Jason Arday murdered himself

And the only person who has to feel guilty about it is him

The terrible Jason Arday takes just keep coming. Big friend of the blog Sam Kriss had this to say.

It takes a greatness of soul to build fabulations the way Jason Arday did. You need a Promethean spirit to decide to create yourself again out of nothing, and real courage to bet your entire being on lies that can so easily be disproven. But you are small and cowardly and you will spend all your life scurrying around in the undergrowth of the world, never poking out your head to look at the sky, and the thing that happened to Professor Jason Arday will never, ever happen to you.

Wrong. Jason Arday was a nasty, vindictive bully who on at least two occasions used the police to silence journalists and academics trying to expose his misdeeds. While incessantly portraying himself as the victim of a racist society, Arday knew perfectly well that all the institutional power in the United Kingdom was on his side, and that he could get away with it forever (if it wasn’t for that pesky Substack). More broadly, Arday’s whole career was an act of violence against the natives of the United Kingdom who are expected to pay for the privilege of being abused and libelled. If you are going to treat blacks as religious objects and throw money at them, at least pay them to do something other than hurl abuse at those footing the bill. There is no evidence he felt any guilt about his life of crime, because he didn’t.

Nasty, vindictive, lying, thieving bullies can still possess greatness of soul though, maybe, but we know that Jason Arday didn’t because when he was exposed, he did the smallest, shittiest thing he could possibly have done under the circumstances and murdered himself. He knew that this would rescue his reputation in large sections of a sick, mad society, and, what’s more, he knew that it would pull the rug out from those trying to leverage his exposure to claw back some measure of sanity in the university system, or - one can only dream - pare down the system of racially-based exploitation that disfigures the western world (the one that actually exists), and he did it anyway. These are evil ends and, whatever else he was thinking too, he intended them on the general principle that the known consequences of action are intended.

Had he possessed greatness of soul, there are plenty of things he could have done. He could have said, ‘you got me, and I don’t regret a thing because what’s yours, cracker, is mine’. He could have made a tell-all biography about how he conned dopey libwomen with self-evidently ridiculous lies and then reinvented himself as a based anti-woke black man. GB News would have given him his own show for sure unless he went too far and started ranting about Jews. Or he could have done some other zany thing that I, a man of no especially big soul, couldn’t even conceive of. Failing that, he could have turned off his phone and gone on holiday. 1.4 million should buy you a few years’ sabbatical, but if that’s made up too, he could always just go work at Sainsbury’s.

Enough of that then, but we’re just getting started. There are the centre-right jerks who say the real villain of the piece is Cambridge University for promoting him beyond his competence which is the ‘bigotry of low expectations’ (maybe you should … let’s not finish that thought). Of course they are villains, but their victims are literally everyone else in the world except Jason Arday who had to live in a planet that is dumber, and more unjust for their decision to appoint him. Arday was not victimised by being given money and acclaim to write total nonsense that he couldn’t be bothered to even write himself. That’s stupid, what are you even talking about? Hey Cambridge University, I’m a bad person, a racist and a bigot, can you victimise me by giving me £80,000 a year to doss around writing nonsense and being a jerk to my students? It’s the only punishment worthy of my crimes. Can you not see how dumb this is? No, of course you can’t, and then you wonder why everything is the way it is.

And then I read this by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, and because when I lie down right now my throat somehow simultaneously feels like sandpaper and has gloop all over it that chokes me, here I am in the middle of night writing, yet again, the most incredibly obvious stuff.

This is the moment that generated Hanania, Cofnas, and others — resentful, ambitious, young, and coming back with a vengeance to defeat wokeism once and for all through the superior tools of scientism, empiricism, etc., defeating the master with the master’s tools. He, too, did not care about Arday at all. He was fighting wokeness because he wanted Cambridge. That is what he cared about and wanted.

I’m sorry, what? WHAT? Why should Cofnas have cared about Jason Arday, a liar, a thief, a bully, a parasite, and also just a completely ridiculous person, a man Cofnas had never met and had no reason to think about at all except for all of the above? Even if you want to claim that the media coverage went overboard (which you shouldn’t think at all), Cofnas didn’t do any of that. All he did was write an article with completely true information that had been provided to him by others who were too scared (justifiably so) to bring it to public attention themselves. In the most literal sense possible, Cofnas did absolutely nothing wrong.

As it happens, Cofnas has been a consistent critic of madness and stupidity on the Right, sadly very much not limited to race mysticism, but including it. He is also an Ashkenazi Jew married to a Korean, which, based on my religion, I can’t condone, but should absolve him of any imputation of racial bigotry or even ethnocentrism. However, even if that wasn’t true, he still did nothing wrong. There is no moral complexity here at all. Arday lived a life of villainy, and capped it off with one last act of irredeemable villainy. Cofnas wrote a correct blogpost. That’s it. If you think there is moral complexity, something has gone very wrong for you. It is true, and no-one can deny it, that Arday’s wife and kids have been victimised, no doubt his friends and other family too, but there is precisely one man who victimised them, and he is dead.

