Nathan Cofnas on Race, IQ, and the Jason Arday Scandal That Made Him Famous

Conversations with Coleman

Nathan Cofnas, a philosopher and self-described race realist, discusses the Jason Arday scandal that led to Arday's resignation from Cambrid

Key takeaways

• Cofnas argues that elite decision-makers should engage with hereditary racial differences in intelligence to avoid being dominated by 'wokeness' as a default ideology.
• The Arday scandal exposed widespread institutional failures in fact-checking, particularly at Cambridge and the BBC, highlighting vulnerabilities in academic and media credibility.

Main topics

• The Jason Arday scandal and academic fraud
• Race realism and hereditary intelligence differences

Notable quotes

If we don't talk about race and IQ, Nathan argues, we are left with one option: wokeness.

Conclusion

While Nathan Cofnas defends his controversial research as essential for elite discourse, Coleman Hughes challenges the

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Nathan Kofnes. Nathan is a philosopher whose research focuses on the philosophy of biology, ethics, and the relationship between science and values. He earned his doctorate in philosophy from Oxford and was a fellow at the University of Cambridge from 2022 to 2025. He currently holds a postdoc position at Ghent University. though that appears to be somewhat in jeopardy for reasons we discuss in this episode. Nathan was instrumental in exposing Jason Arday's fraud on Cambridge University and the BBC, and he has recently made the rounds on the podcast circuit as a result. I thought I had only heard of Nathan in the context of the Arday affair, but I learned at the beginning of this conversation that I had actually signed a letter in defense of Nathan's right to free expression some years ago, when he was getting hounded by Cambridge for something he'd written. I signed that letter because I believe all professors have the right to express the fruits of their research, no matter how controversial, without fear of being fired. I would sign it again today, in defense of Nathan or, indeed, any other professor in a similar situation. That being said, I think there's a big difference between defending the right to free expression and believing that all topics are worthy of discussion. And that is what Nathan and I spent most of our time disagreeing about today. Nathan is a self-described race realist. In particular, he believes that elites in the West should, at least to some degree, spend more time exploring the research on hereditary racial differences in intelligence. He was careful to clarify that this topic should not be mainstreamed or talked about on cable news, for instance, but rather that it should be known and discussed among the real decision makers in society. Why? Because if we don't talk about race and IQ, Nathan argues, we are left with one option, wokeness. As you'll hear in this episode, I don't agree with Nathan. I don't believe that American society, or Europe for that matter, exists in a forced choice between wokeness and the bell curve. And I think that both of those philosophies collapse into interracial conflict and division the moment they do become mainstream. Speaker 2 (2:30) But before I run the interview, I want to read this section on race realism from my book, The End of Race Politics, Arguments for a Colorblind America. I'm reading this because I organized my thoughts pretty well there, and I want listeners to understand exactly where I stand. So here goes. Speaker 2 (2:51) Population genetics is among the most controversial areas of scientific inquiry. To be curious about the average genetic differences between populations of humans risks accusations of racism and race science. This is an understandable result of a recent history of race science run amok. In living memory, countries have used race science to support legally enforced separation of races, bans on intermarriage and sex, forced sterilization and other heinous policies no one of good will wants to repeat those injustices at the same time there is nothing wrong with being curious about population genetics and there is nothing wrong with applying the tools of scientific inquiry to the question of genetic differences when it was discovered that some descendants of europeans have neanderthal dna or that some populations are more likely to be lactose intolerant than others these reports went viral their virality is a testament to how common and indeed normal it is to be fascinated by this topic Although each of us is genetically unique, barring identical twins, each of us also belongs to clusters of similar genomes whose similarity stems from the major out-of-Africa migrations that occurred tens of thousands of years ago. These clusters are not sharply separated from one another. They overlap a great deal, and therefore the boundaries between them are blurry. Using standard statistical tools, the strength of these genome clusters can be measured, and the result is that human beings statistically cluster with medium-high strength into categories that more or less correspond to the layman's notion of race. Speaker 2 (4:43) Whether we want to call these clusters races or not is an issue of semantics. But what is true is that we can each be placed in a cluster