TRASHFUTURE - Leveson 20000

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

We talk about the death of Jason Arday and the culpability of our rotten-to-the-core media industry in bringing it about… and also a truly infuriating article about how a 17th century academic might not fit in at a modern “Pronouns University.” RILEY ALERT Check out No Gods, No Mayors here! HUSSEIN ALERT Check out 10k Posts here! MILO ALERT Check out Milo's tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows NATE ALERT Nate's band Second Homes has just released their debut album and you can stream it for free here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

This is not a test of the emergency alert system. This is a real warning and you must take it seriously. Priority news from your friends at Trash Future. Doctor Who, Alan Stephen Moffat and Jenna Coleman are reuniting in number 10, a workplace comedy drama set to be the British answer to the West Wing. No! It is now time to panic and freak out. No.

Start attacking people around you. If no one's around you, start attacking yourself. The first British Saturday Night Live, now British West Wing. It is happening. The Yankeification is happening and you should be terrified all the time. Oh, we need to live in British threads. This is terrible. British threads as opposed to regular threads where everybody's in like Americanized

Sheffield? Yeah. Everyone's in like Sheffield, New York. And their gigantic F-150s are being pulled by horses. Fuck me. That is a threat. That is an actual threat. Like, fuck Russia, right?

Whatever they're doing. This is a real and credible threat to the life and welfare of the British people. Is threatening to unleash West Wing British. But, but, but, but why? Why?

Why? Like, the West Wing made sense, right? It was, it made sense, at least from the perspective of if you're interested in politics, the Clinton White House seemed like a new thing you'd want to dramatize. We know where it went, but it seemed like a new thing you want to dramatize. What the fuck is Stephen Moffick going to be writing about? Kier Starmar trying to get a TikTok right? It's because politics is back, baby.

A woo. Liberalism is happening. I mean, I think it was like one way of looking at it is like, this is pure like lib bait in the sense for like you know we've lived in chaos for a long time we've got another prime minister who's also promised other sensibles are coming back and like we'll see how long it takes before like that really sort of like unspells and like you know might happen sooner than we think and i think there is like still this appetite among certain liberal types to be like we want to sort of see a sort of sensible quote sensible sort of governments of like basically every year

leading like before 2015, I suppose. And if we're not going to get that electorally, if we're not going to get that through the system and we're, and, you know, also it's awareness that you're never going to get it, right? Because like every government's going to get weirder and weirder. They're all going to have their own freaks and sickos. We're all going to do their sort of bizarre things.

They're going to all sort of have to sort of wrestle with a system that's out of control. But the only thing you really have left is to sort of project that free fiction, right? Yeah. Like you want the sort of like, if the lips can't sort of have. it in sort of like an actual sense, they'll be happy to have it in a kind of, yeah, in a sort of of fictative sense. In a very similar vein.

And like, you know, I will say this as someone who like writes angry letters to Aaron Salkin every year demanding a new series of the newsroom. Of course. Of all the fucking shows that like need a sort of like new season at this moment. I don't understand why the newsroom does not feature in any of this, right? The newsroom Charlie Kirk episodes. Because yeah. We were wrong.

A doctor pronounces him dead, not a Mormon ticotker. No, what it is, what it is, is one of them is a way and has to tell the discord moderators that they've finally been avenged and that Charlie Kirk has died. That's right. You've got to tell the airline pilot that Charlie Kirk has died and the airline pilot solemnly just looks and says, who's that? But like, yeah, you know, of, you know, this, I feel like this is another sort of example of, like the newsroom when it sort of came out,

really giving this very idealized of what the news should be and what media should be. And this is actually kind of relates to maybe some of the stuff we'll talk about today. But, you know, there's also this recognition that you can't really do a new series of the newsroom because it will all just feel very strange, right? It's completely divorced from like the reality of like news media and the fact that we've sort of seen the inside of it. And I think there's something similar here,

except now we've sort of accepted that like we're not, we're only, you know, if you're not going to get like your real, sensibles who are actually doing sensible politics. Like, you have to have the fiction. You know, you have to have the fiction. You've got to have like, whoever the fuck is playing the lead in the show. Handsome Rafe Spore is, I'm looking at the list.

Handsome Rafe Spore. For the newsroom for the media that we have in the UK today, it would just be like fucking, I don't know, Bill Pullman being like, I heard that there's a professor who's been accused of, of academic impropriety at Leeds. Do we have a race on him? Do we have a race on him? It's like, we think he's half.

Black, we think he would, do not come back to me until you know. Solemly telling the pilot that you and your colleagues have hounded a guy to death for next to no reason. Yeah. We are, uh, we are of course going to be talking about, um, just like they did Osama bin Laden. We're going to be talking about that in, um, in a little while. I wanted to do a little bit of news before we get to it though, because there are a few things, by the way.

Hello. Oh, yeah. Hey, it's T. Um, there are a few things that, because I've been on holiday that have built up in my backlog that I wanted to discuss. can I introduce you Okay look We've all know you and Blair

We've talked about him a lot on this show Tony Blair's son Started a kind of Herodicical on the stage To me Tony Blair is you and Blair's dad But you know That's fine if you want to characterize it that way I guess

I'm sorry I'm sorry I cannot I cannot direct my friends To invest in this boy's startup He's my son Oh you mean You mean Sheree Booth's son

You chud piece of shit A woman who helped that guy back from fighting in that Christmas card? We all know you and Blair, right? He was like, oh, I've got a startup that's going to help young people. It's going to replace university, which is no longer connected with people's needs. And it's going to be connecting with a platform,

apprenticeships, Black Lives Matter, gay and soy, all this stuff, right? He was, he was the, he was lib, you know? And he was going to libly make every British teenager do season one of misfits, basically.

Yeah. With an app. this is not the Blair for our times clearly because Tony has deployed a second boy he's deployed Tony has decided to release a second much more

chutted out Tony two boys he's got at least two boys um and we have released we have a second much more chudded out epic

like rock Blair I'm interesting so so what you're telling me is that there's two Blairs, one of them tells only soy and the other one tells only Chud. Yeah. They're both guarding a door, neither are letting

you through it. Um, so Nick Blair, who used to be a football agent, weirdly he pivoted to technology after his brother did and paid tens of millions of pounds. I guess it must be genetic. They must just be talented at it. Yeah. Wouldn't you know

he's seeking funding for a military technology startup called Pira for $200 million. Now, what does Pira do? It's got to be drones, right? It has to be. Sort of. I went to its website and it said only the following.

Deploying summer 2026, stand by. You will never deploy anywhere. You'll never repel down anything. I mean, this is a source of kind of depression to me as well. But then, you know, you can install armor three. You can do that, right? You can make friends with other nerds on the internet and then repel down things. You can wear camo.

Hey, I can fuck off. It's cold in here. I wanted to like, okay. You're in the gulag. You're going to have to fund your way out. So,

Blair is currently the only active officer of the company. In an article published this week in the FT, it was described only thusly that Pira is, quote, this is a statement given to the FTA, a developing technology that will allow users to integrate different systems into a single source. So translation. I mean, I love to integrate different things

into a single source. This is a database? It's Palantir. Oh, okay. Like the sort of visualization software bit of Palantir, where it's like a really nice, glossy UI for your drone strikes or whatever.

But because remember, right, that the Palantir, one of the big problems is the US can just turn it off. Yeah. Right. And it's in the hands of like, you know, a dork with a sword, Alex Carp.

