Even before the Arday incident, Cofnas was a figure of controversy for his writing and research on race and intelligence:

He became an early-career research fellow at the University of Cambridge and research associate at Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 2022. Controversy developed after Cofnas published a 2024 blog post saying that black people are, on average, less intelligent than other groups, and that they “would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment” under a meritocratic system. He was dismissed from his position at Emmanuel College as a result.

In 2026, Cofnas secured a position at Ghent University. Following student protest and a petition calling for his dismissal, the university defended his appointment, citing academic freedom. Cofnas attracted further attention after publishing a blog post in which he catalogued multiple examples of alleged plagiarism by University of Cambridge sociologist Jason Arday …

In that Wiki article I just quoted, I don’t see it mentioned that Cofnas says he got these facts from Harvard’s own study on the matter. Cofnas discusses it in the interview I posted, and it’s also mentioned here:

[Cofnas] cites Harvard University data which suggest that were the college to use a colourblind system for academic selection, judging applicants by academic qualifications alone, its proportion of black students would fall dramatically, from around 14 per cent to just 0.7 per cent. When it comes to Harvard faculty, Dr Cofnas added that in a meritocracy they ‘would be recruited from the best of the best students’, meaning ‘the number of black professors would approach 0 per cent’. He adds that black people would ‘disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment’ in this society.

Cofnas is labeled a racist, but basing a statement like that on Harvard’s own statistics doesn’t make him one. Whether he is or is not, I don’t know. He definitely is a person unafraid of making waves, which is also evident from the interview in my previous post. Cofnas waded into Arday’s background where others feared to tread. Now, with Arday’s suicide, Cofnas has been suspended from his current post at Ghent University:

Nathan Cofnas, suspended by the rector of Ghent University, Petra De Sutter, in the wake of Jason Arday’s death, notes that De Sutter used ChatGPT for her inaugural address, which included fabricated quotes.

Previous news reports confirm this.https://t.co/xppHNZk3Wo https://t.co/XjaV0P6zZk pic.twitter.com/9gCl3NsjXs

— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) August 20, 2026

For those lacking access to X:

Nathan Cofnas, suspended by the rector of Ghent University, Petra De Sutter, in the wake of Jason Arday’s death, notes that De Sutter used ChatGPT for her inaugural address, which included fabricated quotes.

To top it all off, Ghent’s rector De Sutter is a gynecologist who was born a man and transitioned around the age of forty, in 2004.

The reason given for Cofnas’ suspension:

Ghent University said it had suspended Cofnas “as a precautionary measure” pending a preliminary disciplinary investigation, but did not go into further detail on the reasons.

It could not comment any further “to safeguard the confidentiality of the personnel file and the disciplinary proceedings,” it said in an emailed statement.

Pretty closed-mouthed, but my guess is that they are afraid of an uproar from students, faculty, and the public if they keep him. He is identified as the mean racist guy who lynched Arday.

Here’s more on the matter from the University of Ghent:

The suspension comes after Ghent said that following Arday’s death it had “received many enquiries” about Cofnas’s appointment.

“We attach great importance to academic freedom and to open academic debate, even when views are controversial. However, that freedom is not unlimited. It goes hand in hand with responsibility and may be restricted in order to protect the rights of others,” Ghent said in its statement.

“For this reason, the university takes the recent public statements made by a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University regarding this matter very seriously. Ghent University has decided to take appropriate action within its powers and the applicable framework.”

In March, more than 300 staff and students wrote an open letter to the university, questioning the appointment of Cofnas and accusing Ghent of violating its code of conduct.

Ghent defended itself then. But will it defend free speech now, or succumb? A robust defense of free speech doesn’t really exist in Europe anywhere; at least, I’ve never found one.

Cofnas is an American, however, and the Trump administration is sticking up for him:

U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Bill White gets right to the point in the X post below. He calls out the Ghent University rector for “retaliat[ing] against an American scholar [Cofnas] following his accurate whistleblower reporting on academic fraud.”

