The principal figures of the era, organised by their spheres of control were:

The California Railroad Kings

Leland Stanford (1824–1893)

• Served as Governor of California (1862–1863) while simultaneously running the Central Pacific—a conflict of interest so brazen it defined the era.

• President of the Southern Pacific Railroad from 1885 to 1890.

• Used his political influence to secure land grants, subsidies, and legal protections for the railroad.

• Founded Stanford University as a memorial to his son.

Collis P. Huntington (1821–1900)

• Lobbied in Washington for railroad subsidies and land grants.

• Controlled the Southern Pacific's eastern connections.

• Later became president of the Southern Pacific.

• His nephew, Henry E. Huntington, continued the dynasty and built the Pacific Electric Railway in Southern California.

• Huntington was the man who negotiated with British investors.

Charles Crocker (1822–1888)

• Oversaw the actual construction of the Central Pacific.

• His construction company (Crocker & Co.) was paid by the railroad at inflated prices—a standard technique for siphoning public subsidies into private hands.

• Used Chinese labour on the transcontinental railroad, paying them less than white workers.

• Became president of the Southern Pacific after Stanford.

• Crocker represents the construction-contractor side of the railroad business. The money flowed from railroad treasury to construction company to personal fortune, leaving the railroad itself saddled with debt—debt that was often held by British investors.

Mark Hopkins (1813–1878)

• Kept the books and managed the finances.

• Died in 1878,

Jay Gould (1836–1892)

• The most notorious speculator of the era.

• Gained control of the Erie Railroad through stock manipulation and bribery.

• Attempted to corner the gold market in 1869, causing Black Friday.

• Later controlled the Union Pacific, Missouri Pacific, and Western Union telegraph.

• Built a railroad empire through hostile takeovers and financial engineering rather than construction.

• Gould's Western Union controlled the telegraph network. Information about railroad stocks, mining claims, and land values flowed through Gould's wires.

James J. Hill (1838–1916)

• Built the Great Northern Railway.

• Controlled the Northern Pacific and later the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy.

• Known as the "Empire Builder."

• His railroads served the Pacific Northwest.

Henry Villard (1835–1900)

• German-born journalist turned financier.

• Organised the Oregon and California Railroad.

• Led the famous "blind pool" of 1881 that took control of the Northern Pacific.

• His German and English connections made him a key conduit for European capital.

• The Oregon & California bonds that passed from German to English hands in 1879–1880 were part of Villard's network.

i will come back later and add sources

Aotearoa is still being governed by people who call it New Zealand, and they’re passing laws that protect British Crown investment in mining from what they call pesky Greenpeace and Māori protesters. This is Christopher Luxon. He became the Prime Minister in November 2023. He won that election. The Guardian profiled him as going from selling deodorant to running the country. Before entering politics, this man spent 18 years at Unilever. Unilever is not a soap company. It is the corporate descendant of Lever Brothers. In 1911, they took a 750,000-hectare concession in the Belgian Congo and ran it on forced labour. They still owned those plantations until 2009. Luxon was with Unilever from 1993 to 2011. For 16 of the 18 years that he worked there, his employer was the direct legal owner of a forced-labour plantation in the Congo. In 2009, Luxon was the CEO and president of Unilever Canada. The same month that Luxon was getting promoted to regional president, Greenpeace did an investigation called Burning Up Borneo. This investigation exposed Unilever for destroying the rainforest.

[Sources: Electoral Commission report on the 2023 General Election; Beehive biography of Christopher Luxon; Christopher Luxon’s first-party LinkedIn record; Unilever corporate history; University of Liverpool archival report commissioned by Unilever; Unilever Annual Report 2009; Feronia transaction announcement; Greenpeace, How Unilever Palm Oil Suppliers Are Burning Up Borneo; The Guardian profile.]

His own Prime Minister’s Office has been ruled by the Chief Ombudsman to have unreasonably breached the Official Information Act by concealing the Fonterra and Z Energy lobbying notes. The meetings between his office and these private extraction cartels only came to light through court action.

[Sources: Chief Ombudsman finding reported by 1News; LawNews account of the Ombudsman’s findings; Scoop publication of the court-released lobbying record.]

This is not an isolated incident. Another minister in his government, Erica Stanford, admitted to also forwarding official briefings to her personal email. This is a pattern of the Luxon government.

[Source: Erica Stanford’s admission reported by the New Zealand Herald.]

So, the man who built his opposition persona on demanding inquiries into ministerial correspondence now runs an office that has been found by the Ombudsman to have hidden corporate lobbying from the public record.

[Sources: National Party statement on ministerial accountability; RNZ report on Luxon’s demand for an inquiry into ministerial correspondence; Chief Ombudsman finding reported by 1News.]

During that 2023 campaign, his political party, the National Party, raised 10.4 million New Zealand dollars in donations. This was more than double any other party.

[Sources: Electoral Commission political-donation disclosures; RNZ report on National’s 2023 donation total.]

One of his investors, a man named Warren Lewis, said he donated because he likes what Christopher Luxon is doing. That donor is in the sheet-metal business, and those donations are directly linked with fast-tracked construction projects.

[Source: RNZ, “Political donors now on the radar”.]

Another donor on the record, a man named Graeme Hart, who gave $150,000, is from Rank Group, which is a plastics and packaging company.

[Sources: Electoral Commission political-donation disclosures; RNZ report on National’s donations.]

All of the companies that Luxon’s government has granted Fast Track project applications gave more than $500,000 in political donations. More than a million dollars in political donations linked with Fast Track projects have been made to the National Party since 2022.

[Source: RNZ investigation of donations associated with Fast Track projects.]

GMP Environmental Limited, which is a subsidiary of Greymouth Petroleum, an oil and gas company, donated $100,000 to National, $100,000 to ACT, and $100,000 to New Zealand First on 19 February 2026.

[Sources: Electoral Commission political-donation disclosures; GMP Environmental company website.]

So, the gas and oil industry bought access to all three governing parties on the same day. This man’s name is Chris Bishop.

A Transparency International report from February 2026 found New Zealand’s Corruption Perceptions Index score had fallen by two points for the fourth consecutive year. Those would be the four years of Luxon’s government.

[Source: Greenpeace Aotearoa’s account of the Transparency International findings.]

Greenpeace Aotearoa said the report identified a lack of transparency over lobbying and political donations. The central named conflict in that report is Chris Bishop.

Chris Bishop is simultaneously the minister responsible for deciding which businesses get access to the Fast Track process and National’s Campaign Committee Chair, responsible for drumming up campaign donations. The minister who decides which projects get fast-tracked is the same person who raises the party’s donations — to quote Greenpeace, “a clear conflict of interest at the heart of the Luxon government”.

[Sources: Greenpeace Aotearoa on Bishop’s overlapping roles; Beehive biography of Chris Bishop.]

So, that Greenpeace and Transparency International report came out in February 2026. In April 2026, two months after that report, Luxon decided to promote this man with the AI mullet to Attorney-General.

[Sources: LawNews report on Bishop’s appointment as Attorney-General; Beehive biography of Chris Bishop.]

So, the man named in a corruption report was promoted to the top legal job in the country while still holding the Fast Track portfolio. He was rewarded for his exposed corruption. He now has one of the most powerful positions in the state.

But that is just one of Luxon’s appointments. Paul Goldsmith, the Minister of Justice, is another one of Luxon’s appointments.

On 27 November 2023, Luxon appointed Paul Goldsmith as the Minister for Justice. His portfolio is enormous and growing. He now holds Justice, Defence, the GCSB, the NZSIS — which are the intelligence agencies — Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations, Media and Communications, Public Service, Pacific Peoples, Space, Veterans, and Arts, Culture and Heritage.

[Sources: DPMC ministerial list dated 27 November 2023; Beehive biography of Paul Goldsmith.]

The Minister for Justice is the politician in charge of the justice system, the courts, legal aid, sentencing policy, the Ministry of Justice, human rights, the appointment of statutory officers, and the laws that rewrite who can be held to account and how.

Paul Goldsmith is not a lawyer, and his record shows what happens when you have a Justice Minister who cannot read the law.

Paul Goldsmith holds a Master of Arts in History from the University of Auckland, awarded in 1996. His thesis was on the 19th-century missionary William Colenso. He has no law degree, no experience in law, and no record of bar admission.

[Sources: Newsroom profile of Goldsmith’s education and writing career; Waitangi Tribunal, Goldsmith’s Wairarapa research paper.]

