August 2, 2026

LOOK AT HER EXPRESSION:

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

HAHA:

Related:

Plus:

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

RIDE THE LEFTIST MÖBIUS LOOP!

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

TDS HEADLINE OF THE YEAR: You just knew it would be from The New York Times because the Old Grey Lady is Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) Central. It goes like this: “In Trump’s Economy, Job Gains Go to Women. That’s Not an Entirely Good Thing.” Yes, it really does say women getting jobs is “not an entirely good thing.”

Posting a headline like that by the NYT is like tossing chum in the water, for the Issues & Insights crew. They may be swimming miles away, but they smell this TDS manifestation instantly and go for it. You can read the result here. 

Posted at 7:37 am by Mark Tapscott

AND THEN HE SHOUTED, CAMBRIDGE IS MAGA COUNTRY! Cambridge Can — but Evidently Won’t — Catch Jason Arday.

Arday is one of the U.K.’s newest academic superstars, a true success story as the youngest black scholar ever to become full professor at the University of Cambridge, Britain’s second-best institution of higher learning. His life story is truly impressive, an inspiring tale of a man rising to a prestigious position from severe disadvantages in life — Arday claims to suffer from an autism so severe that he was entirely nonverbal until the age of eleven, and wholly illiterate until learning to read at the age of 18. Now, not only is he a national pseudo-celebrity, as a “high-functioning neurodivergent,” he’s at the top of the academic hierarchy.

The devastatingly thorough report by Nathan Cofnas, a scholar at Ghent University (and a former research fellow at Cambridge), summarizes Arday’s remarkable vault up the academic ladder after claiming to have achieved literacy only after he started attending Sixth Form:

Under the influence of a white high school teacher who “gave [him] agency,” Arday pursued higher education. After receiving a PhD from Liverpool John Moores University, he rocketed up the academic ladder as a scholar of racism, education, and inequality. In three years he went from senior lecturer at Roehampton (2018) to associate professor at Durham (2019) to professor at Glasgow (2021). Ivy League universities (plural) tried to recruit him, but he had his heart set on Oxford or Cambridge. In 2023, at age 37, he became the youngest black full professor in the history of Cambridge. He is one of the youngest people of any race to ever hold a chair professorship at Oxbridge.

But by gum, it gets even more inspiring than that. Arday also claims that before becoming a full professor at Cambridge, he raised over £5 million for charity. And built clean-drinking-water facilities for South American and African peasants. While becoming an ultra-marathoner who ran 600 miles in six days (only 50 miles short of the world record) — all without any formal documentation of said feat. He has a heartwarming memoir about his triumph over adversity, with the glurgy, quotidian title of Great and Unfortunate Things, due to be released on August 11. Is there anything this heroic autist can’t do?

As it turns out, the answer is scholarship. If something seems a little too good to be true about Arday’s life story — from nonverbal illiteracy to the halls of Cambridge — then perhaps that’s because it was. Arday may be a fabulist. But according to Cofnas, Arday quite clearly is a serial plagiarist, having stolen enormous chunks of others’ scholarly work — pages upon pages of it, usually almost verbatim — for his Ph.D. thesis. In academia, one’s thesis is essentially one’s professional calling card as a budding academic. Plagiarizing it was once a death penalty offense; just ask Claudine Gay.

And much like Gay, he apparently has kept on plagiarizing well into his (remarkably thin) academic career, up to and including seemingly stealing clinical data (in other words, interview responses) from others for his own pieces. He didn’t do the work himself — he simply rewrote someone else’s work; the approach leaves more time for marathoning, one supposes. Needless to say, the sort of academic work he is vulturing from others is itself largely worthless, which is its own irony — the inevitable decay of “remix culture,” imported into scholarship.

Even the Grauniad has spotted Arday veering into Jussie Smollett territory: Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding a star Cambridge professor.

In an open letter to the government minister Jacqui Smith in July 2025, which outlined Arday’s experiences, he claimed to have been “threatened with a knife, physically assaulted and spat on; [had] rape and death threats being made to him and his family; bananas and bullets being posted to him via the university campus; and corrosive substances and mutilated animals sent to his family home”.

In a subsequent interview with the Guardian, Arday claimed to have been confronted at his faculty building on two separate occasions by a masked man threatening to harm him if he did not resign, and evading detection both times. On the second occasion Arday said the intruder produced a knife and threatened him with it.

The Guardian understands that after Arday reported the first intrusion to the university, enhanced CCTV was placed in the faculty and a panic alarm was installed in his office. The professor said he hit the panic alarm during the second confrontation, but that no one responded. It should have triggered an alarm alerting the faculty’s security team, all of whom were present at the time of the alleged incident.

The intruder was not picked up by CCTV on either occasion and no one in the faculty reported seeing anyone suspicious. Arday did not report either intrusion at the time, telling the Guardian that after the second incident he continued his working day and even conducted a PhD viva for a student less than two hours later.

He did not inform colleagues that a masked man with a knife was in the faculty building.

Arday confirmed in an interview with the Guardian that the “mutilated animals sent to his family home” mentioned in the open letter was a severed pig’s head, delivered in a large cardboard box to his parents’ home address in south London. He claimed to have intercepted the package and immediately thrown it away, only telling the police several months later.

In a subsequent interview he claimed the police investigated, checking with butchers in south London if they had sold a pig, eventually finding one that had sold a “whole hog” on the morning the head was left outside the family home.

When the Guardian checked those details with the local butchers Arday named, they said no police officer had come in to ask them about a pig. When asked if they were sure, the butcher said “that’s the kind of thing we’d remember”.

When the details Arday gave about the pig’s head investigation were checked by London’s Metropolitan police, the Guardian was told they were “categorically” incorrect and no investigation had taken place.

Arday had contacted the Met to lodge a complaint of harassment against Harris after his plagiarism allegations and, because he was based in Plymouth, the case was handed over to Devon and Cornwall police. Correspondence seen by the Guardian confirmed that the force declined to pursue a case against Harris.

Arday took no photographs of the bullet, the banana, the corrosive substance or the pig’s head. The only other people who saw any of the items were close family members, who told the Guardian Arday had shown them the bullet and the “poison”. Arday could produce no messages from the time in which he discussed any of the items with friends, family, colleagues or the police.

Exit quote: “When Arday was asked about his claims by the Guardian, he stood by them. ‘To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me,’ he said. ‘Why would I lie?’ He would be jeopardising his career.”

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

A FRIEND OF A FRIEND:  Alyte Online, a cyberpunk noir tragedy of love, loss, revenge, and collapse. Set in the city of Cartesia, where everything and everyone is observed, the canonical story descends into a criminal underworld with prohibition-era human upgrades in illegal speakeasies, human harvesters, and a terrifying living myth awakening in the depths. At the center of it all, Alyte. Suffering through grief and searching for answers. An excavation of a world, her identity, and the boundary between what is witnessed and what remains unseen.

Posted at 7:00 am by Sarah Hoyt

I SAID IT. THEY LOCKED DOWN THE COUNTRY SO THEY COULD HAVE THEIR COLOR REVOLUTION:  “Fauci did his bit, played his part, and was lavishly rewarded by the press”: So how did a virus with a ~.02%-.04% mortality rate become 24/7 headline news? It became battle prep for the 2020 election steal.

In the blogs of the left leading up to the Covidiocy it was all about “if only we could crash the economy.” So, they did. Also because the press in the rest of the world amplifies our press, they locked down the world. Killed millions of people indirectly. All for their political coup.

Posted at 6:06 am by Sarah Hoyt