Politically Incorrect AI

At The Nerve News: Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying

If Donald Trump ordered Big Tech to turn off all of your country's chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change. Every one of your country's ministries and corporations would chug on with nary a hitch. Households, too, though perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework again.

Contrast this with what would transpire if Trump directed his tech giants to switch off your country's Office 365 access, or to brick your Android and iOS phones, or to killswitch your John Deere tractors. Your country would effectively cease to exist.

Having made a career in tech, I can vouch for this insight:

One person who's had a lot of opportunity to observe the shear between the stated business/AI situation and the real business AI situation is Nikhil Suresh from Hermit Tech, a consulting firm of "radically ethical data wizards" (that is, tech consultants). For a year and a half he has been talking to hundreds of executives — and, more importantly, their subordinates — about what, if anything, AI is doing for their businesses.

. . . Suresh says he's never seen a successful enterprise AI project: "Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half." Not one of their clients would face a business challenge if OpenAI went out of business tomorrow. The problem most companies struggle with is that they're "terminally bad at running software projects effectively". Adding AI to the mix doesn't solve this problem – it just adds a whole new range of ways that software deployment can fail.

Chatbots don't help. The internally facing chatbot that's supposed to help employees figure out how to navigate the business sucks because it is only as good as its training data – the business's documentation of its own processes. Businesses suck at documenting their processes. Customer-facing chatbots also suck. They either can't solve your problem, or, when they seem to solve your problem, the "solution" goes nowhere.

Suresh recounts his sole positive customer-service chatbot experience: a Mitsubishi chatbot with a natural-sounding, responsive voice politely took all the details of an automotive failure and promised him a callback. That callback never came, but Suresh is certain that Mitsubishi has logged this as a chatbot success story, even though the experience convinced him not to buy a Mitsubishi car.

One thing I'm noticing is that the unquestioning corporate adoption of AI is generating a peculiar inverse reaction in academic and literary environments, for instance at The Yale Review:

At The Yale Review, we are committed to publishing work shaped by human judgment, care, and responsibility. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies—including large language models (LLMs)—are increasingly part of the cultural landscape, both as a subject of inquiry and as a tool in creative and critical work.

As an institution, we may occasionally use AI technologies to support internal tasks such as calendaring, research collation, and editorial planning in ways that we deem in keeping with our overall mission. However, all published writing is selected, edited, and fact-checked by human editors.

We welcome submissions that engage thoughtfully or critically with AI—especially when AI is central to the inquiry or deployed self-reflexively as part of a writer’s process. All work we publish must reflect the discernment and intent of a human author. Where AI-generated material appears prominently in a submission, we expect writers to note this in brief and explain how it was used.

More frequently, the policy is just plain No AI, as at the equally prestigious Baltimore Review:

About AI: Do we really have to say it? OK. No. We want to read work created entirely by humans.

What's puzzling here is that, as we see just above, AI is struggling to prove itself in business environments, but results from the real world indicate that the one field where it's been a roaring success has been academics, where it's turned out to be a whole new way to beat the system. It'll knock essay questions and comp assignments out of the park, and I strongly suspect that even the most respected journals are reluctant to feed recent years' issues through an AI detector. In fact, I'll bet they're terrified of what would happen if they announced a policy of henceforth doing this with all new submissions.

I've been chuckling for two days over the result AI gave me in yesterday's post, when I asked it simply to generate a story that looked like Lydia Davis, one of the most respected current authors, had written it. It was a perect example of what an AI large language model can do. There was plenty of training data -- Davis's stories are all over the web. The large language model was capable of breaking out the highly visible elements of her narratives and style. The result was unintentional, but hilariously accurate, satire.

What do you think The Yale Review would do if I submitted an essay outlining the insights to be gained from yesterday's post? After all, they "welcome submissions that engage thoughtfully or critically with AI—especially when AI is central to the inquiry or deployed self-reflexively as part of a writer’s process." That might be a bridge too far, but I'm not going to rule this out, at least for now.

More Comes Out On The Idaho College Murders

There have been several recent TV documentaries on the November 13, 2022 murders of four University of Idaho students at an off-campus residence. I watched the one on Investigation Discovery, The Idaho College Murders. Quite a bit of the information in the program challenges the established narrative that these were four naive, unwitting victims.

