Don't Tell This Guy About Cell Phone Tracking!

A Florida man found a legal loophole to block a Flock surveillance camera using a 12-foot-tall protest sign.

77-year-old Carl Gunn legally blocks a Flock license plate camera in St. Petersburg, Florida, by sitting on a public sidewalk and holding a 12-foot pool skimmer pole with… pic.twitter.com/x3iMcU37RZ

— Historic Vids (@historyinmemes) August 19, 2026

If this guy ever finds out about cell phone tracking, he'll need to cover his umbrella with tinfoil. I'm amazed at the level of paranoia about automated license plate readers, especially Flock cameras, since all they do is trace the location of automobiles. Your cell phone can trace where you are, in a car or not, and GPS is only one way it does this. Nevertheless,

A Wisconsin woman was pulled over at gunpoint twice in one week after Milwaukee Police Department staff failed to remove a vehicle alert from the Flock license plate camera system. TWICE it happened.

Years ago, in the NCIC(National Crime Information Center) files there was a BIG problem that cost the city of Los Angeles millions because- again, short version- they found out that the Police Department, after finding out the description they'd used in the original stolen car/wanted person entry, was not valid, they re-entered the stuff WITH THE SAME INFORMATION. Which led to the poor bastard being pulled out of his car at gunpoint several times. When he filed a case, the judge read that, said "You have no excuse after the first mistake" and awarded the guy a big settlement.Now we have effing Flock cameras being used as if they're part of the LE network, and getting people pulled out of their cars at gunpoint. And, similar to the NCIC problem, if people don't make damn sure information is cleared out when it should be, sooner or later some poor bastard pays the price.

Yes, mistakes get made, and as the case above shows, they were made before Flock cameras, but why is everyone in such a snit? This may come a little closer:

Back in 2013 and 2014 we shared the story of a man returning to Florida was stopped by police in Maryland who asked him for his firearm. When the Floridian asked the Maryland police how they knew he owned a firearm, things got sketchy. {Go Deep} The event kicked off a constitutional discussion.

A few years later in 2015 the Wall Street Journal reported on a national federal database that was using Automatic License Plate Readers (APLRs) to capture and store the travel of millions of Americans {SOURCE}.

Now we fast-forward a decade and that federal database is now being exploited by local police around the nation to keep track of ordinary persons of interest to their community who travel outside their jurisdiction. This is where the Flock Cameras come into the discussion.

The same government interests who dismiss our concerns about privacy are the same govt interests who point out how horrible China and Iran are for monitoring their citizens on CCTV systems.

And now, vigilantes are taking matters into their own hands:

🚨#BREAKING: An Arizona man says he has, "absolutely zero regrets" after he was arrested for using his work truck to bend a Flock camera pole backwards until it faced the sky.

"I kept backing up, saw it bend back, I saw it looking at the sky... and said,

‘That’s good enough." pic.twitter.com/Edtc3LdnVi

— Matt Van Swol (@mattvanswol) August 13, 2026

Did somone say vigilante?

he first time that “NoMark” tried to knock out a Flock camera feed, he waited an hour for the perfect moment – pacing in and out of bushes that towered over him, a few feet behind a pole holding up the device.

. . . These black cameras, which are hooked up to a rectangular solar panel and typically mounted on a pole, snap photos of passing vehicles and run the pictures against large databases. They have sparked nationwide backlash from pro-privacy critics, who point to public records suggesting that these devices can help law enforcement keep tabs on specific license plates and the people driving these cars. That they can sweep in so many people’s location from an innocent act in a public space – regardless of whether the target is a suspect in a crime, and without a warrant – has led to fears of mass surveillance.

And oh, my, the libertarians! Call the intellectual welterweights at Instapundit! They're in a lather because some Iowa sheriff deputies have been advised not to mention Flock cameras to drivers, but the only sane comment in the thread is:

Did you have an expectation of privacy in public spaces before this? If so, why?

So why aren't the same people smashing their cell phones, or at least warning everyone that their cell phones can track them even when they aren't in their cars?

Many assume that turning off location services on their cell phone will prevent their location from being tracked. However, this is only partially accurate, as there are several other ways that your cell phone can still track your location, even when location services are turned off.

Location tracking is a feature that is essential to the functionality of our cell phones. This feature allows us to use various apps and services, such as maps, ride-sharing apps, and weather services, which require location information to provide accurate and personalized results. The location data is recorded by the phone using GPS, Wi-Fi, and cellular data.

