When Nathan Cofnas, the pro-eugenics philosopher who launched what his institution described as a crusade to purge academia of those who disagreed with his ‘race-realist views’, sought funding to bring his unsuccessful case against the University of Cambridge, he may not have had to look very far.
He was already very familiar with the Free Speech Union, the organisation that claims to be unbiased and unpartisan defenders of the right to free speech – despite its close association with the MAGA movement in the US (including briefing American officials on how to pressure the UK government). He had, by this point, already written for Quillette – the magazine founded by FSU alumna Claire Lehmann. He was also a regular writer for Aporia, the eugenics Substack blog edited by Noah Carl – co-owner of the Daily Sceptic, the FSU’s anti-vax sister company.
Noah Carl operates the Daily Sceptic alongside the FSU’s founder and director, Lord Toby Young, whose various current roles include editor of the Daily Sceptic, Contributing Editor of The Critic, associate editor of The Spectator, and sitting Conservative peer in the House of Lords. In 2017, Young attended The London Conference on Intelligence at UCL – an invite-only eugenics convention.
Notably, both Young’s and Carl’s pseudoscientific endeavours are operated through their registered company: Skeptics Ltd.
They are not the only Free Speech Union figures who would have been extremely familiar to Nathan Cofnas in his hour of need – the chair of the organisation is James Orr. Alongside his role as Head of Policy at Reform UK, Orr is an Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge – where Cofnas had been carrying out his philosophical research on “biological basis of moral norms” before being let go.
According to an in-depth investigation by the Byline Times, James Orr was appointed to the position in 2019, accompanied by a £5m donation from his friend Peter Thiel, and tasked with increasing the number of right-wing affiliated students at Cambridge University. It is hard not to hear echoes of that project in Cofnas warning that race realism will not win “without bringing a substantial number of the elites to our side”.
The detailed allegations by Byline Times make for alarming reading, including that students are accepted into Orr’s fold based more on their political persuasion than their academic merit. One department member expressed their concerns to the publication:
I’ve watched the student cohort in the faculty change over the last few years… We are seeing more and more young men, in particular, being recruited who undoubtedly affiliate with right-wing or even hard-right political views. And there are real questions about the quality of their work. This has never happened before.
I suppose it isn’t DEI or affirmative action when the people given an unearned leg-up are young white conservatives.
Funding for such students also proves no barrier – alongside Thiel’s donation, one of Orr’s recruited students received funding from the American conservative non-profit, the Edmund Burke Foundation. Among his many roles, James Orr chairs their UK branch, and claims it is designed to help create a pan-European “Comintern” for nationalist populist parties. Orr was appointed Head of Policy at Reform UK in 2025.
Elsewhere, the Byline Times alleges that some of these students identified as right-wing talent are invited to live with Orr in his private home – which, if true, would be a staggering breach of the university’s safeguarding policy.
Students who enjoy whatever patronage is offered by Orr and Thiel unsurprisingly find themselves quickly elevated into media positions. One such student is now a contributor to the Viktor Orban-backed The European Conservative, writing about the dangers of migration and “transgender ideology”.
Another of Orr’s students has gone on to wite for The Telegraph, The Critic, UnHerd, GB News, and TalkTV, arguing for the importance of ethnicity in capability. In an article for The Critic she wrote about how an as-yet-unnamed academic told her of a secretive discussion group for students who found themselves at academic odds with their liberal peers. She found herself supporting Kathleen Stock, Helen Joyce, and Jordan Peterson – the latter of whom completed the writing of his most recent book while staying at the Cambridge home James Orr apparently shares with several of his students.
Peter Thiel himself is an occasional guest of Orr’s – including for Thiel’s Antichrist lectures, which Orr arranged to take place at Cambridge. It’s hard to disagree that the location could be seen as an attempt to “Cambridge-wash” Thiel’s theories, with the prestige of the university’s name lending legitimacy to the ideas, and to the movement. Such Cambridge-washing has become a theme of Orr’s time at the institution: in 2021, he invited Charles Murray give a talk about his notorious 1994 eugenicist book, The Bell Curve.
