On the Jason Arday Saga

Jason Arday, 1985-2026

Curmie is a little late to the feeding frenzy around the case of Jason Arday.  Arday is, or rather was, a Cambridge University professor of sociology of education (whatever that means), and a lightning rod for allegations of plagiarism and misrepresentation in one direction and racism in the other.  He resigned from Cambridge under a cloud of suspicion on August 5 after the university re-opened the plagiarism investigation, and he was found dead in his apartment on the 14th.  As of this writing, no cause of death has been released, but of course there is the unspoken likelihood of suicide.

Back in 2023, when Cambridge made Arday the youngest black professor to be hired in that venerable institution’s over 800-year history, a couple of things became clear.  First, the university was really interested in bragging about their new hire as an effort “to do everything it can to address this [“the barriers faced by many under-represented groups across higher education and especially at leading universities”] by creating academic spaces where everyone feels they belong.”

Second, even usually responsible news outlets bought Arday’s tales of perseverance and extraordinary accomplishments without the slightest hint of skepticism.  The Guardian, for example, breathlessly exclaimed that “he did not learn to speak until he was 11” and that he was “unable to read or write until the age of 18.”  (Both of these assertions have subsequently been at least challenged if not outright disproven.)  Shortly before Arday’s resignation, The Guardian was calling him a “superstar academic.”

But, as they say in the infomercials, That’s Not All! 

Tyler Austin Harper, a former academic currently writing for The Atlantic, describes a pattern of “systemic, ritualized, dishonesty.”  In an interview with NPR’s Michel Martin, Harper says, 

He lied about a number of elements of his background, his medical history.  He plagiarized a number of his various academic works.  On the athletic achievements front, he claims to have run 600 miles in six days, which would put him 50 miles shy of the world record, which would make him a really world-class endurance athlete.  He claims to have been mute until age eleven and then had a miraculous turn-around, an illiterate until age 18….  So, any one of these things may have perhaps been believable, but the sheer accumulation of implausibilities made it pretty apparent that he was a serial fabulist.

“Fabulist” has got to be the classiest term for “liar” that Curmie has heard in a long time.  There are, by the way, a host of other claims that rather strain credulity, enumerated in the Times of London, and the New York Times, as well as The Guardian.  Asked by that newspaper about some of his more outrageous assertions, Arday responded, “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me.  Why would I lie?” 

The answer to that question is rather obvious; Occam’s Razor would seem to apply.  He wanted the adulation and the benefits of someone who had actually done those great things.  If, Gentle Reader, you think that sounds rather like an obese octogenarian currently living in this country’s most expensive public housing, you are not alone.

Harper notes that the initial accusations regarding the alleged plagiarism in Arday’s doctoral dissertation were set in motion someone whom Harper says “is fairly described as a racist.”  That would be Nathan Cofnas, whose comment that in a true meritocracy, “Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment” would seem to provide sufficient evidence for that assertion. 

Cofnas, who was fired by Cambridge’s Emmanuel College in 2024, has now been suspended from his research position at Ghent University, who must, of course, have known of his views when they hired him.  But Arday’s death somehow changes things in the minds of cowardly university administrators.  (Curmie offers the usual apologies for redundancy).

Importantly, however, whatever motivated Cofnas’s allegations, he seems to have had a case.  Just as Mark Fuhrman may have been a bad cop but that didn’t make OJ innocent (as opposed to “not guilty”), the allegations against Arday cannot be ignored just because he’s black and the accuser is a racist.  Viewed with skepticism, yes; automatically rejected, no. 

It is true that Arday’s PhD school, Liverpool John Moores University, cleared him of plagiarism charges, but if the New York Times is correct that “Dr. Arday’s published papers and his thesis had dozens of grammatical errors, along with identical quotes attributed to different people,” then anything that university says should be disregarded in its entirety.  The thesis is available here; you’re welcome to check it out for yourself, Gentle Reader.  Curmie has neither the disciplinary expertise to evaluate the originality or validity of Arday’s arguments nor the time to search out those grammatical errors.

What Curmie can tell you is that when he submitted his dissertation, the committee did their jobs.  In a study of late 20th-century Irish adaptations of Greek tragedies, Curmie had made a passing reference to a play by a Nigerian playwright, and seemed to imply that it was written by someone other than the actual dramatist.  A committee member pointed out the error. 

