Toby Young – The Daily Sceptic Aug 21, 2026
I know from my own experience of being cancelled in 2018, that being turned on by people you expected to be on your side is far more painful than being attacked by your enemies. For that reason, I doubt the coverage of the Jason Arday affair in the ‘right wing media’ was a major factor in his anguish, as the enemies of press freedom are claiming. More damaging to his mental health would have been the attacks in the left wing media and the cascade of people who initially defended him, changing their minds. I’ve written about this in the latest issue of the Spectator. This is how it begins:
Should I regret writing a satirical piece for this magazine about Jason Arday? Yes, according to those who blame the ‘right-wing media’ for his death. A petition started by Jolyon Maugham this week calling for a public inquiry into the “press harassment” of Arday has gained more than 100,000 signatures. A letter from Dawn Butler MP to Ipso urges the independent press regulator to use ‘every available lever’ to take ‘decisive action’ against the Times, Telegraph, Mail and Spectator. Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of the Guardian, has named me as a particularly egregious offender, while the novelist Will Self has called for the journalists who exposed Arday’s wrongdoing to be prosecuted.
It is impossible at this stage to know the exact circumstances surrounding the 41-year-old academic’s death. But I think it’s unlikely the right-wing media played a big part. I say this as someone who was publicly shamed at the beginning of 2018, so have an inkling of what Arday must have been going through. It wasn’t on the same scale but, like him, I was relentlessly targeted, with my sins gleefully paraded before the world, and like him I had to resign from a job that was my main source of income. The position I’d been given wasn’t as prestigious, but an official inquiry was launched and it concluded the appointments process had been flawed. It was a miserable period, and one detail of Arday’s final days jumped out when I read it: he’d lost a lot of weight over the past few weeks. Exactly the same happened to me.
But here’s the thing. I wasn’t particularly bothered by all the attacks in the left-wing media or from left-wing ‘personalities’. I told myself they were just seizing an opportunity to take down a political enemy and discredit a cause they disapproved of – in my case, free schools. What really stung was being turned on by people I thought were on the same side. I remember listening to an emergency debate in the Commons about the scandal of my appointment and wincing whenever a Conservative MP rose to their feet to condemn me. The same was true of attacks in right-wing newspapers and magazines, particularly if they were by people I knew. That made me think that perhaps I deserved all the opprobrium after all.
So I would hazard a guess that Arday was able to brush off the articles in the Times, Telegraph, Mail and Spectator, but found the negative coverage in the Guardian, the New York Times and the Atlantic more difficult to cope with. For me, the most devastating blows were delivered by political allies who first supported me, then had a change of heart. And the list of those who deserted Arday, having initially leapt to his defence, is quite long. It includes the heads of two Cambridge colleges who signed the original petition on Maugham’s website condemning those who questioned Arday’s credentials as ‘racist’, but who then quietly took their names off, as well as Simon Baron-Cohen, the Cambridge neuroscientist who also signed it and then removed his name. It also encompasses Cambridge University, which put out a statement when the plagiarism allegations first surfaced describing Arday as “the victim of a vile campaign”, only to do a volte-face and announce it was going to investigate him after all. Up to a point, it even includes Maugham himself, who wrote a rambling piece when it turned out Arday wasn’t the saintly figure he’d imagined, explaining that he wasn’t the author of the petition, he’d merely agreed to ‘carry’ it on his website, and hadn’t had an opportunity to investigate the allegations because he’d been on holiday. “I am sure that many journalists – and friends of mine – are acting in good faith when describing him as a ‘fantasist’,” he wrote.
That must have been difficult for Arday to read.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Nathan himself has written a piece in the Wall St Journal about being scapegoated for Arday’s death. Click here to read – last time I tried, it wasn’t behind a paywall.
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assault rifles found in migrant camps in France, sparking huge security fears
Story by Michael Knowles • 1h • 3 min read
Police have seized assault rifles in migrant camps in northern France, a top border chief has revealed.
Charlie Eastaugh, director of maritime and small boats at Border Security Command, said smugglers have been caught with guns amid bitter turf wars.
Mr Eastaugh warned that violence has “become more and more common on the French coast over the last few years”.
And he revealed that French officers stopped two dinghies at sea last Thursday before taking dozens of asylum seekers back, prompting hope that more action will finally be taken.
Read more: New Reform UK advisor said state pension triple lock is ‘unsustainable’
Drone footage released on Thursday night showed police being pelted with rocks as they tried to stop a boat from launching.
A beach buggy intercepted the asylum seekers as they tried to reach the water.
Some split away from the main group, trying to thwart officers from slashing the dinghy. And officers were pelted with rocks as they tried to intervene
its the fact that he faked up some of his CV
they were going to check through his credentials
which pushed him over the edge
when i met him he was jovial a bit eccentric, but i reject what some of his co workers said about being crazy but a few folk wondered if he was homosexual
under the laws of positive discrimination he was given extra help be be where he is, that is undeniable
Just another negro grifter who belongs in Africa.
