‘MAGA Communism and the End of America’ (Apr. 4, 2025)
Calling Trump’s economic program “MAGA communism” collapses distinct things into one inflammatory label. Tariffs and protectionism have a long Republican lineage going back to McKinley. Class-coded populism on the right is not Marxism. Cofnas knows this. He uses the label to associate Trump-curious people with a discrediting tradition.
His economic case rests on aggregate measures that miss what people complain about. As Politico put it Feb. 11, 2025: “Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong.” Real consumption per capita has risen. So has GDP. But aggregate consumption gains tell you little about housing costs in productive cities, the price of family formation, the share of income absorbed by a few unavoidable categories such as healthcare, education, and housing that have outpaced wages, or the collapse of male labor force participation in particular regions. The 1975 autoworker could buy a house near his job and support a family on one income. The 2024 worker with a higher real-consumption basket often cannot. Cofnas anticipates this and dismisses it as inflated desires.
The income-inequality citation is contested ground sold as settled fact. Auten and Splinter’s revision of the Piketty-Saez-Zucman numbers is one important paper, but it has critics who have not conceded. Treating the debate as closed is the kind of move Cofnas rightly criticizes others for.
The federal-income-tax point is selective. Federal income tax is one tax. Payroll taxes, state income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, and various fees fall harder on lower earners as a share of income. The picture changes when you include them. A man can pay a lot of tax while paying little federal income tax.
The IQ frame does too much work. Cofnas argues that capitalism appeals to higher-IQ people, so chasing smart people away leaves the right with the dumb intuitions of the masses. Even if the correlation holds, this reads less like analysis and more like coalition signaling. His audience is anti-woke intellectuals who want to feel different from the MAGA base. The frame flatters that audience and dismisses the working-class realignment that gave the right whatever momentum it has.
On Pax Americana, his concern is reasonable, but the framing assumes free trade was obviously good for everyone. Autor’s China-shock work shows real local damage to towns and regions that did not get compensated. Aggregate gains-from-trade arguments are correct in the textbook sense and incomplete in the political sense. The people who lost did not get compensated. They voted accordingly. Lecturing them about Ricardo does not make them stop voting.
The prescription contradicts the tone. Cofnas says the right needs to win smart people and draw them from the left. The piece reads as contemptuous of working-class voters, populist commentators, and anyone who took Trump’s economic message at face value. You do not build a coalition by calling its members morons. You especially do not build one by calling them stupid while telling them their material concerns are imaginary.
Where the essay lands well: Yarvin’s king is a bad idea for the reason Cofnas gives. The right is short on serious institutional alternatives. Twitter trolling does not produce a governing class. The eating-the-rat story does show a left-coded fantasy about American poverty that distorts policy. And the broader point that anti-woke politics needs a positive program, not just demolition, is correct.
The deeper question Cofnas does not ask: what coalition is he writing for, and whose status does the piece raise? His position is that of the credentialed anti-woke writer who needs to mark himself off from populist MAGA without conceding to the left. The frame that works for that position is “I am the smart kind of anti-woke.” That is what the essay performs. It is a real argument and also a status move, and the two are hard to separate.
If you read the essay through the audit standards Cofnas applied to MacDonald and Sowell, the essay collapses.
The title is the first failure. “MAGA Communism” is the framing the whole piece rests on. Cofnas does not define communism. He does not show that Trump’s program meets any of the elements that distinguish communism from other forms of statism, populism, nationalism, or economic interventionism. Communism is a specific ideology with specific commitments. State ownership of the means of production. Abolition of private property. Wealth redistribution by class struggle. Vanguard-party political control. None of these are part of Trump’s program. Trump’s first term cut corporate taxes. His second term has continued deregulation in major sectors. Tariffs are a form of protectionism, which has been used by every American administration of every party at various points and which the Republican Party historically embraced under McKinley and Smoot-Hawley. Calling tariff-based protectionism communism is a category error. Cofnas is a philosopher trained to handle category errors with care. He produces one in the title and builds the essay on it.
The Batya Ungar-Sargon framing in the opening compounds the error. Ungar-Sargon is a self-identified Marxist who happens to support Trump. Cofnas treats her support as evidence that Trump’s coalition contains communist elements. The logic does not work. Strange-bedfellows coalitions are common in politics. A Marxist supporting Trump on tariff grounds does not make tariffs Marxist any more than a libertarian supporting Trump on tax cuts makes tax cuts libertarian, or a Christian Zionist supporting Trump on Israel makes Trump a Christian Zionist. The presence of an unusual supporter inside a coalition tells you nothing about the ideological character of the coalition’s program. Cofnas runs the inference anyway, because the inference produces the headline he wants.
The Oliver Anthony move is similar. Anthony’s song expresses populist economic frustration in a country-music register. Cofnas reads the song as evidence of the same MAGA-communist phenomenon. A song is not a policy program. A populist lament about taxes and economic conditions is not a Marxist analysis of capital. Cofnas knows the difference. He elides it because the elision serves the framing. The audit standard he applies to MacDonald, where MacDonald takes ambiguous evidence and forces it into a single explanatory framework, applies here too. Cofnas takes a Marxist op-ed writer and a country song and forces them into a single category called MAGA communism. The category is not doing analytical work. It is doing rhetorical work.
The “low-IQ cult of personality” framing is the first place the essay’s tone becomes a substantive problem rather than just a stylistic one. Cofnas asserts, without supporting evidence, that the Republican Party has degenerated into a low-IQ formation. The 2024 exit polls do not support this. Trump’s coalition in 2024 included 41 percent of college-educated whites, gains among professionals, gains in the tech sector, gains in finance, gains across multiple credentialed cohorts. The picture of a Republican base composed of dim factory-nostalgic populists is not the picture the data show. Cofnas’s framing requires the picture. He does not engage the data that complicate it. The audit standard he applies elsewhere requires that an analyst handle disconfirming data. He does not handle the disconfirming data here.
The “people who believe in capitalism have higher IQs” sentence is doing something Cofnas would catch instantly in someone else’s work. The empirical literature on cognitive ability and political-economic preferences is contested and shows weaker effects than the sentence implies, and the effects that exist do not generalize across the populations and time periods the sentence treats as uniform. The sentence is a rhetorical assertion dressed as an empirical claim. The audit Cofnas runs on Sowell rests on showing exactly this kind of move, where Sowell asserts confident causal claims that the literature does not support. Cofnas runs the same move in his own causal claim about IQ and capitalism.
The IQ framing also runs into a more serious problem. Cofnas’s hereditarian commitments require that cognitive ability be a stable property unequally distributed across populations. The political distribution of cognitive ability among voters in any given election is shaped by which party each cohort happens to be voting for at that moment. Cohorts move. Educated suburbanites who voted Romney in 2012 and Clinton in 2016 did not change their cognitive ability between elections. They changed their coalition position. The same cohort movement explains much of what Cofnas attributes to the Republican Party’s “degeneration.” The party did not get dumber. The coalition reorganized. Cofnas, as a philosopher of biology, knows that political coalitions and cognitive distributions are different things measured at different timescales. He elides the difference because eliding it produces the conclusion he wants.
The economic claim that “until Trump came back the American economy was better than ever” is the place the essay loses contact with the electorate Cofnas is theorizing about. The 2024 exit polls show that 65 percent of voters viewed the economy negatively. Real wages for the bottom income quartile have stagnated since the 1970s when measured against housing, healthcare, and education costs. The Case-Shiller home price index has outpaced wage growth for decades. The median home price relative to median household income was 2.5 in 1975 and is roughly 5.1 in 2024. A young family that wants to buy a house and raise children in 2024 cannot do what a 1975 family could do at the same wage percentile. Cofnas’s GDP per capita figures are accurate as far as they go. They do not capture what the median voter is responding to. Cofnas’s response to the disconnect is to call the median voter delusional and explain the response in terms of inflated expectations and personal failings. The audit standard he applies elsewhere requires that an analyst engage the contrary evidence on its own terms. The “inflated desires” move is not an engagement. It is a dismissal.
The Rob Henderson Applebee’s anecdote and the Adam Carolla quotation are the places the essay reveals its evidentiary standards have collapsed. Cofnas spent years auditing MacDonald’s footnotes, Sowell’s citations, the empirical literature on Westermarck, the methodological commitments of behavior genetics. In the MAGA Communism essay he reaches for a single anecdote about a friend who didn’t show up at Applebee’s and a comedian’s grievance about people from his old neighborhood as evidence that poverty in America is mostly a problem of personal failure. The evidentiary leap from one friend’s behavior to a national thesis about poverty is the kind of leap Cofnas would tear apart in a colleague’s work. He does it when the conclusion serves the coalition narrative. The 8 million job openings versus 6.8 million unemployed Americans figure is also misleading. The job openings are not geographically or skill-matched to the unemployed populations. Many openings are in regions or sectors the unemployed cannot easily access. Many require credentials the unemployed do not have. Many are part-time, seasonal, or low-wage in ways that do not solve the underlying economic situation. Cofnas presents the raw figures without engaging the matching problem because the unmatched figures support the narrative.
The “homeless problem in America is almost entirely a problem of drugs and mental illness, which has little to do with the economy” claim is the most directly falsifiable in the essay. The HUD Annual Homeless Assessment Report shows an 18 percent rise in homelessness from 2022 to 2024. The National Low Income Housing Coalition’s 2024 report shows that no state in the country has a minimum wage sufficient to afford a two-bedroom apartment at market rates. Studies from the University of California San Francisco show that the largest single cause of homelessness in California is loss of income or housing cost increases, with addiction and mental illness operating as accelerating factors rather than as primary causes for the majority of new homeless. The “almost entirely” claim is not defensible from the data. Cofnas presents it confidently because the alternative reading would require him to engage the housing-affordability question that complicates the broader “America is rich” framing.
The income inequality argument is technically clever and substantively misleading. Cofnas cites a study showing that after-transfer top one percent income share has not changed since 1960, attributing the apparent rise documented elsewhere to changes in tax filing patterns. The study he cites is real. The literature on income inequality is more contested than Cofnas’s confident citation implies. The Piketty-Saez data, the World Inequality Database, the Auten-Splinter response, the Saez-Zucman countermeasure, all run different methodologies and produce different conclusions about whether and how much top income share has shifted. Cofnas picks the one study that supports his conclusion and presents it as settling the matter.
The wealth inequality dismissal is even worse. Cofnas treats wealth as a “slippery concept” because Elon Musk’s stock is hard to liquidate and Taylor Swift could theoretically sell her underwear. The stock-liquidation point is a real complication for wealth measurement. It does not justify treating the entire wealth-distribution literature as too imprecise to support inferences. The Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts show that the top ten percent of households hold 76 percent of household wealth and the top one percent hold 30 percent, with both shares rising since the 1980s. The directionality is clear across multiple measurement methodologies. Cofnas’s treatment of wealth as a concept too slippery to support inequality claims is not a serious engagement with the literature. It is an evasion.
The federal income tax argument is technically true and rhetorically dishonest. The top earners do pay most federal income taxes. Federal income taxes are a small fraction of the total tax burden on most households. Payroll taxes, state income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, gas taxes, and various fees take a substantial bite out of low- and middle-income earnings. The total tax burden on a median household is in the 20 to 25 percent range when all taxes are aggregated. Oliver Anthony’s complaint about being “taxed to no end” is not narrowly about federal income tax. It is about the total burden, which is real, which middle and lower earners feel acutely, and which Cofnas does not engage. Cofnas’s audit move here is to substitute the narrow federal-income-tax fact for the broader tax-burden fact, which is rhetorically easier to dismiss. The substitution is the kind of move he would catch in another writer.
The fascism comparison is the most strained move in the essay. Cofnas calls Trumpism essentially 1920s-style fascism on the grounds that fascism combined nationalism with socialism under authoritarian state leadership. The 1920s comparison fails on every specific element. Mussolini’s fascism rested on a corporatist state structure that brought labor and capital under direct government control. Trump has done nothing structurally analogous. Mussolini’s fascism rested on the abolition of multiparty democracy, the suppression of opposition press, the elimination of independent judiciary, the cultivation of a paramilitary movement that engaged in street violence as a tool of governance. Trump’s first term produced none of these structural changes despite four years of executive power. The thuggery Cofnas references is a stylistic complaint about rhetoric and adjacent online behavior. It is not the structural feature of historical fascism. Robert Paxton, Stanley Payne, Roger Griffin, and the major fascism scholars all emphasize that fascism is an organizational form, not a vibe. Cofnas reaches for the comparison because it is rhetorically powerful, not because it survives the comparison the scholars require. The term has been so loosely used since 2016 that it now operates as a generic insult. Cofnas uses it as a generic insult while pretending to use it as a category.
Cofnas calls Trumpism MAGA communism in the title and 1920s-style fascism in the body. Communism and fascism are not the same thing. They are opposed political traditions in their historical expressions, despite the shared totalitarian formal features that political theorists like Hannah Arendt and Friedrich Hayek noted. Calling a single political phenomenon both communist and fascist signals that the analyst is reaching for any negative-coded political category that comes to hand, rather than identifying the political character of the phenomenon. Cofnas would catch this kind of categorical confusion in a student paper. He produces it when the categories are tools for attacking a coalition he wants to attack.
The Pax Americana section is the place where Cofnas’s confidence in the international order outruns the evidence. Pax Americana has produced real goods. It has also produced Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the post-2008 financial crisis, the opioid crisis driven by pharmaceutical capture of the regulatory state, the China shock that gutted American manufacturing, and a series of other costs that the people Cofnas is attacking experienced acutely. The phrase “rules-based international order” is doing rhetorical work that the order does not always perform. China’s rise has continued under the order. American manufacturing has hollowed out under the order. Russian aggression has not been deterred by the order. Cofnas presents the order as a settled good that only stupid people would want to disrupt. The order is contested by serious analysts on the left and the right for serious reasons. Cofnas’s framing makes those analysts look stupid by definition.
The hyperbolic escalation in the closing sections compounds the analytical problems. Tariffs have not “crashed the stock market.” Tariffs have produced market volatility. Tariffs have not yet caused stagflation. Tariffs may produce inflationary pressures that economists are watching. The conservative parties in Canada were not on track for an easy victory before Trump’s annexation rhetoric, and the relationship between Trump’s rhetoric and Canadian electoral outcomes is contested rather than settled. Each of these claims, presented as established fact in the essay, is an early-stage prediction or contested empirical question. The audit standard Cofnas applies elsewhere requires distinguishing predictions from established facts. He does not maintain the distinction in the essay’s closing.
The cumulative effect is what makes the essay alarming as a phase-three document in the trajectory analysis. The same writer who audited MacDonald meticulously, who tore apart Sowell’s citations, who argued that the only legitimate response to a hereditarian hypothesis is empirical engagement rather than moral dismissal, produces an essay that fails almost every audit standard he applies to others. The category errors, the strained analogies, the cherry-picked statistics, the anecdotal evidence carrying load it cannot carry, the contradictions between communism and fascism framings, the elision of the matching problem on jobs, the dismissal of housing as a serious factor in homelessness, the contestable income inequality claim presented as settled, the hyperbolic predictions presented as established consequences, all of these are the moves Cofnas built his career by catching in other writers. He produces them in his own essay when the coalition position requires them.
The deeper failure is that the essay does not even succeed at its stated goal. Cofnas wants to convince smart people that the right needs to appeal to elites and reject populist economic positions. The essay he produces is one that intelligent populist-curious readers, the very audience he claims to want to reach, will read as elitist, condescending, factually loose, internally contradictory, and unable to engage their concerns. Anyone whose family has lost manufacturing jobs to globalization, whose town has hollowed out, whose children cannot buy houses on professional incomes, whose health insurance costs absorb growing fractions of their take-home pay, will read Cofnas’s essay and conclude that he does not understand what they are responding to. The audit Cofnas would apply to this rhetorical failure, in a writer he was analyzing, would identify that the writer’s coalition position prevents him from hearing the audience he claims to want to persuade.
The writer of this essay is not the writer who produced the careful 2018 Human Nature paper on MacDonald. He is a writer whose tools have remained sharp but whose use of those tools has become subordinate to coalition positioning that the tools were originally designed to expose. That gap between tool and use is what makes the essay alarming. The instrument is intact. The hand using it is no longer reliable.
‘Was it a mistake to vote for Trump?’ (April 9, 2025)
The note is notable for what it concedes. Cofnas voted for Trump on November 5, 2024. He defends the vote as reasonable on the information available at the time. He then turns the failure of his own vote into an indictment of the broader MAGA coalition rather than a self-assessment. His framework absorbs the disconfirming data by relocating responsibility outward. Cofnas’s vote was reasonable. The MAGA base’s continued support after the tariffs is not. The boundary between Cofnas and the base he previously voted with is sharpened, not dissolved.
CatTurd (the X account @catturd2) is a high-volume MAGA-populist poster with a large following. Cofnas is using the handle as shorthand for the populist-right base he wants to mark off from his coalition. The same author who carefully audits MacDonald deploys “an army of Catturds with the same dumb intuitions” as descriptive analysis. The asymmetry is the four-register pattern operating in pure form. Audit standards apply to coalition rivals across the political spectrum. Coalition allies who vote with him get the same treatment when they remain attached to the populist movement after Cofnas exits.
The “DEI Kamala” hypothetical is doing the heaviest coalition work in the note. Cofnas is signaling that he is not in the woke coalition (he calls Harris “DEI Kamala”) while also signaling that he will publicly trade Trump for Harris if Trump’s economic program continues. This is the unstable position my Pinsof analysis predicts. He is to Trump’s liberal free-market left on economics and culture, to Trump’s right on race science, attached to a credentialed-dissident coalition that wants to be neither. The note is what that position looks like in real time when one of its premises (Trump’s economic management) fails.
For the four-register bifurcation, this note belongs in the same category as the “coalition of stupid people” lines about groypers and medieval peasants. The notes register is where Cofnas’s contempt for the populations adjacent to his own coalition surfaces openly. The publications cannot carry this register. The popular essays modulate it. The interviews accommodate it under host friendly framing. The notes deliver it raw. The contradiction with the “Hereditarian Revolution” call for elite acceptance keeps growing sharper as the notes accumulate, because the elite acceptance the project requires cannot be built on a base that the project’s author calls Catturds with dumb intuitions.
‘Podcast Bros and Brain Rot‘ (May 5, 2025)
Cofnas wants to hold two positions at once: the expert class has discredited itself, and we need expertise more than ever. The essay is at its strongest when describing the failures, weakest when proposing the fix.
The catalogue of expert betrayal is accurate and useful. Fauci’s mask reversal and his admission that he lied about it. The Lancet letter signed by people directly implicated in a possible lab leak. Walensky claiming vaccinated people don’t carry the virus when the FDA’s own documents said data were insufficient. The 51 intel officials calling the Hunter Biden laptop Russian disinformation. The 1,200 medical professionals signing a letter saying social distancing should not apply to BLM protests. Each example shows credentialed authority used to launder political preference.
Cofnas’s diagnosis of the alt-media response also has force. Smith on Churchill’s “unnecessary war” is a good example because the error reveals he hasn’t read the source. Cooper refusing to debate Roberts because he knew he would lose is damning in the way Cofnas frames it. Rogan telling Hughes he sees what Hughes is saying “if you wanted to look at it cold and objectively” captures something real about how the form rewards emotional plausibility over argument.
But the analytical structure has problems.
Apply the four questions to Fauci, Walensky, the Lancet signatories, the Nature letter authors. Who do they rely on for status, income, and protection? NIH, peer-reviewed journals, the public health establishment, the Democratic coalition. Who must they retain as allies? Each other, the media outlets that cite them, the political figures who fund them. What signals mark coalition membership? Trust the science, the lab leak is a racist conspiracy theory, masks work because we say they work now. What would they give up if they changed position? Careers, reputations, possible criminal exposure for gain-of-function funding. The lies were not deviations from expertise. They were coalition maintenance performed in expert vocabulary.
This is where Cofnas’s frame breaks. He treats the lying as a personal failure of individual experts that we should set aside so we can return to trusting expertise. But the lying followed predictably from the coalition structure of credentialed authority. The same incentives that produced the lies will produce more lies. Telling people to defer to expert consensus while acknowledging that the consensus was manufactured by people with strong reasons to manufacture it asks the audience to perform an impossible act of selective trust.
Expertise functions partly as a coalition technology. The credential signals coalition membership. The peer review enforces coalition orthodoxy. The “consensus” emerges from the coalition’s gatekeeping, not from independent convergence. This does not mean expertise is fake. The genome got sequenced. The vaccine works for what it works for. But the layer Cofnas wants to defend, the layer where non-experts defer to expert consensus on contested questions, is the layer most shaped by coalition incentives.
Becker fits the alt-media side cleanly. Rogan’s audience needs a hero system. The credentialed class failed them, betrayed them, locked their kids out of school. Smith and Cooper offer a counter-hero system: the brave non-expert who saw through the lies. That the counter-hero system also produces lies does not weaken its hold, because the hero structure does not require accuracy. It requires meaning.
Cofnas notes that he called the lab leak in April 2020. He treats this as evidence of his social intelligence and skepticism. But many people called the lab leak in April 2020 for many different reasons, including reasons Cofnas would not endorse. Being right about one thing in a contested moment does not generalize to a method.
The strongest section of the essay is the heuristics list near the end. Ask whether the field is real or fake. Ask whether the consensus is enforced. Ask whether the expertise is relevant to the question. These are useful. But they sit awkwardly with the rest of the argument because applying them honestly often pushes toward the alt-media position Cofnas wants to dismiss. Public health on lockdowns was not an expertise question. Climate science is politicized. Race differences in intelligence is a field where many experts state openly that they take their position for moral reasons. Cofnas knows this because he has been on the receiving end. So the frame “trust experts unless you have specific reason not to” collapses into “trust experts when they agree with Cofnas.”
The institutional proposal at the end is Turnerian and the right move, even if Cofnas does not develop it. Procedures and institutions, not heroic individuals, sustain epistemic order. Asking Rogan to be responsible is a category error. Building institutions that reward accuracy is the only durable answer. But Cofnas does not say what those institutions might be, who would fund them, what coalition they would serve, what status they would confer. Without those answers, the proposal is a wish.
If we go deeper, we see that the opening setup with Madhusudhan and Owens is rhetorically effective and analytically clean. A scientist at Cambridge announcing a possible biosignature on K2-18b versus a podcaster announcing the moon landing is fake and gay is a real contrast. The contrast supports the essay’s stated premise. The premise itself is defensible. Some claims are better grounded than others. Some people are better positioned to evaluate certain claims than others. A media environment that flattens those differences produces predictable distortions. Nothing in the audit complains about the framing of the problem.
The first place the essay starts losing its audit standards is the IQ-and-podcast-bros framing. Cofnas treats podcast audiences as a unified low-IQ formation susceptible to whatever the most entertaining grifter offers them. The framing is convenient for the argument. It is not supported by what is known about podcast audiences. Joe Rogan’s audience is demographically diverse, includes substantial numbers of college-educated listeners, and includes professionals who use the show as long-form supplementation rather than primary information. Bret Weinstein’s audience includes academics, scientists, and physicians. Sam Harris’s audience, the audience Cofnas treats as the responsible alternative, overlaps substantially with Rogan’s audience. The same listeners who get Dave Smith on Rogan also get Coleman Hughes on Rogan. The audience is not the formation Cofnas needs it to be for the argument to work. The audit standard he applies to MacDonald, where MacDonald constructs a population of malign ideological actors that the underlying data do not support, applies here too. Cofnas constructs a population of low-IQ podcast-bro audiences that the underlying data do not support.
Smith’s NATO-expansion claim is also caught. The Baker assurance to Gorbachev was verbal, was unauthorized at the time, did not appear in the Two Plus Four agreement, and the formal agreement permitted NATO expansion into East Germany without restricting expansion elsewhere. Smith’s “in writing” claim is wrong. Cofnas’s correction is solid. These are the kinds of forensic catches the auditor mode produces. They are useful. They support the essay’s broader claim that some podcast guests are operating below the basic factual threshold their topics require.
The Rob Malone reading is similar. Malone has real credentials in mRNA vaccine research and has produced claims about vaccine harms that the literature does not support, including the explosion-of-deaths line and the Biden-fake-shot speculation. Cofnas catches the claims accurately. The point that Malone’s reasoning is impaired in ways that should affect how non-experts weigh his expert credential is a defensible point. The audit standard holds for this case too.
The first place the essay starts to slip is the Sabine Hossenfelder reference. Cofnas presents her as a YouTuber whose criticism of CERN’s Future Circular Collider is reasonable but that he, as a non-physicist, cannot fully adjudicate. The framing is fine as far as it goes. The slippage is what comes next. Cofnas treats his reluctance to opine on particle accelerators as a model for epistemic responsibility, then moves immediately to topics where he opines confidently, including the Israel-Palestinian conflict, World War II historiography, vaccine policy, lockdown policy, and economic policy. The same Cofnas who declines to take strong positions on physics because he is not a physicist takes strong positions on military ethics, just war theory, comparative civilian-combatant ratios, the appropriate response to terror tactics, and the moral framing of the Gaza conflict. He is not credentialed in any of these fields. The audit standard he applies to himself in the physics case dissolves the moment he moves to topics where his coalition has stakes. The asymmetry is not announced. It is the structural feature of the essay.
The Israel-Gaza section is where the asymmetry becomes most visible. Cofnas dismisses Rogan’s “30,000 innocent civilians” framing because Rogan accepted Hamas’s casualty figure without distinguishing combatants from civilians. The correction Cofnas credits Hughes with is correct as far as it goes. Hamas’s casualty count does not distinguish combatants from civilians. The IDF’s own count of 13,000 combatants is contested by independent observers including Airwars, the UN OHCHR, and various academic teams who have produced civilian-to-combatant ratio estimates significantly higher than the 1-to-1 the IDF figure implies. The forensic move Cofnas credits Hughes with, taking the IDF’s combatant count at face value to produce a “pretty normal for urban warfare” framing, is itself a contested move. Cofnas presents the contested move as the corrective to Rogan’s error. The audit Cofnas would apply to a writer he disagreed with would catch this. He does not catch it in himself or in Hughes because the conclusion sits on the right side of the coalition line.
The “ethics of war” framing in the same section compounds the problem. Cofnas treats it as obvious that the moral question of how to fight a terror group that hides behind civilians has a settled answer that Rogan was too unsophisticated to grasp. The just war theory literature is more contested than that. Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars, the standard reference, treats the question of proportionality in counter-terror operations as genuinely difficult, with multiple defensible positions. The doctrine of double effect, the requirement of distinction, the principle of proportionality, all generate disagreements among serious philosophers about how the principles apply to specific contemporary cases including Gaza. Cofnas treats the question as having an answer Rogan failed to recognize. The treatment is convenient. It does not survive engagement with the literature. A philosopher of biology who would never claim physics expertise is willing to claim just war theory expertise when the topic is Gaza.
The “Mark Alfano wants Trump supporters to be killed” parenthetical is the place where the essay’s auditor mode collapses entirely into culture-war shorthand. The parenthetical is presented as a casual fact. It is not a casual fact. Whether Alfano said anything that supports the gloss, what context the statement appeared in, what register it operated in, whether it was a tweet or a serious advocacy claim, none of this is supplied. The audit standard requires citations for claims of this severity. Cofnas does not supply any. The same writer who carefully cites the FDA December 2020 transmission report when criticizing Fauci, who cites the specific Lancet paper documenting laboratory-acquired infections, who cites the Inside Higher Ed piece about his own controversy, drops a claim that Mark Alfano wants Trump supporters killed without any sourcing at all. The asymmetry of evidentiary standards across the same essay is the audit catch. Substantiated when the substantiation supports the argument. Unsubstantiated when the assertion would be embarrassing if substantiated and is being deployed as a rhetorical aside.
The Quayshawn Spencer aside is similarly loose. Cofnas claims Spencer “acknowledged to me that he never read my paper.” Whether Spencer said this, in what context, with what qualifications, is not supplied. The claim could be true. It could be a private exchange Spencer would characterize differently. It could be a paraphrase that Spencer would dispute. The audit standard requires sourcing for assertions of this kind, particularly when they are being used to discredit a named academic. Cofnas does not supply it. He uses the assertion to score a coalition point and moves on.
The Joseph Graves reference is the third in this sequence and shows the pattern. Cofnas describes Graves as “a biologist who works with fruit flies” to discredit Graves’s standing to comment on race and IQ. Graves is in fact an evolutionary biologist who has published extensively on the biology of human variation, including work directly on race as a biological category. The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium is a serious book in the field. Whether one agrees with Graves’s conclusions, the “fruit flies” framing is a misleading characterization of his work designed to make him sound less qualified than he is on the relevant topic. The audit Cofnas would apply to a writer who did this to a colleague Cofnas respected would catch the misrepresentation. He produces the misrepresentation when the colleague is on the wrong side of his coalition.
The “9 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Black Plague” survey reference is doing rhetorical work the essay leans on heavily but does not source carefully. The figure appears in a YouGov-style survey that asked respondents about a range of historical events. Survey responses to questions of this kind are notoriously unreliable. Some respondents answer trolling. Some answer thinking the Black Plague refers to something else (the actor Plague Doctor, an album, a rap group). Some answer at random. Treating the figure as reliable evidence that 9 percent of Americans hold a substantive favorable view of the bubonic plague is the kind of move Cofnas would catch instantly in a writer he disagreed with. He uses the figure as a punchline. The figure does not survive serious engagement.
The Garrett Jones invocation pulls Cofnas’s argument toward a position he does not fully defend. Jones’s 10% Less Democracy argues for selective epistocratic reforms in specific institutional contexts. Cofnas’s gloss, that the book should arguably have been called At Least 26% Less Democracy, signals a stronger anti-democratic commitment than Jones defends. The “huge numbers of people are going to latch onto disastrously wrong ideas unless elites exercise some paternalistic control over their informational environment” sentence is a serious claim. It is the central political claim of the essay. Cofnas does not develop it, does not engage the obvious objections (who picks the elites, what prevents elite capture, how do you distinguish paternalistic correction of error from political suppression of dissent), and does not acknowledge that the same logic would have justified the establishment’s lab-leak suppression he correctly criticizes earlier in the essay. The internal contradiction is structural. Either elite epistemic control is appropriate, in which case Fauci’s lab-leak suppression and Twitter’s Hunter Biden suppression are defensible exercises of expert paternalism, or elite epistemic control is not appropriate, in which case Cofnas’s recommendation that elites exercise paternalistic control over the informational environment fails. The essay wants both. The audit standard requires choosing.
The Covid section has audit standards that mostly hold. The lab-leak coverup, the gain-of-function funding, the Kristian Andersen Slack messages, the Fauci mask reversals, the Walensky transmission claims, the school closures, the BLM-protest open letter, the Hunter Biden laptop suppression, are all real events. Cofnas’s framing of them is largely accurate. The “experts told noble lies and the lies eroded their authority” reading is defensible. The “Joe Rogan was right about some Covid things by accident, and wrong about other Covid things in ways that mattered” reading is also defensible. Cofnas does the work here. The Bret Weinstein ivermectin claim, the Robert Malone claims, the Rogan-Tim-Dillon vaccine reasoning, all get caught accurately. The audit standard holds for the Covid material because the Covid material is the place where Cofnas’s coalition position aligns with the careful empirical reading. When the coalition and the empirics align, the auditor mode produces useful work. When they diverge, the auditor mode bends toward the coalition.
The “How to Follow the Science” section is the place where the essay tries to articulate a positive epistemology. The articulation is partial. Cofnas says you should look for clues about whether expert majorities have biases, you should treat consensus as strong evidence absent specific reasons for skepticism, you should defer to experts on questions within their expertise but not outside it, you should weight credentials but not blindly. Each of these is reasonable. Together they do not constitute the algorithm the essay claims to need. The hard cases are the cases where the criteria conflict. What if the expert majority has documented coalition biases (Cofnas thinks this is true of much of academia) and the dissenting minority is not credentialed (Cofnas thinks this is true of many podcast hosts)? The criteria pull in opposite directions. Cofnas’s practice, throughout the essay, is to weight the criteria differently depending on which side of his coalition the conclusion sits. Climate science consensus gets respected with a hint that Lindzen might have a point. Race-and-IQ consensus gets framed as biased and the dissenting minority (which includes Cofnas) gets credited. Vaccine consensus gets respected. Lockdown consensus gets criticized. The pattern is not random. It tracks Cofnas’s coalition rather than a consistent epistemic principle.
The Peter Navarro and Stephen Miran dismissals at the end reveal the audit’s selectivity. Navarro is described as “notorious for being incoherent and angry during interviews” and as citing the fictional Ron Vara. Both characterizations have empirical support. Miran is described as having “a single, coauthored publication in a second-tier economics journal.” The dismissals are deployed as evidence that the tariff-supporting wing of the economics profession is composed of crackpots. The same essay treats Cofnas’s own race-and-IQ research, which is similarly minority within its field and similarly dependent on a small network of like-minded scholars, as the brave dissent of a serious scientist against a corrupted majority. The asymmetry in how minority positions get evaluated is the audit catch. When the minority position is one Cofnas endorses, the minority is the brave dissent. When the minority position is one Cofnas rejects, the minority is the crank. The criterion that distinguishes brave dissent from crankery is, in practice, whether Cofnas agrees.
The Ron Vara line is also worth flagging because it is a fact that bears more nuance than Cofnas gives it. Navarro has acknowledged using Ron Vara as a literary device, claiming it as an inside joke for friends and an aliter ego for stretching arguments. The use of fictional sources in serious policy books is not defensible practice. The framing as evidence of Navarro’s complete bad faith is also not the only available reading. Some defenders argue the device was disclosed, was understood by close readers as a device, and does not necessarily invalidate Navarro’s substantive positions. Whether one accepts those defenses or not, the audit standard requires acknowledging that defenses exist. Cofnas does not acknowledge them. He uses the Ron Vara fact as a clean dismissal because the clean dismissal serves the argument.
Cofnas builds the essay around the premise that elite epistemic authority needs to be reconstructed because the populist alternative is failing. The premise has force. The execution requires Cofnas to construct two stable categories, the responsible elite (which includes him) and the irresponsible populace (which includes most podcast audiences and their hosts). The categories are not stable. The essay’s own examples show why. Bret Weinstein has a Ph.D. and was right about Covid in some ways and wrong in others. Robert Malone has the credential and is unreliable in his reasoning. Sabine Hossenfelder has the credential and is treated as a possibly correct dissenting voice. Mark Alfano has the credential and is treated as a malign coalition enforcer who wants Trump supporters dead. Quayshawn Spencer has the credential and is dismissed for a private acknowledgment Cofnas does not source. The credential does no consistent work. What does the work is whether Cofnas agrees with the credentialed voice. The essay claims to defend expertise while operating as a coalition-position document that uses the language of expertise selectively.
The Madhusudhan-versus-Owens framing the essay opens with is the cleanest case in the entire piece. An astronomer announces a possible biosignature. A podcaster announces the moon is fake. The case is clean because nothing in the example bears on Cofnas’s coalition position. Once the essay moves to topics where his coalition has stakes, the clean cases get rare. Most of the examples become cases where the credentialed expert who agrees with Cofnas (Lindzen, Chan, Ridley, Wade) is the brave dissenter and the credentialed experts who disagree with Cofnas (Spencer, Graves, Alfano) are the corrupted enforcers. The category of “expert” does not survive the political asymmetry.
The closing call for elites to build alternative institutions that enforce intellectual standards is the part of the essay that should be most useful and is the part that lands least convincingly. The call is right. The execution would require Cofnas’s own institutions, which are largely Substack newsletters and the philosophy of biology field where his standing is contested, to enforce intellectual standards on figures with whom he is broadly aligned. The essay does not name a single figure on Cofnas’s coalition side who has been held to the standards he wants enforced on Smith, Cooper, Malone, and Rogan. Emil Kirkegaard, Steve Sailer, the Aporia magazine network, the various heterodox-hereditarian Substacks, the dissident-right podcast circuit Cofnas appears on, none of these are subjected to the audit the essay’s argument requires. The audit applies outward and not inward. That is the audit Cofnas would catch in another writer. He does not catch it in himself.
The expert class did face-plant on Covid in specific ways. The lab-leak suppression was a serious failure. The mask reversals damaged trust. The Hunter Biden laptop suppression was a coordinated establishment failure. The lockdown policies were over-broad. The BLM-protest exception revealed political contamination of medical authority. Some podcast hosts do platform guests with serious factual problems. Dave Smith does get basic Churchill and NATO history wrong. Darryl Cooper’s WWII revisionism does fail under engagement with serious historians. Rob Malone does make claims his expertise does not support. Each of these is a useful audit catch.
The auditor’s tools remain sharp. The hand using them is no longer reliable across coalition lines. The MacDonald audit, the Sowell audit, the Westermarck audit, the no-teleology paper all hold the audit standards consistently because the targets in those papers were inside Cofnas’s coalition or adjacent to it and the conclusions did not require coalition discipline. The Smith and Cooper audits in this essay also hold because the targets are outside Cofnas’s coalition and the conclusions support coalition discipline. The Spencer, Graves, and Alfano dismissals, the audience-IQ framing, the Israel just-war reading, the elite-paternalism recommendation, the asymmetric evaluation of minority expert positions all bend the audit standards in directions the targets-and-coalitions logic predicts.
‘Dave Green: “Should we be more Deferential to Experts?” with Nathan Cofnas’ (May 4, 2025)
Cofnas faces an interlocutor who shares his right-wing skepticism but applies a sharper analytical knife.
