Cry Me a River

By now we all know that Jason Arday has died, likely by suicide. His widely-publicized story has become infamous despite hardly being a month old. The upshot is that he was a black academic who was awarded a professorship in sociology by the woke elites at Cambridge University when he did not have credentials for it. What Arday did have was the capacity to lie.

At the very least, he built his academic reputation on plagiarism, a fact which researcher Nathan Cofnas uncovered last month. Others in the media did as well. Over 100 passages in Arday’s doctoral thesis were identified as originating elsewhere. Of course, the Left backed Arday during this time, claiming racism. The veracity of the charges, however, were undeniable. On August 5, Arday resigned from Cambridge, and on August 14 was found dead in his home. Authorities at the time claimed that the death was “unexpected but is not believed to be suspicious.” It’s hard to imagine any other cause of death under these circumstances.

See Ed Dutton and Lipton Matthews for more insightful and expansive takes on this affair. I especially liked this analysis by Sargon of Akkad as well.

I would like to offer, on the other hand, rhetorical ammunition for those of us on the Right now facing the wrath of Left-wingers lost in the throes of vindictive grief over Arday’s passing. For example, there are many tweets like this one on X which claim that “Right-wing reactionary media” was responsible for Arday’s death and has blood on its hands.

Others blame Arday’s death on a “racist witch hunt,” or “a lynch mob,” or a “Right-wing pile on.” Here is a taste from an outlet called The Voice:

Let’s not beat around the bush here. This entire rancid saga only occurred because Jason was Black.

This was never anything more than a right-wing pile on to attack Diversity Equity and Inclusion, and to suggest that anyone Black in any position of prominence is not there because of merit alone. And believe me, it won’t end here.

And let me clear about another thing. What we saw in Jason’s treatment was a media lynching. He was hounded to his death.

What was always missing from this debate was the fact that Nathan Cofnas, the man who had a fixation on Jason Arday and who launched this campaign, is a so-called ‘race realist’ with views that belong in the dustbin of history.

If Jason Arday were White this would not have happened.

In response, we should remind the Left of its own double standard with regards to academic cancellation. When they do it to people on the Right, they’re utterly vicious about it—and the question of whether the victim actually deserves it or whether his work is academically or scientifically sound makes no difference at all. And yet they cry foul with hideous shrieks and imprecations whenever anyone—Right, Left, or Center—investigates one of their own for actual, verifiable fraud.

Aptly, we should first bring up Mike Adams, the conservative criminology professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He gained notoriety on the Left in the 2010s with his anti-trans, anti-feminist positions, and by saying inflammatory yet defensible things on social media.

Among the professor’s recent statements was his comparing the efforts of North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper to curb coronavirus to that of a slave master, tweeting on May 29: “This evening I ate pizza and drank beer with six guys at a six seat table top. I almost felt like a free man who was not living in the slave state of North Carolina. Massa Cooper, let my people go!”

Earlier this year, Adams mocked women’s studies as “non essential” and labeled civil rights protesters “thugs.”

Back in 2016, Adams used an ultraconservative opinion site to target a student at his school with an article titled “A Queer Muslim Jihad.”


You can buy Spencer J. Quinn’s young adult novel The No College Club here.

When Adams was denied a promotion in 2007, he sued for anti-Christian discrimination and won after a seven-year legal struggle. But by 2020 public pressure against him became so intense that he agreed to retire on August 1 with a half-million-dollar payout from the university. He shot himself in the head a week before that could happen.

Prior to this, a Facebook group called “Justice for UNCW” had pressured the university to fire Adams. Should it and its 8,000 members be held responsible for Adams’ death? According to some defenders of Jason Arday, they should.

There is also a sense of inevitability being projected by Arday’s defenders, as if heightened media scrutiny necessarily leads to suicide. If so, then perhaps we can investigate the numerous times academics and scientists ran afoul of political correctness and did not resort to suicide after being subjected to relentless abuse.

Perhaps most famously, psychologist Arthur Jensen received numerous death threats and much professional hostility in the early 1970s after publishing a paper on the heritability of IQ. For a time, he needed a police bodyguard and a bomb squad to x-ray and open his mail. His lectures were often disrupted by protesters, and calls for his firing were common. This was considerably worse than the one-month ordeal Arday underwent, and yet Jensen never did himself in.

Richard Lynn was another race-realist intelligence researcher who carried on in the face of abuse. Despite many years of activist pressure, disinvitations, lecture disruptions, and widespread calls for his firing—as well as loss of credentials and his removal from the editorial board of a journal he had helped found—he died of natural causes in 2023 at the ripe age of 93. Did Jason Arday actually have it worse than Richard Lynn?

Charles Murray, the co-author of the 1994 work The Bell Curve has faced similar opposition for decades. In 2017, he and a colleague were attacked by deranged Leftist students at Middlebury College in Vermont where he was scheduled to give a speech. Afterwards, College president Laurie Patton refused to expel the perpetrators, despite how Murray’s colleague Allison Stanger received a concussion and a neck injury during the attack. Unlike Arday, the octogenarian Murray persevered and continues to persevere today.


You can buy Spencer Quinn’s novel White Like You here.

Nobel Laureate James Watson had gotten in trouble numerous times throughout his career for dropping bon mots which the Left deemed not so bon. Most notoriously, he stated in 2007 that he felt “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.” This resulted in instant cancellation, mass-condemnation, and professional ostracism. He was reduced to selling his Nobel Prize medal in 2014 for $4.1 million. Then in 2019 he doubled down, stating correctly that “[t]here’s a difference on the average between blacks and whites in IQ tests. . . I would say the difference is genetic.” This caused mass panic at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories on Long Island, New York. They immediately revoked all honors and titles conferred to Watson, despite how he had served as the lab’s president from 1994 to 2004.

And yet James Watson died of natural causes in 2025, age 97.

And these are just the heavy hitters of race realism. Kevin MacDonald, Jared Taylor, Greg Johnson, Emil Kirkegaard, Peter Brimelow, and Jason Richwine are examples of less famous individuals who have been canceled in one way or another for violating Leftist orthodoxy. And yet they continue plugging along. Perhaps ironically, Nathan Cofnas is now receiving death threats from grieving supporters of Arday—one of whom recently promised to “Charlie Kirk his ass” if he ever decided to visit the United States.

I’ve had my issues with Cofnas in the past—but he doesn’t deserve this abuse. I dearly hope nothing bad comes of it. In any event, we do owe Cofnas a debt of gratitude for exposing Arday’s lies in the first place.

We must remember also that, unlike the men mentioned above, Arday was credibly accused of academic fraud. He wasn’t merely a mediocre scholar who might have taken liberties with other people’s material four or five times early on in his career. That would have been merely embarrassing. Instead, at the time of his death he was facing charges of over 100 instances of plagiarism, not all of which came from Cofnas. Add this to the long list of improbable and likely apocryphal things he had said about himself (for example, claiming to have run 30 marathons in 35 days) and the fact that he sicced the police on a journalist who was investigating the fraud allegations against him, and Arday comes across not as a victim, but as a consummate conman and pathological liar who couldn’t face the music once his seven-figure check bounced from the big bank of lies. Furthermore, he was anti-white considering how he co-wrote a book complaining about “whiteness” and once accused a student of having “white privilege” simply for complaining about a low grade.

This is why I cannot drum up even generic sadness for Jason Arday’s passing. And if his supporters wish to lash out at the Right while keeping mum as their fellow travelers trash the memory of murder victim Ann Widdecombe, then they can go cry me a river.

Spencer J. Quinn

Beau Albrecht:

If our lefty moral superiors want to blame critics for Jason Arday’s death, then they also should look into “root causes” as they’re fond of doing.  In this case, the cultural Marxist academic establishment promoted this diversity hire every step of the way – someone was both a chronic liar and didn’t have a clue about academic standards like attribution – to a position far beyond his competence level.  Then when the truth came out, his entire world collapsed.  If instead he’d been working in a job suited to his capabilities (mopping floors, perhaps), then he’d be alive and well now.

https://counter-currents.com/

How to Judge People by What They Look Like by Edward Dutton

‘You can’t judge people by what they look like!’ It’s drummed into us as children and, as this book proves, it is utterly false. In this highly readable analysis of the academic research, Dutton shows that we are evolved to judge people’s psychology from what they look like, we can accurately work out people’s personality and intelligence from how they look, and (quite often) we have to if we want to survive. Body shape, hairiness, eye width, finger length, even how big a woman’s breasts are . . . Dutton shows that these, and much else, are windows into personality, intelligence, or both. Once you read How to Judge People by What They Look Like, you’ll never look at people the same again.

Foreword by Prof. Bruce Charlton

Appearances are not always deceptive. Indeed, quite the opposite. In this highly informative and entertaining mini-book, Dr Dutton surveys the psychological data in support of the neglected idea that we can tell a lot about someone from how they look. The fact that most people believe they can judge a stranger by their face and body makes it plausible that we really can do this, if not with total accuracy, then at least to a useful degree. It is a question of probabilities. So long as we are better than random at predicting traits such as personality, intelligence or aggression; overall this would have a positive impact on reproductive success. As social mammals, this attribute would have been very helpful, and sometimes vital, during our evolutionary history. Dr Dutton’s book is a necessary corrective to misleading modern myths and taboos about ‘judgmentalism’ and stereotyping. As he makes clear; so long as we are prepared to modify our first impressions in the light of further evidence; it is reasonable and sensible to take seriously our innate ability to sum-up a stranger with a glance.

Prof. Bruce Charlton 

Reader in Evolutionary Psychiatry at Newcastle University and Visiting Professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham.  

Chapter One

The Strange Death of Physiognomy

‘People say sometimes that Beauty is only superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.’ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Everyone’s heard the cliché, ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover.’ Don’t judge people by their appearance. Judge people, if you have to judge them at all, by what’s in their hearts. It’s a warm, cuddly idea: that nobody can help what they look like and what they look like is nothing to do with what they actually are like. Imploring people not to judge by appearances has many benefits: it makes you seem kind, for one, and it emphasises your profundity. You are somehow able to rise above your instincts, ignore the ‘superficial,’ and plunge into the depths of people’s hearts. 

In the 2001 comedy Shallow Hal, Jack Black plays Hal Larsen, who is obsessed with physical beauty. Hal’s superficiality appals the ‘life success coach’ Tony Robbins (who plays himself). Robbins ends up sharing an elevator with Hal. Robbins hypnotises Hal such that he can only see people’s inner beauty. If they’re a good person then they’ll be attractive; if they’re a nasty person then they’ll look hideous. Accordingly, Hal ends-up dating an extremely kind but morbidly obese young woman, played by Gwyneth Paltrow. Unaccountably, from Hal’s perspective, chairs collapse under this slender goddess, she creates an enormous splash at the local swimming pool, and she has a bizarrely negative opinion of her own appearance. Most of us would like to think that we are like the hypnotized Hal and that we ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover.’  

1. The Wisdom of the Ancients

Except, we generally do. Despite gaining all the social benefits of claiming we don’t judge by appearances we almost certainly do so, even if only unconsciously. And we do so because we are evolved to do so, and because doing so has worked up until now. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) quipped, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, ‘Only shallow people do not judge by appearances’ (Wilde, 2012). In Medieval and Early Modern England, it went without saying that you judged by appearances. Although the hypotheses which underpinned their thought-systems – such as astrology – were hopeless, our ancestors had it partly right when it came to what is called ‘physiognomy.’ This is the attempt to judge a person’s character from what they look like. 

The Ancient Greeks were firm believers in physiognomy. Aristotle (384-322 BC) wrote in Prior Analytics that, ‘It is possible to infer character from features’ (Aristotle, 1989) and many other Greek scholars took the same view. Michael Scot (1175-1232), a Scottish mathematician and a scholar at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, wrote a learned thesis on the subject (Porter, 2005, p.122). In the late 14th century work Canterbury Tales, the author, Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343-1400), gives the Wife of Bath a gap in her front teeth to imply that she is highly sexual. The Reeve is of slim build, to suggest he is ‘choleric’ (bad-tempered and irritable), while the Summoner is ugly, because he’s an unpleasant person (see Hallissy, 1995). Physiognomy was taught as an academic subject at English universities, until it was outlawed by Henry VIII (r.1509-1547) for having become associated with fortune-telling (Porter, 2005, p.134).

Even so, it continued to be widely accepted in academic and literary circles. Shakespeare made frequent use of it (see Baumbach, 2008). This is most obvious in Julius Caesar’s description of Cassius: 

‘Let me have men about me that are fat 

Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights 

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look 

He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous’ 

(Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene II). 

The medic Thomas Browne (1605-1682) published his Religio Medici in 1643, in which he observed, ‘there is surely a Physiognomy, which those experienced and Master Mendicants observe . . . For there are mystically in our faces certain Characters that carry in them the motto of our Souls, wherein he that cannot read A.B.C. may read our natures’ (Browne, 1844, p.102). 

Physiognomy fell into disrepute precisely because of its association with ‘Master Mendicants,’ but it was then re-popularised by the Swiss scholar Johan Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801) (see Lavater, 1826). Up until Lavater, people had believed that there were a number of ‘general types’ of people, with physiognomy allowing you to discern which type a person was: choleric (temperamental), phlegmatic (calm), mercurial (changeable and unpredictable) or sanguine (optimistic). Lavater developed this, arguing that physiognomy could be used to be far more specific – to discern the character traits of individuals. Physiognomy was duly revived and by the nineteenth century it was implicit in many novels, and most obviously in The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was written in 1890. Dorian wants to maintain his beauty but live an amoral and hedonistic life. Accordingly, he sells his soul in return for his amoral life being reflected in a portrait of him, rather than on his own face and body. He remains beautiful, while the portrait becomes increasingly unattractive. In many other Victorian novels, besides, the good characters were physically attractive while the bad characters were ugly and deformed. Appearance was, once again, a short-hand for character (see essays in Percival & Tytler, 2005). Famously, the captain of The Beagle, Robert Fitzroy, wanted an ‘energetic young man’ as a gentleman companion on his voyage. The nature of Charles Darwin’s nose told Fitzroy that Darwin could not possibly be that man. Darwin’s daughter, Henrietta, later stated that Fitzroy had ‘made up his mind that no man with such a nose could have energy.’ Fortunately, the rest of Darwin’s face compensated for this: ‘His brow saved him’ (quoted in Highfield et al., 2009). 

And this is where the English gentleman scientist Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) makes an appearance. Statistician, polymath, social scientist, proto-geneticist, inventor, meteorologist, geographer and even tropical explorer, Galton was Renaissance man. If there was a belief that remained yet to be scientifically proved or disproved, Galton was drawn to proving or disproving it (see Bulmer, 2004). Physiognomy, therefore, fascinated him. In 1878, Galton published an article in the journal Nature in which he presented his findings. He developed a system of composite photographs in which he superimposed a variety of faces onto each other using multiple exposures. This allowed him to create photographic representations of those with certain qualities, such as being beautiful, criminal or ill. These led to distinct photographs, implying, for example, that there is a degree to which criminals have distinct faces from the rest of the population. 

Unfortunately, physiognomy became associated – and, perhaps, remains associated – with phrenology. Pioneered by German scientist Franz Josef Gall (1758-1828), this was the belief that the nature of a person’s character can be discerned by small differences in the shape of their skull. As the brain is an organ, and different parts of the brain have different functions, it seemed to follow that bumps or indentations in the skull would reflect similar properties in the brain. As such, people could ‘have their lumps felt’ and it would reveal a great deal about the nature of their personality; albeit based on the very limited nineteenth century knowledge of brain modules. Phrenology became hugely popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the establishment of learned phrenology societies, including a significant one in Edinburgh (see de Giustino, 2016). The Edinburgh Phrenological Society was founded by the Scottish solicitor George Combe (1788-1858) who asserted, ‘that the brain is the organ of mind; that the brain is an aggregate of several parts, each subserving a distinct mental faculty; and that the size of the cerebral organ is, caeteris paribus, an index of power or energy of function’ (quoted in Fodor, 1983, p.131). Unsurprisingly, phrenology was debunked. Physiognomy found itself (intellectually) guilty by association.

2. ‘Not by the colour of their skin . . .’ 

The other problem physiognomy has to deal with is the obvious unpleasant consequences judging people by their appearance has when it comes to the issue of ‘race.’ This is most obvious in the case of a bunch of nasty, anti-intellectuals who took power in Germany and attempted to wipe out the race which they regarded as their own race’s chief competitor. The Nazis measured facial features in order to determine the archetypal ‘Jew’ and the archetypal ‘Aryan,’ giving the measurement of facial features for any broader purpose a bad name. But the actions of the Nazis are entirely irrelevant. As we will see shortly, physiognomy works, in most cases, within races. We will look more at ‘race,’ and its relationship with physiognomy, shortly.

But most importantly, if we accept Darwinian Theory, we really must ask ourselves, ‘Why wouldn’t physiognomy work?’ Humans are an advanced form of ape, very closely related to all mammals, such as the lion. Female lions are more attracted to males with darker manes. This is because these males have higher levels of testosterone, as reflected in the colour of their manes, and are thus more aggressive and more likely to win fights. Physiognomy works with lions (West & Packer, 2002). It would be extraordinary if it didn’t work with humans.     

But before proving that it does work, we should be clear on our key terms. I have already defined these terms in detail in my book The Genius Famine (Dutton & Charlton, 2015). So those who have read that book may wish to skip this section as much of it is exactly the same as in The Genius Famine.