Mike Tomenson

[Dr. Matthew M. Wielicki @MatthewWielicki]

I’ve spent many weeks doing fieldwork in Tibet, sitting above these enormous, deeply incised Himalayan river systems and seeing firsthand just how geologically active this landscape is.

So spare me the climate-change grift every time a natural disaster strikes.

Catastrophic glacial outburst floods are not new. The 1981 Zhangzangbo GLOF released ~20 million m³ of water and debris into Nepal, with estimated peak discharge approaching 16,000 m³/s. The Himalayas experienced enormous GLOFs long before today's atmospheric CO₂ concentrations.

If it happened naturally in the past, we should expect it to happen naturally again in the future—regardless of atmospheric CO₂.

Turning a horrific loss of life into an immediate climate-change narrative without demonstrating that CO₂ caused this particular event isn't attribution. It's opportunism.

And the people exploiting tragedy to do it are grifters.

[Christian @InTheTrenchesUK]

There was a girl in Rotherham. Twelve when the first man raped her. Fourteen when social services pulled her from school and called it "consensual." She was doused in petrol and told to burn if she talked.

She was one of 1,400.

Between 1997 and 2013, while the Alexis Jay Report later confirmed industrial-scale child sexual exploitation in Rotherham Metropolitan Borough, John Healey sat in Parliament representing that same borough. Twenty-nine years. Three constituencies. Same streets. Same schools. Same suffering.

In September 2012, The Times broke the story nationally and demanded an inquiry. Healey opposed it. His own website preserves the excuse: "I had an open mind but was not convinced this would help the abused girls."

Not convinced. While the men kept raping and the state kept not looking, Healey wanted more time. Two years later, the number was still 1,400.

Then came the money.

In 2014, UKIP MEP Jane Collins stood in Doncaster and accused Healey and two other Labour MPs of knowing about the abuse and doing nothing. They sued her for libel. In February 2017, Mr Justice Warby ruled in their favour. Collins was ordered to pay £54,000 to each MP. Healey pocketed fifty-four thousand pounds from a woman who accused him of failing those girls.

Total damages: £162,000. Total costs: over £670,000 billed to UKIP.

He did not hand it back. He did not donate it to survivors. He kept it.

Now look at the donors.

While positioning for Defence Secretary, Healey accepted £40,000 from two individuals, Nigel Grinyer and Barbara Follett, whose addresses the Register of Members' Financial Interests lists simply as "private." £40,000 in shadowy cheques while he prepared to accuse Nigel Farage of "secret donations."

Then the tax.

November 2025. Defence Secretary Healey failed to pay council tax on his London second home. An "administrative error," his office claimed. Sources confirmed he intended to claim the £1,469 back through parliamentary expenses. The man setting the national budget planned to bill you for his own oversight while his party stripped nine million pensioners of Winter Fuel Payments.

Then the charity.

Kin Kids. A Rotherham support group for kinship carers. Healey publicly backed it, pushed for its charitable status, attached his name to it. Its founder, Vicki MacGregor, was later convicted of child sexual abuse offences. Healey vouched for a paedophile's charity in the same borough where 1,400 children were raped on his watch.

Then the regicide.

June 2026. Healey resigns as Defence Secretary with a public letter damning Starmer as "unable" and the Treasury "unwilling" to defend the nation. Six weeks later, Starmer is gone. Andy Burnham is Prime Minister. Burnham makes Healey Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The knife goes in. The chair is warm.

Now the legacy.

The Child Trust Fund: Healey's brainchild. Promised as a gift to every British child. Today it sits as £1.6 billion of children's own money gathering dust in forgotten accounts, while fund managers extract £100 million annually in fees. A scheme that became an annuity for the City.

Housing: As Minister for Housing, Healey declared that more people renting rather than owning was "a good thing." The man now drafting the national budget opposes the concept of working families owning their homes.

The ledger:

∘ 1,400 confirmed victims during his tenure.
∘ "Not convinced" an inquiry would help them.
∘ £54,000 from a UKIP MEP for being called out.
∘ £40,000 from private donors while demanding Farage's transparency.
∘ £1,469 in unpaid tax, billed to you.
∘ £1.6 billion of children's money left to rot.
∘ One paedophile's charity, vouched for.
∘ One coup. One promotion. One Chancellorship.

