I wrote about Al Qaeda’s coordinated terrorist attacks on the United States on 11th September 2001 on their 20th anniversary. Things feel different on their 25th anniversary.

On 11th September 2001, I was working for The Disinformation Company Ltd (later TDC Interactive) as an offshore contractor based in Melbourne, Australia. The rest of the team was based in New York City. Our contact was largely via email - with me sitting in on Friday afternoon team meetings at ungodly hours using international calling cards. On that afternoon, then founder / creative director Richard Metzger asked me to post an article on US marijuana politics. I did so and logged off. What Metzger, founder / publisher Gary Baddeley and the rest of the then classic era / core team did not know was that I had been homeless for almost 18 months. I was editing the (now former) Disinformation website from the Borchardt Library and Computer Labs at La Trobe University’s Bundoora campus during the day. At night, I would sleep in the stairwell basement of the then Thomas Cherry Building - renamed in 2025 as the Jenny Graves Building. Earlier this year on a short-term contract, my team and I would go to the Jenny Graves Building for a coffee. I would pass the stairwells where I had slept (apart from when they flooded during winter) with the rest of the team being none the wiser.

Being homeless meant that I missed the wall-to-wall TV coverage of that evening.

The next morning, I attempted to log on to Disinformation’s content publishing system. The server was down. I figured that Lee Hoffman was maybe doing some unscheduled site maintenance updates. This meant I had the day off. I logged off the computer terminal in the ground floor of the Borchardt Library and left the campus. Only later that day in Melbourne’s CBD did I by chance see a Herald Sun newspaper headline and photo. I still didn’t grasp what others did about the terrorist attacks.

I wrote a series of heavily improvised articles on the September 11 terrorist attacks. Their headlines all began with the phrase US Terrorist Attacks on an older version of the now former Disinformation website. Here they are (the listed dates now differ from the original publication dates that occurred mostly in the immediate days and three weeks after September 11 - due to updated content on an old content publishing system):

US Terrorist Attacks: Nevermind bin Laden, Here’s The Arms Trade (Link).

US Terrorist Attacks: Smashing The Control Images (Link).

US Terrorist Attacks: News Frames and Filters (Link).

US Terrorist Attacks: Due To Circumstances Beyond Our Control (Link).

US Terrorist Attacks: Global Terrorism Resources (Link).

US Terrorist Attacks: Profiling Osama (Link).

Rollins Band: Find The Real Patriots (Link).

Everything You Know Is Wrong: A Canticle for Osama bin Laden (Link).

If this had been my September 11 experience it still would have differed from most.

However, real life brings unexpected twists. Several months before, I had pooled money together to purchase a student ticket to fly to New York City for author Howard Bloom’s wedding in Brooklyn. I was in NYC from 20th to 25th September 2001. US President George W. Bush announced the grand strategy that became the Global War on Terror on 20th September 2001 - my 27th birthday. Baddeley picked me up from the airport playing Macy Gray - who by coincidence is playing a live date tonight in Melbourne. Metzger took me on a tour of New York City - including Electric Ladyland Studios, CBGBs, and Christopher St - where we huddled in his apartment browsing his Aleister Crowley books and talking about how things were already getting out of control.

I stayed with Bloom - and on 21st September 2001 stood on the top of his Brooklyn brownstone seeing for the first time the dust cloud in the distance still over the World Trade Center debris now called Ground Zero. It was a sunlit, quiet afternoon - and in the cognitive dissonance of the silence I remember wishing that my college girlfriend was with me. When I wrote my PhD dissertation The Development of Strategic Culture in Terrorist Organisations (2020) my then Monash University PhD Supervisor Dr Luke Howie told me that I had to tell this story - which I did briefly on pages 22-23. But there was a lot more still untold. For example, Bloom and I on a video call for the Howard Bloom Institute had a laugh that I had been in the room of his wedding with Richard Brodie (Virus of the Mind) and Douglas Rushkoff (Coercion: Why We Listen To What “They” Say) - two people who went out of their way (along with Bloom) to give me access and interviews during 1997-99 - but we actually didn’t meet in the room face-to-face (I saw Rushkoff walk out after the wedding ceremony with Metzger—and wasn’t quick enough to grab him).

For most people, September 11 is a collection of images - American Airlines Flight 11 at 8:46am EDT, United Airlines Flight 175 at 9:03am EDT, American Airlines Flight 77 and the Pentagon, and United Airlines Flight 93 which crashed in a field near Shanksville. Metzger, Baddeley, myself, and others were running what at the time was a very well known website that had survived its Razorfish funded period during the peak of the 1995-2000 Dotcom speculative bubble. The FBI had “gone to ground” and had interviewed everyone - including our talented designer Leen Al-Bassam, as Metzger told me in his Christopher St apartment. “Things are going to rapidly get out of control,” he reflected. It was the end of an era that we had already sensed unfolding via events like the 2000 US highly contested election outcome, and the high-profile collapses of Enron Corporation and Worldcom. Metzger and I both made a contrarian decision (which Baddeley later reversed as publisher / current owner) to not pursue the already circulating memes and conspiracy theories that would later become known as the 9/11 Truth Movement.

In not seeing the actual terrorist attacks in real-time - and thus in not fully grasping both their kinetic shock and strategic surprise - I improvised with topics. That’s why for example above there was an article on the global arms trade. What I did turn to was Susan D. Moeller’s book Compassion Fatigue: How The Media Sell Disease, Famine, War, and Death (New York: Routledge, 2002) to map out the group and mass psychology of what was unfolding. Going with Disinformation author Preston Peet to see the Mother Superior era Rollins Band play the Irving Plaza on 24th September 2001 was also a pivotal experience (I missed several larger concerts held later). I had gone to the US with $USD60 in total - and I spent most of it on this gig - brushing Peet off afterwards in embarrassment at being broke.

A few weeks later on 10th October 2001, the Rollins Band played La Trobe University - same line-up, probably the same setlist, and Henry Rollins spoke of the earlier gig - to what I felt was a largely disinterested student audience. I had tried to interview Rollins in 1994 for the then La Trobe University student newspaper Rabelais - and when the cross-border interview negotiations failed - the failure became in Gonzo / New Journalism reportage style the real story. What was so important in retrospect about the Irving Plaza gig was when Rollins came out and spoke to the audience - thanking them for being brave enough to see him play. At that moment, Peet and I both felt that we were witnessing a poignant moment in history. Hardcore punk rock attitude means you turn up and play your gig - even if terrorists attack your city.

So, our influences in the immediate aftermath were not conspiracy theories.

When I returned to Australia, I very soon went to Newcastle for the annual This Is Not Art youth festival to speak. One panel was on technology and mental health. As TINA in 2001 unfolded, the anthrax scare happened and the psychopolitical shock influenced the youth festival cohort in visibly emotional and fear-aware ways. I had written as a BA at risk student about the US military. In the very final essay for my BA which I wrote for peace studies scholar Dr Thomas Weber (now an Adjunct Associate Professor), I tried to also reflect on my period in the John Godolphin Bennett line of transmission in the Gurdjieff Work. Dr Weber did not see the submitted essay as being really part of peace studies - no doubt as The Work is now even more obscure than it was in the late 1990s and the early 2000s - and that it better reflects dealing with political revolutions like the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 and then the tumultuous civil war period of 1917-1922.

In 2003, whilst in the now former Strategic Foresight program at Swinburne University of Technology, I wrote an over-long, unfinished submitted essay called Confronting The Unthinkable. This attempted to deal with the emerging national security and strategic intelligence environment. The essay suffered from not having any scope or selection / inclusion conditions, whatsoever. The same year, now Professor Axel Bruns of Queensland University of Technology invited me to write a Media/Culture journal paper on how September 11 was affecting journalists and the media. Barry Saunders (later of McKinsey & Co) and I would revisit this research question with a closer focus on editorial practices and investigative journalists in a 2009 conference paper (for which Monash University’s Dr Ben Eltham and I co-wrote our now well-known conference paper Twitter Free Iran - which a blind peer reviewer decided to reject from the conference peer review stream as it mentioned psychological operations - despite the fact that Dr Eltham and I critiqued both the United States Department of State and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps - which then led to my blog being hacked). This led me in 2010 to reflect during medical condition related illness on offensive cyberwarfare.

Don Webb has frequently observed to his students that “the Secret of Magic is to change the Magician.” The same holds for witnessing catalyst events like terrorism, geopolitics, and other volatility shocks. It gives you a different framing. Most people think of September 11 as involving two planes and the World Trade Center towers (the Pentagon incident is often forgotten and Flight 93 is summed up in the defiant, rallying cry: “Let’s Roll!”). There is a large (yet now fading) industry of core terrorism studies books, films, documentaries, streaming series, and now other memorials. But what Webb points to is that transformative moments of deep liminality (explored by the anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner) can occur in many, varied life contexts.

In 2004-05 when then Professor Trevor Barr (of Swinburne University of Technology) and I fought over my initial draft of the Disruptive Internet school of thought (for the 2005 contract report Smart Internet 2010 released by the Smart Internet Technology CRC and co-written with now Dr Darren Sharp and with contributions by now Dr Mandy Salomon), it was in part over our respective different subjective experiences of disruption as volatility. Mine were clearly more ‘edge case’ or '‘tail risk’ oriented than most people—reflecting a personal trauma history that included Autism and Complex PTSD. September 11 for me was not just the WTC. Rather, it was the psychological aftermath—and how this then led the US to invade Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Military historians and war studies scholars today call these the Forever Wars - with a nod to Joe Haldeman, Steve Coll, Dexter Filkins, Peter Bergen, and Lawrence Wright, amongst others.

In 2011, I wrote another Media/Culture paper for its ‘Doubt’ special issue on September 11 counterfactuals. What occurred on September 11 now 25 years ago was only one possibility of several contingencies that did not in fact occur. In 2014, I saw Professor Richard Ned Lebow (Kings College London, Cambridge University, and Dartmouth University) and Professor Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (New York University, Hoover Institution) do a tag-team style joint presentation on their respective approaches to counterfactuals and to game theory at the International Studies Association’s annual convention in Toronto, Canada. Wooster College’s Jeffrey S. Lantis and I talked about the paper over coffee, and I later also discussed it briefly with University of Birmingham’s Professor Patrick Porter.

Two years earlier, Professor Jeremi Suri (University of Austin at Texas) kindly had coffee with me at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, where we talked about daily writing schedules, trade press publishers, and he recommended to me Michael Kenney’s book From Pablo to Osama: Trafficking and Terrorist Networks, Government Bureaucracies, and Competitive Adaptation (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). Drafts in progress facilitate mentor-like discussions with far more experienced Professoriate.

I moved from Futures Studies and Strategic Foresight into core Counter-Terrorism Studies and Political Science. One way in retrospect to understand this is that the phenomenological experience of being actually in New York City just after the September 11 attacks meant that I collapsed the optionality of branching future pathways into one onrushing future. Don Webb might remind us that the ancient Egyptians called this onrushing future the Neheh: it creates even more uncertainty.

In 2014, Dr Eltham and I co-wrote a Contemporary Security Policy paper on Australia’s defence and national security oriented strategic culture that Professor Jeffrey S. Lantis had shepherded through an International Studies Association annual convention panel (and subsequent Routledge book). The CSP editorial team turned up to the panel and we discussed blind peer review feedback that I had just received. “Can you handle these suggested edits?” I was asked. “Yes,” I replied. “Good—we need them by the end of the week.” We looked at each-other. “OK, I can deliver that to you,” I replied.

So, I spent the ISA annual convention evenings in my Hilton Hotel room, working through the edits—with a larger budget this time of $USD75 for the week, as Hilton staff had taken my credit card as a security. Luckily, in having previously been homeless, I was able to find cheap coffee and bagels, and to find free meals in the evenings at the ISA conference. That lobster meal glimpsed at in a Toronto restaurant would just have to wait. Instead, I went to the Royal Ontario Museum after seeing a bus stop poster to commune with China’s Forbidden City courtly treasures, in a 2014 exhibition of political, cultural, and social elites.

In early 2024, Dr Megan McElhone of Monash University’s prestigious Criminology Department invited me to sit in for a few weeks to help facilitate a class. In one session we discussed the September 11 terrorist attacks and the Siev X Tampa crisis that occurred in October 2001. Dr McElhone remembered both incidents from her childhood. I was the only one in the room with more mature memories - and mine were divergent than most as I was still a BA at risk student at La Trobe University - and also still homeless during both incidents. It made me feel old as a Generation Xer. Students were receptive to a good discussion and Dr McElhone kindly gave me some space as a facilitator to share some “lived experience” based insights.

25 years later, September 11 is now a hinge / sliding doors moment. The United States psyche changed that morning at 9:03am EDT. As per the Professor Richard Ned Lebow approach to counterfactuals noted above - what occurred was one of only a potential range of plausible and probable events. When you get into the quantum physics involved this is multiverse, simulation, and many worlds theory-oriented ontology, epistemology, and possibly even metaphysics. It made sense to my autistic / neurodiverse mind (having been late-in-life diagnosed in October 2022). It’s also just my own, very subjective experience that reflected the confluence of some very unusual life circumstances. If you were alive when the September 11 terrorist attacks happened then your own equally subjective experience will likely differ from mine. We don’t need to collapse it down into an absolutistic (Milton Rokeach) or totalistic (Robert Jay Lifton) single-point outcome: asperspectival and multiperspectival differences (Herbert J. Gans) can be respectfully honoured, with a dose of antifragility (Nassim Nicholas Taleb).

Traumatic experiences in a longitudinal rear-view mirror become a resource. You cannot escape the strategic surprise or the volatility shock of what you experienced on 11th September 2001 - or have since learned about - as social learning, cultural transmission, and folklore from others. It’s instead a resource that you can use. Osama bin Laden, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, and the Hamburg Cell reinforced Walter Laqueur’s then just espoused theory: a paradigmatic shift from Old to New apocalyptic, mass casualty terrorism.

I (along with many other people) took the bait—and got ourselves hooked on what has subsequently evolved into surveillance capitalism (Shoshana Zuboff) or technofeudalism (Yanis Varoufakis). As the noted military innovation historian and current La Trobe University Vice-Chancellor Theo Farrell has wisely observed, British counterinsurgency experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq were unwinnable. This is also why Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for the cognitive-emotional processing of traumatic experiences can be helpful. You have to accept your limits. Then, you build a far larger life around the traumatic core.

When I go back mentally to the 15-20 minutes on the Bloom brownstone roof in Brooklyn on 21st September 2001, I can still vividly remember it. A clear blue afternoon sky with very warm sunshine. A mild breeze. A very quiet city in which New Yorkers were actually being very nice to each-other. But - that dust cloud hovering in the distance over the World Trade Center site - it’s so large, it’s still there, it really feels out-of-place (a signal of Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance), and - how would other people feel if similar destruction ever occurs elsewhere? I was alone in that moment - I held that thought for a few seconds - and then I went back into Howard Bloom’s apartment where we continued our face-to-face discussions.

At the time, the experience felt very weird - and I didn’t expect it to change me as much as it did. You can learn to have these kinds of dislocative subjective experiences in far more mundane life circumstances - and even to summon them at mental-emotional-physical will - in a far more limited way. In doing so, you take what Carl Jung might call the Shadow of September 11 - with all of the still unfolding and real-world horror that it has wrought (and will continue to do so - including the now observable via negativa existentialist absences of much younger generations).

You begin to transform in a more alchemical and energetic way - into the willed, focused intent of what you wish to bring into the world in a far more positive, constructive way. That for me is the real and enduring lesson of 25 years after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

1. The Trump Towers as the now tallest building in New York City.

2. Being involved in Ground Zero’s clean up.

3. Spreading anti-Muslim rumours.

4. Targeting Democrat politician Ilhan Omar.

5. Claiming to have predicted the September 11 terrorist attacks.

6. Messing up details about firefighters and other emergency workers.

These six lies are illustrative of the afterlives or the memory turn in September 11 studies. I first realised this when I saw Richard Beck’s book Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life (New York: Verso, 2025). Memory studies are a viable trend in historiography—which I had previously encountered in core terrorism studies, and in various books on how and why the Cold War ended. The latter was driven by historians like John Lewis Gaddis and Richard Ned Lebow who gained access to new archives and primary source data from different sides of the Cold War conflict.

In contrast, the afterlives / memory turn in September 11 studies is driven primarily by two trends. The first trend is the intergenerational transformation of population demographics in the United States and elsewhere for Millennials, Generation Z, and the new Generation Alpha. These younger generations have displaced the now largely forgotten Generation X (my generation), and the still dominant Baby Boomers. The second trend is that generational cohort amnesia (or simple lack of direct knowledge due to being either very young or not being born at all during the September 11 attacks) provides a knowledge gap for streaming media, digital marketing, and publisher firms to create consumer products and services for the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Netflix’s Turning Point: Generation 9/11 (2026) is a key example of these synergies (official trailer below). The documentary explores how the September 11 attacks have influenced United States culture and politics - from the domestic rise of homeland security to US involvement in the Forever Wars of Iraq and Afghanistan.

