Rather than fight for the world, America would dominate new civil societies through its formative organization, so that those civil societies of the various nations would be pro-American by nature. To this end, the United States advanced existing nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and created new ones on an unprecedented scale. It was the 1950s, the ‘Era of the Experts’, the moment when scientists, psychologists, and corporate professionals achieved their present power in American society, government, and culture.

Jennica Pounds and Joshua Lisec begin their book with this act of patriotism, decades ago, and then explain how it became the complex of NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) which increasingly run the world through ‘soft power’. I did not find a paranoid screed in this book, Unelected: How You Paid A Sinister Elite To Take Over America.

George Soros is a major actor in the narrative, and other individuals are named, their careers all summarized for readers. Yet these briefs are not aimed at personal reporting. They are data points in the authors’ narration. The achievement in this book is that the reader does not need to share religion or ideology with the writers to see the problem they explain in our world. “There is no ancient alien-illuminati tie-in here”, the authors explain.

Instead, they identify “the persistent belief in blank-slateism, humanity’s interchangeability, and the divine destiny of global harmony” as an ideological system that runs our institutions. We do not vote for the ‘think tanks’ that tell politicians what is real. The ‘campaigns’ of nonprofit organizations impose a discourse on the populace rather than expressing the will of the people. We are unable to directly influence the media sources we know are lying to us.

This is how Karl Popper’s “open society” became closed, forming a bubble that has hardened into resistance against outside information. “What Soros theorized for post-communist Europe in 1993 has long become the language America’s own leadership now uses against half its electorate.”

As this book is careful to show, however, the project has been bipartisan because it began with American bipartisanship. Today, however, the nongovernmental complex denounces its opposition as “populist” and “right wing” and its key project is the dismantling of the West in the name of global democracy. The people who do this to us think of themselves as ‘democracy’, or else its representatives, when they are in fact an unaccountable elite — a new aristocracy replacing the one that was destroyed in the 20th century.

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At the heart of the argument in this book is Conway’s Law, which understands all organizations as communication systems that become architecture. A company is shaped by the collaboration that takes place inside it: put seven teams to work in seven different offices, and the final results will reflect the division of the work. Put zealots for sterilizing children in charge of the relevant committee at the American Medical Association, and watch as they declare puberty blockers a human right.

This is how ideology shapes institutions, and why every last NGO seems to share the same ideology. “The same small world keeps reappearing because the globalist system rewards those trained to speak its language — technocrats, academics, billionaires, and career diplomats”, the authors explain. The system intrinsically excludes critics, for “when legitimacy is defined as participation in expert forums, the result is a system that credentializes entry.” You can’t get in unless you recite the cant.

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Altogether, four fraudulent polling firms have been credibly accused of publishing false information in this cycle. Median Strategies and The Public Sentiment Institute (TPSI) were exposed one week apart in August.

SoCal Strategies apparently took real money from real candidates to conduct real surveys, but they also produced two surveys in May that “are materially different than other releases on their page”, FiftyPlusOne report.

“For example, they do not include a link to a full set of crosstabs, as the firm typically publishes, and the format of the releases is different from their usual style.” FiftyPlusOne says their investigation into SoCal Strategies began a week ago.

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The company appears to be an amateur startup, possibly created by a Floral City, Florida man named Jack Sims, and possibly run by a Boston University student named Wilson Rochford.

Whoever was running SoCal Strategies, that person or persons took down the website and X account this morning. The timing was not a coincidence. Rochford, or someone claiming to be Rochford, had agreed to give FiftyPlusOne “a statement and additional information” this week, and then the Wedgewood story dropped.

Two things in the FiftyPlusOne reporting stand out to me. First is the attestation of Mr. Sims earlier this year that “ITS TIME FOR THIS TO END AND FOR US TO MOVE ON. I JUST WANT TO PUT THIS ALL BEHIND”. Sims was shutting down the limited liability corporation at about the same time SoCal strategies apparently faked a set of poll results.

Second, someone broke a cardinal rule of tradecraft by doing just one apparently fake poll with SoCal Strategies, which had a track record of actual, real, paid survey work. If the plan was to publish both fake and real poll results, the bifurcation of those two lines of business, real and shady, should have been total.

As I said above, this looks like an amateur operation by someone who understands the new world of prediction markets. If you can convince the world that Candidate A will win the race by at least six points while betting on Kalshi that Candidate B will overperform their polls, you can make a bucket of cash on Election Day.

These fake pollsters apparently took Democratic voters for suckers. Nearly the entire polling industry exhibits a bias towards Democrats, in no small part because media consumes more polls that make Democrats look good, especially in the time of Trump.

Whoever did this understood opinion surveys. They leaned into the low response rates from red, rural voters, the normative assumption of a massive youth turnout, and so on. Online betting sites created the opportunity for arbitrage. They did not have to be rocket scientists, or even real political scientists, to profit on the margin call.

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Wedgewood Polls admitted to fabricating months of polling data yesterday after G. Elliot Morris of FiftyPlusOne reached out for comment on problems they had identified in the firm’s data reporting. Wedgewood crowdfunded for polling they represented as legitimate. However, it appears that the scheme may have aimed at profiting on prediction markets.

On X, Morris has released a screenshot of messages “with a person on these servers where the Wedgewood team coordinated their polls” suggesting that one of the people behind the entity “made $4753” betting against Francesca Hong of Wisconsin, who led in their primary polls but lost to David Crowley, an ally of the governor. The allegation will undoubtedly fuel calls to ban Polymarket-style betting on political races.

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You can read FiftyPlusOne’s investigation into Wedgewood at this link. My takeaway is that the fabrication was brazen and obvious to anyone who cared to look into their numbers. The problem is that so many outlets did not. “In all the Times’s poll tracker included 15 polls released by Wedgewood between June and October, some of which included multiple races”, reads a statement from The New York Times.

While they stress that Wedgewood did not affect President Trump’s approval rating or generic congressional ballots, the polling averages of some races were clearly inflated. This would have been most pronounced in the primaries — for example, in Michigan, where the Democratic Party ended up with the weakest general election candidate of three choices. “We need to know who was behind this poll, who was getting paid, and what the mission was overall”, Amy Siskind wrote on X.

Wedgewood is in fact the third ‘fly by night’ polling concern in this cycle to publish completely false information. During August, Median Strategies withdrew their data, took down their website, and ceased operations after journalists from the Los Angles Times reached out to them. An investigation by the Guardian revealed that a 21-year old named Rahil Prakash ran the site. Like Wedgewood, they had released fake polls showing a huge lead for Francesca Hong. They also claimed their website had been a “social experiment”.

