The lingering problem of academic racist Nathan Cofnas. Cast him out.

Update: Only a day after I published the article you’re about to read, the Rector and Vice-Rector of Ghent University, Cofnas’s employer, have announced that the institution has “decided to take appropriate action” after the jerk’s recent comments. Cofnas himself went on X to whine, “I was just suspended by Ghent University. They will almost certainly fire me.” Let’s hope so. And I personally hope leaders at other universities consider my suggestion of shutting him out of academia permanently. Below is the case I made for this.

Just to be clear, this is not yet another Jason Arday piece. This is a Nathan Cofnas piece.

If you want to read a Jason Arday piece, there are a whole bunch out there, and I can personally recommend two excellent ones: Alan Rusbridger’s article for Prospect about the media pile-on and Henry Giroux’s one for CounterPunch, which contains two exceptional insights that universities need to nail on their front doors. One: “This is why symbolic change can never substitute for structural change. Representation matters, but representation without a transformation in the underlying relations of power can become a form of institutional camouflage.”

And Giroux goes on to write that Arday’s “story exposes the cruel underside of performative inclusion: institutions can turn Black achievement into symbolic capital, advertise it as evidence of their own enlightenment, and then withdraw protection when the person carrying that symbolism becomes controversial, vulnerable, or inconvenient.”

But as promised, this is an article about Nathan Cofnas, who by any stretch of the imagination, is a thoroughly despicable excuse for a human being. That’s not simply because Cofnas once wrote that in a meritocracy, the number of Black professors would “approach zero.” And it’s not only because he took such sadistic spiteful pleasure in Arday’s ruinous fall, taking several victory laps over his handiwork. “After the revolution, I’ll be the Head of Eugenics and Race Science at Harvard,” he bragged on some bottom feeder’s podcast.

It’s that even after the media lynching that climaxed in Arday’s death at the age of 41, Cofnas lacked even the basic empathy that makes contrite or simply more mature individuals shut the hell up. When thousands gathered in Trafalgar Square to mourn Arday, Cofnas couldn’t help thinking the vigil somehow had to be about him. “There is an anti-Cofnas hate rally in Trafalgar Square with 15,000 attendees,” he posted on X. (The event actually may have had as many as 30,000 people). He also wrote, “If I were in London there is a real possibility that I would be murdered.” Sure, Dude. Because in the land of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, it’s the white guys who are always in danger.

On August 17, The Guardian called the relentless attacks on Arday “racism at work” yet had only one incredibly tone-deaf line to include about the chief architect of that work: “His latest accuser, Nathan Cofnas, had advanced ideas widely condemned as racist, making it impossible to regard his intervention as neutral.” Advanced ideas? For NPR’s brief article the very next day, the headline read: “Jason Arday’s rise and fall tells a larger story about academia, a critic says,” Cofnas is not mentioned at all, nor is there a single reference to the weaponization of race that far right critics brought to the hailstorm aimed at Arday.

To my mind, Nathan Cofnas is getting off easy. He is practically getting away with what he did. Yes, he is referenced, sometimes with revulsion, but not as widely pilloried as he should be.

I’m sure there are those who would reply that the greater tragedy here is the context of Black academics trying to survive within the system, the frenzy culture of modern media, blah, blah, blah—yes, yes, that’s all important, and I don’t want to dismiss it. As I wrote above, there are fine articles addressing these matters. But the fact remains that the inferno really began because one petty little dung beetle rolled up his ball of filth and set it alight.

Progressives may say, “Yes, but it’s a dung beetle,” while the right—especially the right-wing press in the UK—can chortle and say, “Ah, the dung beetle can be useful.”

And I still wait, as I am sure millions in Africa and Caribbean nations do, for a proper condemnation of the intellectual climate that euphemizes Nathan Cofnas’s garbage ideas as advanced and which let Channel 4 put Cofnas on television while incorrectly referring to him as a professor (when in reality he is only a postdoc, now working at Ghent University after he was fired in April 2024 from his position at Emmanuel College at Cambridge).

Back in April, before the self-declared “race realist” reaped the full rewards of his attack on Arday, he wrote a reply to an article criticizing his appointment at Ghent that was published in The Brussels Times. “Hereditarianism is mainstream science,” he insisted. Well, nine tenured professors thought that was a howler, and they were moved to complain in 2020 about Cofnas getting published in the journal Philosophical Psychology. The nine poured ice water on Cofnas’s argument better than I can, so let me quote them from their letter sent to the journal:

“… The idea that the human species is divided into genetically discrete “races” has long been refuted as empirically unsupportable. An abundance of evidence about the human evolutionary lineage shows that no human groups were ever phylogenetically distinct in the way that racial realism posits. In other words, the human species never persisted in multiple sufficiently isolated “pure” groups for such a prolonged time that it would, evolutionarily speaking, make sense to talk about our species being divided into biologically distinct populations. Indeed, migration in and between continents and regions was never a one-way movement, but, rather, an intricate multi-way network of substantial intersections and interactions.”