Right. And so now, just like there was this huge fervor for sovereign AI, which is not really anything, now, as a result of criticisms of Palantir, some of which have been made on this show, our episode with Donald Campbell last week from Foxglove, one of the many of it is, well, hold on, you're just putting a bunch of your national infrastructure into the hands of America. That seems pretty reckless. And Nick Blair listened so quickly that he was able to found this thing, Pyro. So we're friend-suring Palantir then. Yeah. You know what's crazy, though? Is, A, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, wouldn't you know it? They've said it's pretty important that we have a friend-sured Palantir. Oh, okay.

Yeah, sure. Which is pretty good. I'm glad that they, that father and son were able to work together by coincidence. Yeah. Well, it's just a good idea, you know, and when your son has a good idea, you want to support him. And if your son has a bad idea, like, for instance, you're, soy lib son, then you want to sort of like disown that and move on to the Chudson. So before the Chud Blair, before Nick Vick the Chud Blair did Pira, he had a company called

Skyroll. Skyroll belongs to the Nords. Yeah, you can always tell a Chud tech company because it sounds like a made up name from a fantasy video game. It sounds like a poorly prepared Nazi spy being parachuted into Britain being asked to say the word squirrel as a test. And Skyroll is currently working with Raytheon, UK, on something called the digital twin of the battle space for the AI combat lab of the British military. It's co-CEO, hold on, just wait for this one. It's co-CEO named Naomi Hume recently described its work as, and I quote, Fortnite on steroids. I mean, listen, I'm all for exploring sort of innovative work in the battle space or whatever,

or the digital twin of the battle space in hopes. that one day they let me and my sort of like fat woke ass do like Ender's game and they actually give me like a cool uniform or I can bring my own, that's fine too. But I think maybe one of the lessons that we've kind of failed to learn

from the last few years of everything happening, you know, the sort of season of the newsroom that we didn't make is that you do need some stuff that's not Fortnite maybe. Well, but that's, but Fortnite, what we're building is data centers and what we are, And the skills were very key to Fortnite, for instance.

Yeah. Well, we are actually really building the data centers. We are talking about building the data centers. In many ways, the parachute regiment, the first guys to ask where we drop them. Twist your tower soap. I haven't played Fortnite in 10 years. God damn. We're all old is the thing.

I mean, to be honest, like, I think the real thing here is that if you want an example of a digital twin as a battle space that accurately reflects the sort of, you know, facts on the ground and in sort of modern defense studies, you should be. looking at the sort of like teenagers who are doing like ISIS Roblox role play because as far as I've seen, they're pretty serious about that. We could that this. This is ISIS 2.0. A caliphate in the real world turned out to be very difficult to establish. But in Roblox though. Yeah, a digital twin of the caliphate. But finally, before we go on to our main topic, which is going to consume, I think, a lot of this episode, there's another thing I must discuss, which is a very, a very question. next entry into one of my favorite new verticals that isn't the Charlie Kirk Fund. It is the decline of professional slopfuses. And this is from our friends at 404 Media. Thank you very much,

Jason. I love this. This makes me very happy. And when you hear it, maybe you will become happy as well. Okay. Go on. So you know how 3M is being sued? 3M and Watson grinding are two companies that are being sued for causing a big gas explosion. Yeah. That, you know, destroyed part of town. For all that Sherlock fan fiction. Sure. Yes.

God damn. So, this is a reading from 404. An expert witness testifying in a lawsuit about liability for a Houston explosion that killed three people and destroyed 2,000 homes, apparently used chat GPT to write almost his entire quote-unquote expert report for the trial. Amazing. The man who was hired by the industrial products conglomerate three. 3M exposed his AI prompts publicly.

And the reason he did that we're going to get to, which is great. But he asked Chad TPT to, quote, help me create an exceptional expert witness report defending the standard of care at 3M showing how 3M is zero percent at fault for the explosion at Watson grinding. Make no mistakes. Which is a shame because if 3M had only thought to put in make no mistakes on some of their stuff, then they wouldn't have killed those people. So this guy,

Josh Outen Reith, I hopefully am getting his name right, of Nighthawk engineer. I mean, that's the thing. Should have made no mistakes. It was hired to produce this report. During discovery in the case, Will Moy,

one of the plaintiff's attorneys, found a five-page document called citation overlay, which appeared to have been generated by AI, as it is a common, it's a common artifact when you ask chat GPT to generate a report for you. Huh.

Moy then said, I need all your props. you need to tell me all your prompts and the court said yeah you need to show him all your prompts those count is discoverable the court ordered prompt disclosure is brutal ugh that hurts

what are the most embarrassing things you can tell a machine like in terms of like sort of things that you're putting information into that can embarrass you that's up there with like the fucking porn hub search bar you know yeah it's like the embarrassing things to have read out in court is like

is if in the case of if you've threaded a criminal conspiracy into sexting I think it would be really funny if this guy Check out no customer layers that's happened many times I think it'd be really funny

if besides being an expert witness This guy also had the kind of relationship with chat GPT that you see like women on Instagram posts sometimes where it's like yeah I like I like chat TPT to be like a little bit saucy A little bit minxy towards me

and call me a bitch and stuff and I like to pretend that it's my best friend. So like, and he's just like, okay, sure, but in between that, absolve 3M of any liability for like bombing a Dallas suburb. Absolve 3M of any liability for bombing a Dallas suburb. And then honestly, can you review this date for me? How did I do? So, like we say, the second most embarrassing maybe disclosure you can be forced to give in a courtroom after sex threaded into criminal conspiracy is you've clearly used AI for this. Tell me how much you

how stupid you are and how much you needed to rely on it. The deposition was paused for three hours while they were gathered. So he just had to sit there well, you are a dumbass pile got higher and higher and higher. Oh, that's not so good. A boy was given 350 pages of chat GPT conversations that

Outen Reith had while creating the report. These documents included Chad GBT's public links to their full conversation. Court transcripts suggest that 3M paid him $90,000 for his analysis, and his rate was $4.75 an hour. Oh, they're just giving money away. I mean, if you don't have any scruples, you should get in on this expert witness stuff. Oh, it's incredible. So in one chat, Outen Reith uploaded an image of a gas detector and asked Chad GPT,

what am I looking at? and asked, what are the model names of industrial gas detectors? Did it get it right? It did, but I don't think Alton Reith knew what the gas detector was. There was the subject of the whole case about what she was asking to give, asked to give expert testimony. Oh, gods. This is, this is like a sort of nightmare alternate view into a making of a, well, there's your problem, where we're infinitely lazy. So he told Chad GBT, it was, quote,

being retained as a professional expert witness by 3M in defense of their lawsuits and other legal proceedings. Please create an expert witness report to defend 3M standard of care and counter the defense witnesses outlandish and false claims, particularly about working on equipment you are not trained to without the right permitting. And do it in the voice or the persona of a simple country lawyer. Yeah. So he says, so basically, so the chat DBT created a 30 page report that included the line from a technical and standard of care standpoint, 3M is 0% responsible for the January 24th, 2020 explosion, which is a terrible thing to put into a report that a court is going to look at.

Your Honor, I am 0% guilty of that stuff I did. You, bitch. So in trial transcripts, we'll move on in a second, in trial transcripts, out and right to admit to using chat, GPT, but said repeatedly, I'm an expert in gas detection. I've got a body of work in 20 plus years of experience in the industry, but when asked why he used chat GPT, he was unable to answer.

