▪️ EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece was first published in American Thinker. You can link to it here.▪️
As conservative behavioral scientist and author of “Suicidal Empathy” Gad Saad says of the Jason Arday affair:
“This story understates the Orwellian and Kafkaesque world of academia in every conceivable manner.”
The (trans) “woman,” pictured in the X post below, fired the (white) academic, Nathan Cofnas, who outed (black) “intellectual” Jason Arday as a fraud. And “she” did so, explicitly because of what Cofnas uncovered, characterizing his revelations as lacking in “respect for human dignity and opposition to discrimination.”
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Soooo… Jason Arday was not to be questioned because… racism. How very tedious. Therein swoops the white trannie to white-knight for the poor — dead at 41 by his own hand — black “intellectual.” Because forget protecting the reputation of an 800 year old university when there’s a black “intellectual” who needs to be infantilized even in death.
As you are likely aware, Jason Arday became 800 year old Cambridge University’s youngest professor ever. He was the undisputed darling of the progressives who run the place. Mr. Arday got the job via a howling fraud that only an intellectual could have missed. Anyone — I mean anyone — with a shred of common sense would have seen it immediately. Mr. Arday claimed…
…to have been mute until age 11 and illiterate until 18, disadvantages that did not deter him from getting a Ph.D., which he earned by age 30. He claimed, too, that he had suffered from various medical conditions throughout his life, including autism, epilepsy, locked-in syndrome, testicular cancer, and a brain tumor. He was, by his account, a world-class endurance athlete who had racked up a variety of impressive feats, including running 600 miles in six days.
The entire list should have raised all kinds of red flags, but running 100 miles per day? For 6 straight days?? Especially given what he claimed about his medical history? C’mon…. It all added up to a grab bag of delusion. But what do I know? I’m just a housewife in Western North Carolina, not a fancy European “intellectual.”
One other American — with the chops to do something about it — also saw through it, a Mr. Nathan Cofnas who, according to his own “About” me page, was…
…a postdoc in the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at Ghent University. From 2022–2025 I was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Before that I studied at Oxford (DPhil, Philosophy), Cambridge (MPhil, History and Philosophy of Science), Lingnan, and Columbia (BA, Philosophy).
People often assume I’m British, but in fact I was born in Chicago and grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In my third year in the UK I once accidentally pronounced “status” as stay-tus, but otherwise I have a New York accent.
Having just left his Fellowship at Cambridge last year, Professor Cofnas had a keen interest in the university though he was currently ensconced at Ghent University in Belgium. He therefore began looking into celebrity Professor Arday’s curriculum vitae and found it wanting. He brought his abundant and inarguable evidence to the proper authorities who then rewarded his integrity and academic rigor with a suspension.
Which has resulted in this, from our own Ambassador to Belgium:
From the Ambassador’s X post:
“Free speech means that controversial views are protected… The ultimate purpose of freedom of speech is to overturn lies, fraud, and false ideologies. This is precisely what Cofnas was doing, and precisely the reason his home institution wants to silence him.”
Way to hold that torch of Liberty aloft, which is exactly what our State Department should be doing! Really, really glad to see this. Now that’s some muscular foreign policy. Good for him, the Ambassador, and very good on our State Department under the sure hand of Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who has surprised many of us with his extremely energetic MAGA diplomacy).
We can only hope someone with the integrity and curriculum vitae of Nathan Cofnas finds a new university home, but outside of Hillsdale, there are precious few universities who would welcome him. And therein lies the problem. The political homogeny of the academy. It’s toxic beyond repair. Happily, we are seeing more and more families choose not to send their children to these indoctrination camps. Sooner or later, they will crater under the weight of their ideological fragility, and perhaps then, we can see more universities where Nathan Cofnas’s are the rule and not the exception.