In other words, his ideas are a crock. But we don’t need to crunch the numbers or go back over the science because we can rely on our common sense and of more vital use for this purpose, that tool that Cofnas so clearly lacks: human empathy, for it is human empathy that allows us to recognize other human beings as like ourselves no matter how much melanin they have or don’t have.

For instance, I know that Neil deGrasse Tyson is smarter than me because all I have to do is listen to him for ten seconds on a YouTube video about astronomy. I know that Paul Robeson was smarter than me, a man of profound intellectual courage, which requires the highest intelligence of all. I know for certain that James Baldwin was smarter than me, for all I have to do is to read one of his magnificent essays in Notes of a Native Son or Nobody Knows My Name. And I take comfort in the fact that a giant like Baldwin could reduce Cofnas to a sputtering tantrum or blubbering tears with more dash, more wit than I can summon on a Friday afternoon.

The absurdity of the Cofnas proposition is billboard-size obvious when you consider that their achievements not only disprove his amateur quackery over genetics but recall that these two titans both had to overcome institutional and systemic barriers.

And if you need a more recent example, I am fairly sure that an Ethiopian-American teenager named Herman Bekele is smarter than me, and fully confident he’s far smarter than Nathan Cofnas. The reason being that neither I nor the “race realist” did what young Herman did: invent a special soap bar that delivers medicine into the skin to fight cancer, a feat that got him on the cover of Time magazine in 2024.

It is not “virtue signaling,” it’s not “wokeism” to celebrate these individuals because (and again, it’s pathetic that this needs to be pointed out for some) what they achieved is what defines them as individuals. Whereas for Cofnas, a Herman Bekele, a James Baldwin must be an outlier, an exception, to whatever rigged statistics his favorite researchers can cook up.

So now we must circle back briefly as to why, if hereditarianism is so absurd, so preposterous on its face, it must be dignified at all with another detailed rejection.

The answer is simple: Cofnas targeted Arday because of his race. It is impossible to pick on a James Baldwin or a Herman Bekele, but it is possible—in fact, it was easy—for him to go after Jason Arday. Whatever Arday’s sins and misdemeanors, his fantasist claims and alleged plagiarism, Cofnas went after him because he was brown. With the very worst of intentions, his obvious goal was to prove his revolting notions correct, so he targeted a young man for character assassination.

In his Brussels Times reply, Cofnas argued that “there is no evidence that my science is distorted by politics,” and “I have strongly argued in favor of a value-free ideal for science, and I follow the evidence wherever it leads, regardless of whether the conclusion is politically convenient for me.”

“My science.” The conceit is telling, in the same way that Cofnas apparently did not bother to correct Channel 4 on the spot when it labeled him a professor. He holds no science degree, and if he truly pursued evidence to politically inconvenient conclusions, he would have abandoned his ridiculous premise years ago. I believe it’s not so much that the equality of races is politically inconvenient for him as it’s emotionally inconvenient, for why else would a man devote so much of his career to denigrating a huge portion of the human race?

What can he possibly get out of it, if not a visceral urge to feel racially superior? Why invest so much? We don’t need Cofnas’s “science” or his contentions because we already know where all this leads. It’s a direct line to the Sharpeville Massacre, to the concentration camps the British erected in Kenya, to the sundown towns of the American South and Jim Crow. To the modern colonialism that seeks to pump all of the goods and resources out of Africa while leaving Africans destitute. For what other dubious “benefit” does Cofnas’s hereditarianism offer?

A point is not less profound merely because it is simple and straightforward. If universities still practice inclusion as institutional camouflage, as Henry Giroux argues, yes, that’s because of racism, and because there are still Cofnases or Cofni roaming campuses. If academics need to do soul searching, certainly journalists better do some of it as well. But I won’t hold my breath for editors because of yep… racism.

Nor did it take long for those with influence to try to rehabilitate Cofnas’s image. Right wing pundit Adrian Hilton leapt to Cofnas’s defence, writing on X, “I’m seeing a great many posts blaming Nathan Cofnas for the death of Jason Arday. Indeed, it might almost be termed a pile-on… [is] Nathan’s mental health of lesser consequence than Jason’s and you wouldn’t mind if he killed himself, too?”

I can answer a few of his questions. I’m not on a first-name basis with him like Hilton, so it’s still Cofnas, not “Nathan,” and yes, I do believe his mental health is of lesser consequence than Jason Arday’s ever was. The reason is simple enough: Cofnas already devalues a whole race of human beings, deeming them inferior. Would I mind if Cofnas killed himself? I certainly wouldn’t encourage it but given the verbal toxins he spews into the world, I can’t say he would leave the world poorer, and I certainly wouldn’t be heartbroken.

