It has been one or two years since I first became aware of Nathan Cofnas. His first Substack piece did not appear until January 13, 2023—a paid discussion with Alex Kaschuta, followed by a few pieces that April. It was not really until January 2, 2024, however, that his writing took off, with the deliberately trollish “Why We Need to Talk About the Right’s Stupidity Problem.”
Nathan Cofnas was born in Chicago, sometime in 1986 or 1987 by most estimates. His first CV-listed publication, “Science Is Not Always ‘Self-Correcting’: Fact-Value Conflation and the Study of Intelligence,” appeared in Foundations of Science 21, no. 3, in 2016. Plenty followed: “Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy: A Critical Analysis of Kevin MacDonald’s Theory,” in Human Nature 29, no. 2; “Is Kevin MacDonald’s Theory of Judaism ‘Plausible’? A Response to Dutton,” in Evolutionary Psychological Science 5, no. 1, in 2019.
Or take “How Gene-Culture Coevolution Can—but Probably Did Not—Track Mind-Independent Moral Truth,” published in The Philosophical Quarterly 73, no. 2, in 2023.
These, however, I have not read. They are not how I know Nathan Cofnas.
I know Nathan as a Substack persona. I have read his writings from “Podcast Bros and Brain Rot” to “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution”. I have watched his interviews. I have followed, like everyone else, his battles against ivory academia. I even watched his unfortunate debate against Dave Greene. But something nags at me: why do I know this Cofnas rather than the other one?
Why do I not know the Cofnas of Biology & Philosophy or The American Sociologist? Why do I not know him as an academic Jew, by the strength of his publications? Why not as a worthy man—a man of journals, monographs, and textbooks? Why does Cofnas’s public fame seem to exist almost entirely outside the scholarship that was supposed to establish him?
It seems quite obvious when moving back to his first breakout article. Nathan begins with: “Attributions of low intelligence are considered insults—something we lob at our enemies, not our friends.”
Nathan had an ask: we need to talk about the Right’s stupidity problem.
Nathan had a solution: “To win over the elites, the right needs to challenge the Big Lie that motivates wokism: the equality thesis.”
Nathan had an agenda: “The priority for right-wing intellectuals should be disseminating accurate information about race and race differences, and devising a new political philosophy that is intellectually and morally appealing to the current left-wing elites.”
At the time, I thought well of the argument, even concurring with it pedagogically:
“The ‘single-bucketed’ viewpoint of ‘equality thesis’ scholars [...] is disruptive to the needed asymmetric stoicism of our educational institutions and, by extension, civilization. I feel that this viewpoint’s continuation without consideration leads naturally into infinite identitarian conflict, degenerate misery, and moral inhibition for the children who are made to participate in it, given that they do not yet—or cannot—understand how dishonest intellectual games are operated. The child is left alone, filtering real phenomena through a lens wherein a false model of reality misaligns them from pursuing realistic solutions to their problems.”
These are good thoughts, if I may say so myself, but they prick and nag at something else:
Why did they have to be on Substack?
Why did Nathan Cofnas need a trollish essay about the Right’s stupidity problem, rather than years of serious scholarship in Biology & Philosophy, The Philosophical Quarterly, or The American Sociologist, to become a man worthy of citation—to become, more fundamentally, a man people cared existed?
His scholarship should have brought him some renown, right? Aren’t professors at Cambridge supposed to be people others care about? Surely work on the philosophy of biology deserves some academic interest outside the immediately political.
Unfortunate as it may be, I think I might have an answer for why Nathan Cofnas has been relegated to Substack. It is most certainly an unhappy one.
Listen, I think that Nathan Cofnas—he, he—is a Schlimazel.
Nathan just doesn’t have any luck.
In Judaism, there is mazel—or mazal. It is commonly heard in the greeting “Mazal tov,” or chanted in “Siman tov u’mazal tov—u’mazal tov v’siman tov,” on and on until “Yehe lanu!”—“Yehe lanu, yehe lanu, u’lechol Yisrael.”
