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A tragic and important story is unfolding in the United Kingdom that has captivated the attention of the entire world. Naturally, left-wing politicians, activists, and media are learning the exact opposite of the correct lesson from the whole sordid affair.
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All hell broke loose after former Cambridge University professor Jason Arday died on Friday, in what many suspect was a death by suicide. This came after widespread media furor surrounding the embattled professor who had climbed to the highest levels of British society on the back of his racial identity and life story but was shown to have committed plagiarism, falsified data, and lied extensively about his life and accomplishments.
The depths of Arday’s deceit are incredible in the truest sense: They leave you genuinely incredulous.
“He did not merely claim to have had a challenging life — he claimed at times to have survived and recovered from non-verbal autism, locked-in syndrome, two brain tumours and testicular cancer,” the brilliant writer Fraser Myers chronicled for Spiked. “He claimed not only to have been athletic, but also to have played football for Crystal Palace, played semi-professional snooker and run 30 marathons in 35 days (nine on a broken leg). He said he was on the TV show Seven Up, even though it aired several decades before he was born. To dismiss all this as a non-story, or merely about plagiarism or a few minor academic errors, as his defenders now do, is to ignore what made the scandal so compelling.”
“Nor was the Arday affair merely ginned up by the right,” he continues. “One of the most damning exposés came from the Guardian. Indeed, it was black Guardian journalist Lanre Bakare who exposed Arday’s lurid false claim that he had been sent a severed pig’s head in the post. The New York Times found evidence that Arday’s claim to have grown up as ‘non-verbal’ was false, witheringly concluding that his remarkable trajectory ‘had no precedent in medical literature’.”
Even this recounting only scratches the surface of Arday’s lies. What’s more, when critics attempted to bring evidence of the former professor’s fraudulence to light, he responded by reporting them to the police — leading to monthslong investigations into his critics.
And this all comes in the context that Arday was welcomed into a prestigious perch at Cambridge and given almost farcically uncritical coverage by elite media institutions such as the BBC, specifically because of his identity as a black academic and despite what even the New York Times deemed insufficient qualifications for his appointment.
An entire life built on a house of cards of lies. An embarrassingly blatant example of diversity, equity, and inclusion supplanting merit. And a humiliating failure by supposedly elite institutions to uphold minimal standards, conduct even basic vetting, or properly respond once credible allegations of wrongdoing were raised.
Is it really any wonder the story exploded in the media once it was finally exposed?
None of this changes the fact that Arday’s death is a tragedy. He should still be with us today, and no matter his many faults and misdeeds, his life, like all human life, had intrinsic value and worth. He will surely be mourned by his family and friends, and we all should extend our sympathies and condolences to them.
However, if he did take his own life, then Arday’s death is both literally and figuratively his own fault. Yet instead of honestly reckoning with the countless institutional and personal failures that led his saga to a tragic end, prominent British politicians and activists are blaming the media for reporting on his salacious scandals and myriad misdeeds — even going so far as to demand new and dystopian degrees of government censorship of the press.
Black Lives Matter UK bizarrely and falsely claimed that Jason Arday was “lynched” by the press.
“Freedom of the press should never have been freedom to own and dominate the press,” leftist politician and Green Party leader Zack Polanski posted on X, referring to the Arday story. “(And push constant misinformation and lies.) Media regulation. Now.”
The Times further reports that Green Party members have since “proposed giving a statutory press regulator the power to police the consciences of journalists under sweeping controls on the media.” What could possibly go wrong?
Perhaps most bizarrely of all, thousands of people, and world-famous groups such as Amnesty UK, have publicly supported a proposed “Jason’s Law” that would have the government crack down on media outlets in response to this story. (Ironically, Amnesty International was initially founded in part as an organization dedicated to freedom of the press.)
This is, on its face, deeply illiberal and censorious. Media outlets have the right to cover whatever they want, however much they want, and the idea of politicians and government agents getting to dictate that is nothing short of Orwellian.
As free speech advocate Greg Lukianoff sarcastically quipped on X, “Freedom of the press is a kind of tyranny, if you think about it. Don’t we all deserve freedom FROM speech?”
Jokes aside, of course, we don’t. There is not and can never be any sort of right to be free from criticism or offense. And if the threat or prospect of suicide can silence truthful media reporting, then every emotionally unstable or manipulative public has just gained the ultimate narcissistic veto against ever being held accountable.
The other ironic twist here is that the lack of press freedom in the United Kingdom, before all this proposed new censorship, actually contributed to how out of control this situation got before it all exploded.
“It was because of the U.K.’s lack of press protections that this story took so long to come out, which, in the end, increased the damage done to Arday,” journalist Jesse Singal notes in a piece for the Dispatch. “Times Higher Education had a story in the works last year, but Arday sicced an infamous British law firm, Carter-Ruck, on the outlet, killing it. That would not have happened in the United States, because our defamation laws are much more media-friendly (as strange as that might sound during the Trump era).”
That’s right: If the U.K. weren’t so censorious and hostile to press freedom already, the story would’ve come out sooner, and ultimately the scandal might not’ve gotten so out of control. Maybe, although it’s impossible to truly know, in an alternate universe where his fraud was called out before his house of cards grew so many stories tall, Arday might still be alive today.
So, if anything, the real lessons of Arday’s tragic death are twofold. One, elevating people based on their identity and lowering basic standards of scrutiny isn’t just wrong on its own terms, but it also sets up even those beneficiaries for a fall from grace that can turn tragic. And, most importantly, the U.K. desperately needs its own version of the First Amendment — lest the authoritarian fools losing their minds right now get their way.
Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.
