Nathan Cofnas, the academic at the centre of the
storm surrounding the late Cambridge academic Jason Arday, is an unabashed
proselytiser of what is termed “race realism”. He is also part of a network
which is actively promoting the rehabilitation of eugenics as a discipline of
study and a core determinant of social policy. Cofnas believes that genetics
determine average cognitive and behavioural differences between racial and ethnic
groups, and as such should be used as the crux of dismantling prevalent
ideologies which have enabled Western societies to operate under the basis of
equality of all. He has directed his theories mainly at Black people who he
claims would be unable to compete in a sphere of activities save those of
sports and entertainment. But Cofnas, an ethnic Ashkenazi Jew, has one
particular impediment to his intended “hereditarian revolution”. This is the
cooperation of those White identitarians who consider Jews to be a separate and
hostile group who work against the interests of Whites. In 2018, Cofnas
published a paper aimed at rebutting the works of Kevin MacDonald, an
evolutionary psychologist, who argues that Jews practice a form of
hyper-ethnocentrism which they use to outcompete other racial groups including Whites
in whose societies they form a “hostile elite”. MacDonald is widely considered
to be the intellectual guru of a large segment of White nationalists. Cofnas’
engagement of MacDonald’s work can be argued to have been an attempt at
converting MacDonald’s followers and co-opting them into a philosemitic white
nationalist movement. It failed signally. The irony that Cofnas, a Jew whose
European antecedents were victimised by 19th century “race realist”
notions of Jews as a people with ineradicably flawed biological traits, cannot
go unremarked. And he will have to contend with the logic that in the
“non-woke” marketplace of ideas he envisages, such thinking, along with that
pertaining to the group evolutionary strategy applied by MacDonald to Judaism,
will also necessarily have a place in the public discourse.
In an article titled “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution” which was published at his substack page in 2024, Nathan Cofnas, the fervent “race realist” and supporter of eugenics set out a plan to end “wokism”. It is a task which he believes will involve a “siege of the institutions” and “legal reforms”. And central to such an effort is the need to undermine what he refers to as the “equality thesis”, which if successful will destroy the “intellectual basis of wokism” and provide “the elites a reason to join the (political) right.”
The key to undermining this “equality thesis”, as he puts it, is to bring public discourse on racial differences to the mainstream where over the course of time he believes the notion of intellectual and moral inequalities between races will find wide acceptance.
Cofnas’ strategy is centred on pointing to studies which attribute to Blacks lower intellectual abilities than Whites. The taking down of the late Jason Arday, the Black Cambridge Professor of Education, who resigned and was later found dead after a trial by media instigated by an article written by Cofnas, has been marketed by Cofnas and his right-wing network as a vindication of his views.
Arday, a neuro-divergent individual, was evidently easy pickings for Cofnas and his confederates who would surely have targeted any other Black academic at Cambridge who was vulnerable to an accusation of being a so-called “DEI hire”. The impression, however false, that Black academics at Cambridge and other universities owe their positions to a form of affirmative action rather than their qualifications and professionalism, will have been implanted in the minds of a swathe of persons who will be susceptible to this line of thinking given the backdrop of increasing anti-immigrant sentiment.
Cofnas and his backers will be hoping to exploit an increase in White identitarianism as an essential component in his quest for an “hereditarian revolution”.
But Cofnas, a man of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, has a huge stumbling block which is not apparent to the many who have only recently become familiar with his work. One of his greatest desires appears to be to co-opt a huge segment of White identitarians into the race realist movement of which he is a part. These people do not consider Jews to be part of what they believe to be the biological and cultural family of the European race. This impediment to his dream of erecting a philosemitic White Nationalist movement is found in the work of perhaps the preeminent White Nationalist intellectual, Kevin MacDonald, a professor emeritus of psychology at California State University, Long Beach.
It is important therefore to explore Cofnas’ motivation for challenging MacDonald’s extensive work on Jews in the context of evolutionary psychology, considered by many in the academic field to be every bit as pseudo-scientific as Cofnas’ race realist research. It is also essential to point out the deep irony of Cofnas’ affinity for biological racism only in so far as Jews are not targeted.
He is doubtless aware that the bulk of the 19th century pioneers of scientific racism were explicitly anti-Jewish. Wilhelm Marr the German journalist whose 1879 pamphlet Der Seig des Judentums uber das Germentum coined the term “antisemitism” (Antisemitismus). Marr’s efforts marked a clear separation between anti-Jewish sentiment which was a religious-based animus and that which was a secular one related to biology and race.
The British-German philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain, like Marr thought of Jews as an alien people who were a destructive force on German society. The core ideas of his book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century discarded the philosemitic tendencies of Arthur de Gobineau and provided a clear template for the Nazi movement in the following century.
