Links - 8th August 2026 (2 - Migrants: UK)

Burnham can’t keep swerving the immigration question - "both legal and illegal migration are running at very high levels by historic standards, putting impossible pressure on our public services, depressing GDP per capita and driving social conflict. What does Mr Burnham plan to do about this? He has barely uttered a word on the subject since entering Downing Street. Perhaps this is because Mr Burnham realises that immigration is the issue on which his fantasy electoral coalition risks crumbling. Labour put its faith in Mr Burnham because he promised both to peel off support from Reform UK and to stem Labour’s losses to the far-Left Green Party. That is perhaps possible when talking only about buses and social care. Fixing Britain’s borders offers Mr Burnham no such luxury. The Left’s worst pathologies make Mr Burnham’s task all the more difficult. Far from seeing this week’s events as a wake-up call, many still cling to the idea of rejoining the EU, even though doing so would open up our borders even more egregiously. Others continue to fetishise human rights laws, which make it harder to deport illegals and it is at the heart of Europe’s troubles."

France sends extra police officers to coast but they won’t stop migrants - "France has deployed an extra squad of police officers to patrol its north coast, but rather than stopping migrants, they will tackle a summer surge in tourism."

Tom Harwood on X - "1 in 10 people in this country are foreign nationals. 1 in 4 sexual assault convictions on women in 2024 were committed by foreign nationals. This is clearly complicated by the fact that the migrant population is disproportionately younger than the native population. And, obviously, it is men from late teens to their 40s who commit the overwhelming majority of crime. Unfortunately, the Ministry of Justice refuses to publish convictions broken down by offence, nationality, age and sex. Such data would enable us to adjust properly for the factors of age and sex. It's in everyone's interest that the MoJ release the data."
Left wing logic: refuse to collect and/or release data, then accuse those of pointing out the truth of spreading misinformation

Katie Lam on X - "The Home Office has decided that the Islamic Centre of England, a registered "charity" caught selling Hezbollah trinkets, should be able to sponsor visas for imams. This is obviously disgraceful, and puts the public at risk. Will the Home Secretary overturn it?"

Meme - Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ: "Astonishing. Most people in Northern Ireland now say the biggest divide is not between unionists & nationalists but between immigrants and people born in Northern Ireland"
"In what ways is our society most divided today? Select up to three.
Between immigrants and people born here - 49
Between unionists and nationalists - 35
Between white people and ethnic minorities - 32
Between Protestants and Catholics - 31
Between people who see themselves as British and those who see themselves as Irish - 28
Between rich and poor - 22
Between left and right - 18
Between people who lived through the Troubles and those too young to remember - 16
Between Belfast and the rest of Northern Ireland - 9
Between young and old - 7
Between renters and homeowners - 5
Between people who went to grammar schools and those who didn't - 4
Between settled people and Travellers - 4"

Emily WD🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 on X - "➡️ People say violence against women and girls in UK is being decriminalised... 🇬🇧 He sexually assaulted a 14YO girl and a woman - then threw two chairs through a restaurant window. Just a £400 fine. Meanwhile, throw 2 stones that hit no one and get 2 years in prison."
Bring Back Safeguarding on X - "Labour Government just expect women and girls to live like this, not only to put up with sexual assault, but also to accept seeing the perpetrator walk free so he can attack us again."

Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 on X - "David Lammy is taking legal action to block publication of foreign nationals' crime rates in England and Wales. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is seeking to overturn a ruling by the Information Commissioner that data revealing the full scale of foreign offending in England and Wales from 2018 to 2024 should be published. Citing "costs". They think we're stupid. Corrupt to the core."

W0zza on X - "Comedian Leo Kearse said "theres so many Somalians in London it just doesn't feel like Bangladesh anymore" 🤣👌🏻👏🏻"

Left wing activists REFUSE asylum seekers in their town – hypocrites - "The hypocrisy of some on the Left really does know no bounds. In fact, if the writers of The Thick Of It pitched this story as a script, it would probably be rejected for being too far-fetched. The Oxford branch of Stand Up To Racism has launched a petition opposing the Home Office's plans to house 1,250 asylum seekers at a former Ministry of Defence site near the picturesque Oxfordshire town of Bicester. Why? Well, apparently because living on an old MoD site would be "dehumanising" for the asylum seekers. Fair enough, everyone deserves to be treated with dignity. Their second argument, however, is where things become truly fascinating. They claim the camp could become a target for intimidation and protests by the "far-Right" in the same way asylum hotels such as the one in Epping have been. Now, forgive me if I'm missing something, but if people are genuinely fleeing war, persecution or oppression, I suspect their biggest priority is reaching somewhere safe. A secure camp in rural Oxfordshire doesn't exactly sound like the worst place to begin rebuilding your life. But here's the question nobody there seems willing to answer. If Bicester is unsuitable, where exactly should these 1,250 people go instead? The petition doesn't appear to offer an alternative. Not one... Bicester is a beautiful town filled with lovely homes occupied by compassionate, socially conscious people who clearly care deeply about those seeking sanctuary. So why not open those homes? If every supporter of the petition welcomed just one or two asylum seekers, the problem would disappear overnight. No camps needed. No complaints about institutional accommodation. No concerns about isolating vulnerable people. The new arrivals would live among local families, become part of the community and enjoy the very neighbourliness campaigners so often champion. Everybody wins. After all, it's easy to proclaim "Refugees Welcome" from behind a placard. It's rather more meaningful to put the kettle on, make up the spare room and welcome someone through your own front door. Perhaps they'll do exactly that. And if they don't? Well, I certainly won't accuse them of wanting asylum seekers housed anywhere but their own leafy corner of Oxfordshire. I'll leave that conclusion to you, dear reader."

Migrants who successfully bear Home Office reveal real reason they crossed - "Migrants who successfully won a High Court battle with the Home Office wanted a UK education and believe it is “a better country” than France, court documents show. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s one-in, one-out deal with Paris was dealt a blow after a group of asylum seekers claimed their deportations were unlawful. Immigration officials removed a migrant's right to demand that a claim of being a victim of modern slavery be re-examined... One of the claimants, KAG, “asserted that he “did not claim asylum in France due to concerns about poor treatment of asylum seekers and lack of support. [He] expressed a desire to claim asylum in the UK to pursue education and because [he] believe[s] it is safer”. The High Court judgment added of AYA, another claimant: “He said he did not claim asylum in France because he “saw people sleeping rough in the streets”. AYA also said that he had been told the UK “was a better country and this is why he came here”."
Clearly, France is a dangerous hellhole and migrants fear for their lives there

Shocking visa loophole exposed despite crackdown - 'It is an abuse' - "Migrants are still bringing a “shocking” number of family members with them to the UK despite a crackdown, ministers have been warned. Fury erupted after Cameroonian workers in the UK successfully applied for 180 family members to join them in the in the year to March. This comes despite only 12 health and care visas being issued to workers from Cameroon last year... 257 Ghanaian health workers came to the UK last year but 2,131 “dependants” of health workers from Ghana based in the UK came here over the same 12 months... Under Labour’s plans, migrants will be told to wait at least 10 years before they can apply for settlement rights. Foreign nationals who arrived in the so-called "Boris wave" face a 10 to 15-year wait to apply for indefinite leave to remain. And migrants could be barred from claiming benefits unless they become British citizens. Arrivals applying for indefinite leave to remain after 10 years must have no criminal record, speak English to A-level standards and have no debt, under Labour’s new proposals. But Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is under pressure to water down her proposals. Left-wing MPs, trade unions and health groups want the Home Office to exempt migrants already in the UK from the new rules."

Visegrád 24 on X - "Dozens of illegal migrants crossing the English Channel in a small boat shouted “This is the end of England” moments before landing on British shores. One man said, “London is finished, London is finished. Rozi Khan has finished London.” The migrants were also seen throwing personal documents into the sea during the crossing. The dinghy, carrying dozens of people including women and children, completed the 21-mile journey across the Channel. According to the report, 11,821 migrants had crossed by small boat to the UK by 25 June this year."

Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ⚢ ❌❌✡️ on X - "This woman got six weeks in prison - suspended - and 50 hours of unpaid work. The old man she’s assaulting died.
***
This is Bilikesu Olagunju, from Nigeria. She’s in the UK on a Health and Care Worker visa. Her first job started in December 2024, when she was employed as an agency carer for John Attard, an 88 year old dementia patient from Bexley, Kent. On 19 December, she took a job as an agency carer for John Attard, an 88 year old great grandfather with dementia. Seven days later, on Christmas Day, John Attard’s son Chris found him unresponsive in bed, blood dripping down his face. John Attard was rushed to the hospital, but did not regain consciousness, and died ten days later. Video footage was later turned over to police by Chris Attard. In the footage, Olagunju shouts at John Attard to stand up as she undresses him roughly, yells that she will flog him, and — unbelievably — threatens to call the police on him. At one point she drags him across the living-room floor by the arm as he cries out that she is hurting him. She even jerked the table away when he tried to eat, spilling hot coffee on him in the process, and put marmalade in his coffee because she knew he was diabetic. Last month Olagunju pleaded guilty to one count of ill-treating or willfully neglecting an individual while acting as a care worker. Judge Charlotte Welsh sentenced her to 6 weeks in prison, suspended for 18 months, and 50 hours of unpaid work at Woolwich Crown Court, commenting that: “Being a carer is a very, very difficult job and frankly people don’t appreciate it until they need it. I am convinced that you had not received sufficient training.” Olagunju did not lose her Health and Care Worker visa, in spite of not having the training to do her job properly, nor was she deported. Instead, she found a job at a UK hospital - working with stroke patients."

