Following the dramatic loss of a third of my blood, I recovered medically but not functionally. I couldn’t find a rehabilitation programme without woo or enforced group bonding, so I invented one. I am spending four weeks alone in a lodge in Devon, with a gym, a pool and a physiotherapist called Matt, making physical recovery my full-time job. Readers here for Enlightenment rationalism and liberal principles should ignore me for four weeks while I conquer putting my socks on.

Wednesday 2nd September.

I wake up and immediately began rethinking the idea that an appropriate response to having difficulty walking to the shop on the corner is to travel 6 hours via tube, three trains and a cab to the middle of nowhere.

The husband conveyed me and my suitcase as far as Paddington and we arranged assistance to transfer. I settled in with an audiobook. Sophie Hannah’s new Poirot is excellent.

I was met at my destination by a cab driver and remembered how much I love the West Country dialect. “You’m” (you are) is particularly nice and I’d like to adopt it. Unfortunately, I am from Essex, regularly voted the second ugliest accent in England (thank god for Birmingham).

The lodge is perfect. I particularly love the bedroom with one wall of glass overlooking the forest. A week’s food arrived shortly after I did. The drive to nest gave me energy so I unpack and put everything away and established a reading corner with lots of murder mysteries, a lounging space for watching true crime, paleoanthropology and historical fiction and a table for building a model toy shop, because this is a thing I do now. I regard all this with satisfaction, revel in the solitariness of it all and collapse in a heap.

I regain the energy to move on realising it has become dark. Movement is both difficult and painful. The quiet now feels more threatening than tranquil. I can no longer see into the forest from my lovely big window, but become aware that anybody or anything in it can see me and I cannot currently run. The lodge suddenly strikes me as perfect for filming the kind of horror movie in which I yell at the protagonists for thinking a lonely cabin in the forest was a good place to stay. I have an intense longing for the husband. I close all the curtains and call him. I tell him I don’t miss him at all and am glad to be away from him. He tells me he’s equally glad to be rid of me and to get off the phone because the exotic dancers have just arrived. I feel much better knowing I am loved and missed and go to sleep.

Thursday 3rd September

I wake up early and have tea on the patio overlooking the forest and the lodge is beautiful and cosy again. There are other lodges, a social hub, a restaurant and a leisure centre. Imagining myself on the set of The Evil Dead last night may have been an overwrought reaction to fatigue.

A cab arrives to take me to Matt’s physio clinic/training gym. They’d told me to allow an hour to get there even though it is only 14 miles away. I now understand why. The entire route is made of narrow, winding, single track roads. We’re fortunate to get half a mile before encountering another car or a farm vehicle and then somebody has to reverse to a “passing place”. Everybody generally seems to know which of them should do that, but on one occasion, there was a standoff where we sat for ten minutes with the two drivers glaring at each other until the other finally backed up and my cab driver declared victory. In between passing places, he goes very fast and then slams on the brakes when he sees another car. Fortunately, I can have my spine realigned at my destination.

Matt is great and goes over the plan. He has laminated it and informs me this makes it official and incontrovertible. I solemnly agree. When working together, we will be focusing on the practical movements I cannot currently perform and in between those, I’ll be following instructions on building strength and stamina. The Boss Level of regaining independence is being able to get myself up off the floor.

To this end, Matt informs me we will be starting with a supported lunge-like movement. I tell him my body will not do that and then demonstrate my body not doing that. He spends 10 minutes jabbing me in the legs with a plastic thumb and a rolling pin and then my body does that. I am to perform specific stretching exercises and roller my own legs for the next few days. I am also to walk no more than a mile and stop if I become breathless, perform strange poses in the swimming pool but not swim and lift weights that are almost weightless. Apparently, we are raising the floor of my stamina and endurance before making any demands on it. I have been overwhelming my systems and causing them to crash.

I go back to the lodge feeling great and enjoying the new flexibility of my legs. The man is clearly a genius and his warnings that I will have difficulty moving after this session and need to follow strict active recovery advice seem entirely unfounded. Two hours later, I attempt to walk to the kettle to make tea and find my legs unwilling to support me. The man is clearly a monster and I am broken forever. Only the urgent need for tea propels me onwards. I collapse on the sofa and call reception to tell them I would like them to fill the hot tub after all. I watch Harlots for the rest of the evening while intermittently standing and attempting to kick my own bum as instructed. I then crawl upstairs (literally) to bed.

Friday 4th September

I emerge from sleep feeling very low and tired and walking at all is difficult. I find myself feeling quite frightened to be this weak and limited. I blame myself for this. I did not voluntarily lose so much blood but I could have done much better at doing gentle exercise and not eating so much while dealing with it. I was already very overweight before that and not nearly as fit as I could have been. I am also inclined to think my limitations today are really a matter of pathetic laziness and lack of discipline and I should force myself to move. I have promised not to do this, however, so I spend more time kicking myself up the bum on the patio, which feels fitting.

I realise that I am feeling lonely. This is not a feeling I am accustomed to, because usually, even when I am alone, I am connected to people on Substack and social media. I text my four closest friends pretending to be fine and feeling positive so as not to make a fuss. They are not fooled. The two women encourage me to be kind and compassionate to myself and talk to myself the way I’d talk to them if they were in this position. The two men focus on immediate problem-solving and long-term goal orientation and offer jocular encouragement. I am reminded (yet again) that psychological sex differences absolutely exist and that I love them all.

Restricted to the lodge, I spend the day researching high-protein, calorie controlled meals and arranging to have ingredients delivered next week. I do not think my usual rotation of four different kinds of mashy gloop will inspire me to stick to a healthy diet. Soon there will be lean beef stir fry, salmon and potato fishcakes, prawn linguine and Spanish omelettes. I feel better after this and read the latest Ruth Irons domestic thriller before having an early night.

Saturday 5th September

I awake on Saturday feeling good, gingerly test my legs and find them functional. It has also stopped raining! I arm myself with a map of the resort and set off to explore and specifically to find the gym and familiarise myself with the machinery. On my way, I locate the deer hide. The deer themselves appear to be highly skilled at hiding. I call in at the restaurant and check their afternoon tea menu which is perfectly satisfactory! I am now feeling a little tired so I head for the gym.

Unfortunately, the gym is located on the top of a mountain. I bravely scale it in stages and arrive in the lobby only to collapse in a sofa and be unable to form words. It seems Matt has been speaking to them about my arrival and they were accepting of this. After half an hour I am able to stand up but testing machines is out of the question so I take photos of it in order to watch videos of any I am not familiar with before I next attempt mountaineering.

I make my way back to the lodge and am restored by a virtuous tuna pasta and several gallons of tea. I spend the afternoon working on my model and, on standing, discover that my legs are, again, staging a protest. This seems like a good time for more stretching and testing out the hot tub.

I uncover the hot tub and survey it. Entry appears to require some clambering and it is, by this time, dark. I have visions of myself being eventually found floating face down. I call the husband so he can stay on the phone until I am safely ensconced in it. He cheerfully does so and also informs me that he’s taking advantage of my absence to put his feet up and do absolutely nothing. This means he has embarked on a major renovation or gardening project that he thinks I will be happy about. I’m not sure when we developed this code, but after 25 years, we speak it perfectly. The hot tub restores some flexibility and produces sleepiness so I make my way to bed.

Sunday 6th September

I sleep very badly and on trying to get out of bed, find that this was overly optimistic. I eventually make it to the kettle and spend the morning on the sofa in a fug of groggy stiffness, regretting the exuberance of the previous day. Matt reminds me of the “not overdoing it” rule for which there I have a (laminated) sheet of very specific instructions while heroically avoiding I-told-you-soism for which I am grateful.

I fall asleep for the whole of the afternoon after which I feel better and virtuously perform precisely 20 minutes of active recovery from the sheet, watch trashy true crime on YouTube and go to bed.

Monday 7th September

I wake on Monday feeling absolutely great and full of energy. I “listen to my body” and it informs me that it is raring to go and could, in fact, run a marathon. I am sceptical of this and inform it that it will be walking directly and slowly to the gym where it will perform precisely 20 minutes of exercises on leg machines and then walking slowly back.

On my second journey to the gym, I discover that it is not on top of a mountain after all. It is situated at the end of a moderate and short incline. The perception of Saturday was clearly influenced by a fatigued body. Today, my body is behaving like an overexcited Labrador and powers up the incline straining at the leash. It is reluctant to stop walking when we arrive and insists we should do three circuits of the building and then head straight for the cardio machines. I tell it sternly that this is not the plan and to “sit” (on a leg press and perform a moderate number of sets at a lighter weight than I feel capable of).

My body continues to insist it is strong and capable throughout the prescribed stretches, exercises and more stretches and urges doing more but I ignore it. This was a good move because after the prescribed 20 minute rest, it then informs me my legs are made of porridge and walking back is entirely beyond their capabilities. It also insists that it needs a big, greasy burger and chips (fries). I march it home, ignoring its protests and feed it large quantities of lean protein and tea, whereupon it tells me it now needs sleep and puts that into effect immediately in complete disregard of our sleep schedule.

I feel quite low on waking and still extremely tired. I spend the evening watching a documentary about morbidly obese bedbound people in an attempt to remind myself why I am doing this and reassure myself that things could be much worse, while feeling vaguely guilty that this was exploiting other people’s misery and dignity.

Tuesday 8th September

I wake anticipating another crash day as this seems to be the pattern, but instead my body insists it is fine and needs a walk. It is a bit more restrained than the day before - perhaps a more mature and well-trained Labrador? - but I am disinclined to trust it. I take it for a gentle 15 minute walk on flat ground and enjoy it.

I still feel a little low today and spend the morning adapting my diary for Substack. I had made a rule of “absolutely no work” while focusing on fixing my health but really miss writing and feel quite alienated from myself when not doing it. This seems like a fair compromise. I am still focusing on my body and the conflict I am having with it exists whether I write about it or not! I feel a lot more “myself” when I have spent a couple of hours writing.

At lunchtime, my body again insists that it needs a walk so I agree to walk for just ten minutes and have a sandwich on a bench with an excellent view and then see if I am up to any further walking.

The answer to that is “no” and it soon becomes clear I need to go straight back. On the way back, it becomes clear that I need to go straight to bed and I do so, immediately falling into a sleep that my FitBit recorded as “deep.”

I wake feeling very cold and shaky even though the day is warm and my body insists it needed carbohydrates and tea. Beans on toast restore it significantly but I continue to lie on the sofa feeling like a blob of cold porridge.

It strikes me forcibly while lying here that the advice I keep receiving to “listen to my body” may be complete and utter bollocks. My body is demonstrably a lying bastard. It insists it is tired and needs rest when it actually needs exercise. It asserts that pizza and chocolate will make it feel much better when they make it feel horrible. It declares itself to have the strength and stamina of an athlete at the peak of performance when it is actually a fat, middle-aged woman recovering from a serious health crisis who needs to listen to her trainer about moderation, pacing and rest.

I decide I am done “listening to my body.” It has proved itself to be a thoroughly unreliable narrator. I am, instead, going to go with empirical evidence and sound reasoning based on that evidence. If my body insists it needs rest when it has actually been sitting around for three days and has nothing measurably wrong with it, it is being ignored and taken for a walk. If it demands to be allowed to race up hills and jump on elliptical machines when it has only had four hours sleep, its heart rate variability is poor and the plan says “Active Recovery Day. Go for a 15 minute walk at a moderate pace and then stretch” it will be told to shut up and stick to the programme.

At the end of this first week of physical rehabilitation, I find I am feeling decidedly grumpy with my body.

On reflection, I decide this is probably not fair. My body has, after all, put up with 52 years of me mostly forgetting it exists and treating it as a mere vehicle for my brain. It has consistently done its best to cope with whatever I have thrown at it. It has dealt with being significantly underweight and very significantly overweight. It has tolerated being required to move me about for very long shifts of demanding physical work as a care assistant and had to function for long spells of being almost entirely sedentary while I get lost in some project as a writer. It handled regrettable quantities of illicit substances and hazardous activities during its misspent youth. It went on to produce something of way more value than any product of my brain - my daughter. It also replaced and repaired nerves in my head following three stroke-like incidents and has repeatedly had to try to function on little to no sleep. It really is a very forgiving and quite astonishing machine and it is not at all clear that it should not be filing a grievance against me. In fact, I rather think it is.

Matt informs me this first week of full-time effort to restore my physical fitness has been much more successful than I appear to think and I am expanding my capabilities and raising the level of my endurance as intended. My body is actually responding very well to the effort I am putting into giving it what it needs to recover. I need to be patient.

This does not, however, mean that its signals and assertions should be accepted uncritically. It quite clearly both overestimates and underestimates what it needs in different ways and at different times, and what it wants and feels like doing is not always what it should have or is capable of.

Recommendations to “listen to my body” are therefore trite and annoying and need to be, at the very least, qualified. Humans have had bodies that signal needs and drives for millions of years, but it is only relatively recently that we’ve been able to feel fairly confident that a new human will survive into adulthood and, likely, old age. It does seem that science and reason have a significant role to play here.

I propose a collaboration between body and intellect. I commit to listening to you better, body, and trying to meet your needs much better that has historically been the case. I have, indeed, missed very important and accurate signals like “I am a mammal that requires regular sleep.” I shall endeavour to stop doing that. You, in turn, need to accept that I will absolutely overthink this whole recovery thing, but that this can actually be quite useful. I will compile data on how you respond to what we are doing here and research what is and is not good for you and apply evidence and reason to this joint endeavour.

I accept Matt’s assurances that this first week has been a success and go into the second one with optimism that we are on the right track. Work with me on this, please, body? Onwards!

Edit: Apologies that the original version of this has repeated text. I am writing on a mobile phone in a lodge with intermittent WiFi and had some problems transferring a final draft!

(Audio version here)

A strange kind of black-and-white thinking seems to have arisen around conspiracy theories. A surprising number of people appear to think we face a stark choice:

• Believe that people never conspire together for harmful, criminal or antisocial ends.

• Accept all conspiracy theories as inherently plausible.

This, of course, is a false choice. The same principles for evaluation apply to claims about conspiracies as to claims about anything else. Is there evidence for it? Does it make sense? How probable is it? What would falsify it?

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I recently saw Coleman Hughes give an excellent talk on conspiracy theories at the LevelUp 2026 conference. He rooted human susceptibility to them in our evolved psychology. We make sense of things by arranging them into stories, and stories involving agents with motives are easier for us to understand than complex interactions between impersonal processes, mistakes, incompetence and poorly functioning systems. Consequently, when faced with frightening or bewildering problems, we are prone to attributing them to motivated agents who can be identified and fought.

Interestingly, Hughes provided evidence that we are no more inclined to such thinking now than we ever have been. It can feel as though we have become more prone to conspiratorial thinking, but this appearance is likely due to social media which enables proponents of them to be more visible and find each other.