Curmie had also quoted one of the classical Greek tragedians.  He provided the English translation for the entire passage he wanted to cite, but inadvertently left out a few words of the original Greek.  The classicist on the committee caught that one.  Needless to say, the corrections were made before the document was printed and bound.  That dissertation represented not just Curmie, but the department and the university.  It was going to be accurate.  Apparently, the standards at Liverpool John Moores are a little more… erm… lax.

Fact is, no one looks good here.  Not Arday, not Liverpool John Moores, and certainly not Cambridge, who chose Arday over more senior scholars, including other “global majority” finalists with apparently better credentials, both qualitatively and quantitatively.  Arday was, in the words of the New York Times article linked above, “underqualified, by the school’s own standards.”  Ah, but hiring any old black scholar wouldn’t make headlines the way The Youngest Ever would.  The search committee included someone whose research into autism and related conditions should have set off alarms about just how unlikely Arday’s claims about his medical history truly were.

Plus, of course, the university immediately rushed to his defense even after they themselves re-opened the investigation into his alleged transgressions.  It’s understandable that a university of Cambridge’s stature wouldn’t want to admit they’d been taken in, but that sure looks like what happened.  Jason Arday may indeed have been a brilliant man, an outstanding lecturer, and a researcher capable of cutting-edge work.  He may have had colleagues, students, and friends who liked and admired him.  But, beyond the proverbial reasonable doubt, he was also a fraud, a liar, and a plagiarist.

In that NPR interview, Harper also argues that recent efforts to achieve a more inclusive professoriate “in some cases has led to a lowering of standards, but also has led to the sense that black and brown folks are on campuses to be black and brown first and foremost, and scholars and educators second.”  He then describes “what is often being described as cancel culture is actually a culture of cowardice…. No one has the stomach to say something that’s going to get them yelled at.”  He’s referring here to hiring Arday, to the George Santos affair, and to his own experience as the “token black professor” at Bates College.

Curmie has occasionally mentioned that his views are not uniformly “liberal.”  He tends towards a Confucian belief that every case is different, and towards what is often regarded as a traditional conservative view that people are individuals first and representatives of a group second.  From this perspective, the situation Harper describes is doubly problematic in that it tends to isolate black scholars, making them akin to mascots, uncomfortable in their roles in the academy, and that a single incident like Arday’s apparent unfitness is taken as representative of other members of his demographic, thereby questioning the credentials of hundreds (at least) other black academics who got their positions simply by excelling.

This latter phenomenon, suggesting that most if not all black (or brown, or female, or LGBTQ+, or…) scholars got ahead simply by DEI or some variation on the theme, has been propagated not merely by racist idiots like Cofnas (or, in a different area, by buffoons like Pete Hegseth), but by far too many everyday conservatives.  (Curmie antiphrastically does not mention that most of the whiners had no objections when those who got unearned benefits were straight white males.) 

Let’s be real for a moment.  If Curmie were to identify the three academics whose example he hoped to follow, people whose scholarship, integrity, and interest in helping those lower on the proverbial totem pole were all exemplary, there would be a black man on the list.  If he were to identify three academics he least wanted to emulate, there’d be a black man on that list, too.  And, of course, there are others at about every point along the continuum.  Something similar could be said for any other demographic.  None of this ought to surprise anyone.  Individuals are individuals.

Arday’s misrepresentation of himself in terms of medical history and athleticism tells us something about him as a person, not as an academic per se.  But other than serious abuse of students, there is no greater offense committed by a professor qua professor than serial plagiarism.  There is no excuse.  None.

Shaun Harper (not to be confused with Tyler Austin Harper) writes in Inside Higher Ed, “Even if he plagiarized his work, how can we best extend support to him as the investigation carries on and his reputation is being ruined across continents?”  Sorry, that’s utter nonsense.  It’s pretty clear that Arday did indeed plagiarize, and it’s more than a little smug to say that “Death should not be the price of academic celebrity” as if not everyone believed that.  Give me a damned break.