One week later, FiftyPlusOne announced a permanent ban on all data from The Public Sentiment Institute's (TPSI). They had not only allegedly falsified vote-choice data, but also failed to disclose funding from Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback. TPSI acknowledged their “disclosure failure”, but denied any fabrication, calling the discrepancies a “methodological error”.

As I keep saying, I don’t have a crystal ball and I cannot tell you what the final vote tally will be on election night. However, I can see that the polling industry has been breaking for a long time, and it is more broken now than it has ever been. Early voting results do not herald a massive, nationwide blue wave. Democrats have relied too much, for too long, on bad information, and now November will be a margin call on some number of overvalued candidates.

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Three quarters of Alberta voters chose to keep the province in Canada yesterday. With 90 percent of ballots counted at the time of this writing, 75.2 percent of referendum voters have chosen to remain in Canada, while just 24.9 percent want to start the separation process.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith had opposed the measure and welcomed the result. She had also put it on the ballot in the first place, however, so now the separatists in her coalition are upset with the outcome. The high turnout suggests there is not really a path forward for another attempt. Alberta decisively rejected the question.

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On the other hand, 8 of the remaining 9 referendum questions did pass, including all the immigration-related ones that Smith actually cared about. Aside from the separation question, only Question 8, which would have authorized the government of the province to work with other provinces on a plan to opt out of federal programs, failed, and only by a narrow margin, 50.4 to 49.6 (you can check for updated results here).

The high turnout also means that the measures which did pass now enjoy popular legitimacy. As I recently explained for premium subscribers, the real story in Alberta is a provincial reaction against federal immigration policy. Smith wanted high turnout and got it with a separation referendum she never intended would actually pass. She took a huge risk on good information and it has paid off.

The elite consensus in Canada that citizen concerns about immigration are an automatic slippery slope to national dissolution has been shattered by the result of the referendum. Albertans simply do not connect the two issues the way Ottawa wants to link them. Canada will not break up over an honest conversation about immigration issues. Donald Trump will not make Alberta the 51st state. Mark Carney can cancel his invasion plans.

Canadians do not hate immigrants. As I noted a month ago, Smith does not demonize immigrants as criminals. Rather, Smith gets demonized for speaking to public concerns about housing inflation, the cost of public services, dubious refugee claims, and problems with cultural integration, issues that resonate with most Canadians, according to public opinion polling.

Premier Smith’s approval ratings were consistently in the mid-40s until she announced the referendum. She has taken a big political hit for even holding the referendum at all, and especially for the separation question. I look forward to seeing her future approval polls after Albertans absorb the results of the referendum.

Premium subscribers knew they could expect this result in Alberta. They also know why I do not expect Democrats to do as well as the party hopes in November. If you are a free subscriber, consider upgrading for full content access.

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“What we’re dealing with if in fact the polls underestimate the Republicans is 53 Republican Senate seats compared to 47 [Democratic] seats”, Enten said, confusing the parties in his rush to get the facts out. “If the polls undershot the Republicans by greater than 3 points, well that’s all you need … for them to actually, probably hold on to the US House of Representatives.”

As I recently told premium subscribers, midterm polling has followed a consistent pattern over those election cycles in which the surveyed numbers exceed the eventual results for Democrats. The ‘delta’, the difference between expected results and actual outcome, is worse in the summer, narrows significantly in October, and somehow excludes a small, but important share of conservative in-person voters.

Early voting seems to follow a similar pattern. Right now, the most informed analysts I follow are saying Democrats have not turned out a blue wave, at least not uniformly, according to the limited set of early voting numbers that are available. Every state is a different battleground between a different set of candidates, of course. Your mileage may vary because all of politics is local. Still: the nilometer is not showing a blue flood.

If history rhymes in 2026, Democrats will not gain control of the Senate — and they will not win control of the House, either. They need an actual ‘blue wave’ to actually vote, and that has not really happened since 2006. Overall, Democrats have performed poorly in midterm elections for the last two decades.

I for one have learned to set my expectations low, like the Price is Right contestant who always bids $1. It only works when all the other contestants overvalue an item, but that does happen sometimes. Just based on the available evidence, I think Democratic hopes in 2026 are based on highly-overvalued polls that will be significantly off the final mark.

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Most candidates hate “call time”, former progressive fundraiser Evan Barker tells us in her book Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative. Winning elections requires a candidate to motivate the most voters to vote. Doing that requires money, therefore constant fundraising is a feature of candidacy.

Call time is “a brutal, soul-sucking process”, Barker says. She was good at it, pressed candidates relentlessly every day to commit time to it. Call time is “what candidates hate most about being a politician”, Barker says. Some veteran politicians actually sweat throughout call time, which can last 6 to 8 hours, like they are running a marathon.

It is important to note that this applies to both parties. Politicians who establish fundraising machines of their own do so in order to skip call time. Bernie Sanders is one such politician. He has raised millions with a short video asking for your support. That spared him the soul-sucking work of calling rich progressive people with a “hard ask” for a specific dollar amount.

Barker’s observations bear on two data points in this election. First is the collapse of Jewish support for Democrats in New York, again noted by Harry Enten. “Yes, they are still ahead, but we are talking about historically strong numbers for Republicans among Jewish voters, it definitely seems to me that the developments over the last few years … has had a huge impact on how Jewish voters are going to vote not just for governor, but for Congress.”

That 36 percent share of Jewish voters crossing party lines in New York also happens to include a whole lot of now-formerly-Democratic money. Jewish voters are not a large enough demographic to swing many elections on their own, but they have been a reliable purse for Democratic fundraising. Perhaps not coincidentally, the woke 1.0 Democratic Party Committee is utterly broke.

This has implications for Michigan, where prominent Jews are speaking out against Abdul El-Sayed for his friendship with Hasan Piker. Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate, highlights his opponent’s rhetoric about Israel and Iran whenever possible.

The Michigan Jewish community is older than the new Michigan Muslim community, but it is numerically smaller, so it must rely even more on political patronage. I would be interested to see the current fundraising breakdown in this community.

This also has implications for the recent absence of James Talarico from the campaign trail. That affair became quite an embarrassment after social media allegations that the candidate had been a mental health in-patient turned out to be false. Even in that affair, I set my expectations very low.

I suggested that Talarico was probably just being a ‘good progressive’ by following the new disease protocol of the left, in which a nine-day self-quarantine is a virtue signal. As I also noted last Friday, however, another reasonable explanation for that absence is that Talarico read internal polling which crushed his hopes for winning.

If internal polling on or about 28 September convinced Talarico that victory was out of reach, he may have decided to coast until Election Day. He can restrict call time to his biggest donors, do only big donor events, and use his campaign funds to do more fundraising without him — spending money to make money.

