The Ben Shapiro Show - August 17, 2026


Race, the Media, and a Professor’s Suicide: This Story Is WILD


Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

196.74

Word count

2,433

Sentence count

181

Harmful content

Toxicity

22

sentences flagged

Hate speech

14

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 For the left, the grift isn't everything.
00:00:02.000 It's the only thing.
00:00:03.000 This weekend, a man tragically killed himself. 0.99
00:00:05.000 That man was a racial grifter. 0.99
00:00:06.000 He had lied over and over again. 1.00
00:00:07.000 Those lies were perfectly obvious.
00:00:09.000 And then he was hired at Cambridge University as their youngest ever professor because he fulfilled the woke precepts.
00:00:15.000 And then it all collapsed because the truth came out.
00:00:18.000 And so this man killed himself.
00:00:19.000 So who's to blame?
00:00:20.000 I would say the system that enabled his mental illness, that humored and rewarded the grift for political purposes.
00:00:26.000 They took somebody who had a problem and they made that person famous.
00:00:29.000 And then the truth hit.
00:00:31.000 The left says we were responsible for noticing that he was lying.
00:00:34.000 In a battle between truth and narrative, the left says the narrative ought to win every single time.
00:00:39.000 Jason Arde was a professor at Cambridge University, and he was obviously a fabulist.
00:00:45.000 He was a person who lied about pretty much obviously his entire personal history, like pretty much everything.
00:00:50.000 And he was treated to the best that Great Britain had to offer for all of this.
00:00:56.000 So, to become a professor at Cambridge University, the requirements included an outstanding research record of international stature and a proven track record.
00:01:06.000 Supervising PhD students.
00:01:09.000 Our day had, according to the New York Times, a modest publication record and had bounced from one university to the next, not staying long enough to oversee a full three year or more doctorate.
00:01:17.000 Cambridge hired him anyway in 2023, making him, at 37, the university's youngest black professor at a time when the school was under pressure to diversify.
00:01:26.000 He had told this ridiculous story about himself.
00:01:29.000 He said that he was diagnosed early with autism and then he had such significant developmental delays that he spent his entire childhood in a special needs school. 0.58
00:01:37.000 In his account, he did not speak until he was 11 or read until he was 18.
00:01:41.000 Clearly, this stuff was not true, by the way.
00:01:43.000 He managed to earn his doctorate and began giving keynote speeches on the academic circuit.
00:01:47.000 He said that he had run 30 marathons in 35 days for charity, which, of course, was not true.
00:01:53.000 Cambridge ignored all of this.
00:01:55.000 A review, according to the New York Times, of internal Cambridge documents and interviews with former colleagues and associates shows that in addition to passing over more experienced candidates for the job, administrators gushed publicly about Arte's scholarship and privately disregarded all the complaints about his work.
00:02:08.000 It turns out they were filled with plagiarism and nonsense.
00:02:11.000 Three months after Ardai's hiring, two British scholars privately wrote to Cambridge alerting administrators to potential plagiarism in one of Ardai's papers.
00:02:20.000 The department chair met with him and mentioned his ongoing experiences of direct and indirect racism, along with significant health issues that had affected his work on the paper in question.
00:02:28.000 So he claimed racism and he had health problems.
00:02:32.000 So it turns out that pretty much everything that he said was false.
00:02:36.000 His supposedly remarkable trajectory from nonverbal preteen to PhD had no precedent in medical literature.
00:02:44.000 When a journalist for the Times Higher Education asked about plagiarism last year, a prominent British defamation law firm helped kill the article.
00:02:51.000 And Arte reported the journalist to the police.
00:02:54.000 So, over the weekend, it turned out, so all this came out.
00:02:57.000 Arte ended up resigning from Cambridge over all of this.
00:03:00.000 He still had a book that was out with Simon Schuster and all the rest.
00:03:02.000 And so, over the weekend, he killed himself.
00:03:05.000 Now, again, that's tragic.
00:03:06.000 That's really sad.
00:03:06.000 That really is.
00:03:07.000 When anybody kills themselves, when anybody's damaged themselves, it's really, really, really sad.
00:03:10.000 It's really a terrible thing.
00:03:12.000 And here, I'm going to say something that, you know, as per my usual arrangement, will piss off some folks.
00:03:18.000 Some people on the right. 0.94
00:03:19.000 Mental illness is a thing. 0.89
00:03:20.000 People do have mental conditions.
