Event: Jason Arday

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. Enjoying spiked? Why not make an instant, one-off donation? We are funded by you. Thank you! For Cambridge, he was a symbol. When he was appointed in 2023, as a professor of sociology of…