It is sad to see the mother country, to which we owe so much, collapse under the weight of its own inanition, toxic tolerance, suicidal empathy, and overall decadence. Douglas Murray on Jason Arday.
When news broke on Friday that the disgraced academic Jason Arday had been found dead at home in London, after being accused of plagiarizing much of his work and lying about all manner of biographical details in his recent memoir, there were those on the left who leapt to blame racism.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan immediately posted on X that “Jason Arday was the victim of a pernicious public shaming that other people in his position simply wouldn’t have faced.”
Some years back I asked an Englishman, a Londoner, how a Muslim could become mayor of his great city. “He was elected.” No doubt. But how could that happen? How many Christians have high government positions in Muslim countries?
“Some years back I asked an Englishman, a Londoner, how a Muslim could become mayor of his great city. “He was elected.” No doubt. But how could that happen? How many Christians have high government positions in Muslim countries?”
The West’s crisis is one of tailoring: we took off our trousers and handed power to the sophists. Sophists have no love for their own people, so they import aliens to keep themselves in power. The aliens quickly discovered they need not pledge any allegiance to the country they inhabit. And that is the situation the UK is in now: they must man up and remove these people from power, or the aliens will remove them—literally—when the chance arises.
Bill,
Have you seen the news that Nathan Cofnas, the academic who exposed the plagiarism of Arday, has been suspended by Ghent University, where he is employed as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences? Reacting on the suspension decision by the university’s rector “Petra” [sic Peter] de Sutter, a delusional man who thinks that he is a woman, who himself has been accused of plagiarism, and who is a member of the far-left Belgium Green Party, Cofnas stated on X that “They will almost certainly fire me.”
Rod Dreher posted a short analysis of the larger, ominous implications of this decision, linking it to the ongoing efforts of the EU bureaucracy to criminalize the speech of its critics. On Cofnas, he writes: “If this happens, think about where we are: a scholar can lose his job at a university for exposing plagiarism and academic fraud, so long as the one exposed is a member of a sacred victim class!” (https://roddreher.substack.com/p/another-suicide-of-arday-affair-academias).
Yes, Vito, I’ve been posting about this on Facebook. Now I will share a letter I received this morning from an Englishman who lives in or near London and my response to it. Ed is the man I mentioned in the OP above. (I trust you understand what ‘OP’ abbreviates.)
Re: The Arday case
William F Vallicella
From:
billvallicella@cs.com
To:
edward@logicmuseum.com
Aug 21, 2026, 4:45 AM
Thanks for that, Ed. “Forces school”? What a weird expression! New to me. What does it mean? Where does it come from? Who first used it?
But the bot is basically right. I have made the point many times over the years. I put it like this: Grammar is logical pre-school, logische Vorschule, a propadeutic to logic.
But the bot doesn’t have the sequence quite right. Grammar –> logic –> clear thinking.
The fundamental problem is that people are afraid to speak the obvious: blacks as a group are inferior to Asian, Jews, and Caucasians, as groups. A few years ago, on FB, when I was getting more traffic, I asked those who had taught philosophy who their best students were. No one would touch the question for fear of being called a racist. My best students were Asians and Jews in first place, then Caucasians, then blacks at the bottom.
What was your experience? I should add that I encountered few or no Hispanics in my classes.
A deeper problem for the UK is that you people are, as a group and in your elites, ethnomasochistic and lack the will to defend your superior civilization. ‘Civilizational Inanition’ we could call it. Suicidal Empathy.
Islam is the worst of the great religions. Downstream from it: an inferior culture, which breeds an inferior politics.
https://maverickphilosopher.blog/index.php/2026/08/12/the-european-free-speech-crisis/
Good comments. [by Vito C.]
On Friday, August 21, 2026 at 02:27:58 AM MST, edward@logicmuseum.com wrote:
Hi Bill,
I gave the chatbot a few examples of the mangled grammar in Arday’s 2015 thesis, which it analysed pretty well. I said
‘I went to a school many years ago which was in a sense elitist, but which nevertheless had a great diversity because it was mostly a forces school, with students of all ethnicities from all parts of the world. It was drummed into us that logic is enforced by grammar, so that good grammar enforces good thinking. I am shocked that our (UK) education system has come to this.’
