Would Jason Arday still be alive if he were white?

0:00Bite into a stacked sandwich made with Hero Bread. And the only thing you'll think is delicious. You won't think it has up to 19 grams protein, 11 to 32 grams of fiber, or just 0 to 5 grams net carbs. But it does. Hero Bread. No compromises. Just loaves, buns, tortillas, bagels, and noodles packed with flavor. Right now, get 10 % off at Hero.co with code IHEART. That's H-E-R-O dot C-O, code IHEART. All figures per serving of Hero Bread. See Nutrition Facts on Hero.co. This is a global production. There is someone who is dead at the end of this. Don't you ask the question, has something we've done contributed to this?

0:40It was almost like, oh, you know, if black people are successfully able to be fabulous, then equality has gone too far. I did think there was an ugliness to a lot of the commentary about him after he had stepped down. There may have been overlooking aspects of his CV and they may have kind of been taken in, but that's on Cambridge. Yet it was so much easier to go for the man than it was to go for the institution itself. Things that would have got you drummed out or at the very least facing a disciplinary have now become wholly acceptable. And I think there's this conflation as you say that free speech is the right to say things that are true but perhaps uncomfortable.

1:17It's not the right to say things that have been consistently debunked or that are, you know, the call for violence against people without any sanction. Jason wouldn't dare leave the house. And we said, we'll get a taxi for you. We held him in our arms. We told him he was loved. He held Diane's hands. And he said, I love you. But he said, they're hounding me to death. Those are the scenes from the vigil of Jason Arday. His friends, his family, some of his colleagues talking about his hounding, in their view, by the media. When the news broke that he'd taken his own life on Friday, there was a feeling that perhaps there would be a reckoning by parts of the media about their potential role in what had happened.

2:12It doesn't seem to have happened so far. It feels as though in the media and maybe even at the university itself, it is an introspection free zone. How can that possibly be? Welcome to the News Agents.

2:35The News Agents. It's John. It's Lewis. And it's nearly a week on now since it was announced that Jason Arday had died. and why are we coming back to it because it is a moment it is a parable of the age that we're living in on all sides of a media that thinks this is now a matter about free speech a university that is questioning whether it was a dei hire as some have accused and there in the middle of it was jason arday a slightly fabulist academic who maybe invented parts of his own cv and life story but he wouldn't be the first but there was something different about the coverage of his downfall if you like and the unrelenting nature of it which seemed to be entirely about the matter and fact that he was black and not white yeah look um we spoke about this on on monday when the news was still quite raw and we talked a little bit about um to what extent the media might have some responsibility, let's put it that way, or at least might start asking itself the question, given that the news stories had preceded the man's suicide, whether the coverage was proportionate, commensurate with the transgressions that had undoubtedly taken place.

3:57As we said on Monday, no doubt, Arde was not blameless in terms of some of the things that he'd said, accusations of plagiarism, although, as we said on Monday as well, the primary institution at which he was accused of the plagiarism actually exonerated him of it and so on. But since then, and the reason I think it's important to return to it, I really did think, and I remember being in Albania, we're doing some reporting, which we'll tell you about later, for tomorrow's show. When the news broke, Louis, the exec producer on the show, and I were together and I told him, it flashed up on my phone, and we were talking about it briefly, slightly distracted and shocked from the work we were doing.

4:34and we both sort of agreed and thought you know this could be a major moment for the British media this could be this will potentially prompt at the very least some serious soul searching maybe even a reckoning the likes of which we occasionally see after there are periods where there's a feeling that maybe collectively not about individuals necessarily but collectively there may have been an overstepping of the mark. And I have been astonished, really, at just how little of that there's been. And on the contrary, how aggressive the defence of the media's actions in general has been. Now, this is not to say, as we said on Monday, that there weren't excellent, credible, public interest bits of reporting about the RDA story.

