David has already touched on this today but there are a couple more threads I wanted to pull so if you're not completely sick of this story yet, read on.
First of all, I was taking a brief weekend trip so I missed it when Ibram X. Kendi published his take on Arday this past Saturday. It is everything you would imagine it to be. According to Kendi, Arday is the victim of racist propaganda which must include me since I wrote four or five posts about him last week. In any case, let's Fisk this a little.
To be a prominent antiracist Black scholar is to know you are a target, almost totally surrounded by resentments...
As a prominent Black scholar, you know the attacks haunt and hunt you like a lynch mob.
And then, one day, the attacks are at your door.
The attacks are wielded by racist propagandists, resenting you for shining a light on anti-Black racism. They hope everyone finally picks up their baseless claims. They know that to dim your light is to dim the light on their anti-Blackness.
The phrase "their baseless claims" is doing a lot of work here. What if the claims aren't baseless, as is certainly true in this case? What if the claims are, to adopt a phrase, based and in fact entirely provable in at least some cases.
The attacks come from centrist and progressive White scholars and writers, resenting your positions and honors and pay. They believe the great replacement theory that you’ve taken their spots, their honors, their money, like the followers of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage.
This is not what "great replacement theory" means. That's usually associated with a large influx of immigrants. What he's really talking about is affirmative action or DEI, specifically equity. That's the idea that says we give extra help to those who need it so that outcomes are more or less equal. Of course that's not how Cambridge or any other institution of higher learning is supposed to work. The goal is to get the best teachers and thinkers to accumulate and pass on knowledge, not to provide jobs for people based on skin color.
The university that propped you up for years now abandons you amid all the attacks. It announces an investigation to protect its reputation at the expense of yours, even when it knows the attackers have been coming at you for years, even when it knows they are the problem that needs to be investigated, not you.
This is not, in fact, what happened. In reality, the university bent over backwards to defend Arday, shrugging off clear evidence of perjury and instead allowing the university that issued him a doctorate to investigate the claims. Cambridge only reversed course when it became clear through accurate reporting that at least some of Arday's claims were definite fabrications. Did he run 600 miles in 6 days? He did not. Did he run 30 marathons in as many days? He did not. Did he raise five million pounds for charity? He did not. Was he featured in a famous British documentary as a child? He was not. Was he an adjunct professor at three other universities? All three were asked and said he was not. In fact, he appeared to have no connection at all to two of them.
The White-owned, mainstream media doesn’t investigate the problem: those attackers bent on your “downfall,” believing as you fall, they will rise.
The White-owned, mainstream media circulates their attacks. And piles on and on and on and on.
The White-owned, mainstream media published 249 articles in 22 days on Jason Arday, according to data from NewsCord, a UK media watchdog.
Kendi is such a clown. It's amazing that anyone ever takes him seriously. There is no white mafia running the media. Arday was obviously a fraud and while the school was happy to look the other way, some news outlets finally looked into it. For his trouble, one of the first to investigate was referred to the police who later told him he wasn't being charged but that he needed to stay away from Arday who felt mentally disturbed by the allegations.
Anyway, you'll never convince Kendi that Arday was an intellectual fraud. He was black and that's enough, apparently, to guarantee his virtue.
NY Times opinion columnist has seen some of these reactions to Arday's death, including Kendi's, and has a warning for progressives eager to defend him at all cost. Stop now before you hand the opposition another easy issue to beat you with. Regular readers know I'm not what you'd call a fan of Goldberg but she does occasionally tell people on her side of the aisle things they don't really want to hear.
In the wake of Arday’s death, many on the left are blaming the media. “The media lynched Jason Arday,” declared Ibram X. Kendi. The head of a Cambridge college called for an official inquiry into the “media onslaught.”
Important British progressives, including Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party, and several Labour M.P.s, signed an open letter demanding some sort of official oversight of journalistic decision making. “Self-regulation of the press has comprehensively failed,” it said. The writer Will Self called, in an open letter to Prime Minister Andy Burnham, for the police to begin “impounding computers,” presumably belonging to people involved in covering the scandal.
Here's why all of this is a terrible mistake.
Some who once championed Arday seem to be trying to deflect from their own embarrassing credulity, and it is unlikely to work. A deep resentment of both growing societal diversity and bureaucratic diversity initiatives, or D.E.I., fuels the right; it’s why Arday’s story was such catnip to the conservative press. But heavy-handed progressive attempts to stifle questions about those initiatives — to use institutional power to police the boundaries of public discourse about race, gender and religion — have a way of making that resentment even more politically potent.
Well, yes. If you hand someone a job they didn't deserve and then shout down everyone who points out that person was a fraud, you tend to look like a DEI cultist. And that doesn't help convince normal people that you're right, it only convinces them you've joined a partisan cult that can't tell the truth even when it's hitting you in the face.
That’s what happened in America, where a ferocious cultural backlash — much of it involving complaints of left-wing censoriousness — helped spawn the nightmare of Donald Trump’s second presidency. And it could happen in Britain, where Nigel Farage’s nativist Reform U.K. party is amassing frightening strength. This is a particularly bad moment to let the right claim the mantle of free speech.
That's a very anodyne way of saying that militant progressives trying to silence people they disagree with by demanding they quit, shouting over them, making threats, online bullying, etc. convinced a lot of people the left was too extreme and couldn't be trusted. I honestly can't count the number of articles I wrote about the student takeover at Evergreen State University or the dozens of incidents of the heckler's veto at universities across the country. And that's not to mention the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story or the government requests to remove individual Twitter accounts.
Again, boiling all of this down to "complaints about left-wing censoriousness" is like reducing the story of Joe Biden's mental health to "complaints about his fitness." It's leaving out so much of so much importance for the entire nation that it might as well be a complete lie. That said, Goldberg is not wrong about this:
Like most of Europe, Britain tends to have a less absolutist attitude toward free speech than America does, so the idea of increasing public regulation might appear less threatening there. Still, recent American experience teaches that any limits on speech countenanced by the left will be turned against leftists a hundredfold when the right is in power.
Yes, the right will respond badly to left-wing censorship, as it always does, because they know that censorship is largely aimed at them. Most of the professors and speakers being shouted down on campus are on the right or have at least been misunderstood as having some right-wing views.
In retrospect, it would have been much better for all concerned if the story of his scholarly mistakes and biographical inventions had broken in a careful, professional outlet like Times Higher Education, instead of festering until it turned into a right-wing parable.
And right there, in a nutshell, is why this site and many others like it exist. Because what leftists often do is expect everyone on their side to stay quiet about uncomfortable truths for the cause. We all saw how that worked out with Joe "sharp as a tack" Biden. They lie and lie and threaten and silence until they absolutely can't anymore. And then no one ever apologizes for all the lying or failure to uncover the truth when it mattered. And the people on the right, the ones who said for years that people on the left were lying (about Biden or Arday or Russia collusion or the Steele dossier) are never given any public credit for being correct.
That's how this hideous machinery of the left-wing media operates. In a better world, Arday would never have gotten the job in the first place because some actual reporter would have pointed out he was a fraud years ago. Maybe then he'd still be alive.
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