Jason Arday, Donald Trump, and the Post-Truth World

For Rep. Andrew Clyde, the January 6 insurrection was a “normal tourist visit”; for the Good Law Project, Jason Arday is the victim of smear campaign by “right-wing media.”

There’s a point where the Left and the Right converge. It’s called the “horseshoe effect,” and it’s perfectly illustrated by the responses above to the Arday scandal and January 6. For both MAGA and Arday’s defenders, truth doesn’t matter, lies are accepted as facts, and tribe matters above all.

Arday’s serial lies about his autism, career, and accomplishments led to his transformation into a media star in England, a Cambridge university professorship, and a book contract with Simon & Shuster with an advance of 1.4 million (whether dollars or pounds was never specified). While some privately questioned the integrity of Arday’s research, it took a Substack article by Nathan Cofnas to bring the story into the public arena, resulting in a major scandal.

Once Arday’s multiple frauds were revealed, you’d think his academic employers and defenders would ask themselves how they could be fooled by someone whose life story is improbable fiction and whose scholarship is plagiarized. But instead of contrition and introspection, both blamed racism and the press for hounding Arday to his death.

Cofnas has been widely disparaged as a racist, and the University of Ghent suspended him for three months. Amnesty International claimed that “Professor Arday was a victim of a brutal, racist witch hunt”; the New England Journal of Medicine published an opinion piece asserting that “there are systemic pressures working against your [Black academics] success, your well-being, and in the case of Jason Arday — your life”; and Cambridge’s Chancellor, Chris Smith, condemned the “racist feeding frenzy” surrounding Arday.

It’s the press, not Arday, that’s at fault and needs to be controlled. A group of Black academics demanded that the Press Standards Organization “consider the nature and extent of reporting concerning Professor Arday’s private life and whether relevant editorial standards were upheld.” The Good Law Project asserted in an open letter “There cannot be any doubt that Dr Arday’s tragic death was the direct, foreseeable and foreseen result of press harassment,” and because the press cannot be trusted to self-regulate, they ask the Prime Minister “to commission an immediate public inquiry into how to ensure a responsible press given its contribution to Dr Arday’s tragic death.” As of this writing, 150,493 people, including MPs and academics, have signed this letter (the number keeps rising). Even Nature, widely considered the pre-eminent journal for scientific research, ignores Arday’s misdeeds and blames the press for Arday’s premature death.

Incredibly, no-one holds Arday responsible for lying and plagiarizing. The Good Law Project ignores Arday’s multiple lies, and the NEJM author actually says that Arday’s behavior doesn’t matter: “I don’t care whether or not any of these allegations against Prof. Arday were true.” Nor is she alone: “I have no idea if, how, why, or to what degree Jason may have done or not done what he is accused of having done. And I do not care. At all,” writes Steven Thrasher, a journalism prof at Northwestern University.

Depicting Arday as an innocent victim of White supremacy forgets how Arday did his level best to silence the critics. After Prof. Davis Harris about “puzzling similarities” between one of Arday’s articles and an earlier study by someone else, Arday told him that he should pay more attention to dismantling racism, and to not contact him again. But Arday wasn’t done. He reported Harris to the police, who, to their credit, took no action.

Jack Grove was not so lucky. After Arday found out about the article Grove was writing for the Times Higher Education about Arday’s plagiarism, Arday hired Carter-Ruck, a law firm known for intimidating journalists and whose previous clients include Qatar and Russian oligarchs. Grove’s article was spiked. Someone then reported Grove to Scotland Yard, which spent four months investigating before closing the case. Who paid for Carter-Ruck’s services remains a mystery.

Some of Arday’s defenders go off the wall entirely. The distinguished political philosopher Jason Stanley asserted that plagiarism isn’t “the mere overlap of sentences,” even though that’s exactly how universities define plagiarism.” Others fall back on conspiracy theories.

What is one to make of this sordid tale? Certainly, the Arday affair shows the danger of hiring not by merit, but by skin color and identity. Because Arday ticked off all the relevant boxes (Black, neurodivergent, and telegenic), Prof. Hilary Cremin (who fawned over Arday, claiming that his research “was the best in the world”) and the rest of Education Department didn’t look closely at his CV or take seriously the problems with his teaching, which one student described as “terrible.”

The number of professors on both sides of the Atlantic that defend Arday, discounting his lies and blaming everything on race, is particularly galling because we should be guided by evidence, not ideology. And yet, the pro-Ardayites either minimize his multiple fabulations or say they just don’t care. A Facebook friend and otherwise distinguished scholar posted: “We shouldn’t even know about issues with his scholarship. If he told or wrote untruths about life—how the hell is that our business?” It’s “our” business because Arday makes all higher ed look bad: witness the number of people asserting that all academics commit plagiarism. And it’s “our” business because the agenda dominating Cambridge’s Faculty of Education school is rife in academia.

But while the Arday affair reveals academia’s many problems, there’s an even larger lesson here, and this is where the two ends of the horseshoe meet.  Even though politics and academia are different fields with different goals (truth v. winning), the pro-Ardayites and MAGA use the same strategies to defend their heroes.

But while the Arday affair reveals academia’s many problems, there’s an even larger lesson here, and this is where the two ends of the horseshoe meet.

A study in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology looked at surveys of Trump supporters after the January 6 attack on the Capital.  Some refused to believe the allegations despite the evidence; others claimed that all politicians do the same (hard to maintain with January 6); and a third group said that Trump’s misdeeds are less important than his policies. In other words, tribe is more important than evidence, evidence is subordinate to loyalty, and those levelling accusations are guilty of the same.

Arday’s defenders exhibit the same behavior. Despite irrefutable evidence, many refuse to admit that Arday committed plagiarism and lied about his life. In any event, plagiarism, so they say, is everywhere in academia (not true), and it’s more important to defend a Black man regardless of what he’s done. Both attack and try to silence the critics. For Trump, it’s using the Department of Justice to prosecute his political enemies; for Arday, it’s siccing Carter-Ruck on THE and Jack Grove.

Still, there are limits to the post-truth world. Arday’s case shows that, to paraphrase Macbeth, eventually truth will out. You can lie and cheat for only so long before your dishonesty is uncovered. As for Trump, things are not going well for him. Trump’s approval rating is plummeting; persistent inflation, his association with Jeffrey Epstein, and Trump’s war with Iran has led to MAGA defections; and Canada refuses to back down in the face of his economic bullying.

But there will be no accountability for either. Due to his premature death, we will never know what Arday was thinking when he told all these lies and plagiarized. Was he a naïf? Or, more likely, a deliberate fraudster, amazed at how easy it was to fool the world? When The Guardian asked Arday about his abuse and harassment claims, Arday responded, “I thought you would just believe me.” Evidently, that’s what many did until, finally, someone didn’t. As for Trump, thanks to the Supreme Court, he is immune from criminal prosecution, and the Republican majority in Congress lets Trump do whatever he wants.

While Arday and Trump may escape personal consequences, the responses to their misdeeds has exposed the corruption undermining the institutions they represent: academia by the excesses of progressivism, and American politics by MAGA’s sycophantic loyalty. Consequently, both have suffered a catastrophic loss of credibility, and it will be a very long time before they earn it back.

Peter C. Herman is an emeritus professor of literature at San Diego State University. His latest book is “Early Modern Others: Resisting Bias in Renaissance Literature.”