This transforms how we understand September 11 as a terrorist event.

The initial aftermath focused on proximate (near) and synchronic (present) aspects: the strategic surprise of the attacks; the stochastic shock of the fallout; and the volatility that shifted the United States away from the values and worldviews at the time that were still emerging from the 2000 United States election, the 2000 Dotcom financial crash, and high-profile corporate collapses that included Enron Corporation and Worldcom. These involved “images of the future” (Fred Polak) that were now “de-futured” (Jose M. Ramos) at the “myth/metaphor” (Sohail Inayatullah) or "daemonic” levels of (ontological) reality (Don Webb, Plato).

The afterlives / memory turn in September 11 studies takes us into a very different timeframe: distal (far away) and diachronic (through-time). Memory of what actually happened, how, and why becomes very important. Reliable primary sources from the initial historical time period of proximate and synchronic events and repercussions are now replaced by secondary source reconstructions and tertiary source noise. Therefore, source evaluation and other research and evaluation skills that are taught in cognitive psychology, strategic intelligence studies, political psychology, and historiography become vital. This knowledge base applies to Open Source Intelligence and to other data sources (from commercial to classified or clandestine / covert originated).

There is a body of work in political psychology which deals specifically with why President Trump would spread lies about the September 11 attacks. The late political scientist Robert Jervis pioneered much of this work in international relations during the 1970s period of detente negotiations between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Of his many works, How Statesmen Think: The Psychology of International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017) is a now canonical text. For Jervis, President Trump’s lies are successful in weaponising our human emotions and group-based affiliative identities. His lies are structured cognitively to self-convince people about beliefs, stereotypes, values and worldviews that they are already highly likely to hold.

The lies seem outlandish to President Trump’s critics—in very obvious ways. That’s not their point, Jervis would argue today. Their function as sociological propaganda is to bind together the identified in-group or voter bloc of (what now would be known as MAGA movement) loyalists. People self-convince themselves (the masses). Such groups may be identified via demographic, psychographic, sentiment, positioning, and digital marketing approaches that have long been part of the Values & Lifestyles Survey tradition (the consulting, marketing, and the political elite). In order to work effectively, there needs to be information and knowledge asymmetries between these two different groups that maintain the elite-mass “power over” / structural relationship.

The realist school of John Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato offers a contrasting explanation to Robert Jervis. In their book How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023), Mearsheimer and Rosato suggest that Westphalian nation-states in terms of their foreign policy will largely act in rational ways. They dismiss much of international relations work to date on this, including rational choice—an influential school of thought from the 1970s and the 1980s that emerged from think tanks like the RAND Corporation based in Santa Monica, California.

For Mearsheimer and Rosato, political scientists mostly still don’t understand what true rationality actually is. Their solution? Develop credible theories based on empirical observation of the real world: what people and strategic actors actually do (realism) versus a normative shift from present state to future state that you wish to bring about (idealism). President Trump’s lies also reflect an earlier tradition used by President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger of Madman Theory: appearing to be irrational in order to convince, influence, and to shape potential enemies and adversaries.

Here is a lecture by the late Robert Jervis on his political psychology informed approach.

Here is John Mearsheimer at the Cato Institute on his realist informed approach.

What we see here is the asperspectival / multiperspectival approach of combining (or at least being open to exploring) a range of viewpoints. This differs to being fused with a single point of view—which you believe has the answer. It is found in multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, causal mechanism (process tracing), and Bayesian oriented methodological approaches.

With this in mind we can now return to President Trump’s six lies about September 11.

1. Lie 1 is credibility based.

2. Lie 2 is credibility based.

3. Lie 3 targets an out-group stereotype (in order to strengthen in-group identity).

4. Lie 4 deploys or weaponises this out-group stereotype to target an individual politician.

5. Lie 5 is credibility based.

6. Lie 6 is credibility based.

Critics of President Trump often pre-frame him as being either irrational or dangerous. This belief is central also to those critics who believe that President Trump is a fascist—a complex debate in which shifting definitions have now affected inclusion / selection criteria (this may become clear if you read earlier waves of political science research in fascism studies, notably from the 1960s to the early 1990s, and from varied authorial and ideological based viewpoints). A more focused and credible version of this claim is that President Trump is enacting a socially learned version of the Nixon / Kissinger era Madman Theory - which he learned in the 1970s and 1980s in New York City’s real estate market, whilst working with Bear Stearns chief executive officer Alan C. Greenberg, who provided financing for many of President Trump’s property / real estate investments.

If you view these six lies via a Jervis / Mearsheimer / Rosato informed lens then its strategic rationality becomes more readily apparent. President Trump is openly manipulating public awareness of the September 11 terrorist attacks in order to strengthen his credibility. This is for what likely are egoistic and status-driven personality structure and psychological drives. The status-driven dynamics mean that President Trump has to be dominant; and his targets are dominated via targeted pre-framing and social influence. Muslims and progressive Democrat politician Ilhan Omar are scapegoats: sacrificial victims who are expendable.

This attack PR is agenda-setting (Steven Lukes) and has occurred in US domestic politics in various historical waves that include the 1920s anti-anarchist, 1950s anticommunist, 1980s sociological conflict, 1990s criminal deterrence, and 2001-2021 era Forever Wars that resulted from the George W. Bush administration’s grand strategy the Global War on Terror. President Trump has just mastered it—honing it beyond his mentor Roy Cohn in the formative historical period of Wall Street deal-making in the 1980s and the 1990s.

Finally, this can also be understood very well in terms of John Nash Jr’s development of specific dominance strategies in noncooperative game theory. President Trump is highly adversarial. He manipulates the afterlives / memory turn of the September 11 terrorist attacks for his own personal advantage. This is extractive and rentier based: the dominant mode of how leverage based financialisation actually works in property and real estate transactions (for that specific investment asset class). It is the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey equation on steroids. President Trump is the dominant; his targets are the dominated. It’s always an outcome in his favour. That’s also the strategic rationality.

Tomorrow, I will reflect on the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

This is what emerged from several hours of desk review and in browsing book shelves:

1. 1. Early Career Academic books are written in the first 5 years since the author’s conferral date (given by the university) of their PhD. The book may be a PhD adaptation (that needs to be rewritten to reflect a book monograph format, the publisher, and a broader readership), it may be an expansion beyond the PhD’s “original contribution” to now include new research, or it may be an entirely different project altogether. Jathan Sadowski’s Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2020). The usual book manuscript word count is about 60,000-85,000 words.

2. If the academic pursues a PhD-to-book monograph project then there may be a closer fit with either a major university press (Cambridge or Oxford in the United Kingdom; and examples like Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, Columbia, or Cornell in the United States), or a mid-tier academic press (usually owned by a publishing conglomerate) that has a larger backlist (Routledge and Springer come to mind).

3. Some academics in the Humanities and the Social Sciences also now opt to write on books on contemporary issues for smaller pressses in more regional markets (like Black Inc in Australia). Bloomberg Academic and Polity have emerged as being very popular choices. The usual manuscript word count is about 70,000 words.

2. 2. Mid-Career Academic books are area / field focused in terms of demonstrating a sustained “original contribution” that embodies their expertise. These are usually published by a major university press and often in a particular series or with a specific editorial team. The goal is to advance debate and the state of play in an area / field of research.

3. This often helps to facilitate promotion in the Boyer model of the institutional academic career to the Professoriate: the hardest career stage in the traditional, hierarchical ‘command and control’ structure of academic staff. There is also some overlap here for academics who are able to game academic publishers (as an arbitrage form) to be fast-tracked to becoming a full Professor.

4. An example of this kind of project (actually by a more senior academic) is Benjamin J. Cohen’s International Political Economy: An Intellectual History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). The usual manuscript word count is between 97,000 and 115,000 words for a PhD-to-book project, or 155,000 words for a major study (that reflects a significant personal and institutional based investment in a cumulative research program).

6. 3. Professoriate books are career peaks and major capstone studies that define quality in an area / field for many years. Major university presses dominate this niche due to the specific target audiences involved (which overlap with professional associations like the International Studies Association and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations), and due to the high research, development, production, and pre-publication costs involved in an individual project (which may be $AUD300,000 or even more for a major funder financed project).

7. Both the Mid-Career and the Professoriate books usually depend on national and international competitive grant funding for the individual research projects that the book monograph ‘falls out’ of. Two major examples in international relations theory and military history are Beatrice Heuser’s The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Richard Ned Lebow’s A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). These book monographs are examples of projects that were written at Distinguished and Emeritus Professor career stages. The book manuscript word count is between 150,000 and 235,000 words—and may be even as high as 335,000 words for a truly foundational study or a major edited collection of contributors on a specific topic or research field.

9. 4. Trade Presses: Several different career trajectories converge on trade presses: the Professor who becomes a public intellectual and who jumps (with an agent’s help) from a (more niche) university press to a trade press (like Random House or Simon & Schuster in the United States), or the ambitious Mid-Career Academic who decides for translational research purposes to engage directly with public and social policy audiences.

10. A different pipeline is the academic who combines a journalism / media background; my past coauthor Ben Eltham illustrates these synergies very well, including in his cultural industries and trade union advocacy based work. Albert Palazzo’s The Big Fix: Rebuilding Australia’s National Security (Carlton, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 2025) exemplifies targeted policy intervention in a public debate. Some people specialise as being the very effective boundary-spanners and the backroom operators between academia, government, business, and community / philanthropic / mission-based (transnational) networks. An accessible book is a credibility building and positioning based marketing tool that can open up consulting and networking opportunities.

11. The veteran journalist Annie Jacobsen has had major hits with Nuclear War: A Scenario (London: Penguin Books, 2024) and Biological War: A Scenario (London: Penguin Books, 2026). This has opened up Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) licensing opportunities: Denis Villeneuve has optioned Nuclear War: A Scenario for a film adaptation, and Jacobsen has built over her influential career a niche in defence and national security reportage that reflects how the job crafting involved (much as the late Anthony Bourdain did as a chef, for example). Some books will become truly influential: Peter Thiel with Blake Masters’ course notes for Stanford University on entrepreneurship which became Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (London: Virgin Books, 2014) is an exemplar.

There is a career pathway here in terms of the scope, scale, and the depth of book monograph published research. However, there are important access and socio-economic dimensions as well that both challenge and undermine the surface veneer that we live in a meritocratic world. We clearly do not. Elite university libraries for example are filled with top-tier elite university press books that you don’t find in smaller institutions that rely on smaller publishers like Praeger or Rowman & Littlefield, for example.

All of this is also now being disrupted by data centres, the rational herding into compute for Generative AI platforms, and the transnational stratification of global labour markets, and supply / value chain networks. Finally, most book monograph content is now likely to be pirated, and to end up in the Internet Archive, Z-Library, LibGen, or another shadow network—thus directly affecting royalties payment amounts. Thus, overall compensation for authors will continue to derive from other project activities. I’ll see you for drinks in the Cayman Islands in a few months’ time when your conflict arbitrage profits get marked to market.

B. Today’s Open Yale Course is Capitalism: Success, Crisis, Reform (2009) created by Professor Douglas W. McRae.

C. Robinhood Markets is moving heavily into market-making for prediction markets (Bloomberg). Selling shovels is a safer strategy to be profitable during a digital gold rush. It also signals the success of anarchist strains of political philosophy (Harpers Magazine). The political scientist Professor Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (New York University) foresaw this in his popularisation of game theory, notably his book Prediction (New York: Vintage, 2011) which I saw him speak at an International Studies Association annual convention in Toronto, Canada in 2014.

D. George Mason University Professor Alex Tabarrok (Faculty page) has written at Marginal Revolution on the recently launched Scholar Data that tracks the S-index metric for high-quality scientific data that can be shared (National Institutes of Health challenge & outcome). This looks promising—and could be readily applied to other research fields.

E. Professor Sergey Ivanov (University of the District of Columbia) has useful website resources and a YouTube channel of lectures and talks on organisational psychology. His conceptual framework of ‘fearocracy’ (rule by fear) is very relevant as macroeconomic and business cycle conditions get worse, inflation rises, and volatility spikes.

F. MIT Professor Vipin Narang (website, CV) has a great podcast interview with Dr Michael Green of the United States Studies Centre. They discuss Professor Narang’s research program, his insights on nuclear posture and great power politics, why he became interested in nuclear strategy, and his PhD and Early Career Academic experiences (which involved the importance of mentors, networks, and luck). Harvard University conferred Professor Narang’s PhD dissertation Posturing For Peace: The Sources and Deterrence Consequences of Regional Power Nuclear Postures in 2010 (PDF). It’s a great interview, complete with tips on how to transition from academia to working in government and the public service - and why you might consider this as a possible future career trajectory or pathway.

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From Crisis Theory to the Global Emergency, Degrowth, and Overshoot Ideology: Pathways, Prospects, and Innovation Opportunities

Dr Alex Burns, ADFA @ UNSW Canberra (Graduate student, Master of Special Operations & Irregular Warfare)

‘Simulation-3’ in the Club of Rome’s now infamous Limits to Growth study (1973) forecast an ‘overshoot and collapse’ scenario of environmental and resources collapse that would accelerate from the 2030s onwards. This paper examines and problematises three influential theoretical frameworks: Karl Marx’s discussion in the Grundrisse (1857-58) and David Harvey’s commentaries (2023), critical / integral futures scholar Richard A. Slaughter’s global emergency (2012), and contemporary degrowth philosophies (notably Kohei Saito and Jason Hickel). Each theoretical framework has made their respective contributions; and each is challenged as predominantly normative approaches via contact with contemporary reality.

Marx, Slaughter, and degrowth exponents like Kohei and Saito each adopted counterhegemonic stances. As such, they either anticipated or have responded to the Limits to Growth study’s legacy which Andreas Malm and Wim Carton as ‘overshoot ideology’: the hegemonic stance in scientific circles now that the Earth’s temperature is likely to rise by 1.5-2 degrees centigrade. Each suggests ontological realities, epistemic and ethical stances, and praxis-informed actions that should be more rigorously evaluated. A ‘team of teams’-based approach (General Stanley McChrystal) would be required for more scalable implementation globally. Catastrophe Bond (insurance-linked securities) innovation for financial markets is also suggested. (195 words)

Now, I will do the same for Dr Nathan Cofnas (Ghent University) who accused Professor Arday in a Substack post on 21st July 2026. He is also now faced with a very tragic situation in which a series of Substack blog posts and several YouTube podcast interviews are considered enough to very likely end his Postdoc career, in part due to holding ideological views that place him at conflict with his affiliated institution, and its staff and students. Ghent University this past week suspended Dr Cofnas from his Postdoc role and placed him under formal investigation. This will be compartmentalised, siloed, and highly secretive. A copy of Ghent University’s notification to Dr Cofnas of his suspension, the formal investigation, the specific policies and procedures that he is alleged to have breached, other issues that are in scope, and the claimed adverse impacts to the institution has leaked online. It is not yet been independently authenticated. Ghent University’s notification cites operational, reputation, and psychosocial risks. As the Respondent in this matter Dr Cofnas is unlikely to ever see the full material evidence of these risks.

I proceed as follows. First, I examine Dr Cofnas’ conferred PhD dissertation in 2020 from Oxford University. Next, I address his research program and publications track record to date (“relative to opportunity”) via CV and then research publications informed analysis. This is a standard procedure in a university research office (I have worked in both Faculty and in central Research Offices, and I have a PhD and highly cited published research myself, for what that is worth). Then, I examine in brief some issues that Ghent University has raised about the hereditarian worldview in intelligence studies and the contemporary “race realist” subculture. I do so in part based on as yet unpublished research from 2020-24. Finally, I address what the formal investigation is likely to find. I concur with Dr Cofnas that Ghent University is highly likely to terminate him from his Postdoc employment role. I frame these comments specifically for other Postdocs.

The views expressed here draw on both my MA (2006) and PhD (2020) qualifications in political science, and my research administrative career (2008-26). In part, this is to apply to Dr Cofnas the same evaluative standards that I did to Professor Arday - and that could be done by others to my body of work as well. These are personal views only.

A. The PhD Dissertation.

The University of Oxford conferred Dr Cofnas’ PhD in 2021 for a DPhil in Philosophy (completed in 2020). It is called Evolutionary Explanations and the Debunking of Moral Beliefs. Oxford University awarded the PhD to Dr Cofnas in the area / field of examination of Philosophy rather than Evolutionary Biology or Evolutionary Psychology. His two PhD Supervisors were Professor Guy Kahane (Google Scholar profile) and Dr Andreas Mogensen (Google Scholar search query). Emeritus Professor Jeff McMahan also provided support (Google Scholar profile), with deep expertise in applied ethics. Dr Cofnas also thanks the Duke University academic Dr Jonathan Anomaly (Google Scholar profile) and Dr Neven Sesardic, most recently affiliated with Lingnan University in Hong Kong (CV) (Google Scholar search query). The Acknowledgments section is very brief and does not refer to a broader consultative or social network.