Chamberlain formed a key influence on the American Madison Grant, a lawyer and amateur anthropologist, who developed the racial concept of Nordicism. Nordicism was an intra-European form of racism which designated a three-tier hierarchy in which the Anglo-Saxon, Germanic and Scandinavian people were placed above, respectively, the Alpine race and the Mediterranean’s. In his book The Passing of the Great Race, Or, the Racial Basis of European History, stated that only members of the highest tier Teutonic races should be allowed to enter America and that the others were “intrusive elements”. Grant characterised Jews as an “inferior” and a “worthless racial type”. His beliefs were later adopted by the anti-Jewish German National Socialists who developed from these descriptions the classification of Untermensch.
It is worth noting that most of the race realists of the 19th century and early 20th century like Cofnas believed in eugenics, a phrase coined by Francis Galton. Borrowing from evolutionary concepts developed by amongst others his cousin Charles Darwin, Galton used these ideas to argue that “more suitable races” should be encouraged to outbreed “less suitable” ones. Eugenics formed an integral part of the ideology of Nazism which placed a premium on what was termed Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene), with the greatest threat to the supposed racial purity of Germans coming from Jews.
The endpoint of race realism and its eugenical counterpart came in the Nazi policy of methodically exterminating Jews through the death squads of the Einsatzgruppen in the eastern part of Europe and in death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau where Dr. Josef Mengele, a committed eugenicist, performed a range of inhumane experiments on Jews.
It is of course a vastly different world in which the Jewish Cofnas lives in, one in which he can arrogate his hope that once his “hereditarian revolution” is completed, he will be made the Dean of a “race science and eugenic department at Harvard”.
The post-war acceptance of Jews into the full spectrum of American society has made them a less conspicuous target for racial animus. The use of the term “Judeo-Christian values” has been effectively utilised to reflect a kindred relationship between Jews and the majority Christian nation of America even though, as the late Rabbinic scholar Jacob Neusner noted, it is a "theologically and historically" inaccurate term used by non-believers.
Nonetheless, it is believed to have been popularised during the anti-fascist efforts in the 1930s and 1940s of liberal inter-faith groups and continued through to the 1950s when it served as a counter to “godless communism”. Its revival during the 1970s when it began to be used by the Christian right, also played a part in dimming old attitudes against Jews and it is still used today by those seeking to draw a distinction between traditional Western values and the values of recent non-Christian immigrants.
This backdrop of acceptance has led to a reformation of sorts among a segment of the contemporary proponents of race realism which for so long served as fertile ground for anti-Jewish sentiment. The Jared Taylor-led American Renaissance has since its inception in the 1990s always accepted Jews of White European descent as members. For Taylor, they “look white”, have been contributors to Western culture and can therefore be an asset in promoting White nationalist views.
This acceptance of Jews is fiercely disputed by many in the White nationalist movement to whom Kevin MacDonald functions as a kind of spiritus rector. MacDonald's primary academic interest lies in the field of evolutionary psychology, a scientific approach that studies human cognition and behaviour through the lens of evolutionary biology.
And it is from this discipline that MacDonald developed the concept of “group evolutionary strategy”, the theory that specific cultural, religious or ethnic groups utilise shared social and genetic practices to maximise their collective survival and success. In the final chapter of his 1988 book Social and Personality Development: An Evolutionary Synthesis, MacDonald analysed the Spartans to argue that human groups can cohere together and form highly collectivized "group evolutionary strategies". It was received in niche circles of academia as a serious experimental effort aimed at bridging mainstream developmental psychology with evolutionary biology.
But reactions were different when he turned his quill to the study of Jews.
His thesis on Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy was outlined in his book titled A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy which was published in 1994. MacDonald argued that Jews are extremely ethnocentric and display high levels of cohesion and aggressiveness in the pursuit of group interests which have enabled them to out-compete non-Jews for resources. The book also argues that Jews specifically aim to dominate the economic, academic and cultural institutions of White societies. Jews, he contends, have inspired and led a series of radical social movements which have served to undermine these societies. Among the most harmful he asserted has been the support given by Jewish groups and politicians to immigration policies which threaten White culture and the White gene pool.
He followed this book with Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism and The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth Century Intellectual and Political Movements both of which were published in 1998. In 2005, he also wrote a long paper in his journal, the Occidental Quarterly, titled “Stalin’s Willing Executioners: Jews as a Hostile Elite in the USSR”, a review of Yuri Slezkine’s 2004 publication The Jewish Century.
MacDonald’s books were met with silence by the academy community until Kevin Hannan reviewed The Culture of Critique in the December 2000 issue of the academic journal Nationalities Papers. Hanna’s method of review was to describe chapters and summarise MacDonald’s main arguments. He concluded that the book was "well written and has much to offer the reader interested in ethnicity and ethnic conflict."