Cell phones use a combination of GPS data, Wi-Fi data, and cell tower data to track location.

When you turn off location services on your phone, you are disabling the ability of apps on your phone to access your precise location data. This means that apps that rely on GPS, Wi-Fi, and cellular data to provide location-specific services will not be able to access your location. However, the cellular system must know where you are, so while your apps may no longer be able to access your cellular data, it is still being recorded.

. . . CDRs are a type of telecommunications data that provides detailed information about calls made and received on a mobile phone. These records contain a wealth of information, including the time and date of the call, the duration of the call, the number dialed, and the location of the cell tower that was used to transmit the call. CDRs are primarily used for billing and customer service purposes, but they can also be used to track the location of a mobile phone. Over time, this creates a historical record of the phone's location, which can be used to track its movements and determine where it has been at different times.

CDRs are mainly used by law enforcement and private companies, like Envista Forensics, when conducting investigations to determine the historic location of a person's phone or if someone was potentially distracted while driving by texting or talking on the phone.

Another reason the cellular system continuously tracks you is that cell phone providers are required by law to track your phone's location for emergency services. This means that even if you've turned off location services on your device, your phone is still communicating with nearby cell towers, allowing your provider to pinpoint your location in the event of an emergency. While this information is not available to third-party apps or advertisers, it is still collected and stored by the service providers. This means that even if we are not being actively tracked in real-time, our historic location is still being recorded in CDRs.

So why isn't there a much greater public panic over cell phones?

Whatever's Become Of Hunter's Sugar Bro, Kevin Morris?

We last checked in on Kevin Morris more than two years ago, when I posted,

But I can't resist posting on one footnote. Kevin Morris, Hunter's "sugar bro", attended at least the first day of Hunter's trial on Monday to support him, although as I posted here, after spending at least $6.5 million to pay Hunter's lawyers and fund his lifestyle, he's said to be out of money. I've been increasingly skeptical of the conventional Morris narrative -- he's a "Hollywood lawyer" who stopped practicing law 15 years ago, and he's a "novelist" who was never able to sell a blockbuster despite his wife being one of the most powerful agents in the industry. In other words, he's basically been just a dilettante living off his wife for more than a decade.

And his wife is probably key to the most recent development in the story. In my post two weeks ago, I concluded, "It looks like Mrs Kevin has staged an intervention, and she's cut Kevin off."

Since then, likely due to the efforts of Mrs Kevin's publicists, he's been mostly out of the news. In January, 2025, his home survived the Palisades fire, but his stash of Hunter's paintings went up in smoke:

A trove of nearly 200 artworks by Hunter Biden has been destroyed — one of the casualties of the wildfires ravaging Los Angeles, The Post has learned.

The controversial art had been in storage near the Pacific Palisades home of Hunter’s Hollywood attorney Kevin Morris and is valued at “millions of dollars,” a source close to the Biden family said.

Morris, who loaned the first son nearly $5 million to help pay a tax bill and has been financing a documentary on him, lives in a sprawling five-bedroom, six-bathroom home which is among the few houses still intact in the posh neighborhood, The Post can confirm.

However, despite losing his investment in Hunter's paintings -- which after 2025 were worth about the same whether intact or in ashes -- Morris appears still to be working on an ongoing Hunter Biden documentary project:

Days after reaching a plea deal with federal prosecutors on his unpaid taxes and a felony gun charge in 2023, Hunter Biden appeared panicked and short-tempered, according to leaked footage from a new documentary about the former first son seen by The Post.

“What are you talking about ‘I’m protected’?” wide-eyed Biden animatedly says into a cellphone in the footage, from the documentary-in-progress being made by Hollywood writer and lawyer Kevin Morris, who loaned Biden more than $6.5 million for personal expenses and back taxes.

Morris, a novelist and producer known for brokering deals for “South Park” and “The Book of Mormon,” had been trailing Biden with a film crew between 2021 and 2024, during his father Joe Biden’s White House term. He also documented the scandal-scarred ex-lobbyist’s foray into the art world.

In addition to recording the self-taught artist’s gallery openings in Los Angeles and New York, Morris was seen directing a film crew taping Hunter Biden outside courthouses where Biden appeared on tax evasion and the gun charge.

. . . It’s not clear when the documentary film will be released. Morris did not return a request for comment Monday. Hunter Biden’s attorney declined to comment Monday.

