Such a shame the BBC has cancelled Winterwatch. We're one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, and we need shows like this to help us connect with our wildlife! Please join me in asking them to rethink this decision. https://t.co/VAZkUYushh via @38degrees
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In 2017, with speculation about Trump’s mental state “reaching fever pitch on social media,” psychiatrist and Daily Mail columnist Dr Max Pemberton wrote a column spelling out why that speculation was wrong.
People, he wrote, had “started bandying around mental health labels with abandon,” and he found the whole exercise “not only unhelpful but downright offensive.”
Nine years later, at 1:01am on 14 August 2026, Pemberton published a column in the Mail headlined “Why would ‘Professor Plagiarism’ make such outlandish claims?... there’s one condition that could explain everything.”
It introduced readers to ‘pseudologia fantastica’, a pattern of pathological lying, which he then applied, by name, to Jason Arday. Jason was found dead that afternoon.
In November 2021, under the Mail headline “Safe spaces, hounding staff out of their jobs and de-platforming speakers - those are the last things that should be happening at our universities.” Pemberton named Kathleen Stock, forced out of Sussex University after a student campaign, as an example of exactly the kind of treatment universities must not permit.
Students who resort to “bullying, threatening, intimidating and attacking their opponents,” he wrote, do so under “the subtle, insidious way” of misusing “the language of mental illness,” and universities that allow it are guilty of “the embarrassing infantilising of students.”
Lord Woolley, principal of Homerton College, Cambridge, who met Arday four days before he died, later said Arday told him he “felt hounded to death.”
Stock herself, positioned by Pemberton as a victim, hounded out of University, is no bystander to the Arday story. On 29 July 2026, Paul Marshall’s UnHerd published her article “Jason Arday: Cambridge’s DEI darling”, subtitled “Serious concerns have been circulating for years,” an early piece that was part of the sustained coverage of Arday’s case pushed the DEI framing in relation to Arday. Stock calls Arday a “useful idiot.” (See the next tweet about the use of the US acronym DEI).
Pemberton’s own 2021 example of someone hounded out of a university had, by 2026, themselves become one of the people doing the hounding, but rather than applying the standard he set out for Stock’s case, Pemberton followed the same road two weeks later, in his own piece on Arday.
That piece follows a structure Pemberton has used before, more than once, on other people he was not treating.
In September 2022, writing about Meghan Markle, he used the structure of a generalised clinical pattern drawn from patients he’d treated, “a toxic, noxious combination of self-entitlement and over-inflated self-esteem” he says he saw in wealthy private patients, followed by its direct application to a named public figure he had never examined: “With Meghan, I think there’s something profound going on here, something I’ve seen with some of my patients,” he wrote, before concluding she comes across as “increasingly tone-deaf.”
He did it again in April 2026, four months before the Arday column, this time diagnosing a “victim identity” or “victimhood mindset” in both Meghan and Prince Harry after their Australian tour. “There is a pattern here that anyone working in mental health will recognise,” he wrote He then applied it directly: Harry, he concluded, has “had so much therapy he has forgotten what it is for.”
The Arday piece is the third documented instance of the same method: a general clinical pattern is applied to a named public figure Pemberton has never met. His Arday column concedes, in its own text, “I’ve never met Jason Arday, and so have no idea what has been going on in his mind.”
He says he’s speaking “generally.” That caveat is doing a lot of work for very little protection: the piece names Arday, reviews the specific public allegations against him, and walks through the recognisable pattern of an elaborate, self-reinforcing fabricator, then leaves the reader to do the one thing the caveat claims to forbid: apply that pattern to Arday.
My understanding is that this is precisely what the General Medical Council’s Good Medical Practice and the American profession’s Goldwater Rule exist to prevent: a doctor publicly attaching a diagnostic-adjacent label to a named person they have not examined, taken a history from, or treated.
Pemberton himself made the argument for why this matters, in print, about a different public figure, Trump, nine years earlier. He has since locked his @X account.
Arday had spoken publicly, and Cambridge’s own appointment materials had described him, as autistic and neurodivergent, disclosures that sat alongside the same childhood account, not speaking until 11, not reading or writing until 18, that other parts of the coverage were simultaneously disputing.
Five months before he speculated about Arday’s psychology, Pemberton had published a column arguing that the “worldwide panic around autism” was ending, framing rising diagnoses through the same lens Robert F Kennedy Jr uses to talk about an “autism epidemic.”