Thus, it was not until 2018 when Cofnas wrote an academic review paper on the Culture of Critique for Human Nature that MacDonald’s work was challenged in a well-known peer-reviewed academic journal, albeit that it was not in a top-tier general science journal.
Titled "Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy: A Critical Analysis of Kevin MacDonald's theory", the essence of Cofnas’ rebuttal was to accuse MacDonald of misrepresenting and cherry-picking facts in constructing his arguments. MacDonald made a detailed 42-page reply in the Occidental Quarterly and following Cofnas’ rejoinder issued another 42-page reply in which he concluded that the thesis he presented in Culture of Critique “remained unscathed from Cofnas’ critique”.
While MacDonald’s comment may be adjudged as self-serving, it is worth pondering on Cofnas’ insistence on engaging with MacDonald. Was his motivation solely rooted in the spirit of engaging in academic debate? Did he believe that he could either convert MacDonald or the anti-Jewish segment of the White nationalist movement into a following a philosemitic path? Or was he motivated by a tribalistic concern?
Certainly, MacDonald appeared to think that tribal sentiment played the major role in this. In the conclusion of his second reply, MacDonald noted a clear “abusive tone in Cofnas’ writing, organised, it would seem, around defence of Jewish honour.” An aura of desperation surrounds Cofnas who in the year he wrote his academic critique of MacDonald’s book also co-wrote an article for Quillette titled “What the Alt-Right Gets Wrong About Jews”.
Cofnas continued his efforts in a paper titled "Still No Evidence for a Jewish Group Evolutionary Strategy," published in January 2023 in the journal Human Nature. Betraying feelings of angst, Cofnas bemoaned MacDonald’s role as editor of The Occidental Observer and The Occidental Quarterly in regularly publishing “nasty, scientifically baseless screeds against Jews."
Cofnas’ focus on DEI and academia is an interesting one. While White identitarians such as MacDonald are in agreement about what they consider the unfairness of affirmative action policies to Whites who are denied appointments or admissions to less qualified minorities, they also adamantly criticise what they claim to have been the wholesale takeover of America’s Ivy League colleges by Jews.
MacDonald’s thesis that unlike economically high-achieving groups such as the “overseas Chinese” of Far East Asia, Jews seek to convert such economic power into the control of politics, culture and academia. This is a frequent point of examination in White nationalist circles.
The backdrop they argue is that Jews have displaced America’s traditional White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elite which has been translated into what they perceive as “Jewish domination” of Ivy League colleges.
Cofnas has used the quota system employed by the Ivy League against Jews as evidence that Jewish overrepresentation in elite spaces is not the result of a co-ordinated group evolutionary strategy but the result of a high average IQ people who have persisted in the face of overt discrimination.
But his framing of the now overruled policies regarding affirmative action as solely a Black and White issue in which Black admissions infringed upon the rights of better qualified Whites has been misleading in some key respects. For one, the applicant’s gender was also considered and females, the majority of who were White, benefitted from that system. Cofnas’ has also been disingenuous in interviews when implying that Blacks were the root cause of Harvard’s discrimination against Asians.
Some background is needed here.
The legal action brought by a group of Asians against Harvard which resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court decision which ruled against “race conscious” affirmative action policies was based in large measure on the work of Ron Unz, a multimillionaire ex-Silicon Valley entrepreneur, whose assay "The Myth of American Meritocracy" was published in 2012.
One key point of evaluation on Unz’s part was the following comparison of Asians and Jews:
Based on factors of objective academic performance and
population size, we would expect Asians to outnumber Jews by perhaps five to
one at our top national universities; instead, the total Jewish numbers across
the Ivy League are actually 40 per cent higher. This implies that Jewish
enrolment is roughly 600 per cent greater relative to Asians than should be
expected under a strictly meritocratic admissions system.
Moreover, he stated that figures pertaining to Jewish admissions rose sharply in defiance of the trend of what he termed the "collapse" of Jewish academic achievement which began from the late 1990s and 2000s.
Unz’s finding of Jewish overrepresentation and that White gentiles had become grossly underrepresented in Harvard admissions, was he asserted based on institutional bias or favouritism. MacDonald of course, found Unz’s work to be a validation of his thesis on Jewish group evolutionary strategy and the quest for ethnic dominance. The massive overrepresentation of Jews at Harvard and other Ivy League universities he argues cannot be justified even allowing for correcting by IQ.
Although mainstream media acknowledged the centrality of Unz's arguments to what was a successful legal case brought by Asians, his argument regarding Jewish overrepresentation at the expense of whites was referred to as "inaccurate" and even "antisemitic", a charge which Unz, himself an ethnic Jew, rejects. Charges of “antisemitism” do not override the fact that the beneficiaries of anti-Asian discrimination could not be pinned on affirmative action practices in favour of Blacks and Latinos.
