The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘A Dumpster Fire of Lies’: Netflix Series Race-Swaps British Crime Trend, Journalists Treat It Like a Documentary

Posted on | April 3, 2025 | 46 Comments

When I first encountered the online buzz around the new Netflix series Adolescence, I didn’t have a strong reaction. Streaming services have replaced TV and movies as the primary pop culture sources of entertainment, but it’s been many years since I paid much attention to such things. My idea of “entertainment” is YouTube videos of Arkansas State Police doing PIT maneuvers — reality being far more interesting to me than the fictional product of some screenwriter’s imagination.

What I did know about Adolescence was that it is set in England, and that the screenwriters had essentially reversed the races of contemporary crime trends in the United Kingdom, by making a white boy the knife-wielding killer. Despite the news media’s reluctance to deal with this honestly, anyone who pays attention to crime news out of Britain knows who is implicated in the surge of stabbing sprees there. It’s not a secret.

Here’s the Wikipedia summary of the Netflix series plot:

In an English town, police break down the door of a family home and arrest Jamie Miller, a 13-year-old boy, on suspicion of murder of a classmate, Katie Leonard. Jamie is held at a police station for questioning, and then remanded in custody at a Secure Training Centre. Investigations at Jamie’s school, and questioning by a forensic psychologist, reveal that Jamie has been deeply disturbed by school bullying via social media centred on incel subculture.

How many actual murders in England have been inspired by “incel subculture” on social media? If it’s not zero, it’s pretty darned close. Which is to say, the plot of Adolescence is entirely fictional. No such teenage suspect as “Jamie Miller” has ever committed a murder in England with a motive like the one dramatized in this series.

Still, I had no intention of writing about Adolescence until Ed Driscoll at Instapundit linked to the tweet posted at the top, at which point I was like, “OMG! They’re treating this as if it were a documentary!”

Are you ready to go down this rabbit-hole with me? Because what I do — my value-added, as it were — is this kind of stuff, where I start researching, and following where the facts lead, until I can produce something close to the whole picture of a genuinely weird phenomenon, like this Netflix series that is a 180-degree mirror-reverse of reality.

Let’s start with Martha Gill’s column:

Every so often, a television drama comes along that has the power to change things. . . .
And now we have Netflix’s Adolescence, which looks at the online radicalisation of young boys by men’s rights activists (MRAs) such as Andrew Tate. . . .
The issue of rising misogyny among young boys, fuelled by online influencers, has long been troubling. . . .
Its central character is a boy drawn into MRA culture, which eventually persuades him to kill — but he also comes from an ordinary family, with a loving father and many male role models around him. There is no trauma in his life, no abuse. As the writer, Jack Thorne, puts it: “He comes from a good background, like me; he’s a bright boy, like I was. The key difference between us? He had the internet to read at night whereas I had Terry Pratchett and Judy Blume.” . . .

Now I’ve highlighted just these few sentences for a reason. First, to point out how journalists are presenting this fictional series as dramatizing a real problem, “the online radicalisation of young boys by men’s rights activists (MRAs).” Well, how big of a problem is this? Or, more to the point, how many 13-year-old murderers have been inspired by MRAs?

The second point is to call attention to the show’s co-writer, Jack Thorne, with his insistence about the teenage killer, Jamie Miller, being a “bright boy” from “a good background.” Let’s dig a bit deeper on the subject of Jack Thorne and how this Netflix series came about.

We actually know what inspired Adolescence because Jack Thorne wrote an entire column explaining its origin:

Two and a half years ago, Stephen Graham phoned me up to ask if I was interested in writing a show about knife crime. He wanted to talk about young male violence towards women and he had two stipulations: he wanted to do it in a series of single shots, and he didn’t want to blame the parents.
I enthusiastically got involved and suggested we write together. At first, we didn’t know why Jamie, the perpetrator of the attack, did it. We knew he wasn’t a product of abuse or parental trauma. But we couldn’t figure out a motive. Then someone I work with, Mariella Johnson, said: “I think you should look into ‘incel’ culture.”
I expected to be confronted by anger and aggression; what I didn’t expect was to quickly grasp the attraction of the so-called “manosphere”. I knew almost immediately that if I was an isolated kid, I would find answers as to why I felt a bit lost. One of the central ideas — that 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men — would have made adolescent me sit up and, frankly, nod. The path then becomes: what do you do to upset that equation? How do you manipulate and harm in order to reset a female-dominated world that works against you? If you believe one part of the logic, the other half becomes conducive.

So, there’s the set-up — “young male violence towards women” in a situation where the young man is not from a bad family — and then the suggestion of “incel subculture” as the motive. Take a moment to contemplate the rarity of such cases in the real world. The most famous “incel” case was Elliot Rodger, which happened in 2014, and since then, how many similar cases have there been? Good luck finding a number larger than you can count on one hand. Also, notice the stipulation that the parents are blameless. Although we can’t say Elliot Rodger was “a product of abuse or parental trauma,” his parents were divorced, which is a common enough problem, although seldom does it result in children growing up to be homicidal maniacs. And it is simply wrong to depict Elliot Rodger as a monster created by the “manosophere.” Rodger posted a few times on a Reddit forum called “PUAhate,” i.e., devoted to criticizing “pickup artists,” but if you read his “manifesto,” it wasn’t like he was quoting anything by leading “manosophere” voices to justify his actions. He was just a loser who turned self-pity into rage.

