The Arday Affair

Eli Steele Fair For All Kmele Free Black Thought Helen Pluckrose Jacob Savage Jacob Mchangama Meghan Daum

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Still, this is a lightning rod moment for a reason. This perfectly encapsulates our culture war moment. When school or mass shootings happen the Right often says “now is not the time to talk about guns,” and argues it’s the time to grieve. I disagree, as do most Democrats and Progressives. It’s the same here with Arday. Now is the time to discuss the harm of DEI, the racism of “low expectations,” the dishonesty of higher education, and the protection of fraud.

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If you live under a rock you might not have heard of Jason Arday, DEI-Boy Extraordinaire. The fiasco started a couple months ago when Arday—a young Black British academic in his early 40s who had become the youngest Black professor in Cambridge University’s history at the age of 37—was accused of plagiarism by a “race scientist” named Nathan Cofnas.

It soon became clear that not only had Arday almost certainly plagiarized much of his doctoral thesis, but he actually also made up substantial elements of his life story. This reminds one of the plagiarizing and antisemitic Claudine Gay, former president of Harvard who resigned after accusations were made by Christopher Rufo and other right-wingers. For Progressives the idea seems to be that if the accusations come from the “wrong” people or political side, even if the claims are true, it is invalid and an unfair witch-hunt.

Arday claimed to be autistic and non-verbal until age 11, and to not be able to read or write until age 18. (As of this writing this claim has not been disproved but given his track record of fabulism and the unlikelihood of the claim it’s obvious to contemplate the veracity. Some former classmates have contradictory accounts of his childhood.) He claimed—insanely—to have run 600 miles in six days. He claimed a pig’s head was left at his parents’ doorstep as some kind of racist threat. Many of his claims have already been seriously questioned, criticized, and found to be false. And there so far have been over 100 alleged instances of plagiarism. (Cambridge is currently doing a second independent investigation so we’ll see what they say officially concerning plagiarism claims.)

As the fire heated under Arday’s figurative feet, many within Cambridge and many Progressives denounced the media attention and rising rage as a Conservative-created racist witch-hunt. Given that a “race realist” had first made the claims the left felt more emboldened to cry foul play. Soon Arday quit his professorship. We soon discovered also that some of his former students had questioned Arday’s teaching abilities and style, saying he was more racially and DEI-focused, missed a lot of classes, and could be both extremely harsh with some students and very soft with others.

The media campaign against Arday, or rather the public outcry at this brazen insanity, rose to a fever pitch and, sadly, on August 14^th, Arday was found dead, likely by suicide. (Investigation ongoing.)

I, of course, like any rational, sane person, decry any aspects of the outcry that were genuinely racist, and some of it was. I saw, even on Substack, some people gleefully denouncing him as an “N-Word.” And it’s nothing but a tragedy that he likely took his own life. He is first and foremost a fucking human being, and that should never be forgotten. May his soul rest in peace. It didn’t have to end this way. He must have been in a world of emotional pain. It seems very possible that he had some mental health issues. The likelihood of being a pathological liar seems high as well.

Still, this is a lightning rod moment for a reason. This perfectly encapsulates our culture war moment. When school or mass shootings happen the Right often says “now is not the time to talk about guns,” and argue it’s the time to grieve. I disagree, as do most Democrats and Progressives. It’s the same here with Arday. Now is the time to discuss the harm of DEI, the racism of “low expectations,” the dishonesty of higher education, and the protection of fraud.

For the past decade (and longer, but especially the past decade) Progressives have been complaining about racism, claiming that it’s worst now than 1950, which is patently absurd purely on its face, legally, culturally, in all ways. Black Americans have full and equal rights today and have had them for a long time now. We fought a ruthless and bloody Civil War ending slavery in 1865. Yes, Southern Reconstruction was brutal, painful, immoral and complicated, as were the necessary and correct Civil Rights battles of the 1950s and 60s which resulted in the LBJ Civil Rights Laws of 1964 and 1965, etc. No nation is perfect. Certainly America is no exception.

But Black Americans are clearly more free today than ever before. There is a thriving Black middleclass. Obama was president twice. Many more politicians in power are Black. More Black folks graduate college today, climb the corporate ladder, run cities and states, etc. There are hugely successful Black podcasters, such as (for better or worse) Candace Owens, Keven Jackson, Kmele Foster, and many more. Black thinkers and authors like Glen Loury, John McWhorter and Thomas Chatterton Williams are major voices. I could go on and on.

Why Progressives keep picking the worst examples of Black American excellence is beyond me: Jussie Smollett, Claudine Gay, George Floyd, Kamala Harris, Jason Arday. There are so many qualified Black Americans: Why not pick one of them instead of these people? It’s as if Progressives want failure in order to stoke more culture war rage and polarization.

This event with Arday is exactly what I meant in my previous essay on progressive racism.

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