Compare the two cases and a pattern emerges. Cofnas cleared every formal bar that Cambridge erected—a competitive fellowship, a strong publication record, an eventual ruling that he’d broken no law and no policy—but he was punished anyway, and his position quietly expired while the university dithered. Arday did not clear the bars his professoriate peers had to clear, he was defended anyway, and he was propped up by administrators who failed to do due diligence. One scholar was punished for an opinion; the other was protected despite misconduct that objective methods could verify. Two different treatments, one shared instinct: expedience trumps evidence.
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In fact, RICU has actively become biased against entirely mainstream right-wing beliefs. According to the 2023 Shawcross Review into Prevent, while its ‘products related to Islamic terrorism focus on the most serious material relating to violent Islamist ideology…much of the material covering Extreme Right-Wing falls well below the threshold’. Shawcross mentioned that he ‘saw one RICU analysis product from 2020 on Right-Wing terrorist and extremist activity online which referenced books by mainstream British conservative commentators as “key cultural nationalist ideological texts”. The same document listed “key texts” for white nationalists as including historic works of the Western philosophic and literary canon’. Shawcross also describes RICU analysis of a ‘cohort of social media users it termed “Actively Patriotic and Proud”, listed a prominent Conservative politician and former member of the government as being among figures “associated with far-right sympathetic audiences, and Brexit”’ (who I understand to be Jacob Rees-Mogg). This then, is RICU now. An organisation which seeks to ‘counter extremist narratives’ and maintains ‘contingency communication’ materials ‘for rapid deployment after major incidents’. The methods they deploy are ‘never published’. August 8th, 2026 | 6 comments
 “We are Jason Arday,” say the Cambridge faculty. “We are Jason Arday,” say the British academic establishment. “We are Jason Arday,” say humanities faculty throughout the West. And you know what? They are all correct. August 7th, 2026 | 13 comments
“Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding a star Cambridge professor”, writes the Guardian’s Lanre Bakare. Bakare has made strenuous efforts to be fair to Arday, but, alongside the extensive evidence of plagiarism and the extreme physical unlikelihood of Arday’s claim to to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, ten of those days with a hairline fracture in his leg, the pattern of behaviour Bakare describes below is difficult to explain away:
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He’s going down, and the only remaining question is which of his gullible academic sponsors he will drag down with him. August 2nd, 2026 | 22 comments
In the Telegraph today:
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You may be saying, “I’ve read Viral. This is not news to me”. The news is that it is being reported in a major “quality” British newspaper. Here is what the Telegraph was saying about the “Proximal Origin” paper on 1st May 2020:
Nice touch in linking the thing you don’t want people to take seriously to Trump, though that trick no longer works as well as it once did. There is no shame in having been wrong, so long as you then work sincerely to put things right. In today’s article the Telegraph goes some way to atone for its past errors. Let’s see how the rest of the British media covers this story. Let’s see if the rest of the British media covers this story. July 24th, 2026 | 14 comments
Christopher Nolan’s flick The Odyssey is probably a work of marketing genius, or maybe not, we will see. Many are now saying ‘based’ culture warriors and those repelled by certain very outré casting choices have got it wrong and it is actually good. However, you will never convince me the casting was not epic trolling: a black actress as Helen of Troy, possessed of a face unlikely to have launched a thousand ships, at least not in her direction; an African-American rap singer; a transgender actress playing Sinon (a character actually from Virgil’s Aeneid); and the goddess Athena played by Zendaya Coleman, an actress known for practicing economy of expression. I have not seen Nolan’s Odyssey and probably never will, not for any particularly ideological reason but because of what an old chum of mine with whom I did Classics observed after seeing it.
