It Could Happen Here - The Hunt for Jason Arday

Episode Date: September 2, 2026

Robert reads an investigative report by French author and researcher, Stephanie Lamy, about the community of race scientists who went after Jason Arday.   Source: https://share.google/VTyoNfxD04LW1B51HSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pastos survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all?

And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on Internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.za for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files.

Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought. opinions. Yeah, I'm obsessed.

I'm obsessed. Listen to Pro Society on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook. Each week, we talk to someone in show business and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time, and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do

our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Ben Stillard, and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are, without us. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also Media. Robert Evans here, and this is It Could Happen here, a podcast about our crumbling world and

the people making it crumble. And a good chunk of those people happened to be race scientists, which is why today I'm going to be talking about the gang of race scientists who went after Jason Arde, the former Cambridge professor, who recently died by suicide just earlier this year in August of 26. And I came across a very good article about what happened to Jason and the people, kind of responsible to that, by Stephanie Lammy. Stephanie is a researcher, a feminist, and an expert in influence operations. She's the former Secretary General of Internet Without Borders and the co-founder of d-a-I-D-E-S.org, which develops and deploys technology for civil society

organizations operating in conflict and crisis environments. She's a PhD candidate in political sociology. And she wrote this really, really good article that was published initially on the Club de Media part, which is a French journalism blog effectively. And she published also a really good translation of it. And I enjoyed it very much. I thought it was really valuable. So I reached out to Stephanie and asked if we could pay to host the audio version of her investigation. And she agreed. So I'm going to be reading it. She wanted me to do that. But I want to make it clear. None of this is my work. And I don't say that to, you know, defray any sort of responsibility or whatever. Like, this is much better work than I could have done on the same subject.

And I'm really proud to be able to host Stephanie's article. Before I get into our article, I do want to note that she is the author of two books, Okorra Toxica on Civil Society in the Internet Age, which is about how anti-democratic actors use influence operations and digital platforms to mobilize and undermine democratic societies. And La Terur Masculinist in 2024, an investigation into masculinist radical milieu, their ideologies networks and the use of violence as a political strategy. Both are published by Editions Due de Tour. I think, unfortunately, unless you speak French, then it's very fortunate,

but they are in French. Obviously, I'm going to be reading Stephanie's article in English, and here it goes. The Hunt for Jason Ardei. Race science is a pseudo-science that feeds far-right propaganda, long relegated to the margins, it is gaining traction in universities and seeks to establish its proponents as arbiters of knowledge. The hunt that led to Jason Arde's death reveals how this machinery of epistemic domination operates and who helps normalize it. From day one, everything pointed to the fact that Jason Ardei, the black neurodivergent Cambridge professor who died in August of 2026, was being subjected to racist and ablest harassment, exactly the kind of targeting he himself had described. Artie had been marked as quarry

long before the fatal media pile on, an open and immensely well-funded race science international network enabled its hunters to unleash the pack, to give the pursuit scale, reach, and political unity. But to break out of the margins of race science, the chase had to become something else. Its extremist ideology needed to be laundered into a story about scientific and journalistic integrity. The media had ample evidence to challenge the frame imposed on them by the eugenicists. Instead, they adopted it, running with the hounds, and in doing so, legitimized both the aims and the epistemic authority of race scientists. Marking the Quarry

The hunt for Professor Jason Ardeh began quietly, three years earlier, couched in the civilized nodes of a scholarly society, a professor who was merely asking questions. In May of 2023, Dave Harris, a retired white academic and professor emeritus at Plymouth Marjean University, began examining Arde's publications. Arde's appointment as professor of sociology and education at Cambridge had made national news. At 37, he was the youngest black professor in the university's history. From the moment he arrived at Cambridge, our day was targeted by freedom of information requests. In the United States, Christian nationalist organizations opposed to teaching and researching drawing on critical race theory, CRT, which examines, among other things, how racism is