James Talarico will probably not be a United States Senator, but he can have a big pile of political cash. If he saw that the public polls are off by 3 points or more against Ken Paxton, he may have decided to focus on his political future in a party that is starved for cash.

I am not in the predictions business, nor is this Polymarket advice. I simply no longer buy into the happy polling results set before me. The evidence I follow leads me to expect November will be rather bleak compared to Democrats’ summertime hopes. To what degree is still an open question.

Historically, young voters do not turn out the way these polls expect them too, while conservative voters remember how Democrats govern, and vote accordingly.

Historically, inviting an immigrant community into your ‘big tent’ party, and adopting their agenda and rhetoric against an established community within your coalition, tends to exclude the latter in favor of the former, inspiring partisan defections.

The financial consequences of this exclusionary ‘inclusion’ can be greater than the direct consequences at the ballot box.

Historically, Democrats must lose in three successive election cycles before they give up on the unpopular positions that repel voters.

I look forward to watching Harry Enten explain the election the next day. I’m sure that James Talarico will have a bright future in the Democratic Party, whatever the outcome, but I want to see how the ‘delta’ between expectation and reality for his candidacy is explained on CNN.

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The Protect Kids Colorado website is at this link.

Erin Lee’s X account is at this link.

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I have set the thumbnail image of the video above to the moment when a Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) officer emerges from Ilhan Omar’s Washington, DC residence yesterday morning holding what appears to be a large, flat object with firm sides, such as a framed painting.

If, and I stress the conditional if, Rep. Omar laundered money through an art purchase, then she has been taken down by her own amateur grift, and politics will have nothing to do with it when the charges are unsealed. It will be black-letter money laundering.

Alternately, that object might be a photo, or photos, of her extended family in a display frame. Such an object could be used to prove criminal relationships. Whatever that object turns out to be, it is now evidence against Rep. Omar in whatever charges ensue.

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Democrats are reflexively defending their fellow Democrat. That might change on the strength of the government’s case, which was strong enough that federal judge in Washington, DC was satisfied that evidence indicated probable cause to investigate a potential crime, and that the search should start in the wee hours, so that the defendants could not destroy evidence.

It was all foreseeable. Truth has always been a fuzzy thing for Rep. Omar. Even her biography is contested. Omar has claimed she became a naturalized citizen in 2000, at the age of 17, through her father’s naturalization. Nur Omar Mohamed was a colonel in the Somali National Army during the dictatorship of Mohamed Siad Barre. He appears to have lied by omission on his immigration paperwork.

Ilhan seems to have been 18 or 19 at the time, too, so she may have lied on her own paperwork. The New York Post reporters “saw agents carrying boxes out of the residence to government vehicles, one of which was white and marked with a pink ‘X,’ as the congresswoman’s neighbors looked on in disbelief.” Perhaps the box contains her original birth certificate.

Rep. Omar introduced the MEALS (Modifying Essential Access to Lunch for Students) Act in 2020, and the fraud began at scale during the covid waiver era of this program. It may not be a coincidence that Omar also has close relatives and political connections involved in the Feeding our Future scandal. Rumors of racketeering charges swirl around this story.

Guhaad Hashi Said handled voter mobilization in the Somali community for Rep. Omar’s 2018 and 2020 campaigns. His fraudulent business, Advance Youth Athletic Development, ‘served’ 5,000 imaginary student meals a day and charged $3 million to the federal government.

Associates of Safari Restaurant in Minneapolis, where Rep. Omar held her 2018 election-night victory party, also served millions of fictitious meals, according to prosecutors. Omar’s campaign redirected thousands of dollars contributed by associates of the restaurant accused in the fraud to local food charities after the story became public.

Aimee Bock, the founder of the nonprofit Feeding our Future, was convicted of conspiracy, bribery, and mail fraud in 2025. Bock has told The New York Post that “I struggle to believe that [Rep. Omar] wouldn’t have known” about the fraud scheme, since her office was instrumental in obtaining waivers to keep the program going. Omar’s name appeared on exhibits in the Bock trial.

According to a Daily Wire investigation, Omar’s sister Sahra Noor used the same address for her consulting firm as several people tied to the Feeding Our Future scandal. While this does not prove a conspiracy, it is more than enough for Democrats with common sense to look askance at Rep. Omar and wait on charges to be unsealed.

“We know this investigation was ongoing for a while”, DHS Secretary Tom Homan told reporters yesterday. In an April appearance on The Breakfast Club podcast, Ilhan Omar invited scrutiny. “Please investigate all you want”, she told hosts Charlamagne tha God, DJ Envy, and Jess Hilarious. She had to know that she was under serious scrutiny at the time.

In fact the investigation into Rep. Omar began under the Biden administration and reportedly focused on her personal finances, her campaign spending, and her interactions with foreign citizens. While that investigation stalled for lack of evidence, it appears to have been reactivated under the HSI investigation of her immigration history.

The large, flat object that was carried out of her house will now serve as evidence for at least one, possibly both investigations, which might end up as one single investigation. The fact that mainstream media organizations have never even tried to defend her bizarre marriage record speaks to how sketchy it actually is.

“I’ve heard a lot of Democrats getting out over their skis today without knowing what’s going on in this investigation,” Noah Rothman told a CNN panel. The case “involves whistleblowers” along with other evidence. Rothman recalls that the Minnesota Board of Elections determined Rep. Omar had misused her campaign finance funds, but did not refer her for prosecution.

That body “also found that in 2014 and 2015, she filed jointly with her second husband, when they were not married, raising questions about her first husband and their immigration status. All this stuff is public knowledge”, Rothman said, but “it’s not public knowledge among Democrats, and they’re experiencing it now, and I would recommend they keep their powder dry.”

It is good, sound advice, so of course many Democrats are not heeding it. According to Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, as well as Sen. Bernie Sanders, Trump is solely responsible. The investigation is therefore an “unprecedented abuse of power” (AOC) and “racist smear campaign” (Pressley) by a “fascist police state” (Tlaib). Sanders wants to “fight back” and “defend democracy.”

Of course, when the shoe was on the other foot, all of these selfsame Democrats, Rep. Omar included, told us in very serious tones that no one is above the law in our democracy. They apparently do not respect the republic or the rule of law, since those things only matter when they can be used against Donald Trump in some way.

It is not a defense of Trump to notice this contradiction. Voters do notice it. America notices the two-tier system of justice that Democrats have employed, and they play into this image of themselves every time they “stand with Ilhan”. Politics are special pleading here, Rep. Omar is no one special before the laws.