Yes, my friend is a bit of a wag, but he does read Latin and Greek, and if I am going to watch something called The Odyssey, I want the protagonist to be Odysseus, not just called Odysseus. July 21st, 2026 | 56 comments
Musa al-Gharbi is an American academic – a sociologist and a professor of journalism – who is an occasional columnist for the Guardian. He describes himself as a Democrat. If you were asked to guess from the information in the sentence above what he would say in a talk giving an overview of sociological research about American voters in the era of Trump, you’d probably be wrong, just like I was. I found his talk “How Researcher Homogeneity Distorts Knowledge Production” informative and entertaining, particularly the section that starts at 28:02 and continues until about 40:00 on what is commonly called “the public loss of trust in science”. (As Professor al-Gharbi points out, there has scarcely been any public loss of trust in science.) May 6th, 2026 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
March 31st, 2026 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
The other day I found this Swedish video giving a perspective (from around 2018) on radical feminism. Tip is to set the video to give you English subtitles if you aren’t fluent in Swedish. Assuming that it is satire, let it be put in the balance when one assesses the contribution of the land of Olaf Palme and Gunnar Myrdal to the World, And again, if this was so obvious in 2018, why did it take so long for these types to be called out for what they are elsewhere? March 29th, 2026 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
The BBC reports,
They’ll never get reparations. But this move might end up paving the way for healing and justice – by being annoying enough to finally kill off the MOPE Olympics and the self-destructive mindset that mopery promotes. March 26th, 2026 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)
Fewer Britons giving to charity, study says, with donations down by £1.4bn, reports the Guardian. The article gives cost of living pressure as the main reason for the decline in giving. Commenters in this thread on the UKPolitics subreddit also mention invasive chuggers and the fact people tend not to have cash on them these days. The article itself continues,
Maybe, but far from being the victims of “attacks mounted by rightwing politicians and media”, a lot of charities seem to have been eager to volunteer for the front lines of the culture wars. This excerpt comes from the section of the website of Oxfam International headed “What We Do”:
There speaks a soldier of the culture wars. How long did they expect to keep waving their banners without anyone noticing that they had picked a side? I believe that Oxfam does still occasionally do the “help suffering people in emergencies” thing that most of those who buy from or volunteer to work in their charity shops think is their main purpose. That’s my excuse for buying that nice scarf I saw in their window the other day, anyway. But I wonder what proportion of what I paid for that scarf went to pay the salaries of the sort of people who write “hetero-patriarchal” with a straight face. And writing guff about “neocolonial dynamics” is actually one of the less bad things some of Oxfam’s paid staff have got up to over the last few years, as can be seen by reading some of the many previous Samizdata posts about Oxfam at this link. Added later: Here is another example of Oxfam’s enthusiastic participation in the culture wars:
Compare the pictures in that BBC article and see if you believe Oxfam when it said that “There was no intention by Oxfam or the film-makers for this slide to have portrayed any particular person or people.” I do not. In the Telegraph’s account of the same story, the resemblance is even clearer. Some smart work by the Telegraph’s picture editor has almost certainly found the very photograph of Ms Rowling which Oxfam’s cartoonist had in front of them when they drew the middle witch. That’s taking a side. I have read several comments by people who are on the same side who acknowledge and deplore this. When you alienate half the population, don’t be surprised when they stop giving you money. March 17th, 2026 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
https://x.com/realLandsEnd/status/2025752283435196882 This tweet by Beatrice Alder-Bolton, co-author of Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto, has been garnering interest, as it was intended to do. As the title says, while I never doubt the humanity of people who appear “out of control, incoherent, or in psychiatric crisis”, I do think that while they remain in this state in public places they are disruptive to social life. I also think that while in this state they are untrustworthy. Beatrice Alder-Bolton would like us to believe that she trusts them. If she had said that she sympathised with people visibly in psychiatric crisis, I would have believed her. I also sympathise. If she had said that she tries to engage with such people in order to help them, I might have believed her. I have met a few kind souls who habitually respond in this way. I admire them (the kind souls) from a safe distance. But when Beatrice Alder-Bolton implies that she thinks the man having a psychiatric crisis in front of her on public transport is trustworthy, I do not believe her. Her body goes onto high alert just like anyone else’s. And speaking for myself, you bet I don’t trust the crazy guy. You bet I think he might be dangerous. And if he has just emptied his bowels or his bladder in the carriage I do indeed fear contamination. But in order to be worthy of trust myself, I cannot simply dismiss Beatrice Alder-Bolton as a high-functioning mad left-winger of the sort that even other left-wingers are beginning to realise are poisonous to their cause (“I am begging leftists and liberals to not do this again. It is normal and smart to be nervous and on high alert when someone behaves in a profoundly anti-social way (peeing on the subway) and/or a threatening way (screaming on the subway). The more cities tolerate this, the fewer people ride public transport, the worse that transport gets, and eventually it gets to a breaking point and people wind up voting for right-wing politicians who come in and crack skulls and way over-police.” – Jill Filipovic), I have to acknowledge that when Alder-Bolton’s way of thinking is described as “left libertarian”, the “libertarian” part is perfectly real. I wrote about the influence that the libertarian writings of Thomas Szasz had and continue to have on me in a post called “Ideology and Insanity on the New York Subway”. Just as certain chemicals are harmless in themselves but dangerous in combination with others, the way that Szasz’s* libertarian ideals combined with the dominant suicidally empathetic ideals of our time has produced results like the random murder of Iryna Zarutska by Decarlos Brown. There are ways to respect the equal humanity of those who cannot function in society while, well, continuing to have a society. Private property is one, and if that is too much for modern sensibilities, the rediscovery of the right to exclude mad people from public property. To use Ms Alder-Bolton’s word, sanism. The rediscovery of proud, unapologetic sanism. *You say it “sasses”. In Hungarian the digraph “sz” has the same function as the English letter “s” and the letter “s” on its own is pronounced the same way as the English digraph “sh”. Confusingly, Polish is the other way round. February 24th, 2026 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
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