Re: Why progressives were desperate to believe Jason Arday

On 8/4/26 12:00 PM, Julian wrote:
> The Jason Arday affair has been a great revealer. On the one hand, it is 
> a glorious romp that has brought much-needed mirth to the nation. On the 
> other, the exposure of Professor Arday isn’t really about the guileless 
> Arday himself, but the establishment that elevated him. It has served up 
> a moment of unavoidable clarity in which the nonsense of progressivism 
> stands exposed like the imperial scrotum.
> 
> It is a perfect storm. We have a fantasist in an environment where, for 
> political and social status reasons, everyone takes his claims at face 
> value, or pretends that they do because to express doubt would be to 
> invite unwanted attention. In such fertile ground the fantasist’s claims 
> (which he continues to deny fabricating) inevitably become increasingly 
> outlandish – epic marathon runs, prophetic blessings, an appearance in a 
> television programme that began 20 years before he was born – because he 
> is increasingly secure that they will never be questioned. This is what 
> inevitably occurs when a fantasist encounters people who want, for 
> whatever reason, to believe his fantasies.
> 
> It can be quite uncanny to see a fantasist at work. I once heard of a TV 
> project that met for its first big production meeting. It was only then, 
> after weeks of prep across different departments, that it gradually 
> occurred to everybody that the show hadn’t actually been commissioned. 
> The writer had just told everybody that it had. And they’d wanted to 
> believe.
> 
> Arday himself can hardly be blamed for this scandal. Like Puff the magic 
> dragon, he is notable only for the effect he had on others. Who would 
> dare to speak up against a wunderkind that made a lot of powerful people 
> feel better about themselves? Like love, mediocrity will always find a 
> way. DEI is its great enabler, but this can never be acknowledged.
> 
> Even now we can see the reluctance of Arday’s cheerleaders to throw in 
> the towel. LBC’s James O’Brien, for example, who at the height of 
> Arday’s fame nodded along to his rambling tosh, is currently fighting a 
> desperate rearguard action, telling his Bluesky followers that the 
> Telegraph and the Times have crossed the line into ‘studied [and] 
> deliberate ignominy’ with their Arday stories. I love how O’Brien goes 
> all Victorian in his vocabulary on these occasions. He must think it 
> makes him look very serious. He goes on, ‘If there is any case to answer 
> here, it is about Liverpool John Moore’s supervisory failure of an 
> obviously unique PhD student. Something, I imagine, their own exhaustive 
> investigation concluded… [it] would be comical if the motivation of 
> Jason’s enemies were not so hideously obvious.’
> 
> Like all of Arday’s fans, O’Brien’s only remaining option is to throw 
> murky aspersions of racism on the people who have revealed him to be 
> such a colossal, credulous prat.
> 
> And of course, O’Brien has form on this as long as your arm, with his 
> enthusiastic vaunting of the claims of the fantasist and later convicted 
> paedophile Carl Beech. In both cases, O’Brien wanted very badly to 
> believe a very obvious fantasy.
> 
> Such scandals can often be mistaken optimistically for an end to the 
> whole shebang of  progressive nonsense – for who could ever take them 
> seriously again? But the roots of progressivism are too deeply embedded 
> in the soil of public life. These hilarious exposures – see also Jussie 
> Smollett – are not strong enough to dislodge them. The daring young man 
> on the flying trapeze may fall to the ground with a splat, but the 
> progressive circus is so big that it just moves on.
> 
> People who want to believe are easy marks for the not-very-good and 
> delusional. The Labour party is currently in the grip of just such a 
> mania. Andy Burnham is only another kind of fantasist. According to him, 
> after all, the big problems facing Britain in 2026 are Mrs Thatcher, 
> Sainsbury’s and not enough mayors. Is that really much less bizarre than 
> Arday’s claims? It feels a bit like he’s pulled three things out of a 
> hat. Another dip would have brought up unicycles, Toyah and not enough 
> people called Steve. And on the right, enough people want to believe in 
> Rupert Lowe as the next prime minister, despite his actual status as 
> nothing much more than an electoral irritant to Reform.
> 
> As Arday shows, we need safeguards against that common human failing: 
> ignoring the truth in favour of what we’d prefer to be real.
> 
> 
> Gareth Roberts

do u think this journoslop actually saying anythning?

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hi, i'm nick!
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