Green’s central argument lands. Lies are categorically worse than mistakes for an epistemic system because mistakes are randomly distributed and lies are concertedly directional. Green grounds this in machine learning. A system with random error you can ensemble out. A system with systematic bias you cannot trust at all. Cofnas keeps trying to treat this as a value-neutral comparison that depends on context. Green presses him on the journal example. Every journal Cofnas has ever published in punishes lies more than mistakes. Cofnas refuses to concede the point. The refusal is revealing. He cannot concede it because conceding it would mean conceding that the academic establishment has crossed a categorical threshold that cannot be repaired through ordinary appeals to credentials and consensus.
The Tom Friedman exchange is the funniest and most damaging moment. Green keeps trying to get Cofnas to admit that the New York Times presents Friedman as an expert on Israel even though he produces error-riddled analysis. Cofnas keeps responding “I don’t consider him an expert,” missing the point. Green is not asking what Cofnas personally thinks. He is asking who the institutional system Cofnas defends has anointed. Friedman is one of their anointed experts. If the institutional anointment process produces Friedman, then the anointment process is bad, and appeals to its output are unreliable. Cofnas slides past this every time it comes up.
The expertise standard Green identifies as the core flaw is correct. Cofnas claims he has objective criteria for who counts as an expert. When pressed, the criteria turn out to be post hoc. Scott Horton is an expert because he gets things right that Cofnas can verify. Dave Smith is not an expert because he gets things wrong that Cofnas can verify. The lay person trying to choose between them in advance has no procedure. The expert label is awarded retroactively by Cofnas based on Cofnas’s own judgment of accuracy. This collapses the entire framework. The whole point of expert deference is that the lay person cannot evaluate the substance and so defers to the credential. Once you abandon credential as the standard and substitute “gets it right by my lights,” the lay person needs to evaluate the substance to identify the expert, at which point the deference has become circular.
The housing exchange is the moment where Cofnas’s epistemic instincts visibly fail. Green asks a clean factual question. Can the median worker afford a house within reasonable commute of his job? Compare 1990s to now. Cofnas refuses to engage with the question. He pivots to GDP per capita. He pivots to the basket of goods. He pivots to refrigerators and air conditioners. He never answers the question because answering it honestly would force him to concede that the consensus of economists got the lived outcome of trade liberalization wrong for the median American. Green’s machine learning frame is correct. Test the truth-telling system on a question you know the answer to before trusting it on questions you do not. Cofnas cannot pass the test on housing. He then asks why he should be trusted on tariffs.
Green says the problem with the academy is moral, not factual. The factual battles cannot be won while the moral framework remains intact. Cofnas says that exposing factual lies will erode moral authority. Green argues that the causation runs the other way. The moral authority shapes which facts can be admitted, and admitting facts behind closed doors while denying their importance publicly is a stable equilibrium. Pinker, Chomsky, and Gardner all admit hereditarian facts and then assert the facts do not matter morally. The factual concession costs them nothing because the moral framework absorbs it. Green’s prescription follows from this. Punish the moral authorities. Strip them of status. Make examples of them. Otherwise the equilibrium holds.
The Zoomer exchange at the end is where Cofnas accidentally undermines his own retake-the-academy strategy. Green asks whether the bright Zoomers are on the hereditarian right. Cofnas hedges and then concedes yes for the men. Green’s follow-up move is the strategic insight Cofnas missed in his original essay. The human capital problem is solved. The bright young people are coming up outside the universities because the universities will not hire them. The question is no longer how to produce right-wing intellectuals. The question is what to do with the right-wing intellectuals you already have, who will never be admitted to the institutions on the institutions’ terms. The answer cannot be “wait for the universities to come around.” It has to be either purge or build parallel.
Cofnas’s claim that the academy is not lying about global warming because the IPCC consensus is technically narrow is pure goalpost shifting. The public-facing presentation of climate science is not the IPCC report and Cofnas knows this. He used the same goalpost shift earlier when defending consensus generally. He also tries the same move on hereditarianism in reverse. There the public-facing consensus is the lie, and the private surveys are the truth. He uses whichever framing helps in the moment.
The COVID culpability exchange is where Cofnas’s real coalition constraint shows clearest. Green wants people in jail. Cofnas keeps walking it back. Maybe an investigation. Maybe Fauci was just contributing to a system. Maybe the responsibility is diffuse. The flinch is professional self-preservation. The Cambridge ecosystem does not have a place for someone who calls for medical researchers to be imprisoned. The substack ecosystem does. Cofnas is sitting at the boundary between the two and cannot fully commit to the substack position without forfeiting the Cambridge one.
Cofnas defends the form of institution that grants him status while criticizing only the parts of that institution that have already been publicly discredited. The selection is not conscious. It is what coalitions do to the people inside them. Becker’s hero system fits too. Cofnas’s hero role is the courageous truth-teller who restores science to its proper function. The role requires that science have a proper function to be restored to. If science is structurally captured by moral commitments that are downstream of the same forces that shape every other coalition, then the hero role evaporates and Cofnas becomes one more partisan in one more war. The framework will not let him think this thought.
Green has the better epistemology in this exchange and the better political instincts. Cofnas has the better institutional position and the more careful prose. Watch which one ages better.
‘Nathan Cofnas On MAGA Communism & The Right’s Stupidity Problem’ (5-25-25)
My show is a mess. I waste Nathan’s time. I waste the viewer’s time. I waste my time.
Nathan joins 110 minutes in.
I repeatedly ask Cofnas to validate my framings rather than develop independent challenges to his. The questions about whether Trump is the most extreme bully of private enterprise across recent administrations, whether stature in the world is 99 percent military and economic, whether it is possible to be a Marxist without being a communist, whether Mearsheimer thinks the tariffs are stupid, all run as setups for Cofnas to either agree with me or be on record refusing to agree. Cofnas, who is intellectually disciplined, handles the setups by giving direct answers and then redirecting. The setups do not produce sustained argumentative exchange because the setups were not framed to produce it.
At 3:05:30, I share the Andrew Gelman quote that Niall Ferguson has crossed the John Yoo line where nothing he publishes can be taken seriously. Cofnas does not engage.
At 3:21:43, I tell Cofnas, “I feel like you were self-destructing in these last two essays [MAGA communism and podcast bros].”
Cofnas says that some readers think the essays are his best work. The natural follow-up is to ask which readers, in what venues, and whether the readers’ approval tracks intellectual standards or coalition position. I failed to do this.
The next 20 minutes are the best in the show. Cofnas mentions his $5,500 Substack income against tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees. The right does not have institutional infrastructure that supports serious intellectual work. Instead, attention and money flow to those willing to compromise standards. Intellectual labor in general rarely pays for itself. Cofnas and I work together on substance rather than do coalition combat.
The closing exchanges about Nietzsche on philosophers not marrying, women not wanting to be married to publicly ostracized heretics, and the difficulty of attracting followers when one is committed to optimizing for truth reveal the structural difficulties of Cofnas’s position in ways that the more aggressive earlier exchanges did not. The show ends well.
‘Where does Woke go from here? | Nathan Cofnas | Ep.29’ (Jun. 30, 2025)
This is a loose exchange. The host is friendly, well-read in a generalist way, and uncritical. Cofnas relaxes. The result is the clearest view yet of what his framework looks like when it is not being pressed.
The wokeism definition does what the definition is designed to do. Cofnas wants wokeism to mean specifically the project of taking the racial equality thesis seriously in the face of persistent disparities. This is a coalition move. By restricting wokeism to race and severing it from gender theory, he positions hereditarianism as the load-bearing intervention. If wokeism just is the equality thesis, then hereditarianism just is the cure. The framework is built so that Cofnas’s specialty is also the strategic key to the entire problem. Notice how convenient that is. A philosopher who studies behavioral genetics turns out to hold the master key to the central political pathology of the age. The framework selection is not conscious. It is what coalition pressures do to thinkers.
Wokeism as Cofnas defines it predates the great awakening by a century. He says so. The premise of equal innate capacities was orthodoxy by the early twentieth century. So why did the great awakening happen in 2012 to 2014 specifically? Cofnas’s answer is that we reached a tipping point where people noticed equality had not arrived. But this answer cannot do the work because the same noticing was available in 1965, 1980, 1995. Something else changed in the 2010s. Helen Andrews would say feminization of institutions. Haidt would say smartphones and social media. Hanania would say civil rights law expansion combined with internet-enabled coordination. The point is not that any of those is right. The point is that Cofnas’s framework cannot explain timing because his framework treats wokeism as the pure unfolding of a logical premise rather than the contingent product of specific institutional and technological conditions. Turner’s proceduralism would push hard on this. Wokeism is a coalition formation with specific origins and sustaining conditions. Reducing it to logical entailment from a single premise hides those conditions.
The eugenics section is where Cofnas relaxes most and where the framework’s strain shows. He defends embryo selection cleanly. He notes that prenatal screening for Down syndrome is widely accepted. He frames embryo selection for IQ as continuous with that. This is a strong argument and the host does not push back. But watch what Cofnas does not say. The Orthodox Jewish example he gives is revealing. Parents will select for children who share their religious dispositions, locking in coalition membership at the genetic level. Cofnas presents this as a feature, an explosion of new diversity. The frame is wrong. What he is describing is the convergence of coalition formation with biological technology, where coalitions become heritable in a stronger sense than they currently are. Alliance Theory angle predicts the consequence. Coalitions that can biologically reproduce themselves face less defection and develop sharper boundaries against outsiders. The Amish drop-out rate of ten to twenty percent that Cofnas cites as evidence of healthy diversity within group reproduction will not survive embryo selection. The drop-out path closes when the trait that makes someone want to drop out is selected against in the next generation.
Cofnas frames embryo selection as primarily an individual choice problem, with secondary consequences for population diversity. The choice frame is the liberal frame. The choice frame is what Strauss correctly identified as wanting the benefits of thick formation without paying formation costs. Embryo selection is the technology that promises thick coalition formation without the costs of community life. You can have your coalition continuity and individualism too. The framework will not accept that the costs come due somewhere.
The free speech section contains the most intellectually honest moment in the interview. Cofnas admits that platform-X under Musk’s free speech regime did not produce the people he was hoping for. He admits that anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, and Nazism have been normalized in ways that would have been unimaginable five years ago. He says this does not undermine his commitment to free speech but it makes him wonder how to design institutions to protect society from the negative consequences of free speech. This is the point at which the principled libertarian position cracks open and the institutional question reasserts itself. Cofnas does not follow the thread. He cannot, because following it would lead back to the conclusion that institutions exist to enforce coalition norms, that the right institutional form depends on which coalitions one wants to strengthen and which to weaken, and that the abstract value of free speech is doing less work than he wants to credit. Stephen Turner has written extensively on exactly this point. Liberalism’s procedural defenses cannot ground themselves in their own procedures. Some prior coalition decision is doing the work, and the procedural defense is the post hoc legitimation.
The host’s distance running example is a useful test case. Cofnas wants to argue that openly acknowledging hereditarian patterns will not depress the motivation of members of lower-performing groups, because individuals already know intuitively where they stand. His own example contradicts the argument. He describes realizing as a Jewish runner that he could not catch the East Africans, and the realization shaping his subsequent sense of running as not for him. The acknowledgment did its work on him. The next paragraph denies the acknowledgment would do its work on others. The contradiction is not addressed.
The strongest move in the interview is also the most quietly damaging to Cofnas’s broader thesis. He concedes that the great awakening’s emotional intensity has waned. He insists wokeism remains the institutional ideology. The host does not press the gap. If wokeism is the logical entailment of the equality premise, why did the intensity wane while the premise remained intact? The honest answer is that the intensity was driven by specific generational and platform conditions, not by the logical premise. Once you concede that, you have conceded that wokeism is not what Cofnas’s framework says it is. It is a coalition formation with contingent intensity, and the equality premise is one of its sustaining myths rather than its logical engine.
Cofnas is taking real risk. The Cambridge contract clause requiring him to disclose his affiliation when doing media is the kind of detail that makes his coalition position legible. He has a credentialed perch he is fighting to keep, a heterodox audience he is building outside the perch, and a lawsuit that will determine whether the perch survives. The four questions explain his prose style. He must sound credible to both audiences simultaneously. The careful hedging, the explicit disavowals of the rougher right, the appeals to free speech rather than to substantive heterodoxy, the framing of hereditarianism as good empirical science rather than as moral revolution. All of this is what coalition position-taking looks like when the position-taker is straddling.
The host’s question about whether the lawsuit helps his research is gently probing and Cofnas answers it cleanly. No. He would prefer to focus on his work. The honest answer is the right one and it should be respected. But it also tells you that Cofnas does not see his lawsuit as part of his intellectual project. He sees it as an interruption. Green in the previous interview would have said the lawsuit is the project. The institutional fight is not separate from the intellectual fight, because the institutions determine which intellectual fights can be had. Cofnas treats them as separable. The treatment is itself a coalition position. People whose careers depend on the institutions tend to treat the institutional question as adjacent to the real work. People outside the institutions tend to treat it as the real work.
Razib Khan: ‘Nathan Cofnas: Judaism’s group evolutionary strategy and hereditarianism defended’ (Jul. 24, 2025)
Cofnas talks with someone he treats as a peer rather than as audience, sponsor, or interlocutor. Razib is also Jewish-adjacent in his cultural fluency, knowledgeable about evolutionary genetics at a technical level Cofnas does not match, and friendly to hereditarianism from his own decades-long position in that conversation. This shifts everything. Cofnas drops the careful framing and reveals more of how he thinks about his own coalition position.
Apply my four questions. Razib is the rare case where the questions barely move because his position is unusually stable. He runs his own substack, has an established readership built over twenty-plus years, and operates outside the academic credential economy. He has nothing to lose by hosting Cofnas and Cofnas has nothing to lose by talking to him. The conversation reads accordingly.
The MacDonald section is the most analytically interesting half. Watch what Razib does that no other interlocutor managed. He grants Cofnas’s point about MacDonald’s documentary failures cleanly, then immediately introduces the evolutionary genetics objection that cuts deeper than anything Cofnas raised in his own published critiques. The objection has two parts. First, between-group genetic variation among neighboring populations is too low for biological group selection to do the work MacDonald wants. Second, MacDonald is wedded to a biological mechanism even when a cultural-group-selection mechanism would be more defensible mathematically. Cofnas accepts the cultural version and tries to argue that MacDonald’s substantive claims about Boas, Freud, and Marcuse could survive without the biological apparatus. This is true but it is also a concession. The biological apparatus was load-bearing for the cosmic significance of MacDonald’s claims. Strip it out and what remains is a fairly ordinary historical observation about Jewish over-representation in twentieth-century intellectual movements, which is exactly what Cofnas’s default hypothesis already accounted for. The MacDonald project collapses into something that does not need the framework MacDonald spent three books constructing.
Razib’s framing of this is generous but it leaves Cofnas in a position the framework does not cleanly handle. If MacDonald’s biological claims are wrong on technical evolutionary grounds, and his historical claims reduce to over-representation patterns explained by IQ plus motivation under persecution, then Cofnas’s elaborate engagement with MacDonald has been engagement with a position that did not need such elaborate engagement. The default hypothesis was the answer. The five papers, the philosophia controversy, the back-and-forth across years, all of it was Cofnas treating MacDonald as more substantive than the technical objections warranted. Coalition logic explains why. MacDonald is the prestigious anti-Semitic position. Refuting MacDonald positions Cofnas as the credentialed Jewish defender against the most intellectually serious form of anti-Semitism. The role requires that MacDonald be substantive enough to need refuting. Razib’s shrug at MacDonald’s evolutionary biology threatens the role.
The Tim Wise observation is the best one in either direction. Wise loudly proclaims himself a Jew based on one Jewish grandparent, engages in offensive behavior, and gets received as a Jew doing something offensive. The pattern is the same one Razib points out about Diana Fleischman. Three-quarters European ancestry, deployed as exemplar of Jewish behavior. The mechanism is straightforward. People who already have the framework will find data points to fit it, and they will not look closely at the data points that fit. Trivers on self-deception covers the cognitive operation. The framework selects which features of Wise to attend to.
The Israel section is where Cofnas’s framework strains hardest. Razib says Israel’s existence as a multi-ethnic Jewish state undercuts MacDonald’s racial-purity tenet. The state is forty percent Ashkenazi, twenty percent Mizrahi, fifteen percent Sephardi, plus Ethiopians, Yemenites, Indians, and so on, all bound by religious-national ideology rather than narrow genetic continuity. If Jewish group strategy were really about racial purity in MacDonald’s sense, Israel would not look like this. Cofnas accepts the point. He has to. The data are unambiguous. But notice what this does to the framework. The thing holding Jewish identity together is religious-national ideology, which is exactly the kind of cultural-historical formation Stephen Turner would identify as needing analysis on its own terms rather than reduction to coalition-genetic mechanism. Cofnas’s framework works best when it can reduce ideologies to their group-strategic functions. Israel does not reduce that way.
Razib’s gay-friend example and Indian-immigrant example are doing the work Cofnas’s framework should do but does not. Why do groups vote the way they do? Because of who is threatening them and who is offering them inclusion. Coalition behavior follows persecution and protection patterns. The French Protestant case Razib raises is the cleanest demonstration. Protestants over-represented in revolutionary activism not because Protestantism is fundamentally revolutionary but because the old regime persecuted them and the revolution offered them inclusion. The same logic applies to Jewish over-representation in early-twentieth-century left movements. The right-wing coalitions of that era were structurally anti-Semitic. The left-wing coalitions were not. Coalition behavior followed. No need for group-evolutionary-strategy apparatus. Razib gives Cofnas this argument and Cofnas accepts it without seeming to notice that it does to his own framework what it does to MacDonald’s. Both frameworks try to extract group-specific psychological dispositions from patterns that coalition logic explains without dispositional posits.
The Hanania exchange is short but consequential. Razib pushes back on Cofnas’s claim that wokeism is the inevitable consequence of taking the equality thesis seriously, by pointing out that Hanania’s civil-rights-law explanation has its own difficulties. Cofnas’s counter is solid as far as it goes. Civil rights law cannot explain why Canada and Sweden became woker than the United States, because they did not have the same legal apparatus. But neither can the equality-thesis-plus-disparities frame explain timing, because the equality thesis was orthodoxy long before the great awakening. Razib does not press this. The honest answer is that both Hanania’s frame and Cofnas’s frame are partial. Wokeism emerged from specific institutional, technological, generational, and ideological conditions, and any single-cause explanation will miss most of them. Turner’s proceduralism would predict this outcome. Sociologists who reduce complex coalition formations to single causal mechanisms will always be partially right and largely wrong.
The closing section on Cofnas’s own future is the most candid moment in any of these interviews. He admits he does not make much money on substack. He admits he does not want to paywall because the point is reaching people who would not pay him. He admits the lawsuit may or may not save his Cambridge position. He admits the institutional reception of his work has shaped what is available to him. The candor is striking because it makes visible what the four questions track. Cofnas’s coalition position is unstable. He has the credentials to be inside the institutions and the politics to be outside them, and the gap between those two positions is where his career is being lived. The substack project is partly intellectual and partly an attempt to build a career path that does not depend on institutions that will not have him. Razib understands this from his own twenty-plus-year career outside the institutions and treats it with appropriate seriousness.
The AI exchange at the end is funny and revealing. Razib feeds ChatGPT to Cofnas as a test. The model produces something with the title “Genetic Inequality: The Limits of Egalitarian Social Engineering” and the line “when a policy is built on a scientific falsehood, its failure is not a matter of if but of when.” Cofnas correctly identifies that this is not him. The interesting thing is what the model thinks Cofnas sounds like. The model’s Cofnas-impression captures the brand surface. Confident hereditarian-realism, gestures at scientific authority, prophetic framing of inevitable consequences. The model has read enough of Cofnas to extract the brand and not enough to reproduce the prose. The brand surface is what coalition members of the hereditarian-realist coalition are responding to. The prose is mostly noticed by people who already share the framework.
Cofnas modulates carefully according to interlocutor. With Boyce, he reasons about elite institutions broadly. With Wade, he plays younger interlocutor to the senior figure and lets Wade keep the safer hedges. With Green, he gets cornered on epistemology and housing and cannot extract himself. With the British host, he relaxes into the easier role of credentialed dissenter explaining wokeism to a layperson. With Razib, he speaks more freely than anywhere else because Razib is the rare interlocutor whose own coalition position is stable enough that Cofnas does not have to manage either flattery or hostility.
Cofnas’s framework is doing more coalition work than analytic work. The default hypothesis serves the Jewish-credentialed-defender role. The wokeism-as-equality-thesis frame serves the position of the rational liberal who happened to land on the right side of empirical questions. The free-speech lawsuit serves the role of principled academic against ideological capture. The hereditarian-revolution call serves the role of strategist for the future right-wing intellectual movement that does not yet exist. Each role has a coalition. The roles do not always cohere with each other, which is why under pressure from different interlocutors different roles emerge as primary. Alliance Theory angle does not require that the role-holder be aware of what the roles are doing. Trivers’s self-deception explains why the role-holder usually is not.
‘Beating Woke with Facts and Logic’ (Oct. 9, 2025)
Cofnas distinguishes proximate from ultimate causes of ideological victory and argues that wokism dominates institutions because cognitive elites adopted it, not because it was imposed by force. The institutions are downstream of the elites who staff them. You cannot purge your way to a working scientific establishment if the people capable of doing science remain on the other side.
The 51% tipping point material on conformity is well-deployed. Gay marriage went from 35% to 71% in roughly two decades, with the acceleration happening after the majority threshold flipped. The same logic explains how transgender ideology spread so fast. He uses these cases to argue that minority positions can become majority positions when elites adopt them and conformity reverses polarity. That part of the essay is sound.
The Hitler Youth data is striking. People imprinted with Nazi ideology in childhood mostly moderated as adults, even given the depth of that imprinting. That cuts against the strong version of “no one ever changes their mind.”
Now the problems.
The framework hangs entirely on the claim that hereditarianism is true with respect to between-group cognitive differences and that the gaps are substantially genetic. He treats this as established. The honest position is that the evidence is contested, the heritability of within-group IQ is well-supported, the between-group genetic claim is a different inference, and the leading researchers in behavioral genetics disagree about the second question. Harden, whom Cofnas dismisses, is one of the most credentialed behavioral geneticists working today and she does not accept the strong between-group genetic claim. Cofnas treats her dissent as cowardice or ideology. It might be that. It might be that the data does not support what he thinks it supports. He does not engage that possibility.
This matters because his entire strategic argument assumes the underlying empirical claim is true and that exposure plus time will convince smart people. If the empirical claim is contested, the strategy collapses into “convince elites of a contested empirical claim by repeating it loudly,” which is the same move he criticizes wokesters for making about structural racism.
His treatment of Harden and DeBoer is the weakest section. He raises the obvious objection to his thesis, which is that hereditarian leftism already exists and produces conclusions wokesters can live with. His response is that Harden is not popular among her fellow leftists, ergo her position is not politically viable. That is a status argument dressed up as a structural one. New positions are unpopular at first. The whole essay claims that ideas can spread once elites adopt them and conformity flips. He cannot then point to current unpopularity as evidence that hereditarian leftism is a dead end.
The MAGA section reads as score-settling more than analysis. The Rufo Logos Fellowship anecdote, the Kennedy parasite, the FEMA hurricane line, the World Values Survey chart placing the American right with Erdogan and Putin. Some of this is fair. Some of it is the same contemptuous dismissal of working-class right-wingers that weakened his MAGA communism piece. He wants the right to win smart people while writing in a register that says smart people belong with him and the dumb belong with everyone else on the right. This is the same status move repeated.
His historical sections are useful and well-chosen. The Locke quote on the Hottentots, the UNESCO 1950 statement, the Watson behaviorism quote, the Nixon-Moynihan transcript, the Atheism+ logo with the cross. The history shows that race denial is a recurring theme in liberal thought and was often asserted before any evidence existed. That is a fair point. It does not by itself establish the truth of the opposite claim. Locke believing the blank slate without evidence does not mean Cofnas has evidence for the alternative.
The wokism-as-Christianity-substitute material is reasonable but not original. Lots of people have made this argument, including from the left. He makes it well.
Where the essay lands hardest: the claim that the right cannot retake the institutions because it does not have the human capital. That is correct. Counter-elite production has not happened at the scale required. Rufo struggling to staff a fellowship is a real signal. The right’s media ecosystem rewards demagogues over scholars, and the scholarly right that does exist is small, scattered, and often heterodox in ways that prevent coalition-building. This part of the diagnosis is accurate even if you reject the hereditarian solution.
The deeper question Cofnas does not ask: what if the equality thesis is wrong but the gaps are smaller than he thinks, the genetic component is partial, and the policy implications are nothing like what he assumes? That is the most likely state of the world given current evidence. In that world, neither wokism nor his hereditarian revolution is the right framework, and the path forward is the slow accretion of honest inquiry without grand strategic claims about which empirical fact will dissolve which ideology. That is a less exciting position. It does not generate Substack traffic. But it might be closer to the truth.
‘Don’t Scapegoat Women’ (Jan. 7, 2026)
The dismantling of Helen Andrews works because she made the analytic mistake of staking too much on a timing claim that does not survive contact with the historical record. Cofnas catches her cleanly.
The 1767 Harvard laws section is the killer move. Public shaming, guilt by association, expulsion for blasphemy, denial of degrees for moral failures, religious purity tests for admission. All before women set foot on campus. Andrews’s claim that “all cancellations are feminine” cannot survive that document. The Bertrand Russell example, the French Revolution, the communist purges, traditional religious excommunication, Trump calling Buchanan a Hitler lover in 1999. Cancel culture is the default human condition, not a female import.
The free speech survey analysis is also good. The 2017 YouGov data Andrews cites shows women are less supportive of free speech for both right and left positions. They want to ban the speaker who says whites and Asians have higher IQs and the speaker who says all whites are racist. That is risk aversion, not wokism. Cofnas’s framing of this as Darwinian, the small reproductive ceiling for women selecting for safety preference, fits.
The Yoram Hazony irony lands. Andrews wrote at NatCon that women suppress controversial facts to protect group cohesion, which is the behavior NatCon engaged in toward Cofnas’s race work. The essay turns Andrews’s thesis against the institution that platformed her.
Where the essay weakens is the same place the others weaken. Apply my four questions to Cofnas’s preferred solution. He wants a hereditarian revolution among cognitive elites. Who do those elites rely on for status, income, and protection? Universities, foundations, peer review, prestige media. Who must they retain as allies? Other elites who share the equality thesis as a coalition signal. What signals mark coalition membership? Public commitment to anti-racism, DEI compliance, the right citations. What would they give up if they accepted hereditarianism? Career, reputation, social standing, often family relationships. Cofnas’s own Cambridge expulsion is the demonstration. He keeps proposing a solution his own life refutes.
The essay also has a structural problem of overreach in the closing pages. The argument against Andrews is tight. Then Cofnas pivots to his standing thesis that wokism flows from the equality thesis taken seriously, and from there to the claim that liberal elites are the smart and moral ones who at least follow their premises while MAGA conservatives are medieval peasants invoking demons. The pivot reads as score-settling. He gets to claim the high IQ side, dismiss his enemies on the right as superstitious, and dismiss his enemies on the left as wrong-but-consistent. The essay would be stronger if it stopped after demolishing Andrews.
Andrews’s coalition is the dissident right that wants to roll back civil rights law without sounding like the old racist right. Her thesis solves a coalition problem. It lets her attack the modern order through women rather than through race, which is more respectable in NatCon circles than what Cofnas does. The “feminization” frame functions as a coalition-acceptable substitute for hereditarianism. It tells her audience they can blame the visible thing (women in HR) without paying the costs of the explanation Cofnas thinks is correct. Cofnas misses this read because he treats Andrews’s argument as a sincere empirical mistake rather than a coalition production. The empirical mistakes are real. They are also functional. They let her say something acceptable to her audience.
Becker fits Andrews. The dissident right needs a hero system that explains the fall. Feminization is a clean fall narrative. Once upon a time men ran institutions and made hard rational decisions. Then the laws forced women in. Now we live in the kindergarten. The story has a villain (judges and bureaucrats), a victim (the masculine), and a path to restoration (repeal civil rights law). Cofnas’s hereditarian story is also a hero system but with a smaller and more demanding audience.
Andrews wants to derive a working order from a metaphysical claim about female nature. Cofnas wants to derive one from a metaphysical claim about innate group differences. Both think a single empirical correction will produce political consequences. Turner’s procedural account would say that the institutions sustaining either order have to be built and tended, that they cannot be summoned by a thesis, and that the people running them will have coalition reasons to resist or accept the thesis that have little to do with whether it is true.
Cofnas is right that woke ideology predates feminization by a long stretch. But the section also reveals a problem with his linear story. If the equality thesis has been the orthodoxy since the late nineteenth century, and wokism follows logically from it, why did wokism take 130 years to emerge in recognizable form? His answer is that it took time for people to absorb the orthodoxy and that they had to try every other intervention first. That is plausible but it is a forces argument about coalition intensification, not a logical deduction. The deductive frame keeps collapsing into a coalition frame even when he resists it.
The line that the Civil War “permanently cancelled 258,000 white Confederate soldiers in order to free the black slaves” reads as a rhetorical stunt that cheapens the surrounding argument.
‘The Hereditary Heresy | with Nathan Cofnas’ (Jan. 8, 2026)
Cofnas plays a careful coalition game. He needs to sound hereditarian enough to keep his audience and anti-MacDonald enough to retain mainstream credibility. He depends on Substack subscribers and future academic placements that want HBD truth without Nazi associations. He must attract secular liberals open to genetics and conservative intellectuals tired of the blank slate, while warding off Fuentes-style anti-Semites. His coalition signals are scientific framing, citation of behavior genetics, and rejection of MacDonald. He loses his brand if he concedes MacDonald’s stronger claims, and his next academic placement might evaporate too.
The default hypothesis works as a rhetorical move but answers a question MacDonald does not ask. MacDonald’s claim is not that Jews are over-represented in leftist movements. That part is trivial. His claim is that the content of those movements served Jewish group interests as the participants understood them, particularly after the Holocaust. Cofnas’s reply that Jews are over-represented in fascism, libertarianism, chess, and physics shows high IQ explains presence. It does not show the content of the relevant movements was random with respect to Jewish concerns. The two claims do not contradict, so the default hypothesis does not refute MacDonald, it sidesteps him.
The Italian fascism counter is half a point. Italian fascism before 1938 had high Jewish participation. German Nazism, the case MacDonald cares about, did not. Margherita Sarfatti was Mussolini’s mistress and intellectual patron until the racial laws drove her out. Citing her against MacDonald assumes the two cases are equivalent. They are not.
The Sowell critique lands. Sowell’s redneck-culture story has the structural problem Cofnas identifies. It traces back to slavery anyway. It treats Blacks as passive carriers of cultural memes for centuries. It does the work conservatives need without showing the work is done correctly. Cofnas could press harder on why this story appeals to coalition-bound conservatives. They need a non-hereditarian explanation that does not lead to reparations. Sowell provides it. National Review writers depend on donors and readers who want a respectable race position. They must attract conservative-leaning Whites who reject both white guilt and white identity. Their coalition signals are colorblindness and the Sowell thesis. They lose access to the donor and lecture circuit if they concede hereditarianism.
The Locke 1690 point is an error of intellectual history. Locke held shares in the Royal African Company. He helped draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which protected hereditary slavery. The Hottentot remark sat inside an educational treatise about plasticity, not a manifesto for racial equality. Reading modern wokeness back into Locke is the move Vermeule and Deneen make in reverse when they read modern liberalism back into medieval Catholicism. The continuity is partial. The framing flattens history into a story about ancestral original sin.
Cofnas concedes feminization is real, concedes women drive certain features of the great awokening, then argues the underlying ideology came from men. Both might be true at once. Helen Andrews has a point that institutional intensification required female numerical dominance in HR, DEI, and academic administration. Cofnas has a point that the ideology predates that dominance. The argument reduces to which factor counts as the cause, and that is a coalition-bound question rather than a scientific one. Defenders of the men-built-it position want masculine intellectual lineage protected. Defenders of the women-broke-it position want institutional capture explained. Both serve different audiences. Turner’s point about tradition sustaining itself through unresolved tensions applies. The wokeness story holds together because the male-built ideology and the female-enforced infrastructure each cover the other’s weak spots.
The mouse utopia frame is weaker than Cofnas suggests. Calhoun’s experiments do not transfer cleanly. Rats had no choice about their conditions. Men choose. The dysgenic IQ claim is contested. Whether the Flynn effect has reversed depends on which subtests, which countries, which cohorts. Citing Calhoun functions more as a coalition signal to the evolution-aware right than as an argument.
The conversation skips a question worth asking. Who funds and amplifies which intellectual position? Hereditarianism has small but precise patrons. Blank slatism holds institutional dominance. The debate gets treated as a question about evidence when the structure of who can say what without losing employment is the harder constraint. Boyce gestures at this. Cofnas lost his Cambridge contract over an essay. That is data about which coalitions hold power in which institutions, and it carries more explanatory weight than the evidentiary disputes.
The strongest move in the conversation is the inversion. Anti-Semitism is wokeness applied to Jews. The structure is identical. Take a population with different average outcomes from the comparison group. Demand they be equal. Construct a conspiracy to explain why they are not. Cofnas does not push the point as far as it might go. The two ideologies are mirror images of the same denial of biological variation, and they tend to occupy the same psychological niche in different populations. Becker’s hero system framing fits. Each ideology gives its adherents a cosmic role as resistance fighters against an evil that explains everything. The woke get to fight white supremacy. The anti-Semite gets to fight Jewish supremacy. Each role rewards the holder with status, belonging, and an enemy.
Cofnas’s optimism about a hereditarian science of immigration policy might underestimate the coalition obstacles. He treats the problem as one of taboo. Once we drop the taboo, we can have the science. Turner’s work on epistemic coercion suggests otherwise. The taboo is the coalition signal. Removing it requires that hereditarianism become coalition-neutral, and it cannot become coalition-neutral while one side claims a monopoly on moral seriousness about race. The science cannot precede the political settlement, because the science is the political settlement.
‘Nathan Cofnas: What is IQ?’ (Jan. 26, 2026)
Cofnas walks a popular interviewer through basic IQ material for an audience that has not heard it before. The constraints of the format flatten his argument and expose where his frame thins out under casual conditions.
Travis Myers is hosting a small podcast, 276 views. He has a working-class New York frame, dyslexia story, beat cop sympathies, distrust of credentials. Who does Cofnas need to attract here? An audience that already half-believes him and wants the validation of hearing a Cambridge fellow say it out loud. What signals coalition membership? Casual references to Harvard’s internal numbers, the Indian-American success story framed in racial terms, the side comment about Columbia under lockdown. What does Cofnas give up by talking to Myers rather than declining? Possibly some standing with the academic audience he still wants to win. He is making a coalition trade in real time. The transcript shows him performing for a populist audience while in his essays he insists the populist right is medieval and the smart liberal coalition is the only audience that matters. The two performances do not fit cleanly together.
Cofnas asserts that Brahmins probably underwent selection for religious study over thousands of years and that this gave them an edge. The evidence base for this is thin, the selection pressures hard to measure, and the comparison to African American transracial adoption studies is not parallel. He is doing exactly what he criticizes Sapolsky and Haidt for doing in other contexts: confident extrapolation from suggestive data to civilizational claims. Trivers applies. The certainty about the other side’s coalition bias and the speculative confidence about one’s own preferred mechanism rarely come apart.
The cold-winters theory section has the same problem. Cofnas presents it as established when it is contested even within the hereditarian literature. Lynn proposed it, Rushton extended it, Sun’s recent paper revives it, but the selection-pressure story remains speculative. A non-expert audience will hear it as settled. Cofnas knows it is not, and earlier in the transcript he correctly insists that non-experts should defer to consensus when the consensus is real. He drops that standard when the speculation flatters his frame.
The Bertrand Russell line in his Andrews essay applies to his own situation here. He keeps using cancellation language while saying he refuses to use cancellation language. “I prefer to call it an attempted cancellation process” then ten minutes later “without getting into the details for legal reasons, yes I am” being cancelled. The Becker hero structure shows. He is the truth-teller punished by an unjust order, fighting from within the institution that wants him out. The structure stabilizes his identity. It also makes his analysis of the situation harder to trust because the analysis serves the role.
The Myers questions are leading throughout. The DEI hire in surgery, the cop who cannot pass the test, the illiterate Hartford graduate suing the school district. Each invites Cofnas to confirm a populist grievance. He confirms each one without complicating it. The illiterate graduate case in particular is more complex than the framing suggests, with disability accommodations and IEP failures often in play, but Cofnas takes Myers’s framing at face value because the format does not reward complication.
Cofnas says he wants to highlight the harm done to white people, not just to minorities, by the equality thesis. This is honest about his coalition position in a way the essays sometimes obscure. The essays present hereditarianism as a universal corrective. The transcript shows it as a corrective that benefits one coalition more than others by reassigning blame. Both can be true. But the transcript admits the second part more openly than the essays do.
The Stuyvesant and Bronx Science section repeats a familiar conservative talking point that has been overstated. The schools have not been “stolen” from anyone. The admissions test remains. The recent fights have been about Hunter College High School, the SHSAT in middle school feeders, and selective magnet programs at the elementary level. Stuyvesant still admits primarily by test. Cofnas accepts Myers’s framing rather than correcting it. This is the cost of the format. He is performing solidarity with the host’s worldview rather than reporting accurately.
