Remind me not to vacation in Belgium
The campaign to fire philosopher Nathan Cofnas for not believing woke dogmas has escalated to a demand to arrest him.
So far, the remarkable amount of legal (as opposed to economic) persecution of crimethinkers in Western Europe — by one estimate, more British dissenters have been arrested per capita than Soviet dissenters during the Brezhnev era — has been targeted almost solely at the indigenous working class and lower middle class. Few intellectuals have been arrested, and foreign visitors have largely been immune.
But, the University of Ghent offering a post-doc position to philosopher of biology Nathan Cofnas has demonstrated that wokeness is hardly dead as a legal juggernaut in Western Europe.
From Aporia:
Academic freedom is again under threat.
Mar 17, 2026
Written by Noah Carl.
In case you get confused by the two frequent Aporia contributors with N.C. initials, Noah Carl is a Brit with a doctorate in sociology and Nathan Cofnas is an American with a doctorate in philosophy of biology.
Philosopher Nathan Cofnas must be one of the most petitioned men in academia.
Noah Carl is another contender for that honor.
In 2019, he published a defence of free inquiry into group differences in intelligence. The paper appeared in a respected, peer-reviewed philosophy journal.1 But that didn’t stop the mob from trying to get it cancelled. More than 100 academics signed a petition calling for an apology, a retraction and even the resignation of the journal’s editors. The instigator of this campaign, philosopher Mark Alfano, told Cofnas, “You’re about to learn why people generally avoid fucking with me.” (He thus earned himself the nickname “Mafia Mark”.)
Then in 2022, Cofnas was appointed to a prestigious fellowship at the University of Cambridge (which is by no means surprising, given his impressive CV). This almost immediately sparked another, student-led petition, characterising his appointment as “morally reprehensible” and demanding that it be terminated.
Then in 2024, Cofnas published an influential article titled ‘A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution’. This was not warmly received by his detractors, to say the least. There were student protests at Cambridge and yet another petition, which amassed more than 1,200 signatures. One student claimed “there is blood on the hands of Nathan Cofnas”, and Lord Woolley (the first black man to head a Cambridge College) described his views as “abhorrent racism, masquerading as pseudo-intellect”.
Earlier this year, Cofnas was appointed to a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Ghent in Belgium. This has prompted no less than two further petitions against him (bringing the total to five).
The first, signed by 45 philosophers from the very department in which Cofnas was appointed, claims that his views “are morally beneath contempt” (not merely worthy of contempt but beneath it). The second, signed by several hundred academics from both Ghent University and elsewhere, expresses “indignation” about Cofnas’s appointment and purports to show that his views “violate our university’s ethical code”.
The first of the two recent petitions, published about a week ago, quotes the following passage from Cofnas as supposedly damning evidence against him:
In a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0%. Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.
Now, I will admit that the passage is worded indelicately. But from a factual perspective, it is correct. Statements of this kind are often shocking to people who’ve never studied intelligence research. They assume that only racism, or a deep-seated animosity toward black people, could motivate someone to write such a thing. Yet Cofnas was merely summarising what Harvard itself had found.
As I’ve been pointing out, affirmative action is in big trouble in the U.S. at present in part because almost everybody, including leftist intellectuals, is by now ignorant of just how big the IQ gaps are among the races. To point out that if Harvard admitted and hired only on valid quantitative predictors of academic performance, the number of African Americans at Harvard would drop by 80% or 90% sounds unthinkable. It seems racist to note that most blacks get into Harvard on racial preferences, so if we get rid of racial preferences, then black representation at Harvard will plummet.
But virtually nobody can think through that logical sequence under the current taboos.
Now, a Belgian judge writes …
Paywall here.
