Thread by @WingsScotland on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "This purported "debunking" of the media's "attacks" on Jason Arday by the uber-woke Byline Times is worth examining as an illustration of how the far left fabricates witch-hunts as a smokescreen when it gets caught out.
The article is 3600 words long, and most of it is in fact a character assassination of some of the people who exposed Arday's lies. The first 500 words are pure fact-free messenger-shooting in which donating money to the Free Speech Union is presented as proof of racism.I have no idea if Nathan Cofnas is a racist or not, or whether his theories are correct or not. If he WAS a racist, it still wouldn't change any of the facts about Jason Arday. That isn't how facts work. They are true regardless of who says them. We know that this is true [that Cambridge ""grabbed a random black person" and abandoned academic standards in pursuit of diversity"]. Arday met none of the usual criteria for someone in his position and his work is doggerel and gibberish.The plagiarism allegations are proven beyond even the tiniest shred of doubt. LJMU simply covered them up out of the same misguided DEI impulses that led Cambridge to hire him in the first place. These are excuses, not refutations.As previously noted, the number of articles is wholly unremarkable for an unfolding story of multiple significance spread across numerous outlets. No "disputed or unproven claims" are identified by Byline Times. The "claims" are facts.We're then treated to a lengthy diatribe of whataboutery. Notably, it does not include a single link to a media source highlighting Arday's phantom book. I'd never even heard of that aspect of the story until the Byline Times piece. WHERE was this "double standard" applied?Then we're told that the claims Arday fabricated his amazing marathon feats are false. But the fact that some newspapers "reported on" the challenge does not prove the challenge was actually carried out.Here is the extent, for example, of the Times HES "reporting" on the challenge. Manifestly, it does not constitute proof that any of these marathons were subsequently actually run.Similarly, the Richmond Times article merely SAYS Arday completed the challenge, offering not a single scrap of evidence. It is fair to say that the local press, even in 2010, did not have the resources to bother fact-checking a nice feelgood story.
This part is just nuts.
"Did you raise £5m for these charities?"
"£5m is a small proportion of their income."
"Um, that isn't what I asked."
"Other people also raise money for charities."
"Uh... okay?"
"SEE? RACISM!"
IS it clear [that Arday played professional football]? Let's look at those links: The first is a tweet from an unhinged race-baiter, quoting an unnamed person, saying Arday played for two clubs. The second is a university publishing an unevidenced semantic correction. It's not exactly conclusive proof. "Semi-professional", incidentally, is a term with no specifically-defined meaning in a football context. Waltham & Hersham FC are listed as "semi-professional" on Wikipedia, Lewisham Borough FC aren't. It basically means nothing.
This is some truly desperate straw-clutching semantic misdirection. The idea that "an informal community initiative supporting black mothers" would only be interested in kids at seven-year intervals is just embarrassing. He can only have meant the TV show. Here, Byline Times simply asserts that accounts "effectively" (WEASEL WORDS ALERT!) backing Arday's story are "credible" and those disputing it are, by implication, not. The word "schoolmates" is used in scarequotes implying something sinister which is never outlined. The plagiarism allegations are not even remotely "unproven". They are extensively and comprehensively documented. The rest of this section is merely handwaving distraction and excuses.
Then there's a sharp swerve back into character assassinations of some of the people who'd exposed Arday, as if being reported to - and investigated by - the police for asking questions about someone's dodgy claims is so self-evidently a hate crime that no more need be said.Hundreds and hundreds more words of smears and character assassinations follow, in which Jason Arday isn't even mentioned, based solely on the premise that right-wing beliefs are intrinsically and obviously evil.On and on it goes. Jason Arday is long forgotten now, merely an incidental tool being used as a springboard from which to attack the right, just like Cambridge used him as a tool for woke virtue-signalling... No evidence is provided for the claim that Cofnas' claims have been "debunked". It's merely asserted as a fact. I have no idea whether they have or not.And finally, we hear from all the people smeared in the piece pointing out that Byline Times' allegations against them are bollocks. (And once again, there is no "presumption" in the plagiarism allegations. They have been comprehensively proven. LJMU whitewashed them.)