of genetically similar people, but those clusters bleed into one another significantly. What does this mean? It means that at least hundreds of millions of us are more genetically similar to the members of a different cluster or race than we are to the members of our own cluster. Now it's important to remember that the lines between these clusters don't exist in the data or in real life. The lines between clusters are abstract mathematical entities that can be drawn no matter how weak the clustering is. They are similar to a line of best fit, if you recall that from statistics. A line of best fit can be drawn over basically any assembly of data, no matter how scattered or random. So you must go further and ask the question, how well does this line capture the trend of the data? And even though the lines that separate one cluster from another don't exist in the real world, the fact that the human race can be clustered with medium-high strength represents an observation about the real world. Namely, that the major out-of-Africa migrations from tens of thousands of years ago and the separation of large populations for thousands of years has left a real legacy in our genes. Speaker 2 (6:14) the hardcore race realists of history have assumed that there are hard and fast distinctions between the races there are not the hardcore social constructionists assume that any way of clustering ourselves is as arbitrary as any other that's also not the case The truth is that there are valid ways of clustering ourselves that broadly match the major out-of-Africa migrations and the lay concept of race, but those clusters overlap and bleed into one another to such an extent that it's not possible to draw an actual line between races that has any meaning in the real world. In other words, no real-life racial sorting mechanism could be justified on even purely scientific grounds, to say nothing of political or moral grounds. Okay, well, that's what I wrote in my book. I hope that's clear enough. And so without further ado, Nathan Kofnes. Speaker 2 (7:25) Okay, Nathan Kofnes, thanks so much for coming on my show. Speaker 1 (7:28) Thank you very much for having me. Speaker 2 (7:30) So I want to dive right into it. You have achieved escape velocity into the... public eye over the Jason Arday scandal, which you are partly or largely responsible for bringing into public view. We are speaking, I think now maybe two weeks after Jason Arday was found dead. in his family home, presumed by many to be a suicide. I don't know if we have that confirmed yet. This was the, I would say, con artist, effectively, who... Speaker 2 (8:11) created false details about being a not speaking until age 11 and then getting a PhD by age 30 somehow, doing incredible feats of ultra-marathoning, running 600 miles in six days, and selling this story effectively to Cambridge and to the BBC, which laundered it without much skepticism or fact-checking to the general public. and made him the youngest ever black professor at Cambridge in sociology and all of this came crashing down when he was discovered to have plagiarized the lion's share of his PhD and other work and then you know once once you pulled on the first string the entire edifice came crashing down. I don't celebrate anyone who dies or kills himself at the same time I think it's you know absurd that people would celebrate what is really just a clear example of con artistry. uh just because the person or or you know lionize or or somehow make into a folk hero someone that was fundamentally dishonest just because they happen to um Take their lives so we'll get into all of that and then I want I also want to talk about You are a race realist self-described race realist and you think it's important to I think Mainstream conversations that are currently taboo. I think we're gonna have some interesting and important disagreements there, but before we get to that Tell me a little bit about who you are how you came to study what you did and and walk me through how you discovered Jason our days fraudulence and then ultimately how that has led to your censure at Ghent University. Speaker 1 (10:06) So before I get into that, I have to begin with my new disclaimer that I'm not here as a representative of Ghent University or in my capacity as an employee of Ghent University. My background is in the philosophy of biology. I've done work on the application of evolutionary ideas to various problems in philosophy and science. So although I work in many different areas, the common thread is evolution and understanding its implications. Part of that includes understanding how Natural selection has caused human populations that have been separated for an evolutionarily significant amount of time to diverge in the average level of certain traits, including intelligence, general intelligence. Speaker 1 (11:06) That's, of course, very controversial. There's a very strong taboo in our society on even talking about this as being metaphysically possible, that there could be average differences in any socially relevant trait between groups. Speaker 1 (11:25) I've written on the first time I got involved in a big public controversy was in 2018. I wrote the first real academic reply to evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald. This was at the