5:23It was a perfectly creditable story to pursue. It was perfectly reportable. There were parts of it that were clearly in the public interest. And then there were bits of it, especially after his resignation and even his death, which I think were pretty repugnant, which moved on from simply being about his role at the university, what he did at university, what lies he might have told to get to the position that he he was in or about his wider life, to simply trying to find any bit of salacious gossip or tittle-tattle or anyone who would criticise him. And after his death was announced, I mean, just looking at the way some of the pieces that have been written about it, a piece in The Atlantic, even after his death, calling him a serial, fabulous and unrepentant plagiarist, a successfully conned British academia, prompted by and powered by do-gooder racial neurosis.

6:17Another piece in the Free Press, which is entitled the press didn't kill Jason Arde. Matthew Hennessy at the Wall Street Journal. The media isn't responsible for Jason Arde's death. Journalists can't allow themselves to be bullied out of covering stories with threats of suicide. Douglas Murray in the Free Press again saying that his defenders should admit the true cause of his collapse without, of course, knowing any of the actual details yet because it's been such a short period. And in Spite magazine as well, the Jason Arde vigil was a witch hunt against the press. the former Cambridge professor has been recast and is an innocent victim of media racism, don't buy it.

6:55All of this stuff is so, so un-nuanced. It's so explicit. So, without any attempt whatsoever to maybe even think yeah, of course the guy, maybe there was good reporting to be done about it. But to what extent was the reporting which happened after his death and after his resignation really commensurate with what had happened? But it's like, right, tin hats on guys, spray the machine gun bullets everywhere you can. There's a No surrender. We're going to fight this one out. We're not going to give a single inch of territory over any of this. And I thought equally repugnant, frankly, are the people who have published kind of names of columnists and writers who've written lots of articles about it, because it's almost like you want a witch hunt from the other side.

7:38Now, let's go after the guys that got our day and let's make it even worse. everybody take a breath why don't we just reflect a little bit on yeah Cambridge University yeah some of the fabulism but yes also the way the press have covered it I know what it's like in a newsroom we've both spent you know most of our lives in newsrooms you get a good story and you think oh my god this is fantastic we're gonna chase it we're gonna chase it some point somebody has to say are we doing this the right way have we gone too far is this still in the public interest or are we just a herd that is moving and once it's moving we can't stop and what i think is particularly intellectually dishonest um and this really is tin hat putting on your tin hat i've seen a number of pieces which have cast all of this as a freedom of the press issue no one is saying that you can't print what you like.

8:36For God's sake, it's 2026 to the actual bar on what you can't print or publish or say these days is, you know, sky, is basically sky high. You know, like, no one is saying that none of this stuff could have been published. What there is a legitimate argument about is how much of it should have been published and whether in its totality it went too far. Now, of course, that's hard to say because no individual editor or journalist is responsible for the aggregate. They're just responsible for their individual bit. But now it has happened, and we know that a vulnerable man, whatever his wider demerits and personal failings, a vulnerable man who had had a discotter disability ended up taking his own life.

9:21We can't be sure as to the reasons for that, but we do know that it came after a period of one of the most intense, intense sets of pressures, pressure via media, and some might say, as they did at the vigil, hounding by media that we've seen. It is not a question of freedom of the press. Is freedom of the press, is the litmus test of freedom of the press really the ability to potentially, potentially, hound someone to death or hound someone to the point that their mental health completely collapses when they haven't necessarily done the thing which so many people just naturally assume that they have done because so many of these details were still pretty diffuse and opaque and not even established, but they were being treated as if they were.

10:08I mean, it's the old cliche about the press, isn't it, John? You know, Stanley Baldwin once called the newspaper barons, you know, they accused them of exercising power without responsibility. And that was a question in the early 20th century. And I am just astonished at the number of people who have simply looked at this whole affair, this whole saga, this episode, and instantly concluded that there is no introspection to be had and no self-examination as to whether collectively the media exercised that responsibility while simultaneously exercising that enormous power. And in a moment we'll be hearing from Stephen Bush, the Financial Times columnist, who's written from personal experience about how this whole saga has impacted his thinking.