The whataboutism argument that white academics have gotten away with plagiarism in the past is simultaneously (often) true and irrelevant.  There’s at least one well-known white scholar in Curmie’s field whose career did indeed blow up after a plagiarism charge, but Curmie also knows about some pretty unethical behavior that went largely unpunished.  That said, what should happen is that there are serious consequences for all plagiarists regardless of race.

And don’t get Curmie started on arguments like “there are things he himself may have felt under pressure to exaggerate. But you have to remember always that he was trying to say, ‘Look what we can achieve. Look what black people can achieve and do.’”  Sorry, to talk legitimately about what you can accomplish requires you to actually accomplish something, not just say you did.  Such excuses do more to de-legitimize Arday than to defend him.

There are, in fact, plenty of reasons to suggest that Cambridge has a lot to answer for.  They were certainly lazy, craven, and predictably hypocritical.  But the more profound problem for Jason Arday was… Jason Arday.  It may be a bit much to call him a “turbo-fraudulent serial fabulist whose crime spree has discredited one of the world’s oldest academic institutions, as Tyler Austin Harper  does, but, frankly, not by much.

The coda to all this is that there’s apparently software that says that the chances Arday’s resignation letter was AI generated are 100%.  You may recall, Gentle Reader, that last year Curmie asked ChatGPT to write an essay about Elon Musk in Curmie’s own style.  It did so rather frighteningly well.  Some time later, Curmie fed that composition to one of those programs that purports to determine whether an actual person wrote something.  He was assured that it was 100% certain that it was written by a human.  Oops.  Maybe we ought not to be too trusting of computers’ conclusions?

Another program says that it’s only 3.5% likely that Arday’s resignation was computer-generated.  That’s a pretty wide range!  If the allegation is correct, it provides a sadly ironic conclusion to the whole affair.  If not, it serves as a reminder that whatever his faults, Dr. Arday was also an injured party.

Actually, he’s both perp and victim, however that letter was created.

Imagine That You're Marco Rubio...

Marco Rubio: Moving Target

Imagine, if you will, Gentle Reader, that you’re Marco Rubio.  You’re a rather mendacious little weasel (as usual, Curmie apologizes to actual members of the genus Mustela), but your defining characteristic has become your sycophancy. 

Back in 2012, Curmie, though he disagreed with you far more often than not, allowed for the possibility that, unlike virtually all other leading Republicans, you just might be “both sane and intelligent.”  When you were seeking the GOP nomination for President in 2016, you accurately described Donald Trump as a “conman” who has “spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy,” and whose rhetoric is reminiscent of “third-world strongmen.”  You said that you’d promised to support the Republican nominee in 2016, but “it’s getting harder every day.”

But then you didn’t get the nomination; Trump did.  And, choosing expediency over integrity, you re-invented yourself as a MAGA flag-bearer.  After casually breaking your promise to return to private life if you didn’t get the presidential nomination, you had a pretty easy life, cruising to re-election in both 2016 and 2022.  You could almost certainly could have continued in the Senate for another couple of decades at the very least: a sort of Mitch McConnell without even having to be quite as actively evil.

For reasons Curmie fails to understand, however, you chose to trade that comfortable future, along with the last vestiges of your self-respect, to align yourself with Dear Leader, a feckless buffoon who is the perfect storm of ignorance, xenophobia, malevolence, prevarication, and hubris.  To be fair, you were far from the worst cabinet-level appointment: with Bondi, Gabbard, and Noem now gone, that dubious distinction is pretty much down to two combatants: Robert Kennedy Jr. and Pete Hegseth, neither of whom is remotely qualified to work for, let alone head, their respective agencies.

Unfortunately, those years you’d spent on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee may have been more of a hindrance than an asset when you were expected to carry out the orders of an incompetent narcissist.  You knew that what he wanted in terms of policy was idiotic and what he wanted from you wasn’t your experience, much less any claim to expertise.  He wanted yet another yes-man, someone to tell him his every absurd utterance was the stuff of brilliance.  He didn’t want an advisor; he wanted a minion.

So, there you were, embarrassing yourself on an almost daily basis: you were left trying to justify this administration’s serious violations of international law, its inane and vacillating tariff policies, and the not-so-veiled threats against some of our nation’s staunchest allies.  You came off like a cringing houseplant in that White House meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy because, no doubt, that’s what you were told to do.  You knew better, but you couldn’t seem to muster even the modest amount of courage it would take to rein in 47’s pompous and puerile bluster.