The interview ends with Cofnas saying he does not know how much longer the establishment can keep people from talking about IQ differences in the mainstream because the zoomer right knows all about it. This is the same prediction he makes in the wokism essay, where it serves a different role. There he predicts continuing leftward intensification driven by zoomer wokeness. Here he predicts coming hereditarian openness driven by zoomer rightwingness. Both predictions are true of different segments of the cohort, but Cofnas tends to deploy whichever prediction supports his current paragraph. The zoomers are not a single thing.
The academic papers show Cofnas at his sharpest. The interview shows him at his most accommodating.
‘The Great Awokening: The Lecture They Didn’t Want You to Hear’ (University of Ghent) (Apr. 7, 2026)
Post-Cambridge dismissal from Emmanuel, post-lawsuit, post-petition campaigns. Cofnas now at Ghent, giving the talk that attracted the next petition. The lecture follows the structure he has refined across the interview circuit: equality thesis as logical root of wokeism, then a historical genealogy from Locke through UNESCO, then a science section on ancestral populations and IQ. Every move has been rehearsed.
Apply the four questions to Cofnas at Ghent. Status, income, protection: a precarious Ghent appointment, the Free Speech Union legal backing, crowdfunded lawsuit money, Substack subscribers, the dissident podcast circuit, and the slot as the credentialed academic who paid the costs. Allies to attract or retain: hereditarian researchers, philosophy-of-biology peers, free speech academics, conservative intellectuals who admire him for absorbing damage, and the lawyer-funders who write checks. Membership signals: the equality thesis as the keystone of wokeism, the right-wing stupidity essay as evidence that he is no tribal partisan, the disavowal of Richard Lynn and Nick Fuentes, the embrace of David Reich and James Flynn as serious-scientist allies. What he gives up if he changes position: the funder pool, the audience, and the hero-system role he has built around being the man who told the truth and paid for it.
The opening joke about America preferring to shoot people rather than jail them is coalition work disguised as humor. He is positioning as the persecuted dissident in a European jurisdiction more authoritarian than the American one he came from. The line is not factually clean. Cofnas has said in earlier interviews that he could not get hired in America for these views. America is not the free-speech haven the joke suggests. But the joke is not making a factual claim. It is making an identity claim. Cofnas is the American truth-teller wandering the European wilderness. The audience absorbs the framing before the argument begins.
The historical genealogy is the part of the lecture that does the most rhetorical work and that holds up the worst under examination. Cofnas constructs a single tradition called the equality thesis running from Locke through Watson through UNESCO through Chomsky through Diamond and Gardner. The tradition is not single. Locke’s blank slate was an argument in epistemology against innate ideas. Watson’s behaviorism was a research program in psychology. UNESCO 1950 was a response to a recent genocide. Chomsky’s position is about whether the research has scientific or social value, not about heritability per se. Gluing these together treats them as more unified than they are. Turner on essentialism applies. Movements survive on unresolved tensions. The tradition Cofnas calls the equality thesis is several traditions with different motivations that happen to converge on similar conclusions. Treating the convergence as a single load-bearing claim is the essentialist error. The error matters because the strategic project requires it. If wokeism does not logically follow from one keystone claim, refuting the claim does not cure wokeism. Cofnas needs the keystone to be real.
What the genealogy leaves out is the post-1945 context. Cofnas mentions Nazi pseudoscience and dismisses it as unrelated to responsible race science. He does not engage why the public arrived at the equality thesis after the war. The eugenics movement in America had sterilized hundreds of thousands of people. Restrictive immigration policy in the 1920s was driven by hereditarian arguments. The Holocaust was justified by a framework that presented itself as race science even if it was pseudoscience. UNESCO 1950 was not an irrational lurch toward Lockean philosophy. It was a response to recent atrocity. Cofnas can argue that the response overshot. He cannot argue that the response had no rational basis. The genealogy that pretends otherwise is doing coalition work, not history.
The Europe-backwater question is the moment the framework fails publicly. The questioner asks why Europe was a backwater for most of history if Western Eurasians were being selected for higher intelligence over the last 14,000 years. Cofnas cannot answer. He says he cannot address all questions of history. The retreat is significant. The Reich study he cites is supposed to show selection for IQ-associated genes. If the selection runs over millennia, the framework should predict the populations selected for IQ should outperform their neighbors over historical time. Mediterranean civilization was dominated by non-Europeans for most of recorded history. The European intellectual takeoff happened in the last 500 years. The hereditarian framework has trouble with timing questions because genetic differences accumulate slowly while cultural and institutional differences can swing fast. Cultural-institutional explanations handle the timing better. Cofnas knows this and changes the subject.
The Howard Gardner quote about life being short is damning. Cofnas’s opponents have handed him real ammunition. Gardner more or less admits he will teach multiple intelligences theory even if the empirical evidence runs against it because the political consequences of the alternative are too costly. This is precisely the noble-lie posture Cofnas attributes to the equality thesis tradition. When Cofnas’s critics behave this way, his critique writes itself. The strongest part of the lecture is the part where his enemies have done his work for him.
The audience exchanges show coalition recalibration in real time. The Hispanic-as-socially-constructed concession costs him nothing because the rest of the data still points the way he wants. The Lynn distancing is sharper. A reporter tries to associate him with Richard Lynn. Cofnas counters that he disagrees with Lynn and that James Flynn was the peer reviewer for his first paper on this topic. The Flynn citation is a genuine coalition asset. Flynn was both the leading critic of Lynn and a serious researcher who engaged hereditarian arguments instead of dismissing them. Claiming Flynn-side legitimacy positions Cofnas inside the responsible-scientist coalition rather than outside it. The American Renaissance disavowal does similar work. He concedes that AmRen has hosted people he cannot defend in recent years and explicitly distances from them. He cannot afford the alt-right brand. The lawsuit funders, the philosophy peers, and the free speech academics all need him to be on the right side of that line.
He moralizes about wokeism as a moral emergency built on a false empirical premise. He has argued elsewhere that natural selection has not equipped human beings with moral intuitions that track moral truth, which is why moral realism makes no sense. The two halves cannot both stand. Either his moral claims about wokeism have purchase, in which case the metaethical debunking was overstated, or they do not, in which case the lecture’s moral framing collapses. Trivers on self-deception applies. The contradiction would dissolve the project, so the mind protects the project from recognition.
The closing line is the hero-system statement. “You can decide who should go to jail, me or my critics.” The audience becomes the jury in a moral drama where he is the persecuted truth-teller and the petition signers are the censors. This is the meaning-providing structure of the work. Cofnas is not just defending a research program. He is occupying a role that supplies him with significance. The persecution and the truth-telling are inseparable in the role. Without the persecution there is no truth-teller. Without the truth-telling there is no persecution. Each justifies the other and neither justifies itself.
‘Strange Bedfellows’ aka Alliance Theory
Cofnas presents as outside the frame Alliance Theory describes. His stated commitments are procedural and empirical. He defends inquiry rather than conclusions. He audits arguments rather than building systems. He treats moral intuition as evolved heuristic rather than truth-tracking. The whole posture announces a man trying to step outside coalition psychology and look at the data.
This is the case where Strange Bedfellows predicts that the man who most loudly denies coalitional motivation often uses that denial as a coalition signal.
Cofnas does not sit alone. He sits inside a recognizable cluster: the Journal of Controversial Ideas, Quillette, the heterodox Substack network, free-speech academic groups, behavioral genetics researchers like Robert Plomin, public-facing utilitarian philosophers like Peter Singer, Francesca Minerva, and Jeff McMahan, and a wider X-based commentariat that runs from cautious centrists to explicit race-realists. The Ghent counter-letter signed by Singer, Minerva, and McMahan reveals the network exactly. They defend his appointment because the boundary markers they share with him hold across substantive disagreements.
Cofnas does not share Singer’s utilitarianism. His 2022 paper on Singer’s Golden Rule debunks Singer’s central metaethical move, showing that the cross-cultural convergence Singer needs as anchor for non-natural moral truth dissolves on contact with the texts. Hillel does not present the Golden Rule as the essence of Judaism. Navon counts eighty instances where fifteen different mitzvos are declared equal to all the Torah. Mencius called Mozi a beast for advocating inclusive care. Hindu commentaries center ahimsa. The tradition-by-tradition convergence collapses. Yet Singer signed the Ghent counter-letter defending Cofnas. The substantive debunking does not break the alliance because alliances form through transitivity and shared boundary markers, not through agreement on first principles. Allies coordinate around shared markers. They tolerate substantive disagreement so long as the boundaries hold.
The opposing coalition has its own structure. The DEI administrative apparatus. Mainstream egalitarian moral and political philosophy. Bioethics departments allergic to behavioral genetics. Activist student organizations. Open letter signatories from his own department at Ghent. They share boundary markers too: equity, harm prevention, structural explanation. They are allies of one another even when they disagree on first principles.
Cofnas’s 2022 Academic Questions piece “Four Reasons Why Heterodox Academy Failed” applies the alliance reading to a coalition that might have offered Cofnas cover and did not. Heterodox Academy was founded in 2015 by Jonathan Haidt and John Tomasi to provide academic dissent the institutional cover that mainstream universities had withdrawn. It claimed more than 5,400 members. Cofnas reconstructs the founding choices. Haidt and Tomasi recruited respectable academics who depend on Harvard, Yale, NYU, and the broader prestige system for status, income, and protection. The coalition cannot survive a frank race-differences argument, so HxA never had one. Mill quotes are coalition signals. Condemning Trump is a coalition signal. Treating John McWhorter as the upper bound of permissible race talk and Helmuth Nyborg as beyond the pale is the coalition’s working boundary. The drift toward respectability was not a betrayal of the founding mission. It was the founding mission, visible in the original membership list and in who they let speak from year one. Pinsof reads this as alliance-by-not-joining. Cofnas declined the heterodox-respectable coalition that HxA offered and located himself inside the heterodox-hereditarian coalition that HxA was structured to exclude. The two coalitions occupy adjacent terrain and compete for the same heterodox-academic constituency. Cofnas’s audit polices the boundary between them.
Each side applies its evidentiary standards selectively. Cofnas’s coalition demands extraordinary evidence from egalitarians for the claim that observed group differences in cognitive performance have zero genetic contribution. It treats partial genetic contribution as a possibility that should remain open until ruled out. The opposing coalition reverses the polarity. It treats environmental explanation as the default and demands extraordinary evidence before genetic contribution can be discussed at all.
Both sides present their default as the neutral one. Both sides treat the other’s default as motivated reasoning. The Strange Bedfellows reading is that neither default is neutral. Both reflect prior coalition commitments about which findings are tolerable and which are not.
The selectivity also runs inside Cofnas’s own work. The 2024 Sowell critique applies extraordinary forensic standards to Thomas Sowell’s footnotes. Cofnas catches the Jensen misquote about Appalachian inbreeding. He catches the Ulster geography slip, where Sowell appears not to have checked where his Scotch-Irish ancestors came from. Ulster is a province of Ireland, not a county in New York. The Cicero passage on slaves is doctored. The Dunbar IQ figures lack provenance. Sixty books is a warning sign. Cofnas applies the standards rigorously here. He does not apply the same standards to “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution,” which functions as flag. The Substack audience does not require the specifications a journal article might. Cofnas’s forensic standard is real. It applies more strictly to coalition rivals than to coalition signals.
Cofnas’s coalition rallies around academic freedom when the threatened scholar holds heterodox-right positions. It grows quieter when the threatened scholar holds heterodox-left positions, or when the threat comes from a state legislature pulling funding from gender studies. The opposing coalition reverses the asymmetry.
In his 2024 MAGA-communism essay. Cofnas writes dismissively of working-class Trump-curious voters. The Rufo Logos Fellowship anecdote shows Cofnas’s contempt for movement-conservative institutional struggles. The Kennedy parasite line, the FEMA hurricane line, the World Values Survey chart placing the American right with Erdogan and Putin. The right’s working-class realignment is treated as the embarrassing version of anti-wokism, and Cofnas wants to peel the smart anti-wokes away from it. The same author who defends free inquiry against DEI activists treats MAGA voters with a register he might call defamatory if directed at his coalition. The coalition Cofnas wants to lead is not anti-establishment universally. It is anti-establishment toward the credentialed-progressive establishment and condescending toward the populist working-class right that votes for outcomes that might benefit Cofnas’s coalition.
Perpetrator and victim distortion run through the Cofnas affair on both sides. His coalition narrates the story as an academic of integrity persecuted by activist mobs. The opposing coalition narrates it as a marginal figure with discreditable views protected by powerful free-speech allies. Each story selects facts that fit. The Cambridge dismissal of fifty-eight complaints and the County Court ruling on protected belief get foregrounded by his side. The 2024 post and its political reception get foregrounded by the other side.
The Andrew Gold interview from January 2025 catalogues the victim narrative in pure form. The Daily Mail fabricated a quote and ran it under his name. The Telegraph published a piece calling for his removal. He describes the radio interview with Nick Ferrari as among the nastiest some viewers had seen. A top Korean university deplatformed him, probably through a Korean academic with a UK PhD who had absorbed the Anglo-American taboos. Each new institutional rejection becomes a data point in the persecution narrative the coalition needs.
Attributional bias runs through both narratives. Cofnas’s allies attribute his work to truth-seeking and his opponents’ work to ideology. His opponents reverse the attribution. Neither side considers that both forms of motivation might run side by side. Coalition members read in-group action as principled and out-group action as motivated, and they do this without effort because the bias serves coordination.
Cofnas has built a substantial part of his philosophical work on a debunking argument against the authority of moral intuition. The 2019 paper on Westermarck shows the gap between an evolved drive and a moral norm. Kin selection gives a man a disposition to favor his children. It does not give him a moral judgment that everyone should favor their children. Shor and Simchai’s reanalysis of the kibbutz data, showing most coreared kibbutzniks felt indifference rather than aversion, supplies the inspectable evidence Cofnas brings against Shepher’s Westermarckian story. The 2018 paper on Boehm’s social selection theory closes the door on realist readings by arguing the rule-makers were themselves driven by fitness-tracking impulses. The 2020 paper on debunking moral progress runs the same operation across self-interest plus empathy. Strong moral responses against certain lines of inquiry track coalition fitness rather than moral truth. Therefore the responses do not settle the question. Therefore inquiry must continue.
This is the misunderstanding move in pure form. He casts his opponents’ deepest moral intuitions as products of evolved coordination devices and his own procedural commitments as a tracking of reason. The coalition intellectual presents his side as clear-eyed and the rival side as captured by psychology its members cannot see.
The wokism essay extends the operation. Cofnas frames wokism as following from the equality thesis plus Christian morality. Locke supplies the blank-slate premise. Christianity supplies the moral architecture. WEIRD psychology carries the inheritance. Contemporary secular liberals run on Christian moral software while denying the operating system underneath. The frame flatters Cofnas’s coalition as secular naturalists who have followed the argument where their opponents flinch. The opposing coalition becomes Christians-in-denial, captive to a theological inheritance they cannot see. Pinsof’s framework reads this as the misunderstanding move plus a genealogical insult. Opponents are not simply wrong. They are unwitting carriers of a faith they think they have abandoned. Cofnas’s own coalition signals (procedural commitment, free inquiry, secular naturalism) escape the same genealogical treatment. Why should commitment to procedural inquiry be immune to the same evolutionary debunking? Each commitment has a coalition behind it, a set of co-signatories, a shared vocabulary, a recognizable opponent. Strange Bedfellows says Cofnas applies the debunking selectively. The targets are the moral commitments of the rival coalition. The procedural and political commitments of his own coalition do not get the same scrutiny.
Cofnas’s response to this charge might point out that he applies the debunking argument to his own intuitions too. That is a partial answer. The deeper question is whether the procedural commitments are vulnerable to the same debunking treatment. The Brenner interview from late 2025 surfaces a related layer. Brenner is positioned to see what the heterodox-right interviewers cannot. Cofnas is managing his own exit from inherited Jewish communal identity while retaining the analytic interest in Jewish demographic questions that the exit has not erased. The hereditarian-revolution framework operates partly as coalition relocation. It moves Cofnas from the inherited-Jewish coalition (which might penalize his project) to a heterodox-academic coalition that rewards Jewish-credentialed dissent from progressive orthodoxy. The exit does the work the inherited identity used to do. It supplies coalition position, interpretive vocabulary, and protective markers, while shedding the obligations the inherited coalition might impose. Pinsof’s framework reads this as a fifth coalition operating alongside the four the heterodox-right interviewers usually see. The framework Cofnas has built is partly a coalition migration vehicle, and the migration is doing identity work that does not show up in the procedural language the project officially uses.
“A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution” reads differently inside the framework. As a piece of philosophical argument, it is thin. As a coalition signal, it is precise. The word “Revolution” rallies allies and provokes opponents. The framing of meritocracy as something to be purified rather than reformed marks the boundary between heterodox-right hereditarianism and the more cautious empirical literature on heritability. The implied policy direction lets readers sort themselves into the coalition or out of it.
The Conly paternalism paper extends the policy direction quietly. Cofnas accepts Conly’s case for coercive paternalism and adds the premise she explicitly rejects: that intellectual capacity differs across people in ways bearing on who needs protecting from his own choices. The paper sketches surveillance proposals for low-IQ patients, supervisors monitoring grocery stores, financial penalties for medication non-adherence. Conly’s coalition does not endorse these proposals. The careful-hereditarian coalition Cofnas was joining does. The paper functions as a coalition signal that Cofnas’s hereditarianism has policy teeth, not just empirical claims. Signaling moves of this kind cluster as coalitions consolidate. Cofnas’s defenders treat the paper as exploratory philosophy. His critics treat it as evidence of intent. The function lies somewhere between the two readings. The paper marks territory the coalition might want to occupy if conditions shift.
The 2018 paper on MacDonald looks at first like a counterexample to coalition reading. Cofnas takes apart a man whose conclusions sit on the same general terrain that Cofnas later defends: claims about Jewish achievement, group-level evolutionary explanation, hereditarian framings of social outcomes. If Cofnas were a simple coalition partisan, he might have left MacDonald alone or quietly shielded him.
He did the opposite. The Alliance Theory reading is that the MacDonald takedown was internal coalition discipline. For the careful hereditarian coalition Cofnas was joining, MacDonald functions as a liability. His arguments fail by the standards Cofnas wanted to defend. He gives an easy target to opponents who want to tar all hereditarian work with antisemitic association. By auditing MacDonald in detail and rejecting the group-evolutionary-strategy framework, Cofnas distinguished his coalition from MacDonald’s. He established the credibility he later spent on the 2020 free-inquiry paper. The takedown looks like adversarial truth-seeking. It also functions as boundary policing inside an adjacent intellectual ecosystem.
The 2024 Sowell takedown patrols the opposite boundary. Where MacDonald sits to the right of the careful-hereditarian coalition, Sowell sits inside respectable American conservatism: Hoover, National Review, six decades of accumulated authority, sixty books. His culturalism gives the right a story about Black underperformance that does not touch the genetic third rail. Cofnas’s audit forces conservatives to choose. Either defend the cultural story rigorously, which Sowell’s footnotes do not survive, or move to the hereditarian coalition that does. The takedown is internal discipline at the left edge of Cofnas’s coalition, just as the MacDonald takedown was internal discipline at the right edge. The same forensic register. The same coalition function. Pinsof’s framework reads the two takedowns as a single operation: boundary patrol on both sides of the careful-hereditarian coalition’s territory.
The Calmversations interview from January 2026 shows the MacDonald boundary patrol continuing. Cofnas’s “default hypothesis” against MacDonald holds that Jews are over-represented across cognitively demanding activities, including conservative and hereditarian ones, so high IQ explains presence and MacDonald’s strategic-anti-gentile claim becomes redundant. Italian fascism before 1938 had high Jewish participation. Margherita Sarfatti was Mussolini’s mistress and intellectual patron. The reply works as coalition speech. It does not refute MacDonald. MacDonald’s claim is about the content of relevant movements after the Holocaust, not over-representation. The default hypothesis answers a question MacDonald does not ask, then declares victory. The careful-hereditarian coalition needs MacDonald answered, and an answer that suffices for the coalition audience does not need to refute MacDonald on his own terms. It needs to mark the boundary clearly enough that members can sort themselves into Cofnas’s camp rather than MacDonald’s.
Cofnas Under Hugo Mercier and John M. Doris
The standard reading of academic resistance to Cofnas treats his opponents as either suppressing inconvenient truth or correctly identifying dangerous pseudoscience. Mercier’s framework offers a third reading. The 45 Ghent philosophers signing the petition against Cofnas are deploying open vigilance against his claims. They are evaluating his work against their prior beliefs and their assessments of his competence and honesty. They are reaching the conclusion that his work fails their vigilance checks.
The Mercier frame predicts that the resistance operates through specific evaluative criteria that the philosophers find compelling. It predicts that the resistance does not require coordinated suppression because each philosopher independently reaches similar evaluative conclusions through similar vigilance operations. It predicts that the resistance will be most intense when Cofnas’s claims most clearly violate the prior beliefs the philosophers find well-supported.
The predictions match the pattern. The Ghent philosophers do not appear to have coordinated their letter through secret meetings. They reached similar conclusions through their own evaluations of Cofnas’s work. The conclusions are predictable from their prior commitments to specific positions on race, genetics, and the scientific status of hereditarian research. Their prior commitments are themselves products of specific cultural and academic formation. The formation produced the prior commitments before the philosophers encountered Cofnas’s specific work. When they encountered the work, their vigilance evaluated it against the prior commitments and rejected it.
This is vigilance operating from prior commitments that produce specific evaluative outcomes. The vigilance is sincere. The conclusions reflect evaluation of Cofnas’s work through the philosophers’ evaluative criteria. The criteria themselves are products of cultural formation rather than neutral standards. The evaluation produces what the formation predisposes it to produce.
Cofnas does have an audience that finds his work compelling. The audience includes Steve Sailer and his readers, the broader race realist intellectual community, parts of the rationalist online community, specific libertarian and conservative intellectuals, and various heterodox academics who find his work credible. The audience also operates through open vigilance. They evaluate Cofnas’s work and reach the conclusion that it passes their vigilance checks.
The two evaluations reach opposite conclusions about substantially the same work. Both evaluations operate sincerely through vigilance. The difference reflects different prior commitments rather than different cognitive operations. The Ghent philosophers’ priors include strong commitments to specific positions about what constitutes legitimate scientific inquiry, what hereditarian research methodology shows, and what the social consequences of hereditarian conclusions involve. Cofnas’s audience holds different priors about each of these matters. The same work that fails the first set of priors passes the second set.
Open vigilance is not neutral evaluation that converges across observers. It is evaluation against priors that vary across populations with different formations. Cofnas’s situation illustrates this with specific clarity because he writes for one audience while another audience reads him with very different priors. The two audiences reach opposite conclusions about the same work because their priors differ in ways that produce opposite evaluative outcomes.
Cofnas presents his work as offering hereditarian hypotheses for serious consideration based on empirical evidence. The presentation appeals to readers whose priors include openness to hereditarian explanations for group differences. The presentation does not appeal to readers whose priors include strong skepticism about such explanations.
Cofnas could argue that the empirical evidence should override the priors. Mercier’s framework suggests this argument typically fails because evidence does not operate independently of priors. Evidence is itself evaluated against priors that determine which evidence counts as relevant, which methodologies count as reliable, and which conclusions count as warranted. Readers with different priors evaluate the same evidence differently. They are not failing to engage the evidence. They are engaging it through their priors.
This means Cofnas’s situation cannot be resolved by producing better evidence or more compelling arguments. The resolution would require shifting the priors that determine how evidence and arguments are evaluated. Shifting priors typically does not happen through argument. It happens through specific cultural processes that operate over substantial time periods. Mearsheimer’s passage on the dominance of socialization over reason supports this. People’s priors come from their socialization. They do not shift through argument alone.
Cofnas’s strategic position is difficult. He cannot win the argument through better arguments. He can only continue producing work that his audience finds compelling while accepting that other audiences will continue rejecting it. The acceptance of this division is not what most academics want. Most academics want their work to be evaluated as scientifically valid by all qualified observers. Cofnas’s specific subject matter prevents this outcome regardless of how rigorous his work becomes. The subject matter activates priors that prevent convergent evaluation.
Doris’s situationism predicts that the institutional behavior toward Cofnas reflects situational factors more than stable character of the institutions or individuals involved. The framework illuminates specific features of his situation that character-based analysis misses.
Cambridge dismissed 58 formal complaints against Cofnas in October 2025 under their free speech code. Emmanuel College then terminated his research associateship in April 2024. The two decisions came from different institutional actors operating in different situational contexts. The university’s central administration faced specific situational pressures from the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act and from broader institutional concerns about academic freedom. The college faced different situational pressures from its specific donors, alumni, students, and faculty whose concerns operated through different channels than the university’s central administration faced.
Doris’s framework predicts that institutional behavior will track these situational pressures rather than expressing stable institutional character. Cambridge as institution is neither pro-Cofnas nor anti-Cofnas in any stable sense. Different parts of the institution operate under different situational pressures and produce different responses. The university’s central administration faced legal exposure for suppressing free speech and produced response that protected against that exposure. The college faced reputational exposure for retaining controversial figure and produced response that addressed that exposure. Both responses make sense in their specific situational contexts. Neither expresses unified institutional character.
This matters for Cofnas’s strategic position. He cannot navigate Cambridge by understanding its overall character because the institution does not have unified character to navigate. He must understand the specific situational pressures different institutional actors face and how those pressures produce specific responses to specific actions. The understanding is more granular than character-based analysis would suggest. It also makes navigation more difficult because situational pressures change as broader contexts change.
The 45 Ghent philosophers who signed the letter against Cofnas are not necessarily expressing stable anti-hereditarian character. They are responding to specific situational factors that produce the specific behavior. The factors include: peer pressure from colleagues who signed first, professional incentives that reward signing within their academic culture, social costs of not signing that signal sympathy with the pariah, and absence of effective coordination mechanism for those who might privately disagree.
Doris’s framework predicts that many of the signatories would not have signed if any of these situational factors operated differently. Some philosophers who signed likely have private doubts about whether Cofnas’s work warrants the strong language the letter deploys. Some likely signed because the perceived social cost of not signing exceeded their estimate of the harm Cofnas’s work produces. Some likely signed because they did not engage Cofnas’s work in detail and signed based on the framing other signatories provided.
This describes how human behavior operates under specific situational conditions. Doris’s framework predicts that group letters of this type typically include substantial proportion of signatories whose private views differ from the letter’s content but whose situational pressures produce signing behavior anyway. The phenomenon is sometimes called preference falsification. Doris’s framework provides specific account of why preference falsification operates so reliably in specific institutional contexts.
The implication for Cofnas’s situation is that the apparent unanimity of professional opposition to his work overstates the evaluation many of his colleagues would produce under different situational conditions. If his colleagues operated through anonymous evaluations, or through individual rather than collective response, or through situations that did not produce strong incentives for public signaling, the responses would likely differ substantially from what the public letters and petitions show.
Cofnas’s situation could improve if situational conditions changed to reduce the pressures that produce strong public opposition. The Free Speech Union backing his lawsuit, the UK’s Higher Education Freedom of Speech Act, and similar developments could shift situational conditions in ways that produce different professional responses to his work. The improvement would not require any individual philosopher to change their views. It would require situational conditions that allow private evaluations to produce public expression.
The two frameworks combined explain features of Cofnas’s career trajectory that neither alone captures. Mercier explains why his work activates strong vigilance in specific audiences with specific priors. Doris explains why the institutional responses follow specific situational patterns rather than expressing stable institutional positions.
The combined framework predicts that Cofnas’s career will continue cycling through institutional contexts with similar pattern: appointment, vigilance activation in specific institutional populations, situational pressures producing public opposition, formal procedural defenses sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing, eventual exit or continued precarious position.
The pattern is what happens when work activating strong priors meets institutional environments operating through specific situational pressures and it applies to other figures whose work activates similar priors in similar institutional contexts. Amy Wax’s career follows substantially similar pattern. Steve Sailer’s career trajectory shows similar features. Both face similar combinations of vigilance-based opposition and situational institutional pressure that produce similar career outcomes despite operating in different specific institutional contexts.
This means Cofnas’s specific situation is less personal than it sometimes appears. He is not specifically targeted because of who he is as individual. He is in specific category of work that produces specific responses through specific mechanisms. Other figures in the same category face similar responses through similar mechanisms. The category is what produces the pattern. Cofnas is one instance of the category.
The specific question of whether Cofnas’s work is sound. Mercier’s framework does not directly address whether Cofnas’s specific empirical claims are correct. The framework addresses how vigilance evaluates such claims rather than what claims warrant. The warranting requires engagement with the specific empirical material that Cofnas presents.
Engagement with that material is genuinely difficult because the priors that determine evaluation are not easily set aside for the duration of evaluation. Most readers cannot bracket their priors well enough to evaluate the work without their priors substantially shaping the evaluation. The shaping is not bias in the standard sense. It is how human cognition operates. Mercier’s framework identifies this as feature of normal vigilance rather than as failure of evaluation.
This produces specific epistemic difficulty in evaluating Cofnas. Readers who want to evaluate his work fairly need to engage their own priors about race, genetics, and hereditarian research methodology before engaging Cofnas’s specific arguments. Most readers do not perform this prior engagement. They proceed directly to evaluating Cofnas through their priors and reach conclusions that reflect the priors more than the specific work.
Cofnas sometimes presents his work as if priors should not affect evaluation. Mercier’s framework suggests this presentation cannot succeed because priors necessarily affect evaluation. A more sophisticated presentation would acknowledge the role of priors and address them directly rather than pretending evaluation can proceed independently of them. Cofnas’s presentations vary in how directly they address this. His more academic work sometimes engages prior commitments more carefully than his blog posts do. The variation matters for what audiences his different work can reach.
Cofnas’s continued production of hereditarian work despite substantial professional cost reflects specific situational factors that sustain the behavior. The factors include: alternative audiences that find his work valuable, financial support from Free Speech Union and similar organizations, intellectual community that shares his commitments, family situation that permits the professional precarity, specific institutional contexts that have provided positions despite the controversy.
Without these situational factors, Cofnas’s behavior would likely differ substantially. A version of Cofnas without alternative audience would face different incentive structure that might produce different choices. A version without family support that permits financial precarity would face different practical constraints. A version without alternative institutional possibilities would face different career options.
Mercier suggests that producing better evidence will not by itself shift evaluations from audiences with strong opposing priors. Doris suggests that institutional responses will continue tracking situational factors that often produce opposition regardless of the specific quality of his work.
These suggestions imply Cofnas should focus on situations where situational factors permit better engagement rather than expecting to convert audiences whose priors strongly oppose his work. Specific strategies that follow from this analysis include: writing primarily for audiences whose priors are open to hereditarian hypotheses rather than attempting to convince audiences whose priors strongly oppose them, building institutional support in contexts where situational factors permit such support, accepting that mainstream academic acceptance of his core empirical claims will likely not occur regardless of his specific work quality, focusing on specific applications and implications of hereditarian research that can be engaged by audiences operating from various priors.
The strategies are different from what Cofnas appears to be pursuing. He continues attempting to convince mainstream academic audiences of his work’s empirical validity. The frameworks suggest this attempt will continue producing the cycle of appointment, controversy, and exit that has characterized his career. Different strategies might produce different career trajectories. Whether different strategies would advance Cofnas’s deeper goals depends on what those goals are. If his goal is making specific empirical claims convince mainstream academy, his current strategies will likely continue failing for the structural reasons the frameworks identify. If his goal is producing rigorous scholarly work for audiences who can engage it productively, different strategies might serve the goal more effectively than his current approach.
Cofnas’s 2018 paper critiquing MacDonald’s work on Jewish behavior takes on different valence through Mercier and Doris. The standard readings treat the paper as either coalition discipline (the Pinsof reading), genuine scholarly engagement (Cofnas’s self-presentation), or strategic positioning (a more cynical interpretation).
Mercier’s framework adds that Cofnas was deploying open vigilance against MacDonald’s specific work through Cofnas’s own priors. Cofnas’s priors included commitments to hereditarian framings combined with rigorous methodology. MacDonald’s work fails the methodological rigor test by Cofnas’s standards even though MacDonald reaches conclusions some of which align with hereditarian framings Cofnas defends. Cofnas’s vigilance evaluated MacDonald’s specific arguments and found them wanting on methodological grounds.
Doris’s framework adds that Cofnas’s situational position at the time of the MacDonald paper involved specific incentives. He was establishing his academic position. The position required demonstrating that his hereditarian commitments operated within rigorous scholarly methodology rather than within ideologically motivated argument. The MacDonald paper accomplished this demonstration. The accomplishment served Cofnas’s situational interests in establishing scholarly credibility for his subsequent more controversial work.
The combined reading does not require the paper to be either pure scholarship or pure strategy. The frameworks suggest these dichotomies typically fail to capture what scholarly work involves. Scholars produce work that reflects both their genuine evaluative commitments and the situational pressures of their professional positions. The combination produces specific scholarly outputs that serve both intellectual and career functions simultaneously. The MacDonald paper served both functions for Cofnas.
Cofnas’s career illustrates what happens when work activating strong priors meets institutional environments operating through specific situational pressures. The pattern is structural rather than personal. It applies to category of work and category of institutional contexts. Cofnas is one instance of the pattern.
The impasse is not necessarily permanent. Mercier suggests priors can shift through specific cultural processes operating over time. Doris suggests situational pressures can shift through specific institutional changes. Both kinds of shifts could occur and could produce different evaluative outcomes for hereditarian research over coming decades. The shifts depend on broader cultural and institutional developments that current participants cannot fully control.
The Hybrid Vigor essay assembles a toolkit drawn from biology and applied to social systems. Heterosis, inbreeding depression, niche construction, parasite stress, costly signaling, life history theory, the immune system, endosymbiosis, horizontal gene transfer, crypsis, and a dozen other frames sit alongside one another, each cutting at the same target from a different angle. The target is the question of why institutions and coalitions behave as they do without anyone having to decide on bad faith or conspiracy. Selection pressure shapes organisms. Organisms produce the patterns. The participants narrate the patterns afterward in vocabularies that flatter their own coalition.
Cofnas walks into this framework because his career produces an unusually clean signal across most of its diagnostic tools. He is a man under intense selection pressure who has chosen, at every juncture, the high-cost move. The biology says what to expect from such an organism, and why the institutions around him respond as they do.
Crypsis is the master frame for understanding Cofnas. The Hybrid Vigor essay treats the modern academic environment as a habitat with strong selection pressure for ideological camouflage. Most academics with views on group differences, hereditary explanation, or the empirical limits of egalitarian assumption practice careful crypsis. They modulate their public speech, accept the dominant vocabulary in print, and reserve their honest views for back channels. Some do this because they lack the courage to be visible. Some do it because they care about specific careers and decline to risk them. Some do it because they have reasoned that visible dissent is less productive than careful inside-game work. Whatever the reason, the crypsis is real and pervasive. The coloration of the herd hides whatever individual coloration the organisms beneath it might have.
Cofnas does the opposite. He paints himself into visibility. His procedural arguments could have been made in language calibrated to give minimum offense. They were not. His blog posts could have used hedged academic phrasing. They did not. His Substack could have been a venue for technical discussion of behavioral genetics. He used it for explicit cultural intervention. The 2024 piece on the hereditarian revolution is anti-crypsis in pure form. It announces itself as a flag, and the flag is colored to be seen.
The biological consequence is direct. An organism that refuses camouflage in a habitat where camouflage is heavily selected becomes the most visible target in the habitat. The detection apparatus locks onto him because he is the only thing visible. The arms race the essay describes does not pause for him. It concentrates.
The Hybrid Vigor essay notes that the equilibrium of the crypsis arms race is continuous escalation. Refusing to play that game has its own logic. A non-cryptic organism cannot be infiltrated, cannot be misread as something it is not, and cannot be used by the coalition’s detection apparatus to embarrass a friendlier critic later. The cost is borne up front and openly. The benefit is that he keeps his own coloration. Whether that trade is wise depends on whether his coalition can offer him enough alternative habitat to survive in. So far it has, narrowly, with each move drawing closer to the limit.
The same essay describes Zahavi’s handicap principle. Reliable signals must be costly to produce because cheap signals can be faked. Cofnas’s career is structured around honest signaling at extreme cost. Each high-visibility move imposes losses no opportunistic mimic willingly bears.
The 2024 Substack post is the cleanest example. Read as scholarly argument, it is thin. Read as costly signal, it is precise. The cost it imposed on Cofnas, lost affiliation, public attack, sustained protest, lawsuit, eventual relocation, is what makes the signal honest. A Batesian mimic, an academic who wanted hereditarian-coalition credit without holding hereditarian commitments, could not have produced that signal because the cost of producing it was prohibitive. The signal therefore carries the information that the producer holds the underlying commitment. That information has value to the coalition that needs to identify its own real members against the constant pressure of cheap mimicry.
The handicap principle also predicts what happens next. As the cost of producing the signal rises, the population willing to produce it shrinks. Cofnas operates as the rare honest signaler in an environment where the cost has driven most others into crypsis. His coalition needs him because the supply of high-cost signals is small. His opponents target him for the same reason. He is not an interchangeable example of a class. The class has very few members, and producing more of them is expensive.