Let me repeat what I said about Elliot Rodger in 2014:

It is usually a mistake to generalize from the example of psycho killers. For example, Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marxist and an assassin; should we start rounding up Marxists? Jeffrey Dahmer was a gay man and a murderous cannibal; should we start rounding up gays? Ted Kaczynski was a Harvard graduate and a terrorist bomber; should we start rounding up Harvard graduates? People who commit horrific crimes can be categorized any number of ways, but the key point is that very few people commit horrific crimes. There are probably quite a few gay Marxists at Harvard, none of whom are mass murderers.

The attempt to turn the deeds of a lone maniac into an example of an allegedly widespread trend is a sort of journalistic alchemy and, like so much of what’s wrong with journalism, it usually involves liberal bias.

We have more about the inspiration of Adolescence from comments by the show’s co-creator Stephen Graham:

Jamie’s story itself is not based on a specific person or event, but per Birmingham Live, Graham noted that real reports of knife crime did give him the idea for what the series would be about. “I’d read an article in the paper about a young boy stabbing a young girl, and it made me feel a bit cold,” he said. “Then about three of four months later, there was a piece on the news about a young boy who’d stabbed a young girl.” . . .
“And then it happened again, and it happened again, and it happened again,” he recalled. “I really just wanted to shine a light on it, and ask, ‘Why is this happening today? What’s going on? How have we come to this?’ ” . . .
Graham told The Hollywood Reporter that there is an “epidemic of knife crime amongst young, young lads … up and down the country.” According to the Office for National Statistics, the number of knife attacks in England and Wales has almost doubled in the past 10 years. Meanwhile, Ministry of Justice data for the year ending in March 2023 shows that 17.3% of the roughly 18,500 cautions and convictions made for possession of a knife or offensive weapon were offenders ages 10 to 17.

Here I will interject a point. After the 1996 Dunblaine massacre, the UK outlawed the private possession of almost all firearms, and it is rather amusing that they’re now in a tizzy over “knife crimes.” But note that the evidence offered of such an “epidemic” is the number of arrests for mere possession of a knife. In other words, the doubling of knife attacks is one thing, but they’re identifying minors as “offenders” merely for getting caught with “a knife or offensive weapon” without regard to whether they did anything with the aforesaid weapon. Of such stuff do journalists construct their “trend” stories. But now here’s the real payoff:

‘Where it came from, for me is there was an incident in Liverpool, a young girl, and she was stabbed to death by a young boy. I just thought, why?’ [Graham] told the Radio Times magazine.
‘Then there was another young girl in south London who was stabbed to death at a bus stop. And there was this thing up North, where that young girl Brianna Ghey was lured into the park by two teenagers, and they stabbed her. I just thought, what’s going on? What is this that’s happening?’

Before getting into specifics, the first point is that none of these crimes had anything to do with the “manosophere” or “incel subculture.”

The “incident in Liverpool” was the stabbing death of 12-year-old Ava White at a public Christmas tree lighting event in 2021:

On 25 November 2021, Ava and her friends, aged between 11 and 15 were playing and sharing alcohol near the Royal Court Theatre, Liverpool while waiting for the switching on of the Christmas lights.
A teenage boy and his friends, aged between 13 and 15, started filming them with intent to share it on Snapchat. Ava asked them to stop and delete the recording. The unarmed girls ran towards the group of boys and the 14-year-old boy stabbed her in the neck with a knife, laughed, and ran away.

Because the boy was only 14, under UK law he can’t be publicly identified, but the death of Ava White had nothing to do with “incel subculture.” The lawyers for the boy tried to argue he acted in self-defense, and there is some indication the boy had a previous criminal history. For example, when he was asked why he wouldn’t tell police where his phone was, the boy answered: “Because they always take my phone. I have had a few phones took when I was in the police station.” On the night of the Ava White stabbing, the boy was arrested in Toxteth, a very rough neighborhood of Liverpool with a large immigrant population.

The second incident mentioned by Stephen Graham, the “young girl in south London who was stabbed to death at a bus stop,” was 15-year-old Elianne Andam, who was killed in September 2023. She was stabbed to death by her friend’s 17-year-old ex-boyfriend, Hassan Sentamu.

Hassan Sentamu (let), Elianne Andam (right)

Certainly this crime had nothing to do with “incel subculture” or online influences from the “manosphere,” and the killer didn’t come from the “ordinary” background of the Jamie Miller character in Adolescence.