The first thing that struck both my wife and me was the luxury features of that off-campus residence. We'd both attended undergraduate colleges aimed at the upper middle class in the 1960s, and by comparison, our accommodations back in the day were Spartan. Not only did this place have a fully up-to-date kitchen, it had hardwood floors, fancy bathrooms, and walk-in closets. Everything had new paint. Bedrooms were up to the standard these kids could expect at home in upscale suburbs. I can only surmise that college costs are rising in part due to the increased standard of living students are led to expect.

The second thing uncovered in the documentary was that this residence was widely known as a "party house" and something of an eztension of the on-campus Greek scene. The door locks were combination-style; the combination was widely known and never changed. Outsiders were routinely in and out of the place, it simply wasn't secure.

The third thing was that the murders took place about 4:00 AM, while some of the residents were still awake and partying. Victim Xana Kernodle was still awake, having just received a DoorDash order. Two other surviving residents were also awake. The other three victims, however, were asleep.

The fourth thing, which I frankly found astonishing but shouldn't have, was the level of alcohol and drugs in the victims' blood. Chrome AI mode summarized the medical report:

• Madison Mogen: BAC of 0.282 g/100 mL (an extremely high level approaching alcohol poisoning territory).
• Xana Kernodle: BAC of 0.229 g/100 mL (nearly three times the legal driving limit, with trace levels of amphetamines detected at 12 ng/mL).
• Ethan Chapin: BAC of 0.122 g/100 mL (with a therapeutic or elevated amphetamine/Adderall level of 260 ng/mL).
• Kaylee Goncalves: BAC of 0.107 g/100 mL (reflecting moderate intoxication).

All of them were well above the DUI limit of 0.08 g/100 mL, but three, since they were asleep, hadn't cosumed alcohol for some period before they were killed, which suggests their BAC had previously been even higher. Chrome AI mode concludes,

Legal and medical analysts note that these high levels of intoxication significantly slowed the victims' neurological reaction times, impaired their physical coordination, and heightened their vulnerability to a sudden, middle-of-the-night attack.

I'm also puzzled at Ethan Chapin's apparent use of Adderall, which is used to treat ADHD, which frankly seems incongruous for anyone deemed qualified to attend university. Adderall has a high chance of abuse and misuse and may lead to substance use problems, including addiction.

Adderall may lead to physical dependence after prolonged use, even if taken as directed. Your healthcare provider should check you or your child for the risk of abuse, misuse, and addiction before starting treatment and will monitor you or your child during treatment.

Was this being done for Ethan Chapin?

The documentary pointed out that Bryan Kohberger's motive in carrying out the killings has never been established, and neither have the precise circumstances that led him to select and enter the residence. However, I don't think it's unreasonable to surmise that the residence had a general reputation for lax security, the combination for its locks was apparently well known, and it was generally understood to be a party house. That could easily have attracted Kohberger.

This brings me back again to the experience I had exchanging social-media messages with undergraduates when I was involved in the Dartmouth alumni trustee movement in tbe early 2000s. They objected strenuously to having to swipe keycards to get in and out of dorms, when given the current environment, this is simply a minimum standard of security anywhere. Had this been in place at that off-campus residence, the murders likely wouldn't have taken place. If students resist, or neglect to follow, basic security precautions, they aren't being taught ordinary prudence, which ought to be part of any character development.

It's hard to shake the overall sense of entitlement that surrounds student life in the documentary. Nevertheless, there's also a sense of shallow uniformity in all the victims, and this goes to the standard public reaction: these students were living large in a version of the American dream, what a tragedy that their lives were snuffed out. But they were living recklessly, developing habits of alcohol and drug abuse before they were even of age, and not getting any serious advice from anyone -- if anything, their parents were simply enabling the recklessness and entitlement.

I'm not sure my wife and I would have wanted our grandchidren to wind up in that sort of environment. There's got to be a better alternative.

AI Explains Itself

The Jason Arday and Rahila Khan cases make me think of other potential literary hoaxes, for instance using AI. AI tells me that Lydia Davis, portrait above, is a highly respected author of micro fiction. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Can you write me a micro fiction piece as thoough Lydia Davis had written it?"

The New Arrangement

We agreed to divide the books evenly, but he insisted that the anthology of French poetry belonged to him because his grandfather had given it to him, even though he had never read a single line of it and I had translated three of the poems for a journal that paid me in copies. I let him keep it, of which I was quite proud, until I realized yesterday morning that without its spine on the third shelf, the remaining volumes of biography lean precariously to the left, forcing me to look at them slantwise every time I enter the room, which means he is still disrupting my posture months after moving out.