Wait a moment. Mrs Kevin is one of the most powerful agents in Hollywood, but "it’s not clear when the documentary film will be released?" But Morris's support for Hunter also helped foster a relationship with another priotege, Eric Swalwell:

A campaign filing that was released on Tuesday revealed that Morris, who was dubbed Hunter's "sugar brother," for bankrolling his legal bills and lavish lifestyle, donated $29,900 to Rep. Eric Swalwell's, D-Calif., gubernatorial campaign on Feb. 2.

Swalwell, who reportedly helped orchestrate Hunter's surprise press conference outside the Capitol in December 2023 while he defied the House Oversight Committee's subpoenas to testify behind closed doors, was one of the loudest critics of the GOP investigations into Hunter during the Biden administration.

"There is absolutely zero evidence Hunter or his father acted corruptly," Swalwell said at the time. "So I’m not going to sit quietly and let MAGA Republicans do Trump’s bidding in Congress."

. . . During his time helping Hunter Biden, Morris faced multiple bar complaints, including from the Trump-aligned America First Legal, which accused Morris of violating California's Rules of Professional Conduct after he was publicly photographed smoking marijuana while Hunter Biden, a recovering addict, was around visiting.

. . . Swalwell's support at the 2023 press conference by reserving the "Senate Swamp," a popular area near the Capitol that is often used for press conferences, raised questions at the time about whether the California congressman played a role in the then-first son's decision to deny a congressional subpoena from Republicans seeking to question him about his alleged crimes and other financial dealings.

Morris, who previously maxed out donations totaling over $6,000 to Swalwell's House campaign in early 2023, and Swalwell stood beside each other during the viral press conference later that year.

"Degenerates of a feather flock together," a longtime GOP strategist told Fox News Digital. "Eric Swalwell is literally Hunter Biden's biggest cheerleader – from reserving the Senate Swamp to defending the Biden Crime Family's litany of illicit activities."

Morris and Swalwell also have ties to China that have raised questions among critics. In 2024, Morris confirmed to lawmakers that he still held a stake in a Chinese private equity firm that he took over from the president's son. Morris initially acquired the shares after purchasing Skaneateles LLC, a company that Hunter had previously owned, in the fall of 2021 as pressure mounted for Hunter to divest amid concerns about his stake in the China-based company.

The best that can be said of Morris is that he's a poor judge of character. Two months after the report of his $29,900 donation to Swalwell,

A former staffer of Rep. Eric Swalwell, a leading Democratic candidate for California governor, says that the congressman raped her when she was heavily intoxicated and left her bruised and bleeding, an allegation Swalwell strongly denies.

“I was pushing him off of me, saying no,” the woman told CNN of the incident, which she said happened in 2024 after she had stopped working in Swalwell’s office. “He didn’t stop.”

She said it was the second time Swalwell had nonconsensual sexual contact with her while she was drunk. In 2019, when she was still working for him, she said she woke up naked with him in a hotel room after a night of heavy drinking. She said she had no memory of what happened but could feel physically that they’d had sexual contact.

Three other women who spoke with CNN also alleged various kinds of sexual misconduct by the Democratic congressman – including Swalwell sending them unsolicited explicit messages or nude photos.

Swalwell ended his gubernatorial campaign two days later and resigned from Congress. Kevin Morris seems to have a reverse Midas touch.

Hunter Biden Resurfaces

It's mid-August, everyone's on vacation or wishes he was, nothing's new, so we get a Hunter Biden rerun, even in the Wall Street Journal. The piece is over 1000 words, has three bylines, and manages to convey absolutely no new information:

Those who have spent time with him say the public is now meeting the Hunter Biden they have known for a long time: a sharp observer of politics and media who has had his own life dragged through the mud.

. . . Former Biden White House aides said that Hunter was kept quiet in the White House because he was under federal investigation for much of his father’s time in the presidency. Former aides are now abuzz about what they considered to be a strong showing, and there is some regret they didn’t unleash him earlier, some said.

. . . After Hunter Biden’s laptop was found and its contents leaked, his online history was made public, including nude photos of himself doing illicit drugs. The scandal prompted years of investigations and conspiracies, often spread by some of the podcasters Biden is now choosing to sit with.

“In that total exposure, there was nowhere to hide,” Biden told Carlson.

Hunter's problem is we've already had too much information about the guy, and whatever scraps remain are just more of the same:

Not only is Hunter Biden talking, he is writing. His Substack has more than 65,000 subscribers for essays on sobriety and other topics. He offers paid subscriptions to his Substack that range from $10 a month to $750 a year. It couldn’t be learned how many of his subscribers have opted to upgrade from the free option.