reproduced through law and institutions, were already explicitly encouraging their supporters to use public records procedures to target academics and then identify or manufacture misconduct. Such smear campaigns are now part of the academic far-rights repertoire, aimed particularly at researchers who examine power relations, but also at those whose very presence, whose perceived identity, appears to embody the gains of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. The largely covert campaign against Black scholars also surfaced in 2023 when the work of Claudine Gay, Harvard's first black president, came under heightened scrutiny against a backdrop of misogymoire. Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and former visiting

fellow at the Heritage Foundation, both Christian nationalist organizations, is one of the principal architects of the American campaigns against CRT and DEI. He helped turn the plagiarism allegations against gay into a broader political offensive against minority representation in American institutions. What connects Rufo to what would later come for Ardei is not only the method, but also the network. Rufo has repeatedly promoted race science-focused online magazine Aporia and appeared on its podcast in 2023.

Research by the anti-fascist organization Hope Not Hate identifies Aporia as the public-facing arm of the Human Diversity Foundation, or HDF, a Wyoming registered company created as the successor to the Pioneer Fund, the American Eugenics Organization established in 1937. Byline Times reports that Rufo and H.D.F also shared a funder. Tech entrepreneur Andrew Conru invested $1.3 million in HDF, while his foundation gave $25,000 to Rufo's documentary foundation in 2021. Aporia repeatedly provided a platform for Nathan Koffness. The race-s science researcher who would later propel the allegations against our day to a mass audience. HDF co-founder Emile Kirkagard had met Peter Thiel in 2019.

According to Kirkagard's own account, Teal subsequently asked him to recommend other researchers. Kirkagard named Koffness and Noah Carl, a poorie's editor. Both have been run out of Cambridge for their mediocre work and overt racism. This network also overlaps directly with Britain's Free Speech Union, FSU, founded by Spectator magazine associate, Toby Young, who has himself advocated what he called progressive eugenics. Aporia's Noah Carl is the co-director of Skeptics, LTD, the publishing company controlled by Young, while Aporia contributor Eric Kaufman sits on the FSU's Advisory Council. The funding of race science by Christian nationalist and extractive industry billionaires,

including surveillance capitalism, serves a political function. As historian of neoliberalism, Quinn Slobodian shows in Hayek's bastards, racialist and the obsession with IQ make it possible to naturalize inequality. Social hierarchies are no longer presented as the product of power relations, but as the expression of supposedly objective biological differences that are hereditary. In largely secular societies, race science therefore provides Christian nationalists with a substitute for the authority religion no longer commands. It also provides intelligence-obsessed techno-masculinists

with a scientific veneer for the hierarchies they seek to uphold or even reinforce. The day Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard president, Rufo announced an initial $10,000 fund for plagiarism hunting at elite universities, explicitly tying the bounty hunt to his campaign to defeat what he called racialist ideology. Plagiarism hunting reconfigures legitimacy, promoters of the junk science, that is, race science repositioned themselves as arbiters of scientific integrity, from which position they can disqualify those who expose the cultural foundations of systems of power. By June 2024, black academics were describing the climate in their universities as open season.

The Pursuit. So, against this backdrop of racist attacks on scholars at elite universities, on the 4th of May, 2023, Ardei received his first email from Dave Harris. Harris challenged his public work. When Ardae did not reply, Harris wrote again. On the 11th of May, Ardee eventually responded, accusing Harris of spending hours combing through his work looking for mistake, He told him not to contact him again.

Anything further from you will be considered bullying and harassment, citing a past incident of bullying in which Harris had been involved. Harris replied anyway. Ardei had explicitly asked him to stop, but Harris, willfully oblivious of his own oppressive behavior, treated the pursuit of academic standards as an entitlement to continue. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, this very posture was growing. The self-appointed investigator of black academics

could recast himself as a guardian of merit, simply a man of learning asking questions. With no reply to his last email, Harris took his claims elsewhere and enlisted another retired academic, Martin Hammersley, Professor Emeritus of Education and Social Research at the Open University,

who has a history of wild claims about feminist standpoint theory. His grievance is what he regards as the influence of activist research on the social sciences and the diversity of viewpoints. On the 19th of May, 23, Hammersley wrote to Hillary Crimin, head of Cambridge's faculty,

of education in Rees Morgan, the university's head of research policy, governance and integrity, setting out allegations concerning Arde's 2018 paper in social sciences. Cremend then met with Ardei and the faculty's director of research. Ardey agreed that the article could be temporarily removed from the journal's platform while the issues raised were examined. On the 21st of June, 23, Cremant told Hammersly that Arde retained the faculty's full support. Morgan separately informed him that because the work predated Arde's employment at Cambridge, the university did not consider an investigation to fall within its remit.