11:10This is Ashley Akinetti from the Ben and Ashley I Almost Famous podcast. Ben, I've been reflecting a lot lately on how many big life moments our listeners have experienced with us. Yeah, it's pretty wild. They've watched us go from dating shows to engagements, weddings, babies, buying homes. Every stage comes with new decisions. The milestones are the fun part, but the planning is where things get real. That's why Klarna stands out. Klarna gives people smarter tools to help manage everyday money with flexible ways to pay, cash back that builds automatically, everything in one place, and support that makes everyday decisions feel less overwhelming.

11:50Since life moves so fast, the right tools can help you feel more confident. Download the Klarna app today or visit Klarna.com to learn more. California resident loans made or arranged pursuant to a California finance law license, NMLS number 1353190. Klarna balance account required to be eligible for cashback points. Limitations, terms, and conditions apply.

12:18well we're joined in the studio now by Stephen Bush associate editor and columnist at the Financial Times and you wrote a very powerful uh leader column about the death of Jason Arday and the lessons from it and I just wonder kind of if you wouldn't mind just trying to distill for us what your overriding feeling was when you saw the coverage as it unfolded and ultimately results in his death well so yeah with i i was on holiday for for most of it so like like readers i was just you know following it as a punter and i think the thing i was really struck by is it was very clear in the first week that there was a serious public interest story that had two dimensions the first was about the questions around his phd uh enlivened by his tendency for telling slightly tall tales although to be honest the public interest in tall tales is fairly limited and he's not the first person to have told a slightly you know sugar-coated the cv yeah and you know a sad truth about non-fiction publishing as an industry is that And it is littered with memoirs that would be more appropriately marketed in fiction.

13:37I mean, James Frey famously wrote his first book. I think it was 10 ,000 Little Pieces turned out to essentially be untrue. And then the second and the third book, despite normally being in the same trilogy, were explicitly marketed as fiction. Angela's Ashes, famously his own mother, disputed it and said that it was a lie. Some of his neighbours disputed elements of it. But it won a Pulitzer and again was the first of a trilogy. So that aspect of it is fairly common. But the important bit, as I say, were the questions about his PhD, about how Cambridge responded to questions, including the use of lawfare.

14:15So I think we all grapple with in our industry, of course, is people using instruments of the law to prevent us from reporting legitimate stories. then he resigned and the thing I was astonished and struck by was the the way that in the week in which he had exited the stage the coverage if anything intensified in its personal viciousness you know columns which took an almost perverse delight in calling him stupid or using him as a peg for one argument or another which I felt to be honest even before his tragic death and even if he were you know we don't know what was in his mind when when when it happened but i think even if he were now just contemplating the end of his academic career i did just feel that the that much of the coverage after he resigned was i thought unsettling in its viciousness and its personal nature not least not least because there are still really important questions to be asked of the institution that gave him his doctorate and the institution than um than treated his some of his legitimate critics so poorly just one thing you you haven't mentioned and we haven't mentioned yet his skin color and that seemed to be a very big part of why there was this intensity around the coverage yeah both of its intensity but also um this way that it was allowed i think to uh to shape uh the intensity of what the coverage had to conclude so you know what one uh yeah one opinion piece in the times argued that if you if you argued that the issue was not one of of dei and hiring uh and it may have just been about processes being uh you know being uh abused by a fabulist then you were yourself only putting rocket boosters under uh some of the racist arguments against him now i'm not saying academia is littered with frauds, but it is a repeated problem in academia.

16:21For example, Stephen Ambrose, acclaimed historian of Eisenhower, it emerged shortly before his death that he had committed plagiarism. And then even more importantly, it emerged eight years afterwards in 2010. Despite having said throughout his career, he'd spent hours, hundreds of hours speaking to Eisenhower, he had at best spent about three over the course of his whole career. This, of course, was a huge problem for for the study of Eisenhower because it turns out that the what we thought to be the definitive account of his life might have major flaws but we quite rightly didn't go oh well the issue here is he must have been given this job because he was white we went well the issue here is an academia is a trust-based uh industry and if someone wishes to be a fabulist it is you know it is fairly fairly easy particularly if you're charismatic and I think anyone who's seen footage of uh Professor Arde could see how that could happen and yeah I think it was troubling this way, that he was treated as if he had no agency, as if the only reason that...