St Peter's School, York. Founded 627 AD. Christ's College, Cambridge. Fabian Society. TUC campaigns. Twenty-nine years on the taxpayer. Zero days in a real job. Zero days answering to anyone outside the machine.

That girl in Rotherham? She's thirty-seven now. She lives with it every day.

John Healey lives in Downing Street. He signs your cheques. He decides how much of your money you keep.

Every signature from the man who was "not convinced" an inquiry into her rape would help her.

That's your Chancellor.

[Eve Barlow @Eve_Barlow]

I'm so fucking bored of all of you.

There were fucking incredible bands, and actors, and storytellers, and writers, and comedians, and painters, and fashion designers, and architects, and marketers, and fucking brilliant ideas people, and they were all pitchfork-chased out of the room for being brilliant and NOT boring, by all you boring puritanical talentless wankers, so you can sit around "taking up space" at all the places where fucking amazing art used to happen just opining for hours on end about things that have already been decided.

Things like: "there are many types of lesbians". NO. There aren't "many types of lesbians". There is ONE type of lesbian. A woman who wants to get it on with another woman. We decided this eons ago. Get over it. Move on. It's done. It's decided.

"Black lives matter". Alright, nobody ever said that wasn't the case. We know already. Let's get on with it now thanks. Get back to business.

"Rape is a spectrum". No it's fucking not. Rape is rape, and it's illegal. Fuck you. Move on. Let's stop debating it.

"From the river to the sea". You don't even fucking know which river and which sea, you dolts. Stop endlessly bleating on about things you don't understand. Never gonna happen. Move on.

All this time and fucking oxygen you've all stolen from people who were using it for the betterment of the world and culture at large, and we're all fucking bored out of our brains because all that's left is to try and shut you lot up for giving us all brain damage.

[The Free Speech Union @SpeechUnion]

The Government must come clean over whether extremist groups were able to influence its Islamophobia definition — now repackaged as “anti-Muslim hostility”.

A Freedom of Information (FOI) request from Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Timothy has revealed that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government deleted all responses submitted to the consultation carried out by the Working Group tasked with drafting the definition.

As Melanie Phillips writes in The Times: “When a government department starts shredding the evidence behind its decisions, it’s a fair bet that it has something to hide from the public.”

The whole process has been shrouded in secrecy. The Free Speech Union exposed that all five members of the Working Group had previously been sympathetic to the need for a definition and had troubling links to Islamist organisations, including the Muslim Council of Britain and MEND — both of which successive governments have maintained a policy of non-engagement with.

The Working Group ditched the term “Islamophobia”, following criticism from groups including the FSU, which warned that such a definition would have a chilling effect on free speech. Accusations of Islamophobia have long been used to silence legitimate criticism of Islam, and this definition risks exacerbating that problem.

Nick Timothy himself was branded an Islamophobe, reported to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards and even faced calls to resign after criticising a public Muslim prayer event in Trafalgar Square.

The Communities Department has denied that extremist groups were involved in the process and says consultation responses were deleted in line with data-protection requirements.

But that does not explain why the Government cannot disclose which organisations contributed to the consultation.

The Muslim Council of Britain and MEND have long campaigned for an Islamophobia definition. The public deserves to know whether they — or other similar organisations — were given an opportunity to influence it.

There are already laws protecting people from religious hatred and discrimination. There is no need for this definition.

If the Government is serious about tackling genuine anti-Muslim hatred, it should enforce the laws already on the statute book — not introduce what risks becoming a de facto Islamic blasphemy law.

Yet the Government is actively encouraging public bodies, private organisations and charities to adopt the definition.

The FSU has already successfully challenged South Wales Police after it attempted to implement an even more zealous version, under which officers were instructed to record comments that went beyond “legitimate” discussion of Islam.

Just 45 minutes after the then Communities Secretary, Steve Reed, unveiled the definition in the House of Commons, pro-Gaza MP Iqbal Mohamed asked whether it could be incorporated into the Nolan Principles of Public Life.

Had that happened, parliamentarians could potentially have faced sanctions for raising concerns about issues such as Islamist extremism and the grooming gangs scandal.