Just like, it just seemed like less work. Well, because he would have probably needed to ask chat GPT that question, right? This is also like an underlying thing, which is like,

this is not like an uncommon story, but it is kind of like one of the most extreme examples of it. And as LLMs kind of integrate further into society, one of the things that it does in order to sort of assert itself as like a necessity and therefore requiring infinite amounts of state money and support is to kind of present the idea

of it like, oh, you cannot think and you cannot do anything without consulting the LLM first. And everything that you've studied, whether that's like 20 years in oil and gas or like, you know, advanced medicine, all this stuff that you've studied,

all this stuff that you've trained in, right? You now have to second guess yourself. You now have to like doubt that your abilities to do those things are better than like fucking Sam Orkman. It's kind of, it's kind of revealing. how many people with like actual expertise and actual qualifications are deeply insecure about them.

Well, he said, I put my opinions in there and AI helped me draft a straw man to build off of. I put information and opinions up front before it ever generated. If the output wasn't of my opinion or what I agreed to, I did alter it. But at trial, they agreed that the report was 90% chat GPT. Outer Ryd also said he prompted chat GBT about the case several times, we'll quote, sitting in traffic to jog my memory about different manufacturers of gas detectors. And I mean, again, that's when you've, that's such a, you've really hired a bit of a bum expert witness who he's just driving around writing his report with chat GPT.

You might as well get a guy doing an expert witness report in a front facing camera sitting in his car. We'll get it as a cameo is the main thing. You could have had that delivered by, oh, Sarah Palin. Okay. All right. That'd be a lot of fun. Expert witness, but fun.

Trademark. So, jury awarded $61 million to the plaintiffs. And there are several more upcoming cases. So three excruciating hours of humiliation of being sort of like outed to your employer as like someone who's basically defrauded them. And they lose $60 million off of this. That's, I mean, fun consequences, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

It is, you know what? It's going right there up on the shelf with that time. KPMG invented a new kind of way to engage democracies that doesn't exist. But apparently he's used by every government in the world. Yeah. So I want to come to our main point of discussion for today. It's the jarring shift in tone. It's the jarring shift in tone. About this sort of hounding a guy to death thing from earlier. Yes.

Yes. You may remember us mentioning that. because of course the UK press has, and I don't believe it's too much of a stretch to say this, sort of collaborated to hound someone to suicide. Oh yeah, fully just murdered a guy for racist reasons off the back of racist trolls, basically. So if you're not been following this, if you're not in the UK or haven't been noticing this, there's this guy called Jason Ardei, and he was the youngest black man to receive a professorship at the University of Cambridge. He was a professor of the sociology of education. And it had transpired that his dissertation and sort of CV contained plagiarism and lies and

fabulous. A lot of, a lot of sort of like fabulousism, as you say. But I think one of the things that tends to come out quite often in these cases, usually too late for it to make a difference, is that a lot of people who, and I guess this goes back to the thing about expert witnesses feeling sort of like insecure. A lot of people who lie in this way, who exaggerate their achievements, often do have very real achievements that they could be proud of in and of themselves and that are quite impressive, but still feel the need to sort of like generate more. And very often, some of the more implausible-sounding ones are just accurate. it. And so a lot of people sort of decided when this sort of post came out by this,

this, um, let's say self-described race realist, chud by the name of Nathan Kaufness, that, okay, well, we just, we can, we can dig through everything that Jason Arde ever did and everything we can suggest was a lie, will be. And they're now finding that that's not necessarily true. And you would think that there would be some embarrassment or some shame there, but of course not. I think there's like something important to say. And first of all, there was a sort of sense of like,

as we kind of discover more of the actual truth, because I feel like when I first, I don't know how you guys sort of experienced this, but when I sort of first saw the story, which was like this accusation that Dr. Ardei had like, well, the initial thing that I sort of saw was that, oh, like he had plagiarized or like big portions of his PhD thesis. Yeah.

Were plagiarized. First of all, I was like, who gives a shit? Who gives a fuck? But I mean, but I mean like the point sort of being, number one, actually a lot of that turned out to really be untrue. And like the scale of which like the plagiarism, which was done, was like relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. It's not to say that it didn't exist at all,

but it was like it was investigated and the awarding university did kind of clear him of any sort of like serious academic malpractice. You know, this, I mean, I think one thing to bear in mind is also about this story really contained everything that these people wanted. It was like a young black, you know, a young black man, high achiever, you know, sort of looked like someone who shouldn't be like in their estimation and their imaginations, someone who should not be a Cambridge Don. And so the fact that he was just like already infuriated them, you know, it's being led by like a guy who's like super resentful because he lost his Cambridge job for saying that he loves doing like using the calipers too much. You know, on his on his like big recede. He really gives like guys with receding hairlines like a really bad name.

I felt really... That is true. That was my main takeaway. The other thing is, like, even if you sort of accept the premise that, like, Arde had committed this, like, huge, huge academic misconduct, right? And the whole thesis was plagiarized, top to bottom, knowingly and penitiously, whatever. That's not a national news story, that kind of academic misconduct, right? It happens relatively often.

Like, that's a sort of like local educational news story. You know, it's really funny. You know, who else was accused of plagiarizing a huge amount of her thesis? Bill Ackman's wife at the MIT Media Lab. Oh, well, that's not because he never mentions her or credentials for anything. Anyway, I mean, I guess the other thing here is that, like, this was a very conscious attempt, I think, to run what you might think of as the Chris Rufo playbook, right? Which is, we've seen this.

most notably with Claudine Gay at Harvard in the US, along very, very similar lines of you find some misconduct that you can allege and you turn that into a wedge and you use that to try and extract every possible toll you can on what you consider to be wokeness in academia, right, or wherever else. And one of the things there is that the British press is kind of too advanced. in its sadism, right? You can do that in America and everything sort of broadly holds together, but you do that in Britain forgetting that the British press as power level

is such that they will just murder someone doing that. Yeah, and like, I think it's worth saying as well before we go on, which is like it's worth restating. It doesn't matter what Arde did or didn't do or did or didn't plagiarize. It doesn't matter. Yeah, it's not as if anyone involved really cared, you know? No. No, it's, it's, they care about fucking all of these people, all these spectator writers who spend all their time hating on university educated elites or whatever, right? They're, they fucking, they care about academic rigor when they can turn it on someone who they consider to be both like, who is fear, who they fear and are scornful of, right?

They, it's like someone caring about women's sports all of a sudden when they're an avowed misogynist. It's, it's an interesting comparison because I know that a lot of the people who were most invested in, this were tufts, right? Oh, that's, I can't believe, I can't believe that apparently all of that energy that was about protecting women was also about protecting universities from, you know, being too, being too woke to use electron microscopes. So the thing is, if you make your politics into sort of politics of sadism, it infects everything else about them.

