Calling their Bluff

I cannot stand cheats. Maybe cos I never had to cheat. I enjoyed being clever. I was an academic star. I was brilliant at Latin, Politics, and History. I was a whizz at Maths, Physics, Biology, and modern languages. At 13, I wanted to become a bilingual doctor and move to Spain. But then I found Chemistry a bit of a challenge, and Geography bored me to tears, so I dropped those and took up Art and Philosophy instead. In my English Literature A-Levels I scored a clean 100% in my final paper on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Even I was shocked. I wasn’t a weird kid, either. I had friends, hung out at record shops, and drove my mates to house parties in my mum’s Honda Civic. Everyone loved hanging out upstairs at mine. We were accessible, cool and smart.

I was told to apply to Cambridge University to “read” Law, which already sounded pompous. “Read”? It was a bit of a faff applying to Cambridge. You didn’t just apply like you do at a regular university. You have to go down there and look around all the colleges and decide which one is most you, and then apply directly there. It’s a lottery within a lottery. And once you apply, if you make it to interview, you have to go back down there and experience an audition process that makes Simon Cowell look like a pussycat. So I went for my mooch around Cambridge, and I decided I wanted to apply to a college called Downing. There was absolutely no reason for this beyond aesthetic. It was so different from the fusty medieval courts of the other colleges, and had these giant neoclassical columns and bright green lawns. It looked like the Greek Gods had taken over Camelot.

But when I reported back to my school’s admissions advisor, it was suggested I’d have better luck applying to another college called Selwyn. It was more strategic, apparently. I wasn’t that into Selwyn but I did what I was told. Application and personal statement went off. Fingers were crossed. Then weeks later, I got a fat letter in the post (fat is good) and it contained instructions. I had been invited for interview. So back down I went. I had two different interviews. They were odd and cartoonish, like Monty Python meets Dr Seuss. I was almost waiting for the Knights who say Ni to pop out from behind a bookshelf and offer me riddles. Not like a natural discussion or conversation. It was more like a hazing, and I saw right through my tormentors. It was there I felt something brand new for the first time: a judgment I’d never felt before. They brought up my religion. The fuck does that have to do with Law, I thought. I left feeling like I’d been put in a naughty corner by a bunch of power-hungry academic lunatics. I didn’t have any fun.

Weeks later, I went to visit some other universities I’d already received offers from, including Manchester. I was on the bus going down Oxford Road to the main university campus, blasting Definitely, Maybe by Oasis on my Discman, and I experienced a sensation of total destiny for the first time in my life. I thought - I’m having this! There were students of all flavors teeming out of every crevice of a city that was vibe-ing with music and fashion and everything. I wanted it. But I knew everyone wanted me to go to Cambridge. Everyone except Cambridge.

I got a thin letter in the post (thin is not good), and it said something about regrets and sorry. No room at the inn for you this year. Perhaps their ethnic minority quota was filled. Who’s to say. They advised me to wait a year, reapply, and there will likely be a place for you. Go on a gap year! That pissed me off even more. I was 17. I wanted out and on to the road of real life, not to be killing cockroaches in a hostel in Vietnam with a bad tummy. My school were raging about my rejection, which was really on brand for them. Statistics have feelings too, you know.

But I didn’t give a shit about not getting into Cambridge. I was going to go to Manchester, and have the best three years of my life, and I did, and it was awesome.

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Before I go on, I want to make something clear, because I am a journalist – a real one. Deifying someone who just committed suicide is incredibly dangerous. The Samaritans guidelines themselves instruct journalists and content creators to strictly avoid sensationalizing, glorifying, or romanticizing suicide. That specifically includes blaming anyone’s suicide on a simplified cause such as “the media”. Samaritans media guidelines are free. Anyone is able to look them up online. But I guess it speaks to online commentary these days that none of the thought police thought to do so.

