The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: Who Killed Jason Arday?

Episode Date: August 18, 2026

Jason Arday’s rise to a prestigious professorship at Cambridge University unraveled amid allegations of plagiarism and fabricated claims in his memoir. His death raises difficult questions about the institutions that elevated him, Cambridge’s commitment to DEI-based hiring, and Simon & Schuster’s decision to publish his memoir despite concerns about its accuracy. The scandal exposes the consequences of abandoning academic merit and placing someone in a position he was never qualified to hold. Alliance Defending Freedom - Visit JoinADF.com/HANSON or text HANSON to 83848 and for a limited time your first gift to ADF will be DOUBLED by a special matching grant—while funds last. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Daily Signal podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take. So why did Jason Ardae kill himself? Because he was embarrassed and he was exposed for something he did. Who were the people actually responsible for his death? No one is responsible for his death except Jason Ardae. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hansen for the Daily Signal. What or who killed Jason Arde?

That's the question that's being asked in the English-speaking intellectual academic university world. Jason Ardae was a 41-year-old British subject of African descent who obtained a very rare prestigious professorship donship, at Cambridge University in the UK, which along with Oxford are the two most prestigious colleges, universities in Britain, if not the English-speaking world. So he obviously drew a lot of attention. He magnified that attention by writing a memoir that just came out. In it, it was full of things that were not just made up or missed, but could not be physically possible. and they were completely contradictory in what he said he was going to write when he wrote a 45-page prospectus to the publisher, Simon & Schuster. For example, he said he had brain cancer. The book says he has testicular cancer.

He says he ran 600 miles, 100 miles a day and six days. He ran 30 marathons, 26 miles each, and little over 30. days, said he was a top pool player or billiards player. And then when they started looking at a scholarly account that gained him this professorship, there was hardly any scholarship there. And his dissertation had over 100 passages that were lifted, borrowed, stolen from other writers and scholars. Then the question arose, what do you do with him when this, memoir is going to be published that everybody knows is full of invention and lies and not just lies, but things that cannot be true.

And then, of course, controversy. Why was he given this position when he was utterly unqualified, even if he had not lied and made things up about his life and said he couldn't speak to he was 11 and said that he did all of these fantastic races, and he ran with a swollen leg and things that were just crazy, he still should not have been hired. He just committed suicide. This is why we're talking about him today, given the negative publicity and controversy that he incurred. And people are very angry and written on the left,

and they're accusing the right or conservatives for objecting to this appointment and to chastising Cambridge for being fooled, by this con artist. And the subtext is they would have never hired him had they not been committed to diversity, equity, inclusion protocols that privileged one's race over merit in many cases. Let me just read to you what Cambridge University said about Jason Arde, even though there were rumors and there were investigations at the time suggesting that he was an abjecture. plagiarists. Here's what high university officials released to the press. Jason Arde is an exceptional

scholar of race inequality and education. He will contribute significantly to Cambridge's research in this area and to addressing the under-representation of people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds, especially those from black, Asian, and other minority ethnic communities. And a final parting praise, we are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research you do. That's demonstrably false. Cambridge knew it was false.

And yet they had so invested in Jason Ardai because they were virtue signaling to the world that they were morally superior to most people because in their great magnanimity, they had allowed a black scholar to enter this cloister of the world's top scholars. And after he killed himself, given that news accounts had exposed him as a plagiarist and a faker and a fabulous, then the left turned around and said, you didn't do that to other people who had committed these transgressions.

Well, of course they did. Glass, the new Republic plagiarist and fabulous. He had his entire career destroyed, and he was the object of ridicule in a movie about it. Stephen Ambrose was probably the most popular and beloved

World War II and presidential historian of the last 30 years when he was exposed as a plagiarist who stole a lot of passages from another scholar of the U.S. bombing campaign in World War II, and he was utterly discredited

and reviled for doing that. So why did Jason Ardei kill himself? Because he was embarrassed and he was exposed for something he did. Who were the people actually responsible for his death? No one is responsible for his death except Jason Ardae. There's a lot of plagiarists in the world.

There's a lot of fabulous in the world. There's a lot of con artists in the world who are exposed and they don't kill. himself. He chose to make that decision when his world that he had fabricated came crashing down upon him and also in collateral damage exposed the absurdity of diversity, equity, inclusion, racialism and tribalism on anti-merocratic hiring and admissions. But we can end point if we're going to play this game to two culprits. Simon and Schuester, published his memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, right before his suicide.

And they gave him a $1.4 million advance. Now, I can tell you, as someone who's written 20 books from New York publishers like Alfred Knapp, Simon Schuster, Doubleday, Bloomsbury, Basic Books, that these days, no one really gets a $1.4 million advance unless you're a celebrity or a politician. Usually you get about $3 a book. So if these books will sell between like Jason Ardice 5,000 copies to 10,000 copies. So he might have earned on the actual sales 15 to 20 to 25,000. That advance of 1.4 million will never be realized. But they gave it as part of this. gift to this DEI candidate, and they wanted to show the world that just like Cambridge University,

Simon & Schuster wanted to encourage inclusivity of black academics. But then they did something else. They were told by reporters and journalists and the media that Jason Ardei was a fraud. They knew that earlier on their own investigation because he wrote as I said, a 45-page prospectus of what he was going to write so he would get the advance that was entirely at odds with what he submitted as a manuscript. But whether it was the prospectus or the actual book, it didn't matter if they didn't jive because they didn't jive either one of them with reality. And so this was all known, and why did they publish it when they knew it was a fraud?

why did they publish it? Because they had spent $1.4 million, and they were going to market it, no doubt, as a controversial book. You've all heard about Jason Ardai and all of his lives and fable. Come to the book and look at it. And so rather than being an adulatory memoir, which they originally thought it might be, it was sort of a Carnival Barker type of book, and they thought somehow the publicity that Jason, and got from all of his fables would help sales, and they could get back their 1.4 million. But what might have happened is when he knew that that book was coming out, and his problems would be increased as people picked up that book and could read with their own eyes, their own mind, they could see that what he said was physically impossible. They would have only more contempt for him, and that might have hastened the decision that he made, to end his life. There's another culprit,

and that is Cambridge University. They knew that he was not the top scholar in his field. They knew that he had problems telling the truth. They knew that under the rigid requirements of Cambridge University, he would have never qualified had he not been a DEI, and yet they lied about that. They said that he was one of the top scholars of the world, and they put him in a position of which he did not deserve,

and he was unable by any stretch of the imagination to fulfill the obligations of scholarly rigor that's required of a position at Cambridge of that caliber. And so obviously he knew that once he got that position, and once he was exposed, he would either be fired by the same people who had brought him in there and elevated and inflated his worth, would now turn on him and say, you know what, we are embarrassed to what you did to us and fire him, or if they didn't fire him, there was no way in the world, given his abilities and his problems with the truth,

that he could be a genuine Cambridge scholar. The bottom line, it was not conservatives, it was not journalists, it was not the media who destroyed Jason Ardai. Jason Ardai committed suicide on his own volition. The accessories to that was Simon & Schuster, who chose to go ahead and publish a memoir they knew was fraudulent, and which Jason Ardai, within days after the publication, killed himself. And Cambridge University, which deliberately lied an inflated an applicant for a professorship by claiming he had talents that he and they knew, he did not. Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis-Hansson for the Daily Signal. Female athletes are being forced to compete against biological males, sometimes without their

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Well funds last. Text Hanson to 83848 or go to join ADF.com slash Hanson to have your gift doubled. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.