Phillips concludes: “Self-censorship is bad enough. But now there has been government censorship of the process by which that self-censorship is to be turned into outright submission.”

The Government must come clean about who helped shape this definition.

Read more in The Times below 👇

[Daniel Hannan @DanielJHannan]

‘Imagine a Rip Van Winkle who had fallen asleep in, say, the mid-1990s, waking up today and trying to understand what was going on. “So these refugees. They’re mainly women and children, I suppose?”
“No, they’re almost all young men.”
“Oh. But they’re fleeing some dreadful warzone?”
“No, not exactly. They’re coming from France.”
“So how do they sneak past our coastguard?”
“That’s the odd thing. UK Border Force picks them up in the Channel and then lands them in Britain.”
“Well, I suppose they must make some great contribution once they arrive, then?”
“They’re not allowed to work. But they’re very active when it comes to crime, especially sexual assaults. In fact, the Home Office has just brought out a leaflet asking them not to molest women and children...”’
https://t.co/lXAV2LpqjC

[Kaizen D. Asiedu @thatsKAIZEN]

Jason Arday shouldn’t be dead.

But he is dead - because he didn’t tell the truth.

And Cambridge University didn’t look for the truth - because he’s black.

And fellow black professors didn’t ask for the truth - because he is black.

Jason lied repeatedly.

And he told the exact lies that allow one to excel in the system that elite universities have adopted.

A system that factors in race, hardship, and lived experience under the banner of equity, instead of pure performance.

Nearly everyone in these institutions ignored Jason’s lies, to try and protect black people.

They called the people seeking the truth racists.

Of course there were some racists.

But the majority of people just wanted the truth.

Avoiding the truth didn’t help black people.

Double standards in academia aren’t helping black people.

They hurt the perception of black people who are truly the best, and would have held prestigious positions at elite schools, solely off the merits of their performance.

Double standards always backfire.

Even when well intentioned.

Even when intended to correct for past oppression.

Race-conscious hiring and admissions have created a situation where it is rational to wonder whether a black person has achieved their position because they were simply the best, or because they were good enough, and black.

This is not a racist thought.

It’s a rational thing to wonder when a system promotes people based on race.

It’s a thing I’ve wondered about myself, as someone who graduated from Harvard - which had race-conscious admissions.

No amount of insistence that it’s racist will make it racist.

It’s no more racist than it would be to wonder whether a white player got into the NBA off of just performance, if the NBA decided to focus on “fixing” the underrepresentation of white people.

This is the logical downside of race-conscious hiring and admissions.

You can think the downside is worth the upside.

But the downside remains.

Calling people with legitimate concerns racist didn’t protect black people.

It didn’t protect Jason.

It hurt black people who have earned their positions.

And it allowed a troubled man who built his career on lies to rise to a height so great that his fall from grace killed him.

We could have just had the truth.

Instead, we have a tragedy.

[Nathan Cofnas @nathancofnas]

“How I Became the Scapegoat in the Jason Arday Affair”

Gift link: https://t.co/9NiObZ0bzH

[U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Bill White @USAmbToBelgium]

The United States Mission to Belgium condemns, in the strongest terms, Ghent University’s retaliation against an American scholar following his accurate whistleblower reporting on academic fraud.

The United States government regularly funds and supports research, academic exchanges, and other engagements with overseas universities. Dishonest, corrupt institutions that engage in, or reward, scapegoating mob behavior are not desirable partners for us. This is particularly true where the purpose and effect of the scapegoating is to punish accurate journalism unearthing academic dishonesty. We are therefore reviewing any relationships we have with Ghent University.

Bad-faith idealogues will try to make this a referendum on the content of Cofnas’s scholarship – or polemical distortions of it. That’s wrong. Free speech means that controversial views are protected. And Cofnas’s views were known to Ghent University when he was hired.