The PhD dissertation is a 207 page document that consists mostly of 5 case study chapters. They are clearly written and formatted (each with separate bibliographies) for publication. Dr Cofnas’ Google Scholar profile reveals that two chapters were published as of 2020—when the University of Oxford conferred his PhD. The chapter topics reflect both Dr Cofnas’ research interests and his PhD Supervisors’ expertise. The PhD dissertation’s writing mechanics are strong: clear argumentation, logical paragraph structure, and clarity.

Chapter 1 examines Edward Westermarck’s incest taboo. Cofnas rejects both natural selection and cultural transmission arguments-highlighting instead that other posited theories (such as sociological) may provide more parsimonious explanations (p. 29-30). In Chapter 2, Dr Cofnas likewise rejects Darwinian and Marxist theories of cultural evolution, and instead sides with the late University of Southern California cultural anthropologist and primatologist Professor Christopher Boehm (Google Scholar profile) in its study of power and group selection in the Paleolithic era and in contemporary society. Dr Cofnas argues that traditional approaches should be revisited (p. 78). This is a theory-building chapter about rival schools of thought and different kinds of causal / explanatory theories. Chapter 3 builds on Boehm’s work to explore the claimed Paleolithic era hunter-gatherer origins of various forms of liberalism, how illiberal hierarchies arise, and why revolutions occur and have contagion based strategic effects. This is also an argumentation and logic-based methodological chapter. Dr Cofnas rejects a truth-tracking claim for liberalism and instead prefers naturalistic form arguments (p. 114). Chapter 4 focuses on the causal mechanism of truth-tracking. Dr Cofnas advances realist social selection as a gene-culture coevolution framework—and argues that due to metaethics and accumulating evidence, this hypothesis in the evolution of morality deserves further empirical investigation (p. 149). Chapter 5 evaluates and rejects the moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) and his utilitarianism claims. More convincing for Dr Cofnas are “how-possibly explanations” that integrate “evolution, history, culture, and psychology” (p. 193).

Does Dr Cofnas advance racist arguments in this PhD dissertation? The first three chapters evaluate and reject Darwinian, Marxist, and longitudinal form cultural transmission based arguments. For Dr Cofnas, morality since the Paleolithic era has advanced primarily in human society via dominant groups that have power and which present specific moral and political philosophies as being natural (including the above, and utilitarianism). Liberal political philosophy is not an evolutionary default; illiberal variants also exist. Realist social selection claims that moral rules are imposed by group-based selection pressures that shape cultural evolution based moral debates and trajectories (p. 120). Collectively, if this argumentation is accepted (and it does not necessarily need to be) then this would challenge the primacy of liberal political philosophy (in both its classical and neoliberal variants). It also would challenge the utilitarian premises of social cohesion policies - instead prioritising realist power and conflict sociology as more plausible and empirically observable explanations.

CWRU lists the University of Oxford as second nationally and seventh internationally in its 2025 rankings. Thus, one significant difference between Professor Arday and Dr Cofnas is that their respective PhD level education (in different fields of knowledge yet both in the social sciences, and thus addressable via transdisciplinary comparative methods) occurred at very different ranked universities.

Finally, is Dr Cofnas’ PhD dissertation plagiarised? I ran it through the free plagiarism checker Dupli Checker and got a partial result (PDF). The software found 56% plagiarism and only 46% originality! However, how university teaching staff actually check and use plagiarism software is more sophisticated than is perhaps understood. (Note the rhetoric I used in the prior sentence - an attempt at three cognitive biases called anchoring, framing, and representativeness.) The detected plagiarism was solely from Dr Cofnas’ own subsequent published work - which originated in the PhD dissertation. Scanning hits of 1-2% are usually discarded as false positives. We also don’t know the quality of the Dupli Checker software and I didn’t pay to check the entire PhD dissertation. However, consistent with other robustness checks noted above, it is highly likely that Dr Cofnas’ conferred PhD dissertation fulfils the criteria of making an “original contribution” to a field / area. Whether or not you normatively agree with either the field / area or his specific argumentation / conclusions is a different point.

B. The Curriculum Vitae and Publications Track Record

Dr Cofnas has a publicly available academic format CV - dated May 2026 (PDF). It lists his areas of research and follows the usual areas. The University of Cambridge terminated Dr Cofnas from a concurrent role affiliated with Emmanuel College - whilst he was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in 2025 - for a 2024 blog post articulating what others have described as a “race realist” stance. I read this as a form of arbitrage taken to work-around the outcome of a formal investigation that exonerated Dr Cofnas: the case was so high-profile and politicised that this often is done by senior administrators to get the specific prosecutorial outcome that they want. Others see this differently as the difference between a Postdoc (where termination would require mandatory reporting by the central Research Office to the funder that would be embarrassing to do) and a College that has different budget and functional reporting lines. The Emmanuel College decision was due to its perception that Dr Cofnas had breached Diversity Equity & Inclusion guidelines. For me, this is related to the Lverhulme Postdoc Fellowship: the termination decision was made because others found “deep offence” at what Dr Cofnas had written in publicly available Substack blog and other writings (and interviews) - even though the highly confidential disciplinary proceeding did not find that Dr Cofnas had broken any law and that freedom of speech in scholarly debate is affirmed (University of Cambridge statement). In his PhD’s Acknowledgments section, Dr Cofnas had noted: “In the course of writing this thesis, some of my extracurricular work generated intense political controversy” (p. iii). Dr Cofnas began a second Postdoc at Belgium’s Ghent University in 2026.

The CV lists 21 published peer reviewed papers. It includes in some cases download estimates and AltMetrics scores. Many of these papers are either directly from his conferred PhD dissertation or further elaborate and expand on specific argumentation sections. This is what a normal PhD to Postdoc research career trajectory would do. The journals include Biology & Philosophy (ScimargoJR Q1), Philosophia (ScimagoJR Q1), Utilitas (ScimagoJR Q1), Philosophical Quarterly (ScimagoJR Q1), Philosophical Studies (ScimagoJR Q1), Human Nature (ScimagoJR Q1), and Quarterly Review of Biology (ScimagoJR Q1). Dr Cofnas has two co-authored publications (in 2016 and 2018) with Dr Noah Carl (who the University of Cambridge terminated in 2019) and Dr Michael Woodley of Menie (who Vrije Universiteit Brussel terminated in 2022 after a gunman killed 10 Black people in Buffalo in the United States in May 2022 had cited Dr Woodley’s academic research on IQ dysgenics in a manifesto). There are also a couple of co-authored papers on nutrition that do not add to his research program. A number of Dr Cofnas’ papers deal with the controversial evolutionary psychologist and antisemtic, white supremacist Kevin MacDonald, formerly a Professor at California State University, Long Beach. I address this specifically below.

The CV lists 17 popular articles - which shift over time ideologically from the conservative National Review to the libertarian, contrarian Quillette and his Substack newsletter. 10 invited talks and conferences are noted - again showing a topic and ideological shift in terms of scholarly identity. His teaching experience at the University of Cambridge appears to primarily be in assessment marking rather than face to face / online delivery of learning content. Two strengths of the CV are his referee experience, and his 8 referees - which range from George Mason University libertarian economist Professor Garrett Jones (who has contrarian views) and Harvard University psychologist Professor Steven Pinker. Having a range of referees and several noted public intellectuals can frame you as a strategic hire for Postdoc selection committees.

C. Hereditarian Worldviews and the Contemporary “Race Realist” Subculture

The University of Cambridge (in 2025) and Ghent University (in 2026) both allege that Dr Cofnas is a “race realist” who espouses a “hereditarian” worldview. As noted above, the University of Cambridge decided as a rank ordered preference that holding and publicly espousing these ideological beliefs was sufficient for termination (although the wording of its public statement above suggests that a confidential settlement made via Non-Disclosure Agreement may have been made to Dr Cofnas).

Racial theories can be traced historically to Greece and Rome. They also shaped Christian actions in the Crusades in the Middle Ages against Jews (embodying antisemitism) and Muslims. Racialist theories emerged in Europe with Arthur de Gobinau, Max Nordau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and in Nazi Germany, with Adolf Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, and the Holocaust (Shoah) architect Heinrich Himmler. In the United States, early “race realist” worldviews (that influenced the Nazi Party) were advanced by Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, later to be eclipsed by Franz Boas in cultural anthropology. They also informed Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophical movement which was involved in part in decolonialist responses in India (where Blavatsky’s hidden Masters allegedly were) versus Great Britain. In the United States and the United Kingdom in the mid to late 20th century, William Shockley, Hans Eysenck, Arthur Jensen, Richard Herrnstein, Charles Murray, Jared Taylor, J. Philippe Rushton, and Steve Sailor amongst others have advanced hereditarian based claims of group-based race-IQ correlations which they believe undermine both contrasting environment-based IQ arguments (notably by the late James Flynn), and liberal meritocratic processes of claimed upward socio-economic mobility. Today, an emerging consensus is that “race realists” are part of an illiberal bloc which is intent on seizing political power and shifting Western societies away from its neoliberal consensus (at least from 1979 to 2024) and into an illiberal, post-liberal, and multipolar order.

How does Dr Cofnas fit within this rapidly evolving milieu?

First, Dr Cofnas’ scholarly identity has evolved since the University of Cambridge conferred his MPhil (Distinction) in 2016, and the University of Oxford conferred his PhD in 2021. Over time, he has moved from a conservative to a stance more aligned with libertarian contrarians. His research program focuses on controversies and taboos in the philosophy of biology and ethics. Dr Cofnas can clearly read, understand, debate, and develop new frameworks in his qualifications area of philosophy. He is not an evolutionary biologist or evolutionary psychologist, and nor is he an anthropologist or sociologist.

Second, Dr Cofnas is on record as having collaborated with two alleged “race realists”: Dr Noah Carl and Dr Michael Woodley of Menie. Dr Carl is cofounder of Aporia Magazine with Dr Bo Winegard, who Ohio’s Marietta College terminated in 2020. As noted above, Dr Woodley also was terminated in 2022. Dr Woodley has collaborated with Dr Edward Dutton (The Jolly Heretic), who the late University of Ulster Professor Richard Lynn mentored (the University of Ulster terminated Professor Lynn before his death, so he founded the independent Ulster Institute to self-publish his hereditarian research). Finland’s Oulu University terminated Dr Dutton from his Docent role in 2019, and removed prior affiliation details from its website in 2020. Dr Cofnas and Dr Dutton both disagree with each-other. You may note an employment outcome pattern here for “race realist” hereditarians that Dr Cofnas has also experienced - and is very likely to do so, again (perhaps: a failure to learn from experience).

Third, what has demonstrably happened in terms of Dr Cofnas’ career trajectory to date is that his “extracurricular work” noted in his PhD’s Acknowledgments have effectively swallowed the rest of his identity. Dr Cofnas has shifted much of his attention online (as per the hereditarian “race realists” noted above who are now independent scholars). The University of Cambridge terminated him after a Substack post made on 6th February 2024 which argued for a “hereditarian revolution”. This philosophical stance was implicit in his 2021 PhD dissertation - but was not foregrounded so much, and nor was it in his identity-based rather than scholarly-based language. But at least he wrote for Quillette, and not for American Renaissance (your choice of outlets to publish in and the specific editors who you choose to work with can be very important, and will shape what audiences you may reach.)

Fourth, Dr Cofnas now faces at Ghent University a repeat of his adverse administrative experiences at the University of Cambridge. This creates some cognitive dissonance (Leon Festinger) with his PhD. On the one hand, Dr Cofnas demonstrably put in a lot of work - an MPhil and a PhD from Oxbridge universities, very strong and broad references, deep engagement with being a referee for blind peer review of academic publications, many academic publications in ScimagoJR Q1 ranked journals, and some teaching, administration, conference presentations, and popular work (Quillette has a specific readership). But now he faces intense scrutiny at Ghent University over his Substack post made on 21st July 2026 - on Professor Jason Arday - which most of his critics likely have not even probably read or properly understood his argumentation and knowledge claims (the same for the “hereditarian revolution” piece as well). According to his Google Scholar profile as of today, Dr Cofnas has a h-index of 11 (good for a Philosophy oriented Postdoc) and 689 citations. Instead, he will now mostly be remembered as the “hereditarian race realist” whose Substack post sparked a cascade that led to Professor Arday’s tragic death.

Fifth, let me go back to the University of Cambridge in 2025 and the Substack piece on his espoused “hereditarian revolution.” Dr Cofnas advanced the claims in his 2021 conferred PhD that liberal worldviews are not solely natural or preordained and that competing illiberal worldviews have their own evolutionary logics. Nor is utilitarianism (which underpins social cohesion and multiculturalism) in his view truly defensible as a source of moral sentiments - this arises in part also due to selection pressures that include power and dominant groups that can impose their preferences on others. Whether you personally agree with it or not, this was considered robust enough to result in a conferred PhD in which Dr Cofnas was independently evaluated (including likely in an external examination or oral defence process) to have made an “original contribution.”

By 2024, Dr Cofnas has rejected “Woke” ideology which he believes is rooted in Christian moral worldviews (Dr Cofnas is Jewish). This is not so much a surprise as Dr Cofnas also rejected some Christian moral arguments in his PhD. Dr Cofnas assembles varied argumentation from Christopher Rufo, Richard Hanania, Herbert Marcuse, Amy Wax, Charles Murray, and Immanuel Kant. One important source for Dr Cofnas is the Michael Levitin book Why Race Matters: Race Differences and What They Mean (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997) which remains likely the most philosophically rigorous argued case for a hereditarian worldview (of which the “race realist” label is applied by Jared Taylor, who reissued the book in 2012). Dr Cognas rejects a number of sources, from the conservative National Review where he began his publishing career to the Perth-based Imperium Press. He rejects Darwinians, historical Nazis, contemporary neo-Nazis, Jared Diamond, and most online race realists. The problem is clear in his Substack article’s final section on Strategy in which for example Dr Cofnas highlights public controversy around Charles Murray, articulates the need for hereditarians to adopt a revolutionary stance in order to counter Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DEI) elites, and then fails to work out the logics of a viable way forward. He is not a specialist in revolutionary insurgency. In citing Rufo, Hanania and Murray, Dr Cofnas also highlights that his Substack post on 21st July 2026 about Professor Arday was an attempt to apply a hereditarian counterrevolutionary playbook (that Rufo used against former Harvard University president Claudine Gay, who resigned from this role in January 2024). We are in tit-for-tat game-theoretic territory in which anti-plagiarism detection software is now open to all.

Sixth, Dr Cofnas highlights that one reason the University of Cambridge terminated him was that his Substack article of 6th February 2024 had sections on race realism that appear to have been hastily written. They did not have the argumentation based clarity of his conferred PhD dissertation or his peer reviewed academic research. It is not clear that University of Cambridge academics, administrators, and protesting students understood at all Dr Cofnas’ stance, either - or if they did, they were able to mobilise both “from below” (the student protesters) and “from above” (the academics and administrators), to control the issue framing, and to use the formal complaints process in order to trigger a formal investigation (disciplinary proceeding) in which Dr Cofnas was terminated. The hereditarian or race realist counterreolutionary playbook can be used to get rid of them (so that they become independent scholars on YouTube, Substack, and elsewhere) as well.

Seventh, and finally, much of his peer reviewed academic publications and popular work involved Dr Cofnas making a significant intervention in hereditarian race realist discourse and intellectual history. I have not seen this commented on. If you are unfamiliar with it, you will miss its theory-building and theory-testing significance. Much of this was a debate about the evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald, who has promoted Life History Theory (also advanced by Dr Michael Woodley of Menie and Dr Edward Dutton, and in a different form, by J. Philippe Rushton, Charles Murray and others). This debate occurred between 2018 and 2023 in peer reviewed academic journals, in Quillette, and elsewhere: Dr Cofnas listed a series of publications from both sides of the exchange on his professional academic website. There is agreement, disagreement, critique of deplatforming and the coordinated campaigns to retract articles, and others like Dr Edward Dutton also weigh in. This is not the consensus view that outsiders may believe. More cynically, it is also a strategy to create more controversy via what functionally is a citation network that advanced different forms of group selection theory (itself a heterodox stance). During the time of this infra-group debate, Springer Nature’s Evolutionary Psychological Science was ScimagoJR ranked Q2. It has now fallen to Q3: some newer journals fluctuate in terms of their editorial and published article quality. It certainly is not of the quality of Dr Cofnas’ published work in ScimagoJR Q1 ranked journals: it is an activist-oriented detour that at best could be described as ‘emic’ oriented translational research in contemporary hereditarian discourse - which Dr Cofnas describes as being “race realist” in his Substack article of 6th February 2024 which directly led to his University of Cambridge termination.