Hughes’ most important observation, from my standpoint, was the way in which conspiratorial thinking prevents liberalism from working as it should. He pointed out that, for a marketplace of ideas to work and systems like due process and knowledge production and democracy to function, we need a working assumption that people we disagree with are wrong rather than evil, duplicitous and intending harm. The first assumption enables productive arguments while the second justifies force, censorship and dismantling of systems of dialogue, justice and democracy.

Following this talk, people queued up to ask questions, and several of them were variations on: “Conspiracies really happen. Consequently, some conspiracy theories are correct, and to dismiss them categorically is to shut down arguments without addressing them.” Some people felt that ‘shutting down’ was the intention of deriding conspiracy theories: a way of delegitimising critiques that challenged the establishment narrative.

This is a reasonable concern. A marketplace of ideas cannot function if we decide that any particular type of claim or critique is automatically invalid. Nevertheless, we cannot solve this problem by treating all such claims as inherently plausible either. Too often, people approach the issue as though faced with a black-and-white choice between gullibility and cynicism. Gullibility means accepting ‘establishment’ narratives uncritically and dismissing allegations of corruption out of hand. Cynicism means finding claims of corruption, deception and powerful hidden agendas inherently plausible. Framed this way, most people would rather be cynical than gullible.

Better than trying to lean towards a pseudo-sophisticated, cynical scepticism of mainstream assumptions that leads to an (ironically, gullible) uncritical acceptance of conspiracy theories, however, is exercising an evidence-based epistemology and sound reasoning. The false choice being offered in these discussions is precisely that - false. It is not that in order not to be a conspiracy theorist you have to deny that conspiracies ever happen. Or if you accept that they do, you have to lend credence to all theories that they have.

In most situations, we accept that some claims of wrongdoing are true and some are false and that this is best determined via evidence. We do not typically think we must commit to either accepting or rejecting all accusations categorically on the grounds that a cynical false positive error (believing wrongdoing has happened when it has not) is better than a gullible false negative error (believing wrongdoing has not happened when it has). We might think of reasonable objections to the ‘believe all women’ stance proposed by some feminists on the grounds that the consequences of not believing victims of rape were far worse than the consequences of a few false accusations being believed. Critics of this stance argued rightly for the importance of applying due process to individual cases.

We know that conspiracies happen. When somebody is convicted of conspiracy to commit a crime, this is because the body of evidence has been deemed to have established beyond reasonable doubt that they did this. Likewise, the reason people can point to large-scale conspiracies such as Watergate, COINTELPRO, MKUltra or tobacco companies covering up the harms caused by their products as examples of conspiracy theories turning out to be true is precisely because evidence established that they were.

This does not mean that everybody who believed such a claim before the decisive evidence emerged was epistemically justified in doing so. Whenever somebody who arrived at a claim through an ideological or tribal narrative later says, “Look! This shows that I was right!”, they are confusing being right with having had good reason to believe they were right. Subsequent evidence can establish the truth of a claim, but it cannot retrospectively make an unreliable method of arriving at that claim reliable.

If their original belief was rooted not in the available evidence but in a tribal narrative, they cannot reasonably claim the later confirmation as evidence that their reasoning was sound. They are also liable to forget all the occasions on which the same method led them to confidently assert claims that turned out to be false. This is the distinction between truth and epistemic competence. Somebody who arrives at the correct answer by an unreliable method has not demonstrated that the method for getting there was sound.

The distinction between truth claims and methods for establishing what is true, and why it matters so much that the latter are reliable, seems counterintuitive to many people. So, let’s try a deliberately extreme thought experiment.

Imagine two warring tribes with different gods and different creation myths.

In Tribe A’s myth, God is the sun. It became lonely, so it created the Earth and put people on it. But it could never get too close without burning them, so the sun flung a rope around the Earth and began swinging it around itself, allowing it to see all the people living there. The purpose of life is to worship and entertain the sun. If humanity fails to do so, the sun will cut the rope and fling the Earth out into the cold and dark.

In Tribe B’s creation myth, the Earth was alone and the people living on it were cold and blind, so they prayed to largely indifferent gods for a lantern to warm them and enable them to see. The gods took pity on them, created one and sent it orbiting around the Earth so that everybody could share its warmth and light. The lantern will eventually go out and the gods have lost interest again, so the purpose of life is to make hay while the sun shines!

Suppose science later establishes, through observations such as stellar parallax together with gravitational theory, that the Earth orbits the sun. This would not confirm Tribe A’s creation myth. Its members could not now take credit for having been right, demand that everybody worship the sun as a god and insist that any other truth claims contained in their myth had thereby been vindicated. One element of their story happened to be correct by accident. Believing creation myths would remain a vastly poorer epistemology than relying provisionally on multiple forms of corroborating scientific evidence.

Consequently, when somebody proposes that a large-scale conspiracy is being perpetrated by the government or by powerful factions within society, the response should be neither, “No, because that doesn’t happen/those people would never do that,” nor, “Yes, because this is the kind of thing that happens/those people are the kind of people who do that.” It should be: “How do you know that?”

We know that human beings are prone to constructing complex, seemingly coherent narratives that make events feel comprehensible and manageable, fit our pre-existing beliefs and map readily onto concepts of in-groups and out-groups. We then reinforce those narratives through confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. Our most successful systems of knowledge production are designed precisely to mitigate these tendencies: by demanding evidence, exposing claims to criticism and treating willingness to discover that one is wrong as an intellectual virtue. This applies far more broadly than to conspiracy theories.

One questioner at the conference asked Coleman whether it would help if we stopped using the term ‘conspiracy theory’. He replied that changing the language used to describe a phenomenon does not generally solve the problem, because people will retain the same positive or negative attitudes towards it whatever we call it. I typically agree with this stance. Cultural problems and conflicts are rarely resolved by renaming them.

Nevertheless, I do think ‘conspiracy theory’ is an inaccurate way to describe the problem, and that this inaccuracy lends itself to much of the confusion (and deliberate obfuscation) surrounding the subject. The core problem is not that people develop theories about conspiracies. It is how they arrive at them, why they find them persuasive, and whether they are willing to revise or abandon them when confronted with disconfirming evidence.

The problem, in other words, is with a particular kind of epistemology. I tend to avoid the term ‘conspiracy theory’ because it so readily invites the response that some theories about conspiracies have been verified by evidence. Instead, I prefer to identify the problem as a conspiratorial mindset: a mode of reasoning in which an individual interprets events through a suspicious, low-evidence ideological narrative rather than evaluating claims proportionately to the available evidence.

Somebody with a conspiratorial mindset typically sorts the relevant actors into morally opposed camps: one demographic, tribe or faction is good, another is bad, and society, or some sphere of society, is structured in ways that enable the bad group to oppress the good one. Current events are then interpreted through this theoretical framework. Evidence that could support the narrative is seized upon, even tenuous connections are invested with great significance, and disconfirming evidence is disregarded or explained away. The theory typically becomes increasingly elaborate as more and more inconvenient evidence has to be accommodated without allowing the central narrative to fail.

Below is a diagram of an antisemitic conspiracy theory in which I feature. I have encountered it a number of times while being accused of complicity in a Jewish-led plot to eradicate the white race, undermine Christianity and trans everybody’s children. In this case, the ‘good’ people are white conservative Christians and the ‘bad’ people are Jews. The underlying claim is that Jews control much of intellectual life and the media and use this power to harm the good people. There is seemingly nothing that can disconfirm this hypothesis.

The current conspiracy theory dominating online attention is the one around Lindsay Clancy’s trial for the murder of her three children. She has admitted that she killed them but her defence team is seeking to have her acquitted on the grounds of insanity - specifically, postnatal psychosis. Nevertheless, there is so large an online movement blaming her husband, Patrick, for the killings, that his attorneys have issued a statement, putting accusers with both large and small followings on notice that they are defaming him and causing great psychological harm. The implication is that they are liable to be sued. While most feminists sympathetic to Ms. Clancy have argued that a poor standard of postnatal care and/or reckless overprescribing of psychiatric medication was responsible for her becoming so mentally unwell she committed this terrible act, a subset of her defenders will not be satisfied unless she, a member of the good people (women) is entirely innocent and an agent of the bad people (men) supported by systems of power (patriarchy) is guilty.

In this conspiracy theory, Patrick must therefore have killed his children and thrown his wife out of a window and then convinced her, in her mentally vulnerable state, that she did it. He has been enabled to get away with this, according to the theorists, due to either knowing complicity in a cover-up by multiple parties or patriarchal assumptions that regard men as inherently credible and trustworthy while systematically doubting women and being quick to assume them blameworthy. Michael Wagner, a leading scholar in communication who focuses on how the online environment affects people’s beliefs, described the process by which this kind of thinking develops to CNN

Those conspiracy theories, Wagner said, are often ways of looking at the world that provide answers to questions when an outcome is too uncomfortable for people.

“So, if they’re following the trial and have learned a lot of detail about the trial, but don’t trust the legal system, and don’t trust police, and don’t trust the news media, they may be more likely to adopt conspiracy theories as a way to explain why the outcome they think should happen isn’t happening,” Wagner elaborated, calling the phenomenon a “toxic soup for the development of conspiratorial thinking.”

It is, of course, possible that a conspiracy has taken place and Patrick Clancy actually killed his children. But for this to be true, the conspiracy has to be extremely elaborate. He would have had to somehow fake or manipulate the CCTV footage in both the pharmacy and restaurant, requiring the cooperation of people at two separate businesses. The police officers who examined it would have had to either miss this or been complicit in concealing it. Mr. Clancy would also have had to either convince his wife into lying for him or delude her into believing that she herself killed the children, having already, presumably, planted incriminating searches on her own devices. He would then have had to put on a performance of shock and horror at discovering his children’s bodies that convinced experienced emergency services personnel (unless they were also in on it). This is all incredibly complicated, elaborate and implausible.

It is, however, possible. There would need to be convincing evidence of this, but what has been offered takes the forms of ambiguous forensic details, the absence of Lindsay’s fingerprints on the exercise bands and presence of Patrick’s which can be explained by him removing them and technical problems in retrieving blurred prints, along with Lindsay’s low heart rate and body temperature which do not really indicate anything specific about Patrick and Patrick’s shoes appearing differently in different light and at different angles. Elaborate stories have been constructed around all of these

It is possible to imagine ways in which evidence could emerge that proved an elaborate plot facilitated or enabled by external parties which explained these details. It would make a good psychological thriller. However, none has, and in the absence of it, people dismissing the allegation as a conspiratorial speculation right now would have no reason to be embarrassed if evidence of a plot were later discovered. They are making the right judgement based on what can be known at this time and the reasoning of those making the claim. They should change their minds if the evidence later warranted it and in doing so, they would not become ‘conspiracy theorists’ in the sense that this is meant, because they would not have developed a conspiratorial mindset. They would have accepted that a conspiracy occurred because there was evidence that one had.

Ultimately, we do not have to choose between regarding any theories of a conspiracy having occurred as ideological nonsense or accepting all of them as inherently credible. We can instead choose between having a cynical and politically biased conspiratorial mindset or one which attempts to mitigate the tendency to confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, exercises epistemic humility and critical thinking and regards evidence as essential to determining what is true.

I would argue that we should choose the latter and encourage others to do so too. One particularly good study into “epistemic beliefs’ role in promoting misperceptions and conspiracist ideation” is by Garrett and Weeks, communication scholars. They find (perhaps rather unsurprisingly) that individuals’ beliefs about the nature of knowledge and how one establishes it have important implications for how accurate their perceptions are, with reliance on intuition over evidence and a belief that truth is political being predictive of misperception. They write,

Individuals who view reality as a political construct are significantly more likely to embrace falsehoods, whereas those who believe that their conclusions must hew to available evidence tend to hold more accurate beliefs. Confidence in the ability to intuitively recognize truth is a uniquely important predictor of conspiracist ideation.

Garret and Weeks recommend promoting epistemic beliefs that stress the importance of evidence and the need to be cautious about trusting to feelings.

This certainly seems like a good idea! The issue is how to do so most persuasively. There has not been any notable absence of people informing their political opponents that they are indulging in conspiracy theories and should consider caring about evidence instead. This tends to result in defensiveness and, to a particularly conspiratorial mindset, even accusations that the critic is complicit in the conspiracy in some way. Attempts to address mis/disinformation using legal or institutional power are likely to be received particularly badly. This can be seen as more evidence of oppressive, powerful forces censoring the truth, entrench people further into a conspiratorial mindset and force them to gather outside of mainstream spaces where their claims are much less likely to be challenged at all.

When addressing this point in his talk, Coleman Hughes said, “Institutions are downstream of culture and culture is downstream of the stories we tell.” Yes! Rather than trying to force top-down control of information, we would do better to work on reforming our epistemic environments from the bottom up. By far the best way to address the problem of conspiratorial thinking, preference for intuition over evidence and beliefs that truth is fundamentally political is to do so among our own tribes: the people with whom we share goals and values and by whom we wish to be respected. This is where we have the most influence on the stories that get told, the culture that develops from them and ultimately the institutions we rely upon to produce knowledge and use it ethically and effectively.

I would argue that we should all think of culture on a local level and consider ourselves to have some ability to influence it. Because we do. We choose whose thinking we respect and, consequently, whom we read and listen to and which voices we amplify. We choose which circles we move in and how we engage within them. We can all exert some influence over the stories our tribes tell and the cultures our groups develop.

What would improve in your political circles if their members held in highest esteem those who were rigorous, careful, charitable and consistently principled in their thinking; those who cared about what was true and were willing to change their minds when this was warranted? How would things change if members routinely asked one another, “How do you know that is true?” and people spoke in anticipation of being asked this question, knowing that an unsatisfactory answer would reduce their credibility and status among their peers?

We may not have increased our tendency towards conspiratorial thinking as a species, but the supersession of gatekept legacy media by social media, podcasts, YouTube and individual writing platforms certainly creates the potential for perverse incentives in attracting audiences. It has become commonplace to bemoan the influence of audience capture in degrading political and cultural commentary but, too often, people seem to forget that they are that audience. The rapid expansion of available media gives consumers power too.

What if we all tried to boost the most evidence-based and consistently principled voices and criticised conspiratorial thinking, bullshit and illiberalism within our own tribes? If audiences can incentivise commentators to become more sensationalist, tribal and conspiratorial, can they not also discourage those tendencies? If peer pressure and the drive to be accepted within our own social circles can push people towards reckless and unethical behaviour, could they not also incentivise thoughtful and principled conduct?

I think those of us who are concerned about what feels like a growing culture of epistemic chaos should try to avoid simply feeling powerless and besieged by it as an external force. Instead, we should recognise that we are participants in and creators of culture and do whatever is within our reach to change it.

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A strange kind of black-and-white thinking seems to have arisen around conspiracy theories. A surprising number of people appear to think we face a stark choice:

• Believe that people never conspire together for harmful, criminal or antisocial ends.

• Accept all conspiracy theories as inherently plausible.

