Links - 16th August 2026 (2 - UK Grooming Gangs)

Concerned Citizen on X - "🚨🇬🇧 One of the UK Rape Gang Victims publicly spoke about her life shattering ordeal - and then British Police arrested her for it within 30 minutes and sent her to prison. It’s actually beyond comprehension."

Matt Van Swol on X - "EVERY FUCKING PERSON WHO HAS BEEN SCREAMING ABOUT THE EPSTEIN FILES FOR MONTHS... ...IS DEAD FUCKING SILENT ABOUT A QUARTER-OF-A-MILLION WHITE GIRLS BEING GANG RAPED BY MUSLIMS!!! I DON'T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT WHAT ANY OF YOU FUCKING PEOPLE HAVE TO SAY EVER AGAIN!!!!!!"

Steve's Law 🇬🇧 on X - ""There's no way 250k girls were raped by Pakistanis over decades" says the side that believes 1/4 women have been raped. It's "believe all women" until the women say they perputrator was brown. Exhibit a: (wait until the end)"
Vaush strikes again!

John Carter on X - ">get placed in foster care
>social workers pimp you out
>social workers force you into shariah marriage with your rapist
>your rapist's parents get paid by the government to raise your rapist's baby"
Andrew Follett on X - "Sad truth: The 🇬🇧 Muslim rape gang horrors are so insane, evil, and over the top that Leftists will be able to dismiss them as fake This is one of the Left's most effective defenses...the fact that the truth of their policies is so insane it sounds made up!"

i/o on X - "From The Rape Gang Inquiry Report released today: "While Sir Keir Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions, it has been reported that 13,000 suspected rape gang members and paedophiles were let off with warning letters.""

Guy Incognito on X - "The fake news media in Canada went absolutely ballistic for the woman who falsely accused those NHL players of “gang rape”. Every second story was about her harrowing tale of how she consented and then regretted her decision and decides to try and ruin their lives….   Now. We have a true report of the systemic rape of 250,000 minors in the UK by Muslim men and the fake news media in Canada is silent.   You do not hate the media enough."

Meme - "British police getting ready to arrest a white girl for being racist to her muslim rapist *armed police officers, some in tactical gear with rifles*"

Meme - Mark Taylor @Mark_Taylor: "I don't have 29 friends that would come over if I called and said I had a girl to rape. I don't have even one single friend who would do that. Yet there are entire races of people that will do that. That should put to rest the idea of racial equality."
Deport Foreign Criminals @peterstopcrime: "They all had a go in her and on her from the age of 13. 29 men who identified themselves as Muslim have been charged in connection with the rape of a single female across a seven-year period in West Yorkshire."
"Ajmal Aziz, 39 of Halifax, is charged with three counts of rape and attempted rape
Mohammed Jangier, 44, of Halifax, is charged with rape
Mohammed Asif, 36, of Halifax, is charged with two counts of rape
Harris Ahmed Butt, 37, of Halifax, is charged with two counts of rape and two counts of indecent assault
Taukeer Butt, 36, of Halifax, is charged with three counts of rape
Muitasim Khan, 40, of Halifax, is charged with rape
Mohammed Hamza, 47, of Halifax, is charged with rape
Mohsin Mir, 40, of Halifax, is charged with three counts of rape
Javid Mir, 38, of Halifax, is charged with rape
Haroon Saddique, 37, of Bradford, is charged with two counts of rape
Zahir Iqbal, 41, of Halifax, is charged with two counts of rape
Sarfraz Rabnawaz, 35, of Bradford, is charged with two counts of rape"
Time to condemn white men for not doing more to fight "rape culture"

Meme - SAMMY Woodhouse @officialsammyuk: "A child became pregnant after being raped by the perpetrator at a mental health hospital. A child was wrongly charged with being racist while the rapist roamed free. Let that sink in! For decades, I and others have told the world what was happening, and we were branded as racists and accused of jumping on a 'far-right' bandwagon!"
"It also revealed one girl was visited by one of the men while she was an inpatient at a mental health hospital in Somerset, and got pregnant again. The report said lessons must be learned after one of the girls was wrongly taken to court for alleged racial abuse against her abuser, while her abuser was not investigated until years later"
The UK, where the ultimate sin is to be racist - worse than fatally stabbing someone or raping an underaged girl

i/o on X - ""Moral panic" — that is, an exaggerated fear that a specific group poses a threat to society's values and safety — is how Wikipedia described the systemic sexual abuse of thousands of white girls by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in the UK."

Meme - Grifty @TheGriftReport: "A professor at Georgetown University replied to restore UK MP Rupert Lowe with "get over it" when he said there is a link between Islam and rape gangs in the UK. This is a man who educates young at a highly respected University @Georgetown. He did delete it but later used the same reply again when called out about his first response. Why is he telling people to get over it?"
Rupert Lowe MP @RupertLowe...: "There is a link between the rape gangs and one particular religion - we have seen it again and again and again at our inquiry. That religion is Islam. As a country, we must have the courage to face up to that fact."
Jonathan ACBrown: "Get over it"
Arminho @smalisoat: "There's something absurdly evil about saying "get over it" in context with gang rape, torture and murder for religious reasons. Something like this would never be said about any other group for lesser crimes"
Jonathan AC Brown: "Get over it"
Good luck if you tell left wingers to get over one of their obsessions from longer ago, or a more recent minor one that affected fewer people

Asra Nomani on X - "Jonathan Brown is the golden-haired son-in-law of the Muslim Brotherhood in America. He is married to Laila Al-Arian, whose father is Sami Al-Arian, a rabid anti-Israel ideologue whom the US deported to Turkey after prosecuting him for terrorism financing. Learn more here:"

Ben on X - "🧵 The BBC just published their official response to complaints about ignoring Rupert Lowe’s Rape Gang Inquiry (Feb 2026). Their excuse? “Limited resources.” During the SAME 10 days they found resources for:
✅ Mandelson/Epstein - led every bulletin daily
✅ Prince Andrew - continuous coverage
✅ Winter Olympics - wall to wall
✅ Palestine Action court ruling
✅ Bank of England rates
But not for:
❌ Survivors raped by 600-700 men each
❌ Girls trafficked to Pakistan as sex slaves
❌ “Eid rapes” - white girls targeted as religious celebration
❌ NHS staff ignored 13yr old girls with STDs and miscarriages
❌ Senior police officers “must have known”
❌ A conveyor belt of abuse across dozens of towns and cities
The BBC’s own statement:   “These decisions should not be taken as indicative of bias.”
This is the SECOND time the BBC has had to apologise over the Lowe inquiry. In July 2025, The Spectator reported the BBC rushed a hit piece on Lowe over donation registration — publishing before giving him time to respond. He was later completely cleared. Two apologies. Zero meaningful inquiry coverage. Survivors still waiting. You decide if that’s bias."

Home Office accused of effectively allowing child abuse - "The Government has “effectively allowed the abuse” of thousands of children by failing to implement measures recommended by a national inquiry, the High Court has been told.  The claims were made by the Maggie Oliver Foundation on Thursday as it secured a judicial review of whether the Home Office failed to act on the 20 recommendations of the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse (IICSA).  The foundation, set up by Maggie Oliver, a former police whistleblower, to campaign for tougher action against grooming gangs, argued that the Government had failed to set a clear timetable to implement the recommendations.

Meme - Russian Garbage Human @RusGarbageHuman: "If every one of the 4 billion women worldwide were to meet three random White European men, there's a 99.6% probability that none would run into three rapists in a row. Astonishingly, in a UK town with a population of only 260,000, this improbable scenario actually happened. Make a note of their presumed ethnicities. This is an issue coming from a certain demographic. Look at the statistics, woman."
"One night in Oldham in 2006, for example, a 12-year- old girl named "Sophie" entered a police station and reported that she had just been molested in a graveyard by a man named "Ali." A desk officer told her to come back with an adult when she was sober. Two men accosted her in the police station. Joined by a third, they raped her in their car. When they dumped her on the street, she asked a man named Sarwar Ali for directions. He took her to his home, raped her, and gave her money for bus fare home. A man named Shakil Chowdhury pulled up in his car and offered to take her home. He abducted her and took her to a house where he and four other men repeatedly raped her."
lispbittatits @lispbittatits: "They're no more likely to rape women because they are of foreign descent. Look at the statistics bruh."

Reuben Rodriguez on X - "The UK rape scandal is 100,000x worse than the Epstein scandal (not only b/c there were 400k victims vs like 400)…and it gets 1/100th the press Hate to be conspiratorial but I don’t wonder a *little* if one is being covered to innure the public to the horrors of the other"

Adrian Hilton on X - "It is strange that the first police officer on the scene of the 2017 London Bridge terror attack can be sacked for using the word ‘pikey’ in a WhatsApp message, while those in the police and social services who facilitated or colluded in rape gangs have not been held to account."

Sydney Jones 🇬🇧 (POB) 🟣 on X - "“Police vehicles were used to traffic her and some of the abuse events were called ‘cop nights.'” “torture included waterboarding and strangulation by rope.” “raped by a dog, filmed, and forced to rewatch the footage as the men placed bets.” “she witnessed the murder of at least three girls, one of whom was allegedly killed as a punishment for speaking to the police force.” You aren’t angry enough."

Meme - Wesley Yang @wesyang: "Questions you were allowed to ask in Anglophone academia in 1999. The migrant grooming gangs were already active in Britain at the time."
"Polygamy, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, punishing women for being raped, differential access for men and women to health care and education, unequal rights of ownership, assembly, and political participation, unequal vulnerability to violence. These practices and conditions are standard in some parts of the world, Do demands for multiculturalism-and certain minority group rights in particular-make them more likely to continue and to spread to liberal democracies? Are there fundamental conflicts between our commitment to gender equity and our increasing desire to respect the customs of minority cultures or religions? In this book, the eminent feminist Susan Moller Okin and fifteen of the world's leading thinkers about feminism and multiculturalism explore these unsettling questions in a provocative, passionate, and illuminating debate."
Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? : Okin, Susan Moller, Cohen, Joshua, Howard, Matthew, Nussbaum, Martha C.

