Jeremy Duns Is Still Lying To You

Jeremy Duns has been attacking the writer Johann Hari again - you can see the latest example here and here.

His complaints about Hari I will leave to other people to judge.

But the issue for this blog is whether it is actually Duns who is lying - about being a journalist.

He constantly claims to be a journalist, and he justifies his attacks on Hari and others as somehow policing his profession.

A few weeks ago, this blog raised the question of whether he could be justified in that description of himself as a journalist, when it is in fact the case that it is very hard to find any examples of his published work.

Duns replied on the comment section. He has never been restricted from commenting on this blog, although the reason it was set up was because he would not let me comment on his (Duns believes in free speech for himself, but not for others - or at least only for right-wing public schoolboys).

Asked for examples of his journalism, he pointed to this article.http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-21628728

And that it is.

Check the date, this appeared in March 2013. That is 18 months ago. In the last 3 and a half years, that is the only example of Duns's journalism that he can offer. I do not, I have to say, believe that it counts. That is a history radio broadcast, not journalism as most people would describe it. After all, journalism must have something to do with reporting or analysing the news  - and that is not news.

But allow us to leave that point to one side.

If a person has done one piece of paid journalism in 3 and a half years, is is acceptable for them to describe themselves as a professional journalist?

No.

Duns also says he has a company that does journalism. It is not credible. In half an hour I can set up a company and describe it as an automobile manufacturer. Or oil explorer. Does that make me a car-maker or an oil-person? No, it does not. The question is whether this company has any work.His one does not. If this is not true, Duns is welcome to publish the accounts, or to provide details so that I can look up this so-called journalism company.

Lots of people work hard at journalism. It is not acceptable for someone to just come along and describe themselves as journalist.

It's a lie.

It is a far bigger lie than any one of Hari's.

And it is about time that he was exposed. Duns is entitled to argue against journalists if he wants to. But he is not entitled to call himself one.

Is Jeremy Duns Lying About Being A Journalist?

Jeremy Duns frequently refers to himself as a journalist, especially when he is attacking writers on Twitter, which is one of his main occupations.

He has also, as has been detailed on this blog, claimed legal rights accorded to journalists. For example, he claimed it was alright to tape private phone calls on the grounds that he was a journalist investigating a crime.

But is Duns really allowed to describe himself as a journalist?

It is a matter of record that Duns worked for a publication in Brussels that later closed down.

He has also written for a few British newspapers, largely on the subject of how much he loves the women-hating, racist fictional character James Bond.

I think there is a question over whether writing a few articles on a freelance basis allows someone to describe themselves as a 'journalist'. A number of footballers or politicians, for example, do the same, and they are not usually described that way.

But leave that aside for now.

In the last year, I can see no evidence that Duns has been employed as journalist at all.

If you look at he journalisted site, the last article he wrote was in April 2013, and even that was a re-print of an article from 2011.

There was another article in 2011 about Bond, and before that two in 2009.

And, well, that is it.

Now Duns has sometimes said that it is the case that he does a lot of journalism that is not on the web. I find that odd, since there are very few publications these days that are not online. But if that is true, then Duns is welcome to post evidence below.

My question for this post is, is a man who has not written a new article for three years still entitled to call himself a journalist?

I can understand the case that the criteria for being a journalist are not clear. Some belong to the National Union of Journalists, and some do not. There are also some that are employed by a company, and some that are freelancing for themselves. But it surely cannot be argued to be the case that anyone can just call themselves  a journalist without the requirement to offer any evidence.

An ex-journalist is acceptable.

But if someone was once a taxi driver, are they allowed to describe themselves as a taxi driver when they no longer do so? Or a plumber? Or a web designer? The answer has to be not. So Duns is not allowed to call himself a journalist. 

Duns is once again twisting the truth. It is time his fabrications were exposed.

Jeremy Duns Is Twisting The Truth

The Jeremy Duns - Journalist? website has done some excellent research on the way that Duns twists the truth to smear and attack people and frequently gets his facts wrong.

You can read the full post here.

This blog has consistently pointed out how Duns uses Twitter to mis-lead and destroy reputations, with no regard for accuracy.

But in my view there is a question over whether Duns can be described as a journalist, a subject I will blog on soon.

It is interesting to me that Duns has not responded to these allegations.

Is it because he is scared of the truth?

Is Jeremy Duns lying about his book?

The excellent Jeremy Duns - AKA The Witchfinder blog has a fascinating nugget of information about Duns. You can read it here.

It seems he has been boasting and implying his book won an award from the Daily Telegraph.

In fact, it did no such thing.

Given how much time Duns has devoted to attacking other writers for self-promotion, often without any evidence, this is a shocking allegation.

Duns needs to give a full and honest account of his actions, and if necessary an apology. And he needs to do so right away.

Is Jeremy Duns A Moral Fascist

Nancy Lee has put forward a fascinating view on Jeremy Duns in the comments section of this blog, and I feel it deserves  a wider audience, so I have decided to re-produce it as a separate post.

