German left article exposes U.S. far-right’s role in the British media lynching of Jason Arday 

The German daily newspaper junge Welt published the following article by Faheem Hemboum on Aug. 25. The article exposes the over-the-top campaign against Professor Jason Arday in the British corporate media and the role of the organized international ultraright cabal that attacks diversity and “wokeness,” including U.S.-based Peter Thiel, in driving Professor Arday to suicide. Translation: John Catalinotto

On Friday, Aug. 14, Jason Arday — at the time of his appointment, the youngest non-white professor at the University of Cambridge — was found dead. Although the official cause of death was not yet known at that time, the public was certain that Arday had taken his own life.

On Aug. 5, Arday had resigned from his professorship after it became known that the university intended to re-examine allegations that he had plagiarized in his dissertation. By that point, a media campaign was already in full swing, and it did not end with Arday’s resignation. Right up until his death, more and more newspaper articles appeared — a total of 188 in the last nine days alone.

The Telegraph, which has been part of the German Axel Springer Group since March, published a total of 42 articles since July 24 in which Arday was declared the “diversity poster boy” — in line with other tabloid media — while the Daily Mail, in the period between his resignation and his death, ran three articles a day denigrating him as “Professor Plagiarism” and allowed a psychiatrist — who had no detailed knowledge of possible pathologies — to speculate.

eanwhile, even after Arday’s death, The Times continued to boost the reach of its articles through paid advertising.

Kehinde Andrews, a British professor of Black Studies, and Ibram X. Kendi, a well-known U.S. American researcher on racism, speak of a media lynching. The well-known British commentator Kelechi Okafor also leveled serious accusations against the media, particularly The Guardian, and spoke of unethical behavior.

The Guardian was one of the first reputable media outlets to cover the story. Its opinion pieces were thoroughly balanced and nuanced, writes Jo Maugham of the Good Law Project, which represented Arday during the campaign and published his resignation statement on its website. However, the news coverage often adopted arguments from the right-wing press and prematurely portrayed Arday as guilty.

According to Maugham, an article published in The Guardian Aug. 1 turned what had until then been a right-wing cultural war against a Black professor into serious news. At the same time, several people close to Arday expressed concern for his mental health and urgently pointed out the dangers of further publications.

Coordination among racists

Meanwhile, opponents of “wokeness” — which in this case refers to any form of left-wing scholarship critical of society and the status quo — smirked triumphantly and celebrated their successful campaign. Take, for example, the U.S. American Nathan Cofnas, a proponent of racial theory and eugenics, in a conversation with the conservative British historian David Starkey on August 9. Following an internal tip from Cambridge, Cofnas had used the Copyleaks software to identify passages in Arday’s 2015 dissertation that were suspected of being copied.

Starkey had drawn attention several times in recent years for racist comments, until Canterbury’s Christ Church University terminated his contract in 2020 as a result, and he [Starkey] also lost a book deal with HarperCollins as well as a fellowship at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam College.

Cofnas and Starkey operate within a far-right network that, under the guise of academic freedom and freedom of speech, propagates modern variants of long-discredited racial theories. The fact that Cofnas referred to Arday from the outset as a “DEI hire” — meaning hired based on diversity criteria — and dismissed both his intellect and his qualifications is actually one of the less extreme statements Cofnas has made.

As journalist Nafeez Ahmed revealed in several investigations published in the British magazine Byline Times as early as 2021, the network — supported by right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel — has been working for more than a decade to normalize racism and white supremacy at British universities. Ideologically central to this effort are far-right media platforms such as Quillette and Aporia, for which Cofnas also writes.

The magazine Aporia is considered the mouthpiece of the Human Diversity Fund, which has operated under the name Polygenic Scores LLC since 2025 and follows in the tradition of the Pioneer Fund, founded in 1937, which aimed to promote fascist eugenics. It comes as no surprise that there are also connections to the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) in German-speaking countries. [AfD and FPÖ are both ultraright parties.]

The views of this movement became known to a wider audience in 1994 through the book “The Bell Curve.” The pseudoscientific research, supported by the Pioneer Fund, aimed to identify genetic differences as the cause of lower intelligence among Black people and was quickly exposed as quackery by the scientific community. [See Workers World 2016 article on a protest of the white supremacist authors of “The Bell Curve.” ]

Another work from this circle is titled “The Origins of Woke.” A photo from 2024 shows Cofnas alongside author Richard Hanare company was funded by Thiel. Yarvin has stated on multiple occasions that Black people would be better off under slavery.

owever, it was not the case that this had no impact on Cofnas’ academic career. As the British news website The Canary exclusively reported, scholars at Ghent University — from which Cofnas has now been suspended — had already documented his lack of suitability, his racist worldview and his scientific misconduct in a 19-page report back in May of 2026.

A deadly culture war

All of this highlights the extent to which the culture war waged by the far right in the U.S., in England and here in Germany has escalated. Actual cases of plagiarism, sexual violence and abuse of power by other professors often elicit little more than a shrug and scattered articles in a handful of media outlets. The fact that Arday’s personal character — as well as his academic integrity — was attacked so viciously demonstrates just how far the discourse has already shifted to the right.

Autobiographical details — such as that Arday was diagnosed with autism at the age of three, did not speak until he was twelve and did not learn to read and write properly until he was 18 — were called into question, as was the information that he had a semi-professional soccer career, had completed several marathons in a very short time and had raised funds for charitable causes.

The apparent calculation was that if the legitimacy of Jason Arday as a person were called into question, the legitimacy of diversity and inclusion policies would also collapse, and one could then finally do away with unpopular disciplines such as gender studies and racism research.

The allegations of plagiarism initially concerned his dissertation at Liverpool John Moores University. Following an investigation, the university concluded that while quotations from educational researcher Paula Zwozdiak-Myers’ 2009 work had not been properly attributed in some places in the 2015 dissertation, since both that work and a subsequent work by the author were correctly cited in other places and also listed in the bibliography, the citation error was classified as “honest and understandable.”

Two articles from the early stages of Arday’s career were corrected after their publication. This is not unusual in academic circles and certainly not the major scandal that the media have unanimously portrayed it to be.

The campaign against Arday was a smear campaign fueled by racism, whose initiators themselves lack any academic integrity and cling to empirically disproved theories that contribute to the trivialization of colonialism and slavery and are still intended today to legitimize imperialist war and neocolonial exploitation.

On the other hand, left-liberal media outlets must also ask themselves what stance they are taking on this issue. Only Dalia Gebrial and Ash Sarkar have shown self-criticism at Novara Media. Even there, the focus was on Jason Arday as an individual rather than on the structure behind the campaign. The crisis facing universities in many places today was not triggered by diversity policies, but rather stems from budget cuts and austerity measures, as Gebrial notes. “Wokeness” has become a scapegoat, she says, allowing grievances to be personalized through racist categories.

Jason Arday’s most widely cited publications address structural disadvantages and the imbalance of power in the education system. The ethically questionable reporting of the past few weeks has diverted attention away from this critical perspective and toward proponents of right-wing pseudoscience.