00:03:22.000 That is a real thing.
00:03:23.000 I understand that it's overdiagnosed.
00:03:24.000 I understand that we have a spate of overdiagnosis throughout the West when it comes to mental conditions.
00:03:29.000 But people do, in fact, have mental conditions and they do require people to care for them and people to watch out for them and people not to just give them benefit after benefit after benefit because it turns out that very often mental illness has a high correlation with attention seeking.
00:03:43.000 And in a lot of various industries in the West, you can do really well if you're attention seeking.
00:03:47.000 Like, really well if you're attention seeking.
00:03:49.000 And people will just give you the attention.
00:03:52.000 I remember mentioning this about Kanye West long before his mental spiral with regard to Nazism.
00:03:57.000 That obviously Kanye West is going through some stuff and had some mental health issues.
00:04:01.000 Okay, well, it seems pretty clear that if you are a person who goes around lying the way that our day was for literally decades, if you go around making up the most ridiculous stories, people around you owe it to you to stop you and to get you the care that you need.
00:04:19.000 Instead, an entire infrastructure was created to make our day richer and more famous because he was saying things that a bunch of people on the left wanted to hear about race. 0.97
00:04:27.000 They wanted to hear that white people were the problem.
00:04:29.000 They wanted to hear. 0.99
00:04:30.000 That white society was racist. 0.98
00:04:31.000 And so, in an effort to demonstrate how woke they were, they kept promoting this totally unqualified grifter over and over and over and over again.
00:04:41.000 And then it all fell apart because, on contact with reality, grift tends to fall apart.
00:04:46.000 Or at least it used to.
00:04:48.000 Now, sometimes you just get really, really, really, really rich.
00:04:48.000 At least it used to.
00:04:50.000 I mean, that's Candace Owens' shtick.
00:04:52.000 But here, it actually came into contact with reality and Ardai had to resign.
00:04:56.000 And then he killed himself.
00:04:57.000 Okay, now, why is this an even more bizarre story than it was last week?
00:05:02.000 Again, it's horrifying.
00:05:03.000 Whenever anyone kills themselves, it's terrible. 0.98
00:05:04.000 Unless you're Hitler, in which case, very glad Hitler killed himself. 1.00
00:05:08.000 Other than that, rare circumstances in which I'm very happy that you kill yourself. 0.98
00:05:12.000 This is not one of them. 0.98
00:05:13.000 This is a person who clearly had mental problems who killed himself.
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00:06:16.000 Okay, now what makes this insane is that people then came out of the woodwork and blamed the people who discovered that he was a grifter.
00:06:25.000 It turns out that in order to defend DEI, not only were they willing to promote someone totally unqualified, not only were they willing to go all in on the grift, they're going to blame everyone else for this person committing suicide when in reality, If there are any outside forces that contributed to this person's suicide, it would have been the people who kept on promoting him in the face of reality when sooner or later reality was going to hit.
00:06:47.000 Take, for example, Zahra Sultana, a member of parliament in the UK.
00:06:54.000 Quote, Now, again, the idea here is that this is like a Princess Diana moment, that somehow this is the paparazzi following around Jason Ardai until he gets in a car crash.
00:07:07.000 Okay, let's just be clear.
00:07:09.000 If Jason Arte were a white middle class academic, he never would have gotten a PhD. 0.99
00:07:15.000 He was instead a black academic claiming insane crap and just ramming that into a woke narrative. 0.95
00:07:24.000 And that meant that he ended up at Cambridge University, which, by the way, has completely destroyed its own credibility here. 0.98
00:07:29.000 The Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, came out and talked about it.
00:07:32.000 He said, It's not time to rush to judgment.
00:07:34.000 We need to reflect.
00:07:37.000 It's a tragedy.
00:07:38.000 It's a tragedy on so many levels, but particularly just for.
00:07:44.000 Everybody who knew Jason, his family, obviously, his friends, we think of them today.
00:07:50.000 It's not a moment for any rushing to judgment.
00:07:54.000 It's a moment for reflection, I would say, reflecting on how things came to this.
00:08:00.000 Yes, I mean, I agree, but I don't think he wants to reflect on the same sort of stuff that I want to reflect on.
00:08:04.000 I want to reflect on how a system allowed a person who is obviously a mentally ill grifter to turn into a prominent academic and then, on contact with reality, his life breaks down and he kills himself. 0.54
00:08:14.000 That's what I want to know.