Colenso, by the way, was a Cornish missionary who arrived in Aotearoa in 1834 to run the Church Missionary Society. I have covered the Church Missionary Society in my Christian Zionism series.

This man came to Aotearoa as part of a colonial missionary project, with the goal of converting Māori to Christianity and subordinating them to the colonial order the British were building.

The CMS, as I established in the Christian Zionism piece — which you’ll get here — was the propaganda arm of the East India Trading Company. It was not neutral. It was not religious.

[Source: alimcforever, “Christian Zionism Sources”.]

Colenso was an operative, a Cornishman who arrived with the CMS printing press. The CMS was the cultural technology of dispossession: the religious cover for the transfer and seizure of Māori land to hand it to the Crown.

Goldsmith studied Colenso through his own cover story. His lens is the one that frames the CMS operative as a complex figure — a man of science and a recorder of the Treaty, a scholar.

That framing reproduces the colonial cover story that these were missionaries, not operatives of the East India Trading Company. Goldsmith looked at a man carrying an imperial printing press to convert and subordinate local people and called him a scholar and a man of letters.

That is the worldview that Goldsmith was indoctrinated into. It is the worldview that lets a man today rewrite Māori title law against the courts and call it governance.

What Goldsmith gets wrong is the same thing at every stage of his career, and it is the same thing the CMS was designed to do: he tells the story from the perspective of the people who did it, who committed the harm, and he hides who paid for it.

He writes hagiographies of power. A hagiography is the biography of a saint, written to glorify.

The labour historian Ross Webb has publicly characterised Goldsmith’s biographies of John Banks, Don Brash, and Sir William Gallagher as hagiographies of figures associated with New Zealand’s 1980s right-wing economic reforms — neoliberalism.

[Source: Newsroom, “The teachings of Paul Goldsmith”.]

He writes about rich and powerful men with the goal of glorifying them.

The law does not require the Minister of Justice to have a law degree. This is a political job, not a judicial one.

But the Minister of Justice is appointed to steer justice policy and legislation. Paul Goldsmith, in this role, oversees the entire justice system. He makes important statutory appointments and recommends changes that determine who gets access to the courts and who can be held legally accountable for their actions.

That requires at least enough legal competence to interrogate the advice that you are getting, apply the correct statutory tests, and understand what a proposed law will do before using the government’s majority to pass it without the population’s consent.

Goldsmith’s lack of legal training matters because his record shows repeated failures across exactly these areas.

A court had already ruled that Goldsmith acted unlawfully when he appointed Stephen Rainbow and Melissa Derby to senior human rights roles. The judge found that he used the wrong legal test and failed to consider what the law required.

[Source: LawNews report on the High Court ruling concerning the human-rights appointments.]

Those appointments were ruled unlawful, but the High Court’s ruling did not remove either of them from office.

Then, in May 2026, Goldsmith announced the government would amend the Climate Change Response Act 2002. These amendments barred any tort liability for climate harm. This applies to all current and future cases.

[Sources: Ministry of Justice announcement; official Climate Change Response (Tort Liability) Amendment Bill.]

These amendments block an important legal case called Smith v Fonterra. Mike Smith is a Māori climate leader and climate-change spokesperson for the Iwi Chairs Forum. He filed a civil claim in tort against seven New Zealand emitters: Fonterra, Genesis Energy, Dairy Holdings, New Zealand Steel, Z Energy, Channel Infrastructure New Zealand, and BT Mining.

[Source: Supreme Court judgment, Smith v Fonterra [2024] NZSC 5.]

The claim is that their greenhouse-gas emissions contributed to climate change and therefore caused the resulting flooding, sea-level rise, and storm damage to his land.

On 7 February 2024, the Supreme Court of New Zealand unanimously allowed Smith’s appeal and reinstated his statement of claim, overturning the Court of Appeal and the High Court, which had struck it out.

The Supreme Court said that this case could proceed to trial. That trial was scheduled to begin in April 2027.

[Sources: Supreme Court judgment; High Court litigation chronology.]

In May 2026, Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith announced that the government would amend the Climate Change Response Act 2002.

This Act was originally designed to help Aotearoa New Zealand reduce emissions, meet international climate commitments, and prepare for climate harm. Goldsmith’s amendment does not strengthen the original Act’s purpose. It does not actually do anything legally relevant to the original Act’s purpose.

It does the exact opposite. It adds a legal shield for big polluters. It is designed to stop people using civil law to try to hold massive greenhouse-gas emitters — including the British Crown — liable for climate-related harm.

Luxon’s government has just inserted a rule into its own main climate law that protects emitters. The original Act’s statutory purpose is climate policy, not tort-law immunity.

[Sources: Climate Change Response Act 2002; Climate Change Response (Tort Liability) Amendment Bill.]

This is what I mean about having a Justice Minister who has not read the law. Why is this guy attacking a high-profile, climate-specific piece of legislation if his goal is to protect his polluting cronies from liability under tort law?

The New Zealand Law Society said: “The CCRA was neither intended nor designed as a code and does not address the issue as claimed.”

[Source: New Zealand Law Society submission, para 2.7.]

That is the Law Society directly telling the government: “You are bolting a liability shield onto a statute that was never built to hold it.”

The Law Society is far more polite, calling it a mischaracterisation. What I said was: “That’s the wrong fucking law, bro.”

The government’s stated rationale for amending the Climate Change Response Act is that it wanted to frame this as protecting the coherence of the existing climate regime.

Because if it had just done a standalone tort-law carve-out that blocked Smith v Fonterra, it would not be able to lie to you and say that this is only a technical clarification of our climate policy.

It would be far more obvious, on its face, what this actually is: the building of an immunity shield for the world’s biggest polluters.

The Law Society identified the real mechanical problem here. Tort liability, as defined in this bill, sweeps far more broadly than damages. It includes interim and interlocutory relief, injunctions, declarations, and any other remedies.

[Source: New Zealand Law Society submission, paras 7.3–7.12.]

Vague.

That means it is not a technical fix. It is not a narrow fix. It is such an expansively drafted bar that it could accidentally block far more than just climate-damage claims.

Which is exactly the kind of overreach that a specialist drafting team writing dedicated tort statutes would have scoped tightly. A historian fanboy of colonisers and Thatcherites did not.

He and his team of generalists have now made a muck of New Zealand’s most important climate law while shitting all over Māori customs and stewardship.

So, the Law Society of New Zealand is concerned about the broader legal ramifications of this choice, and international coverage of the cronies has now exploded because they have amended the actual named Climate Change Response Act — the same statute New Zealand used to ratify Kyoto and build its global climate reputation.

[Sources: Climate Change Response Act 2002; official amendment bill; New Zealand Law Society submission.]

Rather than what a strategic lawyer in his position would have done — which I do not advocate for, but I know your enemy — this is what they would have done: amend one of the boring, unrelated general tort statutes.

Instead, they have given every international news outlet covering climate policy anywhere in the world a ready-made search term and hook: “New Zealand amends climate law to protect polluters.”

It writes itself.

So, Mike Smith is suing seven major emitters for climate harm. In February 2024, the Supreme Court said that Mike’s case was allowed to proceed to a full trial. That trial was supposed to start in April 2027.

[Source: Supreme Court judgment and case chronology.]

But these polluters do not want to go to trial, and they do not want to stop polluting. Instead, they wanted Parliament to change the law so that this case cannot continue.

Focus on this 2024 timeline.

On 7 February, the Supreme Court allowed Smith v Fonterra to proceed.

On 23 February, the first recorded ministerial advice to Paul Goldsmith about a legislative response to Smith v Fonterra was made — just over two weeks after the judgment.

[Source: New Zealand Law Society submission, para 2.5.]

Then, on 6 March, the then Attorney-General, Judith Collins, wrote to ministers proposing that, quote, “the option of a statutory bar on climate change tort proceedings is the most straightforward response”.

[Source: The Spinoff’s publication of the released ministerial timeline.]

This government has never once considered it urgent to prepare a response to actual climate damage or climate change. What this government felt was a crisis to respond to was possibly the same reason the Supreme Court let it go to trial.

This case is so important because it might actually create a legal opening in the courts to develop the common law in a way that allows major emitters to be held responsible for climate harm.

The law is not fixed. It develops through court decisions. If Mike Smith won his judgment, that could become what is called, in law, precedent — meaning that other people could bring similar cases and more judges are likely to respond the same way against major polluters.

