Cry Me a RiverBy now we all know that Jason Arday has died, likely by suicide.By Spencer J. QuinnBy now we all know that Jason Arday has died, likely by suicide. His widely-publicized story has become infamous despite hardly being a month old. The upshot is that he was a black academic who was awarded a professorship in sociology by the woke elites at Cambridge University when he did not have credentials for it. What Arday did have was the capacity to lie.At the very least, he built his academic reputation on plagiarism, a fact which researcher Nathan Cofnas uncovered last month. Others in the media did as well. Over 100 passages in Arday’s doctoral thesis were identified as originating elsewhere. Of course, the Left backed Arday during this time, claiming racism. The veracity of the charges, however, were undeniable. On August 5, Arday resigned from Cambridge, and on August 14 was found dead in his home. Authorities at the time claimed that the death was “unexpected but is not believed to be suspicious.” It’s hard to imagine any other cause of death under these circumstances.See Ed Dutton and Lipton Matthews for more insightful and expansive takes on this affair. I especially liked this analysis by Sargon of Akkad as well.I would like to offer, on the other hand, rhetorical ammunition for those of us on the Right now facing the wrath of Left-wingers lost in the throes of vindictive grief over Arday’s passing. For example, there are many tweets like this one on X which claim that “Right-wing reactionary media” was responsible for Arday’s death and has blood on its hands.Others blame Arday’s death on a “racist witch hunt,” or “a lynch mob,” or a “Right-wing pile on.” Here is a taste from an outlet called The Voice:QuoteLet’s not beat around the bush here. This entire rancid saga only occurred because Jason was Black.This was never anything more than a right-wing pile on to attack Diversity Equity and Inclusion, and to suggest that anyone Black in any position of prominence is not there because of merit alone. And believe me, it won’t end here.And let me clear about another thing. What we saw in Jason’s treatment was a media lynching. He was hounded to his death.What was always missing from this debate was the fact that Nathan Cofnas, the man who had a fixation on Jason Arday and who launched this campaign, is a so-called ‘race realist’ with views that belong in the dustbin of history.If Jason Arday were White this would not have happened.In response, we should remind the Left of its own double standard with regards to academic cancellation. When they do it to people on the Right, they’re utterly vicious about it—and the question of whether the victim actually deserves it or whether his work is academically or scientifically sound makes no difference at all. And yet they cry foul with hideous shrieks and imprecations whenever anyone—Right, Left, or Center—investigates one of their own for actual, verifiable fraud.Aptly, we should first bring up Mike Adams, the conservative criminology professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He gained notoriety on the Left in the 2010s with his anti-trans, anti-feminist positions, and by saying inflammatory yet defensible things on social media.Among the professor’s recent statements was his comparing the efforts of North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper to curb coronavirus to that of a slave master, tweeting on May 29: “This evening I ate pizza and drank beer with six guys at a six seat table top. I almost felt like a free man who was not living in the slave state of North Carolina. Massa Cooper, let my people go!”Earlier this year, Adams mocked women’s studies as “non essential” and labeled civil rights protesters “thugs.”Back in 2016, Adams used an ultraconservative opinion site to target a student at his school with an article titled “A Queer Muslim Jihad.”When Adams was denied a promotion in 2007, he sued for anti-Christian discrimination and won after a seven-year legal struggle. But by 2020 public pressure against him became so intense that he agreed to retire on August 1 with a half-million-dollar payout from the university. He shot himself in the head a week before that could happen.Prior to this, a Facebook group called “Justice for UNCW” had pressured the university to fire Adams. Should it and its 8,000 members be held responsible for Adams’ death? According to some defenders of Jason Arday, they should.There is also a sense of inevitability being projected by Arday’s defenders, as if heightened media scrutiny necessarily leads to suicide. If so, then perhaps we can investigate the numerous times academics and scientists ran afoul of political correctness and did not resort to suicide after being subjected to relentless abuse.Perhaps most famously, psychologist Arthur Jensen received numerous death threats and much professional hostility in the early 1970s