It's, you know, if only one of my co-hosts had turned this into a kind of maxim that you could, you could look up somewhere. But so, yeah, and I think because they've done that, it was most obvious with them after the sort of like obvious level of like, you know, Kaufner's who talks about how he wants to be as like professor of eugenics and race science after the revolution, right? But after him, it's stock or rolling or Sonia Soda or any number of other people who have like gender critical views

who were talking about this very openly in terms of like, this is delicious or this is the gift that keeps on giving. Oh, I've got a quote from Helen Joyce in front of me, actually. Please. Which is awaiting a review copy of Jason Ardae's memoirs. This is days before he was found dead. Helen Joyce said, I'm practically salivating with anticipation. And the part that's unsaid is to engage in the ritual humiliation of someone who has, who has because he has committed an infraction, enough people have greed is a weapons hot target. And like, it honestly, like, because of our gutter press's obsession and these people who are all adjacent to its obsession with the specter of like DEI, this idea that like, that the feelings

of liberalism have fundamentally, I think the feelings of social liberalism have fundamentally compromised the utility of every institution they touch. All it takes is like one possibly like unwell person of like. of a identity group favored by DEI, heavy, air quotes, promoted above where they think he should be, as you said, Hussein,

to call the entire presence of black people in public life into question. Which, by the way, Nathan Koffness, who was, who got this, you didn't even do anything. He just got this information leaked to him by someone at Cambridge who was already angry at Jason Ardeh

for being there. And then he just gave it to the press, right? And he's already said, specifically, leaves, you can see him quoted around quite a bit, that in a sane world, the number of black people in high academia would approach zero on the basis of, like, racial differences in IQs. We'll come back to that, which another, I would say, gender critical writer repeats pretty on, and use this word again, critically. It's every respectable columnist, every single one at all of the newspapers across the political

spectrum, they queued up around the block to rip off a piece of his flesh to prove their point that actually everyone was wrong for being mad at them about trans people or DEI or cars or fucking whatever it's all that you know he has a fucking monocause these fucking people have a fucking monocause and it's it's like officially sanctioned fun as well as sort of like a bonding activity and this extends even to people who would like to think of themselves as being on the left or whatever but want to be invited to those things fucking Aaron Bustani got his shots in you know like there's a ton of this just like around that is just like sort of waiting for people to pick it up. And you compare it to something like, for instance, Matt Goodwin's book, for instance, right? We talked about it. A lot of it seemed to have been lifted from chat GPT, right? Does that damage his credibility as an author? Does that damage his credibility as an academic? I would say absolutely. Did we hound him to an early grave over it? Well, we don't have the power to do that, but I also don't think that we would have if we did. But these people absolutely did. I mean, it's also a

a case of like, and I was thinking about this today just in terms of who gets to sort of play the victim, who gets to be the victim, and who gets to sort of be called a victim. And I feel like one of the build of big things, one of the big sort of elements of this story is, and if you think about someone like Jason Ardey, like someone who

comes from like a very, like, you know, he comes from like a very, very difficult background, poor family, you know, went through a lot of hardship, reaches like the kind of pinnacle, or reaches like one of the sort of pinnacle points of British academia in the best university and the country, if not the world, and the anger that sort of emerges from that, but also just the fact that

like, when you sort of occupy those positions, and I'm not, you know, this isn't just for like people who really reach those standards, but anyone, any sort of person of colour, really, anyone who, you know, is not like a non, like, who is not like a white male, kind of is always sort of told that like, well, whatever happens to you, whatever criticism that you get, you really have to learn how to take it, right? You don't get to play the victim. You don't get to sort of like, even sort of feign any type of victimhood. You know, everyone I think who like occupies those positions, even if they're sort of,

even if it's just like being like a head manager at like your sort of corporate job or something, kind of always has those stories of just like, you know, you cannot play the victim because if you can't, you know, because like it will just cause more problems if you do. And so whatever shit that you get,

you internalize that, you sort of deal with that and whatever way that you can. And that's like in stark contrast to someone like Matt Goodwin who like is still playing the victim card, who is still saying that he's been like lambasted and cancelled. And like, I was thinking a lot about this in terms of like fucking cancel culture and like who gets to say that they're cancelled and who gets to go on the fucking podcast tour and get like the book deals and all that stuff on the basis of like people

were mean to them on the internet. And in the meantime, like, you know, these guys have hounded someone to death. And they're still kind of like doing the podcast tour being like, well, actually, I don't know whether you saw like any of the tweets that Nathan Kaufness put out. But he sort of like takes pictures or he takes a picture. or like repost a picture from taken by Andy NGO or like Andy No or whatever his name is. Andy Non-government Organization.

Andy non-government organization. Yeah. Well, you know if you really think about it. No, Andy No. And like you sort of like repurpose the image of from Dr. Arde's vigil. And Nathan Coffner says, oh, this is an anti-Nathan Coffin's rally.

Which like, you know, I mean, I'm sure parts of it were, but it's also not about you. And yet like you are still insistent on being the victim because that is like a privilege. that you are allowed to have, right? And that's such an important kind of thing,

I think that has really not been looked at very much in terms, like considering how important that is for the story. It's like this sort of double exclusion, right? On the one hand, you're being excluded on a racist basis from the sort of normalized lying that is absolutely prevalent in these institutions, and then you're being excluded from the ability to sort of claim that narrative around it of I'm being cancelled.

Well, I actually have the text of what, Kauffinus said in front of me about this anti-Koffness hate rally. And, you know, again, if you're going to what is essentially someone's funeral and saying, I guess they all hate me. Yeah, I guess they want to Charlie Kirk me for revealing the truth about this guy or whatever. Yeah. He says, there's an anti-Koffness rally and Trafalgar Square. If I were in London, there's a real possibility that I would be murdered. Again, this is just him copying Andy No. This is him trying also, I think, to be UK. Chris Rufo, which we'll talk about a little more in a second. But then he says,

thousands of academics and journalists knew the truth about Jason Arde for more than a year. Now you know why no one said anything. And it's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Now you know why no one said anything because a bunch of people turned up in support of him after he was hounded to death by the press. What the fuck do you mean? Clearly, this sort of like, you know, woke DEI protection rack. It doesn't work very well, you know.

It certainly wasn't able to stop the Specsacer from running, you know, 50 articles in a week or whatever it was. And I know the hypocrisy is table stakes, right? But you look at the output on this stuff and the kind of reflexive racist contrarianism that provides you with this sort of ability to hold in your mind at the same time. This Arde's story is the gift that keeps on giving and it's delicious and exposes all of these liberal pieties versus the witch hunt against Prince Andrew has gone too far. Something which the sexator also published.

I mean, you could also remember that the telegraph tried to disprove some of Prince Andrews accusers by putting fully grown adults in masks and sitting them in a bath and saying, see, he's innocent. But the UK, I want to go back to this, this coughness as Chris Rufo thing, which is, I don't want to overstate it, right? Because I think, it's definitely like auditioning for the job, right? Because we've talked a bunch of times about how there is a sort of like far right international now. which has a playbook and is very sort of adept at like learning tactics from each other. Yeah. And I think this is like the Chris Rufo thing, right?

