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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1j1ye6n30no

(Non pay wall link)

Tragic end.

I feel bad for the dude - honestly a hearty laugh is all I want when people violate social norms like this and show us how frankly evil our institutions can be.

Sure I can blame the dude for every lie told but it only permeates my life several levels deep … the association of someone like Arday and my life only really touches when the walks start crumbling down.

What gets me mad is the institutions.

It’s their fault! Every step of the way someone, anyone, could have stepped in and stopped folly.

But things snowball and here we are.

I don’t even know what I’m supposed to learn from this, and I don’t know how I can help make the world a better place than I left it. People used to change the world I feel like, and I’m only changing the people around me … which is something!

I’m 100% reading the biography about this.

I feel bad for the dude

I don't. Short hair don't care. Base your livelihood upon a mountain of lies and perhaps that mountain will erode one day to expose your lies.

Especially when your livelihood is dependent upon denigrating the very population that gives you and people like you a hard carry. Obligatory Norm Macdonald: That's what upsets me most about a black man lying and grifting his way to a career denigrating white people, while supported by a country built by white people—that one day some pesky Noticers might call him out for his lies and grifts.

He and his allies would not give the slightest of fucks if a wrongthinker were murdered, much less suicided. If anything, they'd celebrate it, given how the murder of someone as milquetoast as Charlie Kirk was celebrated.

Arday killing himself now merely gives his supporters "Republicans POUNCE!"-type motivation to lionize him as a martyr, that a bunch of online racists harassed and bullied an innocent Stunning and Brave black man into suicide. Well played, Jason.

Yeah, the emotional first response people get is that of sympathy, but that just serves to highlight how warped and disconnected people are from reality.

It's this odd dynamic of white people being seemingly incapable of internalizing the amount of hate that's directed against them. Which should put people like Jason Arday in a 'The Witch is Dead!' category, at the very least. But instead folks just feel sorry for him. Including many of his alleged political enemies.

One really needs to ask oneself why. Because the most immediate plausible explanation is that everyone knows this is all a sham. No one believes that black people like him are actually academics. There's an emotive/sub-conscious understanding that they are always in over their heads. Playing a prop in an elaborate theater. They are given a lot of power and prestige, but everyone also knows that they have to color inside the set lines. And even that is usually too great an ask.

In a sense Arday did his cause the ultimate favor. He exists as a refutation of every apology and vindication of every critique of western academia and modern western culture as a whole. A stupid serial liar can become a professor at what should be one of the worlds most prestigious academic institutions because he repeated vacuous mantras about race, and happened to be of the right race. Now he is beyond reproach and the rotten system is safe from criticism. Because it relies on manipulation above all else, to keep itself afloat.

People point out that it's not his fault, 'We all killed Jason Arday'. Modern academia has a demand for soft spoken brown people who can verbalize extreme hatred for white people within a certain linguistic framework. But it's just a stupid cope to get away from facing the reality of the situation. That this is modern academia in the west. This is a product, an outcome, of what has been advocated for in the past decades.

Both the 'left' and 'right' will make use of this cope. Since the existence of Jason Arday isn't just a refutation of the 'left' and their academic theater, but also the respectable 'right' and it's inability to deal with the reality of immigration and multiracialism.

Arday isn't in "The Witch is Dead!" category for me, but only because he lacked the reach. He had basically no influence in the US, he didn't even write (or rather plagiarize) papers read by local wokescolds. Other than that... well, Arday went so far as to report his critics to the police. He was not some tragic, innocent victim, not in the least.

Presumably there would have been no sympathy if the person he reported to the police had killed thesmelves. Instead, it would have been seen as vindication that Arday was in the right, and that the person he reported could not live with his own lies and malice.