Links - 13th August 2026 (2 - Jason Arday)

The racist witch-hunt of Jason Arday - "The right are celebrating the fall of Cambridge professor Jason Arday with the glee of a colonial hunting party that has just blasted a lone creature into oblivion. Guns had been out for him as soon as the elite university made Arday one of the youngest black professors in Britain... For the hunters from the Times and Telegraph newspapers though, taking Arday’s head alone was never going to be enough. Their real aim was to insinuate that most black people appointed to prestigious positions are there for cosmetic reasons alone. It is, they suggest, because employers value their skin colour, rather than their abilities... if all university professors—the vast majority of whom are white—were subject to the same spotlight, many would emerge as liars and plagiarists. And, as to Arday’s other no doubt exaggerated achievements, there is little new here either. There is a small industry of people who, for money, will help you lie convincingly. They say you must embellish your CV because all your competitors are doing it—and it’s the only way to get a job. Here Arday’s failing was not that he lied, but that he didn’t lie convincingly enough... The real danger of Arday’s snaring is that the hunters will move on to their real prize. That’s the gutting of all the higher education policies designed to improve representation. And they want the end of teaching the truth of the blood-soaked British Empire. They want to banish discussion of trans people’s rights and gender equality. And they want universities reduced to an echo chamber of the right, where students are only offered courses that will help them aid the wealthy. The bagging of Arday is only the first step to a new, right wing utopia."
Left wingers are so intelligent. They know what people are really thinking even if there's no evidence for that.
Left wingers think merit and achievement are all arbitrary. This explains their worldview - if success is a fraud and just a convincing lie then the successful don't really deserve their positions (what happens when it's a successful "minority" though?)

Jonathan Kay on X - "not sure who does the plagiarism checks at @simonschuster, but it sounds like this whole dumpster fire could have been avoided if he or she had watched the 2010 TV melodrama "Spartacus: Blood & Sand," from which the most dramatic parts of Jason Arday's book were plagiarized"

Saul Sadka on X - "The Humanities PhD plagiarism apocalypse is coming. As the Jason Arday case shows, few expect anyone to read their thesis (in his case, even his doctoral advisors clearly didn’t). Somebody soon is going to set AI on the millions of them; some will be read for the first time, and a list of all the plagiarists going back a century will be spat out. It will be a massacre of reputations."
Master Alpaca on X - "Unless they redefine plagiarism as really not that big of a deal, which they're basically trying with Arday. They say he communicates through mimicry due to autism! So all the plagiarists will bravely and stunningly come out as actually being neurodivergent. Not believing them will be a sign of how much of an ignorant bigot you are and still need to do a lot of work to educate yourself."

Thread by @akarlin on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "For Wokes, a @nathancofnas who allows selection pressures on humans didn't stop acting above the neck 50,000 years ago is more objectionable than serial fraud, plagiarism, and intentional frivolous misuse of police resources to harass journalists (in theory a criminal offense?!).
Object lesson why you really shouldn't don't care about the populist backlash against universities. Populism is dumb but these people made their own bed. This is why I keep saying that AGI seems to have come at just the right moment. Just need to make sure it isn't derailed.
PS. Why does Cofnas actively provoke more outrage than a taxpayer-funded fraudster?
Couple of papers: In 2024, Kirkegaard with Bryan Pesta and Joseph Bronski found that the average American considers the question of whether “European Whites are smarter than African Blacks for genetic reasons” is more taboo than whether “pedophilia is harmful or not”. Just a month later Cory Clark et al. found that the topic of race differences in intelligence was more “discouraged” amongst US psychology professors than sex differences, transgender identity, or even the evolutionary roots of rape. Like for many Wokes being a pedophile is less bad than being a racist as they define it."
The ultimate sin in Western society is to be racist. That's why some of Henry Nowak's last words were pushing back on the slander he was subject to.

The Arday debacle is a great opportunity for the Left - "the BBC Today programme interviewed his fellow Cambridge professor Priyamvada Gopal. She said what a disgrace the Arday affair had been and called for an independent inquiry into Cambridge’s behaviour. An internal inquiry, she said, would mean Cambridge “marking its own homework”. Her words brought expressions of approval from Today’s well-educated, mainly white audience. Despite her “ethnic” name – Prof Gopal is Indian – she seemed not to be jumping on the diversity bandwagon. Perhaps the wheels are at last coming off that particular wagon, many thought. My own reaction is more cautious. Prof Gopal, though much cleverer than Dr Arday, who even needed a co-author to write his own forthcoming memoirs, is one of the most virulent culture warriors in the university. One of woke’s specialities is biting the hand that feeds you. Prof Gopal, a fellow of Churchill College, has firmly sunk her teeth into the statesman after whom her college is named. Without the prestige of the Churchill name, which attracts generous donations, her fellowship would not exist. Chairing a “working group” into Winston Churchill’s imperial attitudes and actions a few years back, Prof Gopal held college events which were platforms for denigrating him as a racist. She was outraged when the college authorities belatedly recognised that the events were turning into hate-fests. In 2020, when she was attacked online and in the press for tweeting: “White lives don’t matter. As white lives,” and saying, “Abolish whiteness”, the university promoted her from a doctorate to a professorial chair. When she was “persecuted”, she rose, whereas poor, fantastical Dr Arday collapsed in a heap. Why does this unrepentant militant move so quickly to condemn her Cambridge colleagues who promoted Dr Arday? My tentative explanation would be that the Left is now seriously alarmed that the whole project “Diversity, Equity [sometimes, Equality] and Inclusion” (DEI) might be derailed. It wants to take charge of a rescue operation which purports to be a moderating force. Prof Gopal’s call for an external inquiry, for example, might sound good, but really it is the duty of a self-governing university to investigate its own failures. You can be confident that any exterior inquiry constructed to the satisfaction of Prof Gopal will come up with the idea that DEI, in order to prevent “abuses”, should be put on a clearer statutory footing with an “independent” (ie. government-appointed) regulator across the whole university sector. Those who appointed Dr Arday would be exposed (justifiably) as ignorant and lazy. More ruthless commissars would replace them. In particular, Prof Gopal surely does not want DEI embarrassments to spoil her related, much greater project, which is the “decolonisation” of the whole university. Decolonisation, she has written, is “a meaningless piety without an extensive enactment of material reparations – indeed restitution” to the victims of colonial oppression; “no academic engagement with it should be soothing”. I would not be surprised if government ministers are not already thinking Prof Gopal’s way. It would fit with Andy Burnham’s style if he could “triangulate” over the Arday issue – seeming to sympathise with conservatives who found the Arday appointment utterly preposterous, while assisting those, like Prof Gopal, who think all universities should banish “whiteness”. The new Education Secretary, Lucy Powell, has a slightly embarrassing link, through a special adviser, with the cult of Jason Arday. She would be a zealous social engineer if Cambridge-educated Andy asked her. A quarter of a century ago, Gordon Brown, then chancellor of the exchequer with no role whatever in education, tried a similar trick, intervening in the decision of an Oxford college not to admit a pupil from a northern comprehensive school called Laura Spence. He used poor Ms Spence as a battering ram with which to assail the commanding heights of academe. Less clumsily, Mr Burnham could achieve similar effects over the Arday case. If he handled the rhetoric right, he could nationalise DEI and force all would-be professors to submit to a government-dictated form of investigation and interview."

Arday ‘accused student of white privilege’ after she questioned mark - "The claim was made by a former student who described Mr Arday’s teaching during his 2018 tenure at the University of Roehampton as “terrible”. The former student described his reaction to being asked for feedback, saying: “I now saw a side of him I’d never seen before – angry, but also scared. Arday implied that I was racist, and said that the only reason I wasn’t happy with 70 per cent was due to my ‘white privilege’.”... Writing for the news website UnHerd, the former student, who was given the pseudonym Fiona Brown, said Mr Arday gave her a mark of 70 per cent for the essay – below her average for the year – and she subsequently asked him for a meeting to provide feedback. When she explained her dissatisfaction, she claimed that “suddenly, his friendly, confident demeanour changed” and he made the accusation of white privilege. “He was clearly upset at being questioned, and I ended the meeting as quickly as possible,” she said. The student, who said Mr Arday had left shortly after the interaction, questioned why none of his universities had “been prepared to point out that the emperor had no clothes” before he joined Cambridge. “Some serious soul-searching must surely follow from all the academics who enabled him to climb the academic ladder,” she said. Describing Mr Arday’s teaching after he arrived at Roehampton as a senior lecturer in the autumn of 2018, she said “the first red flag” was his discussions about song lyrics, including “the way he’d ramble about Tinie Tempah or Eminem, or how black artists like Beyoncé were sexualised by white men, without offering any evidence to substantiate his claims”. Mr Arday would also tell his class to discuss clips from the films Fish Tank and Kidulthood “without offering guidance on how to do so”, she said. She added: “And this was if he was even in the classroom at all. He often arrived late and left early, once teaching for a single hour when four were scheduled. “I can honestly describe Arday’s teaching as terrible. He rarely used the PowerPoint slides. “Instead, he usually sat casually on a desk, giving his generalised views on racism without ever referring to any academic theories – let alone those relevant to the Youth Participation and Identities module he was supposed to be teaching.” The former student said Mr Arday’s class was initially “charmed” by his teaching and “interested in his claims that white people were guilty of every kind of prejudice”. However, she said “it gradually dawned on us that we were learning nothing of substance, and that much of his talk was nonsense”, as Mr Arday continued to fail to turn up for lectures. When the students took an assessment, he recommended that they answer either of the two essay questions that mentioned ethnicity, despite there being four options, she claimed. “This, after all, was the only thing he’d talked to us about,” she said."
On "Fiona Brown's" testimony

