Woke 2 But It's Just Creepy Racism This Time
A couple of very important things happened earlier this month: First of all, apparently Woke ended. It’s finished. Time of death was declared on Sunday the 9th of August sometime around 9am when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on a morning show and laughed and said “Woke 1 was crazy!” That of course implies, god help us, the present or future existence of “Woke 2,” which will, presumably, not be crazy? I’m not sure how anyone is going to ensure that, because I have long maintained and still do maintain that “woke” has nothing approaching a coherent definition. This is a position that makes some people very angry.
One of those angry people is Freddie deBoer. In his post reflecting on the death of Woke, deBoer first rages about Garbage Day writer Ryan Broderick (against whom he holds a long-standing grudge for harshly criticizing the Substack platform three years ago) for apparently misdefining the word in his own column. Later deBoer goes on to list examples of extreme Wokeness, one of which is Muslims getting upset about depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.
Woke seems to be a very gerrymandered concept indeed, an umbrella that somehow covers transgender bathrooms and hardline Islam, but this isn’t an unprecedented suggestion—in 2024, Indiana Representative Jim Banks categorized Al Qaida as being Woke.
If I’m to be generous and grant that most people who complain about Woke are complaining about a coherent idea, one that encompasses all of Freddie’s examples, it would be something like: When a minority group or individual gets upset about something that’s not worth getting upset about, and an institution takes their side, sometimes taking action against some white person who doesn’t deserve it. That’s fair enough. But also a lot of people say that foreign aid is woke, so you know what, fuckin’, whatever.
If Woke actually is dead and gone then at least you hope that means that everyone will stop bitching about it, but we can’t have that mercy either because apparently now everyone has to do a round of “postmortems” to ensure that it, whatever it was, never happens again.
On the topic of postmortems, British writer Sam Kriss wrote one of the best I’ve ever read. It’s about the Jason Arday affair. You’re probably passingly familiar with Jason Arday, considering that he basically was the entire news cycle for the month of August. If you’ve been living under the Rock of Mercy, the short recap is that a black Cambridge professor was accused of having plagiarized much of his doctoral thesis, and as the story gained traction, people began to suspect that much of his actual life story was also fake.
In the immediate wake of the declaration of the death of Woke, the full weight of mainstream, tabloid, and social media felt not just an invitation but a moral duty to absolutely excoriate this person; to burn his life down and bury the ashes under Woke’s grave, and to put his head on a pike as a warning to Woke 2 and any other future Wokes that might come sniffing around. Cambridge officials, who can’t not have known about Arday’s various infractions, can only have hired him because he’s black. We don’t do that anymore, not in Post-Woke, no no no.
So the media and the internet viciously hounded Arday until he resigned, but that only put blood in the water so they stepped up the hounding, so he killed himself. And even folks on the left don’t know what to do with this information because we’re trying to distance ourselves from Woke now, per Queen AOC, and that means admitting Jason Arday was a Bad Guy who probably didn’t deserve to die but was still a Bad Guy.
Oddly, we have to come up with reasons to signal that we think he was really bad, leftistly, so that we can keep our cred as leftists but without appearing Woke. One of the most repeated criticisms I’ve seen is that he was lying about being autistic and so it was evil for him to have given false hope to autistic kids and their parents that they might overcome adversity and become college professors.
Now, I’m not going to talk much more about Jason Arday because it’s been covered to death (wow, no pun intended there) and I wasn’t even planning to cover it at all and I’ve possibly already lost most of my readers since the sentence in which I dropped his name (anyone still with me, thank you, you are my besties and you will be rewarded) but I want to say one more thing: I was immediately skeptical of the claims that Arday was a huge fabulist and con artist, mostly because I like to evaluate claims myself and these claims felt like vibes, but every single person, left, right, center, and even Sam Kriss in that excellent article I linked earlier, fully accepted the frame that he was guilty of all this fraud and habitual lies. Without having much mind to weigh in about it, I pretty much accepted that this had all been proven somewhere.
Now, however, it’s starting to come out that (most? all??) of what Jason Arday claimed may have been either true or not terribly exaggerated. For example, one of his most absurd claims was that he ran 30 marathons in 30 days, and even Kriss ridicules that, but like, there are contemporaneous news articles about it, and… n-nobody thought to check? Nobody thought to actually look into this at all? And it turns out a bunch of his apparent lies were misquotes that nobody thought to double check? And maybe even the plagiarism thing had more to do with neurodivergent information process than idea theft, and may have been careless rather than crafty, and that was taken into account by the academics who cleared him of malicious wrongdoing?
