Jason Arday has exposed the fantastic stupidity of our intellectuals

Has there ever been a dumber clever person than Jolyon Maugham? For someone with a first-class Durham degree who reached the dizzying heights of King’s Counsel, he doesn’t half swallow a lot of bullshit. First he fell for trans-fabulism, becoming one of the noisiest acolytes of the delirious idea that you can have a cock and be a woman. Now he’s fallen for the alleged fabulism of Jason Arday, the disgraced ex-prof famous for his long hair and tall tales.

No sooner had Arday’s thesis and origin story been called into question than Maugham and his nutty Good Law Project were rushing to his defence. The fox-killing, case-losing irritant headed an open letter claiming Arday was the victim of a ‘smear’ campaign by ‘right-wing newspapers’. The claim that Arday plagiarised the work of others is ‘entirely false’, said the letter-signers. It’s ‘racism’, they yelped, as if it were still 2020, as if the cynical deployment of that R-word by bourgeois pricks were still sufficient to tame public discussion. We stand in ‘unwavering solidarity’ with Arday, the letter said.

Turns out their solidarity wasn’t all that unwavering. As the accusations against Arday piled up, causing him to part ways with Cambridge, Maugham engaged in some frantic arse-covering. He wrote a Substack post in which he clings for dear life to the idea that the scrutiny of Arday is racist while also acknowledging he doesn’t know the full story. I’ve been on ‘holiday’, he says (yes, he puts ‘holiday’ in quote marks, because he is far too busy and important to take an actual vacation like you plebs). ‘I do not have the expertise to speculate on what effects [Arday’s] neurodivergence may have had on how he spoke [about his past]’, he writes.

I think this word salad might be the closest thing we’ll ever get to a mea culpa from the turbo-smug likes of Mr Maugham. The class of imperious, insufferable Brexit-allergic bores to which Mr Maugham belongs is never going to say: ‘Okay, okay, we fucked up.’ But they might, once in a while, confess to having ‘lacked the expertise’ to ‘speculate’ so cockily on a ‘matter of public interest’. I wish they’d just admit it – that for all their intellectual pretensions, they are the biggest eejits in Britain, blown this way and that by whatever ideological wind happens to be howling this week.

It’s not just Maugham. Virtually the entire Smart Set (sic) fell for Arday’s alleged grift. From Cambridge to the BBC, from ‘black academia’ to Simon & Schuster, every ivory-tower dweller fawned like a fool over this bloke with an iffy backstory whose academic work consisted of critical-race bollocks about ‘cultural appropriation’ and ‘racist’ pop music. The Arday scandal has exposed the breathtaking credulity of the credentialled classes. This is more than the fall of a ‘DEI darling’ – it’s the puncturing, at last, of the fake moral authority of the graduate classes who so love to lord it over the rest of us.

Another member of the smugocracy who fell at Arday’s feet was James O’Brien, the LBC knob jockey who’s built an entire career on being a clever wanker. He, too, rushed to Arday’s defence against the accusations of academic fakery. Later, when more info came out, O’Brien said he felt ‘like a mug’. Well, if the shoe fits. Someone uncovered an old chat between Arday and O’Brien, from 2023, in which the prof gushes for three minutes straight over O’Brien’s history-shaping moral bravery. O’Brien chokes up. In the future, someone’s going to dig up this recording in the rubble of whatever remains of human society and marvel at the sheer arseholery of the 21st century.

O’Brien, of course, once wrote a book called How To Be Right. Yet he’s wrong about pretty much everything. That’s the clever crowd summed up – their arrogance is entirely out of proportion with their intellect. They pose as the singular possessors of moral truth and yet chat shit morning, noon and night. That’s the great service of the Arday scandal – it has ripped away the cultural elites’ veil of enlightenment to reveal the wide-eyed idiocy beneath. The very people who snootily view ordinary people as ‘low-information’ – translation: thick – are themselves the giddy propagators of half-truths, harebrained beliefs and post-scientific drivel. I don’t know about you but I am done with being called stupid by people who believe in lesbians with cocks.

For years, especially following the votes for Brexit and Trump in 2016, Ivy League types wrung their untoiled hands over the dim-witted throng. They came to view the masses as putty in the hands of demagogues, easily swayable by the sophistry of snake-oil populists. Yet show me the Brexiteer who displayed even a fraction of the obsequious devotion shown by Hilary Cremin as she welcomed Arday to Cambridge in 2023. She’s the head of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education. She all but bowed as she greeted Arday in front of the cameras and gushed about him being ‘the best in the world’ at what he does, whatever that might be.

The Cambridge elites suspended every one of their critical faculties in the presence of this god-child of DEI, this man who they clearly hoped would wash away Cambridge’s sins of whiteness. It was undiluted demagoguery. The amount of ideological effluent that flows from our universities these days is extraordinary. It was on these leafy quads that trans irrationalism first took root. And where the demented cult of white guilt spread like a pox. And where people would need a lie-down if someone asked them: ‘Where are you from?’ I’ll never forget speaking on campuses in the late 2010s and being told Brexit was a product of mass stupidity by plummy twats who thought it was an act of genocidal erasure to say ‘he’ about a fat bloke in a boob tube.

The more that universities became factories of elite reproduction, the more awash they became with ideological folly. The more they morphed from citadels of knowledge into businesses that inculcate correct-think into the next generation of rulers, the more they’ve fallen victim to the demagogic trickery of wokeness. If we take one lesson from the Arday scandal, let it be that the ‘high information’ elites are far more vulnerable to dogma and delusion than the ‘low information’ working classes. Give me the bawdy scepticism of everyday Britain over the high-minded gibberish of the intellectual classes any day of the week.