The race science featured in The Bell Curve was originally funded by white supremacist organisation the Pioneer Fund. In 2023, the organisation was rebranded by its incoming leader Emil Kikegaard as the Human Diversity Foundation (and again, in 2025, to Polygenic Scores LLC). In March 2023 it launched its pro-eugenics Substack magazine, Aporia, with Noah Carl as editor and Nathan Cofnas as regular contributor. It was Kirkegaard who recommended Carl and Cofnas to Peter Thiel and, by November, Cofnas had secured funding for his associate researcher position alongside Thiel’s ally James Orr at Cambridge.
I am no expert on how academia works, nor how people are chosen for postdoctoral positions. However, it does appear to be the case that James Orr had secured funding for other students’ research, and he had secured positions for them at his prestigious university. I have no insight into whether the eugenicist Nathan Cofnas was a well-qualified candidate to study “the biological basis of moral norms” in his role affiliated to Cambridge. I also have no insight as to whether his connections to James Orr and his wider network greased those wheels, because having someone who was talking about the “hereditarian revolution” and the genetically limited capabilities of certain races fit the political project that the Head of Policy of Reform UK was building at a famous and respected institution.
Again, as Cofnas himself put it, race realism will not win “without bringing a substantial number of the elites to our side”.
Once graduated from a prestigious university, the pathway into influential positions in British society and culture are clear. For one, there is an open door into media publications like The Spectator, UnHerd, and GB News (all of which are owned by Paul Marshall, the funder of Jordan Peterson’s Alliance for Responsible Citizenship), The Critic (owned by Reform donor Jeremy Hosking), Quillette (funded at least in part by Peter Thiel, with investment from Marc Andreessen), and the Daily Sceptic (founded by Toby Young of the Free Speech Union, and Noah Carl of eugenicist magazine Aporia).
A rotating cast of writers moves between these outfits, while fringe publications like Aporia sit one side of the Venn diagram, and mainstream newspapers like the Telegraph at the other. Meanwhile, organisations like the Free Speech Union and the Committee for Academic Freedom offer the cover of an unbiased and non-partisan concern for free speech – all the while promoting misinformation or outright conspiracy theories about migration, race, eugenics, climate change, gender, abortion, and vaccines. The funding for these organisations is opaque – indeed, Toby Young’s FSU took out a court injunction to prevent their funding sources from public disclosure.
This overlapping network of blogs and magazines with its repeated cast of contributors is arguably designed to appear like there is a huge groundswell of intellectuals and thought leaders who all agree that climate change is overblown, or that migrants will soon displace the political power of natives, or that wokeness is a mind-virus and the antidote is a race-realist, trans-exclusionary, traditionalist view of the world.
And it is therefore perhaps not a surprise that Young and Carl named their holding company for their various interests, “Skeptics Ltd” – despite their output at the Daily Sceptic being far from skeptical in its nature. It certainly has the appearance of an attempt to push their worldview into the existing skeptical networks of the UK, or to capitalise on the long-standing reputation of the groups, publications and activists within the UK skeptical network.
Why else would the Free Speech Union have wanted to partner with science charity Sense About Science in 2024, on a series of lectures around the importance of restoring public confidence in science? It’s hard not to see it as a deliberate attempt to claim legitimacy, even as the events acted as little more than a mouthpiece for anti-vaccine and climate-change-denialist talking points.
Fortunately, the vast majority of skeptical groups in the UK rejected the likes of Toby Young and his Lockdown Sceptics, and will reject Nathan Cofnas and his race realism. But the UK is just one place, and the deep pockets of people like Peter Thiel, the Human Diversity Foundation, and the Alliance for Defending Freedom aren’t constrained by national borders.
When The London Conference on Intelligence was exposed in London, it quietly moved to Hungary and carried on. When Cofnas was shown the door in Cambridge, he was quickly appointed to a new prestigious role among like-minded people in Belgium.
As skeptics, we should be particularly wary of how academic freedom and the apparent credibility of intellectual institutions can be used as a Trojan Horse, both in the UK and internationally. And we should be encouraging everyone in or affiliated with our movement to try to be a little skeptical when people claim that the real war on science is ‘wokeness’, and not the people and organisations pushing long-discredited pseudoscience under the cover of ‘just asking academic questions’.
