Quotulatiousness

August 6, 2026

More threads unravelling from Professor Jason Arday’s backstory

Filed under: Britain, Education, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

As I mentioned the other day when I first noted this fascinating tale, I don’t think I’d heard of Professor Jason Arday before this week, so pretty much any new facets of the story will be news to me. Here’s an extensive survey of what’s been revealed so far by Donna Louise Flowers:

Cambridge professor Jason Arday
Image from Andrew Doyle

Cambridge Knew in 2023

On 19 May 2023 Martyn Hammersley emailed Hilary Cremin, Head of the Faculty of Education, and Rhys Morgan, Head of Policy. He flagged substantial plagiarism in Arday’s 2018 paper, including quotes attributed to Arday’s own interview subjects that matched quotes from another researcher’s participants. (emails first reported by Nathan Cofnas and later confirmed in The Telegraph)

On 21 June 2023 Morgan replied that it was “not within our remit”. Cremin said Arday had the department’s full support.

That is three years of Cambridge knowing. Everything that followed sits on top of that decision.

In the BBC’s 2023 video marking his appointment, Cremin went further. She said: “We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.” (BBC video, 2023)

Eight months later, on 2 February 2024, Arday was appointed to ITV’s Cultural Advisory Council. Sixteen months after the concerns were raised, on 19–20 September 2024, he led sessions on equity, diversity and inclusion at the National Aspiring Vice Chancellor Development Programme at Bolton.

He was teaching the next generation of vice-chancellors while the questions about his own record remained unanswered by the institution that employed him.

[…]

The Claims, Laid Out Together

Here, in one place, is the full set of claims Jason Arday has made about his life:

  • Diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay at the age of three.
  • Non-verbal until the age of eleven.
  • Unable to read or write until the age of eighteen.
  • Four to five hours of speech therapy every day from the age of three.
  • A mother with five degrees.
  • A benign brain tumour removed a fortnight before his PhD viva, which wiped his memory of the entire thesis; he re-learned it and still passed.
  • Two further brain tumours diagnosed after the PhD, later found to be benign.
  • Deaf in one ear.
  • Ran 30 marathons in 35 days, the last nine after sustaining a hairline fracture that made his leg swell to twice its normal size.
  • Covered 300 miles in three days.
  • Covered 600 miles in six days (later quietly amended in some citations to twelve days).
  • Raised £5.5 million for more than 80 charities.
  • Installed water points in South America and West Africa with WaterAid.
  • Received a severed pig’s head at his parents’ home.
  • Faced a knife-wielding masked man.
  • Received bullets in the post, rape threats against his daughter, threats to make him “top himself”, and other forms of intimidation including corrosive substances and mutilated animals.
  • Came through a professional football club’s academy system and later played semi-professionally.
  • Was on the verge of turning professional at snooker.
  • Awarded an MBE in 2017 and turned it down.
  • Olympic Torch Bearer for London 2012.
  • Appeared in the ITV documentary series Seven Up!
  • Obtained a Masters degree in “psychodynamic practice” from Birkbeck and became a qualified counsellor.
  • Held visiting professorships at the University of Glasgow and Ohio State University.

This is the origin story as it has been told. Almost none of it has been independently verified. Several of the most dramatic claims have been directly contradicted by the organisations or records that should corroborate them.

That is the real failure.

In the rush to be diverse, to be inclusive, to champion a Black, autistic, working-class success story who ticked every box, almost no one stopped to ask the simplest question of all: when you look at these claims as a totality, how plausible are they?

Each claim on its own might have been given the benefit of the doubt. Taken together they form a pattern that should have been obvious long before Carter-Ruck letters and police complaints were required to shut the questions down.

The institutions that elevated the legend spent years repeating it. When the contradictions began to surface they did not investigate. They defended. They edited the websites quietly. They called the scrutiny a vile campaign. They treated the act of checking as the real offence.

Jason Arday did not need to invent a modest success story. He invented a legend. And for years almost no one dared to ask whether any of it was real — because he is Black, and in the current climate that was supposed to be enough.

It was not enough. And it never should have been.

Update: Reportedly after Cambridge opened an investigation into the plagiarism allegations, Professor Arday has submitted his resignation.

Jason Arday, who was touted as the university’s youngest black professor, announced on Wednesday that he was resigning effective immediately from both the university and Jesus College. His resignation came just hours after Cambridge had said it opened an investigation into the allegations after “new information” came to light.

In a statement published by the Good Law Project, Arday said that the “relentless accusations” had taken a “profound toll” on him. He added that he has decided to resign for his “own wellbeing”.

“I have tried to continue because I believe deeply in the values of higher education, in rigorous scholarship, and in the transformative power of universities. I have tried because of my students, my colleagues and the countless people who have written to tell me that my journey gave them hope,” he wrote. “But there comes a point when the personal cost becomes too great. I have a family. I want to be present for them. I want to reclaim some peace, some privacy and some semblance of an ordinary life. I no longer wish to feel as though I am living under a constant spotlight, where every aspect of my life is subject to public examination and judgement.”

The next shoe was funny enough that I assumed it was from the Babylon Bee, but apparently is not parody:

Following Arday’s resignation letter, social media users claimed that the statement itself appeared to have been AI-generated. According to Panagran, the leading AI writing detection software, Arday’s resignation statement was deemed to be 100 percent AI-generated.

Frederick Alexander decrys the fools that bought Arday’s fantastic stories as nothing but the truth and moved mountains to get him advancement at all costs:

The main entrance of Jesus College, Cambridge from Jesus Lane.
Photo by Verbcatcher via Wikimedia Commons.

We may never know the full extent of Jason Arday’s talents. Perhaps he also sang the difficult half of Milli Vanilli, crossed the Atlantic on a lilo with a shattered pelvis, and designed the SpaceX rocket catcher in the margins of his PhD thesis. There is, in truth, no claim he could have made that the intellectual class would not have believed, provided it flattered their view of themselves as good and righteous people.

