How to play liberals for suckers



Jason Arday is almost certainly a fraud. But I hope he is something vastly more interesting.

Until very recently, Arday was one of those people liberal institutions put on a pedestal: Cambridge professor, youngest black professor in the university’s history, working-class, autistic, illiterate until late adolescence, scholar of inequality, champion of diversity, ultramarathon runner. And, by every indication, a man of the left.

It’s a fair bet Arday understood liberal institutions well enough to know that their pants-soiling terror of violating ideological taboos left them ripe for manipulation.

That last part I believe. The rest? Well.

Now there are serious questions about plagiarism, his curriculum vitae, fundraising claims, ultramarathon feats, and some of the more lurid tales he fed the press about racist abuse. Cambridge opened an investigation. Arday promptly resigned.

Right on cue came the liberal anguish: What does this mean for black academics? Neurodivergent scholars? Will racists exploit this? Is the scrutiny itself racist?

I have a better question: What if Jason Arday knew what he was doing all along?

Not merely that he lied. Anybody can lie. What if he understood what the people around him feared, understood what they desperately wanted to believe, and fed it back to them until he landed at Cambridge?

I can’t prove that. But I know the type.

Years ago, I had a close friend who was one of the most brilliant people I ever knew. He was black, an artist and journalist, a trickster, and a magnificent pain in the neck. He loved racial games.

He understood white liberal anxiety about race better than most white liberals did. This was a dude who hung a Confederate battle flag in his apartment just to get a reaction. I thought it was hilarious.

He would also have been deeply insulted by any suggestion that he needed affirmative action. He was too good. He wanted to beat his competition straight up, and he did. Over and over.

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So when I read what Arday told a reporter asking pointed questions, I stopped and smiled: “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me.”

Of course you did, you magnificent bastard! Never give a sucker an even break, right?

Look again at the bio: black, poor, autistic, victimized by racism, couldn’t read, then fell upward and upward until he landed at Cambridge. It’s exactly the kind of story liberal institutions want to tell about themselves.

Look at us! Look how inclusive we are! Look how far we’ve come!

Here a little ideological taxonomy becomes necessary. Conservatives are much too quick to conflate leftism with liberalism. The two overlap, especially in their preference for faux equality and social justice over liberty, but they are not the same. Leftists often look at liberals and see weak, bourgeois, self-congratulatory people who can be bullied with their own moral vocabulary.

Now, I don’t know what to believe about Arday’s biography. My default is to believe nothing at all. But I have little doubt he’s a genuine left-winger. And it’s a fair bet he understood liberal institutions well enough to know that their pants-soiling terror of violating ideological taboos left them ripe for manipulation.

That’s the game. He didn’t need to infiltrate enemy territory. He only needed to know which buttons to push and what gaps to fill.

Did he really hold that job? Did anyone actually read the dissertation? Did he raise those millions? Did he run that far? Was any of it true?

Why are you asking, bigot?

Once Arday became evidence of liberal virtue, liberals stopped looking at Arday and started looking at what he represented. That’s where judgment went limp.

My old friend would have understood that instantly.

He later became severely mentally ill. Last I heard, he was homeless. I don’t know whether he’s alive. Every so often I Google his name, looking for an obituary I pray I never find.

So forgive my limited patience for ritual concern about what Arday’s downfall means for “neurodivergent scholars.” My friend’s illness wasn’t an inspirational bullet point. It wrecked his life.

Maybe Arday really is autistic. I don’t know. But once a man has told enough big stories that prove phony, dubious, inflated, or impossible to verify, he loses the right to say: Trust me on the rest.

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Simon & Schuster; Anselm Ebulue/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Arday has a memoir coming out this week called “Great and Unfortunate Things.” Simon & Schuster reportedly paid over $1 million for the ghostwritten manuscript. I’m not interested. It probably it belongs alongside James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces” in the fiction section.

No, the book I want to read will come later and has only one possible title: “I Thought You’d Believe Me.”

I want the confession. I want Arday to tell us he really is a leftist, really does believe the ideology, and nevertheless realized that respectable liberal institutions had made themselves absurdly easy marks.

I want him to tell us he kept pushing and pushing, waiting for somebody to say, “Hold on.”

And for years, nobody did.

If that’s the story, Jason Arday isn’t merely another academic fraud. He’s a world-class trickster.

And somewhere, I hope, my old friend is laughing.

Game recognizes game.

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The internet makes monsters and saints before the body is cold



The internet has done an admirable job hobbling the corporate left-wing media’s ability to control the population through a single narrative. But that blessing comes with regrettable costs.

The speed of information and the incentive to push hot takes onto social media mean that when a public figure dies, there is an immediate race to decide which competing narrative will define his legacy.

Was Graham a true convert to MAGA and its values? Unlikely. But politics is not a contest over who believes harder.

When Lindsey Graham died suddenly of heart failure over the weekend, conspiracy theories about foreign assassination plots immediately began to circulate online. Many leftists openly celebrated his death, and the reactionary impulse of conservatives drove others to recast Graham as a stalwart crusader for MAGA.

The truth is more complicated. But in the eternal battle for narrative supremacy, there is little time for reflection, even in response to death.

No one is above criticism. But in a healthy society, some space exists between a public figure’s passing and attacks on his legacy.

That standard now seems quaint, perhaps naive. It is also better for the soul of the nation.

Unfortunately, wishing to live in that kind of society does not make it real. The information war is relentless. Abstaining from the fight only means someone else defines the truth.

The news cycle does not observe a respectable period of mourning. The battle begins the moment the headline drops.

Wild conspiracy theories now seem obligatory whenever a prominent figure dies, and Graham was no exception. The senator toured a Ukrainian weapons factory the day before his death, and several figures speculated that he had really been killed in an attack on that facility or poisoned by the Russians.

Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin suggested on social media that Graham had likely been killed by Israel, despite Graham’s long record of advocacy for that country.

This is not to denigrate conspiracy theories in general. One thing we learned after COVID is that such theories can often prove correct. But the narratives around Graham’s death were bizarre.

Graham was a 71-year-old man with a family history of fatal heart conditions who did not take care of himself. His death is sad, but its cause was hardly mysterious.

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Progressives reacted exactly as expected. There was gloating, celebration, mockery, and even speculation about who should come next.

Graham’s death was nowhere near as visceral or violent as Charlie Kirk’s assassination, but the left’s response carried unnerving echoes. It was a brutal reminder of a lesson conservatives have worked hard not to learn since Kirk’s murder.

Even the average Democrat is emotionally unhinged.

Your progressive neighbor may not be willing to commit violence personally against you over politics. But many are happy to cheer those who do and dance on your grave once you are gone.

The reaction on the right was strange in a different way. Some conservatives rushed to construct a hagiography, transforming Graham into a MAGA saint, a lion who died fighting for the cause.

That impulse may have been an understandable response to the left’s disgusting vitriol. It was not wise.

Graham served in the Senate for 31 years. He supported every disastrous war during his tenure, including the war in Ukraine that Donald Trump ran on ending and the war in Iran now costing the administration dearly.

Graham pushed for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. He backed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during military operations in Syria and Libya.

He pushed to send hundreds of billions of dollars to foreign governments while inflation was driving up the cost of living for ordinary Americans. After Graham’s death, Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that when he told the senator Israel should pay for its own defense, Graham insisted that American taxpayers should foot the bill.

On immigration, the core issue of the MAGA coalition, Graham was even worse.

He was part of the Gang of Eight and pushed for amnesty alongside men like Marco Rubio. In 2006, Graham teamed up with John McCain to pursue a similar pathway to citizenship. His attempts to secure amnesty for illegal aliens were so common that he earned the nickname “Grahamnesty.”

Lindsey Graham was, in almost every way imaginable, the essence of the Washington swamp Trump promised to drain.

He was also a savvy political operator.

Graham initially fought Trump tooth and nail. Like many Republicans, he slowly changed his rhetoric. Despite still pushing horrible foreign policy and endless war, the senator became a reliable vote for Trump on many domestic issues. His work advancing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the SAVE Act deserves note.

Was Graham a true convert to MAGA and its values? Unlikely. But politics is not a contest over who believes harder.

It would have been unwise to trust Graham. Many Republicans have discovered new respect for Trump to get what they want, only to betray him the moment he stops prioritizing their issues.

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Blaze Media Illustration

But Graham delivered votes and support at key moments. That made him politically useful in scenarios that cannot be ignored.

