It has been one or two years since I first became aware of Nathan Cofnas. His first Substack piece did not appear until January 13, 2023—a paid discussion with Alex Kaschuta, followed by a few pieces that April. It was not really until January 2, 2024, however, that his writing took off, with the deliberately trollish “Why We Need to Talk About the Right’s Stupidity Problem.”
Nathan Cofnas was born in Chicago, sometime in 1986 or 1987 by most estimates. His first CV-listed publication, “Science Is Not Always ‘Self-Correcting’: Fact-Value Conflation and the Study of Intelligence,” appeared in Foundations of Science 21, no. 3, in 2016. Plenty followed: “Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy: A Critical Analysis of Kevin MacDonald’s Theory,” in Human Nature 29, no. 2; “Is Kevin MacDonald’s Theory of Judaism ‘Plausible’? A Response to Dutton,” in Evolutionary Psychological Science 5, no. 1, in 2019.
Or take “How Gene-Culture Coevolution Can—but Probably Did Not—Track Mind-Independent Moral Truth,” published in The Philosophical Quarterly 73, no. 2, in 2023.
These, however, I have not read. They are not how I know Nathan Cofnas.
I know Nathan as a Substack persona. I have read his writings from “Podcast Bros and Brain Rot” to “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution”. I have watched his interviews. I have followed, like everyone else, his battles against ivory academia. I even watched his unfortunate debate against Dave Greene. But something nags at me: why do I know this Cofnas rather than the other one?
Why do I not know the Cofnas of Biology & Philosophy or The American Sociologist? Why do I not know him as an academic Jew, by the strength of his publications? Why not as a worthy man—a man of journals, monographs, and textbooks? Why does Cofnas’s public fame seem to exist almost entirely outside the scholarship that was supposed to establish him?
Gimpel Neumann calls Nathan Cofnas (b. c. 1986) a schlimazel, a man on whom the soup gets spilled. The frame is warm, the mazel exposition is charming, and the conclusion is wrong. Cofnas read the reputation economy correctly, chose the branch with higher variance, and drew from the tail. He has agency. Ghent and Cambridge have responsibility. God can stay on His throne.
Cofnas published in Foundations of Science in 2016, in Human Nature and Evolutionary Psychological Science on Kevin MacDonald, in The Philosophical Quarterly in 2023 on gene-culture coevolution and moral truth. That record bought him an early career research fellowship at Cambridge and a research associateship at Emmanuel College in 2022. The system worked. It gave him what it gives: a term appointment, a hundred readers who could referee and cite him, and a line on a CV that opens the next term appointment. Neumann asks why the journals failed to make Cofnas famous. They never make anyone famous. That is not their function and never was.
What the guild cannot deliver is a public, and a public is what Cofnas wanted, because a public is what his theory of change requires. He said so in the January 2, 2024 essay. The right needs to challenge the equality thesis. Right-wing intellectuals should disseminate accurate information about race differences and build a political philosophy attractive to current left-wing elites. Whatever one thinks of that program, it cannot be executed in Biology & Philosophy. The people it aims to convert do not read Biology & Philosophy. So he wrote for the people who read Substack, and he wrote in the register that gets read there, and he titled the essay to be shared by people who were annoyed by it.
The trollish tone was a choice. Cofnas is a philosopher of science who spent years learning to write for referees. A man who can write for The Philosophical Quarterly and then writes “Why We Need to Talk About the Right’s Stupidity Problem” has made a decision about audience. The decision paid. Within two years he had a readership, an income stream, invitations, and a name that people in three countries recognize. He also had Emmanuel College ending its association with him in 2024 after complaints about a post arguing that Black students would nearly vanish from Harvard under colorblind admissions. Cambridge’s own review found no discrimination or harassment and no breach of speech rules. The association ended anyway. That is the posted price, and he had watched enough predecessors pay it to know the figure.
Ghent settles the question. When his hire became public in March 2026, nearly a thousand people signed a petition demanding it be stopped, and more than three hundred staff and students, including forty-eight members of his own department, three deans, and two former deans, signed a letter calling his views incompatible with the university’s ethics code. He took the job. Both parties knew what they were getting. Then he went on a podcast and said he was continuing his work on race realism and the hereditarian revolution while employed at Ghent, and Ghent’s legal office quoted that statement back to him in the letter of August 20, 2026, opening a preliminary disciplinary investigation and suspending him. His research mandate, they wrote, covers the future of liberalism and individual freedom and equality, and race realism falls outside it.
A man who takes a post over the objection of a third of his department, then announces on a podcast that he is continuing the work they objected to, is not a man to whom things happen. He is a man running a strategy. The strategy has a name in finance. He is long volatility. He accepts a high probability of small losses and periodic institutional expulsion in exchange for a small probability of a very large payoff, which in his case would be the collapse of a taboo he believes is empirically false and socially catastrophic. Bets like that lose most of the time. Losing most of the time is priced in.
July and August delivered the payoff and the tail in the same motion. Cofnas ran Jason Arday’s 2015 doctoral thesis through plagiarism software and published the matches: dozens of passages lifted verbatim or near verbatim from Paula Zwozdiak-Myers’s 2009 Brunel thesis, much of it uncited at the point of copying, along with problems in four of ten papers drawn from Arday’s own list of principal publications. Times Higher Education had held the same story since September 2025, having spiked it after Arday engaged Carter-Ruck. Once the screenshots were public the suppression failed. The Telegraph commissioned an analysis that found more than a hundred identical or near-identical passages, a later count reached 188 sentences, and academics with no interest in Cofnas’s racial politics examined the two texts and reached the same conclusion. Cambridge, which had called the critics racist, opened an investigation. Arday resigned on August 5 and was found dead at his home in London nine days later, at forty-one. Then the suspension.
Any strategy built on public accusation carries one tail risk above all others, which is that the target is a person, and persons break. That risk was known before the first post went up. Under Neumann’s frame, a man’s death enters the ledger as soup on Cofnas’s trousers. Under the agency frame, it enters as the realized cost of a chosen method.
The luck frame also fails on its own terms. A schlimazel gets no cavalry. Cofnas got one in four days. By August 24 more than seven hundred academics had signed an open letter to rector Petra De Sutter (b. 1963) calling the proceedings retaliation for publicizing misconduct, among them David Deutsch (b. 1953) and Nigel Biggar (b. 1955) and fifteen Oxford signatories and two dozen business school professors. That is the asset the strategy was built to accumulate, arriving on schedule. He spent two years constructing a constituency outside the university so it would exist on the day the university moved against him. It exists. Whether it is large enough to hold Ghent is the question, and it is a question about coalitions.
Ghent hired a man for his work on liberalism knowing he was famous for something else, and now proposes to discipline him because he is famous for something else. The mandate argument is the useful part of the letter. It lets a university avoid saying that it punishes views, and say instead that the views fall outside the contract. Any academic whose public writing exceeds his grant description is exposed to that argument. Ghent has built a tool with wide application, and other rectors are watching to see whether it holds.
So the pattern in Cofnas’s career is a man who concluded that scholarly credentials no longer convert into influence, that the public branch of the reputation economy is where beliefs now move, and that the price of entry is his standing in the guild. He was right about the split. He priced the ticket correctly. The bet is still running.