He notes that the U.S. often funds research projects with foreign universities and that “dishonest, corrupt institutions that engage in, or reward, scapegoating mob behavior are not desirable partners for us.” Therefore, the U.S. plans to review “any relationships we have with Ghent University.”

It will be very interesting to see what ultimately happens to Cofnas. I hope he has a security detail.

NOTE: In doing research for this post, I came across this tweet on X praising the Trump administration for doing the right thing in this instance. But when I looked at the responses to the tweet, there were many that said that Trump only did this because he’s controlled by the Jews and Israel, and Cofnas is Jewish. It was quite the barrage of Tuckeresque contempt, such as (for example):

The Trump administration defended Nathan Cofnas because he’s jewish, and it would have done so regardless of whether it was the right thing to do or not.

The absolute only reason they are defending Confas is because he is aggressively Jewish, and the singular aim of this administration is to serve the Jews.

[Trump] would never do this for a White person

Ok, but Trumps law: ‘everything he does, he does for *them*’ holds true in this instance. No matter how repellently obnoxious the other side is, it’s hard not to notice the consistent pattern. If Confas wasn’t a Zionist Jew it would be very different.

Oh please, let’s not be oblivious here.

Cofnas is Jewish and this administration is controlled by Jews.

You don’t see this “based” administration going to bat for nationalist figures in Europe.

Cofnas is a jew. There have been plenty of times they could have defended this rhetoric, but they aren’t defending the rhetoric they are defending the tribe.

There are plenty more where those came from, but you get the idea. Are they bots? Paid trolls? Muslims in foreign lands? Or real people from the US and Western Europe who are Tucker fans? Probably some mix of all three, but I don’t know the proportions.

Note that they don’t consider Jews “white.” The left, on the other hand, considers Jews extremely privileged whites. This double-edged sword is a really good example of how Jew-hatred works – the Jews are regarded as allied with whatever the Jew-hating group sees as the enemy.

[ADDENDUM:

Cofnas tells his side of it here. An excerpt:

I have been flooded with death threats, smeared in countless newspaper articles, and accused of targeting Arday because I think that, as one commentator put it, “people like Cofnas simply don’t believe that Black people deserve to be professors at all.” Speaker after speaker at the vigil held for Arday in Trafalgar Square on Monday denounced me by name, including a prominent politician. Many have claimed that I fabricated the evidence against Arday, although this is easily refuted.

On Aug. 18, the U.K.’s National Union of Journalists released a “Statement on the Death of Jason Arday.” After “condemn[ing] attacks against individual journalists,” the statement singles out one person for criticism: me. “That one of the highest profile critics of Arday was Nathan Cofnas, a former Cambridge academic and self-described ‘race realist’, is deeply concerning.” Although no one has found so much as a mistaken comma in the article I wrote about Arday, I’m apparently not entitled to protection against attack for telling the truth.

On Thursday afternoon, I received a message from the rector of Ghent University, Petra De Sutter, notifying me that, in the wake of the backlash from the Arday affair, she was suspending me from my position as a postdoctoral researcher. Her letter made it clear that the school has laid the groundwork to fire me.

I’m an easy scapegoat because I hold views about race that are controversial and easily misunderstood. I argue that differences between ancestral populations aren’t entirely due to environmental forces, and that some group disparities stem from natural differences for which no one is to blame. I made a widely quoted statement: “Under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students.” That sentence has been cited repeatedly as evidence that I’m a racist.

Few people are aware that my statement about Harvard admissions was summarizing a finding by Harvard itself. In the course of the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard lawsuit, Harvard disclosed an internal study conducted in 2013, which found that, if admissions were based only on grades and test scores, the undergraduate population would be 0.7% African-American—a significant reduction from current levels. Racial representation at many American institutions is maintained by Harvard-style affirmative action.

I didn’t quote Harvard’s statistic to celebrate it, or because I believe that black people don’t belong at universities. There are many brilliant black scholars. But it’s a difficult fact to face that in a truly colorblind system that didn’t take race into account, there would be a shocking lack of diversity in certain institutions. As I said in the controversial essay that mentions the Harvard statistic, “when it comes to policymaking in a multiracial society, we might need to make sure that everyone feels they have a voice in determining our collective fate.” To this end, I argued for taking measures to ensure meaningful representation of major demographic groups. But we shouldn’t do this under the banner of DEI, which automatically blames differences in outcome on white racism.