I asked, "Can you explain how someone might detect this was written by AI?" It answered,

An expert reader or an advanced AI detector might identify this text as machine-generated through several subtle linguistic markers:

Over-engineered stylistic mimicry: The piece hits every stereotypical Lydia Davis trope simultaneously—extreme brevity, hyper-fixation on a mundane domestic object, mathematical score-keeping of a relationship, and a single, winding grammatical sentence. Human writers usually display more stylistic variance, whereas AI tends to generate an idealized "caricature" of an author's voice.

Flawless, low-perplexing syntax: The long sentence flows with perfect grammatical precision despite its complexity. AI rarely makes erratic stylistic choices, punctuation errors, or rhythmic stumbles that naturally occur when a human is drafting micro-fiction.

Predictable thematic resolution: The punchline (the missing book causing a physical lean that mirrors emotional disruption) is highly logical and neat. AI excels at making these clean, conceptually satisfying connections, while human writers often introduce a element of messy, unresolved, or surreal emotional truth.

However, I put the story AI generated using a Lydia Davis model into a free online AI detector, and it certified it as 100% human-written.

Keep in mind that AI does not have an inherent sense of humor.

A Precursor Of The Arday Case

The Jason Arday case brought to mind a somewhat similar kerfuffle from the 1980s, the Rahila Khan case. In 1986, Toby Forward, a white Church of England cleric from Hull, began submitting fiction under the pseudonym Rahila Khan, an Asian Muslim mother of two. Forward's side of the story is this:

It came as quite a shock when I lost Rahila Khan. I’d known her for two years and we were very close. I told my agent that Rahila wanted to write a letter to the Guardian about a witless piece that they had done about her, but the agent was firm. ‘No. No more Rahila Khan. She’s finished.’ I was upset. We’d done a lot together in just two years.

Rahila Khan and I wrote our first story for BBC Radio at the end of August 1985. We didn’t put my name on it. It was rejected, as not quite suitable, but with an encouraging letter saying that she wrote well and should try sending it to the women’s magazines. We were more pleased than disappointed, so we set to work to write another – after all, the producer had asked her to send something else and had said that they wanted things ‘with a genuine “ethnic” background’ because they didn’t get many. I managed to separate the responses. The failure was Rahila Khan’s; the praise was mine, secretly.

We had found a gap in the market and we set about filling it. All the stories from then on were accepted. The producer said she’d love to see Rahila ‘if she was ever in London’; she was unfailingly kind in her criticism of the stories and patient with revisions. She took a lot of time with us. It was like getting a free writing-course. I was very pleased for Rahila and didn’t mind that my name wasn’t on anything. I liked it better that way.

After a while we tried some stories that weren’t about Asian teenagers, but the producer didn’t like them and sent them back saying they weren’t as good as the others. She didn’t even suggest revision, which was odd. We didn’t know whether there wasn’t room for ‘English’ stories, or if they really weren’t much good, or if the producer just expected Asian themes from an Asian and English themes from a white person.

To test it out, I wrote a story with Tom Dale. It was a country-house murder with a twist at the end. Very English. We sent it to the head of Morning Story to get a fresh opinion, but it landed on the same producer’s desk. To our surprise, she liked it, and it was broadcast. By now, it was getting quite difficult for me, writing some stories with Rahila and some with Tom Dale. We did them on different typewriters and with a different lay-out. When Tom Dale made a mistake – like not keeping a copy of a script that needed revision – the producer told him off quite sharply, not at all the way she wrote to Rahila Khan; and he was never invited to London to meet her. Rahila felt a bit guilty about this and sometimes Tom sulked and wouldn’t write any more stories, but he had to in the end if something English grew in his mind that Rahila couldn’t use.

Another version of the story is here:

In 1987, the feminist publishing house Virago published a collection of stories featuring British Asian girls caught in the conflicting demands of home and school. The author of Down the Road, Worlds Away was a 38-year-old mother of two called Rahila Khan, whose fiction had already been aired on Radio 4. “With hard-eyed realism and poignant simplicity,” the book’s blurb read, “Rahila Khan brilliantly gives voice to uneasy youth.” Virago’s remit, as Lennie Goodings puts it in A Bite of the Apple, was “to publish the stories of women’s everyday lives, stories previously not thought worth telling and recording,” and these tales perfectly fitted the bill.

