Some ideas are so absurd that you would think that there is only one appropriate refutation, because it’s almost pointless to argue with anyone who holds them.
Unfortunately, this response is not only unpersuasive to the person to whom it is aimed, but to the oh-so-enlightened people who will rush to their defense because they feel sorry that something bad happened.
Or should I say, something bad happened to somebody they happen to like or be sympathetic toward; they are perfectly happy to see something bad happen to people they dislike, and often go so far as to celebrate it with glee.
Such is the case with Jason Arday’s exposure as a fraud (and, more importantly, Cambridge University’s). Arday killed himself because he refused to live with the consequences of what he did, so obviously, according to these people, the solution to their sadness is making it illegal to expose bad people the Left likes to opprobrium.
https://t.co/h81j2Mav7z
— The Free Speech Union (@SpeechUnion) August 18, 2026
The Green Party is on the warpath against the media and social media as it seeks to clamp down on free speech.
On top of the Green Party leader wanting to ‘sort out the press’, an emergency motion backed by 89 members has been submitted ahead of the party’s Autumn Conference under the title ‘Justice for Jason Arday: Stopping Racist Smear Campaigns and Reforming Media Power’.
The motion calls for the establishment of two state regulatory services to ‘map and address racism’ and ‘ableism’ in media output, and to monitor ‘harassment’ allegedly arising from coverage.
The proposals would force every major national newspaper to join a state-recognised press regulator with statutory powers.
And the already overpowered media regulator, Ofcom, would be given powers to force large social media platforms to remove ‘hateful, discriminatory and conspiratorial’ material, seemingly even where it falls within the bounds of lawful speech.
Social media companies would also be required to ‘promote and protect’ a prescribed ‘diversity of voices’.
On top of this package of censorious measures, Noa Hoffman writes: “Green members are demanding that around £1 billion of public money be poured each year into an ‘Independent Media Commons’ of non-profit and ‘public interest’ outlets, overseen by national and regional media councils.”
This proposed crackdown on free speech, which will be debated at Green Party Conference, was put forward by Tariq Khawaja of Greens for Palestine.
This is deeply authoritarian.
Earlier today I wrote about the massive “protest” in support of the late, lamented Jason Arday. It was something to behold, in the way that the bloody scenes in “Red Asphalt” are scenes to behold. Disgusting, even nausea inducing, but you can’t and really shouldn’t look away because they serve as warnings about what happens when people do stupid and destructive things.
Jason Arday dying at just 40 is sad, and I have sympathy for his family. But I don’t understand how the takeaway from all of this is that we now need a law limiting how long the media can cover someone.
Serious questions had been raised about plagiarism and his academic record.… pic.twitter.com/AZy64g1hgY
— Clown World ™ 🤡 (@ClownWorld) August 18, 2026
Jason Arday dying at just 40 is sad, and I have sympathy for his family. But I don’t understand how the takeaway from all of this is that we now need a law limiting how long the media can cover someone.
Serious questions had been raised about plagiarism and his academic record. Journalists looking into those claims were doing their job. His death doesn’t suddenly make those questions illegitimate or mean the scrutiny should never have happened.
You can feel terrible about how this ended without pretending he was being investigated for no reason.
Jason Arday should not have died. His crimes were real and socially harmful, of course, but he was merely a cog in a much larger machine that does violence to our civilization. And those crimes in his case were, for the most part, petty, although his sending the police out to harass journalists and academics and the racial tensions he purposely inflamed crossed the line into genuinely destructive behavior.
Princeton professor Eddie Glaude Jr. is not coping well with the fall of Jason Arday. The facts are unbearable: Arday was a fraud; the DEI regime set him up for humiliation; and Glaude himself has been complicit in this system forever. pic.twitter.com/dQxpiiZKLw
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@christopherrufo) August 18, 2026
But the much bigger villains were the dons at Cambridge and the cultural and media figures who knowingly promoted Jason Arday as their own “magic negro” — proof that their agenda of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” accomplishes great things. This assertion is entirely false, not because there are no minorities capable of achieving great things, but because being a minority is not a necessary or sufficient qualification for being elevated to great and responsible positions.
David Runciman exposed the grift of Cambridge, which is far bigger than promoting Arday. And I have already referred you to Tyler Austin Harper’s excellent essay on the essential corruption of woke academia.
Oceans of virtual ink have been spilled about the case of Jason Arday because it was the right story at the right time to grab the maximum attention. It happened in high summer, when apart from the interminable heat there wasn’t much else going on. It unfolded in stages, which kept people interested: first the accusations of plagiarism, then the piece-by-piece unravelling of Arday’s life story in the run-up to the publication of his now absurd-seeming memoir.
Above all, though, this was Cambridge. Had Arday been exposed while still a professor at Glasgow University it would have caused a fuss, but nothing on this scale. The contrast between the augustness of the institution and the very contemporary dynamics of Arday’s downfall is what gives the tale its piquancy.
Race, class, snobbery, wokery – somehow they’re all thrown into sharper relief when the setting is that cloistered little world of ancient colleges and elite reputations, some of them now in tatters.
But what is really going on here is that the story of an apparent fantasist is being played out through the fantasies people have about Cambridge. That place doesn’t really exist any more. When news outlets want a generic picture of the university to illustrate their tales of collapsing standards, they usually pick King’s College Chapel or the Senate House – suitably imposing edifices to juxtapose with the squalid goings-on being exposed.
The Left wants to make it a crime to expose the fundamental corruption of a regime that is failing. This is nothing new, of course. All corrupt regimes do this in some way or another. Putin has you thrown out of windows, Brazil throws you in jail, the United Kingdom sends the police after you, sometimes threatening jail, other times incarcerating you for longer than paedo rapists. Germany takes your electronic devices.
A public servant in Brazil has been sentenced to 1 year in prison for “criminal transphobia” after misgendering a student at the university he works at.
Luís Barros was convicted of “social racism” for telling Odara Moraes that he was “not a woman.”https://t.co/lFSSPNSl4P
— REDUXX (@reduxx) August 14, 2026
As far as I know, nobody puts rats in a cage that sits around your head.
Yet. Although Gulags were proposed during COVID for the vaccine skeptical, and only China actually welded people into their apartments.
Coming up with a new law to do much the same thing is both an ordinary consequence of this impulse, and an insult and danger to liberal societies.
Totalitarianism is the new hotness in the West. So far it is much more gentle than the Soviet or Chinese version, and hence more along the lines of Brave New World than 1984, but totalitarianism it is.
Lest you think that “it can’t happen here,” it already has had its moment during the Biden administration, and few Democrats aren’t eager to give it another go.
And lest you think that your neighbors would stand up for you, look at the polls during COVID, when half of Democrats wanted people like you and me put into camps.
Civilization is far more fragile than we like to believe, and civilizations that have reached the heights of a Golden Age, as the West did, are even more fragile.
Good times make weak men and even weaker women, who have the luxury of believing that they are physically safe enough to demand emotional safety. And truth is often a threat to emotional safety.
It’s so much easier to believe that you can be “Healthy at any size” than accept that being fat is bad for you. Just as it is so much easier to censor uncomfortable truths than to face them.
“Arday’s law” would be just one more blow to the pursuit of the truth.
Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.
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