And what did you achieve by all the bowing and scraping?  Certainly not loyalty; that’s a one-way street in Trumpistan.  Dear Leader expects servile fidelity to him rather than to the Constitution or the citizenry, from everyone around him.  But reciprocating that allegiance?  Who are you kidding?  The Trump administration is nothing if not an organized crime syndicate; you can’t go a week without reading of another case of favors granted in return for… erm… financial largesse (generally in seven figures).  On rare occasions, criminals will get pardons or commutations if doing so either helps 47 politically or is so outrageous that it demonstrates his power.  Usually, though, it’s just a monetary bribe, and Rubio’s net worth is barely over $1 million: nowhere near enough, in other words.

Any normal person with even a below-average ability to read people and the slightest touch of self-preservation would have avoided the Trump administration like the proverbial plague.  Marco Rubio may say and do profoundly stupid things on a regular basis, but, unlike his boss, he’s not a blithering idiot.  He knew better than to trust Dear Leader, but he did so, anyway.

The one-sidedness of that relationship was never more obvious than in the Colossal Catering Container Caper.  Details are sketchy and sometimes contradictory, but a few things seem to be pretty clear.  After the NATO summit in Ankara, Türkiye last month, there was apparently reason to believe that there might be an attempt on Trump’s life by the Iranians.  Remember them, Gentle Reader?  The folks whose military capabilities have been utterly annihilated so many times in recent weeks that Curmie has long since lost count?

Oh, and the intelligence report about the potential attack came not from the US military or the CIA, who perceived only the usual bellicosity and were skeptical of the information, but from Israel, who certainly would have no reason to increase the tensions between Iran and the Trump administration, right?  😉 Still, an abundance of caution in such matters is reasonable, and Curmie is not going to criticize the extra protection in general terms.  The specifics are another matter.  We’ll get there in a moment.

Exactly why it was decided that Trump should not be on board Air Force One is unclear: there are conflicting reports about the plane’s defenses.  What we do know is that the President was sneaked off that plane and taken via catering container to a nearby military jet on which he and a handful of other people left the country.

And then Air Force One took off, with dozens of staffers and journalists on board!  Had there actually been an attack, then those people would surely have perished.  Here’s the take of Joe Lockhart, who served as White House press secretary to President Clinton during their 2000 trip to Islamabad: 

They just didn’t seem to give a second thought to anybody but the president and the few people who were with him.  We went out of our way to make sure the maximum number of people, especially civilians, were protected and not human shields. They didn’t even think about it. And to me, that’s the big difference.

It’s reasonable to assume that the misdirection was initiated by the Secret Service or the military or whoever, but at the very least, Dear Leader must have signed off on the plan.  It certainly fits with everything we know about his personality. 

No particularly strenuous mental calisthenics are required to imagine that 47 would relish the idea of sacrificing the press corps, especially those who had the audacity to ask pertinent questions he couldn’t answer without telling an obvious lie.  He saw nothing wrong with sending American servicemen and -women into harm’s way in a war of choice he started because Bibi Netanhayu told him to, with bombing Iranian schoolgirls and Venezuelan fishermen, with shooting Renee Good and Alex Pretti (among others), with canceling US-Aid programs that would have saved literally millions of lives, with… well, you can recite the litany as easily as Curmie can, Gentle Reader.  So why would he care about journalists, or his own staffers, for that matter?  Yeah, he’d probably miss Stephen Miller, but all things considered it sounded like a good deal.

Of course, the stratagem has its defenders: anything to protect the President, and all that.  Curmie has no issue with the deception, but there’s an easy way to avoid putting all those other people at risk.  Start with exactly what happened: sneaking Trump away from Air Force One.  Wait until that military plane has taken off and the President is out of danger.  Announce that there was an issue with Air Force One and it would remain on the ground until that situation was fixed, but it was important that Trump depart as quickly as possible (make up a reason), so he was taken to a military jet and is already in the air (or in the UK, as the case may be).  The target was specifically Trump, apparently, so there’s no apparent threat to the passengers still on what ultimately became the decoy plane.  Boom (or, actually, no boom): problem solved.