Hammersley escalated the pursuit, rejecting the resolution and demanding a systematic investigation of Arde's other publications. Kremlin did not respond. The chase then spread beyond Cambridge. Harris and Hammersley contacted academic journals in Liverpool John Moore's University, which had awarded Ardei his Ph.D. Harris and Hammersley also harried Ardei outside university channels. As early as 2023, he contacted Jack Grove, a journalist at Times, high-eastern

education, drawing his attention to the correction to Arde's 2018 paper. Times Higher Education, T.H.E. did not investigate the allegations in earnest until June 2025, when another professor contacted the publication about Arde's work. Harris then supplied material to Grove, whose scrutiny extended far beyond Arde's publications to his CV, sporting achievements, charitable activities, and personal biography. By September, Grove had compiled a 63-page dossier and approached Ardei for comment not only on his work, but on his private life. By all accounts, Arde experienced this as a continuation of the harassment he had already identified.

The man he had asked to stop pursuing him had now enlisted journalists for the hunt. It's important at this stage to understand what the hunt had failed to achieve. After years of relentless scrutiny, only two of Jason Arde's 33 peer-reviewed papers had been challenged. The article in social sciences was amended on December of 2023, with additional references and clarification of its relationship to earlier work. The paper and educational philosophy and theory was corrected in May of 2024. Neither was retracted. By the time T.H.E. began his investigation in 2025.

Both matters had been closed. When the allegations eventually reached Ardae's PhD, Liverpool John Moore's University found citation defects but cleared him from plagiarism, including that they resulted from honest and reasonable error, compounded by inadequate supervision related to his learning disabilities. It's also important to center the story here. From Ardey's standpoint, and from LJMU's own standards, there was no intent to commit academic fraud. Ardei, for his part, consistently described what was happening to him as racist and ablest harassment,

not legitimate academic debate. In April of 2006, in his British Sociological Association keynote, wanted Dead or Alive, the Playbook, he described how black academics were being targeted through an identifiable repertoire already deployed against prominent scholars in the United States. He explicitly warned that the very instruments designed to protect academic integrity were being weaponized against them. By then, Arde had already made public the very tangible effects of the campaign, racist abuse, threats, and intimidation. In a July 2025 letter to Jackie Smith, been minister for skills at the UK Department of Education, he reported a physical assault, death and rape threats against himself and his family,

and racist objects and threats sent both through Cambridge and to his family home. In his memoir, he likewise described targeted campaign. campaigns driven by racial animus. In fact, the entire media coverage of the plagiarism affair cast Dave Harris in the familiar role of the reasonable, concerned academic, a variation on the concerned parent or concerned citizen routinely mobilized to lend the appearance of spontaneous,

reasonable concern to far-right campaigns against sex education, trans rights, racial equality, and public health measures, while Arde became the eccentric young black professor resisting legitimate scrutiny. His attempts to protect him, were recoded as aggression through the classic mechanism of Darvo, deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender, first identified by psychologist Jennifer Freed. The reversal drew on the myth of the perfect victim. Inaccuracy in Arde's autobiographical

narrative, as well as unprovable facts, were used to discredit his testimony. If he was not beyond reproach, perhaps he was not a victim at all, and perhaps his place at Cambridge was itself suspect, and maybe he even deserved to be harassed. In a historically white and male elite institution, credibility, merit, and belonging became entangled. The racist trope of the threatening black man did the rest. Ardei could be cast simultaneously as aggressor and fraud, while those pursuing him became the hapless victims of an interloper with something to hide. But for the reversal to take hold, it had to be made public. Darvo works by manipulating how third parties perceive victim and offender. On the 5th of August, as Arde resigned from Cambridge and lost the institutional protections that came

with his position, the Committee for Academic Freedom, CAF, an anti-DEI organization, revealed that Ardei had reported Dave Harris to the police and that the case had been closed without further action. CAF's Frederick Attenborough, who had previously headed research at the Free Speech Union, FSU, framed Ardae's report to the police as a threat to academic freedom. Also on the 5th of August, Times Higher Education helped publicize the same reversal. Jack Grove published his account under the headline, I was reported to police over the Arde case. I was just doing my job.

