Jason Arday and the Ponzi Profs

Tenured liars have inflicted decades of harm on Britain and the US

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor Hilary Cremin, Professor Deborah Prentice, and the Icarus they kept flying. Now they’re all predictably denouncing the “racists,” Cambridge apparently having no mirrors about.

The world is real. Being real, it imposes certain restraints.

Though the world is real, we can never be entirely sure that what we say about it is accurate. Still, there’s a Rule that keeps asserting itself.

If you knowingly lie about the world and draw others into your lie—especially if you then benefit from the web of lies you’ve spun—the world will often get its own back. The Real will catch up to you and take you down.

Bernie Madoff set up the largest Ponzi scheme in history and defrauded thousands of investors, to the tune of $65 billion. The 2008 financial crisis led to some of Madoff’s marks trying to redeem their money, but the money wasn’t there. Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison, and died behind bars in 2021.

Elizabeth Holmes tricked investors into supporting her biotech startup Theranos. She’d tricked enough of them to pump the value of Theranos up to $4.5 billion. But the technology was fake. Theranos is now worth $0, and Holmes is doing time.

Joseph di Mambro co-founded the Order of the Solar Temple. He promised followers spiritual ascension while engaging in massive financial fraud and embezzlement. When in the early 1990s former followers began exposing the electronic gadgetry that made his “supernatural manifestations” possible, di Mambro and sidekick Luc Jouret orchestrated a series of murder-suicides in Switzerland and Canada, having convinced the die-hards they were ascending to the star Sirius.

Yes, the lie can get serious. Jim Jones is another example. Nine-hundred followers “drank the Kool-Aid” in the jungles of Guyana, and a meme was born.

Australian Rene Rivkin built a huge fortune on dodgy investment schemes and illicit insider trading. When he was found out and charged, rather than face the music, he committed suicide on May 1, 2005.

All these figures lied about the world and benefited from the lie. The world caught up with them. Two ended up in prison, many ended their lives. In all cases, money and prestige were involved. In some cases, money, prestige, and pseudo-spiritual chicanery combined.

So the liars and their accomplices often suffer similar grim outcomes. One of Madoff’s sons committed suicide. Elizabeth Holmes’ former lover and Theranos co-conspirator Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani ended up with a longer prison sentence than Holmes. He’s not so sunny now. Hundreds of others are dead for taking part in these systemic lies. Many must have known at some level that what they were part of was a lie. But they persisted in it.

There are lying liars who knowingly lie to others for prestige and profit, and lying liars who lie to themselves and others. The world will often take down the former, but when the latter are found out, the world often takes them down too. As it must. Because the world is real, and lies harm all of us who share the world.

Our financial systems, our spiritual lives, our education systems, our bodily health—all are harmed by lying liars.

After being taken down by the Real, Jason Arday has apparently committed suicide. Or perhaps he overdosed. We cannot yet be sure. I’m saddened to learn of his death, but not that saddened. Arday lied pretty much nonstop. Still, unlike many of these others, Arday could have reinvented himself. His lies were ridiculous, but the real ridiculousness was not so much in Arday as in Cambridge. Which itself is a lie.

There will be much screaming and journalisming to the effect that Arday’s death was caused by “racism,” by the meanness of the “far right,” or by some such. It will be bilge water, the same toxic bilge water we’ve been sloshing around in since the late 1990s.

Tomorrow’s editorial thingies will be a lie. The world, however, is real. And part of that reality is, or at least was, our universities.

The West’s universities used to be as important to us as our financial or medical systems. Now they are quack medicine and woke Ponzi schemes.

Universities were places where the lie was most rigorously challenged, where it was put to the test through evidence and hard debate and pointed diatribe. A degree of meanness was needed. Because the Real must be contested, and those in the contest must fight it out.

Again: Though the world is real, we can never be sure that what we say about it is accurate. Thus we had universities. Once upon a time.

For decades our universities haven’t been. They’ve been turned into theater spaces staffed by a vast cult of systemic liars (to be honest: systemically racist liars). On this there’s little room for debate. Jason Arday’s professorship can be Exhibit A.

Arday was hired because the “progressives” academics who hired him didn’t believe it mattered whether a black man was qualified or not. What does that tell you? It tells you that they didn’t believe any black man was really qualified.

