There is something magnificently cheeky about calling Nathan Cofnas a “whistleblower”, like describing a bloke who keys your car and then asks to buy it off you cheap as an unusually proactive motor trader. Because whatever else happened here, this was never the clean little liberal-democratic morality play currently being assembled around him. Cofnas was not Gary Cooper standing alone in the university quad with a folder marked EVIDENCE. He was a former Cambridge academic with an enormous pre-existing grievance against Cambridge, a career-long fixation on race and intelligence and a stated belief that, under proper meritocracy, Black people would virtually disappear from prestigious positions. Then Jason Arday appeared: young, Black, conspicuously successful, publicly celebrated by Cambridge and working on exactly the sort of race-and-education scholarship Cofnas regards with roughly the enthusiasm of a Victorian undertaker discovering TikTok. So yes, Cofnas investigated him. And then, having helped turn Arday into the central exhibit in his travelling anti-DEI roadshow, he went on Fox News after Arday resigned and announced that people had suggested Arday’s professorship should be given to him. Amazing. That is not even subtext anymore. That is the villain in a daytime soap leaning into shot and explaining the property arrangements. Imagine Woodward and Bernstein finishing Watergate by telling Newsnight that, actually, now Nixon has gone, several people reckon they should probably have the White House. Imagine Deep Throat emerging from the car park to ask whether anyone knows what has happened to Kissinger’s parking space. Whatever you think of the allegations against Arday, once the man driving the campaign starts cheerfully discussing whether he should inherit the job of the bloke he has just helped remove, perhaps everybody can stop pretending we are dealing with some spectral embodiment of academic impartiality. And this is before getting to the weird ideological specificity of it all. Of all the academics in Britain whose work Cofnas might have devoted himself to auditing, he somehow landed on one of the country’s most prominent Black professors, whose rise at Cambridge represented almost everything Cofnas believes has gone wrong with elite institutions. Apparently this was merely an astonishing coincidence, like Nigel Farage accidentally spending twenty years investigating Romanian fruit pickers. Now Ghent University is investigating Cofnas, and suddenly the same people who spent weeks demanding that universities investigate academics properly have transformed into eighteenth-century pamphleteers screaming about liberty. This is apparently RETALIATION. CENSORSHIP. THE DEATH OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY. Steady on, lads. Ghent has opened a preliminary disciplinary investigation and suspended Cofnas while it considers whether there is a case to answer. That may ultimately prove excessive. Universities absolutely can abuse disciplinary processes, and academic freedom includes protecting people whose views are ugly, offensive or unpopular. But you do actually have to wait for the fucking investigation before declaring him Andrei Sakharov. That is the funniest part of this whole miserable spectacle. The Arday pile-on was sold as a heroic restoration of standards. Scrutiny was sacred. Institutions must investigate. Nobody is above accountability. Feelings are irrelevant. Follow the evidence wherever it leads. Then somebody followed the evidence in Cofnas’s direction and half the internet immediately started building him a little papier-mâché Nelson Mandela. Call him a critic. Call him an investigator. Call him a campaigner against DEI. Call him a man who raised allegations that deserved examination. But “whistleblower” makes him sound like an apolitical employee. This bloke helped force open the trapdoor, looked down at the vacant chair and essentially went: “While we’re here, does anyone mind if I have that?”

So here’s a modest proposal. Jason Arday is dead. The circus has lost its main attraction. The tent is still up, the popcorn machine is still warm, and several of the ringmasters are wandering around pretending they were merely checking the fire exits. Perhaps The Telegraph, The Spectator, Kathleen Stock, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Julie Bindel, Andrew Neil, Brendan O’Neill and the rest of Britain’s newly discovered Society for Relentless Academic Due Diligence could turn their tremendous investigative appetite towards Nathan fucking Cofnas. You know Nathan. The self-described race realist whose intervention helped detonate the Arday story. The bloke who already believed DEI was corrupting academia. The bloke who has argued that genuine meritocracy would leave vanishingly few Black professors at elite institutions. The bloke who talks about a “hereditarian revolution”. The bloke who, while discussing what comes next for his own career, joked that after “the revolution” he might become head of the department of eugenics and race science at Harvard. That Nathan Cofnas. Come on, lads. You have just spent weeks demonstrating that no biographical pebble is too small to overturn in the sacred pursuit of Truth. So get the fucking tweezers out. Go through his history. Interview the old classmates. Find the former supervisors. Call the ex-colleagues. Dust off the teenage writings. Read Reptiles with a Conscience from cover to fucking cover. Check every citation. Check every footnote. Find out what he believed before he acquired the qualifications he now uses to defend those beliefs. Ask when exactly the fascination with hereditarianism began. Ask what evidence changed his mind. Ask what evidence could change his mind. Ask whether race realism emerged reluctantly at the end of an exhausting empirical journey, or whether the destination appeared on the map first and the intellectual road-building project came afterwards. You wanted to know whether Jason Arday really ran every marathon he claimed. Excellent. I would quite like to know whether Nathan Cofnas has actually demonstrated that Black people are genetically less suited to elite intellectual life, or whether he has spent years developing increasingly elaborate reasons for believing something he found compelling in the first place. Seems at least as fucking interesting as somebody’s 10K split time. And while we are at it, perhaps ask why the alleged misconduct of one Black academic became so magnificently useful to a man whose existing political project already concerned Black representation, DEI and declining standards. Was Arday merely a plagiarism case? Or did Cofnas look at him and see Christmas morning? Because once you have spent years arguing that progressive universities are artificially elevating Black academics, discovering a celebrated Black Cambridge professor with serious questions hanging over his work must feel less like stumbling across evidence and more like finding a fucking golden ticket inside your ideological Wonka bar. And apparently that angle is not worth the same excavation? Really? Jason Arday tells a tall tale about running and Fleet Street behaves like somebody has discovered the Pentagon Papers. Nathan Cofnas spends years developing a political programme around hereditarianism and race, then helps frame a national scandal involving a Black professor, and suddenly everyone develops a tremendous respect for intellectual privacy. How curious. I am not asking for another pile-on. I am asking for the same thing you all claimed to worship while Arday was alive: scrutiny. Context. Provenance. Motivation. Evidence. Standards. Those lovely grown-up words everybody suddenly remembers when they are about to put somebody else under the microscope. 1/2