The number of people hearing Cofnas’ side of the story is miniscule compared to the number who think he’s a racist who murdered Arday with malice aforethought.]

The post Ghent suspends Cofnas – the Arday fallout appeared first on The New Neo.

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.

The post Jason Arday, leftist martyr appeared first on The New Neo.

Here’s a piece on the topic [my emphasis]:

… [T]oday’s condemnation of Israel comes from a different lineage—a Third-Worldist conviction that the West is the permanent oppressor and that any movement arrayed against Western power is inherently righteous. This is why Western activists with no connection to the region chant in the vocabulary of decolonial struggle rather than Islamic jurisprudence or Marxist economics. They are channeling a worldview born in Paris, Algiers, and Havana, refined in Western universities, and now applied indiscriminately to conflicts framed as West versus non-West.

That is why the unity between Islamists and young white leftist westerners was immediately apparent after 10/7, a unity that puzzled some people but not those who had been paying particular attention to what’s been taught in US colleges for at least the last thirty years. And that is why Israel is merely the proverbial canary in the coal mine and the larger target is western civilization in general.

Strangely enough, the idea of Israel as colonist is historically inaccurate, since the Jews inhabited the land long before the Arabs arrived. The Arabs were the actual “colonizers” (after the Romans, and followed by Ottomans, British – well, you get the idea). But “colonizers” has changed its meaning:

Historically, decolonization referred to the withdrawal of European empires and the birth of new states. That meaning hasn’t vanished, but it now serves as a backdrop for a far more ambitious doctrine: a global theory of power that divides the world between oppressive Western structures and the communities that resist them. Detached from chronology, it operates as a universal ideology—applied to everything from university hiring and border policy to museum curation and armed conflict.

This universal script—oppressor versus oppressed, settler versus indigenous, colonizer versus colonized—explains why accusations against Israel travel easily from Rome to London to New York. Whether the details fit the model becomes irrelevant; the model supplies the moral verdict. Israel is condemned not because of what it does, but because of what it is presumed to represent. Third-Worldism provides the emotional instinct; decolonization provides the conceptual vocabulary.

That helps to explain why neither logic arguments nor historical ones matter to those who espouse these ideas. Logic and historical facts might change a few minds, but just a few.

A short history of the settler/colonizer framework, including how flexible it has become [my emphasis]:

Much of the contemporary decolonial worldview can be traced to the intellectual realignments of the late 1960s, when the Marxist historian Maxime Rodinson published “Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?” in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes shortly after the Six-Day War. Rodinson did not limit himself to criticizing Israeli policies. He offered a structural reinterpretation of Zionism itself, arguing that it was a colonial movement indistinguishable from European expansion abroad. If Zionism is colonialism, Israel becomes illegitimate by definition and Palestinian violence becomes anti-imperialist by default.

Rodinson’s structural Marxist approach ignored basic history. Jews were indigenous to the region; their migration followed persecution and displacement; and Zionism was a national revival, not an extension of the European empire. Yet his template would furnish Middle East studies with a grand structural narrative. Edward Said absorbed Rodinson’s categories and extended them into a sweeping indictment of Western knowledge itself. With Said’s publication of Orientalism in 1978, “colonialism” became the master key for interpreting everything from literature to foreign policy.

Over the following decades, settler-colonial studies hardened into a discipline. Alongside it emerged the concept of surrogate colonialism. First invoked by Indira Gandhi in 1983 to describe how technological and economic dependency could mimic colonial rule, it was later repurposed by anthropologists such as Scott Atran to argue that British support for Zionist immigration made Jews “surrogate colonizers” of Palestine.If Jews were not direct colonizers, they must have been colonial proxies; if historical evidence did not support the accusation, the accusation evolved. Like settler colonialism, surrogate colonialism functioned as a tool designed to delegitimize Jewish sovereignty.