Record 20,000 foreign criminals avoid deportation - "Home Office figures show there are currently 19,779 offenders living freely in Britain, more than double the 8,500 at the same point in 2020. They have been identified for deportation by the Home Office but have been freed from prison to live in the community. Many are using human rights laws to thwart their removal. A Telegraph analysis of more than 400 immigration appeals by foreign criminals in the past 18 months revealed sex offenders, robbers, fraudsters, arsonists and domestic abusers successfully challenged their deportation by claiming it breached their rights to a family life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The research, the first of its kind, found more than 40 per cent avoided deportation either by claiming it denied them a right to a family life, or that they would face persecution in breach of Article 3 of the ECHR on their return to their home country."
Left wing logic: most migrants don't commit crimes, so it's ridiculous to be concerned about those who do. Of course, they need to pretend that crime is costless

Meme - Shabana Mahmood MP: "I am deeply saddened to hear about the stabbings in Huntingdon. My thoughts go out to all those affected. Two suspects have been immediately arrested and taken into custody. I am receiving regular updates on the investigation. I urge people to avoid comment and speculation at this early stage."
Shabana Mahmood MP: "I am horrified by news of the attack in Edinburgh. I am grateful to the police and emergency services for their bravery in apprehending the suspect and for their speedy response in attending to the victims. The suspect appears to be motivated by anti-Muslim hatred. There is no place for hatred and violence against Muslims. I know it is not who we are as a country."

Daily Mail on X - "Afghan migrant, 18, who stabbed a man to death is a 'traumatised refugee', court hears"
Leo Kearse - see me on tour! Links in bio on X - "Poor guy. Really hope that stabbing someone to death helped him with his trauma. I'm so glad my government secretly airlifted 35,000 of these guys in without telling us."
Count Ovaltine Von Phuq-Wolf the 2nd on X - "I'm kind of sympathetic to the guy.....I killed around 27 prostitutes and I felt like a well powerful sex animal right after each one. It was as if all those times my uncle Jim fucked me as a 7 year old simply melted away."

Don Keith on X - "🚨Holy Cow! The UK government just got caught hiding twelve new migrant centres. Speaker Lindsay Hoyle furious at Labour for keeping MPs in the dark. They can’t keep doing this in secret. Britain is being transformed against the people’s will. End the betrayal."

GB News on X - "Lib Dem MP left 'frustrated' at plans to house asylum seekers in small Bicester community: 'It's inappropriate!'"
Sharron Davies HoL MBE on X - "Funny how things change when it’s in their constituancy"

Daily Mail on X - "Bangladeshi man whose 'culture may affect his attitude towards female children' is jailed for raping autistic 12-year old girl and grooming nine-year-old"
Leo Kearse - see me on tour! Links in bio on X - "If I say this man is "from a rapey paedo culture", I'm a racist. But he can defend himself in court by saying he's "from a rapey paedo culture". Make it make sense."
RadleyK on X - "Why would a nation import parasitic people from rapey paedo cultures? That doesn't make any sense either."
Leo Kearse - see me on tour! Links in bio on X - "It's almost as if communists have infiltrated every institution and are trying to destroy us"
It's racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic to say that Bangladeshis are pedophiles. Time to jail him for spreading this misinformation!

Meme - Sargon of Akkad: "Diane Abbott accidently admitts the party does not represent the interests of working class northern Labour seats."
Aisha Malik-Smith @avocadamn: "Labour abstentions on the Immigration Bill."
Diane Abbott MP @Hackney...: "Technical difficulties explain some failures to vote. But I also understand that five MPs contacted whips to say they were going to abstain as voting against immigration bill will "put further holes in the red wall""

Jason Kenney 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 on X - "Watch the incredulous reaction of this UK Green candidate to the suggestion that mass migration drives up housing costs. It perfectly reflects a serious problem on the left. Ideological rigidity, and lack intellectual curiosity often means they never encounter conservative arguments. So they are often stunned and incapable of formulating a response to arguments, or facts, that they’ve never considered. I think one reason for this is the tendency of many on the hard left to adopt a manichean worldview, which means regarding the right not just as adversaries, but as evil."
"Empathy" strikes again!
Left wingers think that supply and demand do not set prices, and that they are arbitrarily set based on "greed", after all

Immigration is out of control: this ten-year plan could fix it - "Why does consensus across Britain’s political class about the country’s problems not translate into effective action? There is a high degree of agreement: the need to hack back the regulatory state, to increase private and public investment, to make the NHS more productive; and, we can now add, reducing historically unprecedented levels of immigration while minimising damage to the economy. One reason this consensus does not translate into action is vested interests, and for politicians to beat them they need at least as much trust and legitimacy as the interests they are challenging. When politicians sink in public esteem it is harder to take on powerful professional and business bodies, environmental campaigners, nimbys etc, because those groups have access to the public too, not to mention the law... It was understandable in the early days of government for Labour to highlight their miserable economic inheritance. But to continue heaping blame on the Tories for what are mostly deep structural problems over which the whole political class has presided sounds increasingly churlish... Reducing immigration requires a five to ten-year plan with cross-party support. It needs such broad support because Keir Starmer will struggle with the pro-immigration instincts of much of his party if he cannot sell this as a popular national plan. Also, high immigration is embedded in Britain’s economy and protected by powerful vested interests and the legal culture — it will require time and a deep consensus to uproot it... Why is it so hard to get immigration numbers down? A recent Policy Exchange report which asks that question, by former senior Home Office official Stephen Webb, elegantly explains that it is a classic example of pressure group theory: the preferences of a large majority of the public (those who think immigration is too high is now over 70 per cent, according to YouGov) are no match for well-organised vested interests. The benefits of immigration tend to be privatised, enjoyed by businesses, universities and the NHS/social care employers, while the costs are socialised, borne by the public and the taxpayer, especially those of working age. And with the post-Brexit shift towards less productive, lower skilled migration, those costs are rising. The lobby that favours mass immigration may have a weaker voice in the media than ten years ago, due to social media and alternative outlets such as GB News, but it has a powerful voice where it really counts, in boardrooms, court rooms and in the Treasury and most Whitehall departments, with the partial exception of the Home Office. In fact, we are all implicated in the country’s immigration addiction by our desire to get things on the cheap. About three quarters of that massive inflow in 2023 was accounted for by student visas and health/social care work visas, plus dependents. This is a symptom of a Treasury short-termism that cuts the cost of higher education and health/social care now but adds to the welfare bill needed to support low-productivity newcomers in the longer run. The Office for Budget Responsibility calculates that a low-skilled migrant by the age of 80 will, on average, have cost the taxpayer £582,000 and low-wage migration in general will end up producing a net fiscal cost running into the tens of billions. Relentlessly high immigration also has the effect, in both private and public sectors, of postponing not only investment but necessary reform. The decades-long dependence by the NHS on foreign doctors and nurses,mainly from much poorer countries — about 40 per cent of UK doctors are trained abroad compared with 12 per cent in France and just 1 per cent in Italy — means we have failed to properly reform our over-elaborate system of medical training. The more recent dependence of social care on migration, which was meant to be a temporary response to the pandemic, has postponed the fundamental reform that sector requires. About 60 per cent of the 270,000 people who arrived on health and social care visas from 2021 to mid-2024 (bringing a further 377,000 dependents) were low wage carers. Fewer than 1 per cent were doctors. Meanwhile, the 750,000 international students, accounting for nearly 25 per cent of higher education revenues, has allowed the whole sector to mushroom out of control, churning out too many young people with high debt and unwanted generalist academic skills. Cutting off the student and work visas cannot be done overnight without serious damage to higher education, the health and social care system and other dependent sectors such as hospitality... We also need better incentives for individuals to comply with their visa requirements. A system of “sureties”, a sum of money lodged with a secure third party, would ensure a significant penalty if visa holders do not leave on time. And an increase in the qualification period for permanent residence from five to ten years, a move just backed by Badenoch, would make it less tempting for those on temporary visas to repeatedly extend. The last extension came under the Labour home secretary Charles Clarke and the Netherlands recently joined Switzerland in raising its qualification period to a decade. A final part of the package is much tougher penalties for those who enable illegal work or residence"
It's only oligarchy when it hurts the left wing agenda

Police 'toned down' statement of mother whose hotel worker daughter was murdered by an asylum seeker in case it led to race riots - "Police 'guided' the family of a hotel worker in 'toning down' their public statements after she was murdered by an asylum seeker – in case their words led to anti-immigration rioting. Rhiannon Whyte, 27, was stabbed 23 times with a screwdriver by Sudanese national Deng Majek while waiting at a train station in October 2024. Majek, 28, who was sentenced to 29 years in prison in January, then spent the night dancing and drinking in the car park of Park Inn Hotel in Bescot, Walsall, where Rhiannon worked. Her death came three months after the fatal stabbings of three young girls in Southport by 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana, a British citizen of Rwandan descent... Rhiannon's mother, Siobhan, has claimed police said they didn't want 'another Southport' when she told them her daughter's life support was to be turned off. She said: 'Did they tell us what to say? No. Did they guide us so it didn't look so aggressive? Maybe. I was aggressive – they toned it down.' Ms Whyte – who stresses that she is grateful for the help she received from the police in the aftermath of her daughter's murder – added: 'I think they didn't want violence... they didn't want a riot.' It follows revelations in last week's Mail on Sunday about how the Government's secretive Research, Information and Communications Unit tries to manage the 'challenges' of multiculturalism by manipulating public mood following murders or terrorist incidents with a racial element... It was only after Majek was sentenced that Ms Whyte mentioned the fact he had arrived in the UK on a small boat three months before the attack – and criticised Sir Keir Starmer. She said: 'The Prime Minister's got blood on his hands.'"
Don Holliday on X - "Authorities keep doing this to stop a race riot from erupting, but the fact is white people have shown a saintly amount of restraint which tells me that the real crime statistics are probably so bad that white people would go scorched earth if they knew the truth."

