Posted on November 1, 2022

Race-Realist Nathan Cofnas Gets a Job

Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, November 1, 2022

Reality is “racist.” There are racial differences and racial patterns that emerge consistently in different countries under vastly different circumstances. Our rulers invariably try to censor discussion of these differences. Let no one mock the medieval Catholic Church for its supposed restrictions on free inquiry. “Our Democracy” can be just as tyrannical.

One man who stands for truth is philosophy PhD Nathan Cofnas. Cambridge University recently hired him as an “early career fellow” in its philosophy department. This is apparently scandalous because according to the Daily Mail and author Elizbeth Haigh, Dr. Cofnas “wrote a 2019 report about so-called ‘gaps’ in IQ between white and non-white people.”

Dr. Nathan Cofnas

Note the phrase “so-called ‘gaps’ in IQ,” including scare quotes around “gaps.” Miss Haigh could claim IQ doesn’t measure intelligence and she’d be wrong, but at least it’s an argument. She can’t say there are no performance gaps. They are a widely recognized.

Miss Haigh refers with distaste to Dr. Cofnas’s paper, “Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry,” published in Philosophical Psychology in 2019:

  • “Nathan Cofnas denied that all ‘human groups’ have the same potential in 2019”
  • “Cofnas appears to question the extent that racism exists within society and argue that white populations are unfairly ‘blamed’ for ‘differences’ between races.”
  • “Cofnas refers to old studies that claim white populations have a higher intelligence than black populations.”

Presumably we are expected to find these statements shocking. Miss Haigh assures us — without evidence — that they have not just been “debunked” but “widely debunked.” She alludes to an alleged refutation to which she does not even link, and quotes an anonymous student who says Dr. Cofnas’s appointment is “crazy.”

Dr. Cofnas himself is unmoved: “The paper represents my views then and now.”

Miss Haigh retweeted the following on Elon Musk’s new website.

Asians do tend to have spatial intelligence superior to that of other groups.

But how can someone be credited with “exposing” the views of an academic who wrote under his own name and still stands by them? Moreover, when Dr. Cofnas first wrote the paper, he faced a wave of criticism led by a philosophy professor at Macquarie University who was determined to “ruin [Cofnas’s] reputation permanently and deservedly.” Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley joined in, calling on colleagues to denounce the paper, even though he admitted he hadn’t read it. This is what passes for philosophy when the subject is race differences.

The 2020 paper that supposedly rebutted Dr. Cofnas is “More than provocative, less than scientific: A commentary on the editorial decision to publish Cofnas” and it’s little better than the Daily Mail article. The authors simply assert “there is no evidence from the study of human biological variation that suggests that racial realism is true . . . .” The writers even appeal to the hackneyed observation that “humans share the vast majority (99.9%) of our DNA in common.” We share about 98% of our genes with chimpanzees too, and we test drugs on mice because their DNA is so similar to ours. Academics should be free to pursue scientific questions that explain these differences, especially because race dominates political discussion in the West.

Nathan Cofnas has also written on the politically incorrect topic of Jews’ alleged group evolutionary strategy. In a 2018 article called “Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy,” he critiqued Dr. Kevin MacDonald’s work in this field. He also responded to Dr. MacDonald’s rebuttals in a 2021 article called “The Anti-Jewish Narrative.” His articles do not say Dr. MacDonald must be silenced. They reply to arguments with different arguments. This is the way scholarship is supposed to work. It’s the way the West is supposed to work.

It doesn’t work that way today. Many professors and students, particularly in “Ethnic Studies,” “African-American Studies” and other variations, train activists in different ways to claim victimhood. Many journalists, rather than challenging the establishment, try to silence its critics. If that is to change, we need more brave academics like Nathan Cofnas. Let’s hope this attempt to purge him instead brings him the attention he deserves at the beginning of a long and successful career.