This, of course, is a false choice. The same principle…

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The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain has over 7000 subscribers! We are creating a space for liberals who care about what is true on the left, right and centre to come together and talk about how to understand and navigate our current cultural moment with effectiveness and principled consistency.

I think it is important that I keep my writing free. It is paying subscribers who allow me to spend my time writing and keep that writing available to everyone. Currently 3.8% of my readers are paying subscribers. My goal for 2026 is to increase that to 7%. This would enable me to write full-time for my own substack! If you can afford to become a paying subscriber and want to help me do that, thank you! Otherwise, please share!

During the third trimester of my pregnancy, I was overwhelmed with fears of postnatal psychosis. I had never experienced psychosis but I did suffer from OCD and my greatest fear was that I could temporarily lose my judgement or self-control or simply fail to pay attention in some vital way and the result would be harm to another person. At one point, I was unable to travel on the tube due to intrusive thoughts that I might somehow lose my mind for a second and push somebody under a train. I was never remotely likely to do anything harmful to another person. OCD works by playing on the sufferer’s greatest fears which are typically contrary to their behaviour. My diagnoses over the years have been ‘scrupulosity’ “harm OCD” and “Responsibility OCD.”

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By the time I got pregnant at 29, I was mostly on top of this. I had an arsenal of techniques to interrupt these thoughts and prevent them from getting a grip. I was aware that being a first-time mother and the anxiety this entails could put these to an unprecedented test and was preparing for that. Then I found out about postnatal psychosis. A horrible news story in which a mother suffering from the condition and experiencing delusions in which she was entirely disconnected from reality had put her newborn baby in the oven, killing it. She did not realise that what she had put in the oven was her baby and was so floridly psychotic that she was taken immediately to a secure psychiatric facility. I found myself dwelling on the horrific nature of that baby’s death but also the feelings of the mother when she came out of the psychosis and was informed of what she had done. I feared that I could be prone to postnatal disorders because my mother had suffered severe postnatal depression, a failure to bond with me and intense anxiety about being able to care for me.

At the time I was pregnant, we lived on the 11th floor of a tower block. I feared that I could, in a state of psychosis, drop my baby out of the window. I had my husband nail the windows closed. I had him and my parents promise me that if I seemed even the slightest bit confused and not myself, they would separate me from my baby and not wait to see if it improved. When I was told I would need a C-Section, my first thought was, “Good. I will be in the hospital for five days. If I immediately become psychotic, there will be people who recognise it and they will protect my baby.”

In the event, nothing like this happened. My daughter was born and I immediately felt an overwhelming sense of love and confidence that I knew exactly what she needed and that I was capable of meeting all those needs. I found the early months easier than most of my friends reported finding them and coped well with initial mood swings and then the sleep deprivation. My fears of postnatal psychosis are now a family story about extreme maternal anxiety and the time I had my husband nail the windows shut.

It might seem that this history could well make me sympathetic to Lindsay Clancy, the mother currently on trial for strangling her three children before jumping from the window in an attempt to end her own life. Her defence is that of postnatal (‘postpartum’ in America) psychosis. I do not know that I am. This entirely depends on what her mental illness did to her understanding of what she was doing, its wrongfulness and her capacity to control her actions. The news reports of the trial include testimony that she was suffering from very profound postnatal depression and a mood disorder and that she had been prescribed a number of psychiatric medications that had produced negative effects to her mood. There are descriptions of her suffering from paranoia and experiencing hallucinations and delusions which, if true, certainly meet the definition of psychosis, but this is contested and it is unclear whether or not she knew what she was doing when she killed her children. This matters.

In addition to this, the case has tapped into the culture wars and particularly the battle of the sexes. There are hundreds of women in pink outside the courtroom expressing their sympathy for Clancy and many are conflating her case with all manner of emotional struggle women may have ranging from hormonal surges to postnatal depression to sleep-deprivation to unsupportive partners. The issue of psychosis and its distinctness from various forms of emotional distress or other mental illnesses is getting lost in the mix. On the other side are those who like to conflate this case with issues like abortion, low birthrates and perceived female entitlement, narcissism, lack of accountability and lack of appreciation for hardworking fathers who enable women to stay home with children. Neither of these is remotely helpful.

Then there are those who make a different kind of conflation between the seriousness of the crime and the responsibility of the person who committed it. This argument goes that if the crime committed is heinous enough, the perpetrator cannot be considered insane, even though these two things are not dependent on each other. If somebody in a state of florid psychosis wades into a pond because she believes a duck is telling her to, she may have committed only a minor park regulation breach, but she still needs to be removed to a place of safety to receive an urgent psychiatric assessment. If somebody hits his mother with an axe because he believes she is not his mother but a demon and only killing the demon will release his mother, he is experiencing a delusion he has no control over and does not know he is killing his mother, even though he has committed a terrible crime. I have addressed this before.

Imagine a scenario in which a woman has just got her baby down to sleep in its nursery and she hears a terrible crash and snarling. She runs into the nursery and finds a wild animal of some kind in her baby’s crib mauling the child. She picks up a chair and repeatedly smashes it into the animal’s head until it goes limp. She snatches up her badly injured baby and runs downstairs to call an ambulance. The ambulance comes and takes her and the baby away. Later, in the hospital, the doctor comes to see her and tells her that her baby is dead. With him are two police officers and they tell her there was no wild animal. The baby died from the blows she swung with the chair. She had been hallucinating.

Imagine that you could know this scenario were absolutely true. You had somehow been able to watch it from her perspective like it was a movie. Would you hold her responsible for behaving in the way she did or was her behaviour entirely morally justifiable based on what she saw with her own eyes? What else could she have done? Run into the room and seen the animal attack and thought, “I’d better not do anything about this in case it is a hallucination and I accidentally hurt the baby and am then charged with that.” Of course not. Nearly every time anybody sees such an attack, it is actually happening and the right thing to do is save the baby.

I would argue that because psychotic delusions, brought on through no fault of the sufferer’s own, really can be indistinguishable from reality and because there are occasions on which violence in self-defence is both morally and legally justifiable, there must logically be situations in which a violent crime can occur and the perpetrator of it should not be held morally or legally responsible. But this is how high the bar needs to be. There must be evidence that the individual did not know what they were doing or that they could not meaningfully comprehend that it was wrong or that they could not prevent themselves from doing it for them not to be morally responsible for their actions.

The question is whether this case was one of those occasions. Did Clancy know she was killing her children or did she believe she was doing something that could not harm them? Did she know the small figures she had in her hands were her children or did she believe them to be some kind of animals or demons that were trying to harm her or her children? The defence has provided psychological testimony claiming that she was ‘like a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings” and “had no appreciation of the wrongfulness of her act.” It claims that she was hearing voices. Meanwhile, the prosecution’s forensic psychologist said she did know she was killing her children and that this was illegal and “her moral awareness of this killing was influenced by her strong desire to die and, if she was dead, not to leave her children behind.” They dispute the claim that Clancy was hearing voices due to lack of prior or subsequent reference to this. The prosecution also presented evidence that Clancy sent her husband out shortly before killing the children which, prosecution argued, indicated an intention to commit an act which she knew he would have prevented. I am not sure, from the evidence reported publicly, that there is reasonable doubt about her criminal responsibility.

The misogynistic rhetoric around this case is contemptible. Those who want to tie this case into their grievances about women not being sufficiently appreciative of men or having become entitled and pampered and resentful of their ‘rightful’ role as mothers and homemakers do not add anything of value to the conversation.

Postnatal depression or psychosis, sleep-deprivation and the psychological toll of spending all one’s time with small children are not social constructs and they cannot be shamed away. People have always had hormones and predispositions to mental illness as well as a physiology that requires sleep and a psyche that needs adult company and intellectual stimulation. Principled social conservatives who wish for a more universally favourable view on motherhood would do better to accept this reality and propose practical remedies such as family support, community support, childcare etc.

That women’s minds can become disordered and their judgement impaired by the toll of giving birth and breastfeeding has long been recognised to the extent that many countries (but not America) recognise infanticide as a crime equivalent to manslaughter rather than murder. This still requires evidence of mental disorder directly related to the effects of giving birth or breastfeeding.

In many times and places in the darker history of our species, the killing of a baby by its parents was considered a decision parents had the right to make or something that was inevitable due to limited resources. Even when it was criminalised by religious or secular law, these laws were frequently ignored or simply not investigated, especially when the mother was married. This rightly appalls us now. We recognise children as having individual rights to continue their existence and we have systems in place to care for them when their parents cannot. The law recognises much evidence that childbirth can, on occasion, produce profound mental disorder which may substantially diminish responsibility. Whether or not it has done so in any given case must be assessed on the details of that case rather than tied into a political narrative.

This is why I believe feminists who try to subsume this case into a vast category of any kind of psychological or practical difficulties women may experience after having a baby or when caring for a number of young children are also very wrong. The existence of genuine postnatal psychosis does not mean every form of maternal suffering belongs on the same continuum of diminished responsibility. Speaking as though it does can only serve to reduce sympathy not only for Lindsay Clancy but for any woman suffering from postnatal psychosis. The need to provide better postnatal care, mental health support and practical support is better addressed practically and without collapsing everything from unsupportive partners to depression to sleep deprivation to psychosis into one mass.

I have a family member who had a history of depression and suffered terrible postnatal depression and struggled to cope. Social workers were aware of this and kept a close eye on the family. This made her extremely anxious and ashamed. She was both terrified that her daughter would be taken away and also so deeply sunk in the ‘worthlessness’ experience of depression that part of her believed she should be. One day, after a sleepless night and a morning of incessant crying, she got on a bus to the social services office, planted her baby on the reception desk, saying, “Take her. I can’t cope and am not fit to be a mother.” She then went home. She believed she had now lost her baby and felt suicidal. Shortly after this, her social worker arrived with the baby and told her this was not the case. In fact, she said, my family member’s action that morning had reassured her considerably. The fear had been that she would fail to recognise that she was not coping and the baby could come to harm. The fact that, when she reached the end of her tether, she reacted by taking her baby to a place of safety spoke in her favour as a mother. Supervision became more supportive than suspicious and she was able to form a positive relationship with her social worker and gradually recover from postnatal depression and be removed from their caseload.

This story had a happy ending due to a combination of a good social worker and my relative’s own primary drive to put her daughter’s wellbeing above her own. She would rather lose her baby than risk her coming to any harm. People may not have control over succumbing to serious mental illness but this does not in itself eliminate a person's capacity to make choices about how their illness affects other people. Did Lindsay Clancy have the ability to make a decision to leave her children rather than killing them? The prosecutor claimed that her motivation was selfish. She wanted to die and she wanted to take her children with her.

Sometimes, when in the grips of a deep, dark depression, life can feel unbearably painful and sufferers forget that they ever have been happy or could be again. It has happened that people in such a state have killed their children in the belief that life is purely pain and misery and a desire to protect their children from that. In this way, both the prosecution's claim that Clancy knew what she was doing was illegal and the defence's claim that she did not believe it was morally wrong could conceivably be true. A severely depressed person might believe that death is a merciful escape from an existence composed entirely of suffering while still understanding that killing another person is against the law. That is not the same mental state as believing that one is fighting a demon or wild animal, or acting under a delusion that makes the true nature of one's actions incomprehensible. Nor, however, does it entirely settle the legal question, which also asks whether mental illness left the defendant substantially capable of conforming her conduct to the law.

Depression and other forms of mental illness, or even chronic sleep-deprivation or insufficient support, can alter someone’s moral evaluation of death without destroying their grasp of reality or their capacity for choice. Psychosis can alter the perception of reality upon which the person believes they are acting, leading them to act in ways which would be both legal and ethically justifiable if their perceptions were correct. The jury in this case needs to decide whether the prosecution has proved beyond reasonable doubt that Lindsay Clancy retained sufficient capacity to appreciate the criminality or wrongfulness of what she was doing or to conform her actions to the law. The answer will determine whether she is held criminally responsible or acquitted on grounds of insanity and dealt with through the psychiatric system.

The drive of political partisans either to exonerate her entirely because they believe society fails to support women struggling mentally after giving birth, or to punish her as harshly as possible because they believe society enables women to become entitled and narcissistic and put their own needs above those of their children, is poisoning any reasoned ethical discussion of this case.

Ultimately, both groups of activists are trying to make Clancy a symbol of a social pathology they perceive and are particularly concerned about whether this is society’s failure to support struggling mothers or a culture of female entitlement and diminished accountability. But Lindsay Clancy is a person with a unique mental state reacting to unique circumstances, and her case needs to be considered as such. Criminal responsibility is radically individual.

During the third trimester of my pregnancy, I was overwhelmed with fears of postnatal psychosis. I had never experienced psychosis but I did suffer from OCD and my greatest fear was that I could temporarily lose my judgement or self-control or simply fail to pay a…

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Since the presumed suicide of Jason Arday, political narratives over who was to blame have escalated in intensity and extremity. These competing narratives tend to collapse several separate questions into one: why Arday reached such a prominent academic position, why concerns about his work were not addressed earlier, why the eventual media scrutiny became so intense, and what ultimately led to his death.

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For many on the identitarian left, the culprits were clearly the media which every day broke new stories about different claims made by Arday, previous attempts by academics and journalists to raise the issue of plagiarism, the shutting down of such inquiries by Arday and Cambridge using the police and legal pressure, interviews with people who knew him as well as opinions on the psychological cause of his inventions and particularly on the issue of ideological capture by Critical Social Justice theories and whether and how this played into the appointment of Jason Arday and failures to take concerns about his academic integrity seriously.

To many public commentators from this tribe of the left, the sheer volume of these stories amounted to harassment which hounded Arday to his death. Further, the motivations for such an intense interest in the case could only be a culture of white supremacy that resented black people gaining professorial roles. Soon the media attention to the case was being deemed a ‘lynching’ - the illegal killing of an individual by an angry mob - including by prominent voices within the realm of critical theories of race. Organised demands for censorship of the press escalated. These focused primarily on state or institutional regulation on reporting of misconduct that could cause any subject of this distress or specifically those of racial minority.

There have also been a handful of alarming threats to individual journalists who report in ways deemed unacceptable.

For many others, but especially critics of the Critical Social Justice (CSJ) movement, significant responsibility for Jason Arday’s death lies with Cambridge University and the culture of universities more generally and their ideological capture by this movement. This stance is underlain by two connected claims. The first focuses on the appointment and promotion of Arday himself. It argues that Cambridge’s interest in Arday was not his academic excellence (his publication record was thin and previous positions brief and unremarkable) but his racial and neurodiverse identity, his focus on Critical Race Theory and his personal story of having overcome great obstacles to do remarkable things. His attraction, in short, was as a symbol of diversity, equity and inclusion and it placed a psychologically vulnerable man of 37 in a high profile position with responsibilities that exceeded his capabilities. Some argued that this was done purely for the optics of his intersectional marginalised identities and personal story and cited reports that it displaced two women of racial minority whose CVs were much more suited to the expectations of the post. This was argued to be unjust not only to the women but to Arday himself. Because he was not able to meet the expected standards and because of his extravagant fabulism, the façade was bound to come crashing down at some point and the toll on him would be excruciating.

