Incredible segment from this discussion between Nathan Cofnas and Glenn Loury & John McWhorter where Cofnas starts to explain how the Nazis were right about racial differences, then catches himself and pivots to how the Nazis were right about the conspiring elites.

You do a great service by brazenly lying and misrepresenting stuff like this that anyone equipped with common sense can decipher for himself, so that when you speak on complex scientific topics requiring domain expertise we can safely dismiss you as a brazen liar. Thank you.

Seeing yahoos like yourself stewing in the replies is one of the few reasons I still log on to this app. So, no, Thank You!

You are deliberately misrepresenting this.

How so?

It seems apparent that Cofnas is carefully trying to make clear that when he says, “the Nazis were right all along,” he means that the Nazis are now using Reich’s findings to make themselves look more reliable than the left with its oversimplified and suddenly outdated position, which does not extend to the Nazi’s outlandish race science claims (but the danger is likely that they will in fact try to use this narrow but significant victory to legitimize their more outlandish claims). My guess is that this is in the context of a broader discussion of why it makes sense for the mainstream to openly claim this ground before extremists do, which of course is what Cofnas, being Jewish, would want to happen.

I don't see how this relates to my tweet. I made three claims: 1) Cofnas starts to say that the Nazis were right about racial differences. 2) Catches himself. 3) Pivots to how the Nazis were right about elite claims about racial equality. Which is inaccurate?

Your post, particularly with the word “incredible” and “pivot”, seems to imply more than these three points alone, namely that there is something about the pivot that indicates that Cofnas slipped up and is suddenly trying to hide something.

Yes, he started to say that the Nazis are right about some group differences, a view that he himself genuinely holds, and then caught himself -- which is why he never finishes the thought. Do you disagree?

But what do you think is incredible about this? And what do you think he is hiding? Near the end, he says that it’s obvious that the left was lying about the idea that all races are exactly the same. That seems clear enough. Nothing incredible or hidden.

My reading is that he said they were right about population level differences but wrong about categorising those populations as somehow entirely distinct. Come on Sasha, if his arguments are so weak surely you can debunk them without deliberately misrepresenting what he says.

He doesn't make any argument at all! He says (at 38s) "they [the Nazis] were, they were right that there are s...", then trails off and switches to a completely different point. There's nothing to debunk because Cofnas never argues from evidence.

@thekevinburch Also, Cofnas says it is "not true" that there are "essential fundamental differences between races." But his entire "hereditarian revolution" argument is that there are such differences. Cofnas debunks Cofnas!

@thekevinburch Yes, I wish he was given more time to talk through this section because it's clearly self-contradictory.

IMO this was deliberate. Everyone knows what he thinks, but now he can refer to a clip where he actually calls Nazis wrong whenever he gets called one

You are either dishonest, or extremely socially inept if this is how you present what was said...

And yet, Cofnas proudly posts this interview on X and BlueSky. In his 2024 "Hereditarian Revolution" article, using careful language, he basically called for a return to legal racial segregation and overturning every civil rights law passed in the U.S. since the 1950s.

Totally disingenous misrepresentation that should shame anyone in a position of public influence - DO BETTER

The Nazis said don't cross the busy street against the Don't Walk sign. The Nazis said wear a sweater when it's cold outside.

We live in absurd times

Cofnas is saying the Nazis were saying in response to the Reich study that they were right, but then (in Cofnas opinion) they weren't right, but then he corrected himself because he believes they were right that there was a suppression by media. How did you misread this?

It's a video with John McWorter in it, so I can already tell you it as full of obvious and unchallenged marxist lies and dismiss it

I thought the consensus is that yes Jews indeed were grossly overrepresented among the wealthy snd elite and had common connections but that it was good, not nefarious.

yes, he said that, but I don't think he wanted to give the nazis more credit than they were entitled to. It's more like the nazis were onto some part of the truth, but also threw in a lot of ingredients into the recipe that had more to do with a political agenda than with what science can back up.

What does David Reich say about directional selection in this article? Is he making claims like the ones Bruce Lahn retracted?

Reich says there is more directional selection in West Eurasia than previously thought, he makes no claims about whether that selection is unique/divergent to West Eurasia (and, in fact, more recent work in East Asia shows it is convergent) and he specifically argues about interpreting as "Europeans are selected to be smarter". Cofnas and his ilk simply ignore all of that or ague it is a lie.

I see pieces like this. I worry about these reports about possibly *very* weak effects from genetic variation with very little understanding of how they are actually working. The enthronement of GWAS methodology is worrisome to me.

Yes, I agree that there's still a lot to understand about these findings.

Do you agree that case for polygenic selection is more difficult? What makes it more difficult? From the NYT article to which you helpfully provided a link: 'But Iain Mathieson, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania who led Dr. Reich’s 2015 study, said the findings about traits like smoking and schooling are less compelling than the 479 variants tied to conditions like celiac disease. “I’m less convinced by the evidence for polygenic selection,” he said.' I take it that the selection that Reich's team has discovered are not hard but soft sweeps, correct?

Yes, for individual loci you can follow the allele frequency in multiple datasets and understand the mechanism; for polygenic tests the risk of stratification is much higher and the mechanism much less clear because of pleiotropy (this is discussed in Akbari et al).

It's well established that are essentially no hard sweeps when you compare modern Europeans to modern Africans. It's unclear whether the Akbari results as soft sweeps, or hard sweeps that get wiped out by admixture, or hard sweeps in competing directions, etc.

Not sure what you mean. He explicitly says in the clip that the Nazis are wrong to endorse racial essentialism.

Liar lol

Strong affinities, no doubt. At least Nazis were elegant.