17:19It was almost like, oh, you know, look, if black people are successfully able to be fabulous, then equality has gone too far. I did think there was an ugliness to a lot of the commentary about him after he had stepped down. Well, indeed, in your piece, Stephen, you're completely explicit. And I think a lot of viewers and listeners, and I myself, for what it's worth, would agree. You say the difficult truth is that if Arde were white, a professor facing allegations of plagiarism would probably still be in post. And if Ardo were white, then a father of two would probably still be alive. Yeah, and I think the reason why that's a particularly difficult truth is a lot of the time we think of racism as holding people to an unjustly higher standard.

17:57I think what is quite difficult about this story is an example of a standard which everyone ought to be held to. It is actually a problem that there is still at Cambridge, someone who was found to have copied 12 pages of an undergraduate's work. and they went oh well you know it was probably and probably an accident he's still there he's still there that it actually is a problem however it is of course and this is the thing we grapple with always when we are doing a story which we know may lead to someone losing their job is the loss of your job can be a hugely traumatic and and difficult process and that is the thing that we always have to balance when we're covering it is okay that doesn't mean that we shouldn't cover cover this story but it does shape you know how we headline it what we do when someone has resigned and i think yeah the challenge for all of us is how do we as an industry balance those two things and i do think we do need to think a bit particularly about the week of coverage after he had because but the point being and i i i'm amazed i've seen so many people just sort of quite breezily dismiss this but i mean i agree with you i really don't see how it is contestable you know if he were white if he had been white i'm sure it may have been a story particularly if he were young um and there would have been questions about cambridge but we really seriously believe that it would have occupied or generated the sheer level of intensity of coverage that it did i mean just it just wouldn't precisely because it was being held up and this was explicitly stated by the telegraph and others this is you know woke's poster boy it's dei's poster boy even though actually there is no particular proof or evidence that he was appointed because of a dei agenda or whatever and we know that cambridge 0.4 percent of professors are black so it's not as if there is this is if it were dei then there were it's a particularly kind of ubiquitous phenomenon but the point is is that it's unarguable that this wouldn't have generated that coverage isn't it yeah i mean i think i think there were three factors all of which came together to amp up the intensity the first is that the the tall tales he told which were not about his his his degree but nonetheless that type of story always does well we were all obsessed with the stories about the salt path and about how it may or may not have been true uh but i think where you're exactly right is the tone and tenor of the coverage i think was very obviously driven as you say explicitly this idea of oh you know he's diversity's poster boy um well again we just don't talk that way about any other academic who's found to have committed plagiarism which does happen fairly regularly um this way then people talked as if you know from much of the coverage you could easily have not noticed that someone on the appointing panel was themselves non-white the candidates he beat two of them were also not white so yeah he did not get appointed because of yeah because of some desire to you know just appoint whoever was available who was an ethnic minority he did beat out two more qualified candidates he was on paper a qualified candidate He had written one academic book that had been widely acclaimed by all of the big names in his field.

21:04Now, of course, because of the fabulism, everything else, therefore, I would say rightly is tainted. But we wouldn't have had that volume and the personalisation without. And there's a fourth reason as well, which is something that I'm always struck by. I mean, it's because it's Cambridge, isn't it? And if it had been Oxford, it would have been as well. In the sense that the media or a lot of our media at an elite level. I mean, I don't know what you think, but I'm always struck the extent to which, you know, many of them have gone to Oxbridge. And many of them, it seems to me, have never left their Oxbridge days behind.

