Once bitten, twice shy

When I was wee I burned my mouth badly on rice. The fluffy white rice was steaming from my plate, seducing me with its fluffy potential, and I was ravenous so I attacked the rice too soon with my spoon, and what I thought was going to be fluffy and beautiful in my mouth became a great and mighty suffering. Even when I spat the rice out of my mouth, the damage had already been done. I chugged water, but ow ow ow it hurts, like the flesh was slashed clean off the inside of my cheeks. And my tongue! Would it ever be the same? I didn’t know. I never ate rice that fast ever again. Fuck you, fluffy rice. You deceived me.

I’ve watched people raise kids around me, coddling their every bite of food, with “nah-ah! blow! blow first! bloowwwwwww!” We sit three times a day with a chorus of “blowwww!” and multiple adults making blow faces at them every twenty seconds, while the wee ones look at us all with cold judgment. Can you all go and catch up on your iPhones instead of making faces at me while I’m trying to eat my unseasoned yellow mash, for fuck’s sake? Listen, I’m in no way advocating you let your kids burn their tiny little mouths. Don’t try that at home. I’m just saying – I got away with it once, and I learned a lesson.

I wish everyone ranting and raving about Jason Arday had been allowed to learn from their past mistakes, but they’re too coddled by their helicopter liberal elite leaders to learn anything.

As I’ve documented throughout our time on this newsletter: George Floyd wasn’t a grassroots thing. It was a match lit under a well-funded, well organized BLM movement ready to weaponize a news cycle to “defund the police”. It failed so hard the woke are having to walk it back now, even Reverend of Woke, Zohran Mamdani, who last week said at a press conference:

“Sometimes what you believe can change, it can develop, it can grow. I’ve made very clear that I do not believe in defunding the police, that I will not be defunding the police.”

Jason Arday is made in BLM 2020’s image. The fever has returned. For this round, the same leftists are going to abuse this story to tear down the free press. They are communist opportunists waiting for their next opening. Don’t fall for the grift twice.

I didn’t fall for it the first time. I spoke out instantly. We know what happened to me. It is the title of my newsletter. I will certainly not shut up now. Now that the flare has gone up again, we see where everyone stands, and many - depressingly - have not moved an inch. They want to burn it all down. The “it” for the re-awoke-ning is not the police. It’s the media. The uninhibited slander of the media (read: journalists’ genuine search for the truth) is preventing society from being as good and benevolent as it should be. How very supremacist of them.

“It is the press, above all, which wages a positively fanatical and slanderous struggle, tearing down everything which can be regarded as a support of national independence, cultural elevation, and the economic independence of the nation.”

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

Who is behind these calls for media clampdowns? One of the most prominent leaders is a barrister in the UK by the name of Jolyon Maugham KC, who was looking for something - or someone – to help his agenda of orchestrating a sequel to the UK’s Leveson Inquiry (2011’s judicial inquiry into the ethics of the UK press following News Of The World’s phone-hacking scandal). He needed a similar ethics-breaching scandal to prove that “right wing media” are evil, and need to be stopped. That way the press will be prevented from investigating powerful institutions that the “good” left is seeking to protect, such as elite universities employing DEI policies.

Who is he? Maugham specializes in tax law and runs a non-profit called The Good Law Project. And unlike the evil right, he is a very kind man. Unless you’re a fox. He clobbered one to death with a bat in his garden on Boxing Day seven years ago.

He got away with the fox thing. Maugham is either a grifter barrister or a legal gangster. Either way, he clearly doesn’t know how journalism works. He has significantly boosted the Arday story, arguably elevating it to international-level after he decided to publish an open letter on July 26 with major support to suggest that Arday was being “smeared”. It has 17,000 signatures now. Quite a claim with zero evidentiary basis. On the website for his Good Law Project, he has written an article on his qualms with the way the Guardian handled the Arday story. (If you’re a leftist going after the Guardian as part of the “far right smear”, you’ve really lost the plot). In this article he includes an email he sent Guardian culture editor, Lanre Bakare.

I wrote to Lanre to ask him to reconsider running the piece:

“I’ve been made aware of your incoming piece about Prof Arday. I’m sure you will have thought about how damaging it will be to have the Guardian carry a negative piece about him.”

