“I Was The One Who Exposed Jason Arday” - Nathan Cofnas

Summary

---

Podcast Summary

The Winston Marshall Show

Episode: "I Was The One Who Exposed Jason Arday"
Guest: Nathan Cofnas
Date: August 8, 2026

---

Overview

In this episode, Winston Marshall interviews philosopher Nathan Cofnas, who broke the story exposing Jason Arday—formerly celebrated as the youngest Black full professor at Cambridge—for plagiarism, fraud, and fabrications in his personal and professional record. The conversation traverses the story's unfolding, DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) culture in academia, race realism, group differences, and the political and ethical ramifications of discussing these sensitive topics.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. How Nathan Cofnas Broke the Jason Arday Story

• Cofnas’s Academic Background and Substack

  • At Cambridge (Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, 2022–2025), Cofnas wrote a substack focused on philosophy of biology and controversial topics like hereditarianism (group differences in innate traits).
  • His essays criticized both left and right for failing to attract "cognitive elites."
  • [00:42] Cofnas:

    “I have a special interest in divergent evolution among human groups...I have to acknowledge that right wingers on average do not tend to attract the highest, the cognitive elites...”

• The Tip-Off and Investigation

  • After leaving Cambridge, an anonymous whistleblower told Cofnas about widespread rumors surrounding Jason Arday's alleged plagiarism and fabricated personal achievements—a story already stifled by legal threats and accusations of racism within Cambridge.
  • [05:02] Cofnas:

    “An anonymous whistleblower who knows I have a newsletter contacted me...I started investigating and found extensive plagiarism, fraud, stealing ideas, and just generally low quality work.”

  • [08:39]

    “I ran his dissertation through the plagiarism detection software...and found that it was just chock full of it, just verbatim copying page after page after page.”

• Cambridge's Attempted Cover-Up

  • Multiple early whistleblowers (e.g., academic Dave Harris) and journalists received defamation threats from powerful law firms.
  • [10:32] Cofnas:

    “The attempted cover-up goes back at least to 2023...a journalist at Times Higher Education also got a letter from Carter-Ruck...if you go through with this story...”

• Arday’s Unverifiable Claims

  • Personal stories included running 300 miles in three days, being non-verbal until 11, playing for Crystal Palace FC, and more—none substantiated.
  • [12:36] Marshall:

    “I’ve actually compiled a list...I’m at 61 [claims] for Jason Arday...It’s almost psychopathic, the list. Just never ending.”

2. Response and Ramifications in Academia and Media

• DEI, Intersectionality, and Culture

  • The Arday case as a window into the “insanity” of unchecked DEI policies: how intersectional identity can shield individuals from scrutiny and lower standards are justified under the guise of equity.
  • [14:16] Marshall:

    “It is a preposterous story of DEI in action...diversity, equity and inclusion.”

• Backlash and Defense

  • Major public letter in defense of Arday signed by prominent MPs and academics (including Simon Baron-Cohen), framed as a right-wing smear or racism.
  • [21:04] Cofnas:

    “Not only did [Baron-Cohen] sign the letter, but...he issued a passionate defense of Arday, that he’s being attacked for no reason...Very strange.”

• The Guardian’s Coverage

  • Shifted responsibility from Arday to Cambridge’s DEI hiring process, framing the exposure as “grotesque racism”—thus absolving Arday and blaming structural systems.
  • [17:41] Marshall:

    “It’s like the spin here is that this isn’t Arday’s fault, this is the fault of those who hired him.”

3. Debate on Responsibility, Plagiarism, and Moral Culpability

• Who’s to Blame?
  • Cofnas argues the system is primarily at fault for enabling and rewarding fraud, though Arday is morally culpable for targeting those with little power.
  • [18:04] Cofnas:

    “Is it really his fault? Primarily it’s my fault because I should have known what I was doing.”

  • [19:07]

    “He knows what he was doing...he took measures to prevent himself from being held accountable, particularly by being very careful to plagiarize only people with very little institutional power.”

4. Reflection on Academia and DEI

• Low Standards in Academia

  • Some academic fields, especially around “whiteness studies” and similar domains, publish low-quality, ideologically-driven research that passes as scholarship.
  • [16:56] Cofnas:

    “He’s been publishing in...journals that I wouldn’t respect, but within that field they’re considered respectable...that’s considered scholarship in these fake fields.”

• Why Didn’t Institutions Catch This?

  • Quotas and opaque processes bred environments where criticism is silenced and poor standards prevail.

---

5. Deep Dive: Race Realism, Hereditarianism, and Colorblindness

• Cofnas’s Hereditarian Arguments

  • Believes group differences, including racial disparities in IQ, are partly genetic and largely unchangeable through environmental interventions.
  • Advocates open quotas if diversity representation is a social necessity, rather than the current “dishonest” DEI practices.
  • [36:21] Cofnas:

    “I would advocate under certain circumstances...a quota system...If it’s really important to have some level of representation...then just say we’re going to have this X percent set aside for this group.”

• Quotas vs. Colorblindness

  • Concerns that purely colorblind meritocracy would lead to extreme underrepresentation of minorities, stoking instability and resentment.
  • [47:40] Cofnas:

    “I think...we might have to engage in some social engineering to prevent a complete decimation of certain group representation...if people are simply not going to accept [disparities], then...some kind of quota system may be necessary.”

• Critique and Host Pushback

  • Winston Marshall argues colorblind meritocracy produces the best outcomes for all, rewards true talent, and that quotas perpetuate resentment and inefficiency.
  • [44:39] Marshall:

    “If you don’t have meritocracy...a sense of injustice comes up because of that...It actually does detriment to the person who’s getting the unfair leg up.”

• Ongoing Disagreement

  • Both debate whether public peace and social harmony trump strict meritocracy, and whether society should prioritize one over the other.
  • [69:20] Marshall:

    “You still haven’t won me over from my being pro-colorblindness...I’d like to live in a society where...I’d be judged by merit as to whether I’m good at it.”

• Race as a Scientific Construct

  • Cofnas defends use of race as a meaningful, if imperfect, scientific category, similar to language distinctions despite “messy” boundaries.
  • [63:46] Cofnas:

    “It’s the difference between French and German and Chinese and Dutch...You can still say that Mandarin is different from English...That’s how I understand race.”

---

6. Personal Controversies and Professional Fallout

• Attacks on Cofnas for Past Work

  • Recalls critique of Kevin MacDonald (alt-right, anti-Semitic academic), which led to public backlash from alt-right circles and mischaracterization of his own positions.
  • [29:10] Cofnas:

    “I suggested [MacDonald] was misrepresenting sources and giving a very tendentious account of history...I criticized Mr. Alt Right Do...”

• Trouble at Cambridge and Move to Belgium

  • Cofnas narrates Cambridge’s investigation and his eventual forced exit following controversial writings.
  • In Belgium, after a student group talk, he was physically attacked (twice) by Antifa members (yogurt thrown, police involved but no prosecution).
  • [77:53] Cofnas:

    “We were standing in front of a bar and some Antifa guys...drove by and threw yogurt on me…another came with a bottle...the prosecutor in Ghent declined to do anything.”

---

Memorable Quotes & Timestamps

“This is the most extreme case of plagiarism that has ever occurred in academia. Really, it’s that I’ve ever heard of.”
— Nathan Cofnas, [16:01]

“It is a preposterous story of DEI in action. Diversity, equity and inclusion.”
— Winston Marshall, [14:16]

"If even your skin is black, they don't want you around if you would question certain ideological assumptions."
— Nathan Cofnas, [26:41]

“I think under my quota system, I don’t think Jason Arday would ever have happened...because they would have had...qualified people.”
— Nathan Cofnas, [44:39]

“When one grasps the logic of wokeism...it’s based on a reasonable argument. It is a response to the world, a moral response...Given a false empirical belief that all groups are the same...everything about wokeism follows from that.”
— Nathan Cofnas, [80:56]

“You still haven’t won me over from my being pro-colorblindness...”
— Winston Marshall, [68:52]

---

Additional Noteworthy Segments

• [32:32]: Breakdown of Harvard’s affirmative action statistics and legal battle over race-based admissions.
• [55:18]: Discussion on whether group disparities have a primarily genetic vs. environmental origin, and why politicians/activists default to structural explanations.
• [65:47]: Cofnas’s rationale for public discussion of group differences: to prevent the blaming of one group for outcomes of another, citing historic anti-Semitism, pogroms against Chinese in Southeast Asia, and contemporary wokeism.
• [77:53-80:07]: Account of physical attack in Belgium and lack of legal action against suspects.

