nor did Cambridge act months later after journals appended corrections on two of Dr. Arday’s papers. Then, in September 2025, Times Higher Education sent Cambridge a dossier of more than 60 pages that detailed apparent plagiarism in Dr. Arday’s work.

A reporter and editor at the publication, Jack Grove, had enlisted experts to review Dr. Arday’s thesis.
One of them, David Sanders of Purdue University, told The Times that, going into the review, he knew nothing about Jason Arday. But when Dr. Sanders sat down to analyze the thesis, he concluded it was “extensively plagiarized.”

Cambridge continued to back its star professor, telling Mr. Grove that questions about Dr. Arday’s thesis would have to be addressed by the school that had awarded his doctorate, Liverpool John Moores University. Concerns about his research, Cambridge said, would similarly have to be handled by others. Liverpool John Moores stood by his doctorate.

At Cambridge, faculty members and allies hurriedly drafted a letter in anticipation of Mr. Grove’s article. “The integrity of higher education is at risk if we do not take a stand and speak out against the systematic attempts to erase Black scholarship,” they wrote in the letter, a copy of which was seen by The Times.

But Mr. Grove’s article never ran. Dr. Arday’s lawyers threatened legal action, and Times Higher Education spiked it. Dr. Arday also filed a police complaint against Mr. Grove, which led to a harassment investigation that was later dropped.

The plagiarism charges burst into public view last month when a former Cambridge scholar, Nathan Cofnas, wrote about them in his newsletter...

Retraction Watch quickly expanded on Dr. Cofnas’s reporting. But once again, Cambridge defended Dr. Arday, saying he was “the victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility, which must stop”...

After new questions surfaced, casting doubt on Dr. Arday’s story, he resigned. Cambridge’s tone shifted.
But the fallout from Cambridge’s enthusiastic promotion of Dr. Arday’s story could last for years. “This has really done some harm,” Dr. Camarata, the speech specialist, said before Dr. Arday’s death.

He said that over the years, he heard from families of children with severe autism hoping for a miracle. “I never want to take away anybody’s hope,” he said, “but this story really has created some unreasonable expectations and false hopes, and I hate that.”

Heidi Mirza, an emeritus professor of education at University College London who once mentored Dr. Arday, said in an interview this past week that he had been ill-served by university administrators’ carelessness in their efforts to demonstrate their commitment to diversity.

“He’s a pawn,” she said, “whose ambition made him vulnerable.”"

Presumably left wingers are going to call the New York Times racist for calling Arday underqualified, since the fact that he had a PhD, was hired for "one of the most prestigious sociology positions in the world" and published a few things is proof that he was very qualified. Luckily almost everyone they interviewed was anonymous, or they would be slimed as racists too. After all, they've already turned on the Guardian when even it had to acknowledge reality.

Left wingers are accusing Cambridge of throwing him under the bus when they decided not to drag their reputation through the mud any more after covering for him for so long.

Links - 19th August 2026 (1 - Brexit)

2026-08-19T09:23:00.000+08:00

The Don’t-Talk-About-Brexit Election - The Atlantic - "the B-word has barely featured in the campaign to choose the next Westminster government on July 4—not in the debates between party leaders, nor in the policy measures briefed to friendly newspapers, nor in the leaflets sent out by individual candidates. The Conservative Party manifesto is a whopping 80 pages long, but uses the word Brexit only 12 times. The word does not even appear as a stand-alone section of the Labour platform, instead falling under the wider heading of “Britain reconnected.” Champions and opponents of Brexit alike have decided that now isn’t the time to talk about this enormous change to Britain’s place in the world. Nigel Farage, the man who led the populist campaign to leave the European Union, rebranded his UK Independence Party as the Brexit Party for the 2019 election. Now, however, his political vehicle is called simply Reform, and he would rather talk about small boats crossing the Channel or the perils of a cashless society. Even the Liberal Democrats, a pro-European party that campaigned the last time around on a pledge to rejoin the EU (and went from 12 to 11 seats as a result), now claim that this is only a “longer-term objective.” As someone who has worked in journalism in Britain for nearly two decades, I can tell you: This is an extraordinary turnaround... Anyone who voted for Brexit to reduce immigration will have been severely disappointed: Net migration was 335,000 in 2016, but rose to 685,000 last year, down from a record high of 784,000 in 2022. And although the economic effects of leaving the European single market were blurred by the pandemic and the energy shock that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one can safely say that Britons do not feel richer than they did four years ago. Above all, voters are bored with Brexit. In April 2019, according to the pollster Ipsos, 72 percent of Britons rated Brexit as one of the most important issues facing the country. Today that figure is 3 percent. “The one thing we found in focus groups that unites Leave and Remain voters is that they don’t want to talk about it,” Anand Menon, the director of the independent think tank UK in a Changing Europe, told me... the Labour manifesto promises to “make Brexit work” with no return to the single market, customs union, or freedom of movement. The B-word has featured more heavily in debates in Scotland, where the majority of voters backed Remain and the governing Scottish National Party is keen to outflank Labour. It is also an election issue in Northern Ireland, where the status of the border with the Republic of Ireland is still fraught. But with both major parties in England extremely reluctant to mention Brexit, the media here have largely followed suit.

Ireland's blind hatred of Brexit has destroyed its borders. Starmer may do the same to ours - "In 2017, when Britain began its disengagement talks with the EU, Ireland laid down two inviolable principles. First, no border: not so much as a matchstick to mark where the EU’s customs territory began. Second, no direct talks between the London and Dublin. If the Brits had anything to say, they should talk to Michel Barnier. Funny how things work out. Over the past week, as asylum claims have surged, Irish politicians have begun to clamour for a bilateral returns arrangement with Britain. They say that 80 per cent of claimants are crossing from Northern Ireland to escape the threat of deportation to Rwanda. And they want those migrants turned back at the… well, the border... Until practically last week, Martin, along with other TDs, was insisting that the border be invisible. Even a traffic camera, of the kind found on every major road in Britain and Ireland, would supposedly risk a return to violence. Yet in reality, there was never the slightest prospect of Britain raising border infrastructure. It was the EU that claimed checks were needed to preserve its single market. But, for whatever reason, the rest of the world, along with a chunk of Remainer opinion here, stubbornly refused to grasp this point, and it somehow became Britain’s responsibility to prevent the EU from raising customs posts. We bent over backwards to do it, accepting what amounted to an internal border on our own territory in order to accommodate a neighbouring country (and getting no thanks for it). Yet, after all that effort, all the hassle of red lanes and the “not for sale in the EU” stickers, Ireland suggested that it was planning to deploy a hundred police officers at the border, before apparently backing down. Ulster Unionists point out wryly that those officers were needed half a century ago. A hundred peelers along the border would have been useful when IRA units were in the habit of withdrawing into the Republic to regroup. But, as Unionists learned long ago, international pressure is never applied to Dublin. Ireland’s own politicians are aware of the irony. “This is the challenge, that we have advocated for an open border on this island,” says Helen McEntee, the justice minister. Still, we may be sure that Joe Biden won’t breathe a word of criticism. These border rows only ever work one way around. Britain is always in the wrong. Funnily enough, the UK never wanted border checks in the first place. When Irish self-government was being negotiated in 1920, David Lloyd George held out until the last minute for a common customs territory, arguing as a “Gladstonian Home Ruler” that it was impractical to have tariffs within the British Isles. But Ireland’s Provisional Government insisted on installing customs posts. Since the Belfast Agreement was negotiated in 1998, there have been two attempts to impose a hard border. Neither came from UK. The first was during the foot-and-mouth epidemic in 2001 when Ireland (not unreasonably, given the importance of its beef industry) sent hundreds of security officers to the border. The other was in 2021 when the EU, piqued because Britain’s vaccine rollout was faster than its own, ordered the border to be shut – a decision it had to reverse hours later. Even bigger than the volte-face over the border is Ireland’s abandonment of the idea that policies within EU competence must not be discussed bilaterally. Again, this principle was laid down very clearly during the Brexit talks... Varadkar was not interested in pragmatic solutions. He seemingly wanted Brexit to be reversed or, if that proved impossible, at least punished. He aimed to do so by flipping what he saw as the historical imbalance in power. Instead of being the stronger party in talks with Ireland, Britain would be the weaker party in talks with the EU. Yet Ireland is now demanding an intergovernmental deal with the UK on the return of immigrants. In other words, Britain would be obliged to take illegals back from Ireland, but unable to return them to France... Meanwhile, other European countries are moving towards their own versions of Rwanda-style scheme, considering third-country destinations for deportations, and the federalist European People’s Party has endorsed the idea. How bizarre it would be if, just as the rest of Europe is coming around to Britain’s way of thinking, Starmer were to follow through on his commitment and scrap the scheme. Where do you suppose that would incentivise illegal immigrants in Europe to move? No wonder Brussels wants a Labour victory."

Poland's prime minister got one thing wrong about Britain - "although Poland’s success plainly has much to do with membership of the EU, Tusk’s second point – that Britain’s economic torpor is explained by its decision to quit the EU – isn’t so easily argued. It may be true, though it is impossible to prove, that the UK economy would have performed more strongly had it stayed in the EU. Personally, I believe it would have done. But if we look at the EU’s three biggest remaining economies – Germany, France and Italy – they have all performed equally badly if not worse than the UK since the vote for Brexit. IMF forecasts, moreover, suggest that Britain will continue to outperform from next year onwards to the turn of the decade, though the differences are admittedly marginal. In other words, if Poland is poised to overtake the UK in income per head, it will also be overtaking France, Germany and Italy. This would strongly suggest that whatever future economic success Poland enjoys, the EU will no longer be the primary explanation. After more than three decades of growing fat on the pig’s belly, Poland’s years of easy growth may be drawing to a close. Meanwhile, the UK has overtaken China to become the world’s number-two destination by value after the US for greenfield foreign direct investment, and its service industries’ exports are booming as never before. These realities do not chime with the idea of a country in terminal decline."

That creaking sound? It’s the United Kingdom starting to break apart - "The slow collapse of the United Kingdom creates an opportunity in all three nations to do things differently. An independent Scotland and Wales could cast aside the culture of corruption enabled – perhaps necessitated – by the UK’s outrageous campaign finance rules. They could reclaim their politics from Westminster’s gross subversions of democracy, its royal powers and the pompous rituals designed both to glorify and to conceal them. They could – and there are plenty of people in both nations with this ambition – create 21st-century governments built on proportional general elections, participatory democracy and continuous policy adjustment, distributive economies and an ethos of public service."
From 2021. When you hate England so much you want your country to break up
Ironically, Scotland had super high profile corruption cases after this
Sargon of Akkad: "The left is pushing the breakup of the UK very hard at the moment. Which is odd, because that is going to clear the field for English nationalism, which will be decidedly anti-woke."

Melissa Chen on X - "The fateful decision by the UK to turn towards Europe via the ECC - the precursor to the EU - and AWAY from the Commonwealth precipitated the loss of confidence in British values, and the decline of Britain 🇬🇧 itself. Roughly 2.5 billion people - out of a global population of eight billion - live in the 56 Commonwealth countries. Four of which, amusingly, were never colonized by the British but elected to join anyway (explain THAT, Frantz Fanon). >60% of the Commonwealth's population is aged 29 or under. Globally, a third of all young people aged live in Commonwealth countries. The biggest country by population is India, which accounts for about half of the total. Also, America should get over the Boston tea party and subsequent 1776 thing, and just JOIN THE COMMONWEALTH. India made an exception (because it didn't want to recognize the monarch as a head of state and joined as a Republic), so the USA can too. We share a common language and cultural, intellectual and political traditions. Together with America, the GDP per capita of the Commonwealth would be untouchable, and it would facilitate the kind of globalization that is in the American AND British national interest, and it would serve as a hedge against the emergence of a less benign international order based on civilizational power politics. With the USA (as a net energy producer) and Canada involved, the Commonwealth will also be energy secure against a feckless German-led Europe and its self-sabotaging climate policies that only serves Putin's (and the New Axis's) interests. This version of globalization - anglocization - will not only serve Britain better than the Euro nonsense, and build upon the legacies of the British empire - English Common Law systems, etc. - but also, the world. The only real draw back is that the Americans will clean up in the Commonwealth Games medal count but no one watches that anyway so who cares. What we need more than ever is an affirmation of the values and culture that unite the anglo countries - and yes that already includes the Five Eyes nations - and a model of trans-civilizational co-operation and knowledge sharing, which will do more to spur economic development for countries lagging behind, rather than cavorting with already rich but useless European countries in exchange for sovereignty. Europe is done. Lean in and double down on the Commonwealth. America, get over yourself and JOIN! Happy Commonwealth Day!"

The authoritarian legacy of the Remain campaign - "One of the most repeated truisms of today is that much of the youth have given up on democracy... This trend is usually attributed not only to political immaturity, myopia and ignorance, but also to genuine disillusionment with our ‘dishonest’ politics. Or it’s blamed on a broken economic system that has left so many young people without long-term employment and without the prospect of ever being able to afford a house. It is perhaps no surprise that in these precarious, insecure times the young would exchange freedom for safety – which is the eternal promise of the dictator. Not everyone agreed with the conclusion that this is specifically a youthful problem... Such anti-democratic sentiments have been made patently clear ever since 2016. We have been constantly scolded by a certain section of the population that 52 per cent of the UK voted the ‘wrong’ way in the Brexit referendum – supposedly out of sheer ignorance. The masses had apparently been duped by the media or by a number on the side of a bus. There shouldn’t have been a referendum in the first place, snobbish Remainers continue to crow, as important matters shouldn’t be left to the ‘low-information’ masses. We must hold another referendum, they say, but this time the great unwashed need re-education in order to vote the ‘right’ way. And vote for what? To re-enter an organisation that is itself anti-democratic. The European Union has repeatedly ignored national referendum results on treaty ratifications over the years. If anything epitomises the technocratic, anti-democratic essence of our times it is the EU. You can’t even vote out its unelected rulers."

