Aug
11
2026

You Been Tellin' Me You're a Genius Since You Were Seventeen.

John McWharter looks at Jason Arday and Academia’s Self-Seeking Pursuit of Virtue for City Journal:

Jason Arday has a tell. Making what he considers important points, he holds his palms out and widens his eyes. Like many gestures, it conveys something beyond the statement itself—a silent way of saying, “Isn’t it obvious?” or “What else can I tell you?” It’s an assumption that all would agree with what he’s saying, but don’t for some reason (as in, racism, classism, ism-ism).

Whether it was his ridiculing an Australian television show for not depicting aborigines or contributing the insight that dissolving the monarchy would change the tax bracket of Britain’s working class, he often has the palms out, the eyes wide with wrinkled brow, the air of “Come on!” In my own teaching, I rarely fall into this conversational gesture. My job is presenting what is new to students, not pointing to what is supposedly obvious.

This alone encapsulated the flaw not only in Arday’s training and scholarship, but the humanities and social science fields that celebrate people like him—a corrosive habit in academia, as Arday’s story of fraudulent scholarship at Cambridge University, and his subsequent resignation, have reminded us. Compared with some other examples of the genre, Arday’s mendacity and incompetence are especially stupefying. But he is nonetheless a symptom of academia’s dehumanization of black scholars and willingness to accept intellectual mediocrity in its self-seeking pursuit of virtue.

Fun fact from further on in the article: Arday's resignation letter "seems likely to have been generated by AI."

Also of note:

  • Want Pun Salad to link to your content? Try using "bonkers" in your headline. Ars Technica has the latest: Trump signs bonkers order that cuts vaccines, promotes ones that don't exist.

    President Trump signed an executive order Monday that makes sweeping, unilateral changes to federal vaccine recommendations. The order aims to reduce the number of lifesaving vaccines all children are recommended to get—from 18 to 11—while also splitting them up and spacing them out over more time and more medical visits.

    The vaccine changes are not backed by evidence or spurred by new findings. Rather, they are based on false anti-vaccine fearmongering about harms, including the debunked claim that they cause autism, and misinformation that multiple vaccinations can “overwhelm” children’s immune systems. This false claim has also been repeatedly debunked and explained.

    The vaccines that "don't exist"? Trump recommends the "MMR" (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine (which he thinks is "quite lethal") be replaced by three different single-disease shots. Only problem is: such vaccines aren't available in the US, and would require the time-consuming and expensive FDA approval process.

    So, yeah, bonkers. I wonder if this was previewed to those early "Truth Social" providers so they could phone their brokers?

  • Muh roads! What about muh roads?! Well, let's ask Cato's David Ditch (appaarently his real name). It appears that the New Highway Bill Has More Spending, Taxes, and Deficits.

    Congress is preparing to bail out the federal highway program once again without paying for it. According to a July 9 score by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the House Transportation Committee’s BUILD America 250 Act (BUILD) would add more than $147 billion (about $1,100 per household) to the already unsustainable national debt over five years, while violating the user-pays principle.

    BUILD is a five-year highway bill that authorizes $474 billion for roads, mass transit, and other surface transportation programs from the Highway Trust Fund (HTF) for fiscal years (FYs) 2027 through 2031.

    The highway fund was created as a “user pays, user benefits” system, with drivers paying a user fee (the federal gas tax) to finance building and improving the interstate highway system. Congress broke this model by expanding the trust fund far beyond interstate highways, adding diversions to fund transit systems and boondoggles such as streetcars.

    My own CongressCritter, Chris Pappas, is one of the members of the House Transportation Committee. Which passed the bill with a 62-2 vote. I doubt he was one of the two votes against.

  • Podcast note. Jay Nordlinger has Kevin D. Williamson as his interviewee: And the ‘D’ Is for ‘Damn Right’. I listened to the Whole Thing (about an hour), and KDW made it through with not a single dirty word.