The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - August 26, 2026


Dr. Nathan Cofnas - Was It Right to Alert the World About Jason Arday? (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_1037)


Episode Stats


Length

50 minutes

Words per minute

140.67

Word count

7,155

Sentence count

258


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 I'm delighted to report that I have joined as a visiting professor the Declaration of Independence
00:00:06.200 Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi. The center offers
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00:00:37.600 exceptionalism. Dedicated to the academic and open-minded exploration of these principles,
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00:01:06.040 Hi everybody, this is Gadsad, continuing the tradition of inviting embattled academics on
00:01:12.320 the show. Today I've got Dr. Nathan Kofnes, who is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of
00:01:19.380 Ghent. He's been recently suspended for reasons that we will be talking about on the show.
00:01:25.020 Nathan, welcome on the show. Thank you very much for having me. And my new introduction is that I
00:01:32.980 am not representing Ghent and I'm not here in my capacity as a Ghent employee. Got it. Thank you
00:01:41.000 for that disclaimer. Let's get going. You got into a hot load of trouble because you did the
00:01:49.260 unthinkable. You went after someone who belongs to a holy class that we should only kneel in front
00:01:56.140 of. He is a black man or was a black man. May he rest in peace. And I don't say that facetiously
00:02:01.920 because we certainly don't want people to be killing themselves because they've been found
00:02:06.840 out. You wrote a Substack article arguing that Jason Arday had done some things that were less
00:02:13.280 and savory as an academic. Take us through the whole story. So Jason Arday was hired as in 2023
00:02:22.580 as the youngest Black professor in the history of Cambridge University. Clearly a DEI hire with a
00:02:30.000 very thin scholarly record. That was obvious, even if you didn't look into it. But he was sold
00:02:37.860 largely on the basis of his extraordinary life story
00:02:42.620 of overcoming impossible challenges,
00:02:46.220 being autistic, not being able to speak a word,
00:02:49.520 not knowing the sound of his own voice
00:02:51.220 until he was 11 years old,
00:02:52.920 not learning how to read or write until he was 18,
00:02:57.420 and then running many marathons per day
00:03:02.100 for many days over and over again
00:03:04.580 in world record territory.
00:03:07.860 And then being this suddenly acquiring these extraordinary academic skills and becoming a star academic.
00:03:15.400 And OK, so he's the youngest black folk professor in the history of Cambridge.
00:03:20.860 Then within a few months, there was an academic named Dave Harris who tipped the Cambridge administration off that this professor, Jason Arday, was a plagiarist.
00:03:41.300 And they told him to get lost, that they're not going to investigate.
00:03:46.240 uh uh harris also notified some of the journals that had published the plagiarized uh articles
00:03:53.780 the articles weren't just plagiarized but uh they also contained like made-up data
00:03:59.120 he doesn't have any like quantitative data he he didn't do math it's auto ethnography yes
00:04:07.280 the auto ethnography uh and but he would sometimes interview his friends who he
00:04:14.760 euphemistically refers to as a convenience sample and he would just reprint what they said
00:04:22.520 but sometimes he would steal the answers from other sources or he would recycle answers from
00:04:30.500 paper to paper attributing in one case to an asian college student in another case to a latino
00:04:38.020 professor. So a lot of issues. The journals also didn't really want to investigate. So
00:04:45.340 they let Arde just insert citations to some of the plagiarized sources and issued a correction.
00:04:53.620 So that was the beginning of the cover-up going back to 2023. They've also known for at least a
00:05:02.020 year that Arde was a fabulist since he made up a story about being attacked by a racist within
00:05:07.920 knife in his Cambridge office, which was about a year ago, and Cambridge investigated and it was
00:05:13.580 all untrue. And they just intimidated people into not revealing the story. So according to
00:05:23.140 a whistleblower on the faculty at Cambridge who tipped me off about this, he said most professors
00:05:32.480 have known about it for a year and it hasn't the rumor the this knowledge hasn't escaped
00:05:39.160 cambridge because everyone is terrified they won't even uh write one tweet about it so what
00:05:45.660 was well two two questions first the allegations of plagiarism which based on the sort of cursory
00:05:54.820 look that i gave to the issue seemed like they're pretty well founded were supposedly
00:06:01.340 investigated, and he was cleared of them. Tell us about that, because that sounds suspicious.
00:06:09.720 Well, he was investigated by the, because his dissertation contained very extensive plagiarism.
00:06:16.420 He was awarded the degree by Liverpool John Moores University. And at some point, they investigated,
00:06:24.900 and they released a conclusion
00:06:30.940 which was that the dissertation still stands
00:06:34.240 which was a very odd expression
00:06:36.700 because the accusation was that it was plagiarized
00:06:39.880 so they didn't really say that it wasn't plagiarized
00:06:42.840 and then they said it still stands
00:06:45.840 but that there were some errors
00:06:48.740 they were very vague about it
00:06:50.480 And now, I mean, I can't speak to the standards of Liverpool, John Moores University, but yeah, I mean, for everyone else, it was plagiarism.
