August 17, 2026

KURT SCHLICHTER: The Death of Academic Fraud Jason Arday Won’t Shut Us Up.

Regardless, it was entirely predictable that the left would use his unfortunate demise to try to shut us up, to place all criticism of woke charlatans off limits because the subject of the critique might decide to do something desperate. They can’t help themselves but act out irrationally, you see. The fact that this tactic deprives the minority of any agency is no shock; there’s no racist like a leftist, who considers minorities to be nothing more than political marionettes unable to control their own actions. We’re supposed to give them a pass because the targets of our criticism have no agency. It’s like that NSFW scene in Blazing Saddles where the sheriff keeps the townspeople from lynching him by sticking a gun to his head—“He’s just crazy enough to do it!” Except this time the townspeople were not trying to lynch an innocent man and didn’t back off, and he did pull the figurative trigger.

We’re not going to play their game. We’re not going to hold fire for fear of feelz. We’re not going to ignore the truth lest the liar lash out at himself or others. Sometimes the truth hurts, but the only people the truth hurts are people exposed doing something they shouldn’t be doing. The truth is more important than feelings. And the truth is more important than Arday’s life. If the choice we are presented with is that Jason Arday will go on living a lie and degrading our civilization by doing so, or that Jason Arday might hurt himself, it’s Option 2 every day of the week. We’re not going to be held hostage or intimidated or shamed into silence and, therefore, complicity.

Related: Cleverly: Cambridge used Arday for bragging rights.

Jason Arday was used by the University of Cambridge for “bragging rights”, Sir James Cleverly has claimed.

The shadow communities minister said that the late 41-year-old would not have been in such a “terrible” and “personally exposed position” had universities done their due diligence.

Sir James added that higher education establishments presented Mr Arday with “glee” because of his age and ethnicity rather than his talent.

British media rushed to make Arday a superstar with similar “glee” and absolutely no checks into the accuracy of his research or his preposterous claims about his life experiences:

Related: The Trouble with Hiding the Faculty.

In a move that I find completely and utterly shocking, but not truly unexpected, the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education staff list is now offline.

Try to access it and you get a simple message: “You are not authorized to access this page.”

While this is hugely important to me as a professor, it wouldn’t be odd to ask why should anyone in America care that the faculty directory of an education school at a British university has disappeared? My answer is that what is going on with a former professor at the University of Cambridge represents a much bigger problem that has gone wrong in higher education.

The omertà — it’s not just for the mafia anymore.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

I WENT TO AN ANTI-ISRAEL DINNER PARTY. IT DID NOT GO AS PLANNED. They described it as “a safe space for difficult conversations.” What they really wanted was an Israeli who would sit quietly and confess:

“Hysterical? I am the calmest person here. I am merely no longer cushioning the information for people who consider contradiction a hate crime.”

“You are proving every stereotype about pro-Israel people,” Nadia said.

“You mean Jews? Which stereotype? That we eventually lose patience after being lectured by people who discovered the Middle East six months ago?”

“You’re impossible.”

“No. I’m inconvenient. There is a difference.”

I picked up my jacket. The room watched me with the shocked resentment of aristocrats who had just discovered the footman could read. At the door, Oliver made one final attempt at magnanimity: “I’m sorry you didn’t feel heard.”

“I was heard perfectly well. That is why everyone is upset.”

“We may simply have to agree to disagree.”

“No. You may have to agree to read.”

He folded his arms. “Do you genuinely believe you’re the only person here who understands the issue?”

“No,” I said. “I believe I’m the only person here who has made the vulgar effort.”

Beatrice opened the door. The conversation, she said, had become unsafe. I thanked her for the meal.

Outside, the night air was cool and gloriously free of moral vocabulary. I walked home reflecting on the strange burden of being “pro-Israel” in polite society. One is expected to arrive with evidence, history, nuance, empathy, military expertise, legal precision, and a detailed alternative strategy for every available course of action. The other side need only arrive with adjectives: colonial, genocidal, apartheid, brutal.

“Hannah Arendt had it right,” Patrick Moynihan once said. “She said one of the great advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

“WELL, YEAH,” SAY AMERICAN LEFTIES:

Posted at 12:24 pm by Stephen Green

THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA Administrator ‘extremely confident’ in Artemis 3 mission in 2027. “The Artemis 3 mission will begin with the launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which will send a test version of its Blue Moon Mark 2 lander into low Earth orbit. That will be followed days later by the launch of the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, which will rendezvous and dock with Blue Origin’s vehicle.”

Posted at 11:40 am by Stephen Green

FROM THE ONGOING “WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO TUCKER?” CHRONICLES:

It helps to remember that Greenwald is a commie and Carlson is… whatever the hell he is now.

Posted at 11:22 am by Stephen Green

POP YOUR CORN: It’s Billionaire vs. Billionaire for the Future of California. “Disagreements between a couple of Google billionaires over how to best fight California’s so-called billionaire tax might just help the ballot initiative become law in November, according to a New York Post report this weekend — but there’s so much more to it than that.”