Jason Arday taught me. Here’s what I learned - "Given that he could neither teach nor support his students, it’s little wonder that he appeared psychologically incapable of coping with criticism. The University of Roehampton was seemingly aware of his failings yet did nothing, avoiding controversy by allowing him to move on to another set of students. Indeed, if any one of the universities Arday had taught at before being appointed to Cambridge had been prepared to point out that the emperor had no clothes, he might never have faced the humiliations of the past two weeks. Some serious soul-searching must surely follow from all the academics who enabled him to climb the academic ladder. Did they really help this young man, or were they only thinking of their own reputations? They might also spare a thought for all his students. I’m reminded here of the tale of the Post Turtle, where a farmer finds a turtle stuck on a fencepost. “That Post Turtle didn’t get up there by himself,” the farmer says. “He doesn’t belong there, and you wonder who put him there. He has no idea what to do while he’s up there, and having been elevated beyond his ability to function, he’s never going to get anything done while he is there.” He adds: “You just want to help the poor bugger get down, and you can’t help but wonder what kind of idiot put him up there in the first place.” It’s a question Arday’s many backers may now wish to ask."

Left-wing lawyer behind Jason Arday open letter defends support - "A lawyer who led a campaign backing Jason Arday has reiterated his support for the former professor. Jolyon Maugham, the founder of the Good Law Project, headed an open letter calling plagiarism allegations against Mr Arday a “smear”... Mr Maugham defended the former academic again despite his resignation, claiming that the former professor’s alleged dishonesty could be attributed to neurodivergence."

The Arday scandal exposes the creeping decay of Britain's great universities - "With his professorship, Dr Arday got a fellowship at Jesus College. I have followed activities at Jesus since I discovered that its China Centre was funded by money sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party, and pumped out Xi Jinping propaganda, refusing a platform to Xi’s critics. Its Master, Sonita Alleyne, also someone without an academic background, defended this arrangement. Zealous about Black Lives Matter, she led her college into the ecclesiastical courts to remove from its chapel a beautiful 17th-century memorial of a benefactor because, she said, he had made money out of the slave trade (actually, he hadn’t). She lost, costing the college a six-figure sum... Dr Arday told The Guardian that he was paid £1.4m for this book. If, for once, he were accurate, you would think his fall this week would cause the publisher to lose the lot. But then again, perhaps not. The people using this bewildered and bewildering man to advance their ideology may yet succeed in persuading the gullible that he is a saint and martyr. If they do, they will succeed in destroying the concepts of research, improving the sum of universal knowledge and properly educating the young. Then the academic freedom upon which a university’s reputation depends will wither away."

Cambridge hired Jason Arday after ‘listening to black students’ - "Prof Hilary Cremin, the head of the Faculty of Education, said the university had “listened to the voices of our black scholars and our black students” prior to Mr Arday’s appointment as professor of sociology of education. She said the conversations had helped the university to “face up to some of the structural issues that people face” at Cambridge... “The board of electors on your interview day were absolutely unanimous. We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”... The job application for Mr Arday’s position specifically welcomed applications from candidates from diverse backgrounds. The application form said: “The Faculty of Education welcomes expressions of interest and applications from candidates from all communities and a diversity of backgrounds. “In particular, the following groups are currently under-represented in our community: women, those with a Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) background and those with disabilities.”... he falsely claimed to hold a master’s degree in psychodynamic counselling from Birkbeck University and to be an “honorary professor” in Durham University’s sociology department... Mr Arday had repeatedly claimed that he was the author of a book called Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse. The book was listed in his biography description in published essays as well as in promotional material for speaking events, and was attributed to the Palgrave Macmillan publishing house. There is no evidence that any book was written or published. Mr Arday also claimed between 2019 and 2023 that he had published a book titled Considering Racialised Contexts in Education: Using reflective practice and peer-mentoring to support Black and Ethnic Minority educators. The title was listed on his staff profile on Durham University’s website as being published in 2019 by Routledge publishing company. He was still claiming the book was published when he took up the post as Cambridge’s youngest black professor in March 2023. It was not until December 2023 that the Durham website was finally altered to say the book was “in press”, meaning it had passed peer review and been accepted for publication, but had not been published yet."

Jonathan Kay on X - "One interesting detail here is that when it became clear that Arday was an incompetent fraud, the university did nothing except let him move on to some new school so he could do the same grift there. Everyone was terrified of criticizing him publicly because they all thought they’d be accused of racism… which in fact is exactly what happened to the first group of people who did go public with their attacks on Arday in 2026. To it’s everlasting disgrace,@Cambridge_Uni even joined in with those first initial accusations of racism, even though everyone there by this time new full well that Arday was a complete fraud"

Prof Ian Pace on X - "The case of Jason Arday involves at least five universities, as well as external academics on recruitment panels, multiple academic publishers, a range of academic journals, the principal sociological professional association. Not to mention many outside academia."

Dan Neidle on X - "Why was the Jason Arday story broken by a racist blogger and not the mainstream press? Because Times Higher Education was intimidated off the story by a letter from notorious libel firm Carter-Ruck. I'm publishing the letter. Its central claim may be false."
Professor Alice Sullivan on X - "The Carter Ruck letter to @timeshighered has now been published. An interesting footnote - the letter states that Arday was supervising 15 PhD students and had acted as external examiner for 35. 15 would be a huge number of PhD students even in the case of a brilliant and energetic supervisor. I would expect a well-run department to discourage this kind of excessive supervisory load because it is very difficult to provide adequate supervision to this many PhD students. If Arday really had 15 PhD students, I wonder what experience these 15 students received and how they are being supported now. Acting as external examiner for 'over 35' students would be extraordinary given that Arday only received his PhD in 2015. If this is true, then there are over 35 people whose PhDs are tainted. PhDs are examined by two academics, the internal examiner, and the external who comes from another university. Broadly speaking, the internal ensures that the student gets a fair ride, while the external is there to enforce standards. The name of the external examiner will typically appear on the PhD graduate's CV, because it tells you who has attested that this is PhD-level work. We now know that Arday's own PhD was plagiarised. But even if it hadn't been, his work was of such low quality that no university should have elevated him to the position of supervising or examining PhD students. There are many victims here. I hope we will hear from some of them."

Nathan Cofnas on X - "ChatGPT counts 46 organizations that had formal ties with Jason Arday including
- Durham University (associate prof)
- Glasgow (full professor)
- British Sociological Association (director)
- Royal Society of Arts (fellow)
- BBC (guest editor)
In 2023, the Guardian itself (!) published a breathless article titled “Jason Arday: he learned to talk at 11 and read at 18 – then became Cambridge’s youngest Black professor.” More than a dozen academic journals gave the imprimatur of “peer review” to Arday’s plagiarized wokebabble. The prestigious NY publisher Simon & Schuster is still going ahead with his memoirs. Now the Guardian wants us to think this is just about “one academic and his bosses at Cambridge”? There are thousands of Jason Ardays in universities all over the Western world. The only thing special about Arday is that he took the plagiarism and lies about his personal life too far, so there was a hook for a news story. But even that wasn’t enough to get him removed from academia. Until last Wednesday Cambridge was still smearing his critics as waging a “vile campaign.” He crossed the line not by being an incompetent fraud, but by claiming prestigious affiliations that he didn’t have, creating conflict between Cambridge and other universities. “DEI” means achieving representation by doing away with elementary standards for certain people based on race. Just take a look at the content of “peer-reviewed” journals like Whiteness in Education and Educational Philosophy and Theory. The other papers in these journals are just like those written by Arday—someone who is now widely recognized to be mentally disabled. The people trying to write this off as a fluke or an isolated case of “research misconduct” are at best delusional. The ideology of elite institutions is DEI, and DEI is Jason Arday."