00:07:00.840 Wow. Okay, so then, okay, having put that aside, because I saw many of the sort of DEI folks saying this was a witch hunt, there was no plagiarism, and based on the sort of simultaneous, where, you know, you would see his manuscript versus what was, where it was plagiarized from, it seemed like it was a pretty clear cut case, and there were many, many such instances.
00:07:23.000 Okay. So I'm glad we cleared that up. How did you get involved in the story? So there was this
00:07:28.580 original guy who, you know, a while ago had made those claims. It went nowhere. People at Cambridge
00:07:35.720 knew about it. How does Nathan come into that ecosystem? So I had my own like free speech
00:07:42.640 crisis at Cambridge when I was a Leverhulme early career fellow in the philosophy faculty
00:07:48.320 in 2022 to 2025 and uh uh so i was known as a person who was concerned with the free speech
00:08:00.760 issues and dei dei criticizing dei was what i got in trouble for now i left the university
00:08:09.860 uh like right before this became an open secret about our day so i was not in the loop i didn't
00:08:18.720 hear anything about it and finally uh an anonymous whistleblower i know who he is but obviously i
00:08:27.460 can't say his name or who knows what the administration would do to him and what he
00:08:32.060 would be murdered possibly if anyone found out what he did uh he contacted me he said
00:08:38.440 And journalists have tried to write about it, and then they get intimidated into silence by legal threats. And everyone at Cambridge is afraid to say anything because the administration will retaliate. And he knows that I had a Substack newsletter and that I would understand the story and be able to communicate it.
00:08:57.820 So he gave me this tip and then I was on June 13th and I investigated and yeah, I mean, it wasn't just the plagiarism. For me, the plagiarism was not the most shocking part of the story.
00:09:14.740 But the fact that the stuff that wasn't plagiarized was, I mean, yeah, there's such a thing as qualitative research, but you can't just ask your friend to write, write something and then post it and then just say like, well, racism is a big problem and call that scholarship.
00:09:37.760 Right. So basically, so there are two issues. There's first sort of the dishonest factor, and that takes on many different tints. It could be the plagiarism. It could be the shoddy research. It could be the made up data.
00:09:56.760 data. Then there's also the life story that is completely, you probably know the reference
00:10:07.840 Baron Munchausen, from which the term Munchausen syndrome and Munchausen syndrome by proxy come
00:10:15.500 from. Baron Munchausen came up with all of these fabulous stories that he came up with. And then
00:10:21.460 the psychiatric condition of Munchausen syndrome is when somebody feigns having an illness in order
00:10:28.500 to garner empathy and sympathy. And so then I took that principle. And then in the parasitic mind,
00:10:33.680 I talked about collective Munchausen, where people really think that the only way that they
00:10:38.660 can ascend the social hierarchy is by confabulating their own victimhood story, hence Jussie Smollett
00:10:44.100 or this guy so as you went ahead and then you know wrote that substat was it 99 percent
00:10:52.120 nathan kofnis is the devil or did you get a lot of people saying thank you for your courage what
00:10:58.760 give us the ratio just so we can get a sense of how lunatic the world has become
00:11:03.900 well actually the the response was mainly positive it blew up on twitter within hours
00:11:10.520 and it was just blowing up, blowing up for three days
00:11:14.620 and finally the Telegraph picked it up
00:11:17.660 and then the Times and Retraction Watch
00:11:19.640 and then it was, you know, it was completely out of control.
00:11:27.100 At first, well, the university replied
00:11:30.580 because remember that they already knew all this stuff
00:11:34.660 and they've been covering it up since 2023.
00:11:36.820 uh so they they released a statement that said the critics of our day were waging a vile campaign
00:11:46.340 obviously insinuating you know racism yeah and the good law project also came out strongly
00:11:54.780 in defense of our day and they explicitly used the r word for us that included some
00:12:02.680 supposedly respectable characters
00:12:06.220 like Simon Baron-Cohen.
00:12:08.060 Oh, boy.
00:12:09.560 I've got an after-
00:12:10.660 Yeah.
00:12:13.380 Arde's biggest supporters.
00:12:18.320 Baron-Cohen has an interesting expression.
00:12:21.500 He says that when you see Arde's work
00:12:26.860 side by side and then the copied text
00:12:30.440 highlighted on one side and the other,
00:12:32.260 He said, it looks to the naked eye like plagiarism.
00:12:35.980 It looks to the naked eye.
00:12:38.340 Yes, well, are you going to believe your eye or Baron Cohen?
00:12:44.420 You're lying.
00:12:45.000 Only a non-nuanced person would take two identical passages
00:12:50.680 and presume that they're plagiarism.
00:12:53.840 But we need the enlightened luminary lens of Simon Baron Cohen
00:12:58.420 to speak to the great unwashed, the rubes, the plebs, to explain to us that it's not so.