[Source: Supreme Court judgment.]

When she says “the most straightforward response”, she is comparing the ways the government could stop climate-tort proceedings.

Big polluters have spent most of the last century buying politicians and trying to win big cases that set precedent in their favour.

A Smith win would swing a wrecking ball through decades of carefully manipulated legislation and case law, built through corporate lobbying to protect polluters from the people they harm.

On 25 June 2024, a member of Fonterra’s Government Affairs team sent an email to Matt Burgess, Christopher Luxon’s chief policy adviser.

[Sources: The Spinoff timeline; 1News identification of Matt Burgess.]

But despite this being a formal communication between a member of Fonterra’s Government Affairs team and the sitting chief policy adviser to the Prime Minister, they used his personal email.

That email said that this was a two-sentence legislative amendment that Fonterra believed would resolve the uncertainty and risks posed by private-law claims like Mr Smith’s.

In plain terms, these two sentences said that nobody could use tort or equity to ask a court for any remedy against any greenhouse-gas emitter for climate effects. The second sentence applied the ban retrospectively, making sure to catch Smith’s case.

The polluters called this balance. But this wording was deliberately and specifically designed to stop Smith’s active case.

It protects “any person”, which means companies and potentially the Crown. It prevents not only damages, but declarations, injunctions, and other equitable relief.

[Source: Released corporate Note on Legislative Resolution.]

So, these big polluters did not just send the government a vague policy suggestion or their thoughts for consideration. They provided Goldsmith with complete statutory clauses expressly killing Smith v Fonterra.

So, Fonterra wrote the addendum to the law that kills the case against them.

But these cronies actually went further than even the industrialists had suggested to them. The version that made it into the Act is even broader and more technically developed.

They added explicit protection for the Crown — the British Crown. They carved out actual or potential contributions to emissions, activity and harm outside or inside New Zealand, supply-chain and related-party activity, an explicit reference to Smith v Fonterra, and a clause denying compensation.

[Source: official Climate Change Response (Tort Liability) Amendment Bill.]

So, the polluters provided the first draft, and these cronies expanded it, making it technically harder to evade and explicitly attaching it to Mike Smith’s case.

These seven polluters named in the Smith case are not operating independently either. They are sharing lawyers.

Z Energy, Fonterra, and Dairy Holdings are all represented by Chapman Tripp. Bell Gully represents Genesis, and Buddle Findlay represents New Zealand Steel.

[Sources: Supreme Court counsel submissions; Chapman Tripp profile of Nicola Swan.]

Chapman Tripp matters most here. Not only are they defending three of the biggest polluters, but they are the ones who prepared that briefing note and asked the government to change the law.

[Source: Scoop publication of the court-released briefing material.]

On 26 March 2025, the Environmental Law Initiative’s legal director, Dr Matt Hall, filed an Official Information Act request.

He asked for documents about Smith v Fonterra, any proposed legislative response, meetings with industry, and internal government discussions about stopping climate-tort cases.

On 21 May 2025, the Prime Minister’s Office sent back a limited set of heavily redacted emails. They did not disclose the Fonterra briefing note. They did not disclose that Z Energy had also sent a similar briefing note. And they did not disclose either company’s meetings with the Prime Minister’s chief policy adviser.

[Sources: The Spinoff timeline; Scoop publication of the released material.]

These documents only surfaced in May 2026, after Mike Smith’s lawyers challenged the polluters’ incomplete court-ordered discovery.

Fonterra was forced to disclose its briefing note to the court, and shortly afterwards Z Energy confirmed it had matching material.

Once that discovery process exposed what the Prime Minister’s Office had left out, the Environmental Law Initiative took the matter to the Ombudsman.

The Chief Ombudsman, John Allen, investigated the Prime Minister’s Office and questioned Matt Burgess.

[Sources: Chief Ombudsman finding reported by 1News; LawNews account of Burgess’s evidence.]

Burgess told the Ombudsman that he could not remember the meetings he had had with Fonterra and Z Energy. He said he did not know what had happened to the printed briefing notes. He said he could not fully remember dealing with the Official Information Act request. He said nobody had deliberately decided to exclude the documents.

Then why are they in your personal email?

On 1 July, the Ombudsman ruled that the Prime Minister’s Office had unreasonably breached the Official Information Act.

[Source: Chief Ombudsman finding reported by 1News.]

Immediately after the Supreme Court said that this case should go to trial, these defendants’ lawyers came back with an application to drag the whole world into the case.

They first tried to make these polluters representatives of all New Zealand industry. Australian legal commentary called this out as a blatant attempt to delay the case and make it unworkable.

[Sources: High Court judgment, Smith v Fonterra [2025] NZHC 940; Environmental Law Australia commentary.]

Then Fonterra’s lawyer — either Nicola Swan or someone working under her as a partner — tried to tell the court that the claims were highly abstracted.

At the same time, these companies and their lawyers were handing sitting ministers a note that called their own court case a sovereign risk.

A sovereign risk.

Yet his claims are highly abstracted, given the context? Because the country is at risk because of you allowing big pollution.

These guys are doing all of this because they are trying to increase their profits. But when they get their profit, they spend it on these lawyers.

Like, notice the labor in all of this. You could end all of this costly, laborious, time-wasting process by just saying, “Yeah, we are emitting and we need to answer for it.”

But every day these lawyers clock in, they are trying to move the truth further away.

Oxford bibliography

Primary legal and government material

Chief Ombudsman of New Zealand, investigation into the Prime Minister’s Office handling of the Fonterra and Z Energy briefing, findings reported in 1News, ‘PM’s Office breached OIA over climate note — Ombudsman’ (1 July 2026) https://www.1news.co.nz/2026/07/01/pms-office-breached-oia-over-climate-note-ombudsman/ accessed 23 August 2026.

Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Ministerial List: 27 November 2023 (DPMC, 27 November 2023) https://www.dpmc.govt.nz/sites/default/files/2023-11/ministerial-list-27-november-2023.pdf accessed 23 August 2026.

Electoral Commission New Zealand, Report on the 2023 General Election (Electoral Commission 2024) https://elections.nz/assets/2023-General-Election/Report-on-the-2023-General-Election.pdf accessed 23 August 2026.

Electoral Commission New Zealand, ‘Donations exceeding $20,000’ https://elections.nz/democracy-in-nz/political-parties-in-new-zealand/donations-exceeding-20000 accessed 23 August 2026.

Environmental Law Initiative, Official Information Act request concerning Smith v Fonterra and proposed legislative responses, described in ‘Fonterra & Z Energy Lobbying Concealed By Prime Minister’s Office’ (Scoop, 24 May 2026) https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO2605/S00169/fonterra-z-energy-lobbying-concealed-by-prime-ministers-office.htm accessed 23 August 2026.

New Zealand Government, ‘Hon Paul Goldsmith’ (Beehive) https://www.beehive.govt.nz/minister/biography/paul-goldsmith-0 accessed 23 August 2026.

New Zealand Government, ‘Hon Chris Bishop’ (Beehive) https://www.beehive.govt.nz/minister/biography/chris-bishop accessed 23 August 2026.

New Zealand Government, ‘Rt Hon Christopher Luxon’ (Beehive) https://www.beehive.govt.nz/minister/biography/christopher-luxon accessed 23 August 2026.

New Zealand Ministry of Justice, ‘Climate change tort law change’ https://www.justice.govt.nz/about/news-and-media/news/tort-law-change/ accessed 23 August 2026.

New Zealand Parliament, Climate Change Response (Tort Liability) Amendment Bill 330–1 (2026) https://www.legislation.govt.nz/bill/government/2026/330/en/latest/ accessed 23 August 2026.

New Zealand Parliament, Climate Change Response Act 2002 https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2002/40/en/latest/ accessed 23 August 2026.

New Zealand Parliament, Justice Committee, Climate Change Response (Tort Liability) Amendment Bill: Report (July 2026) https://selectcommittees.parliament.nz/view/SelectCommitteeReport/880495e5-ccc2-4882-9a83-08deedc1dffb accessed 23 August 2026.

New Zealand Law Society Te Kāhui Ture o Aotearoa, Submission on the Climate Change Response (Tort Liability) Amendment Bill (9 July 2026) https://www.lawsociety.org.nz/assets/Law-Reform-Submissions/Climate-Change-Response-Tort-Liability-Amendment-Bill-9-July-2026.pdf accessed 23 August 2026.

