The Political Rub

The acronym in Britain is “EDI”. “DEI” is American, the E stands for something different, those two letters are a universe, and the use of “DEI” in Britain is as indicative as the use of “Lake America”.

What mattered for his academic appointment was not Jason Arday’s life story, however embellished as is common among teachers at all levels and always funny when it is found out, but his academic work, which does seem to suggest unduly accelerated promotion, in that it was not yet professorial. Nathan Cofnas, on the other hand, publishes only contributions to a wholly discredited field that has had horrific consequences far beyond any ivory tower.

Freedom of speech does not include the right to a particular platform. Both Cambridge and Ghent now need to explain how and why they ever appointed Cofnas, while both the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Belgium, each of which has played no small part in those horrors, need to explain why they ever granted him a visa. As Professor Steve Hall writes:

Cofnas, race science and genetic politics. Please allow me to explain. Bear with me - it's complex but I'll try to boil it down as much as possible.

How does skill/intelligence specialisation work? Very simply - and a lot of further reading recommended here - a master protein called HIF-1 activates a configuration of specific survival genes required by the environment, although it doesn't deactivate or destroy but temporarily relegate others. There's no permanent genetic 'fixation', only a temporary and sometimes spectacular configuration which gives the impression of 'fixation' to the uninformed. The basic genome, the core, flexible, multi-tool DNA sequence, remains unchanged. A few generations in a different environment would activate a different configuration. This explains the varieties of culturally heritable but genetically and affectively/cognitively flexible 'intelligence' and practical skills we find in different environments.

Take Kenya as an example of specialisation. Generations of living and training at altitude altered phenotypic plasticity, allowing Kenyans to be relatively and famously good at long-distance running. They also developed specific farming techniques such as terracing, trenching and microclimate selection to cope with issues such as climate, steep inclines and soil erosion. All of this required constant attention, development and maintenance. They had neither the time, the educational infrastructure nor the survival incentive to sit around in a luxury apartment like John von Neumann doing maths puzzles and learning languages with the help of paid governesses, the environmental source of his highly developed but rather narrow IQ-friendly intelligence.

Which brings us to the politics. White, middle-class right-wingers in the West are in an extreme panic. Their 'successful' imperial background encouraged the specific and admittedly broad intellectual qualities required for the environment they were creating - science, technology, militarism, competitive individualism, hierarchical organisation, markets, financial operations, increased surplus production and so on. A temporary genetic configuration was established, no doubt, and some individuals excelled on that specific landscape.

Then, as always, history moved us along. Former agricultural nations such as Russia began to catch up. The foolish financial 'creditor class' exported too much of its manufacturing to the East. The consumerised, market-worshipping West faced cultural decadence, de-skilling, anti-intellectualism and incompetent leadership as successful but stupid oligarchs bought their way into power, aided by the narrow intellectual skills of the tech and media industries. The populations of the ascending nations faced a whole new set of requirements for intellectual and practical development. It takes a few generations, but they adapted quickly and their flexible genetic, cultural and institutional systems responded.

And here's the political rub. You can see the nervy panic in the faces of the likes of Cofnas because, quite simply, the white Western middle classes are slowly but inexorably being outcompeted in all the dimensions of their own rather ugly game. The success of those abroad risks inspiring those at home. Reacting like frightened animals, the extreme right wing of the middle class are attempting to recall obsolete racial pseudoscience in a desperate attempt to reaffirm their superiority as a fixed quality and justify the continuation of the privileges that maintain their dominance. They also hope that the pseudoscience might 'fix' their new competitors as genetically inferior, a justification for denouncing them, controlling the flow of social mobility and keeping at least most of them trapped in the lower tiers of their societies, deemed unworthy of the long-term educational investment they need. Thus, the principal focus of attack is the 'woke' public education system. Destroy that, and they might win the day and maintain their dominance. We can't allow that to happen.

While Fleur Hargreaves and Imran Mulla write:

Academics at the University of Cambridge privately argued in 2024 that Nathan Cofnas, who accused Jason Arday of plagiarism last month, should not have been hired, Middle East Eye has learnt. Cofnas, a self-described race realist, has been in the headlines after sociologist Arday died earlier this month. His death followed a media campaign accusing him of being a serial plagiarist and fabulist. Cofnas has since been placed under investigation by his employer, Ghent University in Belgium, over public comments he has made. But he has been supported by the US government and tech billionaire Elon Musk, and promoted by right-wing media outlets and podcasts.