Another Dead Eyed Immigrant, hired because he wasn’t white, who proceeded to shit on the system that put him where he was. I doubt he’s dead. Most likely he cashed in his life insurance policy and went to live in israhell. Scum like him don’t kill themselves, especially not over hurty words. Seeing the filthy nigger wearing a university cap and gown is enough to make any sane person puke. But the infection is everywhere and terminal.
This dude is sooo phony, and all these pretend professors on right n left are all part of the act. The superstar fakes his death, you will see him again in some future fake event. Most of us, including myself never heard of this guy, until the media all of the sudden is all over the guy.
the authorities have done the stephen lawrence carnival to death
its more than worn out now
they are clapping their hands at the jason ardly show
the BBC will no doubt keep this going for months
Same in the Netherlands where the masonic daily, the “Volkskrant”, has come up with another article to the defense of this lying weirdo, Jason Arday. But I also remember the “Volkskrant” publishing a noncritical article at the behest of the “Pedophile Club for PvdA Senators” in the weekend edition and never investigating a thing.
That same PvdA is now merged with GroenLinks and calls itself Progressief Nederland, PRO hahaa…
That habitually lying negroid grifter should have been laughed out of the room on day one. Instead, the DEI, Didn’t Earn It, mob promoted that laughably absurd monkey to elevated levels of academia and celebrity…giving further proof of what a perverted shit show academia has become… Of course, those of us who don’t have our heads planted up our own assholes were already aware from the start of what a perverted shit show and mechanism of degradation DEI is.
Anyone and everyone involved in the DEI sewer deserves to get chased through the streets and lobotomized with claw hammers.
The West Bank’s last Christian village under settler attack
Story by Henry Bodkin
The Israeli settlers always come at sunset, their approach sending the inhabitants of the remote farmsteads into a quiet panic.
They arrive fully armed on noisy off-road vehicles, on foot, sometimes on horseback. They throw stones, break windows, set fires and occasionally, residents end up in hospital from their savage beatings, or worse. In Taybeh, the last entirely Christian town in the West Bank, The Telegraph witnessed an attack that pinned down a local Bedouin family for several hours last week The town, which is close to Ramallah, has been declared a “closed military zone” by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) after months of settler attacks. The Telegraph previously reported how the settlers had used leaf blowers to fan the flames they had set to intimidate the town’s Christian inhabitants to leave
The Israeli settler gang call themselves ” the mad bastards” and are very ctuel
The little Christian church has been burnt
Despite this IDF order, attacks continue unabated and the town is increasingly surrounded by illegal outposts built by Israeli settlers.
anyone leaving their home risks a beating or worse The sound of an approaching settler incursion is always the same – a melee of barking dogs and mothers tersely ordering their children to hide inside while the men shout “wein, wein” (meaning “where, where?” in Arabic), as they try to spot the intruders among the olive trees. In Taybeh, the last entirely Christian town in the West Bank, will soon be no more
The town, which is close to Ramallah, has been declared a “closed military zone” by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) after months of settler attacks. The Telegraph previously reported how the settlers had used leaf blowers to fan the flames they had set to intimidate the town’s Christian inhabitants.
Despite this IDF order, attacks continue unabated
“Last week, we had a weaker fence and they got in,” said Naif al-Kaabneh, pointing to the newly installed coils of razor wire that surround his small compound ne
In the end, the fence held up and – perhaps because of the presence of journalists – the masked intruders made do with hurling rocks.
“It’s the constant stress, they come three times a day,” said the father. “We don’t sleep at night. There is always someone on watch.”
Attacks like these are rampant across the West Bank.
American evangelical christians send money to these monsters, and they could stop it said Ali Bey
Anti-migrant demonstrators in Shrewsbury oppose racist migration policies
Around 80 demonstrators gathered in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, today (Aug 22) to protest against mass migration, calling for the Government to ‘stop the boats.’ Many of the demonstrators were part of the ‘Raise the Flags’ group. They were asking forour folk to come first
and migrant criminal gangs be sent home
LOL..
It’s milli vanilli all over again, only this time the show must go on, never mind that this imbecile was miming his way through life..
people will whine about the ‘standards’ falling, but that’s just it, there actually aren’t any in academia as can be seen with the falsified detritus they fucking publish and provably so..it’s merely a regime bolt on…with the real whirk going on behind closed doors and that will be the mind control operation and secret societies.. most of the fools at universities are just ballast running cover for the real deal which is the re-search ivory tower theatricals..
where they pull at wittgenshteen every so often or dorking or a brain in a bottle or some creep in a wheelchair with a synthesiser voice.. selling talmudic occultism freshly packaged as scientism..
every one of ’em like the dead milli vanilli, a fucking charlatan and fraud..
lolo