Emperor Arday’s new clothes - spiked - "To understand the making of the emperor’s new clothes, count the tailors. The University of Cambridge maintains an Office of External Affairs and Communications with nearly 40 named staff. Six of them are press officers in the narrow sense, and there’s a head of media and five communications managers. Another seven sit in research communications. Around them cluster a five-strong directorate, four public-affairs operatives, seven people doing social media and video, four on web and email, three on internal communications, three designers and a three-person brand and trademark team, which exists, presumably, to protect the brand. Then count the moral tailors. The central equality, diversity and inclusion section, nested within human resources at the Old Schools (the university’s central office), has a section head, three EDI consultants, a co-ordinator and an administrator. That is before the separate race-equality team, before the disability service, before the EDI officers salted through every faculty, before the college-level apparatus. None of this comes cheap. These posts sit on the university’s single-salary spine. A communications manager or an EDI consultant occupies roughly the £43,000 to £56,500 band, heads of section run towards £67,000, the deputy directors to £76,000 and the executive director of communications sits somewhere north of £83,000 on a spine that climbs, for the most exalted, past £213,000. Cambridge employs more people and on better salaries to manage its reputation than most national newspapers employ to report the news. And what has all this machinery delivered? In March 2023, it delivered Jason Arday, appointed professor of sociology of education at 37, celebrated everywhere as the youngest black professor in Cambridge’s history, a man whose account of himself – nonverbal until 11, barely literate until 18, doctorate by 2015 – was promoted by the press office and the newspapers with the credulity of a parish magazine reviewing the vicar’s marrows. He was made a fellow of Jesus College. He was garlanded with honorary degrees. He was, in the ugly phrase of the trade, a comms asset... what did all those tailors do? In June, Cambridge’s official response to the questions was to denounce a ‘vile campaign’ to undermine his credibility. Not to examine the claims. Not to say nothing, which is what a competent press office says while it checks the facts. It decided instead to smear the questioner. Eight weeks later, Cambridge announced a fresh investigation into Arday’s qualifications and honorary appointments, and within days, on 5 August, he resigned with immediate effect from his chair and from his Jesus College fellowship, citing the toll of relentless accusation. Whatever the investigation eventually finds, the institution managed, in a single summer, to be both attack dog and prosecutor, to vouch and to recant, and to do it in front of every newspaper in the English-speaking world... The Good Law Project’s open letter pronounced the allegations entirely false, the work of a right-wing smear campaign, and gathered some 14,000 signatures. Archived versions show the text was then quietly rewritten under the signatories’ feet. The claim that two universities had conducted thorough investigations disappeared. Cambridge names were trimmed or shorn of their affiliations. No note disclosed the changes. And now, after Arday’s resignation, the Good Law Project’s founder, Jolyon Maugham, explains that it merely chose ‘to carry’ the letter, ‘a deliberately neutral verb’. Fourteen thousand people signed that letter after the Good Law Project urged them to. They are now left holding a courier’s receipt. And what of the master of Jesus College? Sonita Alleyne made her career running a media-production company before she came to preside over Arday’s college, so she of all people knew what an open letter is for and what a signature on one does. She signed anyway, and she signed as master, lending not merely her name but her office to a text declaring the allegations entirely false. The master of a college is not a fan with a lanyard. She holds a position of trust over her college’s fellowship. Had any question of a fellow’s integrity come before the college, its master had already published her verdict. Then the letter started to slough its Cambridge names, affiliations melting from the page. Within the week, Arday had resigned and the Good Law Project’s founder was recasting the whole exercise as neutral carriage. Thirteen press officers, six diversity professionals and not one of them, apparently, empowered to ask the only question that mattered: Is the story true? Pity the fundraisers. Cambridge’s Development and Alumni Relations Office employs more than 140 people, bleeding 310,000 alumni, fresh from a campaign that raised over £2.2 billion for the university and its colleges. Jesus College runs its own small Development and Alumni Relations Office and was lately recruiting a major-gifts officer to persuade donors that Jesus College is, in the words of the advertisement, a place where ‘academic values’ are a ‘core concern’ and ‘freedom of thought and expression is paramount’. Somewhere this week, a development officer is preparing for a call with a hard-headed benefactor in Houston or Hong Kong who has read the coverage and wants to know why his money endowed a pedestal rather than a scholarship"

Are Therapists to Blame for the Rise of Adults Cutting Off Their Parents?

We know that social connections make people happy and stops them from falling into cults. So consciously or not, this pushes the left wing agenda. 

Are Therapists to Blame for the Rise of Adults Cutting Off Their Parents? - WSJ
Many moms and dads believe that their adult children are getting bad advice—and a growing number of researchers agree. ‘Everything becomes trauma.’

Shoshana Rubli was shocked by her therapist’s advice, given in her second session. But the counselor was recommended by someone she knew and had impressive credentials, so she did as she was told. 

She cut off all ties with her mother.

“It was an argument made from authority, so I followed it,” says the 42-year-old freelance marketer.

Is it really good therapy to break your mother’s heart?

After decades of urging families to communicate better and work on their issues together, some therapists are now taking an opposite tack: They’re encouraging estrangement as a means of self-care. 

Proponents of the trend hold that advising patients to consider a cutoff from a close relative or spouse they deem toxic or unsupportive can protect their mental health and allow for emotional growth. Meanwhile, critics—many of whom are researchers who have studied relationships for decades—say that it encourages self-centeredness and self-delusion and ruins families.

Most therapists agree that sometimes people are justified in breaking ties with their parents or a close relative, especially if they were physically or emotionally abusive. 

What’s changing now is the bar for what is deemed abusive enough for a cutoff. “We are in a culture where we emphasize fragility, everything becomes trauma, and the solution increasingly is to split and leave,” says William Doherty, a therapist and professor emeritus of family social science at the University of Minnesota who has researched the ways that therapy may be harmful. “But it should be the tragic exception that you cut off a parent or loved one, not business as usual in therapy.”

About 25% of the U.S. population is estranged from, or has cut ties with, a close relative at any given time—and 10% is estranged from a parent or child—according to research by Karl Pillemer, a family sociologist and professor of human development at Cornell. He believes that more rifts are likely, as tensions over politics and social issues continue to rise.

Among some 7,000 estranged parents surveyed in April a third believed their adult child’s therapist had influenced or recommended the decision to end the relationship. “A lot of therapists are taught to believe whatever the client is saying at face value,” says Peter Anderson, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Beverly, Mass., who helps families with estrangements and conducted the surveys. “They’re forming conclusions based on one person’s account.”

Social media has played an outsize role in both the growing awareness of estrangement—or going “no contact,” in internet lingo—and the role of therapists in it. In recent years, the number of users sharing personal stories of how cutoffs have improved their mental health has skyrocketed. Meanwhile, therapists and “estrangement coaches” have been producing a growing slew of offerings, from quizzes (“The Emotionally Immature Parent Assessment”) to courses (“Navigating a Family Cut-Off”) to books (“No Contact, No Guilt.”)

“People are coming into a therapist’s office and parroting what they hear on social media,” Anderson says. “They’re looking for affirmation for a decision they’ve already made.”

Whitney Goodman, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Tampa, Fla., takes the patient’s lead when considering estrangement. Trauma and abuse, she says, is in the eye of the beholder. “Why are we giving all this deference only to parents?” Goodman said. “Why aren’t we believing the kids? They are adults.”

Goodman often speaks to her more than 660,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok about estrangement and “emotionally immature” parents. “I reject the argument that we should ignore the impact of abuse because it wasn’t considered abuse 75 years ago,” she wrote in a recent post. 

In her work, Goodman sees people who want to go no-contact with a parent for everything from drunken driving with grandchildren to dictating future spouses. “You have an adult population now who says: ‘I am going to stand up for myself. I am not going to do what was always done.’”

Critics, however, say that therapists should be questioning their clients’ estrangement beliefs, not affirming them. They warn that patients aren’t always reliable narrators, especially if they have mental-health issues. And the therapist is hearing only one side of the story.

This can lead to two major problems, according to Jay Lebow, senior scholar and senior therapist at the Family Institute at Northwestern University, who says he often sees people in his practice who have been encouraged by previous therapists to sever ties with a loved one. “You are not solving the right problem, which is the mental-health crisis,” he says. “And—this is the most tragic part—you may be encouraging them to cut off their best source of support.”

Critics also argue that there is no scientific evidence that separating from a close relative is inherently beneficial. And the long-term damage—including broken relationships with siblings, grandchildren and parents as they age—is often unanticipated. “You can have somebody die during the estrangement,” says Christine Droney, a licensed clinical social worker in Lititz, Pa., who often sees clients who are grieving the impact of estrangements they initiated. “There are lifelong consequences.”