Smith v Fonterra Co-operative Group Ltd [2024] NZSC 5 https://www.courtsofnz.govt.nz/assets/cases/2024/2024-NZSC-5.pdf accessed 23 August 2026.

Smith v Fonterra Co-operative Group Ltd [2025] NZHC 940 https://climatecasechart.com/wp-content/uploads/non-us-case-documents/2025/20250416_2020-NZHC-419-2021-NZCA-552-2022-NZSC-35-2024-NZSC-5-2025-NZHC-940_judgment.pdf accessed 23 August 2026.

Z Energy and Fonterra defendants, Note on Legislative Resolution (2024) https://znz-webbackendassets-s3bucket-prod.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/public/zenergy/PDFs/Attachment-Note-on-Legislative-Resolution.pdf accessed 23 August 2026.

Corporate, archival and first-party records

Feronia Inc and GTM Capital Corporation, ‘GTM Capital Corporation and Feronia Inc announce details of qualifying transaction’ (29 July 2010) https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/gtm-capital-corporation-and-feronia-inc-announce-details-of-qualifyingtransaction-544943772.html accessed 23 August 2026.

Greenpeace, How Unilever Palm Oil Suppliers Are Burning Up Borneo (Greenpeace International 2008) https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-sweden-stateless/2019/01/8bdb437f-8bdb437f-how-unilever-palm-oil-supplier.pdf accessed 23 August 2026.

Greenpeace Aotearoa, ‘Corruption report highlights conflicts of interest at the heart of the Luxon government’ (11 February 2026) https://www.greenpeace.org/aotearoa/press-release/corruption-report-highlights-conflicts-of-interest-at-the-heart-of-the-luxon-government/ accessed 23 August 2026.

Luxon C, LinkedIn professional profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-luxon-bb701b195/ accessed 23 August 2026.

Unilever, Annual Report and Accounts 2009 (Unilever 2010) https://www.unilever.com/files/origin/809fdf125005f4e948c984f3dbae3e10722bc950.pdf/ir-unilever-ar09.pdf accessed 23 August 2026.

Unilever, ‘Our History: 1900–1950’ https://www.unilever.com/our-company/our-history-and-archives/1900-1950/ accessed 23 August 2026.

University of Liverpool, Report on Lever Brothers’ Plantations in the Solomon Islands and Belgian Congo, 1900–1930 (research commissioned by Unilever, 2025) https://royalafricansociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/university-of-liverpool-phase-2-report-lever-bros-plantations-in-the-congo-and-solomon-islands-1900-to-1930.pdf accessed 23 August 2026.

Journalism and specialist commentary

Environmental Law Australia, ‘Smith v Fonterra’ https://envlaw.com.au/smith-v-fonterra/ accessed 23 August 2026.

Hancock F, ‘National raised $10.4m in donations in 2023’ (RNZ, 2 May 2024) https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/politics/515911/national-raised-10-point-4m-in-donations-in-2023 accessed 23 August 2026.

LawNews, ‘Ombudsman takes PM’s Office to task over off-the-record climate briefing’ (1 July 2026) https://lawnews.nz/politics/ombudsman-takes-pms-office-to-task-over-off-the-record-climate-briefing/ accessed 23 August 2026.

LawNews, ‘Two top human rights leaders unlawfully appointed, High Court finds’ https://lawnews.nz/human-rights/two-top-human-rights-leaders-unlawfully-appointed-high-court-finds/ accessed 23 August 2026.

McCulloch C, ‘$500,000 in political donations associated with Fast Track projects’ (RNZ, 7 October 2024) https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/in-depth/530312/500-000-in-political-donations-associated-with-fast-track-projects accessed 23 August 2026.

Newsroom, ‘The teachings of Paul Goldsmith’ (15 February 2021) https://newsroom.co.nz/2021/02/15/the-teachings-of-paul-goldsmith/ accessed 23 August 2026.

The Guardian, ‘From selling deodorant to running the country: New Zealand’s new PM, Christopher Luxon’ (14 October 2023) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/14/from-selling-deodorant-to-running-the-country-new-zealands-new-pm-christopher-luxon accessed 23 August 2026.

The Spinoff, ‘Missing climate briefing note: Who knew what, and when?’ (4 June 2026) https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/04-06-2026/missing-climate-briefing-note-who-knew-what-and-when accessed 23 August 2026.

Connected research

alimcforever, ‘Christian Zionism Sources’ (Substack, 2 June 2026)

Initial funding for the 1947 conference came from four sources: the William Volker Fund (via Harold Luhnow), the Bank of England (via Alfred Suenson-Taylor), the Foundation for Economic Education (Irvington-on-Hudson, New York), and the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt — today Credit Suisse — which alone paid 93 percent of total conference costs: 18,062.08 Swiss francs. Presidents have included: Hayek (1947–1961), Milton Friedman (1970–1972), George Stigler (1976–1978), James M. Buchanan (1984–1986), Gary Becker (1990–1992), Edwin Feulner of the Heritage Foundation (1996–1998), and Deirdre McCloskey (current). Charles Koch has been a member since 1970. A 2010 membership list of nearly 500 members from 52 countries showed that Koch family foundations (Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, David H. Koch Charitable Foundation) had poured more than $100 million into at least 54 organizations represented by MPS members. Hayek used MPS as a direct forum to encourage members to build think tanks. Antony Fisher, an MPS member, founded:

• Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) — London, 1955

• Manhattan Institute for Policy Research — New York, 1977

• Atlas Economic Research Foundation — 1981 (now the Atlas Network).

DeSmog research found MPS members affiliated with over 100 organisations on the Atlas Network membership list. Connected organisations include: the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institution, Reason Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Fraser Institute, Mercatus Center (George Mason University), Heartland Institute, Adam Smith Institute, CIVITAS, IEA, Institute of Public Affairs (Australia), and the Acton Institute. Eight MPS members won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences: Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Maurice Allais, James M. Buchanan, Ronald Coase, Gary Becker, and Vernon Smith. Graeme Maxton and Jørgen Randers have documented that MPS helped create the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences specifically to legitimise free-market economic thinking.

Dr Jason Arday spent his career studying how British education distributes money, employment, legitimacy and intellectual authority.

In July and August 2026, an unnamed Cambridge source handed allegations about Dr Arday to Nathan Cofnas. Cofnas framed him as a “DEI hire”. The Telegraph called him Cambridge’s “diversity poster boy”. Fifteen media outlets then published 249 articles about him in 22 days.

Dr Arday resigned on 5 August.

He died nine days later.

His family described a campaign of sustained abuse and misinformation that became too much for him.

This document asks who initiated that campaign, who supplied the material, what Cambridge and the publishers knew, what they omitted, how they assessed the foreseeable harm and what they did while the coverage accelerated.

These questions require documents, dates, names and decisions.

A statement of regret is not an answer.

A description of institutional procedure is not an answer.

A public-relations summary is not an answer.

Questions for the University of Cambridge

The campaign against Jason Arday

1. On what date did Cambridge first receive a complaint, allegation or warning concerning Jason Arday’s publications, qualifications, appointments or personal history?

2. Who received each complaint?

3. Who supplied each complaint?

4. What documents accompanied each complaint?

5. Which complaints came from Cambridge employees, fellows, students, former employees or college members?

6. Did any Cambridge employee or affiliate contact Nathan Cofnas about Jason Arday?

7. Has Cambridge investigated who contacted Cofnas on 13 June 2026?

8. If not, why not?

9. Did the person contact Cofnas using a Cambridge email account, device, office, network or document system?

10. Did that person send Cofnas documents, drafts, correspondence, personnel information or allegations held by Cambridge?

11. Did Cambridge authorise that disclosure?

12. Has Cambridge asked Cofnas to identify the source?

13. Has Cambridge obtained or preserved the correspondence between the source and Cofnas?

14. Did the source contact any newspaper, broadcaster, journalist, campaign group or other publisher?

15. Did Cambridge staff circulate the description “plagiarist and fabulist” before Cofnas published it?

16. Did Cambridge staff describe Jason Arday internally as a “DEI hire” or equivalent?

17. Which staff members knew that Cofnas intended to publish “DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge” before 21 July 2026?

18. Which staff members knew that the Telegraph intended to publish “Cambridge’s diversity poster boy in plagiarism row” before 24 July?

19. Provide all Cambridge correspondence with Cofnas, the Telegraph, the Times, Times Higher Education, the Guardian, the Observer, the Daily Mail, the Spectator, the BBC, GB News, the Sun, the Express and the Independent concerning Jason Arday.

