I have not said anything about the tragic story of Jason Arday, who was accused of plagiarism and after being hounded over it, was found dead later. I have zero tolerance for plagiarism, but an official Cambridge panel cleared his PhD thesis of claims of deliberate plagiarism, so it should have been over then (unintentional plagiarism is still an issue, but ask Doris Kearns Godwin or Stephen Ambrose about that).
What the Kearns and Ambrose cases didn’t have was a thick overlay of racism. Arday had been aggressively harrassed for a long time by a guy named Nathan Cofnas, before the accusations had filtered into British journalism, which treated them much much more seriously and marshaled the public to question the legitimacy of Arday’s work. I don’t know enough about Arday’s discipline to say whether more investigation was necessary, but I am familiar with Cofnas, that fine specimen of Caucasian superiority shown on the right, and I can tell you that if anyone should have been exiled from academe, it was that fucking Nazi.
Cofnas calls himself a “race realist” and promotes “scientific racism”. He got a PhD in philosophy from Oxford in 2020 for a thesis that sounds like evo-psych muddled up with naive philosophy, arguing that morality is rooted in biological predispositions. I’ve got a copy, but haven’t been able to get through the whole thing, and am unfortunately incapable of throwing a pdf against the wall. He promptly got a job at Emmanuel College, and was promptly fired for grossly racist remarks disparaging black people, generically. He was picked up by Ghent University, why I don’t know, racism shouldn’t be a trait on one’s CV that makes them readily hireable. He’s currently suspended from Ghent because he chose to use his academic freedom to launch his campaign against Arday, because he’s black, and Cofnas does not believe black people should be able to do anything outside of sports and entertainment.
He’s now doing the rounds of racist and right-wing podcasts, and recently appeared with Glenn Loury (a black man) and John McWhorter (a black man) to babble about how he’s not really a racist, but because he’s also a spectacularly stupid person, he couldn’t help but fumble his story.
Incredible segment from this discussion between Nathan Cofnas and Glenn Loury & John McWhorter where Cofnas starts to explain how the Nazis were right about racial differences, then catches himself and pivots to how the Nazis were right about the conspiring elites. pic.twitter.com/fsHE9LdlRd
— Sasha Gusev (@SashaGusevPosts) September 20, 2026
There’s this bit where he’s talking about a science paper about the evidence for directional selection in West Asian peoples, and he let’s slip a few bad beliefs that he desperately tries to talk himself out of the hole he dug.
The Nazis are saying, look, we were right all along. Now they aren’t right, they…they were…they were right that there are…well, they don’t, they say there are like essential fundamental differences between races, which is not true, but there…they said that the left wing establishment that said that all races are exactly the same, uhh, now it’s obvious that the establishment was lying and the establishment has no credibility, which means the Nazis have much more credibility to many people.
No, the left wing establishment
, whatever that is, does not argue that all races are exactly the same
; which he calls race communism
. How could they, when we acknowledge that all individuals are different? And when there are obvious differences in the distribution of physical traits in different populations? Yet somehow this jumped up racist philbro with no comprehension of what population geneticists actually say is happy to claim that now Nazis are more credible.
Let’s hope that Ghent University makes the sensible decision to give this bigoted clown the boot.
I once had a troll who kept using a similar line, claiming I believed everyone was genetically equal. My whole thing was that individual variation and environmental factors were large enough that claims of genetic differences are hard to prove, to the point I argued it wasn’t even worth the effort: When you’re hiring an individual, you’re hiring that specific individual, not a hypothetical average of their lineage, so his notion of racial differences was beside the issue. Investing in a better education system would have considerably greater and faster benefit than eugenics. He seemed very confused about that notion of people existing as individuals.
One of the things that always strikes me is that the whole idea of races as a category is transitory.
Populations are always changing, merging and splitting.
The French that Julius Ceasar conquered weren’t even French. They were Celtic people.
.1. Multiracial Population: People identifying with two or more races have grown significantly, making up roughly 10% to 11% of the population according to recent census data and estimates.
and
.2. Multiracials, people who identify in multiple races, are the fastest-growing racial population in the country (Davenport, Iyengar, and Westwood …
Right now mixed race hybrids are 10% or so of the US population.