Meme - "500,000 British school girls raped and trafficked *Keir Starmer shushing*
American drug addict criminal dying *Keir Starmer kneeling*"

Rupert Lowe MP on X - "In July last year, when a malicious complaint was made against our rape gang inquiry, the BBC immediately reported it with glee. Later that day, the complaint was dropped. The BBC was even forced to issue a formal correction about how they covered the 'story'. The third I've had from the BBC in less than a year...  They were absolutely desperate to report a potentially damaging story about our efforts (which turned out to be absolutely nothing).  Yet when the hearings begin? Not a word on their site. Total silence.  They can't claim it has no public interest, as they covered the negative story with such enthusiasm.  It truly is a disgraceful organisation that is dripping in stinking left wing bias.   We must defund the BBC, strip it of the licence fee, and let it crush itself under its own arrogance."

Councillor who called grooming gang victims ‘white trash’ to keep seat - "A former Labour council leader who referred to grooming victims as “poor white trash in Rotherham” could remain a councillor for another year without a public vote.  Dennis Jones stepped down as the leader of Peterborough city council, apologised and was suspended by the Labour Party after his comments were made public in September last year.  Mr Jones, who now sits as an independent councillor, was due to face re-election in May. However, his seat could now be safe for another 12 months after the council’s Labour-led cabinet voted unanimously to delay this year’s elections. Peterborough city council is one of 26 to have asked the Government for permission to postpone their polls.  One councillor said the decision had caused so much anger locally that some residents were threatening to withhold council tax payments in protest."

Edward Dutton on X - "Hope Not Hate have been right all along! It's not just Muslims that sexually abuse underage English girls! It's also very senior members of Hope Not Hate!"
'Hope Not Hate' anti-racism campaigner exposed as paedophile - "A former organiser for controversial British government-funded anti-fascist and anti-racism campaign group Hope Not Hate has admitted to child sex offences against a 13-year-old girl.  Liron Woodcock-Velleman, 30, pleaded guilty in Highbury Corner Magistrates Court on Friday to one count of “attempting to engage in sexual communication with a child” and one count of “being an offender 18 or over attempting to cause a child aged 13 to 15 to watch or look at an image of sexual activity”... Woodcock-Velleman previously worked as a Political Organiser for Hope Not Hate, which was investigated late last year by the Charity Commission after a Conservative MP accused the antiwhite group of funnelling taxpayer funds given to its charitable trust into its far-left political activism.  “Hope Not Hate Limited is a purely political operation with a reported history of fabricating security threats, spreading disinformation and pushing smear campaigns,” MP for Windsor Jack Rankin wrote in a letter to the Commission that highlighted hundreds of thousands of pounds in government grants and Home Office Counter Extremism Unit funding given to the Hope Not Hate Charitable Trust... Last year another Jewish Hope Not Hate operative, Harry Shukman, came under scrutiny for changing his name by deed poll in order to get a new passport that he used to infiltrate right-wing British groups, and then changing it back again.  And in 2024, Hope Not Hate boss Nick Lowles was forced to apologise after spreading a false story about a Muslim woman being attacked with acid during anti-immigration protests following the murders of three British girls by African teenafer Axel Rudakubana in Southport."

Novara Media on X - ""Where there are white grooming gangs, or white gangs on online paedophiles sharing images of child sexual abuse, there is never ever a question of culture, race, ethnicity, religion' @AyoCaesar speaks to @AaronBastani about the hypocrisy of the right-wing political and media class when it comes to racialising certain types of crime."
Laurie Wastell on X - "You can only maintain this pseudo-argument by being wilfully disingenuous. Why would race have been a factor in white Paul Doyle driving into white Liverpool supporters?  Rudakubana’s race is obviously relevant: he claimed he had suffered racist bullying and wanted to take revenge on the society he was in, which he felt apart from. He read literature about the mass killing of white colonialists.  The rape gangs visited sickening abuse and sexual torture on a racial and religious out-group they despised.  As for so-called “white grooming gangs”, not only are these vastly less common proportionally, but also they are presumably not referring to victims in explicitly racialised terms – “white slag”, “white bitch”, etc, as the Pakistani rape gangs did.  And unlike these gangs, they weren’t being implicitly condoned if not actively supported by their families and wider community and clan structures. White sex offenders are rightly treated as pariahs – family members don’t shout out “I love you Dad!” when they are sentenced for child rape."
Eliot Ranch on X - "Also, I don't know if this is the feed I see or a reflection of reality, but the vast majority of 'white grooming gangs' I see are Romanian/Albanian/Bulgarian (and it's often suggested are Romani). She can try and racialise it all she likes, but there just hasn't been a gang of white supremacists trafficking, torturing and raping black or brown girls (we would have known because it would have been front page news for 10 weeks and echo through our halls of power and policy like Stephen Lawrence did).   It's not about race, it's about culture."
Anti-colonialism has blood on its hands. Hate crime aggravation for sentencing only applies when "minorities" are victims

Melissa Chen on X - "A researcher who worked for the UK government tried to whistleblow about the grooming gangs but was sent to diversity training course instead You cannot make this stuff up. We are beyond parody and satire"

The Rape Jihad Is Unmentionable Because It’s Doctrinal | National Review - "over a decade ago, I scoffed at a colleague who had suggested that ISIS — the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, which used to be the Iraqi franchise of its now rival al-Qaeda — might be concerned that Western nations were on to its rape jihad. Even if we indulged the fantasy that jihadists were possessed of the civilized sensibility that would trigger such a concern, I countered that “the shocking Rotherham rape jihad scandal” that had erupted in England would assure them that “the West is far more likely to look the other way than to mobilize against this signature sexual abuse.” This is akin to a point so eloquently made by such fearless truth-tellers as John O’Sullivan, Douglas Murray, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Among the most heinous elements of the sudden interest in the rape jihad, catalyzed by Elon Musk’s admirable hounding of Britain’s oh-so-progressive government, is that the “grooming gangs” are a very old story. The rape jihad wasn’t hiding in plain sight; it was willfully covered up by Parliament, by Britain and its allies in Europe’s transnational progressive project, and by the American cognoscenti. Talking about it was a surer guarantee of pariah status than participating in it. And then there’s the why. Why is it a signature sexual abuse that we’re not supposed to talk about? Well, because it’s deeply rooted in Islamic scripture. If you have the temerity to notice that, there looms the risk of admonition that the problem is not the rape jihad but your “Islamophobia.” Back in that 2014 column, written when ISIS was conquering territory the size of Britain and reveling in the spoils, I quoted one of the jihadists who was gleefully anticipating “slave market day.” The Koran, he insisted, authorizes Muslims to sexually exploit “the (captives) who their right hands possess.” He was right. Jihadists usually are when they refer to scripture. You can argue that the Islam their well-schooled superiors drill into them is a literalist, selective mining of scripture — passages that more progressive, “moderate” interpretations of Islam contextualize, reinterpret, or regard as applicable only to a bygone time. Perhaps . . . but you can’t credibly argue that the jihadists are making it up. It’s in there. I learned that the hard way in the early Nineties. I wanted to believe that our government was right that the notorious defendant I was prosecuting, the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman, was a raving maniac, but when I dove into his background — as prosecutors have to do because “He’s a raving maniac” is not a very persuasive courtroom argument — I learned that he was renowned in his milieu as a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence who graduated from Al-Azhar University, which for a millennium has been the seat of Sunni Muslim scholarship. And when he purported to draw on scripture, the scripture bore him out. That’s why, even though he was physically unable to carry out actions useful to a jihad, he nevertheless exercised profound influence and commanded authority over jihadists. Doctrine matters to our enemies. Which is why it should matter to us... In the main, the plan is to exploit the West’s — particularly Europe’s — lax border security, generous social welfare regimes, and cultural self-loathing to forge Islamic enclaves. When the Muslim population gets to a critical mass (which need not be large; 5 percent of the population is more than enough if it’s sufficiently compact and aggressive), it seeks to take de facto control of neighborhoods — to the point, often, of making them “no-go” zones for the authorities. The aim of this deliberate adverse possession is to establish the enclave’s “right” to govern its affairs under sharia and to impose fundamentalist mores. Because sharia is deeply discriminatory and antithetical to Western principles of liberty and equality, these enclaves routinely become hellscapes for non-Muslims and, especially, women. This is a strategy of conquest: The enclaves grow, stitch together, and co-opt the political Left, which shares the fundamentalists’ antipathy toward Western liberalism. And the strategy is working, gradually transforming Europe. In that transformation, the same sharia supremacist protocols that ISIS imposed on territory it captured in Iraq and Syria have similarly been imposed by Muslim fundamentalists in the EU... It’s also inconceivable that officials did not know why the rape jihad was happening. Sharia supremacist icons, such as Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, were braying that Islam would “conquer Europe, conquer America.” Sharia courts have been up and running in England for over 40 years — because the British government insisted that its liberal legal tradition could seamlessly meld with Islamic law, even as Muslims demanded to conduct their affairs under Islamic law in lieu of British law. This wasn’t pluralism; it was hostility. Instead of confronting the hostile ideology, Britain embraced it as culturally compatible — risibly branding jihadist terrorism as “anti-Islamic activity,” denying that there were any such things as no-go zones, and sweeping under the rug the rape jihad and the conquest strategy’s other doctrinally rooted acts of menacing. The British government’s rationalization for this was no different from what passes for the reasoning behind Britain’s criminalization of speech. (See my friend Jonathan Turley’s column on that.) If you’re too craven to confront an enemy that means to conquer you, and you’re thus committed to the pretense that Britain can cohere with anti-Britain, then you can’t afford to let the British people bear witness to the madness. But madness it is — madness so long-standing that one is constrained to ask whether it is incorrigible."

