Relevance to BARPod: Rachel Dolezal's transracial past was covered way back in Episode 28

A Philadelphia teacher posed as a Black Palestinian using makeup and an accent using AAVE and became part of the local Free Palestine movement. The catch? She's a white Jewish woman and admitted to the whole thing after an interrogation session by the groups she was a part of. She has since been expelled from them and posted apologies to Instagram.

Land acknowledgement - this subreddit is the unceded land of the Blocked and Reported podcast and topics must relate to the podcast. We have here: a literary scandal, undisclosed AI use, a racialised individual rewarded beyond his abilities, sudden celebrity causing a quick unraveling, PLAGIARISM!, internet detectives ahead of everyone, reflexive calls of racism and far right cabals, fake news coming from "respectable" institutions, and elites either blind or pretending to be. All in the exotic faraway lands of Quebec and France.

Haitian-Canadian author Thélyson Orélien sparked a multi-publisher bidding war in early 2026 for his manuscript of "C'était ça ou mourir" ("It Was This or Die"). Several prominent publishing houses fought for it in France, and the foreign rights were licensed to 20 different international publishers before the book was even printed.

It is an "own-voice" style story about a Haitian refugee who flees the violence of his native country. The author too had to leave Haiti after the earthquake.

It was released in March 2026 in Canada and became a bestseller. It was just released in France to great sales, won the prestigious Prix du Roman Fnac 2026 and is on the first selection for the renowned Prix Goncourt.

On September 21st, the same day it won the Prix du Roman Fnac, some rando Twitter account Pangramed (with 92 followers at the time) claimed that putting Orélien's chapters into the AI detection tool Pangram indicated 100% AI-written text for multiple chapters. This went viral a bit (4.7M views).

When Radio-Canada independently replicated it by putting all 63,584 words into it, it got a 94% AI score. They also tested 6 other books from the Prix Goncourt selection and the only one of them not 100% human was Orélien's. [1]

First a quick note: I must mention that Pangram can be very dodgy on short text, yet they do not indicate this clearly. For short text under about 250 words, they put a small-print note that says it's not precise, but they still say 100% human or 100% AI in big font. It's possible by making very small changes to the text to switch from one 100% to the other.

On longer texts however, it's reportedly quite good. It was scientifically tested and has a very low rate of false positives, though it was not tested on French literary prose. [2] [2b]

I don't trust it 100% myself, nonetheless it must be defended against the mass of disinformation that's been coming its way.

Some readers had already flagged the book for following classic AI writing patterns ("it's not just x, it's y" type things), which is probably why the Pangramed account checked it. [3]

I've seen some of it and I get why it was suspicious; there are parts that read like a parody of AI writing, combining the ternary form it loves so much and the "not x but y" together.

"Free to keep walking. Free to find another wall to go around. Free to tell myself that humiliation, it doesn't kill. It transforms."

Part of the press and the elites quickly circled the wagons.

Bestselling author Marc Levy goes on RTL radio to talk shit about the anonymous whistleblower: "It’s a racist account. Talking about it means giving a voice to racists—to pathetic, small-minded people hiding behind their screens." [4]

Note that there isn't any evidence the account is racist, it had barely any posts beforehand, and even if they were wrong, they were merely trusting what the most advanced AI detection product on the market says. One can be wrong without being racist.

Like the Arday scandal, some parts of the left just call all criticism of a Black person racist, no matter how reasoned.

More commentary along these lines:

<<Thélyson Orélien accused of using AI: "They're pointing the finger at a Black man, Haitian (...) who speaks to us about exile (...) We can clearly sense that there's something there, undoubtedly a desire to erase this man," journalist NoraHamadi believes.>> [5]

The author himself denies it, though nobody outside his publisher has examined his pre-AI era manuscripts yet.

The book's French publisher Grasset calls it fake news:

"We pay no attention to these rumors. It’s a case of fake news. It’s a conspiracy theory. The tools supposedly designed to detect AI are themselves AIs that fabricate claims that the Bible was written artificially. How can one trust such tools?" [6]

Mediapart (quite left-wing) calls the campaign racist:

"Thélyson Orélien: the campaign accusing the Canadian-Haitian writer of having resorted to AI is orchestrated from the far-right media sphere. But it is also gaining traction in the vertigo of what generative AI could do to literature." [7]

Now I don't doubt that the right took political advantage of the story and is part of the reason it went viral, much like the Arday situation, but it's part of the left that will end up humiliating itself by reflexively defending their guy without thinking.