Biden still paints and sells his abstract kaleidoscope-esque paintings using alcohol ink and metal straws, but has said that financial difficulties loom. He testified under oath that the focus on him during his father’s presidency left him in a deep monetary hole.

. . . As investigations into Biden mounted, he made a consequential decision in late 2022 to stop using a lawyer closely aligned with the Biden White House and hire Abbe Lowell, a defense attorney known for taking on high-profile clients and who, according to documents later filed in court, charged Biden $1,510 an hour.

. . . Lowell’s firm later sued Biden for fees in a continuing case, at one point indicating he owed close to $5 million.

For now, in addition to painting and Substack posts, Biden has taken a role as an adviser at a luxury addiction center, Peak Path Health. And his audience is expanding, including to everyday users on social-media platform X, where he has said he is speaking “finally on my terms, not yours.”

I looked into Peak Path Health. As of this past June,

Peak Path Health is proud to announce a new affiliation with Hunter Biden, who will join the organization as the chairperson of the newly established Peak Path Health Foundation, a nonprofit organization created in partnership with Peak Path Health to expand recovery support, advocacy, education, and community outreach efforts.

The announcement comes during a meaningful milestone in Hunter Biden's personal journey, as he celebrates seven years of sobriety this month. His recovery experience, combined with his ongoing work in community service and nonprofit leadership, brings a unique perspective to Peak Path Health's mission of helping individuals and families navigate substance use, mental health challenges, and long-term wellness.

Located in the Hollywood Hills and Woodland Hills areas of Los Angeles, California, Peak Path Health provides private, individualized care through medical detox, psychiatric services, and holistic wellness programs. The new relationship reflects a shared belief that recovery is possible and that access to compassionate, evidence-based care can change lives.

According to Radar Online,

Scandal-scarred Hunter Biden is trying to refurbish his tainted image, RadarOnline.com can reveal, by becoming – of all things – the executive director of an ultra-swanky drug and alcohol rehab center in L.A.'s Hollywood Hills.

. . . Hunter, who reportedly owes roughly $17million in legal bills, has also shockingly hinted he's willing to serve as California Governor Gavin Newsom's vice-presidential running mate in the 2028 election, telling the governor during a podcast: "Here's the deal. I'll run, but only as your VP, because the truth of the matter is that the vice president's residence is a lot cooler. It's a lot easier job, too."

Presidential historian Leon Wagener told RadarOnline.com: "I don't think he was joking, and neither did Newsom. I think Hunter thinks it's a good idea."

But there's a whole 'nother narrative, which Hunter pitched with Tucker Carlson:

The degenerate former first son shapeshifts to suit the proclivities of each interviewer, so he played to Carlson’s newfound paranoia about Israel, insinuating “Netanyahu” or “Mossad” were involved in hacking/stealing/fabricating his laptop/cloud, even though he previously blamed Russia.

. . . Hunter’s central lie is that he never took three waterlogged laptops for repair at John Paul Mac Isaac’s computer repair store in Wilmington, Del.

“I have literally zero recollection or memory of ever dropping off a laptop at John Paul Mac Isaac’s,” Hunter told Carlson.

Then he embarked on a meandering mélange of half-expressed falsehoods, throwing up Ukrainian, Russian and Chinese names, and, for Carlson’s benefit, the name of an Israeli-American “[Yaacov] Apelbaum.” More on him later.

“There is no such thing as a laptop. The laptop that [Mac Isaac] eventually turns over . . . to the FBI, the thing that [he] claims that he got off of a device was a hard drive . . . What he finds through this guy Apelbaum is Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Bob Costello . . .

“There’s no possible way all of the information that was eventually labeled as my laptop came from one laptop. It’s way too large . . . They hacked my cloud . . . There’s the Netanyahu side, the Israeli side. There is a Russian Ukrainian side of it. And then there are the US actors that include Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, Miles Guo and a whole bunch of — Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman and all of these guys.”

Carlson’s response to this incomprehensible nonsense is: “I agree.”

Hunter's basic problem is there's no there there, and there never was. For a 30-year period, he was able to run a grift as part of the Biden family, but that's over. As of last year,

Amid lagging sales of his art and his memoir, the younger Biden remains "several million dollars" in debt after fighting multiple federal criminal cases, claiming in an affidavit that he only sold one painting for $36,000 since late 2023, after selling 27 paintings in the previous couple of years at an average price of nearly $55,000.

