https://gidmk.substack.com/p/the-jason-arday-saga-is-terribl...

> 1 The Racism Of It All: It is not news when white men commit academic misconduct. It gets reported in a handful of stories, there’s a bit of media attention, but everyone quickly forgets about the problems.

> 2 Arday Was Definitely Guilty: The second point is somehow even more frustrating. Yes, Jason Arday was hounded by a society that demands different standards for young Black men than white guys. Yes, the amount of scrutiny he received was obviously connected to the colour of his skin. But also, he definitely did plagiarize. And not just a little bit. His work is riddled with clear, obvious, and extensive theft from other published academic papers.

> You do not need to trust race realists or other unpleasant people. Just download the thesis and check for yourself. It is clear that a significant portion of the thesis was copied directly from other people’s work. This is not in doubt, it’s not in question, and the fact that so many people online are arguing that the plagiarism charges are false because a university said so is deeply depressing. It’s arguably the worst case of plagiarism I’ve ever seen.

> Whatever your thoughts on plagiarism, it’s clear that Arday’s work harmed very few people. As he himself said, “I didn't murder somebody”. If he hadn’t been a Black academic and a poster child for diversity at Cambridge university, we’d probably have never known his name.

You sound like one of the Arday Truthers:

https://archive.is/KkqkY

> For some of Arday’s supporters, acknowledging that any of the media scrutiny was justified has become tantamount to siding with his “killers.” He is instead a martyr—the victim of a “lynching”—and the inconvenient fact of his fabulism must be tidied away from the virtual shrine. This is an emotional position rather than a rational one, and its very indefensibility makes it a greater demonstration of tribal loyalty. Insisting that the academic was completely innocent, in the face of all the evidence, sends a strong social signal that you hate the right-wing media and care about racism.

> The postmortem airbrushing of Arday’s story also ignores how that story twisted and turned while he was alive. When The Guardian confronted him with the implausibility of some of his tall tales, Arday responded by editing them in real time: Yes, he had once claimed to have run 600 miles in six days, an exceptional feat for an endurance athlete, but what he actually meant was that he took daylong rest breaks in between. Yes, he had claimed to have raised more than £5 million for charity, but actually this was with the help of “many fundraising collectives” whose participants he could not name because they had signed nondisclosure agreements.

As they might say on Reddit, "Everybody Sucks Here". Arday the fabulist and plagiarist, the academic institutions who didn't vet him because they were razzle-dazzled by his bullshit lifestory (then drop him like a stone when their attempts to keep his plagiarism hidden don't work any more), the popular press who are happy to amp up a public shaming for clicks and views, the anti-woke and the racists who say this just confirms what they thought about DEI, and the anti-anti-woke and anti-racists who will deny the bleeding obvious if it makes them appear virtuous to their peers.