Did it not occur to him that someone might check? Confronted by the Guardian, Arday has since offered a defence that will live on his Wikipedia page forever despite the efforts of its editors: “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me. Why would I lie?”

It’s probably the most honest thing he’s ever said. More importantly, it describes the workings of his career in the sort of plain language that the sociology department hadn’t quite trained out of him. He thought the Guardian class would believe him because he understood that they wanted to believe him. They were falling over themselves to grant legitimacy to anything he said simply because he was the one saying it. His story bore out their politics, advertised their virtue and bolstered their status. Scrutiny would only spoil the party.

Perhaps this explains why Arday’s writing also got a pass. Here, for instance, is Arday explaining … well, you figure it out.

    As the researcher, textual units concerning the narratives and biographies were identified based on the criteria that the identified themes were fit for purpose in supporting the themes associated with the study.

You would get more sense from a gibberish generator. Academic writing is hell at the best of times, but sociology has mumbo-jumbo built in. Banalities disappear beneath layers of abstraction presumably in an effort to make them sound deep or insightful. Next to this, the plagiarism comes as a relief, another person’s sentences at least making the effort to mean something.

The writing should be disqualifying by itself, but it’s not like Arday tiptoed into the academy while nobody was looking. Cambridge signed him up in the manner of a Premier League football team landing the next Ronaldo, but on the strength of highlight reels that turned out to be AI-generated.

The remarkable thing is not merely that Arday appears to have invented stories about himself. Lots of people do that. I did it when I was nine, trying to convince people I was invisible. Nobody appointed me to a professorship at one of the country’s most prestigious universities. Or rather, formerly prestigious universities. Who can look at these institutions now and not see the wreckage of ideological capture?

They’re calling the fallout “a vile campaign” to undermine Arday’s credibility – of course they are. It’s a smear by “right-wing newspapers” intended to embarrass Arday and those who elevated him. Of course it is. But the embarrassment was born of their own vanity and gullibility. They demanded that everyone believe the story, then labelled anyone who checked it as morally suspect and worthy of a police investigation.

Nearly 15,000 people have signed an open letter declaring the allegations “entirely false”, even as the evidence points the other way. How long before they withdraw their names, reframe events and reposition themselves as the full truth comes to light? Soon they will talk solemnly about the importance of integrity, dissociate themselves entirely from Arday – yesterday a useful idiot, today a serious liability – and somehow still make it about race and right-wing bigotry. This stuff is hardcoded. The rest is just presentation.

The administrators who made the appointment will survive with a few bruises, scapegoating Arday until the media get bored of it. Then they’ll pick up where they left off, a little more careful next time – running the checks, scouring the next candidate’s PhD for plagiarism, testing every fantastical claim against reality, except where reality conflicts with ideology. Which is likely most of it.

The Goddess That Failed by Janice Fiamengo

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On her Substack, Janice Fiamengo shares the foreword to her new book, The Goddess That Failed: Feminism’s Unending War Against Men, Families, and Civilization Itself:

Feminism poses a threat to everything good in western culture, perhaps especially to women’s capacity to love, reason, and exercise self-restraint.

I was an adherent of feminism before I became a critic. I have felt its euphoric exultation and its self-flattering conviction of moral purity. Later, I recognized its hubris and moral hollowness.

I am familiar with feminism’s core texts, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Mary Anne Franks, having studied them and believed in them for years. I understand the psychology and the history of the movement because I lived inside it for many years.

Unlike others who have criticized feminism’s excesses, I contend that although there are some moderate feminists, there was never a moderate feminism inspired by reasonable goals and untainted by anti-male fanaticism. Feminism did not go wrong at some point in history, whether after the Second Wave or before, whether in anti-sex or pro-sex zeal. It was always rooted in resentment and envy, warped by utopian longings and false notions of female moral superiority.

Decades of feminist grievance-mongering and accusation have led inevitably to our present time of ceaseless complaints, anti-western causes, hysterical accusation, rampant divorce, a declining birthrate, millions of abortions, and anti-male cruelty. Feminism has undermined and will continue to undermine the stability and viability of all western societies.

From the first occasions when I began to speak and write about feminism in 2012 and 2013, I encountered the same response from feminists: “What you are describing is not real feminism” or “Those feminists do not speak for all feminists”, and so on.

I am regularly accused of hating myself, of hating other women, and/or of seeking male approval. I am accused, by those who have never studied feminism, of not understanding feminism.

It’s true that not all feminists are as fervid as an Andrea Dworkin or a Sally Miller Gearhart. They do not all fantasize, as Gearhart did (to much congratulation and gushing praise), about how much better life would be if the number of males could be reduced to 10% of the human population. They do not rhapsodize, as Mary Daly did, about a decontamination of the earth through such a reduction. They do not make jokes about killing men as a public service, as Mona Eltahawy did.

But it’s also true that such vicious women, and the many others who have lent their malign energies to the movement, have never been disavowed by other feminist leaders. In fact, feminists’ lack of shame before bloodthirsty feminist pronouncements is remarkably consistent.

True, there are many varieties of feminism, not all of them agreeing on every point: radical feminism, socialist feminism, lesbian feminism, post-colonial feminism, intersectional feminism, eco-feminism, animal rights feminism, abolitionist feminism, trans-inclusive feminism, feminism for sex-based rights, maternal feminism, and even (most bizarrely) conservative or reactionary feminism. Some extend their compassion to victim groups other than women, such as trans women, illegal immigrants, Palestinians, or the environment.

Such distinctions do not concern me because none makes a real difference.

None escapes the victim mentality: the belief that the history of humanity up until the present moment has been a history of (privileged, white) men oppressing women and other innocent victims; and that because of their alleged greater suffering and moral innocence, particular care and attention must be paid to women and to their unique capacity for empathy and social justice.

No version of feminism escapes the binary logic whereby the world is divided up into (sometimes intricate, overlapping) categories of oppressor and oppressed, victim and victimizer, to be treated differently and valued differently according to their identity category.