Guy Verhofstadt on X - "#Brexit is a failure of the Union. There is a lesson to learn from it: to deeply reform the Union. To make it into a real Union, a Union without opt-in, without opt-outs, without rebates, without exceptions. Only then we can defend our interests and defend our values."
Clearly doubling down on an unpopular agenda is the answer

Four years after Brexit: Where does the UK stand after leaving the EU? - "ONS data from September 2023 also reveals that economic activity was 1.5% higher than before the pandemic, roughly comparable to France and higher than Germany (0%), but lower than Japan (3.5%) and the US (6.1%)... 'Take back control' was the slogan of Brexit campaigners in regard to migration policy, which they considered too relaxed due to European policymakers. Nonetheless, according to French newspaper Le Monde, immigration has never been so high to Great Britain: 682,000 moved to the UK between June 2022 and June 2023, twice than before Brexit... Le Monde remarks the “real dynamism in aid to Ukraine” coming from London, but criticized that Brexit has “above all resulted in a reinforced alignment with the United States”."
This misunderstands what "take back control" means and proves the point that Brexit wasn't about xenophobia, since the UK actually has more migration now

The Great Realignment is only just getting started - "“I thought the British accepted election results”. This comment, made to me last year, unprompted, by a Lebanese friend (Hi, Aamir!) I hadn’t seen for 20 years did two things. First, it focused my mind even more intently — if that were possible — on the job of covering Brexit for various outlets. Secondly, it alarmed me. “In my part of the world,” he continued, “when people don’t accept election results, well, then there is war”. “This is Britain,” I said limply. “We don’t do that anymore”. Meanwhile, 400,000 marched through the streets because they wanted to reverse the 2016 EU Referendum. “That,” he said — pointing out the window at a throng of people with loudhailers, face paint, EU flags, and a spirit of general bonhomie — “does not look like acceptance. And it does not look British”. My father made a related observation while watching footage of Lady Diana’s funeral: “Those people do not look British. What happened to the British?” Before you leap to conclusions, miss, and break your neck, this was not a comment on immigration or diversity in either case. Both Lady Di’s funeral and the big People’s Vote marches were, like Extinction Rebellion protests, whiter than my Dad’s native Aberdeenshire. It was a reflection on national character, which appeared to be retreating from the emotional restraint that Britons developed in response to the religious “enthusiasm” of the Civil War... Long before the likes of Rob Ford, Eric Kaufmann, or Matthew Goodwin appeared, Davies was warning that technocratic, expert governance was “politically exhausted” and what gets called “the global rules-based order” is about to pass its use-by date, let alone its sell-by date. Brexit, Davies argues, was a catalyst for the realignment now nearly complete. As in chemistry, it speeded up the reaction without itself being consumed by it. “The question is not so much that of social conservatism versus social liberalism,” he says. “Instead the key issue is that of identity, and in particular the tension between globalism and cosmopolitanism on one hand and nationalism and ethnic or cultural particularism on the other”. In parallel, economics has become a second-order concern... Anyone with eyes can see the extremity with which Wokies persecute liberal leftists and centrists, sometimes accompanied by even grimmer nastiness than is directed at Tories. Given the form cultural traditionalism takes in the UK — it doesn’t revolve around issues like abortion, gun laws, or same-sex marriage, for example — it’s also harder to accuse Nationalists here of bigotry or racism and make the claim stick. They want immigration controlled at the national level. Very few of them want it stopped altogether. They’re cool with gay marriage. They just don’t want trans women playing women’s rugby. Like my friend Aamir, Davies is critical of the behaviour from Remain “elites”, particularly their willingness to entertain conspiracy theories, turn Parliament into a global laughing stock, and reject election results."

Andrew Sullivan: NY Times Abandons Liberalism for Activism - "One of the frustrating aspects of reading the U.S. media’s coverage of Brexit is that you’d never get any idea why it happened in the first place. Brexit is treated, automatically, as some kind of pathology, a populist act of wanton self-harm, an absurd idea, etc etc. And from the perspective of an upstanding member of the left-liberal media establishment, that’s all true. If your idea of Britain is formed by jetting in and out of London, a multicultural, global metropolis that is as lively and European as any city on the Continent, you’d think that E.U. membership is a no-brainer. Now that the full hellish economic consequences of exit are in full view, what could possibly be the impulse to stick with it?... allow me to suggest a parallel version of Britain’s situation — but with the U.S. The U.S. negotiated with Canada and Mexico to create a free trade zone called NAFTA, just as the U.K. negotiated entry to what was then a free trade zone called the “European Economic Community” in 1973. Now imagine further that NAFTA required complete freedom of movement for people across all three countries. Any Mexican or Canadian citizen would have the automatic right to live and work in the U.S., including access to public assistance, and every American could live and work in Mexico and Canada on the same grounds. This three-country grouping then establishes its own Supreme Court, which has a veto over the U.S. Supreme Court. And then there’s a new currency to replace the dollar, governed by a new central bank, located in Ottawa. How many Americans would support this? How many votes would a candidate for president get if he or she proposed it? The questions answer themselves. It would be unimaginable for the U.S. to allow itself to be governed by an entity more authoritative than its own government. It would signify the end of the American experiment, because it would effectively be the end of the American nation-state. But this is precisely the position the U.K. has been in for most of my lifetime. The U.K. has no control over immigration from 27 other countries in Europe, and its less regulated economy has attracted hundreds of thousands of foreigners to work in the country, transforming its culture and stressing its hospitals, schools and transportation system. Its courts ultimately have to answer to the European Court. Most aspects of its economy are governed by rules set in Brussels. It cannot independently negotiate any aspect of its own trade agreements. I think the cost-benefit analysis still favors being a member of the E.U. But it is not crazy to come to the opposite conclusion. More to the point, the European Economic Community has evolved over the years into something far more ambitious. Through various treaties — Maastricht and Lisbon, for example — what is now called the European Union (note the shift in language) has embarked on a process of ever-greater integration: a common currency, a common foreign policy and now, if Macron has his way, a common central bank. It is requiring the surrender and pooling of more and more national sovereignty from its members. And in this series of surrenders, Britain is unique in its history and identity. In the last century, every other European country has experienced the most severe loss of sovereignty a nation can experience: the occupation of a foreign army on its soil. Britain hasn’t. Its government has retained control of its own island territory now for a thousand years. More salient: this very resistance has come to define the character of the country, idealized by Churchill in the country’s darkest hour. Britain was always going to have more trouble pooling sovereignty than others. And the more ambitious the E.U. became, the more trouble the U.K. had. As I said, I would have voted Remain. But I understand the legitimate arguments to Leave, and also would have respected the result of a referendum which attracted more votes than any general election in history. In 2016, both sides insisted that this was it: a clear and irrevocable choice. And when Leave won the referendum, it was incumbent to honor that result, as had been the case when a referendum in 1975 backed membership. That’s what democracy is: the peaceful acceptance of political defeat. And that’s why the refusal of the elites to accept their defeat would be a very mixed blessing."

The Curious Case of RS Archer - "RS Archer is, apparently, a novelist who created the “David Saunders” book series. A man of many talents and diverse experiences, he also has “a background of military service” and is heavily involved in some kind of mysterious family business. His profile picture on his popular Twitter account shows him to have lean, Bondesque good looks. Archer lives in France, in grand luxury. He is always reporting to his Twitter followers about how he is eating the best steak in Europe or drinking Château Batailley, Pauillac Grand Cru Classé from 2009. He has “a house in Switzerland” and ponders buying a 1968 Mercedes-Benz. Chiefly, though, Archer is known for his politics. He is ardently anti-Brexit and anti-Johnson — claiming, for example, that the Russian invasion of Ukraine “began with Brexit” — though he also mocks left-wing extremes of verbal sensitivity and trans activism. Archer earned online attention with a Twitter thread in which he talked about his idiot Brexiteer neighbours who had “made no arrangements” for Britain’s departure from the EU and faced deportation. Their equally idiotic — as well as drunk and violent — son attempted to travel to France to bribe the mayor, with hilarious consequences. Archer’s thread was shared more than 50,000 times. At this point you might have realised that something strange is going on. Does that story not sound a little too perfectly calculated for Remainer prejudices? How can an author, of all people, live in such grand style? Why have you never heard of the “David Saunders” book series? (Is that not a terrible name for a main character?)... Ninety thousand people follow Mr Archer and engage with his blatant fabrications. He claims to have met a Zurich banker who told him that US and European financiers were looking forward to selling off the NHS (6000 retweets). He reports that a new ferry service from Belgium will bypass England and go straight to Scotland (1000 retweets and, by the way, untrue). He makes up a “scathing comment” by a “US spokesman” saying there “are no winners with Brexit” (1000 retweets). Yes, RS (it rhymes with “arse”) is a prolific purveyor of “fake news”. There is nothing unique about that, of course, but what I find fascinating is how he — or whoever is behind “him” — has manufactured a character. It is Remainer wish-fulfilment. Not only do his claims say exactly what middle-class liberals wish to hear, but his whole persona is a kind of seductive fantasy. He is rich. He is sophisticated. He is urbane. He is always “owning” dunderheaded Brexiteers and then laughing it up with cheerful, friendly continentals. Of course, there is intrinsic comedy to this in that Remainers love to flaunt their superior intelligence and education, yet are being taken in — not as a whole, of course, but in thousands of cases — by such a blatant fraud. But something else is going on. It is a symptom of the parasocial nature of online life. Parasocial interaction, wrote the sociologists Richard Wohl and Donald Horton in the 1950s, is “one-sided, nondialectical, controlled by the performer, and not susceptible to mutual development”. It is the “relationship” we have with celebrities, but also with people we follow on social media." Liberals are silent about misinformation that plays to their biases

Lidl's largest warehouse opens in Bedfordshire - "German supermarket Lidl has opened its largest warehouse in the world, in Bedfordshire. The regional distribution centre at Houghton Regis near Luton is expected to service 150 stores and create up to 1,500 jobs, the company said." Damn Brexit!

Meme - "How the EU made you powerless
- By gradually removing your country's sovereignty and seizing power though a series of "treaties" over the past 40+ years.
- By gradually replacing all of the laws and your ancestors established, with laws that are almost impossible for a citizen to change democratically.
- By exercising its stolen authority over an increasing number of policy areas, stripping away the power of your parliament and of your vote.
- By creating faux democracy where its elected MEPs have no power to propose legislation, and where all power resides with its unelected EU commission.
- By increasing constituency sizes from 100 thousand in the UK to 1 million in the EU, diluting your voice, and transferring power from the people to big corporations and lobby groups."

The three classic British sitcoms that forecast Brexit - "Classic BBC sitcoms Dad’s Army, Fawlty Towers and ‘Allo ‘Allo, from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, hold clues as to why Britain voted for Brexit, an academic has suggested. Gavin Schaffer... found clues in the comedies that reflected public ambivalence towards the EU and a desire to stand apart from “the Continent” decades before the vote in 2016."

Britain is stagnating because it is behaving like an EU country - "The deleterious impact of Brexit is debatable but the idea that we have used it to follow a different economic path is for the birds. We haven’t used the freedom to create a dynamic, low-tax, free-enterprise economy. Far from it. We are still behaving like an EU country even though the bloc is stagnating, crushed under the soaring cost of welfare. Mr Streeting may have his eye on Sir Keir’s job but he could at least come up with a more coherent reason for toppling him."

Links - 18th August 2026 (2 - Jason Arday)

2026-08-18T17:02:00.000+08:00

Humza Yousaf | Facebook - "Jason Arday made a mistake, he resigned and yet he was hounded relentlessly by sections of the press - despite saying he had reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure. We know why certain sections of the media decided to pursue him, even after his resignation. If there is no accountability, then nothing will ever change. My thoughts are with Jason's family, his partner and children, who will now grow up without their father."
Comments: "He did not make a mistake. He deliberately lied . He was not hounded he was exposed. It’s a big difference"
"A mistake is putting salt in ya tea instead of sugar"
"Is there no bandwagon you would refuse to jump on?🤷"
"A mistake is doing something once"
"Tell me hamza did you post anything about Ann widdecombe 🙃😡"
"So, should the Farage investigation be dropped, considering the press coverage it's had?"
"Is that a similar mistake to not spotting a motorhome on mum-in-law's drive ?"
"Apologised to the Dundee Girls yet? You didn't mind hounding totally innocent children."
"A mistake like forgetting you need car insurance to drive a car you mean?"
"No accountability? The irony"
"Of course the media coverage had nothing at all to do with the police harassing the reporter right. Truth is truth and no-one should be held "accountable" for truth no matter how uncomfortable."
"A mistake is turning left instead of right, but it can be rectified at the next junction not just ignored and carrying on."

Dr Aseem Malhotra on X - "I’m saddened by this beyond words. I’m also disgusted by white supremacist colonialists who deliberately amplify the mistakes of a black man whilst ignoring the systemic structural racism that’s the much bigger issue that supersedes by orders of magnitude the injustice of ‘wokism’"
Dave Van de Walle on X - "This could have been avoided. Start by not calling everyone who disagrees with you a "white supremacist colonialist," then follow that up by vetting individuals before placing them on a pedestal that they are woefully ill-equipped to be on. Cambridge has blood on its hands."
Carl Benjamin 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 on X - ""I’m also disgusted by white supremacist colonialists who deliberately amplify the mistakes of a black man whilst ignoring the systemic structural racism that’s the much bigger issue..." They're just flagrantly politicising his death. Despicable."
Apparently white people colonised the UK. The left's lies get bigger and bigger, just like Arday's
Normally left wingers claim extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Of course, asking proof of a black man who claims literally impossible things who is pushing the left wing agenda is racist bigotry and harassment ontario

Instagram - "Jason Arday was a victim of DEI. That racialist, philistine ideology built him up on the basis of very little and then let him fall hard and fast. Black academics and writers had reservations about him but they kept them hidden. All that mattered was the promotion of what they told us was a black genius who would dazzle the world and put white Britain to rights. Then, when it inevitably fell apart — it was always inevitable — they threw him out. They were done with their prodigy. He had become a liability to their anti-intellectual project of “decolonising” our institutions. He was an “aberration”, as they said at Cambridge. It’s unclear whether there was any compassionate follow-up once he resigned, but it doesn’t seem that there was. People will blame the media. But the media did its job — it found a story and told it. It was the academy, Arday’s colleagues and possibly even his friends who didn’t do their jobs. They knew the Arday phenomenon was wrong but they let it continue, because to them basking in the half-light of “black genius” was more important than asking what might happen to Jason when it all unravels. The media has merely been inquisitive — it’s the institutions of academia that have been cruel and narcissistic. Wokeness makes false gods and real tragedies. RIP Jason"

Cambridge University Amnesty International CUAI | Facebook - "Cambridge University Amnesty International is devastated by the news of Jason Arday’s passing. We extend our deepest condolences to his family, friends, colleagues, and all those whose lives he profoundly shaped. Arday was a pioneering scholar whose work illuminated the realities of racial inequality in education and beyond. His loss is felt not only within Cambridge, but across the wider academic and human‑rights communities. As a society committed to defending human dignity, we strongly condemn all forms of bullying, racialised aggression, and discriminatory conduct. Jason Arday’s death has prompted urgent reflection on the structural pressures faced by Black academics, including the disproportionate scrutiny that often accompanies their presence in academic spaces. These are not isolated incidents but symptoms of deeper systemic issues within academia that must be confronted directly. We call on the University and the wider sector to continue upholding their promise to stand for anti-racism, confront prejudice, and continue to recognise under-appreciated minority ethnic talent throughout their academic journeys. We stand in solidarity with all those working to build an academic environment where every scholar is valued and able to thrive. If anybody is affected by these difficult events, CU Amnesty is always willing to offer its support."
Comments: "“…the disproportionate scrutiny…” 🤔 It emerges that his CV didn’t receive as much scrutiny it should have done. "
"Do yall also condemn lying?"
"Reflections on the structures affecting black academics? You mean the favouritism? Woke response to unchecked DEI"
"He’s survived worse!"
"They’ll be banning scrutiny of non-white people next. Their once prestigious product is now a laughing stock around the world. Let them."
"When you say ”pioneering”, you you mean in the sense of pioneering lies, falsehoods, fraud and plagiarism? If so I fully agree."
"I suppose I could Google all the white academics who've been hounded from their jobs for daring to question the 'woke' zeitgeist. Where was Amnesty International then?"
"How does Amnesty International feel about people who turn the police on to journalists who uncover their wrongdoing? You used to care about shit like that...."
"Apparently if you're left wing it's okay to make up your entire life and it is discrimination to point out the lies. What a great example you are setting."
"When the truth catches up with lies and woke policies, you blame the messenger and not the perpetrator... dear oh dear."

Sarah Joseph | Facebook - "I didn’t know Professor Jason Arday. But what I do know is that an autistic Person of Colour was subjected to relentless public scrutiny, ridicule and attack, and now he is dead. I have actually been dreading (and indeed waiting for) this news. It was blindingly obvious to anyone who has loved or cared for an autistic person that this level of sustained, public pressure would become too much to bear. Cambridge has serious questions to answer about its duty of care. And those sections of the media that relentlessly hounded and humiliated him should reflect very seriously on the human consequences of what they participated in. In fact, we should all reflect on what type of world we are allowing to be created."
Autistic people can't be put in positions of responsibility. Good job.