---

Conclusion

Nathan Cofnas’s exposure of the Jason Arday case is used as a springboard for a searching (and contentious) conversation on integrity in academia, the unintended consequences of DEI ideology, and the messy terrain of discussing innate group differences. The episode exemplifies Marshall’s commitment to “open, honest, and good-faith discussion,” often leading to disagreement but illuminating uncomfortable areas of contemporary debate.

---

Relevant Links:

• Nathan Cofnas’s Substack: ncovnas.com
• Episode: The Winston Marshall Show
• Guardian coverage, Times Higher Ed, further readings as referenced throughout.

---

Transcript

[Sam's Club Advertiser]

When you join Sam's Club, you get way more than you'd expect. You don't just get value, you get insider tips from fellow members. You don't just pick up a pizza, you actually vote on its toppings. Mmm, bacon crumbles. You don't just visit the club, because with the Sam's Club app, everywhere can be the club. You don't just shop the latest finds, you find your people. And at the end of the day, isn't that what it's all about? Come join us, Sam's Club.

[Winston Marshall]

You broke the story of Jason Arday. Tell me the story from your point of view, how this unfolded and how it was that you even knew about it.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Well, for me, the story starts when I went to Cambridge as a Lever Hume early career fellow in 2023, 2022, on a three year contract. So I had this fellowship in the Faculty of philosophy. And as a side project I write a substack which is related to my area of expertise in philosophy, which is the philosophy of biology and ethics. So I'm interested in evolutionary theory and all its applications and I have a special interest in divergent evolution among human groups. So how groups that have been separated for an evolutionarily significant period of time may have diverged in the average distribution of innate traits, including intelligence, which is of course, very controversial. In 2024, I published the first essay on my substack, Nathan Kaufness's newsletter, which was called why we need to Talk about the Right Stupidity Problem. So as I said in the essay, although I myself am on the right, and very much so, one has to acknowledge that right wingers on average do not tend to attract the highest, the cognitive elites. Cognitive elites lean disproportionately left and woke. And I said, we have to acknowledge that this is a problem. And this is related to why conservatives and right wingers struggle to create effective institutions to oppose. To oppose the woke juggernaut now. And I gave all sorts of evidence for the hypothesis that conservatives and right wingers have lower IQ on average for genetic reasons, a group which again, I myself belong to. Now, no one at Cambridge had any problem with me saying this. Nobody said, well, how would a conservative student feel if you heard about this silence from Cambridge? Although the essay itself actually got quite a lot of attention, but no response from the university. A month later, in February 2024, I wrote a follow up article called A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution. So this is expanding on my thesis that the only way to create an intellectually coherent right wing Philosophy that would attract cognitive elites and cause them to defect from the left is to accept the truth of hereditarianism, that certain group disparities are not necessarily the result of injustice, but may be rooted in natural differences for which no one can be blamed.

[Winston Marshall]

Okay, so look, already I've got about a million questions and you, you're setting the scene, I guess, for how we get to Jason Hardy, because there's a lot there. I'm just like, right, I want to ask about this and that, but let's, let's. I actually read your guide to the hereditarian revolution. I definitely want to ask about that and ask about some of your history. But take me then to how Jason. Before we do that, take me to how Jason our day comes into your.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Okay, so the abridged story is I'm placed under investigation by the university for a year and a half, ultimately exonerated by their investigation. However, I was. I. Another position I had at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, was terminated because they said that I had challenged the values of diversity, equality and inclusion. You're not allowed to do that, therefore you're terminated. This was a very, like, well known and widely covered story.

[Winston Marshall]

Yes. And I'm going to ask you about some of the things in those sep.

[Nathan Kaufness]

So this goes. Okay, so this goes to Jason Arday and why I. Why the story came to me and why I'm the one to break it. And also the fact that I broke it explains part of the response by Cambridge and by Jason Arday's defenders. It was the fact that it was me, Nathan Kaufness, who broke the story, which to some extent determined the trajectory that the story would take. Now, I was in a very bitter conflict with Cambridge for now more than two years. So Jason Arday, as people probably know, a DEI hire who was appointed as a chair professor in the Department of Education at Cambridge, the youngest black full professor in the history of Cambridge University. That was in 2023. Then last year, it became widely known among faculty members at Cambridge that Jason Arday's backstory was totally fraudulent, that much of his work was plagiarized, that the work that wasn't plagiarized was of an absurdly low quality. And these rumors circulated for a long time. They were known to journalists. Either the university or our day hired a fearsome law firm specializing in defamation to intimidate the journalists into silence. And of course, anybody within the university who so much as asks a question would be called racist. And mate, shut up. So an anonymous whistleblower who knows that I have a newsletter on substack contacted me and said, do you know about the story now? The rumors had started after I left, so I didn't know about this. And after the tip off, I started investigating and I found extensive plagiarism, fraud, stealing ideas. And just generally low quality work. A number of totally implausible claims made about his personal life that he's run 300 miles in three days and 30 marathons in 35 days. He says that he was non verbal until the age of 11 and couldn't read or write until the age of 18, which is not consistent with the evidence or at all plausible. And this was in part building on work that some others have done. For example, Dave Harris, an academic, was the first person to raise questions about some of our day's work in 2023. He contacted the university administrators and some of the journals where Arday had published, but he was brushed aside and nobody paid any attention to him.

[Winston Marshall]

Right, okay, so you then publish the piece on your substack where you specifically talk about the plagiarism. Right.

[Nathan Kaufness]

So first I raised questions about the biographical claims. I ran his dissertation through the plagiarism detection software, copy leaks, and found that it was just chock full of it, just verbatim copying page after page after page. Then on his own faculty webpage at Cambridge, there's a section on the website called Principal and Recent Publications where he lists what he considers his most important work. And he lists 10 papers of what he considers the most important things that he's done. So I looked at each paper and I considered, is it plagiarized? Does it have, if it isn't plagiarized, does it have any kind of scholarly content? And then third, did Arday actually write it? Even if it wasn't plagiarized, is he one of 10 authors and is there evidence that he didn't really contribute to it? So I do this for all 10 papers. Several of them are plagiarized. Some of them he's listed as the last of 6 non corresponding authors. And the paper has a note saying the contribution of each author. And he did basically nothing. So he's putting this on his as one of his 10 most important publications to explain how he became the chair professor at Cambridge. And then those papers that weren't entirely plagiarized or were just basically him interviewing his friends and writing down what they said and presenting that as his work.

[Winston Marshall]

Wow. Okay, so then the story unfolds and there's an attempted cover up, Right, From Cambridge.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Well, the attempted cover up goes back at least to 2023, when the first. When Dave Harris, the academic who wasn't able to draw attention to. Who didn't draw attention to the story, raised these questions and then they shut him down. They told him there's nothing to see here, why are you doing this? And then a journalist last year at Times Higher Education also got a letter from Carter Ruck which didn't make explicit threats, but it was obviously implied that if you go through with this story and that was just focusing on the plagiarism.

[Winston Marshall]

That's Grove, right?

[Nathan Kaufness]

Yeah, Jack Grove.

[Winston Marshall]

Jack Grove at the time. So he'd been following this story as well.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Yeah, that was Times Higher Education.

[Winston Marshall]

That's fine.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Yeah.

[Winston Marshall]

Okay.

[Nathan Kaufness]

So he followed the story, but the story got spiked after that, so he did nothing with it. I wasn't aware of his story until just a few days before I published the Subsack article. Because. Because before I published I emailed several people asking for comments and then he heard from one of them that there's this guy Kaufness working on an article. And then after that I learned more information about it.

[Winston Marshall]

He was investigated by the police and.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Oh well, that's true. So our day called the police on Dave Harris, the first person to raise questions and Jack Grove, the journalist who was asking questions. The. Maybe other people too, I don't know.

[Winston Marshall]

And you. Not me, not you. Okay.

[Nathan Kaufness]

I mean I'm in Belgium and.