Mixes are also the fastest growing racial group in the USA.
That is the real racial realism.
In a few more generations, a huge proportion or most of the USA will be mixes of various races.
You see it every day all around you.
Our Kenyan Black president Obama was actually half white.
Kamala Harris, is half Indian and half Jamaican.
The cuckoo VP Vance is married to an Indian woman with 4 kids.
He’s as dumb as a bag of wet mice. I’m proud to say he once threatened to sue me for defamation. THAT’S how much he believes in free speech!
https://altrightorigins.com/2020/10/10/defamation-and-nathan-cofnas/
Honesty compels us to re-emphasize the following in our own concise words:
There are many races. Human society is full of diversity. Obviously, there are biological and cultural differences among the races. It’s an extremely complex issue that CANNOT be simplified into superior and inferior. Any one who tries to do that is a bigoted imbecile.
And, as PZ pointed out, hounding someone to death (or viciously pushing them to suicide) is criminal.
Plagiarism is a crime and ai is a thief that mimics intelligence while shuffling words around to try to prevent their output being labeled as plagiarism.
Thus, we must stipulate that all the hatred, bigotry, murder and thuggery in human society just proves that humanity is, in most cases, a failed experiment.
Race is a social construct. Humanity the species of giant ape is something you can genetically prove with a DNA sequence. He ( and his sources?) is conflating in his head human-race as the ancient name of our species and the silly ways that humans divide ourselves. “Leftists” believe in science which says then that compared to all the other animals our DNA is highly restricted and we are all the same.
He is sacredly (idiotically fucked uppedly and ignorant) special in his head. His mommy told him so. Therefore all leftist are saying that all races are the same, in his twist.ed lit.tle mind.
I had this problem speaking to an oik and a yobbo in London. It might be an English-flavored fascist thing.
raven@2: “The cuckoo VP Vance is married to an Indian woman with 4 kids”
Shady Vance desperately wants to be someone else. He has changed his name multiple times, and his rise from rags-to-riches in “Hillbilly Eulogy” was totally fictional. His statements before the Idiot Orange Führer was elected, and after, show that he is just a world’s best TOADY contest contestant.
https://people.com/everything-j-d-vance-has-said-against-donald-trump-his-2024-presidential-election-running-mate-8678397
Poor Cofnas, no Nobel Prizes for him. Only the idiot Nazis recognize his “jenius” for being an absolutely worthless nobody. But no one important does, and it apparently annoys him to no end. Are these schools doing zero validation on their faculty hires?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_black_Nobel_laureates
Genius mathematician Ramanujan was an East Indian, and there is a LONG list of others.
They say that they can’t fire him due to “academical freedom”. And yet, even academia is bound by the rules of thought. There does not appear to be any data supporting his “academical conclusions”, and for this reason, there does not appear to be any reason for protecting his “academical” works from being judged worthless (with consequences for employment), whatever his personal background may be.
His own behaviour appears to rather poetically disprove any supposed differences between humans of different origins.
I took a look. The plagiarism issue was the initial thing, but it started the ball rolling.
The plagiarism was considered ‘reasonable’*, but that was not the end of it: he lied about being a visiting professor, lied about being mute until 11, lied about his charity fundraising, lied about being on television, and copied interview quotes from other academics to paste into his research articles.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Arday)
So that initial claim snowballed.
Turns out he was doing a bit of a George Santos, except in academia rather than in politics.
Still, it was his own choice to kill himself, so one can’t really blame another for it.
—
* >Accepting that there were problems with Arday’s supervision, the panel concluded that the similarities between Arday’s thesis and an earlier PhD thesis by another academic were the result of “honest and reasonable error”, not deliberate plagiarism, and were “well within the accepted range of compliance with the academic standards of the time”.[11]
In the Infinite Thread, I excerpted threads from disinfo researcher Stephanie Lamy on retired prof David Harris. He has an axe to grind against critical race theory and a history of harassment who was so “concerned” he called various journalists to circulate allegations. Arday filed a police complaint against him. Harris’ buddy Martyn Hammersley escalated to Arday’s head of faculty.