Curmie does not fancy himself a strategic genius, but the solution does seem pretty obvious.  If you’re going to lie, anyway, at least do it in a way that achieves your primary objective while also reducing the risk to dozens of other people.  Duh.

All of this leads us back to Marco Rubio.  There’s a lot of chatter of late about Karoline Leavitt (Bullshit Barbie) leaving her position as Press Secretary the day after finding out that she was one of those that Dear Leader would be perfectly willing to sacrifice for his own safety.  But other than her rather impressive ability to tell outrageous lies without flinching, she’s kind of a nobody.  And she’s young, blonde, attractive, and unprincipled: she’ll have a job at Fox News whenever she wants one.

Little Marco is a different story.  He actually gave something up to be part of this administration, only to be used as potential target practice: not a comfortable position.  What’s worse: those accompanying Trump out of Türkiye included 47’s “executive assistant” Natalie Harp, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, director of Oval Office operations Walt Nauta… and Pete Hegseth.  Yes, Dear Leader was willing to sacrifice the only qualified person in his administration to save a drunken, philandering, bloviating incompetent. 

It’s gotta be tough to be Marco Rubio about now.

Curmie Is So Old That He Remembers Something Called the Right of Privacy

The scene of the “crime.”

Over 16 years ago, in only the sixth post of this manifestation of Curmie’s blogging life, he wrote about the case of Gloria Y. Gadsden, who taught sociology at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania.  She had recently been allowed to return to the classroom after having been suspended for a couple of Facebook posts in which she obviously jokingly wrote “Had a good day today, didn't want to kill even one student.:-) Now Friday was a different story ...” and “Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete [sic.] hitman, it's been that kind of day.”  Yes, really.

There have been a fair number of other incidents of administrations not merely making stupid decisions based on a toxic combination of humorlessness and paranoia, but clinging to their fantasies long after their hysterics were proven to have no merit.  There were the professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stout who ran afoul of the chief of the campus police for having a poster from the TV series “Firefly” on his office door, the faculty member at Bergen Community College  called on the carpet for posting a photo of his young daughter in a “Game of Thrones” t-shirt, the president of Oakton Community College who decided that a single-sentence May Day e-mail from a faculty member was a personal threat against her, and of course the student at Umpqua Community College who was suspended because she submitted an assignment that followed all of the stated guidelines. 

Plus, of course, all those “weapons” that, shall we say, weren’t: five of them are described here and another four here.  (Those two posts were from the same year, by the way.)

Oh, and we mustn’t forget the retired cop who was jailed for over a month with a $2 million bond for posting a meme that referenced (not to be confused with “celebrated” or “threatened”) a school shooting.  (He sued and settled out of court for $835,000.)

There are dozens of others, no doubt, perhaps even including some that Curmie wrote about but didn’t link here.

But it’s that Gadsden case that’s the most relevant here.  This story is over a year old, but there was a recent article about it, apparently shortly after the release of bodycam footage of the incident  that a Friend of Curmie sent along to him.  (Thanks, Kirsten!).  And, alas, one suspects that this is a portent of things to come rather than a one-off.

Kristen Volpe was a student teacher at John L. Hensey Elementary in Washington, Illinois.  One of her students had closed her laptop mid-class, wiping out her lesson plan.  (Exactly how that works technologically, Curmie can’t quite understand, but that’s not the important part.)  Frustrated, she sent a private message to a total of three people, her boyfriend and two other roommates, via Snapchat.  The details of that post are unclear, or rather there are multiple versions out there because hallucinogenic pseudo-evidence and gossip will always dominate such cases, but the essence was something like “should I shoot him?”

Within an hour, she’d been arrested for “disorderly conduct.”  Say whaaaat?  Exactly how was what she did “disorderly”?  And how was the arrest anything but a violation of her 1st and 4th Amendment rights?

That bodycam footage shows that it’s clear that she believes she has nothing to hide.  That’s because no rational person would believe she did anything illegal, as the eventual dropping of charges underscores.  After she’s arrested, she says she made a “stupid post.”  Well, it wasn’t the smartest thing she’s ever done, but to Curmie’s mind it falls well short of the stupidity of literally everyone else involved in the case.  She was naïve, yes, in that she trusted that what was intended as a private vent would indeed be private.