I predict by the way, I predict that right now all the castor oil kids in the like reform, restore of Tories, like all the, yeah, the sort of fascist 18 year old are all clamoring with their bosses to say which of us can draft Koffness to be our next higher ed policy walk or maybe even an MP. Think of how angry people would be if we drafted. Kauffness to like runs in a sort of restore safe seat. God help us. Because remember, Rufo got put in charge of stuff by Groyper's in Ron DeSantis's government. He got put in charge of a university that he then destroyed. Because also the other thing is whether you are Kauffness, whether you're

Rufo or whether you're any of the turfs that are saying, oh, this is delicious to humiliate this man or all of the like spectator writers who are like 10,000 claims in Jason Arde's memoir, blah, blah, blah, regardless of that, all you know how to do, because you think of everything is shallow and purely representational, you engage in a world of only symbols, you can only make symbols. So when Chris Rufo gets put in charge of university, he changes all the symbols, Tim dusts off his hands and says job done. And on the one hand, it sort of is sort of like adding insult to injury as well, because the government is perfectly capable of destroying the British higher education sector for sort of like non-wokeness in flexed reasons. you know, like, we're sort of like busy watching universities get like fucked over six ways from Sunday without anyone needing to even bring, bring race into it at all. But no, it's like these guys, that's not good enough. We have to destroy all the universities for my pet calls because of my calipers. Because the thing is, and I think this is something that we've been building towards and something we've been talking about quite a bit, it's not just that the UK is auditioning at Chris Rufo.

It's that the UK media is and has been for a while Kiwi farms. This is just the most blatant show of it. It's long been low cow stuff. I mean, I sort of, you know, even before that, the sort of the tabloids were on this. I mean, I still remember the Lucy Meadows thing, for instance, with Richard Littlejohn, sort of hounding, hounding her. In Winehouse, you could also put her into, but it used to be celebrities mostly. Well, again, I sort of go to Lucy Meadows as an exception, right?

But they didn't have the sort of like shotgun blast effect, right? I think that's the thing is the difference now is that it's much more possible to take those existing tabloid hounding strategies, which are very, very well worn, and combine them with the kind of tempo and extent of your kind of low-cow culture. Yeah. And when we talk about law cows, by the way, we're talking about, if you're not familiar with the term, it's when either Chan boards or Kiwi farms or stuff like this, we'll find a usually vulnerable person who is acting like kind of an idiot in some way or whatever. And then we'll repeatedly manipulate them into like humiliating themselves or hound every detail of their life or stalk them and so on and so on. This is basically adversarial behavior. But one of the things about bullying, which it also is, obviously, is that bullying is one of the forms of bullying is that it is a way to police behavior, right? It's a way to punish like an effeminate boy for not being, for not being like the right kind of masculine. I feel like, I would like to terrorize every other black academic in the UK, for instance. Yeah. And right. And I think this, and one of the most important functions of the British press, this is true of the American press, but again, it's way more true of the British

press is to function as a disciplinary body. It's to, because you remember, how many just regular people had like their fucking bins gone through because they like went on the BBC and said, well, I actually think that this Corbyn's a nice fella. The guy who, where Boris Johnson like took his phone away from him during an interview in a hospital in the 2019 election, but when it was like, hey, that's a bit embarrassing for Boris Johnson. Immediately the tabloids and the Times and the spectator, in the telegraph, which is no different from the tabloids now, they sprung into action trying to dig up dirt on this guy to discipline the public for not being the right way politically

and not falling into line. This is just them getting more and more and more ambitious. And I've said it before and I'll say it again. You must consider the UK press to be largely hostile to growing segments of the public. Yeah, well, I think part of it is running into this problem of, for instance, when your victim dies, right? people, you know, come out to sort of protest your deplorable treatment of them.

And there are more of them than there are you and your sort of band of sadists, right? That's a rally that intends to murder you. And the reason why is because it's sort of unacceptable to these people's worldviews, the idea that the general public, right, as a rule, will go along with a lot of racist stuff, will have a lot of racist beliefs. that the kind of nakedly racist, like nakedly bullying sadistic kind of world view that someone like Kauffness wants to maybe sort of a spouse or, you know, that applies to some of the turfs as well, is something that people are kind of instinctually repulsed by, even when they might support sort of policy that achieves the same thing, right? and these people they can't comprehend that, you know, within their own framework, that kind of, that kind of racism, that kind of bullying is a luxury belief. It's something that most people do not instinctively

vibe with. It is, if you have the luxury of that much power concentrated in that small of a group of people that you know, that's a belief you get to have. Not a lot of people get that. You should enjoy, hey, you know what? You guys are all pretty lucky. Part of the sadism, part of the fun is being like, oh, aren't we, aren't we sort of heterodox by, you know, sort of slaying all of these sacred cows and this, this piety, you know, and just by being very, very, very dangerous towards each other. And then when people are sort of like repulsed by this, then you have to go, oh, I'm being

assassinated. And fundamentally, all of these beliefs, the entire belief system we've been talking, about is really, really, when I say coherent, I don't mean that as like, oh, it's coherent. It's fine. It's coherent. It's, it's coherent. It's, it's, it's coherent. It's, it's, anti-racism. And it is this really, really, really. Well, it's actually, I think it's, it actually, anti-racism does have some specific meaning. And it's actually one that I think we can unpack in an article. I'm about to read us. But before I do that, I also want to talk, I want to do one more, actually, you can't be mad at us from our friends at the Guardian, who,

publish a real dozy of an, this is not our fault, you can't be mad at us. That was a lot of that, a lot of people who really have blood on their hands all decided at once. Actually, I'm taking a break from Twitter. You guys can argue with each other. You know, I'm too good for this discourse. This place is so toxic. How did that happen? So, this is from there, you're not allowed to get mad at us. But, again, no byline, by the way, the editorial board put this stinker out. The Guardian sought to establish what was true. This is the proper function of journalism. Reporters were contacted by Ardei over a year ago and worked extensively to verify what he told them.

In many instances, they could not. It was right for the Guardian to publish its investigation, and it is wrong the journalists who did their job responsibly are now being subjected to an onslaught of abuse. Cambridge, which has many of its own questions to answer, announced that it would hold an internal inquiry. In its journalism, the Guardian sought to meet tests of importance and proportionality, covering the issue with nuance. This could not be said of much of the right way media and its social media outreach. writers. It wasn't me taking part in that avalanche. It was the bigger snowflakes.

Yeah. And moreover, if you know, if you're the Guardian and if you go on the Guardian, they have a little pop-up that says, for facts sake, and this is what we're up against and so on. So if you are the Guardian and you purport to know what we, what you say

and we, I didn't say we, but we, as you say, are up against, wouldn't you think wouldn't you think that maybe with the extreme prevalence and I would say danger of this anti-anti-racist movement in the UK, that actually, probably this didn't meet the standards of importance and proportionality and that covering this issue with nuance without foregrounding the fact that this is actually, without foregrounding mostly this is a story about anti-anti-racism, and that the plagiarism by a, professor of educational sociology at Cambridge is actually a fucking molehill, right? That maybe the story is actually completely not what you published and that there is no we as long as you think that you can operate in the UK media ecosystem as it is right now while doing that. Yeah, no, it's just being being the sort of like helpless and unwitting

victim of a sort of like phrenologist with a substack. Yeah. So I, I, I want to read this article that I've sort of trailed a little bit which is by Louise Perry who is the Wall Street Journal's free expression columnist. Oh, that's epic. The Chaudwester.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. She is described as a leading reactionary feminist. Pretty good. And she, in her Wall Street Journal article, she said, I wonder how Sir Isaac Newton would fare in the Cambridge of today.