He’s made the identical argument about ADHD since at least February 2023, writing that after “20 years of seeing literally no one with ADHD in my clinic,” he now “comes across it all the time,” and mocking an online self-test with “According to the test, I’ve got ADHD too. Ludicrous!”
That scepticism became a Channel 4 documentary, ‘The Great ADHD Myth?’, which aired 18 August 2026, four days after Arday’s death, and just one day after Reform UK’s “Making Welfare Work” policy announcement.
ADHD UK called it “sensationalist nonsense,” said it would help “more than 10,000” members lodge @Ofcom complaints, and noted the film builds its central argument around a single child.
Prince Harry gets the same treatment: Pemberton has written that Harry is “wading into the debate on mental health with reckless ignorance,” is “a poor advertisement for the... benefits of therapy,” and shows “reckless ignorance, oblivious to the facts,” across separate columns.
Combined with Meghan and Arday, that is three public figures who disclosed something about their own psychology and had Pemberton step in afterward to correct, diagnose, or dismiss it.
Remember, Pemberton defended Trump against precisely this kind of speculative diagnosis by other people.
There’s another inconsistency worth noting: in 2024, Pemberton wrote about Fiona Harvey, the real-life inspiration for “Martha” in Baby Reindeer. Watching her interview with Piers Morgan, he wrote that for the first twenty minutes he “believed every word,” found her “bright, articulate and engaged,” and asked whether the damage to her reputation had been “a gross injustice.”
Pemberton clearly is capable of extending a contested public figure the benefit of the doubt.
Pemberton has described himself as ‘non-partisan’ and, at various points, as libertarian. The record doesn’t quite bear that out as a description of where his scrutiny lands.
In 2015, writing about a Sally Bercow affair, he opened with “I’m a libertarian about most issues relating to people’s private lives,” then argued for a hard line against divorce regardless of a marriage’s unhappiness. In 2021, arguing that unvaccinated NHS staff should be sacked, he opened with “I’m a libertarian at heart and don’t like telling people what to do,” then argued for exactly that. In both columns, the word “libertarian” appears as a preface to the coercive position that follows, not as a description of it.
His politics have also surfaced more directly, and on a platform that matters for this story. On a Spectator podcast from May 2026, discussing some of the latest issue’s articles with fellow panellists, he said “I would say I’m still Tory actually,” before turning to the Makerfield by-election and saying he was “particularly excited” about the prospect of “Reform winning”.
He praised Reform’s candidate Robert Kenyon as “quite extraordinary,” a man “from kind of your average voter stock” who was nonetheless “politically aware and politically engaged,” contrasting him with “these... Oxford PPE kind of, you know, career politician types.”
He also acknowledged that unflattering material about the candidate “might” surface and become “unacceptable,” and said so anyway. But that “unflattering material” had already been reported on.
As well as the grotesque comments about Carol Vorderman which Kenyon supportively commented on in 2021, his older social media posts included saying women can’t “ref, drive or give directions”, said women presenting rugby games on TV “aren’t up to the job and only there to tick a box”, adding: “I’m sexist, sorry but I am”, and said English women “don’t care” and “just walk around with their fat bellies and odd shapes pushing a pram at 16 in their PJ’s”.
In comments from 2019 Kenyon claimed women who have abortions get them for “vanity purposes” and so they can “shag anyone they want” and also suggested women falsely claim to have been raped to terminate a pregnancy. He described gay people as “poofs” on a 2009 forum, and in 2010, described them as “mincing about” on TV. In one post, he wrote: “You can’t call her ‘The Queen’ anymore because it offends the poofs.”
On a special edition of #bbcqt recorded in Makerfield, one female audience member stated: “I’d rather have a career politician than a plumber who’s a sexist.”
Despite Pemberton being “particularly excited” about the prospect of “Reform winning” the Makerfield by-election, Reform lost.
The Spectator is the same outlet, under the same ownership as UnHerd and GB News, that ran three weeks of hostile Arday coverage, and Mail columnist Pemberton was recorded expressing enthusiasm for Reform on its own podcast.
Pemberton’s “non-partisan libertarian” is doing more work as a self-description than the record supports.
Pemberton was a Telegraph columnist for twelve years before moving to the Mail three years ago. He writes regularly for the Spectator, in its UK, Australian and US editions, and for Reader’s Digest. Across several hundred columns catalogued on Muck Rack, that list barely varies. It is a narrow, consistent set of mastheads for a psychiatrist whose beat officially covers “news events concerning culture, social and ethical issues, the politics of health care and the NHS.”