The then Professor Kevin MacDonald is most well known for a trilogy of books—A People That Shall Dwell Alone (1994), Separation and Its Discontents (1998), and The Culture of Critique (1998)—all originally issued by Praeger Publishers, who also published J. Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn, and others (some of its books were niche and reflected intellectual currents at the time, which now would be disavowed as being too dissident and heterodox). In a 2018 presentation made at the University of Buckhingham (where a number of other cancelled, controversial scholars like Dr Neema Parvini the YouTube self-styled Academic Agent now work), Dr Cofnas rejected MacDonald’s Life History Theory informed framework of Jewish group dominance via influencing cultural evolution strategies. Instead, he advanced a competing, new theory called the Default Hypothesis (Dr Cofnas is Jewish) in which Jewish intellectuals self-select for political and social movements that are not overtly antisemitic. Dr Cofnas is perhaps best described as a Jewish philosopher who gravitated to a more declaratory / espoused hereditarian worldview. The irony is that Dr Cofnas rejects a range of other “race realist” views (such as Nazi, neo-Nazi, and antisemitic). His critics who mobilised to get him fired either don’t understand this, or don’t want to describe in any detail what his values and worldview really are. Kevin MacDonald now runs the antisemitic and white identitarian Occidental Observer. The white identitarian, fascist, and Nazi German oriented Antelope Hill Publishers issued a third edition of MacDonald’s book A Culture of Critique in September 2025.

When you are deplatformed, take Fleetwood Mac’s advice: just go your own way.

D. Ghent University’s Suspension, the Formal Investigation, and the Damage Done.

When Professor Jason Arday died on 14th August 2026, this tragic outcome sent shockwaves around the “small world” network (Duncan Watts & Steven Strogatz) of Western academia. Suicidal ideation is very harrowing to endure and the pathway into making a suicide attempt leaves its psychological scars, whether successful or not. People are understandably deeply upset and angry. The softly spoken and clearly introverted Dr Cofnas did not anticipate this cascade of events—which occurred in part due to a United Kingdom Fleet Street media pile-on called a coordinated flak campaign. On August 20th 2026, Ghent University suspended Dr Cofnas from his role and notified him that he faced a formal investigation (disciplinary proceedings). Text of this notification has leaked online and is not yet independently authenticated. The formal investigation process will be compartmentalised, siloed, and highly confidential: a black box.

In closing, here are some specific comments on this and what is likely to happen.

First, when a university employer notifies you of a formal investigation this is often a significant psychological shock. One reason for this is that internal teams who are tasked to implement this process may attempt to use strategic surprise in a coercive and compellance-based manner. This is a prosecutorial strategy: the team is tasked to gather evidence (which often may also involve the hiring of external legal firms who conduct interviews that are really about attempted legal discovery) from the Respondent against a series of allegations, specific claims, violations of specific policies and procedures, and either misconduct or serious misconduct against the university and its beliefs, culture, norms, traditions, values, and worldview. To be accused of this as a Respondent is to face an existential crisis akin to a halogencore genre film. When Professor Arday died, Dr Cofnas would have known he would be scapegoated. Notification of a formal investigation is not simply an email, a phone call or a meeting. As Dr Cofnas has subsequently related, your university work email and access to IT systems is cut off, you are banned from coming physically onto campus, you are not able to communicate with anyone apart from a designated person on the formal investigation team, and you may never hear from some people ever again.

Second, it is very important to understand the specific claims made against you as the Respondent. There is a “reverse onus of proof” here. The leaked notification text specifically notes a Winston Marshall Show podcast of 9th August 2026 with Dr Cofnas. The leaked text also mentions a David Starkey Talks podcast of 10th August 2026, and a Rob Montz podcast of 14th August 2026. Dr Cofnas explains in his Winston Marshall Show interview that his Substack post of 6th February 2024 (as well as a 3rd January 2024 post on Substack called Why We Need to Talk About The Right’s Stupidity Problems, which Dr Cofnas claims that no-one at the University of Cambridge responded to). The leaked notification text makes no reference to what Dr Cofnas explains about his Substack posts and his research program, but does focus specifically on the “hereditarian revolution” post of 6th February 2024 (the Winston Marshall Show interview with Dr Cofnas was aired on 9th August 2026 before Professor Arday’s tragic death on 14th August 2026).

The leaked notification text cites the Ghent University employment contract and contends that Dr Cofnas has both violated this, and again cites the already well known February 2024 post on the “hereditarian revolution” as being “entirely outside the scope of your official research mandate.” But the Substack post from 6th February 2024 was also published prior to his Ghent University employment in 2026. Ghent University refers specifically to his “research mandate as a study of ‘the future of liberalism’, specifically focusing on political doctrine emphasizing individual freedom and equality’ (note the United States spelling for a Belgium originated notification text).

We don’t have Dr Cofnas’ research proposal or his Postdoc contract; we do have via his CV (May 2026) and other publicly available sources, his published academic research outputs and other outputs (which could fit into a translational research or a non-traditional research outputs based institutional classification for research). I have noted above that Dr Cofnas has shifted much of his attention to “extracurricular activities” which have been problematic. This can also be read and situated - notably in his attempts in 2018-13 to counter Kevin MacDonald (again prior to his Ghent University period of employment) - as a targeted intervention in hereditarian discourse and the “race realist” subculture. A futures studies or strategic foresight practitioner (I have an MSc) would point out that ‘future of . . .’ anything is a single-point forecast; I would add that it assumes ideologically that despite current or near-term problems, the prevailing order (classical liberalism and neoliberal capitalism) will continue. Yet, hereditarian “race realism” is one of several illiberal worldviews that is feared to challenge and to possibly eclipse the continuity and security of the liberal global order. So, this could be handled in a project management based change request - except that few people want to actually include an ‘emic’ based hereditarian “race realist” informed worldview - even if it is by a Jewish scholar who very clearly rejects most of the people that the notification letter assumes he agrees with (again, the 2024 Substack article on the “hereditarian revolution” is summed up as just focusing on “racial barriers and segregation” when it is in fact more like elite and counter-elite based sociological and power circulation).

The leaked notification then cites article 4 of Ghent University’s Work Regulation and article 3 clause 1 of the Disciplinary Regulations of Staff. The focus here is that Dr Cofnas is using his Ghent University role and institutional affiliation to advance “race realism” (the 2024 Substack article would have been known when he was hired in 2026), and that this is unrelated to his Postdoc project. It then invokes article 1.3 of the Ghent University Code of Ethics to claim that a Conflict of Interest exists (at a severe level) and furthermore, that article 1.5 in the same Code of Ethics “prohibits spreading ideas of racial superiority or inciting racial segregation.” These are “cumulative breaches” that are claimed to have involved “deliberate public misrepresentation” to “promote ideologies that conflict with its core values” and that are a “breach of your ethical duties” (here, “hereditarian revolution” is mis-typed as “hereditarian evolution” in a sentence that mentions “race realism” - suggesting that this leaked notification was written quickly and not fact-checked or edited, and that aspects of it might be informed via non-public discussions with others).

Several rhetorical strategies are used here to claim that Dr Cofnas has made “a disciplinary offence committed within the university context.” Non-academic (i.e. public communication not published in a blind peer reviewed academic journal system) material that has been publicly available for two years, that was subject to an 18-month formal investigation at the University of Cambridge and a likely NDA outcome (in which Dr Cofnas was terminated from a different, concurrent role to facilitate his role exit when he was found not to have broken any laws), and that would have been known to Ghent University when they hired him in 2026 is described as “deliberate public misrepresentation”. In the Winston Marshall Show above, Dr Cofnas further clarifies his Substack blog and its posts in terms of public communication of his research program interests, which are listed on his public CV. So, there are three issues here that are embedded in the notification text. Dr Cofnas has engaged in public discussion that is not what some Ghent University staff and students want (and this is outlined at length in terms of the protests made against Dr Cofnas - a form of mobilisational action taken against him).

Rather - and these are legitimate issues - there is scope debate around his Postdoc project on ‘the future of liberalism’, disagreement about what the “core ideologies” of a university are (even if an ideology exists and has an intellectual history, it may be outside the allowable Overton Window or can only be dealt with in specific ways of bounded rationality), and Dr Cofnas wrote his Substack post in 2024 (and made subsequent public communications) on hereditarian “race realist” values and worldview that both got him into trouble, and that give Ghent University administrators the leverage points to pre-frame him. As the philosopher Steven Lukes has observed, after causality and ideology, the third dimension of power is the ability to engage in agenda-setting - or to be the dominant group in a conflict-oriented power based situation who can enforce as a selection pressure its specific moral norms. Thus, the Ghent University administrators have potentially given us a real-life case study that deals with some of the very issues in his PhD dissertation.

In bringing a prosecutorial case, common stratagems used include to scope control of the specific issues raised. To achieve this, primary source documents are usually selectively quoted, and may even be misrepresented (or explained in very simplistic ways to reinforce black and white moral dynamics). The February 2024 post on Substack would already have been known to Ghent University when it made its Postdoc employment offer in 2026 to Dr Cofnas. The catalyst is clearly Professor Arday’s death and the public outcry about it - so this is crisis and reputation management from a cost-benefit perspective. The strategic pretext from a prosecutorial stance is also that in publicly arguing “that racial or ethnic groups differ in intellectual ability for inherited or biological reasons” (what the hereditarian race realist stance is, ontologically and epistemologically) Dr Cofnas may have also violated sections 20 and 21 of Belgian antidiscrimination law (despite this being well known prior to Ghent University hiring him - although past controversies occurred in a United Kingdom rather than a Belgium domiciled legislative context). Significantly, the Ghent University leaked notification describes Dr Cofnas as having engaged in “the systematic personal and professional destruction of colleagues” (i.e. because Professor Arday has died) and in having described him as a “mentally disabled” and “worthless scholar” (I disagree with both descriptions of Professor Arday), Dr Cofnas is claimed to have likely breached Chapter 5 of the Belgian Criminal Code in articles 443 et seq.

These are very serious to invoke. Ghent University further stacks the leaked notification in noting the existence of a Students Against Cofnas group, and a volume of staff and student complaints. (Some will be true, and some will be contagion / rumour based as in a moral panic or a purity crusade.) Dr Cofnas is now described as engaging in the “targeted campaign of professional elimination” (did Dr Cofnas either want or expect Professor Arday to die?), and a causal link is then made to the 2024 Substack article on the “hereditarian revolution” and of the belief that Dr Cofnas is engaging in the “purge” of “ideological enemies” that has resulted in “a climate of severe psychosocial distress.”

This is the kind of description used for a militant ideological extremist, guerrilla, or terrorist - I doubt in having MA and PhD qualifications in counter-terrorism / political science (and 17 years of experience in university Faculty and central Research Offices, including working with over 400 academics on their career trajectories and research programs) that this criminal standard could be met, unless you can show that Dr Cofnas intended to kill Professor Arday (very doubtful). This is cherry-picking, escalation, and compellance based strategic bargaining that is designed to be emotionally confronting to Dr Cofnas (likely, in the hope that he will resign his role, as Professor Arday did at the University of Cambridge when he was faced with his own formal investigation). The outcome variable of “severe psychosocial distress” is both relevant and is (along with staff and student responses) what is crafted prosecution-wise to ensure that the formal investigation reaches a pre-determined outcome. You only bring cases of this magnitude that you can plausibly expect to win. Professor Arday’s death, the staff and student adverse reactions (very understandable as grief and shock), the global awareness of this matter (including possibly lobbying and persuasion from special interest groups or networks), and that this is an employer-driven process means that Dr Cofnas is very unlikely to get an objective and procedurally fair result. Professor Arday’s death will now forever taint (and potentially also endanger) Dr Cofnas (who may face potential retaliation).

Ghent University has a TrustPunt counselling service that frames its operational delivery in terms of countering the unlawful discrimination of protected characteristics as countering “transgressive behavior.” Dr Cofnas is notified that he is under counselling study that will assess the psychosocial risks of his continued employment, and potential adverse impacts on staff and students. Next, Dr Cofnas is notified that his public communication is a “reputational risk” including the withdrawal of a guest lecturer and dangers to “its national and international academic relations.” Dr Cofnas is placed under “preventative suspension” of article 57(2) of the Disciplinary Regulations for Staff, “without hearing you prior to this decision” (i.e. the preventative suspension is the administrative invocation of a policy instrument in order to deal with crisis and reputation management). The scope of this preventative ban (which includes all of the normal restrictions already noted above, and that includes academic conferences) is to last for seven working days until 28th August 2026. Dr Cofnas is able to “give an oral or written response”, and to be supported “by a solicitor, a trade union representative, or an advisor of your choice” as well as “to inspect the file and to obtain an electronic copy of it.” This is all standard procedure for a formal investigation - and this is only the initial notification.

Third, the prosecutorial strategy here is to isolate Dr Cofnas as the Respondent. He is cut-off from university facilities and is unable to communicate with anyone. Formal investigations are subject to confidentiality - and can thus in high-profile cases like this be at risk of being politicised. Goalposts can be shifted: further claims can be added to the list. Ghent University policies and procedures - and specific sub-systems in it can be invoked - such as staff and student concerns (which may also be organised as mobilisation to intimidate specific Respondents). External laws and the threat of criminal prosecution may be invoked psychologically - without ever referring this matter to police or to legal / judicial authorities for them to independently prosecute (which is what should really happen if you genuinely believe that Dr Cofnas had the motive and intent to kill Professor Arday or to impose psychosocial distress - and that Professor Arday’s alleged unethical serial plagiarism and research / publications misconduct then provided Dr Cofnas with the opportunity and the means via his Substack post of 21st July 2026 to kill Professor Arday via a social media campaign.

Ghent University as noted above uses specific argumentation to describe Dr Cofnas as engaging in a “targeted campaign of professional elimination” of Professor Arday. In other words, assassination of a rival. Next, Ghent University alleges that Dr Cofnas’ “hereditarian revolution” (published in 2024 and subject to an 18-month formal investigation at the University of Cambridge - and thus plausibly well known to Ghent University when it hired Dr Cofnas in 2026) is described as a militant campaign of targeting and purging staff (has Dr Cofnas actually done this with anyone at Ghent University or elsewhere?), who cannot be reasoned or negotiated with due to his “race realist” ideological indoctrination, and in causing “severe psychosocial risk” to staff and students (logged via the TrustPoint university counselling service - it is also normal for such services to have their highly confidential Information Technology systems kept completely separate and inaccessible from the rest of the university), and “reputational risk” of an international nature, means that he is a clear and present danger. In an external judicial and legal system these claims would have to be more than asserted: they would have to be documented and verified. But this is a highly confidential and employer-controlled formal investigation process, so the normal rules of the separation of prosecutor (the formal investigation team) and judge (whoever makes the final decision in Ghent University’s senior management) are not separated. Ghent University thus has multiple Conflicts of Interest - as all such politicised cases do. The confidential nature of these formal investigations enables very easy institutional cover-up and the silencing via a climate of fear of other university sub-systems (and the usual non-involvement of a truly independent university sub-system like General Legal Counsel or Audit & Risk: who investigates the formal investigation team if any problems or methodological challenges arise?).

There is very clear language for what Ghent University is describing Dr Cofnas as being and doing - due to Professor Arday’s tragic death. It is something that I am MA and PhD qualified in (and doing another Master degree in), as well as having been mentored by United States political scientists, and having edited and written for the former Disinformation website in New York City, from 1998 to 2008 (for nine years). It is called psychological operations or psychological warfare. It is also the alleged magical casting by Dr Cofnas of a curse or death spell on Professor Arday, via his Substack article of 21st July 2026. Dr Cofnas is a “hereditarian race realist” (whatever that ideology actually is - you won’t know if you don’t read historical primary sources), who has breached his Postdoc research program (the ‘future of liberal’ order cannot include advocating for an illiberal worldview), people are stressed (understandably), and the institution is in crisis (very well possibly). This can be both framed and interpreted in several ways, including what the philosophers Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben would call invoking a “state of exception.”

Ghent University’s invocation of Belgian anti-discrimination law is understandable, however its invocation of Belgian criminal law claiming that Dr Cofnas intended to kill Professor Arday via euphemistic language (a “targeted campaign of professional elimination” and the “purge of ideological enemies”) is probably overreach. The “hereditarian revolution” of Dr Cofnas (which disavows Nazis, neo-Nazis, antisemitic white supremacists, and most of the Alt-Right or Dissident Right, and therefore probably much of its Reactionary and Traditionalist wings as well) is closer to the “revolution” of Thomas Kuhn (trying to revive an old paradigm with new philosophical arguments and causal logics) than of the Bolshevisks in 1917 Russia. For “severe psychosocial risk” (plausible - but forget post-traumatic growth and resilience or being antifragile) or “reputational risk” (definitely - and like much of this for all concerned, possibly also having “owned goal” dimensions), you can tick off Michel Foucault, Ulrich Beck, Charles Perrow, and Axel Honneth, but not Diane Vaughan (who might suggest “organisational deviance”) or Jennifer J. Freyd (who defined DARVO: deny, attack, and reverse victim & offender). You (or I) may find Dr Cofnas and his worldview to be repellant (however, my MA and PhD training lies in how to try and understand people who have different beliefs, norms, values and worldviews to you). But did he actually ever advocate the killing, murder or death of anyone?