The problem was that Rahila Khan did not exist. The author of Down the Road, Worlds Away was in reality an Anglican vicar called Toby Forward impersonating an Asian woman. He practised this deception, he said, because vicars were considered sitcom characters and he wanted to be taken more seriously. Forward decided “to let Virago know what had happened and to trust to their good sense, good business and basic humanity,” as he wrote in a confession piece in the London Review of Books. Goodings, who recently stepped down as Virago’s boss after 40 years with the firm, devotes two pages of her buoyant memoir to the fiasco.

“Outraged” by the deception, Goodings ordered all remaining copies of Forward’s stories to be pulped. “I now see this was a little extreme,” she writes. “We could probably have laughed it off—and then pulped his book.” The scandal, which created much hilarity in the press, fed the nation’s anti-feminism and belittled the urgency of Virago’s larger project. But it also stimulated genuine discussion. “Aside from thoughts on racism, lies, and feminism,” Goodings recalls, “a conversation and questions about the text emerged.”

“Does it matter who wrote it if a book is good? Our answer: well, it also depends how you are presenting the book. Question: what about the Brontës—they published under false, male names? Answer: they had to. Question: can you tell the difference between male and female writing? Answer: no. Question: is it true that female writers of colour have an easier ride than white men in getting published? Answer: no, look around you. Question: did the Reverend Toby Forward have the last laugh on the feminists? Answer: nobody agrees on that one! Question: is it okay for a vicar to dissemble? Answer: hmmm...”

Well, of course, Jonathan Swift wasn't just a vicar, he was a dean. According to Wikipedia,

In 1708, a cobbler named John Partridge published a popular almanac of astrological predictions. Because Partridge falsely determined the deaths of several church officials, Swift attacked Partridge in Predictions for the Ensuing Year by Isaac Bickerstaff, a parody predicting that Partridge would die on 29 March. Swift followed up with a pamphlet issued on 30 March claiming that Partridge had in fact died, which was widely believed despite Partridge's statements to the contrary.

In other words, Fr Forward acted in the best traditiona of both English Literature and the Church of England, at least as they were back in the day. What both the Rahila Khan and Jason Arday cases suggest is that in more recent times, the UK bourgeoisie -- especially the university-educated media elite -- has suffered a profound loss of confidence, to the point that they must go on hopeful searches for non-whites who prosper just as they do, with the inevitable result that they wind up being hoaxed.

Let's keep in mind that non-white immigration to England was the project of elites who wanted to keep working-class wages down. This got atarted after World War II, when to make socilalized medicine and nationalized transport affordable, the elites brought in the first waves to work in those fields. Somehow, places like Cambridge and the BBC need to promote a myth of high-achieving writers and academics from immigrant communities -- and inevitably, opportunists find gaps in tbe market.

It's hard to avoid thinking the basic narrative is this: yes, we brought in former colonials to keep wages down, but look at what's come of it! People in these communities are moving into elite professions like media and academics! It's been all to the good!

Jason Arday is nothing new.

A National Embarrassment

There's something profoundly unserious about the UK lately, although I'm increasingly convinced this isn't new. According to The Guardian,

Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor accused of plagiarism and embellishment, has resigned after the university announced he was to face new investigations into his qualifications and career.

Arday, who had been dogged by a growing series of questions over his academic work and credentials, issued a statement on Wednesday night, saying the “relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love”

. . . Simon & Schuster had been preparing to publish Arday’s memoir, entitled Great and Unfortunate Things, later this month. His resignation may pause or even halt its publication and planned publicity tours.

The Simon & Schuster question may be just another of his prevarications. In a separate Guardian story,

Jason Arday, the former Cambridge professor accused of plagiarism and embellishment, claimed he was paid “1.4 million” for his forthcoming memoir detailing his extraordinary backstory.

. . . Despite allegations against Arday, Simon & Schuster said earlier this week it was planning to go ahead with the publication of his memoir Great and Unfortunate Things on 11 August in the US, and 27 August in the UK.

In a previous interview with the Guardian, Arday said Simon & Schuster had offered 1.4m for the book in a “pre-empt”, a type of deal in which a publisher is so keen on a book they put in a high offer to take it off the table before it can go to auction. Arday did not specify whether the 1.4m figure was in pound sterling or US dollars. Simon & Schuster did not respond to a request to comment on the sum.