Shola Mos-Shogbamimu - "For God’s sake Jason Arday has children! Are these monsters trying to kill his children like they killed their father!!! Arday’s grieving family are constituents of MP Bell Riberio-Addy and she has had to call the police on media presence outside their home, reporting from their home and hounding family members! The Police had to push them back yesterday!! What the actual hell is wrong with these people?????? The media actually posted his address in published articles!!!! I’m so angry right now I’m shaking.
Left wingers just keep making stuff up, because they know that their base doesn't care. And if you challenge them on their lies, you're the problem (this is what happened with Arday too). Naturally, she cheered Charlie Kirk's death

mary beard on X - "Maybe at the moment we should all (me included) take a break from any discussion of Cambridge's policies, and reflect on the tragic human costs -- and remember with compassion the person who paid a dreadful price."
Fred Sculthorp on X - "You can't just do this "oh golly, oh gosh, how awful" act and then go back to wittering away on the One Show sofa with David Olusoga et al pretending like nothing has happened. You are part of a wider culture that aided and abetted him up the garden path I'm afraid."
Iron Heretic on X - "Maybe Mary we should behave like adults. Lying is wrong. Plagiarism is wrong. Fraud is wrong. Refusing responsibility for your choices is wrong. Suicide is wrong and tragic. Asking questions, investigating credible allegations is right. Exposing fraud and deception is right. Telling the truth is right. Now the repulsive inversion: because Jason is black the wrong is right, while the people who exposed it are recast as villains. Had Arday been white, these same people would know wrong from right and applauded the journalists. Skin colour cannot turn wrong into right, truth into persecution, or accountability into racism. Grief deserves compassion. Truth still deserves defending."
Me on X - "My brother was hounded beyond belief by the DWP and local authority trying to strip him of is benefits even though he had medical evidence of is spinal problem and metal health issues. No comparison from anyone when he committed suicide.Probably because he was white working class"
Douglas Coombes on X - "We remember your compassionate reflections on 9/11."
Shorea on X - "If Cofnas had taken his life a few years back, would you be saying the same?"

Venice Allan on X - "The people who enabled Jason Arday’s lies will blame the people who exposed them."

Jason Arday, professor at centre of Cambridge plagiarism row, found dead - "Arday’s family said in a statement: “Jason was subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse for more than three years since he accepted the role of professor at Cambridge University by those who would leave no stone unturned in their quest to undermine him. “The campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason, who was a gentle man and who always wanted to see the best in everyone."... “We won’t comment further at this point beyond asking the press to leave us alone now, and to stop the campaign of harassment which has been waged against Jason and his family for too long.” The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said: “I’m devastated for the family and friends of Jason Arday. He faced an unacceptable public hounding and campaign of abuse. I know many Londoners will be angry and upset this evening. “Jason Arday was the victim of a pernicious public shaming that other people in his position simply wouldn’t have faced. His death was a tragedy, but once again it should be a wake-up call for all of us.”... After initially defending Arday as the victim of a smear campaign, as further questions arose about his academic career, the university began to temper its support... Arday’s memoir, entitled Great and Unfortunate Things, was published this week in the US by an imprint of Simon & Schuster, with UK publication scheduled for later this month."
Sounds like they were complicit in his lies.
Comment (elsewhere): "Just a reminder that the 'sustained abuse' was literally basic fact-checking of his story."
As usual, to left wingers harassment and abuse means exposing their lies
Left wingers are denouncing Cambridge for not supporting him. Apparently they should've ruined their reputation even more and for even longer by continuing to cover for his lies
Arday probably didn't want to see more of his lies being exposed, with the book coming out

Celina101 on X - "A Black Cambridge professor dies after resigning amid explosive plagiarism allegations, and the British political and academic class immediately starts talking about racism. Aaron Dugmore was nine years old. He was one of the few White children in a school where roughly 75% of pupils were non-White. His family said he was subjected to racial abuse, including being told that “all the white people should be dead”, before he was found with a cord around his neck. Britain never made his name a national cause. Ask yourself why."

Outrage over Arday: Nothing for the White 9-year-old boy racially abused into suicide - "Within a day, a complete interpretive apparatus had assembled itself. His family’s statement, issued through his publisher, described a three-year campaign of sustained racial abuse. The Mayor of London called it a “pernicious public shaming.” Simon Baron-Cohen, who spoke to Arday hours before his death, relayed Arday’s belief that plagiarism allegations function as a racist playbook for bringing down Black academics, invoking Claudine Gay. Hacked Off demanded an inquiry into press culture. It seems as if Britain possesses a fully developed vocabulary for recognising that a black person’s suffering may have a racial dimension. The question is whether that reflex survives when the races are reversed. The answer, written in blood and institutional silence, is no... Notice what Britain’s institutions did with a clear allegation of racial torment directed at a White child in a majority-minority English school: nothing. No education select committee took evidence on the bullying of minority-White pupils. No charity commissioned research. No university department turned it into a field of study. There is a vast academic literature on the racist bullying of ethnic-minority children. There is virtually none on the reverse, even though the demographic conditions that make the reverse possible now exist in hundreds of English schools. When a minority child’s suffering is alleged to be racial, the allegation itself is treated as national data about Britain. Aaron’s was treated as one family’s private tragedy and then forgotten."
The author also mentions Ross Parker, Richard Everitt, Kriss Donald and Christopher Yates as victims of anti-white hate crime murders that no one cares about

Steven Pinker on X - "The Jason Arday scandal/fiasco/tragedy is a prime example of "pluralistic ignorance." No sapient being could believe his ziggurat of whoppers, but each may have privately thought that everyone else believed them. This happens when the expression of an idea is stigmatized or punished, as obviously happened here: anyone expressing common-sense incredulity was tarred as a racist, ableist, and abettor of suicide (not to mention threatened by a barracuda law firm and questioned by the police). For more on pluralistic ignorance and other extraordinary popular delusions, see When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life (preorder paperback here; out in a few weeks)."

Richard Hanania on X - "Elites told us that we were supposed to respect and admire Jason Arday. When he was disgraced and it became clear that institutions had failed, we were at fault for taking him too seriously. This is yet another fraud. Don't let them get away with it."

They're the Ones Who Told Us to Pay Attention to Jason Arday - "While some actually deny he was a plagiarist, it seems more common to acknowledge that Arday screwed up while saying that the media and conservatives on X should be condemned for paying too much attention to the story... These academics want to continue pursuing their work, get treated with deference by society, and never take the heat that might come with upholding the alleged standards of their profession when it is threatened by frauds. This is how fake fields like women’s studies have come into being, and why others like sociology have turned into such jokes. Yes, Arday is a symptom, and him getting away with his lies as long as he did indicates that Cambridge is in even worse shape than most of us thought. If universities don’t want the scrutiny that comes with being high-prestige institutions, they can no longer continue with the assumption that the rest of us should be deferring to them on intellectual, moral, or political issues. You’re the ones who told us that being the “youngest black professor in the history of Cambridge” was newsworthy. When Arday was being championed as an inspirational figure, being interviewed on major news programs, and getting a “1.4 million” advance for his book (according to Arday himself, for what that’s worth), none of the critics of the recent coverage of his fall were saying that society was paying too much attention to what was going on in academia. Now that it has become clear that Cambridge prioritized the ideology of diversity over academic rigor or a concern for truth, the rest of us are supposed to feel guilty for taking what Arday’s boosters within and outside the university said at face value. As his last act, Arday temporarily made it more difficult to have a real discussion about what has gone wrong in Western intellectual life. But the degree to which Cambridge failed and the vividness of his lies – like my personal favorite, the story of the muggers who gave him epilepsy and then were won over by his compassion – will hopefully help this story serve a purpose. Thanks in part to the uselessness of the so-called scholarship he produced, in death Arday might make a contribution to the advancement of human knowledge after all."

What Jason Arday's memoir says, due to publish days after he resigned | National Post - "The Atlantic read the finished book and obtained a copy of his book proposal. “The story that it tells should not be taken at face value; it differs notably from other versions of his life that Arday has shared in public and in private, including in the original proposal he sent out with his agent,” wrote senior editor Daniel Engber... The book opens on a prophecy. Arday writes that he was 21 and on a relief mission in Brazil in 2006, installing water pumps in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. The woman translating for him put a hand on his arm and told him he was destined to do great things, and “destined for very sad and difficult things as well.”... While working on his doctorate, Arday taught by day, stocked a supermarket overnight from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., then cleaned from 5:30 a.m. to 7:30 in the morning. What was left was the train. London to Liverpool, five hours each way. He writes that he did his 2015 thesis there, laptop on the tray table, typed two fingers at a time... The tumour comes back and his marriage ends, The Atlantic reported. Then autistic burnout during the pandemic, an exhaustion that kept him in bed, and a decision to end his life. What interrupted it was a song. He put on the Eagles’ “Take It to the Limit,” and the pause was long enough for a relative to reach him. His decision to listen to the Eagles, he writes, likely saved his life. Article content Arday sold the book on a 2024 proposal his agent sent publishers, which The Atlantic obtained. It tells parts of his life differently. In it he describes a car hitting him as a teenager and spending three months in a coma, conscious throughout because of locked-in syndrome, while doctors suggested withdrawing life support. He woke “miraculously,” he reportedly wrote. None of the coma is in the finished book, where those months pass at school with Arday sitting his final exams. The proposal also describes testicular cancer where the book only describes two brain tumours... Article content Article content The prophecy is different too. In the proposal, the year is 2005, and the woman is a town elder known locally for foretelling people’s lives, whom Arday elsewhere calls a shaman woman. “Every event she described,” he wrote there, according to The Atlantic, “has since come to pass.” In the book he writes that “you might say” her prediction came true. Article content The Atlantic asked his editors in the U.S. and Britain why the coma and the elderly shaman woman were not in the book. Neither answered."
If one story that Arday told contradicts other versions that he told, clearly there is no proof that he's a liar and only racists would claim that.

Fallen Cambridge Star Jason Arday’s Memoir Appears To Poach Life Events From His Favorite Soap Operas - "A Washington Free Beacon review of the memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, published Tuesday in the United States with a British edition coming later this month, as well as of further claims Arday made in his book proposal, found extensive evidence that suggests Arday, 41, plucked plot lines from films and TV shows and wove them into what he presented as the true events of his life,” Ryan writes. The pivotal dialogue in the memoir’s prologue, for example, “is similar to lines spoken by a Thracian prophetess in the pulpy Starz series Spartacus: Blood and Sand, which was known for sex, violence, and bad writing.” The show’s seventh episode also happens to be titled “Great and Unfortunate Things.” Arday also claimed in his book proposal to have survived testicular cancer, a rare malignancy that afflicted a character on an Australian soap opera, Neighbours, that Arday says he viewed religiously. He said he was cursed with lifelong seizures after being beaten by a gang of thugs at age 18 only to reconcile with the assailants, another Neighbours plotline. He stated he was in a monthslong coma as a teen following a car accident, a plotline featured in both Neighbours and in Home and Away, another Australian soap Arday is known to love. And he claims to have had a brain tumor removed shortly before his 2015 Ph.D. thesis defense, wiping out his memory. In a 2007 episode of Neighbours, a character has a brain tumor removed and suffers partial amnesia."

Cambridge autism expert claims ‘bullying’ of Jason Arday was relentless
Comment (elsewhere): "By bullying do you mean sticking up for his students who complained that they weren't getting a proper education because he didn't know the subject and couldn't supervise them and so the response they got was to call them racist? By bullying do you mean pointing out that his PhD thesis was in the main stolen from someone else and that is a major sin in academia, or perhaps you mean the entire fantasy world that he created in order to shield him from the kind of scrutiny that any leading academic should have. By bullying do you mean that Guardian asking people who went to school with him whether his claims were true or not? Tell us, if you went to see a doctor and it turned out that that doctor knew next to nothing about medicine, had gained their medical degree by presenting other people's work, had lied about their entire history woud you be saying 'Let him continue to work as a doctor'. Jason Arday'd death is a tragedy, it is sad, but it hasn't been caused by those asking the important questions about his academic qualifications and the whole made up back story, his death was caused by the fact that Cambridge University wanted to appoint a black person to an important role and they didn't care about whether or not he should actually be in that role. Jason Arday has done incredible harm to many black academics who will now have the shadow of doubt constantly over them because people will wonder whether the white liberals, such as you, have only appointed them because of DEI or whether or not they really can do the job. There are lots of absolutely brilliant black academics who do not deserve to have white liberals using them as play things, to be paraded in public to show how 'progressive they are' - they need to get to their success by their own merits and hard work and many of them do that and absolutely deserve to be admired for that just as any academic who reaches such a post deserves to be recognised and admired, but Jason Arday did not do that. If you want to ask people if they are happy he has killed himself, look in the mirror and ask how the kind of policies that you support have incentivised this, how they led to him being appointed as a token despite it being obvious he wasn't up to the job and then, then go and ask his students who complained about not being taught and supervised correctly and whose complaints were dismmissed as 'racism' what they think about their time being taught by him. His death is a tragedy but it was caused by the liberal elite who wanted him as a poster boy and didn't care whether or not he was really qualified to be there and who closed their eyes to the rubbish he claimed - the academics who faced with the naked emperor continued pretending he was dressed in the most wonderful clothing."

Beijing offers a poisoned chalice. Carney shouldn't drink from it

2026-08-18T13:18:00.000+08:00

Time not just to denounce the US as a fascist dictatorship and cozy up to China instead, but also continue to refuse to allow American milk in, because it's subsidised, and once it's allowed in they will just jack up prices.

Beijing offers a poisoned chalice. Carney shouldn't drink from it | National Post

"It’s a war that’s underway everywhere, all the time. It’s being waged by Beijing and Moscow. It’s a hybrid war that confounds western intelligence agencies and transcends borders. Like conventional warfare, it involves mobilizations and sophisticated operations and devastating weaponry that lays waste to entire industries.

The war relies on command structures that establish tactical objectives in pursuit of strategic dominance by means of espionage, sabotage, intellectual property theft and the targeted flooding of western markets with heavily subsidized exports. The phenomenon defies description without resort to a lexicon that is only barely intelligible within conventional analyses of international conflict, statecraft and diplomacy: spearphishing, troll farms, botnets and cyber kill chains. Spamouflage, Dragonbridge, Salt Typhoon and Raptor Train...

Compromised global supply chains, high-finance interdependency and digital interconnectivity have obscured the distinctions between the interests of the United Nations police-state bloc and the NATO capitals, and between the public interest and the interests of trade-reliant global corporations and the compliant politicians they champion. There’s no Berlin Wall anymore...

An analysis undertaken by the 38-member Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development published earlier this month found that nearly 60 percent of the global market gains made by Chinese corporations since 2005 are attributable to state subsidies.

Some European manufacturers appear to be finally willing to put up a fight — the European Union has proposed a “Made in the EU” Industrial Accelerator Act. Others, like the Mercedes-Benz corporation, now partly owned by Chinese carmakers, lean towards the accommodationist approach adopted by Mark Carney’s Liberal government in Ottawa. Prime Minister Carney has invested much of the Liberals’ political capital in the “strategic partnership” he entered into with Beijing in January.

The Ottawa-Beijing partnership consists of a series of agreements and promises, beginning with Ottawa’s guarantee to allow the import of low-tariff Chinese electric vehicles into Canada, starting with a quota of 49,000 EVs a year. The deal is opposed by the three largest U.S. automakers in Canada on the grounds that the annual quota represents nearly a third of EV sales in Canada last year and the deal “puts the North American auto supply chain at risk.” Japanese automakers in Canada have expressed similar concerns.