21:33You know, they still continue to be obsessed uniquely with these institutions and sort of often prosecuting kind of whatever they were doing when they were there. You know, the sort of fights and interests and neuroses that had when they were there. They never quite leave them behind. Yeah, I think there is a very strong element. I also think there's an added element in terms of the Oxbridge focus. that there were many pieces which said things about the process which were just simply as a matter of fact wrong and I don't think that would have happened if it'd been any other university because I think a lot of people go oh I know how the Oxbridge or Cambridge process works because I went I was interviewed there as an undergraduate and it must be the same and there were just many claims that I thought no but that's that's actually not how and it's Cambridge in particular has a very eccentric process that no other university has.

22:21And I kept reading pieces where I thought, if this were about, one, as you say, if it had been about Manchester, it wouldn't have been headline news in the same way. But if it had been about Manchester or UCL or another great university, I think then more columnists and more people opining about it would have been inclined to go, oh, but wait a second, I don't actually know anything about this university. Maybe I should find out. Instead of, as you say, this kind of disinterring where people were talking in a way we're thinking the process you're imagining is is an undergraduate interview you have no sense of how it would be different for a professorship i suppose the other thing that i found very troubling about the coverage was that inevitably the focus was on jason arday um as if he was guilty of every single sin and there may have been sins committed there may have been overlooking aspects of his cv and they may have kind of been taken in but that's on Cambridge yet it was so much easier to go for the man the black man with the long kind of beaded hair than it was to go for the institution itself and although Cambridge has had a fraught and terrible time and has got a lot of questions to answer it just seemed to me that it was so much you know for a lot of the people writing and posting on social media it was so much more fun to be able to give Jason Arday a good old kicking than a fusty old institution.

23:47Yeah, I think... And also, there was this sort of double unfairness. And the focus was, as you say, both very much on him, but also so much of it sort of took us read, this idea that he couldn't possibly... He couldn't possibly have talked his way into it. It was like, why is the presence of, you know, this stupid, as much of the coverage sort of took us read, where he very clearly wasn't. Yeah, how could this stupid person, this black man with dreads have walked his way into this it must be the fault of cambridge and then it must be the fault of cambridge was sort of the last line so i think okay so so this idea it's the fault cambridge is actually just throat clearing as an excuse to keep talking about how awful he is the other thing that you know as with a bunch of people who sort of bbc ex-bbc folk last night and we were talking a lot about it is the total lack of introspection there has been from you know if there has been justification yeah we were absolutely right to do what we did and it was an absolutely legitimate story and there are elements in which it was an absolutely legitimate story it was a you know silly season but it was a reasonable story to cover but the way it went on and on and on um and no one's saying oh do you think we went too far do you think i mean have we overstepped the mark here and it's just been immediately go to your trench defend your position don't back down don't give an inch and i find that you know it's just so surprising there is someone who is dead at the end of this don't you ask the question god have we have has something we've done contributed to this and there just doesn't seem to be any of that Yeah, I've been very surprised about that.

25:30Remember when Carl Sargent, who was a minister in the Welsh government, died by suicide after he faced what was seen as credible allegations over MeToo, which is also a very serious issue that did rightly deserve its coverage. but there was this sort of moment of could this coverage have been done better could the First Minister have handled the allegations better and one can disagree about that one way or the other but there was at least you said this moment of well we should have a serious conversation about it as opposed to this idea that it was somehow illegitimate to suggest anything other than every dot and comma that had been written or spoken after he resigned was okay and within the public interest when also particularly visibly some of it was and visibly some of it wasn't and this absence of any desire to learn and again I do think that wouldn't have happened uh had he been white partly because I think one of the reasons for some of the slight inhumanity of some of the coverage is I think lots of people uh did see him as a symbol rather than a person and still do uh I was incredibly struck at the number of pieces about him which made assumptions about his views on other issues which he had never written or spoken or published about essentially as far as i could tell simply because the logic is well you know he must have must have believed in that because look at him and i think that did mean that there both wasn't a sense of human connection and indeed often hearing people speak about it afterwards people don't even seem to have this sense that you know maybe his family might be listening to them discuss their coverage so maybe they should at least perform a little bit of introspection i mean that's the other thing and i suppose one of the slight difficulties with this story isn't it is that it's um we talk sort of talk about the coverage but of course the coverage via established kind of organs of the press newspapers broadcasters whatever is separate to although in some ways connected with the social media element sometimes it's same people sometimes it's not the same people and the social media element has been i mean i think even by social media standards especially bilious i mean i'm talking here in the aftermath of his death.