00:13:05.080 And even if it were so, do you not understand, you bigoted racist, that if he is appropriating
00:13:13.320 other people's words, that is fully justified, because I call that word reparations. Because
00:13:19.600 remember, there was slavery in the United States 150 years ago. So by him appropriating someone
00:13:26.200 else's words that is fully justified as a form of word reparation what do you think of that i i i'm
00:13:33.380 not on uh sir simon baron cone's level to be able to to comprehend that but anyway uh for the first
00:13:43.340 couple weeks so i published this on july 21st then uh cambridge just doubles down and all the all the
00:13:52.080 The apologist doubled down.
00:13:53.680 But finally, the press, at a certain point, it became just ridiculous because he had lied
00:14:01.120 about everything he ever did.
00:14:02.660 And it became a national sport, like pointing out the latest Jason Arday lie.
00:14:08.840 So he finally became enough of an embarrassment that Cambridge, even though, again, they didn't
00:14:14.840 learn anything new.
00:14:16.280 This was all old news for them.
00:14:18.020 he was such an embarrassment on april 5th they said okay yeah this is this is the end we're
00:14:26.740 we're investigating you and within a few hours jason arday had resigned no one knows him
00:14:33.420 probably exactly why he resigned or the circumstances but he would have realized
00:14:39.580 that cambridge is no longer protecting him so that that showed um then around that time i went
00:14:48.940 to london and i gave a bunch of interviews to like the times radio and other places like that
00:14:54.940 and i got like a quite good reception so uh the vast majority of even the respectable press had
00:15:04.420 come around to my point of view. Now it changed dramatically nine days after that, after the
00:15:12.120 resignation, when our day committed suicide and the critics were now very much on the defensive
00:15:19.660 and everybody's looking for a scapegoat for this bad outcome. There was Cambridge who set our day
00:15:27.960 up, who knew that there was this scandal waiting to happen and they thought that they will just
00:15:33.920 intimidate everyone into silence. And then when the scandal gets out, they had three years to
00:15:42.120 figure out a solution. They could have created a non-research position for him or whatever,
00:15:47.320 something, but they just let him crash and burn. Then once he becomes an embarrassment,
00:15:54.460 they tell him to pack your things and go home. Then there was the press, which in a 22-day period
00:16:01.040 published 249 articles about Arde and making fun of him and humiliating him. Two-thirds of those
00:16:08.320 articles were after he had already resigned. So his part of the story was over. And instead of
00:16:14.500 talking about the real wrongdoers, which was Cambridge, they were still making fun of Arde.
00:16:20.100 now neither cambridge nor the press wanted to reflect on their own actions so it became
00:16:30.620 convenient to blame uh the uh super stimulus scapegoat which is me right uh and now all of
00:16:41.600 these i published one article about our day which was 100 factual there was no mistake
00:16:47.620 It, hundreds of thousands of people have read it and no one has found any mistake that I
00:16:52.680 made, but the, there was a rally in Trafalgar Square about a week ago, 30,000 people.
00:17:01.780 It was called the Jason Arday vigil, but really, uh, largely a Kofnus hate rally speaker after
00:17:10.220 speaker denouncing me by name, including a well-known politician, the union of British
00:17:17.600 journalists published a statement on the death of Jason Arday, and they singled out one individual
00:17:25.040 by name for criticism, which was me. Again, one article that was 100% factual, and everyone wants
00:17:34.860 to pin the blame on me. So let me ask you, I mean, let's get into a bit, if you don't mind,
00:17:39.960 the psychological sort of domino effects on you as a result of that reality.
00:17:47.840 Notwithstanding the fact that, you know, both you and I undoubtedly would support
00:17:54.020 the reality that these people should be identified, because truth is more important
00:18:01.340 than any consequentialist, you know, ethic in this case. You are a human being, and I think
00:18:07.620 undoubtedly an empathetic one, and I say that advisedly as the author of Suicidal Empathy.
00:18:14.500 And so is there any part of you when you lay your head down at the end of the day on that
00:18:22.040 pillow to fall asleep where you question yourself? No, I know I did the right thing from a
00:18:28.560 deontological ethic perspective, but the consequence of my deontological pursuit is that
00:18:34.340 a man has died of his own doing. I mean, he's the one who made his bed, and now he's laying in it.
00:18:39.800 But do you feel a sense of uneasiness at the final tragic outcome?
00:18:47.560 Okay, you know, it's obviously the negative situation, the terrible outcome. Nobody wanted
00:18:54.980 that. You know, I've said from the beginning that I didn't want him to be fired. And I thought it
00:19:01.080 would be better for him to remain the face of DEI at Cambridge for the next 27 years.
