In Manchester, on the 25th March at 1pm, outside the University on 188 Oxford Road, Students Against Tyranny will be rallying against institutionalised Marxism. But, why?
In 2012, the University of Manchester still encouraged debate and public discourse among its students. One of these students was a person who went by the pseudonym John Christian, who had just started his undergraduate studies at the university. Despite keeping a low profile, he excelled academically and graduated four years later with a first-class master’s degree in theoretical physics. His outstanding academic record secured him a place in the university’s PhD program, where he continued his studies.
This incident occurred in 2016, a year marked by significant political events such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Unfortunately, these events seemed to have had a significant impact on the treatment of free speech in universities. Many higher learning institutions suddenly shifted to becoming Marxist indoctrination camps where students were no longer encouraged to engage in debate but were forced into one way of thinking.
John was attending one of the University of Manchester’s weekly seminars, where experts were invited to give lectures on various aspects of particle physics, including theory, prediction, and experimentation. He described the seminars as covering a wide range of topics. Unfortunately, during one session, a speaker made racist comments about how there were too many white men in physics, and how that number needed to be reduced drastically. This was deeply troubling for John, who regularly attended seminars with 50 to 100 research professors, students, and PhD candidates. During a seminar discussion on Brexit, someone in the audience had announced that John had voted to leave the European Union. This person’s identity was unknown to John.
John observed,
“It felt a bit weird to me, at the time, that someone had announced that, but I didn’t really think anything of it and I immediately realised, that to a lot of people, they weren’t really happy about this”
He further explained how universities are plagued with left wing and woke students/staff, further postulating, “to vote to leave the European Union was not really allowed. It’s just something you wouldn’t do… at least in their opinion.” And he’s right. These days, a lot of students expect you to think exactly the same way as them. And if you don’t, then you’re a “weirdo”, “far right”, “racist”, etc. I find it very ironic that all the people who claim it’s “okay to be different” are the very ones who push the ideology that we should think and act the same, and those who are neurodivergent should be demonised/punished for “wrongthink”.
Once John’s political belief regarding Brexit had been announced to around 100 people, he was questioned on his thinking process. At the time, John describes himself as not being that politically involved, and that he didn’t really care either way but he “thought the benefits of leaving were more advantageous than staying. There would be more opportunities for us to do trade deals and I thought it was probably a good idea if our government was held accountable because I realised that I didn’t know anything about the European Union like who ran it, you didn’t get to vote for who made the decisions.
“So I kind of thought it would be better if we ran things internally, in our own country where we can have some control over the decisions being made.”
John further stated that around this time, he wasn’t that political… he didn’t really have an opinion on many subjects within the political sphere but this constant harassment, we’ll explore later, from his fellow students and so-called ‘friends’ forced him into it. Despite not being that political, Christian was a member of the Conservative society, but purely to form connections in case it opened up avenues for him career-wise post university.
After the whole pro-Brexit ordeal, John noticed a suspicious increase in the amount of students attempting to engage him in political discourse, which yes, sounds brilliant, debate is exactly what we need, however, their true motives behind this were rather sinister and John himself was oblivious to what was actually going on.
John explains,
“People would frequently come and ask me questions about all kinds of things, and always, political, of course. People would ask me about what I think about Donald Trump, Nigel Farrage, David Cameron.” noting the subject would always be something of a ‘hot topic’ within the world of politics at the time. “I thought people were genuinely interested to know what I thought about things and I was quite naive so I didn’t really realise what was going on.”
So what was really going on? As it later turned out, some of John’s fellow students were trying to bait him into making offensive statements, so they could report him to the university administration and lodge a complaint against him.
John became aware of this plot when he was subjected to disciplinary proceedings. He decided to submit a GDPR request, which revealed emails between professors and administrators within the school of physics. These emails showed that they had been asking other PhD students and staff if they had any complaints against John. It was clear that they were actively seeking to discredit John and were using underhanded tactics to do so.
