Anne O' Brien

So here’s a modest proposal. Jason Arday is dead. The circus has lost its main attraction. The tent is still up, the popcorn machine is still warm, and several of the ringmasters are wandering around pretending they were merely checking the fire exits. Perhaps The Telegraph, The Spectator, Kathleen Stock, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Julie Bindel, Andrew Neil, Brendan O’Neill and the rest of Britain’s newly discovered Society for Relentless Academic Due Diligence could turn their tremendous investigative appetite towards Nathan fucking Cofnas. You know Nathan. The self-described race realist whose intervention helped detonate the Arday story. The bloke who already believed DEI was corrupting academia. The bloke who has argued that genuine meritocracy would leave vanishingly few Black professors at elite institutions. The bloke who talks about a “hereditarian revolution”. The bloke who, while discussing what comes next for his own career, joked that after “the revolution” he might become head of the department of eugenics and race science at Harvard. That Nathan Cofnas. Come on, lads. You have just spent weeks demonstrating that no biographical pebble is too small to overturn in the sacred pursuit of Truth. So get the fucking tweezers out. Go through his history. Interview the old classmates. Find the former supervisors. Call the ex-colleagues. Dust off the teenage writings. Read Reptiles with a Conscience from cover to fucking cover. Check every citation. Check every footnote. Find out what he believed before he acquired the qualifications he now uses to defend those beliefs. Ask when exactly the fascination with hereditarianism began. Ask what evidence changed his mind. Ask what evidence could change his mind. Ask whether race realism emerged reluctantly at the end of an exhausting empirical journey, or whether the destination appeared on the map first and the intellectual road-building project came afterwards. You wanted to know whether Jason Arday really ran every marathon he claimed. Excellent. I would quite like to know whether Nathan Cofnas has actually demonstrated that Black people are genetically less suited to elite intellectual life, or whether he has spent years developing increasingly elaborate reasons for believing something he found compelling in the first place. Seems at least as fucking interesting as somebody’s 10K split time. And while we are at it, perhaps ask why the alleged misconduct of one Black academic became so magnificently useful to a man whose existing political project already concerned Black representation, DEI and declining standards. Was Arday merely a plagiarism case? Or did Cofnas look at him and see Christmas morning? Because once you have spent years arguing that progressive universities are artificially elevating Black academics, discovering a celebrated Black Cambridge professor with serious questions hanging over his work must feel less like stumbling across evidence and more like finding a fucking golden ticket inside your ideological Wonka bar. And apparently that angle is not worth the same excavation? Really? Jason Arday tells a tall tale about running and Fleet Street behaves like somebody has discovered the Pentagon Papers. Nathan Cofnas spends years developing a political programme around hereditarianism and race, then helps frame a national scandal involving a Black professor, and suddenly everyone develops a tremendous respect for intellectual privacy. How curious. I am not asking for another pile-on. I am asking for the same thing you all claimed to worship while Arday was alive: scrutiny. Context. Provenance. Motivation. Evidence. Standards. Those lovely grown-up words everybody suddenly remembers when they are about to put somebody else under the microscope. 1/2