2,399 words

Nathan Cofnas first came to my attention in 2018 when he became the first mainstream academic to challenge Kevin MacDonald regarding his classic work of counter-Semitism, The Culture of Critique. He engaged with Prof. MacDonald point for point over the course of several weeks regarding the work’s merits and demerits, producing academic theater that was both tedious and fascinating; perhaps a little more of the latter. I wrote a four-part series on it for Counter-Currents at the time.

Cofnas penned an essay on January 2 of this year with the provocative title “Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem,” and although I am coming to this late, I feel a response is necessary. As with his contentious treatment of Culture of Critique, Cofnas gets quite a bit right, but he gets quite a bit more wrong.

His thesis can be encapsulated thusly: Because both the Right and the Left in America accept the central egalitarian premise of wokeism, but only the Left is willing to see wokeism through to its conclusion, smarter people are more attracted to the Left than the Right. In order for the Right to combat this and claw its way back to relevance, it must inject race realism into our public discourse in order to refute egalitarian wokeism and bring all those smart Lefties back to the Right, where they belong.

Much of this is plainly absurd from a dissident Right perspective, since race realism has been the Right’s bread and butter for over a century. If race realism is all it takes, then why didn’t Madison Grant slay the Boasian dragon back in 1920? Soon, however, one realizes that by “the Right” Cofnas is referring to mainstream conservatives and not what I presume he would call the “far Right” — i.e., institutions such as Counter-Currents, The Occidental Observer, American Renaissance, and VDARE. (Such organizations would not have been considered “far” anything 100 years ago.) Indeed, Cofnas conflates conservatives and “the Right” so often that if you’re new to politics, you’d think there was almost no one to the Right of National Review and FOX News when reading Cofnas.

Given these parameters, however, Cofnas offers some cutting and valuable insights about wokeism and its origins:

I argue that wokism is simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously, given a background of Christian morality. Both the mainstream left and right believe that innate cognitive ability and temperament are distributed equally among races, and probably the sexes, too. . . . As I will explain, wokesters correctly follow the equality thesis to its logical conclusion, whereas conservatives fail to recognize the implications of their own beliefs. Smart people are disproportionately attracted to wokism in large part because it offers a more intellectually coherent explanation for the major issue of our time, which is the persistence of racial disparities.

Much of Cofnas’ essay delves into the idea that the egalitarian fallacy is the true source of wokeism, rather than competing explanations from Christopher Rufo and Richard Hanania. In his book America’s Cultural Revolution, Rufo points to critical theory and the Frankfurt School as the genesis of wokeism, while in The Origins of Woke Hanania looks to civil rights legislation. Since I more or less agree with Cofnas when he avers that both critical theory and civil rights are effects rather than the causes of wokeism, I won’t recapitulate his arguments — as interesting as they are.

Cofnas should be commended not only for promoting race-realism but for understanding that, logically speaking, it is the lycanthropic Left’s silver dagger. Once an honest person is armed with thorough knowledge of psychometrics, police statistics, political corruption, genetics, and neuroscience, explanations for racial inequalities become much more economical and conclusive.

This, unfortunately, is the end of all the nice things I have to say about Cofnas’ essay. His first mistake is to label mainstream conservatives as “the Right.” This allows him to set up a big, fat-headed strawman that he can smack around for 10,000 words. While he defines wokeism effectively, he never exactly defines what the Right is — other than it presumably not being woke. (And if both the Right and the Left accept egalitarianism, what significant difference is there?) We can surmise, however, that Cofnas’ “Right” consists of unserious, unintellectual rubes of middling intelligence and middlebrow taste. It’s no wonder they’re not able to accomplish what the more intelligent Left has. Further, the thought leaders of Cofnas’ Right — who I presume are all mainstream conservative pundits — are too scared to challenge the Left over the egalitarian fallacy. Thus, they fail to attract the best people and prove to be useless at everything except for distracting their audiences with stories about “UFOs, gay-sex conspiracy theories, and hydroxychloroquine.”