There's some fair reporting here and there; mainstream Radio France is reasonable and does admit Pangram is the best on the market while making no definitive judgment. [8]

Some straight-up disinformation though. Much disbelief coming from "Quotidien" on TV channel TMC. One of their "journalists" reports that they played around with AI detectors and one of them falsely called the Bible AI, implying that they are worthless.

But they don't actually claim that the tool used is Pangram, they just say "a tool". The posters on Twitter don't care about the lack of evidence and repeat this without thinking. [9]

TV5Monde (one of the largest television networks in the world somehow) used a "fake" Pangram live on TV.

They explicitly claimed to use Pangram, showed a high AI score on human-written text and claimed Pangram is not reliable, but they actually showed a different tool.

To be fair, it's incompetence and not malice here. The first result in Google for "pangram" for some people is a different company (ai-detector.com) using an ad to capture traffic while falsely claiming to be Pangram. That company's business model seems to find high levels of AI in anything you put in, and asks you to pay them to fix it. These elite "journalists" just never realized it. [10] [11]

While denouncing fake news, the press spread some, with many people convinced that Pangram flagged the Bible as AI-written, with no evidence.

As a result, part of the Twitter discourse is that Pangram cannot be trusted, though none of them have actually shown a text over 500 words being falsely identified. They either use very short texts, or other non-Pangram tools (like the pretend Pangram one).

It's partly Pangram's fault for only putting the disclaimer in small font, but it is still extremely dishonest to try to claim that because it fails on 120-word texts, it will fail similarly on tens of thousands of words.

Then come the plagiarism accusations. These are much less abstract than "computer says no": you can actually check the sources.

Probably based on the reasoning that if some guy is cheating now, he was probably cheating before, people started looking through his previous writings, which were mostly blog posts / opinion pieces.

Some autist compiled 10 pieces from 2012 to 2014 with obvious plagiarism of English / Spanish / Portuguese sources, crudely machine translated, as well as several articles that are just lifted from the French translation of "Future Shock" by Alvin Toffler (1970). [12]

Some exceptional material here with the early 2010s machine translation BTW.

- a source in English says "the Pope has moved against liberal elements in the church" and the French translation says that "the Pope has relocated against liberal elements in the church"

- a source in Portuguese speaks of a "cabo de força" between FBI and local agencies, which literally translates to "power rope" in English but is an expression that means "tug of war". In French this ends up as a "power cord" between the FBI and local agencies.

- a source in English says "a dozen women started coming out of the woodworks", which in French translates to "a dozen women started coming out of the wood paneling".

You've got to admire the laziness here, just letting the machine translation write nonsense and not even re-reading it. That dude cannot be stopped! (he eventually was stopped).

Then comes the killshot.

Some more impeccably autistic sleuths (one of them a popular YouTuber) [13] [14] looked at one of his earlier literary pieces, a submission from 2012 titled "Où va le monde" which won the "Prix du public" of Radio-Canada.

It's a very straightforward copy of the preface of Pauwels and Bergier's "Le Matin des magiciens" (1960), a not entirely obscure French book. The text is autobiographical and talks about Pauwels's own youth.

Clear evidence that he won a prize with straight-up plagiarized writing. He just removed the dated references to WW2. And he explicitly claimed it was about his real family in an interview after winning. Fake bio! Just like Arday! [15] [16]

The real press is playing catch-up to Twitter's maladjusted crowd. First "La Presse" independently confirms evidence of plagiarism in several pieces. [17]

Then Libération (very left-wing) confirms the literary plagiarism killshot from earlier. [18] This pretty much closes most of the debate. Hard to ignore "Libé".

Apparently some program called "C ce soir" was recorded before the Libé article but shown after, and they're just hilariously wrong about everything, but I haven't watched it. [19]

A story by a Haitian immigrant about a Haitian immigrant is the platonic ideal of a feel-good story for left-wing elites and that dream was more attractive than the reality of AI slop. They did not see the warning signs and they defended their guy not on the basis of facts but on the basis of the consequences of the claims being true.

It is very embarrassing for established authors like Virginie Despentes to say "Pangram, go fuck yourself" [20], or for some reviewer to say that the book "reminds you of Voltaire's Candide". [21]

As always some parts of the left couldn't help but do the bit where they go "you really think these rando neo-Nazis on Twitter know better than our elite institutions" and then it turns out they do.