Graham spent most of his career as an institutional neoconservative advancing policies that were disastrous for the country. He eventually corrected course on amnesty and delivered some key votes for the Trump administration. Yet his monomaniacal obsession with war made him one of the central proponents of a foreign policy quagmire threatening to derail the MAGA agenda.

Does his opportunistic support for Trump in the final years of his life make him a true MAGA patriot? No.

Does he deserve the hatred poured on him by the left after his death? Also no.

That is not mercy for a political enemy. It is moral clarity. Refusing to lie about a man’s record does not require joining the mob that cheers his death.

Those are entirely separate moral sins.

In the rush to define the narrative, the complicated nature of Graham’s legacy disappears.

The internet has made immediate judgment mandatory and thoughtful reflection almost impossible. It turns public figures into mascots, villains, saints, and demons before the body is cold.

In the end, the internet makes fictional characters of us all.

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Who wants to eat a trillionaire?



Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a century ago. “They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”

Last week’s SpaceX initial public offering made company founder and CEO Elon Musk the world’s first publicly known trillionaire — very different from all of us, at least on paper.

Bad enough he became too rich. Worse, Elon Musk became too independent.

On paper is doing plenty of heavy lifting. We’ll get back to that.

If billionaires “shouldn’t exist,” as our boring socialist friends never tire of saying, then a trillionaire must be not merely obscene but downright apocalyptic. If the existence of billionaires is a policy failure, the arrival of a trillionaire is a crime scene. Call Congress! Summon the United Nations! Eat the rich!

Let me tell you about the very left-wing. They are different from you and me. They enjoy little, and it does something to them. It makes them covetous where normal people are merely curious, bitter where normal people are merely skeptical, and stupid where the rest of us are trying very hard to be charitable.

Musk’s gargantuan wealth is a test no leftist can pass.

“If we liquidated Elon Musk as a financial entity we could each pocket $3,000,” one frivolous X user wrote. “Just putting that out there. 3K. Not bad.”

“Elon Musk is a trillionaire but it’s def the people on SNAP ruining your life,” a tedious Democratic strategist posted.

“Right? He could fund SNAP himself and still have a boatload left to spare,” a pseudonymous Marxist replied.

This is what happens when resentment collides with arithmetic.

“Elon Musk could easily fund” makes for a terrific party game, especially if everyone playing has skipped high school civics, freshman economics, and the day in third grade when Mrs. Campbell broke the news that Monopoly money was not legal tender.

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With $1 trillion, Musk could buy every major carmaker in America, Europe, and Japan. With $1 trillion, Musk could fund global famine relief dozens of times over, provide clean water to the world, rebuild Gaza, or hand every person on earth a modest cash gift. With $1 trillion, Musk could cover the United Nations’ humanitarian appeals, the Australian budget, or — according to my friend Mac Owens — roughly 3.5 miles of Gavin Newsom’s high-speed rail system.

Cool. Put it all on the board. Have fun. Pour another drink. (Maybe pour me one, too.)

But Musk does not have $1 trillion in a checking account. He is not Scrooge McDuck swan-diving into a vault of gold coins (not that it would even work that way). He owns shares in companies that other people believe are valuable because those companies build things, launch things, connect things, sell things, and promise things investors think may be worth a lot more later.

His wealth is not a pile of cash. It is a claim on productive enterprise.

The socialist imagination never really gets past the pile. The left sees wealth and pictures a dragon atop a hoard. It sees equity and imagines stolen bread. It sees a balance sheet and imagines a pantry that can be raided without consequence.

But Musk’s wealth cannot be “liquidated” without destroying much of the value the envious wish to seize. Sell enough shares, and the price falls. Seize the company, and watch the engineers leave. Convert capital into consumption, and the thing that made the wealth possible begins to disappear.

Welcome to Economics 102. Economics 101 teaches scarcity. Economics 102 teaches that capital is not loot.

None of this makes Musk a saint. I don’t know if he is a good man. I don’t know if any man should have as much influence as he has, and neither do his fanboys. Musk is erratic, strange, reckless, sometimes brilliant, and often his own worst enemy. But he is not a political theory. He is not a catechism. He is not your dad.

I know do this much, though: If Musk had not bought Twitter in 2022 for the eye-watering sum of $44 billion, Americans would know less about their own country and less about the people who presume to manage it.