Christian later discovered that there was a woman within the administration whose sole responsibility was to email students and solicit complaints against him. These complaints would then be collected and used to build a case against him. The ultimate goal of this malicious campaign was to either have John expelled or prevent him from graduating. Unfortunately, this witch hunt succeeded, and John was ultimately punished for something he didn’t do.
So you had a large mixture of students and professors who were acting like political activists who were all involved in this conspiracy to remove a student from the PhD program for “wrongthink”, which all started when he stated he voted to leave the European Union… may I remind you that these people consider themselves to be “anti-”fascists!
John was regularly invited to the pub on Friday evenings by other PhD students. At the time, he was unaware of their true intentions and enjoyed socialising with them over a few beers. Though he was always cautious not to drink too much since he was heavily involved in sports at the university and had training on Saturday mornings and was also aware that he was being asked probing questions at these events and did not want to put himself in a situation where he might say something regrettable.
Christian also remembered this one guy in particular, of which he initially considered himself to be good friends with. Something worth noting (the reason why will become apparent later) is that this guy was gay. Something else about this guy is that he would become extremely drunk, and very emotional and would start asking John about various different things.
“There was this one time, he got really mad, because he was really drunk, and he started accusing me of being against gay adoption and I don’t really know where this had come from. I think he just assumed that because I’d voted leave, I’d be against gay adoption and like I say, at the time, I was very centrist so I didn’t really have a strong opinion on it but I explained that I wasn’t totally against it but overall, the research shows that children will do better if they have a parent of both genders. The reason I’d made this argument is because he was supposed to be a scientist and so was I so really all I cared about was well what does the science say?”
After receiving the instigation letter, John was understandably confused and surprised. The letter accused him of violating certain policies but did not specify what he had actually said or done and looking at the policies, Christian thought he was fine and it was all a misunderstanding, hoping that he could clear it all up once he found out what the specific allegations were. However, when he finally learned of the accusation, he was shocked and dismayed. The allegation that he had said “all gays are paedophiles and abuse children” which was completely false.
“They were accusing me of being discriminatory and making hostile comments that made people threatened and stuff like that and I was obviously like there’s no way stuff like that has happened. Somebody must of misunderstood, so I went there thinking this was all a misunderstanding”
At this meeting, they’d also decided to make a whole array of other accusations; such as taking his bike into the building even though a lot of professors did that, however, technically it was against the rules. They also accused him of “being rude over email”, because John was very dismissive when he was sent messages claiming he’d breached certain UoM rules, replying with “no I haven’t, this is nonsense”.
John remembers another accusation where he’d apparently said women are too stupid to do physics. A female student had asked John, “if women are not discriminated against then how come there’s less women in physics?” Before continuing, I would like to add my two cents here, equal opportunity doesn’t correlate to equality of outcome. People have free will, they decide what career they want to venture into… offering equal opportunity wont change that. Men and Women are biologically different, men tend to go into the higher paying jobs like maths, science, etc whereas women tend to go into the lesser paying jobs.
Christian responded to this question rationally stating, “well why are more women in nursing? Why are more men bin collectors? It’s just how society is. Different genders on average have different interests.” Unsurprisingly, this was again used against him at a disciplinary meeting to show that he was ‘discriminatory and prejudiced against women’, however, like they did previously, they had twisted what John said to fit their narrative and attempted to punish him.
John further explains,
“In the meeting I was like ‘this was ridiculous, I never said this’ and obviously I didn’t really understand what it was in relation to” additionally telling me, “I thought they misunderstood what he was saying. What I didn’t realise at the time was that they were actively trying to get rid of me because of the whole Brexit thing. So they were deliberately taking these half truths that people were feeding to them and blowing them out of proportion and then using that as a reason to make a disciplinary.”
That was all near the end of 2017. There was a lot more stuff that happened around that time, but we could be here all day talking about it so I won’t go through every single instance John was targeted. Saying that, however, John did uncover emails, due to the GDPR request, between his experiment supervisor and another person high up within the physics department basically asking if they could terminate John’s PhD program. This led to John being asked if he would like to finish with an MPhil degree after one year, John explains,
“I was like no, because I’m here to do a PhD and obviously, that’s not the answer they wanted so they then discussed whether it was legal to hold a disciplinary (he knew this through the GDPR requests) just to get rid of me.”