Mark Carney helped write the playbook that just sank Keir Starmer

Mark Carney helped write the playbook that just sank Keir Starmer

Keir Starmer resigned as British prime minister on June 22, the worst-polling Labour leader on record, undone by a program of tax rises, paternalism, and managed decline. Mark Carney endorsed the chancellor who built that program, sat on the task force that delivered its centrepiece, and is now running a version of it in Canada.

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Keir Starmer resigned as prime minister of the United Kingdom on Monday, less than two years after winning a political landslide. His favourability rating sits among the lowest YouGov has recorded for any prime minister, beaten only by Liz Truss in her final days. His party lost roughly 1,500 council seats and 35 councils in May, surrendered the Welsh Senedd after a century of Labour control, and watched Reform UK turn a protest vote into a governing threat. Andy Burnham will likely take the keys to a government that has nowhere left to fall.

The British press is writing the story as a personal failure: a dour lawyer who could not communicate, outflanked by populists he did not understand. That account misses the part Canadians have a direct stake in. The program Starmer governed by — the assumptions about taxation, the climate planning, the digital paternalism, the reorientation of an economy by ministerial direction — was not improvised in Downing Street. Mark Carney helped assemble it, blessed the people who ran it, and is now governing Canada from the same blueprint.

How Mark Carney helped build Labour's economic program

In October 2023, with Labour still in opposition, Carney appeared by video at the party conference in Liverpool to endorse Rachel Reeves as the next chancellor of the exchequer. He called her "a serious economist" who "understands the big picture," and the endorsement did real work: it rubber-stamped Reeves's "iron chancellor" pitch with the authority of a former Bank of England governor. The month before, Carney had met Starmer in Montreal at a progressive summit to discuss economic policy. After Labour won, he joined the task force that produced the government's National Wealth Fund, the state-capital vehicle meant to direct money into politically chosen industries. By early 2026, British government sources were citing Carney's worldview as a template for Starmer himself.

The relevance for a Canadian voter is direct. The man now running Canada vouched for the British experiment's architects and helped lay one of its foundation stones. When it collapsed, it collapsed on policies he had endorsed in public.

Starmer's hollow majority and Carney's floor-crossing majority

Starmer's 2024 victory looked overwhelming at 412 seats, but it rested on 33.7% of the vote, the lowest share ever to produce a Commons majority. Two-thirds of the people who voted had backed another party. Labour kept its 412 seats, but within eighteen months the public support behind the government had collapsed.

Carney's mandate is thinner still, and cynically assembled. The Liberals won 169 seats in April 2025, three short of a majority. Rather than govern as a minority answerable to the House, the government went shopping for the votes it had failed to win. Five opposition members crossed the floor in what the CBC called a wave "unmatched by other recent minority governments": four Conservatives in Chris d'Entremont, Michael Ma, Matt Jeneroux, and Marilyn Gladu, plus New Democrat Lori Idlout. Conservative members have said the Liberals were working on them too, one of them caught admitting it on a hot mic. Asked about it, Carney offered that he is "often the last to know."

Starmer's supermajority was hollow because voters never really gave it. Carney's majority is synthetic because voters never consented to it — it was stitched together after the election from members elected under other banners. Both rest on the same presumption. Each man is sure he already has the right answers, which makes a real mandate feel optional: get the votes however you can, then govern as planned. Britain has just shown how that ends when voters disagree.

Carney's "build big" agenda and Starmer's tax-and-spend record

Rachel Reeves, Starmer's chancellor of the exchequer, was the figure Carney had endorsed for the job a year earlier. Her first budget, in October 2024, delivered the largest tax rises at a single fiscal event since 1993, roughly £40 billion, and pushed Britain's tax burden to the highest level in its recorded history. The centrepiece was a rise in employers' National Insurance, a tax on the act of hiring, sold as a way to protect "working people" that fell on the firms that employ them. Weeks earlier the government had stripped the winter fuel payment from around ten million pensioners with no warning, a £1.4-billion saving announced out of the blue that it later reversed after the damage was done. The pattern was constant: extract revenue, direct it from the centre, retreat under pressure, and call the whole arrangement a plan for growth.

Carney's Canadian program works the same way under a more appealing name. The British National Wealth Fund he helped design has a Canadian twin: the $25-billion Canada Strong Fund, which he unveiled as the country's first sovereign wealth fund and said was modelled on Norway. As I argued when he announced it, the label does not hold up. A sovereign wealth fund saves a surplus; Ottawa was, at the time, running a $78-billion deficit, so the Canada Strong Fund is borrowed money dressed up as national savings. The rest of the pitch is "build big": major projects greenlit from Ottawa and a promise to double exports to non-American markets within a decade. The assumption is identical to the one that sank Reeves: that a sufficiently clever centre can allocate capital better than the people who earned it, and that the bill can be deferred indefinitely. The Globe's John Rapley, no conservative, warned Carney directly to learn from Starmer — that promising better services, more spending, and no painful taxes at once is the contradiction that hollowed out the British government from the inside. Britain's reward for trying was government borrowing costs that became the most expensive in the G7.

Carney's net-zero central banking and carbon-price agenda

Where Carney's worldview is most fully his own is climate. Long before Canada, as governor of the Bank of England, he used the central bank to enlist the financial system in net-zero planning. His 2015 Lloyd's speech recast climate change as a threat to financial stability that justified central-bank action — climate disclosure rules, climate stress tests, and a call for governments to set a carbon-price "corridor" with floors and ceilings. It was the founding text of a movement to govern emissions through unelected financial authorities rather than through voters. Not everyone in Britain was persuaded that the governor was even minding his actual job; Jacob Rees-Mogg's verdict on his monetary record was that he was "hopeless".

The same instinct now shapes Canadian industrial policy. Carbon pricing raises costs that voters would reject if they were asked directly. They are not asked: the decisions sit with officials and regulators no one can vote out, and the targets are dated so far ahead that no election can assess whether they will be met. In Britain, high energy costs and a stagnant economy were exactly the conditions Reform UK fed on. The assumption that citizens can be planned toward a target they did not choose does not become more popular for being administered by a man with a Davos pedigree.

Bill C-34 and the UK's under-16 social media ban

The clearest evidence that this is one program in two countries arrived this month, and it was not a coincidence of timing. On June 10, Carney's government tabled Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, barring Canadians under sixteen from social media, requiring platforms to verify the age of every user, and creating a new Digital Safety Commission to police the regime, on penalty of fines up to 3% of global revenue. Five days later, on June 15, Starmer announced the British equivalent — an under-16 ban covering the same platforms, enforced by age checks on all users. Carney and Starmer weren't operating in silos. Starmer said he expected to raise online safety with other leaders at the G7 summit in France, and Carney noted that countries would be on the same page about acting on artificial intelligence and child safety. The bans are one front in a coordinated push among like-minded governments: Australia first, then Canada, Britain, France, Spain, and the European Commission's coming Digital Fairness Act, each lending the others the cover of consensus. The point of coordinating is precisely that no single electorate gets to weigh the measure on its own; by the time it reaches any one Parliament, it arrives as what everyone is already doing.

The British version drew a warning Canadians should read before C-34 reaches committee. Verifying that a user is over sixteen requires verifying everyone, which means submitting identification to open an account and ending anonymous use of the internet. Big Brother Watch called it the imposition of ID checks as "the price of admission to the internet," a step "authoritarian regimes can only dream of," and 438 security and privacy researchers from 32 countries signed a joint statement calling for a moratorium on age-assurance technology. Starmer defended it as a parent rather than a prime minister — the tell of every government-knows-best measure, the appeal to emotion that excuses the reach for control. C-34 carries the same architecture and will require the same surveillance to enforce. It arrives in a Parliament whose government is already advancing a lawful-access bill to lower the threshold for police to obtain Canadians' subscriber data, Bill C-22.

Canada is importing the EU's digital regulation rulebook

The model Canada is importing is European in origin and design — the architecture of the EU's Digital Services Act, the same age-assurance regime, the same standing regulator. The countries adopting it did not arrive at it independently; they took a common template off the shelf. Bill C-34 creates a Digital Safety Commission, a Brussels-style permanent bureaucracy with the power to police speech and access on an ongoing basis, and the European Commission's coming Digital Fairness Act is the next template in the queue. Carney's broader posture has been a deliberate tilt toward Europe and away from the United States. Digital regulation is a clear example of it, with Canada adopting the European rulebook clause by clause.

The rulebook reaches well beyond children. The EU's digital regime doubles as industrial policy by other means. In 2025, every euro of the bloc's €3.77 billion in Big Tech fines fell on American firms, Google, Apple, Meta, and X, because Europe builds almost no large platforms of its own to fine. Across 2024 and 2025 the penalties topped $7 billion, all of it levied on companies headquartered in the United States. Europe regulates the industry it could not create, and the rules are written so the bill lands on the Americans.

For Canada the sovereignty cost runs in two directions at once. Adopting a regime authored in Brussels, for European purposes, subordinates Canadian regulatory judgment to an agenda set by a bloc Canadians do not vote in. And aiming that regime at the platforms Canadians actually use means picking a regulatory fight with the country's largest trading partner at the precise moment a trade war with Washington is counterproductive to say the least. A government that markets itself as the defender of Canadian sovereignty is busy outsourcing the country's internet governance to a foreign capital — and importing that capital's quarrel with American technology as though it were Canada's own.

Why Carney's popularity won't outlast the Starmer playbook

The obvious objection is that Carney is popular, around 62% approval where Starmer was radioactive, so the comparison must be wrong. Starmer also began with positive numbers and a landslide. What separates the two leaders is timing and circumstance; their governing substance is the same. Anxiety about Donald Trump has bought Carney a long honeymoon and given voters a reason to look past the contradictions in the plan, which is more than Starmer ever had. Honeymoons end when the bills arrive.