Making things especially awkward, Industry Minister Mélanie Joly has specifically invited the Chinese EV giant BYD to invest in Canada. Earlier this month, the Pentagon placed BYD on a blacklist of Chinese tech firms linked to China’s military.

Even more awkward is the memorandum of understanding in the “strategic partnership” package that binds the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to collaborate with China’s all-powerful Ministry of Public Security (MPS). The MOU follows on a collaboration from 25 years ago that fell apart owing to allegations of tortured witnesses and fabricated corruption charges. The RCMP-MPS agreement remains secret, despite Opposition efforts in the House of Commons to subject its contents to the light of day.

The RCMP’s partner in Beijing’s Ministry of Public Security is a key agency in the hybrid war Beijing is waging against western democracies. The MPS has been specifically implicated in clandestine interference operations in Canada.

In 2023, the U.S. Justice Department identified 40 Chinese nationals deployed by an MPS task force known as the 912 Special Projects Working Group to establish an underground “police station” in New York to harass dissidents and run an elaborate social-media disinformation operation. Thirty-four of them were charged with conspiracy to transmit interstate threats and conspiracy to commit interstate harassment.

The “troll farm” masked the MPS agents’ identities to appear as though they were American citizens and harassed critics of China online, dubbed Spamouflage.

Around the same time, Canadian intelligence sources confirmed that several similar “police stations” had been established in the Greater Toronto Area, Montreal and suburban Vancouver. No charges have been laid in Canada. The long-running scandal involving the Chinese Communist Party’s interference in Canada’s 2019 and 2021 federal elections was investigated by the Hogue inquiry into foreign interference and led to the 2024 Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act. But the foreign influence registry still hasn’t been established.

It is not known just how long Beijing’s Spamouflage operation has been running. It was first detected in Canada in 2023. Last year, the election-monitoring Rapid Response Mechanism group reported that the operation had returned, using a variety of tactics “to intimidate, belittle, and harass individuals based in Canada who are critical of the PRC.” The operation included the production of videos on YouTube and Instagram, “doctored through artificial intelligence (AI), and the release of private information about targeted individuals without their consent (‘doxing’).”

It isn’t just the massive scale of these operations and the unfamiliar nomenclature that keeps the Beijing-Moscow hybrid warfare operations just beyond the public field of vision. It’s the pace of the strategy’s expansion and its deep integration into Beijing’s entire complex of surveillance, social control, foreign policy and trade policy.

In 2017, Xi Jinping’s increasingly totalitarian regime enacted the National Intelligence Law, compelling all Chinese companies, Chinese citizens and ethnic Chinese everywhere to cooperate with Beijing’s intelligence agencies on command. The move turned out to be self-defeating, in the way that any engagement with “national champion” conglomerates like Huawei was immediately understood to be a security risk. But the same year that the National Intelligence Law came into effect, Xi formulated China’s Integrated National Strategic System and Capabilities (INSSC) doctrine. After years of planning and refinement — and after years of disarray in the democratic west — the Communist Party’s central committee politburo was sufficiently emboldened to codify the INSSC.

The new and improved blueprint formalizes the People’s Republic of China as a “military-civil fusion” of the Chinese state and nominally private companies and institutions that requires military and civilian planning, coordination, policy alignment and resource-sharing. It calls for peacetime-wartime integration as a central purpose of the Communist Party’s 15th five-year plan, for 2026-30. And Beijing’s peace-war integration has dramatically ramped up China’s hybrid-warfare collaborations with Russia in targeting Japan, South Korea, Australia and Taiwan...

Over the past five years, the social media giant Meta has taken down thousands of accounts associated with covert Chinese and Russian disinformation operations. Google had already shut down 100,000 accounts by the time of the Spamouflage arrests in New York, and Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, has blocked hundreds of thousands of accounts linked to Chinese state agencies.

On July 1, China’s new “Ethnic Unity” law comes into effect. It’s a comprehensive, enforcement-heavy statute aimed at shoring up the domination of the Mandarin-speaking majority Han Chinese over Tibetans, Uyghurs, Hui, Mongolian and other minorities whose homelands ended up within the borders of the People’s Republic after 1949. The law’s Article 63 stipulates that organizations and individuals outside Chinese territory that commit “acts aimed at the PRC that undermine ethnic unity and progress or create ethnic division” will be targeted by the law.

The walls are closing in on dissident Chinese expatriates: to criticize China’s government is to expose your parents back in China to the loss of their pensions, your siblings could lose their jobs and your children could be barred from university. If you’re targeted as a foreign adversary you risk being subjected to malicious, covert operations run by Chinese law enforcement of the kind a February Open AI threat report described as a well-resourced, meticulously orchestrated strategy targeting Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. That operation involved 35 fake X accounts and nine channels on the microblogging site Tumblr. In the case of the Madrid-based human rights organization Safeguard Defenders, the organization’s external liaison for the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, Laura Harth, was targeted in an elaborate Chinese-run “deepfake” pornography smear.

In April, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab published their investigation of an elaborate operation employing fake journalists to target the ICIJ as punishment for a 2025 exposé of the Chinese regime’s threats, coercion and intimidation of overseas regime critics.

The Chinese operatives were assigned to carry out a wide-ranging scheme to steal private information from Uyghur, Tibetan, Taiwanese and Hong Kong diaspora activists, as well as from reporters who focus on activities involving those targeted groups...

Japan, meanwhile, is launching an emergency audit of its thousands of uninhabited islands out of fears of Chinese buyers quietly buying properties close to its military hubs. The operation follows land acquisitions by Chinese nationals in strategic maritime zones in Okinawa and Yamaguchi Prefecture.

In Early June, the Five Eyes powers — the United Kingdom, the U.S., Australia, Canada and New Zealand — warned of an “aggressive” online recruitment strategy involving Chinese military spies masquerading as agents for private businesses or thinktanks, reaching out to foreign policy or defense analysts on the social media site LinkedIn, offering lucrative contracts for “non-public” information.

Margaret McCuaig Johnston, a former assistant deputy minister with Natural Resources Canada and former member of the Canada-China Joint Committee on Science and Technology, warns that Ottawa’s “strategic partnership” with China threatens to turn Canadian innovation in technology into a national-security liability.

“The new strategic partnership is exposing our technology as never before,” she told me. Any collaborative arrangements with Xi Jinping’s newly aggressive regime run the risk of Canada losing its edge in sensitive technologies like photonics, owing to Beijing’s abuse of joint ventures. Beijing is already using Huawei to persuade Canadian academics to set up companies to funnel Canadian intellectual property to China. “We need to develop, very quickly, a much more defensive strategy to ensure that our innovations aren’t going out the back door to China through contracts, joint ventures and other mechanisms.

“Any research even tangentially related to the defence sector will be targeted by Beijing. Our government will need to communicate to Canadian researchers that their knowledge and skills are needed and will be funded here in Canada as we ramp up our defence capacity. They should not be attracted by offers of easy money from Chinese sources.”

Former diplomat Charles Burton, Canada’s preeminent scholar on China and a senior fellow at Sinopsis, a China-focused think tank based in Prague, says the hour is much later than most Canadians realize.

Burton says Canada is a “bellwether” country in Beijing’s subversion of developed economies. Before Carney’s election, Canada was already the most deeply compromised member of the G7, and since January’s Canada-China strategic partnership was declared, the Chinese Communist Party’s influence operations in this country have expanded exponentially, Burton told me.

“It has been driven by a combination of enhanced resources dedicated to Canadian subversion by Beijing, alongside fortification of the CCP’s proxies in Canada, in sync with a strongly renewed mobilization of captured Canadian co-opted elites.” What’s most concerning about Canada’s rush into Beijing’s embrace is the weaponization of Canadian outrage over Trump’s bellicosity and his threats aimed at America’s closest allies.

“By exploiting Canadians’ natural anger over Washington’s betrayal, the CCP have successfully overseen a campaign of calculated deceit. It’s a classic deflection tactic: by keeping the public’s focus squarely on American betrayal, they effectvely defuse and neutralize mainstream concerns about the PRC’s own escalating campaign of subversion, espionage, and transnational repression in Canada.”"

Links - 18th August 2026 (1 - Left Wing Economics)

2026-08-18T09:13:00.000+08:00

Thread by @RichardHanania on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The German economy is stagnant, so they're considering a radical solution: allow Sunday shopping. A store owner has to pay a $2,500 Euro fine for selling nonperishable food on Sunday, but does it anyway because it's worth it. It's funny Germans are so authoritarian that they've managed to maintain a theocracy without believing in God. But they have trouble enforcing the rules because…government employees also don’t work on Sunday! You can’t make this stuff up."
Interestingly, most of Europe has given up on the restrictions

Jordan Edwards on X - "I told a German I was expecting a package delivery on Sunday and she was quite surprised, which surprised me. I told her several companies do, and USPS sometimes. The concept of lots of players setting their own policies, forcing even the government to compete, was foreign."

Stagnant Germany Considers the Unthinkable: Sunday Shopping - WSJ - "Bedran Günes, 23, was manning the cash register at Ari Mini Markt, his grocery store, when two officers walked in, demanding to see his merchandise. After surveying his pyramids of cans, arrayed spices and stacks of noodle soup, they issued him a 2,500-euro fine, equivalent to around $2,866. His offense: selling nonperishable food on a Sunday. “I keep doing it because I would be out of business otherwise,” said Günes, who estimates he makes 40% of his sales on Sundays. The scene, which Günes said last took place two months ago, is a snapshot not from a stern theocracy ruled by capricious clerics, but from the capital of Europe’s largest economy. Large though it may be, Germany’s economy is far from healthy. Growth has been flatlining since 2019. Battered by U.S. tariffs and Chinese competition, manufacturers have been shedding thousands of jobs. A desperate government is grasping for ideas to get the engine going again... Legal experts distinguish between “work on Sunday,” which is generally banned, and “work for Sunday”—all the activities needed to ensure a smooth sabbath for the nonworking majority—which is allowed. Stores can sell cucumbers or cans of Coke because they qualify as snacks, but not zucchini or cans of beans, which can’t be consumed on the go. The Denns Bio Markt on Berlin’s Bernauer Strasse is open seven days a week. But on Sunday, shop assistants at the organic supermarket erect barriers through the store to guide shoppers to the bakery section and two cooling cabinets, and away from verboten goods. Heikai Briesenicc, 57, had stopped by Denns Bio Markt to buy potatoes last Sunday and was disappointed to find them off-limits. “Everyone should be able to do as they want,” she added. “No one who wants to open should be punished and no one who doesn’t want to should be forced.” Some states allow shops to open on a few Sundays a year to mark significant events like a marathon or a film festival. Yet trade unions have fought these exceptions in courts and judges have ruled that the festive event, not the shopping, should always be the main draw. Maxim Huet, 24, who was visiting from Paris last weekend, said he had no problem with the Sunday rules. Unlike in France, “it’s very strict, very square and I think it’s good,” he said, adding that the law still lets people buy essentials “like bread, water, and, uh, beer obviously.”... One Vietnamese shop owner in the Mitte district near the former Berlin Wall rolls down his shutter but leaves his door ajar for locals, who know to sneak in for milk and vegetables... One reason successive governments have shied away from revising the Sunday ban is opposition by a cross-party coalition of Christian churches and trade unionists... After a lawsuit by the Verdi trade union two years ago, a court banned automated shops that operate without personnel from opening on Sundays. Shortly after, the state parliament pushed back, enacting a law that allowed such shops to operate. “A work-free Sunday is an absolute social achievement,” said Silke Zimmer, a Verdi board member. “The fact that so many people can have time off simultaneously is a significant cultural asset.”... “There is a well documented and rather archaic disdain for my profession,” said Nils Busch-Petersen, head of the Berlin and Brandenburg retailers’ association. “It seems merchants are the source of all evil and vice and to be kept at bay.” Back at Denns Bio Markt, Golo von Engelhardt, a 28-year-old acting student who had stopped for an ice pop, said he wasn’t a fan of the seven-day working week, “but economically, it’s not ideal if everyone stops working at the same time.” “Maybe we should spread it out. I would be off on Wednesday while others keep the shops open. And then I would work on Sundays. That way, not everyone is off at the same time—and we may get away with a four-day workweek.”"

Patrick Ruffini on X - "74% of Medicare for All supporters think it can fully paid for by taxing billionaires. Just 40% think it’s true it can only be paid for by broad middle class taxation. 🫠🫠🫠"
Corey Walker 🇺🇸 on X - "Progressive policies are always popular when you insist that other people are going to pay for it. The left rails against the "billionaire class" because it's an easy target and easy villain. No one wants to face the truth that nothing in life is without tradeoffs, and you have to actually pay for your own nice things."

Meme - Winter @Leftywinter: "Capitalism sucks."
"UNITED STATES (capitalism). NORWAY (social democracy)
HOME OWNERS 65% vs 80%
POVERTY 11,1% vs 1,0%
JOBLESS 4,2% vs 1,9%
HIGHER EDUCATION $11,000 per year vs Free or very low
HEALTHCARE $15,000 per year vs Free (tax-funded)
ECONOMIC GROWTH 2% vs 2,5%
DEMOCRACY Two-party system (capital dominates) vs Multi-party system (people participate)
PRISON POPULATION 530 per 100,000 people vs 70 per 100,000 people
MILITARY BASES 700+ worldwide vs 0 overseas military bases"
Readers added context to this image: "False dichotomy. Norway is capitalist w/ a strong soc-dem welfare state. Also, withdrawals from its sovereign wealth fund (world's largest) fund 20-25% of gov't spend. It ranks higher (8) than US (22) in the Index of Econ. Freedom, tracking how free-market an econ. is."
Of course, left wingers want to shut down the fossil fuel industry too.

Thread by @CynicalPublius on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "I just spent ten days in Norway and left literally yesterday. It's a beautiful country but is nevertheless full of the European acceptance of diminished living standards and a sense of cultural despair and cultural suicide. Nevertheless, some of the economic features mentioned below are correct. Not because of socialism, but because of two reasons: (i) they are drilling the Hell out of North Sea oil and selling it to the rest of Europe while the UK is busy divesting itself of the same due to "net zero" and (ii) their national population is less than 50% of the Los Angeles metro area. Norway is simply taking advantage of the green scam while pretending to support it. In other words, their prosperity is a function of capitalism. Explained.
BTW, before the discovery of North Sea oil, Norway was Western Europe's poorest nation, a socialist state dependent on selling dried cod to Italy. It is now Europe's 4th wealthiest nation, and that change happened virtually overnight upon the discovery of North Sea oil. Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Almost the whole country is natively Norwegian and I did not see a single mosque the whole time I was there."

Meme - Noah Smith @Noahpinion: "The middle class actually isn't falling behind, they're getting ahead. But everyone thinks they're falling behind because they're constantly interacting with super-rich people online, and seeing rich people's lifestyles on Instagram."
"Real Median Personal Income in the United States *going up from just over $36,000 in 2000 to just under $44,000 in 2020*"
Renzo @fwrenzo1: "The "Middle Class" was a 50-year fluke designed to prevent a communist revolution during the Cold War. Now that the threat is gone, the elites are systematically dismantling it. You aren't "falling behind' you're being pushed back into the peasantry."

