Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

August 16, 2026

WILL JASON ARDAY BE MEMORY HOLED OR DISMISSED AS A ONE-OFF BAD APPLE? They’re the Ones Who Told Us to Pay Attention to Jason Arday.

Yes, Arday is a symptom, and him getting away with his lies as long as he did indicates that Cambridge is in even worse shape than most of us thought. If universities don’t want the scrutiny that comes with being high-prestige institutions, they can no longer continue with the assumption that the rest of us should be deferring to them on intellectual, moral, or political issues. You’re the ones who told us that being the “youngest black professor in the history of Cambridge” was newsworthy.

“Crémieux” tweets, “The people trying to dismiss criticism of Arday by saying he’s irrelevant or small potatoes have to reckon with the fact that he was celebrated by the mainstream.”

That may be understating it:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 16th, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS: Terry Moran Says ABC News Is ‘Liberal Institution’ That Lacks ‘Viewpoint Diversity’ — Well, Duh!

Much like Hollywood, the on-air talent is uniformly to the left, but the behind the cameras crew are not. No wonder in 2000, Leonardo DiCaprio could seamlessly switch over from acting to interviewing “Bill Clinton about the environment for Earth Day. The staff, including Sam Donaldson, and outside critics erupted in a barrage of outrage. How dare ABC suggest that a dim-bulb movie star can do the same job as a seasoned journalist? The defensiveness was telling. Because the truth is that most news readers are little more than actors. That’s one reason so many attractive young women want to be an actress/model/news anchor when they grow up.”

While Leslie Stahl couldn’t name any conservatives at CBS 23 years ago when asked by Cal Thomas on a Fox News show, thanks to radical right wing zealot Bari Weiss, Stahl can now actually name, err, two: 

● Lefties Freak Out Over ‘Right-Wing Religious Zealot’ Ross Douthat Joining 60 Minutes.

● “[I]n recent years, as a columnist for The [London] Times and on Sky News, [Trevor] Phillips has moved further towards a small-c conservative liberalism, with tough love for some long-standing fixations of the Left.”

Posted at 4:25 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 16th, 2026

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH BILL MAHER IS A VOICE OF SANITY: Bill Maher thinks immigrants must assimilate, accept American values and principles to be in US: ‘Not negotiable.’

Exit quote:

UPDATE: Great moments in intersectionality:

Flashback to Daniel Greenfield in 2023: The Left Can Have Islam or LGBTQA+. Not Both. The Democrat coalition is falling apart.

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 16th, 2026

ROGER KIMBALL: The Unmaking of Jason Arday.

Overwhelmed, Arday resigned his chair. I am not sure whether it was a sense of humor or merely chutzpah that encouraged him to leave the composition of his letter of resignation to AI, but there seems little doubt that AI was the “onlie begetter” of the missive. Alas, on Friday, August 14, the humiliation became too much. The police were called because Arday was found “unresponsive.” He was pronounced dead on the scene, an apparent suicide.

Who was to blame? A curious subhead to a story in The Wall Street Journal seems to me to get the question completely wrong. “Jason Arday’s academic rise and fall set off a debate about whether he was a plagiarist or victim of a racial witch hunt.” But that is a false dichotomy. There is no doubt that Arday was a plagiarist. And far from being the victim of “a racial witch hunt,” he was the victim of his own lies and intemperate behavior. And let’s not forget that his fabulations were directed not only at aggrandizing himself. He was also perfectly happy to play the race card to damage others, as when he complained to the police that journalists who were investigating his credentials were guilty of harassing him. The police duly opened a four-month-long investigation into a journalist who was simply going about his job.

Cambridge will of course be investigating how someone like Arday could have gamed the system to reach such spectacular heights at a comparatively young age. Nahh, just kidding. They’re blaming the media for doing their jobs: Cambridge college head: Investigate media onslaught against Jason Arday.

The head of a Cambridge college has called for an investigation into the “media onslaught” against Jason Arday.