The second, related claim is that the intense media scrutiny on Arday was facilitated by the university itself and again because of an authoritarian commitment to the optics of Critical Social Justice. If Cambridge had responded appropriately when other academics first raised concerns about potential plagiarism, the argument goes, the issue could have been dealt with internally and privately. Instead, the response from both the university and Arday himself was to shut down such inquiries, reporting a colleague and a journalist to the police for harassment and engaging an aggressive law firm to defend him from scrutiny while creating a culture which intimidated fellow academics out of voicing any concerns. When institutional processes to detect academic misconduct fail, the job falls to investigative journalists. Because investigation revealed the stories Arday had told of his life to be so extravagant and the truth of them was in the public interest due to a claimed £1.4 million book deal, the media machine was set rolling.

This argument also applies more generally to the ability to criticise the work of scholars using Critical Social Justice theories. Much of the interest in this case has been due to pre-existing concerns about the unquestionability of theories like Critical Race Theory within universities themselves. Academics wanting to make a critique of truth claims or ethical principles within this branch of theorising or argue that it is not fit for the purpose of addressing racism, sexism, homophobia etc. have found themselves accused of holding those bigoted views and threatened with professional consequences, leading to self-censorship.

This would be a perfectly reasonable objection if academia did, in fact, still work like this. A university is the place where ideas like Critical Race Theory should be disputed. This has been made increasingly difficult over the last 15 years and resulted in the formation of alternative spaces - heterodox, gender critical, anti-woke etc. - in order to critique these ideas. These have been valuable but also vulnerable to becoming echo chambers and increasing atomisation and polarisation. Because critique of ideas which have significant power and influence within universities has largely had to come from outside universities, the system of internal critique by which Prof. Arday’s work as well as his alleged academic misconduct could have been addressed more quickly, thoroughly and without massive public attention were lacking. Consequently, the ideas and misconduct have become inextricably connected and media reports have, with some justification, focused on both of them as different facets of the same problem of ideological capture within universities.

Others have argued that by focusing on the press or the universities as the problem, people are neglecting the primary driver of both the media attention on Jason Arday and his death which is Arday himself. It was he who made the decisions which led to highly credible accusations of plagiarism and fabulism and he who took his own life (assuming that indications of suicide are correct). There is validity here too. The tendency to portray Jason Arday as the passive victim of external systems has manifested in an infantalising process that stops seeing Jason, the man, as a human being with agency and reconfigures him purely as a symbol. This has happened on both sides with his defenders frequently referring to him as a vulnerable young man (he was 41 with an adult daughter) preyed upon by racist forces and critics portraying him as a pawn and ‘poster child’ for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. Neither of these give him the dignity of being an adult human being in his own right with his own combination of personal qualities and values who makes his own decisions for which he can praised or criticised.

At its most unsympathetic, those taking an uncompromising ‘personal responsibility’ stance insist that we look at the situation as one man making a decision to plagiarise the work of others for his own advancement and tell tall tales in order to secure a profitable book deal. When his deceptions were discovered, he then made a cowardly decision to end his own life rather than face professional consequences and selfishly inflicted great pain on his wife and children and left them to deal with his mess. In this telling, Arday was simply a bad scholar, bad father and bad person.

I cannot support this interpretation. We cannot read the mind of Jason Arday and he cannot now tell us what his thought processes were. If we accept that he was guilty of plagiarism and fabulism, there are two explanations for this: dishonesty and mental illness, potentially in some combination. The most charitable view we can take is that he was not purely dishonest and that some part of him believed his own stories or had genuine difficulty separating them from reality or his own ideas from those of other people. This interpretation is supported by how extravagant and easily disproven some of his claims were. They were bound to be exposed at some point. Those who are fully in touch with reality and seek simply to advance themselves dishonestly usually make efforts to keep this plausible.

I keep imagining the thought processes of Jason Arday. If it was the case that he was a man who, for reasons psychiatric or neurological, had difficulty distinguishing grandiose stories from reality or his own thoughts from other people’s, then he was, indeed very vulnerable. As such a figure sought to understand himself, find his place in the world and form connections with other people and did this via the creation of stories that received warmth and approval, he could be extremely vulnerable to being fed into political narratives and incentivised to keep creating the stories that facilitated his warm reception.

Isn’t this interpretation of events pure speculation on my part produced by a combination of empathy for a man who was surely on some level, vulnerable, and is now dead and a pre-existing concern that the Critical Social Justice movement reductively tokenises those it claims to champion and coerces them into affirmations of its own belief system? Yes, clearly it is. I cannot claim to know the truth of the matter any more than anybody else can. I, like so many, am falling into the trap of making Prof. Arday into a symbol of vulnerability in ways that confirm my own prior assumptions and creating stories about him. The best I can do is be self-aware about this and say honestly, “I don’t know the truth.” I will read him charitably and assume that he was not purely self-interestedly dishonest. I will not use him as a symbol of “victim of all that is unethical with the CSJ movement” but base my criticisms of that movement on what I can know. I will consider his suicide a tragedy and, rather than regarding it as selfish or cowardly, feel deeply sorry for the intensity of desperation and despair that must have led him to that radical act.

At the centre of these positions about who is responsible for the death of Jason Arday - a racist media, an ideologically captured university or Arday himself - are arguments about why precisely the media chose to focus so intensely and for so long on this particular case.

Was it because we live in a society permeated with white supremacist beliefs that will take every opportunity to dunk on a black man who had the temerity to obtain a professorship?

Was it because there is such widespread legitimate concern about ideological capture within universities and an inability to address this within universities?

Was it because this individual case was just extremely compelling on its own terms and there was great public interest in its details?

A badly underappreciated explanation for the intense media scrutiny is the last one, which is also the simplest. People asking, “Explain why this particular case of plagiarism gained so much attention when these comparable cases perpetrated by white scholars did not?” seem not to have considered this at all. To my knowledge, there are no comparable cases in terms of the ability to fascinate. Cases of plagiarism generally involve one scholar being found to have appropriated the work of another for banal motivations of advancing their career. This is a problem but not a terribly interesting one. The Arday case included shamanic prophecies, dismembered animal corpses, brain tumours, amnesia, medical miracles, well building, time travelling to feature in TV shows before his birth, millions of pounds raised for charity, masked knife wielding assailants & world class endurance feats undertaken on a broken leg. In terms of sheer sensationalism, this was compelling. From a purely commercial point of view, it was a page turner that would have readers returning to read the next installment. Every day some new story was uncovered to add to the full account of a truly bizarre unfolding story. Those expecting the public to simply look away were not being realistic.

It was this aspect of the case that made some commentators who had long been very critical of ‘wokeness’ (including me in my first piece on the subject) uneasy about focusing on Arday personally as a dishonest scholar-activist of the kind we had so often criticised. It seemed likely that he was mentally unwell. As Nigel Biggar, a longterm strident critic of ‘wokeness’ wrote,

He’s trapped in a world of fantasy. Whatever his personal guilt, there’s a tragic quality to his predicament. For, when reality does finally break through, Nemesis will enter, too. A terrible reckoning will cause the self he’s constructed to disintegrate. I fear for his life.

They urged focusing instead on the institutions which had colluded in shutting down those trying to raise concerns about plagiarism. It remained in the public interest to uncover these stories and determine which had some truth in them and which could be disproven given that a book based on many of these stories was forthcoming. But for those of us focused on seriously addressing problems in the academy and within left-wing identitarian movements, capitalising on the exposure of one academic who appeared to be, as conservative politician, James Cleverly put it, ‘a vulnerable fantasist’ felt dishonourable.

This argument is also well-supported: the Arday case attracted widespread interest because he was a high-profile academic at a top university whose work and personal story placed him firmly within Critical Social Justice, amid pre-existing concerns about ideological capture in universities and an inability to address this within universities. I made this case on X in response to Ash Sarkar’s claim that the intense media interest was because he was black.

I replied that this was incorrect. I agreed that Jason Arday was responded to not purely as an individual but as a member of a group towards whom there was public animus but that that group was “Critical Social Justice scholars and activists’ rather than “black people.” I pointed out that the media was not treating him as a representative of black people but of those scholars and that the broader context the case was being tied into was not “What does this tell us about black people?” but “What does this tell us about the state of academia?” These are very different things. This thread was shared 500 times and, before long, I was subjected to a social media pile-on that accused me of justifying the lynching of a black man and my X account is currently unusable. I am not particularly troubled by this and have come to accept it as part of being a political and cultural commentator who annoys illiberal types on both the left and right.

I stand by my claim that the critical media coverage of this case which saw the Arday affair as an example of a larger problem affecting society overwhelmingly presented that problem as the ideological capture of universities by left-wing identitarian politics and not as the appointment of black individuals to professorial roles.

Some people have presented as evidence that the motivations of the media are racist the fact that critical reporting has been particularly intense from right-wing outlets. This does not demonstrate that. Right-wing outlets being the most vocal about institutional problems on the left is hardly remarkable. Nor is it inherently suspicious. Leftwing outlets are also most vocal about institutional problems on the right. We might wish that they would each focus just as much on problems on their own side, but they do not. All we can do is have expectations of them that they make their critiques well-informed and honest and regard as unreliable those which do not, while individually reading both right-wing and left-wing outlets to minimise our own political bias.

In fact, this case has been remarkable in that it has not just been the right recognising and addressing the problem. A particularly good balanced review came from the New York Times, and the Guardian has also published several pieces on it. Among the most popular opinion pieces on the issue have been analyses of the role played by ideological capture in universities by black academics who are able to offer both principled objections and personal accounts. These include postcolonial scholar, Femi Owolade, left liberal John McWhorter, and socialist Tyler Austin Harper.

It is very important that we reject the Critical Social Justice movement’s conflation of their own ideas with black people. CSJ is a particular Western political theoretical framework which includes theories about race. Black people are human beings who may or may not subscribe to this theoretical framework. The claims of the CSJ movement to represent the views of black people are contradicted by evidence that black people, like white people, are politically and philosophically diverse. Claims that to be critical of CSJ is to be prejudiced against black people are therefore false. People can, do and should oppose racism from a variety of ethical frameworks.

For many of you reading my work, that framework will be liberalism - the philosophy of individual liberty. Liberals oppose racism on the grounds that people should be treated as individuals of equal inherent social and moral value and with equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Any attempts to constrain or limit individuals on the grounds of their race, sex, sexuality or other immutable characteristic are illiberal, intolerable and must be resisted. We typically oppose CSJ because it does constrain individuals on these grounds and seeks to impose specific views, values, beliefs, experiences and knowledges on people according to their identity and deter dissent using authoritarian means.

Does this amount to a claim that none of the media response to the Arday affair or none of the appetite to read about it was motivated by racism? No. We can, and I would argue should, reject the hypothesis that the intensive media focus on this case is driven by a pervasive culture of white supremacy that objects to black people having professorial roles, but the claim that racism has manifested around this case is supported by evidence.

There have been some blatantly racist responses to the story online and some extremist outlets have also been unambiguous in their belief that black people are intellectually inferior and cannot be academics.

Equally, and potentially more concerningly (due to the plausible deniability inherent within it), some people with genuinely racist views do use legitimate concerns about ideological capture by Critical Social Justice theories and associated DEI (or in the UK, EDI) policies and programmes to their own ends. Their concerns are not genuinely about shoddy epistemology, dubious and inconsistent ethics, counterproductiveness in reducing racism or authoritarian speech control among the scholars and activists of this movement. They were either always rooted in racial animus and white identity politics or have become so in an illiberal, tribal reaction to the CSJ movement’s identity politics and conflation of their own theories with black people.

This is a problem that exists and it is essential that it is acknowledged to exist and addressed. This is best done by those of us who criticise CSJ on the grounds of epistemology, ethics and effectiveness. We come in all races and from all over the political spectrum and are the best placed to detect and object to racism or other identity-based illiberalism masquerading as principled critique.

Nevertheless, we cannot dismiss all critique of CSJ as dishonourably motivated or refrain from principled critique because some of it is racist. There are legitimate and important reasons to criticise this school of thought and its authoritarian movement for those who care about reliable knowledge production, individual liberty and effective methods of addressing social problems. We must instead identify and marginalise bad faith engagement with the problem that seeks to exploit good and principled arguments.

There may be some grounds to criticise the media for its coverage of the Arday case, but current claims to that effect do not seem to be supported by strong evidence and many solutions that advocate suppressing the media in cases like this are alarming in their bias and authoritarianism. I would support a rigorous, empirical investigation into the focus of the reporting on this case purely for informative purposes. I do not anticipate that it would find evidence of a ‘racist feeding frenzy’ as claimed by Cambridge’s chancellor. I suspect that it would find a combination of focus on the details of Jason’s Arday’s stories in response to public interest in the bizarre nature of them and criticism of the case as evidence of ideological capture at Cambridge to address this preexisting concern about the state of academia.

The death of Jason Arday is a tragedy and questions can and should be asked about how he came to be in such a vulnerable position where so many extravagant tales of overcoming adversity to achieve great things failed to pass a fact check and credible allegations of significant plagiarism could be made against him and why this was able to happen at one of the UK’s oldest and most prestigious universities. This will not save Jason Arday, but it could provide information on how to recognise, support and protect both vulnerable individuals and important institutions. Turning such a complicated human and institutional tragedy into a simplistic activist morality tale, will not help us understand what happened, protect vulnerable people or improve the institutions involved. There are no winners here.

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Since the presumed suicide of Jason Arday, political narratives over who was to blame have escalated in intensity and extremity. These competing narratives tend to collapse several separate questions into one: why Arday reached such a prominent academic position, why concerns about his work were not addressed earlier, wh…

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Yesterday, Elon Musk posted an AI video of himself in the guise of the comedy spy character, Austin Powers. It was entitled, “Elon Musk: The Man Who Bought the UK.”

Shortly after this, he posted a five-minute, 30 second video comprised entirely of images of himself in heroic and worldsaving fantasy poses. Here are some of them:

I went to investigate what his fans and admirers were making of all this. In response to the first video, some of them were arguing that he was laughing at himself in an admirable, self-deprecating way. Somebody else had made the video and it was both ridiculous and grandiose. Elon knew it made him look silly but is the kind of man who can take a joke at his own expense.

Musk’s sharing of the second video was not really explicable this way. Some of his admirers were explaining it on the grounds that he is on the autistic spectrum. It seems that those who found it a cringeworthy and grandiose form of self-mythologising only do so because they are neurotypical and don’t understand autistic ways of thinking.

It was this argument that put me in mind of Jason Arday and his self-aggrandising fantasies. The main defence of Arday from those who accepted that he had been fantasising was that it was his autism which led him both to ‘mimic’ (plagiarise) other scholars’ work and to understand himself and relate to others through heroic narratives of excellence triumphing over adversity. The implication was that anybody who saw this as a problem was being ableist (and also racist). For others, his stories couldn’t be accepted as fantasy at all, because they needed to buy into the mythology of Jason Arday and what he symbolised about overcoming racism and ableism. (Many autistic people have, understandably, registered strong objections in both cases to autism being invoked as an excuse for self-aggrandising stories. This is not a common feature of the condition).