We are exhausted from Democrats treating Trump as an emergency that requires fabricated FISA warrants and fake news and impeachment hearings. Whatever his real failings as a person or a president are, the attention has been too much, for too long, with too little result to carry on convincingly forever.

Ilhan Omar has the opposite problem. Her issues go back to her origins, and they connect to systematic fraud by a community that has not integrated well into its host society. At least one state agency has noticed the way she plays fast and loose with campaign accounting, while the “accounting errors” that led her husband’s winery to suddenly inflate and deflate in value shows this pattern extends to her private finances.

Whatever he thinks of Ilhan Omar, Trump has a Constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Nothing in Article II says that he must consult Congress, or Democrats, first. Minnesota Democrats were too beholden to Somali votes, too willing to look the other way, while this scandal built up in plain sight. It was bound to catch up with them, eventually.

We seem to have reached that point just in time for the midterm elections. Make what you will of that timing: the Constitution does not protect any member of Congress from having their home searched with a federal warrant three weeks before Election Day. Special pleading is a bad look on Democrats. It will probably look worse when charges are eventually unsealed. UPDATE: The matter will likely go before a grand jury.

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At this hour, Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico has been missing from the campaign trail for eleven days. Rumors are swirling around his absence. Some sources claim he is a psychiatric inpatient, others that he has relapsed into a hotel room with Andrew Gillum.

Which is to say the rumors are crazy and all over the place, so I have no idea what is really going on. It could all just be the Ken Paxton campaign doing Talarico dirty (“Where’s Jimmy?”) while he is disappeared.

My point is that Talarico could make it stop today with a single social media post. He has not spoken in public since he left a fundraiser in New York City hosted by Robert De Niro on 28 September. The silence itself is speaking.

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Talarico reportedly joined a video call with the U.S. Hispanic Business Council on 30 September and mentioned visiting an urgent care the previous evening that had confirmed he had the flu. His campaign says he is still recovering. Talarico’s next public appearance, a CNN town hall, is scheduled for next Wednesday.

“You know where he is?” President Trump told a Paxton rally on Wednesday. “He’s sick because he’s forced to eat meat for political reasons and he’s throwing up all over the place.”

Take the president seriously instead of literally and you will have a much better time in general. Talarico denies being vegan, but truth is hardly the point, here. Politics are about the projection of strength, and Talarico is projecting weakness.

“I guess I've been shaking too many hands on the campaign trail,” Talarico reportedly told the video call, “and so I want to keep everybody safe.” Here we may have the true story of Talarico’s absence. He might just be following the progressive disease protocol.

Talarico’s campaign absence makes sense as costly signaling, that is, a virtue signal. He is demonstrating empathy and concern for the well-being of other people. See how much I care? I am reducing transmission of the dread disease. I am a good person.

Masking and social distancing do not embarrass the progressive soul. They mark the progressive as someone with a good soul, a participant in the ritual cleansing of the Elect. Masks and social distance make the leftist activist, which is to say the median Talarico campaign volunteer, feel safe.

Maybe James Talarico is just being a scrupulous liberal. I could be wrong! Maybe he will emerge from his campaign cocoon a few moments after I publish this to reintroduce himself as Jennifer Talarico.

Or maybe Talarico read internal polling that crushed his spirit, and he decided to coast easy until Election Day while he stays on the phone with his donors. Texas is still Texas, after all, and the polls are broken. Published numbers show significant Democratic bias.

Texas has a long history of disappointing Democrats. Whenever he re-emerges, James Talarico might disappoint the party once more by appearing so weak for so long, no matter what the explanation is. Politics is a blood sport. You have to play hurt, or you’re not gonna make it.

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Cynthia Burack blames her own career field for the illiberal turn in American academia. “I think that universities, students, and the academic enterprise would be better off if women’s and other identity-based ‘studies’ had never been institutionalized in US higher education”, she writes in How Gender Studies Broke the University.

“I can’t think of a core gender studies belief, ideal, demand, conviction, or standard that didn’t become part of the de facto doctrine of US universities by 2022”, Burack explains. Campuses have become intolerant places by mothering their students. “In the academy, the face of left-wing populist authoritarianism is female.” First on their agenda was the purge of the western canon, with its patriarchal concern for facts and reason.

Humanities and social sciences are “some of the densest pockets of the illiberalism that plagues the academy.” Today, humanities departments are closing for lack of student interest. Even as “humanities disciplines commanded less respect in universities, the progressive worldview born in these disciplines spread throughout universities.”

One might say that the woke mind virus has killed its original host departments and the universities themselves are next. Put another way, the fervid believers in a narrow political ideology have transformed the university into a daycare. Burack notes the irony that avowed feminists loudly reject caring duties as a female concern while imposing “care” as the ruling paradigm of education.

The decolonialist, deconstructionist, postmodern queer theorist academics are carrying on “the struggle between a morally pure and virtuous left and an authoritarian right” as “a matter of faith. They speak a particular language, incant progressive ‘magic words,’ and sniff out unacceptable signs of moral, political, or intellectual ambiguity.” They are doing it to change the world by changing their student body.

As we recently analyzed, this is scrupulosity, also known as ‘religious OCD’ or ‘moral OCD’, that is, an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Academic scrupulosity is focused on being a perfectly good person rather than obeying a set of religious rules. “To be righteous, it was her duty to call out the white guys who dared to speak about feminist issues in class”, Ben Appel writes of a classmate who dismissed his “cis white gay” opinion. “It was a religious act she must perform in order to prove her faith.”

Appel’s book, Cis White Gay, is an account of his experience at Columbia having grown up in a cult. Appel suffered from scrupulosity in adolescence and discovered the university was a repeat of his childhood trauma. Rather than liberation, “everyone in this new religion was required to take responsibility for the behavior of everyone around them. They were at the same time acolytes of the ideology, and its enforcers.”

Rather than obsession with purity of food, or sexual purity, woke scrupulosity is obsessed with the purity of political expressions and the constant struggle for moral certainty. Having arrived at the correct moral conclusions, the academic suffering from woke scrupulosity becomes intolerant of immoral, incorrect arguments, which of course eliminates all contrary arguments. Loud moralizing is a form of social dominance display by the scrupulous.

“Progressives in the academy strongly contest their critics’ characterizations of what they do as indoctrination, but as pejorative as that term is, it fits”, John McWhorter writes in Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. He is explicit about his use of the word “religion” to describe the racialization of the woke academy: “I mean that it actually is a religion.”