What Cambridge knew about Cofnas

1. When did Cambridge first learn that Cofnas advocated a “hereditarian revolution”?

2. When did Cambridge first learn that he advocated barriers between races?

3. When did Cambridge first learn that he claimed Black professors at Harvard would approach zero under meritocracy?

4. When did Cambridge first learn that he claimed Black people would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside sport and entertainment?

5. Did Cambridge tell any publisher using Cofnas’s allegations that he had made those statements?

6. If not, why not?

7. Did Cambridge tell those publishers that its own complaints process found parts of Cofnas’s blog could potentially encourage or incite discrimination against Black students and staff?

8. Did Cambridge tell those publishers that Cofnas’s three-year Cambridge post had been funded by the Leverhulme Trust?

9. Did Cambridge tell those publishers that the Leverhulme Trust receives tens of millions of pounds in annual Unilever dividends?

10. Did Cambridge assess the racial motivation or foreseeable racial impact of a campaign initiated by Cofnas against its youngest Black professor?

11. Who carried out that assessment?

12. Produce it.

Jason’s work and position

1. Did the University understand, when it appointed Jason Arday, that his research examined Black doctoral funding, precarious academic employment, Black mental health, curriculum, neurodiversity, the Black professoriate and routes to intellectual authority in Britain’s former colonial university system?

2. Did Cambridge assess whether attacks on his appointment were also attacks on the legitimacy of Black professors and equality programmes?

3. Did Cambridge monitor racist abuse directed at him from the date of his appointment?

4. How many racist, threatening or abusive communications concerning Jason did Cambridge record between his appointment and his death?

5. How many were reported to police?

6. How many were referred to safeguarding, security, human resources or occupational health?

7. Did Cambridge screen Jason’s email because of racist abuse?

8. When did screening begin?

9. Who reviewed the screened material?

10. Where are those records now?

Investigations and reversals

1. Which body investigated the thesis allegations before July 2026?

2. What was the exact finding?

3. On what evidence did Cambridge state on 24 July that Jason had been cleared of wrongdoing?

4. Who approved the words “victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility”?

5. What changed between that statement and the announcement of a new investigation on 5 August?

6. Identify every item of “new information”.

7. Who supplied each item?

8. On what date?

9. Had any of it already been considered by Liverpool John Moores University, a journal or another institution?

10. Why did Cambridge publicly announce a new investigation before completing a welfare assessment of the person subjected to the campaign?

11. Did Cambridge consider delaying public announcement until it had secured Jason’s safety and support?

12. Who decided not to?

13. Did Cambridge give Jason advance notice of the announcement?

14. How much notice?

15. Who spoke with him before and after publication?

Duty of care

1. Who held operational responsibility for Jason’s welfare between 24 July and 14 August?

2. Did Cambridge appoint a single senior duty-of-care lead?

3. If not, why not?

4. Did Cambridge conduct a written risk assessment after the Telegraph’s first article?

5. Did it conduct another after his resignation?

6. Did it assess the cumulative impact of hundreds of articles, racial abuse, disability scrutiny and loss of employment?

7. Did Cambridge know that fifteen outlets had produced 249 articles in 22 days?

8. Did it ask any publisher to stop contacting Jason?

9. Did it ask any publisher to stop contacting his family?

10. Did it issue any public warning about racist abuse, harassment or the volume of coverage?

11. Did it offer Jason independent legal support?

12. Did it offer independent clinical support?

13. Did it offer security support?

14. Did it offer paid leave rather than resignation?

15. Did it offer to suspend the investigation while he received support?

16. Did any Cambridge employee speak with Jason on 14 August?

17. Give the name, time and record of every contact.

18. When did Cambridge learn that he had died?

19. What action did it take in the first hour?

20. Did it order immediate preservation of all records?

21. Produce the preservation notice.

Unequal treatment of academic misconduct

1. How many Cambridge academics have faced plagiarism, authorship theft, data fabrication or research-integrity allegations since 2015?

2. How many remained employed while investigations continued?

3. How many investigations lasted more than one year?

4. How many findings were never published?

5. How many senior academics continued teaching, examining or supervising after an adverse or provisional finding?

6. Why did the provisional finding that a senior Cambridge academic plagiarised a doctoral student not trigger a public institutional review comparable to the review announced in Jason’s case?

7. Why did Cambridge allow its appointment of one Black professor to become a public referendum on equality, while treating other misconduct cases as confidential individual matters?

Accountability

1. Will Cambridge identify the faculty member who contacted Cofnas?

2. Will it publish the full chronology of the campaign?

3. Will it publish all investigation findings concerning Jason, including findings that cleared him?

4. Will it publish its correspondence with the press?

5. Will it publish its duty-of-care records?

6. Will the independent inquiry examine the role of racism, ableism, media amplification and the anonymous Cambridge source?

7. Who chose the inquiry chair?

8. Can Cambridge management restrict the evidence, witnesses, findings or publication?

9. Will Jason’s family have independent representation in the inquiry?

10. Will Black staff and students have independent representation?

11. On what date will the full report be published?

Questions for Every Publisher

These questions apply separately to the Telegraph, Times, Sunday Times, Daily Mail, MailOnline, Guardian, Observer, Independent, Spectator, Daily Express, Sun, GB News, BBC News, Times Higher Education, Sky News, Metro, Daily Mirror and Channel 4 News.

Source and provenance

1. On what date and at what time did your organisation first receive information concerning Jason Arday?

2. Who supplied it?

3. Did the source work for, study at or hold an affiliation with Cambridge?

4. Did the source identify Nathan Cofnas?

5. Did Cofnas contact your organisation?

6. Who contacted whom first?

7. Provide the date, time and method of every communication.

8. What documents, screenshots, spreadsheets, comparison tables, plagiarism reports, correspondence or personal information did you receive?

9. Provide the original file names and metadata.

10. Did you receive material that had not appeared in Cofnas’s Substack?

11. Did you receive any part of Jack Grove’s 63-page Times Higher Education dossier?

12. Did you receive material from the same source who contacted Plagiarism Today?

13. Did you agree to anonymity?

14. Who approved anonymity?

15. What public-interest test did you apply?

16. Did the source have a personal, professional, political or employment dispute with Jason?

17. Did the source express opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion?

18. Did the source describe Jason as a “DEI hire”, “diversity hire”, “fabulist”, “fraud” or similar before publication?

19. Did any source receive payment, expenses, publication support, legal support or another benefit?

20. Did your organisation coordinate publication timing with Cofnas or another outlet?

What editors knew about Cofnas

1. Before publication, did editors know Cofnas called himself a race realist?

2. Did editors know he called for a “hereditarian revolution”?

3. Did editors know he advocated barriers between races?

4. Did editors know he claimed Black professors at Harvard would approach zero under meritocracy?

5. Did editors know he claimed Black people would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside sport and entertainment?

6. Did editors know he described Jason as a DEI hire?

7. Did editors know his Cambridge post had been funded by the Leverhulme Trust?

8. Did editors know Leverhulme held more than £2 billion in Unilever shares?

9. Did editors know Cambridge had found parts of his blog capable of encouraging discrimination against Black students and staff?

10. Which of those facts appeared in your first article?

11. Explain each omission.

Framing

1. Did your organisation describe Jason through diversity, DEI, race, “poster boy”, “fantasist”, “disgraced”, “plagiarism prof” or equivalent language?

2. Who wrote each headline?

3. Who approved it?

4. What evidence supported presenting an allegation as an established identity?

5. Why was Jason’s race or symbolic position relevant to the headline?

6. Why was Cofnas’s racial programme not equally prominent?

7. Did editors consider that “diversity poster boy” converted an individual allegation into an attack on Black academic advancement?

8. Produce the headline discussion and approval record.

Volume and escalation

1. How many articles, columns, editorials, videos, live-blog entries, podcasts and social posts did your organisation publish about Jason between 24 July and 14 August?

2. How many journalists were assigned?

3. How many pieces were commissioned after his resignation?

4. How many were commissioned on 14 August?

5. Who authorised continued publication?

6. Did the organisation maintain a cumulative count?

7. Did anyone assess whether the volume had become harassment?

8. Did anyone assess foreseeable harm to Jason or his family?

9. Produce every welfare, safeguarding, editorial-standards or duty-of-care assessment.

10. If none exists, explain why.

Accuracy and institutional findings

1. Did your reporting state that Liverpool John Moores University had examined the thesis allegations?

2. Did it state the result?

3. Did it state that Jason’s PhD still stood?

4. Did it distinguish journal corrections from retractions?

5. Did it distinguish allegations from findings?

6. Did it publish Jason’s responses with equal prominence?

7. Did it correct social posts that presented allegations as fact?

8. Did it tell readers that senior Cambridge academics had faced plagiarism or authorship-appropriation findings without comparable coverage?