At the end of the academic year in 2017, John encountered issues with an experiment that led his previously involved supervisor to become increasingly uninvolved in his work. During this time, students were required to submit reports to receive permission to continue with their PhD studies. However, John’s supervisor did not provide him with clear instructions on what to include in the report. As a result, John had to figure it out on his own, which ultimately led to him missing a literature review. The supervisor’s lack of involvement and guidance was a deliberate attempt to set John up for failure. Despite this, John claims he performed well in his transfer interview as part of the report submission process.
Once receiving the results from his transfer interview, they had apparently failed him on a technicality. Because of this, he’d asked if he could look at what other fellow students had done, so he could find out what he missed. This is how he found out he needed the literature review. John then resubmitted the transfer report, which you’re entitled to do. The person marking his report then said “yep, that’s perfect, you have the required sections in there and everything’s good” and thus John had passed.
For a while, things continued without too many issues, and John carried on with his coursework. The next major thing that happened was John continually being banned from things, such as the Christmas meeting, certain PhD talks, etc. The excuse that was given was, “well there’s a history of people being upset by comments that you’ve made” alongside other excuses such as “if people see you, they may get triggered, which would impact the working environment.” They would use that reasoning as essentially a shield to openly discriminate against him.
Because of this, Christian rightly decided to complain to a higher power within the university. During this complaint, he’d made references to files in his GDPR request and them not allowing him to attend many meetings as direct proof that many lecturers, research professors, administrators, etc were not only trying to get students to make complaints about him but just conspiring to have him taken off the PhD program and were attempting to persecute him into leaving.
It’s worth noting that disciplinaries must be initiated within four weeks of receiving a complaint – similar to a statute of limitations. However, in John Christian’s case, the disciplinary process was delayed for several months, which took a significant toll on his mental health. The delay in initiating the disciplinary process added unnecessary stress to an already challenging situation, exacerbating John’s struggles.
They’re also meant to tell you who’s made the complaint about you, which, in this case, they weren’t doing. This is problematic as It means people John considered to be “friends” were making complaints about John’s speech and he had no idea who. This was essentially a tactic designed to silence him due to paranoia that the person he’s speaking to will report him.
In doing what they did they also exposed a major double standard. Let me explain what happened around the 2018 Irish Abortion Referendum. For context, the referendum changed the Irish Constitution allowing the Oireachtas (Irish Parliament) to legislate abortion. To a lot of left-wing students, this was great, and something to celebrate, however, to someone who’s Catholic (like John) this is not. A group of students walked into John’s office celebrating, saying how amazing it was, and John was very concerned that this would get him to engage in a debate, which they could then use to issue another complaint against him. Conscious of the plot to have him removed, he said that he didn’t feel comfortable and asked them to leave.
John told them,
“I respect your right to an opinion but I would prefer that you would not talk about this near me as I find it offensive and I obviously would like to respond to this and debate you, but if I do that there’s a high chance someone will report me and say that I said something offensive so I can not risk engaging in this conversation so I would prefer that you just not talk about it”.
The administration then tried to instigate a disciplinary because of this, saying that even though he followed the rules, he made people uncomfortable by asking them not to talk about this, which again, was a completely made up rule and massively exposed the gaping double standard.
John submitted all this evidence in a report to a higher power within the university, with the hopes he could stop the administration from targeting him for “wrongthink.” Because of this report he’d made, they assembled an entire team of administrators to monitor John’s social media presence without his knowledge. The entire purpose of this group was to find things they considered to be “objectionable”. They took numerous out-of-context comments made by John and twisted them to portray him in a negative light. The group’s actions were subjective and unfair, and it was a clear attempt to silence John and suppress his freedom of expression.