“It doesn’t matter which one we hire, just get the color right. Oh, this one is really colorful. Let’s go with this one.”

I suspect that’s exactly what transpired in the minds of these tenured frauds.

Arday’s death is unfortunate, but not really important. What’s important to us—to me and to you and to the next generations—is the fact that the lie still defines higher education in the nations we live in. Jason Arday’s death is thus not the stuff of “We need to have a conversation about …” columns on race. It’s rather the stuff of a rigorous focus on the liars, and how they harm us.

I’m not much interested in the “race realist” school of which Nathan Cofnas is part. I’m not criticizing Cofnas. I just find race a boring metric through which to interpret humanity. But hard data will do hard data things, and having watched the perverse arc traced by the Western Left over the past few decades, I have to say—you lefties certainly deserve this. There’s no denying it—You were the ones who made this bed. You insisted identity was the All in All. So now some white scholars have decided to agree with you. How could you not have seen it coming?

The world will get its own back, even if the bed you’ve made goes up in flames. The world is far bigger than Madoff, than di Mambro, than Elizabeth Holmes, or than Arday. Of all of them, I probably feel more sympathy for Arday. But so what? He’s another serial bullshitter. And bullshitters in high places harm us.

“Bernie Madoff’s life was destroyed by the far right and their white supremacist obsession with math! Di Mambro just wanted to make a difference and the francophobe press ruined him! Solar Templar Lives MATTER! Elizabeth Holmes was a victim of the patriarchy’s refusal to recognize women’s accomplishments! Jason Arday died because of far right, racist harassment!”

Here’s the thing, Anne, Judith, whatever your name is. If you’re now typing up some extended version of that last sentence, to be published in tomorrow’s Guardian, you may as well also own the previous four sentences. Because the story is the same in each case.

The story is: Jason Arday was a liar whose lies caught up with him.

The other story is: You are a fraud.

Some of the liars I depicted above ended in prison, others ended their lives. Their accomplices met similar fates, as I’ve shown. But the accomplices who hired and championed Jason Arday? What will happen to them? They’ve bilked countless students, and they’ve now caused Jason Arday’s death.

It’s these liars more than Arday who’ve made Cambridge into a Ponzi scheme. Liars just like them hold posts at Harvard, Yale, Bates College—really in every prominent non-academy we might name.

It’s Stage 3 cancer infecting the whole body of academia. And what does one do with Stage 3 cancer? Scalpels. And if one doesn’t? It proceeds to Stage 4 cancer, then death.

I’d like these academic liars punished. I’d really like them fired and broke. Every last one of them. If that’s impossible near term, I’d like the institutions they’ve infiltrated hounded and defunded into the ground. They are defrauding their students and effacing the Real. The harms they’ve inflicted on us are immense.

These fraudsters have now graduated generations of students in the lie. They’ve coddled and trained them in the lie, sent them out into media, the corporate world, and government institutions to do what? To spread the lie. Why do you think your nation is now overrun with foreigners who hate you while living off your largesse? Why do you think half the people around you can’t define the word woman? Where do you think the lies that underpin all this came from?

It’s our academic liars who mixed the glue that made the lies stick.

When Elizabeth Holmes gets out of prison she won’t be drafting regulations for medical devices. Nobody would have seen Bernie Madoff’s record as proof he should be SEC chairman. Our universities once mattered, and still do, negatively. The clique of liars that run them must be taken down.

The eyes of the West should be razor focused on this specific class, the Ponzi Profs. Their strongholds should be swamped with legal challenges and their funding cut, then cut again. As they get smaller, we must support alternative institutions, with their own mechanisms of accreditation, to replace the universities these liars have systematically ruined.

I will pray for Jason Arday. That’s not just an expression, I will do so. I can’t be certain, but suspect Arday was at least decent enough as a human being to face up to what it means to live the lie. As for the tenured Cambridge frauds who hired and defended him, I doubt it. They’re closer to the Bernie Madoff cockroach type. When the light is turned on bright, they scurry for cover muttering excuses. They’re already busy doing so relative to Arday’s death.

Imagine Bernie Madoff sniffily lecturing prosecutors about their racist commitment to math.

Stop them. Make the light brighter. Root them out of their nests.