The Arday Wars

First of all, the most continually annoying thing about almost everything in our contemporary discourse, is the following:

• To us, the sceptical position, that is, a balanced view, is right (i.e., right-and-wrong right), and therefore, perhaps inevitably, “right” (i.e., Right-and-Left right). We think that our opponents are wrong about everything, though, since we are sceptical, we want to be satirical about them without destroying or cancelling them.
• To our opponents, the fact that scepticism leads (in our world) to rightism invalidates the scepticism: so our opponents remain stupid and Leftist, and so stupid that they are incapable of understanding how Leftist they are and how tyrannical they are in their continual memorial-damnation of the “far Right.”

They think they are normal, whereas we know they are abnormal. And it is the abnormal who want to “sort out” (Polanski’s words) the normal (consider the anger felt by the trans / climate / BLM brigades when they are confuted), whereas the normal just want to be kind to the abnormal and classify them as village idiots rather than as ADHD sufferers.

We have suffered a vast civilisational shift since the 1960s or whenever. The shift happened and we went along with it by consensus. But the consensus broke after 2016, or whenever, and now we have an argument – sometimes called the culture war – between the old view and the new view. The old view is, basically, that of Hitchens and Starkey and Liddle, that much has gone wrong and should ideally be reversed. The UK is in crisis, possible civil war, debt, migration, false belief, demoralisation of workers, etc. The new view, on the other hand, is that all is well in England, as long as we have “hope, not hate,” and watch the BBC, and listen to our teachers and HR employees, and enjoy places like e.g. North Berwick or the city of York, which I have just visited, where there is every sign that civilisation is continuing without any difficulty. The new view dominates, someone wrote recently, in London and the greater London that comprises Bristol, Oxford, Brighton and Cambridge: but it also exists in prosperous old cities – the “heritage” bits – and in the country of scorched grass, unscorched grass, 12th Century churches, trees, heather, bog and whatnot, as sculpted by a thousand years of unwilding and enclosing history.

I complicate.

The point is that we divide, as usual, into two sides on the Arday question:

• On the “Right” the History of Jason Arday is a tale of fraud and DEI in the University.
• On the “Left” the Tragedy of Jason Arday is a tale of racism in the media and online.

And we divide on who to praise and blame:

• The “Right” praises the newspapers and blames BBC and the University of Cambridge.
• The “Left,” in alliance with the BBC and the University of Cambridge in trying though not always succeeding in suppressing the story, now that the story is out, blames the newspapers for having not only unearthed the story but having remained steady about it.

There are several pieces that have been written about the Arday affair that I think are brilliant. One is that of our Editor-in-Chief, Lord Young of Acton, who pointed out in the Spectator, by relating the affair to his own experience of “media harassment”, that it is very likely that it is not the steady and resolute criticisms of one’s opponents that makes one despair but the wavering allegiance of and later betrayal by one’s supposed allies. “The Horror When Your Own Side Turns On You.” This is one of those suggestions that is pleasantly twisted, but importantly so. Let’s state it as a principle:

You expect your opponents to oppose you. Therefore it is only your allies who can betray you. And betrayal is more damaging than opposition.

You must have enjoyed seeing Aaron Bastani’s retraction of his suggestion that Arday was a “conman.” Perhaps Bastani has glimpsed that his comments were far more damaging for Arday and the Arday position than those of figures on the Right, Charles Moore, etc. Though Bastani’s reasons for changing his views was doubtless the noisy resentment and sheeplike BLMery from the sub-Novara mob.

Another good piece in the Spectator was by Steve Edgington. “Will the BBC Apologise For Its Role in the Jason Arday Story?” he asked. This piece made explicit something which had been only implicit before. Implicit: all the TV reports about Arday had lots of high-quality footage of him. Explicit: well, this is because the BBC by itself had “produced at least 11 radio programmes (totalling nearly six hours of Arday content), four news articles and two TV interviews” between summer 2020 and summer 2026. So Arday was not only a University of Cambridge protégé but also a BBC protégé. You know, “protégé” means “someone who is protected”? So no wonder that 1. the University of Cambridge and the BBC were not equipped to investigate Arday, and 2. that when they, too, were forced by the newspapers to face the facts, they began to waver and thus launched on Arday the “The Horror When Your Own Side Turns On You.”