"Given the positive feedback and reviews of my artwork and memoir, I was expecting to obtain paid speaking engagements and paid appearances, but that has not happened," Hunter Biden wrote Wednesday.

He said that his "lack of financial resources has been exacerbated by the fires in the Pacific Palisades in early January, which has rendered my rental house unlivable for an extended period of time and, like many others in that situation, I am having difficulty in finding a new permanent place to live."

. . . Hunter Biden has acknowledged taking out millions of dollars in loans from Kevin Morris, a Hollywood attorney who largely bankrolled Hunter Biden's legal defense over the past five years. In congressional testimony last year, Morris said he expected Hunter Biden to repay those loans beginning in 2025, though it was not clear from the affidavit whether those loan repayments have begun.

Much Of The Arday Commentary Misses The Point

One version of the transatlantic ruling class's response to the Arday scandal is this piece at The Atlantic. The author, Tyler Austin Harper, represents himself as capital-B Black, but looking at photos, it seems he could easily pass for white. Still, let's grant that he's a descendant, however distant, of African slaves -- he's nevertheless of a distinctly different class from Jason Arday, who was a member of an entirely new socially engineered class of UK immigrants from former British colonies created by the postwar Labour government.

So about the only thing Harper has in common with Arday is that they share a certain amount of African DNA, but they're from two entirely different classes in two different countries. Nevertheless, Harper sees himself in precisely Arday's situation:

I will confess that, until yesterday, I had watched the Arday saga unfold with some combination of amusement and distress. Amusement because of the undeniable comic absurdity to the revelation that the best and brightest minds at Cambridge had been so easily deceived by a man who claimed to have run nine marathons in about as many days on a fractured fibula, and who maintained that his future had been predicted by a Brazilian shaman. Distress because I could relate to some of the things that Arday might have experienced.

I have written, in this magazine and elsewhere, about what it is like to be the beneficiary of affirmative action in elite spaces. I have seen, firsthand, the way a specific kind of white progressive treats Black men who have overcome obstacles. They cannot conceal a certain blend of pity and glee when they learn, for example, that my biological father left before I was old enough to walk, or that I was raised for a time by a single mother. It is a look that says, How far you’ve come, and how kind I am for helping you go further.

But in these same paragraphs, Harper distingushes himself from Arday in a key way: Arday lived in a fantasy world; Harper doesn't. I'm not a medical professional, and I can work only from the other lay observations I see of Arday's case, but more important than his skin color is the problem that Arday was seriously mentally ill. In trying to get some sort of handle on Arday's autism, I started out by asking Chrome AI, "Does a person whose life is dominated by fantasy have high-functioning autism?"

AI immediately slapped me down and said nobody says high-functioning any more, it's Level 1, 2, or 3 Support. So I revised my question: "What medical support level would apply to an autistic person whose life is dominated by fantasy?" It answered,

Medical professionals look at how the fantasy life interferes with the individual's ability to navigate the real world:

Level 1 (Requiring Support): The individual experiences a strong internal fantasy world or intense interest in fictional universes, but they can easily switch back to reality when needed. They can maintain a conversation, work, or attend school, though they may need help organizing tasks or managing social awkwardness.

Level 2 (Requiring Substantial Support): The fantasy life actively interferes with daily functioning. The individual may frequently talk about their fantasy world in social settings where it is inappropriate, struggle to focus on any topics outside of this fantasy, and show clear distress or behavioral meltdowns when forced to disengage from it.

Level 3 (Requiring Very Substantial Support): The individual's attachment to fantasy severely limits their ability to function or communicate safely in reality. They may struggle to distinguish fantasy from real-world dangers, require constant supervision to complete basic self-care, or completely withdraw from human interaction in favor of their internal world.

As a non-professional relying only on public information on Arday, I've got to say that he seems to have had real difficulty in switching from fantasy to reality; the discussion of his memoir that I linked yesterday showed that he'd completely reconstructed his life experiences based on a pop version of Spartacus and some soap operas and consistently gave this version when interviewed. He pretty clearly "talk[ed] about [his] fantasy world in social settings where it [was] inappropriate, struggle[d] to focus on any topics outside of this fantasy, and show[ed] clear distress or behavioral meltdowns when forced to disengage from it" -- i e, he took his own life.

