The myth of Saint Jason

This is the script from our latest video polemic. Watch it here.

Jason Arday is dead and the ‘racist’ mainstream media killed him. That has been the narrative spun since the disgraced Cambridge professor was tragically found dead at a property in south London last Friday.

Arday’s awful, untimely death, apparently by his own hand, has been held up by activists as the grimly predictable consequence of a weeks-long ‘smear campaign’ against him by the press. This was a ‘public assasination’. A ‘lynching’ of a brilliant black man for having the temerity to think he belonged at Cambridge.

There’s just one problem with this. It’s not true. And in the attempt to turn Arday into a martyr, brought down by a ‘white supremacist’ media, we see a kind of derangement, a racial hysteria, we had hoped had come and gone with 2020 and the peak of Black Lives Matter.

Arday was the story of the summer. Two weeks ago, he resigned from his professorship at Cambridge University, following mounting evidence that he had plagiarised large sections of his PhD thesis, fabricated personal achievements, lied about racist intimidation he had suffered at his workplace, and perhaps even exaggerated the extent of his autism in his youth.

This was a spectacular fall from grace. For Arday was more than an academic. He was a sensation. He guest-edited the Today programme, he was profiled on Good Morning America, a blockbuster memoir was in the works, all off the back of his incredible story. That of the poor, illiterate, ‘neurodiverse’ kid who became a top academic, marathon-runner and charity fundraiser.

For Cambridge, he was a symbol. When he was appointed in 2023, as a professor of sociology of education, Arday was presented as the embodiment of ‘the barriers faced by many under-represented groups across higher education’. His mere presence was proof that Cambridge was committed to fighting the racism and ableism that supposedly lurked among its colleges.

Since Arday’s death, there has been a desperate attempt to rewrite recent history – to downplay his lies, to smear journalists for doing their job, and all for straightforwardly political ends. This tragedy is being exploited to fit an agenda – one that is pro-DEI and anti-press freedom. And it needs to be called out.

The bogus narrative now being forged goes something like this. Arday was a young professor, minding his own business, when the media suddenly decided to take him down. He was accused of plagiarism, then ‘exonerated’. But still they kept on coming, so furious were they that a black man was ever given a perch at Cambridge.

It’s hard to know where to start with this. By the time Arday resigned, the same day that Cambridge finally opened an investigation into his academic conduct, the case against him was overwhelming. The Telegraph found over 100 passages in his PhD that were identical or near-identical to those in another student’s thesis. Worse still, in his later papers, he was accused of falsifying data, of lifting quotes from other academics and passing them off as quotes from his interviewees.

This would, if proven, amount to academic fraud – something much more serious than plain old plagiarism. And contrary to the chatter online, these weren’t just wild accusations, or rumours. The Times, the Telegraph and other publications pored over his output, commissioned independent academics to analyse it, courted a range of expert opinion. And what they found was damning.

The claim that Arday was ‘exonerated’ stems from one investigation by Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded Arday his PhD. It concluded his thesis was legit. As well it might. But this investigation hasn’t been published. Apparently, it’s strictly confidential. In the end, John Moores’ good word wasn’t enough for Cambridge, which was eventually forced to open its own inquiry, after years of burying its head in the sand.

Similarly, activists will point to the role one Nathan Cofnas has played in this story as proof this was all a ‘racist’ campaign against Arday from the off. Cofnas, a self-described ‘race realist’, posted a blog last month detailing extensive evidence of Arday’s plagiarism. But Cofnas was hardly the first or only person on this trail.

David Harris, professor emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University, began privately contacting Cambridge and John Moores about his concerns about Arday in 2023. Had Cambridge heeded Harris’s warnings, things could have turned out very differently. Jack Grove, a reporter at Times Higher Education, picked up these leads in 2025. Grove compiled 97 pages of evidence before his editors were spooked by a legal letter from top law firm Carter-Ruck. Most chillingly, Arday also reported Harris and Grove to the police for supposedly ‘harassing’ him.

