Beyond all reasonable doubt. What links Jason Arday to Sigfrido Ranucci?

Cambridge and Pomezia: a pair of rhyming lines in the summer news. Different stories, kilometres apart – a rising academic, an investigative journalist, a fairy tale that ended in tragedy, a tragedy that faded into comedy – yet all played out to the same script, lines and all. The Jason Arday scandal and Ranucci’s love bomb are linked for various reasons: ‘the evidently high opinion they have of themselves’ and a certain ‘inclination towards megalomania’ on the part of those involved, but also the ‘type of defence available to them’, wrote Guia Soncini. I am particularly fascinated by the almost identical reaction provoked in the two offended camps: the followers of ‘Report’ and the devotees of ‘woke culture’ (speaking as someone who is still very much alive). Faced with a series of events that could have shaken their faith, sown doubts, or at least disturbed a few nights’ sleep, their faith not only remained unshaken. It has been cemented, strengthened and revitalised in a flash on the altar of victimhood: conspiracy! Scheming! Witch-hunt! Obvious, you might say. Well, not really. If anything, it’s called ‘cognitive dissonance’ – a term often misused, like ‘radical chic’, ‘burnout’ or ‘gaslighting’. And if it all seems so obvious to us, it’s because it’s now the state in which we’re all wallowing to some extent, some more than others: everything is exactly as true as its opposite, and when the facts contradict a belief on which we’ve staked everything, we don’t change our minds – we change the facts. It may sound familiar, even somewhat trite; yet the first person to bring it into sharp focus was Leon Festinger, a psychologist, drawing conclusions from a daring ‘live’ experiment in a small house in Oak Park, Chicago, in the mid-1950s. He turned it into a great book, "When Prophecy Fails", which, for some reason, hasn’t yet been made into a Netflix documentary. I’ve been rereading it recently, and it’s perfect for connecting the dots: Pomezia and Cambridge.

For example, it is not so obvious that, when it comes to our friend ‘Tritolo’, the focus is still on the ‘government acting as the moral instigator’, the ‘climate of delegitimisation of investigative journalism’, and a complicated manoeuvre by Telemeloni to get rid of ‘Report’. Even after Lavitola’s admissions, the opinion polls, the uninterceptable apps and the dinners at Cefalù Bistrò, Dario Carotenuto (M5S) calmly reiterates: “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s the fault of the climate created by the government”. It is not entirely surprising that Saviano – having already issued a stark warning in a video recorded in the immediate aftermath of the attack – repeats more or less the same thing, only now in a more convoluted, more allusive, with more Camorra overtones, across five episodes on YouTube, in a format halfway between Corona’s “Falsissimo” and Cazzullo’s “Una giornata particolare” (“Torvaianica, the coast south of Rome, a Thursday evening in autumn, a residential street, detached houses, gardens, silence…”). And then Usigrai, the Order of Journalists – all of them, according to an internal dissident, “forging a political, trade-union and media shield around a single journalist”, to the point where even discussing it amounts to “undermining investigative journalism”; indeed, “playing into the hands of the right”, as we have read in recent days – a timeless mantra, perfect even in a relationship (“What, are you leaving me? Do you realise that by doing this you’re playing into the hands of the right?”). Furthermore, it is by no means a given that Travaglio would find it reasonable for Ranucci to compare himself to Moro, Falcone and Borsellino. Nor is it a given that, at the commemoration in Via d’Amelio, Paolo Mondani would argue that identifying the motive behind this obscure attack is their responsibility – “that of the Report team” – and not that of the judiciary. Except that in an episode of ‘Report’, Ranucci would have been found guilty even on appeal, pinned down by screenshots of his chats, voice messages and ambiguous passages in his autobiography about his encounters with female interns. This whole business of clams and TNT could, in short, have been an opportunity to revisit two or three little things about the ‘Report method’, but no, not at all. In fact, by now, any potential removal from the programme would be nothing more than proof of the moral instigator’s hand. The system is watertight. Meanwhile, Ranucci is taking his show on the road, with that mocking and perfect title, “Diario di un trapezista”, adapted from “La scelta” — a book already immortalised by the five-star ratings the author gave it on Amazon, signing himself as Emilio Cresci. On his summer tour, he presents himself to fans in the style of Salman Rushdie: “They’re forbidding me to speak, I’m under attack, they want to silence me, I risk being sacked”. Persecuted not by swarms of offended Muslims, but by a fantastic army of villains – Musk, Bezos, Trump, Netanyahu, Licio Gelli, the social media accounts of Palazzo Chigi, Selvaggia Lucarelli – as he recounts in La Repubblica, in an interview that is a minor masterpiece. The trapeze artist, as we know, is not an athlete: he is a performing artist.

