Fast Takes: The unmaking of Jason Arday, the left declares war on parents and other commentary

Though he “cannot help but feel bad for [Jason] Arday and his family,” American Greatness’ Roger Kimball also can’t “forget that his fabulations were directed not only at aggrandizing himself”: The professor was “perfectly happy to play the race card to damage others, as when he complained to the police that journalists who were investigating his credentials were guilty of harassing him,” prompting “a four-month-long investigation into a journalist who was simply going about his job.” Claims his apparent suicide creates “a debate about whether he was a plagiarist or victim of a racial witch hunt” present “a false dichotomy.There is no doubt that Arday was a plagiarist,” and he was a victim only “of his own lies and intemperate behavior” — as well as of “an educational establishment” that “colluded in the construction of Arday’s fantastical, self-aggrandizing and ultimately self-destructive fantasies.”“I almost didn’t believe what I heard.

Samuel Moyn, a professor at Yale Law School, told an interviewer that parents can’t be trusted because they have a ‘divergence of interest’ with their own children,” marvels Lincoln Fillmore at The Wall Street Journal.Legally, “parents bear the primary responsibility for educating children.” When they enroll “a child in school,” parents “aren’t transferring responsibility,” they are “choosing a partner to help fulfill it.” Unlike educators, parents have “a lifelong commitment” to their child.

So “the strongest schools understand they are joining families in a shared mission” and that “the parents are in charge.” Bottom line: No person “will ever match a parent’s depth of understanding, love or willingness to sacrifice when navigating the inevitable ‘diverging interests’ between parent and child.”Rep.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is now the left’s “best-known and most popular national figure,” observes The Washington Post’s Henry Ol...