Beyond that, if we look at his outcome, I think it's also reasonable to say his "attachment to fantasy severely limit[ed his] ability to function or communicate safely in reality". For an outcome other than the one he had, he almost certainly should have had better supervision. This also continues to raise for me the question of whether he was ever capable of doing any sort of basic intellectual work at the undergraduate or graduate level.

Arday's problem wasn't racism. His problem was that people were enabling him despite clear, serious symptoms of mental illness. They were doing it to further an agenda, but this agenda was different from the one on this side of the Atlantic. Harper fudges this difference:

Arday was fetishized in his ascendancy by white liberals, for whom he served as a mirror in which they could see their own goodness. And he was fetishized in his downfall by white conservatives who saw him as a test case for their own obsessions with an academic apparatus that they believe is not meritocratic enough—which is to say, not white enough.

The right would have us believe that the Arday scandal is a story of affirmative action taken to its most caricaturish conclusion. Many progressives see it as something else: a racist witch hunt in which self-righteous zealots with suspect motives hounded a man to death.

As I said yesterday, the closest parallel in the US to the Arday case is Claudine Gay, who resigned as president of Harvard after allegations of plagiarism. However, these were much milder than those against Arday, and they didn't appear alongside any fantastical statements by Gay about her life story that called her mental stability into question. Nor did Gay fall especially far; she remains a well-paid member of the Harvard faculty, and she didn't take her own life. Arday's situation is uniquely extreme and says little about racism in the US except in comparison.

What I can only surmise as a non-professional from public information is that Arday's autism put him somewhere in medical support levels 2 or 3, which suggests that even to perform basic intellectual tasks and form goals consistent with a high-flying academic career, he needed extensive assistance. He simply couldn't have functioned at that level without near-constant supervision.

That says to me that we should be looking for a Svengali, "an authority figure or mentor who exerts undue, usually evil influence over another person." So far, nobody has suggested this, but I'm certsin something like this will emerge. But here's where Harper gets things completely wrong:

It is impossible to know what is in someone’s head or heart in their final moments. I have to imagine, though, that Arday understood well enough the world he had entered and how its rules tend to work: When you are Black, some people will open the door for you far wider than they should. And when that door abruptly comes swinging shut, you will be offered no second chances.

Arday's problem wasn't that he was black (or Black). His problem was that he had a severe disability, and he'd gone well past the point of being able to cover up for it. Realistically, if it becomes clear by age 40 that you aren't capable of switching from a fantasy world to the real one when necessary, there's not a lot of hope you can function well as an adult. Second chances don't come into it.

Story Published

As part of restarting my literary career, I just had a story published at Twist & Twain, Don't Worry, te Fix is In.

Jason Arday: If Possible, It Gets Even Worse

I suppose it's just as well Simon & Schuster decided not to pulp Arday's memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, because it raises questions that go beyond just plagiarism or even conventional DEI. Via the Washington Free Beacon,

The Free Beacon's findings include the fact that pivotal dialogue in the memoir's prologue is similar to lines spoken by a Thracian prophetess in the pulpy Starz series Spartacus: Blood and Sand, which was known for sex, violence, and bad writing. Just the News first reported last week that the seventh episode of the show, which aired in 2010, shared its title, "Great and Unfortunate Things," with Arday's book.

In the show's pilot, Spartacus's wife utters a prophecy to him: "That you are destined for great and unfortunate things, if you go to war." Similarly, per Arday's telling in the uncannily cinematic prologue to his memoir, the midwife at his birth insists to his mother, "This boy is destined for great things." Later in the memoir, Arday claims that in 2006 he traveled to Brazil with a nonprofit to deliver water pumps to poor communities. There, a woman tells him, "I can tell you're destined to do great things. But I also believe you're destined for very sad and difficult things."

. . . Arday says in his memoir that he was inspired by—and repeatedly watched—the Rocky franchise, which served as an avatar for his own hard-scrabble struggle. He also religiously viewed two hugely popular Australian soap operas, Neighbours and Home and Away, and writes that from doing so, "my understanding of the human experience expanded."

In its review, the Free Beacon found multiple instances of Arday, as he leveraged his astonishing life story as an accelerant to his swift ascendance up the academic ladder, never having made certain claims about his life until after particular storylines in these shows and films first hit the screen.

Among the other dramatic details from the book proposal that were absent from the published work was the claim that Arday survived testicular cancer. This rare malignancy afflicted the character Kyle Canning on Neighbours in 2021, a plot line that immediately followed another character on the soap suffering a testicular cancer scare.