Here’s where the ending minutes of Rob Montz’s podcast interview on 15th August 2025 becomes important. At 26:53 minutes, Dr Cofnas states: “This is what happens if you don’t give Dr Cofnas a job.” He clarifies in cross-talk with Montz that he already has a conferred PhD. At 27:07 minutes, Dr Cofnas then states: “I have the job currently [at Ghent University]. I’m still waiting for the revolution to happen. And, I’ll get another job. After the revolution, I’ll be the head of, you know, the Department of Eugenics and Race Science at Harvard.” The final line occurs from 27:17 minutes to 27:25 minutes. It has provoked widespread outrage. Dr Cofnas has claimed that it was a joke. Clearly, the “hereditarian revolution” that Dr Cofnas espouses is about restoring what he believes to be a long discredited and suppressed research area that in the late 19th and the early 20th century was the prior, prevailing orthodoxy. It is not about eliminating or purging academics who would work in different research departments or universities. Nor is it a Charles Manson-like call for a Helter Skelter-style race-war. Dr Cofnas wants what every Postdoc secretly dreams about: a tenured job and the expansion of his research program into a well resourced university department. It’s a case of relative deprivation (Ted Robert Gurr) and not black propaganda facilitated revolutionary uprisings (Paul M. Linebarger) or coup d’etats (Edward N. Luttwak). Any political scientist who is familiar with this literature, and most defence / military personnel would have very different estimative threat assessments (and ways of strategically intervening) than the crisis escalation strategy that Ghent University has very predictably implemented (Thomas Schelling, Herman Kahn, S.M. Amadae, Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, Scott N. Sagan, and Vipin Narang). Maybe watch the Kathryn Bigelow film on Netflix, A House of Dynamite?

Already, there are international responses to both Ghent University and to Dr Cofnas. In such escalation dynamics, the allowable “zone of possible agreement” begins to disintegrate. The situation destabilises. People become more entrenched in what they believe is position-based bargaining that relies on agenda-setting power, rhetoric, and Machiavellian power games of interpretation. Remember that this is an employer-driven process that is compartmentalised, siloed, and highly confidential - and also very difficult for all parties now concerned to walk back from. A significant problem here procedurally in such cases is Ghent University’s decision to use strategic surprise with Dr Cofnas in issuing a notification letter and a preventative suspension (which has a “reverse onus of proof” that “risk transfers” this like a put option to Dr Cofnas, and which previously, the University of Cambridge did earlier this month to Professor Arday, prompting his resignation on 5th August 2026. It’s a paired case study of two formal investigation processes—at the University of Cambridge and Ghent University (and, actually, a trio case study if you add Dr Cofnas’ prior suspension from the University of Cambridge which intensified his personal frustrations about DEI policies and thus his relative deprivation comparatively when compared to Professor Arday—who at the time of his death, had far less ScimagoJr Q1 ranked articles for example than Dr Cofnas already did at a Postdoc level).

Some people will read this as me defending Dr Cofnas over Professor Arday - and some people have attempted to publicly attack me as such. Others - also very understandably - don’t want to promote Dr Cofnas or his “hereditarian race realist” approach. I can appreciate that. The debate between Dr Cofnas and Professor Arday never even reached the level of Oprah, Sally Jesse Raphael or Jerry Springer - those talk shows actually had far more direct and real debate than what occurs in a university today (note here that I am autistic / neurodiverse, have a publicly disclosed trauma and mental health history, and am a suicide attempt survivor - so I am more firmly in the “lived experience” camp than the far more surface level “trauma-informed care” camp).

If you genuinely believe that the contemporary university is in danger from “hereditarian race realists” like Dr Cofnas then you will have far more credibility if you can explain their worldview factually and engage with them—and not just sum them up as engaging in hatred or a “targeted campaign of professional elimination.” You also have to treat primary sources in terms of what they actually say, and not just cherry-pick arguments that appeal to the prejudices, stereotypes, and interpretations of your target audience. That is called (sociological) propaganda—not what Ghent University claims Dr Cofnas has engaged in against Professor Arday (the “propaganda of the deed” pioneered in the late 19th century by Russian terrorists). Dr Cofnas has likewise made some significant mistakes that could be described as “unforced errors” (due to the selection pressures of far more dominant groups who are able to enforce their preferences for more utilitarian influenced moral norms which must be complied with).

Ghent University’s formal investigation is under way. In my view - shared by Dr Cofnas - he will likely be terminated. That’s the clearly wished-for-outcome - the decision has likely already been made - and so the formal investigation is simply to run through the process, using a stacked deck of allegations and offences. Bill White the United States Ambassador to Belgium has warned Ghent University that it is treating Dr Cofnas as a scapegoat (Professor Emeritus Freyd’s DARVO framework is very relevant here in how institutional cover-ups occur in politicised formal investigations), and that US agreements with it are now under review. Dr Cofnas told the Wall Street Journal on Friday, 21st August 2026, that he “was an easy scapegoat.” He now faces a double-bind (Gregory Bateson and the Palo Alto Group’s description of multi-level communication that traps the target coercively in an unescapable situation) that Radiohead described in Burn The Witch. It’s all a very stupid waste - that if you are a Postdoc or if you ever want to become one, you can potentially learn from.

I found The Power Triangle after submitting a UNSW student essay on the Iran coup d’etat in 1953 (available here). The Central Intelligence Agency’s covert operations role is well known (Operation TPAjax - the TP referred to Iran’s communist Tudeh Party). I found more when researching the essay, which has insights from area studies, revisionist histories, analytic case studies, and energy security and oil geopolitics. I found some new things as well: I was unaware of TPBEDAMN the CIA’s psychological operations / warfare initiative which used black propaganda and that mobilised protesters (academic study here).

B. I recently posted photos of Luka Puppy the adorable three-year-old Labrador who I live with for Harvard University Professor Cass Sunstein (here) and energy / commodities trader Joel Rubano (here). Now, Professor Sunstein has a new article on the availability heuristic. Of course, it has Labradors. You might consider even buying a Labrador (preferably from a rescue shelter) and seeing what living with them is like. Professor Sunstein also today made me aware of The Routledge Handbook of Classical Realism being available for free on Amazon Kindle. Do check it out.

C. Today’s MIT OCW free course is Energy Economics created by MIT Professor Paul Joskow.

D. The New Institutionalism is very important in economics, political science, and environmental sustainability. If you are unfamiliar with it, a 1996 review essay in the journal Political Science (here) may be helpful.

E. MIT’s influential Associate Professor Joshua Shifrinson has a new book called Archival Research For International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2026). The Amazon Kindle edition is available now; the hardcover and paperback editions will be out in November 2026.

F. I hope to see Yasujiro Ozu’s classic Tokyo Story (1953) this week. The New York Times critic A.O. Scott on the influential film.

G. There are moments in life when you improvise - and experience the transcendent. U2 perform Bad at the first Live Aid concert (1985) and Bono reaches into the crowd as a global audience watches . . .

H. Netflix continues its award-winning Turning Point series with Generation 9/11. This series continues the afterlives / memory studies turn in Terrorism Studies also signalled in Richard Beck’s book Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life (New York and London: Verso Books, 2025). The Netflix series also includes the so-called Forever Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I. A CARP Research Lab lecture on the political psychology based profiling of leaders.

J. An 8-hour series of lectures by HangukQuant on algorithmic / quantitative trading in the Python programming language.

K. Nobel laureate (1997) and MIT Professor Robert C. Merton on how to meet the financial challenges of retirement.

On 21st July 2026, the “race realist” hereditarian scholar Nathan Cofnas published a Substack article which examined plagiarism claims about Professor Arday’s PhD dissertation (conferred in 2015) and 10 of his research publications. Cofnas used the playbook that Christopher Rufo had successfully used to investigate then Harvard University president Claudine Gay - who then had to step down from this leadership role. I am familiar with Cofnas, Rufo, and others like Greg Johnson and Edward Dutton who are ideologically motivated. I’ve not yet published this research because I see a mixture of analytical insight and ideological hyperfocus that I am still thinking about how to best handle.

The Cofnas Substack article set off a firestorm of polarised debate in the United Kingdom media. All of the ingredients for Fleet Street tabloid style flak and attack PR were there. Journalists framed Arday as a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) hire at an elite university (which Cofnas also objected to, for ideologically motivated reasons). They began to investigate both his body of work and claims about his life which formed the basis of Professor Arday’s memoir Great and Unfortunate Things published in the United States by the trade press Simon & Schuster, and co-written with co-writer Eve Claxton. Arday faced a formal investigation at Cambridge and resigned on 5th August.

Professor Arday’s death is deeply shocking for many people, and it is tragic. Public responses are polarised: some emphasise his academic fraud; others focus on his race, autism, and history of mental illness; and still others have focused on institutional responses, the media’s hunt for blood in the streets, and what this episode conveys about contemporary universities.

I was not surprised. Here is a summary of my arguments to others.

Why are the claims of Professor Arday’s serial academic fraud important?

Truth is at the core of academia and the social contract which universities have.

If you betray that, then don’t be surprised if your clients turn to more affordable substitute products and services. Serial academic fraud results in demand destruction and the erosion in a still very fact based world of a distinctive rationale to exist.

A. The PhD Dissertation

Liverpool John Moores University conferred Professor Arday’s PhD in 2015. At the time, the CWRU exercise ranked the University as 53rd nationally in the United Kingdom and 696th overall. Only part of a PhD is the final PhD dissertation. PhD training covers developing a research program, area / field norms, methodology, and, hopefully, publications and career planning. Its criteria for conferral involves making an “original contribution” to an area / field.

Professor Arday conducted a small-n study on peer mentoring intervention using 24 recruited participants (153) that resulted in 4 for the final study (158). This involved workshops and focus groups (160-161). The 4 participants attended the 12 workshops (162-166). The subsequent discussion of data analysis issues (180-187) does not adequately address how the small sample limits generalisability, nor inter-rater reliability of qualitative coding. Much of this and the prior section is descriptive / summative rather than being deeply analytical. The post-intervention analysis (189-191) is largely self-reporting by the 4 participants on their subsequent trajectories.

The study’s Chapter 5 research findings chapter (200-286) is very large. It mostly consists also of self-reporting by the 4 participants. Whilst this fits a reflective, narrative-driven, community of practice based approach, the chapter could have been further strengthened via more analysis than self reporting description. This is also significant when Chapter 2 (35-81) and Chapter 3 (82-136) are included: both are literature review chapters with the second summarising theoretical and mentor oriented constructs in a descriptive way. The analytical core of Arday’s PhD dissertation is thus Chapter 6 discussion (287-329) and the Chapter 7 conclusions (330-355) which follows the usual format. The original contribution section (351-352) would benefit from being edited with tighter clarity. The lengthy section on study limitations (343-346) - which again is usual for PhD dissertations and peer refereed journal articles to have - does acknowledge the small sample size (346). The study’s conceptual framework (356) notes a significant body of historical work on reflective and social learning theories - but this is not developed as analytically as it might have been. The Bibliography (357-401) is substantive - but again is often dealt with in a descriptive / summative rather than in a more analytical / critique based sense.

Cofnas has argued that Professor Arday’s conferred PhD dissertation has significant plagiarism from other sources. Professor Arday denied this - and claimed the issue was minor editing and his PhD supervision (usually a PhD dissertation is sent to an editor before being finalised for conferral as part of the examination process). What I find are other issues. This PhD dissertation is a very limited study - which Arday acknowledges - and which many PhDs actually are (including in the sociology of education in which large-n data collection is a challenge), including my own. Part of developing and internalising effective research skills is to be able to acknowledge this as a self-check.

As a document the PhD dissertation is however closer to being a Professional Doctorate. What I read as the analytical core (Chapters 6 and 7) is 67 pages out of 401 (16.7%). Two literature review / theory construct discussions (Chapters 2 and 3) are 100 pages out of 401 (24.94%). The research findings chapter is 86 pages out of 401 (21.45%) which is mainly participant self reporting and has minimal analysis (which instead are in Chapters 6 and 7). If you add the Bibliography, Chapter 1, and the opening material then the analytical core is only 16.7% of the total - or at best 38.15% if you add the research discussion chapter. This is really for me the core issue: a lot of analytic literature (such as the reflective and social learning theories noted above) are mentioned yet are under-developed. It’s essentially cherry-picking the literature to look persuasive. It looks convincing - unless you know the actual, original literature.

B. Evaluating The 10 Most Important Publications

Cofnas then turns to Professor Arday’s 10 most important publications. These are comparable for example to the research track record “relative to opportunity” that is included in Australian Research Council national competitive grants for the Discovery Early Career Academic (DECRA) and Future Fellowship (mid-career). Such lists can fluctuate and change over time, so we should treat Professor Arday’s list as a snapshot.

The first (Management In Education, 2018) is a small-n (n=3) biographical interview study in a ScimagoJR Q2 ranked journal. It extends aspects of Professor Arday’s PhD methodology to look at senior leadership experiences. It is thus partly a career repositioning paper.

The second (Whiteness and Education, 2018) is an autoethnographic paper that updates the reflexivity construct in Professor Arday’s PhD dissertation. ScimagoJR goes back only to 2023 for this journal so it could be Q2 ranked or possibly lower at the time of publication. The autoethnographic method means that it is self-reported.

The third paper (Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2021) is in a ScimagoJR Q2 ranked journal for education at the time of publication. Professor Arday’s co-author Dave Thomas (University of Kent) flagged it for plagiarism and Routledge lists it as being under investigation. It’s a construct development paper (normatively to decolonise the curricula) and a small-n study (3 academics of colour and 15 students recruited). The small-n aspect reflects aspects of Professor Arday’s PhD dissertation study. The authorship suggests that Professor Arday was the lead / corresponding author on this study.

The fourth paper (Higher Education, 2022) is in a ScimagoJR Q1 ranked journal for education at the time of publication. As the first ScimagoJR Q1 paper it should likely have been listed first on the top 10 list rather than fourth. It is a larger-n study (n=40) on an important administrative issue for a vulnerable, at risk student population. Despite the data issues that Cofnas reports Dave Hughes has raised, it is the strongest paper yet by Professor Arday.

The fifth paper (Social Policy and Society, 2022) is in a ScimagoJR Q1 ranked journal for education at the time of publication. Cofnas describes it as an op-ed piece; I instead read it as an issues analysis for a policymaker (education and public health) audience. Along with the first and the fourth paper above it positions Professor Arday in terms of demonstrating impact and translational research potential.

The sixth paper (BMJ Open, 2022) is a study protocol that as Cofnas notes Professor Arday is not the lead / corresponding author - and nor is he listed in the final authorship position as being the research team supervisor or laboratory senior academic. Rather on page 6 he is listed as having “contributed to the final manuscript.” This usually means that Professor Arday was not involved in the planning, data collection, or data analysis of the study. He rather provided writing (and perhaps editorial) expertise for publication. This is in a ScimagoJR A1 ranked journal. But given that Professor Arday was not involved primarily in either the study and his supervisory role remains unclear, this paper’s inclusion could be read as either vague or, at worst, opportunistic (i.e. building your research track record as a signalling based stratagem from others’ work). The usual way that this would be dealt with would be to ask Professor Arday for further clarification on his specific role and contribution. Sadly, this is now not possible.

The seventh paper (British Journal of Sociology of Education, 2022) is in a ScimagoJR Q1 ranked journal for education at the time of publication. It uses Critical Race Theory as a theoretical framework, it is a small-n study (n=18), it has little data analysis beyond participant self-reporting, and, importantly, Professor Arday would use its posited constructs (systemic racism, job insecurity, and lack of career progression) to defend both his own work and to shutdown any potential investigation. The second and third themes (525-527) are part of the adjunct population experience, as are two of the sub-themes (exploitation, dehumanisation of the first theme (521-523), meaning that the entire study really hinges on claims of gendered racism (523-524) as a differentiator. Professor Arday acknowledges in his Limitations of Research section that the study’s research findings are not readily generalisable (528). I’m more charitable than Cofnas here - this is essentially what parts of Professor Arday’s PhD dissertation might have looked like had he conducted it at an elite institution.

The eighth paper (Educational Review, 2022) is in a ScimagoJR Q1 ranked journal for education at the time of publication. As Cofnas notes, it’s an introduction to a special issue, and not an academic publication with original research. The special issue of Educational Review is volume 74, issue 3 (2022) called World In Motion: Reflections on the Impact of Covid-19 on Higher Education. Professor Arday does not contribute to the special issue’s articles. The authors (several whom I have worked with) all appear to have been recruited for the special issue (as per normal editorial and publisher practices). So this is again a CV and research track record “relative to opportunity” building strategy - having at least several Q1 journal articles and editing a special issue are considered advantageous when applying to elite institutions for jobs. In terms of his career progression, Professor Arday timed this for 2022, before the University of Cambridge appointed him in 2023.