Arday's complaint to the police and his instruction of Carter Rook, the London firm specializing in media and defamation, were framed as attempts to obstruct legitimate journalism, while Ardey's attempts to protect himself from harassment became threats to press freedom. On the 10th of August, the FSU fused the supposed attacks on academic and press freedom

into a single conspiratorial narrative, casting Ardei as a powerful censor determined to intimidate his critics. Quote, in a desperate bid to avoid scrutiny, Professor Ardei tried to use the police to silence a journalist and an academic. This threat frame survived Arde's death on the 14th of August. That same day, T.H.E. published an opinion piece by Ian Pace, an advisory board member of Academics for Academic Freedom, AFAF,

who campaigns on institutional neutrality and academic free speech, alongside Cambridge professor and reform UK head of policy James Orr. As Byline Times is documented, Orr himself is a keynote in the same network. Peter Thiel made a secret five-figure donation to Cambridge through or around the time of his appointment, while Orr later helped bring the race science publication Aporia into organized national conservative politics. Pace argued that the Ardei affair demonstrated, quote, the danger of treating criticism as injury.

Three days after Arde's death, T. He news editor Tom Williams maintained that the journalistic inquiry into the person of Ardebe Grove was justified. And we'll continue, but first, here's some ads. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pastos survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month.

Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.com for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. podcast Solita. We share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people.

They were like, you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your for-you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsesives, and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.

I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages

inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to pro society on the Iheart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your book. podcasts. See you between the pages. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the

unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. The Code of Gentlemanly Conduct. The Chase had remained largely confined to allegations and rumors circulated by Harris and others

through academic and journalistic channels. The public frenzy began in earnest on the far-right French on the 21st of July, 2026, when Nathan Koffness, the race scientist, published allegations based on a dossier he said he had recently received from an unidentified source inside Cambridge. That claim is unverifiable. Three days later, the telegraph, to which Free Speech Union founder and general secretary Toby Young regularly contributes, published an article with the title Cambridge Diversity Poster Boy and Plagiarism Row.

The Times and the Daily Mail followed that same day with similar articles. By the 1st of August, the Guardian published its investigation under the sensational headline, plagiarism, playbooks, and a pig's head, the new claim surrounding Cambridge professor Jason Arday. The story had become a national media affair, still oriented by the Rural. race science networks framing. Four days after the Guardian piece, Cambridge announced a new investigation into Ardei's qualifications and career, citing new information.

Ardey resigned later that day, saying that the relentless accusation, speculation, and public commentary had taken a profound toll on him and those he loved. The scrutiny had to be of Ardei, not the pack. The Guardian article subjected Arde's accounts of racist harassment to minute scrutiny, going so far as to check some of them with police and witnesses and finding discrepancies, but the three-year pursuit initiated by Harris, the Corey, the Chase, and the context, was entirely absent from the story.

Harris briefly appears in the article as a concerned academic. But Dave Harris' own history should have complicated his portrayal as a neutral source. For example, it's publicly available information that, in May of 1998, Times Higher Education reported

that Harris had been dismissed from what is now Plymouth Marion following a complaint, alleging, harassment and bullying. Harris maintained that the dispute had begun after he and a colleague raised concerns about academic standards, and his union supported his appeal. He was reinstated the following month, although the rehearing upheld a finding of misconduct

and issued him with a formal warning. This history should have at least alerted the Guardian to a possible recurring pattern of behavior. Although Arde had pitched specifically to him, maybe sending the arts and culture editor to cover the story was not the appropriate choice to cover a far-right propaganda campaign. In a video published after Arde's death, Harris lied, saying he had been cleared. Furthermore, Times' higher education accounts repeatedly conflated civility with integrity. Harris' correspondence was described as notably, even excessively polite, as though civility of tone