WOW IT SURE SEEMS LIKE WE JUST STRAIGHT UP WITCH HUNTED AN AUTISTIC BLACK GUY TO DEATH anyway, enough about Arday, maybe his story was still more lies than truth and I haven’t done an exhaustive analysis so I won’t argue with you. Let’s just take a look at our general media and political landscape in this glorious Post-Woke world in which we now live.
Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now:
The reason I brought this up is because the only reason I knew about this story all is because I spend a lot of time waterboarding myself with social media algorithms (it’s how I get material for you and it ain’t killed me yet.) Substack, in particular, is extremely sensitive to what you’ve looked at before and eager to serve you more of that. Due to the fact that almost every asshole I write about has a Substack and its algorithm can’t tell the difference between what I’m reading for pleasure and what I’m reading for research, it winds up feeding me a hell of a lot of stuff from what I’ve come to think of as the Aporia Cinematic Universe.
It isn’t cinematic, of course, but it rolls off the tongue.
I’ve had these ghouls popping up from time to time in my feed presumably because I researched them for a review of an “anti-woke science” book called The War On Science, edited by antifeminist Lawrence Krauss and featuring a ton of scientists and science-adjacent characters who were either “cancelled” at some point for some reason or else just make a living bucking the scientific consensus when the consensus is Too Woke. Many of the contributors including Krauss are either proven or alleged sex pests, but also many of them are associated with an institution called Aporia. You can read the book review here but to quote the relevant explainer:
Aporia is a Substack that functions as more or less the hub of modern scientific racism. It’s operated by something called the Human Diversity Foundation, which, after getting bad press and mainstream exposure as a consequence of a Hope Not Hate investigation, appears to have quietly changed its name recently to “Polygenic Scores LLC.”
Whatever it’s called, this thing was started by self-described eugenicist and ethnonationalist Emil Kirkegaard, whose pseudoscience is such legendary bullshit that the only way he can get a paper published is to publish it in his own journals, which carry the aesthetic of proper journals enough to be commonly mistaken as legitimate by laypeople. These fake journals are published by OpenPsych, which is owned by Kirkegaard.
Kirkegaard also has a Substack, naturally.
The HDF, Aporia, and OpenPsych are essentially the shared landscape in which the modern eugenics movement operates. It is an insidious, incestuous, pseudoscientific bundle of quackery that mimics science. I like to call it scarecrow science. But it mimics science well enough that it can trick people who actually want to do their due diligence and back things up with what appears to be legitimate research, because it’s a very delectable cherry for cherry-pickers.
Some of the contributors to Krauss’ The War on Science are more nefarious than others. In any case, the Aporia universe has deeply, deeply infected the whole crop of intellectuals who want to be trendy and appear heterodox and anti-woke. Even if you’re careful to avoid getting any explicit white nationalists, if you scoop up any number of anti-woke scientists to write papers for you, you are inevitably going to get a whole bunch of Aporia bullshit.
In early August I started getting a lot of suggestions for Substack articles written by these people, such as Steve Sailer, shrieking about this Jason Arday guy as though he shot up a church. It turns out the initial piece that exposed Arday was another Substack article written by Aporia mainstay Nathan Cofnas, after an anonymous fan of his from within Cambridge leaked some information to him about Arday.
These people—Sailer, Cofnas, Kirkegaard, Jared Taylor, and a bunch of other prominent names—call themselves “race realists” because they believe human races are real biological categories rather than social constructs, and they specifically obsess over intelligence, especially between black and white people. In short, their primary claim, which some of them build their whole career around, is that black people are simply less intelligent than white people on average, and moreover, it is not due to any sociopolitical reason, it is not due to upbringing, and it is not due to lack of opportunity. It is because they are black.
They don’t call themselves “racists” because the term puts people off, but they are all well aware that they are, definitionally, racists. “Race realism” is simply sophistry.
Cofnas is particularly vicious about this but only because he’s honest—most of the populist right who instinctively call any non-white employee a “DEI hire” are too skittish to admit that they believe, in a meritocracy, they just wouldn’t see any non-white people. Cofnas, though, proudly calls for a “hereditarian revolution” after which, in his words, “Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.”
After the whole Arday thing, though, Nathan Cofnas suddenly finds himself being lauded as a kind of folk hero by people on the right as well as even some conflicted liberals who think we can separate the man from his ideas and admit he was brave to do what he did and it’s good that he did it.
You can believe that Jason Arday was not qualified to be a university professor and I will not argue with you. But everyone is kind of missing the elephant in the room, here: Is Nathan Cofnas qualified to be a university professor?
“Race realism” isn’t an unproven theory because it’s “taboo” or “suppressed” or because of “wokeness,” it’s unproven because nobody has been able to prove it, and that there’s more evidence to the contrary. If you’re looking for a robust, formidable argument on the scientific racism side of the fence, you’ll be pretty let down about what slim pickings are to be found over yonder.
