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.

Ceuta: Nothing To See Here

Almost everyone who entered Ceuta yesterday has now returned to Morocco.

It is not possible to travel from Ceuta or Melilla to mainland Spain without presenting identification at a police checkpoint. The integrity of the Schengen area is fully guaranteed. https://t.co/F2s3JWN4bF

— Embassy of Spain UK (@EmbSpainUK) July 31, 2026

Anne Applebaum, a Yale legacy, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, board member of the National Endowment for Democracy and Renew Democracy Initiative, editorial board member of The American Interest and the Journal of Democracy, member of the international board of directors of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, and former Senior Adjunct Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), where she co-led a major initiative aimed at countering Russian disinformation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), has delivered the establishment line on Ceuta at The Atlantic, a pet project of Laurene Powell Jobs, whose net worth is estimated at $11 to $14 billion: The Far Right Is Distorting Ceuta.

Mostly young, mostly male Moroccans crawling onto beaches, climbing hills, scaling walls, jumping over fences, surging past police in order to get into Europe: The photographs and videos that emerged from Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in North Africa, on July 29 and 30 looked very much like migrant-terror videos, deliberately designed to be broadcast by the international far right. So closely did this incident resemble the “invasion” that MAGA and its European friends have long said is under way that it was hard not to suspect that it had been orchestrated.

Aha! There you have it! Shadowy forces connected to the far right have cooked this up as a provocation!

Last week, according to El Pais as well as other Spanish, international, and Moroccan media outlets, many Moroccans saw a TikTok video nevertheless claiming that “the Spanish border is open and you can cross without papers,” meaning they could reach the European continent. . . . Other messages, many of which have now disappeared, told people where to buy wet suits, flippers, goggles, floats, and even waterproof bags for documents and cellphones. Screenshots from Google Maps told them which sections of the Ceuta beach might have fewer police. Moroccan border guards were either unwilling or unable to stop them.

. . . Vice President Vance posted a link to a wildly dishonest Fox News segment that incorrectly described the migrants arriving in “Northern Spain” rather than Northern Africa. “Thank God,” he wrote, “@POTUS was elected and our country’s border no longer looks like this.” Others made more specific threats. Robert Jenrick, a high-profile member of Reform, the British far-right party, wrote that “Ceuta is our future if we don’t secure our border. These men are on their way to Calais.” Nigel Farage, the Reform Party leader, posted a video also claiming that the Moroccans were en route to Britain. Alice Weidel, the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), declared that “Germany is the likely destination.”

These were lies. The Moroccans who swam to Ceuta were never going to make it to Britain, Germany, or anywhere else in Europe.

On the other hand, the Spanish government itself blames traffickers:

Spain’s Interior Ministry argued an earlier court ruling is behind the latest influx, stating it “believes that human trafficking networks are exploiting a court ruling to encourage the flow of undocumented migrants, mostly young people.”

In addition, reports dating well before last week's crisis in Ceuta make it plain that, contra Ms Applebaum, migrants can and do cross the Strait of Gibraltar and make it to the European mainland, just as they cross the English Channel:

Morocco is a primary gateway for thousands of Africans seeking to reach Europe. At its narrowest point, the Strait of Gibraltar is 14 kilometers (9 miles) wide.

Most migrants trying to reach Spain do so by sea, but there have been several incidents where migrants have scaled the border fences between Morocco and Spain's North African exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla.

As the European Union's only territories on the African continent, migrants can claim asylum in either exclave.

So far this year [2019], more than 15,000 people have made it to Spain, according to estimates from the International Organization for Migration (IOM). However, more than 200 have died in the attempt.

The standard line, repeated by Ms Applebaum, is that the migrants have mostly turned around and returned to Morocco:

More to the point, nearly all of those who swam over the border had returned to Morocco by Sunday morning. The Spanish government negotiated their return with the Moroccan government.

But an on-the-ground report indicates that as of Saturday, migrants still overwhelmed the city:

Locals on the ground immediately called it a lie. One Ceuta resident posted that around 50,000 invaders remained, the city was collapsed, and the official numbers were pure spin. Video filmed that same afternoon showed streets still packed, nothing like the “most have left” story.

A morning ride through conquered Cueta. pic.twitter.com/ADaAnvb8SD

— Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 (@TRobinsonNewEra) August 1, 2026

There can be little question that the Ceuta crisis is an embarrassment to the Spanish government, and so far, Ms Applebaum's position that it was engineered by the "far right", or as Elon Musk would put it, people with normal views, appears tp be unique:

It remains unclear who created the viral posts that encouraged the would-be migrants to believe that they could get to Europe from Ceuta. But those who want to weaken the Spanish government, boost the European far right, and create turmoil inside the EU lost little time in promoting the photographs as soon as they arrived.