Because it thinks in terms of groups and divides the world into innocent and guilty, feminism is incapable of devising universal principles or pursuing individual fairness or freedom. It is distorted by its victim thinking, incapable of extending empathy to those feminists see as oppressors, and incapable of demanding accountability from those feminists see as victims.

Extreme political polarization

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Krzysztof Szczawinski sees the current extreme polarization of political views as being no longer merely ideological:

The Left and the Right are not two different ideologies. They have grown apart to become two different civilizations.

What characterizes a civilization is its relation to morality, to truth, to beauty, to wealth – and the relation of people to power and to reality itself. By this measure, the division is not political. It is civilizational. And Feliks Koneczny — the Polish scholar who mapped civilizational systems with greater precision than anyone before or since — described exactly this architecture a century ago.

The Right represents what remains of Western Latin civilization – the tradition that inherits Roman law, Greek philosophy, and Christian morality, and from that inheritance builds: individual liberty, equality before the law, orderly competition between individuals, free speech, private property, subsidiarity, classical beauty, monogamous marriage, the dual system of private and public law, and — most fundamentally — the primacy of morality over law. Not that law is the codification of morality, but that law must be consistent with morality. Power is not above ethics. What is wrong for the individual is wrong for the state.

The Left represents an amalgamation of what Koneczny called Byzantine, Turanian, and other eastern civilizational systems – characterized by centralism, the omnipotent state, the fusion of law and morality into a single power, and the subordination of the individual to the collective. In these systems, whatever power decrees becomes moral by definition. There is no external moral standard against which power can be judged. Hence the centralism, the bureaucracy, the etatism, the social justice that replaces individual justice, the family defined by the state rather than preceding it. And hence the violence, the lies, the censorship – because in a system where power is morality, opposition is not merely wrong. It is evil.

The most fundamental difference: in the Latin civilization, morality stands above law. In the Byzantine-Turanian systems of the left, there is only one law — which is simultaneously the moral code — and it is whatever the ruler decides. This is not a difference of policy. It is a difference of civilizational architecture. It runs all the way down.

Some will say a balance is needed – a yin-yang between order and creative destruction, between conservatism and progress. This was once true. It is no longer. The Left has ceased to be a force of renewal within Western civilization and has become a force for its demolition – operating not within our civilizational framework but against it, with incompatible rules and incompatible values. Different civilizations do not compete like tennis players who accept the same rules. They fight for power with no rules and all available means – violence, lies, and morally incompatible systems. Bringing a gun to a tennis match is not competition. It is conquest.

The good news: most people are not ideologically committed to either side. They are attached to prosperity, to safety, to beauty, to the life that Western civilization actually produces – and they can be brought back to it, once they understand what they are being asked to abandon. The civilizational argument, clearly made, is the most powerful argument available. Not left versus right. Not conservative versus progressive. Latin civilization versus its opponents. Freedom, morality above power, and the individual who cannot be reduced to a subject – versus the state that decides everything, including what is moral.

The good life versus the state oppression.

Once you see the civilizational map, the political map becomes legible. And once the political map is legible, the choice is not difficult.

August 5, 2026

Canada decides to treat online opinions as matters for police enforcement

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s never a good sign when my region features in a news story, like this post from Exiled Mountie, discussing Canada’s Bill C-9 and the way it encourages local police forces to treat lawful online speech as a matter for police involvement:

As I watch the reaction to Bill C-9 unfold in real time on social media, I cannot help but think that another important line has been crossed in Canada.

Most of us saw the writing on the wall months ago and tried to warn others by screaming it from the rooftops. But as with Covid, nobody listened, and we were probably called racists for doing so. So here we are, another important battle lost.

From a legal point of view, we are now becoming almost indistinguishable from the system in the UK, and that’s a frightening thought.

In the UK, police have recorded non-crime “hate” incidents against schoolchildren for classroom insults, despite no criminal offence having taken place. The system finally became so absurd that the British government recently announced that it would scrap the practice in order to stop police wasting their time on petty arguments. Just imagine the absurdity of this: police resources being tied up over petty squabbles in the schoolyard!

We have now entered a time where the government has extreme control of our speech.

So much so, that we’re even being warned that criticizing or boycotting a company based on moral or ethical reasons can be treated as a hate incident, even when police openly acknowledge that no criminal offence has occurred. From there, the matter can still be reported and subjected to further police investigation to determine if the elements of a hate crime are met.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the twilight zone. We have arrived in the progressive future the Left has been pushing for so long, and it sucks.

The danger here is not only what will eventually result in charges. It is that police are inviting complaints and opening the door to police attention over expression that is not criminal at all.

Durham Police openly acknowledges that these so-called hate or bias incidents are not criminal offences. Yet it still encourages people to report them and even uses the lawful boycott of companies supporting the 2SLGBTQI+ community as an example.

I, Claudius (MCMLXXVI). Show Me The Way To Go Rome

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Stam Fine
Published 3 Apr 2026

Stam Fine Reviews looks at the landmark 1976 classic BBC series I, Claudius based on the books by Robert Graves. I, Claudius is a sprawling epic looking at four emperors, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius. Claudius had a limp, stammered and facial tics but was a survivor when everyone else around him was murdered.

I, Claudius is an influential series, even in places you don’t expect it (The Sopranos, Dynasty, Succession).

Note: The Romans didn’t use the letter ‘U’ at the time unless you upgraded your subscription to Roman+. I do not presently subscribe to Roman+.

Stars Derek Jacobi, Sian Phillips, Brian Blessed, George Baker, Patrick Stewart, Ian Ogilvy, Simon MacCorkindale, Margaret Tyzack, Patrica Quinn, John Hurt, and many more.

