It’s always gross to see a fully grown bloke debase himself before the mob. Doubly so when the blasphemy he’s retracting in a frantic bid to win absolution from absolute arseholes was entirely valid. Take Aaron Bastani, one of the founders of Novara Media. He’s made a video that would make Mao wince in which he begs for clemency for the sin of having an unauthorised thought. That thought? That Jason Arday may not have been the best professor in history.

Yes, we have now reached the struggle-session stage of the Arday frenzy. It won’t be long before we see Guardian scribes and Dalston’s ironic communists sporting cardboard placards saying: ‘I once spoke ill of St Jason.’ Bastani’s heresy, committed before Arday’s tragic death, was to say he watched one of Arday’s lectures and thought it was shit. The guy’s a ‘conman’, he said. Most normal people will think this a perfectly reasonable critique. But to the post-normal left it was sacrilege of murderous proportions.

Bastani’s videoed confession to wrongthink is a truly sorry sight. Like a hostage – only to bourgeois idiocy rather than Islamist militants – he retracts the diabolical thoughts he entertained all of a week ago. ‘I’m sorry, I apologise’, he says, shamefully grovelling to the witchfinders of the Arday cult who are accusing every hack who criticised him of being accomplices to ‘murder’. What I did wasn’t ‘journalism’, says our shook, penitent comrade – it was ‘bile’. He longs, he says, to fall at the feet of the sainted professor. ‘I wish I could ask Jason for his forgiveness.’

Can we be frank? This is fucking mental. Soviet-style televised contrition for once having a pop at a Cambridge professor? So much for the ‘death of woke’. Here it is in all its petty, despotic glory, still collecting the scalps of heretics. Bastani isn’t alone. The whole of Novara Media has fallen into the sewer of self-flagellation. A posh fellow there by the name of Steven Methven has made one of the most insane video clips I have ever seen. His voice wobbles with ersatz emotion as he frets that he will forever be stained by his sin of Arday blasphemy.

He chokes up as he whips himself for the moral error of having very mildly criticised the prof before his death. Reading from a prepared script, like some terrified soul at a 1930s showtrial, he bows and scrapes in performative sorrow for having spoken ‘glibly, frivolously and callously’ of the now beatified professor. That I am a man ‘capable of great callousness’ is now ‘permanently on the page’, he says. I will be tarred for life by my Arday apostasy, he softly sobs – it’s a moral scar ‘I can’t escape’, and that ‘is right, it’s a necessity, to ensure I never make such grave and irresponsible errors of judgement again’.

Jesus wept. Do these people really not know how unhinged they sound? Are they really so insulated from everyday Brits, so hermetically sealed in their sterile chambers of bourgeois bollocks, that not one of them thought to say: ‘Guys, what are we doing? Why are we engaging in televised rituals of Maoist self-abasement simply for having made gentle criticisms of a public figure?’ It’s history repeated as farce. It’s Shoreditch Stalinism, Soviet authoritarianism with oat-milk tendencies: plummy millennials inflicting showtrials on themselves for the clicks and forgiveness of the very worst people on the internet.

Of course, Novara Media could have avoided all of this if it had blacklisted the Arday story entirely. That’s what one of its contributors actually proposed in the wake of Arday’s death – that the most sensible thing would have been ‘to not cover it at all’. Behold our old friend, self-censorship. If a story or event doesn’t fit inside the suffocating parameters of what laughably passes for left-wing thought, then it should be disappeared, shoved in the memory hole. What an apt snapshot of woke: everything that fails to bend to the dogmas of the cushioned post-class left must be scrubbed or shamed away.

The Stalin-lite frenzy sweeping Novara speaks to the broader psycho-malaise of the Arday cult. The clapped left has sanctified him following his dreadful death, making him a martyr to their own cloying racial myopia, meaning criticism of him is now tantamount to a crime. Every columnist who wrote about him is being named and shamed and branded a ‘lyncher’. Every leftist who wondered if perhaps Arday was a tad below par for a Cambridge professorship is being hunted as an apostate of the religion of identity and being given the choice of pleading for mercy or suffering social oblivion. It’s a truly grotesque spectacle – the real-time invention of a truthless cult of personality to give the lost left something to bond and blub over.

It brings to mind the moral derangement that engulfed the West after the death of George Floyd. Then, too, journalists were hounded if they dared to dissent from BLM dogma. Then, too, we were told to bend the knee – literally – to the regressive racialism of the credentialled classes. Then, too, leftists engaged in televised rituals of racial guilt for the moral titillation of self-hating whites and the power tripping of black grads. The cult of Arday has already given us a street vigil that was really a Two Minutes Hate against the media and days and days of digital frothing over the ‘murderous’ consequences of dissenting from the politics of identity.

It will get worse. The Arday cult is demanding that other media outlets engage in the same lunatic self-mortification as Novara. Barrister, fox-killer and anti-Brexit bore Jolyon Maugham is fuming over the Guardian’s critical coverage of Arday. The Guardian, he says, was an ‘enthusiastic participant’ in a ‘racist feeding frenzy’. The digital inquisition is aiming the same charge at every broadsheet. How long will these papers hold out against the witchfinder generals of neo-racialism? Are they prepping penitent columns as we speak?

Wokeness lives. That zombie of tyranny staggers on. Acceding to the brilliance of Arday has joined ‘Trans women are women’ and ‘Israel is genocidal’ as a belief you must dutifully imbibe and spout. The truthlessness of these views is immaterial – they are neo-religious convictions designed to demonstrate one’s fitness for high society, not real political positions.

How ironic that even at Novara Media, some, including Ash Sarkar, have lately touched upon the excesses of wokeness. ‘Woke 1 was crazy’, as AOC says. And yet here they all are once again, utterly incapable of resisting the lure of a new totem of black victimhood; drawn as if to the sirens into another morally imbecilic narrative about institutional racism and white hegemony yada yada. The cheap thrill of performed guilt, the fleeting power they derive from being part of a mob reprimanding ‘racists’, win out over rational analysis every single time. Judging from the past week, Woke 2 is going to be even crazier.