The left says the right is to blame for Arday’s death. But exposing the truth doesn’t kill someone. The left that rewarded his lies set him up for exposure, and if he killed himself (it’s not official, but it’s fairly clear that he almost certainly did), then it’s the tragic outcome of that plus his own actions.

From Roger Kimball:

Whatever else can be said about the “Jason Arday Affair,” he was not the victim. Perhaps you can say he was the casualty, first, of his own mendacity and race-fired megalomania and second, of an educational establishment that, marinated in the anti-white, self-flagellating racial animosities of the moment, colluded in the construction of Arday’s fantastical, self-aggrandizing, and ultimately self-destructive fantasies.

And Kurt Schlichter is harsh but correct here:

Of course, the entirely predictable response of the institutional left to [Arday’s] 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. …

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.

Yes, they treated him as a pampered and indulged pet, which is both insulting and cruel. In the end, it was very cruel indeed.

But I wonder how much they actually knew, at least at the start when they first hired him. He checked all the DEI boxes and then some, and scholarship isn’t what it used to be (and perhaps never was, in the field of education). I think they wanted so much to believe that they followed a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and never checked a thing. When the first doubts were raised, they then went into protective mode. At some point they definitely knew the truth, at least most of them did. But denial is a very powerful thing. People can fool themselves, and that makes them even bigger fools.

Here’s a recent tweet from Nathan Cofnas (I featured an interview with him in this post; he’s the professor who said Arday plagiarized his PhD thesis):

There is an anti-Cofnas hate rally in Trafalgar Square with ~15,000 attendees. If I were in London there is a real possibility that I would be murdered.

1000s of academics & journalists knew the truth about Jason Arday for more than a year. Now you know why no one said anything. https://t.co/V8Y0xzrRYG

— Nathan Cofnas (@nathancofnas) August 17, 2026

For those without X, it says:

There is an anti-Cofnas hate rally in Trafalgar Square with ~15,000 attendees. If I were in London there is a real possibility that I would be murdered.

1000s of academics & journalists knew the truth about Jason Arday for more than a year. Now you know why no one said anything.

Cofnas is asserting that tons of people knew for at least a year. That probably is true. I don’t think most of them knew for the first year or two, but that was through willful blindness. I also think Cofnas is correct that many people were afraid to speak up, for fear of getting the sort of vicious reaction he’s getting. Others wouldn’t speak up because they felt it would hurt the DEI cause to which they were wedded. Some didn’t speak up because they felt not only would it be cause for accusations of racism against them, but because they also might lose their positions.