Stanford's "Classic Liberalism Initiative" seminar series platformed Nathan Cofnas and other far-right ideologues

On August 14, author and University of Cambridge professor Dr. Jason Arday, committed suicide.

Stemming from the resurfacing of a previously-cleared allegation of plagiarism, Dr. Arday was the subject of over 200 articles in the British press in less than a month. These pieces questioned not just his academic practices but everything about his life story, including the severity of his autism and developmental disabilities. In his public response to the firestorm, Dr. Arday admitted to making mistakes but denounced what was clearly a racially motivated campaign to get him removed from Cambridge that began as soon has he arrived at the university. This didn't stop the flurry of negative press coverage, nor did his resignation which arrived a few days later. Even after his death, the attacks in the press towards Dr. Arday continued, with commentators calling him a "liar and a fraud" and claiming that he was "destroyed by the ruthless machinery of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion)".

Nathan Cofnas

The academic who ignited the firestorm leading to Dr. Arday's death was Dr. Nathan Cofnas, an academic philosopher with an intense interest in race science.

Dr. Cofnas received his doctorate from Oxford University and was hired as faculty at Cambridge and as a research associate at Emmanuel College in 2022. However, he caused an uproar with a 2024 Substack post called "A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution: How to win the elites and create a better world in which he embraces "race realism", the debunked racist idea that genetic differences in IQ lead to differences in social outcome between races (Black people in particular). The reaction to this from the Cambridge student body was swift: 58 students filed formal complaints and a petition to have him removed reached 1,200 signatures.

Eventually, Emmanuel College would cut ties with Dr. Cofnas, but a disciplinary investigation from Cambridge cleared him of wrongdoing. He would eventually leave the university in 2024 anyway, moving to a postdoc position at Belgium's Ghent University earlier this year after being hired by Dr. Bouke de Vries of the Philosophy Department.

Upon learning this, there was an outcry from other faculty and students at Ghent, much like the backlash to his presence at Cambridge. In an open letter to Belgian magazine Humo, members of Ghent University's philosophy student council denounced Dr. de Vries' hiring of Cofnas, complaining that he assigned first year students a paper called "Can Liberalism Last?" by Jonathan Anomaly and Filipe Nobre Faria. This paper promotes so-called "great replacement theory" through a thin academic veneer, arguing that immigration and progressive social values lower fertility, which in turn presents a threat to the "biocultural continuity" of the west. It further suggests that a solution to this from governments would be a nationalist "coercively enforced vision of the world".

Bouke de Vries and Jonathan Anomaly have both published other racist papers; de Vries wrote a defense of blackface called "Why shouldn't race be a costume?" in 2023 while Anomaly gained infamy for a 2018 paper called "Defending eugenics". de Vris has recently attracted even more criticism for attending the London Conference on Intelligence, a secretive eugenics conference that hosts white supremacists.

I first became aware of Nathan Cofnas during my investigation into the identity of pseudonymous race scientist Jordan "Crémieux Receuil" Lasker. I noticed that Lasker was inexplicably invited to give a talk at Stanford for a lecture series called the Classical Liberalism Initiative (CLI). The lectures, organized by professor Ivan Marinovic from Stanford's Graduate School of Business, claims to foster an "open intellectual environment where all arguments and ideas are critically examined". However, in practice, the content of these talks is a mix of libertarian economics, reactionary theories about race and IQ, and pseudoscientific attacks towards transgender people.

Cofnas' CLI talk, titled "Race and the Origins of Wokism", follows these themes to a T. In it, he argues that wokism goes beyond just race, becoming a "unicause" that includes "queer climate justice for Palestine". He further asserts that "discrimination in favor of blacks is the norm in business and academia" and claims that the "feminization of institutions" led to more women academics who have "less of an emphasis on truth and free speech over feelings". Later in the talk, Cofnas bemoans that the "behavior of the Nazis gave a bad name to anything under the heading of race science" which is "unfair to the science".