Meme - Rob @houellebecq_2: "Portland Leftoids be like "yeah it's just poverty that makes men assault random women in the street. Your frontal lobe isn't fully developed until you make $50,000 a year.""
Left wingers have a very dim view of "minorities"

Eric Crampton on X - "Up soon on Newstalk ZB talking compensation for plasma donation. NZ's ban on paid donation just means we import product derived from US paid donors, while underusing immunoglobulin. It doesn't make sense."
Thread by @cremieuxrecueil on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Because America has made the wise decision to compensate blood donors, it has ended up supplying some 70% of the world's blood plasma. This is one of America's top exports, and each year, America saves hundreds of thousands of lives because it does this.
Some people argue against plasma donation on the basis of it being disproportionately used by poorer people They say it's exploitative: they feel that selling something your body makes is wrong if disparate in ways they care about But it's a lifesaver! There's also research indicating that plasma donation can be healthy! (And there's more indicating that, with compensation, it might reduce crime in the local area.)"
Time to continue condemning the US while relying on it, as usual.

Meme - Andrew Follett @AndrewCFollett: "Defense is 8% of US government spending. Education 15%! Welfare is 47%!"
"US Total Government Spending Breakdown (Federal + State & Local)
Approximate FY 2025 Total ~S11.0 trillion
Focus on Interest, Defense, and Social Welfare (with refined "Other")
Social Welfare (Federal + State/Local) (47%)
Education (K-12 + Higher Ed) (15%)
Net Interest (Federal) (9%)
National Defense (Federal) (8%)
Transportation (5%)
Public Safety / Criminal Justice (4%)
Veterans Benefits (Federal) (4%)
All Other Government Spending (8%)"

Thread by @MattGlassman312 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Among other things, falsely believing we spend more on defense than education is a product of focusing on federal expenditures and forgetting that the various levels of government in the federal system have very different budgetary responsibilities.
Even within federal spending, defense is only about 16% of the budget; many people mistakenly believe it's *half* of the budget, because it is half of all federal discretionary spending. But the vast majority of fed $ now foes to entitlement programs for seniors.To a first approximation, the federal government is a transfer program for seniors that happens to have a large standing army and does a handful of other small things. The profile of state and local government spending is wildly different, education being prominent."

Meme - "When a Leftist can't afford something.
*hand slapping* Blue button: "HUMAN RIGHT""

Meme - "Katie Wilson is the Communist Mayor of Seattle. When she was first elected (based on my research), I said she was the 'perfect' Democrat. She had never had a real job, and was financially supported by her parents. I WAS WRONG She did have a job. She was a political activist. She formed her own non-profit organization, and took donations. And then she paid herself $73,000 per year! Living off other people's money; while providing no services or added value. The absolutely 'PERFECT' Democratic Socialist!"

Brivael Le Pogam on X - "Biarritz a taxé à 60% les résidences secondaires.
Résultat : -1 million d'euros de recettes.
La mairie parle de "fraude massive". Non. C'est de l'économie de niveau CE2. Déroulons.
Principe premier : un être humain agit pour améliorer sa situation. Quand vous augmentez le coût d'un comportement, il y a moins de ce comportement. Ce n'est pas une opinion. C'est une tautologie. Donc quand vous taxez à 60% le fait de déclarer une résidence en secondaire, vous obtenez mécaniquement moins de résidences déclarées comme secondaires. Le fisc vient de découvrir, en 2026, l'existence de la courbe de Laffer. Félicitations. La mairie appelle ça "inverser sa déclaration pour échapper à la taxe". Le vocabulaire est intéressant. "Échapper" suppose que l'argent appartenait déjà à la commune. Avant même qu'elle l'ait perçu. Avant même que le contribuable ait agi. La taxe n'est pas un prélèvement, c'est une dette pré-existante que le citoyen aurait l'indécence de ne pas honorer. Ce glissement sémantique est tout le logiciel. L'État ne prend pas votre argent. Il récupère le sien que vous déteniez à tort.
Deuxième observation : la mairie est "surprise". Elle a voté une taxe punitive en pensant que les gens allaient docilement payer. Elle n'a pas modélisé la réaction. Elle n'a pas anticipé l'élasticité. Elle a appliqué la méthode de planification soviétique : décréter un résultat et attendre qu'il se produise. Le planificateur ne voit jamais les humains. Il voit des unités fiscales. Des chiffres dans un tableur. Quand les chiffres bougent, ce n'est pas que le modèle est faux, c'est que les unités se comportent mal.
Troisième observation, et c'est là que ça devient drôle : la mairie "dénonce une fraude" tout en "reconnaissant la difficulté à prouver l'occupation réelle". Traduction : nous accusons les gens d'un crime que nous sommes incapables de définir, encore moins de constater. Mais ils sont coupables. Parce que les recettes n'ont pas augmenté comme prévu dans notre tableur. C'est le moment Brejnev. Le plan n'a pas marché. Donc le peuple a saboté le plan.
Quatrième niveau. Pourquoi les gens "fraudent" ? Parce qu'ils possèdent un bien immobilier qu'ils ont acheté, légalement, avec de l'argent déjà taxé, et qu'on leur explique maintenant que le simple fait de le posséder leur coûtera 60% de plus. Ils ajustent. Ils déménagent administrativement. Ils font ce que n'importe quel agent rationnel ferait face à une ponction confiscatoire. Le mot "fraude" suppose qu'il existe un usage légitime de leur propriété, défini par la mairie, auquel ils dérogent. Or la propriété, par définition, c'est précisément le droit d'en disposer librement. Si la mairie décide à votre place de l'usage de votre bien sous peine fiscale, vous n'êtes plus propriétaire. Vous êtes locataire de la commune.
Cinquième point. Le bilan comptable est exquis. Recettes espérées : positives. Recettes réelles : -1 million d'euros. Coût administratif des "contrôles renforcés avec le fisc" annoncés : non chiffré, mais croissant. Coût pour l'attractivité de Biarritz : non chiffré. Message envoyé aux propriétaires qui hésitaient encore à investir : limpide. La commune a réussi l'exploit de perdre de l'argent en augmentant un impôt, de détériorer son image, et de criminaliser ses propres administrés. Triple performance.
Sixième point, le fond. Cette histoire n'est pas une anomalie. C'est le fonctionnement normal d'un système qui croit que la richesse est un stock à redistribuer plutôt qu'un flux à produire. Quand vous croyez ça, taxer plus paraît toujours rationnel. Les gens ne sont que des contenants. Vous appuyez sur le contenant, l'argent sort. Sauf que les contenants ont des jambes. Et un cerveau. Et un comptable. Mises l'a écrit il y a un siècle : tout interventionnisme appelle un interventionnisme supplémentaire pour corriger les effets du précédent. La surtaxe n'a pas marché ? Renforçons les contrôles. Les contrôles ne marcheront pas ? Créons un registre. Le registre sera contourné ? Imposons une déclaration trimestrielle. Et ainsi de suite, jusqu'à ce qu'il ne reste plus personne à taxer parce que tout le monde est parti à Saint-Sébastien.
Dernier point. Le plus important. Cette histoire est instructive parce qu'elle est petite. Une ville, un million d'euros, une taxe locale. À cette échelle, l'absurdité est lisible. À l'échelle d'un pays, elle devient invisible. Mais c'est exactement le même mécanisme. À chaque fois qu'on entend "il faut taxer X pour financer Y", il faut entendre : "nous allons décréter que les gens se comporteront comme dans notre modèle, et nous serons stupéfaits quand ils ne le feront pas". Biarritz vient de produire la démonstration en miniature. Encadrez-la. Elle resservira."
A la fin, les gauchistes croirent que tous les biens appartenant a l'Etat

Meme - Cremieux: "Today's a great day to remind everyone: American workers are far and away the richest in the world!"
"Net Adjusted Household Disposable Income (NAHDI) Per Worker (AIC PPPs) As A Proportion of American NAHDI; Year: 2023
America 100%
Belgium 75% *every other country below this*"
Left wingers prefer that workers are poorer if they can "Eat the rich"
Time for left wingers to try to convince Americans that they're poor and that left wing policies like in the other countries where people earn less will make them richer

Do More Powerful Unions Generate Better Pro-Worker Outcomes? - "Labor unions are often evaluated through the wage premiums they secure at the bargaining table. Our study finds that although US unions have historically secured short-run pay gains, these victories often come at the expense of slower employment growth, fewer future job opportunities, reduced investment and productivity, and diminished firm growth and viability. Yet downstream job losses and firm decline can be traced not to the collective voice itself but to the statutory monopoly structures that amplify aggressive bargaining tactics and block alternative channels for cooperation. These trade-offs arise not because unions are uniquely “aggressive,” but because US labor laws promote a legally protected union monopoly that crowds out constructive representation and worker voice. Drawing on 147 studies, we find that when the monopoly face dominates and delivers seemingly “big wins” at the bargaining table, companies respond to wage pressure by trimming R&D, cutting capital, reducing company growth, and ultimately shrinking jobs for unionized workers—dynamics that explain roughly 55 percent of the decline in the Rust Belt’s share of manufacturing employment between 1950 and 2000. Cross-country evidence shows that systems permitting multiple forms of representation, voluntary unions, and flexible agreements retain the benefits of worker voice without the high costs linked to the downsides of monopolies. These findings show no link between greater union power and increased worker welfare: It is the structure of representation—not the presence of a collective voice—that determines whether unions help or harm workers. Policy reforms that relax monopoly privileges for labor unions in the US and encourage pluralistic forms of worker voice and moderate demands could preserve the gains of collective bargaining while mitigating its unintended costs."
Left wingers love unions not because they help workers, but because they can be used to push the left wing agenda

New York's Shrinking Millionaire Share Now Costs It Up to $12 Billion a Year, New Data Show - "New York’s share of America’s millionaire households fell from 12.7 percent in 2010 to 8.7 percent in 2022, the steepest relative decline of any state, according to the Citizens Budget Commission’s (CBC) Competitive NYS: Value Proposition Tracker, a nonpartisan think tank and watchdog. Had the state simply held its 2010 share, the watchdog estimates, personal income tax collections would have been roughly $10.7 billion higher in tax year 2022 alone. The National Taxpayers Union Foundation (NTUF), a Washington-based advocacy group that campaigns for lower taxes, reached a similar conclusion in a May study. Using a 2013 baseline and counting both state and local taxes, it put the annual cost at $12.2 billion. The baselines differ; the direction does not. No state is shedding its slice of the nation’s million-dollar earners faster than New York... The fiscal exposure is unusually concentrated. A single New York millionaire pays as much state and local tax as roughly 39 average residents, according to the NTUF, while the Tax Foundation estimates the top one percent of earners contribute about 45 percent of state income tax receipts. Per capita state and local collections stand at $12,495, fully 78 percent above the national average and the highest in the country... The state’s economy, at roughly $2.5 trillion, remains the country’s third-largest behind California and Texas, and the city’s population rebounded in 2023 and 2024. The rebound, however, “was driven by international immigration, not returning high earners,” she says, leaving a heavier load on a narrowing base of top taxpayers. For the investment migration market, domestic relocation could prove the first link in a longer chain. The same households weighing Miami over Manhattan are increasingly the ones driving record American demand for golden visas and second citizenships, a trend Shah flagged to IMI as early as 2024, when she observed that even former EB-5 investors were beginning to look beyond the US."
Weird. Left wingers keep telling us that rich people will never move

Christina Henderson on X - "I wish more journalists would point out that Sen. McConnell is essentially on paid sick & medical leave. The same employment protection he has spent his career blocking other Americans from having."
Left wing logic: everyone needs to have an identical benefits package and giving employers the freedom to tailor theirs is the same as banning people from getting one. Left wingers hate choice and freedom so much

Austin city audit finds nonprofit contract performance shortfalls - "Austin paid nonprofit organizations millions of dollars for family, health and social services they did not fully deliver, according to a city audit that found contractors missed nearly half of the performance targets reviewed... The shortfalls were often substantial. More than half of the missed targets fell at least 40% below the amount nonprofits had agreed to provide... The nonprofit contracts audit focuses on the city’s oversight of nonprofit contracts rather than the amount of money devoted to social services. But its findings could sharpen questions about whether Austin is getting the services it pays for as council members weigh reductions to nonprofit funding and a major expansion of the city office overseeing homelessness policy... Contractors must explain missed goals, but the city does not consistently require corrective action, reduce payments or impose other consequences. “As a result, the city fully paid nonprofits that did not meet most of their performance expectations,” auditors wrote. The audit also found that departments do not consistently conduct detailed evaluations after contracts end or share performance problems with other city offices. Departments complete a basic closeout checklist, but auditors said it does not thoroughly assess the quality of the work, whether deadlines were met, whether the nonprofit provided good value or how well it corrected instances of noncompliance. Without a stronger evaluation process, the city could renew contracts or award new ones to organizations with known performance problems"
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 on X - "Nonprofits have hollowed out our state capacity and corrupted the progressive project"
sonch on X - "‘corrupted’? The ‘progressive project’ *isn’t* to maximize gov’t outflows so that Smart, connected ‘progressives’ can use Nice Smart bureaucratic maneuvers such as ‘’’nonprofits’’’ to siphon sinecures for themselves off it?"
This doesn't stop left wingers hating profit and thinking it's responsible for all the problems of the world
Clearly, the problem was they didn't spend enough money, so the nonprofits need to get even more funding!

Links - 17th August 2026 (2 - Jason Arday)

2026-08-17T17:12:00.000+08:00

The Arday Affair - "The centre of gravity in the Arday Affair has shifted. Public discussion no longer focuses on evidence that Cambridge University’s youngest black holder of a professorial chair plagiarised considerable portions of his PhD, embellished his c.v. with three academic appointments at institutions that now deny it, and claimed to be the author of a book that was never written. The focus has moved on to the question of why he was appointed in the first place, and what that tells us about the state of academe. This is good. For Jason Arday himself I feel somewhat sorry. Yes, he’s been serially dishonest. And yet, from what I’ve observed, he really believes his own lies. In brushing aside critics as “racially motivated”, he sounds as if he sincerely means what he says. He’s trapped in a world of fantasy. Whatever his personal guilt, there’s a tragic quality to his predicament. For, when reality does finally break through, Nemesis will enter, too. A terrible reckoning will cause the self he’s constructed to disintegrate. I fear for his life. And that makes me angry—but not with his critics. It makes me angry at all the adults who failed to call him out. Who indulged him. Who lowered the threshold so he could clamber over it. Who encouraged him to dismiss criticism as expressions of ‘eurocentric’, colonialist, racist bad faith. Who aided and abetted the elaboration of his fantasy, year after year. Latest among them are the eight professors and the vice-chancellor’s deputy on the committee that unanimously recommended his Cambridge appointment. Evidently, they failed to scrutinise him. But why? One leading candidate for the answer is the identity of the applicant: an autistic man of African heritage, possessing double membership of historically marginalised and victimised groups. I find this explanation entirely plausible. I’ve witnessed at first-hand how some professors, even at our most prestigious universities, use their victim-identity as a get-out-of-gaol card. How they deploy it to trump intellectual standards and by-pass accountability before the bar of reason. And how their anti-rational behaviour prevented neither their appointment nor their promotion. Several years ago, I was invited to take part in a panel discussion about empire in Oxford. One of my fellow panellists was a female professor of international relations. At one point in our discussion, I turned to her and said, “A few moments ago, you said X. Now you’ve just said Y. They’re not consistent”. Waving her hand imperiously, she swept my complaint off the table, exclaiming, “Enough of your donnish, tutorial tactics!” I was struck dumb, feeling—and I use the word advisedly—unmanned. But, later, I reflected, “Are there no rules to this game any longer? And if not, what on earth is the point?” Clearly, our discussion had not been a searching out of the truth together by common submission to the disciplines of logic and evidence. It was merely the occasion for the declamation of a preferred narrative and silencing criticism by the insinuation of bad faith. Hence, ‘tactics’. But there was more. For, my tactics had also been described as ‘donnish’, which connotes fusty white males in tweed jackets, reeking of pipe smoke circa 1950. My fellow panellist was also exploiting her political power as a member of a group commonly stereotyped as victims (women) over a member of a group commonly stereotyped as victimisers (men). I was aware that, in response to the dismissal of my criticism, my tongue was tied, partly because the one doing the dismissing was a woman and I was a man. And her choice of words took care to remind me of that. Rather than a forum for finding out the truth, our discussion had been an arena for the exercise of power. This was no isolated incident. In my recent book, The New Dark Age: Why Liberals must Win the Culture Wars, I report one of many similar cases on the far side of the Atlantic. After serving as a professor of political science at Alberta’s Mount Royal University for fourteen years, Frances Widdowson was fired in 2021. Why? Because she challenged the university’s policy of requiring its members to ‘respect’ and ‘value’ indigenous ways of knowing. When she disagreed that traditional native American ‘star knowledge’ should be viewed in the same way as astronomical science, indigenous studies professors accused her of racist harassment, making the campus ‘unsafe’ for them. Widdowson sees her particular experience as an instance of a wider phenomenon in universities, where differential treatment on the basis of one’s identity “is becoming the norm”. The silver lining of the Arday Affair’s dark cloud is that it has lifted the lid on this problem in academe, just as the murder of Henry Nowak exposed it among the police. Now it’s up to us to get the measure of it. A local investigation by the University of Cambridge isn’t enough. We need a national inquiry into the corrupting effect of identity politics on our universities."
Left wingers are still insisting that there's no proof that he plagiarised, or that he was innocent because Cambridge cleared him. They really can't deviate from their programming