The situation with Musk does seem to have some parallels, although they should not be overstated. Musk is (probably) not literally claiming to be some kind of superhuman saviour of humanity, like a modern-day Caligula declaring himself to be a living god. He is playing with AI of which he is a creator and which is recognised as such by people viewing it. His mythologisation of himself is therefore presented as a fantasy rather than as literally true. The primary concern, from my perspective, is that the absurd fantasy imagery conveys a political story some fans appear quite willing to endorse non-ironically: Musk as uniquely capable rescuer of decadent Britain/Western Civilisation/humanity. There has already been fan art that buys into the figure of Musk as a saviour as well as some prominent British figures endorsing the idea of Musk owning the UK and its citizens.

Can I suggest we not do this? Creating systems that promote self-aggrandising fantasists into roles for which they are not qualified but which symbolise grand political narratives just doesn’t seem like a terribly good idea. We can admire figures like Arday who (probably genuinely) overcame significant social and communication problems to learn to read and write without encouraging them to define themselves as ‘victor over great hardship,’ giving them a professorship at Cambridge and helping them to build this mythology around themselves. Likewise, we can admire the genuinely very impressive achievements of Elon Musk in the realm of technology without encouraging him to believe himself to also be skilled at international politics and to use his wealth and influence to intervene in them while building up an image of him as the saviour of humanity.

Because neither of these self-images are rooted in reality, building a mythology around them will only ultimately end in disillusionment and a need to try to undo the damage caused by having encouraged and enabled them in the first place. This has already caused a crisis at Cambridge from which it will take some time to recover. The fall-out from anything a man of Musk’s power and influence might do could be much harder to repair. It would be much better to retain a sense of perspective and reality, credit such individuals for their genuine achievements, encourage them to seek appropriate professional support if they appear to become lost in a fantasy world and steer them away from positions of leadership for which they are not qualified. Then address political and cultural issues in ways that focus on material reality and practical strategy rather than heroic symbols and myth-making. Can we not do that instead? Please?


Update: A few hours after I wrote this piece, Jason Arday was found dead. Police are not treating his death as suspicious. Social media is already buzzing with speculation, assuming suicide, and making claims about who should be blamed: right-wing media for reporting the accusations against him, or left-wing academia for promoting him into an untenable position and failing to address concerns about plagiarism earlier. None of us yet knows the circumstances of his death. For now, people would do better to refrain from speculation and respect the privacy of his family.

(Audio version here)

The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain has over 6500 subscribers! We are creating a space for liberals who care about what is true on the left, right and centre to come together and talk about how to understand and navigate our current cultural moment with effectiveness and principled consistency.

I think it is important that I keep my writing free. It is paying subscribers who allow me to spend my time writing and keep that writing available to everyone. Currently 3.8% of my readers are paying subscribers. My goal for 2026 is to increase that to 7%. This would enable me to write full-time for my own substack! If you can afford to become a paying subscriber and want to help me do that, thank you! Otherwise, please share!

Today, I came upon a note on Substack which claimed that somebody who believes that housing should be treated as a human right in public policy but does not take homeless people into their own home is not being true to their principles. This kind of argument appears repeatedly on both left and right. It is a category error. The political stance: “I believe society should be arranged in such a way as to facilitate X” belongs in a different category to the personal stance “I feel I have a responsibility to implement X in my own life.”

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The most common variation on this from the right is a claim that people who support immigration would offer their spare rooms to immigrants if they weren’t hypocritical.

The most common variation on it by progressives is that those who oppose abortion would adopt many children if they weren’t hypocritical.

People can be hypocritical in relation to either of these stances. Occasionally, a Brit declaring that a country belongs to those whose ancestors built it and that others have no business living there turns out to be making this declaration from Spain or Dubai, where they themselves now live. Sometimes somebody who thinks abortion is always morally wrong and should be illegal is found to have had one while publicly proclaiming that position. But the ethical inconsistency comes from proposing societal rules to apply to other people that they are not willing to apply to themselves. This is an entirely different issue to believing that society should implement policies without being willing to take a personal role in the implementation of all of them. This isn’t actually possible.

If you are someone with a range of mainstream positions on how society should be run and what public policy should be, you could legitimately have a range of stances which you do not implement personally. You might think violent criminals should face long prison sentences without volunteering to turn a room in your own house into a cell and guard a prisoner there. Likewise, you can believe your country should have a stronger military defence without joining the army. You can reasonably campaign for school reforms without becoming a teacher and you can think borders should be more strongly defended without becoming a border guard.

The difference between public policy and individual moral obligation is generally tacitly accepted by people who live in complex, modern societies. In a small community of a few dozen people, an individual who wants something done could perhaps reasonably be expected to take responsibility for doing it. A society comprising millions of people cannot function that way. This is why we formed governments, democratic systems, institutions and policies in the first place.

We do not hear people say, “If you really believe the council should fill those potholes, why aren’t you out there with a bucket of asphalt?“ We understand the claim “public roads should be properly maintained” to be a position on how our authorities should spend taxpayers’ money, not a commitment to a personal project. Notably, if private citizens were to take on responsibilities their political goals deem should be a matter of public policy, this would undermine those political goals and be significantly less effective. We all know this when it comes to mundane issues but people tend to become strategically confused about distinctions when the issue is morally or politically charged. This is, of course, because they don’t approve of those political goals and don’t want them to become public policy, but feigning confusion is not a respectworthy way to further that cause.

In liberal democracies, this process of organising responsibilities takes the form of electing governments which operate by the consent of the governed. Political parties who want to be elected set out their policies and then citizens vote for the ones they want to see implemented. This happens within a context of broader public debate in which people make arguments for why certain policies are better than others practically and ethically and others evaluate and counter these arguments. This liberal democratic and dialogic process is complex, messy and sprawling but has been very effective and has created the most successful and prosperous societies humanity has ever known.

People who live in liberal democracies generally do have a basic understanding of how they work. Those who pretend not to know this typically wish to shut down those with whom they disagree while avoiding the part which engages with arguments and makes counterarguments. It is the childish and tiresome recurring theme of contemporary political discourse that made this X post go viral, but it is certainly not limited to the left.

The right way to disagree with somebody making a claim about what rights should exist or what public policy should be is to dispute the proposition itself.

If somebody takes a blanket position in favour of immigration, objections should be made on specific ethical and practical grounds. Ethical grounds could involve stressing the importance of vetting individuals for values compatible with those of a liberal democracy and the pre-existing culture. Practical ones could consider the unsustainable pressure on housing, infrastructure and public services. “Why don’t you house immigrants in your spare room?” contributes nothing to this discussion.

Likewise, someone who thinks abortion is morally equivalent to killing a child should be presented with arguments that counter that proposition. Ethical arguments could include arguing that consciousness and viability matter to moral status, and that the bodily autonomy of the pregnant woman is of paramount ethical importance. Practical ones could consider the likely social consequence of the emergence of dangerous backstreet abortions and people having more children than they can care for. “How many children have you adopted?” does nothing to establish that abortion is morally justifiable.

I suggest that when people take the “pretending not to understand things” stance in place of good faith argumentation, we should take them literally and respond as though to a small child who has not yet learnt how society works or someone who has previously lived in a monastery of some kind cut off from wider human society. Take the objection at face value and patiently explain the distinction it requires you to believe the person doesn’t understand.

That doesn’t work because we live in a very big and complex society. It has millions of people in it and requires thousands of policies to govern rules, rights and responsibilities. We manage these via the system of democracy. Democracy is when every adult individual gets a say on a collection of policies….

This can be surprisingly effective at getting people to stop feigning confusion and I would argue that it is justifiable in such circumstances. It is not gratuitously insulting the purportedly confused person’s intelligence or knowledge. It simply takes claims of ignorance or incomprehension more sincerely than the claimant wanted them to be taken. Trusting that other people mean what they say and responding sincerely to it is generally good practice. If they did not sincerely mean what they said, the fault lies with them, not the person assuming good faith.

This does generally irritate the strategically confused and they will likely object that you are being patronising and assert that they are not a total idiot who does not know how the world works. You can then respond that, in that case, they should probably stop pretending to be one. Instead, they could join the rest of us in arguing for or against certain propositions and policies, as befits the inhabitants of a liberal democracy.

Today, I came upon a note on Substack which claimed that somebody who believes that housing should be treated as a human right in public policy but does not take homeless people into their own home is not being true to their principles. This kind of argument appears repeatedly on both left and right. It is a category…

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(Audio version here)

Yesterday, the feminist Substack account, Liberating Motherhood, published a letter from a female reader struggling with a profound mismatch in needs for emotional intimacy in a heterosexual relationship. The response from the writer of that account, Zawn Villines, has annoyed me intensely. It seems to me to be a perfect example of our current problem with ‘battle of the sexes” narratives getting in the way of good and reasonable people with much to offer a partner being able to have healthy relationships. In writing about this, I found myself returning to arguments I was having with other feminists thirty years ago, and to some of the experiences that shaped my commitment to liberalism in the first place.

Liberating Motherhood

My autistic partner melts down when I ask him for love. How can I ask him for less and stop centering myself? Feminist Advice

Submit a question for this advice column using this form…

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a month ago · 240 likes · 50 comments · Zawn Villines

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The writer of the letter reveals having a much higher need for emotional intimacy than her partner. She describes her attempts to get him to talk more about his feelings and the relationship as gaining in intensity and urgency as she became more insecure. She acknowledges having pursued him and “talked things to death trying to find a way to understanding and repair.”

This appears to have overwhelmed her partner to such an extent that he has withdrawn almost entirely, leaving their shared home and wanting very little contact with her. He has said that her mode of emotionally expressive communication makes him feel flooded and anxious and that he has serious reservations about her approach to conflict and boundaries. Two therapists working with him think he’d benefit from an assessment for autism and that this could explain both his low level of emotional expression and his “overwhelm” response. Their couples counsellor has recommended she respond only minimally when he initiates contact and focus on caring for herself.

The writer clearly feels a great amount of shame that her attempts to reconcile their differences have focused on her own need for emotional intimacy and not enough on his need for emotional space. As a hyperverbal person myself, I feel deeply sympathetic to her compulsion to resolve issues by ‘talking them to death,’ even though this is clearly counterproductive given his withdrawal. I think her decision to go beyond therapists with in-depth knowledge of them both and consult a feminist outlet for “mothers who are pissed off about sexism, household chore inequality, and endless misogynistic bullshit” was ill-advised.

Zawn Villines responds to the letter from a political standpoint which sees men and women as cogs in a system designed to oppress women. She diagnoses the writer’s problem as having been socialised by patriarchy to undervalue herself and her needs. She interprets her partner’s behaviour as a power play in which men weaponise psychological terminology around attachment to get women to shrink themselves and attend only to men’s needs.

Villines claims to be able to see the future because she has seen this pattern repeatedly in heterosexual relationships, but then attributes behaviours to this man that the woman has not described. She depicts him as making endless demands and requiring his partner to be his emotional caretaker when what she has actually reported is his asking her to leave his emotions alone and give him more mental space. She accuses him of meltdowns, tantrums and childishness when his response has been to become anxious and withdraw.

Villines then confidently asserts that he will either demand she give up her career to support his or demand she become the breadwinner while undermining her career. The letter-writer has indicated nothing like this. She also predicts that, if they have children, he will become physically or emotionally abusive to them and their mother. Villines declares that his behaviour will always make his partner feel unwanted and unhappy, leaving no room for the possibility that, despite being emotionally inexpressive, he might care deeply for her and show this through practical support, loyalty and commitment.

Villines does offer two useful pieces of advice. She says it does not matter whether this man’s low level of emotional expression and discomfort with large amounts of emotional expression is caused by autism. It does not. One does not need a neurodevelopmental disorder to be legitimately emotionally private or to find excessive emotional expression uncomfortable. She also says the writer needs to accept that this relationship might not be right for her. It might not be. They may be able to accommodate their very different needs, but they might also each be happier with somebody closer to their own place on this spectrum.

The rest seems like absolutely terrible advice which, if taken to heart, is likely to encourage a woman who currently recognises that insecurity causes her to verbalise emotional distress in ways her partner finds overwhelming to recast herself as the unambiguously injured party. This will not help her current relationship or future ones. Their best chance is for her to continue recognising and working on this tendency while considering his need for emotional space, and for him to recognise how difficult his low level of emotional expression is for her and find clearer ways to communicate his care and commitment despite not naturally being emotionally expressive.

When people are reading the world through ‘battle of the sexes’ narratives, these kinds of individual solutions that focus on the people involved as they really are and seeks to get each individual to better understand the other and find ways to resolve differences can never be considered. They focus only on ‘men’ and ‘women’ as groups with interests and power dynamics theorised to dominate everything according to theories of ‘patriarchy’ or, conversely, ‘gynocentrism.’ Every situation is therefore interpreted towards this end, leading to an utter dearth of consistent principles, empathy, compassion, reason and recognition of the individual human being who loves and seeks to be loved.

Imagine that the writer had been a man reporting that he felt he had overwhelmed his female partner with his emotional expression and urgent insistence that she share all her feelings with him and repeatedly affirm her commitment to the relationship to an extent where she had left their home and was avoiding contact with him? He was aware that he had been centring his own needs by communicating in this way and needed support in giving more consideration to those expressed by her? Is it at all likely that somebody reading the situation through a feminist lens like Villines’ would respond that he was undervaluing himself and his own needs and that she was being abusive and he should flee the relationship? I think not. Instead, this admission would likely be used as evidence of the devaluation of women’s needs and controlling behaviour produced by having been socialised into patriarchy where men feel entitled to continuous emotional support from women at their own expense.

Meanwhile, on the other side of this toxic coin, those contenders in this destructive battle who believe that men are systematically disadvantaged and it is women’s needs which are constantly prioritised and women who have an entitled attitude, would read the situation very differently. They would see the woman in this account not as somebody who struggles with insecurity but loves her partner deeply and wants to repair the relationship via the very communication he is finding so overwhelming, but a mentally unstable, emotionally abusive control freak who believes herself entitled to ignore reasonable boundaries and could potentially become dangerous. In our current discourse, “Borderline Personality Disorder’ would be likely to be diagnosed and weaponised and even argued to be women’s natural state of being and enabled by the “feminisation of society.” If it had been the woman who had withdrawn from the relationship due to becoming overwhelmed by a male partner’s volume of emotional expression and demands for emotional availability, this would be interpreted as women lacking in accountability, being emotionally abusive and manipulating the man via ‘the silent treatment.’

It is all a horrible, toxic mess which threatens to greatly increase misunderstanding and loneliness for anybody who buys into either narrative.