00:19:07.880 That would have been the ideal outcome for me. And I thought, yeah, I mean, he engaged in
00:19:17.500 some wrongdoing, but the punishment that he received was totally disproportionate
00:19:23.660 to what he did wrong and you know he was largely yes he was he manipulated people and all that but
00:19:31.440 he was following he was responding to incentives that were created by other people you know the
00:19:36.480 white liberals who would never question him and he could just make up lie after lie and uh they
00:19:43.300 wouldn't say anything because he's black and therefore you know get special treatment i think
00:19:47.860 that in that sense, he was certainly a victim. But, you know, I think it's kind of, yes, there's
00:19:59.920 some chain of causality that involves me in the bad outcome. But, you know, if you do the right
00:20:12.620 thing and that some somehow leads to you know a bad outcome i i think it's kind of dangerous to
00:20:24.000 to reflect on should i have done the right thing no i agree and that's why i use the terms
00:20:30.060 deontological versus consequential is because the pursuit of truth has to be pursued and defended
00:20:36.600 irrespective of because i mean otherwise that's how you fall into the trap of forbidden knowledge
00:20:42.200 And this is what I call epistemological empathy in the book Suicidal Empathy, because if you're pursuing an epistemology of truth, you're saying, look, if I apply the scientific method in an unbiased and fair way, wherever that takes me, it takes me and that's fine.
00:21:00.340 If I apply an epistemology of care rooted in misguided empathy, then I say, no, no, wait a second.
00:21:06.980 You can't do research on racial differences along whichever trait, because that, if the results don't assort themselves in a way that is consistent with our preferred narrative, then that should be forbidden knowledge.
00:21:19.760 So I completely hear you, which actually is a perfect segue to sort of the earlier clashes that you had in your career, whereby you did pursue certain areas.
00:21:28.980 So we're forgetting now. We're putting aside, are they? You are a philosopher of biology. You study how biology is applied in the social sciences, which, of course, is pretty much my whole career. That's what I've done, applying evolutionary psychology to consumer behavior, economic behavior, the behavioral sciences.
00:21:51.000 And so, you know, you've crossed swords with guys like Kevin MacDonald, who talked about a group selection strategy as a sort of evolutionary strategy for how Jews, you know, manipulate the world.
00:22:05.000 You've looked at things like racial differences in intelligence and so on.
00:22:10.300 Now, so in a sense, is your temperament such that you are the perfect person to do the are they, you know, sub stack, because you're not going to wilt away when you face a difficult problem?
00:22:27.100 i mean you know i don't want to sound like you know self-congratulatory i don't think
00:22:34.460 that is a total coincidence that i say true but unpopular things about certain
00:22:40.840 academic topics and then i happen to be the person to say this
00:22:45.540 i mean um like you know there were as i say there were thousands of people who knew about it
00:22:55.380 No, but you had, sorry, you had the right temper because, so you were doing all that other stuff before our day, which does require courage. Many people would have walked away from that. Then it fell into your lap through the anonymous whistleblower.
00:23:11.460 You could have certainly at that point made the decision of, well, I'm not touching this one, but then given your temperament, and I'm not trying to throw you flowers, but because of your temperament, you said, yeah, sure.
00:23:26.400 No, objectively, yeah. So this is another reason why I'm a scapegoat and why I'm getting so much hate, is because people recognize, especially on the left, well, okay, now we've been forced to acknowledge that Kofnes was right about our day, and Cambridge, and the BBC, and Glasgow University, and Simon & Schuster, and everybody else is just lying.
00:23:55.180 but our whole position was that
00:23:59.300 Kovnus was the bad one
00:24:00.960 making up all this racist stuff
00:24:02.640 and we should trust
00:24:04.380 Cambridge and the BBC
00:24:06.000 and all the rest of it
00:24:08.900 so now
00:24:10.720 there's a lot of cognitive
00:24:12.700 dissonance there
00:24:13.840 or maybe Kovnus isn't actually
00:24:16.960 the lying pseudoscience
00:24:19.180 deranged racist
00:24:21.120 that we thought because he actually got this one
00:24:23.200 right we can't find one mistake
00:24:24.760 in his reporting on our day so yeah but we could still attack you for your motive right so
00:24:31.640 so even if the veracity of what you wrote is perfectly accurate i can still i'm speaking now
00:24:41.160 as the leftist the general i can still say but why why would you write such an article clearly
00:24:48.500 there must be a nefarious reason for you to write such an article with such Jewy glee,
00:24:57.380 Jewy, because you're Jewish. Yeah, well, I should say, too, that, you know, I don't want to make
00:25:02.000 too big an issue out of it, but I think it would be a little bit harder to make the scapegoat
00:25:07.800 thing stick if my name were, you know, Christopher Goyman. It's just, it's part of the package,
00:25:16.420 You know, so you do think that there is a nice little sprinkling of Jew hatred because of your heritage, Jewish heritage that wouldn't be there if it were Joe Smith.
00:25:28.680 And a lot of these people are saying also Kovnus is a Zionist, Zionist Kovnus and it's Zionist, you know, it's just a euphemism.
00:25:39.180 right right gotcha how does so i presume obviously your closest members of your family
00:25:47.040 have heard of some of the story whether it be your parents or i don't know if you're married
00:25:52.620 or whomever is close in your life do they come around and say what the hell man nathan what
00:25:58.540 why'd you go and do this or do they say there's my son i'm so proud of what's the reaction
00:26:04.620 I mean, most of them are definitely nothing to do with any of this stuff.