0:00 Introduction
0:33 Veni, vidi, Google Translate usus sum.
1:15 Technical Difficulties.
1:34 I, Claudius Take Two.
4:09 Augustus and Livia
5:50 Claudius
8:05 Tiberius
10:55 Caligula
13:14 Emperor Claudius
16:00 From Book to BBC2
19:11 Cast
21:24 Legacy

I, Claudius
I, Clavdivs
I Claudius

August 3, 2026

The Ceuta invasion as a tipping point

Filed under: Africa, Europe, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On Substack, el gato malo suggests that the “refugee” invastion of Ceuta is a “bridge too far” for the EU:

peruvian strongman oscar benavides famously said “for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law”.

once, such a thing might have provided a succinct summation of the practice of privilege in its literal sense of “private law”. there were laws for the aristocrats and others for the commoners and still others for non-citizens and slaves.

such ideas date back to time out of mind before stone was placed upon stone in giza and stood as absolute expectation and norm in most of the world until quite recently (and pertain in many parts of the world even today). the idea that “all people should be equal under the law” was a radical alteration to social order, a repudiation of the divine right of kings and aristocrats and their monopolies on property and on violence. the literal idea that land could be owned by a commoner was an astonishing upheaval of established orders. it was also the freeing move that allowed for the west to rise and flourish and prosper, unlocking its vast human potential. one might think that people would be happy about this and cherish and protect this most foundational idea that serves as cornerstone to civilizations of liberty and plenty.

lol.

you must be new here.

[…]

spain looks to be in real danger of falling as a nation. they created a mass amnesty for illegal immigrants from places that do not believe in spain but only in tribe and who do not believe in rights but only in who may dominate whom. if one seeks to be a wrecker, it’s a brilliant incentive. pardon a million and give them access to your social safety networks and welfare payments which fund a lifestyle far in excess of where they came from (and the right to vote for more) and the next wave is already packing its bags to come. spread enough jam and you can attract infinity ants.

the US was well on its way to running this playbook (and likely has ~40 million illegals to show for it) before it was stopped. the astonishing bit was how easy it was to shut this off. you just cut off the incentives. no more free stuff, no more amnesty, no more “path to stay”, and no more “catch and release until our overwhelmed court system can have a hearing years from now”. it’s really that simple.

due process becomes rounding you up and sending you home, not giving you a nice place to live for the 3 years until your case is heard.

and it ALL comes down to prosecutors, courts, and agencies. immigration law became irrelevant not because the law changed but because enforcement did. the spectacle of american judges sneaking illegals out of courthouses to avoid their apprehension by ICE was really pretty astonishing. so too were the massive levels of entitlement fraud, literal government funded flights to needed voting districts, and the astonishing refusal to arrest or hold accountable any among them because “marginalized”. europe is worse.

the NGO bond villian insidious complex has been running the table on the west for 20 years.

and they are moving into overdrive now before the populist right forces they are giving reflexive rise to can take control.

[…]

the media is, predictably, either ignoring this or pretending it’s a humanitarian crisis of families and babies. it’s not. this is damn near all men.

and they are not behaving well.

some are claiming that many of these are criminals freed by morocco and bused to the border as a deliberate act. (this same tactic was used by central and south american regimes to dump their gangs in the US.) images of robbery, rape, and of murder are cropping up.

just what a town of 80k is supposed to do with 80k invaders and how they might be fed or sheltered or controlled remains an open question.

meanwhile, EU commission president ursula von doom has moved to action.

“we have sent a bureaucrat to monitor the situation. if this continues, they will tell people to ‘stop’. if that fails, they will say ‘stop’ again, perhaps in a firmer voice.”

to call this air and nonsense would be charitable. it’s an admission of helplessness. the EC relied upon a soft power it no longer possesses because it now faces people who believe only in hard power which the EC never had.

bluff called.

it’s over.

the EC was fine to govern the sort of citizens who yell at tourists for crossing an empty street against the light. it is wholly unsuited for this and like many an ill fated magician’s apprentice before them, they have now summoned that which they have no hope of controling and will eat them alive.

but here’s the part i really loved: “the images from ceuta are unacceptable”.

talk about saying the quiet part out loud. not the events. not the crisis. the images. even now, for her it’s all perception. you want to understand why they want to mandate ID to use the internet/social media and why they so desperately demand the right to censor it (once more using courts and agencies to enforce their whim)? this is why.

“for my friends, speech, for my enemies censorship and gulag”.

what they are doing cannot survive these images.

On Substack Notes, GenX Anecdotes reacts to the progressives’ response to the Ceuta situation:

I often wonder about the open borders, “migrants welcome” people and I can’t square it.

I am traditionally a left leaning person from a mixed background who has travelled extensively.

To the current progressive mind this ought to make me automatically cheering on the levels of mass migration we are living with.

But it’s the opposite.

The well travelled “anywhere” cosmopolitans should surely be the most aware of cultural differences and that it’s precisely the concept that nations are “particular” and unique from one another, that makes travelling such a fascinating and sometimes challenging thing to do.

[…]

Travelling gave me a fresh and new appreciation of little things (that actually turned out to be important things) about Britain that I had taken for granted before.

The fact that these muppets think that any form of patriotism or nationalism leads to Hitler is absolutely moronic.

And of course they celebrate it everywhere else. It’s just us who are the baddies for wanting to hold onto our traditions, customs and culture.

Why are we uniquely expected to live by different rules? Surely that in itself is kind of exceptionalist?

A progressive travelling in India wouldn’t think twice about a Mumbai taxi driver having an Indian flag hanging on his rearview mirror.

Or a Thai guesthouse having a shrine to the Thai royal family.

When you travel, people are proud of their countries and towns. They want to show you around. They tell you their country is the best proudly.

Of course, I will be here all day pointing out progressive double standards.

But this one is a biggy!

Update, 4 August: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

August 1, 2026

Why UK crime victims’ families always sound so similar talking to the media

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack Notes, John Carter linked to an article about the British Home Office’s “nudge unit” who, among other things, coax and cajole the families of murder victims to avoid any hint that they blame the perpetrators for the loss of their loved ones:

This is incredible. I always wondered how family liaison officers from RICU or the CRS reliably got the families of victims murdered by political or racial terrorists to provide such anodyne, don’t look back in anger public statements. I figured in most cases it would be concern trolling, with legal threats held in reserve.