I would argue that there is a direct equivalent in (misandrist variations of) feminist analyses of mismatched needs for emotional intimacy between men and women, on average and (misogynist variations of) men’s rights activist analyses of mismatched needs for physical intimacy between men and women, on average. It is, of course, entirely possible for the man in a heterosexual relationship to be one who has a greater desire for emotional availability and frequent discussion of feelings and the state of the relationship or for the woman to have a greater desire for sexual intimacy and more frequent sex. However, statistically, this mismatch much more commonly manifests in more women complaining that men are insufficiently emotionally available and more men complaining that women are insufficiently sexually available. Consequently, this is what has found its way into the battle of the sexes and I have engaged with the latter on X many times.

The arguments over a mismatched desire for physical intimacy typically take the form of those who consider themselves to be arguing in the interests of men insisting that women in relationships who lose interest in sex or have never had a high libido are failing in their duty to their male partners and should have sex whether they want it or not. This is often accompanied by a threat of sanctions for not doing so. “Tell her you’re not in the mood for paying the mortgage if she tries that” is a common refrain. Other men always respond to this by saying they have no wish to have sex with an unwilling partner and it is men’s job to inspire the desire for sex in women. However, men are very likely to believe that regular sex is an essential part of a romantic relationship and, aside from times of illness or other physical barrier, that a sexless relationship is unsustainable. Women are the sex most likely to report a loss of sex drive and finding their male partners’ continued appetite for it very stressful and anxiety-inducing, sometimes leading them to dread bedtimes and avoid any form of physical touch in anticipation of being invited to sex and facing disappointment and frustration if they decline.

I get drawn into these arguments when I counter arguments that sex is something women must provide if they want their husband to continue being the main breadwinner by pointing out that this closely resembles Second Wave Radical Feminist arguments that marriage is a form of prostitution for women (or that women typically also have jobs now). However, I have drawn more fire for responding to someone making a strong and, I would argue, insupportable claim that men repeatedly asking for sex (pressuring) or saying that they will end a relationship in the absence of sex is a form of rape.

I have argued repeatedly both that women must always have the absolute right to decline sex with their partner (or anyone) and that it is not abusive for men to continue to initiate sex and become dissatisfied in a romantic relationship that does not include it. I think the parallel with mismatched needs for emotional intimacy should be clear here. Men must always have the absolute right to decline to share their own feelings or devote significant time to listening to a partner’s and it is not abusive for women to continue to initiate such discussions and become dissatisfied in a relationship which does not include emotional sharing. This stance is most simply defined by accepting that two things can be true at the same time:

1. Being in a committed relationship with someone does not grant you automatic and ongoing access to either their body or their mind. The individual holds sovereignty over both and his or her bodily or mental autonomy must be inviolate.

2. People can legitimately become dissatisfied with a relationship which does not meet either their sexual or their emotional needs. They can then legitimately seek a compromise, agree an alternative arrangement or end the relationship.

It is not inherently abusive for one member of a couple to either try to initiate sex or a conversation about feelings and relationships or to decline either. Other factors around this dynamic can make it abusive, of course. If one partner threatens to make the other’s life miserable or become violent or end the relationship and deny the other person access to shared children if they do not have sex/disclose their innermost thoughts and feelings on demand, this can become part of an abusive relationship featuring coercive control. Saying, “No, I don’t want to have sex/talk about my feelings right now or as often as you’d like me to or, even, ever again” is not, in itself, abusive. It is stating a personal decision that every individual has the right to make. In a healthy relationship, we’d expect ‘not now’ to be simply accepted, ‘not as often as you’d like’ to be discussed thoughtfully and ‘not ever again’ to prompt a serious conversation that results in either a new kind of relationship or the end of a relationship.

I argued about this a lot with other feminists in my early twenties when I was an active liberal feminist. This was inspired by being one of many individuals who don’t fit typical psychological sex differences in regard to emotional expression. Although I enjoy analyses of people’s thoughts, feelings and relationships including my own, I am not an emotionally expressive person and I have always required a great deal of mental and emotional space to process and understand my own thoughts and feelings in my own time.

This mentality caused me some difficulties in my romantic relationships with both men and women, but particularly with women who were more likely to want to know what I was thinking and feeling before I had fully processed this myself and worked out whether it was reasonable and something I wanted to share. I was frequently accused of being emotionally unavailable (not necessarily in those words which were not commonly used at this time), wanting to be on my own too much, requiring a silent environment and becoming overwhelmed and irritable with too much talk of any kind, but especially highly emotive talk. Attempts to live with three boyfriends and one girlfriend all failed because I felt crowded and given inadequate mental and emotional space.

When I was 26, I met the man who was to become my husband of (now) 25 years. I had decided by this point that I would never be able to live with someone else. I first told him that ours would be a one-night-stand and then a casual once-a-week dating relationship, then that we could spend weekends together but leave me my weekdays to myself, before I accepted that he was somebody I could share my life with. My David, while sociable and extroverted himself, is an extremely easy-going person who simply accepted that I am someone who needs quiet and to be alone for much of the time and was happy to accommodate that. He liked that I had absolutely no objection to him going out with friends of both sexes without me and actively encouraged this. Previous girlfriends had objected to this. He, while sociable, is also emotionally private and had also been accused of being emotionally unavailable by previous partners. He liked that, if I noticed he was upset about something and asked him what it was, he could tell me that it was nothing for me to worry about and he’d tell me when he’d worked it out and I would accept this. In short, our temperaments are utterly compatible and the relationship works.

In my early twenties, I felt much more under siege about this. At the same time that I was aware that people I had romantic relationships with saw me as emotionally unavailable, feminist discourses were evolving in ways that theorised such attitudes among men to be a product of patriarchy conditioning them to be stoical and resist emotional expression. It is my memory that there was a wave of such ideas in popular feminist culture in the mid nineties although, pre-internet, this may just have been in my circle. There was certainly a drive at this time to decondition men from emotional reserve and get them to open up about their feelings and relationships. I found myself sympathetic to the men on the receiving end of this, due to being very guilty of the condemned reserve myself.

I developed an argument specifically targeted at fellow feminists who were strongly, consistently and rightly arguing that women must have complete control over their own bodies and the absolute right to decide who had access to it. This followed on from legislation in the UK that finally made rape within marriage a criminal offence. I insisted that we should extend this concept of individual autonomy not only to bodies but also to minds. I argued that the right to grant or deny access to one’s own mind was equally important as the right to grant or deny access to one’s own body and attempts to force entry to either were abusive in different ways.

I even raised an objection to the euphemism ‘selling herself’ to describe sex work. I argued that feminists should never use this term because it implied that a woman’s ‘self’ was located in her vagina or other orifices used in sexual activity when, really, a woman’s ‘self,’ like a man’s, is located in her brain. I said that those who sold the products of their minds and creative imaginations could more justly be said to be selling themselves and that they had the right to choose to do so, but that the contents of one’s mind can only legitimately be bestowed willingly. Any attempts to coerce others to disclose the contents of their minds or, worse, to tell them what they must believe and affirm was as abusive and wrong as coercing them into sex or physical labour. This ‘freedom of belief’ intuition would later guide my early objections to the rising Critical Social Justice (woke) movement.

My views on this received a mixed reception among feminists in the mid-nineties because I was arguing from individual autonomy rather than women’s interests as a sex class. Radical feminists were critical of it because they believed that women’s interests could only be advanced by foregrounding women’s interests as a class as theorised by feminism. They valued ‘consciousness raising’ as a way to get everybody seeing the same structures of patriarchal oppression that they did. I felt this subordinated individual women’s preferences, goals, intellects and personalities to a collective and consequently constrained the way individual women must think and live their lives. (If you ever see radfems criticising ‘choice feminism,’ they are talking about liberal feminists like me)

Liberal feminists were more receptive to this idea but they often regarded the ‘liberal’ component of their liberal feminism as secondary to the feminist component. That is, they were feminists focused on the interests of women, first and foremost, and they committed to doing this in a liberal (anti-authoritarian and respecting of individual liberty) way. I gradually came to realise that I worked the other way round and was a liberal, first and foremost, and my activism and writing could be described as feminist when the individuals who were being denied individual liberty were women and they were being denied it because they were women. In the same way, my objections to prejudices like racism and homophobia were not motivated by having the interests of racial or sexual minorities as a guiding star, but having individual liberty as that core principle and objecting to racism and homophobia because it denied that to individuals who were black, brown, gay or lesbian.

I continue to believe that a commitment to individual liberty - liberalism - remains the most ethically consistent way to address social problems whether on a grand political scale or a small personal one. By keeping the individual at the centre of social analysis, we protect ourselves against the kind of motivated reading illustrated above in which the wrongdoer is always going to be identified, not by the specifics of the situation or the personalities involved, but by which demographic group they belong to and the power structures theorised to exist around that.

I am not at all convinced that there is a wrongdoer in this situation and I think political analysis is likely to be the opposite of helpful. I see a woman struggling with deep insecurity which is causing her great emotional distress and to be responding to it in ways that are counterproductive, but still trying to be self-aware and consider the impacts of her responses on a man she clearly loves very much. I have nothing but respect and sympathy for her. I see a man overwhelmed by the verbal manifestations of distress and finding them very difficult to deal with, but he is still hanging in there and engaging with couples counselling, indicating that he cares deeply for her too. I feel deeply sympathetic to him. I hope they find a way to navigate the differences in their temperaments and degrees of emotional expression and find a way back to each other. If they do, it will not be by taking advice from proponents on either side of the battle of the sexes.

The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain has over 6500 subscribers! We are creating a space for liberals who care about what is true on the left, right and centre to come together and talk about how to understand and navigate our current cultural moment with effectiveness and principled consistency.

I think it is important that I keep my writing free. It is paying subscribers who allow me to spend my time writing and keep that writing available to everyone. Currently 3.8% of my readers are paying subscribers. My goal for 2026 is to increase that to 7%. This would enable me to write full-time for my own substack! If you can afford to become a paying subscriber and want to help me do that, thank you! Otherwise, please share!

Yesterday, the feminist Substack account, Liberating Motherhood, published a letter from a female reader struggling with a profound mismatch in needs for emotional intimacy in a heterosexual relationship. The response from the writer of that account, Zawn Villines, has annoyed me intensely. It seems to me to be a perfect…

Read more

(Audio version here)

The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain has over 6500 subscribers! We are creating a space for liberals who care about what is true on the left, right and centre to come together and talk about how to understand and navigate our current cultural moment with effectiveness and principled consistency.

I think it is important that I keep my writing free. It is paying subscribers who allow me to spend my time writing and keep that writing available to everyone. Currently 3.8% of my readers are paying subscribers. My goal for 2026 is to increase that to 7%. This would enable me to write full-time for my own substack! If you can afford to become a paying subscriber and want to help me do that, thank you! Otherwise, please share!

A number of readers have now asked me to comment on the astonishing case of Cambridge professor Jason Arday, against whom accusations of very significant plagiarism have been made, alongside evidence of other blatant falsehoods. People think I might have something useful to say on this issue because Arday uses Critical Race Theory and other Critical theories of which I have long been critical and appears to have a very shaky relationship with the concept of truth, which I have argued to be a pervasive problem in these corners of academia. As one correspondent wrote, “The situation surely illustrates the contradictions inherent in social justice ideology with regard to truth-seeking.”

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I have not weighed in on this issue so far, largely because I feel that the subject is being so thoroughly covered by other writers and commentators and the problems presented by it so widely perceived accurately (even the Guardian has acknowledged the seriousness of the accusations) that I have little to add. I admit to also feeling some measure of pity for Arday himself. Some of the claims made by him are so extravagant and so easily disproven—he claimed to have appeared in a television series that aired twenty years before he was born—that it seemed possible that something more psychiatrically complicated than ordinary dishonesty might be involved. It occurred to me that somebody exhibiting the same behaviour in a more obscure corner of academia might simply have been quietly removed from his post and referred to mental health services.

I continue to think that focusing on Arday as an individual is less useful than considering the failures of the epistemological systems around him: their failure to detect his unattributed borrowing from other people’s work, and to question the sheer volume of deeply implausible, if not impossible, claims he has made about his own achievements. Equally troubling are the fallacious arguments and motivated reasoning now shaping discussion of the case.

Is it likely that Arday’s chosen theoretical approach, Critical Race Theory, which includes postmodern approaches skeptical of objective truth and has ‘storytelling’ as a central feature is directly responsible for his own relationship with truth and fabulism? Probably not.

Theorists within CRT can rightly be criticised for presenting fictional stories which speak to perceptions and feelings of systemic racism rather than empirical research into it. For example, “The Space Traders” by Derrick Bell tells a story of aliens appearing in America to offer technology to fix America’s debt and pollution problems and provide abundant energy in exchange for all of its black citizens. A referendum returns an agreement to this deal and black Americans are taken away in chains. This story has been used to illustrate the belief that white American society, despite having made positive noises about racial equality, would actually sacrifice black Americans if it were in its interests to do so. This can sometimes be used almost as evidence for a positive claim to this effect, even though this event did not occur.

Is it possible that Arday is doing something along these lines? A story has developed around him of a black, autistic individual overcoming great odds—diagnosed with autism at three, he did not speak until he was eleven or learn to read and write until he was eighteen—to become Cambridge’s youngest black professor. Could his later claims to have completed six marathons in six days with a broken leg, pursued professional football and snooker careers, raised £5.5 million for charity, built wells in Africa and South America, while being sent animal corpses and threatened with knives by people who resent black people obtaining professorships represent an expansion of this story?

It is possible, yes. Arday’s forthcoming book, Great and Unfortunate Things, is a memoir of his life and has this theme. One reason that I did not comment on this issue before was that I thought it possible that Arday’s conception of himself as somebody who overcomes great hardship to achieve extraordinary things—possibly influenced by a neurodevelopmental disorder—had become so psychologically important that he had lost sight of what was true and what was fictional. This is pure speculation on my part, but it would be the maximally charitable interpretation. If so, he would be somebody requiring appropriate professional assessment and support, not a social-media pile-on.

This is not, however, the kind of storytelling found in Critical Race Theory. That acknowledges itself as storytelling and claims to express a form of experiential truth distinct from objective truth (although equally valid). Arday presented these achievements as factual and, when questioned about them, prevaricated, softened or recast the claims by supplying additional details, or simply reasserted that they were true and that doubt of this was motivated by bigotry. He has also used his racial and neurodivergent identity to frame questions about plagiarism as motivated by racism and ableism in an attempt to chill scholarly critique and questioning, including reporting a fellow academic to the police for harassment for raising the issue. This, understandably, chills critics’ willingness to be sympathetic.

More significant than anybody’s speculation about an individual’s possibly pathological conception of truth, however, is why his stories have been uncritically accepted within his department, his university and in activist circles and why academics raising concerns about plagiarism (which is extremely hard to deny and even includes reproducing the original work’s punctuation errors) were not taken seriously. This could certainly be related to a mindset among those who value identity-based theories derived from postmodern thought which favour politically and emotionally resonant narratives over objective truth! The initial reluctance on the part of Cambridge to investigate this properly is deeply troubling.

