In Britain, the death of the fraudulent University of Cambridge professor Jason Arday has triggered the kind of networked hysteria not seen on the Left since the death of George Floyd in 2020. Arday, once the youngest black professor at Cambridge, was found dead on Aug. 14 after a cascade of revelations exposed him as a fake and a plagiarist. On Aug. 18, thousands of people gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square to mourn him. The speakers accused the press of an “assassination” and a “lynching,” and called for punitive regulation of Britain’s already punitively regulated media.
This was the real-world tip of an online iceberg of resentment and delusion. The most titanic contribution came from the minor novelist Will Self. In a 7,000-word rant, Self compared half a dozen other commentators, me among them, to members of Nazi death squads and the persecutors of Alfred Dreyfus, and called on Prime Minister Andy Burnham to instruct the police to launch a murder investigation and impound our computers. My name, and those of others who described Arday’s unarguable falsity, now circulate on online lists of targets for retribution.
Call me a cuck and a lib, but I’ve always felt that everyone is free to say what we believe, especially on matters of public interest. As for writers, those of us who are vain and idle enough to mount the soapbox have a duty to tell it like it is. Scapegoating, censorship, and show trials are the hallmarks of police states. When these impulses appear in a liberal state, as in the McCarthy witch hunt, the prosecution of Lenny Bruce for telling rude jokes, or the imprisonment of British people for posting spicy memes, it is a sure sign that the state is losing its grip, whether on the legal machinery that is supposed to be kept out of the grasp of sectarian fanatics or on reality itself.
Reality is becoming a luxury product, like burritos and beef. The difference is, we can digest burritos and beef, but, as T.S. Eliot said, “humankind cannot bear too much reality.” The Left’s reality-denying reaction to Arday’s fall is a collective defense mechanism. The truth about Arday and the institutional patrons who promoted his lies means the death of the Left’s ideals and ambitions. It discredits an ideology and the institutions that have bent towards its service. Why face the pale rider when you can shoot the messenger instead?
Arday’s academic plagiarism was the least of his deceptions. He claimed that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days, nine of them with a fractured bone in his leg. He claimed that he raised a fortune for charity and dug wells in the favelas of Brazil. He claimed that he overcame diagnoses of childhood autism, dyslexia, and muting and, after learning to read and write at 18, researched and wrote a doctoral thesis six years later. He claimed to have had a brain tumor. He claimed that a masked racist threatened him with a knife in his Cambridge office, that he was a target of an “evil” international conspiracy to take down high-profile black men, and that racists had left a pig’s head on his family’s doorstep.
You might think that when a man claims to have hopped his way into the elite company of the world’s top endurance runners and overcome autism by magic, journalists would do some elementary fact checks. The BBC has an entire division, BBC Verify, devoted to exposing “disinformation.”
You might think that university professors, who are overwhelmed by a tide of cheating from their students, would pass an applicant’s work through detection software or make a few phone calls to confirm his resume.
You might think that when a major publisher such as Simon & Schuster pays a seven-figure advance for his autobiography, they would check his extraordinary claims.
Yet the BBC and other left-wing media republished all of Arday’s fictions as fact. Cambridge and several other universities hired him. Simon & Schuster issued his biography after his exposure. How appropriate that the blowback reaches all the way to Simon & Schuster in Midtown Manhattan. The Arday tale is familiar, an American tale told in an English accent.
Cambridge promoted and then dropped Arday like a “pump and dump” junk bond. To polish their DEI credentials, they boosted a fraud at the expense of more worthy candidates, not least black and brown ones, then extracted his resignation when they were busted. The only media malfeasance in his story is that left-wing outlets disseminated Arday’s lies as truth, to impose their white liberal guilt-trip on the rest of us.
Elite institutions justify their status by producing high-quality and accurate information. They are caught colluding in the systemic subversion of reality. In a democracy, this is akin to arson in a gunpowder factory. Don’t blame the firefighters.
Dominic Green (@drdominicgreen) is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.