The essay’s treatment of institutional immune systems maps the Cambridge-Emmanuel-Ghent pattern. An immune system has to distinguish self from non-self and calibrate its response to threat level. Autoimmune disease occurs when the system treats self as foreign and attacks tissue that should be protected.
Cambridge’s formal immune response operated correctly. The university processed fifty-eight student complaints, applied its formal procedures, and concluded in August 2025 that Cofnas’s views, while offensive to many, did not breach law or contravene university free-speech regulations. The formal antibodies recognized him as self. The County Court at Cambridge later confirmed that hereditarianism and his anti-woke commitments qualified as protected philosophical beliefs under the Equality Act 2010. Two layers of formal immune calibration both classified him as protected tissue.
Emmanuel College’s informal immune response did the opposite. It severed his research associateship before the formal review concluded. The college acted on a different signal: reputational threat rather than legal violation. From the formal immune system’s perspective, this was autoimmune dysfunction. The college attacked tissue the formal system classified as protected.
Ghent reproduces the pattern at higher amplitude. The rector has so far refused to rescind the appointment, citing the university’s ethical code, which is the formal immune response holding. Three hundred staff and students, forty-five members of his own department, and a Belgian appellate counsellor have all produced informal immune responses arguing that Cofnas should be classified as foreign and removed. The formal and informal responses point in opposite directions, with the formal protecting and the informal attacking.
The Hybrid Vigor essay predicts the pattern continues across institutions because the selection pressures on formal and informal immune responses are different. Formal procedures are accountable to law, evidence, and audit. Informal responses are accountable to coalition pressure, reputational risk, and donor sensitivity. The two systems calibrate differently and will keep producing opposite verdicts on the same input until the underlying selection pressures change.
Cofnas’s 2018 takedown of MacDonald reads differently inside this framework. MacDonald represented a pure case of intellectual inbreeding: a closed coalition, recycling its own citations, accumulating deleterious recessives, with weakened detection systems because no outside critic was willing to engage at the level of detail. The Hybrid Vigor essay describes exactly this configuration. Inbreeding produces brittle systems that cannot respond to environmental challenge.
Cofnas’s audit functioned as outbreeding pressure. He arrived from a different institutional environment, with different training and different commitments, and crossed his evidentiary standards with MacDonald’s argument. The result was the suppression of recessives that MacDonald’s coalition could not catch on its own. The hybrid that emerged, careful hereditarian scholarship that explicitly rejects MacDonald’s framework, has more vigor than either MacDonald’s group or the egalitarian critics who had dismissed him without engaging.
This makes Cofnas an outbreeding agent inside his own coalition. He carries the heterosis function the essay describes: crossing intellectual material that would otherwise stay separated, and allowing the dominant alleles of one tradition to mask the deleterious recessives of another. His training in analytic philosophy, his stint at Cambridge, his Oxford DPhil, and his fluency in behavioral genetics literature equip him as a vector for this kind of crossing. The careful hereditarian coalition that exists today, what is left of it, is partly his hybrid offspring.
Elite philosophy departments are usually inbred populations: closed citation circles, narrow recruiting pipelines, accumulated deleterious recessives in the form of arguments that survive only because no outside critic engages with them. Susan Haack’s complaint about citation cartels is the example offered. The same complaint applies more broadly. Elite analytic philosophy in the United States and the United Kingdom recruits from a small pool, trains its members in shared assumptions, and rewards work that confirms those assumptions while penalizing work that challenges them.
Cofnas operates inside this habitat without belonging to it. His procedural commitments are recognizably inside the analytic tradition. His substantive commitments crossed traditions the habitat normally keeps separate. The result is that his work generates more dialectical resistance than work conforming to habitat norms because the habitat’s detection systems have not been calibrated to handle outbred material.
The inbreeding-depression reading also explains why his procedural arguments are harder to dismiss than they should be. The habitat lacks the evidentiary tools to engage him cleanly because its tools have evolved in a closed system that did not need to handle the kind of cross-traditional argument he produces. The standard moves, social pressure, citation exclusion, reputational sanction, are inbreeding-population tools. They work on inbred organisms. They struggle against an outbreeder.
The parasite stress hypothesis predicts that environments with high perceived pathogen load produce stronger in-group preference, more conformity pressure, more xenophobia, and more authoritarian social organization. The hypothesis was developed for biological pathogens. The essay extends it to perceived ideological pathogens.
Cofnas’s appearance in any elite philosophy department triggers the parasite-stress response in textbook form. The intensity of language exceeds what the substantive disagreement warrants. The forty-five Ghent department members did not call his views simply mistaken or harmful. They called them beneath contempt. The Belgian appellate counsellor did not argue the views were wrong. He argued they should be criminal. The student petitions did not propose engagement. They demanded removal.
This is the language of immune response to perceived pathogen rather than the language of intellectual disagreement. The hypothesis predicts that in environments where perceived ideological pathogen load is high, behavioral immune responses intensify regardless of whether the perceived pathogen tracks an underlying reality. The parasite stress framework does not adjudicate whether Cofnas in fact carries pathogen. It predicts the response his appearance triggers and explains why the response is calibrated as it is.
Cofnas cannot construct a niche inside the dominant academic ecosystem because the niche is already constructed against him. What he can do, and what his coalition has done, is build counter-niches: institutions, publications, and legal frameworks that favor the survival of organisms like him.
The Journal of Controversial Ideas is counter-niche construction in pure form. Peter Singer, Francesca Minerva, and Jeff McMahan built it to provide habitat for arguments mainstream journals would not host. Quillette plays the same role at the popular end. Substack functions as a habitat layer below the journal layer. The Free Speech Union, the Committee For Academic Freedom, and similar organizations build legal and procedural infrastructure that defends organisms in this niche when the dominant ecosystem moves against them.
The Equality Act 2010 ruling that hereditarianism qualifies as a protected philosophical belief is the most consequential niche construction so far. It modifies the legal environment in a direction that favors organisms holding such beliefs against employment-level immune attack.
The biological framework predicts the counter-niche keeps growing under the selection pressure of accumulated cases. Each new high-profile case adds infrastructure: legal precedent, donor networks, specialized publications, defense organizations. The dominant ecosystem still selects against his coalition, but the cost of that selection rises as the counter-niche develops, and at some point the ratio shifts.
The essay describes how relationships between organisms drift along a spectrum from mutualism through commensalism to parasitism, often without any individual actor intending the drift. Cofnas’s relationship with elite universities follows this trajectory in textbook form.
In its early phase, the relationship was mutualistic. Columbia, Lingnan, Cambridge, and Oxford each invested training in him. He produced citations, peer-reviewed publications, conference papers, and other outputs that returned value to the institutions. The relationship was fitness-enhancing for both parties.
The drift began as his work moved into the politically charged terrain of group differences. From the institution’s perspective, the marginal benefit of hosting him began declining as the reputational cost rose. The relationship slid toward commensalism. The institution continued to host him, but the gain was no longer clear.
By the time of the 2024 post, the relationship at Emmanuel College had crossed into parasitism from the college’s perspective. His presence imposed reputational and political costs the college could not absorb without endangering its own fitness in donor and student markets. The college’s response was the autoimmune-style severing already described.
The Ghent appointment is starting at the commensal stage rather than the mutualistic one. The political and reputational costs are visible from the beginning. Bouke de Vries’s project might absorb them for a time, but the trajectory is already set. The mutualism phase has been bypassed. The framework predicts the drift continues toward parasitism unless something in the environment changes.
The biology explains why the participants on both sides experience the conflict as intractable. The selection pressures producing the conflict are not under any individual’s control. They are produced by the structure of the habitats, the calibration of the immune systems, the trajectories of the niches each coalition has constructed, and the rate of environmental change relative to the optimization of the existing institutions. None of those parameters changes because anyone in the dispute decides it should. They change as the underlying ecosystem shifts.
Becker’s framework in The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil identifies hero systems as the cultural structures through which individuals achieve symbolic immortality. Humans face the terror of mortality. Cultures provide hero systems that offer paths to significance that survive the individual’s biological death. The systems specify what counts as heroic achievement, what counts as failure, and what activities the individual must perform to qualify for the system’s promised significance. Different cultures provide different hero systems. Individuals typically operate within the systems their culture provides and experience the systems as objective standards rather than as cultural constructions.
Cofnas’s hero system has a specific shape.
The truth-against-orthodoxy hero system. Cofnas operates within specific hero system that provides immortality through identification with truth pursued against institutional suppression. The system has long history in Western intellectual culture. Galileo against the Church. Darwin against creationist orthodoxy. Boaz against scientific racism. Watson against the religious establishment. The hero system identifies the truth-teller who maintains commitment to inquiry against institutional pressure as the highest form of intellectual achievement. The truth-teller’s significance derives specifically from his willingness to bear costs for truth. Without the costs, the truth-telling lacks the specific heroic character the system rewards.
Cofnas’s public self-presentation positions him as scientific inquirer pursuing empirical questions against institutional orthodoxy that suppresses the questions for ideological reasons. The positioning is not arbitrary. It reflects how Cofnas understands what he is doing and why his work matters. He sees himself as continuing the tradition of intellectual figures who advanced human understanding by maintaining commitment to inquiry despite institutional opposition. The seeing is not strategic positioning. It is genuine self-understanding that organizes his choices and sustains his commitment.
The hero system provides Cofnas with resources for navigating his situation. Each institutional rejection becomes evidence that he is operating within the system as the system requires. Cambridge’s hostility, the Ghent petition, the Emmanuel College termination all confirm that he is doing what the hero system rewards. Without the institutional opposition, his work would lack the specific heroic character the system promises significance for. The opposition is therefore not merely unwelcome consequence of his work. It is constitutive feature of what makes his work heroic within the system that organizes his significance.
This produces specific psychological stability that more conventional academics lack. Most academics depend on institutional recognition for their sense of professional significance. Institutional rejection produces psychological distress because it threatens the system providing significance. Cofnas’s hero system reverses this relationship. Institutional rejection confirms his significance within the system rather than threatening it. The reversal lets him sustain commitment through career events that would devastate academics operating within different hero systems.
The specific intellectual lineage Cofnas claims. Cofnas’s writing positions him within specific intellectual lineage that runs through figures like Arthur Jensen, J. Philippe Rushton, Linda Gottfredson, Charles Murray, Steve Sailer, and various others who have maintained hereditarian positions against institutional opposition. The lineage matters for understanding his hero system. He is not inventing his position. He is continuing tradition that has specific heroes who exemplify what his hero system rewards.
The lineage provides Cofnas with specific resources beyond the general truth-against-orthodoxy system. Specific predecessors faced specific institutional opposition and maintained their commitments through specific career trajectories. Their examples provide Cofnas with templates for how to operate within his situation. Jensen continued his work despite sustained academic hostility for decades. Rushton produced major books while facing professional consequences. Gottfredson maintained her position through sustained controversy. Murray became major public intellectual despite mainstream academic rejection.
The templates show Cofnas that his current difficulties are typical of figures within the lineage rather than specific to his situation. The typicality matters. It tells him that his career trajectory follows pattern others have navigated successfully. The pattern includes specific costs that Cofnas should expect to bear. It also includes specific rewards that the lineage’s heroes received through their continued commitment. The rewards include intellectual community of others working within the same lineage, specific audiences that value the work, eventual institutional repositioning that some figures within the lineage have achieved, and historical significance that the hero system promises will follow even if contemporary institutional acceptance does not.
Cofnas’s 2018 paper critiquing MacDonald serves specific function within his hero system. MacDonald operates within adjacent space to Cofnas but with different methodological commitments and different specific empirical claims. MacDonald’s work attracts opponents who use it to discredit hereditarian research generally. Cofnas’s hero system requires that the lineage maintain specific methodological standards that distinguish legitimate hereditarian work from work that fails such standards.
Cofnas demonstrates that he holds hereditarian work to specific methodological standards that MacDonald’s work does not meet. The demonstration establishes Cofnas as legitimate inquirer rather than as ideologically motivated advocate. The establishment matters within his hero system because the system rewards rigorous inquiry pursued against opposition rather than advocacy disguised as inquiry. Without the methodological standards, Cofnas’s work would not qualify for the heroic significance his system promises.
Cofnas needs his work to count as the right kind of work within his hero system. The MacDonald paper provides specific evidence that his work meets the hero system’s standards. Without such evidence, his subsequent more controversial work would lack the foundation his hero system requires. The paper is therefore not opportunistic positioning. It is necessary maintenance of the conditions that allow his hero system to provide him with significance.
Cofnas’s hero system overlaps substantially with broader free speech hero system that organizes significance for figures across various intellectual positions. The free speech system rewards individuals who maintain commitment to open inquiry against institutional suppression regardless of the specific content of the inquiry. Figures within this system include Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nicholas Christakis, Jonathan Haidt, Kathleen Stock, and many others whose specific positions differ substantially from each other and from Cofnas but who share commitment to open inquiry against institutional suppression.
The overlap provides Cofnas with some institutional resources. The Free Speech Union backs his lawsuit against Emmanuel College. The UK’s Higher Education Freedom of Speech Act provides legal framework that supports his position. Specific journalists and intellectuals who operate within the free speech hero system engage his case sympathetically even when they disagree with his specific empirical claims.
The overlap also produces specific tension. The free speech hero system rewards procedural commitments that operate independently of substantive positions. Cofnas’s specific hero system requires substantive commitment to hereditarian research. The two systems align tactically when institutions suppress hereditarian research, because the suppression activates both systems. They diverge when the question becomes whether specific empirical claims warrant institutional support beyond procedural protection. The free speech system does not require institutional support for any specific claims. The hereditarian research system requires institutional acceptance of specific empirical claims as scientifically legitimate.
Cofnas’s overlapping position provides resources that pure operation within either system would not provide and it produces complications when the systems’ demands diverge. Most of his current institutional difficulties are situations where the systems align (institutions suppressing his work activates both systems). Future difficulties might involve situations where the systems diverge (procedural protection without substantive acceptance might not provide what his specific hero system requires).
Cofnas’s affiliation with Cambridge University provided specific resources for his hero system before its termination. Cambridge has specific institutional weight within his hero system because the university provides established credibility for figures operating within it. Cofnas’s affiliation marked him as legitimate scholar pursuing legitimate inquiry rather than as marginal figure operating outside academic norms. The marking mattered for how his audience evaluated his work and for how broader publics engaged his arguments.
Becker’s framework predicts that successful operation within hero systems produces specific kinds of figures whose lives become exemplary for subsequent participants. Cofnas’s career trajectory could produce such exemplary figure if specific conditions are met. The conditions include: continued production of substantial scholarly work that meets the hero system’s quality standards, sustained commitment despite institutional opposition that produces specific career costs, eventual recognition from segments of the broader academic community that Cofnas’s work warrants engagement, and historical positioning that allows subsequent figures to point to Cofnas as exemplar of how hereditarian research advanced despite institutional opposition.
These conditions are not guaranteed. Cofnas might fail to produce the substantial scholarly work the hero system requires. His commitment might erode under sustained pressure. The recognition might never come. The historical positioning might place him as failed example rather than as successful exemplar. The hero system provides specific path to significance but does not guarantee the path will produce the significance for any specific individual.
Cofnas cannot know whether his career will produce the significance his hero system promises. He must continue acting as if it will because the alternative would dissolve the system that organizes his choices. The acting-as-if is what the hero system requires from its participants. Without the acting-as-if, the system cannot provide the psychological resources participants need to sustain their commitment under conditions where success is uncertain.
Cofnas’s hero system provides him with specific psychological economy that organizes his choices and sustains his commitment. The economy operates through specific exchanges. Cofnas exchanges institutional security for symbolic significance. He exchanges mainstream academic acceptance for inclusion in specific intellectual lineage. He exchanges contemporary recognition for historical positioning. He exchanges the rewards of conventional academic career for the specific rewards his hero system promises.
The exchanges have specific costs that operate alongside the specific rewards. The costs include: continued institutional precarity, sustained professional opposition, personal stress associated with public controversy, financial uncertainty, and the various practical consequences of operating outside mainstream academic position. Cofnas bears these costs because his hero system makes them meaningful rather than merely costly. Within the system, the costs are evidence that he is operating within the system as it requires. Outside the system, the costs would be simple losses without compensating significance.
Most academics operate within hero systems that provide significance through institutional success rather than through resistance to institutional opposition. Their systems produce significance when institutions recognize them, when they receive promotions and prestigious positions, when their work appears in mainstream journals. Cofnas’s system inverts this. His system produces significance when institutions reject him, when prestigious positions become unavailable, when his work appears in alternative venues that signal his refusal to accommodate institutional pressure.
Most humans need institutional confirmation to sustain their sense of professional significance. Cofnas’s system requires him to find institutional rejection confirming rather than threatening. The requirement is not impossible to meet. Religious and political martyrs throughout history have met it. The meeting requires specific psychological resources that the hero system provides through its specific structure.
Several resources sustain Cofnas’s hero system against the pressures that would otherwise dissolve it. These resources include: the specific intellectual lineage that provides templates and exemplars, the alternative audience that values his work, the institutional infrastructure (Free Speech Union, alternative academic networks, specific publications) that provides material support, the family situation that permits the financial precarity, the specific psychological capacities that allow Cofnas to find rejection confirming rather than threatening, and the broader cultural moment that includes increasing skepticism about academic orthodoxies.
The first paradox Cofnas executed well in phases one and two was the disinterested-truth-seeker paradox. The auditor of MacDonald and Sowell andWestermarck and Lieberman-Lobel claims to be doing pure empirical philosophy of biology. The audit conclusions happen to land on coalition lines. MacDonald gets refuted in ways that protect Cofnas from the antisemitism charge his hereditarian commitments otherwise expose him to. Westermarck gets defended in ways that align with evolutionary psychology against constructionist sociology. Each audit serves coalition functions. Each audit also reads as careful empirical philosophy. The paradox is that the work serves coalition needs while presenting as innocent of coalition needs. Both Cofnas and the audience he was reaching in phase two could read the work as just careful philosophy. The reading required that the coalition function stay concealed. Neither side had incentive to examine the arrangement.
Once the coalition function becomes visible, such as through social media posting and interviews, the signal flips. The behavior that read as honest cue of careful philosophy becomes a deliberate signal, and then becomes a negative cue. The trajectory is what the cue-signal-negative-cue sequence looks like across Cofnas’s career. In phase one and phase two the auditor work read as honest cue. By phase three the “Hereditarian Revolution” call made the coalition function explicit. Once the coalition function is explicit, all the previous audits get reread through it. The MacDonald audit becomes a strategic move to claim the territory MacDonald lost. The 2024 Sowell audit becomes positioning against the conservative establishment. The Westermarck defense becomes evolutionary-psychology coalition signaling. The same papers that read as honest cue in 2018 read differently in 2026 because what they were signaling has become visible. The signal has flipped to negative cue for readers who have been watching the trajectory. The papers themselves are unchanged. The reading has changed because the concealment has failed.
The second paradox Cofnas executed well in phases one and two was the persecuted-but-deserving paradox. He took the costly positions on race and IQ that produced controversy. The controversy was real and the costs were real. The structure of the persecution let Cofnas occupy a position that was simultaneously high-cost (institutional risk, career limitation, social opprobrium) and high-reward (hero status within the coalition that valued the costly speech). Pinsof’s framework treats this as a classic costly-signal arrangement. The cost validates the commitment. The commitment generates the coalition reward. The reward must remain unspoken because acknowledging it as reward would convert the costly signal into self-interested behavior. The persecution narrative had to read as something Cofnas was suffering, not something he was building. The audience and Cofnas both maintained the reading.
The trajectory shows this paradox getting harder to maintain. By phase three the persecution narrative has become so heavily curated that it reads as constructed rather than suffered. The Andrew Gold catalogue, the Boyce Nietzschean self-presentation, the Calmversations Korean deplatforming line, the Brenner self-disclosure, the X feed steady supply of persecution content, the Substack notes about the Flemish television montage and the Chris Rufo hate mail. Each item is real. The accumulation reads as production rather than testimony. The audience that wanted to see Cofnas as suffering for truth can still read it that way. The audience that has watched the trajectory long enough can read the production. Once the production becomes visible the signal flips. The persecution that was a costly cue of commitment becomes a deliberate signal, and then becomes a negative cue of someone whose career runs on persecution rather than someone whose career suffers from it. The Turkheimer reply caught this exactly. Turkheimer’s “weirdness about Kelly Osbourne and Maureen Dowd” line worked because it converted Cofnas’s framing into deliberate strategy. Once the framing was strategy, it could be dismissed as strategy. The paradox collapsed in real time on a single Substack post.
The third paradox is the smart-people-among-the-stupid paradox. Cofnas presents as someone who can speak from inside the elite to the elite about what the elite needs to do. The paradox requires that Cofnas be elite enough to speak with authority and unaligned enough to speak unflattering truths the elite cannot speak about itself. The Cambridge credential supports the first. The hereditarian commitments support the second. The combination is what gives the position its rhetorical power. The “Hereditarian Revolution” essay’s call for the right to attract cognitive elites is the explicit version of the implicit positioning that runs through phases one and two. In phase one and two the positioning stayed implicit. The Cambridge credential did its work without being announced. The hereditarian commitments did their work without claiming elite status as their reward.
In phase three the positioning becomes explicit and the paradox breaks. The “Hereditarian Revolution” essay says outright that the goal is to win over cognitive elites. The MAGA Communism essay (2025) says outright that the populist right is composed of low-IQ people who cannot understand free trade. The Podcast Bros essay says outright that elites need to exercise paternalistic control over informational environments. The positioning that worked in phase one and two when implicit becomes brittle in phase three when stated. The paradox requires that the elite-aligned-but-truth-telling stance not announce itself as elite. Once the announcement is made, the audience can examine the positioning. The examination is what the four-question coalition analysis reveals. Cofnas needs the elite credential, the dissident audience that pays Substack subscriptions, the hereditarian network that supplies institutional support, and the persecution narrative that justifies the position outside mainstream institutional reward. Each of these requires the positioning to stay coherent. The positioning cannot stay coherent once the elite-paternalism position and the populist-contempt position are both stated as principles. The paradox fragments under the weight of the stated principle.
The fourth paradox is the auditor who exempts himself. This is the deepest paradox in the trajectory and the one your audits of the recent essays catch most cleanly. Cofnas built his career on showing that other writers fail to apply their own standards consistently. MacDonald cannot apply his own evolutionary framework to disconfirming evidence. Sowell cannot apply his own empirical standards to his preferred conclusions. Westermarck cannot survive the application of careful philosophy of biology. The auditor’s authority depends on the auditor being seen as someone who applies the standards consistently to himself as well as to others. Pinsof’s framework says this is impossible. No coalition can afford full self-awareness. The auditor’s standards are themselves coalition tools. They will be applied to coalition rivals more rigorously than to coalition allies because the differential application is the work the standards are doing.
The trajectory shows the differential application becoming visible. TheMAGA Communism essay produces a concept called “MAGA communism” that fails the categorical-precision standards Cofnas applies in his philosophy of biology work. The Podcast Bros essay produces an Mark Alfano parenthetical that fails the sourcing standards Cofnas applies to claims about scientific cover-ups. The Turkheimer note produces a Kelly Osbourne and Maureen Dowd preamble that fails the register standards Cofnas applies to disputes about academic substance.
Once visible, the previous audits get reread. Maybe the MacDonald audit and the Sowell audit also exempted Cofnas in ways the readers did not catch because they shared his coalition position. Maybe the consistency that justified the auditor’s authority was always partial. The paradox cannot survive its own examination.
The audience that read Cofnas as careful philosopher was not naive. They were participating in the arrangement. They got something out of treating his work as careful philosophy rather than as coalition signaling. The “something” was the validation of their own commitments through the work of someone who appeared to derive those commitments from independent careful reasoning. The audience needed Cofnas to be a careful philosopher. Cofnas needed the audience to read him that way. Both sides benefited from the arrangement. The arrangement worked as long as neither side examined it.
The trajectory is what the arrangement breaking down looks like. The audience that benefited from reading Cofnas as careful philosopher includes mainstream philosophy of biology in phase two. By phase three that audience has mostly walked away. The current Substack subscribers and X followers do not need the careful-philosopher reading. They need the truth-teller-paying-the-cost reading. The new audience reads through different paradoxes. The truth-teller-paying-the-cost paradox sustains for now in the new audience because the new audience benefits from the reading. The reading might continue to sustain even as the careful-philosopher reading dissolves. Different audiences enable different paradoxes. The paradoxes are coalition-relative. What looks like inconsistency from outside looks like consistency from inside the coalition that benefits from the current paradox.
Cofnas knows the Robert Trivers self-deception framework. He has cited the literature on how humans deceive themselves to deceive others more effectively. The recursion is that someone who has read the literature on self-deception is not protected from self-deception. The literature explains why protection is impossible. Self-deception works by being invisible to the self-deceiver. Knowing about the framework does not make the framework visible from inside. Pinsof’s social paradoxes paper extends this. Common knowledge of the strategy would destroy it. The strategy survives because it stays out of common knowledge. A philosopher who writes about the framework can know about it intellectually and still operate inside it experientially. The two registers do not connect. The intellectual register handles the framework as theory. The experiential register operates the framework as practice. Both Cofnas and his audience need the practice to stay concealed from the theory. When the audits start catching the practice, the theory becomes uncomfortable. The discomfort can be managed. The practice can be defended. The defenses themselves operate inside the framework. There is no exit.
Cofnas refuted MacDonald by showing that MacDonald’s framework absorbs every observation. The framework cannot fail because the failure modes are reabsorbed. Cofnas’s “Hereditarian Revolution” framework has the same property. Wokism continuing means the project is needed. Wokism collapsing means the project succeeded. Trump succeeding means the political coalition is winning. Trump failing means the base was too stupid for the project. Cofnas getting institutional positions means the truth is winning. Cofnas losing institutional positions means the persecution validates the truth. The framework has the property Cofnas correctly identified in MacDonald. The auditor produces the failure mode he diagnosed in his most cited paper. Frameworks of this kind will appear because they serve coalition functions. The frameworks will be defended because the defenses serve the same functions. The defender will not be able to see what he is doing because seeing it would dissolve the coalition the framework supports.
The charisma essay’s specific contribution to this analysis is the inversion mechanism. Pinsof argues that charisma works as long as the charismatic person appears to have it without seeking it. The moment the seeking becomes visible, the charisma flips. The charismatic figure becomes the try-hard. The hero becomes the manipulator. The truth-teller becomes the careerist. The flip is fast. It happens through changes in audience perception, not through changes in the figure. The figure can stay the same. The audience reading flips. Once the audience reading flips, the figure cannot easily flip it back, because the corrective behavior reads as further evidence of the seeking that produced the flip. The charisma is gone. Cofnas’s trajectory shows this in slow motion. Phase one and two charisma was the careful philosopher reading. Phase three turn made the seeking visible to the philosophy of biology audience. They walked. Phase four extension is making the seeking visible to broader audiences. The Turkheimer reply was an inflection point. The Podcast Bros essay’s internal contradictions are another signal. Each event is small. The accumulation is the flip.
Cofnas’s auditor work started as honest cue. The cues were honest because the auditor was doing the work. The work was real. The findings were real. The careful reading was real. Across phases two and three the cues became signals. The audits were still real but they were also being deployed strategically to position Cofnas in coalition space. The strategic deployment was visible to attentive readers but most readers did not catch it because the work itself was good. By phase four the signals have started to flip into negative cues for some audiences.
The paradoxes that sustained the phase one and two work are not recoverable because the audiences that participated in those paradoxes have walked or have shifted to new paradoxes. The phase three and four paradoxes have shorter half-lives because the audiences that sustain them are smaller and more turnover-prone. The persecution paradox sustains for now in the dissident-right ecosystem but the Pinsof framework predicts that it will eventually flip too, because the same dynamics that flipped the careful-philosopher paradox apply to all paradoxes that depend on concealment. Common knowledge of the strategy destroys the strategy. The X feed and the Substack notes are accelerating the common knowledge by making the strategy visible to the audiences that used to participate in concealing it.
Cofnas cannot easily exit the position he is in because exiting would require acknowledging the paradoxes that sustained the previous work. The acknowledgment would dissolve what the previous work accomplished. He could become a careful philosopher again only by giving up the audience and the hero-system role that the phase three turn produced. The careful philosopher position has fewer external rewards in the current institutional environment. The dissident-truth-teller position has more external rewards even as the paradoxes that sustain it become brittler. The brittleness produces the fourth-phase compression you have been watching. More events per unit time. Sharper internal contradictions. Audiences that turnover more rapidly. Each turn requires a new paradox to sustain. The turnover accelerates because the paradoxes are visible faster.
The Cofnas trajectory is the standard output of coalition psychology under attention-economy pressure. The institutions and economy that supported the phase-one-and-two paradoxes have weakened. The institutions and economy that support the phase-three-and-four paradoxes are growing. Cofnas operates inside the new structure. The new structure rewards what he is now producing. T
Cofnas does not run his paradoxes alone. The dissident-right ecosystem, the heterodox-academic network, the Free Speech Union legal apparatus, the Substack subscription economy, the X follower base, and the hereditarian research circle all participate in the paradoxes. They get something out of reading Cofnas the way they read him. The reading flatters their commitments and gives them an articulate champion. The framework will not collapse from outside. It will collapse, when it collapses, because the participants stop benefiting from the arrangement. The reasons participants stop benefiting are usually external. A new figure rises and offers better articulation. The political weather shifts and the dissident-right coalition reorganizes.
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
Cofnas’s hereditarian project is congruent with Mearsheimer’s anti-universalism. Hereditarianism is the claim that human groups differ in cognitively and behaviorally significant ways that are partly biologically grounded. The claim, if true, would falsify the strong universalist position that all human groups are interchangeable rational agents who would converge on similar institutional arrangements given equal opportunities. Mearsheimer’s framework is friendly to the empirical possibility that human groups differ in ways that matter for politics, even if his own work focuses on cultural and institutional differences rather than biological ones. The hereditarian claim that Black-White IQ gaps are partly genetic, if true, would be one specific instantiation of the broader anti-universalist insight Mearsheimer is articulating. Cofnas would have a friend in Mearsheimer at the level of basic theoretical orientation. Both are skeptical of the liberal-universalist program. Both treat humans as constitutively shaped by forces beyond individual reason.
Cofnas wants the right to embrace hereditarianism so that the right can win the battle of ideas with woke universalism and the right can attract cognitive elites to its coalition. The Cofnas program assumes that the right answer to the universalist mistake is a different universalist program that gets the empirical facts right and recruits intellectuals into the corrected framework. The structure is universalist-corrective. The corrections are different from the woke ones. The framework is the same. Reason discovers truth. Truth attracts elites. Elites carry truth to institutions. Institutions reshape society in light of truth. The structure is the standard liberal-rationalist program with hereditarian content substituted for woke content.
Mearsheimer says reason is the least important of the three ways humans form preferences, and thus a project that aims to convince elites through reason will fail in the way liberal universalism fails. Elites are also shaped by innate sentiments and socialization. Their commitments to woke or anti-woke positions are not primarily the result of having processed empirical evidence carefully. They are the result of socialization within particular institutional and class contexts that select for and reward particular commitments. Showing them better empirical evidence will not change their commitments, because the commitments are not primarily evidence-driven. The “Hereditarian Revolution” project assumes that elites can be reasoned into accepting hereditarianism. Mearsheimer’s framework predicts that they cannot, because reason is not what produces the commitments.
If humans are social and tribal more than individual, then the woke commitments Cofnas wants to defeat are not aberrations of reason. They are tribal commitments that serve the social and status needs of particular elite coalitions. The commitments are doing the work coalition commitments do. They identify the in-group, mark the out-group, organize cooperation, justify status differentials, allocate moral approval and disapproval. The commitments are not failing because of empirical errors. They are succeeding because of social functions. Cofnas’s audit of those commitments at the empirical level is beside the point. The audit can be devastating empirically without dissolving the commitments, because the commitments do not stand on the empirical claims. The claims are the public-facing rationalization of commitments that have other sources.
Coalition commitments serve coalition functions. Empirical refutation does not dissolve them. The Mearsheimer passage extends the same insight to a more fundamental level. Humans are not creatures who form commitments through reason and revise them through reason. They are creatures who form commitments through socialization and rationalize them through reason. The rationalization is downstream. The commitment is upstream. Attacking the rationalization does not affect the commitment. The Cofnas program treats the rationalization as the thing to attack. The Mearsheimer framework says this is the wrong target.
If reason is the least important of the three ways preferences are formed, then Cofnas’s own preferences are not primarily the product of his careful philosophical reasoning. They are the product of his socialization within particular intellectual and personal contexts. The Jewish family of origin, the libertarian-rationalist intellectual environment, the heterodox-academic peer network, the dissident-right ecosystem, the Free Speech Union legal context, the carnivore-keto subculture commitments. Each of these socialization contexts has shaped his preferences in ways that operate prior to and through his reasoning rather than as the result of it. The Cofnas who confidently audits MacDonald and Sowell for failing to apply their frameworks consistently is, on the Mearsheimer view, also a product of socialization who applies frameworks that his socialization has selected for.
The audits can be empirically correct while also being socialization-shaped, but the audits cannot do the work Cofnas wants them to do, which is to clear the ground for a rationalist reconstruction of political commitments based on better empirical evidence. The ground cannot be cleared because the commitments do not rest on the rationalizations that the audits attack. Clearing the rationalizations does not clear the commitments. The commitments will reproduce themselves through the socialization processes that produced them, with new rationalizations replacing the audited ones.
Mearsheimer’s framework, applied consistently, suggests that successful political projects work with the grain of human social nature rather than against it. Liberalism’s failure, on this view, is that it tried to reconstruct society on principles that ignore the social nature of the creatures society is composed of. Any reconstructive project that ignores the social nature will fail similarly. A hereditarian-rationalist political project that aims to reshape elite commitments through better empirical evidence is structurally similar to the liberal-universalist project Mearsheimer criticizes. The content is different. The method is the same. Both assume that ideas presented to rational agents will reshape the agents’ commitments. Both will fail in the way Mearsheimer says all such projects fail.
A more Mearsheimerian version of Cofnas’s project would acknowledge this. It would treat political commitments as primarily downstream of social, tribal, and class arrangements, and it would target the arrangements rather than the commitments. It would build institutions, not arguments. It would form coalitions, not positions. It would create social environments where alternative commitments could form through socialization, rather than trying to convert elites by argument. The Curtis Yarvin position, which Cofnas attacks in the MAGA communism essay, is closer to this Mearsheimerian framework than Cofnas’s own position is. Yarvin treats power, institutions, and structural rearrangement as primary, with commitments following from new arrangements. Cofnas treats commitments as primary, with arrangements following from corrected commitments. On the Mearsheimer view, Yarvin has the structural logic right even if Yarvin’s specific recommendations are wrong.
Cofnas wants to defeat Yarvin’s position by showing that Yarvin’s “king” idea is unstable and produces left-wing kings as easily as right-wing ones. The argument has force at one level. At the level Mearsheimer is operating, the argument misses the point. The question is not whether power-first strategies produce desirable outcomes. The question is whether reason-first strategies produce any outcomes at all. Mearsheimer’s framework predicts that they do not, because reason does not have the influence on human behavior the reason-first strategy assumes.
If humans are constitutively social and tribal, then the Cofnas trajectory, where the careful philosopher of phase one and two becomes the coalition combatant of phase three and four, is not a tragic decline. It is what happens when a thinker who has staked his identity on the rationalist program encounters the limits Mearsheimer describes. The rationalist program does not produce the influence the rationalist hopes for. The thinker faces a choice. Either continue producing rational arguments that fail to influence outcomes, or shift register to coalition combat that does influence outcomes within the coalition the thinker now serves. Cofnas appears to have made the second choice. The shift is the predictable response to the failure of the first option. The careful philosopher kept producing careful work and watched the institutional environment punish him for it. The coalition combatant produces work that builds an audience and provides the social rewards that institutional careful philosophy no longer provides. The trajectory tracks the structural incentives.
Cofnas’s project as he has articulated it is internally contradictory in a way Mearsheimer’s framework makes visible. Cofnas accepts hereditarianism, which is anti-universalist in its empirical content. Cofnas’s political program is rationalist-universalist in its method. The empirical content says humans are constitutively shaped by group-level differences that reason cannot bridge. The political method says reason can bridge the gap and reshape elite commitments. The two halves do not fit. If hereditarianism is true, the rationalist political method fails for the reasons hereditarianism identifies. If the rationalist method works, hereditarianism is much weaker than Cofnas claims, because the cognitive and behavioral commonalities that make rationalist persuasion possible would dominate the differences hereditarianism emphasizes. Cofnas wants both. The two cannot both be had.
Cofnas is a liberal-rationalist with hereditarian content. The hereditarian content is incompatible with the liberal-rationalist method. The method’s failures, when they come, will be the same failures Mearsheimer attributes to liberal universalism. The framework will treat empirical evidence as having more transformative power than empirical evidence has. The transformations the framework predicts will not occur. The framework will treat its own failures as failures of communication or coalition, when they are failures of the method itself. The Cofnas project, on this view, is in the same boat as the liberal-universalist project it claims to oppose, and is failing for the same structural reasons.
Cofnas makes the buffered position explicit and pushes it hard. His work exposes the porous registers that survive inside institutions claiming buffered legitimacy. The collision between his buffered project and the porous responses it provokes explains a substantial part of his career. The Peterborough ruling in Cofnas v Emmanuel College has now codified the collision into legal doctrine.