This lays the technique bare, using interviews conducted both with victim’s families and former police officers. Liaison officers serve as anesthetic patches that get slapped on the open wounds of the migration war. They apply therapeutic techniques to calm and reassure the families, establishing dependent relationships and using the trust they build to guide them away from saying anything inflammatory when the time comes to speak to the public. If families become noncompliant in this respect, they’re threatened with causing a mistrial should they speak too openly about their feelings.

That isn’t all RICU does, of course. “Communications” includes a huge propaganda arm, which uses every tool at its disposal, including battalions of fake social media profiles. You have to wonder how much of the culture war of the last decade or more was pure hallucination.

The article in question is by David Shipley for the Pimlico Journal:

RICU, the Home Office’s Research Information and Communications Unit, is often the subject of much attention online, particularly around its role in the consistently bland calls for “unity” after horrific acts of violence. Many people online suggest that either the Unit itself, or the “specially trained officers” (Victim Liaison Officers or Family Liaison Officers) must threaten victims and their families to ensure their compliance with approved messaging. This always struck me as unlikely — widespread coercion would surely have leaked by now. There was also good reason to be sceptical of the efficacy of behavioural science applications to government. And yet public statements by those victims and their families are remarkably consistent.

So I was delighted when, a couple of months ago, Pimlico Journal asked me to investigate RICU and victim liaison properly. In order to do so, I studied historic statements, publications and coverage of RICU and spoke with victims’ families, some of whom are named in this piece and former police officers, none of whom are named, with knowledge of the Victim and Family Liaison units. What I discovered is fascinating and far more insidious than the imagined coercion. This article provides an overview of RICU’s history, goals and methodology, followed by details from those interviews. I hope it sheds some light on this murky area of the state’s “communications management”.

RICU was established in 2007 “under the Prevent strand of [the UK government’s] CONTEST strategy” with its stated goal being to “understand and counter terrorist and extremist ideologies to reduce the risk to the UK, its citizens and its interests overseas”. Giving evidence to MPs in 2009, Charles Farr, a former SIS officer, and head of the Office of Security and Counter Terrorism, who set RICU up in 2007, said the unit is “responsible for advising the rest of government [and] officialdom, from a brigade commander in Helmand province through to a chief constable in Yorkshire, about how they wish to characterise the threat we face and describe the response that we are making and, secondly, rather different, they are responsible for challenging the propaganda which comes to us from al-Qaeda and associated groups — generally not from people in this country; usually from the incessant 4,500 websites that are in one way or another associated with radical Islamist terrorist organisations around the world”.

The unit embraced convenient lies from the start. Part of their strategy was to send advice to “local authorities, people working on community cohesion projects, local police, neighbourhood policing teams” and “the Chief Constable” that they should not “talk about Islamic terrorism, not because in certain circumstances that is an inaccurate description but because the language admits of a number of interpretations which are not always helpful to us“.

RICU was also always concerned with the whole of British society — while Farr said the unit decided to “start” with Muslim communities, he told MPs that he did “not want to give the impression that RICU’s sole purpose is to communicate with Muslim communities in this country. It is not.” So by 2009 a unit existed which had “about 35 people” working for it, “and a bit of the private sector in there to advise us on aspects of communications”, which was telling every arm of the state, along with much of civil society, that they should lie about the nature of the threats the country faced, to serve the state’s perceived interests. It was also already building wide and deep relationships within many parts of the state, including policing.

What has it become, in the 17 years since Charles Farr gave his evidence?

In 2011, when the government reviewed Prevent, it found that RICU’s communications sometimes “erred in seeking to make language acceptable to some in Muslim communities, at the expense of candour”. The unit was described as having “a central role in developing counter-ideological or counter-narrative work”, although its track record was described as “mixed”. It was directed to take “more care … to identify credible partners to develop powerful and specific narratives across a range of communications channels, especially on the internet“. Despite these criticisms, the state chose to “retain RICU, largely in its current form”, but with the expectation that it would produce “much sharper and more professional counter-narrative products” — there was also a commitment to “continue to work with social media enterprises” in the battle against “propagandists and radicalisers” including those whose “propaganda work” might be illegal under “race and religious hatred legislation”. The shift is notable — Farr’s commitment that RICU would work across the whole of British society is clearly underway, with Islamic terrorism and radicalisation no longer the main focus.

More recently, RICU has long been the subject of much discussion on social media, and of occasional interest in the mainstream press. It’s often accused of being behind the anodyne calls for unity and calm issued by public bodies, victims and their families after the latest “Yookay” Event in which a migrant has done something appallingly violent. Not unrelatedly, it is generally the right who are more vocal in their criticism of RICU, and it is regularly suggested that they threaten families into sticking to the regime-approved line.

Homelessness isn’t the real problem … it’s feral humans

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Many well-meaning people see “homeless” individuals on the street and think the problem is that these individuals don’t have homes. An obvious solution occurs: we’ll just give them homes so they won’t need to sleep rough on the streets. What a great idea! With the best of intentions! What could possibly go wrong?

The real problem isn’t that there aren’t enough homes … some of those “homeless” people on the street actually do have places to sleep but for one reason or another choose not to. The real problem for most of them is that they’ve gone feral:

If you give problems the wrong names, you can’t understand them.

If you can’t understand problems, you can’t fix them.

There are almost no homeless people in America. There are only feral humans.

A homeless person is someone whose distinguishing feature is not having a home. I was homeless once, for a day, when the lease on one apartment expired before the next one was cleaned, repaired, and ready.

I parked a moving van full of my worldly possessions at my university, and slept on a couch in the student commons.

That’s “homeless”.

“Feral” is when a human cannot live within society, or comply with the basic expectations required for membership.

Yes, they do not have homes.

But this is not their distinguishing feature. Because they also don’t have jobs, sanity, sobriety, manners, morals, or hygiene.

Which is why they do not have homes.

If you give them a house, because you think they are “homeless” rather than “feral”, then they will simply repeat, within that structure, the same feral behavior.

And soon that structure will be uninhabitable.