Look to Britain for the receipt of what this program costs. The same assumptions — that the centre allocates capital better than citizens, that climate targets justify reaching around the electorate, that adults require the state's permission to use the internet, that a mandate is a technicality — were tested in a comparable Western democracy and rejected within two years. Mark Carney helped write that program and endorsed the people who ran it. He is now running it here, with a majority the voters never granted him. The only open question is whether it will be sooner or later that Canadians see the tab, and the democratic debt, that Carney is racking up on this side of the Atlantic.

 

 

 

Links - 16th August 2026 (1 - Jason Arday)

Two more taxpayer-funded projects Jason Arday is listed as "co-investigator" on - "Arday is listed as a co-investigator on two more studies funded by taxpayers totalling £4,412,501 - in addition to Arday being a co-investigator on an EDI caucus that received £3,676,371 from taxpayers"

Jason Arday says he was an illiterate, mute child. His schoolmates remember it differently - "Several people who grew up with Arday allege he was never, in fact, non-verbal. “I lived next door [to him] for 24 years from when he was born… he spoke all the time,” says a childhood neighbour. She did not wish to be named but is of a similar age to Arday, who became Cambridge’s youngest-ever black professor in 2023.  “He was quiet but he still spoke and he played with us,” the former neighbour says. “I used to have conversations with him every day.”  Fellow pupils at Heathbrook Primary School in Nine Elms, south-west London, which Arday attended from the age of four to 11 between 1989 and 1996, also contest this claim.  Nadia Elawahabi, 42, was in the year above Arday and in the same class as Joseph, one of his brothers. “We had children who couldn’t speak English in our class at that time,” she says, and everybody knew who they were. “There was nothing like [a mute pupil]. It would have stood out.” Another student from Arday’s year, who did not wish to be named, recalls speaking to him directly. “I know he definitely wasn’t mute,” he says. However “he was quiet, quiet in himself… [in fact] the whole family kept to themselves”.  Yet far from being a silent, struggling child who was considered an academic lost cause, this schoolfriend remembers him as “well-mannered… intelligent and polite”. In his memoir, which is due to be published in the UK later this month, Arday also claims that he was “always put in bottom set” as he was illiterate. The schoolfriend counters this. “I don’t think that’s true at all,” he says. “I know full well because I was in the [bottom] class.”  Elawahabi says there were only two classes in each year group... YouTuber Jonathan Stewart, 40, was in the year below Arday at primary school and said that he “knew it was fraud” as soon as he heard that he had claimed he was mute.  In fact, Stewart claimed Arday, who resigned from his Cambridge post last week, was something of a “class clown”. He told The Guardian newspaper that Arday would put on voices to make his classmates laugh and sing on the minibus to Sunday school. Arday, for his part, arranged for The Guardian to be sent a statement from two school friends who said his memoir was accurate... But under Stewart’s video, multiple commenters corroborated his version of events. “I can verify this claim… I was there too,” wrote one. Another comment reads: “The funniest thing I still remember is how he used to talk… And yeah he was a bit quiet at times but around us lot he was very vocal.” With adults, he appears to have been quieter. Samuel Ojoye, 71, has lived on the Heath Road estate in Clapham, where Arday grew up, since 1986. “I have known Jason from when he was very little, practically [since] birth,” he says. “The whole family was quiet and reserved. Jason didn’t talk much but I wouldn’t say he was non-verbal, just very quiet… Although he would always wave and greet you, he was very polite.”... These claims about Arday’s school days are perhaps among the last in his house of cards to collapse... His childhood neighbour describes the school-age Arday as “just normal”. Not extraordinary, just normal: for Arday, that is surely the most damning claim of all."

Cambridge took advice from pro-BLM group before hiring Arday - "An “equality and inclusion” working group was tasked with “updating hiring practices” within the university’s faculty of education to improve its recruitment of black and ethnic minority staff.  The group, which supported the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and attacked “racial inequalities” within the faculty, was still advising the department on hiring policies shortly before Mr Arday was appointed in 2022.  The revelation will raise further questions for the department, which has been accused of lowering its standards to hire Mr Arday as a professor to improve its diversity, equality and inclusion credentials... Prof Deborah Prentice, the university’s vice-chancellor, called Mr Arday’s appointment an “aberration” and appeared to shift blame on to the faculty for its decision to appoint him.  The faculty launched the Equality and Inclusion Working Group (EIWG) in 2018 in response to concerns from graduate students about racism and cultural insensitivity within the faculty.  An account of the working group’s creation is detailed on the website of the Faculty of Education Research Student Association (FERSA), a student-run organisation for graduate research students within the faculty. According to FERSA, graduate students had been raising concerns about racism and cultural insensitivity within the faculty for years by 2018. This included claims that the texts that made up its curricula for graduate courses were “overwhelmingly white and Western”.  In response, the faculty agreed to hold an open meeting with students and staff in November 2018 to discuss how it could take action on issues such as inclusion, diversity, gender and decolonising the curriculum, the student association claimed.  The “main and possibly only result of this meeting”, according to FERSA, was the establishment of the EIWG. Its purpose was to work on various initiatives to improve inclusion across the faculty. One of the group’s primary objectives was staff training. In February 2020, it set up “race awareness training” for the faculty’s staff, according to FERSA, although no further information was given about what this involved.  Another of its priorities was reforming recruitment within the faculty. By 2021, the group was actively “updating hiring practices” within the faculty, according to a departmental review by the UK’s Research Excellence Framework at the time.  The group said the university’s race equality charter – a university-wide framework partly focused on improving the recruitment of black and ethnic minority staff – was “central to our agenda”.  Particular scrutiny will be placed on the group’s influence on the hiring process, given its strong public support for the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. In June 2020, as protesters in the UK were marching and defacing statues following the death of George Floyd in the US, it released a statement saying: “We... stand in solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter and other global communities calling attention to systemic racism.”  The group added that “we support and are inspired by protests in the US and around the world” and hoped they would “make people, particularly white communities, think about the human impact of discrimination”.  It said there were “racial inequalities” within the faculty and acknowledged the “disproportionate labour of BIPOC [black, indigenous, and people of colour] colleagues and students in educating white colleagues and students”.  “We stand shoulder to shoulder with marginalised groups across our faculty and university community and pledge to drive for change,” the statement added. The faculty will face questions about whether the working group was advising on its recruitment policies in November 2022 when Mr Arday was hired, despite his relative lack of qualifications and published academic work."

Professors who hired Arday attacked ‘whiteness’ in education - "Michalinos Zembylas, professor of educational theory at the Open University of Cyprus, and Prof Anoop Nayak, of Newcastle University, were among four external academics chosen to sit on the nine-member panel that unanimously selected Mr Arday in 2022.  Academic articles reviewed by The Telegraph show that one professor called for the “re-education of Whites”, while another condemned “neo-liberal whiteness” in UK and US universities... In a 2023 paper, Prof Zembylas and his co-author, Prof Cheryl Matias, a race consultant and academic coach, argued that “whiteness” – which they distinguished from white people and described as an oppressive ideology – persisted “perniciously” in teacher education and should be held “accountable and culpable”.  The critical race theorists argued that teacher education must stop “emotionally deflecting anti-racist critiques” by merely appearing to say the right things about anti-racism, because this “only ignores, and diverts attention away from the hegemonic presence of whiteness”.  In an earlier paper with a UC Berkeley academic, Prof Zembylas argued that white people should become critical of “whiteness” to create a more equal society, insisting this would not cause white people to hate themselves.  The authors wrote: “Contrary to the impression that this move promotes self-loathing, a politics of anti-whiteness is precisely the re-education of Whites for a world shared with the other.” The second external elector, Prof Nayak, published a paper last year outlining how to remove colonialism from the field of geography, in which he suggested that charging international students higher tuition fees could be racist. He wrote: “The neo-liberal whiteness of Anglo-American universities is exemplified in the practice [of] charging international students often over double the degree fees of domicile students and doing little to mitigate punitive visa restrictions.”  Prof Nayak added that, in other sectors, the practice “could appear a discriminatory act, tantamount to institutional racism”. The paper also praised Black Lives Matter and pro-Gaza student encampments for giving momentum to calls to “decolonise the curriculum from the ground up”, and described a scheme to ring-fence funded PhD places for black and minority ethnic candidates as “necessary”... academics turned their fire on the appointments committee, accusing it of allowing “political correctness” to supersede academic standards.  Prof Sir Partha Dasgupta, a Cambridge economist, told The Telegraph: “If, as is now clear even to outsiders like me, Arday’s appointment short-circuited academic standards, it was not because the university procedures are deficient, it is because members of the appointments committee permitted ‘political correctness’ to override all else.  “And they permitted that to happen either because they themselves are second-rate or because they represent the university administration and want an easy life.” Ritwick Sawarkar, a biologist and Cambridge fellow, said it would be “a big scandal” if standards were found to have been lowered so the university could win “brownie points on the EDI scale”.  He said it was possible that the education faculty had chosen certain academics to interview candidates for the professorship “because they had an agenda and they knew these people would help them”.  But Mr Sawarkar said that it was impossible to know what was in the minds of those who appointed the committee, and suggested that the problem could have started with wording of the job advert which could have “already pre-selected or pre-deselected people”.  When the professorship was advertised, Cambridge told candidates: “The following groups are currently under-represented in our community: women, those with a Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic background and those with disabilities.”  The advert also listed “a demonstrated ability to support equality, diversity and inclusion in education within the faculty and university” as an “essential” criterion... The concerns of these academics were echoed on Saturday by Laura Trott, the shadow education secretary, who accused Cambridge of an “obsession” with diversity targets which she said had left the university “failing students”.  Ms Trott told The Telegraph: “I am concerned that by obsessing with DEI quotas, Cambridge has ended up failing students. We need to put an end to this nonsense.”  She said that Prof Deborah Prentice, Cambridge’s vice-chancellor, had “serious questions to answer”.  “The response so far has been woefully inadequate. It’s right that they are reviewing their appointments process, but that is nowhere near enough,” Ms Trott said.  She added: “The university must establish how alleged fabrications of this scale were not identified, whether concerns were raised and ignored, and who was responsible for those failures. If warning signs were missed or dismissed, those responsible should be held accountable.”"
Whiteness is about having standards and not plagiarising, apparently