Sorry, is this The Godfather. You wouldn’t want your little rag to get a bollocking now would you? Effectively Maugham doubled-down on the intimidation tactics that were already being used vis-a-vis The Times’ reporting, fellow Cambridge professors and Arday’s students, which I wrote about here. Question: how does a tax lawyer have the time to moonlight as a self-anointed editor of a broadsheet newspaper? I digress. Maugham continues:

I want to emphasise that I did not agree with the Guardian’s decision to carry the story – and I was uncomfortable with the editorial decision to choose Mr Bakare to write it given his history with Professor Arday and the fact that, as arts and culture correspondent, it was not obviously on his beat.

I worked with Lanre Bakare while I was a freelance writer for the Guardian between 2015 and 2017. He was a good editor. Diverse range of subjects. In fact, the first feature I ever did for him was with a medically diagnosed schizophrenic; the lead singer of a punk band titled Titus Andronicus. That was enormously challenging and required a great deal of sensitivity to his manic state during our interview. Maugham here was suggesting that he could be the gatekeeper of a black journalist’s “beat” in the name of protecting a black professor from “racist” smears. What spectacular irony.

(By the way, I never thought I’d be here, concerned about the well-being of Guardian journalists after the truly racist blacklisting I underwent at the hands of my industry when they learned that I am a Big Scary Zionist, but even I do not wish them harm. Neither does my peer Suzanne Moore who has also documented her travails there).

Maugham flat out denied all the plagiarism claims. “There is no doubt at all that this was a racist attack on a working class black man,” he says. According to this argument, any query about the claims are racist. To seek the truth is racist! I ask: Can the truth ever be in and of itself racist? No, it cannot. Facts in isolation are not racist. Plagiarism claims cannot in isolation be racist. They are fundamentally neutral. You could however argue that Maugham’s refusal to grapple with the claims was racist. You could also argue that Arday became his pawn for the legal reform he seeks.

Their trope that the media were “punching down” at Arday is preposterously racist, too. If a black professor abuses the law and the police to intimidate and silence his accusers and the media, is that OK? Is he somehow incapable of abusing the law to silence the truth in the same way as a powerful white man does because he’s a powerful black man? The bigotry of low expectations.

The Good Law Project have set an agenda in motion that has inspired a hunting of journalists. Within 48 hours, lists of named journalists including the aforementioned Bakare, plus a string of female journalists including Juliet Hartley-Brewer, Camilla Long, Sarah Vine, Kath Viner, and more, have been circulated online by angry, often antizionist, activists calling them “murderers” and seeking to “destroy them”. Journalists from The Times, The Atlantic, The Telegraph, The Spectator etc. They claim to be “doing some journalism” by urging thousands of people to call the British police on them, and spam their email inboxes with threats of harassment. They are not critiquing their work, but instead demanding their ruination. The same vile mobs who have declared a “genocide” in Gaza. They inflame language to justify their hateful violence. They lie in excess. It sounds much more like an organized mob than the accused “media”.

They want to replace journalists with conspiracy theorists, many of whom are embittered former journalists who failed at their jobs.

(Incidentally, the above names are the some of the only female journalists in the UK who have reported on the Muslim rape gangs and who have fought against the October 7 deniers to courageously publicize the rapes and sexual assaults of Hamas. Something the left’s anti-racists have remained totally silent on…)

Thank god for brilliant journalists like Coleman Hughes who wrote in The Free Press today:

“The Arday scandal has also revealed something else: white liberals in the English-speaking world want to believe in the archetype of the up-from-nothing black intellectual who, despite huge disadvantages, goes on to achieve greatness.

In fact, they want to believe in this sort of story so badly that they are willing to turn off every ounce of skepticism that they would normally bring to bear on fantastical claims.

The irony, however that we already have many examples of up-from-nothing black intellectuals who go on to greatness. It’s just that they usually turns out to be conservatives - or if not conservatives, then at least out-of-step with the left-wing religion of racial justice.”

Kemi Badenoch, who I think is the most talented political performer in the UK, would never get the vote of the white liberal elites no matter how terrible their own options, because she is the leader of the Conservative party. Hughes, who is a brilliant black intellect, writes that this should be a moment of reckoning for white elites to examine white guilt as a “virus” that ensures they prioritize their own catharsis over the public’s interest in the truth. But can they handle the truth?