Mazel, or mazal, is often translated as luck, although the rabbis have a more particular interpretation of it. For one, the rabbis say—or at least the two rabbis of my acquaintance say: that mazel is by no means zero-sum: every prayer makes a little more luck in the world.
Not only is it non-zero-sum, but mazel is directed. Much like coins—or sewage—mazel is associated with pipes and water flowing downward toward those who need it. There is not always enough, they say, and sometimes it gets redirected, but nonetheless, if you pray for luck, luck will find a way.
They—those rabbis—go and make blessings to bring people luck, and God comes down from his heavenly throne and, like a beam or a space laser, decides where it needs to go. That is mazel.
Unfortunately, however, God has promised humanity that we are to be made in His image and thereby possess free will. It just so happens that this forces God, on occasion, to go about playing “pranks”—just a “prank”—on his chosen people.
And so, occasionally, there happen to be men like Cofnas who are simply born without luck. When they go to restaurants, they have soup spilled on them by fools. When they walk outside, it starts raining. And when they publish an article revealing that academia is corrupt and full of plagiarism, the plagiarist decides to kill himself and Cofnas gets dragged through the mud!
God has played quite a prank on Cofnas here. He has gotten soup on his pants. The schlimazel is the man upon which the soup is spilled. That is Nathan Cofnas. This is the pattern of his career:
He publishes papers in respectable journals: No one cares. He gets a position at Cambridge: rather than conferring prestige, he is in constant spats with student groups and professors, each writing nasty “investigative” and “procedural” commentary about him. He gets a break-out article on Substack and ends up getting uncomfortably shoulder-groped by Curtis Yarvin. He tries to debate Dave Greene and ends up cursed to have academia lie about him. He acquires a large audience, but its for clickbait articles.
Then, in July 2026, the biggest “prank” occurs. Cofnas publishes allegations that Jason Arday, one of Cambridge’s most celebrate Schlemiels, extensively plagiarized his doctoral thesis and embellished his biography—that the university that had fired him previously for discussing his “hereditarian” revolution was encouraging academic dishonesty amongst its peerage. “It had covered it up even after complaints for nearly a year! The plagiarism detector blares up with exact matches across multiple articles! The university could’ve corrected this—they could’ve gone for standards, yet they allow Arday to walk about whilst they criticize my articles for all manner of minutiae!”
People listen. The story escapes Substack. Newspapers Investigate. There is a grammatical error in the title of this essay! There is no way he could run like that. All these facts are contradictory. Arday is under investigation. He resigns. For a brief moment, Cofnas has done what every academic dissident dreamt of: he has made claims, made a difference, and forced people to pay attention! It was against his previous employer no less!
Then Arday dies in an apparent suicide. Nathan is suspended. Now he is on Flemish TV trying to balance between the righteousness of his crusade and the fact that he had no desire to see Arday, well, go... Sure, he has some support from ambassadors and Substack and his friends and family, but he is in a worse position than if he hadn’t ever wrote that article at all. “They will almost certainly fire me.”
Nathan Cofnas just has no luck.
We all have no luck. Today, in academia, even if you are worthy, talented, smart, and more, if you simply do not have mazal—if you are on the wrong side of God’s little pranks—everything can still go wrong for you. You can get everything the ambitious academic is supposed to want: a professorship, publications, controversy, an audience, silly enemies, vindication—and somehow each blessing arrives bent out of shape. Academia does not make men like Nathan Cofnas famous. Cambridge does not give him renown. Biology & Philosophy does not give him an audience. In fact, they become anchors tied to his feet.
Perhaps that is the real joke. The institutions designed to confer prestige no longer reliably confer prestige; the journals designed to establish seriousness no longer reliably establish seriousness; the university designed to give the scholar a public name instead buries him in paperwork and threats. Maybe Cofnas’s little “hereditarian revolution” will never happen in academia. Maybe he will remain surrounded by a confederacy of fools. But at least we have all gotten to know Nathan Cofnas, the schlimazel—and maybe that is what truly matters.
The rabbis they tell me that the luck has got to go somewhere good. So I wish Nathan all the best, sincerely:
Mazel tov.
Best theory, he is a Jew OTD and God decided to fuck with him.
At first I thought that you called him a slur