While a bit reductive, this description does have a ring of truth. But Cofnas weakens his argument by excluding most of the highly intelligent people on the Right. Yes, he does admit there are first-rate thinkers there, but he doesn’t name them, let alone compare them to the brightest people on the Left. He talks up race realism but never once mentions Jared Taylor or Peter Brimelow. He talks about the Left’s greater academic achievements, but does not mention scholars such as Greg Johnson or Ed Dutton. He sings the praises of Ezra Klein while ignoring Gregory Hood and Jim Goad. Why Cofnas does this is unclear. Perhaps it’s because these men also reject the egalitarian lie of the Left and for years have been pushing the very same race realism that Cofnas is trying to introduce to his readership. Acknowledging these thinkers would certainly put some backbone into his strawman, which wouldn’t make his un-pithy essay any pithier. Acknowledging them would also undermine his sales pitch.

Here’s Cofnas informing his readers about what some good ol’ race realism can accomplish (emphasis mine):

Hanania argues that if wokism is a “matter of philosophy and belief,” the solution is “more books, articles, essays, and scientific studies debunking the beliefs that form the basis of identity politics and political correctness. In other words, keep employing the same strategy that opponents of earlier and more contemporary forms of wokeness have used since at least the 1970s” (p. 19). But we have never tried the strategy of refuting the belief that forms the true basis wokism, which is the equality thesis. There is every reason to think that undermining the equality thesis is the ultimate solution. The entire woke system collapses when it is recognized that disparities are due to nature. That’s why the left fights so hard to defend the taboo on hereditarianism. Leftists understand what is at stake: everything.

Excuse me? We have never tried refuting the equality thesis? Has Nathan Cofnas not heard of Arthur Jensen, J. Philippe Rushton, William Shockley, Richard Lynn, Tatu Vanhanen, Charles Murray, Richard Herrnstein, and Michael Levin? That’s precisely what those guys did and is what they are famous for doing. If Cofnas is arguing in good faith, then he is either ignorant or naïve. And if he is arguing in bad faith, then this better be some very good snake oil if he expects his readership to believe that his brand of race realism is the magic bullet, while all that those other losers offer is a bunch of duds. Yes, race realism is crucial for overthrowing the Left — but it alone has proven to be insufficient. If Cofnas cares to deny this, then he will have to explain why, after 30 years of beating the race realist drum better than anyone else, Jared Taylor isn’t on the board of trustees at Yale.

Another drawback of Cofnas’ essay is that he assumes the playing field is level, even when he says it isn’t. He assumes that people are free to align with whichever political ideology they see fit and will select the one that is most persuasive or “intellectually coherent.” He tells us that “[t]he fact that an ideology fails to attract smart people is an indication that there is something wrong with the ideology, which needs to be corrected.”

Yeah. No.

In the real world, the elites in charge of functioning societies want to maintain power. This means they have to keep a lid on their society’s subversive elements without cracking down on them so hard as to spark a revolution. When these elites are hampered by such things as the First Amendment and cannot simply jail dissidents (as they do in England), they must resort to rewarding political correctness, punishing political incorrectness, and ignoring everything in between. Most of the time, people avoid “incorrect” ideologies not because there is necessarily something wrong with them, as Cofnas claims, but out of fear of being punished. As we all know, if you choose to become a public dissident in America you will find yourself ostracized, cancelled, unemployable, undatable, impoverished, and the subject of your very own hate page on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website. Who in his right mind would plop for that when he can just keep his mouth shut and go with the (leftward) flow? Just because someone is smart doesn’t mean he’s immune to this. One can be a genius in any number of academic disciplines and still be a squish when it comes to possibly losing one’s 401K.

Oddly, Cofnas seems to understand this:

It’s true that the playing field is not equal for right- and left-wing content creators. A newspaper or video channel that reported accurate information about race, crime, and IQ would be deemed a hate organization and would probably be kicked off of mainstream platforms. Some of the best right-wing YouTube channels were snuffed out by the censors. However, the right’s failure cannot be attributed entirely to censorship. There are plenty of spaces on the Internet where people can speak openly about whatever they want, and where right-wing talent is free to express itself. Liberals are not solely responsible for the right’s failure to capitalize on these opportunities.