guaranteed disinterestedness of purpose. Times' higher education's Jack Grove recalled his first email in his August 5th account as softly phrased. By then, Arda had already asked Harris to stop contacting him and reported him to the police. When Times' higher education had resumed its investigation in 2025, Tom Williams similarly described the anonymous professor who contacted him as almost apologetic about raising his concerns. Politeness became a proxy for trustworthiness, while the repetition and escalation of approaching THE, the very conduct Ardei had identified as harassment, disappeared from view. Two things can be true at once. A harasser can also be perfectly gentlemanly. As race and performance

scholars, Kyla Wazana Tompkins and Tavia Nyango have argued, civility operates as a covert political aesthetic and a rhetorical mode which guards the boundaries of access to politicity. It helps determine whose speech and conduct are recognized in the first place as legitimate political participation. Harris's softly phrased manner helped make him legible as reasonable, measured, rational, and therefore credible, irrespective of the cumulative effect of his conduct. The veneer of politeness, combined with other markers of legitimacy, a white man, a professor emeritus, a selfless defender of academic standards, positioned Harris, as an arbiter of scientific integrity rather than an object of scrutiny himself.

Retraction Watch, a specialist publication dedicated to research integrity and misconduct, glaringly failed to scrutinize Harris' own track record. In its lengthy investigation published on the 27th of July, it detailed Harris' pursuit and quoted Ardei explicitly asking him to stop, yet did not frame that conduct as harassment, nor did it mention that Harris had himself previously been dismissed following allegations of harassment and bullying in a dispute he said arose from concerns about academic standards.

Instead, Harris was given space to complain that bloody awful work could get through when standards were relaxed for special issues devoted to activist issues, like racial inequality. Harris' own record received no comparable scrutiny, nor was his sustained campaign against critical race theory treated as activism. The very man denouncing other people's work as bloody awful had himself faced questions about the quality of his research. In April of 2025, internal Plymouth Marjon-Cquhart. correspondents described publications produced in the Marjan name as poor quality and often

controversial, a criticism Harris himself understood to refer to his methodological assessments of critical race theory. His resulting critique of CRT was self-published in March 24, rather than published by an academic press. The pamphlet attracted just five reviews, including a generic endorsement for Martin Hammersley. Concerns about the poor standard of Harris' research had already been public knowledge since January of 2026, when the Telegraph reported Plymouth Marjohn's decision to suspend his emeritus status. In that article, the Telegraph explained the university's assessment of the publications produced in the Marjan name or poor quality and often controversial. Although the Telegraph framed Harris as the injured party, an academic stripped of title after

critiquing critical race theory, the information was now in the public domain, readily available to any journalist assessing his credibility when the Ardei allegations resurfaced in July. Between the the 24th of July and Arde's death on the 14th of August, the Telegraph published 43 articles about Jason Ardee. It even ran a box-headed. How the Telegraph's reporting led to Jason Arde's resignation. After his death, the newspaper quietly altered the headline. Jason Ardee is living proof that you reap what you're so, removing the word living. Meanwhile, the January article about Harris briefly disappeared from the telegraph's website, the very article containing information that should have disqualified Harris from being treated as an unimpeachably credible source.

What Feldarday was not the action of isolated actors but that of a single well-connected and well-financed pack with a not-so-secret plan. In 2023, Nathan Kauffness laid out a roadmap to power on his substack, how to take back academia. He was not alone in articulating such a strategy, and the prescriptions tend to look very similar. Quote, there are two ways to reduce the power of the wokesters on campus, remove them by showing that they don't satisfy minimal criteria for contract renewal or academic promotion, or dilute their influence by bringing in some of the non-woke scholars who have been pushed out of academia for political reasons. The two-pronged approach, eliminate the black scholars, platform the mediocre white males, is a parent

with the support system they enjoy. When Dave Harris had his emeritus status suspended in January of 2026, he became a cause-celeb in Britain's anti-woke ecosystem, with the Committee for Academic Freedom, CAF, rallying to his defense. CAF's Frederick Attenborough, during his time at the Free Speech Union, had also defended Nathan Koffness. When Emanuel College, Cambridge, terminated Koffness's affiliation on 5th of April 24 following his writings on race, heredity, and intelligence, the FSU assisted him in the proceedings, with Attenborough personally promoting his case. Koffness later stated that FSU chief legal counsel, Bryn Harris, assisted his appeal. The FSU subsequently backed his

