Victor Davis Hanson: Who Killed Jason Arday?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome to the Daily Signal Podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take.

**Victor Davis Hanson** (0:08)
So, why did Jason Arday kill himself? Because he was embarrassed, and he was exposed for something he did. Who were the people actually responsible for his death? No one is responsible for his death except Jason Arday.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. What or who killed Jason Arday? That's the question that's being asked in the English-speaking intellectual academic university world.
Jason Arday was a 41-year-old British subject of African descent.
Who obtained a very rare prestigious professorship, a donship, at Cambridge University in the UK, which along with Oxford, are the two most prestigious colleges, universities in Britain, if not the English-speaking world. So he obviously drew a lot of attention. He magnified that attention by writing a memoir that just came out. In it, it was full of things that were not just made up or missed, but could not be physically possible. And they were completely contradicting what he said he was going to write when he wrote a 45-page prospectus to the publisher Simon & Schuster. For example, he said he had brain cancer. The book says he has testicular cancer. He says he ran 600 miles, 100 miles a day in six days. He ran 30 marathons, 26 miles each in a little over 30 days. He said he was a top pool player or billiards player. And then when they started looking at a scholarly account that gained him this professorship, there was hardly any scholarship there. And his dissertation had over 100 passages that were lifted, borrowed, stolen from other writers and scholars.
Then the question arose, what do you do with him when this memoir is going to be published that everybody knows is full of invention and lies, and not just lies, but things that cannot be true?
And then, of course, controversy. Why was he given this position when he was utterly unqualified, even if he had not lied and made things up about his life, and said he couldn't speak till he was 11, and said that he did all of these fantastic races, and he ran with a swollen leg, and things that were just crazy, he still should not have been hired.
He just committed suicide. This is why we're talking about him today. Given the negative publicity and controversy that he incurred, and people are very angry and written on the left, and they're accusing the right or conservatives for objecting to this appointment, and to chastising Cambridge for being fooled by this con artist. And the subtext is they would have never hired him had they not been committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and protocols that privilege one's race over merit in many cases. Let me just read to you what Cambridge University said about Jason Arday, even though there were rumors and there were investigations at the time suggesting that he was an abject plagiarist. Here's what high university officials released to the press. Jason Arday is an exceptional scholar of race inequality and education. He will contribute significantly to Cambridge research in this area and to addressing the underrepresentation of people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds, especially those from Black, Asian, and other minority ethnic communities. And a final parting praise, we are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research you do. That's demonstrably false. Cambridge knew it was false, and yet they had so invested in Jason Arday because they were virtue signaling to the world that they were morally superior to most people because in their great magnanimity they had allowed a Black scholar to enter this cloister of the world's top scholars. And after he killed himself, given that news accounts had exposed him as a plagiarist and a faker and a fabulous, then the left turned around and said, who didn't do that to other people who had committed these transgressions? Well, of course, they did. Stephen Glass, the new republic plagiarist and fabulous, he had his entire career destroyed and he was the object of ridicule in a movie about it. Stephen Ambrose was probably the most popular and beloved World War II and presidential historian of the last 30 years. When he was exposed as a plagiarist who stole a lot of passages from another scholar of the US bombing campaign in World War II, and he was utterly discredited and reviled for doing that.
So why did Jason Arday kill himself? Because he was embarrassed and he was exposed for something he did. Who were the people actually responsible for his death? No one is responsible for his death except Jason Arday. There's a lot of plagiarists in the world. There's a lot of fabulists in the world. There's a lot of con artists in the world who were exposed and they don't kill themselves. He chose to make that decision when his world that he had fabricated came crashing down upon him and also in collateral damage exposed the absurdity of diversity, equity, inclusion, racialism, and tribalism on anti-mericratic hiring and admissions. But we can point, if we're going to play this game, to two culprits. Simon & Schuster published his memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, right before his suicide, and they gave him a $1.4 million advance.