Lord Woolley, the principal of Homerton College, Cambridge, said the 41-year-old had been subjected to the “most horrendous, toxic, vicious witch hunt” before his death.

Mr Arday was pronounced dead at an address in Battersea, south London, on Friday.

He had resigned from his position as professor of sociology of education the week before after a plagiarism row.

On Sunday, Lord Woolley said: “We need an investigation into the media onslaught, the vicious media onslaught.”

Why not investigate the media for their original not-so-vicious onslaught, which placed Arday on an impossibly tall pedestal?

“Already, leftists are blaming the media for Arday’s death. Hacks hounded him into despair, they say. I’m not having this,” Brendan O’Neill writes. Once Arday was discovered to be a fabulist, “The media is the only institution in this entire tragic scandal that did its job properly. Journalists found a story and they told it. It was the academy and Arday’s colleagues who failed to do their jobs. Who failed to prize merit over identity, and failed to foresee the public embarrassment that would befall their falsely promoted friend. They ignored the truth – the media found it… Let our monument to Jason Arday be the restoration of the true ideal of equality. We couldn’t save Jason but we can save merit from the monstrous jaws of identity.”

Tweet concludes, “Still waiting for the media to A) go at Cambridge and B) attack itself. For falling for all of this.”

UPDATE:

Evergreen:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 16th, 2026

JAMES JAY CARAFANO: Donald Trump Already Won the Iran War. Ending It Is Tehran’s Problem Now.

Outmatched by Enemies. Iran doesn’t really have sufficient combat power to take the war to their enemies in any major way. The U.S. won’t oblige by trying to fight a land war in Iran. What’s worse, Trump had promised “the biggest attack since World War II.” If the regime survived, they could have maybe claimed that as a kind of a win. For now, Trump has decided he won’t give them the chance. What’s more, the operational pause gives the U.S. forces a breather, time to rearm and refit, and take advantage of a slower operational tempo. For the Iranians, that means the longer the U.S. sits out there, the stronger they could become. If Trump does decide to go all out next time—that could be really bad for the IRGC.

Abandoned by Hope. The IRGC must have thought for sure by now Americans would have tired of this war like a Netflix series that just went on a season too long. They hope dragging the war into the midterms will be a nightmare for the White House.  But there are no signs of that. Trump has already discounted the midterms, signaling he won’t change his strategy in hopes of turning a few seats in the next election. In Trump Time, Trump has two and a half years to watch Iranians play stupid games.

But does he? As the Brothers Judd wrote in their 2001 review of Lewis Sorely’s A Better War:

Having failed to achieve their aims militarily, the North Vietnamese turned their attention to the Paris Peace Talks.  They were extraordinarily fortunate to be dealing with Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, two opportunists of the worst sort, who were willing to negotiate a deal which left the North with troops in South Vietnam.  When President Thieu balked at this and threatened to scuttle the talks, the North backed off of the whole deal and Nixon ordered the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi.  For eleven days, waves of B-52’s, each carrying 108 500-pound and 750-pound bombs, pummeled the North.  For perhaps the only time during the entire War, the North was subjected to total war, and they were forced to return to the negotiating table.  Sorley cites Sir Robert Thompson’s assessment that:

In my view, on December 30, 1972, after eleven days of those B-52 attacks on the Hanoi area,
you had won the war.  It was over.

At that point, the Viet Cong had been destroyed, we had definitely won the insurgency phase of the War.  Additionally, the North had been defeated in the initial phase of conventional warfare, and had finally had the War brought home to them in a significant way.  Though the overall War was certainly not over, it was sitting there, just waiting to be won.

And I think we know how that went from there:

Posted at 10:48 am by Ed Driscoll on Aug 16th, 2026

CHRISTIAN TOTO: The Brink of War Makes Reagan Human, Not a Caricature.

[Jeff] Daniels’ Reagan leans heavily on his good sense of humor, a grasp of basic psychology and endless resolve. He isn’t a caricature or a man teetering on the edge of senility. In fact, taking 2024’s “Reagan” out of the equation, it’s the most positive portrayal of the world leader in any Hollywood production.

That’s because it hails from Angel Studios, not La La Land.

“The Brink of War” isn’t dumbed down, but it’s accessible enough for teen viewers as well as adults. It’s hard to grasp the scope of the meeting if audiences weren’t alive back in 1986.

What’s most shocking – slash -welcome? President Reagan’s frequent attacks on the inhumanity at the heart of Communism. “War” doesn’t overplay that message, but it’s a welcome departure from Hollywood’s head-in-the-sand approach to the fascist cause.

Daniels is outstanding here, giving a consistently strong performance that isn’t bogged down by unnecessary tics or personal attacks on the president. He’s not deified, per se, and his stubbornness and folksy charm both help and hinder the mission in play.

In order to remain employable in Hollywood, Daniels is quick to point out that he doesn’t share Reagan’s worldview: Jeff Daniels on Reagan-Reykjavik Movie: ‘We Are All One World.’

Liberal actor Jeff Daniels plays President Ronald Reagan in the movie The Brink of War about the 1986 Reykjavik Summit, but during a promotional interview with CBS Saturday Morning, he appeared to have completely missed the point of the story. According to him, the key takeaway is that we should all aspire to the amoral hippie-ism of John Lennon, “We’re all one person. We are all one world. You know, John Lennon wasn’t wrong in his song ‘Imagine.’”

Except that he was; in his last year, Lennon admitted to be being embarrassed by his political phase culminating in “Imagine” — and reportedly supported Reagan over the hapless Carter during the 1980 election cycle: Trapped in 1972.

Posted at 8:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Aug 16th, 2026

WE NEED A COMPLETE AND TOTAL SHUTDOWN OF CAMBRIDGE UNTIL WE CAN FIGURE OUT JUST WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON THERE: Why is Cambridge platforming Islamic creationism?

At Charles Darwin’s old university, where a college is named after him, Darwin’s discovery is now described by one Cambridge researcher as an example of “potential challenges posed by Eurocentric* monoculture.”

It is the latest sign of fundamental problems at Cambridge’s education faculty, the same department which hired Jason Arday.

The project which platforms the creationist claims, the Islamic Educator Learning Community (IELC), is led by Cambridge’s assistant research professor of education, Farah Ahmed, a former activist in the since banned terror group Hizb ut-Tahrir. Ahmed’s extraordinary CV, and her long record of grossly bigoted, extremist and separatist views, were revealed by a 2002 pamphlet exposed by The Spectator on Tuesday.

IELC is “hosted by” and “partners with” a university body called the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange, Camtree. Camtree is a project of Hughes Hall, the Cambridge University college where Ahmed is a governing fellow. Ahmed is also an “affiliate” of Camtree.

IELC publishes on its website, with a Camtree address, a paper on “Islamic scientific critical consciousness” which asks: “Does the common modern biological assumption that humans have common ancestry with other life forms conflict with [Islamic] religious beliefs about God creating Adam and Eve?”

* I’m pretty sure most British parents footing the bills for their sons and daughters’ educations are rather hoping that their kids are being taught from a largely “Eurocentric” point of view.

Meanwhile:

Tweet concludes, “and [Cofnas’] position quietly expired while the university dithered. Arday did not clear the bars his professoriate peers had to clear, he was defended anyway, and he was propped up by administrators who failed to do due diligence. One scholar was punished for an opinion; the other was protected despite misconduct that objective methods could verify. Two different treatments, one shared instinct: expedience trumps evidence.”

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Aug 16th, 2026

August 15, 2026

DON’T EAT THE BROWN ACID:

Reminder: Woodstock Occurred in the Middle of a Pandemic.

As did Apollo 11, the first manned moon landing, whose astronauts returned to earth on July 24th, 1969, and released from a 21 day quarantine on August 10th:

The Apollo 11 crew in the mobile quarantine facility aboard the USS Hornet. Richard Nixon had come to greet them. From left to right, Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin.