When discussing future plans to end wokism, Cofnas claims that Project 2025, even if enacted, would not be able to completely end wokism. Because there are not enough anti-woke elites, he claims that "the only hope we have is to take some extremely radical actions". His slide lays out three prongs to his plan:

• Promote knowledge of the cause of race differences
• Change the population of decision makers at important universities
• Leverage political power

The Racists

When I first brought attention to Jordan Lasker's presence at Stanford in 2024, the university's only response was to quietly take down the YouTube video of his talk titled "The Academic and Career Trajectories of Underqualified College Admits".

However, he's far from the only racist that was invited to Stanford. Besides Nathan Cofnas, a host of figures from the modern anti-woke movement have lectured at the Classical Liberalism Institute, including:

• Peter Thiel
• Richard Hanania, a far right writer who was revealed to have a white supremacist blog written under the name "Richard Hoste". Despite his disavowal of this earlier work, he has continued to make racist comments such as saying that we need "more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people".
• Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, a controversial and much-criticized 1994 book that presented the debunked idea that Black people are genetically predisposed to have lower intelligence. His 2021 talk at Stanford was titled "The Chasm Between Scientific Consensus and Elite Doctrine on Gender, Race, and Class".
• James Orr, head of policy for the right wing Reform UK party who has ties to Peter Thiel.
• Chris Brunet. Brunet recommends Crémieux and the neo-nazi outlet Aporia on his Substack. Brunet spearheaded the bad faith crusade against Black Harvard president Claudine Gay in 2024 that led to her removal.
• Christopher Rufo - May 3, 2023 - Christopher Rufo (Manhattan Institute) & Keith Whittington (Princeton) - Academic Freedom and Higher Education Reform
• John Sailer, crusader against DEI promoted by Rufo and fellow at the conservative anti-diversity National Association of Scholars. Sailer has written several anti-diversity essays of his own for The Free Press.
• Bruce Gilley, political science professor who wrote a controversial paper called "The Case For Colonialism", leading to the resignation of 15 members from the publishing journal's editorial board. Gilley would later double down on this idea, claiming that colonialism was not an "inherent moral wrong".
• Douglas Murray, British far-right agitator who has promoted the "Cultural Marxism" conspiracy theory. Murray also promoted Great Replacement narratives in his 2017 book The Strange Death of Europe where he argued that the continent and "The West" at large are effectively committing suicide by allowing immigration from Muslim-majority countries.
• Jordan Peterson joined Douglas Murray for his talk. Peterson initially gained fame through his refusal to use the correct pronouns for his transgender students.
• Steven Pinker, Stanford psychologist who has been criticized for his past endorsement of white supremacist Steve Sailer and promotion of race science about Ashkenazi Jews. Mar 19, 2021 - Steven Pinker – Harvard University - An (Unnecessary) Defense of Reason and a (Necessary) Defense of Universities’ Role in Advancing It
• Heather Mac Donald gave two talks called "The Diversity Delusion" and "When Race Trumps Merit" in 2021 and 2023 respectively. Mac Donald is a proud believer in Great Replacement theory and once criticized mothers for hiring non-white nannies from the "low IQ 3rd world".

Many of these speakers are also linked via the far-right pro-eugenics Substack magazine Aporia which openly promotes "race realism", leading to negative press when ostensibly respectable academics appear on it. The outlet is run by Noah Carl and Emil Kirkegaard, a frequent collaborator of Jordan Lasker. Ties between Kirkegaard, Carl, and Peter Thiel were documented by the UK nonprofit HOPE not Hate in an investigation where he was quoted as saying:

"I went over there. And after that, he was so happy with the meeting, he asked me to suggest a bunch of other people. So I suggested also Noah Carl, Nathan Cofnas. All these people have already gotten the Thiel treatment. And never got any money from Thiel, but certainly we know that he knows about some of the stuff now."

Carl defended Cofnas from racism allegations in an Aporia article earlier this year.
Besides Noah Carl, Classical Liberalism speakers who have appeared on Aporia include Nathan Cofnas, Steven Pinker, Charles Murray, and Heather Mac Donald.

