It’s been a shocking week in the stagnant, shrinking frog pond that is academia. First, the world reeled at the news that a man promoted into a professorship at Cambridge solely because he was black and had a thought-processing disorder lacked even the most basic level of honesty and competence needed to pretend to do his job. Then, having been racistly exposed by professional racist Nathan Cofnas- largely because of racism- Professor Jason Arday, the sage in question, seems to have ended his own life, thought details are quite sparse. In the wake of this, a mob, both online and analogue, has descended on Cofnas and demanded his head, both figuratively and literally. His academic superiors at the University of Ghent hurriedly obliged on the former and may yet do so on the latter.
The whole sad affair is ongoing and there will still be much to be said when the dust settles. But I think there are some lessons to be learned already. I’ve written a lot about education and how it relates to the broader project of the right, how concerns about status within a system governed by liberals and leftists affect us, and the meaning and value of the university. This case touches on all of those things, and I believe simply further demonstrates that authentic rightism is defined by hierarchy ordered according to transcendent truth, communicated from higher to lower by revelation and maintained through tradition, and attempts to substitute a contrived morality through some rationalized bastardization of that, whether by way of ‘science’ or some material calculus, is doomed to disaster.
Nathan “I am more autistic than Jason Arday” Cofnas
Cofnas is commonly perceived as being aligned with the right, and certainly many rightists have publicly defended his ideas about race prior to this and have backed him in the current controversy; even those who disagree with him philosophically are correctly appalled by the injustice he faces. Cofnas has described himself as a rightist and as being committed to destroying “wokeism.” But it is important to note that what he means by all of that is very particular and not especially in keeping with rightism more broadly understood. This has implications for the significance of his role in the Arday affair and what we can take away from it.
Cofnas deserves great credit for reporting on Arday, and it takes nothing away from him to point out that the former wasn’t, technically speaking, exposing the latter. Arday’s fraud was no secret to anyone who spent a minute in his company or who was familiar with his work, by Cofnas’ own telling.
I was recently contacted by a faculty member at Cambridge (whose name I will not reveal) who alleges that Arday is a plagiarist and fabulist. My source claims that many if not most professors at Cambridge have known about this for more than a year. However, Arday and/or Cambridge’s administration are using intimidation and legal threats to squelch the story.
The people who didn’t know presumably didn’t know Arday (Cambridge is a big place?) or did, but were themselves DEI window-dressing and figured if they belonged there, so did Arday. Indeed, this group was certainly among the mob who took to the streets following Arday’s resignation and death, demanding Cofnas be punished for a thoroughly researched and honest assessment of a con man posing as a professor.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for Cambridge to denounce this.
It didn’t take long for this to happen. Cofnas, previously fired from Cambridge for race-heresy, already had a paper trail that made him immediately expendable to the leftists who employed him, and they were not slow in demonstrating their commitment to the values that elevated Arday in the first place by defenestrating Cofnas. The rationale for all of this is the latter’s thought crime, but of course, the truth is that Cofnas is not being punished for revealing Arday as a fraud; he’s being cast into the abyss for revealing almost the whole of academia as a fraud.
Obviously, there are a number of honorable exceptions, especially among those few rightist academics on the scene, but for the most part, the reaction to Arday’s spuriousness among his peers was to ignore it, co-sign it, and defend him even after the not especially difficult work of documenting it was published. Pretty much everyone involved in the story was (and remains) a coward, a liar, or himself or herself a fraud. Arday was only fired because the venal and debased people who hired him were, for a moment, more frightened by public pressure than they were by their own peers gunning for them for violating taboos. Cofnas was never, and will never, be forgiven for that.
Cofnas could have avoided a lot of problems by just wearing this disclaimer shirt to avoid scaring the hoes.
This poses a problem for Cofnas, since his entire public career has been dedicated to the proposition that academics are smart people, that smart people have more moral worth than the less intelligent, and that the path forward is to convince professors and their bright charges- those he considers “elites”- that ‘hereditarianism’ is real, whereupon they will abandon woke and guide the right into the future. His self-conception as a rightist is bound up with the notion of himself as a kind of missionary to others he considers as smart he is, to whom he will preach the gospel of race science, giving them moral permission to abandon DEI and, well, not much else. That’s really the furthest his rightism extends. He’s certainly not a Trad of any sort. He doesn't go in for JOOOOZ discourse and is not especially concerned with immigration as such. For Cofnas, the archetype of a rightist is a leftist who will hire people like him.