[Winston Marshall]

Yeah, right. Okay, so when you published, can you take me and tell me how the story unfolds from that moment that was in July, was it July?

[Nathan Kaufness]

I think 21?

[Winston Marshall]

July 2020. Okay, July 21st to now take me on that journey, how this story's unfolded since then.

[Nathan Kaufness]

So I knew that it was a juicy story and within hours people were. It was blowing up.

[Winston Marshall]

Yeah, so it's blow up. And then over time, more and more of these preposterous things have come out, come to light even since this morning to speaking to you, a bunch of new things came up. I've actually compiled a list of all of the documented, false, exaggerated or unverified claims and I'm at 61. For Jason Arday things, as you've mentioned, a couple of them, but he claimed to play for Crystal Palace Football Club that he claimed to have been attacked a couple of times, but there's no evidence of that. It claims that he was a snooker star. Snooker player. I mean it's just this guy is clearly a pathological liar and well, it seems to me that he's a Pathological liar. Because this is, this is almost psychopathic, like the list. It's just never ending. Right.

[Nathan Kaufness]

So now the freedom to talk about these things is much greater than it was on July 20th. I was nervous about being dragged to court. If he produces some fake doctor's note or some fake evidence to support these claims and then I have to go refute them, even if I would win, it's still an ordeal and who knows what. He's fooled a lot of people, so who knows how it goes. But now everybody knows that this stuff is just not plausible.

[Winston Marshall]

And this is caught the imagination of the world because it is a preposterous story of DEI in action. Diversity, equity and inclusion. The idea of hiring people because of sort of intersectionality and the idea of, you know, you've got to have someone who's disabled and he claims to be disabled, I think, or some sort of. He has some sort of mental impairment and he is also black. And sort of add all of these things up and this is kind of. You end up with someone like this. And I've heard him speak. I mean, it's utterly inane the stuff he says. How could this one be, this man be a professor at Cambridge? It's, it's, it's actually like laughable. But. So it's become this great story because it highlights the, the insanity of dei.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Yeah. Well, there are the defenders of DEI want to pretend that it's a story of research misconduct. Like that's it. It's just. It's about somebody committed research misconduct and that's all there is to nothing else.

[Winston Marshall]

So it's no plagiarism. They just made. He, he just made a mistake.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Well, I mean, with all due respect to Jack Grove, that's his angle. He said this is just about research misconduct and it could be like a white person. Like, who knows? I like Jack Grove from the Times Higher Ed. But that was his angle is that we've discovered and other people have said too, you know, race has nothing to do with it. Clearly.

[Winston Marshall]

Maybe it's fair to say that whenever. I don't know. But when Grove picked up the story, a good faith interpretation of this thing as you're uncovering it is maybe it's just what's the best light you can paint our day in is like maybe he. It's just mistakes of research. Right. So is that. Do you think that's possibly what happened with Grove?

[Nathan Kaufness]

Well, I don't want to call it good faith or bad faith. You know, I'm assuming good, good faith but no, I mean, this is the most extreme case of plagiarism that has ever occurred in academia. Really, it's that I've ever heard of and other people have made similar comments. It's just stealing outright, no mitigating anything. It's just stealing.

[Winston Marshall]

And what does it tell us about the state of universities? I mean, aren't these. This is Cambridge University. It's one of the most famous academic institutions in the world. How is it that this man could have got to this situation? I mean, even if for dei there's gotta be more, you'd have thought there's more scrutiny even under DEI terms, right?

[Nathan Kaufness]

Look, what's unusual about our day is not that he's a fraud and does worthless research. Like he's been publishing in not journals that I would respect, but you know, they're, they're technically real journals like Whiteness in Education or whatever, these sociology journals. And within that field they're considered respectable and he publishes this nonsense and like he interviews with his friends in these journals and they're supposed, they have the imprimatur of peer review and, and that's considered scholarship in these fake fields.

[Winston Marshall]

So it's interesting, it's now developed. So the Guardian have got the headline on their paper, Cambridge Unleashed Grotesque Racism with our day appointment. So it's almost like the spin here is that this isn't our day's fault, this is the fault of those who hired him. And because I guess the DEI now there's racism as a consequence, so it's removing the agency from our day and the responsibility from our day.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Well, I actually would agree with removing the responsibility from our day. Like is it really his fault? Like as I used this example before, like if there's some guy in the bar just, you know, spouting nonsense and saying that, bragging about all his great feats and he ran 600 miles in six days or whatever. And I just tell. And I appoint him to be a chair professor at Cambridge and demand that everybody respect him and say that he's a great scholar. Then is he at fault? Is it his fault? I mean, in a way, but primarily it's my fault because I should have known what I was doing.

[Winston Marshall]

I mean, isn't it both? I mean, if you're lying. As he clears to. It seems that to me, given how contradictory so many of his claims are, you know, uncorroborated office knife attacks, false police harassment claims.

[Nathan Kaufness]

No, he's a, I, he's, he's definitely morally culpable and I think he knows what he was doing, he knows he was stealing. He took measures to prevent himself from being held accountable, particularly by being very careful to plagiarize only people with very little institutional power.

[Winston Marshall]

Yeah.

[Nathan Kaufness]

So he never plagiarizes or very rarely plagiarizes full professors at prestigious universities. Like his dissertation is largely plagiarized from a student, a graduate student at Brunel University, London. You know, who's a graduate student at the time, you know, what is she going to do?

[Winston Marshall]

Right.

[Nathan Kaufness]

And, or he would, so he's not,

[Winston Marshall]

that's actually shows some intelligence, right. That he's be careful.

[Nathan Kaufness]

He's not as mentally disabled as he claims. I, I, he's not obviously he's not, you know, intelligent in an academic sense, but he knows he has some awareness of what he's doing and, and how to get away with it.

[Winston Marshall]

Right. And well, we, it's, he has his supporters too and there's this is the, the Good Law Project, which is a progressive lawfare group and they are getting behind him and they, they think it's a smear campaign led by right wing newspapers with fake accusations of plagiarism and we can't let them. And this has been signed by Polanski, leader of the Green party and various MPs up Sana Begum, it's been John McDonnell, Clive Lewis, various other professors, Nadia Whittam, Professor Kehinde Andrews. So this sort of, he has and dozens and dozens here.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Simon Baron Cohen was the most surprising to me.

[Winston Marshall]

Did Simon Baron Cohen sign this letter?

[Nathan Kaufness]

Not only he signed the letter, but on Twitter he issued a very passionate defense of our day that he's being attacked for no reason and it's, it's unfair because he's autistic. Very strange. Yeah, very strange.

[Winston Marshall]

That is very strange for someone who, as brilliant as Simon Baron Cohen is. What can we possibly understand? Why, why might that be?

[Nathan Kaufness]

Why would, I mean, you know, I can speculate, but it's very hard to know.

[Winston Marshall]

Sure. We can't read his mind. Yes. Okay. So this is sort of been spun out my understanding of what might have happened in. And now we are in the realm of speculation. But it's my view of what maybe goes on in this sort of world is that you have ideologues, those who really believe in DEI and think that it needs to be made right, you know, sort of racial inequality needs to be made right and they might be intelligent as you pointed to the beginning of the conversation. And then you have a lot of people who aren't necessarily unintelligent, but who are moral cowards who recognize that di is a problem or this ideology is damaging, not least to minorities. But they are too cowardly because of the repercussions of standing up to it and calling it out. And so that combination is why these things spiral out.

[Nathan Kaufness]

The repercussions are very real.

[Winston Marshall]

Is Islam compatible with the West? Possibly the most important question of our times. And that's why I've brought together some of the sharpest minds to debate and discuss that very question. Journalist and author Majid Nawaz will go head to head with the historian Raymond Ibrahim tackling that very question. But it gets better still. At the very same event, I'll be going tete a tete with the one and only Z Xavier Soilas. Xavier will be arguing that woke hasn't gone far enough in Britain. Believe it or not, I'll be taking the opposite view. Join us live at the Winston Marshall show in person, 11th of September 2026 at the Emanuel Centre in the heart of London for an evening of debates you don't want to miss. Seats are limited, so secure yours before they sell out. Visit winstonmarshall.eventbrite.co.uk that's winstonmarshall.Eventbrite.com.co.uk and I'll see you there.