. . . The bedrock of the Arday mythology is his claim of childhood illiteracy: He claims he could not read until he was 18. However, his ex-wife, Debbie McKenzie, said in an appearance with him on a British TV show in 2012 that he learned to read at 16.

In his memoir, Arday claims McKenzie first started teaching him to read shortly after they met when he was 18. That would have been between 2003 and 2004, roughly the same period when Neighbours ran a plotline about the character Connor O'Neill's secret illiteracy and his girlfriend's effort to arrange tutoring for him.

Additionally, Rocky II (which he became a fan of long before meeting McKenzie) reveals Rocky's illiteracy. Who practices reading with him? His girlfriend, Adrian.

The Free Beacon consults autism resaearchers who offer at least a partial explanation for what may have been going on:

Prone to fixations, autistic people often become superfans of narrow slivers of pop culture and other arcana. Research shows they also have a tendency to engage in "scripting"—memorizing and rehearsing, for example, lines from films or TV and weaving them into their everyday lives—and can form strong parasocial bonds with fictional characters. This can help them mirror and better comprehend real-life emotions.

The problem I see here is that from a medical standpoint, autism spectrum disorders are a pathology. According to the National Library of Medicine:

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are a group of neurodevelopmental diseases. The cause of ASD is unknown, but several genetic and non-genetic risk factors have been characterized that, alone or in combination, are implicated in the development of ASD. Currently, no diagnostic biomarkers are available, and the diagnosis of ASD is based on typical features that include repetitive behaviors, and impaired social communication and interaction.

The Free Beacon piece suggests, though that this could be a reason for Arday's behavior, but not an excuse:

Gray Atherton, who is Cross's Plymouth colleague, said: "One possibility of an individual 'confusing' fantasy with reality could be that if an individual spends an inordinate amount of time engaging with a fictional world or characters, they may begin to relate to those characters or story in a way that can feel 'real.'" But Atherton cautioned: "It would be a stretch to characterize autism as a condition that would mean an individual genuinely confuses their own lived experience with those in a TV show, movie or book."

But here's the overarching question that the Free Beacon approaches but never quite asks: is an individual with this level of neurodevelopmental disorder capable at all of doing intellectual work at the undergraduate level, much less PhD, much less at a world-class university? Was Arday ever capable of doing ordinary course work? Roger Kimball asks a related question:

I say “his” book, but it was only incidentally his. A “book doctor” called Eve Claxton was listed as co-author, and it soon emerged that another co-author was that prodigious scribe, AI. More digging revealed that Arday’s dissertation was lifted largely from a 2009 PhD thesis by a Brunel University student, Paula Zwozdiak-Myers.

. . . I am not sure whether it was a sense of humor or merely chutzpah that encouraged him to leave the composition of his letter of resignation to AI, but there seems little doubt that AI was the “onlie begetter” of the missive.

It's hard not to surmise from the evidence in the Free Beacon piece that Arday at 40 had in many ways the mental state of a child. If there's serious question whether he was ever able in his 20s to undertake ordinary undergraduate course work, I'm beginning to wonder whether he was even functional enough to know he had to plagiarize or use AI. The book doctor Eve Claxton was apparently behind his book, but she appears to have functioned primarily as an enabler and stenographer who filtered out only his most extreme claims. Robert Spencer comes close to this problem as well:

Yes, and it was a meteoric rise, and a spectacular fall, not because of Arday’s talents, or lack thereof, or because of the skillfulness of his lies and plagiarism. In fact, he wasn’t actually very good at either. His purloining of other people’s work was clumsy and obvious, and his autobiographical claims strained credulity well beyond the breaking point for anyone who dared to ponder them rationally[.]

I just don't see how he could have had the capacity to do these things himself if his developmental disorder was that extreme. Take another look at that photo at the top of this post -- the guy strikes me as just plain simple. He had to have had one or more puppetmasters-cum-enablers throughout his career. Who are they? . . .

Jason Arday Found Dead, Apparent Suicide

One of the more thoughtful reactions from UK commentators is in the YouTube video embedded above. At 0:53, he says,

It should be a reminder that many people who do act in bizarre ways in public normally are quite fragile beneath that, maybe quite unwell. We can forget that sometimes, perhaps, maybe forget that with everyone. But that said, I think the inquest will now begin. And by inquest, I mean the liberals reworking the narrative to suit them. And I daresay it will be something like, you know, innocent black man hounded by vicious anti-white right-wing media. I'm expecting that line from everyome from the BBC to the Guardian to James O'Brien as well as Owen Jones and every academic and wokey from SOAS to Berkeley. Won't be much #bekind and tolerance from them. Anywayh, the central question here is who is responsible for this man's death, cause it's an interesting question of paternity, of course.