Yet in London, as we were saying, it’s not really that different. Within hours of his death, Jason Arday had already been transformed from an administrative symbol of the DEI programmes – diversity, equity, inclusion – into an icon of Black Lives Matter. The plagiarism allegations, the nonsense, his unsuitability for the Cambridge professorship: all dissolved into a racist narrative. Yet another plot to discredit not investigative journalists, but Black professors. Gathered in Trafalgar Square, hundreds of people chanted slogans such as ‘I am Professor Jason Arday’, ‘Stop racist media now’ and ‘White Lies Matter’. Our white lies killed him. For the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, Arday was the victim of “a public shaming that others in his position would never have had to face, simply because he is black”. So not ‘a man who cheated and was caught’, not a dubious scholar put there merely to give a face to fashionable theories and promote Cambridge as the world’s most inclusive university – with a history of improbable records and redemptions sold to the public amidst a pernicious resurgence of racism – as in a ‘woke’ version of Victorian-era ethnographic exhibitions, with Black people displayed behind fences and in mock villages – but an innocent man who, solely because of the colour of his skin, has endured what a white person would have been spared. And just like in Pomezia: when the New York Times – not some tabloid like "Libero" – reports that Arday was hired despite being, by the university’s own admission, "underqualified by the school’s own standards", the reaction is always the same: "You’re playing into the hands of the right-wing!" – though spoken with a British accent. Some former students are crafting the myth in real time. They have launched the website “Everything Good About Jason Arday” to counter the racist narrative – whilst making no mention of the students who want their money back from Cambridge due to the very poor standard of Arday’s lectures. Now Amnesty International has also stepped in, mobilising five of its key networks in one fell swoop – disability, anti-racism, students, feminism and queer rights – and declaring Arday “the victim of a brutal racist witch-hunt”, culminating in the masterstroke of a proposed bill, “Arday’s Law”, which would impose a cap by decree on the number of articles that can be published about a single person.

Now, I too believe that the relentless attacks and social media pillorying certainly took place – and how – as is always the case when social media is involved. But not because of Arday’s dark skin: if anything, it was because the story was objectively unbelievable and called into question many aspects of the academic system. Plagiarism, on the other hand, no longer matters. Partly because the allegations stemmed from a post by Nathan Cofnas, a former Cambridge philosopher who had previously been accused of racism and has now been sacked by the University of Ghent (even though Arday’s doctoral thesis was a shambles right from the title – a grammatical error right there – not that Scotland Yard needed that). And because, before long, nobody will remember it. I’ve already seen two or three TikTokers revisiting the whole affair in the light of Picasso’s saying, ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal’: Arday was misunderstood; there was no place for him in this ugly neoliberal system. As with the ‘Report method’, the Arday case could have been an opportunity to take stock of the damage caused by identity politics, which turn academic departments into battlegrounds for civil strife. It could have been a chance to distance oneself somewhat from a system that couldn’t care less about data, analysis or falsifiable theories, and feeds solely on slogans. Perhaps next time. Ranucci and Arday share a common form: they are stories shaped by hyperbole. All-too-exaggerated caricatures. They are no longer the real adversary, with their more or less annoying arguments, but the adversary sketched by the cartoonist from the opposing camp. The story that the enemies would have dreamt of writing to prove themselves right, but with plot twists that even they would have struggled to come up with (I wonder: when did the enemies start to resemble caricatures imagined by the opposing camp? Perhaps it began with Berlusconi, who seemed to have emerged from the unconscious of the old PCI voter? Perhaps it began with Trump?).