[Sam's Club Advertiser]

Did you know Sam's Club isn't a store? It's actually a club with cool finds and like a whole community. It's a club.

[Sam's Club Enthusiast]

Of course, Jason. It's in the name. Sam's Club.

[Sam's Club Advertiser]

Oh, yeah. Come join us, Sam's Club.

[Nathan Kaufness]

The repercussions are very real, by the way. I mean, you look at what happened to me and others like you will be fired, you'll be demoted, something. There will be a penalty to resisting this stuff. And if you don't really care about the principal, then you're never going to get in trouble for signing a letter like this. Okay, what's the worst that could happen? Is our day. Everybody acknowledges our day was a fraud and now you're slightly embarrassed, but you're still on a list of very prominent people. So from their perspective, they might not even think it's that bad. Like, okay, I was wrong with Simon Baron Cohen and the leader of the Green Party. So at least I saw my name was on the same list as I'm in good company now. What happens if. If it goes the other way and the mob decides that our day is right? Like, okay, now you get points for political correctness. Yes, but let's say you are against our day. You were pointing out the fraud. Now, if the mob turns against you, then you're in real trouble. So just logically, if all you care about is maximizing expected, you know, outcomes.

[Winston Marshall]

Yes, exactly. It's not a smart way to live your life because the Overton Window, to use the cliche term, can shift massively. And no, they don't think it will. It's quite a game to play. So you mentioned sort of comparing it with you and I'd. I would love to explore your own story, which is. Which is a story in itself, actually. But there's a more apparent counterexample, which is that of Roland Fryer, who is a black economist at Harvard University who went against BLM sort of dogma and the sacred cow of American sort of woke racialism with a 2016 study titled An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force, which basically went against the tide. And he is essentially guilty of blasphemy and was terribly treated and he ended up with a two year unpaid suspension, permanent shutdown of ED labs and severe restrictions of his ability to advise or supervise. So he was. This is a guy who literally following the data, it was a sincere study, it wasn't political and it was as a consequence because, you know, the information went against the woke taboo, of course,

[Nathan Kaufness]

or rather, yeah, they came up with some trumped up charges against him, but it was very obviously motivated by political considerations. So yeah, they're not. The point isn't. So they called this ideology dei, like diversity. The D stands for diversity. But what diversity means just skin color diversity, like if. If even if your skin is black, they don't want you around if you would question certain ideological assumptions.

[Winston Marshall]

So it's diversity of opinion they do not want.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Definitely not.

[Winston Marshall]

Yes, quite right. So you are interesting part of this story and certainly in the framing. So the Guardian have done several pieces on this, not all of them actually defending our day, although they seem to be vaguely still in favor of DEI not recognizing the flaws in dei. They still seem to. To say like this a case is problematic to say the least, but you are a problem for them or at least you're part of the framing because of your personal history and you've had quite a time. Right. So we mentioned in passing leaving Cambridge yourself, but I wonder if we might just go back then. Your problem started in 2018, is that right?

[Nathan Kaufness]

Well, I wouldn't say problem, but that was I mentioned the first time I was involved in a public controversy. So that was when I was a graduate student I published the first peer reviewed critique of the theories of Kevin McDonald. So Kevin McDonald was the godfather, intellectual godfather of the alt right. And his idea, he's an evolutionary psychologist at Cal State Long beach. And he said that Jews are genetically and culturally adapted to undermine gentile society for their own benefit. And that the triumph of liberalism in the 20th century was the result of Jewish intellectuals pursuing this group evolutionary strategy. So basically, Jews are responsible for leftism liberalism.

[Winston Marshall]

Right. Okay.

[Nathan Kaufness]

And he has this evolutionary psychology explanation for it.

[Winston Marshall]

And your position was.

[Nathan Kaufness]

So I suggested that he was misrepresenting sources and cherry giving a very tendentious account of history, leaving out lots of things that didn't fit with the theory. And that yes, it's true that you can point to many prominent Jewish leftists, but you can also point to many prominent Jews on the right. And to the extent that there are fewer Jews on the right than the left, this is at least in part explained by the fact that the right has been more overtly anti Semitic than the left. And for that reason there are fewer Jews on the right. If, if the right wing movement says that we should kill Jews or expel them or make them or put them in ghettos, then yes, Jews will be less well represented in those movements. But this is just a consequence of above average Jewish intelligence, which explains Jewish overrepresentation across all cognitively demanding activities from chess to physics to chemistry to literature and journalism, law, things that have little or nothing to do with politics.

[Winston Marshall]

So you did a criticism.

[Nathan Kaufness]

So I criticized Mr. Alt Right Do. I said. And this was kind of the tail end of the alt right, which eventually fell apart, but it was promoted by Jordan Peterson. And at that time when he, when he endorsed that paper, your criticism. Right, right.

[Winston Marshall]

Yeah.

[Nathan Kaufness]

People had been kind of. He was a. He was seen incorrectly to be a kind of quasi, quasi alt right adjacent figure, including by many people in the alt right. And so then when he endorsed this paper, people got very mad at him because now he's saying he's not an anti Semite and they were hoping that he was. And then that kind of redounded onto me and, you know, I had never experienced it before. So it was a new. A new thing. So to have thousands of people, you know, piling on on Twitter and.

[Winston Marshall]

Yeah, I'm sure that's particularly unpleasant when it's a bunch of anti Semites.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Yeah.

[Nathan Kaufness]

But, you know, I've got used to it. It's been going on for years.

[Winston Marshall]

Right, okay. So I did read your 2024 piece, which was titled, which you mentioned earlier a guide for the hereditarian revolution. And this is why the Guardian have sort of reframed the Jason Arday thing, because you yourself call yourself a race realist. Right, Right. So I note in this piece you're very clear about criticizing anti Semitic white nationalists. Right. So that's. You're very clear about that in the piece. But there's lines from this that got you in trouble in 2024. So the big famous line is you wrote, under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students. And am I right in understanding that that line was. What was the line used against you in 2024 as evidence of or quote, unquote, evidence of you being racist?

[Nathan Kaufness]

That was one of the main ones. So that's literally a statistic from Harvard. Harvard conducted an internal study in 2013 which concluded that if admissions were based only on grades and test scores, we, without like the funny personality business and all that, that the undergraduate population would be actually 0.67%, so slightly less than 0.7% black. So.

[Winston Marshall]

And that was. Was that used as sort of a reason for DEI policy?

[Nathan Kaufness]

Well, by hardware, they were forced to reveal that in the Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard lawsuit, as I'm sure you and the listeners know, a very famous case where organization representing Asians sued Harvard for discriminating against them. So Harvard, they have a formula for determining who to admit, and they would systematically give Asian applicants low scores on the measure that they called personality, and they would give black applicants very high scores on this. So reduce the number of Asians who are admitted and increase the number of black applicants who are admitted. So, and that was clear. And the Supreme Court of the United States recognized what this was, which was racial discrimination against Asians. And it was Harvard was forced to admit that if they didn't do any of this stuff, if they just accepted based on academic qualifications, then the black population would be less than 0.7% black compared to the current. At the time, it was like 12 and a half, 13% black. So most of the black students who were admitted would not have been admitted under a colorblind system.

[Sam's Club Advertiser]

Right.

[Winston Marshall]

Okay, but you don't like the colorblind system yourself, but for different reasons.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Well, that's the thing. So people just quote this and they say, well, look, cough. Because people don't understand the difference between saying something is the case and being happy that it's the case. They think that I'm gloating about this. And saying that it's good to have fewer black college students, which is in context, not what I was saying. In fact, I was saying I was responding to those people who think that the issue will go away if we become colorblind. And I'm saying that if we adopt the policy of colorblindness, we're going to have disparities that are far larger than people recognize, because most people don't know this. What I say here, even though Harvard, it's Harvard statistics and it was publicized, it's not well known.

[Winston Marshall]

So you think by being colorblind it will perpetuate differences that exist already?

[Nathan Kaufness]

Well, if we adopt a policy of colorblindness, the racial disparities in representation will become massive, far larger than people could possibly anticipate if they're not familiar with these data.