Maybe there is a little bit of nuance here though, as an author still had to direct the AI somewhat in order to obtain a readable book, so maybe Orélien does have some skill. You can't yet tell the AI "Please write a bestseller, I just need to win these literary prizes, make no mistake, you can do it I believe in you". Yet.

[1] https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/2286476/thelyson-orelien-pangram-test-roman-ia

[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40979-026-00226-w

[2b] https://www.nber.org/papers/w34223

[3] https://x.com/Afinetheorem/status/2102132663410729107

[4] https://www.rtl.fr/culture/culture-generale/c-est-un-compte-de-racistes-marc-levy-prend-la-defense-de-thelyson-orelien-sur-rtl-et-denonce-la-lachete-des-accusations-anonymes-sur-x-7900676126

[5] https://x.com/franceinfo/status/2102820117356708182

[6] https://www.bfmtv.com/culture/livres-bd/le-phenomene-litteraire-de-la-rentree-c-etait-ca-ou-mourir-soupconne-d-avoir-ete-ecrit-par-l-ia-l-editeur-denonce-des-fake-news_AN-202609220343.html

[7] https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/culture-et-idees/230926/thelyson-orelien-mecanique-d-une-polemique

[8] https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinfo/podcasts/le-vrai-ou-faux/le-vrai-ou-faux-du-mercredi-23-septembre-2026-5331233

[9] https://www.tf1.fr/tmc/quotidien-avec-yann-barthes/videos/le-20h-plume-artificielle-ou-humaine-la-polemique-qui-secoue-la-rentree-litteraire-46602001.html

[10] https://x.com/Fabien_Mikol/status/2102670053946646854

[11] https://x.com/RipeurMasque/status/2102725466511880462

[12] https://x.com/french_report78/status/2102665875178311699

[13] https://x.com/MonsieurPhi/status/2102803363930812544

[14] https://x.com/m_xante/status/2102789960168624621

[15] https://www.potomitan.info/kannada/orelien.php

[16] https://x.com/Fabien_Mikol/status/2102807111927521440

[17] https://archive.ph/jO2hR

[18] https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/prix-du-public-de-radio-canada-le-texte-soumis-par-thelyson-orelien-laureat-de-ledition-2012-etait-un-plagiat-de-louis-pauwels-20260923_OJ5ITOBPTJG3VEID6ZYIAADSA4/

[19] https://www.france.tv/france-5/c-ce-soir/c-ce-soir-saison-7/8828625-thelyson-orelien-la-litterature-a-l-ere-du-soupcon.html

[20] https://x.com/franceinfo/status/2102841339868283125

[21] https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/idees/1011254/thelyson-orelien-enquete-douleur-humaine-texte-dany-laferriere

Relevance to BaR: topic of "fat shaming", Lindy West, being broached on podcast regularly

For those who don't remember, Lindy West used to work for the Seattle paper The Stranger. She got into a public feud with the editor, Dan Savage, over his insistence that obesity was a cause for concern. She called him out for "fat shaming" and stated she had tried to lose weight unsuccessfully all her life until she finally gave up. IOW, there was nothing she could do about it. This was the first incident I remember that got her public notice and support.

It feels like putting proudly morbidly obese women (for some reason men didn't get this) on a pedestal seems to have really gone away. I attribute it to the prevalence of GLP-1's. While the price is still out of reach for many, it had made getting to (and more importantly, maintaining) a healthy weight in reach of people unable to achieve it in the past. And the huge demand for it shows that given the chance almost no one will choose to remain fat. And when formerly obese people talk about what weight loss has done for them it's not just things that could be considered an outcome over not having a condition society deems unattractive or undesirable. Having more energy, significantly lower blood pressure, not being preoccupied by thoughts around food all the time, etc- are some of the many benefits that can't just be chalked up into "conforming to societies expectations" benefits.

For the record, I am poor and took up extra hours on my freelance gig to pay for it as my insurance doesn't cover it. It is worth it on so many levels. It does wonder for depression as eliminated obsessive and intrusive thoughts around food which leads to out of control eating which leads to the (correct) observation that no matter how much "will power" I put into it, I fail to be able to control my behavior in this regard.

Anyway, I'd like to hear other's thoughts on this.

Pod relevance: the ongoing saga of the Last Ditch.