A PhD is no longer a sign of brilliance – take it from Dr Arday - "I met an old school friend who is a professor at a prestigious UK university. When I told him about my work on PhD appeals, he said that he occasionally examines PhDs but never fails them, no matter how awful. When I asked him why, he said that failed students inevitably appeal and that life was too short to waste time responding to complaints...   Then there are those candidates who cheat in their PhDs, whether through plagiarism or, in more extreme cases, having others write it for them. Again, investigating suspected misconduct can take months of academic and administrative time, with multiple hearings and appeals. There is an institutional incentive to avoid rigorous investigation.  In a recent case, I criticised a university for doing precisely that. My client had engaged in academic misconduct in his PhD but the university turned a blind eye and allowed him to continue despite his evident difficulties. The student incurred tens of thousands of pounds in tuition fees when he should have been withdrawn much earlier. Examiners are usually nominated by the PhD candidate’s supervisors, and so personal and professional relationships can play a role in assessment decisions. Supervisors will tend to select examiners favourably disposed to their student’s approach or intellectual outlook. Examiners who fail a colleague’s PhD student, especially if that colleague carries a strong reputation, may worry about the repercussions on their own career and reputation. Academia is a small world, and professional relationships may influence judgment.  Universities care about the integrity of their academic qualifications, as they so often tell students, but only up to a point. Having a PhD is no guarantee of academic excellence or intellectual ability. As any academic will tell you, there are plenty of mediocre PhDs. Similarly, there are capable candidates who fail their PhDs due to examiners who, for whatever reason, have taken a dislike to their work"

There’s nothing good about Jolyon Maugham’s Good Law Project - "One of the more curious aspects of the Jason Arday affair is that the allegedly plagiarist professor chose to announce his resignation from Cambridge University on the website of the Good Law Project.  The GLP – as most readers will recall – is an organisation (not a charity but a Jersey-based “purpose trust”, enabling it to sidestep English charity law) which seems to exist primarily to promote the pet legal projects of its founder and executive director, Jolyon Maugham KC.   Its record of success can politely be described as patchy. Along with others, the GLP was active in the Brexit “lawfare” of the late 2010s, doing nothing to prevent Brexit but arguably helping to establish some important legal principles.  But over the years the GLP has gained an unfortunate reputation for claiming victories even when it has lost.  For example, in a 2022 case brought against the prime minister and health secretary over Covid appointments, the Administrative Court ruled that the GLP had no standing to bring the case and consequently “the claim brought by Good Law Project fails in its entirety”. This abject defeat – towards which GLP contributors had donated hundreds of thousands of pounds – was initially spun by the GLP as “We won!”  Another claimant, The Runnymede Trust, had in fact achieved a minor win in the same case (while losing on both its main points), but their consolation prize owed nothing to the GLP. In February this year, the GLP suffered a further defeat after it tried and failed to persuade the Administrative Court that guidance issued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission in relation to the provision of single-sex workplace toilets was unlawful.  The GLP’s reaction prompted 30 barristers, KCs and legal academics to write to the Equalities Minister, Bridget Phillipson, complaining about its “straightforwardly false” attempt to spin the defeat, adding “we are aware of no other organisation that has ever published such egregiously false material about the judgment in a case that it has lost.” If the GLP were a private individual spending its own money this sort of thing would be of rather less concern. But although it is not a charity, the GLP constantly wraps itself in the clothing of sanctimonious moral rectitude to solicit, and to receive, millions of pounds – well over £4m in 2024-2025 – from the public every year.  If well-meaning and credulous people are persuaded to donate on the basis of false or puffed-up claims, that is difficult to reconcile with its claim that “everything we do in connection with our work at Good Law Project will be, and should be, measured against the highest possible standards of ethical conduct”.  Exactly what the GLP’s involvement with Prof Arday was before he announced his resignation is a little unclear. When did that involvement begin?  Did he choose the GLP because of its reputation for demanding “the highest possible standards of ethical conduct”? Or did the GLP reach out to Prof Arday, choosing to stake its reputation, such as it was, on his integrity?  Did the GLP have any part in persuading him that one way of dealing with what it still calls “a smear campaign” was to set the police on the journalist who tried to obtain honest answers?  Perhaps unsurprisingly given its record of support for dubious causes the GLP continues to promote its petition in support of Arday, although some of the big names who originally signed – notably Prof Baron-Cohen, Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu, President of Wolfson College, and Sonita Alleyne, Master of Jesus College, – have quietly had their signatures removed in the last few days. Its description of the allegations as a campaign against a man with a “distinguished record of charitable and community service”, is entirely characteristic of the way in which the GLP tends to distort truth and reality in its campaigns. Despite the overwhelming evidence that Arday’s record is considerably less distinguished than once appeared, the petition continues to gather signatures, over 18,000 to date. Every signatory must supply the GLP with a name, email address and postcode, information which it will use, according to the organisation’s privacy policy, in “offering you ways to fund our work” and “inviting you to campaign with us”. Even if the petition itself has had no effect whatsoever, the personal data gathered will help generate the cash needed to keep the GLP lawfare show on the road... Those who sought to use him for their own purposes deserve at least some of the opprobrium that he has brought on himself. Amongst those still doing so, the Good Law Project is prominent."

James Martin Charlton on X - "An extraordinary paragraph from Afua Hirsch in which she admits that many black sociologists and she herself had doubts about Arday but sat on them because “he would be unlikely to be treated fairly and we would all be damaged in the process.” Did they not consider that students were doubtlessly being damaged and - when it eventually came out - so would sociology and the reputation of black academics? It seems second and third order consequences weren’t their strong points."
Jason Arday is now the stick the right will use to beat back racial equality. Don’t let that happen - "I have lost count of the number of emails, text messages, DMs and WhatsApps I received asking me to condemn the allegations against Arday. Not one of these messages asked me first if I know him, what my opinion about the allegations is or whether I actually agree with their assertion that they are baseless... I am unequivocal about condemning the media pile-on, which ranges from overt to dog-whistle racism, and which is completely disproportionate... Black academics, and black people in general, have never and – it’s my confident prediction – will never demand the right to plagiarise, lie or fabricate our credentials. What we have been demanding is to be treated equally. To be appointed to the levels commensurate with our actual credentials, to have our work taken seriously by intellectual peers, and to be paid fairly and on equal terms for our labour. To not have opportunities taken away because of our race. To have our work, performance and legacy held to the same standards as everyone else’s.  We are very far from anything resembling this"
Damn internalised racism! How dare they doubt him!
I love how left wingers always hyperventilate over trivial bullshit, but all the media who criticised Arday are responsible of, at the very least, dog-whistle racism
It's rich how Arday and other DEI hires like Claudine Gay got special treatment, but this somehow doesn't count

The Worst Academic Scandal in 817 Years! - "This is, quite likely, the worst academic scandal of all time. There have been other academic scandals over the centuries, but nothing quite like this one. It’s the worst academic scandal not only because it indicts one of the greatest universities in the world, but because it indicts all higher education in the English-speaking world! The Arday case is the symbol and culmination of the kind of intellectual and moral rot that has been seeping into higher education for sixty-plus years.  If Cambridge University—an 817-year-old institution—is to be saved (and it’s an open question as to whether it can or even should be saved), all those administrators and faculty involved in hiring, promoting, and defending Jason Arday should be fired immediately. Nothing less will do if Cambridge is to survive.  The great tragedy of the L’Affaire Arday is that there may very well be scores if not hundreds of similar cases around the English-speaking world... Watch Professor Hilary Cremin, Head of the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, fawn all over Arday and say to him: “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do!!!!!!!” I’ve never seen anything so cringeworthy in my life. It’s just so pathetic... the Jason Arday scandal is one of the best possible things to happen to higher education in my lifetime.  But let’s make this clear: the Arday scandal is not primarily about Jason Arday; it’s about the corruption of Cambridge University and indeed of all higher education. Arday is, to be sure, a fraudster and a grifter, but his crime is to have exploited a totally corrupt system. The “system”—the system of DEI welfarism—is the greater crime. The faculty and administrators who hired and promoted him are intellectual and moral malefactors who have stolen something important from us. They deserve to be fired. They do not belong in the hallowed halls of academia.  I’m not at all confident that Cambridge will fix the problem. They will appoint a “committee” or a “commission” to investigate and two-years later the committee will bury the report and do nothing. It’s all a charade.  Let’s be clear: there is NO systemic racism in higher education, at least not the kind that they want you to think exists. Quite the opposite. There is, instead, a kind of fawning, sycophantic but ultimately demeaning treatment of black scholars that is, as black scholar John McWhorter put it, “a symptom of academia’s dehumanization of black scholars and willingness to accept intellectual mediocrity in its self-seeking pursuit of virtue.” Just so! So yes, there is racism at Cambridge, just not the kind they want you to think exists. It’s the racism of low expectations, the racism of guilt, and the racism of revenge. But the new, systemic racism is more than about the pursuit of some form of perverted virtue as McWhorter suggests. Hilary Cremin, the Chair of the Education School at Cambridge and Arday’s chief promoter (she’s the fawning woman in the BBC documentary above who said Arday “was the best in the world”), was clearly looking for redemption—the kind of redemption that relieves one of an overwhelming sense of guilt. You can see it in her eyes and hear it in her voice when she tells Arday that he is the “best in the world.” Jason Arday was hired and sanctified by racists, who are morally responsible for his rise, decline, and fall. They nailed him to the cross... we should all say “thank you” to Jason Arday. We owe him a debt of gratitude for exposing the intellectual and moral rot not only at Cambridge University, but in all higher education in the English-speaking world."