This all started because Snapchat has some sort of algorithmic monitoring for certain messages, presumably key words: “shoot,” perhaps.  Curmie has read differing accounts as to whether there’s an intervening step involving a human at Snapchat.  If not, then there’s a lot of FBI time being wasted on messages about basketball games or filming schedules.  If there is, then whoever it was at Snapchat needs to be smacked up ‘side the head.

But the inanity only accelerates.  Someone at the FBI decided this message, obviously not intended to be taken seriously—and formed as a snarky question, not a threat—demanded immediate attention.  So, they called in the local police.  They ask for her phone, which she calmly surrenders.  Some commenters say the correct response to that request is “let me see your warrant” (there wasn’t one, of course).  They’re probably right, but that doesn’t necessarily come to mind for a post-adolescent convinced the cops had no reason to suspect her of any wrong-doing.

The cops proceed to lecture her about the alleged seriousness of her actions (Curmie can’t tell if they actually believe the drivel they’re spewing), keep her overnight (because they can, not because there was any legitimate reason to do so), and eventually let her go with no charges filed because even small-town cops can sometimes out-think an anvil.  The school administration promptly cut ties with her, probably ending her teaching career before it really started.  That’s because idiocy and cowardice are in a death struggle (oh shit, can I say “death”?) to be their defining characteristic.

There are, of course, plenty of people who place all the blame on Volpe.  The narrator of that Facebook page linked above (the bodycam stuff) is shocked, shocked!, as only Claude Rains in “Casablanca” has ever been shocked before, at the message.  He’s still not as annoying as “Mrs. Arensberg,” whose smirking commentary that “unfortunately, she had to learn the really hard way” drips with condescension.

Curmie’s got 20 bucks that says that every asshole who’s piling on Kristen Volpe has done the same thing… or worse, although perhaps not in writing.  Curmie has.  He remembers telling a stage manager that an actor who still hadn’t appeared for a dress rehearsal a half hour after call that “she’d better be dead or dying, or she’s going to be dead or dying.”  That, if you’re stupid enough, could be taken as an actual threat, not just asking for advice.  

A while back, Facebook informed Curmie that they’d taken down a message to a friend—not a post, a private message—about a year and a half after it was sent because it supposedly violated some damned policy.  A little late for that censorship to have a lot of effect, guys, especially since I’d long since forgotten what it might have been about.

There’s are three points to be made here.  One is that the level of surveillance of ordinary, innocent, people by the government and government-adjacent corporations has passed into Orwellian territory.  Curmie, being old enough to be Volpe’s grandfather, has never used Snapchat and doubtless never will.  He presumes that in signing up for an account, one has to agree to allow one’s private conversations to be surveilled, but of course no one ever reads all that lengthy legalese, and the Snapchat (and Facebook, and Instagram, and X, and Bluesky, and…) count on that.  It’s legal; it just isn’t ethical.

Second, this eavesdropping is largely if not exclusively instigated by algorithms, not people... not even idiots like those who sought to punish Dr. Gadsden in the case mentioned at the top of this piece.  At least those folks have the potential for reason, even if they choose not to use it.  The obeisance to AI means that context—including, but not limited to, sarcasm and other forms of humor—is lost.  And, of course, despite improvements over the past few months, the bots still get things very wrong, indeed: perhaps not quite to the extent of the “sexy onions” case from a few years ago, but bad enough.  There are, of course, too few checks on turning everything over to the whims of AI, and the ones that do exist are staffed by incompetents at every level, including, alas, the FBI. 

Finally, outrageous intrusions into personal privacy, whether by the government (think Flock cameras) or by some private corporation, are now routine.  The casual assumption by too many people seems to be that every over-reach by those who in Curmie’s day were called The Man should simply be accommodated.  Yes, there are lessons to be learned here about putting anything with even the potential to be misinterpreted in writing (it’s still illegal to monitor phone calls without a warrant).  It’s also true that tone of voice doesn’t translate to text, so the possibility of misunderstanding increases with the written word.