Jason Arday: Cambridge’s DEI darling

"Be Kind" is not harmless. 

Left wingers believe that "qualifications" are more important than achievements or ability. So you just need to use DEI to give someone "qualifications" - then he becomes untouchable. 

Jason Arday: Cambridge’s DEI darling

The progressive world loves a good fairy tale. Autistic and totally mute till the age of 11, Professor Jason Arday only learnt to read and write at 18. Since then, he has blazed through the academic ranks, from a lectureship in physical education in 2016, to a Cambridge Professorial Chair in Sociology in 2023 — the youngest black professor ever appointed there. He has helped the Government with its antiracism strategies; advised on the national curriculum; guest-edited the Today programme; and been the subject of a glowing profile on Good Morning America. His writing has been enthusiastically praised by James O’Brien and David Lammy. His fans now await his memoir, to be published in a month’s time.

It seems likely to be an incredible read. In various interviews, Arday has claimed to have completed his PhD with a brain tumour; to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, and 600 miles in six days; to have raised millions for charity; to have played both snooker and football at professional levels. And now there is a new chapter in this gripping life story: outright allegations of plagiarism in his academic writing and muttered suspicions of fraud. There are magical-sounding transformations here, arduous journeys, and noble heroes battling it out with dastardly villains. But who exactly are we supposed to root for, and what is the moral of the story?

For some, the obvious baddie is Arday’s recent accuser, Nathan Cofnas, who has alleged several instances of plagiarism on his Substack. Cofnas, a philosopher at the University of Ghent, is best known for his controversial research on racially based IQ differences, and for taking a Cambridge college to court, claiming it had discriminated against him on the grounds of his “anti-woke” beliefs. It is as if the most stereotypically problematic of academics had escaped from a university HR manager’s cheese dream and taken fleshly shape. Predictably, then, commentators who have based their careers on divining institutional racism have been quick to take advantage of the caricatural optics. Cambridge itself says that Arday has been cleared of “allegations of plagiarism regarding his thesis and journal publications”, and is a “victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility”.

But serious concerns about Arday’s work have been circulating for at least three years, voiced by scholars who have no interest in hereditarianism; and it is hard to see how Cambridge could have dismissed them so lightly. In 2023, Professor Dave Harris, an emeritus sociologist, started documenting concerns about Arday’s doctoral thesis and some other journal articles on his own website. Along with another sociologist, Professor Martyn Hammersley, Harris also tried doggedly to raise the matter with journal editors, university authorities, and Arday himself.

Harris sent me his correspondence. To his polite enquiries, Arday insisted he would consider future contact from Harris as bullying and harassment. Cambridge’s Head of Policy told Harris that, since the alleged issues preceded Arday’s time at Cambridge, it was not within the university’s remit to investigate — a bizarrely relaxed attitude to the possibility that a star academic had committed research malpractice. Last year, Times Higher staff reporter Jack Grove looked into the case in great depth, drawing in part upon evidence from Harris and Hammersley, but his editors spiked the piece after legal letters from Carter-Ruck.

It is clear, then, that more reputations are at stake here than Arday’s own. When he was first appointed as a Professorial Chair, Cambridge made huge capital out of the moment, stressing the significance not just of their new hire’s ethnicity but his “neurodiversity” too. The well-known theory of intersectionality has it that a black or brown ethnicity, plus a disability, equals the likelihood of exponential discrimination. Alongside this dogma runs a shadow logic for progressive employers, whispering that two protected characteristics in a prominent employee are even better than one; three, if you count Arday’s origins on a deprived council estate. Or as the University press release put it at the time: “parts of [Arday’s] story… epitomise the significant barriers that neurodivergent individuals, those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people face when trying to build careers in the sector”. But not at Cambridge, they might as well have smugly added.

Throughout his career, Arday himself has highlighted his disabilities just as much as his race. He has said he only learnt to eat for himself aged seven, and that he spent “thousands of hours in speech therapy… six days a week” from the age of three. He has claimed that the aforementioned brain tumour was surgically removed only two weeks before his PhD viva. Last year, he co-authored a book with Dr Chantelle Jessica Lewis entitled We See Things They’ll Never See: Love, Hope, and Neurodiversity, published by the elite Princeton University Press. Its subject is how “neurotypical hegemony reproduces a culture of exclusion”. The authors wax lyrical to their presumed neurodiverse readers: “Not only do you still deserve love, you deserve for your creativity to flourish and be nurtured. You still deserve ordinariness, even if you struggle to communicate your passions.”

As this suggests, the book is an extremely weird mix of academic jargon and chatty informality. Each chapter starts with a song lyric. Chapter Seven, for instance, begins with the Blur lyric “hold on for tomorrow”, then explains: “For neurodivergent people, who are often holding on to the coattails of neurotypicals, there is a need for the neuromajority population to be more accommodating and understanding in this process… and hold on for tomorrow.” There is also a lot of breathless metacommentary, as if the authors were fascinated with their own creative process — a feature often found in student essays, but not so much in work by senior academics. In Chapter Three, for instance, you get: “it will come as no surprise to many of our sociologist peers that this third chapter was one of the last we put together”; and “[a]s we returned to Durkheim’s analysis when writing this book, a sense of sadness and frustration often entered our conversations about neurotypical hegemony”. In Chapter Seven: “As we began to round up our reflections and the rationale of the book, we spoke a lot about the concept of time and our general sense of getting through the day.”

Irrespective of the outcome of the plagiarism allegations, it seems to me there is an even more fundamental problem here. Having waded through some of Arday’s books, articles, and talks, it is my strong impression his published outputs would be judged unambiguously mediocre, bordering on comically terrible, were it not for the heroic DEI-friendly backstory. As Cofnas has pointed out, his journal articles are full of typos and solecisms, and there is even a rogue apostrophe in his PhD title. His 2019 monograph, Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain: Uncorking the Champagne Supernova, is also strikingly garbled, as he uses autoethnography about Britpop in order to pursue “an uncomfortable discourse for melancholic Britain to digest”: that the cool Britannia of the Nineties was actually cruel, racist Britannia instead.

Here, Arday relates how he fell in love with bands like Oasis at a young age, “or at least so it seemed until the veil of innocence and naivete was stripped away through the most pernicious and insidious of discriminatory instruments… racism”. The dramatic pause is his. Other phrases tend to collapse under their own weight: “Significant periods in most individuals’ lives prove to be a point of discovery which can often lead to a sense of belonging that is hard to quantify”; “There are periods historically which capture the mood of a generation and become the soundtrack to a particular type of lived experience”. The book was nominated for a British Sociological Association prize in 2020.

Arday’s academic talks, meanwhile, are rambling and banal, in no way consonant with his elevated rank. In his 2024 British Academy lecture at the University of Bristol, for instance — about “cultural appropriation” in Paul Simon’s album Graceland — he sounds like an enthusiastic sixth-former regurgitating talking points from a rockumentary. At one point he suggests that part of Simon’s “insecurity” and “arrogance” stems from the fact Simon is physically shorter than Art Garfunkel. At another point, he digresses and starts talking about the lack of indigenous actors in Neighbours and Home and Away, observing that “you become a sociologist and start looking at it through a different lens; you start thinking ‘well Australia had an indigenous population… how come none of them are present in the utopia of Summer Bay?’”. And his interest in these two TV soap operas is not merely in passing; in a podcast interview last year, the Professor said he sleeps “probably two hours a night… then in that two hours in between, I fill it with Home and Away and Neighbours”.

There is currently some bafflement on social media about why Cambridge authorities are disclaiming the accusations about Arday with such aggressive, self-satisfied certainty. I have a possible explanation that is only secondarily connected to skin colour. Namely: at some point, the university sector decided that intellectual disability was something that should be mitigated, rather than treated as disqualifying one from scholarly life. Conditions such as dyslexia and dyspraxia, autism, ADHD, speech delay (and so on) were now to be treated as unfair obstacles to a person’s dreams of pursuing an academic career, rather than constituting evidence they were unsuited. And since over-diagnosis of mental health conditions is rife in the sector, and everyone is frightened of being called discriminatory, the predictable upshot was that — at least in some cases — straightforward midwittery came to be treated like an excusable intellectual disability as well.

Lecturers are now routinely expected to make adjustments to their ordinary critical approach as soon as someone has a diagnosis: to ignore spelling mistakes; mentally rearrange sentences without critical comment; try not to mind paragraphs that go on for days, or seem utterly arbitrary in their shape. I speak from experience. As a marker, you are supposed to look beneath the jumble of words and find the true scholar lurking shyly within. Most often, this nonsensical strategy is applied at the level of students; but once the principle was conceded, it was only a matter of time before such accommodations were extended to staff too.

Primed by his amazing personal history, Cambridge bosses seem to have taken this patronising approach to the quality of Arday’s outputs, just as other august bodies presumably did before them: Glasgow University, where Arday was also a Professor; the British Sociological Association, where he is a trustee; Routledge and Princeton University Press, the publishers of his books. According to the unspoken norms of these institutions, it doesn’t matter how silly Arday sounds in interviews, or how bad his writing is. It is already priced in. To point out the fact wouldn’t just be rude, it would also be positively discriminatory in a vague sort of way; whereas to ignore the issue is virtuous and noble. Many people have noticed marked inadequacies in Arday’s work over the years, I assume, but very few have said anything. And I also assume that the pressure to stay silent has increased, the higher he has climbed. What’s this? You are pointing out Professor Jason Arday of Cambridge University — a man who has been through so much to get where he is — can’t write coherent sentences, or stay on-topic in his talks? Are you some kind of Nazi?

