David Cumin, the Free Speech Union and the White Supremacist Pseudoscience

The two hundred and sixty-ninth name, the Free Speech Union, and the machinery that arrived here from somewhere else

Position two hundred and sixty-nine on the letter reads “Dr David Cumin, The University of Aucklamd.” The typo belongs to the original, which tells you something about the speed at which these documents are assembled.

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Image: David Cumin’s name appears among the signatories to the open letter opposing disciplinary action against Nathan Cofnas. (Supplied)

Figure 1: Cumin’s signature and the links to his ORCID and LinkedIn Profiles, linked from the Hyperlink on the name.

The letter asks the rector of Ghent University to protect Nathan Cofnas from disciplinary consequence, and Cofnas describes himself as a race realist. He holds that genes account for a meaningful share of the gap in measured intelligence between racial groups, he wrote in 2024 that under a true meritocracy Black people would vanish from almost every high-profile position outside sport and entertainment, and he has published a defence of what he calls the default hypothesis, the proposition that the gap is genetic until somebody proves otherwise.

Cambridge parted company with him over the first of those.

Five hundred and sixty-nine scholars have now signed on his behalf, two of them from this country, both from the same university in Auckland, and one of them sits on the governing council of the organisation that publishes an annual ranking of how well our universities protect free expression.

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The tradition Cofnas works in has a genealogy and an accounting. It runs from the Pioneer Fund, which financed research into racial difference for half a century, through the journal Mankind Quarterly, described in the scholarly literature as a cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment, into the handful of magazines and journals that carry the work today. Professional bodies in human genetics have examined the central claim and rejected it. The inference the whole structure balances on, running from heritability inside a group to genetic difference between groups, carries no evolutionary content in the form this literature uses.

White supremacist science names that genealogy and that function with some precision, and the naming is what the letter exists to prevent.

The second New Zealand signature belongs to a professor of civil engineering who works on water distribution systems, and nothing in his record connects him to any of this. He reads to me like a man who saw a suspension resting on the volume of complaints, concluded that a process had failed, and put his name to a procedural objection alongside several hundred others. The first signature runs somewhere else entirely, through Wellington and London and Cambridge, and through a network that has been assembling itself in plain sight for eight years.

Image: David Cumin is listed as a member of the Free Speech Union Council. (Screenshot / Free Speech Union NZ)

Figure 2: Cumin lectures in anaesthesiology at the University of Auckland, and his public life runs on a separate track from his clinical one.

In July 2018 four colleagues formed the Free Speech Coalition out of the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union office in Wellington, among them Jordan Williams, the Taxpayers’ Union founder, and Cumin became its spokesman.

The Coalition’s opening campaign was the litigation against Auckland Council and Mayor Phil Goff over the cancelled Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux events. That September he called the Tertiary Education Union sad for declining to join student unions in expressing no confidence in the Massey vice-chancellor over Don Brash. By March 2019 he was arguing that New Zealand should do better than Australia on the question of admitting Milo Yiannopoulos, and later that year he defended a Rotorua mayoral candidate under investigation over remarks about a Māori councillor, on the ground that the Bill of Rights protects opinions of any kind in any form.

The Coalition relaunched in May 2021 as the Free Speech Union, a registered trade union holding a licence from its British namesake, and Cumin moved onto its council, where he remains. He is also involved with the Israel Institute of New Zealand.

The Union claims eighteen thousand members and supporters, shares its history and its Wellington address with the Taxpayers’ Union, and seats on its council a former member of parliament turned commercial lawyer, a commentator whose campaigns I have written about elsewhere, and a scattering of figures the organisation offers as evidence of political breadth.

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The trade union form was chosen, and the choice pays every day. Registration confers standing, a vocabulary of collective protection, and the accumulated moral credit of a century of workers organising against employers who held every card. The Free Speech Union of New Zealand has taken that inheritance and pointed it at litigation on behalf of people whose speech already carries furthest in the room. Each time the organisation appears in a headline the word union performs silent labour, borrowing from a movement that would not recognise the project it is now underwriting.

The British organisation from which the licence comes was founded by Toby Young in 2020. Five years before that, Young published an article in Quadrant proposing what he called progressive eugenics, an argument for embryo selection to raise the intelligence of poor children. In 2017 he attended the London Conference on Intelligence, the meeting convened in secret at University College London where Richard Lynn and others presented on race and heredity. In January 2018 he was appointed to the board of the Office for Students and resigned nine days later. All of it sits in his own bylines, uncontested and easily found.

Since then the British Free Speech Union has sponsored Cofnas’s litigation against Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and published a defence of him in May 2024 arguing for his right to reason his way from a premise to a conclusion, with a membership box sitting beneath the text. On the eleventh of August this year it published on Jason Arday. On the fourteenth it published again, describing him as a fantasist and a prolific embellisher, membership box beneath that piece too. Arday was found dead in south London on the fourteenth of August.

What killed Arday is a question for the coroner. What the Free Speech Union chose to publish in the last days of his life is a matter of record.

The people around this are not incidental to it.

