Politics

When Senator Lindsey Graham died suddenly last month from a heart condition, official Washington paused its partisan spitting contests to honor a Master of the Beltway. Not since John McCain’s funeral in 2018 had there been such a high display of institutional respect for a senator – complete with eulogies in the Capitol Rotunda and an invitation-only funeral at the National Cathedral attended by foreign leaders. But now South Carolina has to decide who replaces the Great Man. We are used to a political climate dominated by candidates who embrace egotistical posturing and exaggerate their qualifications. So on one level it was refreshing to see the South Carolina debate last night.

Behold the human wreckage of the cult of diversity. The tragedy of Jason Arday is that he was both built up and destroyed by the ruthless machinery of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). The academy made him into the golden boy of its philistine project of “decolonization” and gave not one thought to what the consequences might be if his thin story unraveled, as it inevitably would. No one can deny it now: wokeness makes false gods and real tragedies. Journalists found a story and they told it. It was the academy and Arday’s colleagues who failed to do their jobs The death of Arday is not only dreadful – it is enraging. It feels like a catastrophe foretold.

Simon Baron-Cohen, the distinguished Cambridge autism specialist, has been speaking movingly about his friend, Jason Arday, in a BBC radio interview. Baron-Cohen said the last contact he had with Arday was hours before he was found dead at an address in south London yesterday afternoon: “He really wasn't coping. He was being subjected to relentless scrutiny... ridicule, discrediting every detail of his life... He wasn't coping with the loss of his career, the loss of his reputation. He felt he couldn't go on.” Jason Arday was a victim, but not in the way that his political champions suggest Baron-Cohen went on to talk about him as “an incredibly kind and gentle and caring and generous man”.

"All of these men often times who are saying, ‘oh if you haven't had a kid by 30 like you're done,' it's just not supported," said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in a video uploaded to her Instagram Story on Sunday night. The 36-year-old congresswoman has announced to her audience of 9.6 million followers that she, like a growing number of American women, has decided to freeze her eggs. She continued, "Don't trust the people writing abortion laws, that don't even understand the first thing about a woman's body, to tell you about how many eggs you have at what age.