“If we teach young adults that what we and they believe about every contentious issue is correct and that anyone who disagrees is misguided, immoral, or phobic, we’ve already surrendered the possibility of learning.” Being our intellectual and moral betters, they think of themselves as the Elect and behave as priests, teach superstitions, punish original sin, burn heretics at the stake. “The reality is that what the Elect call problematic is what a Christian means by blasphemous.”

Race is merely one form of identity that becomes a university struggle. “The notion that real blackness means framing casual racism as close to physical abuse is a modern one. It feels right only to people who, deep down, do not feel right at all”, McWhorter notes. The concept of “harm” has been used expansively, creating sacred victim groups.

Eric Kaufmann calls them “totemic minorities”. What Burack offers is a first-hand testimony of how, and when, the word “harm” expanded on campus, so that these sacred identities could be protected, mothered. Appel noticed students wearing pajamas to class. I have witnessed this alarming trend with my own eyes. Stuffed animals, comfort blankets, and other public displays of infantilism are embraced and encouraged.

“The illiberal moment in higher ed is often dated as having begun between 2011 and 2014.” Public awareness of intersectional woke religion on campus dates to around 2014, when art student Emma Sulkowicz began carrying a 50-pound dorm mattress across campus to protest Columbia’s handling of her reported sexual assault.

But the policy story begins with the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter issued by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Now rescinded, this policy reinterpreted Title IX to mandate that colleges and universities handle campus sexual harassment and sexual violence as a form of sex discrimination.

The moral panic over an epidemic of campus rape, an ongoing process that is recalled in the ‘Cornell 7’ case today, had already snowballed. “But there’s a caveat: If you’re in a field that helped to produce these ideas and practices, you will have gotten in on the ground floor well before 2011.” Burack knows because she was there.

During the 1990s, “gender studies programs … benefited from the growth and political homogeneity of other identity studies disciplines. These units provided additional pools from which gender studies faculty could safely — politically speaking— be selected.” This is entryism, the political strategy in which a small group of people join a larger organization in order to change its policies, recruit, indoctrinate, and control the institution.

Hiring changed in the 21st century as many of the products of this entryism became the campus administration, and eventually, the deans. “[B]efore 2000, I never heard a group of political scientists posit that what the department needed was another faculty member who cleaved to a theory or belief system to which all faculty were expected to adhere.”

Woke is an ersatz religion that made the campus into its cathedral. Whatever definition of ‘woke’ that we land upon, the effects are the same as a religious indoctrination, Burack argues. “Whether or not we think of academic progressivism as a religion, many professors have been filling up their students’ god-shaped hole with its tenets, its rituals, and the bonds of belief they share.”

“Ideology, like nature, abhors a vacuum”, Appel explains. “No matter the secular context, dogmatism rushes in to fill a void formerly occupied by religious faith.” People fall in line because “a sense of moral purpose, purity, and belonging are universal human needs.” College students are exactly the right age to recruit for causes that bestow a sense of moral purpose, purity, and belonging.

Gender studies further transformed the academy by producing the people who would bloat the administration of the mommy campus. For “women predominate among human resources and student affairs personnel, and investigators of allegations of civil rights violations. Thus, a queer, decolonial, antiracist activist ethos with a female face normalizes many of the beliefs and practices” that Burack describes in the contemporary campus culture.

Burack studies social movements and analyzes her own field as such. It was “inevitable that the locus of the movement would shift to new forms, conceptualizations, and survivors of oppression.” In the adoption of new sacred victim classes to liberate, the prior work of liberation was abandoned. How did a philosophy that once sought liberation for women become all about inclusion for men?

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It was not supposed to be this hard. Democrats were counting on voter anger at Donald Trump to give them power in Congress again. Any normal presidency has thermostatic effects on voters, and Trump is hardly a normal president.

Surely the American voters will reward us for oppositional defiance of Trump, Democrats thought. It was not an unreasonable strategy, but it was bound to wear out on Americans eventually. Perhaps we are already there, because the generic ballot polls are not showing a strong blue wave.

It is not entirely Democrats’ fault. They have relied too much on polling, and the polling industry is increasingly broken all the time, and the media reports polls with the incessant rhythm of a horserace for too long before the election. Democrats could very well be overestimating their position in November, and the echo chamber might have egg on its face again.

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Structural bias is one problem for polls. When a legacy media outlet hires a college polling firm, for example, the incentives are all stacked in favor of liberal bias. The political science department and the editors’ room both likely lean left.

The newspaper or news channel will want results that fit the editorial line, while the college polling firm will want to please its customer. These partnerships in fact supply most of the allegedly ‘nonpartisan’ survey results you see in public reporting.

Most of the remaining market in political surveys belongs to partisan, often internal, polling concerns. Campaigns and committees have even more obvious bias than a media organization. While they get less attention than the headline polls that media pays for, these explicitly partisan polling entities produce most of the surveys that get released in any given election cycle.

This tendency of polls to reflect the biases of the human institutions that create them is called the house effect. It shows up as a repeated offset. If any firm has consistent results that favor one political party by, say, 3 points, that is the measure of their house effect. Rasmussen has a house effect, so does Public Policy Polling. A house effect can be stable over time, though of course it is always wrong.

Even correcting for this bias is fraught. Averages only improve if the relative lean of the firm is consistent. When the whole industry shares the same miss, as happened in 2016 and 2020 and 2024, then adjusting one firm’s results towards the others does not fix the consensus error. Silver Bulletin and similar aggregation firms are unable to eliminate the house effect, producing a house effect from a consensus of the houses.

A truly independent political polling firm is uncommon, and the results that the most independent pollsters firms produce get the least attention in any election cycle. Even a standalone commercial firm can exhibit a measurable ‘house effect’ in their results. To date, no one has figured out a way to eliminate the house effect in polling.

Rasmussen, Trafalgar, InsiderAdvantage, and Big Data Poll formed the National Association of Independent Pollsters in 2025. They do not include media and college surveys in their club.

Their membership is exclusive to firms with a published accuracy record, a category that happens to include well-known conservative firms. This association did one joint national survey the same year. They found the generic ballot basically tied.

This week, Rasmussen says the generic ballot lead for Democrats has shrunk to just 5 percent. It was 8 percent the week before. Big Data Poll also has a crowdfunded generic ballot. Right now, it still shows Democrats with a shrinking double-digit lead.

As the saying goes in elections business, September polls are not October polls. As Harry Enten pointed out on CNN this week, these polls have historically been off by 6 or 8 points in battleground states. Michigan seems to especially defy polling.

Methodology is another layer of failure. All surveys use sampling and then skew their raw results according to the expected voter turnout. Midterms are low-turnout elections, so Democrats are counting on high-intensity anti-Trump turnout to win congressional races. The polls have reinforced their belief it was working, but the polls have problems, and they show the thermostatic effect is cooling.