Cofnas’s stated commitments are buffered-self commitments at maximum strength. Philosophy continuous with science, naturalistic revisionism, evidentiary procedure independent of moral intuition, free inquiry as a default unless evidence forces revision. Each of these treats the self as an interior agent that evaluates external evidence according to procedures the agent can articulate. Nothing reaches inside without going through the procedure first.
The Quine-to-Dennett tradition he writes from is the buffered self extended into philosophy. Empirical inquiry is taken as the only access to truth. Moral intuition is examined from outside rather than received from above. Religious and metaphysical claims are held at arm’s length unless they earn admission through the procedures the buffered self trusts. The world becomes objects to study rather than meanings that radiate.
This places Cofnas in opposition to large parts of contemporary moral and political philosophy that operate in a partial-porous register. Many philosophers in those fields treat normative principles as resistant to empirical revision because the principles carry a kind of moral weight the buffered self has trouble producing on its own resources. Equity, dignity, the wrongness of certain attitudes, the urgency of social repair. These have a charge for many academic philosophers that buffered-self procedures alone cannot generate. Cofnas treats them as empirical hypotheses or as evolved psychological responses. He is doing what the buffered self is supposed to do. Many of his colleagues experience this as scandal because they have not buffered as far as he has.
Cofnas’s forensic style is buffered-self methodology in pure form. The 2018 audit of MacDonald reconstructs the citation chain piece by piece, treats each source as an external object, and asks whether MacDonald’s procedures produced reliable conclusions. The auditor stands outside the argument and inspects it. Nothing about the moral charge of the topic is allowed to disturb the procedure.
The porous self could not perform this audit. For the porous self, MacDonald’s claims about Judaism and group evolutionary strategy carry moral charge that contaminates the auditor by proximity. Engaging with the claims at the level of citation precision feels like participating in their contamination. The buffered self does not feel this contamination. The buffered self treats the claims as text to be checked against sources. The audit is a procedure performed on objects.
This is why his audit of MacDonald cuts where less buffered critics could not. The less buffered critics refused to engage the claims at the level of detail, treating refusal as a moral act. The buffered Cofnas engages, finds the failures, and publishes them. The contamination he supposedly risks does not register. He has buffered so far that the porous response is not available to him.
Cofnas’s work on evolutionary moral psychology runs the buffered project through to its harder consequences. If moral intuitions are evolved heuristics calibrated for fitness rather than truth, then their authority is conditional on independent evaluation. The buffered self can examine them, find them wanting in some cases, and decline to follow them. The porous self could not do this because for the porous self the moral intuition is a real signal from a charged moral order, not a heuristic the self can override.
This is the move that gives Cofnas his procedural argument against suppression of inquiry. If moral objections to certain research programs are evolved responses to perceived coalition threat rather than tracking of moral fact, the objections cannot settle the question. They have to argue for themselves on terrain the buffered self recognizes. The procedural argument is a buffered argument all the way down.
The cost of this move is one Cofnas does not always address. The buffered self that debunks moral intuition has trouble grounding its own normative commitments. Why care about free inquiry rather than coalition flourishing? Why care about truth rather than power? The buffered self’s procedural commitments float free of the porous sources of authority that traditionally grounded such commitments. Cofnas inherits the problem. His commitment to free inquiry has the structure of a sacred value inside his project, but his project denies the legitimacy of sacred values that have not earned admission through buffered procedures. The free-inquiry commitment has not earned that admission. It is treated as bedrock without being interrogated as such.
The institutions opposing Cofnas claim buffered-self commitments. Universities are nominally institutions of free inquiry. Academic philosophy is nominally an evaluation of arguments by their merits. Procedural protections for speech are nominally indifferent to content. But the responses Cofnas provokes operate in a porous register the institutions do not always acknowledge.
The forty-five Ghent department members who called his views beneath contempt were not arguing his views were wrong. They were treating his views as having a charge that radiates outward and contaminates the institution by proximity. The student petitions demanding his removal are not asking for a counter-argument. They are asking for the contaminating presence to be expelled from the moral atmosphere. The Belgian appellate counsellor who argued that hereditarian claims should be criminal is treating empirical hypotheses as having the character of pollution.
These are porous-self responses. The buffered self could disagree with Cofnas without experiencing his presence as contamination. It could argue his work fails on evidence, on logic, on consequences. The porous responses do something different. They treat his ideas as moral pollutants whose presence damages the surrounding tissue regardless of whether they are true.
Modernity buffers the self in some registers and leaves it porous in others. The procedural and evidentiary registers are heavily buffered. The registers that maintain coalition cohesion and moral identity remain porous. Cofnas’s work moves between the two. His procedural arguments are buffered. The substantive content reaches into territory where the porous register still operates. The institutions respond from the register the content activates.
The 2024 Substack post functions porously in its reception. As a piece of buffered argument, it is thin. As a contaminating presence, it is potent. The students who chanted for Cofnas’s removal at Cambridge were not engaging the post’s claims about meritocracy and racial outcomes. They were responding to its presence in the moral atmosphere of the university. The presence had a charge that demanded purification.
Cofnas’s defenders and critics talk past one another on this post. The defenders evaluate it as buffered argument and find it thin or strong on its merits. The critics evaluate it as porous presence and find it contaminating. Both evaluations are coherent inside their own register. Neither register reaches the other.
The University of Cambridge investigation, completed in October 2025, operated in the buffered register. Fifty-eight student complaints, formal evaluation, the conclusion that the post did not breach law or contravene free-speech regulations. The buffered register cleared his beliefs as protected interior states.
The Peterborough County Court, ruling in mid-March 2026, also operated in the buffered register at the level of belief. It accepted with some reservation that hereditarianism and anti-woke commitments qualified as protected philosophical beliefs under the Equality Act 2010. Beliefs as interior states protected by procedural guarantees. Pure buffered legal architecture at that level.
But the same Peterborough ruling held that Emmanuel did not treat Cofnas less favorably because of those protected beliefs. The college acted on the confrontational tone of the post, on its immediate harmful impact, on the reputational damage to the institution, and on the hostile environment created for undergraduates. Each of these is a porous-register concept dressed in legal vocabulary.
Tone is felt, atmospheric, charged. It is what the buffered self has trouble taking seriously as a legal category. The court has imported tone into the discrimination-defense calculus as a justifying factor. Harmful impact and reputational damage describe the moral atmosphere the porous self inhabits. Hostile environment is the legal name for a charged emotional and moral space that some occupants experience as toxic. The hostile-environment doctrine, originally developed for sexual and racial harassment law, is now being applied to heterodox academic expression.
This is the porous register entering legal reasoning through the side door the harassment doctrine cut. The buffered register protects beliefs. The porous register, now translated into legal language as confrontational tone, harmful impact, and hostile environment, has its own legal weight. Universities have wide discretion when speech is deemed harmful. The two registers operate inside the same legal architecture, on different objects, with neither displacing the other.
Modern institutions and their legal infrastructures are mixed economies of buffered and porous registers. The procedures that grew up to handle each register have now been integrated into a single doctrinal toolkit that can apply both at once on different aspects of the same case. Figures like Cofnas activate both registers simultaneously, and the legal system has developed pathways for both.
The protected-belief category is buffered architecture. It treats belief as a private interior state, refuses to require community certification, and protects the believer’s right to hold what he holds. This is the buffered self codified into employment-discrimination law.
But the Peterborough ruling shows the architecture has porous components alongside the buffered ones. The protection extends to belief. It does not extend to expression that produces documented harmful effects. The architecture distinguishes between what the buffered self holds and how the buffered self speaks in environments occupied by porous selves who experience the speech as contamination. The distinction is doctrinal.
The law has not decided which self the legal system protects. It has decided that different aspects of the same situation get protected by different doctrinal pathways. Belief discrimination claims operate in the buffered register. Hostile-environment claims and institutional-discretion defenses operate in the porous register. The same case can produce verdicts in both registers. The Peterborough ruling did exactly that.
Cofnas’s lawsuit produced a finding that the buffered architecture protected his beliefs and the porous architecture authorized the college’s response. The two findings are not in contradiction. They operate on different objects. The buffered architecture protects what he believes. The porous architecture protects the college’s interest in the moral atmosphere of its undergraduate community. Both interests have legal standing. Neither displaces the other.
Cofnas’s opponents had expected the buffered architecture to be more dominant than it turned out to be at the belief level, and had to absorb the protected-belief finding as a partial loss. Cofnas had expected the buffered architecture to extend to expression as well, and had to absorb the institutional-discretion finding as a partial loss. The mixed verdict gives both sides something to claim. It also leaves both sides with unfinished business that future cases will continue to work out.
Most academics in Cofnas’s terrain practice ideological crypsis. They hold buffered conclusions but operate in the porous register of their institutions, where openly stating those conclusions would contaminate their position. They split themselves. The buffered register holds their actual views. The porous register manages their public face.
Cofnas refuses the split. He states his buffered conclusions in the porous register where they will be experienced as contaminating presence. This is buffered-self behavior in pure form. The buffered self does not feel the contamination, so it does not understand why the statement should be modulated. The porous-cryptic colleagues feel the contamination and modulate accordingly.
The conflict is therefore not just about what Cofnas says. It is about which register should govern public speech. Cofnas insists the buffered register should govern. The institutions and their cryptic members operate as if the porous register sets the limits. The Peterborough ruling has now produced a partial settlement of this dispute. The buffered register governs the question of what one is permitted to believe. The porous register governs the question of how one is permitted to express belief inside institutional contexts where porous selves are documented to suffer harm. Both registers retain legal authority, on different aspects of the same speech.
This makes him useful to readers committed to the buffered project who themselves practice porous-register crypsis. He says what they think but cannot say. They can adopt his conclusions through quiet reading without paying the porous cost of public association. The reader ecology around him includes substantial buffered-project readers who require his anti-cryptic visibility to identify the conclusions they want to hold. The cryptic readers benefit from his visibility because his visibility absorbs the porous attack that would otherwise distribute across the readership.
The Peterborough ruling tightens the constraints on this reader-ecology arrangement. The cryptic readers’ protection depends partly on Cofnas continuing to absorb the porous attack. The ruling has now established that institutions can continue to direct that attack, with legal cover, against expression-with-effects even when the underlying belief is protected. Cofnas’s role as the absorbing organism is more legally precarious than the earlier framing suggested, even as his belief-level protection is firmer.
Residues of porous experience persist in every register. Cofnas is no exception.
His commitment to free inquiry has the structure of a sacred value inside his project. It is not derived from his naturalism. It is not entailed by his evolutionary moral psychology. The naturalistic framework can describe coalition responses to perceived contamination. It cannot explain why coalition responses should be subordinated to free-inquiry norms rather than the reverse. The free-inquiry commitment functions porously inside an explicitly buffered project. It carries moral weight that the project’s procedures cannot generate on their own.His selection of targets also has porous dimensions. The audit of MacDonald was not chosen at random from the universe of bad scholarship. It was chosen because MacDonald threatens the careful hereditarian coalition’s standing. The decision to spend the audit’s labor on MacDonald rather than on, for example, equally weak work in his coalition’s preferred direction reflects coalition belonging, which is a porous attachment.
His public-facing rhetoric has porous registers. The phrase “Hereditarian Revolution” is not a buffered description. It is a flag with a charge. The choice to use that phrase rather than, for example, “An Argument Against Affirmative Action After Empirical Constraints” reflects an awareness of porous communication even while the underlying argument is buffered. The 2024 post is buffered argument transmitted in porous packaging.
The Peterborough ruling has now legalized this distinction. The buffered argument inside the post is protected as belief. The porous packaging, the confrontational tone and the documented harmful effects, is what the court found justified the college’s response. The law has separated what Cofnas often presents as a single thing into two legally distinguishable layers, treating each one differently.
The deeper question Taylor’s framework raises is whether the buffered project has the resources to ground the commitments it requires. Free inquiry, evidentiary procedure, the dignity of buffered selves with protected beliefs. These have not earned admission through the buffered procedures themselves. They function porously inside a project that denies the legitimacy of porous functioning. The Peterborough ruling has not solved this problem. It has produced a doctrinal compromise that preserves both registers’ legal standing while leaving the underlying philosophical question unresolved. Whether that compromise can hold across many future cases is a question larger than Cofnas’s career, but his career is the visible place where the compromise is currently being tested.
Cofnas’s forensic style is Turner’s tacit program in operation. The 2018 audit of MacDonald reconstructs the citation chain, treats each source as inspectable, and asks whether the inferential moves survive specification. MacDonald’s coalition relied on a kind of tacit competence claim. The work was supposed to be readable only by those immersed in evolutionary-psychology debates, in long arguments about Jewish history, in the relevant background literature. Outsiders who criticized MacDonald without engaging the detail could be dismissed as not understanding. Cofnas refused the tacit appeal. He went line by line. He made the implicit explicit. He showed the failures in publicly inspectable form.
This is the Turner move at its sharpest. MacDonald’s protection had been the tacit-competence claim. Strip away the tacit cover and the argument has to defend itself on inspectable terrain. It did not survive there.
The same operation runs through the 2024 audit of Thomas Sowell, and the choice of target sharpens the Turner reading. Sowell sits at the heart of respectable American conservatism: Hoover, National Review, sixty books, decades of accumulated authority. His culturalism gives the conservative coalition a story about Black underperformance that does not touch the genetic third rail. The story rests on a tacit-coalition claim: trust the reading because Sowell has earned it. Cofnas refuses the claim. The Jensen misquote about Appalachian inbreeding shows Sowell reading carelessly or filtering through his preferred conclusion. The “Ulster County” slip suggests Sowell never checked the geography of the very Scotch-Irish ancestors who carry the load of his cultural-transmission story. Ulster is a province of Ireland. The Cicero passage on slaves is doctored. The Dunbar IQ figures lack provenance. The same forensic move that worked on MacDonald works on Sowell, and the cost to Cofnas is higher because Sowell occupies a coalition seat Cofnas might have wanted to inherit. The audit is honest precisely because it imposes that cost on the auditor. Sixty books is a warning sign in itself. No man writes that many books and maintains rigor. Sowell’s admirers stopped checking his footnotes long ago, and he stopped expecting them to. The tacit-trust arrangement Sowell relies on collapses once an auditor refuses to grant it.
The 2022 paper on Singer’s Golden Rule extends the operation into philosophy. Peter Singer and de Lazari-Radek argued that leading thinkers across distinct major traditions independently converged on a principle close to the Sidgwickian principle of universal benevolence. The convergence claim functions as a tacit-philosophical appeal. The great traditions, properly read by competent readers, point at the same moral truth. Cofnas walks tradition by tradition and shows the convergence dissolves on contact with the texts. The Hillel demolition is the cleanest move. Singer treats the stand-on-one-foot exchange as showing the Golden Rule at the heart of Judaism. Cofnas cites Navon’s count of eighty instances where fifteen different mitzvos are declared equal to all the Torah: Sabbath, circumcision, tzitzis, charity, living in Israel. The “essence of Judaism is the Golden Rule” reading is a projection by Reform-influenced commentators who want Judaism to look like liberal Christianity. Confucianism rejects impartiality. Mencius called Mozi a beast for advocating inclusive care. Hindu commentaries center ahimsa rather than reciprocity. The Buddha’s reciprocity statement appears in a single passage without framing as the essence of dharma. The tacit-philosophical convergence Singer needs as anchor for non-natural moral truth turns out to be a synoptic move that flattens distinct traditions into a single message they do not contain. Cofnas refuses the synoptic move and reads the texts in their traditions. The protection collapses.
Cofnas’s 2018 ‘Power in Cultural Evolution and the Spread of Prosocial Norms‘ uses Durham (1991) and Fracchia-Lewontin (2005) to challenge Boyd and Richerson’s individualist cultural evolutionary theory, then uses Boehm’s work on reverse dominance hierarchy to argue that majoritarian coalitions deliberately shaped moral norms from the early Middle Paleolithic onward. The 2024 ‘Natural selection requires no teleology in addition to heritable variation in fitness’ performs the Turner-style move on Lewontin’s textbook formulation. Cofnas argues the standard three-condition formulation fails to distinguish natural selection from artificial selection, intelligent design, forward-looking orthogenesis, and selection of nonrandom variation. He adds a fourth condition: no teleology. The paper cites Huxley’s 1864 reply to Kölliker, where Huxley denied that Darwin was a teleologist ‘in the ordinary sense at all,’ though Cofnas via Beatty notes that the historical reception was mixed. The conceptual bug is small. The Turner-style move is large. A hidden tacit assumption gets dragged into inspectable form and made to defend itself.
The same operation runs through Cofnas’s procedural defense of inquiry. The 2020 paper on group differences argues that hypotheses should be evaluated by publicly inspectable evidentiary standards rather than by appeals to moral intuition that cannot be specified. Moral intuitions that forbid investigation function as tacit-knowledge claims. We know this is wrong to investigate. We cannot specify why in fully evaluable terms. The knowledge is part of our shared moral background. Turner calls this tacit-protection rhetoric. Cofnas attacks it on Turner’s grounds. If you cannot specify the reason in inspectable form, the claim has not earned its authority.
Cofnas’s evolutionary-moral-psychology work extends the operation into the foundations of moral intuition. The 2019 paper on Westermarck shows the gap between an evolved drive and a moral norm. Kin selection gives me a disposition to favor my children. It does not give me a moral judgment that everyone should favor their children. The judgment is a coalitional product. If moral psychology emerged through social selection, with humans consciously designing rules and enforcing them, the rule-makers were themselves driven by fitness-tracking impulses, not by access to non-natural moral truth. The metaethical work depends on Cofnas auditing the underlying biology rather than accepting the standard tacit handoff between evolutionary biology and moral philosophy. Turner does not develop this evolutionary version. Cofnas does. The argumentative structure is the same as Turner’s. The biological detail extends Turner’s program into territory Turner does not enter.
Turner’s framework does not flatter Cofnas in every register. The same anti-tacit critique that licenses Cofnas’s auditing of MacDonald, his procedural argument against suppression, his Sowell forensic, his Singer debunking, his audit of Heterodox Academy, and his evolutionary debunking of moral intuition, also applies to Cofnas’s own practice. Turner is consistent. The framework cuts both ways.
Cofnas’s auditing competence is partly tacit. He cannot fully articulate what makes him able to identify weak hereditarian work, distinguish careful behavioral genetics from popular distortion, recognize the moves MacDonald is making in the citation chain, catch the doctored Cicero passage in Sowell, or notice that Hillel exists inside a long list of eighty equivalent statements. His training at Cambridge and Oxford produced this competence. The competence operates in his work. It exceeds what he can specify in inspectable form. Turner says this is fine at the level of personal tacit knowledge. Polanyi was right. People know more than they can say.
The problem arises when Cofnas’s coalition appeals to this tacit competence as a coalition-level claim. The “careful hereditarian coalition” presents itself as having the competence to read the literature properly, distinguish good work from bad, and avoid the failures of the MacDonald wing. This is a tacit-collective claim. Turner calls it incoherent in the same way he calls every collective tacit-knowledge claim incoherent. There is no shared substrate making the coalition’s competence the same competence for each member. There are convergent individual habits produced by similar exposure to similar literatures. The “careful hereditarian coalition” is not a unified epistemic body. It is a collection of individuals whose habits converge enough to produce coordinated outputs.
When Cofnas says the hereditarian coalition does the work carefully, he is making a tacit-collective claim of the kind he refuses to grant his opponents. Any coalition under sustained external attack might reach for tacit-collective claims to legitimate itself. Cofnas’s coalition is no exception.
Two specific places show the asymmetry. In the Calmversations interview, Cofnas defends the “default hypothesis” against MacDonald: Jews are over-represented in essentially all cognitively demanding activities, including conservative and hereditarian ones, so high IQ explains presence and MacDonald’s strategic-anti-gentile claim becomes redundant. The reply works as a coalition move. It does not refute MacDonald. MacDonald’s claim is not about over-representation. It is about the content of relevant movements after the Holocaust. The default hypothesis answers a question MacDonald does not ask, then declares victory. An auditor of Cofnas’s caliber, applied symmetrically, would notice this. He does not. The tacit cover his coalition needs to maintain a hereditarian-without-Nazi-association brand requires the MacDonald case be answered, and the default-hypothesis answer suffices for the audience that wants reassurance rather than refutation.
The Andrew Gold interview from January 2025 produces a parallel asymmetry around WORDSUM data. Emil Kirkegaard’s analysis shows White race-realists scoring 8.5 WORDSUM points below White environmentalists. Cofnas’s response is that this captures the wrong race-realists, the populist version rather than the careful version. A cleaner reading on his own terms is that WORDSUM rewards mainstream verbal conformity and any anti-mainstream position drags the score, including the hereditarian one. The data cuts against his story. He explains it away rather than following his own auditing logic where it leads.
The Brenner interview shows the deepest layer. Cofnas concedes that evolution does not select for intelligence. Evolution rewards charisma and reproduction. Smart people have fewer children. If evolution does not select for intelligence, the long-run trajectory of intelligence is downward, not upward. The hereditarian revolution Cofnas wants is therefore not historical inevitability. It is a small window in a longer arc bending the other way. He does not connect this dot. The framework needs the inevitability to provide the Becker hero-system meaning his project requires. The mind protects the framework from the recognition that the inevitability runs the wrong direction. Trivers on self-deception applies.
The elite philosophy departments, the DEI apparatus, the academic moral consensus, all rely on tacit-collective competence claims. They claim to know how to read carefully, distinguish good from bad work, avoid the failures of cruder thinking. Turner’s framework strips this protective cover. The departments are not unified epistemic bodies. They are collections of individuals whose habits converge through similar formation.
But once the framework strips that cover, it strips every cover. The careful-hereditarian coalition Cofnas defends is exposed in the same operation. The behavioral-genetics community is exposed in the same operation. Every group that claims tacit-collective competence loses the protection.
Cofnas does not always acknowledge that his framework, applied symmetrically, leaves no coalition with the tacit cover that traditionally legitimated specialist judgment. The result is a more austere intellectual landscape than Cofnas usually presents. In the Turner-Cofnas world, every claim has to defend itself in inspectable form. No coalition can rest on accumulated tacit competence. Specialists cannot point to their training as authority. They have to produce arguments that survive inspection by anyone competent to follow them.
This austerity is what Cofnas’s procedural commitment requires. It is also, on his own terms, what he should accept for his own coalition. The Turner framework keeps him honest about where his commitments lead, including in directions that complicate his self-presentation as a defender of careful hereditarianism against careless hereditarianism. The careful hereditarianism would have to defend itself in inspectable form too. The training does not legitimate. The training produces individual habits whose value can only be tested by inspectable output.
Turner’s framework has a notable gap. He does not pursue the possibility that what looks like transmitted tacit knowledge is partly independently generated from a shared biological substrate. If some portion of cognitive and perceptual capacity is heritable, then convergent individual habit formation has a biological substrate that varies across populations. The “transmission” Turner correctly says cannot occur is partly replaced by independent generation from shared genetic resources, not by collective sharing of cognitive content.
This is the place where Cofnas’s project enters territory Turner does not enter. Cofnas insists that empirical investigation of group differences in cognitive capacity must remain open. If the investigation reveals partial genetic substrate for capacities that produce what looks like collectively transmitted tacit knowledge, then the picture changes. Tacit-knowledge claims may be indexing real differences in capacity, not coalition manipulation alone. The ineffable competence that excludes outsiders might sometimes be a real capacity outsiders lack, not always a protective ideological cover for incumbents.
Turner’s anti-tacit project and Cofnas’s hereditarian project are natural allies against collective-transmission theories that ground specialist authority in ineffable shared substrate. Both projects say: there is no shared substrate. There are individuals with personal tacit competence and convergent habits. The convergence has biological as well as social sources. Coalition tacit-knowledge claims are protective covers, not real epistemic resources. Where the projects diverge is in the political register Cofnas’s hereditarian conclusions move into, which Turner has not pursued. The underlying epistemic structure is closely allied.
Organisms refusing tacit-knowledge cover pay a cost. The cover is what protects practitioners from external scrutiny. Without it, every claim has to defend itself in inspectable form. Defenders cannot retreat behind training, community standards, or tacit competence. They have to argue.
Cofnas pays this cost openly. He does not retreat behind his Oxford training when challenged. He does not invoke the tacit competence of his coalition. He produces arguments. He answers objections. He follows his procedural commitments where they lead. The cost is that he cannot use the protections that other academics use freely. He cannot say “this is settled in the field.” He cannot say “you have to read the literature to understand.” He cannot say “trust the experts.” All of these are tacit-knowledge moves. He has rejected them in his attack on his opponents. He cannot use them in his own defense.
The visible costs are catalogued in the Andrew Gold interview from January 2025 and the2023 Brenner interview. The Daily Mail fabricated a quote and ran it under his name. The Telegraph published a piece calling for his removal. He describes a radio interview as among the nastiest some viewers had seen. Emmanuel terminated his college affiliation in April 2024. A top Korean university deplatformed him, probably through a Korean academic with a UK PhD who had absorbed the Anglo-American taboos. “Too racist for Korea” becomes a line on the CV that the hero system the recent interviews have hardened around requires for narrative purposes. Each new institutional rejection becomes another data point in the story. The hero system requires the persecution. The persecution justifies the hero system. The Korean wife the interviews mention functions as the counter-example showing he is not a racial tribalist. The combination is the brand. Turner’s framework reads this as the cost the anti-tacit auditor pays, plus the Becker hero-system meaning the cost acquires once the auditor needs to keep going.
The Peterborough ruling has added a new layer to this cost. The harassment-doctrine extension means institutions can now act against him on tacit-register grounds with formal legal cover. The earlier informal-disaffiliation pattern remains, but it now has doctrinal backing where it had only convention before. Cofnas’s refusal of tacit cover does not buy him exemption from tacit-register attack. The legal architecture has institutionalized that attack at the expression level even while protecting his beliefs at the inspectable level. His position remains exposed because the protections he refuses for himself are not the same protections that his opponents now have legal cover to wield against him.
This is consistent with Turner’s account of what serious anti-tacit work requires. The work is socially costly because it removes the protections that make academic life livable. The auditor cannot also claim auditor immunity. Cofnas knows this and accepts it. The acceptance is part of what makes his project Turner-coherent rather than self-protective. The Peterborough ruling has not changed the fundamental shape of the trade. It has clarified the legal pathways through which the cost will continue to be imposed.
Turner’s framework also illuminates the venue question. Cofnas writes in journals and on Substack. The journal habitat operates with high tacit-knowledge density. Specialist readers bring background, vocabulary, and assumptions that allow compressed argument to function. Substack operates with lower tacit-knowledge density. Readers do not share the specialist background. Arguments have to specify more.
In the journal habitat, Cofnas’s arguments can rest on tacit-shared specialist competence in a way that matches the habitat’s normal operation. Readers know what behavioral genetics looks like, what philosophical-naturalism arguments look like, what counts as a careful citation. The tacit cover is functional rather than protective. It allows efficient argument inside the specialist community.
In the Substack habitat, the cover is not available. Readers do not have the specialist background. Cofnas has to specify more. The arguments have to defend themselves in publicly inspectable form to a much wider extent than journal arguments do. This is more Turner-coherent in some ways, less in others. More coherent because it forces specification. Less coherent because it strips arguments of the legitimate compression that specialist tacit competence allows.
The 2024 post on the hereditarian revolution shows the trade-off in action, and the Peterborough ruling has added a legal dimension to it. The post moved specialist content into the lower-tacit Substack habitat. The compression that worked in journals stopped working. The specifications the new habitat required did not get added. The post functioned more as a flag than as inspectable argument because the audience could not read the specialist tacit content compressed inside it.
The court’s reading of the post tracks this analysis. The court found the post confrontational in tone, with immediate harmful impact, producing reputational damage and hostile environment. These are the porous-register effects of expression that has shed its specialist tacit-knowledge regulatory context without acquiring sufficient new specification for its new habitat. Move arguments out of their normal tacit-knowledge habitat without re-specifying for the new habitat, and the arguments stop functioning as arguments. They function as something else. Cofnas’s critics correctly noticed the change. The court has now codified that the change can produce legal consequences when its effects are documented. Turner’s framework attributes the underlying phenomenon to habitat mismatch, and the court has effectively codified habitat-mismatch effects into doctrine.
The formal-versus-informal distinction continues to break down as the legal system develops doctrinal pathways that integrate both registers. The Peterborough rulingg is one step along that path. Future cases might produce more such pathways. The inspectable register might remain dominant at the level of belief. The tacit register, dressed in harassment-doctrine vocabulary or its successors, might remain operative at the level of expression-with-effects. The relationship between the two might continue to be worked out case by case.
The legal architecture continues to develop in ways that protect belief while authorizing institutional discretion over expression. The Equality Act 2010 protected-belief category, as applied in Cofnas v Emmanuel, is the model. Future cases might add to the architecture along the same lines: protecting interior states, authorizing institutional response to documented harmful effects, leaving the underlying philosophical questions unresolved.
The Style
Cofnas writes in four distinct registers, each calibrated to a specific audience and a specific function, and the differences between them are larger than most readers notice because most readers encounter only one or two of the registers. The registers are the academic-journal register of his peer-reviewed papers, the long-form-essay register of his major Substack pieces, the short-essay register of his Substack notes and shorter posts, and the social-media register of his X feed. Each has its own conventions, its own rhetorical structure, its own characteristic moves, and its own characteristic failures.
The academic-journal register is the most disciplined of the four. The 2018 Human Nature paper on MacDonald, the 2019 Philosophical Psychology paper on race and IQ, the 2020 Biology and Philosophy paper on Westermarck, the 2022 Utilitas paper on the Golden Rule, the 2024 Biology and Philosophy paper on natural selection and teleology, and the 2023 Evolutionary Psychological Science paper that closed his MacDonald exchange, all operate in this register. The register has the conventions of analytic philosophy of biology. The prose is plain rather than ornamented. Sentences run medium-length and avoid subordinate-clause stacking. The argumentative structure announces itself in the introduction, restates itself at the section boundaries, and concludes by returning to the announced thesis with the substantive material now installed. The opponents are named and quoted at length before being engaged. The engagement proceeds case by case, with each case marked by the specific claim being engaged, the specific evidence being adduced, and the specific conclusion being drawn from the engagement. The register’s signature move is the patient compilation of cases that the opponent’s framework cannot accommodate. The MacDonald paper is the canonical example. The paper does not argue against MacDonald’s framework in the abstract. The paper assembles cases (Boas was not what MacDonald says he was, Boas’s students were not the leftist activists MacDonald says they were, the leftist Jewish movements MacDonald cites had right-wing Jewish movements running parallel to them that MacDonald omits) and lets the cases do the argumentative work. The register’s strength is that the cases are checkable. The reader who wants to verify the claims can verify the claims. The register’s weakness is that the patient case-by-case method is slow and produces papers that read as plodding to readers who want quicker satisfaction.
Cofnas in this register is meticulous about scope. He does not say MacDonald is wrong about Jewish involvement in leftist movements. He says MacDonald is wrong about specific empirical claims about specific figures and specific movements, and the wrongness pattern accumulates across enough cases to challenge the framework. The qualifier does precise work. It prevents the argument from overreaching. It also lets the argument land at exactly the level where it can be defended. The register rewards the qualifier because peer review punishes overreach. The register has trained Cofnas to write with the qualifier installed at the sentence level. The training shows.
The academic-register papers close on what the argument has shown rather than on what the argument implies for broader contests. The MacDonald paper closes by saying that the specific empirical claims do not survive scrutiny, not by saying that this means the dissident right is wrong about the Jewish question. The closing leaves the broader implications to the reader. The discipline of leaving them to the reader is what makes the academic-register work durable. Other writers’ broader implications can come and go. The specific empirical demolition stays.
The long-form-essay register, exemplified by the major Substack pieces (the Hereditarian Revolution piece of February 2024, Why We Need to Talk About the Right’s Stupidity Problem of October 2024, the Sowell audit of August 2024, the four reasons Heterodox Academy failed of January 2024, MAGA Communism and the End of America of April 2025, Podcast Bros and Brain Rot of May 2025), operates differently. The register has structural features that mark it as long-form Substack rather than as academic prose. Paragraphs are shorter. The voice is more present. The opponents are described rather than quoted at length. The cases still appear, but they are summarized rather than reconstructed. The argumentative architecture is announced more explicitly, with section headings and numbered points, in ways the academic register suppresses. The closing is more rhetorical. The implications are surfaced rather than left to the reader.
The long-form register has its own characteristic moves. The first is the framing-of-the-problem opening. The Hereditarian Revolution piece opens by announcing that we are about to undergo a transformation comparable to the Copernican revolution. Why We Need to Talk About the Right’s Stupidity Problem opens by announcing that the right has a problem that needs naming. MAGA communism opens by announcing that the right has adopted communist policies. The framing is large. The framing is meant to lift the essay above ordinary commentary. The framing also commits the essay to delivering on the framing’s scale. The essays sometimes do not deliver on the scale. The Hereditarian Revolution piece does not actually establish the Copernican-revolution analogy. Why We Need to Talk does not actually demonstrate that stupidity is the right’s defining problem. MAGA communism does not actually demonstrate that Trump’s tariffs are communist. The framing functions as a hook rather than as a load-bearing element. The reader who expects the framing to be supported is sometimes left with the framing dangling.
The second characteristic move is the audit-by-summary. Where the academic-register papers reconstruct the opponent’s position before engaging it, the long-form essays summarize the opponent’s position in the writer’s own terms before engaging the summary. The summary is generally accurate but generally compressed in ways that suppress complications the opponent’s actual position has. The Sowell audit is the cleanest example. The audit treats Sowell’s culture-based explanation of group differences as a position that can be summarized in a few sentences. The summary is roughly accurate. The summary does not capture the specific historical-economic mechanisms Sowell elaborates across multiple books. The audit then attacks the summary. The attacks land on the summary. They do not always land on Sowell’s actual elaborated position. The same pattern shows up in the MAGA communism essay’s treatment of various Trump-administration figures and in the Podcast Bros essay’s treatment of Joe Rogan and Dave Smith. The summary-then-attack structure is faster than the academic register’s quote-then-attack structure. The speed comes at the cost of the precision the academic register protects.
The third characteristic move is the rhetorical close. The academic-register papers close on what has been shown. The long-form essays close on what the argument means for the broader cultural and political contest. The Hereditarian Revolution piece closes with a call for elites to align with the truth. MAGA communism closes with a warning about the end of America. Podcast Bros closes with the prediction that elite paternalism will need to reassert itself. The closing rhetoric serves the essay’s coalition function. The closing is what the audience wants to read. The closing is also what makes the essay a coalition production rather than an analysis. The academic register suppresses this closing because peer review does not reward it. The long-form register requires this closing because Substack readers expect it. The register’s adaptation to its audience is visible at exactly this point.
Cofnas in the long-form register has a distinctive prose voice that the academic register suppresses. The voice is dry, occasionally sardonic, willing to use understatement for effect. The voice can be funny when it wants to be. The voice can land a punch when it wants to. The voice’s strength is that it makes the essays readable in ways the academic prose is not. The voice’s weakness is that the voice can substitute for argument when the argument gets thin. The Podcast Bros essay has stretches where the voice is doing more work than the argument. The voice carries the reader through stretches where the argument would not carry the reader on its own. The voice is therefore both an asset and a vulnerability. Readers who like the voice forgive thin argument because the voice is enjoyable. Readers who do not like the voice notice the thinness. The voice makes Cofnas a writer rather than a researcher in the long-form register. The transition from researcher to writer is what produces both the gains in readability and the losses in argumentative discipline.
The short-essay register, which appears in his shorter Substack posts and in some of his Substack notes that run beyond a paragraph, is a distinct register that has not received much attention because it sits between the long-form essays and the social-media posts. The register operates at roughly one to three thousand words. It addresses a specific topic or specific figure with less scaffolding than the long-form essays use. The register’s typical structure is a single sustained argumentative move rather than the multi-section architecture the long-form essays deploy. The register can be more focused than the long-form essays because the shorter length forces compression. The register can also be sloppier than the long-form essays because the shorter length does not give the writer time to install the qualifications the longer pieces install.
The register’s characteristic moves include the take-down profile (a short essay focused on a specific figure who is judged and dismissed), the position-clarification (a short essay restating the writer’s view on a specific topic in response to perceived misunderstanding), the response-to-critic (a short essay addressing a particular line of criticism), and the prediction-or-warning (a short essay anticipating a development and registering the writer’s position before the development arrives). The takedown profile is the most common. The register’s strength is that it allows the writer to address a specific case without committing to the long-form architecture. The register’s weakness is that the takedown structure rewards quick judgment over careful analysis. The register can produce work that lands harder than it deserves because the form does not require the work to be load-bearing in the way the long-form essays require their work to be load-bearing.
A specific feature of the short-essay register is the willingness to extend judgments beyond the evidence the essay actually presents. The Mark Alfano “wants Trump supporters killed” parenthetical in Podcast Bros is short-essay-register thinking that has migrated into a long-form essay. The judgment is registered. The evidence for the judgment is not presented. The register tolerates this move because the register is built for quick takes that the audience trusts the writer to back if pressed. The migration of the move into the long-form essays imports the register’s standards into a context where the long-form register’s standards should apply. The result is essays that have long-form scaffolding but short-essay-register judgments at specific points. The hybrid produces unevenness across the long-form essays. The unevenness is most visible at exactly the points where short-essay register has migrated into long-form territory.