Jason Arday - if you haven’t already read - was the youngest ever Black professor at the University of Cambridge, and the poster child for DEI. After months of scrutiny over plagiarism allegations, among other issues, he was found dead yesterday. An absolutely dreadful end to a torrid scandal. His suicide is being exploited by progressives and leftists to score political points, and it is depraved. Journalists who would know not to post incessantly after a very public suicide story have been replaced by self-promoting activists who don’t care about the ramifications of their actions or their speech, and are motivated to point fingers at the media (“hounded to death” has been the common slogan) and make baseless accusations that his treatment by the press had something to do with his race. London Mayor Sadiq Khan pulled the race card.

The idea that other people who are not Black have not been victims of “pernicious public shaming” is categorically insane. Can’t we please live in reality? No, we can’t. The Mayor shut off any replies to his tweet, doubling down on the refusal to be held accountable.

I would like to ask. If DEI prevents systemic racism, then how did racism kill Arday? Pick one. Either the ideology is failing or they’re lying to protect the ideology. It’s very uncomfortable for leftists to admit that DEI is inherently racist, that positive discrimination is a mechanism that protects the racism of low expectations, and encourages fraud. So they force everything through the lens of race, and continue racing to the bottom.

DEI is cruel. It is cruel to promote and tolerate the delusions of the under-qualified and then abandon them when the toxicity of those delusions begin to harm the surrounding system. Students had a right to complain without being targeted as racists. Fellow academics and journalists had a right to investigate Arday’s bogus claims without being intimidated by police, or threatened with legal action. Arday hired Carter-Ruck, one of the most aggressive libel law firms in the UK, to scare off Times Higher Education who were investigating the integrity of his academic research. Those who are swift to blame “the media” for his suicide must face a question: do you not believe in a free press that holds systems of power to account?

Let’s be clear. Arday was the darling of the elite liberal left, and he courted intense media coverage upon assuming his professorship. He was due to have his memoir published by the biggest publishing house in the UK, Simon & Schuster, and claimed he had received a £1.4million advance. This was a public interest story. Something of extreme concern to me in all this outrage-baiting around Arday is that barely a single person outrage-baiting has given a sentence to the dangers - or indeed the nuance - of suicide. They demonstrate zero understanding of what may lead a person to take their own life – one that doesn’t involve their own projections about their own feelings.

Arday is a victim of progressive ideology; an ideology that only knows how to double down instead of looking itself in the mirror, and asking if it’s really working. Even more of a victim of the ideology are his students, who will no doubt be harassed and harangued now by the morally virtuous left. More tragedies will occur. How many more marginalized people do the liberal elite want to build up to tear down? How many more will they exploit? To blame the media is to deflect from a corrupt system, the investigating of which is not “racist” or hateful. It’s strange that my previous piece was titled “Killing With Kindness”.

And say it was “racist”, OK. Say the media’s behaviour was “racist”. Say everyone who wanted to expose Arday was “racist”. Then I must call the bluff of the racism patrol. To label Arday’s suicide a “racist witch hunt” and a “disproportionate media onslaught” is pretty rich from the same people who have spent years either participating in or standing by a disproportionate and completely baseless witch hunt that has been happening to Jews worldwide. We, as individuals and a collective, have been dealing with daily media libels and social media harassment that incites violence against us in the streets at an alarming rate. We are at war, and I don’t say that lightly.

Last night, a terrorist invaded a synagogue in New York City. In Manhattan. He wanted to harm people. It is due to a “media onslaught” against the Jewish people and Israel that has lasted decades. It is being supported by media including the Guardian and BBC, by elite academic institutions including Oxbridge and Ivy Leagues, by politicians including Sadiq Khan and Zohran Mamdani, and by non-profits who are receiving their money from foreign sources in Iran, Qatar and China. The Jews are accused of genocide. Which is the worst crime in the world. Far worse than plagiarism. It’s also the crime we have endured. Genocide is a term coined by a Jew who lost almost 50 members of his family in the Holocaust. We are not guilty of genocide. But the “media onslaught” continues. And it is supported by frauds who were elevated to positions of prestige by DEI. Care to speak up? Why don’t they?

