‘Even Nazi Psychologists Acknowledged Jewish Intelligence’: The Posts of the Academic Who Targeted Jason Arday

A Byline Times review of Dr Nathan Cofnas’ social media output has found that he posted comments about “Jewish IQ”, racial purity and miscegenation that appear to be racist and antisemitic, and shared an essay arguing that the “emptying” of Gaza should be seen as “a realistic option”.

Cofnas, a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University in Belgium, published a Substack article in July 2026 that accused Professor Jason Arday of plagiarism and “academic fraud” and implied that Arday had invented aspects of his personal biography. The piece set off weeks of media coverage of Arday, Cambridge University’s youngest black professor, who resigned on 5 August and was found dead on 14 August.

Cofnas’ posts on Facebook and X could undercut his claims to be engaged in academic inquiry into the role of race and IQ in society. They also raise serious questions about why the media took their cues and framing on Arday from Cofnas despite his objectionable views.

In one post about Jewish IQ in August 2024, Cofnas approvingly cited the work of “Nazi psychologists” who “acknowledged Jewish intelligence”. In other posts, Cofnas complained about how “sh*tlibs” in Israel were facilitating “nonwhite immigration” into the country. He also dismissed a “huge %… of US Jews” as Mischlings, a derogatory German term meaning ‘mixling’ or half-breed that was adopted as a legal term by the Nazis to describe individuals with mixed Jewish and Aryan ancestry. Cofnas is Jewish.

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Cofnas Saved by Trump

Cofnas was suspended by Ghent University on 20 August, six days after Arday’s death. In a post to X, Cofnas said the university was investigating him “for discriminating against Arday”.

However, Ghent lifted the suspension after the Trump administration intervened publicly on Cofnas’ behalf.

The day after the suspension, the US Ambassador to Belgium, Bill White, publicly condemned it in a lengthy post on X. White said it was an exercise in “scapegoating” and “punish[ed]” Cofnas’ “accurate journalism unearthing academic dishonesty”. “Dishonest, corrupt institutions that engage in, or reward, scapegoating mob behaviour are not desirable partners for us,” White said.

White announced that the US Government would be “reviewing any relationships we have with Ghent University”. Public records show that the US Department of Defense funded research projects at Ghent valued at $869,000. His post was shared by Elon Musk, who responded with an American flag emoji.

On 27 August, Cofnas posted to X that Ghent’s rector, Petra De Sutter, had allowed him to “stay”. He said he wished to “personally thank” White, citing White’s “great support which helped bring about a just outcome. I am proud of my country.” The university also clarified that Cofnas’ case remained under disciplinary investigation, and that he would be barred from teaching and required to work remotely for three months.

Byline Times has discovered that Cofnas’ claims against Arday were either flatly incorrect or seriously dubious. Cofnas, for instance, questioned Arday’s claim to have run 30 marathons in 30 days, but evidence from the time, since unearthed, suggest that Arday did.

Byline Times has also shown how media coverage of allegations of plagiarism were heavily skewed and ignored the possibility raised by several academic observers that they may have resulted from unintentional errors.

Cofnas was dismissed from Emmanuel College at Cambridge in July 2024 after he published a blog post, ‘A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution’, that argued for “anti-woke” politics and said “there must be some barriers set up between races in order for each one to express its own unique genius”. Cofnas has denied advocating racial segregation.

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Posts on Jewish IQ and racial purity

Cofnas is a prolific poster online, including on X and Facebook. A review of his Facebook, in particular, reveals that Cofnas has posted inflammatory and bizarre commentary about Jewish IQ, racial purity and other matters.

In August 2024, Cofnas posted a rebuttal to an article and video made by the influencers Simone and Malcolm Collins, in which they argued that it was a “myth” that Jewish people had higher than average IQs. “If you think Jews don’t have higher average IQ, what planet are you living on?” Cofnas asked. “Even Nazi psychologists acknowledged Jewish intelligence.”

