Say, what’s going on at Cambridge University?

https://bylinetimes.com/2026/07/09/peter-thiel-and-reform-uks-cambridge-university-pipeline-project/

Powered by US money and far-right European think tanks, Cambridge has recently become an outpost of a peculiar blend of national conservatism and apocalyptic Christianity, through the figure of James Orr – Head of Policy at Reform UK described as Nigel Farage’s “Kingmaker“.

Oh, just willful ignorance replacing science, cult indoctrination replacing education. Do you think that is coincidence?

The sprawling complex regularly houses at any one time half a dozen or so postgraduate students from the University of Cambridge.

According to James Orr, the property is more than just a home, but a political and religious centre: a “right-wing Mecca” and a “Conservative Kibbutz”.

A regular resident, Rod Dreher, author of the 2017 book The Benedict Option, likens the place to “a Christian Asturias”, after the medieval Iberian kingdom that launched the Catholic Reconquista against Muslim rule. He has said it “needs to happen in as many places as it can”.

It is a cancer that seeks to spread.

Recent guests and visitors read like a ‘Who’s Who?’ of political pilgrims and scholars – almost exclusively from the right.

Peter Thiel has visited; as has his protegee, Donald Trump’s Vice-President, JD Vance, who described Orr as his “British Sherpa“.

Savory characters, huh?

Orr’s Cambridge University position, he said, was central to this. He had met “hundreds” of Cambridge students he considered suitable allies, and his job at Reform was to work out how those students could be “recruited into the party at scale”.

What are all those students learning?

Subjects such as Palestine and human rights are frowned upon; and authors on the reading list include Orr’s former colleague at Oxford University, Nigel Biggar – a Conservative peer who has sought to rehabilitate the reputation of the British Empire against the consensus among academic historians.

But you want to pretend religion is tolerable in the information age. You want to pretend religion and science are compatible.

Jordan Peterson finished his 2024 book, We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine, at the Orrs’ Cambridge base. He endorsed The Bell Curve in an interview with Douglas Murray, whom sources describe as another close friend of the Orrs and a regular guest at their compound.

One Cambridge student familiar with multiple humanities departments outside the Faculty of Divinity described a “normalisation of disparaging views of ethnic minorities” among some Cambridge academics.

You defended this racism whether you meant to or not. That is the harm of magical thinking.

Isaac Riley is a postgraduate student in Old Testament theology at the Faculty of Divinity who currently lives with the Orrs. He writes for The European Conservative – a Budapest-based far-right magazine previously funded by Orbán’s Government through a state-linked foundation. In November 2024, he published a “moral argument against migration”, contending that a government’s “primary obligation is to the native”. A second essay cast transgender identity as theologically “heinous”.

Do not make the mistake of tolerating this bigotry.

In January this year, as part of a US and European tour, Thiel delivered four private, invite-only ‘Antichrist Lectures’ in the Ramsden Room of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge University – again hosted by Orr. Previous leaks from these lectures suggest that his version of the ‘Antichrist’ ranges from the climate activist Greta Thunberg to any regulation of AI.

Religion is killing us. It’s time to do better.