UPDATE: The Making of the Counter Culture.

Posted at 11:20 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 15th, 2026

STEVE DEACE: Tucker Is Now Deconstructing His Own Work.

Blaze Media personality Steve Deace comments on Tucker Carlson’s interview with Hunter Biden, recalling his past interview with “laptop repairman” Tony Bobulinski:

* * * * * * * *

Maybe the most celebrated work Tucker did at Fox was Tony Bobulinski, Hunter Biden’s associate. What was Joe’s name? Was it “the big guy,” that Bobulinski was telling us that Hunter was trying to get grift deals with the ChiComs and others on behalf of “the big guy,” right?

Now, see, the deconstruction goes all the way down. Tucker’s now deconstructing his own work.

And he’s saying, “Hey, the Jews made me do this. The Bidens are really the persecuted people here.”

We’ve reached rock bottom at this point.

I’m not even sure what would warrant doing this segment anymore, unless or until Tucker just flat-out converts to Islam and appears, you know, with a towel on his head. I’m not sure where there is left to go here.

Earlier from Stephen Kruiser: Cute Couple — Tucker Carlson and Hunter Biden Find Each Other. “If Carlson really does want to run for president, his pathological hatred for Israel pretty much obligates him to run as a Democrat. He’s going to need to start working on his commie bona fides if he wants to get any cred with them. Don’t be surprised to see him brunching with Hasan Piker soon.”

Tucker’s already learned to stop worrying and love the New York Times, so brunch with Piker wouldn’t be that far out of place for him.

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 15th, 2026

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT! China ‘funding pro-Palestine marches in UK.’

China is suspected of funding pro-Palestine marches in the UK, The Telegraph can disclose.

US politicians investigating alleged secret Chinese backing of Code Pink, a far-Left feminist protest group established in the US, are examining its activities in Britain as part of an inquiry into foreign interference.

Code Pink has organised protests in the UK against Britain’s involvement in “the genocide in Gaza”, encouraged its activists to demonstrate outside RAF bases, and issued statements claiming that Britain’s leaders have been “bought by Zionism”.

The investigation comes amid concern that Beijing is seeking to exploit divisive causes in the West to deepen social tensions and wage what critics describe as “political warfare” against its adversaries.

The Telegraph can reveal that the US investigation is examining £250,000 in alleged payments to a company linked to Code Pink in the UK from firms connected to Neville Roy Singham, a tech tycoon accused of financing Chinese propaganda around the world.

As Eyal Yakoby tweets, “We told you that this is a foreign psyop intent on destroying the West.”

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 15th, 2026

RIP: Dave Marsh, Bruce Springsteen Biographer and Rock Critic, Dies at 76.

Dave Marsh, the music critic and biographer who documented the early days of Bruce Springsteen in his influential 1979 book “Born to Run,” died Friday in his Connecticut home. He was 76.

Jim Rotolo, who hosts the Springsteen-fan cast “The Wild & The Innocent” on SiriusXM, confirmed Marsh’s death in a Facebook post on Saturday morning.

“Dave wrote several books about Bruce as part of a remarkable body of work spanning some 25 titles,” Rotolo wrote, along with a picture of himself, Springsteen and Marsh. “A longtime rock critic for Creem and Rolling Stone, he was also one of the creators of ‘E Street Radio’ and hosted ‘Kick Out the Jams’ on SiriusXM for 19 years. Rest easy, Dave. Thank you for everything, my friend. You will be missed.”

“Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story” was one of the first extensive biographies written about the Boss, who was still rising through his young career when it was published in 1979. “Born to Run” followed Springsteen’s journey from local New Jersey rocker to budding global phenomenon and shared a name with Springsteen’s 1975 breakout album.

Marsh, who penned several works about Springsteen, also published texts on the Who, Sly & the Family Stone, the Beatles, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Black Sabbath. He was also one of the earliest editors of Creem magazine and was a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.