9. If not, why was that institutional context omitted?

Race, disability and private life

1. Why did your organisation investigate Jason’s childhood, speech, literacy, disability, school friendships, family and mental health?

2. What public interest required each intrusion?

3. Who approved contacting childhood acquaintances?

4. Who approved psychiatric speculation about a person the writer had never examined?

5. Did the organisation consult disability specialists?

6. Did it consult racism specialists?

7. Did it assess the cumulative impact of challenging every element of a Black disabled person’s life in national media?

8. Produce that assessment.

The final day

1. List every item about Jason published or updated on 14 August, with its exact publication time.

2. When did your newsroom learn he had been found unresponsive?

3. When did it learn he had died?

4. Which scheduled pieces were stopped?

5. Which were allowed to publish?

6. Which were edited after the newsroom learned of his death?

7. Which were deleted?

8. Who made each decision?

9. Did your organisation contact the family that day?

10. How many times?

11. Did it continue contacting them after they asked the press to stop?

12. Did editors review previous coverage immediately after learning of the death?

13. Did they identify inaccuracies, unsupported conjecture, degrading language or excessive intrusion?

14. What corrections or editor’s notes followed?

15. If none followed, why not?

Responsibility

1. Does your organisation accept that its coverage contributed to the sustained public pressure experienced by Jason?

2. Does it accept the family’s statement that the campaign of misinformation was “too much for Jason”?

3. If it disputes the family’s account, state precisely what it disputes and the evidence for doing so.

4. Does it accept that the source’s racial ideology was material information readers needed?

5. Does it accept that omission of that ideology distorted the story?

6. Does it accept that the volume of publication became part of the event being reported?

7. Will it publish its internal review?

8. Will it publish the source chronology?

9. Will it release the content-management history of deleted or altered articles?

10. Will it preserve all records for the coroner, regulators, litigation and public inquiry?

Publisher-Specific Questions

The Telegraph

1. Why did the 24 July article call Jason Cambridge’s “diversity poster boy”?

2. Why did it not name Cofnas?

3. When did Gordon Rayner or another Telegraph journalist first communicate with Cofnas?

4. What material did Cofnas supply?

5. What material came from a Cambridge source?

6. Who commissioned the statistical analysis of Jason’s thesis?

7. Who selected the texts and comparison method?

8. Was the analysis independently peer reviewed?

9. Why did the paper publish “The Cambridge fantasist” before an adverse institutional finding?

10. Who approved the 3.11pm article about Jason’s childhood disability on 14 August?

11. When did the Telegraph learn that emergency services were at his address?

12. Why does that article remain unannotated?

The Times and Sunday Times

1. Who approved the AI-detector story about Jason’s resignation letter?

2. What evidence established that detector output could identify authorship reliably?

3. Who approved “Jason Arday may want to get himself a nice pair of orange trousers” at 6.12pm on 14 August?

4. When did the newsroom learn that Jason had died?

5. Who deleted the article?

6. Why was it deleted without a correction, explanation or editor’s note?

7. Provide the full article, revision history, publication log, deletion log and decision record.

Daily Mail and MailOnline

1. Who commissioned the psychiatric-speculation column published at 1.01am on 14 August?

2. What evidence justified diagnosing or explaining Jason’s behaviour without examining him?

3. Why did the Mail publish 30 items between his resignation and death?

4. Who monitored cumulative harm?

5. What podcast was deleted on 6 August?

6. Who deleted it and why?

Guardian and Observer

1. What did the Guardian know about Cofnas before 1 August?

2. Why did its full account of Cofnas’s racism, Cambridge dismissal, lawsuit and funding appear only after Jason’s death?

3. Why did the 12 August article continue interrogating Jason’s childhood disability after weeks of escalating coverage?

4. What welfare warnings did editors receive?

5. Will the Guardian add editor’s notes to earlier articles explaining Cofnas’s role and funding?

BBC

1. The BBC identified Cofnas as a self-described race realist. Why did it not investigate the Leverhulme and Unilever funding behind his Cambridge authority?

2. Did the BBC receive material from Cofnas or the anonymous Cambridge source?

3. Did it share documents or findings with other outlets?

4. What assessment did it make of the racialised framing used elsewhere?

Times Higher Education

1. Who supplied the original tip-offs to Jack Grove?

2. What did the 63-page dossier contain?

3. Who received copies?

4. Did any part reach Cofnas, the Telegraph or another publisher?

5. Why was the investigation abandoned?

6. What did Carter-Ruck’s letter say?

7. Why did THE wait until 3 August 2026 to explain that it had held the story since 2025?

8. Why did the editor’s note not identify Cofnas or the wider document-distribution network?

Spectator, Sun, Express and GB News

1. What independent reporting did your organisation conduct?

2. Which claims were copied or derived from other outlets?

3. What evidence justified “gift that keeps on giving”, “fantastical truth”, “Plagiarism prof”, “Disgraced” and “DEI gone mad”?

4. Who assessed the racial meaning of those labels?

5. Who assessed their cumulative effect?

Documents Required

Demand the following records from Cambridge and every publisher:

1. complete source chronology;

2. all communications with Cofnas;

3. all communications with Cambridge employees or affiliates;

4. all documents and attachments received;

5. original metadata and file hashes;

6. commissioning records;

7. headline drafts and approvals;

8. legal review logs;

9. welfare and safeguarding assessments;

10. publication and update timestamps;

11. content-management revision histories;

12. deletion records;

13. complaints received;

14. correction discussions;

15. record-preservation notices;

16. internal post-death reviews;

17. correspondence with Jason and his representatives;

18. correspondence with his family;

19. correspondence with police, the coroner, regulators and Cambridge;

20. the identity and role of every person who approved publication on 14 August.

Evidence Underpinning the Questions

• Jason’s family said he had faced “a campaign of sustained abuse for more than three years” and that “the campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason.” (Associated Press, 15 August 2026)

• Fifteen outlets published 249 articles in 22 days, including 188 between resignation and death. (NewsCord, The Jason Arday Pile-On)

• Cofnas said a Cambridge faculty member contacted him on 13 June and described Jason as a “plagiarist and fabulist”. (Retraction Watch, 27 July 2026)

• Cofnas framed Jason as an education professor and “DEI hire” before publishing. (Cofnas interview)

• The Telegraph’s first national article called Jason Cambridge’s “diversity poster boy” and did not identify Cofnas. (The Telegraph, 24 July 2026)

• Cambridge’s own process found that parts of Cofnas’s blog could potentially encourage discrimination against Black students and staff. (County Court at Cambridge, Cofnas v Emmanuel College, 13 March 2026)

• Cambridge first called Jason the victim of a “vile campaign”, then announced a new investigation and he resigned. (University of Cambridge, 2 August 2026; University of Cambridge, 5 August 2026)

Primary contacts

University of Cambridge

Freedom of Information:
foi@admin.cam.ac.uk

Postal address:
Information Compliance Office
Governance and Compliance Division
University of Cambridge
The Old Schools
Trinity Lane
Cambridge CB2 1TN

Cambridge Information Compliance Office[information-compliance.admin.cam.ac]

Leverhulme Trust

Grants:
grants@leverhulme.ac.uk

Early Career Fellowship contact:
Andreas Heiner
020 7042 9863

Postal address:
The Leverhulme Trust
1 Pemberton Row
London EC4A 3BG

Leverhulme Trust contacts[leverhulme.ac]

Isaac Newton Trust

Email:
administrator@newtontrust.cam.ac.uk

Postal address:
Isaac Newton Trust
105 Eddington Place
Cambridge CB3 1AS

Isaac Newton Trust accounts and contact page[newtontrust.cam.ac]

Contacts for the Dr Jason Arday Accountability Questions

Recommended routing

Send directly

Send the Cambridge questions to:

• the Vice-Chancellor’s Office;

• Cambridge Legal Services;

• the Information Compliance Office;

• the Committee on Benefactions and External and Legal Affairs;

• the Faculty of Education;

• the Faculty of Philosophy;

• Emmanuel College;

• the Isaac Newton Trust;

• the Leverhulme Trust.