That purchase did not make him richer. It made him more dangerous.

Dangerous to whom? To the people who think “misinformation” means information they cannot control. To governments that prefer pressure campaigns to open censorship. To NGOs that discovered a business model in laundering political speech control through the language of “safety.” To journalists who miss the days when a few institutions could decide which scandals were real and which ones respectable people were expected not to notice.

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mikkelwilliam/iStock/Getty Images

This is why the hatred aimed at Musk is never really about money. The money supplies the moral pretext. Control supplies the motive.

The left does not hate Musk because he could “fund SNAP.” The federal government already spends enormous sums on SNAP, and no serious person believes American nutrition policy should depend on one weird rich guy hawking rocket shares. The left hates Musk because he took a portion of his unrealized fortune and bought a speech platform that was supposed to belong forever to the consensus managers.

Bad enough he became too rich. Worse, he became too independent.

A billionaire who funds the approved foundations may be vulgar, but he can be managed. A billionaire who underwrites lawsuits, climate conferences, university centers, “democracy” initiatives, and grants for people who use the word “equity” as an incantation may still be welcomed at the proper tables. His money can be baptized.

Musk’s money did something else. It bought the key to a door the regime wanted to remain locked.

No wonder they want to eat him.

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Muslim, pro-Palestine HS valedictorian blasts ICE in graduation speech — which school official cuts short: 'I feel oppressed'



A Muslim, pro-Palestine valedictorian from a North Carolina high school blasted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during her commencement speech last week, which a school official is seen on video cutting short.

During the graduation ceremony for Clayton High School last Thursday, Leen Hijaz delivered the welcome speech, WRAL-TV said, adding in its video report that Hijaz is the valedictorian of the graduating class.

As Hijaz reached the closing remarks of her speech, she began commenting about ICE and Palestine, the station said. The following is the transcript of Hijaz's final words based on a video recording:

Before I leave the stage, I have one last thing to say. Every single person here has a voice, and we are privileged to have the freedom to use it when so many people around the world are struggling and suffering to be heard. Whether it's the millions suffering in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Afghanistan, and so many other countries around the world, or the families being torn apart by ICE, these are not distant issues; they are happening right now as I speak. My point is, we're not given a voice to stay silent.

Then what appeared to be a school official approached Hijaz at the podium and cut off her speech, after which Hijaz turned and sat down in her seat onstage.

Nevertheless, the crowd gave Hijaz a big round of applause.

Below is the clip of her off-script words:

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The moment was captured on video as Clayton High School live streamed the commencement ceremony on the school's YouTube page, WRAL reported.

What's more, Hijaz on her TikTok account the day after the graduation ceremony said her diploma was being withheld due to her words in her speech, the station said.

"What I focused on throughout my entire life was my education, and for something so important to me, something that I worked hard for 12 years of my life to get taken from me, I feel oppressed," Hijaz said, according to WRAL.

Hijaz in her TikTok video also identified herself as a Muslim and added that she was the graduating class' valedictorian even though she was technically a junior, noting that she graduated early.

Hijaz added that for six months she did "a lot of fighting to get on that stage" before the school "gave in and they said that I could do the welcome speech."

"The only reason why I wanted to go on that stage is because I wanted to say something,” Hijaz said in her TikTok video. “And I really think that somebody had to say something because nobody else is going to speak up. Nobody."

Hijaz added in her TikTok video that when the high school principal approached her at the podium, the principal said that "if you don't stop speaking right now, you're not graduating."

What's more, Hijaz said in her TikTok video that her diploma was going to be "withheld for a week."

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The News & Observer said the school's principal didn't respond to an email requesting comment on the incident.

In a statement provided to WRAL, Johnston County Public Schools said students were required to submit their remarks well in advance of graduation and that a student deviated from what administrators preapproved.

"School administrators intervened in order to maintain the integrity and focus of the program in real time," the district said, according to the station. "This action was not about limiting a student’s voice but about ensuring that a school-sponsored event remained consistent with its intended purpose."

In her TikTok video, Hijaz said she didn't submit the end of her speech as part of her official speech because she said the school would've denied it "immediately because of how racist they are."