There is not a single refutation in the entire 3,600 words of any reporting about Jason Arday, save for the fact that IF he played for Waltham & Hersham FC (an unproven claim from an anonymous source), they are indeed a semi-pro football club, at least according to Wikipedia.
tl;dr - Byline Times is a joke. If that's the best its Head Of Investigations can do, he's as big a fraud as Arday was."
Meme - Wings Over Scotland @WingsScotland: "I don't think this bit is SUPPOSED to be hilarious, I think that's accidental."
"Unanswered Questions. Cambridge University has questions to answer. As Byline Times documented last month, it took no action after repeated internal safeguarding complaints about James Orr and his involvement with right-wing extremist groups. Asked repeatedly to comment on the extensive findings of this publication's six-month investigation, Cambridge University's press office merely stated: "Byline Times has sent the university a slew of unsubstantiated allegations, wilful mischaracterisations, and falsehoods, which we strongly reject. The volume of misleading claims and conjecture means we are unable to engage with the approach as a legitimate media enquiry.""
Charles Steadman @CharlesSteadman: "Wow, sounds like Cambridge university press office are substantially more competent than the rest of the organisation..."
The carrion-eaters - "Of course, everything the carrion-eaters said about Arday was true. Since his death, some of the people who think they’re on his side have tried to rewrite history. He was really just an ordinary academic, hounded to death by the right-wing media, because they couldn’t accept that a black man might deserve a professorship at Cambridge. Or, in the more condescending version, he was the hapless victim of all the smug white liberals, who kept promoting him way above his abilities to burnish their diversity quotas. No: this is an insult. He was brilliant at what he did. He blagged his way through the world with nothing but brio and good looks. One of the great British chancers, a wide boy from a council estate who managed to insinuate himself into one of the most prestigious universities in the world. He conned them all; all it took was some South London street smarts and he had them eating right out of his hand. He could ramble about Australian soap operas and convince everyone they were listening to a genius. They were! But now, in death, you want to shrink him down again. Domesticate him, turn him into another passive victim, distinguished by nothing more than the colour of his skin. It’s also completely true that the press had every right to report on this. It’s news. Cambridge is a major institution, it takes government grants, it represents the country; of course we have a right to know if it’s giving out professorships to lovable rogues with a totally invented backstory. Arday was advising the government on the school curriculum; people in that kind of position need to be held to public scrutiny. But is that really all you were doing? Admit it: you were having fun. Everyone was enjoying it... The Daily Mail quoted some of his frantic excuses, and then reported that ‘he asked that we attribute the quotes to ‘a source close to Professor Arday.’’ Cue much hooting, and I suppose it does sound nuts if you don’t know, but the British press has a longstanding tradition where a public figure can choose to speak their mind freely and be quoted as a ‘friend of’ or a ‘source close to’ themselves. If you ever read something like ‘a friend of the beleaguered minister said that ‘she’s doing her best and everyone needs to fuck off and leave her alone,’’ you can be pretty sure those words are from the minister herself. The journo gets a nice unfiltered quote, the source gets to keep some dignity, everyone wins. But they didn’t extend this courtesy to Arday. Instead, they published the fact that he’d asked for it. You could break trust with the man; it didn’t matter. No need to play nice, keep him on as a potential source; they knew they were going in for the kill, and when it was done there would be no more need for any further quotes from Professor Jason Arday... Right now, on the other side of the Atlantic, a lot of different people are upset for a lot of different reasons because AOC went on the news to say that ‘woke 1 was crazy.’ The issue was another DSA type called Francesca Hong, whose old tweets had resurfaced: she’d railed against Thanksgiving as a celebration of colonialism, ‘the original superspreader event that killed Indigenous folx and women.’ Back in 2020, this was a totally normal thing to say; now you sound like a maniac. The word folks is already gender-neutral. It does not need an x. But that’s not why woke 1 was crazy... What made woke 1 crazy wasn’t the content of the beliefs but their social function, which was to let you feel good about doing the thing they just did to Jason Arday. Look, this minor celebrity chef has some old tweets where he spelled folks without the x... It is genuinely deranged, in this situation, to start ginning up a moral panic over academic standards. We’re in November 1918 and you’re trying to have a Prussian infantryman whipped for not shining his boots. It’s over; the academy is a literate institution marooned in a postliterate world, governed and staffed by people who no longer have anything to do with whatever way of being these places were once built to protect. They’re all form-fillers, generating excellence in predictable increments. They don’t know how to read. Which is how an institution like Cambridge could hire a man like Jason Arday, who left a grammatical error in the title of his dissertation. Not because he was black, and not because of his purported disability, but because there was probably no one on the hiring committee who had actually bothered to read his work. Just check his citation numbers. Why not have a professor who, by his own account, takes an hour to read a single page of text? In a fully literate institution that would be disqualifying. Not everyone has to be an academic; it has nothing to do with your worth as a human being, but maybe, in light of your disability, this particular line of work isn’t for you. In the postliterate university it’s no impediment at all. Welcome; you’ll fit right in... Arday’s colleagues were clearly in awe of him. The world is full of illiterates, but only one of them became one of the youngest professors in Cambridge’s history."