Existing rightists are simply dumb. As with Neema Parvini and Richard Hanania, most of Cofnas’ “rightist” commentary is geared toward signalling to leftists that he totally gets how stupid the right is, and if the left would just get on board with his particular project, he could finally and happily move over to the smart kids’ table. This sort is a recognizable phenomenon on the right- the temporarily embarrassed social-science theorist slumming it like Alcibiades uneasily spooning down blood soup with Spartan chuds. They’re just waiting on that call to return from exile.
Fun fact: Gerard Butler was the president of the University Law Society at the University of Glasgow School of Law. He gave up being a lawyer to work as a carnie, which meant dealing with fewer lowlifes.
For Cofnas, the fetishization of intelligence as the virtue of virtues is near total, the signifier of all that is valuable in a person or a quantifiable group. To be fair, he does allow that intelligence is not the sole measure of value. He offers, for example, that a hamburger chef he knows is a good fellow (though he mentions the man probably has a high IQ). And he is aware that smart people can be snakes. But as a whole, he really seems to believe that there is a genetically predetermined cognitive elite that amounts to a natural aristocracy which, guided by a proper indoctrination into hereditarianism, can and should rule the world. And much like a Puritan who will concede that perhaps not everyone is his congregation is one of the elect, but the elect certainly aren’t down the road with the Baptists, Cofnas seems to believe that while not everyone who passes through a contemporary R1 university is one of his elites, they sure aren’t anywhere else.
This poses a problem for him, because despite his efforts, the people who score well on the tests he considers significant for determining human value hate him and would no doubt gloat online if some deranged communist harmed him physically. Cofnas would pull a drowning sociologist out of a river over an HVAC guy on the grounds that the professor contributes more to humanity; the sociologist would call out for assistance in holding Cofnas’ head under water and a gaggle of adjuncts would no doubt swoop in to help. And if they don’t hate him- if they secretly agree with everything he says and actually want him to succeed- few are saying it in public. I hate to pile on, but it really appears that his mission to sell race realism to the intelligentsia is a total bust on the level of trying to sell them MAGA hats.
“We attach great importance to academic freedom . . . however . . .”
Indeed, it’s a bit baffling from the outside looking in what Cofnas really thought he’d accomplish with the Arday exposé. He is a smart man and must have known that he’d face severe backlash for it. One could venture the guess that he’s actually proceeding from his theories about how intelligent people are supposed to act rather than his own experience dealing with them. Perhaps he reasoned that if he made a case that was airtight in its logic and irrefutable in its proof- which he did- his woke peers would be compelled by their intellectually superior nature to concede his points at last. When you look at the data, smart people in the aggregate are pleasant and rational and don’t engage in witch hunts like Congolese peasants. Except that in real life they do, and for the same reason.
Perhaps the reason Cofnas is oblivious to all this is that Cofnas doesn’t believe in objective morality:
In my view, moral realism is an illusion. Our intuitions about right and wrong are the product of morally blind evolutionary and cultural forces. There is no reason to think that our moral beliefs correspond to an independently existing reality. Furthermore, moral realism is conceptually incoherent. I have no idea what it would even mean for there to be objective truths about how we’re supposed to think and act. Any concept of moral worth that is predicated on moral realism can be dismissed.
A worldview like this leaves no room for notions of sin, and certainly not any conception of pride. It thus doesn’t seem real to Cofnas that the bright professionals among whom he worked until very recently could be not merely mistaken or ignorant about him, but actively evil and committed to his destruction because he told the truth about them in a way that offended their self-regard- not a corrupt element within, but the entire institutional structure. Most people on the right, even the dumbest of us, have long since moved past any instinctive or even considered deference to credentials or academic clout with regard to our public figures. Cofnas has to be the last person on earth who thinks these people are his friends.
He’s still, even now, deferential to them and their worldview. Writing today in the Wall Street Journal, Cofnas says of his situation:
On Thursday afternoon, I received a message from the rector of Ghent University, Petra De Sutter, notifying me that, in the wake of the backlash from the Arday affair, she was suspending me from my position as a postdoctoral researcher. Her letter made it clear that the school has laid the groundwork to fire me.