00:26:09.180 I mean, my wife, she obviously, like, it's a big concern, like a safety concern.
00:26:21.020 I'm getting, I'm flooded with death threats and just more run-of-the-mill hate mail.
00:26:26.200 you know there was a 30 30 000 person rally in trafalgar square where people are just
00:26:34.100 screaming about me that i've killed jason arde so it's uh and you i i have connections to the uk
00:26:43.860 not sure if i can go back there so you you genuinely feel that there is a threat to your
00:26:53.180 person i mean it's in the uk how about in the greater uh europe i mean can you walk around in
00:26:59.620 belgium on the street can you can you i was so i was assaulted uh in uh belgium after i gave a talk
00:27:09.800 to a student group a uh and a guy wearing a keffiyeh threw a heavy bottle of uh yogurt
00:27:20.900 forcefully at my face and uh wow yeah uh so i i'm definitely a target here and more so now
00:27:33.840 more so now than before but does that so it i'll first answer it for myself and then i'll ask you
00:27:42.620 to answer the same thing when people come after me it only riles me up so if you come after me
00:27:49.440 I come after you 10 times more if you tag my university I'll tag my university and attack
00:27:56.960 you endlessly for the next six hours so I never ever back that and it's not a strategy it's not
00:28:02.900 anything it's just my temperament right I'm I'm a very affable warm guy but I also have the side
00:28:09.160 of me whereby you know you you can't disrespect me you can't attack me you can't threaten me
00:28:15.320 I'm never going to back down. It is your I mean, you seem like a pretty sort of gentle, soft spoken guy, but it's your inner inner dialogue that they will never shut me down.
00:28:30.020 And this has increased my resolve to fight for truth. Or are you sort of sitting?
00:28:35.160 Oh, gee, I just want to go back to writing a philosophy of biology article in some journal that nobody will ever read.
00:28:41.140 Where are you on that trajectory?
00:28:45.320 I don't know. Maybe I'm just wired in a weird way, but it's like all this screaming at me or throwing stuff at me, whatever, like I say what I think is true and important. Like all that stuff is irrelevant to that.
00:29:03.500 Wow, that's amazing. That's fantastic. Do you worry that moving forward, you've become this radioactive toxic stew? And I'd like to believe that there will be many people who listen to this chat and see you on other platforms and say, this is exactly the type of guy that we want.
00:29:26.900 Look, and I'm a case of that, right? I mean, I've been doing what I've been doing for 32 plus years as a professor. I don't know, knock on wood, how I have survived all these years in academia. And then here I am, some really wonderful universities, including the one that I'm currently at, University of Mississippi, said, hey, this is the kind of guy that represents the kinds of, you know, ethos of liberty and freedom that we want, despite the fact that many other universities,
00:29:56.900 view me as a toxic evolutionary Zionist pig who supports the genocide of Gaza and so on.
00:30:04.140 So do you feel that, look, I could have been an obscure guy that's going to toil in postdoc
00:30:12.060 after postdoc, or pragmatically, I'm now at the center of these important debates, and
00:30:19.260 I can't wait for hopefully the right school to come along and rescue me.
00:30:23.360 Where are you in that sort of career trajectory?
00:30:25.820 Well, I'm very committed to the project of retaking the institutions. You know, I don't like the idea of slinking away and kind of doing my own, just doing the independent thing. Yeah, I do. I do that. I do a lot of work on Substack.
00:30:45.040 But it's very important to have a physical presence, in my opinion, in important institutions, and not just cede them to left-wing activists. So I do want to obtain a position that I am qualified for.
00:31:05.100 but uh yeah i mean there has been the last generation has really seen a purge
00:31:16.820 of almost every anyone who would be in a position to get to you know recruit me now you're at a much
00:31:27.660 earlier stage in your career than where i am so i can speak as someone who's longitudinally sampled
00:31:33.720 many generations of students and so on. But at your stage right now, do you hold out hope that
00:31:42.080 to your point about, you know, not ceding the ground to the ideologues, is there hope for the
00:31:48.720 universities? Or do you think it's a slow death and all of these institutions, including, I mean,
00:31:54.300 Cambridge? I mean, imagine Cambridge is succumbing to all this nonsense. Is there hope? Or do you
00:32:01.180 think it's a losing battle. We should do what we can to muscle our way back in. I don't think that
00:32:08.360 we can really reform institutions until there's significant cultural change. Right now, the
00:32:15.880 wokeism, which I see as what follows inevitably from the denial of group differences in socially
00:32:24.540 relevant traits that is the religion of the of the elites and it's not you know legislated
00:32:33.400 there's no conspiracy it's just if you believe that all groups are innately the same then the
00:32:40.260 existence of persistent disparities presents us with a moral emergency and everything about woke
00:32:46.320 ism follows from that so people just have to understand until people learn to think biologically
00:32:53.460 i uh i don't see any you know real prospect for for retaking i love that you said this because
00:33:05.300 until people start thinking biologically so one of the parasitic ideas that i discuss
00:33:11.140 in the parasitic mind is biophobia the fear of using biology to explain human phenomena
00:33:19.100 And there is a wonderful term, not mine, called the human reticence effect, which basically posits, to your point, that it is perfectly reasonable to apply biological-based thinking, Darwinian thinking, to every single species on Earth except one that transcends biology.