Which, for certain people, is the whole point.

A man whose job is to sell 3d printed houses isn’t trying to fix the feral-human problem. He’s trying to sell 3d printed houses.

And it’s one hell of a lot easier to sell them to bureaucrats who aren’t spending their own personal money.

It doesn’t matter if 3d printed houses suck to live in. It doesn’t matter if the feral humans trash them. Nobody in this equation cares about the feral humans, even the feral humans themselves.

And nobody in this equation cares about the taxpayers. If the feral humans are still feral, then the 3d house grifters can sell more gimmick houses, and the bureaucrats can spend more of someone else’s money.

If a violent political upheaval becomes necessary, this will be very unpleasant for everyone involved, but at least afterwards, we will all be able to use the feral humans, bureaucrats, and grifters to fertilize the garden of new homes.

Which will be made out of bricks.

Update, 2 August: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

July 31, 2026

The “vibe coding” “revolution”

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’ve used Grok a couple of times to create custom graphics to go with articles on the blog, but aside from that I’ve barely considered using AI for anything. Sometimes the AI-generated email conversation summaries on Gmail are helpful, but they just happen and don’t require any direct interactions from me. As such, I’m in no position to make sweeping declarations about the current state of the AI revolution … but Freddie deBoer has thoughts he’s shared on his Substack:

You are aware, I imagine, of “vibe coding”. The large language models that have received so much fanfare in the past four years have thus far not delivered on the outsized promises that have been made on their behalf; limitless free energy, an end to hunger, and immortality have all conspicuously eluded us. One thing that LLMs really appear able to do well, though, is to write code. And this proficiency has gotten sufficiently advanced that many people now write software solely through directing an LLM, without necessarily having any actual programming skills themselves. The overwhelming majority of the output of this effort is useless or redundant or barely functional, true, but the mere fact that people can do it is an interesting statement on what “AI” is actually good at. And for stupid meme reasons we call this practice vibe coding.

So, in the past two-ish years, several hundred million human beings acquired the ability to write software by speaking to a machine in ordinary language. This was heralded (correctly, in a narrow technical sense) as a great democratization: a notoriously Byzantine skillset had been suddenly made available to vastly more people. A capacity once reserved for a priesthood of specialists, a relatively small society of craftsmen, has been distributed suddenly and nearly for free to baristas, accountants, fourteen-year-olds, retirees, you, me … We have been told that the instruments now available to the general public are staggeringly powerful. The era of citizen coding is upon us! A reasonable person, informed of this, would have braced for the consequences. Surely something would have to change, right? A wave of brilliant new apps? A flowering of new affordances granted by software? Any visible change to daily life commensurate with the scale of the gift of vibe coding? All of the above, no doubt. All of the above and more.

Well, take a look around and tell me … where is it? What are the fruits of all of this vibe coding? What difference has it made? What is the great application that has emerged from all this liberated capacity? What new thing does our species now do with its hours that it did not do three years ago? What old thing does our species not have to do that it had to do three years ago? What chores have been eliminated, what friction has been smoothed over, what corner of ordinary existence been reshaped by the sudden arrival of hundreds of millions of amateur programmers? There’s been a great deal of activity, some of it quite frantic. There’s been a steady churn of half-built to-do apps and Wordle clones and boutique email clients that do nothing the old standbys can’t, weekend RPG projects that flare and vanish, and at the end of it, there’s a world essentially unchanged. And to give the teams at Anthropic and OpenAI their flowers, this has not been a failure of their tools. The tools work, more or less. This is all about something stranger and more important than a failure of the LLMs: the necessary work of software has already been done. We haven’t seen a lot of new types of software because we already have what we need. You can’t flood a vessel that’s already full, and the amateurs, God bless them, have been pouring this new power into a jug that we’ve been frantically filling throughout the 21st century.

The project of software is complete. Not decelerating, not maturing, not entering some new and humbler phase, but complete. Complete in the way that the map of the Earth is complete, which is to say complete in the sense that the great blank spaces have been filled and what remains is the labeling of tributaries and the correcting of coastlines, mapping and remapping the parts of the globe that are in a state of permanent flux, responding to changing conditions without altering our conception of the Earth. I’m aware of how this all sounds. In particular, I’m not naive to the fact that for those who write code for a living (whose number is growing, not shrinking, despite doomsaying) it’s going to sound provoking rather than provocative. I’m also aware that some are going to mistake my saying that the project of software is complete for somehow belittling the achievements of software. This is not the case! I assure you that I’m aware that I’m typing my argument into a machine that would have been indistinguishable from sorcery to my grandparents and then transmitting it through a lattice of code so vast and so intricate that no living person could comprehend more than a sliver of it. I am aware that software enables my current economic existence, however ambivalent I have become about that relationship. No, I’m not claiming that the global project of satisfying humanity’s appetite for software is in any sense unimportant. I am however claiming that it’s finished. It has been accomplished.

Update: Corrected a boneheaded typo.

Drinker’s Extra Shots – Clarkson’s Farm

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Critical Drinker After Hours
Published 30 Jul 2026

In the mood for an Amazon show that’s actually good, unlike Rings of Power? Then Clarkson’s Farm, arguably the best reality show on TV right now, has got you covered. Join me for a quick review of this absolute gem.

July 30, 2026

Support for capital punishment is the opposite of a luxury belief

Filed under: Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As noted in City Journal, support for capital punishment is overwhelmingly high … which is why politicians and wealthy progressives whole-heartedly oppose it. As you probably know, a “luxury belief” is one that is usually held by people who will not be in any way impacted by the downstream effects of that belief. It’s not the wealthy and privileged who suffer when murderers get out of prison, so they are generally all in favour of ever greater leniency in sentencing and easing parole conditions. Poor and middle class people are more likely to suffer when violent criminals return to their communities, which is why they generally want longer incarceration for violent crimes and favour capital punishment for certain abhorrent acts of murder. Charles Fain Lehman has more:

Those findings undermine the narrative, routinely advanced by death-penalty abolitionists, that capital punishment is on the decline because the public has turned against it. In reality, both public opinion and the current composition of the Supreme Court militate in favor of expanding the death penalty’s use — and, specifically, relaxing many of the arbitrary and undemocratic restrictions imposed on it by courts over the past several decades.

