The Jason Arday Truthers

In death, Jason Arday has become two people.

To many readers of legacy newspapers, the late Cambridge University academic is a proven fabulist.

The life story on which he built his career, of being nonverbal until 11 because of autism, and then learning to read at 18 and becoming a professor, has “no precedent in medical literature,” as The New York Times delicately put it.

Among many other extraordinary claims, his tale of being menaced by a knife-wielding man at Cambridge could not be corroborated, and neither could the story that his family had received a pig’s head as an act of racist intimidation.

“To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me,” he told a Guardian reporter who challenged him.

That is one reality.

However, another one dominates left-wing new media, activist nonprofits, and visual social networks such as Instagram and TikTok.

There, the prevailing narrative is that Arday did nothing seriously wrong and Britain’s right-wing media hounded an exceptional Black scholar to his death on August 14 for no reason except racism.

Well-wishers have raised more than $300,000 for his family, and made his upcoming memoir a best seller in Britain.

At a rally in central London held in his memory, attendees carried placards reading Rest in Power Professor Jason Arday , even though he had resigned the title days before his death.

They wanted to make clear their belief that he was unfairly deprived of his academic status.

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.