Who Killed Jason Arday?

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.”

Yes, and it was a meteoric rise, and a spectacular fall, not because of Arday’s talents, or lack thereof, or because of the skillfulness of his lies and plagiarism. In fact, he wasn’t actually very good at either. His purloining of other people’s work was clumsy and obvious, and his autobiographical claims strained credulity well beyond the breaking point for anyone who dared to ponder them rationally, but clearly, no one around him was willing to do so. He was more powerful than a locomotive? Okay. He could leap tall buildings in a single bound? Sure.

Why were Cambridge academics, as well as those at the universities where Arday taught before moving on to Cambridge, so willing, even eager, to believe all the ridiculous claims Arday made about his achievements? This brings us back to the question of who is really responsible for his death. Cambridge didn’t hire Arday because they believed him, or because they were impressed with him, although they may have been both. Cambridge hired Arday because he was valuable to them, in a DEI world, as a black professor, a man who had overcome horrible adversity and made good.

But imagine what being Jason Arday did to Jason Arday. He knew that his claims about himself were fabricated and that his academic record was just as much a tissue of lies as his biography. Yet everywhere he went, he received nothing but praise and adulation. And as he piled even more outlandish lies, the praise and adulation only increased. He might have felt invincible. But he never really was.

A man in that position might start to think that he cannot fail. He might assume that so many people have so much invested in his not losing that they have made it so that he will never lose. He might think that Cambridge, and the left in general, needed him so badly that there was nothing that could break through the web of lies that supported him.

But there was. It took real academics who were courageous and persistent enough to persist amid immense pressure to tell the truth about Arday, and a media that finally could no longer ignore or conceal the fact that yet another one of the left’s emperors had no clothes.

Related: After Lying Black Plagiarist Prof Resigns, Leftist Academics Say It Was All Because of — Yeah

And then what was left for Arday? His web of lies broken, he tumbled into the torrents of ridicule that his tall tales called for. But wait! This man was a world-class scholar! A genius! A titan of intellectual achievement and physical athleticism! The left had cosseted him for so long that he was caught out with absolutely nothing to say in his own defense. The left’s protection was supposed to be foolproof. Yet those whom the Cambridge dons thought of as right-wing fools had foiled it, and then Arday’s friends, allies, and accomplices could do nothing to protect him.

The left killed Jason Arday. It built him up and gave him every reason to believe that he could get away with lying and feeding their fantasies forever. Leftist wishful thinking and the DEI imperative killed Jason Arday. Some leftist somewhere might at some point have been the slightest degree skeptical about his claims, but no leftist anywhere gave him any advice about how to cope in case he were exposed.

But he was. And more like him, one hopes, will also soon be exposed. The Jason Ardays of the world, as dishonest as they are, should all have known better than to trust people who love and celebrate lies and fantasies. Reality, sooner or later, comes crashing in.

Editor's Note: President Trump is fighting to ensure America's kids get the education they deserve.

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