00:08:15.000 Why did that system promote grift?
00:08:17.000 Why did that system look the other way on plagiarism?
00:08:20.000 Why did that system, in spite of every warning sign, decide to look the other way?
00:08:24.000 That's the real question.
00:08:25.000 I think the question that Andy Burnham wants to ask is why is the press even mentioning reality?
00:08:29.000 Why couldn't we have kept pretending?
00:08:30.000 Again, this is something the left loves to do. 0.74
00:08:33.000 In fact, the entire radical trans movement is based on this. 0.67
00:08:36.000 The idea for the radical trans movement is that if a person believes he is a member of the opposite sex and you tell him that he is not, in fact, a member of the opposite sex and then he kills himself, that's your fault for mentioning the truth. 0.95
00:08:47.000 You should have played along. 0.95
00:08:49.000 Reality has to bend and move around people depending on just how woke the argument they are making is.
00:08:55.000 Now, as you would expect, America's own brand of racial grifter, Ibram X. Kendi, came out and did a whole long piece about all of this.
00:09:02.000 First, he tweeted about how he is the actual victim. 0.71
00:09:07.000 Jason R. Day killed himself, and that means Ibram X. Kendi is the victim.
00:09:10.000 Quote The death of Jason R. Day hit so close to home I had no words yesterday, but I woke up with words.
00:09:16.000 Great.
00:09:16.000 Oh, good.
00:09:18.000 Need some words from this guy. 0.88
00:09:19.000 To be a prominent anti racist black scholar is to know you are a target, almost totally surrounded by resentments. 0.59
00:09:24.000 You know that at any point the attacks can come like a lynch mob.
00:09:29.000 Okay, he was not, Ibram X. Kendi was not lynched.
00:09:31.000 Ibram X. Kendi used the Black Lives Matter moment to clear millions of dollars for himself. 0.52
00:09:38.000 Millions and millions and millions of dollars.
00:09:42.000 In September of 2023, it was made clear, for example, that his Center for Anti Racist Research, which was started at Boston University, took in $43 million in grants.
00:09:57.000 $43 million in grants, including $10 million from the original Twitter co founder, Jack Dorsey.
00:10:02.000 They let off almost all of their staff.
00:10:04.000 They never generated anything, anything.
00:10:09.000 It's insane.
00:10:11.000 Other donors included TJ Maxx, Stop and Shop, and Peloton.
00:10:16.000 A week after the layoffs, BU announced that they had received complaints focused on the center's culture and his grant management practices, and allegations of workplace culture that included fear of retaliation and discrimination.
00:10:27.000 So Ibram X. Kenyon knows the grift well.
00:10:29.000 The reason that he identifies with this stuff is because he, too, is a grifter.
00:10:32.000 His entire shtick was grift. 0.98
00:10:34.000 His anti racist nonsense was grift from the very outset. 1.00
00:10:38.000 But he continues with his dumb tweet. 1.00
00:10:40.000 If you die from all the attacks, the media still calls the attacks on you accusations to wash their hands of the blood. 1.00
00:10:45.000 Understand.
00:10:46.000 What he is saying is that if you pointed out that Jason R. Day was lying and was a plagiarist and had been grifting, you're responsible for his death.
00:10:53.000 Your lynchers announce your death as if they had no role in your lynching.
00:10:57.000 Yes, we all participated, according to Ibrahim X. Kendi, in Jason R. Day's lynching by pointing out things that are true.
00:11:02.000 If we now live, again, in a world in which truth is completely arbitrary, According to people like Candace Owens, or in some cases, like Ibrahimax Kendi or Jason Arde, the truth is offensive, so offensive that if you kill yourself because of the truth, it is the truth that must lose.
00:11:19.000 The post truth era is a terrible place.
00:11:21.000 It is a truly, truly terrible place.
00:11:24.000 And again, Ibrahimax Kendi suggests the white owned mainstream media is responsible for this.
00:11:31.000 The white owned mainstream media published 249 articles in 22 days on Jason Arde, according to data from News Corp, a UK media watchdog.
00:11:38.000 A similar media pylon happened to me in the fall of 2023 when I was a professor at Boston University.
00:11:46.000 You know what your lynchers won't denounce?
00:11:47.000 When you are cleared of wrongdoing.
00:11:48.000 The media will bury its culpability while we bury Jason.
00:11:51.000 Okay, but again, is there any indicator that it was lies, like what was said about Jason Arde?
00:11:59.000 Or have we just moved so deep into the world of narrative that truth no longer matters?
00:12:05.000 I mean, certainly for the left, the truth no longer matters.
00:12:07.000 The narrative is the only thing that matters.
00:12:10.000 The narrative is the only thing that matters.
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