The ninth paper (Higher Education, 2022) is in a Scimago Q1 ranked journal for education at the time of publication. So far, Professor Arday’s publication strategy has peaked with multiple Q1 publications in 2022 - this would have created a potentially favourable anchoring bias for the University of Cambridge selection panel who appointed Professor Arday in 2023. That is because he shows collaboration, multiple Q1 publications, and this suggests an upward career trajectory which would also be favourable to attracting national and international competitive grants as a named Chief Investigator. This is a small-n study (n=43) of staff and students recruited from United States and United Kingdom universities (thus hedging against home country bias) (59). We see here in terms of research program development and publications strategy that Professor Arday is focusing on what at the time were sentiment-based themes: Critical Race Theory; Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Covid-19, Black Lives Matter, Black academics, and disadvantaged ethnic minorities (54-59). The findings and discussion section (61-67) uses very similar thematic material to several of Professor Arday’s other papers - so this could be viewed as potential salami-slicing (and the innovative aspects in this section on socio-economic stratification probably come mainly from Professor Arday’s co-author Christopher Jones as this is his specific area of expertise). Nevertheless, Professor Arday and his co-author acknowledge that the small-n study design makes generalisability difficult (68).

The tenth paper (The Sociological Review, 2023) is in a Scimago Q1 ranked journal for education at the time of publication. The lead / corresponding author is Dr Chantelle Jessica Lewis (University of Oxford). This paper is the seed of a 2026 co-authored book by Dr Lewis and Professor Arday called We See Things They Never See: Love, Hope and Neurodiversity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2026). Like Professor Arday, I am autistic (late-in-life diagnosis) and have a trauma history, so this is both a personally relevant paper / book, and it has been very sadly ignored in comparison to Professor Arday’s memoir. Princeton University Press is very good at reaching broader audiences that include non-academic readers.

My conclusions thus differ from Cofnas.

These 10 publications are a snapshot of Professor Arday’s career in the transition from his Early Career period (first 5 years after PhD conferral = 2020) up to his University of Cambridge appointment. When you combine it with academic bio extracts (e.g. Academic Libraries North, British Sociological Association) you begin to see other strategies that Professor Arday used - accelerating his promotions via changing institutions, becoming a trust representative, engaging with media, co-editing a book series, and announcing books with mid-tier academic presses like Routledge and Palgrave Macmillan (of which Dismantling Race In Higher Education as an edited collection from 2018 and the solo-authored Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain from 2020 appear to have emerged from pre-publication development).

However, both of these books are not included on the 10 Most Important Publications - the Routledge book monograph from 2020 would normally be expected to be included on this list. Professor Arday’s cumulative research program has both enduring themes that build on his 2015 conferred PhD dissertation, as well as being more opportunistic in terms of adopting themes (Covid-19, Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, and autism / neurodivergence) that arose and that were prominent during this sample time period. Some people view this favourably; it is however often questioned in the reviews of national and international competitive grant applications.

C. Career Trajectory and Research Program Development Issues

Professor Arday’s defenders have often focused on identity / stratification based barriers (race, mental health, and autism / neurodivergence), flak-driven predatory media coverage, and institutional failure as the major contributing factors to his tragic death. All of these are factors (necessary) yet in their single cause form they are not fully explanatory (sufficient).

I’ve worked for two universities who are leaders in education (being responsible for research administration / management). My own conferred MSc (2002), MA (2006) and PhD (2020) all draw on sociology, although my primary area / field of qualification is political science. I’ve worked with and mentored hundreds of researchers from ECA and Mid-Career to supporting world class Professoriate that include Centre / Institute directors and senior research managers. The kind of analysis you see above is normal for rigorous processes in Faculty based and central Research Offices.

Let’s consider Professor Arday’s career trajectory and research program development from an institutional perspective. Much of the work I have done is to convey this to Early Career and Mid-Career researchers. It is the kind of discussion and estimative assessment that occurs in a research grants ranking session or in the corridor chats of a selection panel for a competitive job interview.

Professor Arday received his PhD in 2015. The University of Cambridge appointed him as Professor in 2023. That’s a period of only 8 years. Comparatively, most academics would have reached a career stage of Senior Lecturer in Australia (Assistant Professor in the United States), or, maybe, Associate Professor. The initial media and public narrative around Professor Arday was that he was an iconic exemplar, a once-in-a-generation wunderkind. To people who know how to read research career trajectories from an institutional vantage point, that’s actually a huge red flag - unless you can substantiate it with a significant body of work.

If you revisit the above sections (noting both that what Cofnas cites is only a sample of Professor Arday’s work and that Cofnas had his own “race realist” / hereditarian motivations for his Substack article) then you may begin to see why this claim is problematic - and is more an example of contemporary marketing PR.

PhD dissertation quality is an important marker of subsequent research career trajectory. I’ve noted some specific issues above - which most PhDs (including my own) have. Professor Arday did not seek to publish a book monograph from his conferred PhD dissertation. He instead chose (and the PhD dissertation itself) reflected a more practice-based route. Within three years (2018), Professor Arday had shifted his focus to both student and senior leadership sub-populations in universities - a very savvy positioning strategy. He was then able to leverage his research career thematically. This is a sentiment-based populist-driven strategy. In university research offices, we refer to it as chasing the ‘hot topics’ of the moment. It used to be very dominant around 2005-2010. Then, as the Australian Research Council introduced initiatives like Excellence for Research in Australia (modelled in part on the UK’s Research Excellence Framework), institutions reacted both in terms of the gamesmanship of strategic hires, and in putting significant investment into research development as a separate career pathway to research grants and contracts. The goal was to help Early and Mid-Career academics to develop viable, cumulative research programs.

Professor Arday appears to have rushed through this - using every stratagem that he could to short-cut the system. It’s like finding the cheat codes on a video-game to ‘level up’ prematurely. You are eventually going to run into the Peter Principle of being promoted to your level of incompetence. Specific areas and fields have known problems here also in terms of comparative maturity or immaturity of career trajectory and research program development. The sociology of education is no exception: many of the issues noted above in Professor Arday’s work are limitations of research in the dominant chosen research designs. Autoethnography, small-n studies, and critical theory-building all have their place - and will also be bounded. That is why it is helpful to examine how career trajectory and research program development occurs in more stratified, mature areas and fields - for example, Michael Weisbach’s The Economist’s Craft (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021) or Peter Feibelman’s A PhD Is Not Enough! (New York: Hachette, 2011) for economics and for the hard sciences, respectively.

This time is not different. Things work - until they don’t.

D. The Expectations Curse of “You’re The Best In The World.”

Much has been made of a 2023 video in which the University of Cambridge’s Professor Hilary Cremin enthusiastically endorses the newly hired Professor Arday as being the “best in the world” at what he researches. My view on that specific video is a little different to most people. This kind of positive self-talk goes on all of the time in academia. Part of managing an Early Career or Mid-Career researcher lies in applying the psychological insights of attachment theory (John Bowlby), the Object Relations school (including Harry Stack Sullivan and Karen Horney), and the Tavistock school (Wilfred Bion) to address concerns about imposter syndrome and self-sabotage. The video again illustrates marketing PR - in a morale-building role within universities as part of managing human capital. Academia is thus very performance-based.

The problem is if you actually believe and internalise Professor Cremin’s “best in the world” comment as reality. To really be this, you have to be an edge case, an outlier. Your upward career trajectory has to be incredible: the PhD conferral and the Early Career Academic period (the first 5 years) as a first stage rocket, which then sets the stage for your research career trajectory as the second stage rocket to ignite. It’s one of the hardest things to do (and not one that even in knowing these unwritten rules I have personally been successful at). You have to get everything right. To often get an ARC DECRA competitive grant for example, some of the key decisions must actually be made in the second and third year of your PhD studies, even before conferral.

This is where the Nathan Cofnas plagiarism analysis is devastating. It’s also why Professor Arday’s supporters have often minimised his decisions and instead attempted to “shift the blame” to the University of Cambridge and the flak-driven media (which are both not blameless). It’s also why identity-based, single cause explanations are so persuasive to so many people. To be fair, most people (including many academics) don’t fully know the institutional rules around career trajectory and research program development. The “race realist” / hereditarian agenda of Cofnas and others also uses Professor Arday’s background (and his mistakes) to advance their own ideological agendas and interpretations. It’s part of a reactionary, dissident right playbook—and so due to Cofnas, many people have interpreted Professor Arday’s demise as being racist-motivated. However, finding ways to take down potential competitors (or revenge motivated stratagems) can be found throughout academia, such as also in competitive grant reviews.

The roots of institutional failure lie in part in why Professor Cremin’s “best in the world” comment is well-meaning yet flawed advice. Universities drive Early Career and Mid-Career Academics to hyperfocus on a specific research problem that can be readily explained to government policymakers, industry employers, community and philanthropic leaders, and to the general public. This is also stressed in the highly confidential (and often very critical) feedback that applicants receive in Postdoc and grant applications. It underpins book deals with Tier 1 university presses (until 2026, Professor Arday published with Tier 2 academic publishers who are broader). It even affects which PhD students you choose to supervise, and what research projects or topics they take on.

What researchers are doing here is building the corporate strategy equivalent of a competitive moat. That is not the strategy that Professor Arday implemented. He didn’t have studies with significant generalisability (an issue with specific sub-fields in the social sciences). He wasn’t really making new methodological advances. What he was able to do was to see a range of populist driven issues - and to write papers that reflected this in the 2018-25 time period in particular. This builds what looks like a highly competitive research career trajectory on paper. Professor Arday to his credit filled much of this out with university, industry, philanthropic, and media engagement. But the problem is that the specific areas that Professor Arday chose to focus on in being populist were also what drove rational herding (behavioural economics) of other researchers as well. Speculative bubble dynamics fueled critics and backlashes. What is on paper does not necessarily translate long-term.

You do not want to be the “best in the world” at a narrow and niche topic unless you have truly outsized performance. Rather, you want a focused and cumulative research program which makes (and tests for) an original contribution, with methodological skills, collaborations, and that can attract a range of potential funding opportunities. You also want to know who the four or five other research teams are in the world who are working on similar issues - perhaps from a different paradigm, school of thought, or methodological perspective. This is why academia is a kind of entrepreneurship that attempts to work in an institutional bureaucracy, and which uses optionality-based stage gates and resource-based strategy. The Early and Mid-Career stages are in part time-based. You are building core competencies, over time.

What Professor Arday did instead was a high risk strategy that had a high payoff (the University of Cambridge hiring him at Professor level after only 8 years after his PhD conferral). The maturity of research program skills and being able to handle the volatility of scaling up must be there. You may initially persuade the media, the public, and even some of the people who hire you: this is the halo effect, positive illusions, and wishful thinking.

Professor Arday’s problems did not start with Nathan Cofnas and his Substack post in July 2026. They had in fact been there all along since his PhD conferral in 2015: what in financial services is called iceberg risk (and behavioural / counterparty risk as well). Sooner or later, most fraud usually gets found out. Had Professor Arday simply plagiarised parts of his conferred PhD dissertation and some of his academic publications then this could likely have been contained. Yet he further damaged himself via a series of misleading claims that simply don’t stand up to fact-checking, reality-testing, or to common sense. Cofnas triggered a crisis, the flak-driven media took the bait, the University of Cambridge went into crisis management, and the cascade got worse for Professor Arday until he faced existential ‘risk of ruin’. It’s like an overleveraged hedge fund manager “blowing up” their fund. People have said you don’t know what was on Professor Arday’s mind when he passed away. Actually, for suicide attempt survivors, we have a pretty good idea of the stochastic shocks and the psychological undertow involved. It’s very tragic for Professor Arday’s family.

E. Machiavellian Academia, the Superstar System, and Universities Babylon

Many people are deeply shocked at Professor Arday’s death, and the savagery around it. Again, I am not surprised. I have seen aspects of it happen to many people over almost 30 years. I’ve experienced adverse facets myself. That’s partly why I’m not going to likely give you the kind of response on Professor Arday’s regrettable death that you might like: it’s very non-consensus.

One of the problems of the “best in the world” narrative above is that it is a well-meaning attempt by Professoriate and university senior managers to create a reality distortion field around high-profile, status-driven, new strategic hires. I mean a reality distortion field like that around Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal), Peter Thiel (Palantir, PayPal, Facebook), or Steve Jobs (Apple, NeXT). To work it requires a suspension of both individual and collective belief. For that to work it requires social messaging and reinforcement around specific beliefs, norms, values and worldviews. If you have taken a craft-based approach to developing your career trajectory and your cumulative research program, then this is not really such a problem. Public fads, fetishes, and ‘hot topics’ that are sentiment-based will all come and go. Your response to this is not to chase them, or to attempt to arbitrage them as Professor Arday did in the hope of rapid career advancement. Rather, your question might simply be: What is the Work that I have to Do today, and who can I potentially collaborate with? And: How can I do this in the most effective, efficient, and self-sufficient way possible without ending up in a dependency relationship? This is also the exact opposite of conducting a populist-driven and media-focused charm offensive.

The shock about Professor Arday’s death is a disintoxification for some about what contemporary universities are actually like. It’s not the romanticised myth that some people have had in an idealised past. Nor is it the conservative weaponised misinterpretation of Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School’s march through the institutions: academics are explicitly told not to indoctrinate students, and Marxist books sit ageing and unborrowed in university libraries. The reality is that there are two nested, parallel sub-systems. The first is what most academic and professional staff spend their lives in: a student-focused world of high-pressure service delivery. The second only really becomes apparent with sustained engagement at the senior managerial level: the “commanding heights” of real estate / property development, the financial engineering and leverage of structured products like bonds, and the design of Centres and Institutes as mission-driven vehicles for donor-based tax minimisation strategies.

This is where the critics of Cofnas and the flak-driven media who focus on institutional failures have a point. Professor Arday was hired to facilitate the first sub-system (student engagement and public-facing outreach), for the more covert purposes of the second sub-system (harnessing mass psychology for forecastable, predictable, and sustained revenue generation or free cash flow). This is elite theory redux: the masses or the populists (the first sub-system) versus the managerial elite (the second sub-system). That is also why Postdocs and entry level Lecturers or Assistant Professors face the behavioural economics dynamic of the winner’s curse: the second sub-system ensures artificial scarcity and intensified competition in order to hire / select employees whose career trajectory and cumulative research program will be often well beyond the minimum standards in a job advertisement or contract.

This issue came up recently with my tax accountant. I have since 2007 largely worked on administrative / management contracts that do not have the scope to fund academic research, so I have had to self-fund it. Therefore, it is also largely not tax deductible. My tax accountant likened this to their CPA license studies. Yes, I noted, that’s like needing to have a conferred PhD and a Graduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching (Higher Education), but beyond this, there is plenty of vagueness in job advertisements about the research track record that is required to be internationally significant in a field or area, and labour oversupply means that universities have an oligopolistic role. These well known labour conditions (which continue to shift more to adjunct-like, casual and sessional hiring that is institutionally flexible yet that personally involves taking on risk transfer and stressors) are what understandably drove Professor Arday’s strategy to accelerate his career progression as time and opportunity-based arbitrage.

The contemporary university thus comes to resemble the Classical Hollywood studio system of the Hays Production Code era (1934-1968). Its senior managers usually come from corporate industry with its focus on quarterly driven shareholder returns and cost reduction. Those who make it like Professor Arday are treated as academic superstars (illustrated by Professor Cremin’s “best in the world” comment) and get preferential access to internal resources. As a former boss told me, their job was to back winners, and so there were often gambits, side-bets, and a whole game-theoretic ecology of optionality-base risk-taking that in particular Early and Mid-Career researchers were usually not aware of (or who were slowly introduced to by their mentors). It is thus an institutional climate in which a Machiavellian ethos reigns - which is why I advise Early and Mid-Career researchers to watch financialisation and halogencore oriented films like Moneyball, The Big Short, Michael Clayton, and Margin Call. Backgammon and poker are also well worth learning - including position sizing and the interpersonal psychology or the observable cues of ‘tells’.

To navigate this world you have to look carefully at what people actually do (realism) versus what specific other normative ideology they might espouse. This is one of the traps that Professor Arday fell into. OK great - people are promoting Black Lives Matters, Critical Race Theory, Covid-19 responses, or whatever the ‘hot topic’ of the moment is. There is general reform needed (this attracts the first sub-system oriented people). Who gains the overarching power? (This is what the second sub-system people are often more focused on.) Professor Arday made a series of stratagems with cumulatively growing payoffs. He did not appear either to have considered what the potential “blow up” conditions of these payoffs would be; or who might turn on him in betrayal. He was a (captured) idealist, not a Machiavellian.