tail end of the alt-right. And Kevin MacDonald was the intellectual godfather of that movement. His idea... was that Judaism is a group evolutionary strategy and that Jews are genetically and culturally adapted to undermine Gentile society for their own benefit. Speaker 1 (12:04) McDonald has lost a certain amount of prestige in the online right in the last several years as it's become less and less literate and people just rally behind, you know, Nick Fuentes memes. But in the heyday of the alt-right, people were at least pretending to read books and talk about ideas. And McDonald was a major presence there. So I wrote the first academic critique. of his ideas, I acknowledge that, as he says, Jews have been overrepresented in left-wing movements that, according to MacDonald, were designed in order to advance the Jewish group evolutionary strategy of undermining Gentile populations while preserving Jewish racial purity and group continuity. It's true that Jews have been overrepresented in that McDonald likes, but they're overrepresented in everything across the board, in all intellectual activities. And I argued that Jews lean left, of course, because right-wing movements in the 20th century have been disproportionately anti-Semitic, so they're driven away from the right. But there's no pattern of Jewish involvement in politics that matches the predictions made by McDonald. Speaker 1 (13:37) I published that when I was a PhD student at Oxford in 2018. Jordan Peterson retweeted it. And at that time, he was wrongly perceived by many people to be alt-right adjacent and perhaps also an anti-Semite himself. And then he came out as being not an anti-Semite by endorsing this paper. So he got mobbed, and then the mob... turned on me and so my first cancellation was from not cancellation they couldn't do anything to me but my first mobbing was from the right not from the left The second mobbing was from the left when I published a paper in December 2019 in the Philosophy Journal called Philosophical Psychology, which was called Research on Group Differences in Intelligence, a Defense of Free Inquiry. And basically all the paper said is that... This is a serious scientific area of investigation. We're not talking about flat earthism here. And there are reasons why we ought to know the truth about this, whatever it is. And the purpose of that paper wasn't to argue about what's true, but that we should be allowed to investigate what's true. Speaker 1 (15:05) and see where that takes us. So there's a huge backlash against that. There's a petition to retract the paper. There was a group of activist scholars who lobbied the editorial board to accept their non-peer-reviewed commentary on my article, bypassing the editors-in-chief. who wanted to subject it to normal peer review. Then one of the editors-in-chief of the journal resigned in protest because of that. Then the other editor-in-chief was pressured into apologizing for publishing my original paper, and then he got fired anyway. And they replaced the editors and most of the editorial board, and so that was another incident. Then when I was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the philosophy faculty at Cambridge in 2024, I published two essays on my sub stack. The first was called Why We Need to Talk About the Right Stupidity Problem. So I went through several lines of evidence showing that the average intelligence of conservatives people on the right, which is, by the way, my group, are significantly less intelligent on average than people on the left. for genetic reasons, that people who currently identify leftism, wokeism, disproportionately attracts cognitive elites, people who are thoughtful, intelligent, morally sensitive, and then those who have less of those qualities are more likely to be on the right. And it was a very frank discussion of the problems that... that stem from the intelligence deficit on the right, our failure to create effective institutions, to take over even a single serious university. Speaker 1 (17:09) So that actually, no one had a problem with this essay at Cambridge. No one said, well, what would a conservative student think, feel if he knows that you're grading his paper or aren't you guilty of hate speech? No one said anything like that. That was totally fine for me to say that about conservatives and right-wingers. A month later, February 2024, I published A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution. which included a frank discussion of race differences in the American context, and in particular, what would happen in a colorblind meritocracy of the sort that a lot of mainstream conservatives are calling for without any affirmative action. And I point out, you know, just the data show that representation of certain groups, particularly African Americans, would just... fall to a degree that very few people understand. And so there was a huge backlash to that, an effort to get me fired. Actually, Coleman was himself involved with this. Coleman was one of 14 signatories on a letter to the Times of London defending academic freedom and calling for the university... Speaker 1 (18:34) and my college, which is Emanuel College, to call off. All Speaker 2 (18:37) right, just Speaker 1 (18:37) so people Speaker 2 (18:37) understand, you're not saying