The substantive criticism of Pemberton’s Arday column was never that the psychology of elaborate, self-reinforcing fabrication doesn’t exist. It’s that a practising NHS psychiatrist mapped that pattern onto a specific, named, living man on the strength of newspaper coverage, which was published on the morning that man was found dead, having already written the argument against doing exactly this, twice, once about Trump and once, in Kathleen Stock’s own case, about the precise word “hounding.”
The Telegraph’s own last article about Arday ran at 3:11pm that same day, one minute before the ambulance was called. Pemberton’s column remains live, carrying an update timestamp of 08:18 the following morning; what exactly was changed is not stated on the page.
It is only fair to note what the column itself does not do. Unlike hundreds of other articles published about Arday, it does at least plainly state that the plagiarism allegations “were not upheld” by Liverpool John Moores University, that Arday “denies being a liar,” and that “nothing has been proved” while “investigations remain open.” It does not end by condemning Arday alone.
Its final lines turn on “the institutions – not least Cambridge University and the diversity, equality and inclusion industry – that made him their poster boy… For that they bear considerable responsibility in this sorry saga and should reflect on it in shame.”
Pemberton wrote “I don’t feel triumphant about Jason Arday’s downfall.” The defence the column offers for itself is that it describes a pattern rather than delivers a diagnosis, despite foregrounding pseudologia fantastica.
Pemberton’s article named Jason, reviewed the specific allegations against him, and walked through that pattern in detail, all within an article titled “Why would 'Professor Plagiarism' make such outlandish claims?”
Whether this amounts to unethical journalism is not for me to decide. But it is quite the contrast to his 2017 article defending Trump by criticising those “bandying around mental health labels with abandon,” and finding the whole exercise “not only unhelpful but downright offensive”.
EXCLUSIVE: Jason Arday was targeted in a coordinated campaign by an anti-black race science network with ties to Cambridge and pro-Trump billionaire Peter Thiel, whipping up a catalogue of systemic misinformation across the British press 🧵/1 https://t.co/FNbu43nrEF
I've just signed the open letter calling for a public inquiry into the tragic death of Professor Jason Arday. Will you join me?
https://t.co/LKUq1Mh08e
🚨 New analysis: Which journalists hounded Dr Jason Arday the most in the 22 days leading up to his death?
- Albert Tait / The Telegraph: 14 articles
- Gordon Rayner / The Telegraph: 12 articles
- Emma Yeomans / The Times: 8 articles
- Janet Eastham / The Telegraph: 6 articles
- Jack Hardy / Daily Mail: 6 articles
- Eleanor Harding / Daily Mail: 6 articles
- Lanre Bakare / The Guardian: 6 articles
- Richard Adams / The Guardian: 6 articles
- Georgia Lambert / The Times: 5 articles
- Tom Williams / THE: 5 articles
- Nicola Woolcock / The Times: 4 articles
Dozens of articles were nameless editorials and op-eds in what was a concerted, systemic effort to defame and destroy a Black man's life.
It wasn't just about getting him fired from Cambridge University. Post-resignation, the papers savagely increased the rate of articles they published about him.
The papers, of course, need to be held to account. 150,000 emails and IPSO complaints have already been filed against them on our action campaign.
But the individuals who wrote the articles should also be held to account. 14 articles about one man in 22 days is not journalism.
Albert Tait is not a journalist. Gordon Rayner is not a journalist. Emma Yeomans is not a journalist.
Journalism means informing readers on matters of public interest. Journalism means sticking to honest principles and conducting your investigations ethically, taking care not to spread misinformation or sensationalism.
How many articles did these journalists write about Peter Mandelson's leaking of sensitive government information to child sex predator Jeffrey Epstein?
How many articles did they write about William O’Reilly, Ros Holmes, David Latchman, and Nicola Morrison? Who have all been found guilty of plagiarism?
Note: numbers are based on our corpus of articles, in which we have counted 249 articles about Dr Jason Arday.
Full analysis here: https://t.co/WEjc8Bpd9K
It’s hard to wrap your mind around the abusiveness of the imperial status quo, partly because it’s all we’ve ever known, and partly because it’s too big to perceive all at once.
The statistics don’t show you the human impact. The personal anecdotes just show you small snapshots of individuals suffering in their own lives. A working single mother crying in her car in a TikTok video because the endless toil necessary for survival is all-consuming and overwhelming. A news report about child labor in DRC cobalt mines. An Instagram reel about a father in Gaza carrying plastic bags he’s been told contain the remains of his daughter.