He would get smallpox probably. I don't fucking know. The fuck you're talking about. about? A 17th century gentleman academic at 2026 fucking banker credentializing institution? What the fuck you talking about? I mean, I think that's

interesting. Yeah, I think he'd be I think he'd love being on TikTok. I think I think it's instructive because these people have a bouse as much connection to the actual work of, you know, Oxford or Cambridge as Isaac Newton does now. They're about as removed from it. Yeah, and like, again,

this is going to come up because this is infuriating. We have as a culture, as a media political culture, we've invented what a university is that is just completely divorced from what it does. This is a, it's largely a place where fucking billions of pounds of research money is spent at like the Rolls-Royce lab

that's giving the classics dawn cancer. That's mostly what it does. There's kind of two universities, right? At any given British universities, just particularly acute in Oxbridge, right? Where it's like, doing, doing lopping brackets real has made me aware, of exactly how much stuff is lopping brackets derogatory in real life, right? Because we've said this

for a long time, but doing your undergraduate degree is basically an exercise in elite reproduction and like permission seeking to enter institutions, right? Not to say that you can't get anything out of it, right? But like, or that it doesn't have like technical or vocational value or whatever, but in the main, it's kind of a lop. It's kind of like you get to spend three years being a student and feeling like a student. In terms of your relation to the actual university, it's in some ways almost nothing, you know, except unless you're an international student,

in which case it's piggy bank. What you are doing is subsidizing that Rolls-Royce lab, paying for some people to be there. I did a bit of research into Louise, and I think I've got this, I've got like a very important bit of information, which I think is key to sort of unlocking all of this, which is that she at least did her undergraduate,

at the School of Oriental and African Studies, which is to say that she did it not at Oxford. And the reason why I think, or like not at Oxford, and the reason why I say that it's important is because you're completely right into the suggestion that like the country is run by Oxford grads have not really gotten over like their time being at Oxford or Cambridge.

But right below them are another subset of people who I would actually argue are actually far more harmful. And those are the people who are Oxford rejects. I wonder who that. That's science four. And you can, yeah, there's like a big self-awareness alarm that's going off right now. This is the thing. Whenever, whenever people on Twitter are like trash future fucking like posh oxbridge

cunts, it's like, no, we're the posh cunts who didn't get into Oxbridge. That's the axe we're grinding. Yeah, I actually went to Alcquin College in York. Anyway, no, no, I think this is sort of important because it does like this idea and, you know, this has sort of been kind of like every time there's sort of been like attacks on people and attacks on like, you know, university institutions and everything, like these kind of very fake ideas of what Oxford and Cambridge are supposed to be. And by extension, what like, quote unquote, universities are supposed to be are always kind of bandied around.

And again, they're completely divorced from like what the university actually is in relation to like the rest of the country, which is kind of something like a midway point between like a piggy bank, a place where like a lot of sort of like money is stored, a place where, you know, corporations kind of like pick out employees. And so, and also like manipulate and mold courses in order to sort of like suit their needs. Also like a way of kind of just like sort of subsidizing local economies, right? Yeah. Yeah. There's an article that has been cited a few times in the sort of like aftermath of this

as an example of how irrelevant and tawdry this coverage got, which was, I think it was in the Times, and the thrust of it was, I was in Jason Arde's class and he graded my essay unfairly and I didn't enjoy it, right? And a lot of people kind of took that to be like, look how low they're stooping. I think that's in some ways the main thrust of this, right, which is the crime here is interfering with the lop, right? You don't belong in this sort of like village green idea of like what a university experience should. be like and people care a lot about what Oxbridge should feel like as an undergraduate, particularly people who went there and liked feeling young again imagining it. I'll carry on because I think that some of this is gets, it comes back in what Perry writes.

Would he, Isaac Newton, be able to negotiate funding applications, HR, student politics? Would he demonstrate social? Probably. Because he did have to negotiate student politics. Oh, no. See, student politics were invented in the 1980s when students did. decided that Nelson Mandela shouldn't be in jail. Oh, okay.

That's what student politics is. Student politics isn't like, hey, it looks like some royalists are coming up the drive. We should probably hide. Would he demonstrate social grace, prudence, and avail, but also irrepressible drive towards acquiring power within the institution? Again, the argument is that this is just what university is about. In Isaac Newton's time, it wasn't about demonstrating social grace. It was just about doing math.

in 17th century England when no one tried to acquire power within Christian institutions. Also, crucially, there was no kind of like, there were no flowery concepts in maths back then, you know, it was just good, hard science. Would he use the correct pronouns?

Because, you know, they got... Yeah, Z and thou probably. Oh, fucking no. Stupid. Stupid. Order the correct identity groups and keep perfectly within the confines of the Overton window at all times. What this is being portrayed

as is that to question whether or not Jason Ardei should have been there is going to be a having you cast out of the institution you're not going to require any power in the institution and you're not staying because you're not you're not engaging in like it almost I'm going to jump around my eras here Victorian level of like sort of repressed manners which just now are about inclusivity rather than exclusivity and like what and again the implication of this is everyone who did everything to this guy. It was justified because to do anything because you either accept

and love him totally or do what the whole press did. And it's just at every moment you see all this fucking justified. It's so fucking stupid. Notably, the people who are currently being accused of having, you know, created this sort of D.

DEI woke starzy thing like, you know, Cambridge, did not really care particularly. We say this very, very often. and that all of this stuff is like institutionally performative, right? Like, you have the kind of bare minimum of pronouns required so that the, you know, Rolls-Royce test lab keeps functioning as like a modern work environment, basically.

And the people sort of, like, look at that and then go, oh, well, the problem here is all of these pronouns, which I assume Rolls-Royce or, you know, whichever fucking defense contractor lab that works at the university, whatever nefarious shit the university is up to. I assume they mean that 100% sincerely. And I don't think it's sort of like, you know, out of place to criticize these institutions as well

for absolutely like failing to support this guy who they put in the line of fire for this. And so she says, modern elite universities are trying to do two things at the same time. Their primary if unspoken role is to act as a finishing school for the elites. Fuck off. No, it's not. It's the role's right.

Lab. It's the fucking Rolls-Royce Lab. It's the Glaxo-Smith Klein Institute for fucking animal testing. That's what it's for. The rest of it's fun. The rest of it is generating social permission for the first thing. God damn. And so number

one is saying, oh, well, modern universities are acting as finishing schools for the elites. What? What was Lord Byron doing at Oxford? Maths for Royce having jacks? Yeah, Rolls-Royce engines. Was that what he was? What was everyone Who wasn't Isaac Newton?

How many super famous? What percentage do you think of super famous truth seeking like self-described autistic or they would have said if they had the terminology described the social statistic? Hard like hard maths and science people. Do we remember from Cambridge at the time of Isaac Newton as a percentage? Do you think it's more than 0.5%? Probably fucking not.

The rest of them were all like going to fucking Fauntleroy school to learn how to I don't know get drunk. get drunk on like the youngest Madeira ever made. And so they say, Harry goes on. The academic training may be rather lax, but it's offered alongside superb social training. An attentive student emerges from a university like Cambridge,

with the skills necessary to integrate into any elite profession, including a strong grasp of progressive ideology, particularly understanding of what one should say in polite company. It also includes exposure to more subtle signs of elite status. And again, we're going to have to do that Kill Bill Claxon again. In Hillbilly Elogy, Vice President J.D. Fucker.