after publishing a paper on the heritability of IQ. For a time, he needed a police bodyguard and a bomb squad to x-ray and open his mail. His lectures were often disrupted by protesters, and calls for his firing were common. This was considerably worse than the one-month ordeal Arday underwent, and yet Jensen never did himself in.Richard Lynn was another race-realist intelligence researcher who carried on in the face of abuse. Despite many years of activist pressure, disinvitations, lecture disruptions, and widespread calls for his firing—as well as loss of credentials and his removal from the editorial board of a journal he had helped found—he died of natural causes in 2023 at the ripe age of 93. Did Jason Arday actually have it worse than Richard Lynn?Charles Murray, the co-author of the 1994 work The Bell Curve has faced similar opposition for decades. In 2017, he and a colleague were attacked by deranged Leftist students at Middlebury College in Vermont where he was scheduled to give a speech. Afterwards, College president Laurie Patton refused to expel the perpetrators, despite how Murray’s colleague Allison Stanger received a concussion and a neck injury during the attack. Unlike Arday, the octogenarian Murray persevered and continues to persevere today.Nobel Laureate James Watson had gotten in trouble numerous times throughout his career for dropping bon mots which the Left deemed not so bon. Most notoriously, he stated in 2007 that he felt “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.” This resulted in instant cancellation, mass-condemnation, and professional ostracism. He was reduced to selling his Nobel Prize medal in 2014 for $4.1 million. Then in 2019 he doubled down, stating correctly that “[t]here’s a difference on the average between blacks and whites in IQ tests. . . I would say the difference is genetic.” This caused mass panic at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories on Long Island, New York. They immediately revoked all honors and titles conferred to Watson, despite how he had served as the lab’s president from 1994 to 2004.And yet James Watson died of natural causes in 2025, age 97.And these are just the heavy hitters of race realism. Kevin MacDonald, Jared Taylor, Greg Johnson, Emil Kirkegaard, Peter Brimelow, and Jason Richwine are examples of less famous individuals who have been canceled in one way or another for violating Leftist orthodoxy. And yet they continue plugging along. Perhaps ironically, Nathan Cofnas is now receiving death threats from grieving supporters of Arday—one of whom recently promised to “Charlie Kirk his ass” if he ever decided to visit the United States.I’ve had my issues with Cofnas in the past—but he doesn’t deserve this abuse. I dearly hope nothing bad comes of it. In any event, we do owe Cofnas a debt of gratitude for exposing Arday’s lies in the first place.We must remember also that, unlike the men mentioned above, Arday was credibly accused of academic fraud. He wasn’t merely a mediocre scholar who might have taken liberties with other people’s material four or five times early on in his career. That would have been merely embarrassing. Instead, at the time of his death he was facing charges of over 100 instances of plagiarism, not all of which came from Cofnas. Add this to the long list of improbable and likely apocryphal things he had said about himself (for example, claiming to have run 30 marathons in 35 days) and the fact that he sicced the police on a journalist who was investigating the fraud allegations against him, and Arday comes across not as a victim, but as a consummate conman and pathological liar who couldn’t face the music once his seven-figure check bounced from the big bank of lies. Furthermore, he was anti-white considering how he co-wrote a book complaining about “whiteness” and once accused a student of having “white privilege” simply for complaining about a low grade.This is why I cannot drum up even generic sadness for Jason Arday’s passing. And if his supporters wish to lash out at the Right while keeping mum as their fellow travelers trash the memory of murder victim Ann Widdecombe, then they can go cry me a river.
Let’s not beat around the bush here. This entire rancid saga only occurred because Jason was Black.This was never anything more than a right-wing pile on to attack Diversity Equity and Inclusion, and to suggest that anyone Black in any position of prominence is not there because of merit alone. And believe me, it won’t end here.And let me clear about another thing. What we saw in Jason’s treatment was a media lynching. He was hounded to his death.What was always missing from this debate was the fact that Nathan Cofnas, the man who had a fixation on Jason Arday and who launched this campaign, is a so-called ‘race realist’ with views that belong in the dustbin of history.If Jason Arday were White this would not have happened.