I’ve read Marsh’s 1982 book on The Who, Hope I Die Before I Get Old numerous times over the years. His obit at Rolling Stone mentions his rather more caustic side when he found an artist he couldn’t hero worship:

Marsh was a fearless critic, rarely holding back even with his most caustic and controversial views. “Whatever its claims, Queen isn’t here just to entertain,” he wrote in a notorious Rolling Stone review of Queens’ 1979 LP Jazz. “This group has come to make it clear exactly who is superior and who is inferior. Its anthem, ‘We Will Rock You,’ is a marching order: you will not rock us, we will rock you. Indeed, Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band. The whole thing makes me wonder why anyone would indulge these creeps and their polluting ideas.”

He had similar disdain for Journey, Air Supply, and Kiss, once bragging that he did his “share to keep [Kiss] off the ballot” during his 26-year tenure on the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominating committee.

Similarly, Marsh’s Wikipedia profile adds:

Marsh has been referred to as a “grumpy rock and roll journalist” due to his acerbic comments on popular musicians whom he dislikes. In 1976, he wrote that Led Zeppelin had an “insurmountable flaw” in drummer John Bonham, whom he saw as “something like clinically incompetent” and responsible for marring every Zeppelin album to date.

Somehow I think most of those artists managed to survive his withering reviews.

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 15th, 2026

“A NOTABLE NUMBER OF AWFLs WANT THEIR POLITICAL OPPONENTS DEAD:”

Earlier: The Assassination Fan Base.

Posted at 4:54 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 15th, 2026

JONATHAN TURLEY: The worse it gets, the better it is: American leftism is thriving on its own failures.

From New York to California, the American left is proving that nothing succeeds like failure. From immigration to taxes to health care, politicians are playing to their past fiascos to push an even more radical agenda.

Take immigration. Many, including the Democratic Socialists, have called for open borders or disbanding ICE. After the Biden administration chose to allow millions of undocumented people to enter the country, most Democrats are now calling for “pathways” to make them citizens. After all, they argue, there are too many to deport.

We now know the open border was a choice. The Trump administration immediately stopped crossings using the same laws Biden had refused to enforce. As expected, Democrats are expressing horror at the thought that the government would try to deport the millions that they allowed and even encouraged to enter the country.

The same is true on public health policy. Remember when ObamaCare was going to reduce health care costs and improve health care options? While insisting that they did not want government-run single-payer healthcare, Democrats promised that ObamaCare would lower costs while allowing you to keep your own doctor and health care plan. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised his plan would “lower your premiums by up to $2,500 per family per year.”

As Stephen Miller tweeted in June after Nithya Raman bested Spencer Pratt to run again Karen Bass in L.A. and thus perpetuate that city’s continued collapse:

Tweet continues, “See the entire defund the police movement and homelessness nonprofits in California. Gavin Newsom promised to end homelessness and instead it ballooned on purpose. This is why there was such enormous flip out over Trump renovating the reflecting pool or Spencer Pratt’s campaign. Once people realize that things can be improved a lot of nonprofits and public union/money dries up. There is a reason why cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, and now Denver all look the same because they are all run by the same people running the exact same scam. Mostly the concern I see on the political right over AI is cultural because there’s nothing more that the political left and the Democratic Party wants them to get their claws into AI. Because once an AI is programmed to tell people that boys can become girls it’s the death of truth. Data centers being built isn’t the problem, the data in those data centers is.”

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 15th, 2026

STEVE HAYWARD: The Left’s Permanent Derangement — It’s more than Donald Trump.

Cold War liberals may have been weak-minded and timorous, as James Burnham and others never tired of pointing out, but they understood that Stalin was no hero, that Soviet Communism was an obstacle to social democratic aspirations in the West, and fellow-travelling was not to be tolerated. Equally important for Cold War liberals was the disposition to see America as a decent country, even as they remained highly critical of American capitalism, militarism, imperialism, and racism.