The social-media register, which operates on X and in the very short Substack notes, is the most informal register and has the loosest standards. The register’s typical post is a single observation, judgment, or response, presented without scaffolding. The register includes the parenthetical takedown of an opponent, the snarky reply to a critic, the gnomic observation about a passing event, the link-and-comment, the multi-tweet thread that occasionally extends to short-essay-register length. The register has its own conventions. The voice is more compressed than the long-form voice. The judgments are more direct. The qualifications that the academic register installs and that the long-form register sometimes installs are mostly absent. The register operates on a different epistemic standard. Posts can be wrong without the writer paying the cost the wrongness would cost in a long-form essay. The audience expects rapid posting and tolerates the errors that come with rapid posting.
The social-media register has its own characteristic moves. The first is the framing of opponents in compressed form, often in ways that would not survive the academic register’s quoting standards. The “coalition of stupid people” formulation about Karlin’s audience is social-media-register compression of a more complex argument. The compressed version registers the judgment without the supporting work the academic register would require. The second is the willingness to engage in personal characterization in ways the more formal registers suppress. The Galloway-Moroccan-Jews thread is social-media-register engagement with George Galloway’s pattern that would be modulated differently in a long-form essay. The third is the strategic deployment of provocative framings to generate engagement. The social-media register rewards provocative framings because the platform rewards engagement. The writer who wants engagement on the platform produces what the platform rewards. The fourth is the rapid response to ongoing controversies. The Turkheimer reply note from April 2026 is social-media-register response to an exchange that would be addressed differently in a long-form piece. The rapid response gets the writer into the conversation while the conversation is happening. The rapid response also commits the writer to positions that more deliberate engagement might modulate.
The social-media register is the register where the protection circuit is most engaged. The register’s compressions and provocations and rapid responses are partly defensive moves against the constant attack the platform produces. The defensive moves shape the writer’s posture in ways that bleed into the other registers. A writer who spends substantial time in the social-media register develops habits of compression, provocation, and rapid response that show up in long-form work even when the long-form work is supposed to operate by different standards. The migration of social-media-register moves into long-form essays is one of the visible effects of sustained social-media activity on Cofnas’s writing. The Hereditarian Revolution piece reads in places as long-form expansion of social-media-register thinking. The MAGA communism piece reads in places as long-form expansion of social-media-register reactivity to the Trump second-term moment. The pieces have long-form scaffolding but social-media-register impulses at the argumentative core. The hybrid produces work that reads as more agitated and less considered than the academic-register work the same writer produces in journals.
A few observations across the four registers.
The first observation is that the registers have been migrating toward each other across the trajectory we have mapped. The academic register has stayed roughly constant, because peer review enforces the register’s standards. The long-form register has loosened, because Substack does not enforce the standards peer review enforces. The short-essay register has expanded as the long-form register has loosened, because the boundary between them is permeable. The social-media register has accumulated more total writing as the X presence has grown. The net effect is that the proportion of the writer’s output produced under the academic register’s discipline has declined, and the proportion produced under the looser registers has grown. The shift is not visible at the level of any specific essay. The shift is visible at the level of the body of work. A reader who tracks the body of work across years notices that the recent work runs at registers the earlier work did not. The registers themselves have not changed. The mix has changed.
The second observation is that the writer can move between registers but the registers have different effects on the writer’s reputation. The academic register builds long-term reputation among readers who care about peer-reviewed work. The long-form register builds short-term audience among readers who follow Substack writers. The short-essay register and the social-media register build engagement among readers who follow rapid response. The four registers have different reputational currencies. A writer who concentrates in the higher-currency registers builds different kinds of standing than a writer who concentrates in the lower-currency registers. Cofnas’s reputation in 2018 was built in the academic register. His reputation in 2026 is increasingly built in the lower-currency registers. The reputational composition has shifted. The shift is consequential because the academic-register reputation was institutionally portable in ways the lower-register reputations are not. The Cambridge appointment was based on the academic-register work. The Ghent appointment is presumably based on the same. The Substack and X presence does not produce the kind of reputation that institutions are willing to underwrite. The transition from higher-currency to lower-currency registers is therefore not just a stylistic shift but a reputational shift with material consequences for what kinds of institutional positions remain available.
The third observation is that the registers have asymmetric relationships to truth claims. The academic register is built to produce truth claims that survive scrutiny. The long-form register is built to produce truth claims that survive Substack-audience scrutiny, which is a weaker standard. The short-essay register operates at a still weaker standard. The social-media register operates at the weakest standard. A writer who produces in all four registers ends up with a body of work whose truth claims are not all defensible at the same standard. The reader who is trying to evaluate the writer’s body of work has to track which register a particular claim was produced in. Most readers do not track this. The result is that claims produced in the social-media register get cited as if they had been produced in the academic register. The conflation is a feature of how Cofnas is read. The conflation is also a vulnerability of his body of work, because critics can target the social-media-register claims and damage the academic-register reputation by association. The Mark Alfano parenthetical and the Quayshawn Spencer attribution in Podcast Bros are examples of social-media-register material that has migrated into long-form work and become available for the kind of attack that the academic-register work would have been protected from.
The fourth observation is that the writer has voices in each register that operate as distinct authorial personae. The academic-register Cofnas is a careful philosopher of biology with a particular interest in evolutionary theory and the philosophy of intelligence research. The long-form-register Cofnas is a Substack essayist with a sardonic voice and a willingness to make large framing claims. The short-essay-register Cofnas is a takedown specialist who registers judgments quickly. The social-media-register Cofnas is an embattled combatant who responds to incoming attacks and produces compressed framings of opponents. The four personae are all the same writer. The four personae also operate by different standards and produce different kinds of work. The writer’s identity sits across the four. No single register expresses the whole writer. The reader who wants to understand the writer has to read across all four. Most readers do not read across all four. Most readers encounter one or two and form an impression based on the encounter. The impression is partial. The partiality is a feature of how the writer is received, and the writer presumably knows this and presumably has some view about which registers he wants to be received through.
The fifth observation is that the registers have characteristic vulnerabilities that map to the registers’ standards. The academic-register vulnerabilities are technical: methodological challenges, alternative interpretations of the evidence, additional sources that complicate the framework. These vulnerabilities can be addressed within the academic register, through replies and follow-up papers, in ways that maintain the writer’s reputation in that register. The long-form-register vulnerabilities are rhetorical: framings that overreach, summaries that compress in ways that distort, closings that import coalition assumptions the body of the essay did not establish. These vulnerabilities can be addressed by tightening the register’s standards, but the addressing requires effort the register’s pace does not always permit. The short-essay-register vulnerabilities are evidentiary: judgments registered without the evidence the academic register would require. The social-media-register vulnerabilities are categorical: framings of whole populations that the academic register would not permit and that the long-form register would modulate. The vulnerabilities are not symmetrically distributed. A writer who works hard in the academic register and lightly in the social-media register accumulates fewer overall vulnerabilities than a writer who works lightly in the academic register and hard in the social-media register. Cofnas’s mix has shifted toward the latter. The accumulated vulnerabilities have grown accordingly.
The sixth observation is that the prose at every register is the prose of a careful philosopher who is operating under increasing pressure that the philosophical training does not fully equip him to handle. The academic register protects him because peer review enforces the standards he is trained in. The long-form register exposes him to standards he has not been trained for, and he handles them with mixed results. The short-essay and social-media registers expose him further to standards no philosophical training prepares anyone for, and he handles them with the predictable difficulties most philosophers face when they enter those registers. The cumulative effect is that the writer’s strengths show up most clearly in the academic register and his weaknesses show up most clearly in the social-media register, with the long-form essays sitting between the two and showing both. The body of work, read across all four registers, is the body of work of a serious philosopher who has been forced by circumstance into registers his training did not prepare him for and who is doing his best across registers with uneven success. The unevenness is not a moral failure. It is the predictable result of a philosopher operating across more registers than philosophical training equips a person to operate across.
The literary style across the four registers is evidence about the trajectory we have been mapping. The academic register holds. The long-form register loosens. The short-essay register expands. The social-media register intensifies. The pattern across the registers tracks the pattern across the phases. The phases we have been describing through hero-system consolidation, coalition migration, and structural pressure show up in the literary style as the migration of compressed-register standards into expanded-register settings. The style is a symptom of the trajectory. The trajectory is what produces the style. The style and the trajectory cannot be separated. They are two ways of seeing the same thing. A reader who attends to the style is reading the trajectory. A reader who attends to the trajectory is reading the style. The attention runs both ways.
The literary analysis is therefore not separable from the structural analysis. The two converge. The convergence is what makes literary criticism of contemporary public-intellectual writing useful. The criticism is not just about how the writer writes. The criticism is about what the writing reveals about the writer’s situation. Cofnas’s writing across the four registers reveals what his situation across the four phases has been. The writing is the record.
Watergate as Democratic Ritual & Cultural Trauma
Jeffrey Alexander’s argument is that Watergate was politically trivial for fifteen months and then generalized upward through three levels: from political goals at the bottom, through institutional norms, to the deepest values of American civil religion at the top. The five conditions for this generalization came into alignment over time. Consensus that the event had polluted. Perception of threat to the civic center. Activation of institutional social controls. Mobilization of differentiated elite countercenters. Ritual purification through televised hearings that opened liminal space outside ordinary politics, where partisan rules suspended and senators performed as priests of democratic civil religion. The pollution traveled outward from the burglars to Nixon’s aides and finally to Nixon. The republic performed its self-cleaning ritual.
The petition campaigns against Cofnas are best understood as attempts at exactly this kind of ritual generalization. The petitioners do not write as if they are participating in a personnel matter or a debate about empirical claims. They write in the registers of civic religion. The language is moral and absolute. The demands are not for refutation but for institutional action. The signatories perform priestly roles, speaking on behalf of values they treat as foundational rather than contested.
The five conditions apply with precision to the dominant trauma narrative the petitions enact. Consensus that Cofnas’s writing has polluted: substantial within elite academic institutions, where the racial equality thesis has achieved the kind of taken-for-granted status Alexander reserves for civic religion. Perception of threat to the center: the petitions describe Cofnas’s views as threats to vulnerable students, to the academy’s mission, to the project of an inclusive society. Activation of institutional social controls: HR processes, ethics reviews, departmental investigations, the procedural apparatus the petitioners demand the institution deploy against him. Mobilization of differentiated elite countercenters: the over 1,200 academics who signed the Cambridge petition, the 196 at Ghent, are themselves the elite countercenter Alexander describes. They are the priesthood asserting jurisdiction. Ritual purification: the demands for dismissal, the calls for the rector to act, the language of the ethical code. The full apparatus Alexander describes for Watergate is operating against Cofnas in something close to the form it took against Nixon.
Cofnas wrote that under a meritocracy, the number of Black faculty at Harvard would approach zero. The petitioners did not follow the citation in his paragraph, did not engage the underlying argument, did not address the inference’s logical or empirical status. They quoted the passage as a sacred violation. In civic ritual, facts work this way. They serve as focal points for moral classification rather than as objects of inquiry. The question is not whether Cofnas’s claim is true. The question is whether the claim places him on the polluted side of the symbolic boundary. The petitioners answered this question with their signatures. The signatures performed the classification.
Alexander’s pollution-transfer logic adds another layer. In Watergate, pollution traveled from the burglars to Nixon’s aides to Nixon. In the Cofnas case, pollution travels from his published claims to him personally, and the petitioners are trying to extend the transfer further outward. They demand that institutions that employ him share his pollution unless they expel him. They demand that the Ghent rector “act in accordance with the university’s ethical code,” which is to say that they demand the rector either join the pollution-management activity or become contaminated by association. The petition’s structural function is to transfer pollution from the named figure to anyone who refuses to participate in his expulsion. This is what makes neutrality unstable. The institution cannot stay neutral because, in the symbolic logic of civic ritual, neutrality is itself a polluted position.
What makes the Cofnas case sharp in Alexander’s frame is that the cooling-out apparatus has partially worked. Alexander’s Watergate essay describes how Nixon’s aides tried to cool out the proceedings by speaking the language of technical rationality, due process, and procedural propriety. They failed because the ritual frame had already captured the broader political conversation. The Cambridge and Ghent administrations have tried similar cooling. They have spoken in the language of academic freedom, employment law, and procedural review. Cambridge eventually cleared Cofnas formally even though he left. Ghent has held its procedural line through repeated petitions. The ritual has not fully completed.
The dominant trauma narrative against hereditarianism has achieved generalization within elite academic institutions but has not achieved unchallenged status across the broader culture. The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act in the UK, the legal pushback against DEI in the United States, the donor pressure on universities, the growth of alternative media that treats ritual purifications as moral spectacle rather than as legitimate civic action, all of these constitute counter-civic-religious forces that prevent the ritual against Cofnas from completing. The petitioners are doing the priestly work, but the institutional context in which they operate has shifted enough that the priestly authority no longer carries the weight it carried five years ago. The ritual proceeds. The purification stalls. The polluting figure remains in academic life, employed, publishing, suing the institution that tried to expel him.
Now bring in the second Alexander essay, on cultural trauma.
The cultural trauma frame illuminates Cofnas’s position from both directions at once. He sits at the convergence of two competing trauma narratives, each constructed by a distinct carrier group, each performing the four representational tasks Alexander identifies, each treating the opposing narrative as polluting. Cofnas is also carrier-group figure for one of the two narratives. He produces trauma claims even as other carrier groups produce trauma claims about him.
The dominant trauma construction he opposes is the structural racism narrative as it has been elaborated since the 2010s. The pain is the persistence of racial inequality in outcomes, presented as evidence of ongoing systemic discrimination. The victims are Black and minority communities, students of color in elite institutions, and the broader project of an inclusive society. The connection to wider audience extends through the post-civil-rights settlement: anyone who values racial justice shares the wound when scholars publish hereditarian work that, in the petitioners’ framing, would license abandonment of the project. The responsibility belongs to those who produce, defend, or institutionally tolerate hereditarian claims. The construction has the four pieces Alexander identifies. It has carrier groups with material interests in DEI infrastructure and ideal interests in the moral framework. It has structural position in elite universities, foundations, and media. It has discursive talents in legal, academic, and journalistic arenas.
The premise of innate equal capacities across groups operates in elite American and Western academic institutions the way the premise of constitutional propriety operated in 1973 American civic culture. To question it is to enter the polluted category. To affirm it is to occupy the sacred center. The petitioners do not need to argue the premise because the premise has the status of sacred axiom within their institutional world.
Cofnas is constructing a counter-trauma. The pain is the suppression of empirical inquiry by ideological enforcement. The victims are scientific truth, the academy as a knowledge-producing institution, students and citizens denied accurate information about human nature. The connection to wider audience extends through anyone who values truth and free inquiry. The responsibility belongs to wokeism, DEI bureaucracy, the equality thesis, the activist class that enforces it. He answers Alexander’s four questions cleanly. He has carrier-group standing. He occupies the structural position of a credentialed academic philosopher who has paid costs for his views. He has the discursive talent of analytic philosophy plus a feel for media performance.
What he lacks, and what makes his task harder than Scheuer’s was, is the cultural opening. Scheuer was attempting to construct a trauma around al-Qaeda before September 11 supplied the conditions for generalization. The conditions then arrived externally and the trauma achieved generalization in directions Scheuer could not control. Cofnas faces a different problem. The dominant trauma narrative he opposes is already entrenched in his institutional environment. He is not constructing trauma in a void. He is constructing counter-trauma against an established sacred order. His task is closer to what an Enlightenment skeptic faced when challenging Christian civic religion than to what Scheuer faced trying to elevate a threat to civic salience. He must persuade his audience that the existing sacred is in fact a misinterpretation of empirical reality. This is harder than constructing trauma from raw events.
The carrier-group competition Alexander describes is the key to seeing why Cofnas’s situation has the shape it has. The petitioners and Cofnas are both performing carrier-group work, but they are not competing on equal terrain. The petitioners work within the dominant trauma framework, drawing on its accumulated symbolic capital. They do not have to construct the framework. They have only to deploy it. The framework treats their actions as restoring moral order rather than as attacking a colleague. Cofnas works against the dominant framework, which means his every move is processed through the framework’s classifications. He cannot present himself as a neutral inquirer because the framework has already classified hereditarian inquiry as polluting. He cannot appeal to procedure because the framework has already classified procedural defense as a cooling-out strategy that misses the moral point.
This produces what looks from outside like an unfair contest and from inside the dominant framework like the proper exercise of moral authority. Both descriptions are accurate within their respective frames. Alexander’s contribution is to show that the contest is between frames rather than within a single frame. The argument is not really about behavioral genetics. The argument is about which trauma construction will hold civic-religious authority in the relevant institutional sphere. Cofnas is trying to dislodge the dominant construction. The petitioners are trying to enforce its boundaries against an internal challenger. The empirical questions about genetics and cognitive ability sit beneath this struggle. They are the surface phenomenon. The struggle is over symbolic classification.
Alexander’s naturalistic fallacy point applies symmetrically and uncomfortably. Constructivism does not deny the underlying phenomena. The petitioners are responding to real concern about what hereditarianism could license if widely accepted. The history of racial science includes Auschwitz, segregation, and the apartheid state. The concern is not invented. Cofnas is responding to real concern about what equality-thesis enforcement could cost in scientific inquiry, in institutional honesty, in the credibility of expertise. The history of ideological enforcement of empirical claims includes Lysenko, Soviet psychology, and the long suppression of inconvenient findings in many fields. That concern is also not invented. Both trauma constructions are responding to genuine phenomena. Both are also performing symbolic work that exceeds what the phenomena alone require. The frame holds open the empirical questions while showing what the symbolic struggle looks like from above.
The counter-petition Cofnas’s defenders mounted illustrates Alexander’s logic with particular clarity. The over one hundred academics who signed it did not defend hereditarianism. They defended the right to hold heretical views without dismissal. This is meta-ritual activity. It is a ritual about the legitimacy of rituals. By shifting the symbolic frame from the content of Cofnas’s views to the institutional norms governing how controversial views get handled, the counter-coalition tries to construct a different sacred. The new sacred is academic freedom itself. Anyone who values academic inquiry shares a wound when professors face dismissal-by-petition. The responsibility belongs to those who deploy mob tactics against intellectual heretics. The counter-petition performs Alexander’s four representational tasks for a different trauma narrative, one whose pain is the corruption of the academy by activist enforcement. It tries to mobilize a different elite countercenter. It seeks its own ritual purification through institutional refusal to expel.
That this counter-mobilization had partial success at Cambridge and Ghent suggests that the dominant trauma narrative’s hegemony is incomplete. The institution cleared Cofnas formally even as he left. The Ghent rector held the procedural line. These are not full reversals of the dominant ritual. They are partial blockages. They suggest that the cooling-out apparatus, which Alexander treats as ineffective in the Watergate case, can be effective when the dominant trauma narrative has not achieved full civic-religious generalization. The Watergate ritual completed because no significant institutional countercurrent existed. The Cofnas ritual stalls because significant institutional countercurrents exist. Different cultural conditions produce different ritual outcomes.
Cofnas’s published philosophy work, including his exchanges with Kevin MacDonald in Human Nature and his articles on hereditarianism in journals such as Philosophical Psychology, has the structural markers of argument in Pinsof’s sense. The work engages with the strongest versions of opposing views. His critique of MacDonald’s Culture of Critique takes the trilogy at its strongest points and examines whether the evolutionary group-strategy framework can do the work MacDonald asks of it. The critique is granular. It engages with the citations MacDonald uses, the inferences he draws from them, and the alternative explanations available for the same data. The paper does not straw-man. It restates MacDonald’s position carefully before challenging it.
The same is true of Cofnas’s papers on hereditarianism. The work acknowledges counterexamples, addresses the strongest objections in the secondary literature, and accepts the burden of distinguishing claims that the data support from claims that exceed the data. Cofnas concedes points where concessions are warranted. He revises positions in response to peer-review pressure. The papers carry the markers of inquiry rather than the markers of pseudoargument. They have the doubt, the acknowledgment of debt, and the openness to revision that Pinsof identifies as signs that an author is engaged in real argument rather than tribal performance.
Pinsof’s framework predicts that humans are rational animals on practical questions and apparatchiks on tribal ones. The questions Cofnas addresses in his academic work are tribal questions in their public reception, even if not in their philosophical content. Group differences, evolutionary explanations of social outcomes, and the validity of hereditarian claims are precisely the topics on which the framework predicts pseudoargument. That Cofnas’s academic work largely passes the diagnostic suggests that the academic register, with its institutional incentives toward peer review, methodological discipline, and reputational consequences for sloppy reasoning, can hold an author to argument standards even on topics where the broader culture rewards pseudoargument.
The peer-review apparatus does work here that the patristic apparatus does for Jones and the citation apparatus does for Duke. The difference is that peer review is adversarial in a way that the other two are not. Jones cites patristic sources to readers who already accept patristic authority. Duke cites hereditarian science to readers who already accept hereditarian framing. Cofnas submits his arguments to philosophers who do not share his conclusions and who are professionally rewarded for finding errors in his reasoning. The structural pressure on the author is different, and the form of the work reflects the pressure.
Now consider the Substack essays. The register shifts. The audience changes. The peer-review apparatus drops away. Cofnas writes for readers who have chosen to subscribe and who tend to share his broad orientation toward heterodox claims about group differences and Jewish overrepresentation in particular institutions. The essays retain some of the discipline of the academic work. Cofnas still distinguishes claims that the data support from claims that exceed the data. He still acknowledges counterarguments at points. He still revises positions in response to feedback.
The discipline is partial, however. Pinsof’s diagnostic flags several features of the Substack work that point toward pseudoargument. The essays select for the strongest cases against his ideological opponents and against Jewish institutional behavior, and the selection function operates without the methodological corrections peer review supplies. The treatment of opposing views is more compressed than in the academic work. Strawmen appear more often, though not as often as in Duke or Jones. The tone shifts toward the rhetorical, with sharper rhetoric directed at progressive academic culture, at the critics who have attacked Cofnas’s career, and at the institutional Catholic and progressive Jewish establishments he sees as obstructing honest discussion of group differences.
The status-defense function becomes visible. Cofnas writes about the campaign against him following his appointment at Cambridge and his subsequent dismissal. The writing presents him as a victim of the kind of ideological enforcement Pinsof’s framework describes. This is partially accurate. The campaign against Cofnas was real, and the institutional response did follow patterns that the framework would predict if Pinsof’s account of pseudoargument as a tool of tribal enforcement is correct. The writing is also partially a status operation in Pinsof’s sense. It positions Cofnas as the dissident truth-teller, and the positioning does work the bare facts of the case do not require. The framework reads this as an example of how a real grievance can be metabolized into status-defense rhetoric, and how the rhetoric can shade into the kind of self-presentation Pinsof identifies as a marker of pseudoargument.
The Substack also performs a tribal-rallying function. Cofnas’s readers are not a tribe in the political sense, but they are an intellectual coalition with shared commitments to hereditarianism, free inquiry on stigmatized topics, and resistance to what they see as the ideological capture of academic institutions. The essays produce common knowledge for this coalition. They establish shared references, shared arguments, shared villains, and shared heroes. Pinsof’s framework reads this function as compatible with real argument when the rallying is incidental to the inquiry, and as incompatible with real argument when the rallying becomes the function the inquiry serves. Cofnas’s Substack is a mixed case. Some essays are inquiry that happens to rally. Others are rallying that wears the costume of inquiry. The reader has to evaluate piece by piece.
The interviews represent a further register shift. In long-form podcast interviews, particularly those on YouTube channels in the dissident-right and heterodox-academic ecosystem, Cofnas operates without the structural pressures of either peer review or the written word. The interviews tend to run two or three hours. The interviewer is typically sympathetic. The audience is typically already committed to the broad orientation Cofnas represents. The format rewards extended exposition over careful argument, memorable framings over methodological caution, and rhetorical sharpness over qualification.
Pinsof’s framework finds more pseudoargument features in this register than in the others. The strongest versions of opposing views appear less often. Strawmen appear more often. Acknowledgment of counterarguments becomes briefer. The autobiographical element grows. Cofnas spends more time on his own story, his own treatment by Cambridge, his own intellectual journey from one set of views to another. This is what Pinsof’s framework would predict for a register without the disciplining pressure of peer review or the editorial pressure of written publication. The form of the work shifts toward the rhetorical and away from the analytic, and the function shifts in parallel.
The verbal-sparring function becomes more visible in interviews than in the other registers. Cofnas is often asked about his critics and about the figures he has criticized in his academic work. The exchanges are framed as opportunities to make memorable points, deliver effective lines, and demonstrate intellectual command. The framing is the framing of competitive verbal performance rather than collaborative inquiry. Pinsof’s framework reads this as an important diagnostic. Real arguments, on his account, generally do not look like sparring matches. The presence of sparring is a sign that the activity has shifted from inquiry to performance. The shift is not absolute in Cofnas’s interviews, but it is real, and it is more pronounced than in the written work.
The interviews also perform a chant function. Cofnas’s central themes recur across interviews with different hosts on different platforms. The campaign against him at Cambridge, the failure of the academic establishment to engage honestly with hereditarian claims, the importance of distinguishing what the data support from what ideology demands, the cowardice of academics who privately agree with him but will not say so publicly. These themes are repeated in interview after interview. The repetition serves a real communicative function for new audiences who have not heard the case before. It also serves the function Pinsof identifies as chant: the building of common knowledge among the coalition that shares Cofnas’s orientation. By the tenth interview, the audience has heard the same arguments framed in similar ways with similar rhetorical moves. The repetition has done what repetition does. It has felt, by accumulation, like established fact.
The social media register is the most pseudoargument-heavy of the four. Cofnas’s Twitter exchanges have the structural features Pinsof’s framework predicts for short-form public exchange on tribal topics. The platform rewards punchy framing over careful argument, dunks over engagement, and viral moments over sustained inquiry. Cofnas operates within these incentives. His exchanges with critics are often combative. The strongest versions of opposing views rarely appear. Strawmen appear regularly. The treatment of opponents shades toward status attack. The audience effects are pronounced. Cofnas writes for his followers as much as he writes to his interlocutors.
Pinsof’s framework predicts that any sustained engagement on Twitter with tribal-adjacent topics will tend toward pseudoargument, because the form of the platform fits the function of pseudoargument better than it fits the function of persuasion. The character limits, the public visibility, the audience structure, and the reward dynamics all push in the same direction. An author who tries to do real argument on Twitter is fighting the platform. Most authors lose the fight. Cofnas mostly loses it, in the same way most thoughtful authors mostly lose it.
The verbal-sparring function dominates the social media register. The status-attack function operates with little restraint. The chant function is constant, with Cofnas’s core themes appearing in compressed form across many posts. The status-defense function operates whenever Cofnas responds to criticism. The rallying function organizes his follower base around shared targets and shared framings. The concealment function is reduced, because the form is too compressed to disguise what it is doing, but the residual concealment runs through the framing of even the sharpest exchanges as honest inquiry rather than as the tribal performance the framework identifies.
Now stand back and look at the full picture. The same author, working on the same broad set of topics, produces work that ranges from real argument in his academic papers, through mixed work in his Substack, into substantially pseudoargument-shaped work in his interviews, and into nearly pure pseudoargument in his social media engagement. The variance is not random. It tracks the structural features of each register: the presence or absence of peer review, the editorial discipline of written publication, the audience structure, the time horizon of the format, and the reward dynamics of the platform.
Pinsof’s framework reads this as an important confirmation of his account. The function of an activity is not determined by the topic and not determined by the author. It is determined by the structural features that shape the form. When the form is shaped by adversarial peer review, even tribal topics can be addressed in argument mode. When the form is shaped by Twitter, even careful authors are pushed into pseudoargument mode. The same intellect, working on the same problems, produces different objects in different registers because the registers do different things.
This has implications for how to read Cofnas. A reader who takes the Twitter exchanges as representative of his work will misread the academic papers. A reader who takes the academic papers as representative will misread the interviews. Each register has to be evaluated on its own terms, and Pinsof’s framework provides the diagnostic for doing so. The academic work is largely real argument and should be engaged as such. The Substack is mixed and requires piece-by-piece judgment. The interviews are partly inquiry and partly performance, with the proportions varying by host and topic. The social media is largely pseudoargument and should be discounted accordingly.
The implications also run in the other direction, toward how Cofnas should evaluate his own output. Pinsof’s framework suggests that an author committed to real argument should be cautious about the registers he works in. Time spent in registers that produce pseudoargument is time spent producing tribal performance regardless of the author’s intentions. The form does work the author does not control. An author who wants to do real argument on tribal topics should weight his output toward the registers that support real argument, accept the smaller audiences those registers produce, and recognize that the larger audiences in pseudoargument-friendly registers are larger because the registers fit pseudoargument’s function better than argument’s. The trade-off is real, and the framework predicts that authors who do not manage it carefully will find their work drifting toward the registers’ incentives over time.
The Cofnas case shows how the framework cuts. It does not classify authors. It classifies activities. The same author can be doing argument in one register and pseudoargument in another, and the diagnostic depends on the structural fit between form and function in each setting. This is the framework’s strength and its difficulty. It demands that the reader evaluate each piece of work in its own context rather than relying on a global verdict about the author. The work it asks of the reader is the work pseudoargument is designed to make the reader skip. Doing the work consistently, across all four of Cofnas’s registers, produces a more accurate picture of what he is actually doing than any global judgment of his output.
Pinsof’s framework allows an author to be partially captured by pseudoargument incentives without becoming a pseudoargument author in toto. The same author of impressive academic work when working in less disciplined registers produces work that drifts toward the patterns of pseudoargument. The fragility is what the framework predicts. Real argument on tribal topics is hard, requires structural support, and tends to erode in environments that do not provide the support. Cofnas’s case shows that the same intellect can be observed across registers that do and do not provide the structural support, and the work produced in each register tracks what the framework would predict.
Will Cofnas Return To Serious Work?
There aren’t many examples of academics who once did serious work, turn popular and political, and then return to serious work.
The pattern is recognizable across multiple disciplines and eras, and worth examining because it tells you something about what conditions support the return to serious work and what conditions foreclose it. The cases sort into rough categories. Some are full transitions to performance with no return. Some are mixed, where the serious work continues alongside the performance work but at reduced output and reduced quality. A few are genuine returns. The returns are rare and the conditions that produce them are worth identifying.
The full-transition cases are the most numerous. Cornel West is the textbook American example. His early work at Princeton and Harvard, the Prophesy Deliverance book from 1982, The American Evasion of Philosophy from 1989, the engagement with American pragmatism through Emerson and Dewey and DuBois, was real philosophy of religion and intellectual history. The work was not always rigorous in the analytic-philosophy sense, but it was substantive engagement with primary texts in service of a coherent intellectual project. The transition to public-intellectual-as-performance happened gradually across the 1990s and accelerated after the rap album and the Race Matters trade book and the move from Harvard to Princeton and back, and the dispute with Lawrence Summers over whether West’s work was meeting Harvard’s standards. By the 2000s the public West was a distinct figure from the academic West. The political appearances, the cable news segments, the spoken-word performances, the prophetic-mode rhetoric all consolidated. The serious philosophical work did not return. The Bernie Sanders campaigns, the presidential runs, the Israel-Palestine commentary, the Twitter presence, the Theosophy Society lectures all read as performance work. Whether one agrees with West’s politics, the trajectory away from serious philosophical production is hard to dispute. He has not returned.
Niall Ferguson is a different version of the same pattern. The early work at Oxford and Cambridge, Paper and Iron on Hamburg business and German inflation, The Pity of War on the First World War, The House of Rothschild in two volumes, was serious archival history. Ferguson made a name in the 1990s as a counterfactual-history specialist and a financial historian capable of working in German and English archives. The transition to public-intellectual mode began with Empire and Colossus in the early 2000s and accelerated through the financial crisis commentary, the Henry Kissinger biography (which is half serious archival work and half hagiography), the Hoover Institution position, the Substack newsletter, the steady stream of opinion pieces in Bloomberg and the Times of London. The serious history did not stop entirely. The Square and the Tower is a real book. The Doom book on disasters has substance even if it bends toward the popular register. The output is increasingly weighted toward commentary and mixed-purpose books rather than archive-driven history. Ferguson’s case is less complete than West’s. The serious work continues at reduced rate and is intermixed with the performance work. He has not returned to the archives the way the early career promised.
Glenn Loury is the case that approaches a return. His early work at Northwestern and Harvard and Boston University was serious economic theory on welfare economics, social capital, and statistical discrimination. The “social capital” concept Loury introduced in 1977 is the version Putnam later popularized with attribution. The transition to public-intellectual mode happened in the 1980s and 1990s, when Loury became a prominent black conservative commentator. The 1987 cocaine arrest and the Brookings episode interrupted the trajectory. The rehabilitation included a return to academic work at Boston University, where Loury produced The Anatomy of Racial Inequality in 2002, which is a serious theoretical book that engages the social capital framework in new ways. Since then Loury has run the Glenn Show podcast, become a major figure in the heterodox-academic ecosystem, and produced commentary at high volume. The academic output has continued at reduced rate. The 2024 memoir Late Admissions is more confessional than scholarly. Loury’s case is mixed. The serious work did not stop. The performance work has expanded to take more of his time. He has not fully returned to the technical economic theory of his youth, but he has not abandoned it either.
Cass Sunstein is a different kind of case worth examining. His early work at Chicago and then Harvard Law, the constitutional-law scholarship through the 1990s, the partial-constitution work, the One Case at a Time book on judicial minimalism, was serious legal theory. Sunstein then moved into the behavioral-economics-meets-law direction with Nudge in 2008 with Thaler. Nudge is at the boundary between serious work and popular work. After the Obama administration position at OIRA, Sunstein returned to academic life and has produced an enormous volume of books, papers, and commentary. The output is serious in the sense that it engages real questions in real literatures. The output is also distinctively performative in that Sunstein has become a brand and the brand demands continuous output that no scholar working at depth could maintain. His case is the inflation-of-output version of the pattern. The work continues. The work also expands beyond what one careful person could do well. The result is a body of work where the depth of any individual book or paper is harder to find than in the early career.
Steven Pinker is probably the best-known case in the cognitive sciences. The early work at MIT and then Harvard, The Language Instinct in 1994, How the Mind Works in 1997, Words and Rules in 1999, was serious cognitive science aimed at general audiences but grounded in real research. The transition to public-intellectual mode began with The Blank Slate in 2002 and accelerated through The Better Angels of Our Nature in 2011 and Enlightenment Now in 2018. The later books are increasingly arguments for a coalition position rather than expositions of cognitive science. The Better Angels critique by John Gray, by Nassim Taleb, by various historians, identified specific empirical and methodological problems that would not have survived the early-career Pinker’s own standards. Pinker has not returned to the cognitive science of the language work. He has continued producing books at the public-intellectual scale and pace. His case is closer to West’s than to Loury’s. The transition has been close to total even if the performance is more dignified than West’s.
Jordan Peterson is a more dramatic case in the same field. The early work at McGill and then Harvard and then Toronto, Maps of Meaning in 1999, was a serious if eccentric attempt to integrate Jung, Piaget, Solzhenitsyn, and evolutionary psychology into a single framework. The book is dense, often confused, and original in ways that mark a serious thinker even when the synthesis fails. The transition to public-intellectual mode happened around 2016 with the Bill C-16 video, accelerated through the 12 Rules book and the global lecture tour, and consolidated through the post-illness and post-Russia-coma period into a register that is almost entirely performance. The serious psychology has not returned. The university position has effectively ended. The output is now almost entirely YouTube, Daily Wire, and the Maps of Meaning lecture series. Peterson’s case is the cautionary example in the cognitive sciences. The early work suggested a different career was possible. The performance work absorbed the trajectory.
Michael Walzer is a case where serious work has continued through what could have been a transition. The early work at Princeton, Just and Unjust Wars in 1977, Spheres of Justice in 1983, was foundational political theory. Walzer became a major public intellectual through Dissent magazine and his commentary on Israel, the Iraq wars, terrorism, and democratic theory. The performance work was continuous with the academic work because Dissent operates at high seriousness even in commentary mode. Walzer kept producing books that engaged the academic literatures. On Toleration, Politics and Passion, In God’s Shadow, and the later collected essays maintained the academic register. His case is the example of a public intellectual whose performance work and serious work were never separated because the venues of his performance demanded the same standards as the academic work. Walzer is not the brand the others became. He is the model of what the others might have been if they had selected venues that disciplined the performance.
Charles Murray had an unusual trajectory. Losing Ground in 1984 was a controversial but methodologically serious policy book. The Bell Curve with Herrnstein in 1994 was the work that defined his public reputation. The book was not the work of a careful philosopher of biology in the Cofnas mold, but it was a substantial empirical work that engaged real data even if the framing and the conclusions were contested. After Bell Curve Murray could have transitioned fully into public-intellectual performance mode. He did not. Human Accomplishment in 2003 is a serious empirical book on patterns of historical achievement. Coming Apart in 2012 is a serious sociological book on class divergence. By the People and Real Education are more polemical but still engage real data. Murray has continued producing scholarship of mixed quality at reduced rate while maintaining the public-intellectual brand. His case is closer to Sunstein’s pattern of inflated output than to West’s complete transition. The serious work has not stopped. It has not been at the level of his best work either.
Larry Summers is a case where the serious economic work largely stopped after the Harvard presidency and the Treasury position, but the policy commentary has continued at high volume. Summers’s early academic work on labor economics, public finance, and macroeconomics was first-rate. The 1990s policy positions and the Harvard presidency interrupted the academic trajectory. The post-Harvard career has been Bloomberg interviews, Council on Foreign Relations panels, op-eds, and the secular-stagnation commentary. The academic work has not returned at the early-career level. His case is the policy-track version of the pattern, where institutional service replaces academic production rather than performance work in the pure sense.