I really can’t summarize the richness of the article; I suggest you read it yourself. But here’s an excerpt describing how the ideas evolved over the years, and while you read this, remember that this is what our university-“educated” young people have been taking in for a long long time. It will help make it clear why so many of them believe what they believe so fervently [my emphasis]:

This expanding catalog [of the evils of which Israel is supposedly guilty] rests on an older revolutionary formula that took its most influential form during the Algerian War of Independence from 1954 to 1962. The Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) defeated France militarily; it also transformed how Western intellectuals spoke about power, legitimacy, and violence. Beginning in the late 1950s, the FLN’s presentation of the conflict as a struggle between a foreign settler population and an indigenous nation electrified French and European thinkers. Sartre embraced this narrative in 1960, describing FLN violence as a cleansing force, and Franz Fanon canonized it in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), portraying revolutionary violence as the sole path to psychic and political liberation.

Their writings established the ideological foundation of Third-Worldism. The categories they articulated—the illegitimate settler, the pure native, the dismantling of the colonizer’s institutions, and the inherent morality of resistance—shaped generations of postcolonial scholars in France, Britain, and the United States.

By absorbing this FLN-derived vocabulary, decolonial theory symbolically defines Israel as the new France and Palestinians as the new Algerians. Once a conflict is cast this way, negotiation becomes impossible: the settler can only be dismantled, never recognized. This is why contemporary calls to “decolonize Palestine” echo the rhetoric used against France in 1961, and why the experience of Algeria—not Iran—guides both academic theory and activist instinct.

The FLN narrative aligned neatly with the sensibilities that came to dominate U.S. Middle East studies. …

This climate shaped figures such as Karen Brodkin at UCLA, who denied the historical continuity linking Jews to the land of Israel and portrayed the state as inherently racist; and Joseph Massad at Columbia, who cast Zionism as a European racial ideology. These scholars and kindred scholars collapsed the complexities of the Middle East into the moral certainties of decolonial thinking. The FLN model, moralized in the 1960s, was naturalized in American classrooms in the 1990s and 2000s.

That’s at least how long this has been building and spreading in universities – and beyond, as generations of students graduate. The article doesn’t deal with the influence of Soviet Russia, which beginning in the 1960s also began to spread the word that Israel was a settler colonial power; I’ve described some of the process in this previous post. The Soviets spread propaganda that indicted Israel as a racist and colonialist state, knowing this would target western sensibilities and help turn them against Israel.

But back to Third-Worldism and October 7:

Politicians and activists formed in these intellectual environments emerged fluent in the idiom of settler colonialism and Third-Worldist liberation. By October 7, the decolonial imagination had migrated from the margins of academia into public life. The slogans that appeared within hours of the attacks were the product of an intellectual system built over decades. Rodinson’s structural Marxism, surrogate-colonial and settler-colonial theories, and the legacy of the FLN coalesced into a political language in which Israel functions as a condensed symbol of Western domination.

The piece goes on to analyze the rise of Zohran Mamdani as “the outcome of a generation shaped by postcolonial theory”:

When Mamdani speaks about Israel, he is not making a local argument but delivering a civilizational critique of the West through the most convenient example at hand.

In decolonial thought, the United States is not merely Israel’s ally but also the structure that makes Israel possible—the master empire, the global settler republic, the architect of racialized modernity. Israel gains its ideological charge by being characterized as the extension of this American project. When politicians like Mamdani describe Israel as colonial, they condemn the United States as the deeper engine of injustice. It’s no surprise, then, when decolonial rhetoric moves quickly from Gaza to policing, capitalism, immigration, borders, and the Constitution.

All of which need to be destroyed.

I also think it’s instructive to see Obama as the first president subscribing to Third-Worldism, and to interpret his “fundamental change” as a pivot towards that point of view. His attempt at rapprochement with Iran, his turning away from Israel, his apology tours, much of his presidency and in particular his foreign policy can be seen that way. Nowadays, it is the potent worldview behind the DSA, who are not just socialists but socialists with a Third-Worldist framework and Third-Worldist goals.