00:33:40.800 It's called Homo sapiens. But if we are going to provide affordances for the evolutionary
00:33:48.260 mechanisms to seep into for human behavior, it has to stop at the neck. So using biology or
00:33:57.680 evolution to explain why we have opposable thumbs, sure, that sounds great. Why our respiratory
00:34:02.360 system is the way that it is, yeah, sure, that sounds great. But applying it for the most
00:34:06.660 important organ that defines your personhood, now that's just quack pseudoscience. And that's
00:34:12.620 how I originally, Nathan, started the idea of parasitic thinking was simmering in my head
00:34:20.540 30 plus years ago, because I finished my PhD, I had gotten my evolutionary epiphany, I had read
00:34:27.660 the book Homicide by Daly and Wilson, where they applied the evolutionary framework to
00:34:33.340 study patterns of criminality. And I said, okay, great. I'm going to take that framework and now
00:34:38.560 apply it to the behavioral fields that are most interesting to me. And I was housed in a business
00:34:43.220 school. So I applied it to consumer behavior and to economic behavior and so on. And then I saw
00:34:49.220 all of my colleagues who were either at the business school or in the social sciences
00:34:53.280 say, what kind of nonsense is this? And then I started thinking, well, how could these supposedly
00:34:59.600 intelligent people with many titles before their name and after their name be so imbecilic so
00:35:05.260 removed from reality and then basically the parasitic mind just wrote itself i just collected
00:35:10.220 enough evidence for 30 years and voila here comes suicidal empathy here comes so what's your
00:35:16.640 explanation for biophobia several several reasons that's a great question and in one of my earlier
00:35:23.460 books and The Consuming Instinct, I offer an exact explanation of what you just asked me.
00:35:30.720 So let me give you a few. Number one, to the extent that many people have misused evolutionary
00:35:38.680 thinking to pursue their political vision, then it becomes dangerous to apply biological-based
00:35:47.080 thinking. So if the eugenicists say, hey, we need to get rid of people who may have the gay gene,
00:35:52.500 Why don't we sterilize them? And therefore, we can select out. Of course, that mechanism doesn't work. But I'm using a, quote, pseudo Darwinian process. If the British social Darwinists, and I hate that term, or the social class elitists say, hey, there's a natural struggle between the upper and lower classes. This is in the 19th century. And if the lower classes die, they die of tuberculosis. Well, hey, that's just a natural struggle between social classes. It's Darwinian who gives a shit.
00:36:21.880 if the nazis come along and say hey there's a natural struggle between races we're the aryans
00:36:27.160 sorry jews gypsies you're out that's just darwinian so then here comes franz boas regrettably
00:36:33.520 a fellow jewish cultural anthropologist who says why don't we now create a new reality
00:36:38.920 so that we can build edifices of bullshit that are fully detached from reality but it leads to a good
00:36:47.340 consequentialist outcome, which is we've at least protected against the possibility of biology being
00:36:53.440 misused. So that would be one example. Can I give you one or two others, or do you want to interject?
00:36:57.420 Well, I would say I did have some dispute with Kevin MacDonald about Franz Boas's role in
00:37:06.660 bringing about this orthodoxy. You know, I trace the original statement of race denial, also the
00:37:17.140 denial of individual differences to 1690 and john locke true he that he he literally said not only
00:37:23.960 was he a blank slatist which of course he's very famous for but he said that there's no difference
00:37:30.080 between groups if an englishman were born in africa or vice versa then they would just be like
00:37:34.980 no difference at all um i think that it's uh that well blank slatism in general that the idea of
00:37:43.500 human malleability is very appealing to like the leftist mind exactly right so so one of the other
00:37:49.560 by the way i i only refer to franz boas because to the extent that he is the originator of cultural
00:37:56.620 relativism then there is a very direct pathway from internalizing cultural relativism and then
00:38:02.460 supporting open border policies as a suicidally empathetic position right who are you to judge
00:38:07.740 whether other people can't assimilate as easily within the western tradition
00:38:11.620 but but you are right John Locke said that he had the blank slate position but also behaviorism
00:38:18.060 right the stimulus response model of John Watson and all these guys also was that so social
00:38:23.920 constructivism goes in tandem with with biophobia and so you're exactly right so that's why I'm
00:38:31.240 saying that my original impetus to write parasitic mind in 2020 really started in 1994 when I would
00:38:39.980 make these arguments about, for example, how hormones affect women's beautification practices
00:38:48.700 as a result of where they are in their menstrual cycles. And people would go completely wacko.