None of this changes the unethical conduct of everyone from Snapchat to the local school district’s administrators.  Unfortunately, however, blaming the victims of such snooping is now a blood sport, whether the aggression comes from ICE, the FBI, police in a small town in Illinois, or somewhere else.  If someone who has no legitimate right to be monitoring what was presumed to be a private conversation doesn’t get the joke (or whatever), you’re in trouble. 

And we’re supposed to just go along, to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, as it were.  Curmie prefers Hamlet’s other option: to take arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them.  Given the topic at hand, Curmie hastens to clarify that the “taking arms” here is intended to be metaphorical.  He’s not going to perpetrate physical violence.  He’ll leave that to the goons in the masks.

Cause for Celebration? Wrong Verdict? Maybe Both?

Shiloh Hendrix at her trial.

Curmie has often claimed to be more of a civil libertarian than a liberal, but there are limits to that analysis.  He believes, for example, that the 2nd Amendment doesn’t mean that the general population ought to have ready access to semi-automatic weapons.  We’ve gone over those arguments before, and they needn’t be repeated here.

The 1st Amendment has similar boundaries: slander, “true threats,” incitement to immediate illegal activity, etc.  You can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater, and so on.  But some situations aren’t so easy to classify.  One recent example would be pro-Palestinian protesters chanting “from the river to the sea.”  It’s not difficult to imagine a scenario in which those words could reasonably be construed by some onlookers as a “true threat,” but the mere fact that someone might be offended or even apprehensive isn’t enough to deny 1st Amendment protection.

Or at least that’s Curmie’s view; his position is supported by the likes of Eugene Volokh and Will Creeley.  They are, respectively, one of the most-respected constitutional scholars in the country and the legal director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). 

The most recent case to make national headlines concerns Shiloh Hendrix.  She’s the Minnesota woman who was recently convicted of disorderly conduct for calling a young black boy a “nigger.”  Well, actually, despite what a lot of the headlines imply, she was acquitted of that charge.

OK, here we go.  In April (naturally, Wikipedia says May) of last year, Hendrix, who is white, took her toddler to the park in Rochester, MN.  Curmie is trusting the account of FIRE’s Aaron Terr on what follows: an 8-year-old black boy allegedly reached into her diaper bag and took (i.e., stole) an applesauce pouch.  Hendrix then chased after him, and called him a “nigger.”

This caught the attention of a bystander, Sharmake Omar, who is also black.  Omar starts recording on his phone, criticizing Hendrix’s use of the racial slur.  She responds, “it’s none of your fucking business,” and adds a gesture that one of Curmie’s Irish friends refers to as “the long finger.”  Omar then challenges her to repeat the word; she obliges: “Fuck you, nigger. Nigger, nigger, nigger.” <Sigh.> 

After a little more cross-talk, she walks away, meaning there was never even a threat of violence.  Omar says, “OK, we’ll see about that, what the internet has to say about you.” That threat was indeed realized, as the video went viral, and Hendrix ended up being charged with three counts of disorderly conduct, that all-purpose charge which is sometimes legitimate and sometimes a stand-in for “you didn’t really do anything illegal, but we didn’t like it.”

Two of the three counts (Curmie can’t figure out what the third one was for… saying “fuck,” maybe?) went forward to trial, where Hendrix was actually acquitted for her using the slur to the child but convicted for her interaction with Omar.  Curmie can’t quite wrap his head around the reasoning there.  After all, Omar was egging her on; he’s as responsible as she is for that altercation.  All Curmie can think of is that what she said to the boy isn’t recorded.  Hendrix doesn’t explicitly acknowledge Omar’s allegation, so the evidence is perhaps a little shaky. 

There are other questions, too, before we get to the central argument.  Why wasn’t Omar called as a witness?  Was he, as some commenters on video posts suggested, “back in Somalia” (voluntarily or otherwise)?  Why did Shire Jimale, the boy’s father, testify?  If he was there at the incident, why didn’t he prevent his kid from stealing the applesauce?  (Or, whether he was there or not, teach him not to take other people’s stuff?)  If he wasn’t present, who was looking after the boy?  And what does he have to offer that is in any way pertinent?  That the boy is autistic has no relevance to Hendrix’s behavior, and therefore none to the case.

Is it relevant that Hendrix was doxed and raised some $860,000 for attorney’s fees and relocation?  Or that the NAACP raised over $300K for the boy?  Is there anyone in this case who we can actually cheer for?

