Nathan Cofnas's Jewish Apologetics (rebuttals to K. MacDonald)

[Archie]

Cofnas has been getting attention lately due to his involvement in the Jason Arday scandal. This prompted me to revisit his debates with Kevin MacDonald on the Jewish question. In 2018, Cofnas published a paper in an academic journal responding in detail to MacDonald (note that MacDonald was a professor and all three books in his trilogy were originally published by Praeger, an academic publisher). This resulted in a reply by MacDonald, which generated replies to the replies, and so on.

For the full exchange, see here:
https://nathancofnas.com/debate-with-kevin-macdonald/
https://www.kevinmacdonald.net/replies.htm

Likely few people have read this entire, excruciating back-and-forth. But the main ideas are of interest and can be boiled down.

Cofnas's "Default" Hypothesis

Cofnas is a right-wing "race realist" and his arguments reflect that worldview. It's telling that the only serious rebuttal of MacDonald has to take a tack that is normally not allowed. Cofnas concedes Jewish overrepresentation (usually a big no-no) and argues essentially that this is to be expected on HBD grounds using Bell Curve style arguments (another no-no). His basic argument is that things that anti-Semites blame on "Jews" are explained mostly by IQ and "geography"/urbanism. He calls this the "default" hypothesis.

Individual Counterexamples

Cofnas also spends a lot of time pointing out that there are individual Jews on every side of an issue, often in key leadership roles of opposing positions, and these in his view serve as counterexamples to MacDonald's theory. Cofnas is of course correct that at the individual level, all bets are off. Some Jews become anti-Semites, anti-Zionists, Holocaust deniers, etc. And a few of them might even be sincere! But so what? The relevant question is what the overall net impact is of Jews as a group. Cleary someone has been supporting Zionism. Founding a new country that was already inhabited is not something that just happens. That some Jewish intellectuals are nominally against Israel in some totally ineffectual way (probably because they couldn't maintain credibility if they were open hypocrites) is really neither here nor there. A good rule of thumb here would be that the side that actually gets its way is the real Jewish position.

The Jewish Question - Big Picture

Cofnas also complains about falsifiability along the lines of "oh, no matter what Jews do you'll say it's some Jewish agenda." In a way, yes! The idea that Jews generally support Jewish interests in my mind is an obviously true statement that is true pretty much by definition, and it's crazy to me that Cofnas wants to spend tens of thousands of words contesting this.

Below is my attempt to summarize "the Jewish Question" as concisely as possible.

1) Jews promote Jewish interests (self-evident)
2) Jews are REALLY good at promoting those interests (this point could be expanded by with discussion of dominance of finance, media and other nodes of power)
3) Jewish interests are often in conflict with the interests of their Gentile host populations
4) Because of 3, they often must attempt to conceal or deny their activities (or say that the people doing a certain thing are only coincidently Jewish)

They are basically like a political and cultural apex predator or invasive species. (I know that sounds harsh, but I think it fits). The Cofnas critique appears to me to be mostly an attempt to stall the discussion at point #1 forever. Because he deconstructs the very idea of group interests, he has no framework for discussing conflicts of interest among groups (#3).

Addendum on Jewish IQ

For some background reading on Jewish/Ashkenazi IQ, see the two articles below. The first argues for an average of around 110 based on a meta-analysis. The second argues that the numbers are not well established and that there are not many good datasets with actual IQ tests on representative samples of Jews.

"Pinpointing Jewish IQ," by Cremieux Recueil, 28 Dec 2023
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/pinpointing-jewish-iq

"The Myth of Jewish High IQ," by Neema Parvini (AKA Academic Agent), 26 Nov 2021
https://forbiddentexts.substack.com/p/t ... sh-high-iq

While there is no conclusive figure for average Jewish IQ, I will go ahead and assume it's 110 (+2/3 SD) just to show that even assuming this is true, it would not explain the overrepresentation that we see.

Assumptions: Jewish Mean =110, SD=15; Gentile Mean =100, SD=15; Jews = 2% of the population (Gentiles 98%)

We can calculate the Jewish share of the pool above a given threshold.

115+ - 4.5% Jewish
130+ - 7.6% Jewish
145+ - 12.9% Jewish
160+ - 21.7% Jewish

If we test out different means in the range of 107-117, the 160 share would range from 12% to 57% (so it's highly sensitive to the mean). The range for the 130 share would be 5.3%-14.8%. A good intuitive way to think about this is as follows: An IQ of 130 is roughly the top 2% of the overall population. Well, that means there are about the same number of 130 IQ people as there are Jews. And Jews certainly are not all 130+, so Gentiles must predominate at that level just by sheer numbers. Only with a high mean and very extreme threshold would Jews begin to approach 50%, but I don't know of any professions with an IQ threshold of 160. Even the MIT physics department is probably not that high.

Moreover, a lot of stuff Jews dominate is not extraordinarily cognitively demanding. What's the IQ threshold for pornographers? It's not 160! Hence the extreme overrepresentation in many domains can't be explained by IQ. Basically all of the early Hollywood studios were founded by Jews and Hollywood (especially at the top producer and studio exec level) is still really Jewish. This didn't happen randomly. I believe the most significant goy studio was the Walt Disney Company. When the Disney family lost control of the company in the 80s, it was taken over by a Jewish CEO, Michael Eisner. Because of course that's what happened. An apologist might argue that Jews are just good at media or like working in media or something like that. But it also sure seems like they have benefited greatly from dominating the means of communication.

When you think about it, high IQ is really a red herring in that ethnic conflict is possible with or without group differences in IQ. You could even argue that high IQ makes the problem worse because a high IQ group is more capable and dangerous.

All of that said, I can't say I really dislike Cofnas. I would actually be really curious to see him work his way through some revisionist material to see how he would respond. I would actually be surprised if he hasn't read any of it.

[Wetzelrad]

Only with a high mean and very extreme threshold would Jews begin to approach 50%, but I don't know of any professions with an IQ threshold of 160. Even the MIT physics department is probably not that high.

The average person has no idea what IQ is normal for elite professions, and that information is often, probably intentionally, left out of the discourse. It's not very high at all.

In 2023 one Tobias Wolfram ranked occupations by average IQ. The highest on his chart was ~114 IQ. Some of the occupations that you might expect to require exceptional intelligence like financial manager landed at ~112 IQ. (From "(Not just) Intelligence stratifies the occupational hierarchy: Ranking 360 professions by IQ and non-cognitive traits" in Intelligence, 2023.)



In 2017 a paper led by Ernesto Dal Bó looked at the IQs of politicians and other professions using Swedish government data. He revealed that, on average, Swedish Parliamentarians were around ~110 IQ, CEOs ~106-113, legal professionals ~113, economists ~115. (From "Who Becomes A Politician?" by Ernesto Dal Bó et al. in The Quarterly Journal of Economics.) This was charted by one of the Aporia guys.



Based on these numbers, we can (generously) use the 115+ IQ pool you calculated as being only 4.5% Jewish. Therefore the claim that IQ explains Jewish overrepresentation is not compelling.