"I was extremely scared to say something and really wasn't planning on doing it, but I had so much support from my friends and family around me, and they really encouraged me to say something," Hijaz said in her TikTok video, adding that "I didn't get the chance to say everything I wanted to say, but I said enough that the word went out."

Hijaz added in her TikTok clip that her principal was yelling her name and making her feel "uncomfortable" — and that later the principal said that she was "so disappointed" in Hijaz and that the valedictorian "made this all about" herself and "abused" the "privilege to speak."

The school district told WRAL that while it respects students' right to express their views and encourages important conversations concerning their views, they also have "a responsibility to ensure that official school events remain inclusive, respectful, and focused on celebrating all graduates."

"We remain committed to supporting student expression while upholding the structure and expectations of school-sponsored activities," the district said, according to WRAL.

WRAL added that the school district has given Hijaz's diploma to her.

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Sara Gonzales calls out left’s hypocrisy over Michael Jackson biopic success



Many leftists pin their hatred of Donald Trump on their unproven claim that he was involved with Jeffrey Epstein — but that isn’t stopping them from supporting an alleged abuser at the box office.

And BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales is tired of the hypocrisy.

“They’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, we hate pedophiles. We are the party against pedophiles, and the Republicans are always protecting pedophiles. If there’s anything we hate, it’s pedophiles,’” Gonzales mocks.

“Actually, that’s historically not been the case. Has not been the case, as documented with all of these Democrats involved with Jeffrey Epstein, but also they have apparently been crawling all over each other to go watch a movie about [an alleged] renowned kiddie diddler,” she continues.

The movie is Antoine Fuqua’s Michael Jackson biopic, which brought in a whopping $218.8 million globally over its opening weekend and became the biggest domestic opening of all time for any biopic.


“Michael Jackson, when it comes to him, technically he was cleared in the legal system in 2005,” Gonzales says, though she isn’t buying it.

And according to a report in People magazine, Gonzales may be on to something.

The report claims that the director of the biopic allegedly made an extra $25 million to remove child sex abuse allegations.

“That’s a lot of money to pay the director and a producer to remove things from the movie if they weren’t true,” Gonzales says, pointing out that it’s not the first time allegations of abuse have been suspiciously squashed.

“You also had the documentary ‘Leaving Neverland,’ which was 2019. And the biggest accusations that came out were highlighted in this. ... But guess what? If you missed it and you want to go back to check it out, you’re not going to be able to see it because the Jackson Estate sued to remove it from the internet, just like they buried it in the movie and got paid off,” she continues. “Are you sensing the trend yet?”

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

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Leftists are already politicizing Chuck Norris’ legacy after death



Following the death of action legend Chuck Norris, what might have been a moment of shared cultural reflection has quickly turned contentious. Leftists are already scrutinizing Norris’ film legacy through a political lens — something BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales is tired of.

“Democrats never waste an opportunity to make everything about politics, make death about politics. ... This guy was a Hollywood icon, a meme legend, and you would think that we could all just be like, ‘Oh, that’s sad that he died,’” Gonzales says.

One article published by Variety magazine makes this clear, with the headline reading, “Chuck Norris Was a Great Action Star — but Politics May Overshadow His Legacy.”


“Yes, he was a Republican, but he didn’t really wear that with a badge on his shoulder or anything, but weirdly, this isn’t even what the article is taking shots at him about,” Gonzales comments, before reading a paragraph from the article.

“Was Norris a brilliant athlete and top-shelf star? Yes. But there’s no denying that his roles were part of a body of work used to show American strength, might, and the pernicious attraction of taking the law into one’s own hands — something that seems less fun in a year in which our country is funneling money into bombing Iran and ICE agents are acting like one-man militias,” the author, William Earl, wrote.

“Given our nation’s divisions in morality, information literacy, and overall sense of reality, it’s easier to see Norris’ characters as justification for a fringe conspiracy movement rather than a moral standing,” he continued.

Earl went on to ask the question that’s on no one’s mind: “When a star is the poster boy for American exceptionalism and might, at what point does his legacy transition from escapism to dangerous propaganda?”

“What an absolute freaking loser,” Gonzales comments.

“The Democrats make everything unfun. They are unfun, miserable, ghoulish people,” she continues. “But you know what? That leaves us with no shortage of things to talk about.”

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

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