Cambridge’s stubborn defence of its employee in the light of the plagiarism accusations looks to me like just more of the same. Managers there don’t seem to see the deliberate repetition of other people’s phrases as any kind of vice, in his particular case — it can only be inadvertent and excusable, given his known disabilities, and so perhaps doesn’t count as plagiarism at all. And it seems his race might be being treated as an additional mitigating factor, based on the assumption he routinely undergoes racist treatment which causes him psychological distress.

For instance, in correspondence between Harris and Head of the Cambridge Faculty of Education, Dr Hilary Cremin, Cremin said that when she had asked Arday about Harris’s plagiarism allegations, the former had “spoke movingly about his ongoing experiences of direct and indirect racism, and the conditions that he was living in whilst the… article was being prepared”. She also stressed that her faculty remained “immensely proud of Prof Arday’s achievements and scholarship”.

You’d be forgiven for thinking here that Cremin was trying to offer mitigating circumstances for a troubled but promising undergraduate — except that she was talking about someone holding a Professorial Chair. Once a narrative of mental disability is firmly in place, it seems that a presumed experience of racism can just be added to the list, as yet another unfair impediment to intellectual achievement. Minority ethnicity plus disability now equals the suspension of critical judgement.

Ultimately, there are likely to be many losers in this embarrassing debacle: deserving young scholars who were overlooked as Arday was appointed, now lost to the profession; fee-paying students who came to Cambridge or Glasgow to bask in the intellectual glow of world-class academics, and got some waffle about Australian soap operas instead; accomplished black or brown researchers smeared by association, now facing abuse online from hereditarian idiots who assume that Arday’s case is the norm. And ultimately, Cambridge University will be a massive loser, deservedly so. It is a necessary condition of the place’s continuing glamour and prestige that it enforces rigorous academic standards. To be shown not to care about this, in such a public way, is an act of catastrophic institutional self-harm.

But I can’t help thinking another loser is Arday himself, wandering like a modern-day Forrest Gump through various prestigious institutions, treated like a sage for every strange or incomprehensible thing he says. To be radically unsuited to an Oxbridge professorship is scarcely something to be ashamed of. Indeed, these days, in my book, it is practically a badge of honour. There are plenty of decent jobs Arday might have found earlier on, more suited to his skill set, which would not have set him up for such public humiliation later. Yet — whatever pieties university managers spouted at the time of his appointments — ultimately, the real reason for his elevation was that they saw the symbolic benefit of his protected characteristics for themselves. Irrespective of the truth about his research techniques, it is obvious Arday is already being treated by Cambridge and other places as — quite literally — a useful idiot. His fairy tale is not yet over; but I think we can already identify some clear villains.

Links - 8th August 2026 (1 - Pro-Crime Policies)

Austin Justice on X - "Memphis was one of the most dangerous cities in America. It’s now becoming a model for how to fight crime when you have a terrible DA. From the peak:
- Murders down 47%
- Carjackings down 48%
- Robberies down 51%.
- Vehicle theft down 80%.
What changed:
1. State troopers took over interstate patrol, freeing up local officers.
2. Police launched focused initiatives targeting fugitives, violent repeat offenders, and gang members.
3. National Guard, federal agents, and US Marshals came in and made 9,000+ arrests, including 400+ gang members. Plus 629 illegal firearms seized, 150 missing children located.
4. Technology filled the gaps. Police deployed license plate readers citywide, expanded drone use, and opened a downtown command center. A cancer center went from a crime attempt every other week to none.
Overall crime is now down more than 43% compared to the same period last year Memphis has a long way to go and remains a dangerous city. Its DA is still dismissing 3 out of every 4 felony cases. In fact, the state legislature just passed a bill to audit and potentially remove him. But the city is showing that a rogue DA doesn't have to be a death sentence for public safety. Flood the streets with law enforcement, target repeat offenders, and make arrests faster than he can dismiss them."

Rafael A. Mangual on X = "And there it is… Six years ago, the man accused of committing a heinous mass shooting that claimed the lives of eight children in Shreveport, Louisiana this morning, was given probation rather than a lengthy prison term for a shooting (per the @nypost)."
Bonchie on X - "He got probation for shooting up a car outside a school. Probation. The left’s views on guns are totally contradictory. On one hand, they demand strict gun control laws. On the other, their social justice crusade requires not enforcing them. A circle that can’t be squared."

Thread by @ES_News_ on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "This is PC Lorne Castle. He’s pulled people from rivers, taken knives off the streets, mentored young people, and risked his life on the job.  Last week, he was sacked.  Not for corruption. Not for abuse of power.  But for the way he arrested a knife-carrying teen who’d just allegedly assaulted an elderly man. 🧵👇
The arrest was messy. The teenager resisted. A knife dropped from his waistband. Castle swore, lost his temper, and called him a name.  The force deemed his techniques lawful.  But they sacked him anyway.  No complaint came from the boy. The outrage? From within the job itself. PC Castle's colleagues complained about his behaviour. This is the reality of frontline policing today.  Knife crime is rising. Teenagers are carrying weapons and teenagers are being stabbed to death on our streets.  And officers are expected to be therapists, robots, and punching bags all at once, with a smile on their face for the bodycam.  Lose your cool for a second? Your career’s over.
We’re told trust in policing is low.  Maybe that’s because officers are being forced to spend hours recording social media posts and logging “non-crime hate incidents”—instead of being backed when they take dangerous individuals off the street.  The system is broken. Castle’s story proves it. We have written a full piece on this case; what happened, why it matters, and what it says about the state of policing in Britain today.  This one deserves your attention."

Meme - T. Becket Adams: "Infrequent reminder that Disney made a movie recently that sympathetically recasts as a trauma victim a lady whose defining characteristic is her insatiable lust for skinning puppies." *Elphaba from Wicked*
Paul Anleitner @PaulAnleitner: "That because there's been a radical change in how postmodern culture told stories about "villains." Villains were reframed as victims of prior oppression or trauma. Crime became the excusable result of an unjust system, & "law abiding" meant being complicit in that system."

nxthompson on X - "The stats here are kind of remarkable. BART's new fare gates have led to a 1,000-hour decline in clean up time; 41% drop in crime; and $10 million increase in projected revenue."
Poplicola on X - "just waiting for the more perfect union coverage about how this tech is killing jobs"
Jeremy Carl on X - "Broken windows theory is undefeated."
@jason on X - "… basic law and order is better than chaos?!? Would have never guessed that having been to Singapore and Japan 😂"
Jason McMinn on X - "So if I hear you correctly, you are saying that if the “riff-raff” are kept out, we can go back to having nice things?"
Spikels on X - "As expected. The grifters and politicians - but I repeat myself - who run BART fought this basic public safety improvement for decades disproven their wack theory that criminals don't commit crime."
Gregory Kennedy on X - "BREAKING: Liberals discover that even the mildest forms of law and order, like fare enforcement with gates, can bring a tiny amount of sanity to BART, a system bleeding cash so severely it may have to shut down, which would kill their favorite playground for bizarre experiments"
Gregory Kennedy on X - "I felt like I was taking crazy pills when I read this. So I dug up a report from Yale that said the gates on Bart wouldn't work, I mean, "didn't really address the issue of public safety." Because I wanted to make sure I wasn't an insane person imagining that I had heard all these wackadoodle arguments against any common-sense solution that might make Bart more tolerable.  Why is the Ivy League working so hard to destroy civil society?"
Trust the Experts!
Proof that public transport must be free

End Wokeness on X - "This bodega owner told ABC a year ago that he fears for his safety in NY. Last night, he was kiIIed by a shoplifter"
How ignorant. He didn't know that crime had fallen and was believing misinformation about danger

Heather Mac Donald on X - "We are not over-policing. We are not over-prosecuting. There is not an over-incarceration problem. We are under-policing, under-prosecuting, and under-incarcerating criminals."

John D. Macari Jr. 🇺🇸🗽 on X - "I remember 2013, right after Bill de Blasio became Mayor. I was a Sergeant in Brooklyn.  My team was working on a pattern of vehicle break ins occurring in a neighborhood. The night before, I changed our tour to put cops in the area at the exact time the crimes were happening.  Late that night we spotted a guy walking down the block, peeking into car windows and checking door handles.  At one point he stopped, pulled out a blunt, and started smoking marijuana right on the street. When he finished, he put it in his pocket and kept walking and continued casing vehicles.  I had a young cop with me who was new to plainclothes work. He attempted to jump the guy too early, and we got made before we had enough to charge the individual for a car break in.  So I made the call.  We locked him up for smoking marijuana in public, which allowed us to identify him and search him for property connected to other break ins from the pattern.   This also gave us an opportunity to see if he would confess to the prior crimes or give us intelligence related to those and other crimes.   He didn’t have anything on him, and he didn’t confess or give us any info but that night there were no car break ins and the pattern died after that arrest.  The next day I was called into my Commanding Officer’s office.  Instead of asking about the crime pattern, I got a lecture about not locking up “black and brown people” for marijuana because they are locked up at disproportionate rates for this specific offense.  I remember responding:  “Black and brown people are locked up at disproportionate rates for major crimes like Rape and Robbery also, are you suggesting I only lock up white people?”  He told me I should use more discretion for minor offenses.  I told him:  “I didn’t lock him up for marijuana. I locked him up for breaking into cars. Marijuana was just the only charge I had at the moment.”  I also stated that he wasn’t just a dumb kid smoking marijuana, he had a lengthy criminal history and I observed him engaging in current criminal behavior.  I walked out of that office confused.  I remember thinking: How far is this not well thought out ideology going to go?  Now, more than a decade late, we have the answer."