Then came the revelations that Arday had likely embellished, invented or flat-out lied about his backstory. The details stretched credibility, to say the least. He claimed to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, a feat that would have placed him among the world’s elite athletes. He claimed to have raised an astounding £5 million for charity, a figure top celebrities would have struggled to achieve. And he claimed to have appeared in a TV series that began two decades before he was born. He also said he was mute until age 11 and illiterate until age 18, due to his autism, and to have suffered from everything from cancer to locked-in syndrome.

For all the talk of ‘right-wing’ smears, some of the most damning exposes in this area were published in liberal outlets. The Atlantic magazine found wild discrepancies between Arday’s memoir and his book proposal for the memoir. The New York Times spoke to old schoolmates of his, who recalled Arday as a talkative, wise-cracking child. Most damning of all, the Guardian found zero evidence to support Arday’s claim that he had been threatened at work by a masked man with a knife.

Arday also claimed a pig’s head was left on his parents’ doorstep in London. He said the Metropolitan Police had investigated this apparent hate crime and even found the butcher where the hog had been purchased. The Met says no such investigation ever took place. The butcher which Arday named had no recollection of this episode, either. When pressed by the Guardian, the butcher said ‘that’s the kind of thing we’d remember’.

I take no pleasure in recounting all of this, in light of how this sorry tale ended. I repeat it only to stress that there was a story here. The insistence this was a whole lot of nothing, cooked up by a racist press, is a vicious lie. This matters. Because the Arday debacle raises deep and difficult questions not only about one man’s credibility, but also about elite institutions that had – at best – turned a blind eye. It raises questions about his publisher, Simon & Schuster, which offered Arday a hefty advance for a memoir that couldn’t withstand a basic sniff test, let alone a diligent fact-checking.

And, above all, it raises questions about Cambridge. This is supposed to be one of the top universities in the world. And yet it junked the most basic standards in pursuit of an eye-catching hire. Someone who, with this fantastical story of triumphing over adversity, and in his critical race theory-enthused work, was the walking-talking embodiment of a DEI ideology that had become so fashionable following the rise of BLM.

Those who dared to point out that Arday clearly did not deserve his position, are being accused of racism. But, if anything, Arday’s ascent through the academic ranks underlines the racism of modern ‘anti-racism’. DEI essentially insists that academic standards must be lowered in order for ethnic minorities to thrive. It also tends to elevate ethnic-minority people who best fit the political script, over those who are most accomplished.

You see this all-too clearly in the New York Times; reporting. It found that, when Arday was interviewed for his position at Cambridge, he was up against ‘three more senior scholars, including two women of colour’. Despite his ‘modest publication record’, he was catapulted into one of the most esteemed academic positions in the country – apparently at the expense of more qualified ethnic-minority candidates.

We may never know why Arday did what he did, and said what he said. But the picture that emerges is one of a man who became trapped in his own fantasy land, and who was indulged by institutions who should have known better, until it all came tumbling down. He was put on a pedestal, from which he was bound to fall.

To accuse the media of effectively killing him is not only despicable, simplistic and wrong, it also risks chilling the free press, presenting scrutiny of public, influential figures as dicing with death. And it risks presenting the taking of one’s own life as an almost rational response to public criticism. This is a dangerous road to go down.

Jason Arday’s death was an unspeakable tragedy. But amid the hysteria of recent days, we risk learning all of the wrong lessons. Journalists are being smeared for telling the truth, while activists are insisting we swallow another batch of falsehoods. There are calls to subject the press to state regulation – ie, censorship. There are even lists of journalists who covered the Arday story doing the rounds online, including me, with activists fishing for embarrassing personal information about us. Despicably, this tragedy is being used as a soapbox – not only to call for more state control over the press, but also to shore up the toxic, racist ideology of DEI.

Everyone in possession of a pulse wishes Jason Arday, the man, were still with us. To say he erred is not to say he wasn’t a cherished friend, colleague, family member – a human being. The thought of anyone making that worst and most final of decisions grates against our common humanity. But this myth of Saint Jason, murdered by a racist press, is an affront to reason, truth and genuine equality, which we simply cannot abide.

Watch the polemic below: