From Academic Peanut Grifters to Big Con Artists, is the Scam Finally Unravelling?
By Stanley K. Ridgley, PhD
The Jason Arday affair at Cambridge University is only the most recent and most egregious example of the DEI grift in the universities.
Arday demonstrates that the grift infects even the finest colleges in the Anglosphere.
Arday is, of course, the disgraced liar and plagiarist, whose too-good-to-be-true success story unravelled when journalists discovered that almost none of it was true. The fantastic comprehensive story appears here, under the byline of Benjamin Ryan. Academic Nathan Cofnas originally broke the story.
The hapless but shrewd Arday followed the template for DEI grifters that has worked so well in United States higher education. He faked his way into the halls of learning with a con-story that took advantage of what psychologists call “virtuous victimhood.”
Grifters and Big Con men and women in the states have run the “virtuous victimhood” scam for years, accelerating since 2020.
Major con artists with household names are Ibram Kendi, Ta-Nehesi Coates, Ijeoma Olua, Robin DiAngelo, Michael Eric Dyson, and Stacey Patton, among many others.
For the con to work, a willing mark must be found, and Jason Arday found an entire Cambridge University department eager to indulge his fantasies. So he spun his stories and the Education Department of Cambridge wolfed it down.
Want to know how it works on the campus? I offer an entire book on the DEI con game, and here I include the chapter from DEI EXPOSED on grifters like Arday.
Here is how the scam works along with the major rogues who employ it, from DEI EXPOSED:
For a successful con to work, the con-artist must spin a great Con Story. It must have gravitas. Someone must identify the “mark” and craft a story tailored to dupe the mark into either parting with cash or to lead him into behavior to satisfy a need. Someone must craft the Con Story, give it intellectual cachet, to invest it with credibility. Someone must serve as inspiration for the phalanx of grifters and con men.
That someone is the racialist intellectual who weaves together a bit of fact and lots of fiction. This is the guru of grift. These gurus of grift ply their trade at the topmost tier of the DEI tale-spinning hierarchy, where compensation is lavish and responsibilities nil.
These are hustlers extraordinaire, and they provide the veneer of legitimacy and even a bit of faux intellectualism that is essential to the success of DEI on campuses. These masters of the con provide the story, its essential details, and the plausibility for the intellectual classes of the university to buy into the fraud. They provide the story for others to repeat, ad infinitum, so that it gains unquestioned legitimacy by virtue of repetition alone.
These DEI yarn-spinners constitute the mandarin class of hustlers. They generate the ideas and stories that comprise the Con Story of virtuous victimhood. Big Con-artists and many hundreds of peanut grifters alike use victim-signaling to bring in the cash in what we know as “Victimhood Culture.” This culture renders it financially and psychologically advantageous to announce victim status publicly and sell absolution to the college rubes they dupe.
To position Jason Arday in the same context as the many grifters working the racialist hustle right now, I provide the chapter from DEI EXPOSED, the “Gurus of Grift—Peanut Grifters to Big Con Artists” to demonstrate the pattern of behavior that has proven so lucrative for so many charlatans.
Here is the whole sordid method and the major players who employ it.