Individually, such stories are heartbreaking and enraging. But they are not merely personal anecdotes from separate individuals. These stories are unfolding all around the world, every moment of every day, affecting the lives of billions of human beings in different ways and to varying degrees.
If we could see it all, it would radicalize everyone against the empire instantaneously.
But we cannot see it all. We simply can’t take in all the suffering that is happening in all the ways it is being inflicted upon innocent people all around the world.
The most powerful weapon our rulers have is the fact that homo sapiens are incapable of perceiving everything all at once. If everybody could perceive all the consequences of the decisions being made by powerful people on a deep experiential level, most of humanity would rise up to overthrow the established order, and there’d be hardly anyone willing to defend it.
The only thing keeping the heads of the oligarchs and empire managers attached to their necks is the limitations of human perception.
Which of course is why they work so hard to maintain the present limitations of human perception. All the propaganda, internet censorship, AI shenanigans, algorithm manipulation and government secrecy we see from the capitalist empire is there to keep us from seeing too much, because unadulterated truth tends to have a radicalizing effect on the mind.
That’s why they’re scrambling to roll out police drones, AI mass surveillance and autonomous weapons systems while doing everything they can to slow down our access to information and insight: it’s a race to get us fully locked down in a capitalist dystopia policed by militarized robots before humanity’s unprecedented ability to share inconvenient facts and ideas lets us see enough to awaken a revolutionary zeitgeist in our collective consciousness.
So in that sense there really is a kind of worldwide struggle between light and darkness — not in a religious sense, but in the sense that there is a direct ongoing conflict between the agenda to see and to know versus the agenda to keep things hidden. Humanity’s higher impulses are trying to bring things into the light of awareness, while those representing our lower nature are trying to keep things obscured in the darkness of ignorance and confusion.
I don’t know which side will win in the end. I just know it makes sense for every well-intentioned person to spend as much the time and energy as they can muster trying help make the abuses of the empire as visible as possible for everybody.
It’s not just all the war, injustice, ecocide and dystopia that hurts. It’s knowing it didn’t have to be this way. It’s knowing what could have been.
All this innovation that’s being poured into finding new ways to conduct mass military slaughter, to surveil and control our entire society, to restrict and manipulate the flow of information, to create artificial scarcity for products that people need, to create artificial demand for products that people do not need, to compete with rival corporations in order to turn billionaires into trillionaires — none of that needs to be happening. Humanity could be using its creativity and cleverness to make the world a better place instead.
If we were pouring all our resources, time and energy into collaborating with each other for the common good instead of competing with each other for power and profit, we could easily create paradise on earth. If all our brainpower was going toward improving life on this planet without worrying about our competitors or overlooking any possible advancement that doesn’t generate value for shareholders, our innovative potential would easily increase a thousandfold.
We could heal our biosphere while ensuring that everyone on earth has what they need to live. We could provide healthcare, education and rapid public transportation to everybody while using automation to eliminate the need for human toil. We could be living lives of ever-burgeoning leisure, wonder, and satisfaction, assured of a better future for our children and grandchildren.
Instead we get this shit. Mass murder and exploitation in an increasingly dystopian civilization on a dying world, where the front line of scientific discovery is the military-industrial complex and the construction of an AI tech surveillance network.
All because we haven’t yet managed to unplug ourselves from the abusive system of capitalism and its outgrowth into global imperialism. We’re being held strangling at this self-destructive chokepoint humanity created for itself a few hundred years ago, and soon it’s going to squeeze the life right out of us.
And it could have been so good. It could still be so good. We’ve just got to find some way to use the power of our numbers to throw off these oppressive chains and build the kind of world that needs to be built. Because the current system clearly is not working.
Rupert Lowe, the head of Restore UK, wants the death penalty back. He thinks people should vote on it.
I'm totally against this idea.
What do you think?
Let's make this the biggest online poll ever on Scottish Independence! Do you support Scottish Independence? RT RT RT 🗳️🏴 #Poll#Independence#Scotland
Don't know if anyone else said it, but this is so obvious it has to be said: Epstein managed his international satanic empire mainly from the US and occasionally from Europe, discussing crimes openly with thousands of people.
This tells us Epstein knew he had perfect immunity from law enforcement in the US and Europe (he had a house in Paris and was heavily involved in everything in Britain, including the monarchy). He knew for sure, with absolute certainty, that he was untouchable and no intelligence or law enforcement agency was going to stop or interrupt him.
Who gave Epstein this sweeping Western immunity? Who were the respective local figures in the US, UK, France and other countries who colluded to keep Epstein outside the reach of the law in their country? It is an interesting question, isn't it?