. . . While it is a high figure, publishing sources said it would be plausible if Simon & Schuster US and UK teamed up to buy the book and sought worldwide rights – meaning they could sell the book into other regions as well as the UK and US. After the deal was signed, it was rumoured to be a seven-figure sum.

One senior publisher said it was an utterly mad number, but that “madness sometimes happens”, so it was conceivable. They said a book such as Arday’s would normally be expected to sell about 5,000 copies, so with £2 of royalty per copy, that equates to an advance of £10,000, not 1.4 million dollars or pounds.

One publishing executive said Simon & Schuster’s decision to stand by its author thus far may simply be because “they had a contract, and they’re sticking with the contract”.

If there was a significant advance involved, there may be more motivation on the publisher’s side to “recoup” it, they added.

There have been suggestions that the publisher had to amend elements of Arday’s work. The journalist Benjamin Ryan shared a series of screenshots on social media of different versions of the memoir’s manuscript suggesting that edits had been made to dilute claims related to Arday’s fundraising efforts. Ryan has written pieces on Arday for the Washington Free Beacon, the conservative outlet behind the investigations that led to the Black academic Claudine Gay’s resignation from Harvard. Simon & Schuster did not respond when asked why these edits were made.

Pulling the book at this point would be a “pretty massive decision”, one publisher said, if only for logistical reasons: Simon & Schuster has “probably printed the book already, probably paid the author, and may have started shipping the book all over the world”, so “actively withdrawing the book now is both extremely difficult and quite expensive”.

In a statement before Arday’s resignation, Simon & Schuster said: “We have worked closely with Professor Jason Arday on Great and Unfortunate Things since acquiring it and can speak to the professionalism and integrity he has brought to every stage of the publication.

So far, Simon & Schuster is doubling down:

“We are proud to publish Professor Jason Arday. We have worked closely with him... and can speak to the professionalism and integrity he has brought to every stage of the publication,” Simon & Schuster said in a statement sent to AFP on Aug 5.

The publisher noted that “no allegations of plagiarism have been made with respect to” the memoir, which is set to be published next week in the United States and the end of the month in the UK.

But this X thread sums things up"

Disastrous for Cambridge

But let’s be frank

Cambridge is Britain in microcosm

The past 25 years has seen millions of Arday’s rise to the top

Just look at the frauds in the PLP

— Marble Chops (@Marblechops79) August 6, 2026

I Can't Ignore The Jason Arday Debacle Any Longer

The case of Jason Arday, a professor at the UK Cambridge University, becomes more bizarre every day.

If The Onion or Babylon Bee or another satirical publication wanted to spoof the absurdity of DEI -- the ideology of "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" -- they couldn't have invented a character as unbelievable as Jason Arday.

But Arday is very real: Born in 1985, in 2023 he became at 37 the youngest black man ever to hold a professorship at Cambridge University.

Naturally, he had to overcome great adversity to do so -- indeed, superhumanly great adversity.

Arday, the son of Ghanaian immigrants to London, is not only black; he's autistic and was nonverbal until the age of 11, according to glowing media profiles he's received.

. . . In a 2021 blog post on the "International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination," the University of Bath presented Arday as claiming that he'd played both soccer and snooker (kind of like billiards) at a professional level as a child -- though on July 30, the university amended the transcript of Arday's conversation to say he'd only played soccer "semi professionally" and was "really good" but "not good enough to be professional" at snooker.

Never mind -- he has so many other claims to fame that correcting that legend takes little away.

After all, Arday was also a star of perhaps the most famous documentary in British history, Michael Apted's "Seven Up" series, which followed the same group of subjects from childhood to old age at seven-year intervals, starting in 1964.

Starting, that is, 21 years before Professor Arday was born.

No, the series didn't add new participants over time -- the whole point was to track the very same people who took part in the first installment.

Yet thanks to DEI, truly anything is possible.

The whole thing began with a fairly minor complaint of plagiarism:

[I]n September 2025, the British magazine Times Higher Education started working on a story about plagiarism accusations against Professor Arday. According to information received by THE, Arday not only lifted parts of his 2015 PhD thesis from another academic’s 2009 work, but he also allegedly included quotes from himself in his dissertation.