legal challenge and urged supporters to contribute to his legal fund. The FSU itself says it has supported Coffinus throughout and helped him bring legal action against Emanuel College. In March of 26, Attenborough, now at CAF, intervened on Coffness's behalf again, urging Ghent University to resist demands that his appointment be rescinded. Coffness had been recruited to Ghent by Boop DeVry, whose own work on intelligence and dysgenic fertility draws extensively on hereditarian researchers. In 2024, DeVry also attended the London Conference on Intelligence alongside Human Diversity Foundation, founder, Emil Kirkagard. Dvry had already sought university funding to bring Koffness to

Ghent for a lecture in February of 2024, just days after Koffness published A Guide for Hereditarian Revolution, before later hiring him as a postdoctoral researcher on his liberalism's fertility problem project. So when, on the 21st of July, Nathan Koffens published DEI Fraud and Cover Up at Cambridge on his substack, the architecture of uncivil society actors to immediately scale the harassment initiated by Harris, as well as give cover to the attackers, was already in place. So was the framing. Koffness heavily promoted his blog entry on X, where the post exceeded 1 million views. It was amplified by figures such as Richard Hanania, the American race and IQ writer from the

same reactionary intellectual milieu as Curtis Yarvin. A foundational figure of the anti-democratic dark enlightenment, Yarvin coined the concept of the cathedral to describe what in secular societies he presented as a new church. A decentralized system made up in particular of universities and mainstream media, responsible for producing and disseminating progressive orthodoxy and policing the boundaries between truth and heresy. The concept made refutation almost impossible. If academic institutions rejected race science,

that rejection itself could be presented as proof of their membership in the cathedral, discrediting academic knowledge production on race, while recasting hereditarian race science as censored truth, fitted directly into this logic. By the time the first national newspaper, articles appeared three days later in the telegraph, the Times and the Daily Mail, Coffness and those amplifying his narrative had already transformed Ardei into a symbol of the supposed corruption of universities by DEI. A DEI star whose alleged failings were presented as

proof that Cambridge had sacrificed academic standards to racial hiring and then sought to conceal the consequences. Brought to bay on the 31st of July, Ardey submitted to an interview with the Times to defend himself against the allegations. But by then, the media pack was closing in and the kill seemed inevitable. According to Newscord's verified corpus, 52 articles about Ardei had appeared by the time of his resignation statement was published on the 5th of August. Arde's resignation did not stop the hunt, because the actions of the victim have no bearing on the level of harassment they receive. It stops when the harassers stop, whether because they move on to another target or because institutions and bystanders intervene. If the prey is isolated, the hunt can intensify. Another 222

articles appeared between his resignation and the moment he was found dead on the 14th of August, 214 through the 13th, and eight more that day before his death became known. In all, NewsCord records 274 articles across 26 outlets in the 22 days between the first national coverage on the 24th of July and his death. Of those articles, my own, Stephanie's, mapping identifies at least 23 produced by outlets or authors with links to the FSU, 19 of them after Ardei resigned. 21 appeared in The Spectator alone, where FSU founder, Toby Young, as associate editor and columnist. Another was written in the telegraph by FSU linked Allison Pearson, and another in the Times by FSU chair, Nigel Bigger.

And we'll continue, but first we've got one last ad break. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pasto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit.

Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. If your bookshelf and your for-you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. So I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the

latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is the Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro Society on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. On the new podcast Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B.

I'm Julie Pinero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people, and they were like, you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.