[Winston Marshall]

Can you explain to me why? Because I've not heard that before.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Well, currently, for example, at Harvard, there are, I think the latest figures are like 14, 15% black among the undergraduate population. But according to Harvard's study, without affirmative action, it would be 0.7%, so less than 1%.

[Winston Marshall]

So, so you actually support DEI policies.

[Nathan Kaufness]

So what I say, I don't. I'm not saying I support DEI policies because DEI has the connotation that your, your so recruiting, you're recruiting specifically to address historical injustice.

[Winston Marshall]

Right.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Now, what I would advocate under certain circumstances, for certain positions is a quota system.

[Winston Marshall]

So affirmative action, you can call it,

[Nathan Kaufness]

but affirmative action the way that, that, that policy normally, that normally means you kind of engage in funny business to, to give people extra points. I'm saying just make a decision what level of representation you want. If it's really important to have some level of representation of different racial groups so that everybody feels that they're participating in society, that every group feels that they have a stake in our collective fate, then just say we're going to have this X percent set aside for this group.

[Winston Marshall]

But what do you think?

[Nathan Kaufness]

I think that would make sense for at least some position. That doesn't mean it has to be exactly proportional. But the alternative is. Well, we have the current system, which is there's this very ideologically charged DEI ideology where they take unqualified, but politically, you know, but unqualified candidates of a race that they want to increase in representation and kind of pretend that they're competing on an equal playing field, but then find some sneaky way to like, give them extra points on their personality and take personality points away from the less favored races. And it, it creates a huge amount of dishonesty.

[Winston Marshall]

And so you don't mind that it's happening. You just mind that it's being done in a dishonest way or like, we're not open about why it's happening.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Well, what's happening, the thing that's happening is the dishonesty and, and covering things up and lying and most importantly, attributing the differences that would exist. So. So differences in test scores, for example, between the races to injustice generally. That means white. White racism.

[Winston Marshall]

Right?

[Nathan Kaufness]

So I'm saying don't. You don't have to blame white people for. For why African Americans have lower SAT scores on average than white or Asian students. Just we could have a discussion about if. If it's necessary to maintain some level of representation for different races. And I don't think that should be proportionate to their number in the greater population. It should be some meaningful representation at certain important institutions. I think that is a defensible view. Now, if people were willing to accept that, there would just be the way I accept that I look at the Olympic sprint sprinting teams and I don't see Jews with glasses to be a role model for me. And I don't feel represented there. I'm okay with that. Like, so in certain contexts, people do live with these disparities. And I don't think that that's an injustice. I don't think that it's because Jews are discriminated against in athletics that that's why they're not represented in Olympic sprinting. If people could come to accept that there are disparities in. At Harvard that are natural and people could live with that, then I think that would be even better. But realistically, I think it will probably be necessary in a multi. Multiracial society to have some kind of quotas. Some kind of quotas. And if we're going to do that, I think we should do it openly.

[Winston Marshall]

Okay, so there's a few things I want to push back on or at least work out where we differ in a degree. Because you say right at the end, actually, your preference is for no quotas, and so your preference is for a colorblind approach.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Well, it's like, my preference is that there should be no crime and therefore we don't need prisons. Like, that's my preference. But then, like, realistically, there will be crime and we will need prisons. Like, so, you know.

[Winston Marshall]

Okay, so how does that analogy apply?

[Nathan Kaufness]

Realistically, there's the utopia that I would like, the utopia of colorblindness, and everyone just accepts and people don't feel a sense of racial, tribalistic injustice when they don't see their tribe represented in certain areas for reasons that are not anyone's fault. Yeah, that would be ideal. I feel that personally I'm not bothered if, if my group isn't represented in some domain. Now of course somebody could say, well that's easy for you to say because your group is represented.

[Winston Marshall]

You make the point of sprinting. Right. So this is an interesting point because it's, I think for the last like 30 or 40 years it's been almost, it's not just that Jews aren't represented in sprinting, but it's been almost entirely West Africans who have been dominating.

[Nathan Kaufness]

There was like one or two who were able to, who, who were competitive, but of course the records are being set by West Africans.

[Winston Marshall]

Right, okay. But it's, it's like once in a blue moon that there's even a white person in the hundred meter sprint at like the Olympics. Right. So it's almost entirely West. It's not even African. It's is West African. Just as long, long distance runners are predominantly of this very niche, small parts of East Africa. Right. So I, that doesn't bother me. And so I, I, I mean it sounds like it doesn't really bother you. You don't, I don't feel like we need to have quotas for other races to be represented in that or even to have different races for different races.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Well, we do it. We have the Maccabee Games. Right. So we have games for Jews.

[Winston Marshall]

Right, Right.

[Nathan Kaufness]

So they do have their, their own league so they can, you know, see who's the fastest Jew. Which is, but nobody thinks that that's the Olympics and you know.

[Winston Marshall]

Right.

[Nathan Kaufness]

That's its own thing. Yeah.

[Winston Marshall]

And but when it comes to your point about the kind of, you think colorblindness is utopian, I would say that the problem with going for affirmative action, even if it's to, the problem of it, is that it leads to a two tier society. So you get a sense of unjustice and I think what you were implying is that there will be a sense of unfairness if certain groups aren't represented in certain parts of society. But I think that if you don't have meritocracy and people get ahead because of their characteristics that they can't change. A sense of injustice comes up because of that. And that is exactly what we're going through in the west. And that's a problem. And not only that, it actually does detriment to the person who's getting the unfair leg up because they end up in places like Jason Arday has been where he shouldn't have been into the first place, wasting everyone's time. And he's not improving as an individual.

[Nathan Kaufness]

I think under my quota system, I don't think Jason Arday would ever have happened because they would have had. So Jason our day was possible because they have a system based on lying and looking the other way and pretending that there are no differences. And that's why he's able to make all these ridiculous claims and people are afraid to question him because then they'll be called racist. And this is all rooted in DEI ideology. Now if you just said, you know, 2, 3% of Cambridge professorships are set aside for people of African descent and then we're just gonna choose the best of them, we would get qualified people,

[Winston Marshall]

but I think you would get them anyway. I mean, it's still the case that, let's say you take someone like Thomas Sowell, who I'm a massive fan of, this is a black American academic who is orders of magnitude more intelligent than I could ever imagine being. And it doesn't matter that he's black, it doesn't stop him from being that. So just because you have clusters and you have different racial disparities between groups does not mean that someone like him can't come up through the ranks and prove to be the brilliant man that he is. Right?

[Nathan Kaufness]

Sure. But he's one guy. There is a bell curve within each group and he's on the very tail end. But you know, statistically, if you don't set aside, if you don't have quotas and you don't have a DEI as we understand, as we know it, and you're just selecting the tail, tail end of the intelligence distribution. It's going to be, it's not going to be very diverse. It's going to be overwhelmingly white and Asian.

[Winston Marshall]

And which you think is a problem because the lack of diversity will lead to inter.

[Nathan Kaufness]

I don't think it's inherently a problem. I think that in a multiracial society that we might have to engage in some social engineering to prevent a complete decimation of, of certain group representation of certain groups in high profile positions. So, because, so look, according to Harvard's own data, right, the undergraduate population will be well under 1% black. Now if you look at professors who are going to be drawn from the best of the best students, it's going to be significantly less lower than that. The black representation will be much lower than it is among the undergraduates because you're going further and further on the end of the tail.

[Winston Marshall]

But why does that matter?

[Nathan Kaufness]

Well, look, we don't think it matters for sports. We don't think it matters in some other contact. No one really cares if, you know, certain races are less represented in music. In that case, you know, black people are very overrepresented in certain creative fields, likewise.

[Winston Marshall]

That doesn't bother me.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Yeah, so, I mean, I, I think, you know, this is very difficult to measure, but could there be some. Some kind of musical ability that's higher in people of African descent than people of European descent? Very. That's possible. I think that's. That's possible.

[Winston Marshall]

Yeah, I think it's possible. I mean, you could say, look at Ireland. I mean, this is a tiny country that's produced insane amount of quality music. And it might be to do with the culture, it might be to do with something else, but it's. I don't think it's offensive to me to say that different groups are better on average at certain things. But I don't understand why. Yeah, I'm not persuaded. I'm trying to get you to persuade me why we should actually have. It doesn't seem to me as a. In these domains, it's not a problem.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Right, okay. So what do you feel would happen if we adopted the colorblind system?

