Man who started the Jason Arday witch hunt is a Nazi-style “race realist”

Man who started the Jason Arday witch hunt is a Nazi-style “race realist”



Nathan Cofnas and Jason Arday

On 14 August, the 41-year-old academic Jason Arday was found dead in Battersea, London. His death followed a relentless media blitz in which the previously unknown professor was subjected the sort of relentless coverage which is usually reserved for heads of state. The media figures joining in should really known better too; especially as the man who spearheaded the campaign against Arday is a proponent of the ‘race science’ that drove the Nazis:

‘Race realism’

The man in the video above is Nathan Cofnas. Cofnas was also an academic at Cambridge, but his criticism of equality, diversity, and inclusion programmes led to his departure. Cofnas’s objections to these programmes went way beyond the usual criticisms of fairness or legality too; he actually argued that in a true meritocracy, Black people:

would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.

Cofnas has described himself as a “race realist“. In other words, he’s someone who uses pseudoscience to argue that People of Colour are intellectually inferior to white people. So he has Nazi-style beliefs, in other words. And the media should have ensured this was a heavy focus in any reporting.

We didn’t just get more reporting than was warranted; we also got low quality reporting which failed to capture why Arday became such a singular point of focus. Cofnas himself is not shy about admitting this stuff either.

Jason Arday — “Too far”

In the clip above, Cofnas says:

Now, Arday was special. The reason Arday is getting a lot of attention is he took the plagiarism, which is fairly common in academia, too far. And he told these crazy lies about his personal life. And he had such an exalted position that the mismatch between the quality and the prestige was so enormous that there was a hook for a story. That was what was special about him. Not that he’s a fraud, not that he’s a worthless scholar. It’s that there was a story. There was a basis for a news story that would capture people’s attention.

While stories about Arday’s personal life have been drawn into question, it’s notable that he was cleared of the plagiarism accusations:

As Cofnas notes, plagiarism accusations are also far from uncommon in the field of academia:

Cofnas continued:

… there are so many cases of people who are just like Arday, but there isn’t that kind of story potential. Well, maybe the lesson is this what’s happened if you don’t give Cofnas a job, right?

Cofnas later said:

Well, I have the job currently and I’m still waiting for the revolution to happen and then I’ll… It’s going to take a while. …get another job. After the revolution, I’ll be the head of the Department of Eugenics and Race Science at Harvard, maybe.

Focus

The outlets which delivered relentless coverage of Arday are the same ones who published stories like the following:

People should be very mistrustful of a media that activates like this; a media which can remain silent for years while people with actual power get away with murder.

RIP Jason Arday.

Featured image via Christian Sinibaldi / Save our Citizenship

By Willem Moore





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