In response to the questions sent to him by THE via email on the matter, Jason Arday retained the high-power British law firm specializing in defamation cases, Carter-Ruck. The law firm successfully intimidated the publication into not releasing the story initially. What’s more disturbing is that, according to The Telegraph, the journalist who was working to break the story was subsequently investigated by Scotland Yard for supposed harassment, and was told by officers to stop emailing the professor questions because he is harming his mental health…

However, unfortunately for him, Professor Arday could not stop the accusations against him coming out in public outside Britain. They were eventually published by Nathan Cofnas, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ghent in Belgium, in a Substack post.

Since then, the heightened public scrutiny of Arday’s work has unearthed a slew of other scandals around his person.

The UK Guardian has gone into great detail about the plagiarism accusations:

Wen the superstar academic Jason Arday took to the stage at the British Sociological Association’s 75th anniversary conference earlier this year, he delivered a talk called Wanted Dead or Alive: the Playbook.

The youngest black professor in Cambridge University’s history told an audience of his peers that the playbook in question had helped bring down some of the biggest names in US academia. Conservative “activists” were trawling through the work of black academics, looking for anything to use against them: inconsistencies, citation errors, passages in their work that were similar to existing papers.

. . . Claudine Gay, the first black woman to become president of Harvard, was only in the post for seven months before she was forced out over plagiarism allegations. Others said they felt like “sitting ducks” as their work was pulled apart.

. . . “The instruments that are designed to protect academic integrity, designed to protect our wellbeing and our intellectual property, are weaponised,” he told the audience in April.

He called for his peers to defend him. “There isn’t any room to sit there and watch your fellows suffer for no reason. It’s abhorrent, it’s a disgrace and, quite frankly, evil,” he added. “That’s the cancer that we need to eradicate from academia.”

Some of the audience thought it was strange. Keynotes are usually places where academics talk about their work and discuss breakthroughs, yet here was Arday talking about racism and harassment. Some felt he must have been saying this for a reason.

Then last week a row erupted concerning Arday’s academic work.

Other problems have surfaced regarding the upcoming publication of his memoir in the US:

Crucially, among those making quiet edits is Simon & Schuster, the powerhouse publisher that is slated to release Arday's memoir in the United States next week and in the United Kingdom later this month. In a statement to the Free Beacon, Julia Prosser, a spokeswoman for the publisher, said the book would be released as planned. Arday, Prosser said, "worked closely with his co-writer"—Eve Claxton, who is uncredited on the book’s Amazon page and the corresponding U.S. book cover—"as well as our editorial and legal teams, to carefully research, write and corroborate the narrative."

But documents suggest Simon & Schuster realized Arday's public image was under scrutiny, given the edits they made to claims about his fundraising during the 11th hour of the book's production and the stealth changes they made to his Simon & Schuster speaker bio.

According to the available archived pages, Simon & Schuster quietly edited Arday's bio at some point between May 19 and July 24, 2025. The initial version stated: "Arday has been a prolific fundraiser having raised over £5.5 million pounds for 80 national charities over an [sic] 20-year period. His fundraising achievements include running: 30 marathons in 35 days, 300 miles in 3 days and 600 miles in 6 days."

Question now is, not how long he stays, but who's he taking down with him?

To save their sociology department, they'll have to destroy it.

— Northern Barbarian (@xnoesbueno) August 4, 2026

According to a Wall treet Journal op-ed,

When the Guardian, whose woke credentials are usually seen as unassailable, confronted Mr. Arday about his misadventures with truth, he said, “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me.”

Just so! Some banks are too big to fail. Some academics are, too. The media had indeed, until very recently, made a habit of simply publishing as fact whatever he said, and there’s the real problem here. It isn’t only that a professor at a leading university appears to be a serial fabulist. (Mr. Arday denies this categorization.) It’s that the university, as an institution, along with the media, is supposed to be one the most rigorous pursuers of truth in our society.

I don't think this is over by a long shot.

What's Really Going On In Ceuta?

The official version of the Ceuta crisis is that it's over, the migrants have mostly turned around and gone home, everything's back to normal. In reality, it's very difficult to check. Yesterday, I embedded an X post from the UK Spanish embassy that said as of this past Friday, July 31, they'd mostly gone back home. If this is the case, then the photos and videos of the migrants overrunning tbe streets should date almost entirely from Thursday, July 30.