In November 2023, Cofnas posted a lengthy thread about the IQ scores of Ashkenazi Jews and “Jewish success”. Cofnas argued that the stereotype of Jews as “shrewd”, long treated as an antisemitic trope, was proof that there are genuine “obvious personality differences” between Jews and non-Jews. “We know that stereotypes generally have a basis in reality,” Cofnas wrote.

In a post in June 2024, Cofnas argued that the “reported intermarriage rate among non-Orthodox Jews is 72%, and it’s been that level for two generations. Huge % of US ‘Jews’ are 1st or 2nd degree Mischlings who identify as Jewish for oppression points (e.g. Tim Wise), fake Reform converts, or Kanye-style Israelites.” He later identified Tom Steyer, the businessman and failed California gubernatorial candidate, as a “Mischling Democrat”.

Mischling was adopted as a legal category by the Nazis for people with mixed Jewish and “German-blooded” or Aryan ancestry under the Nuremberg Race Laws. The German word can mean ‘mongrel’ or ‘half-breed’.

In a post from November 2023, Cofnas dismissed Tim Wise, an anti-racist and anti-Zionist campaigner with Russian Jewish heritage, as “one quarter Jew Tim Wise”. Cofnas compared Wise (and other liberal Jews) to “full-blooded Jews” who were “increasingly likely to be orthodox or Stephen Miller-type Trump voters”.

Cofnas also posted about the share of recent immigrants to Israel who are “halachically” Jewish, meaning recognised as Jewish under traditional religious law.

“Sh*tlibs in Israel want to do to Jews and Israel what their ideological counterparts in America and Europe want to do to whites and the West,” he wrote in February 2026. “Left-wing politicians like [Ehud] Barak constructed an immigration policy under which the majority (according to one report, 86%) of recent immigrants to Israel are not halachically Jewish.” Later in the thread, Cofnas wrote that “its the same philosophy as ‘anyone can be an Englishman, let’s bring in 20 million Pakistanis because they’ll become English.’”

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Posts on Gaza and Zohran Mamdani

In late November 2023, Cofnas shared an essay by the right-wing commentator Richard Hanania titled ‘Israel must crush Palestinian hopes’. Cofnas highlighted a passage claiming that the “international community cares more about the sins of Israel than everyone else in the world combined”. Hanania ended his essay by writing that “eventually I think we can get to a place where emptying Gaza becomes seen as a realistic option both within and outside the region”.

In November 2025 Cofnas responded to a post featuring an Associated Press photo showing destruction in Gaza City from Israeli bombardment. Cofnas wrote that “for the first time in 2000 years, there are consequences for killing Jews. With that image in their brains, people will think twice before they try to do it again.”

In June 2025, Cofnas wrote about Zohran Mamdani, now Mayor of New York: “Mamdani just won the Dem mayoral primary in NYC on the promise to be more anti-white/Jewish and to nationalize grocery stores and housing.”

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Interviews with Noah Carl and Amy Wax

In 2024, Cofnas interviewed the British academic Noah Carl on his podcast, The Cofnas Podcast. Carl lost a fellowship at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, in 2019 following widespread outcry from academics who accused him of publishing “ethically suspect and methodologically flawed” studies that amounted to “racist pseudoscience”.

In October 2024, Cofnas said on social media that YouTube had removed all episodes of The Cofnas Podcast for violating its “hate speech policy”.

Cofnas filmed two interviews with Amy Wax, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, in 2024. In October 2025, he posted a photo of himself with his arm around Wax, with the comment “Jewish race realist singularity”.

The university sanctioned Wax in September 2024, stripping her of her named chair and halving her salary for a year, after a faculty hearing board found that she had engaged in “flagrant unprofessional conduct” including a “history of sweeping, blithe, and derogatory generalisations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status”.

On a podcast in 2021, Wax said that “as long as most Asians support Democrats and help advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration”.