Too Good to Check

When it comes to the collapse of Victor Marx, don't blame the messenger

In reply to a note by my KOA radio colleague Michael Brown (a note that I agree with), I have some thoughts.

Here’s Michael’s note: https://www.facebook.com/michael.d.brown.54/posts/pfbid029CmY6LwsMwoD2QsRBkWst2W2v1aXRrnUpNpzrjPeLnnwW52dAR86NMjZBQsS73ixl

My response:

As president of the Bad Analogy Club, I offer this comparison, plucked from news of the past several days: After recently being discovered to have massively embellished his background, including saying he was a visiting professor at Ohio State when he wasn’t, likely having plagiarized some of his writings, claiming to have achieved athletic feats that he almost certainly didn’t, and insisting he was the intended victim of a stalker with a knife (for which there is no evidence), Jason Arday, who had been the youngest black professor in the history of Cambridge University, resigned yesterday.

Cambridge professor Jason Arday resigns amid accusations of plagiarism | University of Cambridge | The Guardian

On my radio show, I described Arday as the kind of person who seems like such a “unicorn” to his supporters, so precisely the sort of messiah they’ve been looking for, that his claims were “too good to check.” How long would it have taken Cambridge to ask Ohio State if Arday really were a visiting professor, for example? Why did it require a somewhat obscure researcher to run Arday’s “scholarship” through a plagiarism detector program?

Arday wasn’t properly vetted because Cambridge forgot their mission for a time. They went from caring about scholarship and intellect to caring about showing that they were hiring their youngest-ever black professor. NOW they are investigating: Statement about Professor Arday | University of Cambridge. And it surely will be interesting what they find.

But mightn’t it have been better had they done that work first so that they don’t end up with the embarrassment of an apparent grifter having fooled them? And what about the professor, black or not, who didn’t get hired because Arday did? All because his story as a young charismatic black “intellectual” was too good to check?

For a while, academics, the liberal media, and the big publisher that is supposed to release Arday’s book in a few days, rallied around him and the story percolated within conservative media. The usual liberal cabal was desperate for the story not to be true, so desperate that they didn’t want to talk or think about it; they called Arday’s questioners/critics “racist” and hoped it would just go away. But things like that tend not to go away. Just ask Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard.

Victor Marx (and his supporters) are the right-wing anti-intellectual version of the same story. They find a hyper-religious (albeit in ways that even many Christians find odd) political outsider who is charismatic and superficially appealing, who wants to run for political office. Because of these traits, his remarkable claims (rescuing 45,000 people for example) become too good to check.

His most ardent supporters first found Marx too good to check, then attacked Marx’s questioners/critics as “RINOs” or secret Democrats and, more recently, as people who hate Christianity and Christians.

No.

Like Jason Arday, Victor Marx is not a unicorn. He’s a pony that his supporters put a fake horn on and called him a miracle.

Those of us who recognize what Marx is and call him out for it are not the ones to blame for what will be a massive loss in the governor’s race, not the ones to blame for damage to Republican candidates down-ballot or bad outcomes on ballot measures.

This is what happens when you insist on promoting a charlatan who is “too good to check.”