New in PJ Media:
The strange and fascinating tale of the greatest con-man and fantasist of the twenty-first century has come to a macabre and shocking end. On Friday, Jason Arday was found dead in his London home. Police said that while his death was “unexpected, but is not believed to be suspicious,” which, whatever else it may mean, indicates that he wasn’t murdered, and apparently that he committed suicide. Yet the question of who really killed him, in a moral if not in a criminal sense, is still very much on the table.
Arday’s family immediately went into aggrieved victimhood mode, issuing a statement that clearly put the onus on those who had ridiculed and mocked Arday in the wake of the exposure of his truly breathtaking web of lies: “Jason was subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse” the family claimed, referring not simply to when his lies and plagiarism were exposed, but to his becoming the youngest black professor ever at Cambridge University four years ago. “The campaign of misinformation,” they added, “was too much for Jason, who was a gentle man and who always wanted to see the best in everyone.”
Wait a minute. Whose “campaign of misinformation”? Jason Arday was in no conceivable sense a victim of any “campaign of misinformation.” The only “campaign of misinformation” in the entire bizarre story of Jason Arday was the one he waged himself, in spinning what The Atlantic dubbed “a fabricated backstory filled with hard-to-believe details.”
Hard to believe is an understatement. The Atlantic provides a helpful summary: “He claimed to have been mute until age 11 and illiterate until 18, disadvantages that did not deter him from getting a Ph.D., which he earned by age 30. He claimed, too, that he had suffered from various medical conditions throughout his life, including autism, epilepsy, locked-in syndrome, testicular cancer, and a brain tumor. He was, by his account, a world-class endurance athlete who had racked up a variety of impressive feats, including running 600 miles in six days.”
Interestingly, The Atlantic then continues this list with examples of how rapturously the academic world received Arday, as if these were more examples of his “hard-to-believe” life story, when actually these are examples of how supposedly rational, evidence-based academics react when they encounter an obvious mountebank who just happens to confirm everything they want to believe about the world: “Then there were his academic accomplishments: Arday was billed as a once-in-a-generation talent, whose research in his field—the sociology of education—was ‘the best in the world,’ according to Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge’s faculty of education. He claimed to have received a book advance of 1.4 million in unspecified currency for his memoir, released this week by Simon & Schuster. It was a meteoric rise, until it wasn’t.”
There is more. Read the rest here.
WPM says
The truth killed him ,he kill himself because his fantasy world collapse .His family is guilty of not calling him out on his” life works ” where built on lies .That should have been the first line of people if they did care about him should have reign in his nonsense before the universities and other “experts ” shallow his line of BS in the line of DEI worshipping .Anyone who really love him should have reign him in before it reached this level .Imagine if he was a fake medical doctor ,or fake airline pilot ,or a fake engineer ,he could have killed many innocent people .He is no victim ,he could have face his shame and moved on .Even had a ghost writer pen a book on how he fooled the smart “experts ” with his over the top exploits .
John Pepple says
I understand some other black academics are now saying they had doubts about him, but this is sort of like the psychics who all claimed to have predicted JFK’s assassination, after the fact.
WPM says
The other “Black academics” where afraid of going against him because of tribe loyalty ?It would be in their best interest that after he off himself they keep their collective mouths shut. It would be like predicting yesterdays weather to comment you had your doubts about him after the truth lead to his suicide .Maybe a good vetting process based on only investigated merit and not a racial race to satisfy a hiring quota would have saved this pampered dreamer the embarrassment and maybe save his life.
Edward Brennan says
He committed suicide.
But D.E.I. murdered him.
RIP.
Taffy says
He was a DEI hire that was given a professorship at Cambridge without fact checking a single item on his curriculum vitae. This is very similar to the former president of Harvard that had to resign when her lack of credentials and plagerism came to light when Harvard was accused of discriminating against Jewish students, to the point where they were assaulted on their way to classes for merely being Jewish.
Nowadays, everyone’s thesis, essays and other academic writings are put through an AI program that scans the work product for plagiarism and the probable use of AI in its authorship. Turnitin is a favorite in the academic world. The ex-president of Harvard put herself in the spotlight, and someone then pulled her thesis and ran it through Turnitin. It was deemed 70%-80% plagiarized. Jason Arday met a similar fate. As a result, someone who should’ve been busted out of college for cheating, kept getting promoted until the bubble burst. And burst it did!
Alkflaeda says
It seems to me that he may well have suffered from Munchausen’s Syndrome, and that those who are saying that he was hounded because of his race, could usefully switch their focus to what happens when an affirm at all costs movement like DEI gets its hands on someone who is psychologically vulnerable.
Namer says
Still not missing this DEI hire,
gravenimage says
Who Killed Jason Arday?
…………………………….
Well, I’m sorry to hear this–presumably he commited suicide. Sorry that he did not decide to live his life honestly in the future. But he had been rewarded for cowardice and dishonesty for so long now.