me, Coleman. Speaker 1 (18:42) No, Speaker 2 (18:42) Coleman. You're talking about someone else, right? Speaker 1 (18:44) Coleman, Speaker 2 (18:44) you. Speaker 1 (18:45) You signed the letter on my behalf. I was his Speaker 2 (18:47) signatory? Oh, on your behalf. Yes, not against him. Speaker 1 (18:50) No, you were the good guy. Speaker 2 (18:52) Correct. Yes. Right, right, right. Okay, got it. So thank you. That doesn't sound like me. I thought you were saying. Go ahead. So Speaker 1 (18:59) there was a letter to the Times of London in favor of free speech, which Coleman was involved with. Speaker 1 (19:07) signed by 14 intellectuals and academics such as Peter Singer and I think Steven Pinker was also there. I didn't Speaker 2 (19:18) connect just until right now that you're the same person that I signed that letter about. Speaker 1 (19:24) Yeah, there's a huge confidence connection before this podcast. Speaker 1 (19:33) Ultimately, the university, after an investigation that lasted a year and a half, they... Speaker 1 (19:44) exonerated me, but they waited two weeks until my contract was up. So they used the investigation as a way to sequester me. And then they said, okay, we, he didn't do anything wrong. Emanuel College terminated my position on the grounds that my essay, quote, is or could be construed as a rejection of the values of diversity, equality, and inclusion, close quote. And I'm engaged in litigation with them, which is an ongoing thing. Okay, so this brings us to our day, the big news. I left Cambridge at the end of August 2025. And around that time... Speaker 1 (20:34) somehow word got out among the Cambridge faculty that this guy Jason Arday is a fraud and a plagiarist and is lying about everything. Apparently, the majority of the faculty came to know about this and was also leaked to a number of journalists, including Jack Grove at Times Higher Education. Grove wanted to write about it. but he received a threatening letter from the defamation lawyers that were hired by our day Speaker 1 (21:14) insinuating that only a racist would care about this story and that it would be very damaging to Arde's reputation and these allegations aren't proven and Arde has already been investigated and exonerated. Grove himself wanted to go through with the article, but it got spiked by his editor, who didn't want to deal with a lawsuit or be called racist or whatever his motivation was. So somehow this... explosive information remained contained within Cambridge for a year. Finally, a whistleblower on the faculty contacted me, knowing both that I have a platform to share the story and that I have my own experience with Cambridge, and so I would be able to understand and explain what had happened. Speaker 1 (22:12) His idea was that if I would break the story, then... Speaker 1 (22:18) then that would clear a path for the mainstream media to cover it because now I've kind of taken the first hit. And that turned out to be exactly what happened. So he contacted me on June 13th. I published on July 21st. Three days later, it was picked up by The Telegraph, then The Times and Retraction Watch, and then everyone else from there. Speaker 2 (22:46) Got it. And so what has happened, if you're capable of talking about it recently at Kent University, maybe you can give this short version of your treatment there. If you can't talk about it, then we can move on. Speaker 1 (23:00) I can't really give details. It's public information. Arday committed suicide on the 14th, August 14th. nine days after he was pushed out of Cambridge. And there was a huge backlash against me. I became very unpopular and certain events followed from that, but I can't comment directly on them. Speaker 2 (23:32) Sure. Many threads I want to pull on here, but one is just to say the Jason Arday fiasco, I think you did a very good thing by exposing it. Speaker 2 (23:44) I am glad to learn that I signed a letter defending your right to free speech and open inquiry, which I would do not just for you, but for any good faith academic that was pursuing a controversial or taboo topic. I do not like to see or suffer the norm of academics being fired and canceled, not for any actual breach. of their ethical duties as professors, but rather for the subject matter that they're interested and interested in their research and their expression based on that topic. Speaker 2 (24:26) Mean the the our day fiasco as I wrote in the Free Press. It's revealed You know many of the things that people like me have been complaining about when it comes to academia for decades, which is You know number one lowering standards invites Lower caliber people and actually invites fraudulence right when you lower standards for a certain group That's like a bug light for people who are going to take advantage of those lowered standards, that lowered skepticism. And you are literally inviting con artists in through the front door. And this has been one of the perpetual problems with the spirit of DEI, or at least what DEI has become in the past 20 years or so. And Jason Arday may be the ultimate example of that just because of how fully he defrauded Cambridge and the BBC and, you know, every elite he probably ever met. But there are shades of this that are less extreme than Arde and probably have never been