Now the cases of return, which are rarer. The cleanest example I know is Bernard Williams. Williams’s career through the 1970s and 1980s was full academic philosophy at Oxford and Cambridge and Berkeley, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry, Moral Luck, the work on truth and truthfulness. Williams also did substantial public-intellectual work, including the Williams Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship, the Royal Commission on Drugs, and various government advisory positions. The public work expanded in the 1980s and 1990s. Williams could have continued in the public-intellectual direction. He did not. Truth and Truthfulness in 2002, his last completed book, is among his most serious philosophical works and represents a return to the kind of sustained philosophical argumentation that the early career promised. Williams died in 2003. The return was completed before the end. Williams is the model of how it can be done. The conditions that made the return possible were institutional (Oxford and Berkeley appointments at the highest level, no need for performance income), temperamental (Williams was reserved by temperament and disliked the public role), and intellectual (Williams’s seriousness about philosophy as a vocation never weakened even when his attention was on public work).
Alasdair MacIntyre is a complicated case in the same direction. After Virtue in 1981 was the work that made his public reputation. The book was philosophy of the highest quality. MacIntyre could have transitioned into the public-intellectual mode the success of After Virtue invited. He did not. The subsequent books, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, Dependent Rational Animals, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, are progressively more demanding philosophical works that have lost popular audience precisely because MacIntyre refused to accommodate the popular register. The trajectory is the inverse of the typical pattern. MacIntyre got more serious as he got older. He retreated from public engagement rather than expanding into it. His case is the example of an academic who recognized the temptation of performance and chose against it. The cost was reduced public reach. The benefit was philosophical work that has held up.
Charles Taylor is a similar case in political philosophy. The early Hegel work, the Sources of the Self book in 1989, the later A Secular Age in 2007, all represent serious academic work at the highest level. Taylor has done public-intellectual work, including the Bouchard-Taylor Commission in Quebec, but the public work has been disciplined by his philosophical commitments rather than displacing them. A Secular Age is a 900-page work that no public-intellectual commercial pressure would have produced. Taylor wrote it because the philosophical argument required it. His case is closer to Williams and MacIntyre than to the West-Pinker-Peterson pattern.
Among economists, Thomas Schelling is a case worth examining. The Strategy of Conflict in 1960 made his public reputation. Schelling moved into policy work at RAND and the Kennedy administration but returned to academic economics for the bulk of his career. The 2005 Nobel Prize was for the early game-theoretic work that he had continued to develop quietly across decades. Schelling did not become a public-intellectual brand even when the opportunity was available. His case is the model of an economist whose serious work continued because he selected the venues and pace that protected it.
Robert Nozick presents a partial-return case. The early work at Harvard, Anarchy, State, and Utopia in 1974, was serious philosophy. Nozick then deliberately distanced himself from libertarian politics and moved away from the public-intellectual role the book had created for him. Philosophical Explanations in 1981, The Nature of Rationality in 1993, and Invariances in 2001 are progressively more abstract philosophical works that consciously abandoned the political register that had made Nozick famous. Nozick died in 2002. His case is the deliberate-refusal-of-performance case. He had the chance to become a libertarian-movement figure and chose not to. The philosophical work that resulted was less famous and probably more important.
The pattern across the return cases is recognizable. Every academic who returned to serious work or who refused the transition in the first place did so under conditions that included institutional security, temperamental disposition, philosophical seriousness about the vocation, and venue-selection that disciplined the public work. None of them faced economic pressure to perform. None of them needed audience metrics to sustain a career. None of them were running Substacks or YouTube channels or lecture tours that required continuous content production. The conditions that produced the returns are largely unavailable to writers operating in the contemporary attention economy.
The structural problem with contemporary academic-to-public-intellectual transitions is that the venues do not exist that would discipline the work back toward seriousness. Williams could return to philosophy because Oxford was still there and the journals were still there and the Cambridge appointments were still there. The contemporary version of Williams would be running a Substack and a YouTube channel and giving conference keynotes and would find that the institutional alternative to performance no longer offers the same protection. Universities have become more performance-oriented themselves. Journals have become less central to careers. The Substack-and-podcast economy has become the default career structure for public-facing intellectuals. The economy rewards continuous content production and audience cultivation. Returning to the slow careful work the journals once rewarded means giving up income, audience, and visibility in ways that few writers can sustain.
The Cofnas phase three turn from journal articles to Substack manifestos was not a personal failure of intellectual seriousness. It was the predictable response to an institutional environment that no longer rewards the slow careful work and an economic environment that rewards the manifesto. Cofnas’s audience grew on Substack in ways it would never have grown on Biology and Philosophy. The institutional reward structure that disciplined Williams and Taylor and MacIntyre into philosophical seriousness has substantially weakened across the past two decades. Cofnas operates inside the new structure. The new structure rewards what he is now producing.
Tyler Cowen has run Marginal Revolution since 2003 and has become a public-intellectual brand of unusual scale. The serious academic work has continued at reduced rate, partly because Cowen has structured his life to permit both. His case is the most successful contemporary version of the dual-track approach. Whether the academic work has held its early standards is contested. The output has not collapsed into pure performance.
Jonathan Haidt’s trajectory is closer to the failure pattern. The early work at Virginia on moral psychology was serious experimental and theoretical work. The Righteous Mind in 2012 was the inflection point. The subsequent books, the Heterodox Academy work, the Anxious Generation book in 2024, have been increasingly oriented toward a public-intellectual brand. The serious experimental work has slowed. The brand has expanded. Your style preferences flagging Haidt as untrustworthy track a real shift in his output away from the careful empirical work toward the advocacy work.
Steven Sailer has operated as a public-intellectual outside academia for his entire career. There was no academic period to abandon. The output is voluminous commentary and pattern-matching. Whether his work qualifies as “serious” depends on standards that may not apply to non-academic writing. His case is the example of a writer who never had to make the transition because he never operated in the academic mode in the first place.
Returns to serious work are rare and require conditions that mostly do not exist in the present environment. Cofnas’s case sits inside an institutional and economic structure that rewards the trajectory he is on. The structure was different for Williams and MacIntyre and Taylor and Nozick. The conditions that produced their returns or their refusals of performance are not easily reproducible by individual will. This does not mean the trajectory is fixed. It does mean that observers expecting a Cofnas return to phase-one-and-phase-two seriousness are expecting something the structural environment is not currently producing. The realistic versions of return for contemporary academics involve institutional protection (a serious journal editorship, a research university chair with real time protection, a foundation fellowship) that creates conditions where the slow work can resume. Whether such protections will be available to Cofnas, given the heterodox-hereditarian commitments and the petitions and the lawsuits, is hard to predict.
What we see with Cofnas is the standard pattern of the present academic-to-public-intellectual environment. The cases of return belong to an earlier institutional moment. The conditions that produced them have weakened across all the disciplines where they once held. Some writers will still pull off returns by force of temperament and by selection of venues that discipline the work. Most will not. Most will follow the West-Pinker-Peterson trajectory in different registers. The trajectory is the structural default in the present environment. The exceptions are rare and worth noticing when they happen because they tell you something about what conditions still permit serious work to be done. Williams’s quiet retreat into Truth and Truthfulness is a model hard to follow.
Engagement
Cofnas’s current position has several features that make most ordinary engagement ineffective. He has been repeatedly attacked at the level of his person, his career, and his credentials over the last two years. The attacks have produced a defensive posture in which incoming critique is filtered through a protection circuit before it reaches the analytical processor. The protection circuit is reasonable. He has been on the receiving end of bad-faith criticism often enough that filtering is rational. The filtering also screens out good-faith criticism, because the protection circuit cannot easily distinguish the two at the moment of incoming impact. Engagement that reaches him has to be designed to bypass the filtering rather than to fight it.
He has also developed a hero-system role that requires the persecution narrative to remain coherent. Engagement that confirms the persecution narrative reaches him as further evidence of the role. Engagement that denies the persecution narrative reaches him as further evidence of the role, because the denial is itself read as participation in the persecution. The role is not falsifiable from inside. This is the standard structural problem with hero-system roles. Most engagement modes that try to address the role directly fail because the role is structured to absorb the address. Engagement that works has to come at the role from angles the role does not have ready responses to.
He is also in a moment where his economic and institutional situation is precarious in ways that produce defensive intellectual moves. The legal fund, the Ghent appointment’s uncertainty, the absence of long-run institutional protection, all create conditions under which intellectual flexibility is expensive. Conceding a point has costs the conceder cannot easily afford when the conceder’s identity and income depend on holding the line. Engagement that asks for concessions in the current moment is asking for something the situation does not permit.
The productive engagement modes have to operate within these constraints. A few are worth describing.
The first productive mode is engagement at the level of shared intellectual problems rather than at the level of his positions on those problems. Cofnas cares about problems in the philosophy of biology, in metaethics, in the structure of academic disciplines, in the relationship between empirical claims and political commitments. These are real intellectual interests of his that exist independently of the dissident-coalition role. Engagement that takes him as a fellow worker on these problems, that brings him questions or material or readings he might not have encountered, that treats him as someone with something to contribute to the problems rather than as someone whose positions need to be corrected, reaches him through the part of his self-conception that has not been militarized by the persecution narrative. The careful philosopher of phase one and two is still inside the figure of phase four. The careful philosopher is still receptive to engagement that addresses the careful philosopher rather than the dissident combatant.
The second productive mode is engagement that surfaces material from outside his current intellectual diet. Cofnas reads within a particular cluster of sources. The cluster includes evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, certain strands of analytic philosophy, certain dissident-right outlets, certain heterodox academic figures. The cluster does not include large sections of contemporary social theory, historical sociology, the better strands of continental philosophy, or much of what working historians and anthropologists are producing on the questions adjacent to his own. Engagement that brings him serious material from outside his cluster, with no particular agenda attached, is engagement he can absorb because it is not coded as attack. A reading list, a particular passage from a book he has not encountered, a citation from a tradition he has not engaged with, all reach him as gifts rather than as ammunition.
The third productive mode is engagement that addresses the structural problem of his situation rather than the content of his positions. Cofnas knows his situation is difficult. He is not blind to the structural features. Engagement that names the structural features without judgment, that treats them as the conditions under which his work is being produced rather than as failures of his work, can land in ways direct critique of his positions cannot. This is most of what your two-part-test discussion with me has been about. You were not asking me to fix Cofnas’s positions. You were asking me to articulate the structural conditions under which his trajectory makes sense. Engagement with him that operates at this level (here is the structural situation you are in, here is what writers in your situation typically face, here is what the historical record suggests about how such trajectories develop) addresses him as a thinker working under specific constraints rather than as a defendant who needs to confess to errors. The thinker can engage with structural analyses of his own situation more easily than the defendant can engage with prosecutorial analyses of his positions.
The fourth productive mode is engagement at the metalevel of how his project should be evaluated. Cofnas’s project as he has framed it is to produce a hereditarian revolution by reasoning elites into accepting the empirical claims his project rests on. The framing has structural problems we have been describing through Mearsheimer and Pinsof. A productive engagement does not attack the empirical claims. It engages the metalevel question of whether the framing matches what political projects actually do. Cofnas can engage this kind of question because the question does not require him to abandon the empirical claims. The question requires him to think about whether the political method matches the empirical claims. The thinking is something he is capable of doing. The thinking has not happened because no one has framed the question in a way that lets him do it without it feeling like an attack.
The fifth productive mode is engagement that takes him seriously as a writer rather than as a position-holder. Cofnas’s prose, his rhetorical choices, his structural decisions in essays, his relationship to genre, are all parts of his work that have received almost no serious attention because everyone reads him for content rather than for craft. Engagement at the level of craft is engagement he probably does not get from anyone else. A close reading of a particular essay that attends to its rhetorical structure, its argumentative architecture, its choices about audience and register, would reach him as a writer being taken seriously by another writer. The reading does not have to be flattering. Serious craft criticism rarely is. The reading has to be attentive in the way that serious writers want to be read. Most criticism of Cofnas treats his prose as transparent vehicle for content. The prose is not transparent. It has features. The features can be examined.
The sixth productive mode is engagement that surfaces the unresolved tensions in his own framework without demanding resolution. The metaethical contradiction (anti-realist debunking plus confident moral claims), the political-method contradiction (rationalist persuasion plus hereditarian content), the auditor-exemption pattern (applying audit standards to others without applying them to himself), the dissident-rationalist tension (operating in the cluster while claiming to reason independently of cluster commitments), are all unresolved tensions that someone could surface for him without requiring him to fix them. The surfacing operates as observation rather than as critique. The observation gives him material to think about without demanding that he do anything with it in the moment. The thinking can happen later, at his pace, without the surfacing party watching to see whether he has thought it. This is how careful intellectual influence usually works. The influence shows up in writing five years later that has internalized the tensions. The influence does not show up in immediate concession. Engagement that produces immediate concession is rare. Engagement that produces five-year-later integration is more common and more valuable.
The seventh productive mode is engagement through shared work on third subjects rather than direct engagement with him. Cofnas has worked productively with collaborators across his career. The collaborations operate on the gift logic. Working with him on a question that interests both parties, where the question is not about him and not about his trajectory, builds the kind of relationship through which other engagement becomes possible. The relationship is the substrate. The engagement happens later, inside the relationship, after the relationship has standing. Most people who want to engage with Cofnas skip the relationship-building step and go directly to the engagement. The engagement does not land because it does not have the relationship behind it. The relationship is what makes the engagement possible.
The eighth productive mode is engagement through specific cases rather than through general claims. Cofnas’s writing operates through case studies. He audited MacDonald case by case. He audited Sowell case by case. The case-by-case method is one he respects. Engagement that brings him a specific case rather than a general claim works better than engagement that operates at the level of general claims. Bringing him a particular intellectual figure who illustrates a tension in his framework, or a particular historical episode that complicates his political method, or a particular passage in his own work that displays an unresolved problem, gives him specific material to work with. The specific material is something he can engage. The general claim is something he can deflect. The case-by-case method is the method his own work runs on. Engagement on the same method works on him.
The ninth productive mode is engagement on questions adjacent to his work but outside his current focus. Cofnas’s recent Substack output has concentrated on particular targets: Thomas Sowell, MAGA communism, the Podcast Bros. The targets are coalition-relevant in particular ways. Engagement on questions outside the current target list, on questions where the coalition stakes are lower, can elicit better thinking from him because the protection circuit is less engaged. Asking him about, say, the philosophy of mathematics, or the history of behavior genetics in the Soviet Union, or the relationship between his metaethics and the metaethics of his philosophical training, gets him talking in registers the recent Substack work does not show. The careful philosopher of phase one and two is still in there. The careful philosopher emerges when the questions are framed away from the current battles.
Interaction Ritual Chains by Randall Collins
Start with the production conditions of forensic philosophy. Cofnas’s method is the granular audit. He reads MacDonald line by line and reconstructs the citation chain. He reads Joshua Greene line by line and tests the empirical premises against the evidence. He reads the equality-thesis literature line by line and asks whether the cited studies support the conclusions drawn from them.
The work produces real findings. It also produces, in Collins’s terms, almost no emotional energy. The audit is solitary. The texts are not co-present. The barrier to outsiders is the difficulty of the material, which excludes more readers than it admits. The focus of attention is on footnotes, statistical methods, and chains of inference. The shared mood is impossible to manufacture because there are no other bodies in the room to share mood with. Cofnas alone with MacDonald’s bibliography for months at a time is the pure low-yield ritual. The work pays off only when published, and even then the payoff arrives in delayed and dispersed form, scattered across readers who consume the article in solitude.
Collins’s framework predicts that men who do this kind of work pay a steep emotional-energy cost. They have to find their charge somewhere else. The standard places for academic philosophers are the seminar, the conference, the journal symposium, the festschrift, the dissertation defense. Each of these is a Collins-style ritual with the bodies in the room and the focus of attention organized to produce energy. Cofnas has been cut off from these rituals.
The Cambridge years gave him some access. The Leverhulme fellowship sat him in Emmanuel College’s combination room. He could attend seminars, present at workshops, talk to colleagues at lunch. The bodily co-presence with other philosophers supplied some of the ritual machinery his solitary forensic work could not. Even there, though, the access was limited. The petitions and protests pushed against his presence. The seminar invitations came less freely than they would for a less controversial colleague. The lunch conversations carried wariness. The ritual access existed but ran at lower energy than the institutional position alone might have supplied.
The exit from Cambridge to Ghent disrupted the chain further. Ghent is a smaller philosophy department in a less central location. The visiting postdoctoral position carries less status standing than the Cambridge fellowship. The shift from English to a department where Dutch is the working language for many internal interactions cuts him off from the corridor talk that ordinarily charges an academic life. The ritual machinery available at Ghent is thinner than what Cambridge offered. The forty-five-philosopher petition signed by his own department colleagues makes the ritual machinery actively hostile.
A man in Cofnas’s position has limited options for emotional-energy replenishment. Collins’s framework names what those options are.
The first option is online ritual. Twitter and Substack and YouTube interviews offer substitutes for the seminar room. The bodily co-presence is simulated rather than real, but the focus of attention is real, the barrier to outsiders is real (followers and subscribers self-select), and the shared mood travels through the comment threads and replies. Collins’s framework was developed before Twitter existed but extends to it with adjustments.
Cofnas has built a Twitter presence with 76,000 followers. He posts the audit findings, the responses to critics, the running commentary on the latest petition or controversy. The followers respond, amplify, defend, attack. The interaction supplies emotional energy that the seminar room no longer reliably provides. Each viral thread is a small ritual success. The follower count climbs after each major institutional confrontation. The energy replenishes.
The substitute carries costs. Twitter’s ritual mechanics select for the kind of content that generates engagement. Audit findings about MacDonald’s footnotes do not generate engagement at scale. Sharp aphorisms about the equality thesis, pointed mockery of academic petitioners, ironic reversals of the activist talking points, all generate engagement. Cofnas’s online voice has accordingly drifted toward the aphoristic and the polemical, away from the dense forensic style of his published work. The drift is what Collins predicts. The man whose seminar-room ritual chain has been cut substitutes online ritual, and the online ritual selects for content that the original work would not have produced.
The Substack supplies a slightly different ritual register. Longer essays. Less immediate feedback. More space for the extended argument. The audience is smaller but more committed. Each new post is a ritual occasion for the regular readers, with the comment section providing the post-ritual processing. The energy yield is steadier than Twitter’s spikes but lower in peak amplitude.
The YouTube interviews supply another register. Cofnas has appeared on a long list of heterodox podcasts. Each appearance is a high-yield ritual. The bodily co-presence with the host (or its video simulation) is real. The focus of attention is concentrated. The audience watches in real time and responds in the chat. The emotional energy travels back to Cofnas through the analytics, the subscriber growth, the speaking invitations that follow. A Loury appearance in 2024 produced more energy return than a year of Cambridge seminar attendance. Cofnas has accordingly invested heavily in the podcast circuit, and his rhetorical style has adjusted to the podcast register: faster, more aphoristic, more aimed at the listener than at the philosopher peer.
The second option is the heterodox conference circuit. Heterodox Academy gatherings. The Stanford Academic Freedom Conference. The Free Black Thought conferences. The Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. The Manhattan Institute panels. Each of these supplies the bodily co-presence, barrier to outsiders, focus of attention, and shared emotional mood that Collins names. Each is a high-yield ritual for participants who feel embattled by their home institutions and find at the conference the energy that their institutions deny them.
Cofnas has worked the heterodox circuit. The conferences are supplements to his thinning institutional ritual chain. He arrives at each one and finds Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Coleman Hughes, Wilfred Reilly, Bo Winegard, Steve Sailer, Charles Murray, and a long bench of figures who occupy adjacent positions. The conferences supply solidarity, validation, and the shared mood that is the core of Collins’s emotional-energy production. Participants leave charged. They tweet about the gathering for days afterward. The charge replenishes the energy that the home institutions drain.
The heterodox circuit has its own Collins-style chain effects. Each conference recruits attendees to the next one. Each panel produces the symbolic objects (memorable phrases, viral video clips, shared in-jokes) that carry the energy forward to subsequent gatherings. The chain stabilizes a coalition that lacks the home-institution support that mainstream academic coalitions possess. The conference circuit is, in Collins’s terms, the heterodox coalition’s substitute for the seminar rooms it has been pushed out of.
Cofnas’s position inside this coalition is rising. He is becoming one of its named figures. The rise is partly the product of his work and partly the product of the persecution. Each new petition against him, each new institutional confrontation, raises his standing inside the heterodox coalition because the persecution itself is what marks him as one of theirs. The high cost he pays at home is the credential that opens the heterodox conference circuit to him at the highest rungs.
Now turn the framework on the campaigns against Cofnas. Collins’s most striking application here is to the petitions themselves. The petitions are not primarily epistemic events. They are interaction rituals in Collins’s full sense, and they generate emotional energy at high yield for the participants.
Consider the Cambridge protests. Students gather in physical space. The bodily co-presence is real. The barrier to outsiders is the chant, the placards, the shared identification as defenders against racism. The focus of attention is the named target, Cofnas. The shared mood is moral indignation, generated and amplified through the rhythmic chanting, the eye contact among participants, the sense of shared righteous purpose. Each chant cycle entrains the next. The protest as a whole is a textbook Collins ritual. It produces high emotional energy. Participants leave charged. They tweet the protest for days afterward. The viral clips of the protest become symbolic objects that carry the energy forward into subsequent protests at other institutions.
The Ghent petition operates at a quieter register but on the same principles. The forty-five philosophers do not gather physically, but the petition itself functions as a ritual focus. The act of signing is a small ritual moment. The list of signatures becomes a charged symbolic object. Each signature reinforces the others. The shared mood of moral seriousness is generated through the language of the petition, with its stakes-raising vocabulary about beneath contempt and morally reprehensible. Reading the petition and seeing the names of one’s colleagues attached to it produces the entrainment Collins describes. The participants leave charged. They feel they have done something important, and the charge sustains the coalition.
What strikes here, in Collins’s framework, is that the petitions generate higher emotional energy than serious engagement with Cofnas’s arguments would. Reading a 2018 paper on MacDonald’s footnotes is low-yield. Signing a petition about the danger of race science is high-yield. The petitioners are not lazy or dishonest. They are responding rationally to the energy economy. The petition delivers in minutes the emotional return that hours of careful reading could not produce. Collins predicts exactly this pattern. People seek the rituals that pay best.
Mark Alfano’s January 2020 tweet to Cofnas is a Collins ritual condensed to a single utterance. “You’re about to learn why people generally avoid fucking with me.” The tweet is performative bodily presence in textual form. It generates entrainment among Alfano’s followers, who experience the satisfying mood of watching one of their own deliver a public threat to the pariah. The tweet produces immediate emotional energy for Alfano and his coalition. The cost to Alfano is low. The yield is high. Collins’s framework says this is what coalition enforcers do, because this is what generates the charge that holds the coalition together.
Collins’s framework forces a hard observation about the structural asymmetry. The arguments Cofnas makes are low-yield in his own production. Reading them is low-yield in their consumption. Refuting them carefully would be low-yield for any philosopher who undertook it. The campaign against him is high-yield for everyone involved on the activist side. The petition signers, the protest organizers, the Twitter enforcers, the Daily Nous amplifiers, all gain emotional energy from each phase of the campaign. The peer reviewers who decline to engage Cofnas’s papers gain less, but they at least avoid the energy drain that engagement would produce.
The energy economy is what Cofnas is up against. The arguments themselves cannot win, in the sense Collins names, because the arguments do not generate the energy that mobilizes coalitions. The campaigns against the arguments do generate that energy. Cofnas can be right and lose. Collins’s framework does not predict which side will turn out to be empirically correct on heritability or on the equality thesis. It predicts which side will mobilize more bodies, generate more conferences, produce more viral moments, and sustain more institutional pressure. The mobilization side will win the mobilization contest regardless of where the empirical evidence eventually settles. The empirical evidence does not generate the energy. The campaigns do.
This is the structural disadvantage of forensic philosophy in the current era. The audit method produces findings. It does not produce rituals. The findings sit on the page waiting to be picked up. The rituals against the findings move through bodies in real time, generate emotional charge, produce symbolic objects, and feed coalition cohesion. Collins’s framework predicts that the rituals will dominate the discourse regardless of what the findings show, until the findings can be packaged in forms that themselves produce ritual energy. Cofnas has been moving toward such packaging through his Twitter, Substack, and podcast work, but the packaging strains against his original method. The forensic audit does not translate into the punchy thread without losing the granularity that gave the audit its force in the first place.
Collins’s framework also explains why the heterodox coalition has the staying power it does. The coalition lacks the institutional resources of its mainstream rivals. It does not control hiring, journals, conferences, or grants in any of the major academic disciplines. By every standard institutional measure, it should be losing. It is not losing. It is growing.
The growth is energy-driven in Collins’s terms. The heterodox coalition runs on persecution, and persecution is structurally high-yield in Collins’s framework. Each new petition, each new firing, each new social-media pile-on generates emotional energy among heterodox observers. The energy flows toward the persecuted figure and toward the coalition as a whole. The persecuted figure becomes a charged symbolic object. The coalition accumulates these charged objects across years. Cofnas joins Bo Winegard, Noah Carl, Stephen Hsu, Charles Murray, and a longer list as figures whose persecution charges the coalition that defends them. The coalition does not have to win the academic battles to grow. It only has to absorb the charge produced by losing them.
This produces a strange equilibrium. The mainstream coalition gains short-term emotional energy from each campaign. The heterodox coalition gains long-term emotional energy from each campaign. Both coalitions have an interest in continuing the campaigns. The campaigns are the ritual chain that sustains both sides. Collins’s framework predicts the equilibrium will hold until something disrupts the energy economy. What that disruption might be is hard to specify. Either side losing access to the rituals that sustain it would change the picture.
The framework’s harshest application is to the cost Cofnas has paid in his own emotional-energy chain. The frame of forensic philosophy asks for sustained solitary attention to difficult texts. The energy economy of academic life ordinarily supplies the replenishment through seminars, lunches, conferences, and the steady ritual rhythm of the institution. When the institution turns hostile, the replenishment fails. The forensic work continues to demand its solitary investment. The replenishment has to come from somewhere else or the man will burn out.
Cofnas has not burned out. The substitution chain (Twitter, Substack, YouTube, heterodox conferences) has supplied enough energy to sustain him. The substitution carries costs that show in his work over time. The early forensic papers (the MacDonald audit, the Greene paper, the equality-thesis arguments) display the patience of a man with full institutional ritual support. The later writing displays the faster, more aphoristic, more polemical register of a man whose ritual chain has been replaced by online substitutes.
Stephen Turner’s framework on expertise asks how authority gets organized for people who claim knowledge their audiences cannot evaluate by inspection. The framework distinguishes peer-checkable authority, where a working network applies tests the audience cannot apply, from audience-recognized authority, where the audience grants standing on grounds it can apply, usually less rigorous than peer tests. Turner’s harder move is that disciplinary peer networks do not always test the things they claim to test. Sometimes they test conformity to the discipline’s conventions, fit with the discipline’s prevailing politics, or alignment with the social interests of the discipline’s members. The procedures by which a discipline grants and withholds expert status are not always procedures for assessing truth. They are procedures for maintaining the conditions under which the discipline can function as a discipline.
Apply this to Nathan Cofnas and the framework reaches its hardest test yet, because Cofnas operates in a configuration where multiple peer networks reach incompatible verdicts on the same body of work, and the resolution of the verdict has been transferred to a court of law.
Cofnas holds peer-checkable academic credentials of a kind his critics rarely contest at the level of training. He earned his D.Phil. at Oxford. He held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the Faculty of Philosophy at Cambridge. He published in Philosophical Psychology, Philosophical Studies, the Journal of Controversial Ideas, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and other recognized venues. The training is real and the publications passed the peer-review tests of journals operating under conventional procedures. By one set of disciplinary tests, the procedures that produced his standing are the same procedures that produce standing for academic philosophers across the field.
But the peer network of academic philosophy did not grant him stable standing despite the credentials. Emmanuel College, Cambridge, removed him from his college affiliation after student protests. The University of Ghent saw forty-five philosophers from his own department sign a letter declaring his views beneath contempt. Petitions circulated at multiple institutions. Public statements from the Cambridge philosophy department distanced themselves from his views. The peer network applied tests that the credentials did not predict and could not deflect.
Turner’s framework reads this directly. The peer network of academic philosophy applies multiple tests, only some of which are the substantive disciplinary tests the field officially recognizes. Other tests run through coalition fit, ideological alignment, willingness to address topics within prevailing limits, and capacity to stay inside the conversational boundaries the field has come to enforce. Cofnas passed the official tests cleanly enough to publish in the field’s journals. He failed the unofficial tests sharply enough that the field’s institutional structures moved against him at multiple sites. The two sets of tests do not coincide, and his career has been a long demonstration of how widely they diverge in practice.
This is the same configuration that operated on Maccoby, but inverted in one important respect. Maccoby produced work that the peer network rejected on grounds that combined the substantive and the social without separating them cleanly. The substantive grounds were available because Maccoby’s claims about Paul could be challenged on philological terrain the network controlled. With Cofnas, the substantive grounds are harder to invoke directly, because his hereditarian claims rest on behavior-genetic and psychometric literatures the philosophy peer network does not have the technical competence to evaluate. The behavior-genetic peer network, where one exists in a relevant form, holds different views from the philosophy network on the substantive questions at stake. Multiple peer networks with overlapping but distinct competences reach different verdicts on the same body of work. Turner’s framework predicts this when the topic crosses disciplinary boundaries that no single network controls.
The behavior-genetic peer network has, for decades, held that significant heritability of cognitive traits is established and that group differences cannot be explained on environmental grounds alone with current evidence. The cautious mainstream position in that network is that the question of group differences in cognitive ability is unresolved but cannot be ruled out on environmental terms. The philosophy peer network has, for decades, held that group differences in cognitive ability are racist pseudoscience that no serious person should pursue. Cofnas brought the behavior-genetic literature into philosophy and refused to defer to philosophy’s standing position on what behavior-genetic findings mean. The philosophy network rejected him. The behavior-genetic network has not collectively endorsed him but has not rejected him either. The configuration is one Turner’s framework treats as common in interdisciplinary work where disciplinary verdicts diverge: the figure becomes a contested expert across networks, with no single network able to settle the contest by its own authority.
The audience-recognized side of his authority operates on a different track. His Substack reaches a sizeable readership of educated readers who follow heterodox academic writing. He has been read by Steven Pinker, Bo Winegard, Charles Murray, and others associated with the dissident-academic scene around questions of cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and behavior genetics. He has appeared on podcasts in this network. The audience here is not the general reading public. It is a self-selected community of readers with substantial training in adjacent fields, capable of applying tests that approach but do not quite reach peer-network rigor. Turner’s framework treats this as the kind of audience grant that is closer to peer recognition than to typical audience recognition, because the audience can check more of what the figure produces than ordinary audiences can.
This puts Cofnas in a configuration with structural similarities to Marc Shapiro’s, but with crucial differences. Shapiro operates across two functioning peer networks that share most of their substantive tests and diverge mainly on loyalty grounds. Cofnas operates across peer networks that diverge on substantive grounds as well as loyalty grounds, and across an audience that overlaps with one of his peer networks but not the other. The configuration is less stable than Shapiro’s because the substantive divergence among peer networks creates ongoing contestation about whether his work meets the relevant tests at all, before any question of loyalty arises. Shapiro’s substance is conceded by all networks that engage him seriously. Cofnas’s substance is conceded by some networks and denied by others, and the denial runs through the substance itself and not merely through the social position of the figure producing it.
Turner’s analysis of “good-bad” theories applies with particular force here. A good-bad theory is one that performs useful functions for its holders without meeting the standards other theories in the field have to meet. The functions might be coalitional, institutional, or pedagogical. The egalitarian default in academic philosophy and the social sciences generally is, on Cofnas’s reading, a good-bad theory in this sense. It performs the function of keeping the discipline’s politics aligned with prevailing norms, of sparing scholars the social costs of engaging with hereditarian literature, and of preserving institutional peace with adjacent fields and constituencies. Whether it meets the substantive tests of the relevant evidence is, on Cofnas’s reading, a question the discipline does not seriously ask. The good-bad theory persists because the functions persist, not because the evidence has settled the matter.
Turner’s framework allows this reading without endorsing it. The framework asks whether the peer network’s procedures track substantive tests or coalition tests, and the answer in any given case has to be reached by examination rather than assumed. Cofnas’s claim that academic philosophy operates on coalition tests rather than substantive ones is itself a claim that requires evidence. He has provided some. The petitions calling his views beneath contempt without engaging the arguments are evidence. The departmental statements that distance the field from his work without specifying which arguments fail are evidence. The institutional actions that follow audience pressure rather than peer-reviewed verdicts are evidence. The pattern does not prove the discipline is operating on coalition tests, but it is consistent with that hypothesis, and the absence of substantive engagement at the level the discipline officially claims is the kind of evidence Turner’s framework treats as significant.
The deeper Turner question is what tests Cofnas’s own work invites and how it scores on them. He has been clear about which tests he accepts. He accepts behavior-genetic standards on the heritability question. He accepts standard psychometric procedures on the measurement of cognitive traits. He accepts evolutionary biological reasoning on the question of group differences. He accepts standard philosophical procedures on the metaethical and political-philosophical questions about what hereditarian findings imply. By his own statement, he holds himself accountable to the inspectable procedures of these fields. Whether his work passes the tests of these fields is a substantive question that Turner’s framework does not answer. Some of his arguments have been challenged on substantive grounds within the relevant peer networks, and some have been defended. The peer-network verdict, where it can be reconstructed, is mixed and contested rather than settled.
This is the configuration Turner’s framework treats as most demanding for the figure operating within it. He has to defend his work on substantive grounds without retreating behind the tacit-knowledge protections that academic figures usually invoke. He cannot say “this is settled in the field.” He cannot say “you have to read the literature to understand.” He cannot say “trust the experts.” All of these are tacit-knowledge moves, and Cofnas has rejected them in his attack on his opponents. He has paid the cost of refusing the protections by making himself available for inspection on every claim he makes. The cost is real. Most academic figures do not pay it because most academic figures do not need to. The peer network that grants their standing also grants them the tacit-knowledge protections, and the protections do most of the work of maintaining the standing once it has been granted.
The Peterborough County Court ruling from March 2026 added a dimension Turner’s framework does not directly anticipate but accommodates without strain. The court ruled in a way that extended harassment doctrine to certain expressive acts, with the practical effect of giving institutions legal cover for actions that previously operated through informal coalition pressure alone. Turner’s framework treats legal procedures as another network of tests, with their own procedures, their own conventions, and their own relations to substantive truth. Courts test for conformity to legal categories rather than for substantive accuracy on the underlying questions the cases concern. A court can find harassment in expression that is also true. A court can find protected speech in expression that is also false. The legal verdict is a verdict on the legal questions, not a verdict on the substantive questions the expression addresses.
The Peterborough ruling had the effect of formalizing some of the unofficial tests Cofnas has been failing in academic peer networks. The harassment doctrine extension means that institutions can now act against him on tacit-register grounds with formal legal cover where they previously needed coalition cover alone. Turner’s framework reads this as the convergence of one network’s procedures with another’s, with the legal network providing institutional support for verdicts the academic network was already producing. The convergence does not change the substantive question. It changes the institutional environment in which the substantive question can be addressed. Cofnas’s work continues to make whatever substantive contribution it makes regardless of the legal ruling. The legal ruling alters the conditions under which he can make that contribution and the costs of doing so.
Turner’s framework also illuminates what kinds of authority Cofnas does not hold. He does not hold the institutional authority that comes with a stable academic chair at a major research university. The Cambridge fellowship was time-limited. The Ghent appointment carries the contestation that has followed him from Cambridge. He does not hold the audience authority that comes with a mass readership. His Substack is sizeable but not mass-market. He does not hold the political-coalition authority that comes from explicit alignment with a major political faction. He has avoided that alignment with some care, partly to preserve what he takes to be the integrity of his project as inquiry rather than advocacy. The result is a figure with peer-network credentials, a respected-audience grant, contested standing across multiple networks, and limited institutional or political-coalition support. The configuration is exposed in ways that more typical academic configurations are not.
Compare him to Bayless on one axis and to Shapiro on another. Bayless built audience authority by performing in a format that did not test for substance. Cofnas has built audience authority by performing inspectable arguments in a format that does test for substance, with an audience capable of applying the tests. The two cases are at opposite ends of the audience-grant spectrum. Bayless’s audience grants standing on entertainment grounds. Cofnas’s audience grants standing on argumentative grounds with substantial overlap with peer-network tests. The substance is real or absent in different proportions in each case. Turner’s framework treats both as audience-recognized authorities but distinguishes them by the proximity of the audience’s tests to peer-network tests. Cofnas’s audience is closer to peer-network operation than Bayless’s audience is. The standing he holds with that audience carries more substantive weight than typical audience standing carries.
Compare to Shapiro and the contrast clarifies in the other direction. Shapiro’s two peer networks share substantive tests and diverge on loyalty tests. Cofnas’s peer networks diverge on both. Shapiro can produce work that both networks substantively recognize while one network rejects on loyalty grounds. Cofnas produces work that one network substantively recognizes while another network substantively rejects, with loyalty considerations also operating. The configuration is structurally more contested. Shapiro’s case is the rare modern case of stable dual peer-network authority. Cofnas’s case is the more common case of a figure caught between peer networks that disagree about whether his work meets their substantive tests.