For reference, this is Petra De Sutter:
The person that Cofnas refers to as “she” and “her” is quite obviously a perverted man pretending to be a woman. The cognitive elites Cofnas thinks should be running things appointed him (the tr00n) to be deputy prime minister of Belgium and then rector of the University from which Cofnas was suspended. From positions like that, said elites passed laws saying that if you call this pseudowoman a man, you can be fined or go to prison, but at the very least you should certainly be fired and rendered unemployable. Cofnas is evidently quite prepared to go along with this; this was, after all, the norm in his workplace. The problem with that is that the authority that proclaims an AGP degenerate a lady is the same that sees fit to declare a middling physical education teacher a distinguished scholar. To call out Arday is to challenge the fundamental legitimacy of that authority the same as if you called this tr00n “mister.”
If you believe that morality is the product of evolution you can hardly object when you end up as the dinosaur, and if you hold that it’s a social construct then it makes no sense to argue that some injustice has occurred when the social elements you deem authoritative denounce you as an outcast. JK Rowling, rendered a non-person for holding a braver position on tr00ns than Cofnas, still sees fit to denounce him for racism. They each sing “The Marseillaises” on their sequel cart-rides to the guillotine. It’s a good thing to denounce Stalin, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re Trotsky.
Above: Leon Trotsky during his Paris years.
I understand that what was done to Cofnas was wrong because I believe in truth and that it’s always evil on some level to deviate from it. It’s more fundamental than woke or DEI or campus politics. What the people who hired Arday did was wrong because it was all based on lies, Arday’s lies and the lies his supporters and backers told to cover them up. When that failed, they threw him to the wolves and pretended that the critics were the real problem, and went after the only man who told the truth. These were not the ignorant MAGAts Cofnas despises. They were people he thought were his friends and potential allies, who will now all act as if they never knew him. The whole episode is a giant cavalcade of mendacity, cowardice, groupthink, abuse of authority, and institutional degeneration.
Meanwhile, MAGA steps in.
I don’t claim to be a smart man like Cofnas. But I knew Jason Arday was a fraud the moment I read about him, just as I can plainly see that Petra De Sutter is a mentally disturbed man foisted into a position where he can inflict his fetish on others, to the applause of the people Cofnas thinks need only a bit of hereditarian polish to become rightists in good standing. I have no idea whatsoever what gray little trimmers like that could offer any movement that values integrity or courage. I can’t imagine why anyone would treat them as any sort of elite.
I want to be clear. I think Cofnas did a brave thing, writing what he did. I support him in this. I hope that he reconsiders his idea that the bright people currently denouncing him as a kulak wrecker are the kind of people he wants to stand beside him in any worthwhile endeavor. Intelligence is a gift from God, one of many a person might receive. You can use it for God’s ends, or your own. What comes of the former is love. From the latter only hatred, strife, deceit, slander, and cowardice can result. In this story we see this in real time.
I mentioned hierarchy ordered according to transcendent truth in the beginning. Pace Cofnas, egalitarianism is not a Christian virtue. We occupy different stations in life, and are judged according to how we execute our duties. I’m just a schoolteacher in a rural Southern town, but I live a life where I don’t have to lie to get through the day, or abide those who do. All the status in the world isn’t worth that peace. In another life, if Jason Arday had made better choices, he might be at a similar place teaching PE. If things don’t work out for you in Belgium, Dr. Cofnas, we can always use another science teacher. We might not be as bright as you’re used to, but no one here wants you dead.
Or if you want to work for someone just slightly less weird than your latest employer, this guy is probably still out there, and pretty elite. The fashion industry is a bit less gay than academia and people seem to get along better.
Academic philosophy did the same thing to Giorgio Agamben, who was one of their most precious heroes. He was the first (and only that I can think of) major philosopher to speak out on COVID as an excuse for government overreach back when it was first happening. Out of nowhere came all of these oh-so-appalling stories about how he had the audacity to pee on a bush after a night of post-conference drinking. What an old pervert!
Everyone denounced him, the champion of Foucault was now a senile old man who may as well have been Mussolini.
There's been a true, longstanding joke in academic philosophy about how professional ethicists are almost always *horrible* people. I suspect the truth in it comes from the fact that academics tend to separate their work from their lives and the real world; their work is more an academic game vying for prestige than anything connected to real life... and they don't actually care about real life or real morality. It's just all about impressing their institutional comrades. Confas' mistake was being too autistic to realize his "comrades" would never be swayed, lest they themselves become pariahs.
it is fitting. Cofnas exposed arday as a man whose life was a fraud and for doing that he was then fired by a man whose gender identity is a fraud