Now scrutiny is growing into Cofnas’s academic record, particularly at Cambridge, which was also Arday’s university. Cofnas was dismissed by Cambridge’s Emmanuel College in April 2024 after a blog post he wrote in February that year claiming race was linked to academic ability. Cofnas said black people would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment” under a true meritocracy, and argued that there “must be some barriers set up between races in order for each one to express its own unique genius”.

On 23 February a private meeting was held responding to student protests over the blog post. It was attended by Bhaskar Vira, the pro vice chancellor for education, as well as members of the Cambridge philosophy faculty - which Cofnas was part of - and around 20 philosophy students. During the meeting, according to minutes seen by MEE, the pro vice chancellor said that many among the university’s senior management were “outraged” by the situation. 

Vira explained that while Cofnas was a fellow of Emmanuel College, one of Cambridge’s constituent colleges, the university itself was now considering how it could respond to the blog post. Vira also said that in his personal view, Cofnas had crossed the line regarding concerns over “freedom of speech”, but that it would be “foolhardy for us not to seek legal advice” on the legal issues surrounding free speech.

Angela Breitenbach, then the chair of the philosophy faculty, said that “if one could’ve Googled, one would’ve found out more” about Cofnas’s views before he was hired. She admitted the hiring process was “not satisfactory ultimately”. Cofnas was appointed in 2022 as a Leverhulme Trust early career fellow. Breitenbach said the hiring process had involved one or two people who did not necessarily read everything on an applicant’s CV, but that the process had since been changed so applications would be available to the whole faculty. Sophie Dandelet, an associate professor, suggested Cofnas’s views on race could negatively affect his ability to teach students. MEE has contacted the University of Cambridge, Dandelet and Brietenbach for comment.

Cofnas dismissed by Cambridge college

In March 2024 a petition by Cambridge students and academics calling for Cofnas’s dismissal gathered more than 1,200 signatures. After Cofnas was dismissed by Emmanuel College that same month, he sued the institution for belief discrimination. But the college won the lawsuit on the grounds that Cofnas’s blog post had caused it reputational damage. However, Cambridge dismissed student complaints against Cofnas in late 2025 after an investigation. The university had adopted free speech rules in 2024 which allowed “controversial or unpopular opinions within the law”.

Ghent University, which currently employs Cofnas as a postdoctoral researcher, suspended him last week pending a disciplinary investigation into “recent public statements” that he made. This followed the death of sociologist Jason Arday, who resigned from Cambridge after it announced an investigation into his academic record earlier this month following a storm of press coverage. US Ambassador to Belgium Bill White condemned Cofnas’s suspension and said the Trump administration would review its relationship with the university. President Donald Trump has often criticised Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) legislation, a political framing that has increasingly been imported to the UK - so much so that it is widely referred to by its American term, DEI, rather than the British equivalent, EDI.

Cofnas announced on Thursday that he was being allowed to stay at the university to work on his research and thanked the US ambassador for his help, although the university said his disciplinary inquiry remains ongoing. Aside from being supported by the US government, Cofnas has also been promoted in the past week by Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X.

Criticism of Cofnas’s work

The Guardian reported this week that professors at Ghent University earlier this year accused Cofnas of having “very limited expertise” for his academic role. Ghent’s philosophy department sent an official statement to the university’s rector on 28 May questioning his qualifications and "limited expertise”. The Guardian quoted a leading academic in the philosophy of science, who described Cofnas’s work as “abysmal” and “shoddy”, and accused him of presenting “speculative racial theories as science without providing even a shred of evidence”. “We find it very improbable that Nathan Cofnas was the best out of 14 candidates,” the philosophy department’s statement said, alleging that there had been a lack of transparency around his selection, which a “large majority” suspected had been “an ideological choice … decided in advance”.

In response Cofnas said: “My academic qualifications are a matter of public record.” He added: “The silliest accusation is that I am ‘uninterested in the academic exchange of ideas’. The people who said this are trying to get me fired or even thrown in jail for expressing my ideas.” In 2023 Cofnas posted on X: “There are obviously personality differences between Jews and non-Jews… On average, Jews are better than gentiles at capitalising on their [intelligence]”.