27:37I mean, never mind before. But not just, John, the lack of introspection, as you say, but in some cases, from leading broadcasters and journalists, what would once, frankly, have been totally cancellable, sackable offences, basically taking the piss out of his funeral process, unbelievably crass comments around him, his life, which his family inevitably may well see. And there seems to be, and I do think this is, again, on some level, Stephen, I think you're right. I think, again, would this be happening if he were white by those people? I don't think so. No, I think, and I think, yeah, because one of the problems is we often, we talk about sort of, we talk about our industry as if it's a homogenous block, which it isn't.

28:16I'm going to give a specific example, which is I was on another program yesterday in which one of the people who was writing about him was talking about a piece she had written. And there was, and essentially, well, look, I review a book every week. and I thought do you have absolute do you have no sense of the idea that like maybe maybe the the wife of an academic might be a radio for listener and maybe therefore you should however you feel about it at least try and imagine and someone related or friends with this person might be listening which I just think I think that would have been a concern she would have had had she been writing about a white academic because she would understand that well those people do listen to radio 4 but in this topic was like well those people yeah they probably listen to you know radio 1 right like i i do think that would that was yeah it was inflected by people's beliefs about black people that was reflected in a sense and he wasn't a real human being and yeah it was has been yeah i have been astonished at some of the the commentary as you on social media since since his death has it made you rethink how you think elite british society thinks about race and about black people yes i mean i think i think the thing about the last two years is that uh a thing which i never would have expected to happen quite so frequently is where i and other minority colleagues will would be what's happening pieces going like i They don't understand why there's this gratuitous swipe about black people in it.

29:55I mean, to take a much more trivial example, the return of the Elgin Marbles, right, which has been a live debate since 1811. A column which went, oh, yeah, if someone says they're in favor of the return of the Elgin Marbles, I know what they think about BLM reparations. And it's like, what on earth does Black Lives Matter have to do with a debate which has been running since 1811? And I have, yeah, I have genuinely been disturbed over the last two years at the sort of reflexive use of black people as a rhetorical prop about a whole range of unrelated issues. About, you know, sort of weighted with assumptions about what black people must think about a bunch of other hot button political topics.

30:48and I've been astonished at how casual that's been and so it has made me rethink, as someone who's a, I mean, statistically, it remains true that this is a country that is a great place to be an ethnic minority, but I have been forced over the last two years to confront and actually support for and sympathy for us among elites is rather more shallow than I had thought. And not only more shallow, it seems to me, but also, I mean, what's one of the reasons, I mean, taking a step back, What's one of the reasons why this story became so intense in part of the press and so fevered in part of the press in a way that I'm sure it wouldn't have been five years ago?

31:28One of the reasons is because there is a wider political agenda going on, right, which is to prosecute the idea that this is a two tier country that speaking to and fermenting white anxiety, which never used to be a big part of our politics. But there are certain political actors and forces which deeply want to make it a bigger part of our politics. And, you know, this is a micro example. But what was the kind of macro idea behind it? It was two tier. Right. It's basically saying, look, among the whole of British institutions, this is something explicitly stated by Farage and others now that that this is there is a an attempt to oppress and suppress white life chances in favour of minorities.

32:07And this was basically was never explicitly put that way, but that was the implicit assumption and sort of driving force, it seems to me, behind this story. Oh, yeah, you're completely right. I mean, right down to the fact that the inconvenient truth of the other minority candidates for the role, well, they were imagined away because it had to be, as you say, a debate about two tier. The way that the implicit logic was that if if an ethnic minority ever successfully tricks you, then anti-racism has gone too far. The acceptable level of racism in society should be that only honest ethnic minorities are appointed people.

