Matt2phat

Triggered by a far-right, anti-black race science network, the entire British media whipped up a state of national psychosis in which an extraordinarily talented, generous black academic - who excelled against many odds and challenges - was endlessly labelled a fraud, despite plausible reasons (documented in detail below and which ought to have been recognised by journalists doing their jobs responsibly) to believe he was just flawed. The network that drove this campaign has for decades sought to mainstream its pseudoscientific fantasy that black people are inherently stupider than white people, due to genetics and heredity. Premised on that religious-level conviction, dressed-up in the language of science but actually at garbage levels of empirical rigour, this group has worked to mainstream the idea that higher education is structurally disadvantaged against white people by systematically recruiting underqualified ethnic minorities (who are believed to innately lack capacity) into university roles and jobs. Like a mind-virus, this specious bullshit has beguiled the greatest minds of many of the most influential figures in politics and media - despite lacking empirical evidence, which consistently points in the opposite direction. (See, for instance, this study based on national data led by experts at Imperial College London and published by Wellcome Open Research: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4177…) Jason Arday became the lightning rod of this campaign. It is clear that his autism and learning difficulties did lead to errors in his work. But a university inquiry had cleared him of plagiarism and identified that the citation errors found had been compounded by his disabilities at the time. Notwithstanding this, his entire life story became fodder. Every apparent inflection in wording, every inconsistency in source testimony from decades back, every claim which journalists 'could not verify' became evidence of "fraud", "fabrication" "fabulism". It turns out that the efforts to verify were themselves weak and nonsensical, such as the headline claim that Arday lied about writing an academic book (detailed below in my article). Fraud is hard to prove. Courts put the litmus test very high. Yet the press had made up its collective mind. And worst of all, the thing that really gets me, is that it is widely known in the literature that some autistic people can experience issues with how they recollect autobiographical details. It didn't occur to these responsible journalists bravely seeking the "truth" to consider that Arday's diagnosis might plausibly explain errors and inconsistencies (much of which are catalogued and investigated below). Instead, a working class man who had fought tooth and nail from the estate against challenges most of us would be floored by, was systematically defamed. Yes, you cannot defame the dead by law. But there was a time when Arday was alive. And during that time, the vast bulk of the "journalism" published about Arday promulgated speculative falsehoods and failed to prove dishonesty. I'll repeat: they failed to prove dishonesty. Yet in the minds of millions on this hell site, fraud and dishonesty is the only way they will remember Arday. They, and the trolls and bots below, lack the functional literacy to even bother reading through the thread carefully, let alone reading the whole article itself. Something strange and alarming happened this summer at the tail end of the climate-induced heatwaves that set alight our forests and homes. We've seen before how societies can descend into bouts of madness. We follow the crowd, we take the meme as Word. The masthead has tremendous power. It sets the frame and tells us where the wind is blowing, and so we blow there. These past weeks, the British media chased its own tail into a hyperreality of its own construction. At the heart of it was a concocted, baseless moral panic about a disabled black man in one of the country's most elite institutions. The black man was portrayed in fundamentally parasitical terms, against the backdrop of the unquestioned assumption that there are two many underqualified black people plaguing Britain's precious universities. His disabilities, and their symptoms which he had struggled against for his entire life and career, were weaponised against him. I do not blame individual journalists as such for this. And I utterly condemn those hurling abuse at any journalists. I do not offer ready-made simple solutions. I do not believe in censorship or top-down press control. But what just happened is bigger than that. This was an institutional failure, and a systematic collapse in basic journalistic standards - whipped up by a movement of anti-black racists who are operating in mainstream British institutions which regularly receive airtime and respectability. It was a cultural hurricane that resulted in death. Retreating into self-defensive justifications is a natural psychological response. I understand. But simply saying - we were just doing our jobs - is quite a pathetic cop-out. It illustrates that our media institutions are unwilling and incapable of holding themselves to account in even the most mildest of ways. A national public inquiry is urgently needed.