[NOTE: You may or may not recall the 2016 debate in which Chris Christie tangled with Rubio and made the latter look somewhat incoherent. At the time, I did a deep dive into their exchange and found that Rubio actually came out way better than most people perceived, although at the time the perception of ineptitude had won out. I was revisiting that post on the 2016 debate the other day – I may end up writing another post on it – and re-read this statement Rubio made during the exchange, which seems to fit into what I’ve just been saying about Obama. Here it is:

Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He is trying to change this country. He wants America to become more like the rest of the world. We don’t want to be like the rest of the world, we want to be the United States of America.

Obama and his political heirs (and those who are even more leftist than he) want the US to be more like the appeasing European First World, and more like the rest of the Third World.]

The post You may not be interested in Third-Worldism, but Third-Worldism is interested in you appeared first on The New Neo.

“At this time his death is being treated as unexpected, but is not believed to be suspicious. The case is being investigated by officers from the Met’s Central South Command Unit. A file will be prepared for the coroner.”

He cited an “unrelenting level of public scrutiny” as his reason for resigning.

I find it suspicious until proven otherwise. Suspicious of suicide, to be exact. But there are more innocuous possibilities. All of it is extremely sad.

One thing that seems clear and has seemed clear from the start: whether or not Arday’s backstory of mutism till 11 because of autism was true, it seemed fairly certain that he was both a liar and a fragile person who both used and was used by the DEI system. Then, when the unraveling occurred, it was overwhelming to go from the heights of adulation to become basically a joke.

Apparently it was too much for his system to handle, however he met death. This is an extremely sad sequel to the story, and if suicide was involved I suppose that, in retrospect, it should have been predicted as a possibility. Was he getting any sort of psychological help with the fallout of his fall from grace? I haven’t a clue, but it seemed indicated.

His latest book is titled Great and Unfortunate Things. His death is a highly unfortunate thing and I think an extremely sad one.

RIP, Jason Arday.

The post Jason Arday has died appeared first on The New Neo.

So Cofnas was an imperfect messenger, to say the least. I noticed some discussion of Cofnas in the comments here a few days ago, and I’ve been curious about who Cofnas is and what he’s been saying that’s so controversial. I found this recent interview with him, and this is the most relevant part. You don’t have to go by what other people say that he’s saying. Make your own decisions about his message:

The entire interview can be found here:

And if you want to read more of the details from a source defending free speech, there’s this. An excerpt:

You don’t have to agree with what Cofnas wrote to see that the fact he might be fired for expressing his views violates fundamental principles of academic freedom. If people believe he is wrong, then they are perfectly within their rights to say why and how and to explain the flaws in his arguments. Instead, the principal claim levelled against Cofnas has been that some find his ideas ‘offensive’ and ‘distressing’. That may well be so, but if universities are to successfully fulfil their truth-seeking mission, academics’ right to explore offensive or controversial topics must come before considerations of hurt feelings. This vital principle must always be defended – especially when it comes to hard cases. Nathan Cofnas must be free to speak.

The post Nathan Cofnas and accusations of racism appeared first on The New Neo.

The scandal of the Arday story isn’t really about Arday, it’s more about his fawning enablers. But even that isn’t broad enough, because it’s about an entire system that let this happen. For it’s not just a story about plagiarism getting past a committee. Nor is it just a DEI story about race and neurodiversity, although it’s about that as well. It’s not even just about a fabulist whose lies were so obvious no one should have believed them. Primarily it’s a story about universities that have utterly lost their way. The reason I say that is that the people who have actually read Arday’s academic work or listened to speeches he’s given have concluded that the content itself is garbage – and that includes both the plagiarized parts and the parts he seems to have composed. Unintelligible, ungrammatical, meaningless sloganeering.

Arday should not have been hired as a professor anywhere, much less at Cambridge. And yet he was not only hired, but praised to the skies in an almost ecstatic frenzy.

Everyone involved with this needs to go, and universities need to rethink their entire curriculum in race studies and gender studies and in particular the education departments. It’s of absolutely zero surprise that the Arday affair involved the education department of Cambridge. Education departments have always had less rigorous scholarship than most other departments, but in recent years they have become deeply political and deeply woke.

Will this happen? To put it bluntly: no.