Nathan Cofnas for his part consistent in his maintaining that selecting students be strictly based on a standardised test which purely examines cognitive ability. He is doubtlessly aware that the “personality test” at Harvard back in the 1920s as a device to weed out Jewish to impose a strict Jewish quota.
But he also rigidly refuses to accept any proposition of Jewish bias, something which many White identitarians do not accept. Apart from what they believe to be the officially unexplained reasons for the colossal level of Jewish overrepresentation; they perceive the factor of Jewish tribal favouritism in the appointment of Elena Kagan as Dean at Harvard’s Faculty of Law in 2003. Kagan was depicted as been grossly underqualified for the job role, largely because of her lack of published work and represented as the beneficiary of an appointment by then Harvard President Larry Summers – himself a Jew- although Summers is claimed to have consulted widely with faculty and students prior to making his decision.
Kagan was also criticised for her handling of the inquiry into whether Professor Alan Dershowitz had plagiarised from Joan Peters' book From Time Immemorial when writing a book titled The Case for Israel. Dershowitz was unfairly exonerated in the opinion of many including Professor Norman Finkelstein, Frank Menetrez, a legal scholar and the writer, Hilton Obenzinger.
And there is the case of Jared Kushner’s entry into Harvard even though administrators at his high school, the Frisch School, noted that his grade point average and test scores did not meet standard Ivy League requirements. Kushner’s 1999 admission occurred after his father Charles Kushner had made a $2.5 million donation to the university the previous year. The White identitarians naturally bemoan the lack of a demographic breakdown of the ultra-wealthy parents who utilised this admission method referred to as “development cases”.
They also view Steven Pinker, a Professor of Psychology at Harvard, as a Jewish academic who like Cofnas is keen to promote the idea that any form of Jewish attainment and high representation in institutions and in movements is solely down to high Ashkenazi IQ. They also fault Pinker for hypocrisy given his endorsement of a 2005 research paper titled Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence which posited the theory that the higher average level of verbal and mathematical intelligence found among Ashkenazi Jews has a genetic and an evolutionary basis.
Given that the central thesis of the paper veered on the path of evolutionary psychology applied to an ethnic group, many in the MacDonald-influenced White identitarian movement found Pinker’s approval to be extremely hypocritical. Pinker was on record as dismissing MacDonald’s work as lacking scientific credibility and of been beneath the threshold of academic attention-worthiness. He followed up his endorsement by giving a public lecture titled “Jews, Genes and Intelligence” in which he expounded on the aforementioned paper’s proposition that selective breeding had resulted in in superior intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews.
Pinker, it should be noted, implicitly supports eugenics. He has defended the Tuskegee syphilis experiment on American blacks, stating that the experiment was a “one-time failure to prevent harm" in the future. It is astounding that Pinker would offer such justification for such a shameful episode in American history when he or any reasonable person would be repulsed at the idea of justifying Dr. Mengele’s experiments on Jews in the same or similar fashion.
He is a fervent supporter of Cofnas on the grounds of “academic freedom”, first signing a letter to the London Times in May 2024 which urged Cambridge University’s Faculty of Philosophy to call off their investigation into his comments about race and genetics, and more recently signing and inviting other scholars to sign a petition protesting the University of Ghent’s suspension of Cofnas regardless of their opinions about Cofnas’ views.
To conclude, the resurrection of race science by Nathan Cofnas and his enthusiasm for eugenics must surely be viewed with great irony given the pathway both created for the attempted annihilation of European Jewry in the mid-20th century. The aggressive and snide direction of his race realist views at Black people while expressing denial and revulsion at those who seek to apply theories of race realism to Jews can only be viewed as rank hypocrisy.
It is possible that present trends in North America and Europe toward anti-immigrant sentiment and a noticeable polarisation in views on race and religion may form a large reason for Cofnas’ confidence in pushing his race realist agenda. But while the idea of collectively renouncing unfair practices in the academic sector regarding hiring staff and selecting students is one which fair-minded and rational people would agree, Cofnas’ push, at the behest of his backers, to achieve meritocracy on the basis of biologism is a dangerous one. Such a reconfiguration of social policy would run the risk of creating racial hierarchy and segregation in the public sphere. And while he may think that assertions of the high IQ status of the ethnic group to which he belongs will ensure that they will fare well in a system organised around biological determinism, his dispute with White nationalist adherents of Kevin MacDonald demonstrate how sorely mistaken he will likely be.
The lessons from history of what his people endured ought to weigh heavily on his mind, as should the adage:
“Be careful what you wish for.”
© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).
Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.
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