The Transphobes

Alongside the race scientists, CLI has hosted a number of anti-transgender hate activists, including:

• Mia Hughes, director of the Canadian branch of the anti-trans hate group Genspect, gave a lecture at Stanford called From Hysteria to Gender Dysphoria: How Culture and Medicine Shape Mental Illness. Hughes is most well known for creating the WPATH Files, a . A biography of her on Substack describes her focus as being "how trans rights collide with the rights of women and the LGB community"; "LGB" is an ancronym commonly used by transphobes who want to remove transgender people from the queer community in some form.
• Alex Byrne. Byrne was one of the co-authors of the Health and Human Services report on gender affirming care for minors released by the Trump administration in 2025. The report claims that normal medical treatments for trans kids are pushed on them by "trans activists" and promotes conversion therapy as an alternative. This report also legitimizes the recent "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria" conspiracy theory which posits that many trans people only transition because of a social contagion.
• Alex Byrne's wife and committed transphobe Carole Hooven gave a CLI talk in 2023. After leaving her academic position over her transphobic comments, she is now at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank where she continues to advocate for anti-trans policies.
• Author Jonathan Haidt, who has also promoted Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria theory. Haidt gained infamy after he refused to sign a statement about equity, inclusion, and anti-racism for a psychology conference.
• Author Lionel Shriver, who believes that trans people are "delusional", gave a talk calling wokeness "leftwing tyranny".
• Controversial sex researcher J Michael Bailey gave a talked called "What Activists Don’t Want You to Know About Transgender and Gender Dysphoria". Bailey, alongside his peer Ray Blanchard, are proponents of the pseudoscientific theory of "autogynephilia" which posits that queer trans women are actually men with a fetish for being a woman.
• Besides their racism, Christopher Rufo and Steven Pinker both have a history of transphobia. Rufo claimed in 2024 that "gender ideology" has "conquered a vast portion of the American mind" and played a crucial role in the passage of Florida's anti-queer Stop W.O.K.E. Act. Pinker resigned from his position at the Freedom From Religion Foundation in 2024 and complained that trans people are imposing a religious dogma on society.

Besides their views on trans people, Ray Blanchard, J Michael Bailey, and Steven Pinker are all connected via their association with the white supremacist Human Biodiversity Institute (HBI). Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a group that tracks extremism, documented the connection and the modern eugenics movement ties into their anti-transgender views; the. HBI's discussion group talked about “differences in race, sex and sexual orientation” in order to study “artificial selection”. SPLC notes that HBI founder Steve Sailer has called homosexuality a "disease".

The Epstein Connection

Harvard law professor and lawyer for Donald Trump Alan Dershowitz has given three CLI talks.

Lawrence Krauss presented a talk at CLI called "Is Woke Science the Only Science Allowed in Academia?" in 2022.

Alan Dershowitz, Lawrence Krauss, and Steven Pinker are all in the Epstein files.

Lawrence Krauss, who was accused of sexual harassment by several people, has defended Epstein, arguing that he would "believe (Epstein) over other people" because he "always has women ages 19 to 23 around him". Krauss further stated that "I don't feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey". Steven Pinker would later reveal that Krauss invited him along on "trips to salons" with Epstein.

The Classical Liberalism Institute is part of Stanford's long, complicated history with eugenics. Elwood P. Cubberley, the Dean of Stanford's Graduate School of Education in the early 1900's, was a vocal advocate of eugenics who didn't want to dedicate resources to children with learning disabilities. This is mirrored today in both the focus on Jason Arday's disabilities and the nature of the talks at CLI, such as Jordan Lasker's "The Academic Career Trajectories of Underqualified College Admits" and Heather Mac Donald's "When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives".

In this context, Nathan Cofnas' pursuit of race and sex "realism" is simply the latest stage of a decades-long campaign to prevent women and Black people from being educated and attaining positions of power in society.