[NOTE: These trends were already starting in the 1960s. I’ve written many times about Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind as well as the 1969 Cornell uprising. Here are some previous posts and an article on the subjects: this list as well as this post and this account by Thomas Sowell.]

The post It’s not about Arday. It’s about the rot in colleges that’s been going on for a long long time. appeared first on The New Neo.

While criticism is an inevitable part of academic life, what I have experienced has gone far beyond scholarly disagreement. The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love.

I have tried to continue because I believe deeply in the values of higher education, in rigorous scholarship, and in the transformative power of universities. I have tried because of my students, my colleagues and the countless people who have written to tell me that my journey gave them hope.

But there comes a point when the personal cost becomes too great. …

For my own wellbeing, for my family, and for those who have stood by me throughout this difficult period, I have concluded that the only way to bring this chapter to an end is to step away. …

This decision should not be interpreted as a loss of faith in scholarship or in the values that first brought me to Cambridge. Nor should it be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me. It is simply the decision of someone who has reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure.

It’s really an extraordinary letter, under the circumstances – the circumstances being that Arday was caught in an enormous number of lies, and with having issued other statements about his history that were so suspicious as to probably be lies. And yet he claims both integrity and victimhood, even as he leaves the fray.

The fact that AI tools indicate his resignation letter may have been written or assisted by AI – see this – isn’t of all that much importance to me compared to the rest of his story. Those tolls aren’t always correct, for one thing. If they are correct in this case, it would be one of the least of his deceptions. At any rate, I am assuming the sentiments in the letter are his, no matter how it was written. And as such, it is very typical of the sort of thing we see these days when people are caught in wrongdoing – a doubling-down on their innocence, and a blaming of those who have uncovered what they did.

I say “people” because this phenomenon is hardly limited to one race or another. It seems common everywhere, and it doesn’t matter how much evidence implicates them. With Arday, the evidence finally reached critical mass so that even the leftist Guardian piled on. It has become too embarrassing to continue to defend him.

But, as this article indicates, it is especially embarrassing and actually destructive to the black community in Britain, especially those in academia. The piece is written by one such person, who says:

But the existence of bad-faith agitators can’t excuse us from confronting the rot: the patronising assumption is that standards and truth are optional when evaluating a black professional. This is a slap in the face to the 160 or so black professors in Britain today who earned their chairs through gruelling intellectual labour, original research and the unglamorous grind of academia.

It’s also an insult to the civil-rights titans who forged the path before us. Pioneers like Doreen Lawrence, whose unyielding pursuit of justice transformed British policing; Dr Harold Moody, who founded the League of Coloured Peoples in 1931; Sir Geoff Palmer, Scotland’s first black professor; and visionary educator Dame Jocelyn Barrow. These giants didn’t demand to be recognised based on sentiment. They forced a hostile establishment to respect them because their work was bulletproof.

The ultimate casualty of the Arday scandal isn’t one man’s career, nor the bruised egos of those who rushed to his defence. The tragic reality is that Jason Arday has potentially done far more damage to black Britons than any racist agitator ever could. External critics and bad-faith actors can only ever attack from the outside – their prejudices are expected, discounted and easily identified. But Arday’s unchallenged rise, if the allegations turn out to be true, has handed our harshest detractors the ultimate weapon. It provides a silver bullet to anyone looking to roll back equality legislation or widening-participation schemes, or to question every rightful appointment and call professionals like me ‘diversity hires’. No external opponent could ever inflict as much damage as this “>case potentially has.

But it doesn’t only give “the ultimate weapon” to bigots. It can certainly make even non-bigots doubt the credentials of minorities in academia. This problem was identified quite a while ago in the US by two brilliant black people who had a remarkable lack of advantages in their early lives: Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas. Sowell is older, and grew up in a time when there was nothing remotely like DEI to help him along, and his intellectual achievements are so profound that I don’t think they’ve ever been doubted. But black academics today all run the risk of having their accomplishments doubted, because of the Ardays of the world as well as minority professors who seem mediocre rather than duplicitous. And this is true even though there are plenty of non-minority professors who are also mediocre (I’ve had my share).