The ultimate purpose of freedom of speech is to overturn lies, fraud, and false ideologies. This is precisely what Cofnas was doing, and precisely the reason his home institution wants to silence him.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

[Basil the Great @BasilTheGreat]

🚨BREAKING: There has been widespread public outrage after 2 men involved in disorder at Epping Migrant Hotel protests have received LONGER SENTENCES IN PRISON than the illegal migrant who sexually assaulted a 14 year old girl which started the protests in the first place

- Charlie Land, 2 years 8 months
- Jonathan Glover, 2 years 6 months

- Hadush Kebatu, just 12 months

The UK justice system is a complete joke

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

I spent 16 years in the British Army, leaving the Parachute Regiment as a Major. I served three tours in Afghanistan, one attached to US Army Special Forces, as well as tours in Bosnia, Northern Ireland and the Middle East. I later taught military theory and leadership at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.

Academically, I have an LLB in Law & Politics, an MA with Distinction in War Studies & Military History and an MSc with Distinction in Psychology. I also hold postgraduate qualifications in Leadership & Strategic Management and Higher Education, and I am now completing a PhD in War Studies examining what Ukraine and the post-7 October wars can tell us about the future of warfare.

Since leaving the Army, I have spent a great deal of time going to the wars I write about. I visited Gaza twice in 2024, went inside captured Hezbollah tunnels in Lebanon, visited the Ukrainian front lines, and in 2025 became the first neutral researcher invited to observe the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution sites. My research has produced substantial reports on casualty statistics, human shields, information warfare, humanitarian operations and the tactical lessons emerging from Gaza. You can find them at @HJS_Org

I make no apology for advertising to you that this is an unusually strong background for analysing contemporary conflict. There are not many conflict analysts who combine command experience in war, formal study of war, law and psychology, experience teaching future Army officers, think-tank research and repeated fieldwork inside the conflicts they analyse.

Those different disciplines also catch different mistakes. Military experience makes it harder to mistake a map arrow for a feasible operation. War Studies forces tactical events back into their political and strategic context. Psychology matters when propaganda, perception and behavioural manipulation have become part of the battlefield. Law matters when almost every contemporary campaign is simultaneously fought through international institutions, courts and competing claims about legitimacy. Fieldwork is the final check because people who actually fight wars have a habit of complicating theories developed by chairborne researchers from several thousand miles away.

That is what I try to bring to my Substack. I am less interested in telling readers who “won” yesterday than in working out what happened, why it happened, what the participants were trying to achieve, whether they possessed the means to achieve it, and what the consequences are likely to be. Tactical success, military effectiveness and strategic success are not synonyms. Much bad analysis begins by treating them as though they are.

I will get things wrong. Anyone analysing wars in real time will. The promise I can reasonably make is that I will go to the evidence, go to the people involved where I can, change my assessment when the evidence changes, and tell you what I think rather than what my supposed political tribe would prefer me to think.

There is an enormous quantity of geopolitical commentary available for free. I think the combination behind mine is genuinely unusual.

If that is the sort of conflict analysis you want to read, please check out: https://t.co/YJdNYaoObl

[David Collier @mishtal]

So on Saturday, I was in Liverpool and I stopped at a pro-Palestine street stall in the shopping district for a chat.

As always - I wanted to know what these activists were actually telling passing members of the public.

What followed was extraordinary. 1/6
⬇️⬇️⬇️

[Richard North @ollieparrot]

Defund the BBC

Although much more is to come out of the woodwork with the Arday affair, the role of the BBC in reporting the emerging controversy should not be forgotten.

The contrast between how newspapers like The Telegraph or The Times, and journals such as The Spectator, meticulously dismantled his claims and the passivity of the BBC in handling the story points to several systemic failures in the broadcaster’s objectivity.

The BBC possesses an elite investigative arm, yet it fundamentally failed to use Verify or any of its other fact-checking resources independently to audit Arday's work during the height of the controversy.

While print journalists were calling up charities, mapping out impossible marathon times (such as his claim of running 600 miles in six days), and running software on his academic papers, the BBC largely limited its coverage to reporting on other people's reporting.

It limited is coverage of the controversy, effectively treating the crisis as a mere “row” or a clash of opinions between opposing camps, rather than a verifiable case of fraud. In so doing, it seems to have been attempting to protect a narrative it had spent years building.

The BBC itself was a primary driver of the Arday phenomenon. They presented him as the definitive symbol of progressive triumph over institutional barriers: a man diagnosed with global development delay who could not speak until 11 but became Cambridge’s youngest Black professor at 37.