But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. The Trophy. Rather than a media pile on, this was predatory propaganda. Fighting propaganda is not simply a matter of,

determining whether each individual claim is true or false. It is first and foremost to struggle over who has the power to define reality. That is what framing does. It places certain perspectives at the center, relegates others to the margins, and determines what becomes visible, sayable, and relevant. That authority, that power, is precisely what is at stake. Race science, a belief system fundamentally untethered from reality,

needs to be received as science. Its proponents crave legitimacy because their very existence depends on it, Without recognition from journalists, universities, and the public, they remain what they are, marginal and extremist. With it, they acquired the authority to police the boundaries of knowledge, to decide what counts as evidence, what constitutes merit, whose scholarship warrants investigation and whose testimony can be dismissed as mere grievance. And Arde was an extraordinarily useful object around which to manufacture that authority. A young black professor at Cambridge with a remarkable life story working on racism, sanism, and inequality. Make him doubtful

enough and he can be made to carry the weight of a much larger proposition. Perhaps inclusion policies put him there. Perhaps standards were lowered. Perhaps research on racism itself is suspect. Perhaps the people telling us racism structures the academy are precisely the people who do not belong in it. You do not have to prove the whole proposition. You only have to keep the doubt moving. As defense researcher Olivier Schmidt, now research director at the Institute for Military Operations at the Royal Danish Defense College has shown, methodological doubt can be turned into systematic doubt.

I'm just asking questions, then becomes a posture through which suspicion can be kept moving, alive, indefinitely, even in the absence of sufficient evidence, while claiming the credibility of critical thinking. Arde did not have to be proved a fraud. He only had to be made permanently suspect, and with him, everyone who looked like him.

But the hunt could continue only as long as the pact kept running and the hounds baying. Ardae's mass harassment on social media was participatory. For some, the serialization of revelations discrediting him became collective fun, harassedainment. Adam Serwer, the American journalist at the Atlantic, whose work examines race in American politics, captured this political pleasure in collective humiliation in one phrase. The cruelty is the point.

For others, the reward was informational ascendancy and a misguided impression that their contribution would protect science somehow. Kate Starboard, a University of Washington professor who studies collective sense-making, has shown that online crowds do not merely consume a narrative. They participate in investigating, producing, and circulating the material that sustains it. The invitation to go and look for yourself, to check another supposedly outlandish claim, to uncover another discrepancy, was particularly enticing to those who define themselves as rationalists or skeptics.

Participation could be experienced as independent inquiry, affording a sense of intellectual superiority over those who brought the issue back to the reality of harassment and thereby established ascendancy over them. Participation in the harassment offered epistemic domination. That reward helps explain why, even after Arde's death, so many of those who engaged with the ready stream of revelations remain invested in fact-checking him to this day, unable to let him go, even the reasonable minds. Kate Starboard has also argued that the answer to information disorder lies, quote, not in better facts, but better frames. Ardae was hounded to death.

But the frame that made the hunt possible survives, a frame centered on the feelings of cisgender white men who believe themselves to be being greatly replaced from the institutions that produce knowledge, while pushing Ardei's own perspective out of view. On the 20th of August, six days after the kill, Ghent University suspended coughness as a precautionary measure pending a disciplinary investigation into conduct that, in part,

predated his post about Ardei. The disciplinary letter describes months of complaints, reports and concerns about his conduct and public statements, and their impact on staff and students. It accuses him, among other things, of using his position and Gint affiliation to pursue and promote his race realism and hereditary and revolution,

despite having been hired to work on the future of liberalism. The university regarded this as a breach of his professional obligations, a misuse of his institutional reputation and a conflict with its code of ethics, which prohibits, among other things, the dissemination of ideas of racial superiority

and incitement to racial segregation. This time, fraud really was at the heart. of the case. Koffness immediately recast his suspension as censorship, an attack on his freedom of speech. The experiences of his racialized colleagues disappeared from the story. His claim amplified by the very architecture of actors implicated in the hunt, but now with an American dimension. Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal handed him its opinion pages to consolidate the frame. How I became the scapegoat in the Jason Arday affair. My university suspended me, the article declared. All I did was tell the truth. U.S. Ambassador

of Belgium, Bill White, then reproduced the free speech frame, pressuring Ghent to reinstate Koffness and warning that all options were on the table as the United States reviewed its relationship with the university. Its rector, Petra de Sutter, a transwoman and former Green Party Deputy Prime Minister of Belgium, then became the new target onto which the frame could be transferred. Within days, an open letter opposing the punishment of a whistleblower in the person of Koffens attracted more than 800 academics. Among them, actors embedded in a billionaire-funded Christian nationalist and transphobic networks across Europe. In France and Belgium, for example, signatories Florence Beauregard Blackner and Xavier