Helen Andrews on X - "My biggest “aha” moment in our post-2015 racial unrest was Ezra Klein’s piece calling Darren Wilson’s version of events “literally unbelievable.” Why would someone holding stolen goods mouth off to a cop? Implausible! It’s not “something a human would do”!"
Left wingers keep boasting about how much "empathy" they have, but they are unable to imagine how people would think differently from them. This naive view of criminals leads to pro crime policies

End Wokeness on X - "Chicago Alderman William Hall wants to see Walgreens face charges for closing (over a shoplifting crisis)"

Nick Minock on X - "🚨NEW: Fairfax County Commonwealth's Attorney Steve Descano's office reduced a rape charge (up to life in prison) against Alberto Ruiz Mendoza to assault and battery. Mendoza is now walking free. His sentence time was 90 days and his entire sentence was suspended. Descano also dropped the gun possession by an unlawful alien charges, a brandishing a firearm charge, and a threat in writing charge."
Patrick Casey on X - "What do Democrat officials at the state and local levels do other than raise taxes, profess love for minorities, and let criminals walk free? Honest question."

Dr Lawrence Newport on X - "City of London police arrested a handful of criminals in a bike theft gang. Bike thefts fell by 90%. It's pretty clear: if you imprison criminals, they can't commit crimes. If you imprison career criminals you stop the majority of offences. Capture. Convict. Imprison."
Too bad this hurts the left wing agenda, so left wingers push for unlimited social spending instead, because they're deluded/lying about the "true cause" of crime

Polymarket on X - "NEW: Home Depot & Lowe's to install parking lot cameras with license plate readers amid a surge in shoplifting."
Rothmus 🏴 on X - "I present this evidence again to make one thing clear: your life is not worse because of the top 1% it is worse because of the bottom 1%"
Damn billionaires and greedy companies! They should just let people shoplift!

Marc Porter Magee 🎓 on X - "“approximately 50 violent groups or gangs in Oakland with an active membership of between 1,000 and 1,200 people, which represented just 0.3% of the population … were responsible for up to 85% of the city’s homicides”"
Daniel Friedman on X - "Oakland has a population of 450,000 people. It is blessed with geographic conditions existing almost nowhere else that allow year-round temperatures in the low 70s. It is also, notoriously, a crime ridden hellhole.  90 percent of the crime is committed by about 1200 recidivists.  Oakland could make crime vanish by making these people vanish. Into a prison or whatever. Instead, Oakland elects progressive mayors and prosecutors who keep these people on the streets, keep encampments in the parks, provide no remedy for rampant property crime and disorder and keep spending hundreds of thousands of public dollars in social services and criminal justice expenditures every year for each of these individuals who are nothing but detrimental and will never be anything else."

Trust David Lammy to think adulthood begins at 25 - "That is the latest bright idea of Justice Secretary David Lammy. Buried in his recent white paper on youth justice is a one-line proposal that criminals up to the age of 25 should be dealt with as if they were under 18... younger adults already benefit from generous provisions in the sentencing guidelines... Treating adult criminals like children then feels like another abdication of the fundamental duties of the state: to protect our borders, and to keep the peace within. It is the inevitable consequence of a system that prizes and protects the interests of wrongdoers above all else, no matter the cost to the ordinary citizen."

D.C. police in turmoil after allegations of manipulated crime stats - "D.C.'s police department is in turmoil after its interim chief said 13 officials were served termination letters amid a widening investigation about crime stats being downplayed... Trump claimed last summer that D.C. police were putting out "phony" stats"
EXPOSING THE FALSE CLAIMS JUSTIFYING THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION'S ATTACKS ON THE METROPOLITAN POLICE DEPARTMENT: Evidence Demonstrates Significant Reduction in Crime in D.C. Since 2023. DEMOCRATIC STAFF REPORT - "As this report’s findings reflect, the investigation backfired on Republicans and the Trump Administration almost as soon as it began, thanks in large part to the testimony of every single one of the eight current and former MPD commanders who sat for transcribed interviews. The investigation provided evidence that President Trump lied about crime in D.C. to justify his attempted takeover of MPD and deployment of troops to D.C.’s streets. It also generated evidence refuting Republicans’ far-fetched conspiracy theory alleging a whole-of-department effort to manipulate MPD’s crime data. And the investigation undermined Republican attacks on home rule—the right of D.C. residents to govern themselves—by showing how D.C.’s government, including both the D.C. Council and MPD, was successfully reducing crime without federal intervention."
Oops. So much for this "conspiracy theory"

Meme -  i/o @avidseries: "Antiracism in action:
> People do bad stuff
> Efforts are made to stop that bad stuff
> Those efforts involve identifying the people who do bad stuff
> But those identified people are virtually all black and brown
> Therefore the efforts are racist and must stop"
Truthout truthout.org: "Chicago Nixed Its Racist Database of Gangs. Other Cities Should Follow."
The ultimate sin in the West is Racism. You can destroy the West by just threatening to call it Racist

Vancouver man facing 227 days in jail after assaulting teen with feces | National Post - "A man who pleaded guilty to several “vile” offences that included assaulting a teenager and smearing fecal matter over her face and mouth has been handed a sentence of 695 days, or almost two years, by a judge in Vancouver. However, after time served in pre-trial custody, he will face just 227 more days behind bars.  Fitsum Wode Zewdu, 33, pleaded guilty to sexual assault, assault, and committing an indecent act. In sentencing, Judge Reginald Harris of B.C. Provincial Court said he took into account the guilty plea and “the love and support of his parents,” including a letter from his father in his support... The judge noted that Zewdu has a criminal record that stretches back to 2019"
Left wingers want fines to be a percentage of the offender's income, so a $0 fine for someone with no income fits their worldview

Swan on X - "You're much more of a slave to the 1% that commit 50% of crimes than you are to the 1% that create 40% of the wealth."

The 1 % of the population accountable for 63 % of all violent crime convictions - "The majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, typically males, characterized by early onset of violent criminality, substance abuse, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality."
Previously quoted. Proof that stigma and discrimination cause crime!

Lauren Chen on X - "Progressives always talk about sympathy for criminals. But what about the families forced to live around violence and chaos because they can’t afford to move? Why does nobody talk about them? #Politics #Debate #Commentary #newsring"

MA city votes to disable gunshot detection system just one week after major "active-shooter event" in order to shield blacks, migrants from cops - "Police Commissioner Pauline Wells begged the council on Monday not to deactivate the devices, citing multiple recent cases where lives have been saved due to the system, but to no avail."

pagliacci the hated 🌝 on X = "WELL I was assaulted by a schizo homeless guy today in Toronto. I was walking to the grocery store when he started stalking me. I tried to get away from him but it didn’t work. He grabbed me, pinned me against a fence, and then tried to break my hand to steal my phone. Three people passing by helped save me.  The police were quick and kind, but the officer I spoke with told me this guy had been arrested for attacking people repeatedly in the past month, and “fair warning, a judge will probably let him out by tomorrow morning.”   🫠 lovely system we got goin on here folks"
Thread by @Slatzism on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "update:  the schizo black guy who assaulted me has now self-identified as Indigenous and will be going through a special court where a judge is required to consider the impact of colonialism when determining his sentence and reduce it accordingly.  :)
Was also amazing to learn today is that this guy has a violent track record dating back 20 years.  He actually very much could have killed me.  And the crown is only asking for 12 months anyway. So even if they get what they want with no reductions, he’ll be out in less than a year.  And he may have been given documents with my identifying information."

Another Walgreens Is Closing in Chicago—Blame Criminals, Not the Company - "Walgreens is pulling out of Chicago’s South Side, home to some of the city’s most crime-ridden areas. The closure of a store in the city’s Chatham neighborhood, set for June 4, marks the seventh Walgreens location to shut down on the South Side in the past year.  Who’s to blame for this departure? Chicago Alderman William Hall, who represents Chatham as part of Ward 6, blames the company. Walgreens, he said, should be charged with “first-degree corporate abandonment” for creating a “medicine drought,” and he even accused it of committing a “pharmaceutical genocide.” (It’s particularly rich that Hall is now castigating Walgreens for closing, given that he hadn’t been happy about Walgreens opening, alleging it “ran out” small, local businesses.) Hall is right to be concerned that residents and seniors with chronic health conditions may suffer. But criminals, not corporations, are to blame for the closures. Strengthening both policing and prosecution of property crimes is the key to bringing Walgreens and other businesses back to the South Side. Rhetoric like Hall’s, by contrast, continues to send the message that Chicago is closed for business.  Walgreens has been clear that crime is the problem. At a town hall on May 9, executives revealed that the Chatham store lost more than $1 million last year due to shoplifting and declining prescription sales. The location loses 16 percent of its inventory to theft—four times the company average, according to Walgreens’ regional vice president.   Like many stores reeling from the national surge of retail theft, the Chatham Walgreens was forced to install lock boxes to protect merchandise. And it spent more than $400,000 a year on security guards. Yet criminals were undeterred. Thieves broke the locks, leaped over counters to steal liquor and cigarettes, and assaulted workers... even in its difficult circumstances, Walgreens is doing far more to serve vulnerable residents than is Chatham’s own alderman. The company is reaching out to local customers to explain how they can receive their prescriptions by mail and offering free delivery for seniors. It has made its Chatham employees eligible to transfer to other stores, where, one hopes, they won’t have to fear as much for their safety.  Meantime, Alderman Hall did not even bother to show up for this month’s town hall, according to residents. Amid backlash over the Walgreens closure, Ward 15 Alderman Raymond Lopez asked a common-sense question: “Where was that anger when the stores in our communities were under years and years of assault by criminals allowed to shoplift, vandalize, and destroy neighborhood institutions?”   Lopez has it right. Crime is what’s closing stores in Chicago. It was the main reason that Aldi abruptly closed its Auburn Gresham neighborhood store in 2022, and it’s helped drive the departure from the city of other major businesses like Citadel."