Equally concerning have been some of the politicised responses to this story, in which little regard has been paid to what is true. Some on the identitarian left have dismissed concerns about Arday’s apparent fabulism and scholarly misconduct as products of racism and ableism. While the Good Law Project described the plagiarism allegations as entirely false and baseless, others, such as the prominent Black Studies professor, Kehinde Andrews, have argued that such “exaggerations” are ubiquitous and that Arday has been singled out because he is black.

Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology, was criticised for appearing to argue that the media should not cover the allegations against such a high-profile academic because he is autistic and at an increased risk of suicide. Both Andrews and Baron-Cohen signed the Good Law Project’s petition asserting that the accusations were not true. Baron-Cohen, however, appears subsequently to have removed his name, after Cambridge announced new investigations into Arday’s qualifications and honorary appointments and confirmed that separate complaints of academic misconduct were already being considered.

This is unambiguously placing identity-based narratives above truth. It can only serve to undermine academia and principled activism against racism and ableist discrimination against autistic people.

It is not entirely unreasonable to be concerned about the motivations of those presenting evidence of Arday’s plagiarism and challenging his claimed achievements. Nearly all reports of the plagiarism allegations have stressed that Nathan Cofnas, the philosophy researcher who produced convincing evidence of it, had previously written that, under a true meritocracy, black people would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.” It is reasonable to consider the possibility that Cofnas continues to believe this hypothesis and has been seeking evidence that supports it.

This does not, in itself, invalidate the evidence he has presented concerning Arday specifically, or its possible implications for whether Arday earned his high-profile position legitimately. It is normal for scholars to investigate hypotheses they already consider plausible, including hypotheses that many people find deeply offensive. To reject evidence because one objects to the perceived motivations of the person presenting it is, again, to confuse truth with morality: “I object to what I perceive to be your motivation for presenting this evidence; therefore, I reject the evidence itself.” This is clearly fallacious reasoning.

The safeguards against scholars—or anyone else—seeking only to confirm beliefs they already hold include viewpoint diversity, openness to criticism and an expectation that people will change their minds when counter-evidence warrants it.

The incident has also prompted some deeply illiberal conclusions from the identitarian right, with certain social-media users interpreting it overwhelmingly through the lens of Arday’s race rather than his individual conduct. Some have implied that black people can obtain academic positions only by cheating because they lack the necessary intelligence and are invariably “DEI hires”; others have suggested that plagiarism is an inevitable consequence of an inherent dishonesty among black people. Such claims have, however, been scattered among comments from small social-media accounts and have been greatly outnumbered by criticisms of the institutions and left-wing activists for having created the environment and discourses that failed to recognise, dismissed or denied evidenced concerns about Arday’s scholarly integrity.

Some of these criticisms have also been expressed in hyperbolic language that condemns universities utterly and/or the entirety of ‘the left.’ However, serious criticisms remain and should be addressed seriously.

Why did Cambridge take so long to investigate concerns about academic misconduct raised by other academics, seemingly acting only after intense media pressure? Were those responsible for investigating genuinely convinced that the allegations formed part of a dishonest and racist right-wing campaign against black academics or scholars who used Critical Race Theory? Did this conviction prevent them from examining the evidence properly?

Were they intimidated by the social and cultural prestige of the Critical Social Justice movement and afraid of being accused of institutional racism themselves? Had Cambridge invested so heavily in the celebrated figure of Jason Arday and in its appointment of him as its youngest black professor that admitting error felt too embarrassing? Or were truth and academic rigour simply less important than maintaining the correct “social justice” narrative, which both Arday’s academic field and his personal story appeared to embody?

Will scholars and activists on the identitarian “woke” left accept any responsibility for this debacle? Will they acknowledge that a discourse in which prominent black or otherwise marginalised figures cannot be criticised or held to ordinary academic and professional standards without their critics risking accusations of prejudice and professional reprisals damages both the quality of those fields and public trust in them?

Will they consider that this does not remotely serve the people they claim to champion? It diminishes genuine individual excellence by casting suspicion on those who have earned their positions. It forces members of minority groups into political pigeonholes, denies the diversity of their views and subjects them to the soft bigotry of low expectations.

This cannot achieve social justice.

A number of readers have now asked me to comment on the astonishing case of Cambridge professor Jason Arday, against whom accusations of very significant plagiarism have been made, alongside evidence of other blatant falsehoods. People think I might have something useful to say on this issue because Arday uses Critic…

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(This is a transcript of a talk given at the 2026 Heterodox Social Sciences Conference at the University of Buckingham)

Nearly everybody in this room agrees that Critical Social Justice—or “woke”—has become a serious problem within the academy: one hostile to objective truth, academic freedom, individual liberty and scholarly standards. The disagreement is not over the diagnosis but the cure: should disciplines shaped by Critical Social Justice be abolished or reformed?

That disagreement was neatly illustrated in a recent exchange between Nicole Barbaro Simovski of Heterodox Academy and J. D. Haltigan, Professor of Developmental and Evolutionary Psychopathology. Writing in defence of reform, Simovski argued that the real question is not whether ideologically homogeneous departments should be preserved or abolished, but whether universities will do the harder work of reopening them to genuine inquiry. Viewpoint diversity, she argued, is not a token gesture but a necessary condition for knowledge production.

Haltigan’s response was blunt:

“You don’t introduce viewpoint diversity into something like Gender Studies. You abolish it. It is not science. It is not knowledge. It has no place in the university.”

At first glance, these positions appear irreconcilable. I don’t think they are. Once we distinguish between what universities study and how they study it, much of the disagreement dissolves. Sex, gender, race, ethnicity, culture and identity are all legitimate subjects of inquiry. The problem is not the subjects. It is the epistemological framework through which they are increasingly being studied.

This distinction is reinforced by the recent Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. The report recognises that excellent scholarship exists in every field it examined, but says:

“The most straightforward form of distortion arises when otherwise traditional scholarship is constrained by disciplinary norms to yield results that have been determined in advance to be required by a political or social project.”

If we want to preserve the humanities, this is the problem to solve. Crucially, it is not merely the conclusion of outside critics but one reached by many scholars within these disciplines.

It is also what my colleagues and I set out to test in the Grievance Studies project. We deliberately wrote papers around political conclusions chosen in advance, supported them with impossible or implausible claims, stretched theory to fit, and abandoned ordinary scholarly standards. Rather than rejecting this, reviewers urged us to push further.

One reviewer expressed a wish to make our argument that queer astrology is as valid as astronomy a reality in physics classrooms. The leading feminist philosophy journal accepted, in nine days, an argument that criticism of Critical Social Justice should itself be treated as oppression and punished by universities. A paper claiming that nightclubs are inherently rape-condoning spaces and that men should be trained like dogs based on implausible observations of thousands of incidents of “dog humping” won an award from a feminist geography journal.

The absurdity is obvious. The real tragedy is what this does to rigorous scholarship within these fields.

That was brought home to me by two emails I received after our award-winning geography paper was exposed. One came from a group of empirical feminist geographers studying sex discrimination in the allocation of medical resources in South Asia, deeply concerned that the publication of work just like ours was undermining theirs. The other came from a scholar who blamed me for damaging the journal’s reputation because she had a paper due to appear in it. When I suggested that the real damage was being done by scholars publishing papers like ours in complete seriousness, she concluded that this merely demonstrated my racism and misogyny.

Those two responses captured the divide. Some scholars wanted higher standards. Others defended the framework that had allowed obvious nonsense to pass as scholarship.

The abolitionists’ objection is almost never aimed at scholars doing rigorous research on sex, race, identity or culture. It is aimed, quite rightly, at the critical-theoretical framework that has come to dominate large parts of Identity Studies. The reformers’ proposal is not to preserve that framework, but to subject it to rigorous scholarly standards and competition, requiring it to justify itself or fail.

Reform is often cast as the cautious option, and abolishing departments called things like “Gender Studies” as the radical one. The opposite is true. The source of the problem is not departments or course titles, but an epistemology, coupled with an authoritarian certainty, that has spread far beyond them. Abolishing a handful of departments is a cosmetic fix; it cannot address the way of thinking now running through much of the university.

Critical Social Justice rests on a distinctive postmodern understanding of knowledge, power and language. It treats knowledge as something constructed through relations of power and perpetuated in language. Those who embrace this framework regard themselves as uniquely able to perceive these hidden structures, while dissent is read as ignorance or complicity. There is nothing new in this: religious zealots and conspiracy theorists have been doing it for centuries.

The Humanities Report identifies exactly this problem, describing:

“A long-standing and deeply rooted current in contemporary humanistic scholarship that regards the idea of scholarly objectivity with profound suspicion.”

This is not the uncontroversial observation that scholars are fallible or influenced by their social context. It is the far more radical claim that truth, objectivity and reason are themselves expressions of power. As the report continues:

“A scholar who repudiates the language of truth and evidential support will see the political standards she brings to bear in assessing scholarly proposals as no less legitimate than any other standard...”

Once that premise is accepted, political commitments become not merely legitimate criteria for evaluating scholarship but the only valid ones. The report calls this a ‘catastrophe’ for the humanities. I think that is the right word.

If the problem is ultimately epistemological, authoritarian and widespread, it becomes clear why abolishing departments or courses cannot solve it. That approach removes wokeness in conveniently identifiable chunks while leaving intact the conditions that allowed it to spread. It has two problems.

First, it risks destroying legitimate scholarship along with the ideological excesses. We saw this last March, when the Trump administration proposed measures targeting courses and research that used terms such as race, gender, class or equity, referenced transgender ideology, or were deemed anti-Israel. Universities hurriedly removed anything that might attract scrutiny. Sociologists and economists studying social mobility, historians and legal scholars researching America’s racial history, and international relations scholars analysing the Israel–Hamas conflict were all caught in the net. Biomedical datasets went too, affecting, to my knowledge, researchers studying HIV in the United States and even those opposing puberty-blocker trials in England.

Second, it mistakes the symptoms for the disease. Critical Social Justice has spread far beyond Identity Studies. Remember that our most notorious paper was published in geography, and our flagship paper in philosophy, a discipline the report identifies as containing both outstanding scholarship and serious problems. The fields in which I was penalised for referring to evolutionary biology were history and literature. The academics and students who contact me now most often come from teacher training, social work, clinical psychology, nursing and medicine.

Trying to cure universities of wokeness by targeting its most visible manifestations is like lancing the boils of a systemic infection while leaving the bacteria in the bloodstream. You remove the obvious symptoms, but the disease remains alive and well.

Meanwhile, academics genuinely committed to Critical Social Justice can simply change their terminology while leaving their epistemology and their hostility to free inquiry entirely intact. This is a central theme of Cynthia Burack’s excellent forthcoming book, How Gender Studies Broke the University. Burack, a gender studies professor, describes how her colleagues responded to external pressure not by abandoning their assumptions, but by changing their language, reorganising institutional structures and creating hidden processes that continued to privilege affirming scholarship while excluding dissent. As she concludes:

“This is how I know a piecemeal, guerrilla warfare approach to respect for free speech and debate is bound to fail. Free inquiry requires institutional infrastructure.”

I suspect everyone here agrees with the second sentence. The real question is what that infrastructure looks like. Burack argues that free inquiry cannot be sustained by reacting to bias or censorship whenever it appears. Those interventions are necessary, but reactive. Instead, free inquiry must be built into the university itself, modelled by academics and administrators, reflected in policy, taught explicitly to students, and upheld whenever disputes arise.

For her, this is fundamentally an epistemological commitment. Universities should cultivate the critical thinking that makes knowledge possible: evaluating arguments, weighing evidence, engaging seriously with criticism, and recognising logical fallacies and cognitive distortions. Students should encounter serious arguments from competing perspectives, learn when questions can be answered empirically and when they turn on values or interpretation, and see academics modelling intellectual humility by acknowledging uncertainty and engaging fairly with those who disagree.

That is why I do not think we should simply aim to abolish departments because they use language or concepts we now recognise as “woke”, as some abolitionists recommend. What we need instead is something much more ambitious: a renewed commitment to the purpose of the university itself. It means rigorous methods grounded in the assumption that knowledge is obtainable; an uncompromising commitment to individual liberty and free inquiry; and the restoration of reason, evidence, coherence, viewpoint diversity and responsiveness to criticism as the common currency of scholarship.

That is reform—not of subjects, but of epistemology.

Some scholar-activists argue that insisting on evidence, reason and viewpoint diversity simply imposes another worldview. It does not.

Universities should not impose a single worldview or require historians, philosophers or political scientists to reach particular conclusions. Different disciplines ask different questions and use different methods. Not all of them even seek empirical truths. Literature can be interpreted and aesthetically evaluated. Philosophers must be free to challenge evidence, reason or freedom itself. Political scientists must be able to hold political views and argue from them. What universities should demand is not neutrality, but something harder to evade: intellectual honesty, openness to criticism, and scholarship demonstrably fit for purpose. This does not enforce agreement on conclusions, only standards for reaching them.

Interpret a poem, and you owe no one evidence. Make a claim about the world, or impose a policy on other people’s lives, and you owe them coherence and, where the claim is empirical, evidence.

Critical Social Justice does not confine itself to interpretation. It makes claims about the world and prescribes policies for it, and to prescribe a policy is to claim that it will work—a truth claim answerable to evidence. Its advocates must therefore choose. Either they want their claims warranted, and have already accepted the standards they profess to reject, or they do not, in which case they give us no reason to believe them, fund them or act on them. A framework that denies that objective knowledge is obtainable cannot coherently demand to be believed.

This is where woke claims have struggled. Unconscious-bias training, rolled out across universities, corporations and public institutions, has repeatedly failed to produce its promised effects, and where effects appear, they often run in the wrong direction. One large study of over 800 US firms found that the share of black women in management fell by 9 per cent on average after five years of mandatory diversity training. Compulsion provoked the very resentment it was meant to dissolve.

Universities already refuse certain grounds for knowledge: a researcher cannot appeal to divine revelation or diagnose criticism as demonic possession. We call this not persecution of the devout, but the price of admission—an expectation that claims must be supported by evidence and defended against criticism. Critical Social Justice has been exempted from that price, and I see no reason to keep exempting it.

As activists like to say, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” They’re right. Subjecting Critical Social Justice to the same standards as every other scholarly tradition is not oppression. It is equality.

And none of this bans a single idea. Perhaps we are all wrong, and queer theory, the critical theories of race and the rest have more to offer than they appear to. If so, there is a way to find out: let them compete on an even playing field, defending their claims according to the standards required of any rigorous scholarship and engaging seriously with competing hypotheses, not dismissing critics as unenlightened or declaring topics ‘not up for debate’.

Imagine what a genuinely reformed Gender Studies department might look like: an open debate in which gender conservatives, who see gender roles as a natural and good expression of sex differences, weigh their ideas against those of gender-critical feminists, who see those roles as socially constructed and harmful to women; queer theorists, for whom an internal sense of gender is more fundamental than biological sex; and evolutionary psychologists, who draw on biology and psychology to understand psychological sex differences.

