I have often said that shamelessness is one of the great superpowers in politics. Almost without exception — and those exceptions have everything to do with timing alone — politicians can survive almost any scandal as long as they don't physically go to jail.
If one can survive the initial wave of opprobrium attached to a scandal by merely sticking it out and coasting, one can thrive. Even Graham Platner, who survived multiple scandals until an actual criminal rape accusation derailed his ability to fundraise, is back doing rallies and speeches.
Bangor Daily News: Graham Platner will headline Ellsworth, Maine Labor Day rally
— Politics & Poll Tracker 📡 (@PollTracker2024) August 13, 2026
Platner will speak at the rally, slated for noon on September 7 outside Ellsworth City Hall, about the history of unions and the role organized labor plays in communities across the country,…
Nazi turned Communist fake oysterman rapist is being politically revived. Jay Jones gets elected. Gavin Newsom is a likely presidential candidate. Adam Schiff is a Senator. The Clintons...I could go on, but what's the point? If you can get people to ignore reality and set aside mere ethics and moral judgment, anything is possible.
We live in a post-truth world, or at least the Left does. If reality is an obstacle to achieving their hopes and dreams, reality is completely dispensable, because reality is a construct of the mind. It is Cartesianism taken to its logical extreme. All that exists is Mind.
Damn you, Descartes. You gave us Critical Theory, if by a roundabout path.
When I think of the essence of the culture war it is this. There are many thousands of our fellow citizens living entirely make-believe lives, utterly, metaphysically detached from the rest of us.
— Jacob Reynolds (@jacobreynolds) August 17, 2026
They are more different to us than aliens. https://t.co/G126Xf2LDi
We are seeing this play out in the Jason Arday case, where the hopes and dreams of the left have been (temporarily) crushed by the reality that Arday just wasn't all that. He was a fabulist, not what they call in the TV and film world a "magical negro." Stephen King is the master of inventing magical negroes, who are a recurring trope in his books and their adaptations. Whether it is Dick Halloran in The Shining or John Coffey in The Green Mile, King attributes magical powers to the pure hearts of black men and women who help redeem the world because of their long-suffering status.
Arday was your archetypal magical negro brought to life. His suffering was immense, if fantastical, and his achievements superhuman, quite literally. He was the best in the world at everything he did, and the only flaw in the ointment was that every part of his story was as made up as a Stephen King novel.
Leftists are furious that their magical negro was exposed as a con man, and even worse that they were exposed as his accomplices. So they are reinventing reality in real time, making him the victim of a lynching.
We have gone past "Move On" to "It's all your fault, not his or Cambridge's.
There is an anti-Cofnas hate rally in Trafalgar Square with ~15,000 attendees. If I were in London there is a real possibility that I would be murdered.
— Nathan Cofnas (@nathancofnas) August 17, 2026
1000s of academics & journalists knew the truth about Jason Arday for more than a year. Now you know why no one said anything. https://t.co/V8Y0xzrRYG
Yesterday, liberals held a rally celebrating Jason Arday and condemning his "accusers" whose sin was telling the truth. These people are angry and insisting that speaking the truth makes you a liar and a murderer, and are even threatening to destroy anybody involved in revealing Arday for being a fraud.
Martin Larper King https://t.co/Db3JFGs0Oz
— Róisín Michaux (@RoisinMichaux) August 18, 2026
It's a worldwide outpouring of hatred, and as with all expressions of hatred by the leftists, it is couched in terms that demand we accept their hatred as expressions of virtue, love, and compassion. "If you don't love what we love, you are evil and deserve to be harmed."
It's the academic version of "Kill a TERF." Arday's thousands of supporters are baying for blood.
“White lies matter”
— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) August 18, 2026
Photos from my secret attendance at the Jason Arday memorial in London on Aug. 17.
Arday was a Cambridge University DEI academic who had to resign in disgrace after journalists began reporting on his plagiarism, academic fraud and serial hoaxes.
Thousands… pic.twitter.com/OFvZ39lUvj
“White lies matter”
Photos from my secret attendance at the Jason Arday memorial in London on Aug. 17.
Arday was a Cambridge University DEI academic who had to resign in disgrace after journalists began reporting on his plagiarism, academic fraud and serial hoaxes.
Thousands attended the rally, many of them nearly in tears. Arday k—lled himself after his lies were revealed by the press.
The speakers said those who exposed Arday are to blame for his death.
Our crime is that we pointed out that Arday was not, as Cambridge insisted, the "best in the world" at his academic discipline. In fact, he was barely literate, and everybody knew it. His colleagues and thesis advisors never read his work; his audiences and colleagues knew that he merely regurgitated, poorly, the stupid ideas of others; and even his book publisher quietly revised his biography and his writing on a semi-regular basis as they discovered that his story kept changing.
Even the title of his thesis was plagiarized, and yet he ascended to the heights of academia, because everybody desperately wanted the magical negro to save their souls.
The worst part is Arday’s PhD thesis, which, if the media and the entire DEI regime had been honest for even a moment, should have ended this saga almost as soon as it began.
— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) August 17, 2026
It is bad enough that the title of the thesis contains a grammatical error. What is infinitely worse is… https://t.co/vwUcxK5hhc pic.twitter.com/SdGTgB8HjA
The worst part is Arday’s PhD thesis, which, if the media and the entire DEI regime had been honest for even a moment, should have ended this saga almost as soon as it began.
It is bad enough that the title of the thesis contains a grammatical error. What is infinitely worse is that the error itself was imported from a thesis he plagiarized. In the original, the apostrophe in “student teachers’ reflective practice” is correct because the reflective practice belongs to the student teachers. Arday then rearranged the wording, apparently to make the title look less obviously plagiarized, but was so careless in his deception that he left the apostrophe behind even though “student teachers” was no longer possessive.
And perhaps most damning of all, this thesis supposedly passed through the entire academic apparatus of supervision, review, assessment and examination without anyone noticing a glaring error in the title. It’s almost as if no one ever read the thing. They were handing out PhDs like candy and now they blame Nathan Cofnas for pointing it out.
Cambridge, like all institutions, has a motto: Hinc lucem et pocula sacra, which roughly translates to From here, light and sacred draughts" or "From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge." Most of us assume that "enlightenment and sacred knowledge" refer to discovering the truth, but in the post-truth world it just means "our fantasies."
One of the worst parts of this entire Jason Arday saga, other than how it ended, is that even after his fraud was already public and extensively documented, Cambridge University decided that the appropriate response was to denounce the exposure of the truth as a “vile campaign to… https://t.co/D7oDgWiCbI pic.twitter.com/cD0RuvNecW
— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) August 17, 2026
One of the worst parts of this entire Jason Arday saga, other than how it ended, is that even after his fraud was already public and extensively documented, Cambridge University decided that the appropriate response was to denounce the exposure of the truth as a “vile campaign to undermine his credibility.”
I still find it hard to believe they actually said that. Even after everything was out in the open, Cambridge still seemed to think it could simply invoke its institutional authority, browbeat everyone into submission, and make both the truth and the problem disappear, even though Cambridge itself had created the problem in the first place.
The main task of the cultural elite these days is to demand we accept falsehoods and punish those who don't. I saw this firsthand in academia during my stint in the intellectual sewer, and we have all seen that in public life over the past decade as we keep getting fed The Narrative™ and punished when we don't accept it.
What we saw in that square outside Cambridge was just another version of the harridans who hounded us in grocery stores for not wearing masks, or a thousand Jimmy Kimmels hoping the unvaccinated die of COVID.
Let a thousand Faucis bloom.
There is evidence that Simon & Schuster knew as early as July 2025 that there were questions about Arday’s credibility, because that’s when they made stealth edits to his bio on their speakers bureau to take out some of his fantastical claims about his life.…
— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) August 18, 2026
Jason Arday was "sharp as a tack" and could Homer in Greek while doing handstands (or, in this case, run nine marathons with a fractured leg), just like Joe Biden, and if you say differently, it is you who deserves to die because you are a murderer.
I've just watched this on #C4News, with Lord Woolley, Principal of @HomertonCollege, decrying “the public assassination of Jason Arday”, and leading the crowd in a Spartacus-like chant of “I am Jason Arday”. This is feverish, cultic stuff. If Nathan Cofnas kills himself because… https://t.co/kECfhf1FtJ
— Adrian Hilton (@Adrian_Hilton) August 17, 2026
I've just watched this on #C4News, with Lord Woolley, Principal of @HomertonCollege, decrying “the public assassination of Jason Arday”, and leading the crowd in a Spartacus-like chant of “I am Jason Arday”. This is feverish, cultic stuff. If Nathan Cofnas kills himself because of the current pile-on he's getting, would Lord Wolley lead chants of “I am Nathan Cofnas”, or would he put the suicide down to justifiable academic opprobrium, the reasonable loss of his job, and the inevitable media criticism?
Now we are told to expect a running effort to personally destroy anybody who had impious thoughts that amounted to "the truth matters" and "Cambridge University should pursue enlightenment and precious knowledge." Doing so will shatter the illusions that the Left holds dear, and there is a social and perhaps physical death penalty for doing so.
There is something deeply ironic about condemning a supposed “witch hunt” while publishing a list of journalists’ names and asking strangers for personal and professional information about them. pic.twitter.com/xUVsXDoGBn
— SEEN in Journalism (@JournalismSEEN) August 18, 2026
These people have captured the commanding heights of our culture, and every time we think that we have broken their bubble and exposed the rotten core of this ideology, the post-truth mob demonstrates that disdaining the truth is a superpower.
Arday was never the real issue. He was an example of the corruption, not its cause. Aside from being the perfect example of how corrupt our institutions have become, he was little more than a garden-variety con man with a serious mental illness that needed treatment.
What matters is the corruption at the heart of our cultural institutions, and that corruption will persist as long as we let it.
Unfortunately, that means nuking the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
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