Abolitionists have based their case for declining public support on polls such as Gallup’s, which for nearly a century has asked respondents if they are “in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder”. The share in favor has indeed dropped steadily since the 1990s, from a 64-point difference between support and opposition to just a 6-point split today.

That question, though, artificially reduces support by asking about all murders. Under current precedent, only certain heinous murders — those in which jury-determined aggravating factors outweigh mitigating factors — are eligible for the death penalty. There is likely far more support, for example, for executing Dylann Roof specifically than there is for executing all murderers generally.

The new MI poll illuminates this point. It asks about support for capital punishment under a variety of circumstances. The result is lopsided endorsement in the event of, for example, murder involving “extreme cruelty”, mass murder, or the murder of a child — all supported by 3-to-1 margins. Death for premeditated murder generically has 72 percent support, suggesting that even clarifying intent significantly increases support for capital punishment.

Notably, the poll also finds majority support for executing those who rape a child (71 percent) or an adult (57 percent). Yet neither offense would, absent a concurrent murder, be death-eligible. The Supreme Court ruled that applying the death penalty to non-murdering rapists violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment” in 1977’s Coker v. Georgia, a prohibition it extended even to child rapists in a 2008’s Kennedy v. Louisiana. With certain exceptions for crimes against the state, the Kennedy majority asserted, a crime that did not result in the taking of someone’s life was categorically ineligible for the death penalty.

Both decisions were justified by reference to the court’s “evolving standards of decency” test. First introduced in 1958’s Trop v. Dulles, the test has led the court to understand “cruel and unusual punishment” through its interpretation of “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society”. That lens allowed it to reach the conclusions it did in Coker, Kennedy, and numerous other narrowings of the use of the death penalty. In combination with the aggressiveness and gamesmanship of the capital defense bar — which spends decades filing often-frivolous procedural motions to keep clearly guilty clients alive — the result has been a steady choking off of capital punishment.

Update, 31 July: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

Canadian conservatives need different leaders, say Liberal media

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Unlike the Liberals and NDP, whose leaders get a media honeymoon that sometimes lasts for years, Conservative leaders are never given the slightest break by presstitutes paid by the Liberals. (Anyone further to the right than the centrist Conservatives get almost no media attention at all, as Maxime Bernier can attest.) L. Wayne Mathison responds to “helpful” suggestions for how the Conservatives can get rid of their current unpopular-with-the-state-media leader and replace him with someone more “acceptable”:

The pattern is obvious.

Scheer was supposedly too awkward. O’Toole was too inconsistent. Pierre is now too aggressive, too divisive, too nasty. Change the leader and the criticism changes with him. The objective stays the same: keep Conservatives apologizing, retreating and replacing leaders while the Liberals remain the default governing party.

The elite Red Tories never wanted Pierre Poilievre as leader because he threatens the arrangement they are comfortable with. They prefer a Conservative Party that manages Liberal policies a little more efficiently, attends the right receptions and never seriously challenges Ottawa’s permanent political class.

Put on the economics hat and the incentives become clear. The people closest to government often do very well under bigger government. Consultants get contracts. Lobbyists gain influence. Bureaucracies expand. Well-connected corporations receive subsidies and protection. Housing owners watch scarcity drive up their assets. Ordinary workers get higher taxes, weaker wages, expensive housing and declining public services.

Pierre’s real offence is that he speaks directly to the people paying the bill.

Canada has nearly every advantage a country could ask for: energy, minerals, farmland, fresh water, educated people, stable institutions and access to the largest market on Earth. We should be one of the wealthiest and strongest countries in the world. Instead, our political class keeps managing scarcity, blocking investment and teaching Canadians to expect less.

Conservatives should stop chasing approval from commentators and insiders who will never support them. Back Pierre. Defend the principles. Make the economic case clearly.

Prosperity should not be reserved for the people who already know how to work the system.

The best investment the Liberals ever made was buying the loyalty of the relic media with a dollop of cash from the government’s coffers. They already were mostly onboard with the Liberals — those that didn’t think the NDP was too far right — but the financial leash made even the mavericks think twice about substantive criticism of the man who co-signed their pay cheques.

Update: Fixed missing URL.

Intramural conflict in the progressive “big tent”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison identifies some of the major fault lines among the temporary coalition-of-convenience on “the left”:

“Free Palestine/Anti-Israel protest” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

The modern woke worldview keeps colliding with reality because it sorts people into fixed moral categories: oppressed people are presumed good, while designated oppressors are presumed guilty. Once that framework takes hold, facts become secondary.

That is why some progressives can condemn “Christian nationalism” before breakfast, then struggle to name radical Islam when an Islamist attacks the very people they claim to defend.

The contradiction is obvious. Radical Islam is deeply hostile to homosexuality, women’s equality, free expression and secular liberalism. Pretending otherwise does not make anyone tolerant. It makes society dishonest and vulnerable.

This does not mean every Muslim is dangerous, nor does it justify collective blame. It means an ideology should be judged by what it teaches, what its extremists do, and whether its institutions openly confront the problem. The same standard should apply to every religion and political movement.

The woke response is usually predictable: redirect attention toward the far right, blame Western society, or accuse anyone raising the issue of hatred.

That protects the ideology, but it does nothing to protect ordinary people. Compassion without boundaries becomes negligence.

A healthy society needs openness, but openness is not the absence of judgment. Immigration, asylum and multiculturalism require enforceable limits, cultural confidence and a clear expectation that newcomers accept the laws and basic freedoms of the country receiving them.

You cannot build social trust by demanding that citizens ignore obvious conflicts. You cannot defend gay people while excusing movements that despise them. You cannot defend women while tolerating misogyny from politically protected groups.

Reality does not care which side has the approved slogans. Eventually, contradictions collect a human cost.