Indeed, research from Cornell’s Pillemer and colleagues shows that while people who start a cutoff often feel a temporary sense of relief, they also experience significantly higher rates of chronic unhappiness and depression over time. He calls this the “exiter cost.” 

Shoshana Rubli was a young woman living abroad when her therapist surprised her by recommending she cut off her mom. Her childhood had been chaotic after her parents divorced when she was a toddler, she says, but she didn’t view it as so extreme.

“I went in expecting to focus on boundaries,” says Rubli, who lives near Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. “I thought that meant better self-discipline and better communication.”

Rubli tried to push back, but her therapist framed her concerns as blind spots that impeded healing, she says. So she took the advice and stopped talking to her mom. “I thought it wasn’t permanent, that it was just fewer phone calls when I was in my therapy process,” she says.

The estrangement lasted 10 years, despite her mom repeatedly trying to reach her. During that time, Rubli fell in love, got married and lost two grandparents. She also experienced other family members cutting her off in anger over her estrangement with her mom. “It was really hard,” she said. “There were all these unintended consequences.”

Then Rubli had children of her own and realized all parents have flaws. So one day she called her mother, and the two began talking again. “I was thrilled to hear from her,” says her mom, Ann Tendler, 69, of Cedar Key, Fla. “It was a real trial, but I always figured that someday she would realize she had made a mistake.”

Rubli deeply regrets taking the therapist’s advice, but says she blames herself. 

“At the end of the day, you can’t hold them accountable,” she says. “Because you told them what you told them, and you listened to what they said.”

 

Related:

Katie Miller on X

"Therapy has become incredibly dangerous for societal bonds.

In a new study, 1/3 of parents believe their child won’t speak to them because of a therapist’s influence.

This is how countries weaken and fall apart.

Rome didn’t fall primarily because of barbarians at the gates. It fell because loyalty, duty, bonds, and the birth rate collapsed. When the Romans lost the traditional family, its societal structure that fostered mutual support fell.

Therapists are creating a mental health crisis by actively encouraging patients to cut off their families.

When communities are no longer connected, they become unrecognizable to their people."

Links - 13th August 2026 (1 - Socialism)

Handre on X - "In 1968, while teenage Red Guards beat their professors to death with clubs in Beijing courtyards, Jean-Paul Sartre sat in Paris calling Mao's Cultural Revolution a model of revolutionary democracy. The most celebrated intellectual in France looked at a country burning its own libraries and saw liberation. He sold the Maoist newspaper La Cause du Peuple on French street corners himself, holding it aloft like a sacrament. Consider what he was endorsing. Between 1966 and 1976, the Cultural Revolution killed somewhere between 500,000 and two million people. Schools shut down across the entire country. Students dragged teachers onto stages, hung placards around their necks, forced them to kneel on broken glass, then murdered them. The historian Bian Zhongyun, vice-principal of a girls' school in Beijing, died on August 5, 1966, beaten by her own students with nail-studded clubs. Sartre called this the people governing themselves. You should understand why a man this intelligent got it this wrong. Sartre believed knowledge served power, that truth was whatever the revolution required, that the individual existed to be dissolved into the collective will. So when Mao abolished the distinction between teacher and student, between expert and mob, Sartre cheered. He had spent decades arguing that bourgeois reason was a class weapon. Here was a regime taking him at his word and clubbing the reasoners to death. This is what economic illiteracy buys you. A university, a price, a contract, and a peasant's grain stockpile all carry knowledge that no central planner can seize or replicate. Mises explained the calculation problem in 1920. Hayek explained dispersed knowledge in 1945. Sartre had access to both and chose the dunce cap of the collective instead, then handed out its propaganda on the Rue de Rennes. He died in 1980, mourned by 50,000 followers, never having retracted a word about Mao. The professors of Beijing got no such funeral. They got a ditch, and a philosopher in Paris explaining that their murder was freedom."

Rothmus 🏴 on X - "Sartre’s defense of totalitarianism ended his friendship with Camus. And the irony is that it wasn’t Camus who walked away from Sartre branding him an immoral monstrosity. It was Sartre who ended it because Camus DARED to criticize the intellectual habit of excusing tyranny when it wore the right ideological colors. That break exploded after Camus published The Rebel. The book drew a hard line between (1) genuine revolt that begins with a moral “no” to injustice and respects human limits, and (2) revolution, which by contrast, treats history as an absolute that justifies any crime today for a perfect tomorrow From the French Revolution’s Terror to Stalin’s Gulags, Camus showed how revolutionary logic always produces new tyrannies that consume their own. On the other hand, Sartre embraced a Marxist framework where history and class struggle demanded “engagement.” Revolutionary violence was often a necessary tool for liberation. In addition to Mao and the Red Guard’s atrocities, he defended or contextualized Soviet crimes, dismissed reports of labor camps as bourgeois propaganda, and drew closer to the French Communists. For him, refusing to get your hands dirty while the oppressed suffered was the real betrayal. The Rebel directly challenged the intellectual tendency to look the other way on mass murder when the killers claimed “the right side of history”. Sartre’s circle responded with a vicious attack in his own journal. Camus fired back. The friendship was over."

Handre on X - "In 1994, Fidel Castro's government did something no Marxist textbook prepared anyone for. It legalized the U.S. dollar, the currency of the imperialist enemy, and built a parallel money around it called the convertible peso, or CUC. Cubans now lived under two currencies: the worthless national peso (CUP) they earned in state wages, and the CUC they actually needed to buy anything worth having. A doctor pulling 20 CUP a month and a taxi driver pocketing CUC tips occupied two different economic universes. You can guess who ate better. Think about what a dual-currency system confesses. A government that claims to abolish markets and prices still cannot escape the fact that its own money is garbage. The CUP did not buy soap, beef, or working appliances at any reliable rate, so the regime created a second money pegged to the dollar to capture the tourist trade and remittances from Miami. The state needed hard money it could not print at will. Socialist planners cannot calculate without real prices: this is the discipline Mises described in 1920. You cannot run an economy on slogans. You run it on prices, and prices require honest money and private property. Castro abolished both and then spent decades quietly importing the dollar's price signals through the back door because his planners were flying blind. The CUC was a parasite feeding on Federal Reserve credibility, which tells you the planned economy could not generate a unit of account anyone trusted. The system limped on until 2021, when the government finally killed the CUC under the "Tarea Ordenamiento" unification. The result was instant. Inflation tore through the island, the black-market dollar exchange rate exploded past 300 CUP, and shelves emptied while the state printed pesos to cover its deficits. Unification removed the borrowed crutch and let the patient collapse. Cuba spent 27 years admitting that a worker's salary was a fiction and that survival depended on touching the enemy's money. Socialism filed its own bankruptcy paperwork in two denominations."
Northern Barbarian on X - "I could have sworn I was told Cuba is socialism done right. Except US sanctions. But why would a worker's paradise be reliant on the capitalist nightmare across the Straits of Florida?"
It's telling how the same people who keep demanding sanctions on Israel keep protesting the sanctions on Cuba

Meme - "In 1987, Castro once again asked a team of scientists to genetically engineer cattle, this time hoping to create dog-sized cows to live in people's homes and produce enough milk for each family. This idea never came to fruition"
cheyenne @evilvillain1231: "My Romanian mom just told me that Ceausescu had at one point announced plans to build apartment buildings "with wheels so they could move around""
Iivana Lemmetyinen | Lemmetöin Vana @ALemppu: "My favourite was Soviet Union trying to domesticate moose for farm work, but the mooses were not impressed by Marxist dialectics."

Handre on X - "Marx built his entire economic system on the labor theory of value, and the labor theory of value is wrong. He claimed that the value of a good equals the socially necessary labor time embedded in it. This collapses the moment you ask why a bottle of water sells for ten dollars in the Mojave and fifty cents in Vienna. The labor is identical. The price is not. Carl Menger settled this in 1871 with his "Principles of Economics." Value is subjective. It arises from the ranking each acting person assigns to units of a good at the margin, not from hours sweated in production. A diamond commands a high price because the marginal unit satisfies an urgent want, while water, abundant, satisfies a trivial one. Marx never answered Menger because he could not. The "Capital" volumes he left unfinished circle the transformation problem endlessly: he could not reconcile labor values with the actual prices markets generate, and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk demolished the attempt in 1896 in "Karl Marx and the Close of His System." Then there is the matter of capital itself. The capitalist advances present money against an uncertain future return, absorbing the risk the worker avoids by demanding payment now instead of after the product sells eighteen months later. That premium on present goods over future goods is interest, and it reflects time preference, not theft. Böhm-Bawerk named this in 1884. Marx had no theory of interest because he had no theory of time. You see the same blindness in his monetary thinking. Marx assumed value was an objective substance you could measure and centrally administer, which is precisely the fantasy that justifies a central authority printing the money supply. Hard money like gold or Bitcoin imposes discipline because no planner sets its quantity by decree. Easy money is the Marxist instinct dressed in a suit: someone in a committee decides what your labor is worth and dilutes it at will. Every socialist calculation since 1917 has crashed into the wall Ludwig von Mises identified in 1920. Without market prices, you cannot allocate capital, because you cannot calculate. Marx never priced anything. He counted hours and called it science."
If you follow left wing logic, either the third world worker is being underpaid by evil capitalists or the first world worker is being overpaid. Of course, the cope will be that both are underpaid, even though the first world worker's wages wouldn't even be covered by the revenue associated with the third world worker's labour

Anti Kommunistic on X - "Every communist government starts by identifying a group to blame for society’s problems. Then it promises extraordinary powers to fix those problems. History shows what usually comes next."