00:38:55.080 Are you saying that human female consumers are no different than female chimpanzees? You quack
00:39:03.260 pseudoscientists. So that's why I'm saying that the parasitic mind was a natural progression
00:39:08.700 of all the lunacy i saw so but let's talk since you mentioned kevin i mean i originally referred
00:39:15.340 to kevin mcdonald and you mentioned him tell us about that you know locking horn because once in
00:39:21.540 a while not often i will get some sort of you know uh pro-white anti-jew guy quoting kevin
00:39:30.100 mcdonald as the real evolutionary scientist whereas i'm just the fake evolutionary scientist
00:39:35.320 Tell us about your locking horns with him.
00:39:38.180 So, McDonald is an evolutionary psychologist who is at Cal State Long Beach, and he came up with the theory that Judaism is a group evolutionary strategy, that Jews are genetically and culturally adapted to undermine Gentile society for their own benefit.
00:39:57.840 and specifically argues that the triumph of leftism
00:40:03.800 in the 20th century was brought about
00:40:07.220 by highly ethnocentric Jews
00:40:09.400 who were consciously or unconsciously
00:40:11.680 pursuing the group evolutionary strategy.
00:40:13.980 Sort of the Frankfurt School stuff.
00:40:16.240 Yeah, so the thing is,
00:40:18.580 it is possible to point to a bunch of left-wing Jews
00:40:22.620 in prominent positions.
00:40:24.280 Like, that is a thing that you can do.
00:40:25.760 Now, the alternative explanation, not really seriously considered by McDonald's, is that Jews are just overrepresented in everything.
00:40:38.580 And basically every country in which they live, Jews are overrepresented in high-profile or cognitively demanding positions.
00:40:49.440 and so that the alternative explanation is you're just picking out the jews doing the thing you
00:40:56.260 don't like and spinning some story about that now it may be true that jews have been disproportionately
00:41:03.820 on the left in recent history but it's also true that the right has been disproportionately
00:41:11.960 overtly anti-Semitic. And so the hypothesis that I propose is that Jews are more likely to be
00:41:23.380 involved in any cognitively demanding activity that isn't overtly anti-Semitic. So you can't say,
00:41:32.800 well, why are Jews not overrepresented among leading Nazis? Although even there, it's not
00:41:37.920 clear that they aren't. Because you look closely and some of these anti-Semitic accounts turn out
00:41:45.680 to be run by Jews. But anyway, the null hypothesis is that they would not be as overrepresented in
00:41:52.900 overtly anti-Semitic movements. And then there's nothing to be explained. Jews are overrepresented
00:41:59.980 in physics and literature and math and in political movements that have nothing to do
00:42:05.740 with leftism and the stuff that
00:42:07.700 MacDonald doesn't like, like libertarianism,
00:42:10.200 paleoconservatism,
00:42:12.540 and evolutionary
00:42:13.840 psychology, Jews are
00:42:15.900 overrepresented.
00:42:17.680 So one explanation
00:42:19.760 explains Jewish overrepresentation
00:42:22.200 across the board, is what I
00:42:23.940 argued, and that MacDonald's
00:42:25.840 arguments that
00:42:26.740 people like the Frankfurt School theorists,
00:42:29.820 Franz Boas, were really
00:42:32.160 motivated
00:42:33.120 by ethnocentrism and the desire to undermine Gentile society
00:42:40.180 but preserve Jewish ethnic separatism is not based on real evidence.
00:42:48.140 Right. And I mean, a current manifestation of this,
00:42:52.480 picking the Jews whose positions you don't like,
00:42:56.460 Oh, NGOs run by Jews are all about open border policies. George Soros is about the open, you know, open borders. And therefore, there is an inherent Jewish proclivity to undermine Western societies by having open borders, not recognizing that there are two pretty high profile exemplars of Jews.
00:43:23.360 One is called Gatsad. One is called Stephen Miller, you know, the head czar of immigration in the Trump administration, who is also Jewish.
00:43:33.120 But we are not the real representation of the Jewish position because we are anti-open borders.
00:43:40.860 The real Jewish position is the George Soros one. That speaks to your point, yes?
00:43:45.580 So the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society is very famous among anti-Semites.
00:43:53.360 Constantly hearing about Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, there are eight organizations that are funded by the government to promote open borders.
00:44:04.300 Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society is one of eight.
00:44:08.060 There were like three or four Christian organizations and a few others that have nothing to do with Jews.
00:44:16.720 So people select the one that's Jewish.
00:44:19.180 And besides that, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society loves open borders for Israel, and they're doing everything they can to bring refugees and diversity to Israel. So these arguments fall apart often when examined.
00:44:35.700 The other case that I'm familiar with regarding you locking horns with some academics is someone
00:44:42.380 that I've had the distinct displeasure of interacting with, if only obliquely on a few
00:44:47.660 occasions. And to my earlier point, when I find out that she's coming after me, I usually will
00:44:52.820 spend four hours going after her until I get bored and move on to something else, is Rebecca Sear,
00:44:58.980 who apparently came after you and taught Shackleford,
00:45:03.540 but in an earlier time, she went after Satoshi Kanazawa,
00:45:07.480 who's at the London School of Economics.
00:45:09.960 Maybe you could tell us about,
00:45:11.320 because she's a lot more enlightened.