Send each publisher’s questions to its editorial complaints or readers’ editor address. Send the publisher-specific questions separately rather than placing every outlet into one shared email.

Copy for record preservation

Copy Cambridge’s Legal Services and Information Compliance Office on requests to preserve correspondence, source records, device records, metadata and investigation files.

Copy the relevant parent-company complaints address where a publisher belongs to Reach plc, News UK or dmg media.

Escalate if no adequate response

• Printed and online newspapers: IPSO where the publication is a member.

• Television and broadcast output: Ofcom after completing the broadcaster’s own complaints process.

• BBC: BBC complaints, then the BBC Executive Complaints Unit, then Ofcom where applicable.

• Guardian: the Guardian Readers’ Editor.

• Observer: the Observer Readers’ Editor.

• Independent: its managing editor and internal complaints process.

• Press accountability support: Hacked Off.

No organisation has been contacted and no complaint has been submitted.

Cambridge, colleges and funding bodies

Publishers and broadcasters

Regulators and accountability organisations

Verified Cambridge recipient list

vice-chancellor@admin.cam.ac.uk;
vco.enquiries@admin.cam.ac.uk;
legal@admin.cam.ac.uk;
foi@admin.cam.ac.uk;
data.protection@admin.cam.ac.uk;
communications@admin.cam.ac.uk;
cbela@admin.cam.ac.uk;
GCDEnquiries@admin.cam.ac.uk;
reception@educ.cam.ac.uk;
research-office@educ.cam.ac.uk;
philadmin@phil.cam.ac.uk;
hrassistants@admin.cam.ac.uk;
academic.secretaryWBdisclosure@admin.cam.ac.uk;
registraryWBdisclosure@admin.cam.ac.uk;
communications@emma.cam.ac.uk;
masterspa@emma.cam.ac.uk;
foi@trin.cam.ac.uk;
director@newtontrust.cam.ac.uk;
administrator@newtontrust.cam.ac.uk;
grants@newtontrust.cam.ac.uk;
grants@leverhulme.ac.uk;
grants@leverhulme-trade.org.uk

Verified publisher and escalation email list

telegraphenquiries@telegraph.co.uk;
feedback@thetimes.co.uk;
editorialcomplaints@the-sun.co.uk;
corrections@dailymail.co.uk;
guardian.readers@theguardian.com;
readers@observer.co.uk;
newsdesk@independent.co.uk;
managingeditor@independent.co.uk;
editor@spectator.co.uk;
theeditor@spectator.co.uk;
letters@spectator.co.uk;
geoff.maynard@express.co.uk;
complaints@reachplc.com;
readercomplaints@reachplc.com;
webhomepage@mirror.co.uk;
feedback@mirror.co.uk;
news@dailystar.co.uk;
starletters@dailystar.co.uk;
gbviews@gbnews.com;
media@timeshighereducation.com;
webmaster@timeshighereducation.com;
viewerR@sky.uk;
news@skynews.com;
corrections@metro.co.uk;
correct@ukmetro.co.uk;
Deborah.Arthurs@metro.co.uk;
inquiries@ipso.co.uk;
advice@ipso.co.uk;
campaign@hackinginquiry.org;
press@hackinginquiry.org

Contact forms

• University of Cambridge

• Trinity College Cambridge

• The Telegraph

• The Times

• The Sunday Times

• The Sun

• Daily Mail and MailOnline

• The Independent

• Metro

• BBC

• Channel 4

• ITN

• IPSO

• Ofcom

• Hacked Off

My microphone is charging, so I’m sorry if you can’t hear me. I’ll put the subtitles on, even if there’s typos in them. I’ve just made two videos about Jason Arday and Nathan Cofnas and this whole, you know, what I found from looking into this is two things.

The first is if you look at Jason’s actual research, and I would strongly recommend that you do that and read some of it and get to know what he was working on, because he was working on important decolonial research. It’s really interesting to me. I did a video that touched on his topics, completely unrelated to him, about a year ago, and I was so aggressively piled on by random internet accounts that I ended up taking the video down. Not because there was anything wrong with it, but I still wanted to give myself the opportunity to go through the academic sourcing and make sure that there wasn’t anything wrong with it because of the way people were responding. It was insane.

That video that I did was about education. Jason Arday’s work is about education. Jason Arday studied how the British education system reproduces racial inequality.

(Jason Arday, Cambridge Faculty of Education profile; Jason Arday and Heidi Safia Mirza, Dismantling Race in Higher Education)

In 2025, he wrote “The routes to intellectual authority in a prior colonial empire: continued racialised, geopolitical inequalities in the academic staff composition and employment conditions of UK universities.”

(Belluigi, Arday and O’Keeffe, full paper, 2025)

In 2023, he wrote “We See Things They’ll Never See: Sociological Reflections on Race, Neurodiversity and Higher Education.”

(Lewis and Arday, full paper, 2023)

In 2022, he wrote “‘More to Prove and More to Lose’: Race, Racism and Precarious Employment in Higher Education.”

(Arday, full paper, 2022)

In 2022, he wrote “Same Storm, Different Boats: The Impact of COVID-19 on Black Students and Academic Staff in UK and US Higher Education.”

(Arday and Jones, journal paper, 2022)

Also in 2022, this is the year he started to teach at Cambridge, he wrote “No One Can See Me Cry: Understanding Mental Health Issues for Black and Minority Ethnic Staff in Higher Education.”

(Arday, journal paper, 2022)

Over a decade of citations, the through line is very, very clear. Jason Arday researched how colonial and racial power controls entry, employment, legitimacy, mental health, and even survival inside British education.

When you look at his body of work, there is a clear institutional motive to discredit him. He was asking questions like who receives research funding, who becomes a professor, whose knowledge counts, who gets attacked for plagiarism, how are Black academics routinely pushed into insecure employment, and how this racism is damaging their mental health.

(Leading Routes, The Broken Pipeline, 2019; Belluigi, Arday and O’Keeffe, 2025; Arday, “No One Can See Me Cry”, 2022)

On the 21st of July 2026, Nathan Cofnas used his Substack to publish allegations against Professor Jason Arday. He called Arday’s appointment DEI ideology and told The Times that Arday was not smart enough to be a Cambridge professor. He claimed that Arday’s PhD thesis, which was done in 2015 in Liverpool, yeah, Liverpool John Moores University, and Liverpool John Moores University have investigated and concluded that he did not plagiarise any work.

(Nathan Cofnas, “DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge”, 21 July 2026; The Telegraph, quoting Liverpool John Moores University’s response, 24 July 2026)

Evidence note: the direct Times URL is still needed for the “not smart enough” quotation.

I may have slightly plagiarised a little bit of my 2016 master’s thesis. There you go. Even if that’s true, would you [ __ ] get over it? It’s a master’s thesis from 10 years ago. If you asked my university, they would probably say Alison cheated off everyone and stole out of the canteen.

His university says he did not plagiarise at all. That’s more than the Dublin Institute of Technology would probably do for me.

On top of that, if you follow my friend Abby Heer, you will have seen her very important video over the weekend pointing at the hypocrisy of this, the level of academic fraud at Cambridge University. She points to an investigation done recently by the Byline Times that exposed the university for allowing Peter Thiel to influence chair selection and academic procurement.

Evidence note: the direct Byline Times investigation is still needed for this sentence.

I have a list of Cambridge still-in-post professors who were caught cheating, plagiarising off their students. Apparently any old billionaire can simply buy a research appointment at this university, and Nathan Cofnas, Cofnas, whatever, himself, who is doing eugenics. This is racism sugar-coated as research paid for by Unilever.

(County Court at Cambridge, Cofnas v Emmanuel College, 13 March 2026; National Human Genome Research Institute, “Eugenics and Scientific Racism”; Akbay, “Hereditarianism: a century of the science of inequality”, 2026)

In case you have forgotten, Unilever’s history in Africa was grossly violent. Their company in the Belgian Congo used forced labour. They would cut your hand off if you didn’t meet their quotas. Their recruiters threatened people. Chiefs were paid for supplying workers. And when men fled, the company and their colonial agents would seize the women, the children, and the cattle instead.