Here is what Nancy has to say: 

Maria, I have to say first that I don’t believe that you are correct to describe Jeremy Duns as right-wing. The impression I have gleaned is that he is in fact a left-wing moral fascist, the type who seem to dominate the Social Media networks these days.

I am currently working on a PhD dissertation on the growth of internet bullying, specifically on Twitter. The name of Jeremy Duns kept cropping up during my research, and that is what led me to your blog.

I am fascinated by what motivates people to bully on the internet. It is a relatively new phenomena and one which I think needs to be explored so that we can first understand it and then put in place safeguards to minimise it.

In the Spectator magazine British journalist Toby Young wrote an excellent article on the left-wing Twitterati as he describes it - http://www.spectator.co.uk/life/status-anxiety/8780801/the-tyranny-of-the-twitterati/ There is no doubt in my mind that Jeremy Duns is a member of this group.

It was only when Jeremy Duns revealed here that he had in fact been adopted by his step-father and changed his name that I realised what has made him the man he is. Jeremy Duns was adopted by a rich, successful man who was able to buy him the best possible education. He went to Winchester which is one of the top private schools in England and then to Oxford, one of the country’s best universities. He benefited from a truly privileged education out of the reach of most people. (Incidentally there is some confusion about private and public schools. Jeremy Duns went to Winchester which in England is described as a public school. However it is a very expensive private school and only the wealthiest of students can attend. In the United States, a public school is a Government school open to anyone. That can cause confusion!)


As an aside, it is interesting how many of his Social Media friends went the same route. I have looked at many of the people that he corresponds with on Twitter and it is noticeable that many are from the north of England who went to top universities such as Oxford and Cambridge but then went on to have less than successful careers. Like Jeremy Duns they seem to take pleasure in attacking others from what they see as the moral high ground, the trademark of the left-wing moral fascist. The Twitterati as Toby Young calls them.

Great things were expected of Jeremy Duns when he was young, but recently he celebrated his fortieth birthday and it is clear that he has been far from successful. Despite applying for jobs on most major newspapers the only post he could get was on a small magazine in Belgium, where he failed to shine. He wrote a handful of mediocre spy novels that failed to sell. Despite the most privileged of educations, he is now basically a house-husband living with a more successful Swedish lady.

It is interesting that much of his writing is set around the time of the Cambridge Five, the notorious double agents who were recruited at university. I would be very surprised if Jeremy Duns had not applied to work for MI5 and MI6 (the English equivalent of the CIA) , and his wish to write spy books reflects the fact that he was rejected by them. In fact Jeremy Duns has been plagued by rejection his whole life – by his biological father, by newspapers, by the intelligence agencies, and by the book-buying public.

My feeling is that it is this rejection manifested itself in a jealousy that now motivates him and in fact it is what motivates most of the bullies who operate on Twitter. It is noticeable that Jeremy Duns tends to attack successful writers and journalists, those who have the careers that he wanted and was denied. A simple Google search will show up a long list of people that he has attacked on Twitter and on his blog, often based on the most spurious of information.

Is he anti-gay? I think probably not. His left-wing political stance wouldn’t allow him to express anti-gay or racist views even if he had them. But my belief is that he is motivated by jealousy. In years gone by, bitter men like Jeremy Duns would sit alone muttering about how life had treated them unfairly or writing angry letters to local newspapers and politicians which would almost always be ignored. No one would care about their views and least of all take them seriously. The internet has given them a voice, and they are keen to take advantage of it to heckle, bully and taunt. Jeremy Duns is just one of many, unfortunately. The question of course is what can be done about them. 

As, I said it is a fascinating view, and adds a lot of our knowledge. Whether Duns is right-wing or left-wing is not really the point. I think Nancy is right to describe him as a moral fascist: his bullying, the violence of his language, the anger, and the threats to anyone who disagrees with him, these are all fascist traits. I think she underplays the hatred of women and gays that runs through his work. I have not yet investigated whether he is a racist or not. But certainly the writers he praises were.

Where I certainly agree with Nancy is that men like Duns represent everything that is ugly and wrong about our world. And what we have to do is women is work out ways of standing up to them. 

The Shocking Sexism of Luca Veste

I have never heard of the writer Luca Veste until a few weeks ago when he started to post some tweets about how he had 'trapped' me.

The background is this. I set up this blog to scrutinise the work of the right-wing public school commentator Jeremy Duns. But Duns and his gang of right-wing writers are so sexist that they cannot accept a mere woman would dare to stand up to them. So they keep insisting this blog is the work of a man, even though I am quite open about who I am.

The latest to join the hunt was 'Veste', who laid what he described as 'traps'  that led Duns to conclude this blog was written by a man called Gerrard Killoran. As it turned it, it was a mistake, and Duns had to apologise soon afterwards. But in the meantime, Veste put out some smug tweets about how clever his 'traps' were.

What sort of man I wondered can talk about laying 'traps' for a woman? The language was so extreme, and so violent, that it led me to take a look at Veste's most recent book, 'Dead Gone'. What I found in this book was I believe genuinely shocking, and it tells me that something has to be done if women are to feel safe anywhere.