An anecdote might illustrate this for you. Many years ago I got to know very superficially some senior decision-makers in a university. I was not in any way important or influential to them. One day, I came to a meeting with a copy of Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532). One of the senior decision-makers asked me about it; I explained my academic background; they nodded. A few weeks later I was given a professional development task: an opportunity to observe a Professoriate meeting. I wasn’t even aware it existed. There was strict protocol: Chatham House rules, and I was in an observer capacity only. I went, I observed, I saw, I thought I kind of understood what was going on. A few weeks later I ran into the senior decision-maker again, who asked me about the Professoriate meeting, and my impressions of it. I gave my thoughts in a typically autistic, over-sharing manner. The senior decision-maker smiled. And then came the payoff - the lesson. “You saw how involved they were in the meeting debate?” I nodded. “If you ever get to be a Professor you are very successful, very important, and - from a whole-of-institution perspective you are still a specific stakeholder group to be influenced and managed.” That’s the Machiavellian view, redux.

Incentives drive behaviour and commitment escalation. People who focus on normative explanations like race or DEI grasp the ideological dimensions - and have often made an identity-based commitment to a particular set of ideas or ideology. We all do that and charismatic superstars like Professor Arday are pivotal to modelling this for broader audiences. That’s why the reflexivity and the social learning aspects of his conferred PhD dissertation were key: he shifted the target sub-population from students to include university senior leaders, first in the United Kingdom and then to also include the United States, and finally added subculture and social movement groups. For Machiavellians, that’s a strategic hire that enabled them to harness populist sentiment. Professor Arday’s self-narrative and in particular his employer disclosed health, life history, and medical condition issues were also important. Again, for Machiavellians, it was a way to engage with a broader, at risk student population as part of expanding the meritocratic appeal of higher education. That is sub-system two making a strategic hire as part of managing sub-system one: you also hire people for the latter who have made demonstrable commitment escalation to it.

When this investment strategy works you get asymmetric payoffs that in being on the efficient frontier can help to fund the rest of the university, generatively. Like the Classical Hollywood studio system it involves harnessing what economist Sherwin Rosen later called the economics of superstars: a small group of elite people dominate a particular field or area. The sociologist Robert K. Merton earlier identified the related Matthew Effect of success to the already successful. This was Professor Arday’s career trajectory from 2015 to 2023. Events like the University of Cambridge hiring in 2023 are what Rosen and Edward Lazear noted as rank-ordered tournaments in competitive job contracts. Cofnas and the flak-driven media were also driven by their own respective incentives to act in the way that they did, which increased Professor Arday’s “risk of ruin”. Yet as an unfolding process of crisis escalation it can get out of control very easily. It can tip into adverse outcomes and value destruction.

Machiavellians will often manage both institutional risk and public sentiment via hiring a specific Professor or even a research team on a particular issue. All of what Professor Arday focused on in his career trajectory and in his cumulative research program fit this mould. He was perceived to be the right person at the right time to promote a specific message in order to support students (sub-system one) and that would also drive client demand and revenues in a specific time period (sub-system two). For a financialised Wall Street hedge fund manager it would be “putting the Professor Arday trade on.” You know that the trade is going to have a half-life - there will eventually be a significant market change or a regime shift. But part of the Machiavellian arbitrage is not to convey this “risk on” based asymmetric knowledge - it’s simply to lock in from a sub-system two perspective what the sub-system one superstar thinks their arbitrage is. It’s a multi-level game.

People like Cofnas are self-selecting outsiders (whose ideological indoctrination is contrarian to the prevailing sentiment-based orthodoxy) who can start a cascade rolling. The flak-driven media plays a similar role with its audience or readership. In the tripartite framework of Orrin C. Klapp, they transmute people like Professor Arday from Heroes (the University of Cambridge stance) to either Villains or Fools. Sadly, Cofnas triggered the Villain card in revealing Professor Arday’s history of serial plagiarism; and Professor Arday locked in the Fool card via a series of demonstrably false claims. Consider the flak-driven media’s audience here. Do they care what elite institutions think? Unlikely - such people are either remote or are rarely encountered in their daily lives. Serial plagiarism? Look, you were hired to do a very expensive job, you lied, you didn’t do the work or put in the actual required effort, you found out, and so you should expect to get fired or to face some kind of adverse outcome like a formal investigation (very harrowing to go through) that at least will bring you down to Earth with the rest of us. It is thus social class in the United Kingdom that is just as important as race - and yet is often missing from highly selective DEI narratives.

I’m personally not an enemy of DEI. I come from an adverse, working class background. Like Professor Arday, I am (late-in-life diagnosed) autistic / neurodiverse, and have demonstrable, verifiable medical conditions (that are not actually well understood in academia). I can see the value in several of Professor Arday’s papers in building the case for institutional support and for strategic resource allocation. But what I hate is DEI as a kind of surface level identity that status-driven people actually mobilise and then often weaponise against people with real “lived experience”. It’s not an escape route to cover-up unethical behaviour that is subsequently discovered. Real DEI in its truest and deepest sense would be more multidimensional that oversimplistic narratives (usually, gender and race) that I have seen used to facilitate commitment escalation. It’s also usually also connected to prevailing economic conditions - inflation (2.8%), interest rates (3.5%), and 30-year bond yields (5.797%) in the United Kingdom - rather than being a more free-floating signifier. DEI advocates often talk about ideology (the superstructure), but they rarely in my experience talk about the actual economic life barriers faced (the base).

Superstars have a career half-life. That is why some of the best Professoriate I have worked with have cultivated the portability of being able to negotiate favourable deals, to be able to move institutions, and to develop greater self-sufficiency like multiple income streams. A crisis can derail or end your academic career: it’s very performance-based, like an elite sports athlete. That is known at the Professoriate level and is often well grasped by even the Mid-Career Academic stage. It can be a life shock for Postdocs and for Early Career Academics: a direct encounter with Universities Babylon much like Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon of the Pre-Code Hollywood (1930-34) and the Classical Hollywood (1934-68) periods. That’s why I’m not shocked by Professor Arday’s death - I’ve seen a lot of people burn out, get chewed up, or have to endure what are very adverse outcomes. The marketing PR model of contemporary universities means that much of this is never reported in the media or ever made public. It’s the realm of things like non-disclosure agreements.

Some defenders of Professor Arday who emphasise race, DEI, and other identity-based alternatives claim that this kind of outcome doesn’t happen to other people. Not exactly, but I know of many examples of both men and women that adverse outcomes have occurred to. Here, ideological beliefs act in a sub-system one way that often prevent or limit you from seeing how the entire system works from a sub-system two based perspective. One emergent defensive strategy has been to compare Professor Arday to other academics (or to publicly well known fabulists, fraudsters and rogues) who engaged in plagiarism or research misconduct, and who are not dead. This is an Elizabeth Kubler-Ross bargaining with the realities of death. Yes, there are double standards and political motivations. There are people who did this later in their careers (rather than what Professor Arday appears to have done during his PhD and Early Career Academic phase) and who had social networks / status to survive. I’m sorry. You don’t have to endorse the Machiavellian worldview. But if you want to both work in the contemporary university, and to survive at any significant level in it, you at least need to understand why it exists, how it works, and to be able to read the poker ‘tells’ or the social cues, so that you can protect yourself.

This means being coldly brutal. If you get the call that you are the Respondent in a formal investigation for example, your first steps are to find out what specific allegations you face, what the worst outcome scenario for you is (it has possibly already been decided), to organise support, and then to fight it. If you face flak-driven media, you need countermeasures for what is a form of cognitive or narrative warfare, albeit being conducted in a civilian rather than in a military context. Where Professor Arday “blew up” here (in a hedge fund manager sense) was that he engaged in what Harry G. Frankfurt popularised in On Bullshit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025) as a series of deceptive misrepresentation claims (such as running multiple marathons back-to-back or being in Michael Apted’s influential 7Up documentary film series). These tend to work in periods of economic growth and speculative bubbles. They also can work if you have finesse and a savvy media personality with a Mephistophelean sense of humour. They don’t work if your response to every critic or investigator is to shut them down and tell them that they are being racist. People who understand argumentation, facts, and evidence aren’t swayed by how DEI is used here in a narrowly ideological sense.

There are many sides and perspectives to Professor Arday’s tragic death. It is understandable that many people want to decompose a complex, multidimensional case into an emotional stance or a single outcome. That will keep you in sub-system one (a specific, narrow ideological frame) rather than sub-system two (being able to see multiple stances and to understand their own articulated viewpoints on their own terms, rather than what you may psychologically split or project onto them). The latter has more cognitive-emotional flexibility and more ‘freedom to operate’. Professor Arday made a Faustian deal - trading a slower career trajectory path for a more high-risk, high-payoff outcome. Others will have far more nuanced and informed perspectives than mine. It’s a very cautionary case where overdue institutional reform - and more careful self-conduct - would be good outcomes. But I doubt anything will demonstrably change. It’s all a very stupid waste.

B. During my MSc studies at Swinburne University of Technology, I wrote an essay on Long-Term Capital Management that you can download here.

C. Today’s MIT OCW free course is The Art and Science of Happiness, created by Dr Holly Sweet.

D. UC Berkeley Professor Frank Partnoy’s collective work - which goes back to facing financial crashes and derivatives challenges in the early-to-mid 1990s - is well worth reading, right now. See his Google Scholar profile.

E. How Susquehanna International Group uses mathematics (the comment on the importance of scalar laws is a key insight).

F. Bloomberg on how private credit (which has been freezing up) is now entangled with insurance. This is relevant to structured products discussions.

The first was on Strategic PSYOP (Psychological Operations). Here are the bare bones Presentation Slides, the Presentation Audio, and the Discussant Response Audio.

The second was on the Rules-Based International Order. Here are the bare bones Presentation Slides, the Presentation Audio, and my Q&A Response Audio (to Dr Andrew Goodhart of the University of Nebraska Lincoln - also see his Google Scholar profile).

My thanks to my ISA colleagues, organisers, and the technical moderators for your help. It was very collegial and supportive. It was also great to see Global South scholars represented.

B. Last year I provided a personal capacity response to a Parliament of Victoria inquiry into cults and fringe organised groups. My response (and some further clarifications / corrections made here) dealt with “lived experiences” in the Gurdjieff Work and the Temple of Set - and thus are in no way official or representative responses about those organisations and lineages. I differ from many cultic victim-survivors in terms of having a complex (and now public) history due to adverse childhood and subsequent betrayal experiences in a blended “family of origin”, that involved neglect, fraud and other behaviour. Much of this informed subsequent experiences with the Disinformation website based in New York City (1998-2008), my university studies, my work history, my journalism and academic research publications to date, and my 2020 conferred PhD dissertation from Monash University called The Development of Strategic Culture in Terrorist Organisations.

Yesterday, the Parliament of Victoria released two public reports: Volume 1 Crossing The Line and Volume 2 In Their Words, both available here. I have not yet read the public reports or the Inquiry’s recommendations and was not called to give public :on the record” testimony - but I commend the Inquiry on its actions and in raising public awareness of important issues. The Inquiry has responded proactively to a technical error that accidentally disclosed group emails: I deleted it immediately as a recipient, and my own affiliations have been public knowledge (for which I have been targeted at multiple employers and have been subject to adverse administrative action and credible threats). There have been further developments and fallout from this, concerning the Presidio case and other known instances of grievance / ideological motivated misrepresentation. This area involves significant psychosocial risks, out-group stereotypes and polarisation, and often, what are called Type I errors (false positives and anchoring, confirmation, groupthink, positive illusion, and representativeness based cognitive biases). There is a lot more that I could write, but I’ve not wanted my self-funded research program to fit into either the cultic studies or the new religious movements sub-fields, both which have respective original contributions to make, strengths, and weaknesses.

I’d rather go and rub some dog bellies.

To clarify my own position: I do support all credible, documented, and independently verified victim-survivors and the Inquiry’s aim to strengthen Australian legislation to counter coercive control (which can actually occur in many different contexts, including in interpersonal relationships, families, workplaces, and in mainstream religious and spiritual organisations). My preference is for medical and psychological condition issues to be dealt with by non-EAP medical treatment teams (qualified psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and counsellors) rather than the attempt to professionalise the (allied health) role of exit counsellors (formerly known as cult deprogrammers).

One of the best ways to counter coercive control - or any other forms of manipulation - are to understand how this works, to develop situational awareness and counterdeception skills (you might start with a reading list corpus originally compiled by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Dr Barton Whaley), to become more risk (loss) aware, to conduct in-depth due diligence (involving primary sources and from a range of viewpoints), to set healthy boundaries (including “no contact” conditions), to invest in your own education, and to be financially independent - so that if needed you can exit a specific circumstance, and move on with your own life, on your own terms.

The Inquiry and many of its victim-survivor responses (and expert submissions) have importantly highlighted the critical role of what in Schema Therapy (Jeffrey Young & colleagues) are called abandonment, mistrust / abuse, failure, and subjugation schemas (amongst others). For victim-survivors in recovery, you might start with Young & Janet Klosko’s excellent book Reinventing Your Life (Brunswick, Australia: Scribe Publications, 2019). Be kind and compassionate to yourself. The kind of religious or spiritual self-work that you felt called to explore is often very tough. Dealing with human and organisational failings - and potential isolation and rejection from others - is even tougher. The ways that this is all understood, interpreted and portrayed is often highly simplistic: explanatory model risk, and even mirror-imaging, projection, blame-shifting, and (opportunistic) mobbing and scapegoating, in some cases. Fixes that fail (a common systems archetype) can make things even worse.

I may respond further in future, but at the moment have other priorities.

C. Annie Jacobsen is a veteran investigative journalist with a cumulative track record of excellent books on defence and national security issues. Her latest book Biological War: A Scenario (2026) is already out in some formats (Amazon Kindle and Audible audiobook), with hardcover and paperback editions to come very soon. The book is getting mostly rave reviews and has already been optioned for a television adaptation. BW of course is of interest to me due to my PhD dissertation case study of Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo.

The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus is skeptical in a lengthy review of scenarios and futures studies / strategic foresight oriented thinking: a deficit-based view that my mentors and colleagues noted almost 25 years ago as I entered the former Strategic Foresight program at Swinburne University of Technology, which discussed the Global Business Network (Peter Schwartz) and Oxford University based approaches to scenario planning. Do check the new book out - and Jacobsen’s other books are well worth a read. If you want to explore some of these issues, they are also very good exemplars for benchmarking, continuous improvement, quality assurance, and as reflective writing models.

D. The University of Chicago’s Professor John Mearsheimer has launched a new YouTube channel. The inaugural launch video is below. Professor Mearsheimer also has a Substack newsletter. This illustrates how international relations and politics lecturers in the United States are engaging with the public. It would be great to see comparative Australian academics in these sub-fields do the same.

E. Palantir’s chief executive officer Alex Karp has now differentiated his company from Generative AI firms in terms of building ‘sovereign stack’ capabilities (such as in secure and war-fighting / combat based environments). At the very least this is an unfolding case study in competitive strategy, marketing, policy analysis, and opportunity evaluation - you could build a free, online MBA from such invited talks.

F. City University of New York’s Professor David Harvey has answered a few of my questions on Marxian political economy and capitalism, in a new talk (below) and in a Jacobin article. Versions of his long-taught classes are on YouTube for free.,

G. One of Yale University’s anthropology units is online for free (the first two lectures are at the bottom of the playlist).

H. Today’s MIT OCW free course is Identity and Difference, created by Professor Jean Jackson.

B. The film director John Carpenter on where he gets his horror ideas from and his varied Hollywood career. In late life, he focuses on composing music, basketball, the news, video games, and dreaming. This illustrates his internal locus of control.

C. Quantitative hedge funds are falling off a cliff in China. One related market signal of this is that if you search for “quantitative trading” on Amazon, you will begin to find self-published books of sophisticated quant models that differ from the Wall Street consensus or what the trade press (John Wiley & Sons, McGraw-Hill, and Harriman House) all release for professional execution traders.

D. The artist Florentina Holzinger has stunned audiences at the Venice Biennale. I’ve not yet seen her shows. The news coverage reminds me of Stelarc.

E. Vanity Fair’s Daisy Shaw-Ellis profiles the enduring influence of Ancient Egypt on popular culture (she blames Napoleon) and on contemporary fashion.

F. A philosopher Rick Roderick lecture series on Friedrich Nietzsche. He explains the overman / ubermensch, self becoming, master and slave morality, the Antichrist, the Eternal Return, perspectivalism, genealogy, the influence on Michel Foucault, and how Nietzsche’s sister led his misinterpretation and misuse by Germany’s Nazi Party. I had flashbacks to undergraduate philosophy lectures (which covered Niezsche across several units) whilst hearing these talks, which are vintage early 1990s.