Memorably of attending a formal dinner while at Yale Law School, tasting sparkling water for the first time and spitting it out in horror. And can I just say, I would love to have seen that if it's true, but I bet he was fucking not. Yeah, do you think that that lie

casts any of his fitness or office or whatever? Mm. Yeah. A preference for gross water, he discovered was one of those things that separated the wheat from the chaff. You learn those things at Yale. No, you, that is,

this is fucking, ludicrous. This is insane. I don't understand. Well, this thing, I don't understand the world that she lives in, but I also kind of do because the whole point of anti-anti-racism, which I said I was going to come back to, is to engage in

the world in a purely symbolic way, right? And to do the things that, you know, this claims that those sort of like markers of like, you know, virtue signaling are supposed to do, right? It creates, it creates you, it sort of, you know, puts you in this

like elite you know and by the way I'm gonna if we want to talk about virtue signaling quote unquote I'm gonna trail an episode I hope to do soon did you know that grocopedia the thing that was created by Elon Musk because Wikipedia was too woke and he was going to destroy it with a maximally truth seeking AI enabled thing hasn't been updated since April they just sort of forgot about it like they made their point they did their branding exercise now they're done we got we got we got we got a we got a bust woke grok out of out of Elon's gung gay as the tweet goes Cambridge is a cynical institution All UK universities are

their businesses, their sovereign wealth funds They are also like weapons And weapons manufacturing facilities They're training the next generation of rapacious bankers These are not, I don't want to come off As defending these institutions But it is cynical

It is partly a finishing school for relief And partly a gigantic patent incitation generating machine But also like you can even say That the hiring of Jason Ardei Which Cambridge did could have done cynically, right? Because it's like, we are going to get a guy who's going to burnish a whole bunch of our progressive credentials at once, which is something that preemvada

Gopal, who's a post-colonial studies academic at Cambridge, did basically accuse them of. She led an open letter saying Arde was, quote, employed by those seeking a quick fix for their perceived diversity issues. And he'd been, quote, fast-tracks the university could capitalize on his image, right? So in effect, they were treating him as an advertisement, which I think is, again, a gross disservice to him as a person. But if you think of the essence of modern anti-ante-racism, it is the same thing every fucking time. It's getting angry at an advertisement so you can replace it with the drawing you'd like to live

in. And in this case, the drawing is of like, I don't know, a theoretical cover of Brideshead revisited. But this cuss to the core of everything is anti-anti-racists are constantly getting mad at ads. Like, every year now, getting pissed off at the John Lewis Christmas ad is as much of a Christmas tradition as the John Lewis Christmas ad. because it defines itself only in opposition to representational politics, engages in only representations. And so it's like a form of political thought that you can engage in and total depth from the toilet.

Riling, you realize what we've done. We've created a Fortnite battle space digital twin of the university. And that's where all of these people are fighting. All of these people are fighting in Fortnite and then it's killing a guy in real life. Yeah, this is like they want. So it is Ender's game. Yeah, they want to debate in the public square. and they want people to be exposed to uncomfortable ideas.

Okay, now what's your plan? You've done it. And it seems that a lot of people think that the press acting together so no one individually can be blamed, killed the guy. Okay, now what? Clearly the answer is to kind of like snootily declare that you're above this whole discourse and like get off Twisser for a while. But like ultimately, like the anti-racist has to engage with things that are instantly

repeatable. We got to just start saying racist. But I think it's actually different. because what you, because this is racism that is defined in opposition to anti-racism. Yeah, I agree. I agree with that point. And what I was going to say was, like, I feel like there's kind of several elements of like, the sort of like response to this from what I've seen over the past couple of days has been, you've got like a couple of like columnist people that are just, you know, basically saying, yeah, we did nothing wrong. Like, you know, this was, you know, a tragic incident that like,

you know, was actually like beyond our control. But like, as the press, we were like a noble force and etc, etc. Most people just like thankfully not saying anything at all and then like some who are sort of teetering around the edges where you can kind of see where they're trying to sort of like figure out how they can do cultural war games again.

And I feel like there was a version of this that at the beginning of last week most of the press including the Guardian were sort of thinking about okay like the worst thing that's going to happen is that like he's going to resign from his Cambridge post he'll be like publicly humiliated for a while he'll disappear and then he'll kind of

reappear at some point in the next few years at like, I don't know, like Manchester Metropolitan or something like that, right? Like the whole point is to basically just like, you know, get him out of this sort of like Cambridge chair and put him where he belongs, which is, you know, just like a middle to low ranking university. I genuinely believe that they felt that that was the way it was going to go and that they could sort of contain that narrative and they could implement these kind of four channel like techniques in order to sort of accelerate that with the belief that like, yeah, you know, the worst that's going to happen is that he'll just kind of like come out of public life. It's a very classic sense of like, you know, an actual cancellation.

But considering what did happen, like the tragedy that did happen, I feel like none of them really particularly felt that this was ever going to happen, right? This was also the first time or one of the first times were like a kind of narrative through line that was supposed to sort of like sustain them until, you know, the politics comes back, did not go their way. And there is this real sense of like, well, what the fuck do we do now? What's like the point of the press and everything? I do wonder whether this might, it's not to necessarily say that things will be better because I don't think they'll be in, you know, the press and the media and, you know, is particularly like opinion pages will always be vindictive and they'll continue to like, you know, ramp up and do and do more of this. But I do wonder whether part of them will sort of be aware that like, look, there is only a limit to what you can do without like the real risk of like someone actually doing the same thing again. I wonder whether this will like sort of change the techniques that are implemented in order. to sort of like be that disciplinary force. I kind of doubt it just because I think I think that's what Leveson was legislating.

And, you know, and the sort of subsequent court cases to that. I think that's it. But they're waiting for it to die down. But I guess they're waiting for the politics to come back. So that hopefully people stop talking about this. Yeah, you get back on Twitter and you kind of winkingly go like, hey, how's everyone been? You know, I took a digital detox. So I want to go back to this.

Of course, there's another purpose to modern universe. He also claims to serve. Cambridge still takes pride in having historically even a site of intellectual excellence. The alumni of Isaac Newton's Trinity College have been awarded more Nobel prizes than the citizens of most nations. Again, like, why is that? Why is that one place? Why are they?

Is it because it just attracts very smart people? Maybe. But is it also because of, I don't know, let's see some kind of obsession with, let's say, exclusion. Possibly. It's because what you do is you get everybody who's the best at doing maths. together and then, you know, you don't, and that's meritocracy, right? I assume. And they say, but a Cambridge that truly gave priority to the pursuit of truth over status would

look very different to that of today. That's just the Nathan Kaufner's black people would disappear from all fields except sports and entertainment and emeritocracy, racism, but laundered. That's literally just like rephrasing it. Well, check this out. The irony in all this is that the record of the man who first exposed Mr. Ardei perfectly reveals the true nature of the university system now. Between 22 and 25, Nathan Kauffinus was a philosophy fellow at Cambridge, but he was forced out by his college after he wrote a blog post.

Oh, just a blog post? Sure. Link to one of his key areas of academic interest, arguing that racial differences in IQ scores are partly attributable to genetics. And what does a blog post put words, right? It's just not even words, letters. Pixels are screen. They fired him for pixels.

He just did the wrong pixels and they fired him. That's what they would have done to Isaac Newton, probably. Yeah, if he had pixels, it's hard to think of a more taboo subject to study. M-Dash. Endorcements of child murder or bestiality are typically safer intellectual ground, M-Dash. And yet, Mr. Curry bullshit. What? Endorsments of child murder?