Readers of crime fiction have already started to complain about the obsession male writers have with extreme violence against women. I have already blogged about this in the work of David Hewson  and Ian Rankin - and suffered terrible levels of abuse from the Duns gang as a result. But Veste has taken it to the most extreme level yet.

The book opens with a genuinely creepy description of a young women being sadistically tortured and murdered. A man captures her on the way back from a nigh club, which in Veste's world automatically marks her out as a 'bad girl' who needs to be tortured and killed.

Later on when the detective discovers her, she is described as being 'spread-eagled' on the ground,  a shocking use of female sexual imagery. Clearly the author believes that any woman who opens her legs deserves what is coming to her.

There is worse to come. The story develops into one of a sick individual who carries out a series of 'experiments' on women. The descriptions are horrible to read, taking a perverse pleasure, it seems to me, in what is being described. In one scene a women is told that she will be tortured unless she is 'good'. In another, there is a discussion of slowly bleeding a women to death, a clear reference to the female menstrual cycle. The women in the story are kept locked in a cellar, and subject to levels of abuse that are both psychological and physical. At one point, one of the is described as 'begging for death, in much the same way a sexist male might describe a women as 'begging' for sex.

It was shocking to read, and I was asking myself as I read it, what sort of man could write this and why?  And why would they think that anyone would want to read it?

There is a regrettable trend towards the use of graphic violence against women in the crime genre, and several women writers have courageously spoken out against it. But Veste has taken it to a new and horrific level.

Violence against women has become part of our culture, and in my view men such as Veste are responsible for that.

The issue now for women is how we stop them - and protect our bodies from further violence.

I believe that it is shocking that a major publishing company would bring out a book such as 'Dead Gone' - it is published by Avon, which is owned by Harper Collins, which in turn in owned by Rupert Murdoch, the same man who gave us Page 3 girls.

I will be blogging some more about this book over the next few weeks.

But the most important question to be asked I think is how can a book like this be stopped?

Does Jeremy Duns Hate Gays?

In my views the campaigning journalist Glen Greenwald is one of the most important figures of our times. You can agree or disagree with his views, of course. And you can certainly argue that he is not right about everything, and has made some mistakes in his reporting, whilst supporting his overall purpose of limiting the ability of the state to spy on the individual.

But he is someone who is standing up for our freedom - and I find it hard to see how you can think that is a bad thing.

And yet the right-wing, public-school pundit Jerermy Duns clearly does.

He had devoted a huge amount of his time over the past few months, both on his own blog and on Twitter to attacking Greenwald. There is one example here...http://storify.com/pindarninja/an-epic-twitter-rant-against-glenn-greenwald. There are many other examples on Duns's blog, and on his Twitter feed.

For a while I was puzzled by why Duns was so aggressive towards Greenwald, and was so determined to discredit him.

And then I started to work it out. It is because he is gay?

Now, Duns will I believe now threaten legal action against me, as he frequently does. So I want to make it quite clear that this is only a theory - I have no definitive evidence that Duns hates gays. And like anyone Duns is innocent until proven otherwise. But there several facts that point clearly in this direction, and it is important that these are made public.

First, Greenwald is not the only example of Duns attacking a prominent gay journalist. A few years back, Duns devoted a huge amount of energy to attacking the gay, left-wing journalist Johan Hari. You can read examples of his attacks here and here. And Hari is openly gay. There are very few senior gay journalists working in the British media (the only other one I can think of is Matthew Parris - but Duns probably likes him because he is a Tory). So he is not just attacking one but a series of gay journalists.

Second, Duns was educated at one of the major British public schools - Winchester (see this link). It is well documented that public schools are rabidly anti-gay, perhaps because the risk of homosexual relationships is so high in a mostly male environment. So Duns may well have picked up these attitudes at schol.

Thirdly, Duns is the main supporter of the literary merit of the work of Ian Fleming. Fleming was not just a sexist writer - he was anti-gay as well. Take this except from Goldfinger -

Bond said firmly, ‘Lock that door, Pussy, take off that sweater and come into bed. You’ll catch cold.’

She did as she was told, like an obedient child. She lay in the crook of Bond’s arm and looked up at him. She said, not in a gangster’s voice, or a Lesbian’s, but in a girl’s voice, ‘Will you write to me in Sing Sing?’

Bond looked down into the deep blue-violet eyes that were no longer hard, imperious. He bent and kissed them lightly. He said, ‘They told me you only liked women.’

She said, ‘I never met a man before.’

That is only one example. There are many, many instances of Fleming's homophobia. He was a writer who hated gays - and yet Duns insists on promoting him as one of the greatest writers of the last fifty years.

So that makes three pieces of evidence. Duns frequently attacks prominent gays, he came from a traditionally gay-hating background, and his main professional occupation is praising the work of an openly homophobic writer. On my analysis, that makes Duns anti-gay.

It may be hard for men like Duns to accept, but being gay is not a deviation - it is an allowable choice. Gays are victimised, and subject to assaults just like women. And this is because men like Duns promote an agenda in which it is considered acceptable to attack gays.

Public school bullies like Duns represent everything that is wrong with our society. He has to be stopped - and can be if we all work together we can unite around an agenda that denies any space to men of his sort.