Dustin on X - "Elon Musk just reduced American crime politics to a single question on Joe Rogan.  And answered it like it was arithmetic.
Musk: “While obviously not everyone who’s a Democrat is a criminal, almost everyone who is a criminal is a Democrat.”
That’s not a partisan attack.  That’s an observation about how incentives work.  If you’re a criminal, you don’t vote for the party promising longer sentences and more cops.  You vote for the one gutting bail laws and calling enforcement racist.  This isn’t opinion. This is game theory.
Musk: “Because the Democrats are the soft-on-crime party. So if you’re a criminal, who are you gonna vote for?”
 Nobody wants to follow that logic to its conclusion.  But the math doesn’t care.  The softness isn’t accidental. It’s architectural.  No-cash bail. Decriminalized theft. Sanctuary cities. Defund the police.  These aren’t compassion. They’re infrastructure.  Every policy that removes consequences builds a constituency that needs them to stay gone.  That’s not ideology. That’s customer acquisition.  You don’t protect criminals because you care about them.  You protect them because they show up in November.  The people paying the price are never the ones writing the policy.  It’s the working-class neighborhoods getting hollowed out.  The immigrant families who played by the rules watching the system reward the ones who broke them.  The small business owners boarding up windows because the DA won’t prosecute.  They’ll spend the next week calling Musk reckless for this.  But he didn’t build the incentive structure.  He just described it.  And that’s what they’ll never forgive."
That's why left wingers push "vote blue, no matter who" - so the Democratic party can continue to push its disastrous policies at will

Links - 7th August 2026 (2 - Jason Arday)

Andy Ngo on X - ".@Cambridge_Uni’s over-promoted celebrity DEI professor Jason Arday appears to admit to being an academic fraud in his first interview since the scandal broke. He blames his autism and says it’s racist to want him punished for the plagiarism in his published academic work. He also admits that reports that he himself helped raised millions for charity were false. Leftists and DEI supporters say he shouldn’t be punished because white academics get away with plagiarism all the time, they claim."
Malachi32 on X - "In basketball, you try to get credit for a score you didn't make, you're out. In academia, you fake something and you're gone. Period. Remember Ward Churchill at the U of Colorado? Faked his research. Fired."

Jonathan Kay on X - "This article about arday is bizarre… the first chunk of it is the standard effort to smear critics as racists. But then there’s a bunch of great new reporting about all his other lies, including a particularly insane and obvious fabrication about a nonexistent pig head… Arday is obviously a completely pathological liar. He claims there was a guy with a mask and a knife roaming around his school threatening to kill him, but he didn’t bother telling his colleagues and just stayed in his office and kept working"

Jesse Singal on X - "Jason Arday was accosted by a masked man with a knife who figured out a way not to show up on CCTV, evading detection. Arday didn't inform his colleagues of the guy wandering around with a knife menacing professors."

Audrey Ludwig MBE on X - "Arday is throwing every excellent black and disabled academic; plus everyone who has experienced unlawful race and disability discrimination under a bus"

ripx4nutmeg on X - "I've now become in awe of him. This is an academic speech he made in 2023. It's 46 minutes of pure rambling in which he uses racial buzzwords like 'decolonisation' several times every minute. At no point is a point made. How did he get away with this?"

Prof Ian Pace on X - "‘Although Arday did not dispute the allegations of plagiarism, he defended himself by saying he had received inadequate supervision and support, especially given his autism and “complex learning disabilities”.’ Ok. But that does not sound like a Cambridge Professor."

Meme - Simon Baron-Cohen @sbaroncohen: "In 2014 we published the first large-scale study of suicidality in autism, subsequently widely replicated, revealing that 1 in 4 autistic people have planned or attempted suicide. That’s why I’m very concerned about the impact of the media coverage on Professor Jason Arday who is autistic. He has been accused of plagiarism and he was cleared of any academic misconduct following a rigorous investigation by Liverpool John Moores University. And yet he continues to be systematically discredited over every detail of his life, daily. We should of course always investigate plagiarism to protect academic standards. However, I cannot stand by and watch when an autistic man is on the ground and the kicking continues. This is relentless bullying of a vulnerable autistic man and raises safe-guarding issues. It’s time to stop."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "Despite university clearance, Arday's PhD thesis contains dozens of near- verbatim unattributed passages from prior works, and a journal corrected his paper for missing citations to adapted text including participant quotes."

Alex Edmans on X - "It is disappointing to see an academic of Simon Baron-Cohen's stature suggest that academic or media scrutiny should be moderated because of the personal characteristics of the person being scrutinised. Academic standards must apply equally to everyone. Autism may require adjustments to how we communicate criticism, but it cannot determine whether criticism is made in the first place. If we accept the principle that scrutiny should be relaxed because someone might suffer psychologically, where does it end? Should journal editors accept weaker papers because rejection might harm an author's mental health? Should tenure committees lower standards because a negative decision could be devastating? The integrity of academia depends on evaluating work by the same standards, irrespective of the identity or vulnerability of the author. That principle applies equally to academic journals and to the media, which plays an important role in scrutinising research that influences policy and practice. Of course, criticism should be directed at the work rather than the individual, and personal abuse is never acceptable. But that principle applies equally to Professor Arday as to every other academic. Equal treatment means equal standards. Lowering the bar because of someone's neurodiversity or demographic characteristics does a huge disservice to them and to the thousands of other minority academics who want to be judged on merit."
Alex Edmans on X - "This is spot on. In the past, your currency was the quality of your work or critical thinking. Now, it's how victimised you claim to be and how many accommodations you need. This does a disservice to those with legitimate needs for accommodation."

Jonathan Kay on X - "Oh Are we finished playing the racism card and now we’re playing the autism card?"
Richard Hanania on X - "What if Arday’s critics also have autism and don’t like to see a liar and plagiarist be a respected academic? Maybe you are putting them at risk of self-harm."

Jack on X - "“It’s okay to be a serial fabulist if you’re autistic, and if people call you out, they’re putting you at risk of suicide.” Sad to see Baron-Cohen torching his reputation like this."
Crémieux on X - "'You can't enforce the law because what if the criminal feels bad about it?' Compelling."

Prof Ian Pace on X - "If an academic is in such a condition that public scrutiny of his (equally public) work may cause suicidal urges, then as a matter of urgency he should take leave and receive care. Using this threat to try and silence critics is about as low as it gets."

Colin Wright on X - "So we can't ever criticize or fire an autistic person, even if they occupy elite positions in society like a prof. at Cambridge, because they're still part of such a vulnerable group that being forced to face the consequences of their actions might cause them to commit suicide."

Crémieux on X - "Man, what a discrediting let-down from Simon.
1. You cannot actually clear someone of a crime by lying and saying they didn't do it.
2. It doesn't matter if you're autistic, retarded, or just a liar like Arday. If you do fraud, you deserve to be punished for it. No exceptions."
Basically Cohen is saying autistic people get a blank cheque to do what they want. Of course we must still treat them equally otherwise if that would benefit them

Allison Pearson on X - "Does anyone know the hospital where Professor Jason Arday had his brain tumour removed just before his PhD viva? The reason Arday dared make up such outlandish falsehoods is because he knew the Cambridge middle-class ninnies revered him for his exciting DEI backstory."

Alice Salisbury on X - "Six months ago a guy gave a talk at my husband’s office about overcoming autism and brain surgery. My husband came home and told me it should give us hope for our son, who actually has had two rounds of brain surgery. Just put two and two together and I’m a bit upset really."
Roger on X - "One of the saddest posts I saw on this whole thing was from the parent of a non-verbal autistic child who kept getting told, by well-meaning friends and colleagues, “don’t worry, he might get over it and go on to be a professor at Cambridge, like this guy I read about..”"
Helen Joyce on X - "Liars do so much harm to so many people they never even know about. No reckoning of the consequences of Jason Arday's false claims will ever be complete."

The Cambridge plagiarism row proves Black academics are held to higher standards | The Independent - "The scrutiny surrounding Arday has moved beyond his academic work into his life story, athletic achievements and charitable activity. When the search spreads across an entire life, it begins to look less like accountability and more like a hunt for the flaw that will explain away every success... Dr Claudine Gay’s ascent to become Harvard’s first Black president should have represented a shattered ceiling. Instead, the scrutiny around her took on the atmosphere of a modern-day witch trial"
Amazing how the left wing line is the exact opposite of reality.