Ask Not For Whom the Bell Curve TollsBy Mark GullickThe story of Jason Arday is a peculiarly English tragedy.he story of Jason Arday is a peculiarly English tragedy. Its first acts were comprehensively covered at Counter-Currents here, here, and here, by Mark Collett, Lipton Matthews, and Professor Edward Dutton respectively, and the final act has now arrived. Professor Dutton makes an excellent point about the effect this affair will have on what is perhaps Britain’s—and even the world’s—most famous academic institution:What is the point of Cambridge University? Its hands are tied by Woke, it’s corrupt, and genuine scholarship—that fearlessly challenges ideas—is increasingly to be found elsewhere.Quite. I have often said that university tuition fees would be better spent in charity shops buying the philosophical and literary works which are to be found there in abundance. However, there is no need to revisit the extraordinary mythomania of Jason Arday, Cambridge’s youngest-ever black professor.Arday was a hybrid of Walter Mitty, Billy Liar, Baron von Munchausen, and Hilaire Belloc’s Matilda, who “told such awful lies/It made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes.” Like Matilda, and the boy who cried wolf, lying did not end well for Arday, who left his position at Jesus College ultimately over plagiarism charges in relation to his gobbledygook thesis. The mainstream media, it goes without saying, want this story down the memory-hole as soon as the news cycles allow, but that is no longer possible. Mr. Arday was found dead in his south London apartment last Friday. It is widely assumed that he took his own life. Mr. Arday may be dead, but he is going to haunt both media and academia from the grave.Cambridge and Oxford are among the oldest university towns in Europe. Bologna came first, followed by Oxford and Paris, and Cambridge has been a collegiate town (really a city, as it has a cathedral) since 1208. Its reputation for academic excellence has attracted students from all over the world, and the suffix “Cantab” after one’s degree has a cachet few outside England will fully appreciate. Oxford and Cambridge, often referred to as “Oxbridge,” are Britain’s Ivy League. The intellectual probity of Cambridge professors is universally recognized as second to none. How, then, did its faculty fail to detect the outrageous fabulism of an obvious chancer? The answer is obvious to us; he is black.Since his death, black academics, politicians, and commentators have predictably lined up to defend Arday, and to play the race card, the most dog-eared and worn in the grievance pack. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, sums up the consensus:Jason Arday was the victim of a pernicious public shaming that other people in his position simply wouldn’t have faced.As we shall see, if that shaming was enacted earlier, Mr. Arday might still be alive. He leaves a wife and two children behind.One particularly shrill black activist, Dr. Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, called the exposing of Arday’s plagiarism a “public crucifixion,” equating Arday with Christ. “I feel like a mug,” said Leftist radio shock-jock James O’Brien. “If I was a racist,” he said, “I might have been suspicious of a black professor. But I’m not a racist, so I didn’t.” This is a novel and ultimately self-defeating argument. It implies that to be a racist is advantageous in that it allows you to detect falsehood at a stage early enough to save a life. Blacks and their white handlers will never grasp the fact that blacks need white racism in order to understand their quite severe limitations.What white liberals will also never understand is that white racism does not have hatred as its driver, it has despair. We don’t actually hate black people, we hate their culture, a culture the vast majority of blacks will never be able to escape, and the perimeter fences of which are constructed by white liberals, particularly the female of the species which, in this case, is more deadly than the male. More, we despise that section of white culture that wishes to use blacks as stage props in a drama intended solely to flag up their own supposedly impeccable virtue. The ultimate end of this aggressive narcissism will soon be visible wherever Jason Arday is buried. Perhaps, appropriately for a university town, a lesson might be learned.Black academia is one more cog in the machine of subversion and destabilization being assembled and run by the deep state and its malevolent engineers. Here is just one example of a Cambridge thesis:Unsexed beings: constructing gender, humanness, and agency through the use of the word “unsex” in Late Modern British society and writing.If Shakespeare had known the use to which his word “unsex” would be put, he would never have had Lady Macbeth say it. There are many, many more such titles, all of which read as though they had been created by the Postmodern Generator (well worth a visit if you don’t know it and want a good laugh).The white liberal women who crammed Arday into a position for which he was fundamentally unsuited are just as much fabulists as the man they effectively killed. His boss at Cambridge spoke to Arday on his appointment with an erotic yearning. “We are so lucky to have you,” she gushed. “You are the best in the world.” Not anymore.These are not good people, they are a carefully stage-managed production of what they think a good person is. They believe that accelerating the progress of blacks will somehow help them. It absolutely won’t, and for important reasons. The eccentric French novelist George Perec wrote a comic novel entitled Life: A User’s Manual, and that is something blacks will never have or, if they did, would not read. As Nietzsche wrote, “life is not a puzzle to be solved,” but there is a trick to it, and mastering it means little more than being authentic to your nature, and recognizing your limitations.
The Milli Vanilli of Academia