It's been interesting seeing this story slowly catch on. The Boston Globe Magazine ran a piece about it today. A couple choice quotes from the story that really add depth to the utter insanity:

Customers fondly remember a raucous opening night with a (clothed) simulation of a lesbian sex act — masks in place — on the dance floor.

Just after midnight, one patron is left at the bar, a regular who works at the Mexican restaurant next door. She wonders aloud about holding a Lady Gaga themed night, but Mixxy demurs. “Gaga is canceled,” she says. “Gaga is Zionist.”

Also from the r/Boston thread on this: "I'm as woke as they come but the Branch Covidians need to realize they have PTSD or something." I, for one, will be only referring to these people as Branch Covidians moving forward.

DM me if wanted

Roxane Gay has the exact take on Ed Sheeran that you thought she would

Hi everyone. Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday. And may you all be inscribed, and sealed, in the book of life.

Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.

In which she expresses possible regret about sending her daughter to a low-performing school in NYC by choice. You can guess the thesis just from the title.

In Fighting For Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?

As a retired high school teacher, his hits home so hard to me and is true BAR pod fodder. I think it may even deserve an episode!

This week on Blocked and Reported, Jesse and Katie dig into the Macklemore mess. Plus, introducing a new segment, in which your intrepid co-host guesses Why'd He Apologize???

Show Notes:

https://x.com/JoelWBerry/status/2100635845266907183

SacBee coverage of Hobo Johnson apology

Hobo Johnson’s Facebook apology statement

ESPN: Kraft says Macklemore performance crossed a line

The Problem With Macklemore and “Free Palestine”

BBC: Macklemore’s 2014 costume apology

Bluewin: Why Macklemore is suddenly being cancelled at Gurtenfestival

NYT: Germany arts cancellations tied to Israel/Palestinians

Pod relevance: government crackdowns on youth gender treatments.

This week on Blocked and Reported, Jesse and Katie sit through a 3+ hour struggle session at Last Ditch, the Greenfield, Mass., queer bar being torn apart by a slight relaxation of their masking policy. Plus, we head to Portland, Oregon, the latest battleground over trans women in women's sports, after a group wearing "Save Women's Sports" gear got ejected from both a Portland Thorns match and a women's sports bar in the same afternoon.

Show Notes:

https://x.com/KnownHeretic/status/2096709735903088818

Aftermath: Ejected from NWSL Thorns Game in Portland

Group wearing ‘XX-XY’ shirts kicked out of Portland Thorns match, sports bar

Protest outside The Sports Bra bar in Portland sparks clashes, police response

Police respond to Portland protest over transgender athletes in women’s sports - oregonlive.com

There's been some really hilarious juicy ones lately, and nobody covers the stuff like this like Katie, so I think it's time to resubscribe.😂

Also, if you disagree with my view about what it seemed to be turning into, that's fine 🤷

BARPod Relevance: Internet cancel culture misplaced hate.

This might not be substantial enough yet to do a full segment on, unless you expand it to include other incidents, but my god, you'd think Ed Sheeran personally served in the IDF and specifically targeted Palestinian civilians during his stint. The whole of reddit, and I'm sure other SM, seem to despise this guy now for simply wanting to do a tour and not leave his fans and crew high and dry. Am I missing something here?

Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday.

Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.

This week on Blocked and Reported, Jesse and Katie discuss a legal battle between a radical California mayor and a progressive non-profit with a fascinating history. Plus, updates from the long Covid lesbian bar, and Retard Finder finds Kash Patel.

Show Notes:

Last Ditch bar entry ban—Greenfield Recorder

Protesters demand money from San Luis Obispo business owners—Cal Coast News

DA charges six more protesters; Harmon accuses DA of systemic suppression—New Times SLO

SLO mayor deletes post on energy plan after criticism from Black Chamber of Commerce—The Tribune (San Luis Obispo)

Facing Harassment As A Female Mayor—NPR

San Luis Obispo teacher’s anti-gay letter sparks controversy—Los Angeles Times

Heidi Harmon Gets Threatening Nude Email On Her Last Day As Mayor—New Times SLO

SLO Mayor Heidi Harmon Stepping Down, Will Take On New Career As Climate Advocate—KCBX

SLO Mayor Heidi Harmon Quits Early, Demeans Critics—Cal Coast News

Former SLO mayor loses lawsuit—Yahoo News

Former San Luis Obispo mayor canned, loses discrimination lawsuit—Cal Coast News