Equilibrium: 198451 with Gun-Fu Fighting

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 27 Mar 2026

Equilibrium (2002) is a curious mix of early-aughts action movie and mid-20th Century dystopia. While it does feel a bit overwrought and derivative at times, it ends up being more than the sum of its parts.

00:00 Intro
03:17 Gun Kata
04:44 198451
06:45 Endings
07:07 Anti-Human Systems
(more…)

July 29, 2026

The American Deep State’s biggest experimental laboratory

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

On Substack, John Carter links to the latest of kulak’s fascinating-and-unsettling Anarchonomicon posts with this introduction:

Kulak’s thesis here is that English Canada generally, and Toronto specifically, is ground zero for a lot of the more insane gay race communism trends because America has been using Canada as a testing ground for psychological operations since the 1950s.

That sounds kind of nuts but he makes a plausible case. Since Canada is technically a foreign country, intelligence agencies don’t face the same limitations they do at home. Since Canada is almost culturally identical to the US, what works in Canada will generally work domestically (and all the GAE psyops are ultimately aimed at America’s domestic tax cattle).

Kulak also brings the receipts here, showing how things like MeToo and GamerGate seem to have been prefigured by similar movements in Canada a couple years before.

One thing he misses is land acknowledgements, which began spreading in Canada in 2013 or so, and have since started appearing at American and Australian universities. I don’t know for sure that they started in Canada, all I can say is that it was Canada where I first noticed them, and where they have become ubiquitous.

Multiculturalism is another Canadian export, developed here in the 60s and rapidly introduced all over the Western world. The prime ministers who introduced it were American puppets, and the ideology itself has a very broadly American “nation of immigrants” feel to it.

Anyhow, you motherfuckers, two can play this game.

On the land acknowledgements, the first time I encountered it was at my son’s university graduation ceremony, but his university had a big First Nations specialization so it didn’t seem too outlandish at the time. Since then, of course, pretty much every event in urban Canada seems to feature a land acknowledgement and they don’t appear to be optional any more.

Anyway, on to kulak’s post on “The Battle for the Mind of North America”:

The Land of Mind-Rape and Honey

Canada is/was a nice enough place to visit or grow up … several large nice cities surrounded by tons and tons of quaint and cute functional “Mainstreet USA” style quirky little towns.

The “Rape” refers to Rapeseed, the primary ingredient in Canola Oil, the unhealthy seed-oil. (they named it “Canada Oil” because “Rape Oil” might make people hesitate)

But when you scratch at the surface there’s something profoundly deeply wrong with Canada. You can feel it. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work … when you go to church … when you pay your taxes.

and the Canadians are quite pleased to tell you just what that thing is:

America.

Funnily though, when you ask what Americans have done to them or what is wrong with America, they’ll tell you things about moral degeneracy and perfidy of Americans … no different than what the American elite and the US Government expresses about its own populace.

For reference: Canada is a vassal of the US.

It has been since the 1960s when the British lost the Suez Crisis and the American Deep State backed “Multiculturalism”, an end to “God Save the Queen”, legalized sodomy, ended prayer in public schools, demilitarized Canadian education (which til the 60s included rifle practice, marching, and survival training) … and oh ya a new flag.

The Canadian flag, adopted in 1964 … which the very year should be a “red flag”. Is in fact, an American flag. It is the symbol of America’s diplomatic and espionage victories over the British Empire and its final conquest of Canada.

Canada’s entire culture, defined by being British, Imperial, warlike, frontier militiamen (Indeed Canada’s 1950s culture in many ways resembled Washington’s and Jefferson’s colonial American culture more than America did) … was ripped out in the course of a decade … quite intentionally and by design.

Indeed Canada was the testing ground for the Global American Empire’s psychological cultural program.

To get a feel for just HOW aggressively Canadian culture was purposefully ripped apart … I encourage you to flip through the various programs for “Empire day in the Schools of Ontario” up on archive to see English Canada’s actual natural culture. (I will be writing about this in more detail in another piece.)

And Please Note: The British did nothing comparable … the “Narnia” age of Canada coexisted with The Fabians, George Bernard Shaw, and the basically open communist treason of the actual British Aristocracy.

The mottoes on the posters: “Obey/ the Law/ Follow/ Duty”, “One God/ One King/ One Flag/ One Fleet”, “Love God and Honour the King”

This was immediately ripped out by State Department’s assets like Pearson and Trudeau in the 60s and 70s in favour of “Multiculturalism”.

How does the one Canada: Royalist, Militaristic, Patriotic as Can Be, defined by the three institutions of Church, Militia Armoury, and the old-style High School ruthlessly enforcing standards … More akin to Cadia from 40k than a 21st century country … How did it transform into the modern Canada within living memory?

How do you destroy the entire culture of a country and replace it with an entirely new culture in front of its population’s very eyes … without resistance and without protest?

Well that’s the problem that was solved here.

Canada was the testing ground for all of the American Government’s cultural occupational weapons it would go on to use on Europe and on its own people.

Terms like “melting pot”, “racism”, “tolerance”, “the open society” … These of course has all been coined by American Jewish and Communist activists (“Racism” specifically is a Trotskyist doctrinal term of art propagated by Trotsky’s personal pamphlets, and you should call any “Conservative” who ever uses the term a Communist traitor).

However it was in Canada that top down US foreign policy institutions first applied the current model to a country which they had conquered without a war.

Indeed when one looks into “Denazification” in Germany or the US occupations of France, Italy, or Japan you find little to no overlap between the language, structure, and even values of the “Democratic”, “antifascist”, and “Peaceful” occupational ideology and modern Globohomo.

“Monument to Multiculturalism”. Toronto. Erected 1985. (The “Monument” can be interpreted two ways … the man and doves working together to build a unified world … or the man is unwittingly cooperating in his own caging and enslavement)

Whereas in Canada the US occupational ideology EXACTLY resembles modern globohomo. From the outset.

Pierre Trudeau’s first major political moment was the 1967 decriminalization of homosexuality.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress