The Conservative Cave
Current Events => Politics => Topic started by: SVPete on August 18, 2026, 11:42:21 AM
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COLEMAN HUGHES: Why the Left Needed to Believe in Jason Arday.
https://instapundit.com/817331/ (https://instapundit.com/817331/)
The Jason Arday scandal has left the academic world reeling. Found dead in his family’s apartment last Friday, Arday has been the subject of intense scrutiny over the past month. Appointed in 2023 as Cambridge University’s youngest-ever black professor, he faced extensive and credible allegations of plagiarism that exploded into public view last month. Those allegations led to public interest in the (literally) incredible details of his life. Arday claimed to have run 600 miles in six days—which would make him one of the best ultra-marathon runners on Earth. He claimed that he couldn’t speak until the age of 11 and couldn’t read until 18, but somehow managed to complete a PhD around 30. And he claimed to have raised the equivalent of several million U.S. dollars for charity.
Jason Arday was either the most interesting man in the world, or he was a liar. It turned out to be the latter.
All this has revealed many unflattering things about academia: DEI invites fraud by lowering standards, the bigotry of low expectations is alive and well, and a disturbing number of “experts”—not just Arday but all the Cambridge professors and BBC journalists who co-signed him—are compromised by ideology, cowardice, or both.
But the Arday scandal has also revealed something else: White liberals in the English-speaking world want to believe in the archetype of the up-from-nothing black intellectual who, despite huge disadvantages, goes on to achieve greatness. In fact, they want to believe in this sort of story so badly that they are willing to turn off every ounce of skepticism that they would normally bring to bear on fantastical claims.
The irony, however, is that we already have many examples of up-from-nothing black intellectuals who go on to greatness. It’s just that they usually turn out to be conservatives—or if not conservatives, then at least out-of-step with the left-wing religion of racial justice.
My emphasis; the full Free Press article is behind a paywall. WRT the emphasized paragraph, Thomas Sowell and Ben Carson come to mind.
As a side note, the claim to have run 600 miles in six days is patently absurd. I'm weird/unusual enough to be acquainted with a couple of runners who have done 100-, 135-, and 200-mile events. They prep for it- training and arranging course support crew - for months, and, more to the point, recover from successfully completing such an event for weeks.
If Arday's death can be, accurately, attributed to more than his own fabulism and the exposure thereof, the contributing factor would be the pressure to perform/conform to what he was not but leftists and Progs set him up to be.