James Orr, an adviser to the British Free Speech Union, chairs the UK arm of the Edmund Burke Foundation, heads policy for Reform, has been described in the American religious press as JD Vance’s British sherpa, and hosted Peter Thiel’s lectures on the Antichrist at Cambridge in January of this year. Arif Ahmed travelled from the Free Speech Union’s advisory council to the Office for Students as its first director for freedom of speech, which is a journey from the lobby to the regulator. Nafeez Ahmed’s reporting in Byline Times traced how Charles Vaughan, chief of staff at Thiel Capital, cultivated this exact Cambridge circle from 2017 onward, and traced the Pioneer Fund money through to the magazine Aporia, where Toby Young turns up as a co-director alongside Noah Carl of a company connected to that world.

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Thiel’s money has never been traced to the Free Speech Union. The investigations that went looking, including the donor material behind the High Court injunction, found no such transfer, and the relationship is one of shared personnel and shared rooms.

What can be documented does the job anyway. Confirmed British funders include the Injustice Foundation, whose backers sit inside the Tufton Street reform-donor circuit, Elon Musk has paid for specific litigation, and in July of this year the Guardian reported a proposed five million dollars from the United States State Department to Free Speech Union International. A lobby group in London now draws on the foreign policy apparatus of another country.

The New Zealand franchise has its own money question, answered on the record by its own chief executive, who confirmed to Newsroom that the organisation has received funding from the Atlas Network. Atlas is the Washington coordinating body that has spent four decades assembling free market institutes country by country, and I have spent the past year mapping its work in this one. The model travels without instructions, carried instead by templates, training, convenings and a modest amount of seed money, after which local operators run local campaigns in a local accent. The Union sounds like us because it was built to sound like us.

The imports arrive in person as well. The Union has brought Nigel Biggar to New Zealand, the same Nigel Biggar who chairs the board of the British Free Speech Union and had a hand in drafting the British legislation. It has brought Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, who made their names submitting hoax papers to gender studies journals and now tour as authorities on the collapse of the academy, and it has brought Michael Shellenberger. These visitors meet ministers. An outfit presenting itself as a scrappy defender of the ordinary New Zealander has better access to the ninth floor than most of the communities I work alongside have to their own local council.

Image: The University of Auckland City Campus. (Shutterstock)

Figure 3: Then the statute arrived.

The Education and Training Amendment Act 2025 requires every university council to establish a complaints procedure on academic freedom and freedom of expression and to report on it annually. Universities New Zealand warned about vexatious complaints while the bill was moving and the warning went nowhere. This country now operates a national counting mechanism for grievances against academics, complete with an annual report, and nothing at all running in the other direction. No count of the academics who were targeted, no count of the campaigns run against them from outside the institution, no provision whatever for the scholar being ground down by a press cycle who discovers that her own university has become the venue for the fight rather than the shelter from it.

Ghent shows what that architecture produces at the far end. An outsider holding no procedural standing generates a claim about a scholar, a press ecology multiplies it into a hundred and eighty-eight items across nine days, and the scholar’s employer becomes the battlefield. When the employer finally moves, a letter arrives from the other side of the world, five hundred and sixty-nine names and climbing, to explain that moving was itself the violation. Somewhere in that letter sits a council member of the organisation that will reach the microphone first when the same sequence runs here.

Nothing in the record suggests Cumin holds any view about race and intelligence, nothing suggests he coordinated with anybody, and nothing suggests he signed for a reason beyond the one the letter states. A man can put his name to a defence of due process in good faith on a Tuesday afternoon, and the signature will still perform work bearing no relation to his intention, because the document was built by people who understood precisely what a few hundred unrelated signatures would do for a hereditarian and what they would do to a rector in Belgium. The infrastructure converts sincerity into a resource. That conversion is the design, and it runs whether or not anyone signing notices it running.

Any organisation that names itself after free speech invites a test of consistency, and the local answer to that test is written across eight years of case selection. Palestinian and Jewish New Zealanders have faced consequences for speech about Israel. Academics here have been targeted for teaching the history of colonisation. Māori scholars have been subjected to organised campaigns for asserting the standing of mātauranga. The Free Speech Union has not been reliably present for any of it, while it has been present for Don Brash, for Southern and Molyneux, for the Listener letter, and now for a self-described race realist in Belgium. Speech that punches downward gets a lawyer, and speech that punches upward gets an argument about context.

Te Tiriti o Waitangi gives this country something Britain has no equivalent of, which is a constitutional relationship in place of a market in grievances. Every tertiary council already carries a statutory duty to acknowledge its principles, and the Waitangi Tribunal has already located authority over mātauranga where it belongs. That framework asks the question the imported model cannot survive, which is who holds authority inside a community and on whose warrant, and it runs accountability outward into the places a university actually sits rather than upward to a ministry and sideways to a hostile columnist. An institution answerable to Rangitāne, to Kāi Tahu, to the Pacific communities of South Auckland is far harder to capture than one answerable to a complaints register. The imported model will therefore attack it here as a threat to academic freedom, in the same register, through the same four moves, and the attack has already started.

The letter will have grown again by the time this appears. It has grown every day since it went up, the founding tranche of British professors giving way to a long tail of names from forty-seven countries, one in seven of whom list no institution at all. The document has stopped being an argument from standing and become an argument from volume.

Somewhere in that volume, at position two hundred and sixty-nine, is a lecturer from Auckland who helps decide how this country talks about who gets to speak.

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