InfantryDort on X - "Communism has always appealed because it offers a morally simple answer to an impossibly complex human problem.
>Life is unfair.
>Therefore someone must be guilty.
>If we punish the guilty, justice will follow.
It replaces responsibility with resentment. Most importantly, it tells ordinary people they can become virtuous without becoming better. That is why it returns every generation. Not because it works, but because it flatters. History’s warning is not that these ideas begin with prison camps. They begin with moral certainty and the belief that society can be perfected if only the “right” people are given enough power to identify the guilty and reorganize everyone else’s lives. Today, that temptation is more dangerous than ever. Never before have governments and institutions possessed so much data, so many surveillance tools, so much influence over information, and such extraordinary capacity to shape public life at scale. Every generation inherits more powerful instruments than the last. Whether those instruments preserve liberty or erode it depends on the ideas guiding the hands that wield them. The lesson of the last century is not merely that communism failed. It is that no society is immune from believing that concentrating power in pursuit of moral perfection will finally succeed. History has already rendered its verdict; 100 million+ dead. Our responsibility is to remember it before we convince ourselves that this time will be different."

Thread by @sfliberty on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "In 1825, a rich Welsh industrialist bought an entire American town to prove that socialism could work. He had the money, the buildings, the theory, and hundreds of eager followers waiting to move in. Two years later, it was over. 🧵
Robert Owen paid around $150,000 for the town of Harmonie, Indiana. He got 20,000 acres, more than 160 buildings, working mills, and farms already producing food. He renamed it New Harmony. Close to a thousand people arrived in the first year. Owen already ran successful textile mills in New Lanark, Scotland, where he was famous for treating workers well and running a profitable business at the same time. He believed that if you removed private property and paid everyone equally, cooperation would naturally replace competition.
In January 1826, William Maclure sailed a riverboat full of scientists, teachers, and geologists down the Ohio River to New Harmony. Historians call it the "Boatload of Knowledge." Thomas Say, the father of American entomology, was on it. So was Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, one of the most respected naturalists of the era. This was the most educated, best-funded, best-equipped socialist community ever attempted on American soil. If cooperation could beat markets anywhere, it should have worked here. It collapsed almost immediately. The hardest workers were feeding, housing, and clothing neighbors who did nothing while receiving the same food, the same shelter, and the same rewards. So they stopped working too. Why wouldn't they? Production dropped and food ran short. Buildings decayed because no one owned them and no one was responsible for maintaining them. Endless meetings replaced actual work. Owen wrote seven different constitutions in two years trying to fix it. None of them worked.
American inventor Josiah Warren, one of the country's earliest libertarian thinkers, was there. He watched the community fail from the inside and later wrote about why. His conclusion: "The difference of opinion, tastes and purposes increased just in proportion to the demand for conformity." The more the community demanded unity, the more it fractured. Warren identified the deeper problem almost a century before Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek made it famous in academic economics. When everyone owns everything, no one owns anything. When labor earns the same reward regardless of effort, effort disappears. When prices vanish, no one knows what anything is worth.
Owen finally admitted defeat in 1827. In his farewell address, he blamed the settlers themselves, saying they were "unprepared to be members of the community of common property and equality." Translation: the system would have worked if only people had been different. Every socialist regime since has offered some version of that excuse. His own son, Robert Dale Owen, put it plainly years later: "All cooperative schemes which provide equal remuneration to the skilled and industrious and the ignorant and idle must work their own downfall." He had lived through the collapse. He knew what killed it.
Every socialist experiment since New Harmony has ended the same way, and for the same reasons. Prices communicate what things are worth. Ownership creates responsibility for maintaining them. When both are abolished, production collapses because no one can calculate what to make or repair."
When I went to New Lanark, they glossed over this epic failure, of course

Meme - "THE CONTRADICTION OF THOSE WHO CLAIM... "Capitalism allows wealthy oligarchs to accumulate power, serve themselves, and control the lives of ordinary people." THEIR SOLUTION? Give political elites control over the economy, production, and the distribution of resources. SOCIALISM DOES NOT ELIMINATE CONCENTRATED POWER, IT MERGES ECONOMIC POWER WITH THE POWER OF THE STATE."

Handre on X - "Angola sits on some of the richest oil reserves in sub-Saharan Africa, pumping over 1.1 million barrels per day at its peak, and managed to keep the majority of its population in grinding poverty for decades. This is a policy outcome, not an accident. The MPLA took power in 1975 and immediately began doing what Marxist-Leninist governments do: nationalizing industry, collectivizing agriculture, and funneling resource wealth into the state apparatus rather than allowing it to circulate through voluntary exchange. Sonangol, the state oil company created in 1976, became the regime's personal treasury. By the 2000s, with oil prices surging, Angola was posting GDP growth above 15% annually. The average Angolan saw almost none of it. Isabel dos Santos, daughter of longtime president José Eduardo dos Santos, accumulated a personal fortune estimated at $2.2 billion while overseeing state enterprises. Socialism operates exactly as designed: concentrate control, and the controllers enrich themselves. The coercion is the point. When you strip away the revolutionary language and the five-year plans, the state is an institution that extracts wealth from some people by threatening violence against others. Angola's ruling class did not stumble into predation; they organized around it deliberately, and the MPLA's ideological scaffolding gave them moral cover to call it liberation. Free market economists have explained the resource curse clearly enough: oil wealth flows to whoever controls the state, and that control becomes worth fighting over, so you get civil war (27 years of it, ending in 2002), institutional decay, and zero incentive to build the legal and economic infrastructure that actually produces broad prosperity. Diversification never happens. Manufacturing never develops. Farming collapses after collectivization destroys price signals and private incentive simultaneously. Angola began modest liberalization after 2002, and private sector activity did grow. But the MPLA never surrendered structural control over the commanding heights of the economy. The lesson the regime drew from the Soviet collapse was not that central planning fails: it was that you need better PR and a sovereign wealth fund to quiet foreign critics. Current poverty rates above 40% are the tuition fee ordinary Angolans pay for that lesson."
Damn colonialism!

Karlyn Borysenko, anti-communist cult leader on X - "Last week, I secretly recorded the Party for Socialism and Liberation calling to abolish the constitution and overthrow the government. This is a private training they held for their members. When will they be arrested? The longer clip is in the QT below."

Meme - Students For Liberty @sfliberty: "Modern commies, you're not smarter than Lenin. You won't work harder than Stalin. Whatever you think of them, we're talking about two of the most competent political organizers in modern history. Both were true believers in communism in a way only someone living in the 1920s could be. They tried to make it work. They used the full power of the state. They pushed it to its limits. And it still failed. The attempt ruined entire societies and cost millions of lives. If Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Joseph Stalin couldn't make communism work, you won't either. It's over. Turn the page. Happy New Year from Students For Liberty."
Unmoving Great Library: ""A Communist is someone who reads Marx and Lenin. An anti-Communist is someone who understands Marx and Lenin." -Ronald Reagan"

Meme - Radio Cobasna @coandaeffekt: "never will not be funny how the USSR had so many tropicalian client states and that did not improve the fruit and coffee availability in the slightest"
Out Of Context Communism @OOCcommunism: "Average pole"
"My dad never had a banana until he was 26, fuck communism."

Meme - Triploi @triploi.bsky.social: "It actually doesn't matter how you feel about communism. if we don't destroy capitalism it will destroy the planet. Communism is the ONLY force that can defeat capitalism. So you either learn and become a communist. or you sit around and wait for the billionaires to destroy the world. Your choice"
The left wing agenda is all connected. This is also why Greta Thunberg went into the Palestine grift after finishing her climate change grift

Meme - Punished Rosesark @FreeRo...: "What will be your position after communism is achieved?"
Alejandro @ASG_ML: "I will write books on the mornings, playing football on the afternoon and drawing in the evening without ever becoming a writer, an athlete or a painter."
Penitent One @Penitent_One: "Coal mines"

Meme - "EASY MODE: BEING A COMMIE IN A FREE COUNTRY *Masked man in black with Palestine flags in background*
HARD MODE: BEING FREE IN A COMMIE COUNTRY *Tiananmen Square Tank Man*"

Ashton Cohen on X - "Every communist leader you can think of was a downwardly mobile loser from the elite class. Not surprisingly, the people most in favor of communism today come from the “high-education, low-income” crowd."

Daniel Priestley on X - "11 logical steps that take you from fair-minded socialism to totalitarianism and economic collapse …
1.The desire to reduce inequality requires redistribution. You can’t equalise outcomes without taking from some and giving to others. This is definitional, not sinister.
2.Redistribution requires measurement and control of production. To redistribute wealth, the state must know who has what, who earns what, and increasingly, who produces what. Surveillance of economic life becomes a prerequisite.
3.People respond to redistribution by changing behaviour. Capital flees, high earners reduce effort or emigrate, assets get hidden. The policy underperforms its projections.
4.Underperformance is blamed on sabotage, not incentives. Politically, admitting the model failed is impossible. So the shortfall must be someone’s fault - speculators, hoarders, the rich - an enemy class is named and blamed.
5.Closing the loopholes requires expanding coercion. Exit taxes, capital controls, mandatory disclosures, criminalising avoidance. Each patch requires more state power than the last, because each patch creates new evasion.
6.Economic control becomes control of livelihoods. Once the state directs capital, sets prices, or dominates employment, your income depends on political compliance. Dissent now has a career cost.
7.Central planning cannot adequately process information without real price data. Prices are compressed knowledge; abolish or distort them and the government planners are blind to reality.
8. Shortages appear. Shortages require rationing. Rationing requires deciding who gets what - pure discretionary power.
9.Discretionary power selects for ruthless administrators. The worst authoritarians get on top: a system requiring people to override individual choices for the collective good attracts and promotes those most comfortable doing so. The scrupulous exit; the zealous ascend.
10.The project can’t survive open opposition, so speech narrows. If the plan is morally mandatory, opposing it is immoral. Criticism becomes sabotage; media, education, and civil society get conscripted to defend the project. The single goal crowds out pluralism, because pluralism is disagreement about goals.
11.Reversal is now impossible through normal politics. The state controls jobs, capital, information, and enforcement. Institutions that could check it depend on it. What began as compassion has become a machine that no one can switch off - and everyone must pretend is working
… until it collapses and adherence to reality is restored."

The Revolution That Makes Everything Worse - "Under capitalist systems, anti-capitalist activists chant, “The only solution is communist revolution!” and “Soak the rich, make them pay their fair share!” When you step back and look at the historical record, however, communism may be the greatest grift of all time. It does not merely risk concentrating power and wealth, it structurally encourages it. It is no accident that almost every communist dictator and ruling class since WWII has found a way to enrich themselves or their families. Across very different countries and cultures, the pattern is remarkably consistent. Leaders of communist states have lived far better than the populations they ruled, often accumulating wealth, privileges, and even dynastic advantages while claiming to govern in the name of equality. Whether it is Stalin’s Soviet nomenklatura with its privileged access to goods and services, Mao’s insulated ruling class amid famine, Castro’s quiet access to luxury, the hereditary regime in North Korea, or Ceaușescu’s palace built during national austerity, the outcome is the same, add to that modern examples like Venezuela’s leadership and elements of Iran’s ruling structure, and the pattern becomes difficult to dismiss as coincidence. It isn’t coincidence. It is simply guaranteed by structure. In communist states, the people at the top inevitably become one with the government itself. The system collapses the distinction between the state, the ruling party, and the leadership class into a single organism. There is no meaningful separation of powers because the party is the government, and the government is the enforcement arm of the party. Once that consolidation occurs, there are no independent institutions left with either the authority or the incentive to restrain those at the top. The result is predictable. Rather than functioning as an economic system that distributes wealth broadly, communism concentrates control of national resources at the very top of the hierarchy. At that point, enrichment is no longer an aberration, it is an outcome. In a market system, wealth accumulation is at least partially constrained by competition, transparency, and legal structures that exist outside any single individual’s control. Even the wealthiest are exposed to risk, and in creating value, they tend to distribute opportunity and income across employees, investors, and entire supply chains. In a communist system, those constraints are subordinated to the party... The irony is unavoidable. A system built on eliminating class distinctions instead creates a class more insulated from accountability than traditional elites ever were. Without opposition, without a free press, and without independent courts, there is no mechanism to expose or punish abuse. The refinement of the premise is this: it is not just that communist leaders enrich themselves. It is that the structure of communism, as it is actually implemented, makes that outcome not only possible, but likely. Isn’t it ironic that the useful idiots screaming that capitalism should be destroyed because “it doesn’t work” want to replace it with a system that gives them crumbs while being guaranteed to result in the very things (and people) they claim to despise? Maybe it really isn’t ironic, maybe it is just ignorance. Communism is flawless in theory because theory never has to contend with human nature, power, or reality, unfortunately for its adherents, the real world requires all three."

Links - 12th August 2026 (2 - Jason Arday)

Donna-Louise on X - "Believe Me - The Extraordinary Story Of Jason Arday... On 22 August and 31 August 2025 formal complaints were made to the Advertising Standards Authority about claims in his biographies. On 11 September 2025 the regulator told the agency Amfo to remove or amend claims that lacked adequate substantiation. A British regulator acted on this a year before the story broke publicly... Arday said he had obtained a Masters degree in “psychodynamic practice” from Birkbeck, University of London, and had become a “qualified counsellor.” That claim does not appear on his Cambridge Faculty of Education page. It does not appear on his Wikipedia entry. It does not appear on any of his standard institutional biographies. Birkbeck does not offer a master’s degree called “psychodynamic practice.” What it does offer is an MSc in Psychodynamic Counselling and Psychotherapy — a three-year part-time course that requires prior relevant experience and cannot be taken full-time. No entry for Jason Arday appears on the public registers of either the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) or the UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP). He claimed the degree and the status of qualified counsellor. The specific degree title he used does not currently exist at Birkbeck. The qualification is absent from his official academic listings. No independent confirmation of either the degree or the professional registration has been produced... In a 2023 podcast he said he had been awarded an MBE in 2017 and turned it down. The 2017 London Gazette contains no such award. Declined honours are never gazetted, so the absence cannot disprove an offer. What it sits against is the word he used: “awarded.” An award is a completed act. A completed award would appear. Cambridge announced he would donate a £20,000 book advance to charity. Princeton University Press later declined to name the recipients... A former student at the University of Roehampton wrote that Arday “arrived at 4 hour lectures over an hour late and usually left after an hour,” sat on a desk talking generally about racism and celebrities, and that “we learned absolutely nothing.” The student said Arday relied on claims of autism and minority status to attack anyone who questioned his work. After several complaints a lead academic sat in on one of the lectures; the faculty were said to be reluctant to act for fear of being called racist. Arday left of his own accord. A follow-up comment in the same thread claimed the course head had said they would not employ him again... That is the story. Not simply a man who told tall stories. A machine that turns “we are not going to tell you what we found” into “he has been cleared,” and treats everyone who asks to see the working as a bigot... Jason Arday says he is not a liar. He says his errors stem from autism and inadequate supervision. He says he is the victim of a racially motivated campaign. He is entitled to say so. He is also entitled to the one thing nobody has given him: a proper, independent, published investigation by people with no stake in the answer, whose findings anyone can read. Robert Dingwall has called for exactly that. John Preston says there is a case to answer and the evidence triangulates. Colin Mills at Oxford has said he does not want his discipline smeared by association with academic fraud and low standards. The Office for Students says it cannot comment on individual cases. These are not campaigners. They are senior academics in the field asking for the one thing that would settle it. The institutions that elevated the legend have spent the last year quietly walking pieces of it back while insisting that the scrutiny, not the claims, is the real issue. The record is now long enough that the pattern itself is the evidence... The institutions that elevated the legend spent years repeating it. When the contradictions began to surface they did not investigate. They defended. They edited the websites quietly. They called the scrutiny a vile campaign. They treated the act of checking as the real offence. Jason Arday did not need to invent a modest success story. He invented a legend. And for years almost no one dared to ask whether any of it was real — because he is Black, and in the current climate that was supposed to be enough. It was not enough. And it never should have been."    