But the current reponse by the EU is just kabuki:

Italy said on Friday it ‌was suspending the European Union's border-free Schengen arrangements with Spain for one month in response to a mass influx of migrants into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta from neighbouring Morocco.

. . . Critics of Meloni's right-wing government dismissed the new border checks as largely symbolic, saying there was no indication that migrants arriving in Ceuta had any desire to travel onwards to Italy. Meloni's coalition, which came to power in 2022 promising to reduce illegal immigration, has faced strong pressure from ⁠a new far-right party led by former army general Roberto Vannacci, whose anti-migrant rhetoric has resonated with some voters.

With migration once again dominating headlines, the government has sought to promote a tough stance on security, however centre-left opponents accused ⁠the government of pandering to populists and undermining ties with Spain.

I see, it's the "far right" against the "centre-left". But don't worry, everything's under control.

More Fauci Fallout

Here are a couple of more recent takes on Dr Fauci's Senate testimony this past Wednesday. First, from Alan Dershowitz:

Let me begin with Fauci’s constitutional right to invoke the Fifth Amendment. Yes, he was pardoned for any past crimes but the pardon does not operate prospectively. The committee was trying to prove that he had committed crimes not only before his pardon but after it. He surely had the right to invoke the Fifth Amendment as to any potentially incriminating information that would allow prosecution for post-pardoned crimes.

. . . Senator Rand Paul tried to avoid this constitutional barrier by specifically asking him questions that are clearly covered by the pardon President Biden gave him. This may make it appear that Dr. Fauci had nothing to fear from answering questions limited to that period. But that ignores a line of Supreme Court cases that hold that if a defendant answers some questions about a particular subject, he may not refuse to answer other questions about that subject. He may not turn the spigot on and off. Once he opens the door by answering questions about a subject, he may not close it in response to other questions.

So any good lawyer will always advise a client who seeks to invoke the Fifth Amendment to invoke it across the board and not try to pick and choose safe areas. That’s what Dr. Fauci’s lawyer did here, and that’s what I would’ve done had I been Dr. Fauci’s lawyer.

But that doesn't solve Fauci's contempt of Congress problem:

The congressional committee may well recommend that he be held in contempt. And congress may vote to hold him in contempt. The Trump Justice department could indict him and he would have to litigate these issues. Although there is no guarantee that he will win, the law seems clearly to be on his side. Moreover it may take a considerable amount of time for this case to work its way through congress and the courts.

Dr Fauci is 85 years old. I'm not sure what good it would do to prosecute the guy at this stage, especially when the sociopolitical mechanisms that put him where he was are fully intact. Alex Berenson touches more on this issue, but he doesn't quite get there:

Throughout the Covid epidemic, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci didn’t know what he didn’t know.

Worse, he didn’t care.

Fauci’s Covid “diary” — his musings about his Covid experience — have revealed his epic self-love to the world. But it’s what the diary doesn’t say that’s the real problem.

. . . Fauci had just turned 79 when the news of a potential outbreak emerged from China at the start of 2020. For a generation, he had worked mainly as an federal administrator, not a bench scientist or physician. Now he faced a novel coronavirus with a “furin cleavage site,” an unusual and frightening feature.

. . . He could have insisted on a national seroprevalence trials, like the ones the British government conducted, to track the spread of Covid infections over time. He could have pushed for fast relatively cheap studies of different medicines tested alone and in combination. (Again, the British ran such a study; it found dexamethasone, a cheap steroid, cut the risk of death in people with severe Covid.)

He didn’t do those things, or much else that was forward-looking. He didn’t push for head-to-head trials of Covid vaccines, either. Later, in 2021, he would prove to be stupidly overconfident in the mRNAs, failing to realize how quickly their protection would wane.

. . . The answer is that Fauci was not daunted by the need to keep up with the flood of information about Covid. Quite the opposite. His diary shows a profound lack of interest in nearly all the topics mentioned above. No wonder he had so much time for television appearances.

“I represent science,” Fauci famously proclaimed in 2021. “I am science.”

Dr Fauci's real problem is that he was raised up by the media, which delighted him, and he absolutely encouraged it. That he was a complete phony helped his rise, but it's led to his fall, and now, that same media has turned him into a scapegoat.

I think of this often when I’m standing in the supermarket checkout line and reviewing the latest headlines from the tabloids: an actress who has gained weight and looks grotesque in an inappropriate swimsuit, claims that dashing leading men are abusive or involved in clandestine gay relationships, divorces, rehab, etc. We all are fascinated by the beauty and life of celebrities, and even more intrigued by their delicious falls from grace. Details change a bit, but essentially it’s the same story, week after week, year after year.

What Dr Fauci really needs to do now is hire the kind of publicist that can keep him out of the news. I'm not sure if he knows that exists. He might check with Dubya, whose flacks have done an outstanding job.