Eric Hendriks on X - "Now the Guardian is obsessively delving into the backstory of the Arday saga, to reinforce the ‘one bad apple’ theme and quietly obscure the structural problem of which the paper is itself a part: the ideological capture of culture and intellectual life."

Why would 'Professor Plagiarism' make such outlandish claims? DR MAX PEMBERTON has been a psychiatrist for 20 years. Here he examines the questions facing Jason Arday and says there's one condition that could explain everything - "Why lie? I don’t mean the small, social lies that keep things running smoothly, but what appear to be enormous ones – invented academic posts, fabricated childhood, feats of endurance that never happened. And having decided to lie, why choose stories so extravagant that they invite disbelief, and so specific that anybody with a spare afternoon and an internet connection can take them apart?... There is an old descriptive psychiatric term, pseudologia fantastica, coined in the 1890s for people whose lies are elaborate, sustained and built around a fantasised version of themselves rather than for obvious material gain. You may think that hardly fits here, given this story apparently brought Jason Arday a professorial chair, several honorary doctorates and, he claimed, a 1.4million book deal. But the gain is usually a by-product of this pattern of behaviour rather than the object, and you can usually tell this from the type of lies. Someone who, for instance, wants a certain job often embroiders their qualifications. But they stop there, as anything beyond that is pure risk, and tall tales about marathons they’ve run, funds they’ve raised and the desperate childhood they’ve endured do little for a selection panel except draw questions that up the chance of being caught out. The people I’ve met who fit the description of pseudologia fantastica tend not to stop lying. They are seldom cold or calculating. They tend to be charming and, perhaps most importantly, fragile underneath. What strikes me most is how often they appear to half-believe the story they’ve invented. The lie is not really being told to the listener at all, it is being told to the ego of the person telling it. The listener is only there to confirm it... The stories are hardly ever straightforward boasts of success either, because someone who simply claims to be clever or rich invites envy – and envy is not what these people are looking for. Instead the tales are about suffering that has been overcome, odds that were insurmountable, the diagnosis nobody believed, the childhood that should not have been survived, and then the triumph over all this. It is a far more effective structure for any fantasy, because it makes doubting it feel like an act of cruelty. It is also the structure our whole culture of aspiration is built on, the one that fills memoirs and TED talks and the back-stories on TV talent shows. This is why anyone constructing an identity out of borrowed material will reach for the template. It’s the stuff of fairytales and legends, the struggle in the face of adversity, a struggle that demonstrates positive things about an individual’s personality and inner character... Every fantasist I’ve known kept going with their stories long past the point where anybody was still convinced, because the alternative was to confess it was a sham and allow people to destroy the false identity they had built for themselves, so become a nobody. Which is why I don’t feel triumphant about Jason Arday’s downfall. When a world collapses it is a terrible thing to live through, and no less terrible for having been constructed of tissue paper. He built it and must answer for it. But he did not build it on his own, and the institutions – not least Cambridge University and the diversity, equality and inclusion industry – that made him their poster boy and handed him the bricks have gone very quiet. For that they bear considerable responsibility in this sorry saga and should reflect on it in shame."

Links - 15th August 2026 (2 - Nolan's The Odyssey)

Rex Churchill on X - "Repeat after me: "The Odyssey is fiction, not history.""
The Medieval Scholar on X - "Lord of the rings is fiction and look at the exceptional armor WETA Workshop made. The odyssey takes place within an age of human history that is very much real. Trying to refute the criticism of bad looking costumes by just saying it’s fictional falls flat"
Mark Howard on X - "The costumes in Nolan's film aren't just aesthetically displeasing, but they also look cheap and anachronistic even within the film's setting."

Aɴᴛ on X - "Christopher Nolan has built such a strong reputation that, if he wanted to, he could have given Greece and its people not only an epic masterpiece, but also one that showcased Greek acting talent by hiring several actors who aren't internationally known, adding a huge degree of authenticity while celebrating Greek culture.  He wouldn't have had to bow to studio pressure to make it "woke." He's one of the few directors in Hollywood who could pretty much do whatever he wanted, and the movie still would have received all the funding it needed.  Instead, he chose the coward's route by capitulating to the Hollywood hive mind. It also comes across as a calculated move to maximise the film's chances of picking up multiple Oscar nominations.  Yes, The Odyssey is a work of fiction, but it's built on the foundations of Greek history, mythology and culture. It's something Greeks hold close to their hearts, something they're immensely proud of and fiercely protective of.  Instead, Nolan chose casting decisions that many Greeks see as insulting, forcing a modern ideological narrative onto one of the most important stories in Greek culture."

Jon Root on X - "John Leguizamo complains about the lack of Latino representation in Hollywood, while on the red carpet for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey where he stole the role from a Greek/European actor… What a hypocrite."
Josh Innes on X - "He stole that one role from mustachioed Italian plumbers…"

Meme - "VISION. LEADERSHIP. LEGACY. HISTORY tS WRITTEN BY THOSE WHO DARE TO DREAM
ELLIOT PAGE as MICHELLE OBAMA
ZENDAYA as BARACK OBAMA
WHOOPI GOLDBERG as JOE BIDEN
A CHRISTOPHER NOLAN FILM
OBAMA. THE MAN. THE PRESIDENT. THE LEGEND"

Nolan’s Odyssey cast angers Greek film fans - "Over the course of The Odyssey’s production, Greek and Greek Cypriot media platforms wrote open letters to Sir Christopher’s team and Hollywood, stating that Greek people “did not vanish” and were “still here” as “a living people whose story has never stopped being written”.  “We are not asking for exclusion or limitation,” wrote one such letter in Greek City Times. “We are not arguing against diversity, nor against reinterpretation. Greek culture itself has always been shaped by exchange, migration, and encounter across centuries.  “What we are asking is something simpler and more human. That, when Greek stories are retold on a global stage, Greek people are not rendered invisible within them.”  There is one Greek actor, Yannis Kokiasmenos, listed among the cast. He plays a coastal villager. Yannis Smaragdis, a filmmaker, said it would be “despicable” if Sir Christopher made the decision to cast Nyong’o to meet Academy Award diversity requirements... Lina Mendoni, the Greek culture minister, was forced to address calls for state intervention during production after it was revealed that the ministry of culture had granted The Odyssey a reported €6.5m (£5.6m) in subsidies.  She maintained that the Greek government’s approach since 2019 had been to treat culture as a strategic national investment and that “art cannot be censored”... After July 6, The Odyssey will be screened for critics only, in a move by Universal and Sir Christopher that bucks the trend of studios inviting fan-site bloggers and influencers to post enthusiastic reviews on social media in advance of a film’s general release in an attempt to pre-empt bad reviews."
Representation is not for white people
Apparently if you subsidise something and have conditions for your money, that's "censorship"

Meme - "Progressive Director *Christopher Nolan*
- Makes a film set in Ancient Greece
- Doesnt cast a single Greek
- The cast is as diverse as downtown L.A.
Racist Director *Mel Gibosn*
- Makes a film set in pre-colonial Mexico
- Only hires indigenous actors
- has them all speak Mayan"

Eren Bali on X - "Lupita Nyong’o role as Helen of Troy in Odyssey has already started a war, so in a way she has been a very historically accurate pick."

Fandom Pulse on X - "Christopher Nolan says his version of The Odyssey is for modern audiences: “When you look at the ancient world… there’s a lot of cultural prejudice….I want to make it feel very fresh for modern audiences.” Is this the final blow for the movie?"
Brandon Morse on X - "Let me translate this for you.   When they say "modern audience" they don't actually mean they're making this for those with modern sentiments. There aren't that many people with those sentiments to keep a movie studio afloat. Box office numbers have crashed and burned for films.   The point isn't to make films for you, or those small groups of people who like the message (and often still don't see it anyway), the "modern audience" is the youth. Teenagers and children.   The point is to redefine and restructure a story so that it loses it's intent and the value it serves to larger concepts like reinforcing Western civilization's values. The chief virtues it wants to push to replacement are things you often see repeated ad nauseum. "Inclusion" and "found family" are often held over actual family. You see a lot of moral ambiguity and nihilism as wisdom ("He sees the good in people, I see the truth" - James Gunn's Supergirl) and incredible amount of identity-based hierarchies.   So these "remakes" that continue to fail aren't cash grabs. The dice roll on them comes up snake eyes way too often, but the point isn't to make money, it's to take a story or characters that helped define the attitudes, morality, and virtues of the Western world and corrupt them so that they become the "updated" version for young sponges to consume and be influenced by."

Roman Helmet Guy on X - "It might seem hypocritical that Variety praises Moana for respecting Polynesian culture while attacking you for wanting Nolan’s Odyssey to respect Greek culture. But there’s actually a consistent moral through-line: They just hate White people."

Meme - "LOOK AT ME. I AM THE HELEN OF TROY NOW" *Lupita Nyong'o to Diane Kruger in Somali ship hijacking meme*

Fandom Pulse | Facebook - "Lupita Nyong'o, in a separate interview with DC Film Girl ahead of The Odyssey's July 17 release, on why she believes Homer's original epic needed correcting: "When you read The Iliad and The Odyssey, very little time is spent on the female perspective. The story is told from a very masculine point of view. But this film takes the time to really look at things from the women's point of view." Penelope holds Ithaca together for twenty years. Athena drives the entire plot. Circe turns men into pigs. Is Nyong'o describing Homer's Odyssey or a different book entirely?"