What the fuck you're talking about? The Cambridge Regis chair of dog fucking? Like, what? When did that come in? He worked there for several years. While researching this, he worked there for several years. They never had a dog-fucking chair.

as far as I'm aware. Yeah, it's like, yeah, I assume Cambridge probably has like dog fucking classes, right? You know, it's unfortunate that they replaced all the electron microscopes with pronouns, and then they fired the guy who's the race realist substacker. Oh, sorry, Nathan. There's no money for your, there's no money for your job anymore, Nathan. We have to get more dog fuckers in. At least, at least the Leonard Wolfson endowed professorship in dog fucking is still there.

What the fuck are you talking about? You utter lunatic. Yet Mr. Koffinus seems to not care about social desirability. In fact, he seems to be exactly... He's so brave. He seems to be exactly the kind of disagreeable, obsessive, obstinate oddball. Who might have once found a permanent home in a place like Cambridge, but who can't possibly negotiate the university. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

I don't want to endorse all of the shit that he believes. So he's, you know, he's eccentric. He's a crank. I think what she's implying is that he's like Isaac Newton, which again, are you actually saying they're just repeating some birchrist shit, are you saying that's the same as fucking calculus? Apple falls bonks you on the head and then on the inside of your brain, one neuron rassels around, hits another one and goes,

I should be racist. God damn. And like what specifically, like calculus responsible for a lot of stuff good and bad? What specifically were studying racial genetic difference in IQ? What was that going to accomplish other than trying to re-segregate the public realm? Yeah, I mean, it kind of died out off of the whole third Reich thing, I guess, you know? It says, it was always going to be difficult for university to play both the role of finishing school and arbiter of truth.

Again, not an arbiter of truth. It's a place where fucking Rolls-Royce invents new engines. Yeah. It's particularly difficult right now since the reigning idea. of our times is so often at odds with this latter endeavor. And this is something that absolutely infuriated me. I'm sorry, this article has fired, I'm fired up by this one. A graphic displayed in the guidelines issued by the Smithsonian famously described objective rational linear thinking and an emphasis on the scientific method as aspects of whiteness and thus implicitly undesirable. See,

and this is in the most minimal dishonest sense true. The Smithsonian for like 20 minutes, years ago, one of its sub-museums of African-American, of like, of African history, posted that, which is basically a kind of bad articulation of standpoint theory. Yeah, basically. Look it down. Yeah. It's, is it worth critiquing these lenses of like objectivity, right? Is that something that's worthwhile to do for a scientist?

Probably I reckon Newton wouldn't have thought so because D. was just about adding big numbers together. Yeah. Science is about writing the biggest number you can think of and then multiple. multiplying it by two. And like, again, what Louise Perry wants you to think is that the modern university, having replaced the electron microscopes of pronouns and having the only sort of real subject left, I guess, is the dog fucking guy.

Notably, they haven't. The electron microscopes are still there. The pronouns are there so that people who know how to use the electron microscopes want to work at your electron microscopes instead of moving somewhere that has electron microscopes and pronouns. Oh, I'm sure they're going to get rid of the, they're going to replace the electron microscope with a big she, her any day now. But also, by the way, that post from the Smithsonian,

that was like one of the first Chris Rufo bug bears. And again, it's like, the question of like, did Jason Ardae confer social status on Cambridge students for which everyone involved is happily sacrificing scientific rigor? That's such a symbolic surface level question. You might as well ask if your choice in fast food represents the live moss lifestyle.

This entire way of thinking and engaging is exactly the same as, again, Nova, I told you about this headline earlier today. It's something I've been repeating to myself for about two weeks. And it's, to me, there is nothing in this article that is different from a Sunday Times headline from like two weeks ago, which is a Ricky Jervais piece promoting his new show. And the headline is just, I can't wait for people to be offended by my cartoon cat. I'm sorry to tell you, Riley, but I really think that Cambridge and really the higher education sector in this country as a whole is in thrall to the live master.

ideology. It's like, it's, it's just trying to grab smoke, but smoke is somehow the dominant ideology of our media. So, just to finish this up, because it's been going long, Mr. Ardei and Kauffness represent the two extremes of Cambridge's two possible roles. Which will it choose? I think the answer is obvious. Mr. Ardei lost his position, not because his colleagues at Cambridge finally got their act together. And again, the implicit thing is, didn't do what we in the press actually did. Why didn't you hound this guy out of his job? But because, Because legacy media... Probably because they were too busy working on the electron microscopes or fucking the dogs or whatever.

Like, they have other shit to be doing than obsessing about whether you're like your co-workers' thesis. But because legacy media picked up on Mr. Koffness's expose of his plagiarism and put pressure on the institution. Misunderstanding what peer review means and imagining it as a kind of like horizontal panopticon surveillance. Every academic must be able to present their thesis when asked. I don't remember my thesis. Oh, this guy's stealing valor. Your Viva begins now and it does not end.

You hire like a cano to sort of jump out at you and challenge your conclusions. You're always ready. I don't expect Cambridge or any other elite university to abandon its finishing school role anytime soon. Cambridge has a two billion pound research endowment. It has an actual job in the capitalist system. and the sort of finishing school thing and especially it's like progressive end is a fucking advertisement.

Yeah. I wonder if the private sector may take on the intellectual role once played by the university. There are companies you can employ to answer almost any question you like, M-Dash. Most commonly, where should I invest my money, M-Dash? As well as plenty of companies that employ scientists to carry our research.

What if instead of having to live in the postcards now that the postcard has black people in it, what if I lived in a different postcard? Yeah. It's like, listen, man, you could fucking play Fortnite if you'd rather like I don't care. Yeah. There is really

and truly no limit to the larp. It is crazy. You will, there are postcards everywhere for those with eyes to see. Objective, rational linear thinking reliably always have market value even if its social status is diminished. And you can find that at, oh, I don't know,

the University of Austin, Texas or whatever. I mean, how's that going? Is that, was that just an exercise in branding or did they really follow through with that one. Well, they have a big bust of Barry Weiss, right? And I don't know what it looks like by imagining it's like it looks like the same bust as Christiana Ronaldo. Ultimately, ultimately, this is, this is just, it's complaining about the student experience

and it's complaining about the most aesthetic part of the student experience. It's just that the aesthetic that they're focusing on is racism. Yeah. And once again, I'm saying that like this is something that this is a take that old can only really be expressed from someone who applied to Oxford or Cambridge and didn't get in. and like it has eaten them up ever since. Me, for having all of my takes. The imagined idea of what Oxford and Cambridge should be

based on what you hoped it would be when you applied to like Mordland all those years ago, only to be told that like you're chopped and you're unk. And 90 year old Maurice Bora told me I was unc and because of that I didn't get into what I imagined to be Hogwarts. Yeah, you never got to, you never got to wear like the fucking bow tie and the robes to like your opening fucking salmon I don't know how it works

and like you just and you just can't get over it right? The all souls exam being set by a 90 year old with broccoli zoomer hair and it just said the question is just six

and you have to write the answer the thing is you can actually get a year's incredibly generous burstery and you can study whatever you want provided you you answer that correctly but only a couple of people do every year so it's like

all right all right look I think that's all the time we have for today. So as ever, I want to say thank you very much for listening to the pod. Sorry, it's a little late today. There's been some, some holiday, but we are back. We are back at it. And we are going to have a bonus episode for you later this week. So do check that out. Otherwise, I want to thank you for listening. Our bonus subscribers for being bonus subscribers, my co-host for being my co-hosts. And we'll see you in a couple days. Bye. Bye. Bye.