It’s too bad that Cofnas never bothered to include interviews with actual Right-wing content creators who were purged from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube following Unite the Right in 2017. They went to alternative platforms, sure, but their follower counts plummeted from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands — without any reduction in quality or quantity of output. Organizations that unfairly lost their payment processors likewise lost the majority of their donors and funding. You cannot blame the Right for this. Yet Cofnas, for the most part, does. It comes across as plainly snide.

Cofnas similarly does not notice a glaring hole in his argument. If smart people are smart enough to recognize that wokeness is “intellectually coherent” because it takes the equality thesis seriously, then why aren’t they smart enough to spot the obvious flaws in the equality thesis itself? The answer is that the so-called smart people Nathan Cofnas trumpets are not actually very smart; they’re midwits. They are people in the 110-115 IQ range — highly functional and productive people, certainly, but not geniuses and not truly gifted. Although one advantage they do have over gifted people and geniuses is numbers — that is, a higher position on the Y-axis along the right side of the bell curve. As Cofnas himself explains:

But great institutions aren’t built by lone geniuses. They require a large network of staff and supporters to competently execute the myriad tasks that keep the gears turning.

This, more so than “intellectual coherence,” helps explain why Leftist institutions have such near-universal reach while intellectually coherent Right-wing ones such as Counter-Currents and American Renaissance do not.

Cofnas spills a lot of ink proving that the white consumers of Leftist media are on average smarter than white consumers of conservative media. After noting that Republican voters have a slight IQ edge over Democrat voters in the General Social Survey test, which administers a vocabulary test called WORDSUM, Cofnas states that

the results are skewed by the large number of lower-average-IQ minorities who vote Democrat. When Emil Kirkegaard restricted the analysis to whites (still the most culturally influential demographic) and considered ideological rather than party identification, he found a substantial difference favoring liberals in WORDSUM IQ. “Extreme liberals” score the highest at 107, followed by “liberals” at 105. They were trailed by “conservatives” at 101, and “extreme conservatives” at 98.5. Only people who reported that they “don’t know” their political orientation scored worse than extreme conservatives. The same conservatives who complain about immigrants not speaking proper American know fewer English words than liberals, and this indicates lower IQ.

I won’t challenge him on this because he is largely correct. But I will note that never once does Cofnas spare the feelings of the people he’s belittling. Note also that this essay’s third paragraph is just dripping with contempt for conservatives — or is it contempt for ordinary white people?

Following Marjorie Taylor Greene, some American conservatives think the solution to our political problems is a “national divorce.” I think this would be a bad deal for both sides, but worse for conservatives. The Conservative States of America would most likely be a middle-income country that squanders its national budget on hunting down abortion doctors and erecting Pyramid of Giza-scale Ten Commandments monuments. Not satisfied with country music and Daily Wire films starring Gina Carano, the conservatives would have to import most of their entertainment from Wokistan, which the conservatives would still complain about despite being unable to produce their own alternatives. Many conservative elites would probably apply for asylum in Wokistan.

The worst-case scenario is that Nathan Cofnas is an anti-white race realist. At best, he’s a race-neutral one. I’d like to think he’s the latter, but since at the end of his essay he insinuates that Kevin MacDonald is an “emotionally disturbed fool,” I think I’ll place my bets on the former. Of course, all of this is his prerogative. He has every right to insult a white advocate such as Prof. MacDonald and to call average-IQ whites stupid. It certainly doesn’t bother me. But this also means I have the right to call Nathan Cofnas a midwit in return, and to call the 115-IQ Leftists who run academia and the media midwits as well. I will leave it to Cofnas to explain why people who are educated yet too intellectually muddled to recognize the biological basis of race are actually somehow “smart.”

We’ll see if Nathan Cofnas is smart enough to answer that one.