Austin Petersen | Facebook - "There's only one Greek cast member in the Odyssey. When Black Panther was made, Lupita Nyong'o praised it for drawing carefully from real African cultures and avoiding cultural misrepresentation.  Then they asked her to defend playing Helen of Troy and her answer was that it was a mythological story.  So was Wakanda.  When it came time to build that fictional space of Wakanda, fidelity was sacred. But when the myth was Greek suddenly we should all relax.  There are two rulebooks the left plays by. One for their protected cultures which are holy, and one for European civilization which should be considered open source."
Comment: "Unlike Wakanda, Troy was real."
Of course, left wingers are continuing to claim the Odyssey is fiction, so anything goes.

Nicholas Piff Peterson | Facebook - "It’s genuinely terrifying that Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey trailer has more dislikes than the Snow White trailer did, and a lot of people did not like the Snow White movie with Rachel Zegler. It’s concerning that so many Christopher Nolan fans seem to be turning on him just based on a few characters being cast that are literally great actors in what is a massive ensemble. Nolan has put together a stacked cast of talented performers, and the backlash feels way overblown for a mythic story like The Odyssey. Fans are acting like one or two casting choices are going to ruin everything, ignoring that he has a proven track record of elevating actors and delivering incredible movies regardless of initial skepticism. I honestly believe that when the movie comes out, if the reviews are great similar to Oppenheimer — which was widely praised and a huge success — people are gonna go out regardless of what they think of his casting decisions. The story, visuals, and Nolan’s signature style are what ultimately drive audiences to theaters. All of the nonsense over the casting is actually so ridiculous to me. Nolan isn’t trying to troll anyone; he’s making an ambitious epic with the actors he believes will serve the vision best. Let’s wait for the actual film instead of judging a masterpiece in the making based on trailer reactions. Here’s hoping the positive word of mouth wins out like it has for so many of his previous projects. Nolan deserves better than this premature pile-on."
This guy is "terrified" by everything

Nolan's Odyssey Review: Beautiful but Dreary - "What is missing from Nolan’s film is the “rare excitement” that “stirs your spirit and your body.” The Odyssey is, to put it bluntly, a three-hour downer. In Nolan’s screenplay, Odysseus (Matt Damon), is not “the man of many tropes”, as Homer described him (andra...polytropon)—the wily king of Ithaca who leads his men in and out of trouble as they sail around the Mediterranean for years after Troy’s fall. Rather, he is a man of only one trope: guilt... After that confession, Odysseus’ rout of the suitors, drawn out and overproduced, feels like an anticlimax. We next see him abdicating his throne as a self-imposed punishment, leaving son Telemachus (Tom Holland) to rule over Ithaca while he sails off into mysterious exile with a veiled Penelope at his side. I had to ask: “What did she do to deserve this fate?” In Homer’s epic, by contrast, the ever-helpful Athena, goddess of wisdom, prolongs the night and signals rosy-fingered Dawn to take her time arriving so that Penelope and Odysseus can enjoy hours of love-making and he can regale her with the tales of his adventures. Watching the couple’s decidedly un-erotic exit in Nolan’s movie, I wondered if Odysseus would ever forgive himself long enough to realise that Penelope might be in the same room (or boat). This is not to say that The Odyssey doesn’t have admirable aspects, mostly in regard to its special effects... Nolan used next to no CGI... The effect is of a satisfyingly tangible reality that computer generation simply cannot produce.  Still, the sets are mostly dreary. The fall of Troy, if it occurred historically, took place around 1190 B.C., at the height of Greece’s Late Bronze Age civilisation. But the structures in Nolan’s movie, modelled after the Palace of Mycenae on the Peloponnesus and similar ruins, look already faded and decrepit. Nolan is notorious for his greyed-out cinematic palettes, and here the brilliantly sunny Mediterranean beach-scapes that enthral visitors to modern Greece and its islands look more like the fog-beset English Channel in his Dunkirk (2017). Odysseus and his men dress almost entirely in Batman black in this film, with dingy leather armour that has been criticised for bearing little resemblance to the colourful and brightly polished battle-wear of archaic Greeks. It’s supposed to be the Bronze Age, we’re told again and again, but where’s the bronze?... Lupita Nyong’o works out fine as Helen. Her beauty does not rise to the level of immortal perfection imagined by Homer. (What woman’s does?) But she is a skilled enough actress to convey Helen’s arresting glamour in her very brief scene. (She is less successful playing Helen’s half-sister, Clytemnestra, who, as she is murdering her husband, Agamemnon, glares in the banal fashion of a mother hectoring her children about housework.) The real diversity flop in Nolan’s movie is Elliot Page as Sinon, a character from Virgil’s Aeneid who has somehow wandered into Homer’s world. The 5’1” Sinon is supposed to be a warrior, yet cannot hit voice notes lower than what Tom Wolfe called the 'King Sano croak' of chain-smoking Upper East Side society ladies... The main problem is lacklustre acting in general"

Homeric Society - "The values of this society are quite different from those which many modern readers bring to the poem, as is evidenced by the tendency of today's students to dismiss Homer's heroes, especially Achilles, as childish, selfish, arrogant, testosterone-driven brats... The Iliad, like Beowulf and the other poems cited above, celebrates the achievements of the aristocratic warrior class who earn their privileged position in this society through their prowess in battle. The focus is on the adult male hero, whose martial exploits are celebrated as the acme of human achievement... The heroes of these poems display an overriding concern for personal glory and its external trappings, with relatively little concern for the common good or other moral issues... In describing societies such as that portrayed in the Iliad, anthropologists employ the term *Shame Culture (in contrast to the *Guilt Culture found in most of today's western societies). Individuals in a guilt culture tend to hold themselves up to a set of personal moral standards.... In a shame culture, by contrast, the focus is not on a set of personal standards but on one's public standing. The overriding concern is to save face... As in war, success is everything in such a society: good intentions, high moral standards, fairness, a peaceful conscience — none of these count in the face of public disgrace. The competition for public honors is often intense and takes the form of what is known as a zero-sum game: that is, honor is won only at someone else's expense. Thus the notion that winning or losing might be less important than how one plays the game is utterly foreign to such a culture. Winning is everything: results are much more important than means. The crucial thing is to prove one's superiority and to have that superiority publicly acknowledged by one's peers. This intense competition inevitably leads to factionalism. The Greeks divide the world very clearly into "friends" and "enemies," with the understanding that one should do everything in one's power to aid one's friends and to harm one's enemies; failure to do so results in disgrace. Thus the Greek equivalent of the Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.") is, "Help your friends, harm your enemies." The contrast between these two aphorisms nicely captures the gulf that separates a guilt culture, with its cooperative values, from the competitive values of a shame culture. In Greek, the innate quality that renders one superior to others is called *aretê; (often translated "excellence" or, less happily, "virtue." The masculine, aggressive connotations of the word can be seen in its etymological connection to the name Ares; compare the English "virtue," which derives from the Latin vir ["man"] and originally meant "courage" or "manliness.") For the Homeric hero, war provides the occasion for the display of aretê; and the winning of glory (or *kleos). In a shame culture, however, mere success is not sufficient (it is not enough, for example, to know in your own mind that you are the best); public acknowledgment of one's superiority is essential. The Greek term for such acknowledgment is *timê. Timê refers to the public, concrete acknowledgment of aretê by means of prizes. In a pre-monetary society like that of the Iliad, such prizes are not financial in nature but symbolic: they represent, not income, but honor. As such, they have a strong emotional significance that is difficult for the modern reader to appreciate. (Students often think of the contract disputes of professional athletes.) You must remember: the hero's position in society is based upon his aretê; the surest sign of that aretê is the timê offered to the hero. Modern readers would prefer a hero who was "above" such concerns, but it is clear that the Greeks did not. Even as late as the 4th century (when cooperative values have sprung to greater prominence in Greek society) the philosopher Aristotle is able to describe the megalopsychos or "great-spirited man" as one who is innately superior to others and demands to be treated accordingly. For Aristotle, humility on the part of such an individual is a character flaw, a sign of some defect in his (note the masculine pronoun) personality."
Someone suggested that Achilles and Odysseus were anti-heroes. But that's because modern ideas of heroism have changed and Christian morality is not the same as Classical. Ergo why Nolan's portrayal of Odysseus as wracked with guilt is anachronistic. An imperfect hero is not a anti-hero

On the Iliad and Excellence - "Much of the Iliad celebrates the competitive, toxic pursuit of excellence and perfection. Heroes strive for glory over survival, with the risk of being a detriment to their family legacy... Achilles is later pushed into battle by the death of Patroclus, and ultimately fulfills his destiny and kills Hector, solidifying his legacy. To the ancient Greeks, these events proved that no one was able to escape destiny, and portrayed the glory of their predecessors... It wasn’t until I analyzed the Iliad in an academic setting that I began to realize that the ancient Greek ideal of a hero should not be idolized. It was in the analysis of the aristeiai that I learned of the flaws of both Achilles and the Homeric concept of heroism. The aristeia was the climax of the ancient hero’s greatness, when he demonstrated his power in battle and destroyed his enemy, and was often what solidified his legacy. Achilles’ aristeia, for example, was him killing Hector. However, these feats of greatness were often war crimes in disguise. Achilles’ aristeia continued after the death of Hector, when he proceeded to mutilate the body of the hero, dragging him behind his chariot around the walls of Troy. These demonstrations of so-called greatness show an alternative side to perfection, demonstrating the toxic nature of the expectation of excellence."

