Cofnas Podcast (Nathan Cofnas)

Amy Wax is the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2017, she suggested that “all cultures are not equal,” and she observed that, on average, black students do not perform as well as white students at Penn Law. She has been fighting for her job ever since.

In this episode we discuss strategies for defeating wokism. Contra Richard Hanania who says we should “shut up about race and IQ,” Amy and I say that we can dewokify the elites by teaching them the truth about race.

Nathan Cofnas’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Noah Carl is a sociologist, writer, and editor at Aporia.

In this episode we discuss whether hereditarianism is the cure for wokism, and the relationship between intelligence and human worth.

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Nicholas Wade worked as an editor and science journalist at the New York Times from 1982 to 2012. He is the author of several books including A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. His megaviral 2021 article, “The Origin of COVID: Did People or Nature Open Pandora’s Box at Wuhan?,” played a major role in making the lab-leak theory mainstream. Wade initially self-published “The Origin of COVID” on Medium after it was rejected from “every outlet [he] could think of, left, right, and center.”

Nathan Cofnas’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

0:51 Social behavior vs. IQ

8:51 Rice vs. wheat farmers

16:14 Persistent race differences

19:30 Environmental explanations

28:55 Response to A Troublesome Inheritance

36:43 Academic censorship

39:53 Reforming academia

49:59 Origins of race denial

58:11 Making race realism mainstream

1:01:15 A racial hierarchy?

1:11:04 Academia after race realism

1:13:50 Groupthink and resistance to the lab-leak theory

1:20:43 Conclusion

Michael Huemer is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder. He’s written several books, most recently Progressive Myths, and he writes the Fake Nous Substack.

Nathan Cofnas’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Timestamps and sources

0:27 – Why no one wants to read peer-reviewed philosophy

MH: “Publishing in Philosophy”

50:40 – What is wokism?

MH: Progressive Myths

NC: “Was I Wrong about Woke?”

1:05:05 – Vegetarianism: For and against

MH: Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism

NC: “Is Vegetarianism Healthy for Children?”

F. Leroy & NC: “Should Dietary Guidelines Recommend Low Red Meat Intake?”

1:26:00 – Is ethics real?

MH: Ethical Intuitionism

MH: “A Liberal Realist Answer to Debunking Skepticism”

NC: “A Debunking Explanation for Moral Progress”

NC: “How Gene–Culture Coevolution Can—but Probably Did Not—Track Mind-Independent Moral Truth”

2:17:27 - Closing

Amy Wax is Professor of Law at Penn.