The latter point was not always to be expected. Left-wing intellectuals reveled in their alienation and contempt for America especially when the Great Depression seemed to validate their Marxist worldview. But sometime early in World War II Mary McCarthy shed her aloofness, consciously recognizing she wanted America and its allies to win. Her attitude quickly spread. Shortly after the war, Partisan Review startled the Left’s intellectual circles by noting “a reaffirmation and rediscovery of America is under way,” and Lionel Trilling grudgingly conceded that “for the first time in the history of the modern American intellectual, America is not to be conceived of as a priori the vulgarest and stupidest nation of the world.”

On some questions, many of the Dissent-ers sounded increasingly like neoconservatives, and might have completed the odyssey to the Right but for their stubborn attachment to dreamy socialist utopias. (Some of those at Partisan Review, such as William Barrett, did shed their socialist commitments—the key step, as it turns out—and became neoconservatives.) At the very least, a number of these conditionally pro-American Old Left figures understood early on that the so-called “New Left” of the 1960s was bad news for democratic socialists. Irving Howe thought the New Left amounted to “kamikaze radicalism.”

***

The Old Left decisively lost (and ultimately surrendered) this intramural fight, but the conditional American loyalty remained. Enough so that in spring 2002, just months after the 9/11 attacks, Dissent’s then-editor Michael Walzer, whom The New Republic’s Martin Peretz described as “the unanointed dean of the American left,” threw down the provocation, “Can There Be a Decent Left?” A serious student of just war theory among other issues, Walzer was appalled by what he perceived to be “the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved.” Needless to say, his essay was not well received at the very moment that Bush Derangement Syndrome was taking hold.

To paraphrase AOC, woke 0.0 was crazy.

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 15th, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:

Jonah’s tweet concludes, “I think the most annoying thing about these people — not the worst thing in a moral/intellectual sense, just the most annoying thing — is how cliched and boring they are to anyone who knows anything about this stuff. These are not edgy, new, exciting positions. This crap was in the streets and sitting in crumbled pamphlets in coffee houses in the 1960s, 1930s, heck in the 1890s. It’s just weak-minded radical cosplay for people who think incanting stale ideas makes you transgressive and cool if your audience already agrees with you or if they’re even more ignorant than you. She’s just an academic version of Hasan Piker and no more impressive.”

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 15th, 2026

OLD AND BUSTED: “There are no second acts in American lives.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon, 1941.

The New Hotness? “American culture is wild, irrepressible, and exuberant and full of hucksters always coming up with new ways to reinvent themselves. There’s a shamelessness to Americans that Europeans perhaps look down upon but that is a great source of creativity and excitement.”

Posted at 12:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 15th, 2026

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Jason Arday Should Never Have Been Allowed High Enough to Fall as He Did.

I think, for example, that Arday’s professional colleagues — the men and women who passed him up through the scholarly ranks at warp speed — ought to account for putting him in the position to fail, despite such obvious lack of merit and so many strange red flags. We don’t have to speculate about whether they doubted his credentials, scholarship, or intellectual capacities: In The Guardian, Afua Hirsch reveals that black studies academics in the U.K. had quietly pegged him as a fraud long ago:

The fact is that many of Arday’s black peers in academic sociology have been voicing concerns about him for a while. He seemed, to them, to have come out of nowhere. His performance at high-profile academic events did not match the credentials that were being touted. I have had various conversations with sociology professors in which this has been the main topic of conversation, and their questions began to mount into a list. They did not voice them publicly because we all know that whatever the truth or the outcome, he would be unlikely to be treated fairly and we would all be damaged in the process.

What a damning confession — and published in a national newspaper, no less. Did any of Arday’s “black peers” ever think to quietly go to their department heads for a frank discussion? Maybe if one of Arday’s “peers” had taken him aside, man-to-man, and called BS on his impossible tales (“no way did you run 600 miles in six days, friend”) he wouldn’t have felt emboldened to make up so many spectacular lies about his life — and put them in a memoir, no less. After all, he’d gotten away with the entire grand fable until then! Arday wouldn’t have been able to bring such a truly catastrophic amount of shame crashing down upon his head had he not been coddled, excused, and even encouraged at times.