Oh, she added more after I’d checked.
Stephanie Lamy:
The attached doc has a tab at the bottom for English.
Stephanie Lamy:
@2.raven :
Two of Trump’s 3 wives are economic migrants. Melania was born in part of Yugoslavia that is now Slovenia, Ivana Trump was born in Czechoslovakia now Czechia. Of Trump’s 5 children, four were born to East European Slavic* migrants. The USA infamously has a felon married to a migrant telling others that felons and migrants are bad.
Hitler famously considered the Slavic “race” inferior and slaughtered many of them in the Shoah (Nazi Holocaust.) Modern racists seem to be just be fine with counting them – and even the Irish and Greeks too (Gasp! Shock!! Horror!!!1ty!) as just “white” because “race” is a bullshit idea with bullshit arbitrary politically convenient categories.
.***
@ shermanj – 21st September 2026 at 1:17 pm : “Honesty compels us to re-emphasize the following in our own concise words: There are many races.”
No there aren’t.
Race is a social cultural construct and Humanity has no sub-species or “races” in scientific reality.*
We are all one species with a lot of individual variations and thousands of cultural groups.
The idea of “races” being superior and inferiror is indeed extremely complex and problematic and those claiming there’s such a thing as racial superiority or inferiority are racist, willfully, ignorant bigots.
Sorry but no. NOT an “experiment,” We evolved naturally and are a very flawed species that has created some seriously fucked up cultures and false ideas including the fucked up and erroneous idea that there’s “races” and some “racial hierarchy” within our species.
.* See source : https://www.newsweek.com/there-no-such-thing-race-283123
As that article also notes, racism is very real and obviously wrong.
PS. Meta – do people prefer this format addressing multiple other commenters preferable to two separate comments addressing each commenter individually?
Print it out and then you can throw it against the wall.
But then it’ll exist in the physical world and need to be burned.
Well, technically, Homo includes several species. The other humans besides our subspecies went extinct, unfortunately.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain@9,
I disagree with the claim in the passage you quote from Stephanie Lamy, that attention to questions about Jason Arday’s work, or his life and how he presented it, after his death, makes one “a slave to far right propaganda”. Truth is important, and often complicated. It could be true that Arday misrepresented aspects of his work or past, even though it is undoubtedly true that he was hounded to death by racists and an irresponsible press. Does this stricture, in any case, apply to articles that defend him as well as those that attack him? There is a very interesting article in the UK magazine Byline Times September 2026, pp.14-19, which does exactly that, although its main theme lies elsewhere, as the title suggests: “The Race Science Network that Penetrated Cambridge University and Targeted Jason Arday”.
That article links Cofnas to the online magazine Aporia, “the public-facing arm of the Human Diversity foundation, now known as Polygenic Scores”, to another right-wing online magazine Quillette, to Peter Thiel, and to one Professor James Orr (who Byline Times had looked at in a previous article on his unprofessional – social, political and domicilary, not sexual – relationships with students as well as his links to Thiel) and to cryptobillionaire Ben Delo. The last two have been in the UK news recently. Orr was (when both articles were published) Head of Policy for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party. He has now resigned, along with another close Farage aide, after they were filmed in a “sting” operation, apparently accepting a donation in kind from a supposed American businessman, which would be illegal under UK electoral law, and which is currently being investigated by the police. Belo, even more recently, has given Reform £34 million – which the party may have to return under legislation currently going through Parliament. Both on boasting about Arday and then dropping him, and on Thiel, Orr and their network, Cambridge University has questions to answer.
KG @14:
What if we participate in the manufactured controversy to show that a lynch mob *gasp* lied sometimes?
From the Google-translated Le Monde article about Russian propaganda:
Lamy shared this article approvingly.
What Jason Arday’s death and ‘reputational warfare’ should teach Ireland
How to Survive the Broligarchy – The killing of a black man
Stephanie Lamy:
CA7746, you really don’t like to think for yourself, do ya?
All you do is quote others’ opinion pieces.
A suggested solution to this minor problem: Dump the PDF onto an old thumbdrive that’s about due to be tossed anyway.