Finally, Curmie notes that there seems to be something magical about the term “nigger” and its ability to trigger a response.  If the demographics were different (and remembering that it’s the encounter with Omar, not the boy, that got Hendrix convicted) would there even have been a case if the offensive term were “fag” or “spic” or “kike”… or “cheese-eating surrender monkey”?  Curmie has a couple of black friends who think that proverbial “n-word” really is different.  Curmie respects their perspective but struggles to see why he should agree with it.

The case is also intriguing for another reason.  Unlike the MAGA faithful, Curmie doesn’t think that something isn’t a problem just because he’s never personally seen it manifested.  That said, it’s been decades since he heard that—or, indeed any—racial slur applied in the speaker’s own voice, that is, not as an actor in a play or film, or as a critic, professor, or journalist quoting from a book, movie, etc.  That’s because most people, especially those with whom Curmie chooses to associate, have learned that using offensive terms, even those that were once commonplace, just isn’t cool.  So, there’s an added level of shock.  None of the foregoing, of course, is in any way intended to deny the experience of those who have indeed been on the receiving end of such verbal assaults.

So now we finally get to the key question: should that which is reprehensible automatically be illegal?  Curmie thinks not, not merely because that’s what seems in keeping with constitutionality, but also because assigning parameters of offensiveness sort of defeats the whole idea of free speech.  If Curmie calls some politician a “scum-sucking shitgibbon,” that’s part of the give-and-take of democratic (lower-case “d”) politics.  And if that pol responds in kind, that is, too.

Of course, there are limits.  Curmie may have pretty much abandoned Jack Marshall’s Ethics Alarms blog when it took a hard right turn into defending (or ignoring) indefensible behavior of the Trump administration, but there are some topics for which Jack’s perspective remains valuable.  His delineation of the relevant past SCOTUS rulings is particularly useful, even if the resulting guidelines are, in his words, “clear as mud.”

There are good arguments both ways, which is why the topic intrigues Curmie.  No one Curmie wants to associate with would use the word “nigger” the way Hendrix did.  Unlike, say, “from the river to the sea,” there is no other possible meaning except as slur.  That’s relevant, but does it meet the “fighting words” threshold?  Curmie doesn’t know, but presumably the jury thought so.  And, of course, a lot of the support, monetary and otherwise, Hendrix has received has come from other racist jackasses.  Most of them are savvy enough to cloak their vitriol in 1st Amendment garb, but the racial animus is still perceptible.

All that said, Curmie is still going to side with the civil libertarians on this one.  As Terr points out,

The video merely shows a heated verbal exchange between Hendrix and Omar. No threats. No violence. Nothing beyond words. However much offense they caused, that simply does not justify the government imprisoning, fining, or otherwise punishing the speaker. A public argument does not become a crime because a speaker used a particular word.

Hendrix’s behavior was unquestionably unethical.  She deserves to be shunned.  But if acting like an asshole for a minute or so is actually illegal, then virtually everyone in the country would have a criminal record.  “Yes,” as Terr says, “that means we must sometimes tolerate speech we find repugnant. But that’s the only way to ensure the speech we value remains free.”

In other words, Curmie thinks the prosecutor and the jury got it wrong.  (The defense attorney claims the judge was against him, too.  Curmie isn’t going to take sides in that squabble.)  But there are two reasons to be at least cautiously optimistic.  They seem to contradict each other, but that means that one of them (at least) is likely to be true.  Hendrix has already appealed the conviction, meaning that it will be reviewed by at least one higher court, possibly all the way up to SCOTUS.  An acquittal cannot be appealed, and double jeopardy would apply.  The conviction, then, allows a little more judicial light into the room. 

That is, one of two things must happen.  Curmie doubts that the conviction will be upheld, but if it is, then racists, homophobes, and similar bigots of the future might be a little more reticent about spewing their hatred into the world.  That would be a good thing.  If Hendrix wins on appeal, then the spirit of the 1st Amendment would be upheld, and some court, perhaps even SCOTUS, would be forced to better define the parameters of protected speech.  That, too, would be a good thing.

Oh, and both the city and Hendrix will have to spend a lot of money on the appeal process.  Good.  They both deserve it.