One of the purposes of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY is to expose eugenic principles and practices within professional philosophy. As Shelley Tremain has argued persistently since founding this blog, the profession is largely animated by the spirit of “neoliberal eugenics,” such that “few philosophy departments (in the Global North at least) remain untouched by the eugenic vision of neoliberalism.” From bioethicists who argue that disabled people should be eliminated, to metaphysicians who oppose gender-affirming care, to “race scientists” who argue that Black people are innately intellectually inferior, philosophy is shaped by eugenicists. Certainly, compared to the situation of critical disability theorists, eugenic philosophers enjoy far more publicity, institutional support, and financial security. 

Now we have a better understanding of why these hateful bigots have been so successful. Besides the documented paper trail of billionaire philanthropy that I have already discussed, there is also an unknown amount of dark money (invisible to the public) circulating in the profession, funding the dissemination of eugenic propaganda in the guise of non-partisan philosophical inquiry and objective science. Sadly, this shadow economy made headlines only because of the tragic suicide of Jason Arday, a disabled Black man who was the victim of a targeted witch hunt organized by a network of academic eugenicists affiliated with the famous techno-fascist Peter Thiel – a prominent supporter of transhumanism (which seeks to eliminate disability) and opponent of the welfare state, including disability assistance. 

Thiel, apparently, is secretly investing in philosophical eugenics. The Byline Times reports that 

[The] coordinated targeting [of Arday] by an explicitly anti-black race science network did not come out of nowhere… Backed by the pro-Trump Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, this network has spent a decade penetrating Cambridge University before reaching Reform UK, Restore Britain, and the pan-European far-right. This phase of the campaign against Jason Arday began when academic and anti-black racist Nathan Cofnas raised claims of plagiarism in Arday’s work in a Substack post last month.

Cofnas (whom I previously wrote about here) was a philosophy fellow at Cambridge before being “dismissed(though the university faculty continued to sponsor his fellowship), after publishing a blog in which he argued that black people are less intelligent and that, in a meritocracy, the number of black professors at Harvard University ‘would approach zero percent.’” (He currently holds a postdoctoral position at the University of Ghent). According to the Byline Times (which I will quote at length here), Cofnas is connected to Thiel through a Cambridge network that “began forming in 2016 and 2017, when Thiel Capital chief of staff, Charles Vaughan, attended meetings at the university,” aiming to “encourage conservative academics to build ties, recruit sympathetic people, and build media and political influence.” Later, Thiel gave “a secret five-figure donation to Cambridge University through [religious philosopher] James Orr at the time of Orr’s hiring.” Orr, in turn, is a founding member of the advisory council of the Free Speech Union, which “support[ed] Nathan Cofnas through two university inquiries and sponsor[ed] his unsuccessful legal action,” before “turn[ing] its public advocacy against Jason Arday directly.” Orr is also linked to Aporia Magazine, an alleged vehicle for neo-Nazi propaganda, which “published an article calling Jason Arday’s case the ‘bitter fruit of equalitarianism.’” The same magazine had “already built Cofnas’ public profile through interviews, a podcast, a live debate, and an essay portraying opposition to Cofnas’ race science as persecution.” Cofnas and Aporia editor Noah Carl, moreover, had both been introduced to Thiel and given “what Aporia’s co-founder Emil Kirkegaard called the ‘Thiel treatment.’” Cofnas is also apparently affiliated with “the wider Thiel-linked US right”: a July 2024 photograph “shows Cofnas arm-in-arm” with Richard Hanania, “another race science sympathiser whose book, The Origins of Woke, was endorsed by Thiel,” and Curtis Yarvin, “whose software company was funded by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund,” and who “claims that white people are genetically more intelligent than black people, whom he repeatedly calls ‘negroes’ and casts as better off under slavery.”