However, I embedded another X post yesterday from the UK's Tommy Robinson dated Saturday, August 1, apparently filmed the day before, that shows significant numbers of migrants still on the streets. The Nick Shirley video embeddded above, by far the most comprehensive report from the crisis, speaks of Juy 31 in the past tense, so I think it's reasonable to assume it was filmed over the weekend and released yesterday. Although it has some shots of migrant groups being escorted by Spanish guardsmen, there are many more of migrants still wandering the streets in small groups. According to Reuters as of yesterday,

Spain estimates that about 69,500 migrants have returned to Morocco over the past four days, exceeding initial estimates of around 50,000 arrivals in Ceuta on Thursday. The official death toll on the Spanish side of the border stands at 72, with 11 deaths on the Moroccan side.

. . . Ceuta's leader Juan Jesus Vivas told broadcaster Telecinco between 3,000 and 5,000 migrants remained in the enclave, adding that its two migrant reception centres — one for adults ​and another for minors — had "collapsed".

It's been clear throughout the crisis that the numbers released by government sources are intended to minimize the problem and create an impression that it's been solved. The actual numbers remaining are likely much higher than these estimates. But farther down, the piece carries information on how the invasion was organized:

[Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares] said Morocco had immediately offered police support and had not attached conditions to its cooperation, allowing for the ‌rapid return ⁠of most of those who crossed.

But Ceuta's Vivas was critical of Rabat, saying there was a widespread perception within Ceuta that it had allowed — if not orchestrated — the crisis.

"Morocco has shown us that it isn't reliable. There's no alternative but to put in place whatever means are necessary to ensure it cannot do this again," Vivas told newspaper El Pais.

Morocco's Interior Ministry on Sunday blamed the surge on misinformation on social media, human trafficking networks and misinterpretation of a Spanish court ruling banning immediate ​returns of migrants intercepted at sea. That ​was in line with Madrid's official ⁠view.

According to reports by El Pais and Cadena SER radio, citing officials familiar with the matter, Spanish intelligence services have concluded that Morocco did not plan the mass crossing, but allowed it to happen.

Moroccan border controls were gradually relaxed during July and were allegedly removed as crowds surged toward the Tarajal crossing during Morocco's Throne Day holiday, the ​reports said.

The UK Guardian opens up the possibility of another explaination:

But there has also been speculation that the Moroccan authorities may have opened the border to signal their displeasure at Sánchez’s recent visit to Algeria, which supports efforts to free the disputed territory of Western Sahara from Moroccan occupation.

Morocco’s ambassador to Spain, Karima Benyaich Millán, said Rabat was not happy about the mass crossing, adding that it hoped those in Ceuta would return.

Moroccan government sources told the Europa Press news agency that the surge of people entering Ceuta was down to “criminal organisations” and insisted that Rabat’s cooperation with Spain remained “exemplary”.

In May 2021, Rabat loosened border controls – allowing 10,000 people to cross into Ceuta over the course of two days – during a diplomatic standoff triggered after Madrid allowed a Western Sahara independence leader to be treated for Covid-19 in Spain.

The crisis has become an extremely sensitive issue for the EU:

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s migration policies have weathered withering criticism as leaders from across the European Union met Tuesday following last week’s rush of migrants to the Spanish territory of Ceuta in North Africa. /p>

The sudden arrival of 72,000 migrants on Thursday and Friday sparked a humanitarian crisis in Ceuta and reignited the immigration debate in the 27-nation bloc, though most of the migrants soon went back. More than 80 migrants died, including some who drowned or were trampled in a stampede to cross a breakwater barrier, according to Spanish and Moroccan authorities.

Notice how, in the space of a few days, the estimate of migrants has crept upward from 50,000 to 72,000. This would also affect the number remaining in Ceuta if "most" of the 72,000 have gone back; it seems much more likely that those remaining are still in five digits.

While ministers seemed to rally back around Sanchez after meeting Tuesday, Europe displayed a deeply damaging disunity in the aftermath of Ceuta as it faces security threats from Moscow, instability with Washington and economic tension with Beijing, said Alicia García-Herrero, chief economist for Asia Pacific and Middle East for the financial firm Natixis.

“Europe has shown weakness again,” she said. “Massive weakness.”

EU leaders quickly pounced on Sanchez once videos from Ceuta went viral. Many blamed the incident on his government's progressive policies and publicly rallied for new border checks at sea, air and land ports of entry.

So far, only Anne Applebaum at The Atlantic has blamed the Ceuta crisis on the far right.