Cofnas accused Jason Arday of plagiarism in a Substack post last month, basing his allegations on an AI detection software. Cofnas described Arday as “retarded”, “mentally disabled” and “just another DEI hire” in public comments. Cofnas’s allegations were picked up by The Telegraph, which published the story on 24 July under the headline “Cambridge diversity poster boy in plagiarism row”, and subsequently published 42 articles about Arday before his death.

‘The hegemonic hounding of Professor Arday’

An analysis by media watchdog NewsCord has found that 229 articles were published on Arday by numerous media outlets in just 22 days. Of these, 188 appeared in the nine days before his death, averaging almost 21 articles a day, after Arday resigned from his role at Cambridge, saying he had reached “the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure”.

Although newspapers claimed their reporting was “in the public interest”, NewsCord founder Nima Akram pointed out that only 166 articles were published about Peter Mandelson in the two weeks after the Epstein files were released - many merely mentioning him - despite accusations that Mandelson leaked sensitive government information to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

“The hegemonic hounding of Professor Arday by UK media as a collective can only be described as a shameful witch-hunt,” Akram told MEE. More than 218,000 complaints have been made to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) through NewsCord’s campaign website - well over doubling the previous record set by its complaints tool for the media campaign against Misan Harriman, and almost 10 times the number lodged against Jeremy Clarkson’s 2022 Sun column about the Duchess of Sussex, which held the record before that.

Numerous opinion columns and online posts claimed Arday had a largely fabricated backstory. He was widely accused of being a serial plagiarist and fabulist. But last week a Middle East Eye analysis found that key claims Arday made, which had become central talking points in attacks on him, appeared to be true. Another MEE analysis this week found that the characterisation of Arday as a serial and unrepentant plagiarist does not stand up to scrutiny. Instead, an examination of his work and the controversies surrounding it revealed a more complex picture. 

“Elements of the press boast that they are watchdogs, but they are also attack dogs,” Des Freedman, professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths University, told MEE, adding that “instead of punching up ... they punch down,” going after vulnerable people under the guise of acting in the “public interest”. “It is a fake public interest because it is so utterly disproportionate to what they need to know about in terms of interrogating, of asking questions of power,” Freedman said. He argued the frenzy was the product of a “coordinated, international right-wing movement”, using Arday as a scapegoat to promote culture war issues and anti-DEI policies.

Cofnas’s network of supporters and allies

Byline Times reported last week that Cofnas’s allegations against Arday were boosted by a network linked to Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of US spy firm Palantir. After Emmanuel College Cambridge had sacked Cofnas in 2024, the Free Speech Union (FSU), a pro-free speech advocacy group, launched a fundraiser for Cofnas, portraying him as a victim of an attack on academic freedom.

A series of investigations by Byline Times linked the FSU to a wider network of academics supported by Thiel’s chief of staff. James Orr, an academic in Cambridge’s divinity faculty and an adviser to FSU, hosted a series of talks by Thiel at Cambridge in January, known as the “Antichrist” Lectures, and held student meetings at his home alongside race science advocates and right-wing political figures. Orr also serves as Reform’s head of policy, and has been described as Reform leader Nigel Farage’s “kingmaker”, while US Vice President JD Vance, called him “my philosopher king”.

Online magazine Aporia promoted Cofnas’s arguments through a series of essays and interviews, and published an article on 8 August calling Arday’s case “the bitter fruit of equalitarianism”. Aporia serves as the public-facing arm of the Human Diversity Foundation, now known as Polygenic Scores, which is linked to the far-right German party Alternative für Deutschland.

Indeed, Cofnas is too much even for Spiked, where Albie Amankona writes:

The Jason Arday saga unfolded like a fable: the allegations of plagiarism, staged racist attacks and fabricated achievements captivated the world before his tragic and premature death. In the weeks since, one thing has bothered me: the media’s relative lack of curiosity about the man who helped spearhead the crusade against him, Nathan Cofnas.

Cofnas is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University and a former fellow at Cambridge. His trajectory has been extraordinary. The Jewish-American academic built his early reputation dismantling Kevin MacDonald’s pseudoscientific anti-Semitic theories, arguing that sweeping evolutionary claims about Jewish power were methodologically dubious, heavily cherry-picked and fundamentally incapable of proving causation.