The harder Turner question with Cofnas is whether the contestation among peer networks reflects a genuinely unsettled substantive matter or whether it reflects one network operating on coalition grounds while another operates on substantive grounds. The framework does not answer this from inside any of the networks. The answer requires the kind of disinterested observation that few participants in the controversy are positioned to provide. The behavior-genetic peer network, where it operates on substantive grounds, holds positions closer to Cofnas’s than the philosophy peer network does. The philosophy peer network’s position is harder to reconstruct on substantive grounds because the network has often declined to engage substantively with the literature Cofnas brings forward. The pattern is consistent with the hypothesis that the philosophy network is operating partly on coalition grounds rather than purely on substantive grounds, while the behavior-genetic network is operating closer to substantive grounds. The hypothesis is not settled. The pattern of evidence runs in that direction without proving the case.
What Cofnas’s situation finally adds to Turner’s framework is a worked example of authority operating across peer networks in active substantive disagreement, with a court of law providing institutional weight to one set of unofficial tests, and an audience recognizing him on grounds closer to peer-network tests than typical audience recognition allows. The configuration is unusual in modern academic life, where most peer networks reach internal consensus on the questions they address and most figures hold standing within a single network rather than at the contested boundary among several. Cofnas has chosen the contested boundary. The choice was deliberate. He has stated that he holds himself responsible to inspectable arguments and is willing to accept the costs of operating without tacit-knowledge protections. He has paid those costs. The costs include institutional displacement, public condemnation, legal exposure, and the kind of professional precarity that most figures with comparable training avoid by staying inside the boundaries that confer protection.
The configuration is unstable in the conventional sense. Cofnas’s standing depends on continued audience grant, continued publication in venues willing to publish him, continued institutional position at universities willing to retain him, and continued absence of legal action that might forclose his expressive options. Each of these supporting conditions is contestable. Each has been contested. Whether all of them will hold long enough for him to produce the body of work he intends to produce is uncertain. Turner’s framework does not predict whether the configuration will hold. It only describes what is at stake in each of the supporting conditions and what would happen if any of them failed.
The closing question Turner’s framework presses is what verdict will eventually be reached on the substantive questions Cofnas raises, by whatever procedures of inquiry can operate after the immediate coalition pressures have resolved or shifted. The substantive questions about heritability, group differences, and the implications of behavior-genetic findings for political philosophy are not going away. They are being addressed in some peer networks and excluded from others. The networks that exclude them cannot foreclose the questions, only their own engagement with them. The networks that engage them produce verdicts that are then either incorporated into the broader conversation or kept at the margins by coalition pressure. Cofnas’s contribution to the substantive question can be assessed only by procedures that engage the substance, and the procedures that do so are not the procedures most commonly running in the academic philosophy network where his career has been situated.
What survives Cofnas’s situation under Turner’s correction is the substance of whatever arguments he has made that can be tested by procedures capable of testing them. The behavior-genetic claims can be tested by behavior-genetic procedures. The philosophical claims can be tested by philosophical procedures, where philosophical procedures are operating on substance rather than on coalition fit. The political claims can be tested by political procedures, which is to say by the slow working out of what views can be sustained in public life and what views cannot. None of these tests has been concluded. Turner’s framework is patient about such matters. It treats current verdicts as provisional and final verdicts as the product of much longer processes than the immediate controversies typically allow. Cofnas may be vindicated by some peer networks and remain rejected by others. He may be partly vindicated and partly rejected on different parts of his work. He may be largely rejected on substance once procedures capable of testing substance are applied. The outcomes are not predictable from the present configuration. What is predictable is that the configuration of authority he occupies now will not be the configuration of authority his work occupies in retrospect, because retrospection runs through procedures different from the procedures of immediate reception, and the verdicts produced by retrospection rarely match those produced in the moment.
That is the discipline Turner imposes. Authority granted in the present is granted by audiences and networks operating under the pressures of the present. Authority sustained over time is sustained by procedures that operate beyond those pressures, when they operate at all. Cofnas’s authority in the present is contested across multiple networks with conflicting tests. His authority over time depends on whether procedures capable of testing his substance get applied and on what verdicts they reach. The framework does not predict the verdicts. It only shows what kind of question they are, why the present contest cannot settle them, and why figures who occupy contested positions like his rarely receive their final verdict during their working lives. Cofnas’s case is unfinished by every measure Turner’s framework recognizes. What the case shows about expert authority in modern academic life is more visible already, and it is not a flattering picture for the configurations that have failed to test his work on the substantive grounds the field officially claims to apply.
‘Cambridge University’s War on Free Speech‘
After accepting a job at Cambridge on the promise of free speech, I was betrayed the moment the administration determined that free speech was inconvenient for them. I was effectively driven off campus with threats of violence against me brushed off as not a big deal. I was forced to resign from my paid position as undergraduate examiner. A senior administrator and two philosophy professors (including the chair of the faculty) met with student protesters to conspire about how to “[get] rid of him” even before they had bothered filing trumped-up charges against me. The Faculty of Philosophy adopted new policies to ensure that controversial scholars could never be hired again. I was subjected to a year-and-a-half-long investigation straight out of Idiocracy. Emmanuel College, where I held the position of College Research Associate, terminated me on the grounds that my belief in hereditarianism “amounted to, or could reasonably be construed as amounting to, a rejection of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI and EDI) policies.”
…We now have the absurd situation where the limits of philosophical inquiry are set by the most emotionally fragile students at each university. Except for the libertarians, philosophers who publicly challenge conventional left-wing views have been virtually purged from academia.
I recently started a one-year, part-time postdoc at Ghent University. I’m very happy to be here, except when students are throwing bottles at my head because they disagree with my lecture. However, I am hanging on to an academic career by my fingernails. I would ask my critics to think about the day after I am banished for good. Will philosophy really be more interesting or better equipped to address important problems when there is no room for someone like me?
Cofnas writes well. The doggerel opening, the line about “Cofnas” not rhyming with anything, the deadpan list of philosophers who never held a university post, his comic timing pulls you through a long piece. The Aileen McColgan section lands a clean hit. She seems to have confused “0.76% of Americans with IQ 135+ are Black” with “0.76% of Black Americans have IQ 135+.” That is an elementary base-rate mistake. Writing a long report that turns on it is bad work and embarrasses her and Cambridge University.
Who would hire her now? Who promoted her to a task beyond her abilities? This is damning.
Administrators meeting with student protesters to plan how to “get rid of him” before any charge, then commissioning an inquiry that ran out the clock on his three-year contract, fits a pattern other targets at other universities describe. Death threats downgraded to a writing exercise while the faculty member faces a year-and-a-half investigation tells you what the institution prioritizes. The contrast he draws between the Gopal case (speech is allowed unless criminal) and his own (speech is allowed unless we can find an excuse to punish it) is a fair one, and the documentary record he reproduces supports it.
Where the essay strains is in his self-presentation. He casts every administrator as a coward or a fanatic and every critic as part of a mob. Some of them are. Some of them are doing their jobs. He treats his views as plain mainstream science. They are not. Robert Plomin, who appears in his supportive letter, is more cautious in his published work than Cofnas is in his blogging.
The word “betrayal” pings me. After reading Betrayals: The Unpredictability of Human Relations by Gabriella Turnaturi, I’ve adopted her framing of betrayal as that overwhelming pain I feel when I see that other people have different priorities from what I expected and I don’t want to say I was wrong. Instead, I must describe the other parties as diabolical.
I love this bit from the book: “Furthermore, if it is true that not only in every relationship but in every interaction parts of ourselves that we were unaware of come to light, we cannot even be sure that we will never betray. Betrayal, both as an act on our part and as an action we undergo, is always relational and always possible. When we enter into relations with others, a step that is necessary for the construction of our own identity, we put into play our desire to be with the other — but also our desire not to lose ourselves in the other.”
Turnaturi’s frame turns betrayal into a sociological event rather than a psychological wound. Betrayal is an asymmetrical rearrangement of role content, started by one party while the other does not see it coming. It requires a prior relationship with disclosure and exchange of trust. It emerges from complexity. Until the 16th century, treason against the sovereign was the paradigm case. After that, the act privatized. Today adultery and similar personal violations carry the gravitas the word once reserved for matters of state.
Cofnas reaches for “betrayal” to describe his Cambridge experience. The word is doing more work than the situation can bear.
What relationship did he have with Cambridge as an institution? A three-year contract for a Leverhulme fellowship in the Faculty of Philosophy. An unpaid affiliation with Emmanuel College. A piece of paper, the December 2020 Statement on Freedom of Speech, approved by 87% of the governing body. None of these constituted a personal covenant. The 87% did not know him. The document did not name him. The administrators who hired him for the fellowship were not the same administrators who moved against him eighteen months later.
What Cofnas calls a betrayal is the collision of priorities that always coexisted at Cambridge. The free-speech coalition won the vote in December 2020. The DEI coalition was already present, growing, and waiting. Pro-Vice-Chancellor Vira affirmed his right to free speech on February 16, 2024, then reversed course one week later under student pressure. That looks like betrayal if you read Vira as a single moral agent with a stable commitment. It looks like coalition arithmetic if you read him as a man balancing forces that differed in strength at different moments. The first reading produces betrayal. The second reading produces information.
Turnaturi’s point that betrayal requires a prior relationship sharpens this. Cofnas had no relationship with Cambridge as a unified actor, because Cambridge as a unified actor does not exist. He had relationships with specific people: his hiring committee, his fellowship sponsor, the colleagues who supported him quietly. The administrators who acted against him were either different people or the same people responding to coalition pressure they had not previously revealed. The asymmetrical rearrangement Turnaturi requires for betrayal happens between parties who share a role frame. Cofnas and the Cambridge administration did not share a role frame. He read the document as a covenant. They read it as a procedural norm subject to override under enough social pressure.
Betrayal as a category dresses up the discovery that other people had priorities I did not anticipate. The cry of betrayal converts a failure of prediction into a moral injury. It protects the speaker from the harder conclusion: I read the situation wrong. I projected unity onto a system of competing forces. I treated procedural language as personal commitment.
Cofnas has reasons to choose the betrayal framing. It places him in a clean moral story with a wronged party and a wrongdoer. It justifies the lawsuit. It justifies the public essay. It mobilizes allies who recognize the betrayal grammar from their own coalition memberships. The alternative framing, that he made a forecast about how the institution worked and the forecast failed, gives him nothing to organize a narrative around. There is no allied coalition for the man who simply made an error.
Another framing is that Cofnas erred by moving into the Substack register and he would have been better served producing serious academic work and avoiding polemics.
Cofnas had a choice of register. He had a peer-reviewed paper trail in Evolutionary Psychological Science, philosophical work on debunking arguments, a respectable academic position in philosophy of biology. He could have continued in that register: technical papers, careful hedging, peer review, the slow accumulation of academic credibility on a difficult topic. The academic register has a protective function. Even colleagues who disagree must defend the legitimacy of peer-reviewed work, because attacking it threatens their own claim to academic freedom. The register encodes a tacit alliance among academics across ideological lines.
He chose the Substack register instead. “Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem.” “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution.” The titles are not academic. The word “Revolution” is a political call, not a scholarly proposal. The contents discuss what happens if affirmative action ends, what social arrangements might be needed in a colorblind system, what Sowell’s theory says in stark unhedged language. This is policy advocacy in the register of online combat.
The choice of register changed what Cambridge could do to him. Aileen McColgan’s report leans heavily on the question of academic competence in the published material she was reviewing. If she had been reviewing a peer-reviewed paper in Philosophy of Biology, that line of attack might have been harder to land. The journal’s review process supplies presumptive evidence of competence. The Substack register supplies no such presumption. The polemical title alone gave her something to work with.
Tacit knowledge about what an academic can and cannot say is encoded in register, venue, peer review, and hedging conventions. The academic register provides protective armor that the Substack register strips off. The protection is not absolute. Academics with controversial views still face attack. But the attack must work harder against academic-register publication than against Substack polemic. Cofnas chose the more direct register and lost the armor.
He cannot see this. The essay treats the Cambridge response as ideological persecution of his views. It treats his choice of venue and register as transparent or invisible. The framing is: I held heterodox views, Cambridge punished me for the views, therefore Cambridge betrayed academic freedom. The unstated middle term is the register choice that altered what Cambridge could plausibly do.
Several reasons might explain the blindness.
The Substack register may feel more honest to him. Academic hedging reads as cowardice or obfuscation to many writers who break out of it. The polemical register feels like truth-telling against the academic norm of softening everything. From inside that experience, the trade-off does not register as a trade-off. It registers as moral clarity.
The Substack platform supplies rewards the academy does not. Chiefly, attention. The reward structure pulled him into the register. Once in, the rewards reinforce the choice. He cannot see what he gave up because the platform he chose keeps paying him in the currency he traded for.
The polemical register is a coalition signal. By writing this way, Cofnas signaled his break from the academic left and his alliance with the heterodox right. The break was the point. Acknowledging that the register cost him something means acknowledging that the break had costs, and the heroic-rebel narrative has no room for self-imposed costs.
The lineage he closes the essay with includes Socrates, Diogenes, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche. None of them are peer-reviewed academics. The lineage is one of direct speakers who refused institutional softening. From inside his frame, the academic register reads as betrayal of the lineage he wants to inhabit. So he cannot say “I should have written more peer-reviewed papers and fewer polemical essays” because that admission shrinks him from the lineage he claims.
The strongest counterargument on Cofnas’s behalf is that the academic register has narrowed. Hereditarians have trouble publishing even in technical journals. Reviewers reject manuscripts on coalition grounds. The protective function of the academic register may have eroded. The Substack reach might have been worth the institutional risk because the academic alternative was closing.
Even granting this counterargument, the trade-off was still a trade-off. He chose. The essay erases the choice. A clear-thinking analyst might write: “I chose the Substack register because I wanted reach, I knew it carried risk, the risk materialized, Cambridge then punished me using the register as evidence of incompetence, I now reconsider whether the trade was worth it.” Cofnas does not write that. He writes: Cambridge promised free speech and lied. The first version is what self-examination looks like. The second is what coalition mobilization looks like.
Cofnas cannot see his own agency in producing the situation because seeing it unwinds the narrative that sustains him.
Cambridge is a complex institution with multiple competing coalitions, an explicit free-speech text, tacit norms of administrative response, separate college and faculty governance, and a long history of selective application of stated principles. The complexity is where his expectation diverged from reality. The complexity is where the felt betrayal lives. A simpler institution might have spared him the experience because his expectations would have matched its operation.
The media handling of betrayal has shifted to an indifferent tone. As the review puts it, “what once toppled monarchies now sells mops.” Cofnas’s case plays out in Daily Mail headlines, Varsity articles, Substack essays, Twitter mockery. The gravitas the word once carried has thinned. He reaches for the strong version of “betrayal” because the cultural register no longer supplies it freely. The strain shows. The schoolyard mockery in his essay sits alongside the lofty Spinoza-Hume lineage claim. Both are needed because neither alone can carry the weight he wants the situation to bear.
The schoolyard register and the betrayal framing do the same work in different keys. They both inflate the encounter beyond what its structure can support. A man whose priorities differed from those of the institutional coalitions around him met the result. He calls it betrayal. The word does the heavy lifting the situation refuses to do for him.
The Sowell passage is where Cofnas’s framing wobbles most in this essay. He quotes Sowell’s list, aversion to work, proneness to violence, sexual promiscuity, drunkenness, and treats McColgan’s reading of it as crude stereotyping as self-evidently ridiculous. A reader can hold both that Sowell is a serious scholar and that printing that list in a Cambridge essay reads as a sweeping characterization of Black Americans, whatever Sowell intended. Cofnas wants the protection of “I am only describing the data” while writing prose engineered to provoke. He gets to do that. He does not get to act surprised when people react.
The closing comparison to Socrates, Diogenes, Spinoza, Hume, Descartes, and Hobbes is where he loses me. A three-year fellowship cut short and a part-time postdoc in Ghent is not a hemlock cup. The pose is overwritten and it cheapens the parts of the case where he has the goods.
What he does have is a real grievance about how Cambridge processed him. The bait-and-switch between the December 2020 free speech statement and the standard McColgan applied is a documentable shift. The Faculty of Philosophy’s new procedure of circulating finalists’ dossiers for ideological vetting, if he describes it accurately, is a chilling thing for any institution that calls itself a university. He is more persuasive when he stays on the procedure and less when he tells you he is Diogenes.
The last paragraph is a plea for mercy. “Hanging on by my fingernails.” “The day after I am banished for good.” “I would ask my critics to think about…” Strip the rhetoric and you have a man asking the people trying to destroy him to please consider that he might fully lose. That posture forfeits ground he built in the procedural sections.
It signals weakness, and his enemies will read it that way. His Cambridge antagonists already believe they won. They got him off campus, ran out the clock, made hiring him a reputational risk anywhere in the Anglosphere. The fingernails line confirms their scoreboard. Worse, it broadcasts to any administrator at any future institution that hiring Cofnas is hiring a man near the end of his rope. That is the perception he most needs to fight, and he hands it to them in his own voice.
The closing also clashes with what comes right before it. He compares himself to Socrates and Diogenes and Spinoza, men who refused to flinch in front of power. Then he flinches. The reader feels the gear change. Either you are the heir to Diogenes, telling Alexander to stop blocking your sunlight, or you are the postdoc on year-to-year contracts asking critics for clemency. You cannot hold both poses in the same paragraph without one collapsing the other. The Diogenes pose collapses first.
There is a counter-case. He runs a Substack and the post is also a fundraising vehicle. Vulnerability sells subscriptions. The Free Speech Union case needs public sympathy, donors, witnesses willing to come forward. For those readers the fingernails line works. So there is a tension. The plea helps with money and helps with sympathy. It hurts with hiring committees, hostile press, and the activists looking for proof they broke him.
A stronger ending might have closed on the lawsuit. He has a live legal argument that hereditarianism is a protected belief, the judge in Cambridge County Court accepted that point, and Maya Forstater also lost in round one before winning on appeal. That is the threatening note. The opposition does not fear his sadness. It might fear his persistence and his lawyer.
Alistair Penbroke writes:
Nathan Cofnas is such a curious guy. I am fascinated by his mindset.
After years of writing about how smart and brilliant leftists must be because there are no right wing academics, he pens a giant essay in which he admits he was completely duped by a single document in which Cambridge claimed to care about free speech and intellectual freedom. So he went to work there and discovered the reality was one of violent mobs texting each other stuff like, “can we just all order ski masks and turn up on a voi and beat the shit out of him.”
He even describes the entire situation there as “retarded,” says the leadership “pour[ed] gasoline on the fire”…
Cofnas writes that he made the “fateful decision” to go to Cambridge because of the December 2020 Statement on Freedom of Speech, approved by 87% of the governing body, no escape clause. He took the written document at face value. He read the institutional self-description as binding reality.
This is the move he had spent years diagnosing in others. The credentialed liberal reads the university mission statement and believes it. He reads the official line on diversity and believes that. The gap between the formal text and the operative practice is where Cofnas’s analysis used to live. Then he stood in front of the most consequential text of his career and treated it as truth.
The warning signs were present. His friends told him not to accept. He had an offer from a top university in Asia where, he writes, the students do not care about Western political correctness. The Noah Carl precedent sat right there: Cambridge had fired a researcher in 2019 for almost exactly the kind of work Cofnas does. The document overrode the priors. A man trained to spot the move fell for the move.
That sentence might be the most useful one in the essay if he chose to write it. He has not chosen to write it.
The language problem is smaller but real. The piece shifts register as the stakes get personal. Section titles like “Cambridge University: Cofnas Is a Gay Nazi, LOL” and “Emmanuel’s Kangaroo Court” sit alongside careful statistical reconstructions of McColgan’s errors. He calls the investigation “straight out of Idiocracy.” He describes Chalmers “pouring gasoline on the fire.” He cracks wise about the Daily Mail journalist becoming his “old friend.” None of this is wrong. It might even make the piece more readable. But it represents a different Cofnas from the man who wrote in measured cognitive-science prose about between-group IQ differences.
The measured prose came easier when the question concerned other people’s groups. When the question concerns his own livelihood, the measured prose breaks down and the schoolyard voice emerges. That shift carries information. It suggests the prior dispassion was a posture enabled by his standing on the safe side of the inquiry, treating other men’s coalition positions as objects of study while his own sat secure. Once his own coalition position came under attack, the detachment evaporated. He started to write the way the people he had previously dismissed write.
Most men write differently when their own neck is on the line.
Cofnas’s sacred values at Cambridge were the right to publish hereditarian conclusions, the legitimacy of his professional standing, and his self-image as a man who follows the data wherever it leads. The Cambridge apparatus came for all three. He responded with the moves the woke deploy when their sacred values come under attack.
The list runs longer than his allies might want to count. He frames himself as the victim of mob rule. The students framed themselves as victims of his scholarship. He gathers a coalition of named allies (Singer, Pinker, Plomin, Srinivasan, the Free Speech Union) to sign letters and write public defenses. The students gathered petitions of hundreds and then more than a thousand signatures. He mocks his opponents in the register of social-media combat: McColgan as a “math expert,” section titles like “Cofnas Is a Gay Nazi, LOL,” the investigation “straight out of Idiocracy.” The students mocked him in Varsity and in ROAR. He files a lawsuit under the Equality Act. The students filed seven formal complaints. He says his career hangs by his fingernails and bottles fly at his head in Ghent. The students said his presence on campus traumatized them and threatened their educational environment. Both sides perform the same routine. The content of the sacred value differs. The shape of the defense converges.
Alliance Theory predicts this. Moral vocabularies are coalition technologies. When the coalition is under attack, members reach for the strongest available moral words. For the woke that vocabulary runs through harm, trauma, safety, White supremacy. For Cofnas it runs through free speech, academic freedom, Socrates, Spinoza, Hume, the Enlightenment lineage. Each vocabulary feels to its user like bedrock truth and to the other side like obvious cant. Both sides are sincere. Sincerity is what makes the routine work.
Becker fits here too. Cofnas closes the essay by placing himself in a chain of philosophers who were poor, exiled, sold into slavery, and self-publishing in obscurity. Socrates with the hemlock. Diogenes in the wine jug. Spinoza turning down Heidelberg. Hume rejected by Glasgow and Edinburgh. Nietzsche selling 250 copies. That is a hero-system claim. He is not just an academic with grievances. He is a link in the chain of truth-tellers crushed by institutions. The students at Cambridge make a parallel hero-system claim about themselves. They stand in the lineage of those who resisted scientific racism and protected vulnerable groups from dressed-up biological determinism. Two hero systems collide. Each side reads the other as a threat to the cosmic order their lineage protects.
Trivers handles the self-deception piece. Cofnas does not experience himself as performing a coalition defense. He experiences himself as the rational man stating obvious truths against a mob that has lost its mind. The students do not experience themselves as performing a coalition defense. They experience themselves as protecting their classmates from a dangerous bigot. Both sides feel the moral clarity. Neither side sees the structural match. Self-deception is more persuasive than conscious deception, which is why both sides come across so confident.
The asymmetries should not be erased. The woke side issued threats of physical violence. Cofnas did not. The woke side built its case on emotional injury that resists external check. Cofnas built his on documented errors in McColgan’s report and on the text of Cambridge’s own free-speech statement. Cofnas was the one whose livelihood was at stake. The students lost nothing. These differences are real.
But the form of the response is the same. The framing of self as victim, the recruitment of named allies, the public mockery of opponents, the resort to legal and procedural machinery, the moral lineage claim, the absolute confidence in one’s own clarity. These moves do not change when the content of the sacred value changes. That is the lesson the essay does not draw. If Cofnas saw himself in the structural mirror, the piece might have a different ending. He might write that he had spent years studying the woke and never expected to perform their script when his own coalition position came under fire. He might treat the experience as evidence about human coalition behavior in general, not about the unique pathology of one side.
He may get there. The essay does not show it yet.
FAFO (F– Around and Find Out)
FAFO does specific work the academic frames cannot easily do.
Start with what it captures. FAFO centers the actor’s agency. Cofnas chose to take the Cambridge job after his friends warned him not to. He chose to publish “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution” with that title on Substack. He chose to remain publicly visible during the controversy rather than withdraw and write quietly in journals. Each choice was a fuck-around move. The Cambridge response was the find-out.
The frame strips moral inflation. The betrayal language Cofnas reaches for converts his choices into wounds. FAFO converts them back into choices with predictable consequences. It does not deny that Cambridge behaved badly. It refuses to treat the bad behavior as surprising or as evidence that Cambridge broke a unique covenant with Cofnas. The institution does what the institution does. He should have known. His friends told him. Noah Carl’s case sat in the public record from 2019. The Substack platform had a track record of attracting institutional pushback. He fucked around. He found out.
FAFO also flattens the heroic framing. Cofnas closes the essay placing himself in the lineage of Socrates, Diogenes, Spinoza. FAFO says: nah, you took a job your friends warned you about and published a piece called “Hereditarian Revolution.” That deflation is brutal and might be approximately accurate.
The frame is folk-vernacular Turner. The person who fucks around is the person who did not absorb the tacit norms of the institution. The person who finds out is learning the tacit norms the hard way. Stephen Turner’s academic apparatus and FAFO point at the same phenomenon. FAFO does it in three syllables.
It is also folk-vernacular Pinsof. The fucking around is operating outside coalition norms. The finding out is the coalition response. Cofnas violated coalition norms on race, IQ, affirmative action, and academic register. The coalition responded. FAFO summarizes the structure without the theoretical vocabulary.
And it is folk-vernacular Trivers. Self-deception lets the actor tell himself he did not know. FAFO refuses that move. It says: you knew, or you should have known, and the universe is now informing you of what you pretended not to see. Whether this is fair depends on the case, but in Cofnas’s case the warnings were explicit, written, repeated.
Cofnas fucked around in foreseeable ways and got the foreseeable response, AND Cambridge’s response included real failures (McColgan’s math, Vira’s reversal under pressure, Emmanuel College’s reasoning) that are evaluable on their own terms. The two frames sit in productive tension. FAFO covers his agency. The institutional analysis covers their conduct.
The frame is useful as a private check on betrayal claims. When you find yourself reaching for the language of betrayal, FAFO is a useful pause: did I fuck around? Did the other party do anything I could not have predicted from prior evidence? The pause does not always resolve the question, but the question is the right one to ask.
For Cofnas: he was warned, he had the Noah Carl precedent, he had the published track record of academic responses to his earlier paper, he had the Substack reward structure pulling him toward escalation. He fucked around. He found out. The find-out included some real institutional misconduct, and he is entitled to call that out. He is not entitled to frame the whole thing as betrayal of a covenant he projected onto a document. The first move is FAFO discipline. The second move is honest evaluation of institutional response. Cofnas has done the second. He has not yet done the first.
The Set
His circle includes figures of several types. Senior researchers in psychometrics and behavioral genetics: Charles Murray (b. 1943), Robert Plomin (b. 1948), Linda Gottfredson (b. 1947), Helmuth Nyborg (b. 1937), Heiner Rindermann, Gerhard Meisenberg, and Russell Warne. The dead but canonical: Arthur Jensen (1923-2012), J. Philippe Rushton (1943-2012), Hans Eysenck (1916-1997), Richard Lynn (1930-2023), Henry Harpending (1944-2016), Tatu Vanhanen (1929-2015), and Richard Herrnstein (1930-1994). The evolutionary and genetic adjacent: Steven Pinker (b. 1954), Nicholas Wade (b. 1942), Greg Cochran, Razib Khan, David Reich (b. 1974), Bret Weinstein (b. 1969), Heather Heying, with E.O. Wilson (1929-2021) and William Hamilton (1936-2000) as founding spirits. Bloggers and podcasters who carry the work to public audiences: Steve Sailer (b. 1958), Edward Dutton, Emil Kirkegaard, Bo Winegard, Noah Carl, and Cremieux. Quillette and Aporia editors: Claire Lehmann (b. 1986), Matthew Archer, and Tomáš Hudík. The Black intellectuals on the margin of the set who accept some claims while distancing from others: Glenn Loury (b. 1948), John McWhorter, Coleman Hughes (b. 1996), and Wilfred Reilly. The libertarian or rationalist-adjacent who treat the claims as part of a broader anti-orthodoxy: Bryan Caplan (b. 1971), Robin Hanson (b. 1959), Tyler Cowen (b. 1962), Scott Alexander, Richard Hanania, and Curtis Yarvin (b. 1973). The behavioral geneticists who occupy ambiguous positions: Kathryn Paige Harden (b. 1982) accepts much of the science while rejecting the racial application. Philosophers in the Journal of Controversial Ideas orbit: Peter Singer (b. 1946), Francesca Minerva, and Jeff McMahan. The legal-academic ally Amy Wax (b. 1953) at Penn. Sympathetic mainstream-adjacent voices: Andrew Sullivan (b. 1963), Sam Harris (b. 1967), Lex Fridman (b. 1983), and at times Tucker Carlson (b. 1969) and Joe Rogan (b. 1967). The set polices its border against figures like Kevin MacDonald (b. 1944), Jared Taylor (b. 1951), and John Derbyshire (b. 1945).
What they value.
Truth as the highest good, especially uncomfortable truth. The set takes its mission to be defense of empirical findings against ideological suppression. They cite the heritability literature, the cross-cultural replication of IQ score patterns, the genome-wide association studies on educational attainment, the failures of compensatory programs to close test score gaps. They believe these findings have been suppressed, distorted, or denied by mainstream academia and journalism, and they take that suppression as the central scandal of contemporary intellectual life.
Hard data over narrative. The set has a quantitative orientation. Heritability estimates. Effect sizes. Meta-analytic correlations. Polygenic scores. Twin-study coefficients. The Flynn effect debate. The 1996 APA task force report on intelligence. Statistical literacy operates as the entry credential.
Free speech and academic freedom. The set treats the firing of Noah Carl, the resignation of Bo Winegard from Marietta, the termination of Cofnas at Cambridge, the deplatforming of Charles Murray at Middlebury in 2017, and the broader pattern of professional sanction as the defining injuries of the era. They want a return to inquiry without political vetting.
Anti-blank-slate, anti-progressive. They reject the view that group differences in outcomes follow from environmental factors alone, from historical oppression alone, from structural racism alone. They see the dominant progressive framework as empirically false and politically corrosive. They argue that disparate impact analysis, much of affirmative action, and much equity-focused policy rest on premises the evidence does not support.
A particular ordering of cognitive distributions, drawn from Lynn, Rushton, Murray, and the wider literature. Ashkenazi Jewish high mean. East Asian high mean. European intermediate. Sub-Saharan African low. This ordering operates as background assumption within the set and as scandal outside it.
Their hero system.
Darwin and Galton stand at the head. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) for evolutionary biology applied to human variation. Francis Galton (1822-1911) for inventing the study of individual differences, statistical correlation, twin studies, and the program of measuring human traits. They are the founders.
The Jensen line follows. Arthur Jensen’s 1969 Harvard Educational Review article “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” is the canonical text. The set tells the story of Jensen as the brave scientist who endured death threats, protests, and professional ostracism for stating what the data showed. Hans Eysenck wrote Race, Intelligence and Education in the same era and was assaulted at the London School of Economics. Rushton at Western Ontario faced years of attempted firing. Lynn worked at Ulster largely outside the academic mainstream. These men are the saints of the persecuted-truth-teller story.
Charles Murray is the living elder statesman. The Bell Curve (1994), co-written with Herrnstein, is the consolidating popular work. Murray survived Middlebury. He continued publishing. Human Diversity (2020) restated the case. He gives the keynote that ratifies the younger figures.
E.O. Wilson and William Hamilton are honored from the evolutionary biology side. Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975) and Hamilton’s inclusive fitness theory are the bridge between behavioral genetics and population thinking.
The fired or canceled younger generation receives a particular kind of honor. Noah Carl. Bo Winegard. Cofnas. The Cambridge termination is the apex martyrdom because Cambridge is the apex affiliation. Lower-ranked terminations confer less status. The pattern of academic punishment creates the cohort’s identity.
Status games.
Publishing in mainstream peer-reviewed journals on hereditarian topics carries the highest status because it requires getting past editors and reviewers hostile to the work. Cofnas in Philosophical Psychology. Plomin in Nature Genetics. Reich at Harvard publishing on ancient DNA. The hostile publication outranks the friendly publication.
Being fired prestigiously is its own currency. Cambridge fellowship terminated. Oxford speaker invitation rescinded. Princeton chair denied. A high-prestige institution validating you long enough to fire you confers more than never being hired. Cofnas’s Emmanuel termination ranks higher than Winegard’s Marietta departure because Cambridge ranks higher than Marietta.
Substack subscriber counts. Twitter following on X. Podcast invitations. Sam Harris remains the high-prestige sympathetic platform. Lex Fridman is broader. Tucker Carlson splits the set: appearing on his show signals one position to the broader public and a different position within the set. Andrew Sullivan’s Dishcast offers moderate-respectable cover. Joe Rogan ranks high in reach, lower in prestige inside the academic wings.
Book deals from mainstream publishers. The Bell Curve from Free Press. Murray’s Human Diversity from Twelve. Pinker’s The Blank Slate from Penguin. Harden’s The Genetic Lottery from Princeton. A trade press contract for a hereditarian-adjacent book is a coup.
Conference invitations. The International Society for Intelligence Research. The Behavior Genetics Association. Various smaller gatherings. The London Conference on Intelligence ran for several years before reputational pressure shut it down. The set holds informal gatherings now, mostly in private.
Citations from mainstream figures. A Pinker tweet. A David Reich citation. A Plomin endorsement. These confer disproportionate status because they cross the boundary from the set’s interior to the respectable outside.
Distance from the more explicit racialist figures. The set scores its members on whether they have repudiated Kevin MacDonald, Jared Taylor, and American Renaissance. Cofnas has done so on the record. Others stay quieter. The border policing produces internal tension.
Normative claims.
Free inquiry includes inquiry into uncomfortable empirical questions. A science that refuses certain hypotheses is no longer a science.
Truth-telling at personal cost is the central intellectual virtue. The man who keeps his job through silence ranks lower than the man who loses it through speech.
Progressive policy rests on empirical errors that better data would expose. Affirmative action, disparate impact analysis, equity-focused education reform, much of contemporary anti-racism: all assume environmental causation of group differences that the set thinks the evidence does not support. The set holds that honest discussion of the science would force reconsideration of these policies.
The blank-slate consensus is a noble lie that has hardened into an enforced regime. Its enforcers know it is false or refuse to look, and they punish those who look.
Group mean differences in measured traits do not justify group-level judgment of individuals. The set states this disclaimer often. Whether the surrounding work supports the disclaimer is a question critics raise and the set disputes.
The American liberal order requires honest engagement with biological variation rather than denial of it. Cofnas argues that the only stable defense of a meritocratic liberal society against progressive critique is acceptance of hereditarianism. This is his particular contribution.
Essentialist claims.
Intelligence is real, measurable, and stable. The general factor g exists across cognitive tests. IQ scores predict educational, occupational, and life outcomes. The score is a measurement of an underlying trait, not a social construction. This is the foundational essentialism.
Group mean differences in cognitive ability are heritable. The Black-White gap in the United States is real, durable, partly genetic in origin. The Ashkenazi-Gentile gap among Jews of European descent is real and partly genetic. The East Asian-European gap is real and partly genetic. The sub-Saharan African distribution sits below the European distribution at the mean and is partly genetic in origin. These are the core hereditarian claims.
Races are biologically real categories, not arbitrary social constructions. They reflect continental ancestry clusters detectable in genome data. The set draws on Reich’s work, on 23andMe-type results, on population genetics, to argue that the folk categories track biological reality at the level of statistical distribution.
Personality and behavioral traits are heritable. The Big Five. Aggression. Impulsivity. Conscientiousness. Time preference. The set extends the cognitive findings to broader trait space.
Sex differences are largely biological. Spatial reasoning. Verbal ability. Aggression. Mate preference. Career interest. The set accepts the evolutionary psychology literature on sex.
Human universals exist beneath cultural variation. Donald Brown’s Human Universals (1991) is the canonical text. The set treats culture as a layer over biological constants rather than as the determinative force progressives take it to be.
A particular essentialism about the academic guild: the modern university has been captured by an ideological coalition that selects against hereditarian researchers, sanctions them when discovered, and trains students who carry the orthodoxy forward. The capture is structural. Recovery requires reform or alternative institutions.
A more contested internal essentialism concerns Jewish intellectual and political traits. Lynn and the Cochran-Harpending-Hardy “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence” paper (2006) argued for selection pressures producing high mean Ashkenazi IQ. Kevin MacDonald turned related material toward anti-Jewish ends. Cofnas has argued against MacDonald’s interpretation while accepting the genetic claim about Ashkenazi cognition. The set divides on whether to engage MacDonald, dismiss him, or ignore him. The fault line runs through the coalition and shapes much of its public positioning.
The members of the set know they belong to it. They read each other on Substack. They cite each other in papers. They appear on each other’s podcasts. They defend each other when the firings come. They argue about the Jewish question, about the strategy of mainstream engagement, about how plainly to state conclusions. They take their punishment as evidence of importance. They believe history will vindicate them. The cost they pay is their proof of seriousness, weighed against the respectable journalists and academics who refuse to report what the set holds true.