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The University of Cambridge has scaled back their institutional review into the death of Jason Arday. His appointment, academic record, and personal history will not be subject to review.

Vice-Chancellor Deborah Prentice had promised a “thorough and transparent” investigation into Arday’s appointment, but instead, former prosecutor Nazir Afzal will inves…

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California Attorney General Rob Bonta has settled his litigation with David Ellison, ending a long-shot bid to delay or disrupt the merger and acquisition of Warner Brothers by Paramount Skydance.

Ellison is required by the agreement to do everything he was already doing, such as making “blockbusters”, but now according to a formula devised by state attorneys general, who are of course sure to be experts at such matters.

Leave aside the politics and the properties, however, and the move out of Los Angeles remains the same. Ellison has reportedly lived in the Nashville area for over a decade, giving him more than enough time to consider a move from Los Angeles, and Bonta’s lawsuit has reportedly finalized his decision to do that. Both push and pull factors are at work in this decision, if true.

This move is still going to happen, I believe, even though Bonta has stopped trying to fight it, because the logistics of the move favor Paramount’s business interests. The ‘triangle’ of Austin, Nashville, and Atlanta has advantages versus Los Angeles for movement of people, machines, and ideas from office to lot to set. It reduces exposure to political risks. We just saw a demonstration of those risks.

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There are other risks that get reduced by the move. Much attention is paid to California tax incentives, location shooting headaches in Los Angeles, and red tape. All of those analyses are legitimate, but mine is a specialized application of military-historical research. The starting point of my analysis is the friction created by the city of Los Angeles against the corporate movement of Paramount assets on a daily production basis through sheer transportation geography. LA is the prison that keeps Paramount incarcerated.

In city planning, this is called the ‘last mile problem’: the part of any journey between LAX and any part of Hollywood, including Burbank or Paramount Studios, that is spent in traffic gridlock. Both major highways add at least an hour of overland travel time to any flight, to or from LAX to Paramount. Burbank has its own airport, of course, and Southwest has flights to and from Austin and Nashville, but this hardly alleviates the highway congestion.

By personal comparison, the drive time between Nashville and Atlanta is about as long as the drive time across the length of LA, roughly four hours. A Nashville executive can visit a set in Atlanta and return the same day in a company vehicle just as easily as an executive in LA can visit a set in the outskirts of Los Angeles and return on any given day in the same vehicle.

Presently, a crew lands on the ground in LA and burns union hours before the camera ever rolls. In all three cities of the triangle, the airport is already at the gateway to production centers. Intermodal linkage provides a robust ‘triangle network’ of highways and airports that lead from airport to doorstep, wherever shooting locations are. The benefits accrue most if Paramount moves production machinery out of the LA basin gradually, over the next 4-5 years, to Austin.

My theory is testable — eventually. These changes will take years to become visible. If I am correct, the center of mass of the Paramount motor pool will shift east, to the geographic center of the American interstate highway network. A robust production network will connect each node of cultural production, old and new, to the whole country with higher efficiency, so that Paramount can take advantage of any production tax incentive anywhere in America — or the world.

While this new system will have a direct economic impact, likely saving Paramount hundreds of millions of dollars over a decade, that fiscal impact is a rounding error compared to the more significant savings in opportunity costs identified here. In order to make the promised 30-32 movies a year that the merged company is obliged to make by all the merger terms now agreed, and still make a profit, Ellison needs a flexible, hardened, ready-made logistical network — one that includes LA, but without being locked inside the Hollywood penitentiary.

Here ends my executive summary. Premium subscribers have access to the full analysis below.

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Albertans go to the polls in October to decide Question 10, a referendum on whether to begin the process of thinking about possibly planning to maybe leave Canada, some day. Polls show that the measure is unlikely to pass. However, the other nine questions are probably going to fare well with voters.

Alberta is different from Ontario in the same way that, say, Texas is different from California, but Canadian identity remains at the core of Albertan identity. Albertans want to remain Canadians, but they want to remain different Canadians. Alberta has always been different from the rest of Canada.

Economics describe a cultural difference. Alberta is the only Canadian province with no sales tax. Corporate income taxes are among the lowest in the country. Resource royalties from oil and gas are volatile, but they substitute for other forms of tax. This is the “Alberta Advantage”, and it is why the province routinely posts the highest GDP per capita compared to the rest of Canada.

Local politics reflect the difference. Federal voting has been strongly conservative in Alberta for decades, running counter to the nation as a whole. A long tradition of Western alienation from Ottawa has only grown more intense as national carbon policies and resource regulations have affected Alberta’s oil and gas industries.

Alberta receives nothing from the equalization formula that props up other provincial governments with less revenue. Alberta’s measured fiscal capacity is always the highest in the country, so the province does not qualify for revenue sharing, but it still makes the largest contribution to Canada’s federal budget. Many Albertans resent this arrangement.

All of Canada, including Alberta, is reacting to a wave of immigration from 2022-2024 that created economic shocks. Like their American neighbors, Canadians have changed their minds on immigration questions. Five of the ten questions on the October referendum impact immigration policy in the province.

Danielle Smith is the provincial premier, the Canadian equivalent of an American state governor. Right now, she is taking flack for even putting Question 10 on the ballot. Still, Smith is probably going to win on all the questions that actually matter to her, including the immigration-related questions. She has no interest in Albertan separatism. She just understands Alberta very well.

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Alberta’s culture of self-reliance

One measure of the difference between this province and the rest of Canada is that Alberta frequently records the strongest internal migration of Canadian citizens. The population is also younger than most provinces due to this in-migration. While most attention goes to foreign-born immigrants, the movement of Canadians from the east of the country to Alberta in search of jobs has driven most of this population growth most of the time for most of the last 45 years.

Deindustrialization of the Maritime provinces led to high unemployment across eastern Canada during the late 1970s. Meanwhile, Wayne Gretzky made his first start with the Edmonton Oilers in 1979. Alberta was booming right as eastern Canada was dying. Many working class Canadians rejected welfare benefits for staying put, moving west to the new oil patch in search of honest work instead. This trend was soon captured in the lyrics of “The Idiot”, a 1981 song by Stan Rogers from the album Northwest Passage. The title is ironic. Rogers gave voice to a perspective that was politically polarizing even then.

In his 1992 oral-history book Away: Maritimers in Massachusetts, Ontario, and Alberta, oral historian Gary Burrill frames his anthology of internal Canadian migration stories through the lyrics of this song. It is a folk classic because it connects the deep roots of Albertan success to the Protestant work ethic expressed throughout Rogers’s work. Rogers calls on “all you fine young fellows / who’ve been beaten to the ground” to “bid farewell to the Eastern town / You never more will see” and find “self-respect and a steady cheque /In this refinery”.