Because the BBC’s senior editors used its platform to champion this specific biography, critically examining his thesis would require the broadcaster to admit that its own editorial vetting had failed.

Thus, to preserve institutional face, the BBC consistently framed the accusations not as an issue of basic academic integrity, but as a “highly politicised” debate surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

The broadcaster’s limited coverage heavily repeated Arday’s defensive framing. In his statements - broadcast extensively by the BBC - Arday claimed that the identical passages in his thesis were merely “errors” caused by his autism and a reliance on “mimicry” to learn.

This was despite independent fact-checking and analysis of his 2015 PhD thesis at Liverpool John Moores University, which exposed 188 sentences that were identical or near-identical to a 2009 Brunel University thesis, a statistical impossibility to achieve by accident.

Any experienced academic (in fact, any academic) knows that copying entire blocks of text from a previous student’s dissertation is plagiarism, not a symptom of "neurodivergence".

By uncritically broadcasting his defence without explicitly pointing out that the scale of text duplication breached standard UK university regulations, the BBC chose to prioritise editorial sympathy over strict factual analysis.

But the most significant indicator of a lack of objectivity was the BBC's initial silence on how the story was suppressed.

The public now knows that journalists trying to investigate Arday were met with legal threats from elite law firms, and that the Metropolitan Police actually launched a four-month harassment investigation into an independent reporter just for emailing Arday standard journalistic questions.

The BBC’s failure to investigate why a university professor was using the Met Police to silence legitimate journalistic scrutiny reveals what appears to be a deep-seated reluctance to challenge the establishment figures they admire.

Yet, as a universally tax-funded broadcaster supported by the UK licence fee, the BBC is bound by a strict Royal Charter that legally requires it to maintain absolute impartiality and objectivity.

When the broadcaster prioritises protecting a celebrated narrative over conducting basic, rigorous fact-checking, it represents a profound systemic failure that directly violates those foundational public duties.

By contrast, the BBC routinely deploys its “Verify” unit to fact-check minor internet rumours or political claims, yet it consciously chose not to apply those same data-journalism tools to a high-profile academic scandal that was emerging.

By framing massive text duplication as “errors” and focusing heavily on Arday's defence, the broadcaster allowed its own editorial sympathy to obscure the objective reality of the plagiarism.

This demonstrates that the BBC had created for itself a clear conflict of interest where a public broadcaster was protecting its own historical reporting at the expense of the truth.

In aligning its coverage with a specific progressive worldview – in this case uncritically championing a high-profile appointment to support a diversity narrative – it has succumbed to institutional capture.

It has ceased to be an objective observer (not that it has been for some time) and instead has become an active participant in a cultural conflict, using public money to validate its own institutional preferences.

Prior to the current Charter running out on 31 December 2027, the BBC’s reporting of the Arday controversy should feature prominently in the funding review. It should be taken as additional evidence that the current public service broadcasting model has outlived its usefulness.

If the BBC wants to be the propaganda arm for the progressives, it should be so on its own dime. It is wholly unacceptable that the public should be forced to pay for it.

[Barry Wall @HeadWarriorTWM]

EDI.

The vast majority of educational research could end tomorrow and the result would be nobody would notice and money would be saved.

They say that turds are tapered so that your asshole doesn't shut with a bang, it's time this particular back passage was closely examined by a very anti-woke proctologist.

We may then find that every department, every funding stream and every individual involved needs to go.
At the very least we should do the work to find out.

[Sunday Sport @thesundaysport]

A reminder that yesterday, today, tomorrow and always: clothes horses are horses.

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

Bingo.

[Mike Tomenson @MikeTomenson]

@WingsScotland Just seen her old car in Leicester

[Dr Jordan B Peterson @jordanbpeterson]

https://t.co/CQWRrcI81k

[Wings Over Scotland @WingsScotland]

I would like to once more express my gratitude to the @SpeechUnion, without whom this unpleasant experience would have been orders of magnitude worse. Join up if you can. https://t.co/NISQ5kpgDH

[Colin Wynter KC @QcWynter]

More black people of influence should be expressing opinion on the Jason Arday fiasco.
It appears that the man has gained positions & status on basis of grift & progressive white gullibility.
This is not good for black people.
It casts a cloud on genuine achievements of others.