Richard Hanania, arguably the most mainstream of these people, wrote an article recently, “The Strange, Secret, Open Triumph of Race Science,” in which he declares that race realism is true in a similar fashion to how Donald Trump recently declared via executive order that vaccines cause autism. That’s not how it works! You can’t just declare stuff! You can’t just Michael Scott this thing!
Hanania’s response to the arguments against genetic racial intelligence is “This can be refuted by…simply looking at human beings. Honestly, that’s all you need to do. There is obviously enough temporal separation between human races to make them appear very different.”
That’s kind of the primary argument that race realists fall back on and it’s also the nucleation point of every kind of racism there is. “Just look at them, stupid! Their genes have affected the color of their skin, the shape of their nose, the thickness of their hair, the color and shape of their eyes, what could possibly lead you to believe that genetics stops at the brain?”
Okay, well, there’s a bizarre and persistent myth among white people that Asian women’s vaginas are sideways and perhaps we can apply the same reasoning to that too. I mean, look at their hair, their eyes, their skin, their height, different shapes, sizes, colors. What could possibly lead you to believe that genetics stops at the crotch?
Nathan Cofnas’ academic work is similarly next to worthless, based on motivated reasoning and propped up by junk papers that cherry pick data, ignore recent findings if they contradict earlier ones, misrepresent and misinterpret studies. In a recent interview with conservative pundit David Starkey, Cofnas said that “all right-wing positions are just utterly indefensible if you can’t talk about hereditarianism.” But if the validity of race realism follows from the correctness of right-wing ideology, then the correctness of right-wing ideology can’t follow from the validity of race realism. That’s just a racist dog chasing its own tail.
It would be redundant for me to go into the details of what’s wrong with Cofnas’ work when an academic going by the name Artlust has read and critiqued a number of his papers already, and I’d implore you to read her brilliant essay in which she also goes into detail about the sophistry of the term “race realism” itself and their positions.
Cofnas says “race realism is the best term to describe the scientifically correct position,” and that it is “a standard term used in the philosophy of biology.” He means racial classification is rooted in biological reality, and that race correlates with sociologically significant traits, intelligence above all.
That first half isn’t a suppressed finding. It’s a position his own adjacent field has formally rejected. In 2019, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists unanimously adopted a statement holding that the distribution of biological variation in our species shows that socially recognized races are not biological categories, and that Western racial groups were socially, politically, and legally constructed over the last five centuries. That statement doesn’t say race is imaginary. It says the opposite: that race as a social reality is very real and lands on real bodies. What it denies is that the categories carve nature at the joints.
So “realist” is him taking sides, while framing the language so people think it’s settled on his side. The only reality is that he is making one up.
And yet, according to outlets like Quillette, Nathan Cofnas is a generational staggering intellect whose treatment by academia has been profoundly unfair. But his work has not been suppressed or censored—it has appeared in major journals, and in fact, journals have defended their decision to publish it despite its flaws.
He has had some trouble keeping a job, however, though he hasn’t had too much trouble finding new ones despite his controversies. It might seem in keeping with the freedom of association philosophy espoused by racial separatists that universities don’t need to retain the employment of academics who create explosive controversies, but many disagree, such as The War On Science contributor Maarten Boudry—to his credit, one of the few contributors to that book who isn’t accused of sexual harassment—who is “agnostic” about race realism but nevertheless profoundly concerned that the “heterodox gadfly” can’t catch a break.
I believe in academic freedom too, but at what point are universities permitted to stop funding wholly discredited research by individuals whose stated project sounds frighteningly similar to some kind of soft Helter Skelter revolution?
In Sam Kriss’ essay, he says “[Woke 1 is] over now; we’re in something else.” Is this Woke 2, or maybe the mirror-universe opposite of Woke, where we now have to coddle undeserving and discredited academics on the right, and assist their targeting and cancelling of academics on the left, because, what, that’s what they’re owed? We have to do Reverse Woke now to reset the balance? Is it time to dust off those calipers and start measuring each other’s skulls because we gave video game developers too much leniency for too long in reducing Lara Croft’s cup size?
I’m still no closer to a solid definition of Woke, even though I’ve been called that a whole bunch of times. So if General AOC wants me to retreat from that line, I’m still not sure exactly what I’m retreating from. But if it involves giving a bunch of rope to “race realism” then, I don’t know… uh… Allah… Ackbar?
I'm writing a book about right-wing reactionary movements in tech and geek culture in general. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and if you like this newsletter then you'll probably like my book. If you're unsure, the good news is I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop.
Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now:
S Peter Davis