The BBC reported from Sentamu’s trial:

The jury was told he was born in Uganda in 2006 and first came to live in London with his mother at about the age of three after allegations of domestic abuse against his father.
He had previously been referred to mental health services after staff at his primary school reported he was self-harming and he had pushed and slapped other children.
The Old Bailey heard that before joining that school Mr Sentamu had been sent by his mother to a Ugandan boarding school aged 11, where he reported he was physically abused and beaten with a metal pole.
He was later placed in foster care after a social worker found him home alone at the age of 12, and the court heard his mother told them “to take him away”.
His foster carer reported that he struggled to make friends and, when he did not get his own way, he had threatened to chop the cat’s tail off. . . .
The court also heard Mr Sentamu previously reported his mother had beaten him and tried to strangle him. She denied the allegations.
When he was 13, teachers had to disarm him after he took out a knife during a lesson and pointed it as his own chest, saying he wanted to kill himself.
He received a police caution for possession of a bladed article.
The jury was also told of other incidents, including Mr Sentamu threatening another child with a knife while on a residential trip because he felt he was mocking him, threatening to stab another student with scissors, and placing two girls in headlocks.
In July 2019, Mr Sentamu was assessed and diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.

This kid had more red flags than a May Day parade in Beijing, and it was manifestly absurd for Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne to use such a case as inspiration for a story about “a boy drawn into MRA culture” who “comes from a good background.” And finally, we get to the third case Graham mentions, “this thing up North, where that young girl Brianna Ghey was lured into the park by two teenagers, and they stabbed her.”

What does this crime have to do with “incel subculture”? Nothing.

Scarlett Jenkinson (left) and Eddie Ratcliffe (right)

The murder of 16-year-old Brianna Ghey happened in Warrington, about 20 miles west of Manchester (“up North” in England, as Graham says) and was committed by Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe, both 15 at the time. Jenkinson and Ratcliffe had been friends since they were 11, and Jenkinson had befriended Ghey, who was transgender, having been born a boy named Brett Spooner. The prosecutor, Deanna Heer, told the court how Jenkinson and Ratcliffe planned the murder:

“The messages they exchanged show that they were preoccupied with violence, torture and death and record them discussing how they wanted to kill people they knew.
“If that was not an unusual way for two teenagers to speak to one another, the messages demonstrate how, over time, they encouraged one another to think about how they would actually carry out a killing.”
They spoke about murder as carelessly as if they were talking about their homework. Their possible targets extended beyond Brianna. In November 2022, the pair discussed killing a teenage boy, known as boy M, after Ratcliffe became worried he was getting too close to a girl he fancied. Jenkinson told him: “You can restrain him as I kill him so it’s easier.” In December, she confided that she had been watching videos of people being murdered and tortured on the dark web. Far from being shocked, the pair discussed whether potassium cyanide, sarin or ricin was a better way to kill someone.
In court, Jenkinson admitted enjoying “dark materials” online and said she often fantasised about murdering someone. She bonded with Ratcliffe, she said, over their “similar interests”.
Brianna, who Jenkinson had become friends with after she complimented her eyeliner and who she hung out with after school, was first mentioned in their messages on December 15, 2022. Jenkinson sent a message to Ratcliffe, which read: “I’m obsessed over someone I know but don’t have feelings for them… She’s called Brianna… I don’t know how to explain. Also she has a [penis] lol”.”
Ratcliffe responded: “I don’t think you’re necessarily in love but I think you’re more curious and intrigued by its unnatural nature.” . . .
Jenkinson wrote out a plan. On February 3, 10 days before the murder, she sent a photo of it to the boy. It was headed: “Saturday 11 February 2023. Victim: Brianna Ghey.”

After they were arrested for the murder, both Jenkinson and Ratcliff were diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum, but as for “incel subculture” or the “manosphere” — nope, not a factor at all. In other words, Graham was 0-for-3 in terms of finding a stabbing that remotely resembled the plot of Adolescence, with a perpetrator anything like “Jamie Miller.”

Schools to give boys anti-misogyny
lessons to stop toxic masculinity
in wake of Netflix hit Adolescence

That’s the Daily Mail headline about British schools adding this TV show to their curriculum — for real, not kidding — despite the fact that the show is about a problem that doesn’t exist. No crime with such a motive (“incel subculture” and the online “manosphere”) has ever been committed by a teenager in England, and yet no journalist in England seems capable of doing the research necessary to point this out.

Rollo Tomassi, who is arguably the most influential activist in the “manosphere,” isn’t telling boys to stab girls. He’s not advocating any kind of violence at all. There are men who have read Rollo’s book The Rational Male who swear that it literally saved their lives. Why is it that none of the journalists in England raving about Adolescence and its allegedly powerful lessons have bothered to interview Rollo?

We are witnessing a psyop. People need to wake the hell up.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!



 

Shop Electronics at Amazon

Save on Groceries and Everyday Essentials

Shop Amazon Basics

Office & School Supplies

Category: Crime, Media Bias

Comments

StatCounter - Free Web Tracker and Counter