Lawrence Salvador led back to Christian nationalist billionaire Pierre Edward Stern, who funds Salvador's Observatoire due to colonialism, while his Pericles project funds Justicia, created with the Institute Thomas More in Belgium. The latter collaborates with Beauregard Blackner and is linked to a French transphobic organization that fuels campaigns against trans-right. Pierre Edward Steran's Observatory has since expanded its remit. The organization intervenes in academic controversies in the name of academic freedom, opposition to censorship and scientific integrity, a function comparable to that of the Free Speech Union in the United Kingdom.

And like the FSU, it has relays across several media spaces. Its actors circulate in particular through the neo-secularist cluster around LePoint, Marianne, Frank Tire, and Charlie Hebdo, but also through far-right media organizations. such as Le Figaro, Casuer, Belior's Actuals, and Atlantico. Added to this is Christian nationalist Vincent Belor's media apparatus, C-News, Europe 1, JDD, and others. But Beauregard Blackner and Salvador are not the only French signatories.

Martine Benoit, Jean Fischot, Andreas Baccholvi, and Charles Ramond, have, like Beauregard Blackner and Salvador, signed initiatives organized by Vigilance Universities, a collective founded in 2016 to combat what it describes as racialism. communitarianism, and attacks on universalism and higher education. The neo-secularist milieu thus performs both a function of monitoring and that of ideological laundering, the dominant group's identity, anxieties, and the objectives advanced by Christophascist networks are stripped of their religious matrix and translated into the language

of universalism, secularism, science, and academic freedom. Nathan Koffness has since been permitted to return to his mediocre work, albeit remotely in pending investigations. But he is only a cog and a well-oiled machine, the one who looks the part. Behind him, billionaire money flows through think tanks, media, and strategic litigation, and concerned academics, allowing the same politics of white cis male supremacy to circulate under the cover of neutrality, a very long way from the besieged dissidents they claim to be. The hood is not what makes the racist. Sometimes it simply makes the racist easier to recognize, and race science is a lab coat with an equally white hood.

The onslaught against Jason Arde was not inevitable. It became possible because, at every stage of the pursuit, people and institutions, the police, universities, the media, the commentariat, chose to ignore his warnings, legitimize the frame and amplify the reality imposed by the proponents of race science. Collectively, we did not simply follow the hunt. We handed them the trophy, the power to define what is real. To overturn that frame, to take back the power, we first have to lift the hood, collectively name what is wearing it. That starts with bringing the voices of those producing knowledge from the front lines back to the Center and listening when they sound the alarm. Jason Ardeh was afforded no such attention.

The stakes are huge. As Jafari Sinclair Allen, professor of black studies at Columbia University, writes in the nation, this is a transatlantic movement to end the independent production of knowledge about race and power, and to decide on both shores who is permitted to produce it at all. The question now is whether we can recognize the hunt for power when it disguises itself as free speech, academic freedom, or scientific concern, and refuse our assigned role in the killing of our democracies. And that's it. Again, this was written by Stephanie Lammy.

You can find more of her work on the Club de Media part, and we'll have that linked in the show notes. Thank you again, Stephanie. We'll be back tomorrow. It Could Happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Coolzone Media,

visit our website, Coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. If your bookshelf and your for you page are equally important

to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island to serve the same level of discourse. Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. Yeah, I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. Listen to pro society on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements.

We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook. Each week, we talk to someone in show business and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time, and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman,

Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Ben Stillard, and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.

These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever. you get your podcasts. Our hometown is not a test tube. 90 miles northeast of Nashville, a battle for the future of America, plays out in one small town. Developers with right-wing ties

have purchased hundreds of acres of land. We need cities on a shining hill. This is Our Town, a podcast about what happens when a small town becomes the site of a social experiment and fights back. Guess you didn't move in on a bunch of dumb hillbillies now, did you?

Listen to Our Town on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.