Jason Arday's PhD Turnitin Report - "Below is a linked PDF of what happens if you run Jason Arday’s PhD through Turnitin. Turnitin is a proprietary plagiarism checker that is used by most universities in the UK. Basically, it scans documents and compares them to its own large database of publications and theses as well as work submitted through its system at other universities around the world... Alongside the plagiarism from Zwozdiak-Myers, which has been reported in the press, there is substantial plagiarism from a range of other sources including a PhD thesis by Christina P. Ligadu at the University of Wollongong. There is also a lot of plagiarism from sources by academics in the field, and in particular Arday seems to have borrowed liberally from various handbooks (for non-academics, a handbook is a publication where various thinkers in a field contribute definitive articles on a set topic.) Most people outside of the academy don’t do plagiarism checking. So here are a few pointers for things that are important to note. The highlighted sections are all copied from some other place. They are numbered and those numbers refer to a list that is at the end of the PDF that gives a source. So you can go and look at where the words are from and compare it to the original if you are that way inclined. For plagiarism checks, the standard procedure would be for us to go and look at that original for each case... In general, there is no real problem with including lots of quotations in academic work as long as they are critically contextualised, and it is striking that Arday actually gives very few quotations, instead presenting other people’s words as his own. The large blocks of verbatim copying we see in Arday’s thesis are not normal. Nobody in academia would consider this normal... A Turnitin report that looks like this rings every single alarm bell for people used to looking at them. Arday has argued that “if anyone’s academic work had been subjected to as much scrutiny it would show similar errors.” This is simply untrue. The report linked below is genuinely unusual... the report did turn up a >1% match with a PhD thesis by Shatha Hamdan Alghamdi from Glasgow. It seems that she was plagiarising Arday’s thesis in her own, as she does not cite him and this similarity score for a single source in a PhD thesis is very high. The churn is real. "
Clearly, Turnitin is structurally racist. The developers need to do better and root out its (unconscious) bias. This is an anonymous hit post and needs to be ignored and condemned!

Benjamin Ryan on X - "Jason Arday told The Times: “I am not a liar.” And yet over at least five years, he repeatedly claimed to have—or allowed others to assert he had— raised millions of pounds for charity, which he now acknowledges is not true. Today The Times reports that Arday "said that he did not raise all the money [£5M] for charity but was part of a syndicate of about 100 people. Asked why he did not correct the narrative, he said: 'Could I have ever guessed that somebody would literally comb through every single word I’ve ever said on that? There’s no way because I never, ever guessed I’d ever be in this position.'” This suggests the figure was the result of a single moment of misunderstanding that might have been lost to time had people not started digging. And yet: Here is what Arday said in a TedxDurhamUniversity speech in 2021: “My lifelong ambition was to raise a million pounds for charity before I turned 40, and at 36, I've raised just over 5 million pounds to charity.” The Guardian wrote about him in 2023: “The University of Cambridge’s youngest Black professor, he joined its faculty of education in March 2023, at 37. Before then, he had been a professor at Glasgow and Durham universities; published three books of academic work, mainly focusing on race and education; and, most importantly to him, raised more than £5m by doing charity work.” In the announcement page for the honorary degree he received from Southampton Solent University in 2023: “A prolific fundraiser, Professor Arday has raised over £5 million as part of several fundraising collectives for a host of charities over an 18-year period.” In a 2023 interview with the Cambridge Student, the paper wrote: “The ‘accent of charity is the centre of my identity and belies something greater than yourself’– this sense of selflessness was drilled into him upon visiting a ‘homeless shelter for Christmas’ aged 18, raising over £5 million to date.” In 2024, the National Autistic Society conference peaches announcement stated: “In his spare time, Jason has been a prolific fundraiser; having raised over £5 million pounds as a part of several fundraising collectives for a host charities over an 18-year period, winning numerous prodigious fundraising awards.” In 2024, the Daily Mail reports, he gave a speech in New Orleans to America's National Funeral Directors Association in which he said: “My target was to raise £1million for charity before I turned 40, but by the time I'd got to 30 I'd raised over £3million and at the moment it's £5.5million and counting.” His current Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau bio page: “In his spare time, Jason Arday is a prolific fundraiser; he has been part of several fundraising teams that have raised millions of pounds for charity, winning numerous prodigious fundraising awards.” My question is why all these publications and other entities did not ask for evidence that he was such a prolific fundraiser. That is on The Guardian, most notably, for not doing their own fact checking."

Jonathan Kay on X - "for more on jason arday's hallucinatory megalomania, check out this excerpt from his forthcoming @simonschustermemoir memoir: claims that a woman who gazed upon him received a "prophecy" that he was destined for "great things" & "sad and difficult things," like a hero of myth"

Pete North on X - ""How did allegedly intelligent professors fall for his bs?" Simples. They aren't intelligent. They are people who progress the same way Arday did - looking and sounding the part while having socially convenient opinions. Social sciences departments are basically institutional version of Bluesky. There's a reason academics have deserted X and its not on any moral grounds. It's because the more they say, the more they out themselves as morons, which is reputationally damaging for them. On that basis, academia has very little public engagement and talks mostly to itself - which is what makes it parasitic. You could close every single politics and sociology departament in the land overnight and no work of value would be lost. The people therein would struggle to find even a minimum wage job. They have no useful skills. Most are computer and data illiterate who have meltdowns if faced even with an Excel pivot table."
memetic_sisyphus on X - "Yeah they’re the professors that are telling you white men are evil."

Ecgwine Icling on X - "I find it hilarious that this is really the best they have. If there was even a tiny pool of competent blacks, they'd draw from that and showcase them everywhere. But they can't, because clearly there isn't."

Julie Bindel on X - "I know, personally, two women, both from disadvantaged backgrounds, who lost out to jobs because of Arday. He was promoted over one, and got the job over the other. Both are great in their field, and WAY better than him. In my view, he is not the innocent victim in this."

Adrian Hilton on X - "“We’re talking about academia here. I didn’t murder somebody,” Jason Arday told the Times. It's a very revealing statement: you'd expect someone who holds a prestigious chair to respect the academy, not traduce and then trivialise it. I feel most sorry for his students, who go up to Cambridge for a world class education and expert supervision. The Faculty of Education there is perpetrating an educational fraud."

Timur Kuran on X - "Arday joins Kendi and Gay as a symbol of DEI’s obsession with race over merit. He’s been lionized despite clear intellectual mediocrity. That’s why the backlash is so fierce. Cases this blatant embolden people who stay silent on smaller DEI abuses and inefficiencies."
Cambridge didn't learn from Harvard, and did an even more epic fail

Yuan Yi Zhu on X - "Yesterday Arday said something like 'I haven't murdered anybody. It's just academia' to The Times and I just can't stop thinking about it. There is somebody out there whose career ended because Arday got their job."
Wesley Yang on X - "It's actually true that Arday is just one ridiculous fraud who took one person's job by spouting a mildly less competent version of the same inane drivel that much of academia specializes in producing. It's not like he was part of a grand conspiracy to defraud the public into believing that chemically castrating children was evidence-based, medically necessary, and lifesaving -- a vastly more consequential enterprise of equivalent fraudulence for which no accountability is even contemplated."

Charity casts doubts on volunteering record of Cambridge professor - "A charity has cast doubt on claims about volunteering made by the Cambridge professor at the centre of a plagiarism row. Prof Jason Arday has listed among his achievements “installing water points” in South America and West Africa with the charity WaterAid. WaterAid, however, says it never sends volunteers abroad... Thousands of people have signed an open letter supporting him, but the name of one of the most prominent signatories on the list has now been removed. Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu, the president of Wolfson College, Cambridge, was previously the second named signatory on an open letter accusing newspapers of “trying to smear [Prof Arday] with fake accusations of plagiarism”. Her name has now disappeared from the open letter organised by the left-wing Good Law Project."
Damn racist charity!

Andrew Lawrence on X - "It's clear this guy is absolutely full of shit, and nobody has ever called him out on it, because they were terrified of being called racist."

Jason Arday is merely a symptom of academia’s moral disease - "The controversy engulfing the Cambridge professor Jason Arday should prompt a moment of introspection amongst the Great and the Good who rule our lives. Whatever conclusions are drawn about the allegations of thesis plagiarism, this sorry affair has already exposed how a fixation with moral virtue has downgraded sound judgment. Yet there will be no reckoning for all those who helped create the conditions in which the Arday saga unfolded, no admission that universities have become uncritical purveyors of fashionable orthodoxies. Arday is making a show of contrition: in an interview, he reiterated this weekend that he was the victim of a “racially motivated” and “coordinated” effort to unseat him... Meanwhile, the usual suspects have already mounted their high horses: the ludicrous Zack Polanski has signed an open letter in support of Arday. The equally ludicrous Kehinde Andrews, a Black Studies professor, who once unselfconsciously attacked the work of his peers as “mind-deadening”, has decried the affair as a “smear campaign”. Alas, our opinion-transmitters will learn no lessons, and we can be sure of this because in the same week that the Cambridge farce became big news, Dame Harriet Harman declared that Labour should ban men from running in its next leadership election... Our society is so obsessed with “the first” that excellence or even competence has been subordinated to symbolism. Arday became the “youngest-ever black person” appointed to a professorship at Cambridge. Rachel Reeves was the “first female Chancellor”. Our institutions still behave as though they are in Gilead or 1950s Deep South, forever searching for the next “historic” milestone to congratulate themselves on... The allure of Arday’s branch of Critical Race Theory scholarship to our self-flagellating leaders is another factor. Had the professor (and part-time super-athlete) devoted his career to the economics of pension schemes or the evolution of butterflies, he would probably not have become a celebrated national figure. But he worked in a field which allows universities to bask in the warm glow of their own benevolence by encouraging the spending of public money on this intellectual pap. Economics and a chunk of political science – such as analysis of voting patterns – and some sociology have a quasi-scientific methodology and genuinely attempt to quantify concepts and test conjectures. Most other “Social Science” is opinion dressed up in incomprehensibility. For his 2018 paper on black and minority ethnic students’ mental health, Arday’s empirical basis was 32 self-selected interview participants, yet it made broad claims about the “lived experiences” across higher education... arguments were evaluated less on methodological rigour than by conformity with prevailing political assumptions. That same instinct suffuses virtually every aspect of British life. Broadcasters, higher education institutions, public bodies: they are all addicted to inspirational narratives because those stories flatter whoever is telling them... Harman’s intervention was not the only reminder this week that identity politics remains embedded in Labour’s thinking. The party also lifted Diane Abbott’s suspension, she who once wrote that Jews experience similar prejudice to “redheads”, but not racism. Abbott later apologised for the remarks, before saying she did not regret writing them. Would a pre-Your Party Jeremy Corbyn have been readmitted with such magnanimity? However doubtful Arday’s future, the system in which he was a willing participant is alive and well."

