Fake Professor Jason Arday was found dead in the wake of being exposed as a complete fraud, and if it were my choice, he would still be alive and suffering the humiliation that should be the result of his crimes. I would prefer that he did not likely choose to kill himself instead of facing the consequences of his actions. My preference is irrelevant. If he decided to do himself in, it’s crushing for his wife and kids, and that was a selfish, cruel, and stupid decision. But it was his decision, as was his decision to commit fraud upon fraud. I don’t celebrate his death, and his death changes nothing. We’re not going to stop rooting out the charlatans.
Of course, the entirely predictable response of the institutional left to his cowardly and apparent self-deletion has been to insist, loudly and with quivering outrage, that his death is our fault. You see, we normal people pointed out that he lied about his background, his achievements, his credentials, and his work. The fact that we did what a functioning institution should’ve done itself outraged his boosters, so these moral illiterates now invert the moral calculus to keep the exposure of academic fraud from happening again. Arday lied pathologically and endlessly, enabled by a ridiculously solicitous academia, then likely killed himself when his lies were exposed. Obviously, the villains are the people who did not lie and did not choose to end his life.
And you’ll never guess their key accusation in a million years.
Okay, you guessed it: RACISM!
Arday was, like so many of the pet minorities the lily-white left chooses to showcase, a serial plagiarist of the most outrageous sort. It’s not just a few words or phrases or even paragraphs here and there that he lifted without so much as bothering to modify them enough to provide a shred of deniability. He understood that his skin color and perfectly crafted fake CV would insulate him from any kind of scrutiny by his professorial peers. His vibe was simply too good to check. He therefore felt emboldened to engage in massive cutting and pasting to “write” his works. He stole huge chunks of his allegedly brilliant musings from others. Naturally, their work is also garbage, to be sure — the kind of race-hustling, jargon-filled muck that stupid people use to either convince even stupider people that they really are geniuses, or to intimidate people from attempting to critique them. That’s a key tactic that these phonies use to avoid accountability. You can’t critique something that doesn’t make sense; their fallback when confronted is always to accuse the critics of simply not understanding the fraudster’s brilliant assertions. This charade isn’t the exception in leftist academia, but I repeat myself. This is standard operating procedure.
Until Arday’s artful dodging became simply too audacious, the left, from the professorate to the media, rallied behind him. When the heat got too hot, they cut him loose. But before that, it was business as usual for the left. To accuse their magical minority of any wrongdoing, to doubt his miraculous story of overcoming illiteracy, autism, and a zillion other invented challenges, was clearly racism because, well, everything is racism. Maybe if they shouted “Racism” enough, his critics would shut up. But this time, we didn’t shut up. More and more revelations came out, from Arday’s fake marathon running to his lies about being threatened with a pig’s head to his bizarre teaching style in which he’d show up late to a four-hour class, lean back in the chair and spout off semi-coherently about racism for an hour, and then leave. In the end, his institution not only would not, but could not, police itself. He was supposedly the youngest black professor in Cambridge’s history, a history that goes back over 800 years; sadly, this says more about Cambridge and modern academia than it does about an imposter who knew exactly how to manipulate the people who think they are the smartest people in the world. Of course, they were happy to be manipulated.
But let’s be serious about these condescending leftists. They knew Arday was a phony. They also knew he was useful. His existence supported their narrative, so that irritating objective truth thing could be dispensed with. But he was never their peer; he was their pet. They tried to make Jason Arday into something he wasn’t — an intellectual and a genius — because he was a good-looking black guy with the kind of lengthy dreads that send a tingle down the legs of childless liberal wine women who spend their endless free time reading Ibram X. Kendi’s tomes (that relic of Woke 1.0 is yet another clown whose scamming was too much even for left-wing academia to bear) and doing the work to ameliorate their appalling residual whiteness.
And Arday, who knew the score, was all too eager to cooperate. But now, he is dead, almost certainly by his own hand, and that’s something of a surprise, considering his previous shamelessness. Based on his record, one might expect that he would try to bluff his way through the Schiffstorm and become a martyr, a victim of those terrible racists who interfere with useful narratives by pointing out unhelpful facts. Perhaps it was residual shame that drove him to his desperate final act, but if he felt shame then, it would be the first time. More likely, he understood that his fate was to be figuratively locked away in the attic with all those other embarrassing and obsolete relatives like Cindy Sheehan, Ward Churchill, Herr Oystergruppenführer, and, coming soon, Francesca Hong. Jason Arday was once something, though that something was built on nothing, and perhaps he just couldn’t go back to being nothing.
Just think how his family feels knowing he considered their love irrelevant compared to his loss of public acclaim. That’s a crime worse than all of his public frauds.
The new party line is that we’re to blame. It’s our fault that Arday is dead. You see, if we hadn’t told the truth about his many, many lies and exposed them, this never would have happened. And that’s probably true, in a sense. He would’ve gone on being a celebrated icon of the left, though most of the left understood he was a joke and kept their laughter in check for the good of the movement. He was useful, and he would’ve gotten the benefits of being useful. He had an autobiography coming out for which some credulous (no doubt female of pallor) publisher had paid him an advance of around $1.4 million. Not a bad gig in a time when most fiction authors are wearing a barrel with suspenders.
Regardless, it was entirely predictable that the left would use his unfortunate demise to try to shut us up, to place all criticism of woke charlatans off limits because the subject of the critique might decide to do something desperate. They can’t help themselves but act out irrationally, you see. The fact that this tactic deprives the minority of any agency is no shock; there’s no racist like a leftist, who considers minorities to be nothing more than political marionettes unable to control their own actions. We’re supposed to give them a pass because the targets of our criticism have no agency. It’s like that NSFW scene in Blazing Saddles where the sheriff keeps the townspeople from lynching him by sticking a gun to his head—“He’s just crazy enough to do it!” Except this time the townspeople were not trying to lynch an innocent man and didn’t back off, and he did pull the figurative trigger.
We’re not going to play their game. We’re not going to hold fire for fear of feelz. We’re not going to ignore the truth lest the liar lash out at himself or others. Sometimes the truth hurts, but the only people the truth hurts are people exposed doing something they shouldn’t be doing. The truth is more important than feelings. And the truth is more important than Arday’s life. If the choice we are presented with is that Jason Arday will go on living a lie and degrading our civilization by doing so, or that Jason Arday might hurt himself, it’s Option 2 every day of the week. We’re not going to be held hostage or intimidated or shamed into silence and, therefore, complicity.
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