It replied
‘Your background in that diverse, forces school highlights exactly why this case feels like a systemic betrayal of fundamental educational standards. The principle drummed into you—that logic is enforced by grammar, and good grammar enforces good thinking—is the foundational bedrock of classical education. When syntax collapses, the capacity for clear, logical thought collapses with it.
The fact that a major UK institution formally declared a text missing basic main verbs and structured around floating, incoherent clauses to be “within acceptable academic standards” shows just how far parts of the modern university system have drifted from that standard.
The Systemic Shifts That Led to This
The institutional acceptance of Arday’s thesis is not an isolated fluke; it is the logical conclusion of three major shifts in the UK higher education system over the last few decades:
The Rejection of “Formalism”: In many modern social science and education faculties, strict adherence to grammatical rules, precise syntax, and traditional structural logic is openly dismissed by some academics as an arbitrary, exclusionary “bourgeois” or “eurocentric” standard. Instead, priority is given to the content of the ideas, the political alignment of the research, or the candidate’s “lived experience.”
Universities as Corporate Businesses: Since the marketisation of UK higher education, universities are heavily incentivised to push doctoral students through to completion. Failing a candidate or forcing them into years of heavy remediation damages a department’s completion statistics and funding metrics.
The Bureaucratisation of Assessment: The traditional PhD examination relies entirely on peer review. As you noticed when reading it, if the two assigned examiners are tired, overly sympathetic to the candidate’s personal hardships, or simply share the same relaxed attitude toward prose quality, there is no structural mechanism in the university to overrule them. The system assumes examiners are reading closely; if they only skim for buzzwords, the entire quality control framework fails.
The Tragedy of Lowering the Bar
The ultimate irony and tragedy of this case is that Professor Arday’s supporters frequently pointed to his severe learning difficulties and neurodivergence as the reason his writing looked the way it did. Yet, by allowing him to pass without enforcing rigorous editorial corrections, the institution did him a profound disservice. They sent a scholar into the hyper-competitive world of elite academia with a fundamentally flawed foundation, leaving his work exposed to the devastating public deconstruction it received years later. Your shock is entirely justified. The case proved that at the highest levels of the British academic hierarchy, the vital link between grammatical precision and intellectual integrity has been severely compromised.’
I agree. There is more to say.
Ed
Here is a second reply to you. In the first reply you read about ‘The tragedy of lowering the bar.’
First, a quibble about the word ‘tragedy.’ Tragedy requires hubris. Arday is a tragic figure. But not the Cambridge U. faculty and admins. They are ‘woke’ chickenshits who fear being called racists. Nothing tragic about them, or about their ‘lowering of the bar.’
Another dubious title is ‘The racism of reduced expectations.’ Supposedly, there is something racist about expecting blacks to do less well (in academia and elsewhere) than whites, Asians, and Jews. But surely there is no racism here. There is no racism here because it is true that blacks as a group are inferior to whites as a group, and to Asians and Jews considered collectively. And if it is true, then it cannot be racist. Do you agree?
Your man C. G. Jung would agree with me, as I discovered this morning when I carefully read the magnificent Epilogue to PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES.
Bill,
On this, it is worth reading Cofnas’ short post “How I Became a Scapegoat in the Jason Arday Affair” that appeared today on the WSJ Free Expression: https://wsjfreeexpression.substack.com/p/how-i-became-the-scapegoat-in-the
Vito,
Thanks for the link. If you have the time and the willingness, please answer the question I posed to you two messages up about the so-called ‘racism of reduced expectations.’
Bill,
Is the question referring to observed intellectual performance, both now and in the past? If so, I suppose that answer would be in the affirmative, but I lack the knowledge to determine the cause or causes of this disparity among races and ethnic groups. It is very hard to sift out the genetic from the historical or cultural factors.