"After the revolution I will be the head of the department of eugenics and race science at at Harvard"

Arday can be a fraud and Cofnas can be an asshole. It doesn't have to be one or the other. It's a tragedy he died the way he did, but that doesn't change the fact that he was a compulsive fabricator.

He’s not aggrieved and fragile. He’s a racist. Call him what he is. He is a bigot and a eugenics loving racist. Don’t give him the courtesy of nice words that he doesn’t afford others.

Cofnas looks like his parents are siblings 

I feel deeply for his family and friends. Truly tragic. 

But in no way does that tragedy mean Arday the academic was anything but a complete fraud. His ‘scholarship’, if we can call it that, was nearly wholesale plagiarized. He didn’t just steal the words of other academics of color; more importantly he stole their ideas. And when he wasn’t doing that, he was fabricating anecdotes or interviews. 

I’m an academic, so the academic misconduct bothers me most. But Arday’s outright fabrications about his conditions and experiences ate likely the most consequential. Lying about having autism, about being non-verbal, about being illiterate until 18, about being physically attacked by some knife wielding racist, or about receiving a pig’s head in the mail, only trivializes the conditions or experiences others actually have. Lying about this shit only makes people more suspect when confronted with true examples. 

Cofnas may be a POS with tendentious motives, but can we cut it out with the smear campaign bull shit. This wasn’t some campaign of false claims meant to demean someone’s character. It was true reporting about a serial fabulist making his way to the top of his field by stealing the work of other academics of color and by crafting a fantastic personal story meant to manipulate sentiment and play into the cynical motives of institutions bent on aligning their public image according to en vogue concerns of the college-going segment of western society.

It’s also worth remembering that the whole ordeal did not start with Cofnas but with a senior scholar working in the same sub-discipline of sociology as Arday. Cofnas did secondary reporting and some cursory fact checking of Arday’s work.

The true scandal here is actually not Arday’s fraudulence, but the institutions that propped Arday up and advanced his career, his graduate institution, his dissertation advisors, the college administrators and faculty who hired and promoted him, the editors and publishing houses that indulged Arday’s lies, the academic journals that published his plagiarized or fabricated scholarship. They are to blame for putting him in the position he so plainly did not earn on the basis of his work. He fell from such a great height because he had been hoisted so high. 

This has attracted so much attention in part because of the sheer absurdity of Arday’s claims about himself; but also because of the blatant cynicism of the institutions that propped him up; because his backstory and scholarship play into popular concerns, these institutions were so eager to capitalize, whether for prestige or profit, on putting him in the spotlight. The real story is how these institutions took advantage of an obviously very sick person for their own gain, wiped their hands of him when it became inconvenient, and then denied responsibility for his predictable downfall. 

This smear campaign nonsense just misses the whole point, and in doing so, who is truly responsible here.

Why does he look like I took his lunch money back in 1998

I am kind of out of the loop on this thing, but from what I've gathered, it looks like Arday was a massive fraudster who sued and intimidated the majority of his critics into silence, and the only people who were willing to take the hit and push the issue were scumbag racists.

Do I have that about right? Because if so, that is a completely bonkers situation.

His mother is very proud.

https://preview.redd.it/00tix5nyrckh1.png?width=886&format=png&auto=webp&s=6d1cdb8d8dc451a70bfa5c25cb61e47080c351b5

Isn't that Jason guy the dude that lied to everyone about his qualifications?

I feel like everyone’s missing the parts in the video (like 99% of it) about the crazy-asses publishing and promoting their insane eugenics “research.”

People suck.