00:45:12.960 She's a very liberal, progressive, white anthropologist.
00:45:17.380 She knows better.
00:45:18.540 She knows that only Islamophobes would ever have a problem
00:45:22.300 with a society becoming more Islamized.
00:45:24.120 What was the timber of your locking horns with her?
00:45:28.980 I don't think I took out my horns for that. I know she's smeared me a few times, but I'm not sure I ever responded.
00:45:37.660 Oh, you ignored her.
00:45:39.160 I don't think I responded as far as I can remember.
00:45:42.880 Well, maybe I need to implement your sort of, in French, you say mon fichiste, your kind of, I don't give a crap.
00:45:50.740 Is that what led you to not respond because she wasn't worthy of your time? Because I'm sort of the opposite.
00:45:56.720 Yes, I mean, I do ignore a million people who come after me, but someone who is at the, I don't know where she is exactly, somewhere in London or something.
00:46:05.060 But, you know, she's the president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society in the European edition.
00:46:11.420 And she's been, I think, editor or, you know, consulting editor of several journals.
00:46:15.380 When someone like that, with whom you would think I share many, many commonalities, intellectually speaking, in terms of our commitment to applying the evolutionary lens to human affairs, when she starts sort of really, I mean, just smearing me.
00:46:30.400 She said that both Elon and I were instrumental in calling for civil war in Britain, where
00:46:38.560 what I had said is that the natural outcome of the realities that we're seeing now will
00:46:44.580 be civil war.
00:46:45.560 I did not call for civil war.
00:46:47.320 I said that this is what would end up happening.
00:46:49.640 So she's literally defamatory and libelous.
00:46:52.800 And so that pissed me off.
00:46:53.900 I went after her.
00:46:55.160 What led you to say, ah, I'm too busy on this Saturday.
00:46:58.420 I'm just going to ignore her.
00:46:59.400 Did she do it recently? Because I know she did it some years ago. I do remember that. I don't remember replying, but did she do it recently, too?
00:47:06.960 You mean to you or to me?
00:47:08.540 To me.
00:47:09.660 To you, I don't know. I just heard through other sources, because somebody saw my very pitbull responses to Rebecca Sear. They wrote to me privately.
00:47:21.200 You're fighting her for both of us.
00:47:24.080 There you go. You're welcome.
00:47:25.320 thank you i uh i it's very possible she's been attacking me recently too i'm i because i i
00:47:33.200 frankly haven't been able to check my notifications recently it's just impossible
00:47:38.540 but uh yeah i'm sure i there was a i i wasn't aware of this until like a few days after it
00:47:47.100 had been going on but there's a a bunch of people who are going through my phd dissertation at
00:47:54.620 oxford and uh explaining why i'm just like jason arday and and uh it's totally fraudulent and i
00:48:02.900 don't know anything and incidentally there were five so they somebody pub uh posted the introduction
00:48:10.660 to my dissertation and they said that it doesn't have enough citations therefore it's not real
00:48:18.620 like scholarship but anyway my dissertation had five chapters uh all of them published in top
00:48:27.280 journals biology and philosophy the flagship journal in the field quarterly review of biology
00:48:34.080 philosophical studies philosophical quarterly and journals with the less than five percent
00:48:40.880 acceptance rate. But anyway, the internet commentators are all saying that I'm no better
00:48:53.860 than Jason Arde. Well, I have to say, and I say this, we're speaking one-on-one, but of course,
00:49:01.320 it will be viewed by many people. I have to say that I'm really impressed by your ability to take
00:49:08.280 this with stride and perhaps it's that temperament that has allowed you to to survive this stuff
00:49:15.820 because I think I mean believe me as I said I've been this is my 33rd year as a professor
00:49:20.880 and I don't think there is a more cowardly class anywhere in nature than professors this is why I
00:49:28.640 call professors a separate species I call them the invertebrate castrati right they don't have
00:49:35.140 a spine, nor do they have testicles. And so to be able to see someone like you who is exhibiting
00:49:42.360 the exact opposite of what is expected from a good standing citizen of academia is a breath of fresh
00:49:51.740 air. Is there anything else that you want to add to our conversation before we wrap it up that
00:49:57.080 you'd like to tell the audience that we haven't discussed so far? Well, that was very kind of you
00:50:02.740 to say of course uh the the result is that i'm uh well i'm not a professor i can't even well uh
00:50:10.960 due to the disclaimer i made at the beginning i can't even say what i am so but i'm still
00:50:16.980 you know you still have a brain you still have courage you still have the pen you still have
00:50:24.660 the mouth and you're welcome back any day on the satyr thank you so much for your courage nathan
00:50:30.960 if anybody is watching never modulate what you want to say for careerist perspective the good
00:50:39.400 people will pay attention if you do the right thing and hopefully i'm sure something good
00:50:43.780 will come of this nathan thank you so much for coming on stay on the line thank you very much
00:50:48.060 thank you thank you my pleasure stay on the line so we can say goodbye cheers take care