In Britain, the death of the fraudulent University of Cambridge professor Jason Arday has triggered the kind of networked hysteria not seen on the Left since the death of George Floyd in 2020. Arday, once the youngest black professor at Cambridge, was found dead on Aug. 14 after a cascade of revelations exposed him as a fake and a plagiarist. On Aug. 18, thousands of people gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square to mourn him. The speakers accused the press of an “assassination” and a “lynching,” and called for punitive regulation of Britain’s already punitively regulated media.This was the real-world tip of an online iceberg of resentment and delusion. The most titanic contribution came from the minor novelist Will Self. In a 7,000-word rant, Self compared half a dozen other commentators, me among them, to members of Nazi death squads and the persecutors of Alfred Dreyfus, and called on Prime Minister Andy Burnham to instruct the police to launch a murder investigation and impound our computers. My name, and those of others who described Arday’s unarguable falsity, now circulate on online lists of targets for retribution.Call me a cuck and a lib, but I’ve always felt that everyone is free to say what we believe, especially on matters of public interest. As for writers, those of us who are vain and idle enough to mount the soapbox have a duty to tell it like it is. Scapegoating, censorship, and show trials are the hallmarks of police states. When these impulses appear in a liberal state, as in the McCarthy witch hunt, the prosecution of Lenny Bruce for telling rude jokes, or the imprisonment of British people for posting spicy memes, it is a sure sign that the state is losing its grip, whether on the legal machinery that is supposed to be kept out of the grasp of sectarian fanatics or on reality itself.