Today many noticed that someone by the name Tia Lazaro-James began a petition on Change.org for a new “Arday’s Law” - already signed by thousands - that would limit the number of articles the media can write on a public figure. I can think of many, many public figures who have survived more than 249 articles being written about them. Johann Hari survived an enormous plagiarism scandal. He admitted his wrongdoings, left traditional journalism, and went on to write books. Many books!

Upon Googling the Change.org petitioner’s name, the top result is for a Wimbledon Court criminal hearing eight days ago for battery and assault.

Perhaps it is not the same Tia Lazaro-James.

The only reason the media wrote so many articles on Arday was because he made so many stupendous claims. Arday’s Law as a reaction to journalists doing journalism is one thing, and one thing alone: a revenge smear.

But beyond anything else, if you’ve ever witnessed a real witch-hunt, which I have, you would know that “Arday’s Law” would be completely unenforceable. How do you ensure that only, say, ten pieces of media a week are produced about said public figure? You cannot. It would become a tool for the new dictators of who should be silenced, and who should not be silenced. For some reason, leftist barristers are interested in this particular selective power. Yet what the barristers seem to forget is that journalists investigate. That’s our job. So if you declare war on us, strap in. No stone will be left unturned.

When I woke up this morning, the first thing I saw were people glamorizing Arday in droves at the vigil that was held for him yesterday in Trafalgar Square. Thousands of people came. At first it made me laugh. The usual suspects, with their predictable slogans, oblivious to what it looks like from the outside. A last-ditch desperate attempt for the progressives whose time is coming to an end. Had it been Nigel Farage committing suicide after a summer of bad press, I’m sure they’d have gathered to dance on his grave, Zack Polanski throwing shapes from the main stage: Brrapppp.

Perhaps they are truly clueless as to the pendulum swing they are due to experience. Their puritanical blindness has led them to believe that Hamas are a resistance movement, that DEI is aspirational, that “rape is a spectrum” (recent commentary from “trans” member of the Scottish Parliament who goes by the name Q Manivannan), and that Islamism is not a threat.

The amount of exploitation of victims the progressives have done to advance their own agendas is inhumane. The victims are waking up. Why did Arday take his own life? Was it because of the press, or was it because he was abandoned by the people who said they’d protect him? The people who exploited him?

You wonder.

But then it made me deeply angry – the theater of the vigil.

I have been to several vigils in the last three years. My friends have been to many, many funerals too. One of the hardest vigils was for the Beautiful Six. I wonder if the Arday vigil-goers have heard of them…

Hersh Goldberg-Polin.
Eden Yerushalmi.
Carmel Gat.
Ori Danino.
Alexander Lobanov.
Almog Sarusi.

They spent 328 days underground, starved and emaciated, refused basic hygiene in the tunnels of Gaza. Then executed at gunpoint in August 2024. People wailed at that vigil like the world was ending. Young gorgeous souls.

Then I spoke at a vigil in Beverly Hills in March 2025. That one was for three people. Shiri Bibas, Ariel Bibas and Kfir Bibas. Again, have they heard of them? Shiri was last seen clutching her two red-haired babies as Hamas dragged her from her home in Nir Oz into Gaza. Her husband and their father Yarden was also kidnapped. He was kept separately. Yarden was released after 484 days. Nineteen days later, he discovered that his wife and babies were murdered in November 2023. They were returned to Israel for burial. Hamas sent back a different woman in a casket marked with Shiri’s name. That vigil was also hard. Awful.

To those who went to Jason Arday’s vigil yesterday and are preaching today about “compassion” and “kindness” and “300 articles!!!!” etc. Just stop with the performance already.

Grow the hell up.

Don’t you dare scream that he was “lynched”. He died by suicide.

Don’t you dare tell us that he was killed by “racism”. You’re insulting our intelligence.

For 738 days total there was a hostage crisis in Gaza. Not one of you wore a yellow pin, or advocated for the return of innocent civilians captured by a terrorist organization. Not once did you do that. Let me know when you want to talk about how many articles have been written about Jews and Israel in the last three years, accusing us falsely of genocide? Do you want to know how many hate messages private individuals have received? How much social media abuse? How many attacks in real life that continues to lead to? How many innocent Jews around the world have been murdered by your kind and compassionate silence?

You say nothing. You know nothing. You do nothing.

Why? Because you’re racists.

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