[Winston Marshall]

And

[Nathan Kaufness]

so it's not only Harvard. I'm using Harvard just as an illustration of how affirmative action works and what the difference would be between the affirmative action system and a colorblind system. So black representation in the undergraduate population will go from 14% to under 1%. If we were colorblind, black representation among the professors would go. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but it would similarly, you know, fall even more. So it would. Black representation among the professors would be even lower than among the students. And that would happen in. Among top judicial appointments and in businesses, leading corporations. Most of the black representation is being sustained by Harvard style affirmative action. Okay, so now black representation in these places goes to less than 1%, although they're 13 1/2% of the population. Now, we could just be. If everyone was okay with that, I would be okay with that too. My question is, is that actually a politically viable solution or are people just not going to accept it? Now you could say, well, people should accept it, and maybe I would agree with that. But that's similar to saying people shouldn't commit crimes. We still have to take precautions knowing that people will commit crimes, even if we don't want them to. If people are simply not going to accept that they have such a low level of representation in certain high profile positions, then there can be no peace in the society. Unless we do something about that, then I think that justifies doing something.

[Winston Marshall]

I see what you mean. Okay, so it's not actually necessarily the case that affirmative action in the ways we've described is the only solution. So if you recognize that a certain group are underperforming at something. We've been focusing on sort of American, African Americans in the academy. But it could just as well be sort of. I don't see any, there were any Chinese people at the World Cup. So it could be, you know, it could be something else. We could be like, right, there's, there's a problem there. We decide as a society that we don't like that disparity. The solution isn't to just give China automatic place at the World Cup. The solution is like, right, we're going to invest into Chinese football. And I know this is an absurd sort of counterexample, but we're going to, we find the problem. This group, this maybe community, maybe it's a regional community, it's not maybe necessarily racial or whatever it is, we want to lift them up. So we're going to invest more at the base level. Right. So that would be an active way of dealing with a problem of disparity. If we as a society decide it by actually trying to help grow, you know, improve this from the root.

[Nathan Kaufness]

But the problem, if the root is genetic, which to some extent it is for many of these disparities, then it doesn't matter how much money we dump on the problem, there will still be disparities. And when it comes to group disparities between blacks and whites in the United States, we've invested mind boggling amounts of money and resources and effort into correcting it. And there's just a limit to what can be done.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Real value shows up in reliability. You don't have to second guess. Like a set of Firestone all season tires. They're designed to deliver confidence inspiring wet weather traction and a quieter ride, no matter the road, season after season. Firestone all season tires for durability you can count on just like people count on you. Firestone always dependable since 1900.

[Sam's Club Advertiser]

Did you know Sam's Club isn't a store? It's actually a club with cool finds. And like a whole community, it's a club.

[Sam's Club Enthusiast]

Of course, Jason. It's in the name. Sam's Club.

[Sam's Club Advertiser]

Oh Yeah, Come join us. Sam's club.

[Winston Marshall]

Uh huh. Right. Okay, so. So that's what race realism is then, is sort of seeing there's genetic differences between people. And the problems though is if you, if you of the opinion that nothing could be done about it, which itself I'm not sure I agree with. Because if you take, let's say Ashkenazi Jews, as far as I've understood it, there was a point where they had lower average IQ than other Europeans and now they have higher average iq. So it can change over time. Right?

[Nathan Kaufness]

That was a myth. If you read Thomas Sowell on this subject. I'm a big fan of Thomas Sowell, but he makes a number of statements which are incorrect.

[Winston Marshall]

Right? Do you think that's right?

[Nathan Kaufness]

If people are curious, they can see my substack essay, Thomas Sowell's Wishful Thinking about Race. Much of a. Again, I'm a big fan of his, but he misses the mark and makes a number of historically inaccurate statements.

[Winston Marshall]

Okay, so race realism. I think I'm getting an understanding of where you're coming at it and you're trying to create. You see a problem and that these disparities are going to be a problem in society and you think, you're trying to suggest helpful ways to deal with it and you think affirmative action, you've sort of come at it all the way around and that actually might be a way. But it also sounds like you don't believe anything can be done about it anyway. So it's a plaster on a problem that won't actually fix the problem, but you still advocate it because it will appear to fix the problem. And that's more important for keeping societal harmony.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Well, there are two problems. There's the problem of genetic differences that cause some groups to have worse outcomes in some respects than others. And that problem will only be solved when it can be addressed at the genetic level or when you come up with some up to now unknown environmental intervention that can close the gaps. But that's okay, a science fiction scenario. So something that would be something that corrects the disparity on a very deep level so that technology is not available to us. So that problem, we can do what we can to maximize everybody's potential, but we can't do more than that. Once we've maximized everyone's potential. We spend huge, enormous amounts of money on schooling for every public school child in the United States. There's so many programs and billions and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on this. There's just, we really are approaching the limits of what environmental intervention can do. Okay, so that's one problem. There's another problem, which is, is that

[Winston Marshall]

specific for race IQ stuff that you're talking about?

[Nathan Kaufness]

Yeah.

[Winston Marshall]

Does it apply to other domains or

[Nathan Kaufness]

is it, I mean, to some extent to sex differences too? I mean, race and sex differences are similar phenomena, right? That's groups, the different kinds of groups, but groups who differ from each other for evolutionary reasons.

[Winston Marshall]

Okay, so. And sorry, just on the point that you make that there's been billions put into to try and deal with this problem, but is the problem specifically disparity that you're concerned with or. Because if the problem is like trying to lift up education and iq, it is the case, isn't it, over generations that it does rise if you invest in these sort of things? So the disparity might be the same because it's happening across the. The board, but you're still helping those people. Right?

[Nathan Kaufness]

I mean, I. So there was the Flynn effect, which maybe you're referring to, which is the fact that IQ of all racial groups has increased, increased steadily over the course of the 20th century. But the Flynn effect has basically maxed out. It can't go on forever. Like, we are very close to creating an environment where people achieve their genetic potential with respect to intelligence now. So anyway, that's one problem, is the existence of natural disparities. And then there's a second problem, which is how do the sociological one, how do people feel about it, and what are the political implications of these disparities? Now, currently, people look at the disparities and they see injustice. If African Americans have a worse outcome with respect to education or income or something like that vis a vis whites or Asians, the conclusion is that it's because of white racism, either past or present. So that is the problem of how people perceive those disparities. And when addressing that problem, problem, the political problem of how people perceive the disparities, you have to make a choice. You have to try to choose among the best viable, realistic options. So the current one is the one that I think is the worst, which is we deny the natural differences, which implies that the disparities must be due to the environment, because we've said they're not due to genes, so it must be the environment. And in practice, attributing those differences to the environment will trace back somehow or other to white racism and blaming white

[Winston Marshall]

people for the situation. But I think it's possible to take a different position to both those options, which is again, why I quite still not fully won over to sort of colorblindness is just in that we try and treat everyone equally and lift them up. And I don't mind human difference. And I mean, I don't. I mean at the individual level, like we're. I'm very content in the fact that there are better podcasters out there, better interviewers out there, better dressed people out there, more handsome people, more intelligent people than me. And I'm quite happy with that difference as an individual. So for me, that, I guess this is what is the general problem with people with my worldview come when they see this race realism stuff is, or the race IQ conversation is like, what do we do with that information? And I guess if your underlying point is that nothing, you can't do anything about it specifically with race iq, then why dwell on it so much? I mean, yes, have the argument about the lies that are said about whiteness that Jason Arday says and destroying whiteness and how white whites are oppressing everyone when it's not true. Absolutely. Call it out. But why do we need to spend this other time on, on the race iq?

[Nathan Kaufness]

Well, that's saying. How do you say so Jason Arday says that look, this group of, this group has worse outcomes than this group, therefore it's injustice. And so how, how do you show that that's wrong?

[Winston Marshall]

Well, firstly, the, the. It's quite arbitrary what groups he's referring to, because he might say something like blacks, right. And they'll capitalize the B. But you know, a Jamaican heritage guy who's been here for three generations is completely different from a first generation Haitian who's living in America. Likewise, the Nigerians are overperforming. Right? So first generation, second generation Nigerians in Britain are way outperforming, even white, I guess what you'd call them sort of indigenous Brits.

