What sounds more like a mob to you? Reporters asking questions about a professor’s CV and backstory? Or swarms of the perpetually offended damning those reporters as racists, fascists, scum, even murderers?

It’s the latter, isn’t it? This is the bleak irony of the Jason Arday tragedy: his self-styled defenders decry the media mob while forging their own frothing mob. They accuse journalists of destroying a man’s life even as they hound those journalists, and libel them as ‘lynchers’, and demand that they face the kangaroo justice of a public shaming.

Arday’s death was a ‘modern-day lynching’, say self-styled anti-racists

Arday’s death was a ‘modern-day lynching’, say self-styled anti-racists

The people with blood in their nostrils are not the newspapermen who only did their jobs and asked probing questions about a public figure. It’s the vengeance seekers of the bourgeois left, whose violent dream of muzzling the free press has been turbo-charged by the horrible events of the past few days. They scare me far more than the press ever could.

The dreadful death of Jason Arday following weeks of media scrutiny of his credentials has given rise to a truly toxic atmosphere. The left,........

© The Spectator