Now as I said at the top, you know, I'm sure many people will just say, "Well, it's Arday. He's the only person you can say, you know." If of course this is as it seems, which is obviously the likely outcome. And in a brute sense, tbat would be true. Not only did he presumably take the final act, but he didn't help himself by getting in the mess he was in. You could say he was unwell, maybe he was, I don't know. But it seems to me, if I was to hazard a guess, clearly this is somebody who's a little bit unhinged and has an almost very deep craving to be worshipped and loved and celebrated, as if his identity depended on it.

And when all of that falls away, probably what's revealed is a very lost and traumatized boy, and a lot of S-H-I-T was coming at him from every angle.

The Guardian's reaction was actually even-handed:

Arday’s rise to a prestigious professorial chair was remarkable. Arday said he had been nonverbal until the age of 11, requiring extensive speech and language therapy, as well as being illiterate until 18.

That life story contributed to him being made a torchbearer for the 2012 London Olympics flame.

After leaving school, Arday went on to further study before completing a doctorate in education at Liverpool John Moores University in 2015. That was followed by a string of academic posts culminating in a professorship at the University of Glasgow and a professorial chair at Cambridge.

Arday was initially accused of plagiarising another academic’s work for his PhD thesis. But he denied the accusations, and an investigation by Liverpool John Moores University earlier this year upheld its decision to award him a PhD.

But other elements of his life story were increasingly questioned, including claims of prodigious money-raising for charity and feats of long-distance running.

He was also challenged about whether he was nonverbal as a child.

However those claims meant little in the world of academia. After initially defending Arday as the victim of a smear campaign, as further questions arose about his academic career, the university began to temper its support.

Real Clear Politics ran only a three-hankie weeper from Alex Berenson:

May God welcome Jason into His company and give him the peace he clearly did not have -- for the fabulist is the best example of the “peaceless person” running from the world and himself -- and may God save us from the quasi-religion that contributed so much to his fall.

There's a DEI culture, especially as it relates to people of African descent, on both sides of the Atlantic, but at least from what I can observe from halfway around the world, it's become even more exaggerated and bizarre in the UK. The closest comparable episode in the US is the plagiarism allegations against Claudine Gay, who was briefly president of Harvard, but resigned:

In response, Gay said she stood behind the integrity of her work and requested an outside review of it. The Harvard Corporation reported that the review found "a few instances of inadequate citation" and "duplicative language without appropriate attribution" in her work, but "no violation of Harvard's standards for research misconduct." Analyses by The Harvard Crimson and CNN contested Harvard's statement, finding that Gay had likely violated the university's policies on plagiarism and academic integrity. Gay requested seven corrections to add citations and quotation marks to her dissertation and two of her articles. Academic Joseph Reagle opined that media reports that Gay "plagiarized" implied that she had stolen the central ideas in her work, saying "I don't think this is the case" but that the work "contain plagiarized prose. This is a lesser but still significant infraction." Academic William Arighi, writing for the Journal of Academic Freedom, later characterized the events as "an attempt not at promoting truth but at grinding a political ax".

In response to the allegations, the congressional committee that held the hearing on antisemitism said it would examine Gay's work, and asked the university to produce related communications and documentation.

On January 2, 2024, Gay announced she was resigning her position.

However, Gay retained her posiition on the Harvard faculty. The instances of plagiarism in her case appear to have been far fewer than those in Arday's case, and there were no equivalent fantastic claims of running marathons with a broken leg or Stakhanovite fundraising achievements. Her fall was from a much lesser height, and her prior career was much less enabled by the media. There seems to have been something in the UK water that required Arday to be magnified to a much greater extent.

Why is this? The public justification for privileging people of African descent in the UK appears to have something to do with guilt over colonialism, but this is a much more venial matter, it seems to me, than guilt in the Americas over slavery. My current thinking is that the current liberal UK immigration policy began with the Labour/Fabian program after World War II that nationalized transport and the coal industry and socialized medicine, while at the same time making this affordable by importing third-world labor to keep wages in all these industries down. This effectively wrote the UK native working class out of the equation, solving the problem of the 1926 General Strike for good.

I think the ruling-class guilt in the UK stems in large part from this; DEI is just a distraction.