The team of administrators monitoring John’s online presence found several groups he was part of, including a ranting group where members pretended to be angry about trivial things. Using a combination of his online comments and posts, they fabricated new complaints, which were then used to delay John’s complaint about the university’s malicious persecution of him. They informed John that they had received additional complaints about his social media presence and that they needed to investigate these first, effectively dismissing his original complaint. The administrators claimed that the new complaints were more serious, which was a clear attempt to discredit John’s complaints and avoid addressing the real issue at hand.
Because of this, another disciplinary had been launched against John, but this time at a way higher level… taking place at the uni level rather than the school level. While Christian was in front of the disciplinary panel, he explained that his social media activity was just being used as a way to dismiss his own complaint, which a few on the panel fortunately sympathised with. They ended up not taking action against him and instead told him to just watch what he posts on social media as it could offend someone. He was also required to do community service in the library. Let me remind you that this was entirely over what he posted on his OWN PERSONAL social media in his SPARE TIME.
A couple of years later, we saw the death of George Floyd, an abusive drug addict who was in and out of prison for an array of crimes, which seemed to have a major knock-on effect for the UK. Many universities were pushing BLM ideologies, and encouraging students to join events whilst also proudly putting up political BLM posters all over walls and waving flags with the raised fist on, demonising anyone who criticised the organisation. I mean why would you? Do you hate black lives? Unbeknownst to many, the name BLM was just to keep anyone from criticising it in true Karl Marx fashion.
John objected to the fact the University of Manchester was publicly promoting and supporting the Marxist organisation. He explains in no uncertain terms that the emails sent out by the university to students indirectly inferred “support BLM or your out”. John was unhappy about this and so he sent an email to the university’s president, Nancy Rothwell, who by the way, is intent on stepping down in 2024.
In that email, John made several excellent points, the primary one being that Antifa has a history of resorting to violence and promoting the belief that all universities are institutionally racist, which aligns with the tenets of critical race theory. As an example, John pointed out that the university library is filled with books authored by white men, which Antifa could use as evidence to claim that the University of Manchester is an institution of white supremacy. John cautioned that if the university were to encourage Antifa too much, they might go as far as attempting to burn down the library, which would be a severe threat to the institution’s integrity and safety. John’s concerns were valid and warranted serious consideration by the university administration.
John clarified that even though this may have sounded extreme, due to the BLM riots going on at the time, it wasn’t actually that unthinkable, also stating,
“no one really knew in the summer of 2020 how far this BLM thing was going to go so obviously it was a genuine concern at the time.”
John’s concerns were not well-received, and he faced another disciplinary action, once again, on false grounds. The university administration accused him of threatening to burn down the library, a claim that, as you can see, was entirely fabricated.
In this disciplinary, luckily, the people who were assigned to the panel were smart enough to realise that John wasn’t threatening to commit arson, but was merely pointing out something that BLM/Antifa could potentially do. It’s worth mentioning that these panels are supposed to be completely independent from the university as well as politically neutral, which in some of the investigations into John, they were, however in most, especially towards the end of his PhD, they weren’t.
Following the false accusation of threatening to burn down the library, John was subjected to two more meetings. During these meetings, he lodged complaints that his research had been excluded from the proceedings. Every December, there is a summary of everyone’s research, but John’s work was removed, effectively erasing his contributions. By disregarding his work, they were sending a message that his opinions and contributions were not worthy of consideration, which was a clear violation of academic integrity and respect.
There was another time where John challenged a professor asking why he had placed a complaint about Christian previously, despite their limited interaction. John had basically argued that this professor didn’t really have time to grasp a good enough judgement of his character in order to make a complaint on behalf of another student. An example of this, was the professor in question had a gay student, and had apparently said that John shouldn’t be allowed to finish his PhD and should just work in a basement out of sight and mind in case of what he might say in future. So this lecturer was going out of his way to preemptively stop a future thought crime, a bit like minority report. Where do we live? Is this Nazi Germany? China? No, it’s the UK and we have professors acting like this.
John basically asked him “why do you feel it’s appropriate to make a complaint like this?” with the sole goal being to make him feel a bit awkward. The teacher then complained again, this time stating he has mental health issues, which the university backed up accusing John of giving him “PTSD”.