But let’s return to Oak Park, because that’s where the story begins: detached houses, lawns, quiet streets – as Saviano would say. It is also the birthplace of Hemingway, who left as soon as he could and is credited with the phrase “wide lawns, narrow minds”. Back then, he voted Republican; today it is a Democratic stronghold, with 86 per cent of the vote going to Hillary Clinton. The year is 1954: the Cold War, McCarthyism, the bomb that could strike at any moment, anti-nuclear drills at school. It’s the golden age of flying saucers: from Roswell to the lights over Washington, the sky is full of alien metal – to highlight the relevance of the story today, with Trump now declassifying the UAP files and flooding our timelines with blurry photos of UFOs. Anyway, in one of those little houses lives Dorothy Martin, a desperate housewife like so many others but with a gift: she writes under dictation. Messages appear on the page which – she is absolutely certain – come to her from a distant planet, Clarion. She calls them the Guardians. One day, the Guardians announce the end: on 21 December, a deluge will engulf the world. There is, however, a lifeboat: at midnight, a flying saucer will come to collect her and those who have believed her. A small group gathers around Dorothy, ‘the Seekers’ – a university doctor, a few students, other housewives. They quit their jobs, leave their wives, say goodbye to their relatives. On the evening of the appointed time, they tear off every piece of metal – zips, buckles, underwired bras: it’s well known that they won’t let you board the spaceships with them (a magnificent scene; I’d start the documentary like that).

What they do not realise, however, is that there are three infiltrators amongst them: Festinger and two colleagues, who have read a short article in the newspaper (“Flee the flood, it will engulf us on 21 December”) and want to observe firsthand what happens to a faith when reality presents it with the bill. Midnight strikes: no disc, no apocalypse, no lifeboat. They wait some more. Perhaps their watches aren’t synchronised with the aliens. Nothing. Great despondency in the living room. Then, however, Dorothy’s hand springs into action again: a new message. The Guardians announce that this small group has radiated so much light that it has convinced God to spare the planet. The prophecy has not failed: it has come true in reverse. Not only were they right – they’ve even saved humanity. And here comes the dramatic twist that ensures Festinger’s place in the textbooks: instead of feeling ashamed and slipping away, the Seekers – who until a moment ago had been dodging the press – are now phoning newsrooms, demanding microphones and television cameras; they must tell everyone. The retraction didn’t bring them to their senses; it exhilarated them. Some time later, Dorothy would disappear – first to Arizona, then to the Andes – as a prophetess under an assumed name. Here lies the cognitive dissonance: admitting you were wrong, after you’ve put your reputation, your money, your loved ones and your burnt bridges on the line, costs too much. Better to tweak reality, as in Brecht’s adage, ‘if the people don’t agree, let’s appoint another people’ – the cornerstone of any self-respecting form of communism. But this flaw is human, and therefore politically universal. Take Trump’s ‘stolen election’: every recount that disproved the claims of electoral fraud became proof that the fraud came from even higher up.

Here lies the crux of the Oak Park story: on their own, the deluded would almost always give up; it is the group that keeps hope alive. The more of them there are, the more they prop each other up. The more the prophecy crumbles, the more the need to convert explodes. Festinger had laid down the conditions of the formula – a fervent belief, an irreversible commitment, a prediction capable of failing, an undeniable failure and, above all, a group at hand; in short, a cult. Yet the cult has now become our environmental condition: a ‘safe space’ tailor-made for each of us, where every refutation – a fact-check, a ruling, an admission – instead of putting out the fire, pours a can of petrol on it. That is why Cambridge and Pomezia end up more or less the same. Then, of course, there is the historical context. That book has been re-examined, put into perspective, and partly debunked: the three infiltrators ended up influencing the group they were supposed to observe, and certain scenes were exaggerated. The theory itself has been revised and superseded by half a century of psychological research. As a science, in short, it has become outdated. As a story, it remains compelling and instructive. More so than many recent studies. Certainly more so than those coming out of the sociology departments at Cambridge.