Following the Arday affair that has been a predictable eruption of navel gazing and self-praise by the legacy media, the pages of which have been smothered in think pieces about how important a free press is for holding the powerful to account and how those who have chosen a career in journalism constitute an inextricable pillar supporting liberal democracy.
Lost in all of this suppuration is the fact that the Arday story began life as a Substack post. It began on alternative media because the Editor of Times Higher Education was scared off by a legal letter which as well as promising financial damage obliquely implied that there would be a shade of racism cast over whoever reported the story. The responsibility to bring Arday’s fraud to light fell to Cofnas, who would not be intimidated by accusations of bias, and Substack – where there are not teams of lawyers advising caution standing in the way of publication. Without a free social media Jason Arday would currently be making the rounds on the One Show and various government funded Potemkin podcasts to promote his biography of lies. Because of the internet, history took a different course.
This mechanism, the way in which social media allows the truth to bypass gatekeepers worried about their professional reputations, is being destroyed by the government through the Online Safety Act and other bits of forthcoming legislation which will deboost alternative media by executive fiat. Pandora’s box is being shut at the behest of far-left activists who weaponise claims about ‘disinformation’ (whilst supporting the likes of Arday) and barely a single person in the legacy media cares about it in the slightest. In some cases they are wilful accomplices to this crime, which will profit them by redirecting clicks and engagement away from ‘some nutter with a blog’.
The legacy media is quite capable of shrugging off another attempt at Leveson, whatever the designs of ‘Hacked off Hugh’. The first stab at press regulation had the moral foundation of phone hacking dead children. Arday’s ‘digital lynching’ does not command the same moral weight and the protest in Trafalgar Square at the start of this week was a thin smattering of professional activists, with none of the energy of black lives matter six years ago.
The only scalp these activists have managed to get so far, in response to their DEI ideology being exposed, is getting Cofnas sacked from his posting at the University of Ghent. The legacy write-up of this, and of Cofnas in general, has been appalling. ‘Race realist professor sacked’. Whenever Cofnas’s role in bringing Arday to justice has been acknowledged by the press they have felt the need to point to his controversial comments about how there would be few black academics in a purely meritocratic academia. This was the comment which saw him ejected from the University of Cambridge a couple of years ago.
We note now that Nathan Cofnas has been expelled from two educational institutions for making two separate claims (about black academic ability and Arday’s plagiarism) that his critics have not attempted to factually rebut, instead causing a stink about them being ‘offensive’ (not an argument) in order to hound him out of his career. The legacy media, including the right, has chosen to reinforce this messaging by whingeing about his past comments on race whilst gorging on the engagement and advertising revenue resulting from his work in exposing the fraud.
So as truth seekers we say solidarity to you, Nathan Cofnas. And J’accuse any scum who have profited from following up on his story while slagging him off to remain respectable.
We end this with some advice to a fellow blogger. You rightly chose to continue pursuing academia after your sacking from Cambridge University instead of becoming a political commentator and enjoying the podcast circuit in America. The temptation to pursue the latter course now that you have become internationally famous will no doubt be immense. But this is cheap, and this is dirty, and you have more to give.
Play the long game. I’m sure you could leverage MAGA/anti-DEI forces in the Trump Admin to force your way into one of these American anti-woke Universities like Hillsdale.
If all else fails…