G. The Ewan McGregor film Rogue Trader (1999) on Nick Leeson and Barings Bank has been leaked online. This is peak late 1990s.

H. A BBC documentary on the 1956 Suez crisis.

I. John Frankenheimer’s coup d’etat film Seven Days In May (1954).

J. An interview with veteran investigative journalist Steve Coll.

K. Orson Welles and Peter O’Toole on William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

B. Today’s MIT OCW free course is Innovation in Military Organisations created by Professor Barry Posen and Professor Harvey Sapolsky.

C. Current Reading: Buying Defence and Security in Europe: The EU Defence and Security Procurement Directive in Context by Martin Trybus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). The academic literature on defence procurement and the defence industrial base is rather small. It is part of the broader subfield of defence economics. This book covers the European defence industry, contractors and subcontractors, relevant legislation, procurement processes, and export controls.

D. I was born 3 months premature. Only at 52 am I undergoing clinical tests for possible cystic fibrosis. The news that Perth medical researchers are developing artificial placentas for premature babies is huge.

E. Groups turning in on each-other has been a trend from Japan’s Red Army Faction to the Weather Underground in the United States. It often happens when a group schisms into more violent, extremist, and militant tendencies. The New Republic’s Adam Federman examines what has happened to the Earth Liberation Front, which founder Richard Metzger and I both covered for the former Disinformation website over 25 years ago.

F. Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987) set the art world aflame - and this influenced Metallica’s Load album (1996) which also used Serrano’s artwork for its cover. The New Yorker’s Louis Menand surveys the cultural and religious wreckage.

G. The term Forever War (Joe Haldeman, Dexter Filkins) is often applied now to the Iraq (2003-2011) and Afghanistan (2001-2021) by military historians. Now a consensus is emerging amongst journalists that Forever War will also apply to the second Trump administration and Iran.

H. The YouTube channel The Partially Examined Life considers philosophy.

I. China’s President Xi Jinping delivers a keynote speech on AI.

J. Nine Inch Nails live in 2018.

K. A live set from Aphex Twin at Day For Night, Houston.

L. The Miles Davis septet in Berlin, 1971.

B. An explanation of the major geopolitics theories from the Geopolitical Futures podcast.

C. Citadel’s Ken Griffin on AI and geopolitics.

D. The think tank CSIS on the future of AI-driven cyberdefence.

E. The Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy has launched a Timothy Snyder lecture series on Hitler and Stalin Today. The individual lectures are on Munk’s YouTube channel (playlist). Here is the first on What is History?

F. A monetary economics seminar at the NBER Institute.

G. A 27 lecture series by Ann Swidler (then at Oxford University) on sociology. The first lecture below is on the sociologist Emile Durkheim and suicide.

H. Math with Ming offers four hours on introducing Mathematical Finance.

I. You can view the Reginald Rose play 12 Angry Men filmed in 1957 by Sidney Lumet (and in 1997 by William Friedkin) for free. This is an important film on race, stereotypes, social judgment, group conflict dynamics, and truth processes. I played the Foreman in a high school production.

B. E. Jean Carroll (who directly influenced me in 1993 to go into freelance journalism, which I did until 2004) is pursuing President Donald Trump for $USD5 million in damages that he owes her. This is a common “shifting the burden” pattern that Trump has used in his position-based negotiation strategy (which others have adopted). What this means in reality - and what Carroll is likely experiencing - is a compellance-based targeting by Trump of her vulnerabilities by trying to block and delay as much as he can having to pay these damages. This stratagem is now central to coercive and compellance based lawfare that is occurring in other industries.

C. Today’s MIT OCW free course is Taxes and Business Strategy created by Professor George Plesko (Google Scholar).

D. Neal the elephant seal has returned to Tasmania. He is putting the disruption back into disruptive innovation (the late Clayton M. Christensen) and “move fast and break things” (Meta / Facebook / Mark Zuckerberg).

E. Data centres for Generative AI are becoming a flashpoint in some Australian towns and cities. James Footh is ready with The Data Center Asset Class (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2026), which is out on 16th December. That shows you that Wiley (which for many years had the leading Wiley Trade imprint for pre-Volcker Rule proprietary traders) is acquiring new titles based on visible social trends and public sentiment, in order to build an audience. Footh is an asset / property / real estate manager - so we see the AI-data-property nexus (as an infrastructure asset) that might replace the historical “cash nexus” of the reactionary philosopher Thomas Carlyle. This stratagem combines ground rent (Karl Marx) with AI (John McCarthy and the early Dartmouth conferences).

F. If you search through the W&L Law YouTube Channel, there are free mock courtroom classes, and specific recorded sessions on topics that range from evidence to negotiation. This is student driven, yet may be useful for self-education.

G. The legendary producer Rick Rubin on finding your life’s work.

H. The now legendary Rage Against The Machine set from Woodstock ‘99.

I. The NTS guide to music from talented Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s novels.

B. I’ve known about Francine Shapiro’s EMDR Therapy for over a decade. I have long-term grief from early maternal death and cumulative betrayals in a blended family, and via retraumatisation involving paternal family members who have sought to reinforce family control systems (and conformity with it). I haven’t been able to afford EMDR Therapy yet. The New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich explores how EMDR Therapy has changed her life and has helped her to deal with her husband’s death.

C. Romance scams often use money mules to make cross-border unlawful financial transfers. There are three very easy ways to deal with this. First, restrict what you use online and cut down on social media platforms. Second, get a pet (yes, even a capybara). Third, join the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, and read Becky Holmes’ hilarious Keanu Reeves Is Not In Love With You: The Murky World of Online Romance Fraud (London: Wilson Square, 2026).

D. Today’s MIT OCW free course is Music and Technology (Contemporary History and Aesthetics) created by Professor Christopher Ariza (Google Scholar and his Academia.edu hosted CV).

E. A Harvard Kennedy School event on how private equity is restructuring the United States economy. PE is also used to operationally manage United States and Australian universities (including their human capital) to ensure “risk transfer” arbitrage, value capture, revenue growth, and profit maximisation.

F. I was lucky to interview the late author J.G. Ballard (best known for the books that became the films Crash, High-Rise, and Empire of the Sun) in 1994 for Perth’s REVelation Magazine. It was my first freelance magazine sale. Here is why the very prescient Ballard still matters today.

G. An audience filmed playlist that captures most of the Nine Inch Noize set at Coachella in 2026. The set looks as if it was professionally filmed in multi-cam, so an official release might occur in the future. As one audience member is overheard saying: “This is a once in a lifetime set - it’s probably their best performance.”

H. Faith No More’s full live set from Coachella in 2010.

I. An introductory lecture by Dr Yaron Brook for the Peterson Academy. Brook represents an Ayn Rand / Objectivist stance - see Rand’s book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library / Signet,1966).

B. At the OCIS 2023 conference, I heard about some anthropological research on Asia’s cyberscam centres. Now, very credible allegations of gender-based violence are emerging. This builds on the recent risk advisory about how these cyberscam centres are involved in ‘pig butchering’ romance cons and cross-border investment fraud.

C. I’ve posted lists compiled from Google for my research program of defence contractors and geopolitical risk firms in Australia and internationally. The latter includes bespoke / boutique firms, as well as law, trade, investment, risk & audit, corporate governance, and other sectors.

D. Actor Dustin Hoffman reflects on the creative process for the recent, excellent film Tuner.

Here is Mark Kermode’s review.

E. Why Iran will probably still get nuclear weapons, notes the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

F. Man Group’s Ed Cole on Bloomberg about how to best structure your diversified portfolio in equities.

B. WOPR in John Badham’s film WarGames (1983) - and the military sourced police surveillance helicopter in Blue Thunder (1983) have returned with a vengeance. Daniel Boguslaw considers the AI-nuclear command and control systems debate for The New Republic. That this is missing from Australia’s domestic debate on AUKUS in its public national security elites highlights how disconnected in reality they are from the reality that the United States and China are two legs of nuclear tripolarity (Russia is the third and has a renewed geopolitical alliance with China). This shift from a Cold War bipolar era to a tripolar or complex deterrence era has long been debated in the United States (for example in 2025 at the Center for a New American Security think tank. Australia does not have the comparative think tank networks that the United States has - and so there is still not yet the contestability (although it is wished for) in either domestic debates or the socialisation pathways of national security elites.

C. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama discusses with Damon Linker the intellectual history of Leo Strauss and the pathway of some adherents into the MAGA movement. There are some great insights here about academic publishing; how to teach about Plato’s Cave Allegory; and how Liberation oriented pedagogical teaching practices actually work in the context of moral and political philosophy. Aspects of this debate can be applied to other contexts and problems - such as concerns in Australia about the rise of populism.

There is a discussion about dissociative fugues as the brain’s attempt to deal with time dislocation experiences. Not referenced in the script is that Arthur Koestler documented such radical subjectivity in real life in the 1950s and the 1960s as part of the Eranos Circle. Peter Moon’s Montauk Project took a different angle on this in the 1990s that directly influenced (in a Background IP sense) Thomas Pynchon’s novel Bleeding Edge (New York: Penguin Press, 2023) and the hit Netflix series Stranger Things (2016-2025). The episode also inspired an Anthrax song called ‘The Constant’ as part of their album Worship Music (2011) in which the classic era singer Joey Belladonna returned to the fold.

Cuse, Lindelof, and episode director Jack Bender play up Hume and Widmore’s reconnecting phone call in the 2004 timeline for its melodramatic worth: Hume’s male ego craves validation and dyadic acceptance. In reality if you try this with someone who has left and clearly rejected you in a “falling up” situation (where you are not their type, you are not good enough for them or have character flaws, and you got together by sheer accident), it is unlikely to work as the episode portrayed. You are more likely to get the dismissive reply “I think you have contacted the wrong person.” Time’s arrow goes only one way. You are now an unwanted ghost to them. Your well intentioned attempt to reconnect will be perceived and treated as a boundary violation. You will never get the positive, emotional, reflective response that Widmore gives Hume in the episode’s closing minutes.

‘The Constant’ in the end portrays wish fulfillment: the delusional belief that a fragment of the original “falling up” situation can survive many years later. In romance psychology this is called a positive illusion: see the 1988 influential paper by Shelley E. Taylor and Jonathan D. Brown that inspired this on-going, cumulative research program. Or as Alice In Chains once noted in “All Secrets Known” that opens the mournful, liturgical When Black Gives Way To Blue (2009): “There’s no going back | To the place | We started from.” Silence can also be metacommunication.

B. The Crow (1994) directed by Alex Proyas and starring Brandon Lee (whose on-set accidental death overshadowed the film’s initial release). This was one film that I didn’t see in the year that I took an unpaid writer / industry liaison position for the now former La Trobe University student newspaper Rabelais. I didn’t see Gettysburg, Speed, or Forrest Gump, either. This film adaptation of the James O’Barr comic series is filled with 1990s film tropes from its MTV influenced visual style to criminogenic narratives that the then Clinton administration legislated in its focus on an urban underclass.

The film opens and its narrative arc deals with Devils Night (arson and pyromania events) which we discover in the second act are orchestrated by crime boss “Top Dollar” (Michael Wincott), who quotes an underclass variation of the Wall Street elite financier Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) in Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street (1987) - itself sourced from Drexel Burnham Lambert client and insider trader Ivan Boesky.

Much of the film deals with Eric Draven’s mission (Brandon Lee) to avenge his murdered fiancee Shelly Webster (Sofia Sinas) with the help of Sergeant Albrecht (Ernie Hudson), and to protect Sarah Mohr (Rochelle Davis). This quartet structure (a quintet with “Top Dollar” is from the Christopher Vogler school of scriptwriting. Co-scriptwriter John Shirley was on the cover of one of the final 21C Magazine issues, and we corresponded about The Crow and his other projects in 1998-2001. The rest of the cast are essentially gang members to be dispatched, although Mohr’s drug addicted mother Darla Mohr (Anna Levine) experiences the kind of familial redemption that the criminologist James Q. Wilson would perhaps have espoused (Albrecht’s character arc definitely fits a Wilson critique of then bureaucratic policing and urban crime contagion due to anomie and alienation).

The Draven-Webster romance is idyllic early love that is savagely ended on 30th October when the gang leader “T-Bird” (David Patrick Kelly) leads an assault that kills both victims. A year later when Draven returns in a post-death afterlife (suggestively vampiric) state as The Crow (complete with a familiar), Devils Night is now routine - there is even unauthorised merchandise that “Top Dollar” complains to his medium-like half-sister Myca (Bai Ling) the gang do not get to cash in on. The film - together with its iconic and now very influential soundtrack (and its various in-film band performances) - plays to Goth and Romanticist subcultures that in the mid-1990s were a growing consumer market for morbidly sad Generation Xers. The surface reading of Generation X by others (now both Baby Boomers and the subsequent Millennials / Generation Z cohorts) is of falling into the schema trap of depressive realism. This misperception fails to pierce the eudaimonic core of who Generation X actually is (and was at the time of the film’s initial release). You don’t really know us. We (still) really don’t care, either.

The Crow ultimately is an argument that the emotional transcendence of a Draven-Webster romance (the idyllic early love of courtship, prospective marriage, and starting a family together) will conquer all. Eros will defeat Chaos and Thanatos. Draven as The Crow - with the help of Sergeant Albrecht - is able to harness the Direct Action, Surgical Strike, and Strategic Surprise of utilising Special Forces modes to achieve relative superiority. The communicated “strategic effects” of this is that whilst Draven can’t bring Webster back to life, he can use his willed, focused intent (one of the major aims of the Vitalist school in the United States, Europe, and the United Kingdom in 1900-1945) to avenge her and to wreak revenge on “T-Bird” and his gang.

The operative key to this is a traditionalist understanding of Troth (pledged faith, fealty, and loyalty to another - such as in both upholding and exalting the marriage oath with your betrothed to last beyond physical death) that energises and actualises the individual human psyche as a causal willed force. (The Troth state in suitably receptive, mindful individuals may create an empathetic sense of shared psycho-emotional attunement that is subjectively experienced as being dyadic - whilst such consent-based commitment lasts and is jointly honoured.) This is the deeper ritual (operative in the sense of linguist J.L. Austin’s speech act theory in which the mutual betrothed now have an ontologically changed identity) in a marriage vow that most people experience as a ceremony.

In retrospect The Crow (1994) cast the die for Proyas with Dark City (1998) and the Wachowski Brothers’ more well known The Matrix (1999). It also runs in parallel with the magical hyperstition of Grant Morrison’s iconic series The Invisibles (1994-2000) which influenced creative director Richard Metzger and the original, core team of the now former Disinformation website (and Magick.me founder and Disinformation alumnus Jason Louv). Hollywood producers attempted to turn The Crow into a franchise and a 2024 remake. These all largely failed because they all focused on stylised aesthetics and criminogenic revenge narratives. They all largely missed the Draven-Webster romance as the original film’s emotional core, and its Troth narrative for its then younger Generation X audience. This is also summed up in the original film’s repeated maxim: “It can’t rain all the time.”

Except if you live in Melbourne, Australia. It often rains here several times a day.

B. Prior to the SpaceX IPO this week making him the world’s first trillionaire, The New Republic ran a lengthy profile on Elon Musk’s ideological politics. Human-Machine symbiosis was the hyperfocus in the 1990s of Extropian and Transhumanist schools of thought. Now, such utopian future visions are used to create social media narratives to raise investor capital. The TNR article is a long-form review of Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s new book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Penguin, 2026).

C. For the past 5 years I’ve been researching some as yet unpublished material on the Alt-Right, the MAGA Movement, and contemporary metapolitical thinkers. I’ve circled around the Russian geopolitical thinker and ultranationalist Alexander Dugin who has advocated a Eurasian informed vision. I’ve also been aware of the late Baron Julius Evola and his Traditionalist influence on contemporary initiatory networks that are helpful to spread political propaganda via multi-level metacommunication. Now, Arktos has released Dugin’s new book Julius Evola: Political Traditionalism which is my reading this week.

My estimative assessment of Dugin differs from Marlene Laruelle, who I saw speak at an invited workshop at the University of Melbourne. For Laruelle, Dugin is not “Putin’s brain” (biographer and translator Michael Millerman) and he is instead pre-framed as Russian Oligarch funded. This causal flow between Dugin and Putin is a little too Rasputin-like in terms of its posited Bayesian priors and its historical analogies. For me, Dugin’s role is more to influence transnational networks, notably in building US-Russia and Russia-Europe nodes and connectors.

D. The other material I’m reading this week is the CAIA Association’s professional designation for the Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst. Aced It Publications has two unofficial guides on Level 1 (Foundations) and Level 1 (Asset Classes).

E. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on the Philosophy of Love created by Dr Lee Perlman.

F. The Social Reckoning (2026) - the sequel to The Social Network (2010) - now has a trailer.

G. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has posited a US-China war scenario.

H. The infamous debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault that happened on 22nd October 1971.

I. Author Charles Bukowski on dying and how to write.