Of course, harassing someone who used a word the left considered out of fashion was totally the same as demanding accountability from someone who lied, plagiarised, set the police, lawyers and institutions on critics, defrauded his students and gave false hope to parents of autistic children
Would a similar white non "autistic" candidate have been hired like Arday was? Just because you don't go on about all of universities' problems doesn't mean the problem you do identify is not a problem
Thread by @eugyppius1 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "This is the dumbest fucking part. "When a famous white man errs", those errors are systemically ascribed to his entire demographic by left-prog movement. "When a famous black man [errs]“ it is always individual. In postwar liberalism, whites succeed as individuals and sin as a group; blacks succeed as a group and sin as individuals. On Arday specifically: The most standard take on the right is that Arday's failings represent the foolishness not of black men in general (aside from unreasonably high self-regard, Arday has few stereotypical black male attributes), but of the DEI system in particular. Which they do."
Thread by @BlitzGeburt on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "This was not just "some academic plagiarized in his PHD and work" (even that would be very bad), it's he did that, lied about a bunch of other stuff publicly (in a ridiculous way), had full institutional backing even after the accusations first became public because of his race.Institutional backing from both his university and media running cover for him and the system he represented. Is there even any similar case of a fraudulent white academic who made public claims similar to running 9 marathons with a broken legs? 30 marathons in 35 days? etc."
la scapigliata on X - "There's an explosion of DARVO happening, from the DEI and British establishment ecosystem that enabled Jason Arday. The grift is up, for all of them, and they think that using such a manipulative and abusive tactic to enact interpersonal violence against people who have had enough of the lies, grifting and state control in the name of untenable ideologies rooted in falsehoods and desire for domination of others, will give them back the control of society they once had."
Rhys Laverty on X - "Only one per cent of professors in UK universities are black, making each appointment hugely significant."
"What on earth is this second sentence doing in a news article?"
Max Klinger on X - "On Arday, it’s worth remembering: The left have spent over a decade trying to destroy people’s lives, get them censored and fired for disagreeing with their cultish dogma. They’ve succeeded, often. They simultaneously mocked and vilified anyone who pointed out this Maoist scumbaggery, said cancel culture was a myth, and so on. The media massively supported them in all of this, granting woke ideologies and ideologues huge, gushing coverage and celebrating both endlessly, while smearing those who pushed back as being racist, as far right, as white supremacist, and all the rest. Now the same exact people are turning around and calling legitimate media scrutiny of one the woke left’s most high profile and public representatives a ‘lynching’ and an ‘assassination’, etc. It’s just absolutely, 100% transparent, morally and intellectually inconsistent bollocks. Whipped up to help them further their agenda and deflect attention from the actual issue here, namely their own domination of, and bastardisation of, our university system."
Mousumi Bakshi on X - "NEW Students of Jason Arday address a vigil, telling a crowd “Racism did this” “For many of us, Cambridge was once imagined as an arrival..we believed in the university..that we might belong” “Jason’s death & the cruelty & smear around him reminds us that for many, we do not”"
Titus Techera on X - "The martyrology of Arday is well underway. We should stop this. All the evidence that he was a fraud, that he harassed people & threw cops & lawyers at the few journalists asking questions is available. All of his published works, including the fake memoir -- everything is available, if anyone gives a damn! Stop this lie"
Richard Hanania on X - "They tell us that Jason Arday was fragile and couldn't handle being in the public spotlight. This is true. But the academics at Cambridge are the people who made him famous and brought scrutiny to his work. They should be ashamed of themselves."
