You Can’t Con An Honest Man & The Case of Jason Arday

Brit coppers—do they still call them the Old Bill?—investigated reporter Jack Grove for months because Grove investigated serial truth fornicator and black Cambridge (now ex-) professor Jason Arday, a black professor, who is black, appointed because he was black, for the many lies, fabrications, colored rhodomontade, and hilarious whoppers this black professor, who is black, and who writes about how he is black and about how amazed he is about blackness, this being a serious academic subject, because, suspected the Old Bill, the reporter’s investigations may have been “racially motivated.“

This is part of the One Way Compassion Fallacy, applied to race. Blacks can be promoted, praised, pampered, pedestaled and pandered to, but they cannot, and must not, be criticized, critiqued, or subjected to the same standards of quality and evidence as anybody else. To engage in any of these “hateful” acts is “racist”, the dastardly ploy of “racists”.

Race, say academics in the West, does not exist, and, say those same academics, only whites are racist. Which proves, as the Arday case makes plain, that consistency is not required in academia. But never mind.

I wanted to write “unbelievable lies” above; alas, unbelievable now always means shockingly believable. But in this case, I wanted the word in the strict sense that Arday’s lies could not be believed by any rational person, or even by most irrational persons. Straining credulity isn’t in it. Baron Munchausen has from the grave surrendered his title of Tallest Tall Tale Teller. New York realtors blush when hearing Arday. The stories are so preposterous even used car salesmen won’t take Arday’s calls.

Yet academics, especially lady academics, swoon. Hard. I saw one interview from a woman academic of a certain age who gushed in Arday’s presence. “You are the best in the world in terms of the research you do,” she purred. She simpered—I swear this: she actually simpered. Did I imagine a hair flick? Did I heard the cameraman whisper “Get a room”? Maybe not, but whatever Arday was selling, she was lapping off the floor. This is not the Writer’s Barely Disguised Fetish, this is it out in the open.

Women like her, therefore, are the real miscreants in this story. Not Arday. He was only giving the drooling set what they wanted. It’s pure Economics 101: they demanded, he supplied. Arday gulled the willing, the set most desirous of being taken.

He did it the right way, too. There is no point to telling one small lie. That’s stupid, because it stands out, and when it’s discovered you’ll be forever explaining or attempting to evade it, with all efforts growing successively thiner. If you’re going to lie, turn the dial up to 11. Do not cease. Add new lies upon old lies. Build a castle of lies. Make them preposterosities so fantastic that academics will say to themselves, “No one could possibly lie about matters this large!”

If you’re good enough, your victims will work for you. Thus, when some non-academic challenges the lies, the academics will scream “Racism!”

Yes, they will, and yes, they have. Not only that, when they hear this magic word—and though you will doubt what I am about to say, I promise you it is so—this perfect word will transform the profusion of lies into truths. Academics will begin to defend and explain each and all of the lies.

They will say, “Of course a black man can write acres of prose that accidentally looks just the exact wording used by others, likely because of the extreme pressure of first writing an auto-biography which the publisher lost, during the time in which he was a visiting professor at institutes who cannot remember hosting him, all while running 35 full marathons in 30 days, half with a broken leg, which was right after he ran 600 miles on a treadmill in 6 days to raise money for charity, which was right after he beat a knife-carrying masked man who tried to break into his building, and it was probably that same bad man who sent a severed pig’s head to his house, because racism, and that this black man did all this even though he could not speak until he was 12, and could not read or write until he was 18, which explains how he could have starred in a TV show that wasn’t produced before he was born, which might have been some kind of time travel caused by the brain tumor that plagued him, and he had removed by people we’re not allowed to know about, two weeks before he took his PhD exam. You racist.”

The magic word is the magic word for good reason. It works.

And works best of all on academics. The people you pay ridiculous sums to for the sake of your children’s education.

They always say you can’t con an honest man. That wisdom holds here. Cambridge academics gobbled up Arday for their own sakes, to make themselves feel good that they promoted an exciting black over some dull white. They wanted Arday’s glory to be true so bad they were willing to throw all the intellectual capital they had at him. They lost it all.

As in any classic con, Arday took his mark and then brilliantly cooled him off. He resigned right as Cambridge announced an investigation—which now won’t happen. Meaning he, and his future marks, will go on defending his con and he looks for his next target. I shouldn’t wonder he ends up an MP.

BONUS

Academics will not let themselves see unpopular (with their class) truths. By what is no coincidence, as I was writing this I came across this tweet which explains the Arday situation exactly:

theres this move that philosophers do where theyre like “if P is true then Q follows, and Q is ethically terrifying so P must be false” and if baffles me that anyone would think this way

This is the Academics Fallacy. Look for it in the second edition of Everything You Believe Is Wrong, coming this fall.

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