I remember back six years ago
This western life I chose
And every day the news would say
Some factory’s going to close
Well, I could have stayed to take the dole
But I’m not one of those
I take nothing free, and that makes me
An idiot, I suppose

Stan Rogers died tragically in 1983, so we cannot know what his opinion about current Canadian politics would have been. His vivid lyrics perfectly capture an idea of Alberta in his own time, and moreover they reveal something that Albertans still want to preserve about the character of their province today. Danielle Smith gets it.

Immigration measures on the ballot

“A new poll ahead of Alberta’s fall referendum finds that a majority of voters will likely vote in support of the five questions related to immigration” on 19 October, according to the news from Edmonton. An opinion survey in August “found that 66 per cent of Albertans support the provincial government introducing a law requiring individuals provide proof of citizenship to vote in a provincial election.”

‘Voter ID’ has been a contentious political issue in the United States for decades. In Canada, it has been a contentious topic since 2007, when Harper-era Conservatives made proof of identity and address mandatory at federal polls (Bill C-31). The controversy peaked in 2014 with the Fair Elections Act. Echoing American Democrats, opponents denounced the measure as a solution in search of a problem. Liberals have rolled back some measures of the Act.

The requirement for proof of citizenship in Question 5 of the October referendum is a new layer of controversy. All Canadian elections require ID, but no other province currently requires citizenship documents at the polling station. Naturally, opponents charge that the measure is “scapegoating” all the usual minority groups in “an age-old strategy of blaming minorities for the social, political, and economic challenges facing society”.

Bronwyn Bragg, the report’s author and a geography and environment professor at the University of Lethbridge, says most Albertans are not paying attention to the referendum’s questions about immigration.

“The separatist question is taking up all the oxygen in the room,” she said in an interview, calling it the “most alarming” of the 10 questions.

Bragg is being disingenuous. I found six polls going back to May. An Angus Reid poll in August had the highest support, just 33 percent, for Question 10. None of the other five surveys reached 25 percent support. “Separatism”, which Bragg considers intrinsically anti-immigration, is the least-threatening measure on the ballot in terms of likelihood to actually pass, and does not actually achieve separation even if it was to pass.

All five immigration-related questions on the referendum ballot are likely to pass. Research Co. found that “65 per cent of respondents are in favour of the Government of Alberta taking increased control over immigration for the purpose of decreasing it, prioritizing economic migrations and giving Albertans first priority on employment opportunities.”

Research Co. president Mario Canseco said all five questions on immigration saw a level of support around 60 per cent.

“This is quite remarkable … unless something changes drastically, we’re going to see those pass,” Canseco told CTV News Calgary. “There is definitely a sense that the notion immigration is having a negative impact in the lives of Albertans is resonating with the public.”

He added that a question on Alberta leaving confederation was only supported by 22 per cent of respondents.

According to Smith’s detractors, these questions create “an us versus them divide” in Alberta politics. Immigrant rights lobbyists complain of “hate rhetoric” and “fear”. The Globe and Mail calls it a “shameless attempt to scapegoat immigrants”. Let us be charitable, for the sake of argument, and assume these advocacy voices are right. If so, then Bronwyn Bragg is wrong, because the separatism question is not “alarming” in the least.

Bragg is condescending when she says that Albertans “are not paying attention” to the immigration-related referendum questions. The proposed measures affect eligibility for public welfare programs funded by the province — health care, education, social services, all the many things that every Canadian citizen expects their provincial government to provide.

Anyone with non-permanent immigration status living in Alberta would be charged a fee — basically, a health insurance premium that includes education services. These are commonsense measures to most Albertans.

New residents will also have to live in Alberta for a full year to qualify for any social welfare programs, and it is here that we find the historical character of Alberta reasserting itself. Temporary ‘guest workers’ are deeply unpopular with working class voters across North America and were one cohort of the recent immigration wave that soured Canadians on Liberal Party immigration policy. As the song reflects, ‘the idiots’ in Alberta, the Canadians who made the province great for decades, demand a measure of self-respect from people who come to work there.

“For every $1 of taxes a guest worker generates, taxpayers are covering $10 in services. This is not sustainable”, Danielle Smith has said. Critics dispute her math, but this is a losing response, because it merely slides the scale down to some other dollar figure that will not make Albertans feel better.

Her government’s $4-million promotional campaign asks Albertans to vote yes on questions 1–9, but not 10. Smith says she plans to vote “remain” on the question herself. She has not put any resources into making it pass.

Her cabinet only produced the nine questions that “deal with immigration” and “strengthen our constitutional and fiscal position within a united Canada” (emphasis added). Smith only added Question 10 to the ballot after a judge on the Alberta Court of King’s Bench blocked a citizen referendum on independence for not consulting First Nations beforehand.

Smith says she simply wants the “Stay Free” petitioners behind the earlier initiative to “be heard”. They will of course vote for the rest of the questions, in her coalitional calculation. Letting support for independence onto the ballot in this way is a classic stalking horse strategy.

The elite consensus in Canada that concerns about immigration are an automatic slippery slope to national dissolution is being exposed as a fraud. A moment happened in America in 2024 when opposition to open border immigration policy became speakable, and that is happening in Canada, too. The federal culture of governance is in retreat as the Albertan culture of governance asserts itself.

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Entertainment news site TMZ reported yesterday that Paramount Pictures, the last major studio still mainly based in Hollywood, is leaving California. The move is a death knell for the local film and TV/streaming entertainment industry, which had already experienced a severe decline in recent years. …

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I am just getting back in the swing of things after a three-week slowdown for a slipped disc that made it impossible to do much writing, or much of anything at all. The grand plans I had for August have been delayed into September.

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Forget 'Gender Dysphoria': Almost All The Hormonal 'Gender Medicine' Is Billing Fraud

Everyone can stop talking about ‘gender dysphoria’ now. The term is largely irrelevant to questions about kids and puberty blockers and hormones, anymore, because hardly anyone is actually billing for coverage under that diagnosis…

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3 months ago · 4 likes · Matt Osborne

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“Even in left-wing spaces we can accidentally reproduce health fascism through the language of healing”, Reverend Jain told the Socialism 2026 “Liberatory Spirit, the Sp…

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Archaeology will perhaps wonder, millennia hence, just what gods the people of southern California worshipped at a certain hill overlooking the former urban skyline. Based on the needle hazards they find in the destruction layer, those future scientists will likely speculate that worshippers all used intravenous drugs during some sort of mass pilgrimage…

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You can find Dr. Travis Morrell on X here.