Finally, there is that piece by Jesse Singal in which he nicely points out that 1. the Left are saying the Right is racist for having exposed the story, whereas in fact 2. the Left (BBC, University of Cambridge) were originally racist for boosting Arday for reasons of race without doing their due diligence on his claims and capacities and achievements. That’s another twisting argument: one the Right understands when it looks at it, but one the Left simply refuses to recognise. You don’t like the word Right and Left? Let me define Left as the class of people who refuse to recognise that they might be racist for holding up Arday as an icon without reading his work or caring about its quality.

This story is not yet finished. It is unfortunate that the story is now fully about Nathan Cofnas as well as about Jason Arday. Cofnas is the fellow who published on Substack his study of Arday’s plagiarism, from which it was taken up by the Telegraph and others. Now the University of Ghent has suspended Cofnas. The truth is that the whole story has become a vast supernova explosion. First, simply, it was a story of fraud and exposure of fraud and denial of fraud. But of course and alas this was against a backdrop of race vs merit. So, second, it became a battle over the “diversity poster boy”: for and against, depending on whether one likes having diversity poster boys or not. But, third, the suicide meant that it has been magnified and fahrenheit451ed until we now have a battle between “racists-drove-Arday-to-death” and “it-is-not-about-race”. Now, fourth, and because of this – because of the race argument – Nathan Cofnas has been dragged in. If Cofnas were only an innocent passer-by then perhaps nothing would have happened. But his own academic position is, by mirroring and reaction, also in jeopardy. Why? Because, by first irony, he was rejected by Cambridge whereas Arday was elevated by Cambridge. (I assume you know the story: which is always garbled by the press.) And, second irony, Cofnas is, we are told, a “race-realist”. He is deeply interested in this sort of thing and has views about it. This seems a bit unwise to me: a bit unacademic, actually. I’d have advised Cofnas to study something else for his Ph.D. and the rest: Incans or Latin or something. Then he could have criticised Arday without being equalled-and-opposited by the BLM Arday Vigil people who want to find in Cofnas a Judas, a Satan, a “Racist” against whom they can elevate Arday into secular sainthood.

Let me give you a taste of the sort of thing we now hear on the Left. It is likely to be heard for a long time, as certain people try to hold up Jason Arday as a sort of good-looking aspirational higher-educated equivalent of George Floyd. Here is a petition to interfere with newspapers:

249 articles were published across 15 major British news outlets in the period between 24th July and the date of his death (14th August). Worryingly, 188 articles were written in the nine-day period between his resignation and his death (5th–14th August). These articles scrutinised every area of Professor Arday’s life.

Ergo,

This petition calls for legislative action to impose limitations on the number of news articles published about a single individual within a defined time frame.

Meanwhile “Amnesty UK’s Disabled People’s Human Rights Network, Student Action Network, Anti-Racism Network, Feminist Network and Queer Rights Network issue a joint statement” supporting the Good Law Project from the viewpoint of “Disabled, neurodivergent, racialised people” by saying: “Professor Arday was a victim of a brutal, racist witch hunt.”

Finally, Sneha Krishnan, Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Oxford, declares for Al Jazeera: “Jason Arday’s death is institutional murder.”

The New Statesman, last week, before Arday’s death, was quite balanced about Arday: in pieces by Pratinav Anil (of Oxford) and David Runciman (of Cambridge). One wonders whether it, too, will have to fall in line with the slowly rigor-mortising response to the story that is now likely to be militarised by the Left, in such a way that war continues to be waged.

Postscript. On August 28th I hear that Cofnas, after the intervention of the US Ambassador to Belgium, has been reinstated. Even that story is amusing. Cofnas seems to have appeared on every off-piste podcast from Starkey’s to the Sceptic’s to Triggernometry’s to Bret Weinstein’s. He originally mentioned, in his X post about his suspension from the University of Ghent, that the Rector of that University Petra de Sutter was formerly a Green MP. Ah, politics! I googled this lady and then discovered that her ladyishness was originally a bit laddish, so to speak, as she has been transgender since 2004. So Cofnas had been quite restrained: anyhow, he now thanks her for reinstating him. But there is plenty of material here for further ruminations on the culture wars. The major thing to notice is that no Democrat US Ambassador to Belgium would have waded in like Team America on behalf of a ‘Race Realist’. There is also the point that both the Master of Jesus College and the Rector of the University of Ghent do not look particularly academic.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.