Posted at 11:09 am by Stephen Green

AND THIS IS AT BERKELEY: I teach calculus at Berkeley. Some of my students can’t do middle school math.

I teach mathematics at UC Berkeley. Three days a week, I stand in front of lecture halls with 500 to 1,400 students. By the second week of the semester, I already know who is in trouble. Some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics. Office hours that should be spent discussing integrals instead become lessons on fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school.

That is why this spring and summer, thousands of faculty members across all 10 UC campuses — including more than two-thirds of UC’s mathematics faculty — signed open letters urging the system to restore the SAT and ACT in admissions. Five Nobel laureates joined us, along with professors from across the university, including Beatriz Manz, Berkeley’s first Latina full professor.

We did so because what an admission letter is supposed to mean — that a student is ready to attend the school — no longer matches what we see in our classrooms.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 10:38 am by Stephen Green

TO BE FAIR…:

…reality is offense to people living in denial of it.

Posted at 10:20 am by Stephen Green

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT: Recall Petition Filed Against Seattle’s Far Left Mayor Katie Wilson. “Certainly the current crop of far-left ‘Democratic Socialists’ mayors ruining American cities are not the sharpest knives in the drawer (though Zohran Mamdani seems to display the sort of unprincipled cunning exhibited by many confidence artists), but Seattle’s Katie Wilson, someone who was still being financially supported by her parents at age 43 when running for mayor, strikes one as possibly the very dullest in the lot. From refusing to investigate fraud at Somali-run daycare centers to encouraging capital flight from Seattle via a proposed ‘billionaire’s tax’ (‘I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are, like, super overblown. And if, you know, the ones that leave, like, bye!’), Wilson seems a particularly obtuse example of the breed. Now two Seattle citizens have filed a recall petition against her.”

Posted at 9:36 am by Stephen Green

THE BIDEN CABAL HANGOVER WILL LAST FOR YEARS:

Posted at 9:20 am by Stephen Green

THE NEW SPACE RACE:

Posted at 8:50 am by Glenn Reynolds

SPENCER PRATT: Bombs, Burnt Beef, and the Big $20 Burrito Battle.

At some point, we will have to reckon with the fact that we shut down the world’s largest economy over the flu. You can’t do that. You can never do that. Not for global wars, not for nuclear holocaust, you never ever shut down your economy. Despite what decades of communist propaganda may have you believe, concern over the economy isn’t just vanity, it’s not greed…the economy is the proxy for our collective lives. Shutting down the economy means people die from missed cancer screenings, business owners kill themselves because their legacy family restaurant shuts down for good, people can’t afford basic human needs. We crippled the global economy and attempted to backfill the void by printing more money than had ever been printed in the history of human civilization and doled it out with alacrity. This grand experiment in universal basic income led to hyperinflation on a level that we only see in collapsing communist countries. The factories went dormant while the money printer went “brrrrrrrr”, so with too many dollars chasing too few goods, there was only one predictable outcome; prices go to the moon.

It will take decades for us to absorb and dilute the shock of the deluge of cash flooding into our economy. In 2015 in Mexico, eight straight days of torrential rainfall on Cozumel flooded the coast with freshwater. This temporary disruption of the salinity in the marine ecosystem was devastating for aquatic life, and it took years for the system to stabilize and recover from that singular shock. Similarly, it will take decades for us to absorb and dilute the shock of the deluge of cash that flooded into our economy during the government’s irrational shutdowns.

Unfortunately, this reckoning with our past mistakes is unavoidable. We can’t legislate nor print our way out of the most colossal fuck-up in the history of economic policy. No government program can unring that bell. The $20 burrito is a teachable moment: NEVER SHUT DOWN YOUR ECONOMY. EVER. The problem is, we have short memories, so nobody is going to connect the expensive burrito to the bad choices of yesteryear.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll

BECAUSE OF COURSE: DSA Praises Fidel Castro in 100th Birthday Tribute, Denounces Marco Rubio as ‘Genocidal.’

The Democratic Socialists of America website called deceased Cuban dictator Fidel Castro a “stalwart symbol of anti-imperialist struggle and self-determination,” while denouncing Secretary of State Marco Rubio as genocidal.

In a tribute to Castro on what would have been his 100th birthday Thursday, the DSA website commemorated the “historic significance of both this day and the man.”

The fast-growing socialist organization that’s made strong inroads in Democratic Party primary elections over the past year, said that they have “a long history of solidarity with the Cuban people, their revolution, and their self-determination.”

Any solidarity with their hunger, crushing poverty, or desire for American liberty?

Posted at 8:34 am by Stephen Green

THE COUNTRY’S MOVING IN A DIRECTION WHERE ONE SIDE OR THE OTHER WILL BE PUTTING PEOPLE IN CAMPS:

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

THIS JUST IN: Active deployment frequently causes soldiers and sailors to lose weight — and Ro Khanna is on it! 

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll