August 18, 2026

FATHERS MORE LIKELY TO BE SENTENCED TO EXECUTION THAN MOTHERS:

Posted at 5:31 pm by Helen Smith

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Jason Arday’s Final Self-Delusion.

Some lies are so preposterous that intelligent people who believe them bear some responsibility for being taken in. And they are outright guilty for repeating the lies and urging others to believe them. This is obviously so in Arday’s case. The lies depended on willful credulity, as well as amplification by other professors, including Cambridge’s Hilary Cremin, who went on the BBC and told Arday that “you are the best in the world, in terms of the research that you do.” Reviewers gushed over his books and pronounced them moving, “brave,” and “insightful.” Defenders did begin to distance themselves when the lies became even more lurid and inexplicable, as with the claims that a masked man invisible to security cameras had menaced Arday with a knife and that someone had sent him the head of a pig, which he disposed of rather than preserved as evidence. The trajectory of his deception seems to have been from tragedy (a man carried away with lies and too compulsive to stop telling them) to farce (once the lies became ridiculous enough that only a complicit person could believe them) and finally back to tragedy on Friday. Arday’s colleagues, his editors, and the people who knew he was a fraud but said nothing have absorbed some ridicule for their role in hiring and publishing him. But to date, I have seen no evidence that they have considered their complicity, let alone repaired the damage to their institutions by explaining their error or, better yet, just resigning.

They elevated Arday, a fragile and disturbed person, into a position where his fragility would be tested and he would be shattered. Even if the Cambridge Faculty of Education’s standards were so low that his inadequacies would remain unremarked there, he was a fellow of a Cambridge college with real scholars who would eventually be indignant upon realizing that their new colleague’s scholarship consisted of copy-paste jobs, semiliterate nonsense, and fan notes on his favorite 1990s Brit-pop. Did Arday’s allies think no one would notice? That those who noticed would be forever intimidated into polite silence? That drinking sherry in the common room of Jesus College would be a pleasant experience for Arday himself as he waited to be found out? Those who placed Arday in that situation were cruel and heartless. They may as well have taken a skin-and-bones Make-A-Wish kid, told him that he could fly, and shot him out of a cannon. The journalists were not the ones who stuffed Arday into the cannon and lit the fuse. They were gravity.

“The media didn’t kill Jason Arday,” Brendan O’Neill adds:

Then there was the supposed vigil for Arday in London’s Trafalgar Square last night. A vigil for the late Arday is a fine idea: his death is a tragedy and his friends and followers are cut up about it. Yet that gathering felt more like a mass screech of rage against the “vicious” media than a quiet tribute to a late professor. Attendees mauled the gutter press and its “relentless campaign” against a black man.

Journalists need to stand up to this crusade of defamation. Editors too. The media did what it is meant to do: found a fascinating story and it told it. I know some of the journalists who wrote about Arday. The idea that they thought to themselves “Look, a black man at Cambridge, let’s take him down” is preposterous beyond belief. It is a slur far more vile and truthless than anything the media said about Arday.

The stakes are high. The very liberty to utter is on the line. There are now cries for a public inquiry into the media coverage of Arday, and even for new legislation to “cap news coverage of any individual within a set time frame”. They’re calling it Arday’s Law.

Let us be clear: this would be an intolerable assault on the freedom of the press. Nobody – not the state, not the “moral majority” and certainly not noisy mobs of ideological crusaders – has the right to tell the press what it can cover and for how long. Our forbears did not fight and die for the sacred liberty to speak only for silver-spoon leftists to trash it now on the back of a tragic death. Such exploitative despotism must not stand.

I’m sure no one could ever abuse such a well intentioned law, right?

UPDATE:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

EMOTIONAL ANTIBODIES ARE JUST AS VITAL AS THE REGULAR KIND:

Posted at 4:35 pm by Stephen Green

SOMALI PIRATES UPDATE: Minnesota Man Arrested for Medicaid Fraud Scheme Previously Won State’s ‘Outstanding Refugee’ Award.

In 2021, Salman Ahmed Elmi was awarded the Outstanding Refugee Award for Entrepreneurship by the Minnesota Department of Human Services. Now, he’s facing charges in connection with a Medicaid fraud scheme with alleged ties to a sex trafficking ring.

Elmi, a native of Somalia, was charged last week with three counts of aiding and abetting theft by swindle and five counts of aiding and abetting theft by false representation.

Prosecutors allege Elmi and three associates — Frank Reeves, Viktoriya Komonash and Andrea Sampson — ran four agencies that they used to bill more than $4.5 million to Medicaid since 2023. Those agencies were called Reva Health, Reva Autism, Helpful Housing and Homefelt Assisted Living.

Elmi and his associates allegedly recruited young women who were homeless or struggling with addiction, housing or finances. They then rented apartments in the women’s names using fake pay stubs and enlisted them in a pay-for-sex scheme. Investigators say they’ve been tracking the alleged sex trafficking ring since 2019. Sampson and Reeves were arrested as part of the sex trafficking ring bust last week.

The group then began stealing victims’ identities to bill Medicaid in their name, according to court filings.

As Amy Curtis writes, “We have yet another story of Medicaid fraud out of the corrupt state of Minnesota, and this time the suspect was not just busted for stealing taxpayer dollars; he was actually given an award from the state’s Department of Human Services before allegedly billing the state more than $1 million for fraudulent services.”

Minnesota appears to be resorting to the Obama-style tactic of “stray voltage” to give the DNC-MSM a reason to ignore Elmi’s misdeeds:

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

GO AWAY: Woke Mob Tries to Sink Children’s Ride. Owner Doesn’t Give a Ship.

A handful of parents in England decided a Titanic-themed children’s slide was the iceberg to die on. The slide has been there for years. Nobody cared until the slide’s return this summer.

At Graveley Fruit Farm near Hitchin, Hertfordshire, just north of London, £2 buys a turn on the ride. Children climb into a replica of the ship’s stern, which rises and sends them down four slides onto a crash mat.

Graveley opened in 1981 and offers fruit picking in summer, crazy golf, a playground, and water slides. The Titanic ride ran for several years before returning in May; the online complaints showed up this summer.

Before each turn, the children get boarding passes. The farm calls the trip a “wreck,” and about 500 people use the ride on a busy day. Roughly 500 children happily abandoning ship, and until recently, very few adults demanding an inquiry.

That changed on Facebook.

I haven’t been on Facebook since 2018 or 2019, when the company demanded my phone number to complete my login. It appears nothing has changed.

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

CONGRESS CLOSES HUGE TRANSPARENCY LOOPHOLE: But the issue now may be if President Donald Trump will sign it into law. Check it out in my latest for The Washington Stand. 

Posted at 3:14 pm by Mark Tapscott

WHERE DID ALL THE MEN GO? It’s true, a growing legion of men are dropping out of the workforce. They just stop looking for work. The result is not merely economic damage; the traditional family structure, among much else, suffers grievous damage when hard-working, responsible men aren’t available for marriage.

Writing for The Washington Stand, Zachary Patton, a talented young journo, offers this prescient analysis of the problem:

“A major driver of this contraction in the workforce is the direct consequences of social safety net expansion. What was once designed with the intention of being temporary cushions during economic recession has morphed into a permanent way of living for millions of able-bodied Americans.

“Divided amongst state-funded disability benefits, nutritional assistance, and low-income housing subsidies, the economic estuary that exists between a demanding career and remaining jobless has dried up to almost a point of non-existence. When safety nets mitigate non-work without demanding an exchange, the motivator to persevere through demanding labor dissolves.”

 

 

Posted at 2:39 pm by Mark Tapscott

STURDY, TOO:

And even more pics:

Starship flight 14 is tentatively set for Aug. 28.

Posted at 2:32 pm by Stephen Green

DANIEL MCCARTHY: Democrats’ Southern Strategy. “It’s actually about keeping power in the hands of the party establishment, the people who backed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020, and who are likely to wind up supporting Kamala Harris in 2028.”

They sure can pick’em.

Posted at 2:16 pm by Stephen Green