UbermanXXI_too on X - "Eh? He has a history of appearing in various media. I am an example of someone who does not like the spotlight. JA is not."
What they mean is he loved positive attention but couldn't stand negative attention so those who praised him were good and noble but those who exposed his lies are cruel and evil and the moral thing to do when he was alive was just to praise him and not to talk about his lies
Razib Khan on X - "the attempt to reinvent jason arday as an honest and rigorous scholar brought down by racist right-wing publications like the new york times and the guardian is one of the most brazen attempts at the 'shaggy defense' i've ever seen..."
Titus Techera on X - "Suddenly, all the corrupt elites who enabled this Arday moron to think his magical realism is really magical -- they're out there doing a kind of riff on Nietzsche: Truth is Deadly! We must have lies instead! I think the truth matters & some willingness to tell the truth about public affairs, especially when it's unpleasant, is essential for our way of life. We cannot compromise here. Education is the core of our regime. We must tell elite institutions promoting censorship, harassment of dissenters, & incredible self-dealing as saving lives or commemorating the victims of our mis- dis- & mal-information to stop lying to our faces!"
Will Kinney on X - "One thing that is I think a real impediment to understanding in cases like this is that very smart people often lack an accurate theory of mind for very stupid people. They simply cannot imagine that somebody like Arday, who found a button he could push to get attention, would continue pushing that button without any awareness of what the inevitable consequences would be, because he apparently lacked the intellectual capacity to entertain the hypothetical of "what's going to happen when somebody starts to question this?" You saw that in the interviews he did: he was genuinely surprised that someone would check if his story was true, because no one ever had. I also found it noticeable in his lectures, which were full of weird malapropisms: he literally had no idea what the words he was using meant. That audiences sat through those alarming word salads and continued to reward him for it is pathological, and a testament to how powerful social manias can be among educated people eager to prove their innate goodness. This blindness among the very smart to the minds of the extremely stupid, especially among sociologists, finds its way into all kinds of bad policy making. You won't set good policy for policing if you don't understand how somebody with really low IQ and poor impulse control is going to think and behave. You won't get why winning the lottery ruins people's lives, because you don't understand that giving a really stupid person a huge amount of money in a lump sum is like giving a child a loaded handgun. (Apply this to universal basic income and see what you come up with.) You don't get why a homeless guy, given a nice apartment for free, would immediately trash it or burn it down. You don't get why admitting people to college who don't have the innate intellectual capacity for college work is going to cause them serious harm. Some people just have very low intellectual capacity, and you can't fix it."
judyk113 on X - "A misleadingly selective account of Arday as a naive button pusher who got used.He was a consummate, skilled fraudster who worked hard at not just copying & pasting others’ (copyright) work but manipulated it to publish & get qualifications to leap from post to higher status post"
So the Arday furore was founded on racism, was it? Nonsense - "In late 2018, I saw what authentic Diversity, Equality and Inclusion in our elite academic institutions looks like. For the previous 10 years, Glasgow University had been developing a carefully-constructed programme to provide opportunities for children from disadvantaged neighbourhoods to access their world-class medical degree course... “They were all still expected to meet the very stringent academic standards required to study medicine at Glasgow.”... Underpinning the entire project was a duty of psychological and emotional care towards the young participants. The university had gone to great lengths to ensure that they were all properly equipped to handle the academic and emotional challenges that come with studying for a medical degree. This was done cautiously and sensitively through building relationships with local schools. There were mentoring schemes to ensure each student had the best possible chance to maintain their studies and obtain their degrees. Crucially, Glasgow University only went public with the success of their programme (and cautiously so) when they felt confident that it was sufficiently robust to serve future generations of young people. They avoided the temptation for flag-waving, sloganeering and media blitzes. Glasgow University’s care for these young people stands in contrast to the way that Cambridge University exploited Jason Arday, the young academic who died in tragic circumstances last week. It’s become clear that Cambridge bent their own rules to an absurd extent to appoint Mr Arday to its highest academic station. It stands accused of having done so to massage its own sense of esteem and to increase its own academic cache. This insulted thousands of young academics across the UK who had toiled honestly for their degrees and had their research robustly peer-reviewed. Worse than this though, was that Cambridge was undermining the prospects of under-graduates by making them guinea pigs in this exercise in self-glorification by placing their academic dreams in the hands of a man who was ill-qualified to be in such an elevated position. To describe the justified anger arising from this as somehow "racist" is dishonest and irresponsible. Of all the columns and commentary I’ve read questioning how we arrived at this situation there has been no racism. Indeed the overwhelming bulk of it has been reasonably expressed concern about the apparatus that had permitted such an absurd situation to develop. Some have suggested that other academics found guilty of plagiarising had been spared the scrutiny of Mr Arday’s work. Cambridge University and its marketing department though, had craved media exposure for its progressive appointment of Mr Arday. It must have occurred to some on their academic appointments board that his garlanded CV and some of his more unlikely-sounding achievements would attract future scrutiny, even as they were pushing him in front of the cameras and microphones. Did none of them consider for a moment that this might disintegrate in contact with the real world? Or was their commitment to inclusion and diversity so shallow that they simply didn’t consider the future wellbeing of their young star? Did it not occur to them that an intervention may be required to prevent the delusion careering out of control? Or was it simply a case of "so long as we’re alright, that’s all that matters"? A depressingly predictable narrative has emerged following Jason Arday's death. This claims that he was only subject to such intense media scrutiny because he was black. Perhaps they’ve not been aware of what’s been happening in Scotland in recent years. Ask the poet, Jenny Lindsay, who lost her home and her career for her sex-realist views what a personal and professional hounding looks like. Likewise, Fiona Macdonald the trade union activist. The Labour MP, Joani Reid endured an appalling and vindictive campaign of extreme misogyny and sex-shaming in the wake of her husband’s arrest on suspicion of spying for China. These three women did nothing wrong. How many of those now indulging in race-baiting after Mr Arday's death expressed any sympathy for them? How many actively participated in humiliating them? Some of those now hurling accusations of racism gleefully celebrated the murder of Ann Widdecombe in the vilest terms imaginable. As they’d done with the murder of the American political activist, Charlie Kirk. Earlier this year, they hounded a man suffering from Tourette's because he had an unfortunate episode at a cinema awards night. The scrutiny of Mr Arday’s increasingly questionable CV and Cambridge University’s elevation of him was legitimate public-interest journalism that proceeded across both right-wing and left-wing publications. The university had enlisted the media’s participation in conferring academic sainthood on him and most were happy to indulge them. There’s a cost to flinging around false accusations of racism. It reinforces the motives of real racists and diminishes the gravity of real racism. Some of those who gleefully participated in brutal houndings of honest individuals whom they disagreed with on gender or faith, portray themselves as fiercely anti-racist. I wonder though, how deep their anti-racism runs."
Steven Pinker on X - "If you're an academic (and can prove it with an ORCID), consider signing a petition protesting the University of Ghent's suspension of a postdoc for exposing academic misconduct, a blatant violation of academic freedom (as always, regardless of your agreement with all of the whistleblower's views). http://johnarmstrongmaths.com/openletters/letter.php?campaign=cofnas https://johnarmstrongmaths.com/openletters/le"
Black Lives Matter - London | Facebook - "The disgusting eugenicist Nathan Cofnas who led a campaign against Jason Arday has been suspended by Ghent University in Belgium. The repellent creep is whining aplenty about being 'victimised', is he fc. Hateful rancid yt supremacist."
I was surprised all of the comments were hateful, then I remembered what group it was. Of course, harassment is only wrong if it threatens the left wing agenda.
Naturally, people were blaming Jews, Zionists and Israel
Dr. Sabreena Ghaffar-Siddiqui on X - "This is the man the British media took their tip on Jason Arday from. The man who helped spread the fake beheaded babies story that manufactured consent for genocide. Forget looking into this white/Jewish Zionist man’s background to see if he was a reliable source of information, they basically handed him the torch to lead the media lynching crusade."
No surprise the woke hate white people, Jews and "Zionists".
RogSat on X - "The Byline Times' hagiographic defence of Jason Arday boils down to: (a) exaggerated fundraising claims don’t matter because the charities involved were big; (b) he sometimes spoke before 11, therefore claims that he didn’t speak until 11 are vindicated; and (c) evidence that Arday did *something* is proof that everything he subsequently said about it was true - even where his own accounts contradict one another. This is how mythical heroes are made."