32:42Now, look, we've all run multiple hiring processes, and I've been very lucky that most of the people I've hired have been very good at their job. But I think if you've run more than eight hiring processes, you know that if they're fair, occasionally someone slips past who shouldn't have. And the fact that so much of the tone of British politics is if the eighth person you shouldn't have hired is anything other than a white person, It's a sign that you were insufficiently alive to the fact that we should only be let into public life on sufferance. And yeah, that is part of a broader political agenda.

33:11I do think one of the elephants in the room here is a lot of journalists have decided to stay on a platform whose owner regularly posts about the idea that we need to have some kind of preemptive act of violence against people who are either of mixed race origin, such as myself, or in a relationship with people who are from an ethnic minority, or people who are in favour of ethnic diversity, because otherwise there will be some kind of calamity. And I think that background hum, I think even people who believe that they are not shaped by it, that it becomes a dull rule, I think is part of why people have become so desensitized to language and comments they just would not have made a couple of years ago.

34:03Stephen, you talk about this timeline of two years, and I'm sort of struck by some of the changes we've seen in two years. The ownership of X by Elon Musk, the lack of content curation on that platform, the fact that the more extreme you are, the more likely you are to get clicks and also it being framed on the right as though this is a free speech issue you can say whatever you like about a black person now because that is free speech and to do otherwise is to impinge that vital kind of first amendment right in america and that has been picked up and i just you know we talk a lot on this podcast and which is kind of the ghastly phrase the overton window about it shifting of what is acceptable dialogue now it's not just the implicit racism that maybe we've all lived with or implicit anti-semitism or implicit whatever it happens to be people now seem to think it's fine just to say it out loud yeah i think i think you're exactly right i mean i think that there were obviously many problems with uh anti-semitism in parts of the labor party uh in the 2010s but actually almost all it was you had to explain it to viewers and listeners because a lot of it was in code the anti-semitism we see online now you know you you do not need to explain it is not it is not coded i think you're exactly right then there has been um an opening up of what it's acceptable to say as lewis said earlier things that would have got you drummed out or at the very least facing a disciplinary have now become wholly acceptable say and i think there's this conflation as you say that free speech is the right to say things that are true but perhaps uncomfortable it's not the right to say things that have been consistently debunked or that are you know the call for violence against people without any sanction right you know it's not free speech to say you know look kill them before they kill you that is not a legitimate use of free speech in my view and I think it is about this this very successful project across the world to bring back ideas that were decisively defeated on the field of battle in the second world war that have come back into vogue again about yeah I mean, one of the striking things about one of the people at the centre of this story, Nathan Kofnus, a so-called race realist, who says in a truly meritocratic system, black people would vanish from everything other than I think it's entertainment and sports.

36:31Which is good of him in some ways because the first wave of race realists thought that black people were actually too weak to do boxing. So even someone like Nathan Kofnus can learn a thing or two. But the fact that those ideas are now considered, he was invited onto Times Radio to discuss this story. To be blunt, the idea that the only person you could find to discuss academic misconduct was someone who said that, I just think that would not have happened on that programme two years ago. I think, yeah, it is a consequence of the election of Donald Trump in 2024, which has extended the Overton window quite significantly.

37:10Stephen, thanks so much for coming in thank you, thanks for having me

37:22you know what quality feels like you can see it in the way a fabric moves recognise it in a flawless fit and appreciate it in the details that make our styles unique that kind of quality doesn't happen by accident, it happens with imagination, creativity, and intention. At Coldwater Creek, it's the design standard we've honored for over 40 years. Our rich mountain heritage has shaped how we think about clothing from the very beginning with a commitment to quality that never quits. Exceptional fabrics, considered design, silhouettes we've made our own. The signature touches that set each piece apart and styles that are distinctively Coldwater Creek.

38:06For a wardrobe you can count on season after season, visit coldwatercreek.com. Shop new arrivals and save 15 % on purchases$75 or more with code iHeart.