Hilton is hardly the person to bear the standard for compassion. Only days before Arday’s death, he called the scandal an “academic crime,” and after Arday was found dead, wrote, “I said that @Cambridge_Uni, @CamEdFac have a duty of care. I hope to God they gave him all the support they could because this tragedy is on them. His poor wife and children must be given every support.”

Where then was the concern for Arday’s mental health and his family support while he tweeted again and again about the scandal for days? Hilton, in fact, helped promote the interview of Confnas done by David Starkey, the British historian who went down in disgrace in 2020 after he argued, “Slavery was not genocide otherwise there wouldn’t be so many damn blacks in Africa or Britain would there? An awful lot of them survived...” Oh, yes, Hilton’s touching concern for Arday’s mental state was on full display when he tweeted on August 10 about Starkey and Cofnas, “…It speaks volumes, does it not, that Cambridge University banished these two minds while it embraced Jason Arday’s much lesser mind. But they would no doubt consider it ‘racist’ to point this out.”

This is a very old game, and it won’t fool those who know better. There have always been the Klan types, and one level up were those who tried to bring an intellectual or academic gloss to good ol’ fashioned bigotry like the unfortunately named quack anthropologist Carleton S. Coon. Coon’s pseudoscientific piffle and the like naturally made it easier for politicians such as Ronald Reagan to refer to Africans as monkeys and for Margaret Thatcher to keep the African National Congress listed as a terrorist group.

And so it goes. The 1960s suffered with Carleton S. Coon. Today, we are stuck with Nathan Cofnas, an academic Stephen Miller. Admittedly more articulate yet just as fanatical over his chosen cause. Miller has made it his mission to demonize migrants, hating Mexicans and Hispanics since his teen years. For Cofnas, the enemy is supposedly wokeism, but in reality it is Black people who cannot ever be allowed to be as intelligent as whites, and axiomatically by extension, smarter than Nathan Cofnas.

So. What to do with him?

As much as we may think he deserves the same cruel tsunami of dissection that he reveled in happening to Arday, a nice, low-key shunning will get the job done just as well. And it’s long overdue. Ghent University’s taking him in has clearly only emboldened him. A proper, more final eviction is needed.

I can imagine some out there might say, Well, why bother writing about him in the first place? Because in an all-too-brief earlier time, intellectuals and writers were shrewd enough to know that the threat had to be properly discussed before dismissal. That a dismissal without diligent scrutiny is not enough—it allows the creep to claim martyrdom, which Cofnas did like clockwork when Cambridge gave him the boot.

It’s crucial always to remember that acknowledging the right of free speech does not mean you give equal weight or attention to all views. Universities are not obligated to let a Flat Earther give a rebuttal lecture after they host deGrasse Tyson. Nor did news outlets ever have to give Cofnas the time of day or put him on a Channel 4 broadcast, even if they deemed Arday newsworthy. Why did Channel 4 do it then?

It can’t merely have been journalistic negligence because it would take any half-wit in the studio five minutes to discover who Cofnas was and what he was. I suspect it happened because producers think controversy equals coverage which equals ratings. The big giveaway is not that he was mislabeled a professor but that he was granted deference at all.

In a just world, Ghent University would reconsider its decision and kick him loose. It would be enough if Cofnas simply never get another academic position—no great tragedy there. There are plenty of belligerent neo-Nazis out there, no doubt, who can find work in a car wash. The racist against Black people can still find shifts as a janitor at a B-grade community college—just don’t let the creep teach or let him near impressionable minds.

In a just world, if a bigot began ranting about hereditarianism, a room of sensible people—hell, a class of smart sixth graders—would burst into derisive laughter and say, “Please. There’s the door.”

But we cannot begin to build that just world by waiting for the legislative planks to fall into place, or the leadership of those with genuine integrity. Sometimes, those of us in the rank and file must rise to that challenge of integrity, and an egregious case needs a very public lesson. If the far right and certain white extremists want to bang on about the ancient wisdom of so-called Western civilization, we can remind them that in those distant eras, there were occasionally groundswells of public sentiment for one particular solution to the pariah: exile.

In this case, it may be the most elegant expression of public justice:. Exile from the very respectability and status that Cofnas so obviously craves. Kick him loose and make sure he can’t swim or slither his way back in.

The issue of his public influence will then take care of itself, for without a teaching post, without even the most humble job title at a university, what validates him as worth talking to at all? He has neither the snake oil charisma of a Jordan Peterson nor the economic power of fellow racist Elon Musk to keep plaguing us over and over.

So if we can, we should get his raft ready and set him adrift.