[Nathan Kaufness]

But this is a, this is also a hereditarian phenomenon. Right. So the smartest people in Africa are moving to the UK and for hereditarian reasons, they're outperforming the average white people. Average white Brits.

[Winston Marshall]

Yeah. So what does hereditarian mean? Sorry?

[Nathan Kaufness]

Just so that differences in socially relevant traits, particularly between population representative groups of different races, can differ for genetic reasons. So ancestral populations in particular have been subject to different evolutionary selection pressures over tens of thousands of years. And this has caused average differences between them. Now, the hereditarian perspective doesn't say that all groups of black people or all groups of white people are all the same as each other, which is clearly untrue. African immigrants in the United Kingdom are different in a variety of ways. For example from immigrants from the Caribbean or African Americans. These groups have different outcomes, in part for genetic reasons, in part for cultural reasons too. But genes play non trivial role in this. Right now I accept the fact that they're talking about this makes people feel bad. And there are a lot of things that are true that make people feel bad that we don't need to talk about. Not everything that's true needs to be the subject of a controversial substack essay. So why should we talk about this? It's because people see disparities as proof of injustice that we must provide an explanation for the disparities that exonerates the people who have been accused of the injustice that there are.

[Winston Marshall]

Okay, so, I mean, look, it's fair enough to, to, I think if you're certainly in an academic setting, you're just talking about it. Even though I, I mean, I'm not fully convinced because I think racial lines are pretty arbitrary. I mean, I can see, I understand how there might be clusters, but it's not exactly like it's not the same as a male versus, you know, men. The difference between a man and a

[Nathan Kaufness]

woman, it's the difference between French and German and Chinese and Dutch. You know, there's overlap between the languages, borrow words and grammatical structures from each other. Where does German end and Dutch begin? You know, and Korean has borrowed thousands of words from English. And North Korea, they borrowed thousands of words from Russian. You know, are they speaking the same language? It's all kind of messy, but you can still say that Mandarin is different from English, even though, you know, in Mandarin they may say some words from English and vice versa. There's still different languages. It's still meaningful to talk about differences and make generalizations about Mandarin versus English. So that's how I, how I understand race. And you know, it's, it's, you don't have to think of them as discrete entities totally separate from each other. They never interact. It's just, you know, populations, then they, they exchange genetic material back and forth, but they still are separate enough to have some genetic structure and be differentiated. And therefore among these populations, it's possible to have different distributions of traits.

[Winston Marshall]

I mean, makes sense to me that there's different populations have different distributions and different traits. I, I guess I'm still stuck with the question of like sort of, so what? A little bit like, I'm not sure why that information is, is beyond. You're making the point that it's not all white People are racist and that's why black people are underachieving or, or something like that. It, you know, there's multivariate, multifactor reasons for all of these different things. But you know, if it's one factor, why, you know, how much, how much digging into this do you really need to do? I mean, what, what, what would be an example of a positive thing to have come out of this?

[Nathan Kaufness]

Well, that we would stop blaming white people for all. It's not only white people, right? It's the, the logic of wokeism applies to any, can be applied to any situation where there are disparities between groups. So for example, overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia have been pogrommed because they have better outcomes with respect to economics than the population. So they assume that they're cheating. Indians in Africa have also been targeted because they had better economic outcomes than the Africans. Antisemitism is in many cases based on woke logic. Jews on average are wealthier than white

[Winston Marshall]

gentiles and more intelligent than white gentiles on average.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Well, so the anti Semites often say. Some of them would acknowledge that, but some of them would say no, they're the same as white gentiles and therefore the only explanation for Jewish success is that they're cheating, they're helping each other, they're stealing from us. That's the same as woke logic. It's just a wokeism. What we usually call wokeism is just that same idea applied to whites vis a vis those groups that do perform less well in some ways than whites. Incidentally, whites are kind of in the middle of the pack with respect to many outcomes like education and income. In Britain and the United States, Indians do better. East Asians do better. Even in the uk. African immigrants in some ways do better than whites. But there's special sensitivity related to whites and blacks because of the history of slavery and discrimination. If you don't, if you're not allowed to talk about the genetic influence on these disparities, they will inevitably be traced back to these things. These things really did happen. There's slavery and segregation and discrimination. If you deny the role of genes, it is very logical to conclude that historically persecuted groups are having worse outcomes because of historical persecution. Like, that's a very logical thing to say. However, if you look at the totality of the evidence, it indicates that that's not the full story and that there are differences between people and that those differences can explain.

[Winston Marshall]

So you still haven't won me over from my being pro colorblindness. And it's because even if there are differences between groups, I'd like to live in a society where, let's say I was in a group that underperformed at something. I'd write to have just be judged by merit as to whether I'm good at it. And I would hope that people who outperform the rest of their group, whatever domain that might be, are elevated and rewarded for it because that is good for all of society. You know, but now I agree with

[Nathan Kaufness]

everything you just said, right, but the disagreement is that I think that colorblindness is not always a politically viable policy. And insofar as it's not viable, then some kind of quota system may be necessary.

[Winston Marshall]

Okay, so in the circumstance that it's not politically viable because of resentments, that's where you think you're trying to look for solutions.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Remember, if people are fine with disparities, whether they favor me or disfavor my group, that's fine by me. That would be the best outcome because

[Winston Marshall]

I would even go actually try and make the case that we want colorblindness, despite what resentments there might be, because it's the best for everyone. If in a meritocratic society, people go up and are rewarded and go up the hierarchies based on their talent because that's good for all of society, I

[Nathan Kaufness]

mean, it's debatable whether that's best for everybody. I mean, people who participate in, who, who get a position that they didn't deserve and money and honor or benefits that, that go along with that. And it's kind of a stretch to say that nobody could possibly benefit from that, that if they appointed a competent professor of sociology of education, that our day would be better off in a much less prestigious position. Maybe from our day's perspective, the best he would have lived his best life

[Winston Marshall]

from society's perspective, the students under him would have got an absolutely not even second rate.

[Nathan Kaufness]

I mean, I know there are lots of victims in the archives.

[Winston Marshall]

There's a hell of a lot of victims. And actually if we'd had the best sociology professor there was, that subjects he

[Nathan Kaufness]

was doing, Sociology of education.

[Winston Marshall]

Sociology, education. We had the best actually, whatever. The best sociology of education professor, whatever that means, the, the students would have got a better education and it's better for, you know, for their lives and, and you know, it's, it's better for everyone. And then he would have been sorted into group into a job he could actually do and perform at whatever that might be and achieve at that rather than go through this absolute, you know, worldwide pile on. So it's been very bad for him, it's been terrible for Cambridge, it's bad for the students. There's no one that's good for.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Well, it's bad because he got caught and he got called out. So I'm saying that in a system where most of the Jason Ardays are not called out, it's not obvious that it would be better for them not to have their positions because Arday got. The reason our day got caught as a DEI hire is he took the plagiarism way too far and he told these over the top lies about his life story. If it hadn't been for that. I mean, Cambridge was even willing to keep him after the plagiarism accusations. They just denied the plagiarism accusations, said it's a vile campaign. That was Cambridge's statement. And he's already been investigated and exonerated, which is just a lie. But that's what they said. They started the investigation because our day was claiming an affiliation with prestigious universities like the Ohio State University and Glasgow, which he didn't have. So he was messing with institutions that actually had the power to push back. And also his lies about his accomplishments and his life story were so crazy that the story was just getting bigger and bigger and out of Cambridge's control. So to address. That's when they started the investigation and which precipitated him quitting. So he would have gotten away with. If he did just didn't plagiarize and it was equally fraudulent and equally incompetent, then there would be no problem. And there are thousands and thousands of people like that in the academy all over the Western world, publishing in the same journals that he did in whiteness and education and whatever, whatever else it is. And they, they publish papers, they do peer review, they, they get tenure and they teach students and they're just as useless as, as academics as Jasonard. So. Anyway, that's the system that we can,

[Winston Marshall]

we've really gone around the houses on this race realism. I want to ask you lastly about your problems in Belgium that you've had. But before I do that, is there anything on this issue of race realism and colorblindness that, that you think that I've missed that?

[Nathan Kaufness]

Well, I mean, there's so much to say about it. I've written extensively. You're reading from A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution, which of course people are curious. They can, they can check out.