Odysseus vs. Achilles: The Two Faces of Ancient Greek Heroism - "Achilles is the kind of hero who charges into battle, sword in hand, ready to face any foe. His entire existence revolves around kleos, the Greek concept of glory that ensures his name will live on forever. He is nearly invincible, and his physical prowess is unmatched. In Homer’s Iliad, Achilles is described as “the greatest warrior of the Greeks,” a title he earns through sheer force and bravery. His mother, Thetis, tells him that he faces two fates: a short, glorious life or a long, obscure one... In ancient Greece, Achilles was the hero everyone admired. His physical prowess and relentless pursuit of glory made him the ideal warrior. Cities like Sparta revered Achilles for his martial excellence, which aligned with their values of military might. The Iliad was a staple in Greek education, and Achilles’ heroism was something every young Greek boy was taught to emulate. His valor and tragic death became the gold standard for heroism in a society that prized martial prowess... Odysseus, while respected, was viewed differently. In Athens, a city that valued intelligence and strategy, Odysseus was admired for his cunning and adaptability. The Odyssey was cherished not just for its adventure but for its portrayal of human resilience. However, Odysseus’s reliance on deception made his heroism more complex and, at times, controversial. Some city-states preferred Achilles’ straightforward heroism, while others appreciated Odysseus’s more nuanced, cerebral qualities."

Odysseus and the Genus ‘Hero’ - "The presence of 'unheroic' features in the character of Homeric Odysseus was noticed long ago, and since the time of the ancient commentators it has become habitual to gloss those features by predicating them on Odysseus' metis, 'cunning', as opposed to the bie, 'might', of other Homeric heroes, first and foremost Achilles... The last labour of Odysseus is remarkable in that it is regarded as a crowning achievement in his life, an achievement which, in accordance with the view of labours outlined above, will guarantee him the approporiate reward. Indeed, according to the prophecy of Teiresias, only upon accomplishing this mission will Odysseus be able to return home, where he will live happily and die of old age: 'And from the sea shall thine own death come, the gentlest death that may be, which shall end thee foredone with smooth old age, and the folk shall dwell happily around thee.' This promise seems to be a clear indication of the fact that the Odyssey is not only aware of the popular notion of heroism as outlined above but also deliberately models its hero to fit into this notion... In full conformity with popular Greek ethics, Odysseus is represented as contented with his lot and preferring to immortality his own life even if it is a life of toil and suffering. In this, he proves as exemplary a hero as only a Greek hero can be... To sum up, either Homeric poem offers its own version of heroism. In the Iliad being a hero amounts to readiness to meet death on the battlefield: the sense in which the words 'heroism' and 'hero' are used today ultimately descends from this concept. According to the Odyssey a hero is one who is prepared to go through life enduring toil and suffering. Whatever the reasons for this difference, there can be no doubt that it is the Odyssey's version of heroism that conforms to the popular Greek attitude to the phenomenon of hero-worship."

The Smithsonian Forgot the One Job It Had

Taxpayer dollars only come with taxpayer accountability (not to mention, doing the job you're supposed to do on paper) when that pushes the left wing agenda. 

@amuse on X

The Smithsonian Forgot the One Job It Had

On July 4, as the country marked its 250th birthday, the White House released a 162-page report from the Domestic Policy Council titled Saving America's Story. The report, which follows President Trump's March 2025 executive order directing Vice President JD Vance and the Office of Management and Budget to steer the Smithsonian away from what the order called improper ideology, focuses on the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Its findings deserve a wider audience than a holiday news cycle will give them, because they document something more troubling than a few tendentious wall placards. They document a museum that has forgotten the one job it had.

Start with what that job is, because the museum's founders were not shy about stating it. When Smithsonian leadership made its case to Congress in 1953, it argued that a main reason to build the museum was to place before the millions who visit the capital a permanent exposition commemorating our heritage of freedom. In 1955, Secretary Leon Carmichael testified that the museum would tell the story of American national progress and instill in each citizen a deepened faith in the country's destiny as a champion of individual dignity and enterprise. Congress believed him and appropriated $36 million to build it. At the dedication in January 1964, President Lyndon Johnson expressed his hope that children would come to the building and see with their own eyes the ripe fruit of America's historical harvest, Whitney's cotton gin, Edison's phonograph, Bell's telephone, the victory of freedom and the genius of the country. The mandate was never subtle. The museum exists to tell the American story in full, sins included, but with gratitude for the civilization, liberty, prosperity, and constitutional order Americans inherited.

 

Now consider what the report found. A visitor walking through the National Museum of American History during the semiquincentennial of the American Founding will find no exhibit dedicated to George Washington. None dedicated to Thomas Jefferson. None to the Second Continental Congress, the Mayflower, the Pilgrims, the Puritans, or Washington crossing the Delaware. Read that again slowly. The flagship history museum of the United States entered the 250th anniversary of the Revolution without a single exhibit, new or existing, devoted to the Founders or the pivotal events of the Founding. The Declaration and Constitution appear selectively. The constructive role of Christian belief in shaping American liberty receives scant attention. According to the report, the museum scheduled no special programming for Independence Day itself in either 2025 or 2026, despite being open on both days. 

 

Is this not simply an oversight, the kind of curatorial gap that afflicts any large institution? The report's most damning contribution is to show that it is not. The omissions trace directly to stated intent. Anthea Hartig, the museum's director since 2019, has described history as a prime tool of social justice and her role as connecting research and scholarship to activism and advocacy. She has said the museum works to reframe the traditional celebratory narrative of US history. Most remarkably, she told her profession that it had to figure out how it was going to problematize the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Problematize is a term of art in critical theory. It means to surface alleged oppressions within a subject in order to deconstruct and discredit the prevailing narrative about it. The nation asked for a birthday. The curators planned an intervention.

 

The institutional evidence runs deeper than one director's rhetoric. Under current leadership, the museum rewrote its mission statement, removing the phrase American history itself and replacing it with language about empowering people to create a more just and compassionate future. Hartig explained the change candidly: the goal was to get out of the America First mentality when telling history. Think about what that means in practice. The National Museum of American History deleted American history from its mission. If a bank removed the word deposits from its charter, depositors would be entitled to some alarm.

 

The museum's Interpretive Plan converts that mission into marching orders. It directs staff, whatever the topic, to tie exhibits back to seven core issues of our time: race and identity, gender and sexuality, climate change, immigration, economic inequality, technological change, and nationalism versus globalism. The complaint here is not that these subjects are off limits. A serious history museum should address race, immigration, and inequality, because a serious history of America must. The complaint is that every subject, whether democracy, entertainment, childhood, women's labor, or sports, is now routed through the same ideological grid, one that treats American institutions chiefly as instruments of oppression and treats visitors as recruits. When Alexander Hamilton appears, he is an influential and flawed founding father who owned slaves, with no mention that he helped found the New York Manumission Society in 1785 or that its African Free Schools educated more than 1,400 students. When Benjamin Franklin appears in the Many Voices, One Nation exhibit, he appears once, not as a Founder but as a Philadelphian with allegedly ambivalent views of immigrants. The Pilgrims are framed as colonial oppressors and Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning. This is not history with the hard parts included. It is prosecution with the exculpatory evidence excluded.

 

Why should the federal government care what a museum's curators believe? Because this is not a private gallery in Brooklyn spending donor money. The Smithsonian is a trust instrumentality of the United States, overseen by a Board of Regents currently led by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and populated by senior federal officials and congressional appointees. It received $1,080,500,000 in appropriations for Fiscal Year 2026, and federal money has covered roughly two thirds of its expenditures over the past two decades. Taxpayers are not being asked to tolerate a point of view they dislike in someone else's institution. They are being compelled to finance, in their own institution, a systematic campaign against the story that institution was chartered and funded to tell. Congress bought a museum of American history. It is entitled to receive one.

 

Defenders of the museum, including the American Historical Association, argue that the White House is trying to sanitize history and that political pressure threatens institutional independence. But notice what this objection must assume to succeed. It must assume that the only alternative to grievance curation is whitewash, that a museum which centers the Founding must therefore hide slavery, and that honoring Washington requires forgetting the enslaved people at Mount Vernon. Nothing in the report demands any such thing. Its own framework insists the museum should document the failures of the nation alongside its achievements, should tell the story of 750,000 dead in the Civil War, and should explain how Americans came to reject Jim Crow by appealing to the colorblind promise of the founding documents themselves. Telling history honestly is not the same as teaching contempt, and a curriculum of contempt is precisley what the current museum delivers. As for independence, no one proposes that curators take orders on individual label copy; the proposal is that a publicly chartered, publicly governed, publicly funded trust be held to its charter, which is what boards of regents and congressional oversight exist to do, and the notion that an institution can take more than $1 billion a year from the public while remaining accountable to no one but its own staff is not independence, it is capture, and calling capture independence does not make it so.

 

For decades, complaints about institutional bias in museums, universities, and cultural agencies produced columns and conference panels and little else, a pattern scholars at the Heritage Foundation have long described as conservatives funding their own marginalization. The Smithsonian report models a different approach: read the documents, quote the leadership, follow the money, and then use the legitimate levers of governance, budgets, appointments, and oversight, to restore an institution to its purpose. The report does not order exhibits torn down. It establishes a factual record and invites the Board of Regents, the Chancellor, and Congress to act on it. That is not a culture war stunt. That is what stewardship of a public trust looks like.

 

The deeper stakes are generational. Parents bring children to the National Museum of American History for the reason President Johnson named at the dedication, so that the young can touch the inheritance and understand the meaning of the past. A child who leaves that building never having encountered Washington's character, Jefferson's pen, Franklin's genius, or the improbable miracle of a republic conceived in liberty has been cheated of a birthright, and no amount of programming about the seven core issues of our time compensates for the theft. A nation that cannot explain to its children why it deserves their gratitude will eventually raise children who feel none. The prediction market currently gives strong odds that the Smithsonian fight becomes a defining cultural story of 2026, and it should, because memory is the ground on which every other political battle is fought.

 

The museum forgot the one job it had. On America's 250th birthday, the country noticed. The task now is not to burn the institution down but to hand it back its charter, point to the words American history, and insist that it do the job the American people built it, funded it, and trusted it to do.