The Do No Harm website is here.

Nobel Prize recipient Dr. James Watson, the discoverer of the DNA double helix, was a genius in the true sense of that word. Still, Watson was destroyed personally and professionally for saying out loud that intelligence has a genetic variability linked to what we call ‘race’. In the western academy, it is a thoughtcrime to notice that genetic variation produces more or less desirable traits in human beings, or that evolutionary time in different environments will produce a variety of traits.

Touching the third rail of racial determinism destroyed Dr. Watson. Academia hates determinism, whether it involves race, gender, or sexuality. Spare me your diatribes on the imaginary racism that Jason Arday supposedly endured in the press with appeals to imaginary white men who got away with something in a dream you just had. Watson dared to say out loud that some inequalities cannot be eradicated safely or reasonably. The academy destroyed him for it.

Nor was the press notably racist against Jason Arday. The most consequential article unmasking him ran in the Guardian, which is hardly a noted right wing outlet. No, the actual racism thrives inside the ivory tower of the academy, among the elite professoriate. The racializing tentacles of academic racism radiate outwards through the host civilization of the western university, corrupting everything.

It is unsustainable, and moreover the reckoning is due. The economics professors can explain it to their colleagues: the enshittification of society, politics, and industry began as, and will likely end in, the dismantling of the university as donors and politicians reprioritize. The academy will go down very much like the English monasteries, now, because the universities are governed by the very utopian idealism they have imposed upon us all.

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Race and the superstitions of the academy

To repeat: Dr. Watson recognized a link between IQ and race. Group average differences are not the same as individual destiny or justification for discrimination, as Watson has recognized, but he was still stripped of all his honorary titles and hounded by the academy, anyway. His family went through months of media harassment.

He did not take his own life, though, because he was not a coward, or a pathetic fraud, which is the same thing. Narcissistic collapse is a much bigger red flag for suicide than autism. And anyway, Jason Arday’s story about being autistic was clearly false, as people who knew him as a child say that he was verbal.

His miraculous story of magical African mother-healing does real harm to actual parents of actual autistic children who mistake his risible lies for truth, then blame themselves for inferior results in their kids. Of all his intellectual crimes, that one is the most unforgiveable, to me, and it speaks volumes about privileges afforded the ‘neurodivergent’ in the academy today. When the neurodivergent have privileges, everyone will become neurodivergent.

Arday is no innocent. A man who sends the police and libel lawyers after journalists when they ask him questions very likely has something to hide. Still, in the 48 hours since his body was found, Jason has become Jesus. Activist students are gathering to hold vigils and declare Jason Arday innocent of plagiarism. Academics who defended his fraud now declare him innocent of same. Never mind the hundreds of examples of plagiarism staring us all in the face: we are supposed to buy this cockamamie story in which racists made it all up, because someone with a degree has said so.

Tyler Austin Harper is such a person. Arday “was fetishized in his downfall by white conservatives who saw him as a test case for their own obsessions with an academic apparatus that they believe is not meritocratic enough — which is to say, not white enough”, Harper writes at The Atlantic. This puts the cart ahead of the horse: a purely meritocratic academy would necessarily be a whiter academy, say the genetic determinists, who are racist for saying so, according to Harper. He deplores the “nakedly racist enthusiasm” for the Arday story which, again, culminated in the pages of the left wing Guardian.

Which is disappointing, because Cambridge is synonymous with academic elitism, and Harper recognizes how out of touch the academy is. He sees “a British academic aristocracy so blinded by do-gooder racial neurosis that it was unable to spot lies that would have been obvious to any Joe Schmo”, someone who is not educated enough to buy Jason Arday’s bullshit. Men who never go to college, who work for long periods of time in blue collar occupations, meet fabulists like Arday, and learn to recognize them. Every working class neighborhood has someone like him.

The degreed classes lack this form of immunity. People who grant actual doctorates to students for masturbatory self-biographies disguised as a dissertations will naturally have no bullshit detector for any man who claims to have run nine marathons on a broken leg. A nonwhite man who makes the same claim will be received with glowing approval by a white academic elite professor, for he feels his privilege most keenly, being a cleric of the ideology of social justice.

Writing about Arday at City Journal before the suicide, John McWhorter said that academic hucksters all share “an assumption that his view is one that everyone would share if not compromised by hatred of the subaltern”. Arday was “a Magic Negro. The kindly, antiracist white academics think suspending their judgment when it comes to a black man makes them good people.”

The cathedral of the university has no immunity to a fraud with Jason Arday’s constellation of real and claimed characteristics. Indeed, it is impolite to question the word of a nonwhite person anywhere, anytime, inside or outside of the cathedral grounds, because of past racism. Black men are presumed truthful because they are held innocent by default due to past racism. This is all supposed to correct past racism, but it is deeply racist, and racializing. It promotes someone like Arday above their ability, guaranteeing an eventual, likely consequential, failure at some point.

That point came when Arday secured a $1.4 million book deal with Simon and Schuster. The triggering event that started the landslide of exposures was Jason Arday chasing a payday with lies. This was not the fault of any white person. Nathan Cofnas dared to write about Arday only after other people had met with Arday’s intimidation tactics. Cofnas is just one academic heretic who has exposed Arday’s extensive plagiarism using standard detection tools.

Never mind: we are supposed to blame racism because Cofnas has been railroaded out of the academy for the same thoughtcrime as Dr. Watson. Harper for one is sure that Cofnas is too tainted by racism to speak about Arday. Harper notes the exposure of Ross Barkan as a plagiarist, and the discrepancy that Barkan has kept his new job at The Nation. Racism, surely!

But this is nonsense. In the counterfactual universe where Arday did not take his own life, he might have profited handsomely on a tell-all memoir, How I Got Away With It. Writing before the suicide, McWhorter made this same point. “We don’t even need to speculate whether sometime in the near future, Arday will use critical race theory to justify his inventions, on the premise that his anecdotes represent a ‘common black narrative.”

In this, he will be backed by people devoted to that school of thought who say that we need to understand him “on a certain level.”

What level is that? A low one—bigotry.

We will never know, of course, because Arday was unable to cope with disclosure of the truth. He probably needed intensive cognitive behavioral therapy. So where were all the people who had lifted him up, at that moment? Why were they not getting him the help he so obviously needed?

The answer, of course, is that they were ghosting his messages. Those are now the same chattering bunch of Brits who demand “accountability” for his death. They are washing their hands in the blood of Jason Arday, martyr to the anti-racist cause. All their DEI crimes are forgiven, now. Thus the effort to sanctify him, exonerate him, and lift him up once again as a saint.

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