Love the UK - Bring back common sense on X - "BREAKING: Jason Arday has been found dead. The police say the circumstances are not suspicious. He spent years building a life on claims that did not hold up. Students who questioned him were shut down, labelled, and left carrying the cost. When the evidence started piling up he did not step forward and own it. He could have said the simplest thing: that a small lie grew, that the rewards made it hard to stop, and that proper checks earlier might have forced him to face it and get help. Instead he kept going, gathered public letters of support, and waited for the next wave to pass. The book coming out this week was the final weight he could not carry. Blaming the media for this is a form of gaslighting. Journalists did what they are supposed to do. They looked, they checked, they reported what they found. The people who should be sitting with this are the ones who never looked. The universities that waved him through. The broadcasters and presenters who put him on air without scrutiny. The institutions that treated his race as a substitute for due diligence and turned him into a symbol instead of a person who needed honest challenge. If those same people had pushed back years ago instead of elevating him, giving him the Cambridge post, the book deal and the platforms, he might still be here. Intervention and accountability would have been harder in the short term and kinder in the long one. He never had to practise either. The DEI shield closed down every criticism before it could land, and the people holding that shield now want to point the finger anywhere but at themselves. It is always a tragedy when a young man dies, especially if the choice was his. Standing up and taking responsibility would have been the harder and better path. He was never required to walk it. RIP Jason - the system failed you."

Billy Bragg chan on X - "He died doing what he loved: emotionally manipulating people into thinking he was a victim"
A lot of left wing cope involves blaming Cofnas. Apparently Cofnas tricked Arday into plagiarising as well as lying about his life

Eli Steele on X - "This is tragic. No one wished this for Jason Arday. The tragedy is that he went down the wrong road, and the people he met on that road enabled him. They looked the other way to avoid the lie and to profit off what his presence gave them. But a house of cards can only stand for so long before reality comes along. The deeper tragedy is that no one ever told Jason Arday he did not have to do this, that he did not have to fly like Icarus. Had someone stopped him earlier on that fateful road, who knows what he might have become. That is the tragedy here."
Given that he sent the police and a law firm after those who tried to expose his lies, he was not innocent

Enguerrand VII de Coucy on X - "The story that will be spun about Jason Arday will be that his death lies at the feet of the people who called out his serial fabulations for being what they so transparently were, but the real story is of an elite academic world that was so excited by a compelling narrative that they rushed a clearly mentally unbalanced man with no real qualifications to the heights of academia because he ticked so many useful boxes. If anybody had stopped to drill into his story BEFORE we got to the point that he was a notable enough figure for others to begin to drill into it none of this would have happened"
Left wing logic - if you expose black people's plagiarism and lies and they kill themselves, you're a murderer. Of course, if someone the left disapproves of kills himself or is killed because of left wing incitement of violence, they celebrate (eg Charlie Kirk).

Jay Beecher on X - "Very sad and tragic news re Jason Arday. As with Virginia Giuffre, who also took her own life after her false allegations began to be exposed and she was due to finally take the stand and be cross-examined, those who blindly believed Arday's clearly questionable lies, who attacked his critics and elevated him into the public eye, are partly to blame for his death. If common sense had prevailed, perhaps both he and Giuffre would have been given the help they needed and they'd still be alive today. Giuffre was blindly believed because she was a woman - anyone questioning her claims with facts and logic or saying she needed help was branded a 'victim-shamer'. Arday was blindly believed because he was black - anyone questioning his claims with facts and logic or saying he needed help was branded a racist. But the truth is that it is never inappropriate to question the veracity of what someone claims, for neither gender nor race play any form of role in the ability for a person to tell a lie. And political correctness/wokeness - often fanatically promoted/enforced by journalists/activists - intentionally suppresses common sense, often with dire consequences...
She definitely committed suicide. She'd written to her ghostwriter on how she intended to take her life, and the method. She'd also lost custody of her children and was battling to have a judge throw out Rina Oh's lawsuit against her. Around a week before she sent her suicide email and wrote a (strange) will, the judge rejected her petition and said she'd have to take the stand and be cross-examined (for the first time). Her lie about only having four days left to live and being involved in a serious car crash being exposed in the press also pushed her over the edge. Re Arday, you're spot on. Cambridge Uni needs to hold an inquiry into why he was hired in the first place and no checks were made."

GB Politics on X - " NEW: MP Zarah Sultana has claimed that if Jason Arday were a "white middle-class academic," he "would not have been hounded by the British press in the way he was""
Saskia on X - "Here we go then. Was literally waiting for this boll**ks to begin. The death of Jason Arday is tragic and disturbing. DEI incentives helped elevate and protect a story built on serious exaggerations and lies. Those claims were allowed to grow for years until the public exposure became too much. In his 2012 appearance on Surprise Surprise, even his missus presented his claimed achievements as fact. It’s reasonable to think his kids largely believed that version of his life up until the last few weeks too. He was unlikely to get the mental health support he clearly needed. That sector is full of low expectations and a deep reluctance to apply the usual standards to certain people for fear of being called racist. Few on the progressive side were willing to suggest deeper personal or psychological problems while the story still fitted their preferred narrative. What lessons will actually be learned? Almost certainly none. We’re only likely to see further efforts to hide the problems created by an ideology that rewards identity and narrative over evidence and accountability - as Zarah demonstrates here. My thoughts are with his children."

Vladimir Poutine™ on X - ""If Jason Arday were a white middle-class academic, he would not have been hounded by the British press in the way he was." Sir Tim Hunt was awarded a Nobel prize for his research and was hounded into retirement over inoffensive jokes made in one speech. A distinguished, decades long career torn from him. Over literally nothing but progressive butthurt and hatred of "old white men". Dr Matt Taylor who was part of a team which landed the first probe on a comet was made to publicly apologise for wearing a shirt designed by a female friend of his - once again because you progressive loons lost your minds over cartoons. These two men did nothing wrong whatsoever and you hounded them viciously. Plagiarists and liars, and those within the academies who supported them, having their lies and plagiarism exposed is no crime. Save your breath."

Millennial Woes on X - "It's awful about Jason Arday, and yes the gormless female academics bear the ultimate responsibility (like the dog-owner with their pitbull), but let's not forget that the man was a pathological liar and serial fraudster. Yes, he shouldn't have been facilitated, but he did it willingly and purely for personal gain. They were prepared to be lied to, he was prepared to lie."

Philip Proudfoot on X - "Jason Arday is dead. Right-wing reactionary media did this. Relentless public attacks on what should have been an internal university matter and not the subject of a mass media frenzy. Blood on their hands."
SpongeBOZZ on X - ">man builds entire career on fraud
>Rightfully loses his job and gets clowned
>Commits suicide
>"oMg tHiS PoOr iNnOcEnT MaN, hOw CoUlD ThEy HaTe On HiM tHeY HaVe bLoOd oN tHeir HanDs"
Maybe dont try to lie your way to the top, if you can't handle heat when you get called out."
Of course, without the "relentless public attacks", the establishment would've covered it up - as they tried to for so long

Meme - planefag @planefag: "Look who's lecturing us on "relentless public attacks." *Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann 'smirking'*"

Queen Bee on X - "Here we go. Nobody in the media “did this”. A young man taking his own life is an absolute tragedy, and my heart goes out to everyone who knew and loved him, but turning his death into a weapon against people who questioned him helps nobody. For decades, Jason Arday made claims about his life which were accepted, repeated and celebrated by friends, employers and the media. When serious questions were finally asked, the resulting humiliation must have been utterly crippling. If anything, the tragedy here is that so many people around him enabled something that could never withstand scrutiny. They didn't protect him by doing that. They helped paint him into a corner from which he may have felt there was no escape. That is desperately sad. But blaming journalists and commentators for discovering the truth is neither fair nor helpful."

Eric S. Raymond on X - "Jason Arday has committed suicide. In former times, this would have been considered an honorable exit from a situation in which one has utterly disgraced oneself. Today, I fear, it will only produce a major chorus of "You were all so MEAN to him!". In an ideal world, this would trigger a wave of copycat suicides by DEI hires who can no longer live with the shame of their existence. Alas, we won't get that."

Sangita Myska on X - "The ideological, right wing, racist media that hounded Jason Arday - shame on you and your monstrous witch hunt. The 41 year old was found dead at his home today. He was complicated, vulnerable, and at times reckless but he was a human being . He didn’t deserve to be treated as fodder in a culture war. Cambridge and the other institutions that benefited from his appointment must also be hold themselves to account for their part in his story. RIP Jason Arday. My condolences go to his friends and family."
Accountability for those that the left approves of is harassment. Harassment of people the left disapproves of this accountability that's why they claim cancel culture doesn't exist
If you resist the left's attempt to radically remake and corrupt society, you are starting a culture war and are a bad person

lizzy on X - "He championed himself on fighting rascism racial inequality and how black people should have the same opportunities he was an inspiration to black people only to be found out to be liar . His legacy is how to lie and cheat ur way into a prestigious job ."
Lucas on X - "Shame on you Sangita. You and your leftist ideology put this totally unimpressive lying black man where he did not belong. If he were white this would not have happened as he never would have got a job at Cambridge through their DEI shit!"
Yetomy on X - "I don't think it was a witch hunt though; didn't he resign in disgrace?"
Emily Keeler on X - "He was a liar who got called out. ‘Racist’, really? For saying he didn’t run 600 miles in 6 days, some of it on a broken leg?"
C F on X - "His left wing beliefs killed him, as usual the left refuse to take responsibility."
Gary Younge on X - ""When people talk about the need for Black Excellence I counter with an insistence on Black mediocrity: the right for black people to be as average, flawed, compromised & mistaken as any other group of people. The right, ultimately, to be human." R.I.P. Jason Arday
From Pigeoholed: Creative Resistance as an Act of Freedom"

Eric Christen on X - "You lied about him he lied about himself and your DEI cult caused all of this. Congratulations sociopath."
A perosn on X - "Exactly, they did this, they abandoned him, they've learned nothing and want to blame us."

i/o on X - "Reaction from right: "He was used by the academic establishment to score DEI points; it is to blame."
Reaction from the left: "We told the racists that if they continued their witch hunt, this would happen."
My reaction: Maybe the guy who spent his adulthood lying, used these lies and his race to run a much-too-easy grift, and then threatened and maligned those who dared to call him to account finally felt some guilt about the way he had behaved, and ended his life the way he had lived it: Irresponsibly and with moral cowardice."

Barry Wall on X - "The Haldane Loophole: The Angle on Arday You Don’t Know About
Arday and the cronies of Cambridge do not exist in a vacuum. To think so is to fail to see the key changes that occurred in the university sector since the creation of something called UK Research and innovation, UKRI as it is known, in 2017. Something important happened at that time that most people missed. Why wouldn't they, after all it seemed like a dry exercise in funding allocation for the HE sector even if you were aware. In reality it was anything but, and it's a story worth telling.UKRI is the main public body that funds research and innovation across the United Kingdom. Its creation dissolved the previous research councils covering science, medicine, social science, arts and humanities, along with Innovate UK and Research England, bringing it under one organisation, UKRI. It controls billions of pounds (8.8 billion in 25/26) of taxpayer money each year and decides which projects, universities and researchers get funded. But there is a problem, an overarching one that many still fail to recognise flows directly from the Equality Act 2010 and the subsequent Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED). UKRI, like so many of these out of control Quangos, has institutionalised and embedded EDI as a core part of its mission and operations with a dedicated Equality, Diversity and Inclusion strategy titled “research and innovation by everyone, for everyone.” Downstream individual research councils (EPSRC, Research England, BBSRC and others) publish their own multi-year EDI action plans. These treat EDI as fundamental to high-quality research, diversity intrudes at every stage of the funding cycle, they monitor award rates by protected characteristics, push for more diverse panels, and encourage or require EDI-related statements and inclusive practices in applications and project design... This dumbing down, the abandonment of excellence and meritocratic rigour, and the ascendancy of EDI in all its destructive force from implementation to infection of the funding pipeline did not occur by chance, but does illustrate a perfect Chesterton's Fence example. This demolition of a fence that has allowed Cambridge, with its Jason Arday and his boss Hilary Cremin, to behave in such a way was built into the creation of UKRI within The Higher Education and Research Act 2017 from the beginning, it is not a bug it is a feature.The Haldane principle is the long-standing UK convention that decisions about which individual research projects should be funded are best made by researchers themselves through peer review, rather than by politicians or civil servants. It is named after Richard Burdon Haldane, who chaired the committee that produced the 1918 Machinery of Government report. The core idea is that ministers set the overall science budget and high-level priorities, but the detailed allocation of grants to specific projects and researchers should be left to independent experts judging quality and excellence... The old formulation, set out clearly by David Willetts in 2010, involved evaluating “quality, excellence and likely impact.” The new legal definition dropped those two crucial elements: “researchers themselves” and “excellence.” It now reads that decisions are best taken “following an evaluation of the quality and likely impact of the proposals (such as a peer review process).” This was a deliberate softening, and it opened the flood gates for the modern day snake oil sellers, the likes of Arday and his cronies; along with, I suspect, thousands of others across academia and by default the public and private sector, hamstrung by a funding chain predicated on EDI compliance. The 2017 statute opened the door to the infection of EDI. Once the legal text no longer insisted on researcher-led excellence as the core standard, it became much easier for other criteria to be layered on top and in the years after UKRI was formed, that is exactly what happened. EDI requirements, diversity statements, inclusive excellence language and identity-focused considerations moved into funding calls, peer-review guidance, panel composition and appointment processes across UKRI and the universities. Officials and administrators could still claim they were evaluating “quality and likely impact” while expanding what those words meant. The formal defence of pure scholarly merit had been wounded, and if we do not address it; that wound could be fatal. The downstream effects are now highly visible. We have seen rapid promotions and high-profile appointments justified by identity narratives rather than by the quality, originality and excellence of the scholarship. The Arday case is one high-profile example, but again it is not isolated. When the formal standard of excellence is diluted at the legislative level, the institutions respond accordingly. Peer review becomes less rigorous, scrutiny of credentials weakens, fabrication and plagiarism are more easily overlooked. If the candidate fits the preferred story or box in need of ticking they are in, driven of course by the incompetent grievance scholars and the Lanyard sporting bureaucrats who now hold sway over everything. A careful change of a few words in legislation and standards collapse, as they have, followed by years of cultural pressure from the expanding EDI industry and its Utopia driven equity zealots. That 2017 change removed a key defence against these snake oil merchants, for what began as a move for strategic flexibility around industrial strategy, became a useful opening for the wider cultural shift being manufactured inside academia itself. The loophole was real, and it was exploited. Excellence is not bigotry. It is the only fair and reliable way to decide who gets scarce public money and prestigious positions. When you attack the word itself in law, you attack the principle. The results are now playing out in plain sight and yet the state shows no intention of restoring the words “excellence” and “researchers themselves” to the statute. Until that happens, every future Arday will have a legal and cultural loophole ready and waiting."