(The image above depicts Yarvin with his arms around Hanania, left, and Cofnas, right)

This is not the entirety of the Thiel network – Charles Murray, The Quillette editor Claire Lehmann, and others are also connected; nor is it the only billionaire network funnelling money, both openly and clandestinely, into the eugenic movement in professional philosophy. We have no way of knowing how much dark money is being channeled into the philosophy of eugenics, including ableist and racist political activism disguised as value-neutral “philosophical inquiry.” As Cailling O’Connor and Craig Callender observed in a recent open letter, there is no professional obligation to disclose industry ties or conflicts of interest in philosophy. If someone cites a conflict of interest on their CV, this is completely voluntary. But even if conflict-of-interest disclosures were mandatory, this would not address the funneling of dark money into philosophy departments, programs, and associations. Such funding channels are deliberately hidden from public view, which allows techno-capitalists like Peter Thiel and Ben Delo (who has funded the Free Speech Union, Aporia events, and the Cambridge Scrutonian Society, a right-wing political hub) to co-opt philosophical ideas and institutional prestige in secret, giving eugenics the patina of philosophical respectability. When philosophers argue for ableist reproductive policies, they call it “procreative beneficence”; when they argue for white supremacy, they refer to “differences in gene frequencies at multiple polymorphic loci.” This jargon mystifies the public, and some professional philosophers, into mistaking ideological claims for non-partisan philosophy.  

Those who are unfamiliar with disabled philosophers’ work, including the extensive reporting on this blog, may be surprised to learn that professional philosophy (as practiced within the Ivory Tower) is not an insular bastion of critical thinking and enlightenment, untainted by the influence of dirty money, but is instead – especially within certain subdisciplines – a site of elite capture, a convenient vehicle for eugenic propaganda, and a central source of “ethics washing” rhetoric and gaslighting narratives about the “degeneracy” of disabled, trans, and racialized communities, which are depicted as social refuse, fit for incarceration, servitude, or death. Those who are surprised by the news that technofascists are pouring money into the philosophy of eugenics are ignoring the history of philosophy – including the dissemination of eugenic ideology through Harvard, Cambridge, the University of Toronto, and other prestigious departments – as well as its eugenic present, which includes the revitalization of the same eugenic logic through academic plutocracy. (I had suspected Cofnas of being affiliated with plutocratic networks all along). 

I have been told by naïve philosophers that, unlike science, philosophy does not appeal to billionaires. Yet philosophers have been just as instrumental to the eugenics movement as scientists, from colonial times to the present. This is partly because philosophers have a monopoly on ethics, including bioethics and AI ethics – fields that tell us not only how things are, but how things ought to be. Eugenicists, of course, do not merely want to scientifically validate the “degeneracy” of historical minorities; they also want to morally validate their hateful bigotry, transforming eugenics from a value-neutral science into a moral obligation: we must not only study, but also exterminate the brutes. Philosophical ethics gives eugenic science the force of a moral imperative: eugenic hierarchies must be imposed on the world.   

It is tragic that it took an academic’s suicide to draw attention to the existence of a technofascist dark-money network in academia, particularly in academic philosophy. But this tragic event is part of a broader eugenic system that subjects disabled, racialized, trans, and other marginalized persons to oppression, humiliation, and death, both within academia and beyond. I have previously reported that many disabled philosophers are secretly living in despair, and some are even suicidal, due to the profession’s relentless eugenic bias and chronic denial of its own ties to the broader eugenic movement funded by techno-capitalists. Disabled philosophers continue to struggle under this culture of eugenics, discrimination, and gaslighting. But rather than confront these centuries-old structural injustices, some academics are already blaming Arday’s death on the recent invention of DEI or “woke culture,” ignoring the much longer history of racist/ableist eugenics that shaped his life. Billionaire technocrats are likewise propagating the lie that “affirmative action” is responsible for Black and disabled deaths in academia – even though, in reality, affirmative action has always been for mediocre white men like Cofnas. DEI may be ineffective or performative, but unlike eugenics, it is not fatal. The fixation on DEI is simply a red herring, a distraction from the role that billionaire-backed eugenics plays in the marginalization, alienation, and mortality of Black and disabled academics, who are already materially disadvantaged. “Wokeism” is the scapegoat for billionaires’ ongoing eugenic crusade.   

As professional philosophy is increasingly co-opted by techno-capitalist eugenicists, will philosophers chase the bogeyman of DEI, or finally address the eugenic elephant in the room?