I went to school a long long time ago, and it was before there was any favor shown to black teachers or professors. Nevertheless, I was taught by a number of black teachers both in high school and college, and it just so happens that they all were highly superior teachers, definitely among the best teachers I ever had. Perhaps that is a reflection of the fact that, back then, the standards for black teachers were higher than for white teachers. That was a discriminatory situation, but it certainly made for some extremely excellent and memorable black teachers (here’s a previous post I wrote about one of them, a junior high school English teacher who was one of my main inspirations for writing).

That state of affairs was discriminatory and wrong. But the supposed corrective – favoring certain minorities – was wrong, too. I submit that there are plenty of very qualified black teachers who would be hired if the standards were merely the same – I knew some of them and know some of them now. Probably, however, some or even many would tend to be – like Sowell and Thomas – more conservative than leftist. And there we have another group which has been discriminated against in the teaching field in recent years: the right.

Arday wasn’t just a DEI hire. He was a DEI hire with a story that was preposterous on its face. And yet the desire to hire him – and broadcast his wonderful story not just of race but of overcoming profound autism – was apparently too great to resist and too good to fact-check. One of his claims is that he didn’t speak until he was eleven or read and write till eighteen, and yet he became a brilliant professor. Just now I did an experiment; I asked Google “is there a documented case of someone autistic who didn’t speak until the age of eleven but later spoke well and fluently?” The answer from Google AI was this:

Yes, Jason Arday, a professor of sociology of education at the University of Cambridge, was diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay as a toddler and did not speak until age eleven. He later acquired fluent speech, learned to read and write at eighteen, and went on to earn a PhD.

But the only authority who has said this about Arday was Arday himself; I have been unable to find a single independent confirmation of it, either from a doctor or a relative of his. There are tons of articles referring to his diagnosis and story of language acquisition, but it appears that the only source is Arday. And although it’s not unusual for children with autism to gain speech much later than average, I can find no other case of a non-verbal autistic child beginning to speak as late as eleven; it tends more often to be some time between four and eight.

To have challenged Arday would not only have raised cries of “racism,” but cries of discrimination against the autistic as well. Some people may have originally kept silent out of fears of accusations of racism being leveled against them, but my guess is that a larger number simply wanted to believe in his fabulous story.

[NOTE: Here’s a summary of some of Arday’s apparent fabrications.]

The post What the Arday case signifies appeared first on The New Neo.

Arday became the youngest black professor at Cambridge. But he seems to not only have been guilty of plagiarism but also of a series of lies that sound preposterous:

We have a fantasist in an environment where, for political and social status reasons, everyone takes his claims at face value, or pretends that they do because to express doubt would be to invite unwanted attention. In such fertile ground the fantasist’s claims (which he continues to deny fabricating) inevitably become increasingly outlandish – epic marathon runs, prophetic blessings, an appearance in a television programme that began 20 years before he was born – because he is increasingly secure that they will never be questioned. This is what inevitably occurs when a fantasist encounters people who want, for whatever reason, to believe his fantasies. …

Such scandals can often be mistaken optimistically for an end to the whole shebang of progressive nonsense – for who could ever take them seriously again? But the roots of progressivism are too deeply embedded in the soil of public life. These hilarious exposures – see also Jussie Smollett – are not strong enough to dislodge them. The daring young man on the flying trapeze may fall to the ground with a splat, but the progressive circus is so big that it just moves on.

You can read some of Arday’s claims in this article from 2023. And you can find some of his debunked statements here. I think, however, that if checked, a great many other “facts” in his biography might be unsubstantiated as well.

Will Arday lose his position? Or will the wagons circle until the furor dies down, and will he remain?

The post Jason Arday, Cambridge professor: too good to fact-check appeared first on The New Neo.

Cornyn has spent over a year courting Trump’s support, while Paxton has run to Cornyn’s right and pitched himself as a stronger ally of the president. Cornyn and Senate GOP leaders argued that he is a stronger general-election candidate as Democrats look to win statewide office in Texas for the first time since 1994.

The runoff is a week away, and early voting began Monday.