There was another instance, where Christian had a disagreement with a trans person over instagram, where John refused to acknowledge or agree with him that he was truly a woman. Again, this resulted in a disciplinary with the outcome being he was “suspended pending investigation”.
Furthermore, John emailed the university president again. Essentially, the university president comes occasionally for what they like to call a “school visit” to hear about any concerns people may have or if anyone wants to raise any suggestions… basically pretty standard trivial stuff. This was during Covid, so it was done virtually. John basically RSVP’d saying he wanted to go, which is when he received an email from the school saying he wasn’t allowed to attend the president’s visits, saying he wasn’t allowed to go as he’s currently under investigation because of a complaint made by a trans person. Reasonably, John asked that if he wasn’t allowed to attend the visit, could he submit a question to be read in his absence with the response being recorded and sent to him. The question was, “does the university still stand by its comments from the Summer, where the university said that it supports BLM”, this is because around the time new information was coming to light about the truth behind BLM. The university responded with, “no we’re not going to do that, but you can read this report, it’s called ‘Race Matters at Manchester’.” I’ve read the report, and it’s just a perfect example of cultural marxist anti-white horse crap with an extremely bad representation of British history. I’ll do a thorough video examination of the document soon which you can watch on my channel, Students Against Tyranny.
This is what resulted in John once again emailing the university’s president a list of his concerns, quite extensively. One of the points that he made was that this report was written by a non-white non-British person. John explains the importance of this,
“if there was an increase in hostilities against white people as a consequence of the fallout from BLM or if the universities report was seen to increase racial tensions, then he wouldn’t suffer any reprisals… the fact that he’s not white meant he could say bad things about British history with no risk of a violent reprisal against him.”
This resulted in yet ANOTHER disciplinary where John was accused of making a “racial attack against the author of the report” even though the author, Professor Nalin Thakkar, never saw the letter between John and the president. Because of this, they concluded that John should not be allowed a PhD degree, but should only be allowed a masters degree (of which he’d already obtained in 2016). John refused this and then they tried to assess him on it without his permission, with Christian telling them that he didn’t want them to assess him on this degree because he had quite clearly been discriminated against here and unreasonably punished for not doing anything wrong.
Something I also need to mention about this disciplinary in particular was that John was only in the meeting for a couple of minutes as he had to leave due to a phone call from work, of which he’d only been employed for that same week. Not wanting to let them down not long after his first ever shift he had to answer the call. The disciplinary panel refused to adjourn the meeting, which is a requirement all universities need to follow when it comes to disciplinary procedures.
The university’s actions so far blatantly disregard both their own internal policies and procedures, and arguably even the law. Despite the fact that students don’t have the same legal protections as employees, it’s clear that John has been subjected to gross mistreatment and unfair discrimination. Unfortunately, seeking legal recourse through a judicial review is prohibitively expensive, with costs exceeding a hundred thousand pounds. This means that access to justice is largely reserved for those who can afford it, leaving individuals like John at a severe disadvantage. It’s possible that the university was aware of this fact and exploited it to their advantage, knowing that John would be unable to obtain legal justice for the unjust actions they had taken against him.
After the phone call had concluded, John returned to the meeting but having missed most of it, didn’t know what had been said. Christian wasn’t really taking this disciplinary that seriously either, as compared to previous ones, the accusations in this one, though they were all fabricated/twisted, were completely miniscule.
“I realised shortly after that this had been planned for a very long time and no matter what happened, they weren’t going to let me have a PhD because they would’ve found some excuse to get rid of me. I think they thought they were going to get rid of me during the BLM thing, but it didn’t work, it sort of backfired when the panel basically said ‘no, he’s entitled to disagree. He’s allowed to write to the president if he wants to.”
So that’s the story in its entirety. We are up in Manchester on the 25th march @ 1pm with the aim of protesting against this. The address is 188 Oxford Road, Manchester University, M13 9PL. I hope to see you there.