Jonatan Pallesen on X - "Hah! No. This is the perfect story. Jason Arday is the perfect awful DEI candidate: useless as an academic, his work contains a large amount of plagiarism, and he is obviously a liar and a fraud. Jason Arday-gate will hopefully keep going and going. In the very optimum outcome, this story becomes so big that Cambridge University is forever tainted with it. And other universities can see what happens when you go full DEI."

Benjamin Ryan on X - "I found that Cambridge quietly edited Jason Arday's Jesus College bio sometime between Jan 1 and Aug. 2. His title changed from "Professorial Fellow of Education" to "Fellow of Education," and an MA in Education Studies from Liverpool John Moores vanished from his list of degrees."

The Thucydides Trap Is Fake And Gay

The Thucydides Trap Is Fake And Gay
The commentariat has read Xi’s condescending history lesson completely backward and missed the real signal. 

At the recent summit with President Donald Trump in Beijing, Chinese President Xi Jinping invoked the fifth-century B.C. Greek historian Thucydides in his opening remarks, saying: “The world has come to a new crossroads. Can China and the United States transcend the so-called ‘Thucydides Trap’ and forge a new paradigm for major-power relations?”

Cue the predictable, breathless coverage from the mainstream media, which has rushed to take Xi’s remarks at face value and eagerly embraced the Chinese Communist Party’s framing, a narrative that aligns perfectly with the elite talking point popularized by Harvard’s Graham Allison in his 2017 book “Destined for War.” In it, Allison argued that a rising power (China as Athens) must inevitably clash with an established hegemon (America as Sparta) unless “cooler heads prevail.” For nearly a decade, this thesis has been treated as an unassailable truth in think tanks, Wall Street boardrooms, and foreign-policy circles. The deeper implication is that America should step aside gracefully, accommodate China’s “peaceful rise,” and accept managed decline so the benevolent dragon can assume its rightful place as the world’s new leading power.

Unfortunately for our elites, it turns out that the Thucydides Trap is fake and gay.

Fake, because it is nothing more than pop-political science masquerading as profound historical destiny. Gay, because, well… it’s ancient Greece and the Peloponnesian War basically involved Sparta and Athens arguing over who got to be the top in the Mediterranean. And it’s both fake and gay because most of the commentariat has read Xi Jinping’s condescending history lesson to Donald Trump completely backward and missed the real signal.

Let me explain.

Graham Allison’s Destined for War hit bookshelves in 2017, just months after Donald Trump’s shocking 2016 victory. It was the first time since Nixon that a U.S. presidential candidate had openly rejected the bipartisan elite consensus on China, as evidenced by Trump hammering China on its currency manipulation, massive trade surpluses, IP theft, and hollowing out of American manufacturing while on the campaign trail. His promise to America was a total “America First” reset by slapping tariffs and decoupling from China.

The foreign policy and business establishments were in full panic mode. For decades, they were drunk on the Kool-Aid that economic liberalization inevitably leads to political liberalization, as they pushed for China’s entry into the WTO in 2001. Of course, we know now that it never panned out as Beijing failed to blossom into a “responsible stakeholder,” nor did it have any desire to embrace Western norms.

Allison’s book arrived as the perfect intellectual counterweight to President Trump’s new agenda. Suddenly, every think tank panel, Davos dinner, and editorial board had a shiny new framework to wield: You can’t get tough on Beijing — that’s Sparta panicking and triggering the Thucydides Trap. It reframed Trump’s hawkishness as dangerous and historically illiterate brinkmanship that risked catastrophic war. The message to policymakers, CEOs, and pundits was to push for continued “strategic engagement,”  i.e., keep the money flowing, keep the technology transferring, and don’t let this populist disruptor upset the profitable status quo. The business elite lapped it up because it gave them the perfect intellectual cover to keep doing what they already wanted and were incentivized to do: make obscene amounts of money in China, while pretending it was sound political strategy. In other words, Thucydides was a rhetorical weapon deployed to neuter the first serious challenger to the China engagement consensus in two generations.

Putting aside his distinguished record in political science and international relations, in this particular work on China and the Thucydides Trap, Allison commits a fundamental error. The bulk of the historical evidence shows that, contrary to his thesis, status quo powers have rarely launched preventive wars against perceived future rivals. In reality, it is the rising powers that usually strike first when they sense opportunity and weakness because established ones have far too much to lose — wealth, prestige, stability, and hard-won power.

For example, it was Imperial Japan, the ascending challenger in 1904, that launched a surprise attack on the long-established Russian Empire. Later in the 1930s, a recovering and resurgent Germany faced no preemptive assault from Britain, France, or the Soviet Union; the established powers dithered and appeased until the revisionist forced their hand. Even the Peloponnesian War, the supposed origin story for this historical analogy, does not fit the script Allison assigns it. Thucydides, an Athenian general writing after his own side’s catastrophic defeat, portrayed Sparta’s fear of Athenian growth as the “truest cause.” Yet the historical record reveals an aggressive, expansionist Athens provoking a reluctant Sparta through a series of calculated affronts. The vanquished, not the victors, shaped the narrative that has endured for 2,400 years.

Allison rests his entire thesis on 16 historical cases of rising versus ruling powers. Critics have dismantled this dataset for cherry-picking, miscoding, and ignoring critical variables such as agency, ideology, and revisionist behavior. In at least 14 of the 16 examples, the historical record simply does not support the core claim that fearful status quo powers preemptively attack rising challengers. Many of the wars were instead initiated by aggressive rising states, not paranoid incumbents.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the U.S.-China relationship itself. After emerging from World War II as the undisputed superpower, America did not crush Mao’s revolutionary regime despite Chinese forces killing tens of thousands of American soldiers in the Korean War. Nor did America retaliate against the Chinese for providing massive, sustained aid to North Vietnam throughout the Vietnam War. Instead, the United States opened diplomatic relations in the 1970s, integrated China into the global trading system, and, through investment, technology transfer, and market access, engineered the greatest economic lift in human history. So not only was Beijing’s rise never thwarted by Washington, it was actively aided and abetted by America.

Fast-forward to 2026, and the picture looks far less rosy for Graham Allison and his fellow elites who once eagerly proclaimed the dawn of the “Asian Century.” The structural headwinds they long downplayed have now become impossible to ignore. A collapsing property sector, demographic freefall, crushing local government debt, chronically weak domestic consumption, and tightening U.S. export controls have collectively shattered the narrative of China’s inevitable overtake of the United States. Recent projections show the nominal GDP gap between the U.S. and China actually widening by 2030.

So what is the signal that most of the mainstream media missed? Back in 2015, at the peak of China’s swagger, Xi Jinping had declared: “There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap.” At the time, Beijing was surging with double-digit growth (on paper), the Belt and Road Initiative was rolling out to great fanfare, island building in the South China Sea was barely met with any Western response (thanks, Obama), and the American president was still preaching “strategic patience.”

Why would the man who had only a decade ago dismissed the concept as non-existent, now suddenly treat the Thucydides Trap as the central dogma defining the U.S.-China relationship?

To answer this, one must read between the lines. The difference in what Xi said in 2015 vs. 2026 is what, in poker, you would call “a tell.”  In “The Art of War,” Sun Tzu teaches to “appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.” When China appeared unstoppable, Xi pretended there was no trap at all in order to lull America into complacency. Now that China is visibly weakening, he suddenly discovers the Thucydides Trap and warns of looming danger — projecting strength and issuing veiled threats to deter pushback.

This seminal text is a window into the operational doctrine of how the Chinese Communist Party thinks and acts. The mainstream media, predictably, has missed it entirely. What they hail as “statesmanship” is in reality a desperate tactical feint from a revisionist power whose “century of rejuvenation” has slammed into harsh headwinds. Xi invoked the phrase to ostensibly warn Trump against “disrupting the relationship.” In reality, he was making a veiled threat: Don’t contain us. Don’t push back too hard. Keep the one-way transfer of wealth, technology, and power flowing, or you’ll be the paranoid Sparta that starts the war.

The Thucydides Trap was always a strategically convenient fiction, weaponized to keep America passive while its rival rose. Xi is not educating Trump on ancient Greek history; he is testing him. Rising challengers press their advantage until they meet credible resistance. Xi’s blatant flip-flop is proof that the balance of power is tilting back toward American strength. America should reject Xi’s premise and continue to maintain unrelenting pressure across every domain — economic, technological, military, and diplomatic — to force Beijing to choose between genuine internal reform and managed decline on far less favorable terms.

Americans should see Xi’s sudden rediscovery of the Thucydides Trap as a clear sign that their country is not in inexorable decline, no matter how loudly the usual chorus of influencers, podcasters, and legacy media insists otherwise. Ignore the usual suspects shilling for managed decline. What we are witnessing is a weakening rival’s desperate plea for America to once again choose self-delusion over self-defense.