Does anyone really think queer theory would emerge from that process strengthened?

My suspicion is that, if required to submit their ideas to such critique, many advocates would simply leave the academy. But they would not have been banned, no-platformed or silenced. They would not acquire the glamour of forbidden knowledge and retreat while crying persecution and gaining support on those grounds. They would simply have conceded that their methods do not meet a university’s standards. Those who stayed to argue would only demonstrate the poverty of their arguments.

This is where reform and abolition turn out not to be so different. Bad ideas are not defeated by prohibition. They are defeated properly and lastingly by being exposed to rigorous criticism and shown to be false, incoherent or indefensible. There is no better place than a university for that to happen.

This approach also plays the long game. We do not establish the precedent that governments, managers or prevailing orthodoxies may decide what can be researched or taught. Nor do we risk those ideas returning, or other equally bad ones replacing them, whenever political fortunes shift. Instead, we restore the conditions that transcend politics and make scholarship possible.

Serious scholarship exists across these disciplines; serious epistemological corruption exists alongside it. The university exists to produce knowledge, and that requires evidence, criticism, humility and openness to revision. Those who accept those conditions should be free to participate, whatever their politics. Those who reject them reject the purpose of the university itself.

I don’t think the choice is between reform and abolition. I think we should reform the epistemic conditions of scholarship in order to abolish the ideological exemptions that have corrupted it. My argument is not that epistemic reform offers an easy path, but simply that, if the problem is epistemological, only epistemological reform addresses it at its source.

If we can preserve the subjects but restore academic rigour, Critical Social Justice will not need to be banned. It will simply need to defend itself against competition.

I do not believe it will survive.

(Audio version here)

On Sunday, the leader of the Green Party, Zack Polanski, shared a set of photos from a Green Party event from another account on Instagram. Among them was an image of a man wearing a tee-shirt that quoted the song lyrics “We’re only making plans for Nigel” and below that was an image of a guillotine. Mr. Polanski later removed the image, with a spokesperson for the Green Party saying he had not been aware of the image on the tee-shirt.

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Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform, immediately reported this on social media, sharing a screencap of the image, cropping out the part which revealed it to be a share from another account. He wrote, “If I was to post anything as inciteful then I would expect to be arrested, and so should Polanski.” Mr. Farage then reported this to the Met Police asking for them to investigate Polanski for incitement to murder and also made a complaint to the Greater London Authority, on which Polanski sits, asking them to investigate whether he had breached their codes of conduct.

For some people, mostly Reform party members, the issue here is that there have been threats of violence against significant Reform party figures and one of its spokespeople, the MP Ann Widdecombe, was recently brutally murdered. In such an environment, they argue, posting such imagery, even if unserious and citing a song lyric, is dangerously irresponsible and puts Reform MPs at risk. Polanski responded to this by saying that he had received a death threat that day and that Farage’s hyperbolic language alleging incitement to murder was, in fact, putting him in danger.

This is all very silly. While sincere threats of violence against politicians (or anybody) must always be taken seriously, we cannot encourage a mentality where people, especially grown adults leading political parties, accuse each other of rendering them unsafe and endangering their lives for sharing tasteless jokes or using hyperbolic language. Nor does it provide much assurance of their competence to cope within positions of political responsibility when they feel the need to immediately report such things to third party authorities.

The Met Police have now responded to Farage’s report with,"We received a third-party report relating to an image shared on social media. We take reports of this nature extremely seriously, and officers are conducting enquiries into the matter." I would suggest that we’d do better not to encourage the police to take social media posts extremely seriously and conduct inquiries into them unless they are clearly and directly inciting violence. Their recent activities in this regard have indicated a distinct lack of proportion, reasonableness and respect for free speech.

Many people have pointed out what they see as Mr. Farage’s hypocrisy here, given that he staunchly defended Lucy Connolly who was convicted and imprisoned for a Twitter post expressing positive views towards setting fire to both immigrants and politicians,

He even went as far as to say that millions of mothers were fantasising about burning down buildings with human beings inside. British mothers, including me, took to social media to refute this accusation. I would also hope that there are not millions of left-wing activists fantasising about the kind of violent revolution and mass execution of ruling elites indicated by the symbol of the guillotine and am fairly confident there are not.

These are expressions of political anger. One may argue that they are irresponsible in situations where there are violent protests (in Connolly’s case) or tasteless in the aftermath of an MP’s murder (in Farage’s) and that we should not respect people who give vent to them. It can be reasonable for police to investigate that those uttering them are not directly inciting violence, which is plausible in Connolly’s case given that people did attempt to burn down migrant hostels with people inside, or part of hard-left factions which do exist and genuinely conspire to violent revolution. Nevertheless, we must not lose a sense of perspective or encourage politicians or activists to ramp up this form of ‘victimhood culture’ mentality for the purposes of political point scoring. It feels particularly important right now that we try to restore the benefits of dignity culture to our political discourse.

Meanwhile, defenders of Mr. Polanski are arguing that he did not know that one of the images he shared included a tee-shirt bearing a guillotine and a reference to Nigel Farage, that he simply shared a collection of 20 photographs and such oversights are honest mistakes and that Mr. Farage was being dishonest to crop out the information that revealed this. Others are, not unreasonably, pointing out that identitarian left-wing (woke) activists who tend to congregate around the Green Party have never shown such charity to anybody making an honest mistake, an off-colour joke or expressing anger intemperately at some aspect of contemporary politics.

This is all true but it fatally misses the key points that defenders of both mature and serious political discourse and freedom of speech should care about. These kinds of childish, hyperbolic and ethically inconsistent political dramas should be beneath the individuals we rely upon to lead political parties. There are serious and important issues of public policy to deal with and we need to be able to trust them to behave like sober and sensible adults with a sense of proportion and respectworthy priorities.

Equally importantly, tit-for-tat attempts to capitalise on our growing problem with freedom of speech for political point-scoring can only further intensify that very serious problem which presents a threat to us all.

Reform party members and others on the right currently supporting Farage in his endeavour to have Polanski investigated by police and professional bodies with arguments that amount to, “Well, they started it” should spend some time reflecting on whether this is a sound, ethical basis for politics.

Green Party members and others on the left currently objecting that this is all deeply unreasonable and uncharitable should remember that they did, in fact, start it and spend some time reflecting on the censorious, self-victimising culture they have normalised and how they can reform left-wing parties and politics to address this problem.

Until our political leaders recover the concepts of dignity culture—proportion, resilience, charity and a principled defence of free expression— along with the faintest semblance of ethical consistency, we should expect these endless, performative rows to continue at the expense of serious politics. Quite simply, we need our politicians to grow the hell up.

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On Sunday, the leader of the Green Party, Zack Polanski, shared a set of photos from a Green Party event from another account on Instagram. Among them was an image of a man wearing a tee-shirt that quoted the song lyrics “We’re only making plans for Nigel” and below that was an image of a guillotine. Mr. Polanski late…

Read more

(Audio version here)

The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain has over 6500 subscribers! We are creating a space for liberals who care about what is true on the left, right and centre to come together and talk about how to understand and navigate our current cultural moment with effectiveness and principled consistency.

I think it is important that I keep my writing free. It is paying subscribers who allow me to spend my time writing and keep that writing available to everyone. Currently 3.8% of my readers are paying subscribers. My goal for 2026 is to increase that to 7%. This would enable me to write full-time for my own substack! If you can afford to become a paying subscriber and want to help me do that, thank you! Otherwise, please share!

Axel Rudakubana, the murderer of three little girls, has been moved to Broadmoor on the grounds that he has a mental condition which cannot be safely managed in a prison environment. This means he has been clinically assessed as too much of a danger to himself or others for prison officers to be expected to handle. Given that he allegedly attacked a prison officer with boiling water last year, it seems likely it is the threat to others which has been assessed as unmanageable in a normal prison. A high-security hospital like Broadmoor has powers to legally administer medication including sedative and antipsychotic substances against an individual’s will and also place patients in clinical seclusion cells long-term for safety and observation. It is also fundamentally therapeutic rather than punitive: those held there are treated as patients requiring treatment rather than prisoners serving punishment. The families of the murdered girls, through their lawyers, have expressed their disgust at the move.

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The social media platform, X, exploded with people responding angrily to this including the leaders of the political parties, Reform - Nigel Farage - and Restore - Rupert Lowe.

One objection is that keeping Rudakubana in a secure psychiatric facility will cost around £300,000 a year while keeping him in a normal prison costs £60,000 a year. Whether the additional cost is justified is, at least in principle, a practical question. If treatment in Broadmoor genuinely reduces risks that cannot be managed in prison, then the expense can be weighed against those benefits. This practical concern is intertwined with a moral one: that someone who committed such a depraved crime does not deserve this level of public expenditure, and that providing it appears to show concern for his wellbeing in stark contrast to the callousness with which he inflicted such suffering on three little girls. People fear that he is manipulating the system to be housed more comfortably and afforded special privileges and that he will be gloating that he has ‘won’ and escaped punishment, and that he must not be allowed to do this.

Ultimately, the various objections are manifestations of a deeper moral and conceptual concern. When Bayliss says we are incapable of thinking of the malign as anything other than insane by default and when Farage & Lowe object to Rudakubana being considered a patient rather than a prisoner, they are expressing anger at a perceived change of category from ‘bad’ to ‘mad’ on a moral level. They feel this is tantamount to at least partially exonerating him from culpability for his actions and that this is something he has manipulatively engineered. The system is letting Rudakubana win and this is intolerable.

Nor is this a particularly politically polarised issue with newspapers all over the political spectrum framing this move as a manipulation by Rudakubana that retraumatises the families and stressing the improved facilities and better food he will get to enjoy at Broadmoor. The overwhelming feeling in media output is that he has escaped punishment.

Duncan Harding, a psychiatrist who previously worked at Broadmoor told the Telegraph that he believes this to be a misconception.

“It absolutely is a therapeutic place, but it will still feel like a punishment,” he says. “The idea that he may have ‘manipulated the system’ simply isn’t possible. He would have been assessed thoroughly, and the case discussed very carefully before any transfer.

Rudakubana is believed to be intelligent and reported to have lied to social workers and Prevent caseworkers alerted to warnings signs of his potential for violence. However, he did not ever claim not to know what he was doing or appear to be at all shocked or distressed by his own actions. On the contrary, he is reported to have said, “It’s a good thing those children are dead... I am so glad... I am so happy.” Nor did his legal team advance an insanity defence, despite his having been known to mental health services for several years.

The fact that Rudakubana's legal team did not raise an insanity defence at trial has led many people to question how he can now be transferred to a psychiatric hospital. They see this as a change of story and suspect manipulation and an attempt to backtrack. However, the legal threshold for a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity is extremely high. It requires compelling psychiatric evidence that, because of a severe mental disorder, the defendant either did not understand the nature of their actions or did not understand that what they were doing was wrong.

Rudakubana’s defence made no such claim about his mental state and this decision to move him does not make one. The transfer is not retrospectively claiming legal insanity. The criteria for compulsory treatment in a secure psychiatric hospital is entirely different. A person does not have to be so psychotic or delusional that they cannot understand what they are doing. Prisoners may be transferred to hospital when their mental condition creates risks that cannot safely be managed within the prison estate, whether because they present a serious danger to themselves or to others. Rudakubana has not been claimed to be psychotic but to have a neurodevelopmental disorder, a complete lack of empathy and a single-minded fascination with violence. He can be held responsible for his crimes despite this because he knew that he was killing little girls and that this was wrong. He does not have to be capable of empathy or devoid of blood lust to be expected to control his own impulses and so he is held responsible for his crimes.

Some have also expressed fears that Rudakubana could now be released sooner because people found not guilty by reason of insanity may be discharged from secure psychiatric hospitals if they recover sufficiently and are judged no longer to pose a serious risk. This does not apply to Rudakubana because he was found guilty and sentenced to 52 years. If and when Broadmoor psychiatrists consider him safe to leave their custody, he will be returned to prison to serve his sentence. He is not, as many fear, now being held to be less culpable for his brutal murders simply because, while he is in Broadmoor, he will be considered a patient rather than a prisoner. He remains a convicted child murderer serving a 52-year sentence, while also being treated as a psychiatric patient in a high-security hospital.

Those who believe that Rudakubana will now have a much more comfortable lifestyle with access to better food and a more comfortable cell and enjoyable activities such as swimming in the pool, using the gym, walking in attractive grounds and attending classes in things like woodworking may not be correct. His single-minded obsession with violence means he has had to be segregated in prison and still managed to pour boiling water over a guard. It is precisely these levels of risk that are judged to require a high-security psychiatric hospital rather than an ordinary prison. It is very unlikely he will be allowed to join in enjoyable group activities and Harding believes he will likely be segregated and restricted from activities unless assessment deems his behaviour has changed enough to render him safe to be allowed out. Unlike prison officers, Broadmoor staff can use clinical interventions, including rapid tranquillisation, and are specifically trained and staffed to manage extreme violence. Rudakubana may well find himself restrained and restricted more strenuously and also drugged in ways that render him too sedated to harm anybody or even to think clearly. This is unlikely to be a pleasant experience.

Regardless of considerations of quality of life, expense of upkeep and designation as prisoner or patient, it is essential that the decision to hold Rudakubana in a prison or a secure psychiatric facility remains rooted in material reality and not abstract moral concepts about what he deserves and which category of mad or bad he belongs in. The lives of prison officers depend on it.

Whether we ultimately regard someone as 'mad' or 'bad' is, at root, a philosophical question. Bayliss might argue that we, as a society, now have difficulty in seeing people who commit heinous acts as malign and instead are inclined to think they must be insane. But neither the psychiatrists at HMP Belmarsh evaluating Rudakubana nor the prison officers trying to manage his behaviour on a day-to-day basis are likely to be thinking in terms of abstract moral philosophy and the nature of evil vs the nature of insanity. They are not there to assess issues like free will, individual responsibility and the social and moral purpose of punishment or the justifiability of retributive justice. They are there to keep everybody safe and will be assessing from their professional experience where and how an individual with a mental condition that lacks empathy and is fascinated with violence can be managed. Unless there is reason to think they have been ideologically captured to a point where this is affecting their professional judgement, armchair psychologists and philosophers should probably take a back seat.

Ultimately, the issue is not about societal attitudes to distinctions between ‘malign’ and ‘insane’ or about what feels like the appropriate place for a mass murderer of little girls to be punished. The public, politicians and philosophers are all entitled to debate what Rudakubana deserves. Where he can most safely be managed is a different question altogether. It’s one for psychiatrists and prison professionals.

Axel Rudakubana, the murderer of three little girls, has been moved to Broadmoor on the grounds that he has a mental condition which cannot be safely managed in a prison environment. This means he has been clinically assessed as too much of a danger to himself or other…

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