[Winston Marshall]

Well, I actually will push back on something because right at the beginning of the conversation you said that conservatives are genetically. What was the exact thing you said? Genetically conservatives. I didn't even know there was such thing as a genetic conservative.

[Nathan Kaufness]

No. So people who are conservatives are cognitively less currently identify as conservatives, are on average less intelligent, particularly when you look at whites as a group. So if you just restrict the analysis of white. White people.

[Winston Marshall]

The average iq, you're saying the average IQ of conservative is lower than the average IQ of progressives?

[Nathan Kaufness]

That's right, yeah.

[Winston Marshall]

Right. Is that, is that actually true?

[Nathan Kaufness]

So there, unfortunately there isn't like the definitive study on this topic, but we have data from the General Social Survey, so there a couple intelligence kind of abbreviated intelligence tests that are administered to subjects a relatively large population representative sample of subjects every year to going back some decades.

[Winston Marshall]

And

[Nathan Kaufness]

very people who identify as very white, respondents who identify as very conservative get the worst scores, followed by the conservatives, followed by the liberals, followed by the very liberals who have the highest scores. And there's a lot of indirect evidence which is that. Well, just the fact that conservatives are simply unable to create intellectual institutions that can compete with those of leftists.

[Winston Marshall]

I mean it's certainly the case that higher educated people skewer left. It just, it wasn't clear to me that just because you're higher educated that you're more intelligent. Because in fact I've met a lot of stupid people who are, who have all the credentials and have gone through.

[Sam's Club Enthusiast]

Right.

[Nathan Kaufness]

I mean Jason our day.

[Winston Marshall]

Right.

[Nathan Kaufness]

But, but there is a correlation. Not most, most chair professors at Cambridge are not like Jason Arday. So it's just a. There is a correlation between being a chair professor at Cambridge and not being mentally disabled, even though Jason Arday was a chair professor at Cambridge. So now there is a moderately high correlation between education and intelligence. So you know, if educated people are overwhelmingly leaning left, that is evidence that intelligent people are leaning left.

[Winston Marshall]

Let me ask about Belgium then. So you went from Cambridge, you had your troubles after you published this guide for hereditary revolution. I know that the Free Speech Union supported you.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Yes.

[Winston Marshall]

But you were forced to resign. Is that.

[Nathan Kaufness]

No, no. So I was. My unpaid position at Emanuel College was terminated and the Free Speech Union is helping me respond to that. And I had a three year contract with the university, so that expired after three years and then that was gone.

[Winston Marshall]

And then you moved to Ghent University.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Yes.

[Winston Marshall]

And you're studying the same thing.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Yeah, same. Same work as.

[Winston Marshall]

Okay. But you're not there anymore.

[Nathan Kaufness]

I'm still. But I came here to do interviews.

[Winston Marshall]

Oh, you came here to do interviews. But you had a run in with Antifa, is that right?

[Nathan Kaufness]

So a student group called the Catholic Flemish Student association. Invited me to give a talk on some of these topics. And afterwards we were standing in front of a bar and some Antifa guys. First there were two attacks. The first one less serious. Two guys on a motorcycle drove by and threw yogurt on me. And then a few minutes later, another one came. It was a plastic bottle, but full of yogurt. So a heavy bottle.

[Winston Marshall]

And then hurled it at me with a closed lid.

[Nathan Kaufness]

I'm not sure, but it exploded. Because it exploded somehow or other. Maybe it was open and then. So there was yogurt in my eyes because I tried to chase him, but I had. Because my shoes had yogurt on them. I had untied them from the previous attack. And then there's also yogurt on my glasses, so I couldn't really go after them. But then the. The. The fraternity guys tried to chase him, but he was on the bicycle and anyway, we were able to identify him and.

[Winston Marshall]

Will you press charges?

[Nathan Kaufness]

Yeah, I mean, I can't get into too much details because this is still going on, but I'll just say that the prosecutor in Ghent declined to do anything after this was brought to her attention. And the individual identified and identified by the police and everything on CCTV and the.

[Sam's Club Advertiser]

Did you know Sam's Club isn't a store. It's actually a club with cool finds and like a whole community. It's a club.

[Sam's Club Enthusiast]

Of course, Jason. It's in the name. Sam's Club.

[Sam's Club Advertiser]

Oh yeah. Come join us. Sam's Club.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a [e-mail] Switch upfront payment

[Sam's Club Enthusiast]

of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for a 12 month plan. Required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees. Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. Me slow when network is busy. See terms.

[Winston Marshall]

So we have to speculate about why she would have done that.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Yeah, I mean, for now I'm not going to comment on that, but yeah.

[Winston Marshall]

Is there anything you'd like to add in this conversation? Just that you think I might have missed that is important and that you'd like viewers and listeners to know.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Well, I very much enjoyed our conversation and we, we had a real debate. Yeah, I, I, I do think that when one notices, when one grasps the logic of wokeism, that this isn't a crazy, crazy ideology, that it's based on a reasonable argument. It is a response to the world, a moral response to the world. Given a false empirical belief that all groups are the same and in a, in a just society they would achieve exactly the same outcomes that everything about wokeism follows from that everything that looks crazy that wokesters do is logical. From the perspective of this false empirical belief in group sameness, then that's an

[Winston Marshall]

interesting point actually, because it's not explicit. The woke people don't say that explicitly. I think it's implicit in what they believe.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Some of them say it explicitly, but for many, I mean, most people aren't really able to articulate their ideology as a set of premises and conclusions that follow logically from the premises. But this is kind of the guiding logic. The intellectuals understand this. Everybody's the same. And some people have stated it very explicitly, like Ibram X Kendi, that disparities mean injustice. They've said it openly, clearly, and others have, have also said that. But just imagine looking at the world and thinking Japanese people and people in the Congo are born on average exactly the same and it's just some sort of weird historical accident that Sony exists in Japan and not the Congo. If you're looking at the world like that, it's very confusing. It looks like there's a moral emergency to correct the environment and, But I

[Winston Marshall]

guess this is maybe why. So forgive me for hammering this, if I am hammering this, but why sort of, I get a bit icky about sort of race, IQ stuff is because if IQ is a factor, it is one of many, many, many factors, right? In any of these things, there's, you know, like you've already mentioned, cultural factors. There'd be environmental factors. There'll be so many things that affect why different groups get ahead. There'll be, you know, you can even compare, like North Korea and South Korea is ethnically the same group and one's way ahead of the other because of political factors or indeed, you know, we're here in England, but you know, our American cousins are way ahead of us and you know, I think they're about to double our GDP per capita or something insane like that.

[Nathan Kaufness]

But, but, but I also think we should talk about why you shouldn't be communists like North Korea. So that's also an important issue. Don't be communist like North Korea.

[Winston Marshall]

Right.

[Nathan Kaufness]

So that, so the cultural things we do talk about and we've actually won on most of the major cultural issues, like most people are not asking for communism. Okay? Now it has a resurgence. But if, if people were demanding a return to communism, as some of them are, then it would be very important to talk about why communism is a bad idea. And we would hold up North Korea as an example of what not to do. And, and, and that would be the most important thing. But since we've already won mostly on that issue now, this is the issue which is that they're within in a free society where people are able to achieve their potential, different groups on average achieve different potential. And either you interpret that as injustice or at least a problem that needs to be corrected, or you acknowledge that in some cases the disparities are not the fault of the environment, it's just nature.

[Winston Marshall]

Well, thank you Nathan, for your time. I really appreciate it. It's been a long conversation and I, I guess well done on exposing Jason Arday and I appreciate it very much. Is anything you'd like to bring attention to, to our viewers and listeners?

[Nathan Kaufness]

If you're interested in more, you can see my substack Nathan kaufness [e-mail] Nathan,

[Winston Marshall]

thank you so much.

[Nathan Kaufness]

Thank you very much.

[Winston Marshall]

Thanks for watching the Winston Marshall show with Nathan Kaufness. If you want to support this show, all you have to do is press subscribe. And if you head over to WinstonMarshall.co.uk, which is our substack, or you become a YouTube member, you'll enjoy ad free viewing and listening exclusive content and you'll be able to ask future guests your questions. Otherwise. Thanks, Ken, and be well.