Why am I so angry about this? Some might claim the question is misprised, as if me being angry about something requires a local explanation. I’ll leave you to judge, but in the great mess of lies and illusions that Sam Kriss says we all live in, my subjectively-felt reason for being angry is because people say things like this.

I understand the sentiment, but it’s just not true. I know this because, almost literally every day, I benefit from research at a university.

• I am very interested in Hebrew pronunciation, and by far the best book on the subject is by Geoffrey Khan, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge. You can literally read it for free online! His student, AD Hornkahl, has also published amazing work you can read for free too.

• The best and most illuminating work on Talmud and halacha today is created by Robert Brody, professor at the Hebrew University. His edition of Rav Natronai’s teshuvot, on its own, is more of a contribution to Torah scholarship than anything that has come out of a yeshiva in 50 years. I have also read things that have massively increased my understanding by Noam Vered (University of Tel Aviv), Shulamit Elitzur (Hebrew University), Menachem Kehana (Hebrew University), Yair Furstenberg (Bar Ilan University), Moshe Halbertal (Hebrew University), Martin Goodman (Oxford University), Adiel Schremer (Bar Ilan University), Yair Lorberbaum (Bar Ilan University), Ishai Rosen-Zvi (Tel Aviv University), and David Stern (Harvard University) among others.

I’ve also learned some very interesting and important things from people outside universities, but, in complete honesty, nowhere near as much. I’ve also found that academics are almost always very gracious in answering unsolicited questions by randomers emailing them. Conversely, I have been involved in efforts to promote scholarship outside of universities and they almost always end in fiasco. Of course, there’s no shortage of nonsense in Jewish Studies about queer subjectivities in the Tosefta, but if you want to know what classic Jewish texts mean, or even just read editions of them that aren’t basically useless, academia is your friend, and almost your only friend. I’ll desist now from going on a rant about yeshivos, but I’ll add that this is even more true now than it was in the recent past. Dovid Weiss haLivni and Shaul Lieberman זצ’’ל spent their time at JTS, but now the institution produces almost exclusively nonsense, and much the same is true of Pardes, Hadar or the Hartmann Institute.

I appreciate that Jewish Studies is in a better state than a lot of other subjects for various contingent reasons (and this, perhaps, provides the best justification for the State of Israel), however, I think that most nerds who are into something and have made a real effort to become knowledgeable about it will end up with more or less the same verdict. If the research isn’t being conducted in universities, it isn’t being conducted anywhere else either. In certain areas of science, there are always Google and Facebook, but the politicisation there isn’t all that much better.

There is a widespread belief on the Right that universities are a lost cause, and one should search elsewhere for civilizational salvation. Life in Israel has convinced me that the more or less the opposite is true. At least in certain circumstances (whether or not they are replicable anywhere else), the Right can win by doing an end run against the educated classes, and what they will do with it is implement the relentless promotion of ignorance, boorishness, ugliness of every conceivable kind, unhinged ethnonarcissism, and the cannibalisation of religion into a repulsive horror. If something doesn’t come along to replace Bibi as the mechanism for reining all this nonsense in, it will flame out in a mad rush of violence our descendants will have marked upon their head.

Universities, however, can be saved, or saved enough. Who, exactly, is saner on the Israel-Palestine than Benny Morris? What else except a university would have given him the space and funding to be sane? Everywhere, even in the most disastrous ivory tower bastions of gay, race communism, there are honest nerds doing honest work that makes the world a little bit more comprehensible to other nerds. I shan’t say that is the only thing that matters, for that would be nerd supremacism, but it is a thing that matters, and to some extent is doable. Every real scholar who is left alone in his study to write is a victory, and every Jason Arday fired is a victory too. He got exactly what he deserved. Scratch that, he didn’t get 1% of what he deserved, because he wasn’t just a liar, a thief, and a bully, he was an existential criminal, waging war on the mind, and thus the dignity of humankind. If you can’t do the crime, don’t do the time.¹ That he was far from alone in this is no excuse. Justice isn’t any less justice because the guilty, as a general rule, prosper. Some have pointed out that Nathan Cofnas’s plan for fixing society won’t work. I agree, it won’t work. The only thing that will work is complete disenfranchisement of the entire population to turn this whole ghastly machine we call politics off, and no-one knows how to start doing that because Moldbug quit in the middle and started writing slop. So what? Nathan Cofnas did, for the world, and whether he knows it or not, a hesed shel emet.

1. Right now someone is typing out that ‘he didn’t deserve to die for what he did’. Correct, he didn’t deserve to die for what he did. He deserved what happened to him. He killed himself, no-one else.