He then went on to establish his own biological explanation for Jewish exceptionalism, based on a hereditary, above-average IQ in Jewish populations. Intentionally or not, this move flattered his own ancestry while edging close to granting scientific legitimacy to one of anti-Semitism’s oldest tropes.

Cofnas has since deployed theories of ‘race realism’ against black populations. In a display of pure hubris, he compares his banal ideas in ‘A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution’ – which advocates rolling back 20th-century civil-rights advances – to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a claim as absurd as Jason Arday’s wildest myths.

Across both mainstream and alternative media, interviewers have proved completely incapable of challenging Cofnas. On LBC, Nick Ferrari pressed him on his assertion that, in a meritocracy, ‘blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment’. Yet Ferrari flinched when Cofnas laundered the claim through a Harvard study on undergraduate admissions, which projected black enrolment dropping to 0.7 per cent under strict academic criteria and without a DEI leg up. This let Cofnas falsely attribute his own sweeping generalisations about race to Harvard itself.

Even within the national context of the United States, Cofnas’s defence collapses. Extrapolating the 0.7 per cent figure, referring to graduates at one elite Ivy League institution, to claim there would be no high-profile, high-achieving black people in a nation of 330 million people is statistically unsound.

I do not deny the heritability of individual human traits. While studying education and economic development at the London School of Economics, I examined Nordic adoption studies showing that some children’s educational outcomes align more closely with their biological parents than their adoptive ones. Individual heritability is a documented scientific reality.

However, it is absurd to extrapolate narrow, localised datasets into sweeping pronouncements about billions of people based on race, especially when two populations in sub-Saharan Africa can share as much genetic distance as an African and a European – a point argued by Angela Saini in Superior: The Return of Race Science. What’s more, working in finance has taught me a fundamental truth: statistics are easily massaged, whether to cover up a bad balance sheet or to promote abject nonsense. Asserting an intrinsic biological hierarchy across entire continents based on sparse data from developing regions or a single Ivy League admissions projection is lazy at best and farcical at worst.

Crucially, the assumption that IQ tests measure raw intelligence independent of environment is fundamentally flawed, as Joseph Henrich has demonstrated. If we accept Cofnas’s rigid hereditarian logic, how do we account for the birth-order effect, where older siblings consistently score higher on IQ tests than younger siblings born to the exact same parents? Furthermore, the 20th-century surge in global IQ scores – the Flynn effect – was largely driven by expanded schooling, public health and cognitive enrichment, not by rapid genetic selection. To isolate a true biological racial IQ gap, one would need to control for every conceivable cultural, socioeconomic and environmental variable, a task that remains virtually impossible.

Indeed, every metric Cofnas uses to infer black cognitive inferiority – including lower test scores and higher crime rates – is routinely documented among white working-class populations in post-industrial Britain and America. If group-level disparities proved biological unfitness, Cofnas would be forced to conclude that the white working class is genetically unsuited for modern society.. White British pupils rank among the lowest-performing demographics in the UK, trailing almost every ethnic minority group. In fact, low-income ethnic minority students on free school meals regularly outperform white British children who are not economically disadvantaged. Some of the top-performing state schools in England educate a disproportionate number of black students, such as Katherine Birbalsingh’s Michaela Community School, Brampton Manor Academy and St Olave’s, to name a few. Across the Atlantic, historical precedents tell a similar story. Under Jim Crow segregation, black schools like Dunbar High School, in Washington, DC, regularly outperformed white schools despite receiving significantly less funding and facing systemic discrimination.

Do conservatives who uncritically endorse Cofnas’s claims about black capability also accept the logical conclusion of his framework, that white working-class families are also ‘biologically hardwired’ for failure? I should hope not.

Let’s be frank, there is nothing ‘real’ about Cofnas’s so-called race realism. If I’d submitted an essay with methodology this porous, my tutors would have picked it apart line by line. He has relied on flawed methodologies to construct a rigid racial hierarchy, one that conveniently places people of his own Jewish ancestry near the top and people of my black ancestry near the bottom. I worry about the broader ramifications of such appalling scholarship gaining mainstream currency – for Jews, for black people and for everyone else.

If our media class cannot dismantle arguments this banal and structurally unsound, we are leaving the door wide open for more batty ideas to permeate through society unchallenged.