What did these people’s reflexive tribalism get them? A man whose obvious lies about himself, whose track record of grievous academic misconduct, and whose frank inability to actually do the work on any level found himself promoted, on a fast-moving conveyor belt, to the place where his many lies could no longer be concealed. His peers claim they knew all this — and they stayed quiet even as white administrators promoted him into a position where he was destined to flame out.

Even the New York Times is surprisingly tough on Cambridge’s role in Arday’s self-immolation: Professor’s Death Leaves Behind Hard Questions for Cambridge on Race and Hiring.

Prominent academics on the left agree that Cambridge must answer for its decisions. They say that the ordeal has fueled racism and cast unjustified aspersions on accomplished scholars of color.

Cambridge said on Friday that it was “desperately saddened” to hear of Dr. Arday’s death. An administrator, in a letter to the faculty on Tuesday, called the misconduct accusations “an aberration” and “troubling.” A spokesman separately declined to answer a list of questions about his hiring and his time there, citing a planned independent investigation — a difficult inquiry that will likely be made even more uncomfortable following Dr. Arday’s death.

Dr. Arday, for his part, had worked hard to silence any questioning of his credentials. When a journalist for Times Higher Education, a respected academic industry publication, asked about plagiarism last year, a prominent British defamation law firm helped kill the article, the journalist said. Dr. Arday later reported the journalist to the police.

When a scholar from another university questioned his work, Dr. Arday turned the tables and filed a racism complaint with the other school, according to someone with direct knowledge of the complaint. That person, like some others who spoke to The Times, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid being dragged publicly into the controversy.

Dr. Arday never squarely addressed the questions of plagiarism and fabrication.

But what is clear from interviews and public records is that elements of the story would have been easy for Cambridge to check.

Greg Lukianoff reminders readers that this isn’t the first time that an academician has succumbed to massive public scrutiny by ending his own life. “Mike Adams was mobbed and cancelled in 2020, and he killed himself shortly thereafter, and the American press largely treated it like he had it coming. Also, some commenters on the Internet seemed almost gleeful about his death. That was wrong then and it would be wrong now.”

Personally, I had hoped that Arday would have taken a few years to hide out, self-reflect, and then reemerge to tell the public about how deeply the rot has set into academia. He would have been a massive hit on the British talk show circuit:

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Aug 15th, 2026

PROFILES OF THE FUTURE – AND THE FUTURE IS NOW: Ordinary Abundance. “Edward Bellamy once imagined that music on demand would be ‘the limit of human felicity.’ A modern apartment is full of things that once drew the same kind of awe.”

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Aug 15th, 2026

OH TO BE IN ENGLAND: Netanyahu mocks UK as ‘Islamic Republic of Britain.’

“[Churchill and his son] came here and covered the Six Day War in a way that was very positive for us. Try to find that now in Britain, which you could call the Islamic Republic of Britain,” he joked to the host. “Try finding that.”

“All the Europeans, all of Europe has already become like that, hasn’t it?” the host asked in response.

Netanyahu replied: “Yes, but you know, someone said the first Islamic republic with nuclear weapons will be the Islamic Republic of Britain. We’re making sure there won’t be another one — you know, in Iran.”

British politicians and their operatives with bylines were in full high dudgeon mode when JD Vance said that in 2024: Trump’s Vance pick riles UK politicians after ‘Islamophobic’ remarks

Posted at 8:44 am by Ed Driscoll on Aug 15th, 2026

IT RARELY ENDS WELL FOR A MASCOT OF THE ANOINTED: “The real [Arday] story is of an elite academic world that was so excited by a compelling narrative that they rushed a clearly mentally unbalanced man with no real qualifications to the heights of academia because he ticked so many useful boxes.”

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Aug 15th, 2026
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