It’s a sad story, the life of Jason Arday – the former Cambridge professor exposed as a fraud and plagiarist, who is now suspected of killing himself. I didn’t know him, had barely heard of him, but it was pretty clear that much of the life story he sold the world did not add up. Just how much of it was fake will come out eventually, but none of it needed to be. People must realize that it is what you actually do that matters, not your sad tale of woe nor any part of your biography.
Arday was “celebrated” because of the color of his skin and not much more. “He’s the youngest black professor in the history of Cambridge!” Who cares? In what way is your skin an accomplishment? The answer is none, period.
It sure seemed to me that he knew it, considering the outrageous biography he’d created for himself. He was “non-verbal throughout his childhood and only learning to read and write aged 18.” Or so the story went.
For most people, simply working your way up to becoming a professor at Cambridge would’ve been more than enough, but it doesn’t seem like it was for Arday.
He claimed to have “run 30 marathons in 35 days.” It takes a lot to run one marathon, more than most professionals can muster to run two of them in a week, but a novice nerdy black kid could run almost three dozen in just over a month? Do I have to name that smell hitting your nose right now?
The New York Times wrote (before his death):
“Two-thirds of the way through the challenge, he writes in the book, he had a seizure during a race and collapsed, resulting in a hairline fracture to the fibula in his right leg. Against doctors’ advice, he continued running.
“The next nine marathons were truly an ordeal,” he writes. “It took me well over five hours to complete each one. Even though I used painkillers, I was in agony throughout. My right leg ballooned to twice its size. To this day, I don’t really know how I did it.”
In his last marathon, Arday says, he was buoyed by hundreds of supporters in the final stretch. “Just like the famous scene in ‘Rocky II,’ where Rocky sprints away from the pack and up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I forced myself to speed up to a sprint and break away from the rest of the runners. I’ll never forget the crescendo of cheers as I turned the corner towards Piccadilly Circus, like I was being carried along by a wave of sound.”
Sounds like something out of Hollywood, doesn’t it? Or the biggest BSer you’ve ever met.
I don’t understand why the accomplishments for some people aren’t enough, or why some people simply need to lie about stupid, unimportant aspects of their lives, but they do. Fabulism is a disease, and if you’re so inclined to be uncomfortable enough in your life to need to lie about stupid things, there is no limit to where it stops. Obliterated lines in one aspect of life tend to lead to lines being obliterated elsewhere, then eventually everywhere.
Once you start down the Yellow Brick Road of believing your own press – that you’re special because you exist, rather than what you do with that existence – your connection to reality begins to fray. You tell absurd stories and get away with it because, say, liberals want to believe you for the color of your skin and nothing more. Next thing you know, you have to make up even more absurd stories to outdo the last and maintain the interest of anyone else around.
It's a spiral from which there is little escape. Arday did not seem to be able to pull up from that nosedive. He had to know that writing a book about his “life” was going to lead to scrutiny of his claims; that’s how it works. Yet, he still put himself in the spotlight. He could have continued in his Cambridge job and simply not written the book, but too many people had told him he was special for just being him that he had to plow ahead, no matter what.
The death of Jason Arday is sad, but it appears to be the result of years of lies and an existence of the irrelevant over accomplishment. Whatever ends up being exposed as the reason for Arday’s death, his life should serve as a cautionary tale for everyone else even remotely in a position to be celebrated for the unimportant. Don’t believe the hype; earn respect.
Derek Hunter is the host of the Derek Hunter Show on WMAL in Washington, D.C., and has a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on X at @DerekAHunter.