Arday in Wonderland | Jacob Phillips | The Critic Magazine - "One reason why Arday’s defenders seem to have sidestepped actually disproving the allegations, is that they share a set of commitments which amount to a different worldview, rather than a difference of opinion. A commitment to to race “equity” rather than “equality” — to achieving balanced outcomes even if it requires differing standards — is formally embedded in 101 universities that have signed the Race Equality Charter (REC) orchestrated by Advance HE, a charitable professional membership scheme which is ubiquitous (and unchallengedly so) in the HE sector. There are 86 REC award holders, including most universities in Britain, who are awarded bronze, silver or gold on the basis of demonstrating their commitment to racial equity.  The unassailable presupposition for such a scheme is that old chestnut that everything is racist, racism is everywhere, and it no longer means evidenced examples of discrimination or hatred but is rather a systemic and pervasive atmosphere from which no-one can escape. The REC is “underpinned by 5 Principles”, the first of which is that “Racism is an everyday facet of UK society and racial inequalities manifest themselves in everyday situations, processes and behaviours”. In light of this, you might ask, how could concerns be raised about Arday without those concerns manifesting racism?    Advance HE tells us that the “work to drive out racism in all its forms from our sector is imperative and incumbent on all of us”, whether it is “deliberate or unconscious”. This is interesting, given that a key element of any submission for a REC award will involve training in an ideological spaghetti plate of dubious notions like “unconscious bias” which would seem to forestall the awkwardly legal fact, pointed out by the Committee for Academic Freedom, that “latest OfS guidance on freedom of speech states that it is illegal for universities” to (as put by the OfS) “require training or induction that imposes a requirement to endorse any controversial viewpoint or value judgement”.   The main reasons why the Arday case will not lead to any change — whatever the truth behind the allegations — is that it is a primary commitment for the REC to promote “inclusive practices that improve the recruitment, retention, progression and success” of staff “from racially minoritised (sic) ethnic groups”. Now, you hardly need an (unplagiarised) PhD in rocket science to deduce that this incentive scheme is likely to clash with a racially neutral approach to academic standards. Remember, there is no such thing as racial neutrality anyway, and the end goal is equity, not equality, meaning that the standards have to be altered in supposed proportion to the case at hand.   The absurdity doesn’t end here. The commitment to recruiting and promoting more staff on racial grounds is enveloped within an entirely uninterrogated assumption of the REC about the applicability to the academic world of “representation”. Somewhere along the line, someone decided that academic roles are not about high quality teaching and research, but rather representing racial demographics... The result of all this is a strange world where the illusory notions of ubiquitous systemic racism, unconscious bias, equity, and representation, conspire to make universities like a strange Alice in Wonderland dimension so deeply enmeshed that it can no longer find its way out. Even to suggest that returning to level ground might be a good thing is to admit you’re on the wrong side of history, and perpetuate the sense for denizens of that otherworld that behind every corner lurks a demented Nazi intent on the oppressed victims of staffing disparities. In the meantime, those of us who still hold firm that properly functioning universities are more necessary than ever for a fracturing public square find ourselves with less and less sympathy from people off campus. Removing the REC from all higher education institutions would surely be a fine first step to recovering public confidence again, if it isn’t already too late."    
Only uneducated and ignorant right wing conservatives criticise universities        

A comedy at Cambridge | James Martin Charlton | The Critic Magazine - "In what style might a script based on the Cambridge plagiarism scandal surrounding Jason Arday, Cambridge’s youngest ever black professor, best be written? The story certainly has a packed plot: an almost miraculous backstory, astonishing claims of sporting achievement, a spectacular rise to the top of his profession, and allegations of serial plagiarism. It also features a gushing crew of admirers, expressions of outrage at Arday’s accusers, attacks on their motives, and a few plain dealers who insist upon saying what they see. Put that way, despite its lack of ruffs and garters, it could readily be imagined as a lost comedy by the great Renaissance playwright Ben Jonson... Modern social justice activism has much in common with the Puritanism Jonson delighted in mocking. Both encourage their adherents to regard themselves as morally elevated by the righteousness of the cause they serve... Jonson portrays his Puritans not as holy people, but as aggressive social climbers who use religious moral superiority to control others while secretly indulging in the very vices they preach against. The question any Jonsonian comedy drawing from the Arday affair would ask is not simply, “who has behaved dishonourably” but “who has really harboured the more degrading view of black scholars?” Is it those who insist identical standards should apply to every candidate, or those prepared to suspend ordinary academic judgement because a candidate is black, working-class or neurodiverse? A great deal of scabrous comic mileage might be found in exposing a culture of low expectations presided over by white, well-heeled, expensively educated liberal academics... There is a rich seam of comedy to be mined not simply from the case in hand. Academia and the wider managerial and HR-led world are full of confidence men and their rubes. This class of people defines our age. Yet it would be a struggle to name a single play, television series or film which satirises this particular strain of institutional idiocy. Could it be that media and arts commissioners themselves belong to the same managerial culture? Like Jonson’s fools, they have become incapable of laughing at themselves. Even when the only appropriate response to a scandal as outlandish and revealing as the current one is to guffaw."            

Jason Arday: a question of academic standards - "Amid much attention to Jason Arday’s plagiarism and advanced Walter Mittyfication, the gobbledygook of his writing style has been largely overlooked, not least by the professorial electors at Cambridge and the PhD examiners at Liverpool John Moores University.  Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurantism in an academic discipline expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity. Modern physics is genuinely difficult. Natural selection of Pleistocene man did not prepare our poor brains for Einstein or Heisenberg. Common sense, forged in a world of middle-sized objects travelling at medium speeds, must be sent away on compassionate leave when we open a book on quantum mechanics or relativity. Physicists have no need to language-up their writing. Their subject is intrinsically difficult. Naming no names, practitioners of a subject that any fool can understand may suffer from what has been called “physics-envy”. Longing to sound more profound than they are, what recourse have they but obscurantist language?... I must ask: did the examiners at Liverpool John Moores University, who judged his thesis worthy of a PhD, actually read it? One trivial give-away: the thesis contains 332 instances where a plural noun’s terminal “s” is incorrectly followed by an apostrophe. There’s even one in the thesis title: “An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research.” Where I come from, a PhD candidate has a research supervisor, with a duty of care. It’s hard to believe even he read the thesis before letting it go forward to examination... I wouldn’t normally use a public forum to lampoon a style that should have been corrected by a PhD candidate’s supervisor. I wouldn’t normally do it but — for heaven’s sake — it’s a Cambridge professor we are talking about, appointed to a presumably much-coveted chair at one of the world’s great universities, possessor of three honorary doctorates. Mightn’t you be forgiven for wondering whether, just possibly, normal standards were relaxed?...   Fortunately, there are signs that other faculties at Cambridge are as aghast as the rest of us at what has been done to their university’s good name. May I arm them with a lovely quotation from one of science’s great stylists, Peter Medawar: “…no one who has something original or important to say will willingly run the risk of being misunderstood; people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.”"

The Highly Credentialed Are All Jason Ardays - "Despite Arday's story completely collapsing along with the reputation of Cambridge University among people in the know, the media are still trying to cover for both by basically ignoring the facts of the case. Basically, it's the same thing they have done with Fauci, focusing on Rand Paul as Inspector Javert rather than on the fact that Fauci ruined lives because he is a malignant little man with a God complex. This is now the standard practice with all cases of experts lying and destroying lives. We still get the same insane coverage of climate change despite the fact that the research has been shown to be, a nearly infinite number of times, complete crap. Every prediction is wrong. Every "climate-fueled" wildfire is arson. Every "the polar bears are going extinct" claim is complete bullpuckey. None of it matters, because of The Narrative™. No place is this pattern clearer than in the area of gender medicine, where the research is of such low quality that most can be called fraudulent, and yet the consequences are so damaging that thousands of lives will be ruined and suicides will be caused. We are going through a totally unnecessary culture war over whether men ogling teenage girls and masturbating in locker rooms is kindness and compassion to an oppressed class, or aiding sexual predators.   For God's sake, they are all Jason Ardays... The credentialed class is fatally compromised. Their loyalty is not to truth, rigor, or any vision of the good you and I can recognize. It is to their ideological commitments, which include a complete disdain for the hoi polloi and whatever we consider to be important values.   These days, the tweed coat, the white coat, or any other symbol of high-status credentials should be viewed with special suspicion. "          

Steven Pinker on X - ""A Lot of the Attacks on Higher Ed Are Unfair. Not This One....This was a prime example of academia’s maddening tendency to embody the worst caricatures painted by its critics." Cambridge U appoints a flaming charlatan then denies what everyone can plainly see. This fiasco should accelerate universities' self-examination. An obvious failure point was a lack of viewpoint diversity, with no non-woke profs or admins to call out the delusion. The more serious one is threats of punishment of critics: anyone who point out the obvious is smeared as a racist, ableist, and abettor of suicide (in this case, also police visits & barracuda libel lawyers). We know is a powerful generator of  the madness of crowds."            

Opinion | A Top Scholar’s Fall Shows That Universities Don’t Get It - The New York Times - "It’s easy to see how Jason Arday held on to his University of Cambridge professorship until Wednesday, despite facing significant accusations of plagiarism and dishonesty for years. After all, his story fit quite neatly into certain culture war grooves. On one side was a scholar born to working-class immigrant parents in South London public housing who rose to become the youngest Black professor in the university’s 800-plus-year history. On the other were the forces of reaction, seeming to target him as part of a wide-ranging attack on tolerance and progress. In many academic circles, he was clearly the good guy... If interest in this story peters out, that would be unfortunate, because what’s needed now is genuine accountability. This was a prime example of academia’s maddening tendency to embody the worst caricatures painted by its critics. The available evidence strongly suggests that, when faced with the allegations against Mr. Arday years ago, Cambridge and the other academic institutions connected to him responded not by genuinely investigating them with integrity and transparency, but acting in ways that helped him avoid scrutiny. Their decisions were both wrong and further damaged the reputation of higher education at a time when it has come under withering and sometimes unfair attack... Professors are hired on the basis of their prior work and an assumption of academic integrity; if that work was plagiarized it’s fair game for an investigation. Moreover, a credible allegation of plagiarism isn’t resolved by an author agreeing to take down a paper for revision; it demands a thorough independent investigation. Instead, Social Sciences posted a correction informing readers that the article had “been amended to increase the clarity of citation sources within the text.”...  Mr. Cofnas arrived on the scene because of Cambridge’s complacency — he wrote the post after an anonymous Cambridge tipster reached out to him — which soon hardened into stridency. “Professor Arday has been the victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility, which must stop,” Cambridge said in a written statement it sent me last month, insisting the allegations against him “have been thoroughly investigated by the relevant institution and the journals in question.” That phrasing pointedly excluded Cambridge itself. Instead, the university gestured at the aforementioned investigations, none of which appear to have been thorough, as evidence it needn’t burden itself with further action. Liverpool John Moores even kept Mr. Arday’s Ph.D. thesis online, with the apparently plagiarized sections intact... If this had all come out earlier, it might have jeopardized Simon & Schuster’s publication of Mr. Arday’s memoir, “Great and Unfortunate Things,” which is next week. Simon & Schuster told The New York Times that it stands by Mr. Arday’s memoir and plans to press forward with its publication, naturally. When Cambridge reversed course Wednesday, it cited new information about Mr. Arday’s “academic qualifications and honorary appointments” — an apparent reference to recent reporting showing that Mr. Arday claimed affiliations at universities that denied any connection to him. In light of Cambridge’s years of complacency, I think the more likely explanation is that it could no longer ignore the growing PR problem represented by Mr. Arday’s continuing employment... Sometimes, though, academics use Mr. Trump and the populist forces he represents as a convenient excuse to avoid the quality control that was so obviously absent here. Their more cleareyed peers acknowledge that higher ed’s own hands aren’t spotless. A Yale University report published in April said “declining trust” in higher education “must be addressed,” and acknowledged that “those of us in higher education have too often resisted calls to critically examine our own institutions, professions, and modes of thought.” In this case, perhaps what should be critically examined is how academia treats its stars — especially those who come to symbolize important new ideas or social-justice movements that bolster the reputations of their home universities. In 2023, The Times of London paraphrased comments from the head of Mr. Arday’s academic department, writing that his hiring “was proof of the university’s commitment to tackling existing inequalities.” “To any students or prospective colleagues who are wondering if Cambridge is a place where they can belong, the answer is, emphatically, yes,” she told the paper. If Mr. Arday isn’t just a scholar, but a symbol of his university’s commitment to social justice, perhaps that made it more difficult for Cambridge to examine its own role in his ascent — and to delay, by several damaging years, the full investigation Mr. Arday’s case so obviously warranted."

Jonathan Kay on X - "absolutely wild: in the book proposal he sent to @simonschuster, arday claimed a magic "shaman woman" (correctly!) predicted he'd be a modern spartacus leading the world's (metaphorical) slaves in an epic freedom rebellion And Simon & Schuster was like "sounds good. green light""

Nick Dixon on X - "All this talk about Jason Arday, but people still don’t realise what DEI has done. One, it has destroyed millions of lives (they’re all white men, so no one cares). Two, it has destroyed entire industries and even art forms, potentially forever. There’s no sign that literature, for example, is coming back from the assault of DEI, and the related ideological impositions upon content, sensitivity readers, and general idiocy. Older authors like Ian McEwan or Don DeLillo still publish, but they are like the last Elvish kings whose ilk will never be seen again. Obviously it’s similar across all the arts, not to mention the many fields where DEI puts people in actual danger, like policing. You may think Jason Arday is a joke, and it is funny to a degree (no pun intended), but DEI is synonymous with the collapse of the West."

Luke Rosiak on X - "The only lesson from Jason Arday can be recognition that this is going on everywhere. This is the dissertation of a University of Maryland campus president. She stole someone else's dissertation and changed the name of the field. Maryland has known this for a year."

Konstantin Kisin on X - "A lot of people say Britain is falling behind America but our Claudine Gay is way more advanced than theirs!"
Hans Mahncke on X - "No chance. America remains the global leader in this field. Making Jason Arday a Cambridge professor so everyone involved can congratulate themselves on their virtue is beginner level stuff. America took a serial plagiarist with embarrassingly poor scholarship and made her president of the most prestigious university in the world. That is how you do institutional decline at scale."
Michael Laprarie on X - "And we took domestic terrorist Bill Ayres and gave him an Ivy League professorship (Columbia) and let him earn Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago."
Julie Trimble on X - "It’s not surprising when you realize that America’s political elite took a serial plagiarist, Joe Biden, and elevated him to the highest position of power—President of the United States."

‘Old racist wine in a new bottle’: Black academics respond to Jason Arday affair - "“Jason has to take responsibility for what he did. But when a white person makes mistakes, it’s just a story about them as an individual. When a Black person makes a mistake, it’s treated as collective – and used to undermine the very principle that Black people should be in these spaces,” one Black academic said this week, describing the impact of Jason Arday’s case on his peers... days of reporting describing sociologist Arday as a “diversity poster boy” have had a chilling effect on the UK’s Black academics, already demoralised by the impact of cuts on Black scholarship. Many compared the response to the academic criticism with accusations against white academics that have passed with little fanfare. While views among Arday’s peers vary on the gravity of the accusations about his academic work – no formal investigation to date has found him guilty of plagiarism – opinion is united that Arday’s story has provoked a rightwing backlash against Black progress in academia and public life. “I think there’s a real question about whether these spaces are safe for us and whether we just have to start doing this outside universities,” says Kehinde Andrews, who was the first Black Studies professor in the UK but was recently made redundant from Birmingham City University. Andrews added: “No matter how many cracks have appeared in [Arday’s] CV, it doesn’t change the fact that this is a dedicated, coordinated smear campaign from the right, based on the premise that Black people should not be at Cambridge. There’s so many other things that happen in higher education that are never discussed.” Andrews believes there were “problems with some of [Arday’s] scholarship,” but that they stopped short of plagiarism. For the eminent sociologist Paul Gilroy, responsibility for the row lies with the “culture warriors” who appointed Arday, as well as “racist critics” – and comes at a critical time for the sector. “Reckoning with Jason Arday and his impact-chasing enablers should not be allowed to obscure the vicious, irrational cuts to humanities that are wrecking UK universities,” Gilroy added... Few Black academics are happy to speak about Arday’s case publicly. One academic said: “I can’t say anything on the record or I’ll be the right’s next target. The [right] have set their sights on pushing Black people out from all these institutions... “It’s not just about Black people – any minoritised group, our success is generally seen as not being genuine,” said one academic, speaking anonymously. “[The row] will make the small number of Black people in the field feel much more vulnerable. It will give licence for a while to people who don’t want Black people in the academic space and it may give pause to people who want to redress the massive [racial] imbalance in academia... “There’s a bunch of people out there who think Black people are less intelligent than white people, and that the only way they can get anywhere is by being forced into situations that they are unqualified for. For those people, being Black is the definition of being unqualified. It’s an old racist wine in a new bottle.”"
I wonder what white academics have not just shamelessly plagiarised to such a large extent but lied about marathons, fundraising and being non-verbal till 11, and not been fired.
When "minorities" succeed, they show how good their demographic group is. When they fail, they only represent themselves. When "majorities" succeed, they show how the system is rigged to help them. When they fail, they show how useless and underserving their group is.
Arday was paraded about as a DEI success story, but of course, his fraud and failure are only on him.
If a formal investigation does not find that it is hot in summer, that means you can't say it is hot in summer
Maybe the fact that the humanities are incapable of self-policing shows that they deserve their cuts
I wonder who all these mysterious unnamed people who claim that all black people are unqualified are. Since they are everywhere surely a few examples can be named