They don’t speak up because it doesn’t serve their fake virtue. They only stand up for their own, even if they’re liars. They fall silent otherwise. And Jews; they’ll take from us, but they won’t invest. So upset about racism, they have said nothing about Arabic copies of Mein Kampf going on-sale in book stores across London. No big deal, eh.

Being a true journalist takes integrity and a willingness to be hunted for speaking the truth. I had - I have - a successful career rooted in integrity and talent and a preparedness to be fearless. Despite being smeared, called a racist, a transphobe, accused of spreading misinformation online about issues and about individuals I have been linked to, with absolutely no evidence to back-up any of these weaponized claims, I continue to do my work. I have done nothing I have been accused of by those who are trying to stop me from writing the truth. Frauds who have stolen from me, including stealing work. It’s funny isn’t it that the liberal elite call for media crackdowns when they’re trying to avoid exposure, arguing that it’s the “right wing” who hold the power. Reader: I have not had a byline in a mainstream outlet since 2020. That’s not because of the “right wing”. I’m politically homeless, despite the smears.

Free press is not a a luxury. A free press keeps power honest. Hard-hitting investigative journalism must ask the uncomfortable questions that nobody else is prepared to ask, whether they are politically correct or not. That is the only way to hold systems, to hold individuals, to account, particularly in instances when the public interest is at stake. For years, however, that kind of journalism has been under attack, as reporters have been intimidated and silenced from doing their jobs. It’s not governments bullying them, it’s activists with immovable agendas. Those bullies decide which stories are allowed to exist, and which voices must be discredited and totally destroyed.

I am no stranger to this. I have been intimidated and silenced; by pop stars, by public academics and by gangs of online activists, particularly progressives. People who claim to stand for truth, but who work overtime to suppress it whenever the truth challenges their narrative.

I had an experience in which I subtly called out an academic fraud without even naming them. This person is not a private individual. They made themselves a public figure by also courting a lot of media attention. For the crime of minimal journalism pointing out their hypocrisy, they lied and claimed that I smeared them – a smear it was not. They however had already been smearing me in private, spreading harmful gossip about me and making up lies. They approached several of my own contacts with these lies via third parties to intimidate me into silence. Ten years prior a similar thing happened with a female celebrity who took offense at a mild review I did of her concert. She similarly smeared me behind closed doors and engaged in intimidation tactics including threatening serious legal ramifications.

These cowards know what they did. You fucked with the wrong Jew.

I have been hounded by activists and agenda-driven “journalists” for asking basic questions about social justice movements including BLM who vandalized synagogues and terrorized Jews in the name of anti racism. I was memed. I was abused. I was harassed. I was cancelled. I have asked basic questions about the hypocrisy of so-called feminist academics. And I have been punished and threatened in private over it. None of those outraged by Arday said anything. Silence.

I never gave up. I continued building this. I had nothing to escape accountability from, and those who smeared me know that. Liars tend to lie. You’ll find out when you criticize them.

Activists will blame the media and cry bully to avoid all accountability for their own DARVO, their own circle jerking, their own narcissism, their own savior complexes. They will avoid the uncomfortable truth of Arday’s own attempts at silencing and intimidation. Do the press sometimes go too hard with individuals? Yes they do. I speak as someone who has been absolutely terrorized by former colleagues. But those posting outrage right now are completely demonizing a press that was caught in a public scandal. Many individuals get caught in public scandals, some guilty, some innocent. Should vulnerable people be better protected? Yes absolutely.

Journalists must ever be forced into silence. That is moral blackmail. When that happens we all lose. Accountability disappears. Power - whether celebrity, academic or institutional - operates without scrutiny. A free press that can’t speak freely is not free. It must be defended, or it will be replaced by more cheats, more frauds, and more activists pretending to be professionals. And then what happens to the truth?

This week, a female supporter of Islamic Jihad was appointed an assistant professor at Cambridge University. But hey, let’s not report on it. Islamophobia and all. It might hurt her feelings. I’m sure the students will be fine…

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