Nigel Jacklin The Good Stats Man on X: "Is the Education Bubble About to Burst?" / X - "The Jason Arday scandal (Cambridge University's youngest black Professor) has generated much interest and criticism of academia. Whilst some link his promotion to DEI, I see a more broader picture:
a sector that is increasingly out of touch.
According to statistics published by the HESA (Higher Education Statistics Agency) the number of academic staff in UK higher education grew from 140,000 in 2000 to around 245,000 in 2025. This 75% increase was associated with a broadening of the university education pool based on the assumption that a better educated population would benefit society and the workplace. As a result, a university degree went from being a desirable qualification for many jobs to being a necessary condition. At the same time children in senior school were persuaded that a degree was a good thing, that they could achieve their dreams and that the lowly jobs their parents had (shop assistant, trades person) were beneath them. Some time ago we analysed the Labour Force Survey, producing a guide to the World of Work. This was designed to help students understand 'what jobs exist,' something schools careers advisers seemed to be not particularly good at. We also ranked jobs by education (the proportion of people working in a given job who had a degree). At the top a significant proportion of those in jobs with degrees were in...education. They were clearly convinced of their own worth. Out in the real world, it now seems people are less convinced... If the reaction to the Jason Arday scandal is anything to go by, many people hold the same level of contempt for academics as academics do for them. Why might this be? Listening to some of those defending Arday it is clear they have a different 'world view.' Whilst Arday is British, he represents the global majority. As such they feel he deserves a place at the heights of academia. In this respect the latest stats from the HESA are informative (see picture). These show that in the latest academic year just over a third of all people employed in Higher Education were non-UK nationals. The biggest growth in the past four years has been in non-EU nationals, up from 33,270 to 46,795, an increase of 41%. Your views on this may depend on whether you have a 'global' outlook (it's good) to a 'national' one (it's bad). You may feel this influx of international talent enriches our universities or just makes them feel less relevant and less 'for Brits like you.' It may be that you are quite happy with life at a local level and see no need to leave your home town and go to university. If you are in the latter group, and see a job as being a means of earning a living more than as a career and part of your identity, these international academics are clearly not going to 'do' it for you. Personally I think we have an over-supply of academics. 'Research' projects highlighted by @CharlotteCGill show just how much cash is being spent on quite ludicrous projects. If I had to choose which part of the bubble should be burst, the projects she lists would be the ones I would start with."

Jason Arday: Times analysis finds ‘impossible’ data in his work

2026-08-17T13:25:00.000+08:00

I saw defenders claiming Jason Arday didn't make up data. But some still claim he didn't plagiarise either, so.

Jason Arday: Times analysis finds ‘impossible’ data in his work
Academic research by the former Cambridge professor is littered with inconsistencies, false funding claims and reused quotes, investigation shows

Professor Jason Arday’s academic research contains “impossible” evidence and is littered with inconsistencies, a new Times analysis of his work has found.

An audit of five years of study conducted by the former University of Cambridge scholar, who is the youngest black person ever appointed to a professorship in the institution’s history, suggests that large parts could be fabricated.

Cambridge has faced questions about academic integrity since allegations against Arday - who resigned on Wednesday - first emerged two weeks ago. Arday issued a resignation statement in which he said "the personal cost" of media scrutiny had become "too great" and that he no longer wished to live "under a constant spotlight".

It followed Cambridge launching an investigation because it said new information had emerged about his "academic qualifications and honorary appointments". The investigation will continue despite his resignation.

Arday’s resignation brings to an end a fortnight period that began when the sociology of education professor was initially accused of plagiarising parts of the PhD dissertation he wrote in 2015. Although Arday has now stepped down, questions remain about years of his research.

The findings include false funding declarations; participant quotes that appear to have been taken from another researcher’s own analysis; and “impossible” samples, such as a breakdown of his participants’ genders, which adds up to 110 per cent.

Arday has come under increasing scrutiny after allegations that he plagiarised his PhD thesis and parts of his published academic research. Arday denies plagiarism and was cleared by investigators at Liverpool John Moores University where he completed his doctorate.

Six academics said the new findings unearthed by The Times could indicate fabrication of his research. A further two have separately and publicly accused him of fabrication in his studies.

Robert Dingwall, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Nottingham, and former editor of two international sociology journals, said of the findings: “The cumulative impact is pretty damning, even if some individual examples might have more innocent explanations in terms of sloppy work or coincidence.”

A Cambridge academic in social sciences, who asked to remain anonymous, said: “It’s disastrous for Cambridge, and it’s disastrous for higher education and for the discipline, because we trade on the belief that we do reliable, informed research. Anyone can do their own research but our credibility comes from doing it properly and rigorously.”

The academic who compiled the new analysis, who asked not to be named, said he had begun reading Arday’s work himself because the first public allegations of plagiarism emerged from “an unpleasant source” and he was “suspicious of prejudice against Arday”.

He said: “But when I started reading, I noticed something much more concerning, because the reports of the studies seemed to show signs of fabrication … which is far worse than plagiarism, and so I decided to look more closely. The more I looked, the more problems I found.”

Arday has previously denied fabricating any of his research. He told The Times last week: “It’s more likely that I’ve made a mistake, there’s a clerical error. It’s not that I’ve fabricated.”

“My understanding of English is improving daily,” a Latin-American academic is quoted in one of Arday’s papers. “Sometimes I struggle to articulate clearly and accurately what I would like to say to the healthcare professionals provided at university.”

There was just one issue. Three years prior, he had attributed the same quote to an Asian female undergraduate. It is one of numerous issues identified with his papers.

In a section of his 2021 paper under the heading “Funding”, Arday wrote: “This research was supported by Mind.” Mind confirmed to The Times that they have “no record of any research we funded or commissioned relating to this”.

The Times also understands that Arday has not applied for ethical approval for his published studies, despite working with human participants to discuss sensitive topics of race and mental health.

Giving a webinar in July 2020 about the paper prior to its publication, Arday referred to a participant who took their own life and read out their quote detailing the “violence of these racialised cultures” in the academic world. Although the published paper used near-identical quotes attributed to a male, mixed-heritage academic, there was no reference to this person taking their own life.

Arday told The Times that it was normal to be “selective” and impossible to use every detail. He said: “I have no reason to fabricate or to exaggerate black people’s suffering in academia.”

The 2021 paper was Arday’s second piece of research into mental health and race at universities, after a 2018 paper that he was forced to retract and republish with corrections.

The new analysis has identified more quotes in his 2018 paper that appear to have been plagiarised from a study by the renowned epidemiologist Anjum Memon and his team, which Arday now claims come from his own participants. While some had been identified, The Times has seen evidence that far more quotes are textually or structurally traceable to Memon’s work.

The academic who compiled the analysis said: “The clearest indicator is that some quotes Arday claims are from participants in his study seem to be reworded fragments of analysis in Memon’s paper, turning an academic paper into fictional participant quotes.”

Professor Anjum Memon, 2016

"Available for men of color who have mental health issues particularly at universities like ours (Russell Group)..." — Male, Black, UG, 12

Arday, 2018

Services were not "available for men of colour who have mental health issues" — Male J, Focus Group 1

Memon, 2016

"I have also found that when you, for instance, discuss how racism impacts your daily existence... that actually a lot of them get uncomfortable..." — Female, mixed heritage, UG, 32

Arday, 2018

"And I have also found that when you, for instance, talk about racism that actually a lot of them cannot deal with it" — Female I, FG1

Memon, 2016

"we are really, really isolated in this space" — Female, Latin American, UG

Arday, 2018

"the mental health service does not always understand. That we are really, really isolated" — Female I, FG1

Analysis and discussion by Memon et al, 2016

"This could play a valuable role in accessing mental health services for BME individuals at university" — Female, mixed heritage, PG, 2

Arday, 2018

"A network of family and friends... could play a valuable role in accessing mental health services, particularly in crisis"

Analysis and discussion by Memon et al, 2016

"the inadequate provision of interpreters only highlights that universities do not value..." — Female, mixed heritage, PG, 20

Arday, 2018

""concerns were still raised over inadequate provision of interpreters particularly in primary care"

Passing off another academic’s research as if it comes from one’s own interviews would amount to fabricating his data, experts said. Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University in New York, said: “I can’t think of any alternative explanations of this … but maybe I just don’t have a good enough imagination.”

Arday’s research relies on interviews with samples of black and minority ethnic students and university staff, discussing their experiences of race and mental health.

In one paper, titled “Attempting to break the chain: reimaging inclusive pedagogy and decolonising the curriculum within the academy”, he says he interviewed a sample of 17 participants. But a breakdown of their races, genders and jobs adds up to 18.

Further oddities appear: he quotes four distinct academics, but says he only interviewed three; quotes five mixed-heritage participants, but interviewed only four; and attributes a quote to participant No 21, in a study that only interviewed 17 or 18 people. Similar issues appear in five studies.

Dingwall said there could be “legitimate privacy reasons” for blurring participant numbers, especially if the participants were known to one another. He added: “However, this decision should always be declared and justified. It does not seem relevant to the focus groups described here.”

In another paper, titled “More to prove and more to lose: race, racism and precarious employment in higher education”, the quote in the title comes from participant No 13, described as an Asian female academic.

However, two paragraphs later, participant 13 is described as a black female academic. Arday has previously said that his title quotes are mostly taken from song lyrics, and other papers feature lyrics by REM and Jimmy Cliff.

In a third paper, studying the experiences of black and minority ethnic staff and students during the pandemic, he says 78 per cent of his interviewees were female and 32 per cent male, totalling 110 per cent.

Sentences explaining his methodology were corrected by one journal, due to plagiarism from Memon. However, new analysis finds these same sentences form the basis for his methodology section in four further papers, despite him retracting them once.

Gelman said: “At some point bad-enough sloppiness is a form of fraud, because if you submit and publish a research report, you are implicitly attesting to its honesty and accuracy.”

Another sociologist, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the findings gave him “cause for concern”. He said: “Whether this is fraud, misconduct or something else is a matter for legal judgment or the judgment of the journals and universities involved.

“A wider ethic is that as academics we are responsible for reporting our methods, and using data, accurately. If it was one of my colleagues, I would advise them to contact the editors of the journals to make the corrections or retract the articles.”

The University of Cambridge has previously said that any inquiries must be carried out “by the institution at which the research was carried out”, and that it had passed information to the relevant institutions.

On Wednesday night the university said: “The University of Cambridge has begun an investigation following new information about Professor Arday’s academic qualifications and honorary appointments. In order to ensure a fair process, we will not comment further until this has concluded.

“Separately, there remains a number of ongoing complaints regarding academic misconduct, which are being handled in line with our Misconduct in Research policy. This is consistent with our previous statement on the matter.”

It is not clear what if any statutory mechanism exists to force an independent inquiry. The Office for Students, the independent regulator of higher education in England, only has the remit to investigate course quality, management and free speech, while the separate Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education only takes complaints from students.

The University of Durham, which employed Arday when he published the 2021 paper, said: “We have looked into this, and there are no records that the research discussed at the July 2020 webinar or the subsequent paper accepted in September 2020, fell under our institutional ethical oversight.”

The journal Higher Education, which published his 2021 paper, investigated the ethical approval of the study but concluded that at the time he had submitted, ethical approval was not a condition of publication so there was no breach of their rules.

Its editor, Professor Simon Marginson, told The Times: “Journals do not administer research ethics, universities do: you need to go there in relation to ultimate accountability for the ethical conduct of the research.”

Liverpool John Moores University said in 2025 it received allegations of academic misconduct against Arday. “A confidential procedure was conducted in response to those allegations and Professor Arday’s PhD still stands. We will not comment further on a private matter between the university and a former student.”

Arday did not respond to requests to comment on the new findings.

Links - 17th August 2026 (1 - Trans Mania)

2026-08-17T09:02:00.000+08:00

Róisín Michaux on X - "Holy shit. The EU Commission gave €2.4 million to a researcher for a project intended to "free science and society from the unfounded dogma of sex categories" and "to challenge the ancient categorization of humans into men and women and the unjust gendered social order this categorization helps maintain." The grant has resulted in just three research papers, all concerning sexual attraction, based on internet surveys and an existing dataset (from what I can tell, there is nothing more). What the hell?? Two and a half million? It's like that UK project that got €750k and produced a couple of internet surveys on "fragile heterosexuality"."

Amy Hamm: Court letting 'fetish gear' in woman's changeroom conflates sex, gender - "The city of Edmonton has successfully quashed a judicial review of the Alberta Human Rights Commission's (AHRC) refusal to hear a complaint about women's sex-based rights. The city was also awarded $625 in costs for their successful application against the woman seeking the review... The case centred around academic Kathleen Lowrey, who, along with her 14-year-old daughter, encountered a male in overt sexual fetish gear using the female change room at the Bonnie Doon Leisure Centre in February 2025. Lowrey argued that the facility's policy, which allows males who self-identify as women to enter the women's-only areas, compromises the privacy, dignity, and safety of all females... In an affidavit filed with her application for judicial review, Lowrey described entering the Bonnie Doon female change room with her daughter only to find "a bald man wearing only a black thong outlining his penis and a pair of artificial rubber breasts slung around his neck." Lowrey wrote that she wound up calling police after the leisure centre staff told her that the person in the thong was perfectly entitled to be in the women's area, fetish gear and all... "It keeps going against women in legal case after legal case. It is an accumulating record of smug institutional disregard for women and girls in Canada, and everywhere we attempt to contest policies put in place by gender activists. But we are learning from each kick in the teeth, and we are not giving up""

Wesley Yang on X - "The Finnish study is orders of magnitude more complete and rigorous than the entire literature cited in justification on behalf of the false claim that pediatric gender medicine is evidence based combined. All the criticism of an enormous study tracking every single person receiving gender medicalization in a country, in some cases for decades, by people willing to cite a collection of the shoddiest pseudo-studies ever assembled on any subject, is tragifarcical cope by people whose bad faith has long ago been established beyond question."

Labour Heartlands on X - "The irony would be funny if it were not so grotesque. The Green Party, we are told, is considering a policy that would stop parents consenting to non-medical circumcision for boys on the grounds that children should not be subjected to irreversible procedures before they can give informed consent. Fair enough. That is a serious argument. But this is the same political movement that has spent years demanding “gender-affirming care” for children, opposing the ban on puberty blockers for under-18s, and treating child transition as a matter of liberation rather than safeguarding. So let us get this straight. A religious circumcision, practised by Jewish and Muslim communities for centuries, is suddenly an intolerable violation of bodily autonomy. But placing distressed and sexually confussed children on a pathway involving puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and lifelong medicalisation is apparently progressive healthcare. That is not a coherent child safeguarding position. It's the ideology of cult. Either children are too young to consent to life-changing interventions, or they are not. You cannot discover the principle of bodily autonomy only when it is useful for attacking religious minorities, then forget it the moment gender ideology walks into the room. There is a serious debate to be had about children, consent, medicine, religion and bodily autonomy. But the Greens do not get to pose as guardians of the child while cheering on medical and social transition for minors. Lets not pretend the Greens have not discovered child safeguarding. They have discovered selective outrage, and spooned hypocrisy over the top."