True that Cornyn would be stronger in the general? False? I am no expert on Texas politics, but it seems to me a tossup: Paxton appeals more to the base and Cornyn to the middle and is disliked by the base as a RINO. But Paxton is described as “scandal-plagued.” Then again, Lisa Murkowski supports Cornyn and says “she was ‘supremely disappointed’ and echoed leadership concerns that Paxton could have a harder time keeping the seat in GOP hands.” I suppose “leadership” means Thune? And of course, it’s Murkowski saying this, and I do not trust her to act in the GOP’s best interests..

The whole things seems like a mess:

Despite promising to intervene quickly after March 3, when Cornyn finished narrowly ahead of Paxton, Trump kept both campaigns on edge for months. He initially said he would ask his non-endorsed candidate to drop out, but his neutral stance meant the opportunity to do so came and went.

Instead, the two camps and their allies have spent nearly $25 million on advertising in the runoff, much of it used for the two candidates to bash each other in intensely personal terms. It brings the total ad cost of the Republican primary to nearly $125 million, most of which has come from the pro-Cornyn side.

Apparently Trump thinks that Talarico, the Democrat opponent, will be a weak candidate. I hope he’s correct. For what it’s worth (probably not all that much), polls indicate that both Republicans are more or less tied with Talarico at present.

The post Trump endorses Ken Paxton for Texas senator appeared first on The New Neo.

Howard University has given Ibran X. Kendi a plum job – or, as the headline of the article puts it, “Howard University appoints racist crackpot as history professor, giving him an endowed chair.” An excerpt:

… [Kendi] “will serve as the inaugural holder of the Carter G. Woodson Endowed Chair in History, a position supported by $3 million in donor funding that honors its namesake historian, known as the ‘father of Black history’…In addition to his chair position, Kendi will direct the school’s new Institute for Advanced Study, which ‘is dedicated to interdisciplinary study advancing research of importance to the global African Diaspora, including inquiry into race, technology, racism, climate change, and disparities,’” reports Campus Reform.

Interim President Wayne A.I. Frederick said the appointment “affirms Howard University’s enduring responsibility to steward Black history with rigor, integrity, and purpose.”

Kendi supports racial discrimination against whites, and hates capitalism. “To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism…Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” says Ibram X. Kendi’s best-selling book promoting race-based government policies, How to Be An Antiracist. The “key concept” in Ibram Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist was that discrimination against whites is the only way to achieve equality for black people: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” wrote Kendi in that book. Students in many school systems have been assigned a book by Kendi that is historically inaccurate. Kendi once wrote an op-ed suggesting that white people are aliens from outer space.

Boston University had tried giving Kendi a similarly influential job and lots of money during heyday of Black Lives Matter and the antiracism craze (June 2020), and got almost nothing for their pains and their money. The center he headed was finally demonetized last year:

… [Kendi] wrote zero academic papers at least during the first three years he was there…..On a [2024] page titled ‘What We’re Working On,’ nothing is listed from this year. No policy reports or convenings have been published since 2022…[In 2024] The Antiracist Legal Education Project advertises an event from September 2023 as ‘upcoming,’ while the annual Antiracist Book Festival was not held in 2023 or 2024. A Vertex Symposium, which is also described as an annual event, has not occurred since 2022.”

As Campus Reform notes, “Before joining Howard, Kendi founded and led Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research (CAR), which launched in 2020 following the death of George Floyd. The center aimed to promote policies and scholarship designed to build what Kendi described as an ‘antiracist society,’ but was shuttered by the university last June following reports of internal management issues and financial concerns…..Campus Reform reported on the closure and questions raised by staffers about the center’s operations, including former employee Yanique Redwood, who stated that employees felt ‘overwhelmed’ and that leadership made ‘too many promises’ to funders while delivering few tangible results.”

Boston University’s gain is Howard University’s loss, although Howard doesn’t seem to see it that way.

At least Kendi’s not a terrorist from the 60s. Many of them landed cushy university jobs, too – after they got out of prison, or remained “free as a bird” on technicalities.

The post Howard University snags quite the prize: Kendi appeared first on The New Neo.