Steve McGuire on X - "After the last election, Rep. Moulton said: “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” He added that Dems are “out of touch” and “losing on issues like this.” Then the groups mobilized against him. Now he supports a bill that calls for redefining Title IX to include gender identity."

Local 12/WKRC-TV on X - "The Cleveland Clinic has agreed to end youth transgender care and has committed millions of dollars for detransition care."

Boris Spider on X - "One of the most damning pieces of evidence that WPATH was, in fact, engaged in a campaign of deception is that they paid Johns Hopkins to conduct systematic reviews on the strength of the evidence in support of pediatric medicalization, but when the reviews came back showing the evidence was poor, WPATH shut down further study and blocked Hopkins from publishing its results."

The way forward - "one thing that does make me genuinely proud to be British is that we are now known to trans activists across the world as “TERF Island”. And that’s important because the UK punches above its weight in terms of cultural exports. What we are doing here is watched by the rest of the world. And what we are doing is standing firm against an ideology imported wholesale from the US; an ideology that has the backing of some of the world’s most powerful people. And I’m not talking about elected politicians and peers who make the law in that building over there. I’m talking about the technocrats, those in Silicon Valley, with the power to shape minds. Social media has become a vector for body dysmorphia, and pornography has made the prospect of growing up female a sentence to sexual subservience. Many young people now believe that their bodies can be changed like a gaming avatar. Today, lesbians only exist online as fodder for male fantasies. It’s no wonder so many girls want to opt out of womanhood. Men who use porn are increasingly becoming dead to the touch of another human, preferring to consume fantasies through a screen. For a significant minority of men, there are entire genres of “Sissy porn” and forced feminisation that are feeding their fetishistic delusion that they can change sex. For these men — typically middle-aged white men who call themselves transgender — “woman” never involves scrubbing the skidmarks out of the loo; it means being a sex object... profit-driven social media companies have colonised space online. Unelected beardy players have programmed the parameters of what is deemed acceptable speech according to their own agenda. The rise of transgenderism, both as it manifests in confused young people and in the midlife crises of men, is just one facet of the shift towards online living. This new form of power demands a new form of resistance. We need to think differently. Not that many years ago, I would never have imagined that I would be the one walking past protesters to speak — I would have been one of those holding a placard. And that’s been a shock, because being a progressive left winger was part of my identity. The mob protesting here today — those attempting to intimidate and silence people whose views they fundamentally misunderstand — have the support of everyone from President Biden and Mark Zuckerberg to Russell T. Davies. And until the most powerful political figures in the land can say only women have a cervix without fear of reprisals, the time for political purity is past. The threat to our humanity from transgenderism transcends the divisions of left and right. The divide is between those who acknowledge reality and those who commit dangerous lie. So wherever we stand, politically or socially, it must be side by side. This should not be a difficult fight — not least because sustaining a lie takes more effort than upholding the truth. And the anger we face is because our detractors know that their position is indefensible. We should take heart from the fact that the vast majority of those as yet unaffected by this social media-borne virus instinctively know that sex matters because, like it or lump it, everyone’s mum knows where babies come from. Mother Nature is a TERF. Lesbian feminist philosopher Mary Daly came up with the idea of patriarchal reversals. She saw them everywhere. But the obvious example is the idea that Eve — a woman — came from Adam — a man. The shift in shame is a perfect example of a patriarchal reversal, we’d need not be ashamed of knowing that sex is real any more than we are of being lesbian, gay or bisexual. We don’t need so-called trans women to voice our entirely legitimate opinions for us in case we are thought unkind. We don’t need to demonstrate that we are good people before expressing our views to appease some moron who thinks that biology is a colonial concept. It is baffling to me that we are so defensive. We have allowed ourselves to be forced back into a shame-filled closet by the ignorance and insouciance of the wider world. Where was once there was a subtle way of sussing out if someone was same-sex attracted — a hyperawareness of whole gestures and giveaways — today, a similar system has developed for those who know that sex is real and that it can’t be changed. Some have the colours of the suffragettes or dinosaurs in their social media profiles, whereas others refuse to play the pronoun game. And, just as in years gone by, the courtesy dance around each other before we come out was a dangerous, heretical belief that sex matters. We need to stop hiding, to stop deflecting and to boldly tell the unvarnished truth that it is impossible to change sex. Those who should be ashamed are the perverts and straight men who call themselves lesbian, that the surgeons who right now are removing the healthy breasts of teenage girls, that the likes of Stonewall CEO Nancy Kelly, who is currently whining that the multi-million pound protection racket she runs is being unfairly targeted because journalists at the BBC are finally doing their job. They’re the public figures like LGBT envoy Lord Herbert. It’s his job to engage with this debate, to listen, to show some leadership. And yet, I can’t see him in this room. Lord Herbert, if you see this, if you ever watch this, I would like to tell you that through your silence, you have allowed yourself to become complicit. And what will go down in history as the biggest medical scandal of a generation. We need to remember that the shame is not ours. We do not need to apologise for being lesbian, gay or bisexual — or for knowing what that means. In a way, we’ve been here before. Just as in the past, we have to lose our shame. The way forward is to come out and to stand together with pride."
From 2021

wokeandwoofing on X - "I brainwashed my son into thinking he was a girl. Chemicaly castrated him with puberty blockers. Then pursuaded him to have his penis cut off. And now the Girl Guides won't let him in. How could anyone be so cruel to a child? 😡"

Meme - "How it started:
Alec Gunter @PunishedAG: Only TERFs could simultaneously make their entire identity about having a uterus or giving birth then get mad when people refer to them as "person with a uterus" or "birthing person""
How it's going:
Alec Gunter @PunishedAG: Actually just hallucinating shit to be upset about
Taylor Silverman @tmsilverman: Never forget that the left tried to erase the word "mother"."

Canadian teen acquitted on ‘hate crime’ charges for warning of trans surgery dangers - "An 18-year-old Ontario student has been acquitted on “hate crime” charges after putting up flyers calling out the dangers posed by transgender surgeries."

Politics UK on X - "🚨 NEW: The NHS will recruit children as young as 11 for the puberty blockers trial set to begin in August"
Chris Rose on X - "“We have taken the steps to ban your children from watching YouTube but if you would like to sign up for them to be chemically castrated, go right ahead.”"

Chicago Sun-Times on X - "In a report published Tuesday, the group found “anti-trans violence is often compounded by broader structural barriers,” and outlined suggested policy changes on a wider range of issues, including housing, workplace practices, and health care access."
Jonathan Kay on X - "The article contains zero examples of “anti-trans violence” …. unless you count the example of a biologically male transit worker who (it is speculated) committed suicide because of being misgendered by the public"

PeterSweden on X - "IT'S REAL BAD. The British government just came with a new bill that could throw parents 5 years in jail if they try to stop their child from wanting to change gender. I had a look at what the new "Conversion Practices Bill" says. And it's WAY WORSE than you think. Any "conduct" from a parent toward their child that causes the child to "believe that they have or do not have" a "particular" identity will be in violation of what they call "conversion practice". In other words, if the parents tell their child that they are either male or female and the parent is using what they call "coercive words" which causes what they define as "serious alarm" to the child that has a "substantial adverse effect" on the child's day to day activities, this could then be enough to put a parent 5 years in prison. PLUS an UNLIMITED FINE. Years in prison and a limitless fine, where do they even come up with this? You just know that the activists will use this law to persecute and throw any parent in prison who is in opposition of woke gender ideology. The state wants to take away parenting rights from the parents and have full control over children. This comes just days after Britain restarted trials where they will give puberty blockers to children as young as 11. Britain is turning into a truly evil country at this point. This goes against all human rights."

Andrew Lawton on X - "2018: "No one is ever going to jail for 'misgendering' so stop fear mongering."
2019: "Mother, 38, is arrested in front of her children and locked in a cell for seven HOURS after calling a transgender woman a man on Twitter""

Meme - "They're calling it the most trans post of all time"
Mia *Trans flag* @Mia1447613: "Suicide being a sin in christianity is so disgusting"

The Globe and Mail on X - "Supreme Court allows states to ban transgender girls and women from school athletic teams"
Jonathan Kay on X - "No, that’s wrong. Men are still allowed to play, they just have to play with the other men. Please give the gaslighting a rest. It’s 2026. This crap doesn’t work anymore."

Erin for Parental Rights on X - "🚨MUST READ ARTICLE! Remember when I started blowing the whistle 4 years ago on a large concerted effort to secretly sexualize and transition kids while cutting parents out? Here’s one of their actual playbooks — written pro bono by Dentons, the world’s largest law firm, with Reuters and IGLYO. It’s a tactical guide for creating the classroom-to-clinic pipeline:
• No minimum age
• No parental consent
• Override dissenting parents in court
• Keep it quiet to avoid backlash
By the time my own daughter was pulled in, every safeguard was gone. I wasn’t supposed to find out, save her, or speak out. My life continues to be threatened for doing so. So I speak louder. The country is waking up. Their plans are being exposed. Parents are rising and will dismantle every piece of this agenda — the laws, the policies, the captured schools and courts. Read the article. Share it. Get your kids out of public schools. Inoculate them against gender ideology. Show up and fight every bill. We have a LOT of harmful laws to undo & systems to fix. But we will not let up. Parents united will end this.💪🏼"

Jennuh 💜🏳️‍⚧️ on X - "The Supreme Court ruled today that women aren’t allowed in women’s sports if they are trans, this is legal erasure of our humanity based on bigotry and junk science. Don’t tell me the fascists don’t want us dead"
If you don't allow biological males in women's sports they'll kill themselves and it's other people's fault?

Library's 'Drag Queen Story Hour' Strip Show Goes Viral - "A video of a "Drag Queen Story Hour" in Washington state has gone viral on social media. The video is of a drag queen stripper, and although it reportedly occurred over the summer at the King County Public Library in Renton, it was only recently posted to Twitter. One Blogger reported the June 2019 event was advertised as being for "teens and tweens." To date, the video has received nearly 2 million views and many people who posted comments about it asked, "What does this have to do with reading?"... Photos released in July of another drag queen library event at Portland's St. John's Library showed children laying on top of a drag queen on the floor."
Children Stare Up Drag Queen’s Miniskirt During Drag Performer Library Story Hour - "Children attending a “Stories Together With Drag Performers” event in Minnesota saw up a drag queen’s skirt as the drag queen sat spread legged in front of them. A volunteer from the Child Protection League (CPL), a nonprofit organization that seeks to protect children from “exploitation, indoctrination, and violence,” attended the event on Oct. 17 at Ridgedale Library in Hennepin Count"
What I Saw at Drag Queen Story Hour - "The atmosphere in the theatre was reverent, almost church-like. Amid the whines and cries of evident disinterest from the cranky toddlers, I heard lots of “shhhhhs” and “okay now, pay attentions.” These parents were eagerly trying to convince their children that what was about to happen would be very special and very important... I recently read an article in Reader’s Digest about what “really” happens at Drag Queen Story Hours, as explained by drag queen Veranda L’Ni to reporter Elizabeth Yuko. “Despite what you might have heard or read,” said Veranda, “absolutely nothing about our program is adult themed.” Having experienced one myself, I can now comfortably and objectively state that this is flatly untrue. All three queens were hyper-sexually dressed, although to varying degrees. The mildest was the tall drag queen, whose outfit I described above. The most extreme and offensive outfit was worn by a queen who flaunted a double-slitted, tight pink dress that displayed a generous amount of thigh—so much so that when he sat down, all were able to see not only the totality of his thigh, but also his butt cheek. His bodice was translucent, so we could see his fake breasts bouncing around, as well. Somewhere in the middle was the portly queen, who sported a tight bedazzled jumpsuit that hugged his BBL (Brazilian Butt Lift—one to make any woman jealous). Veranda also told Yuko that “the kids are either really shy or super happy.” In this case, at least, they were exclusively the former. The discomfort of the children in the audience was evident as the stories began... For many of them, it was nap time. Kids who nodded off were roused with parental taps on the shoulder, guiding their attention back to center stage. I can say from experience that there are not many things parents will sacrifice a child’s nap for. The behavior reminded me of how my wife and I will try to guide my son’s attention to the center of the altar during Mass... In keeping with the tenor of the whole event, parents nudged their children to stand up and watch the dance number. The parents got up too, clapping and dancing. Some dads in the crowd even whistled in a sort of imitation cat call. Throughout, the perplexity and disinterest of the children was palpable. Kids below a certain age exhibit this pure and beautiful honesty. You know what they are thinking immediately either by facial expression or because they bluntly tell you. Before the imposition of political theory, which events like these are designed in part to effect, children have a natural and straightforward grasp of the dull, the ugly, and the threadbare. The kids at this event could plainly see that it was all three... perhaps we have failed to grasp just how thoroughly silly and bland most of these events are. There may be an extent to which we afford Story Hour too much mystique and cachet by speaking of it in hushed tones of disgust and horror. These emotions, after all, are almost the mirror images of the reverence and urgency with which the true believer parents regard the whole affair. These events are in some deep sense grotesque and perverse, to be sure. But they are also dreary rituals of forced cheer, which characterizes much of the alphabet brigade’s mission in practice on the ground, as opposed to the high-energy charisma and enthusiasm of its more glamorous public face... Story Hour is neither chic nor fun: it’s as bland and coercive as the most uncharitable atheists think religious rituals are. The kids can tell that the whole thing is cringe, which is a sign of hope: those of us who hope to steer kids away from this creepy death cult will be aided by young people’s natural revulsion at all things lame and ridiculous, which can puncture the pretensions of the rainbow Leviathan like a motley balloon. The devil, that proud sprite, cannot bear to be mocked."
I saw someone claim that "Drag queen story times never have adult material or sexually explicit material"

Meme - USA TODAY: "Opinion: My trans daughter, Becky Pepper-Jackson, wanted to play the sport she loves. That simple wish took her all the way to the Supreme Court."
Readers added context: "It has been noted that BPJ made derogatory & sexually abusive remarks towards a number of girls in the locker room. The evidence presented to the court confirms this. AOL has run the story on it. Remarks like "suck my d*ck" and threats of anal and vaginal rape."

Dr Helen Webberley (she/her) on X - "Non-binary people are owed the same quality of care as anyone else. The gap between that entitlement and what actually happens in the clinic? That's a failure of training, not a failure of your identity. My full take:"
How do you treat people with mental illness>

Retard Finder on X - "UC Riverside prof Brandon Andrew Robinson (They/them/theirs) wants to abolish terms like "gay" and "lesbian". he argues these labels harm trans people. This retard is a university professor? Insane."
Weird. Left wingers tell us that rights are not like cake - more for one doesn't mean less for another

Ritchie 🌷 on X - "If I have to explain a joke, it's probably not funny. If you have to explain your gender, it's probably not real."

Sall Grover on X - "Every human has a biological sex. Every human has a sexual orientation. But who has a “gender identity”? We’re told only a tiny minority have one, & no one can even define it, but law & society is being restructured around it. That’s why we’re fighting back. It’s bullshit."

Labour's ultimate irony as they confirm once again they're not party of workers - "Guidance from September this year for schools will instruct them they do NOT have to inform pupils’ parents if their children are questioning their gender. Only where there are “safeguarding issues” (and remember all the recent cases of child cruelty where that has gone so well!) would require the school passing on any information. How has this almost Marxist-like obsession with the state knowing best about our children been able to take such a hold?"
The left wing state thinks it owns children - and ultimately, everyone, after all