(Henriet and Loffman, “‘We Are Left With Barely Anything’: Colonial Rule, Dependency, and the Lever Brothers in the Belgian Congo, 1911–1960”; University of Liverpool, Unilever-commissioned archive survey, 2022; Port Sunlight Village Trust, Racism, the Belgian Congo and William Lever, 2022)

Evidence note: these sources document forced labour, coercive recruitment, imprisonment, corporal punishment, payments to chiefs and the seizure of women and cattle. The current evidence pack does not document hand-cutting by Lever Brothers.

That palm oil fed Unilever. And William Lever’s company shares are what became the Leverhulme Trust, which funds Nathan Cofnas. Cofnas is the individual who brought these plagiarism allegations against Arday. He describes himself as a race realist and calls for a hereditarian revolution. He was dismissed from his position at Cambridge’s Emmanuel College in 2024 because his views on race were deemed to challenge the college’s core values.

(University of Liverpool, Phase Two archive report, 2025; Unilever Archives, The Formation of Unilever; Leverhulme Trust, 2025 accounts; County Court at Cambridge, Cofnas v Emmanuel College; Varsity, 7 February 2024)

It’s only three days between when he published on Substack and when the British national press goes into a frenzy. Three days. Within a week, there are over 300 articles accusing Jason Arday of plagiarism, but there has yet to be a single article, until I [ __ ] publish it, about, well, why is Unilever funding eugenics research at Cambridge University? Anyone want to answer that?

(Nathan Cofnas, original post, 21 July 2026; The Telegraph, first national article, 24 July 2026; NewsCord publication census)

Evidence note: NewsCord records 249 articles in 22 days, including 188 between resignation and death. It does not support “over 300 articles within a week”.

Whether someone did or did not plagiarise their master’s thesis 10 [ __ ] years ago, I don’t think that matters. I would like to know why Unilever are still funding eugenics research at one of the biggest, most prestigious universities in the [ __ ] country.

That is money earned by taking the hands of Black children being used to discredit and leads to the death of a Black researcher. That is one continuous through line of colonial exploitation.

(Henriet and Loffman, Lever Brothers in the Belgian Congo; Associated Press, family statement and death reporting, 15 August 2026)

Evidence note: the family attributed the harm to sustained abuse and misinformation. No coroner’s medical finding is public in the current evidence pack.

Shout out to the British again. Like, are you not embarrassed? Like, if you are someone working for The Times right now, maybe you just don’t come out of your house anymore.

Following Arday’s death, there has been widespread calls for accountability at Cambridge University. Real accountability from Cambridge University requires scrutinising intensely every bit of research being done at that facility on Unilever coin.

(Associated Press, 15 August 2026; Leverhulme Trust, 2025 accounts)

There are two different stories here running in parallel. Both of them need to be pushed forward.

The first is Jason’s work. People need to understand what he was working on and [clears throat] why that threatened the status quo. The tragedy is not just that Jason died. It’s that he spent his career meticulously mapping the machinery that killed him, and then that machinery was turned on him with lethal precision.

(Belluigi, Arday and O’Keeffe, 2025; Arday, 2022; Associated Press, family statement)

I’m going to read you a quote from Jason’s 2025 paper, which was published in Race Ethnicity and Education. It’s called “The Routes to Intellectual Authority in a Prior Colonial Empire.”

He said, “Two problematics are exposed and explored within this paper which currently undermine the United Kingdom’s international commitments to address racial inequality and injustice. One, the routes to national, regional, and international intellect intellectual authority via the academic profession, particularly the assigned leadership position of full professor or chair. And two, the effects of dysconscious data literacy, which is out of step with international mechanisms and agendas to combat racism and xenophobia.”

(Belluigi, Arday and O’Keeffe, full paper, 2025)

In plain terms, British universities say they care about fighting racism. They’re lying. And this paper shows how white people still decide who becomes a professor, and then the people in charge either don’t see the racism right in front of them or they just don’t want to see it. Meanwhile, the UK government makes pretty speeches about equality while the system has stayed the same.

More people need to read this research, and more people need to translate it into plain terms and make it accessible for even more people. But that’s only one side of this story.

Remembering Jason, making sure that his work is carried on and that people understand it, and that they understand it as a threat to power, and that they keep attacking that power.

The other side of this story is the guy who accused him. People are talking a lot at the moment about how he’s a big fat racist, and yeah, individual guy, a big fat racist, very problematic. But he is being funded by a giant corporate inheritance. And that exact corporation

literally

are colonialism.

(Leverhulme Trust, 2025 accounts; Unilever Archives, The Formation of Unilever; University of Liverpool, Unilever-commissioned archive research, 2022)

So how did wealth created through colonial extraction, preserved through Unilever, purchased Cambridge authority for a eugenics researcher, and despite all of that red-flagging, the British press wrote 300 articles smearing his enemy that he didn’t like?

(Henriet and Loffman; Unilever Archives; Leverhulme Trust accounts; County Court judgment; NewsCord census)

Why did the British media conceal that funding and power structure, which took 30 seconds for me to pull up by simply asking before publishing on someone’s behalf, who [ __ ] funds you?

And how did it go from one [ __ ] Substack to 300 national stories in three days?

(Nathan Cofnas, original post, 21 July 2026; The Telegraph, 24 July 2026)

When you look at it that way, Cofnas is just the guy that you’re supposed to hate. You’re supposed to blame him for what the institution did, because one individual cannot create that level of a [ __ ] storm without institutional backing, without being able to pick up the phone to someone at The Telegraph and get smears published unapologetically.

(Cofnas, original post; Retraction Watch, Cambridge-source handoff and prior dossier, 27 July 2026; The Telegraph, first article)

Why was he even at Cambridge? Why is he still? Why does nobody seem to care that Unilever are funding research? Think about what that means.

(County Court at Cambridge, appointment and funder; Isaac Newton Trust, fellowship salary mechanism; Leverhulme Trust, Unilever shares and dividends)

The people who call Jason a fraud, the media that called him a diversity poster boy, the weird little eugenics kid who’s proud of being a race realist, and the funding body of colonial money behind all of that.

This is literally what Jason was studying and exposing. To remember Jason correctly is to continue the work of exposing the system that killed him.

(Belluigi, Arday and O’Keeffe, 2025; Associated Press, family statement)

So here are some questions that you can take to Cambridge University and the British press.

For Cambridge University, on Nathan Cofnas: Why did you hire a researcher that had already built his career on racist rhetoric and eugenics, including publishing with the eugenics think tank? Why did you give him a three-year fellowship and a Cambridge address, and then the authority to supervise and examine your students?

(County Court at Cambridge, Cofnas v Emmanuel College; Nathan Cofnas, CV, May 2025; Isaac Newton Trust, Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships)

Nathan Cofnas was not a blank slate when you appointed him in 2022. He had already published with the Ulster Institute for Social Research, which was founded by Richard Lynn, a self-described scientific racist who wrote that poor people should not be encouraged to breed. He had already defended race realism in academic journals before you appointed him. His first book was published by a eugenicist think tank.

(Nathan Cofnas, CV, May 2025; Institute for Social Research and the Humanities, institutional history of the Ulster Institute; HOPE not hate, history of the Pioneer Fund and Richard Lynn quotations)

You knew exactly who this man was. You hired him anyway.

Then your own investigation found that Cofnas’s blog could encourage or incite others to discriminate against Black students and staff and was capable of creating a hostile environment. Why did you clear him of all charges and let him keep his position, his salary, and his platform?

Cambridge received over 100 student complaints about this man, and they investigated 58 of them. The university’s complaints office concluded that statements in his blog could potentially encourage or incite others to discriminate against Black students and staff on the grounds of their race, and were capable of creating or contributing to an intimidating, hostile or humiliating environment.

(County Court at Cambridge, complaint findings; Varsity, University outcome, 3 October 2025)

Apparently, that Cambridge found as free speech.

Why did you only act against Cofnas after public outrage, and even then only through a college, not the university itself? Emmanuel College cut ties with Cofnas in 2024, but the university did nothing. Even the Leverhulme Trust launched an investigation, and the university did nothing. Cofnas kept his fellowship, his salary, and his Cambridge affiliation.

(County Court at Cambridge, Emmanuel termination and fellowship dates; Daily Nous, Leverhulme urgent investigation, 15 February 2024; Varsity, Cambridge clearance)

You were happy to take the funding. You were happy to take the prestige. You’re not happy to take responsibility.

Why did you identify Arday as the victim of a vile campaign, and then days later open an investigation into his appointment? Who spoke to you? What changed?

On July 24th, 2026, The Telegraph first broke the story. Cambridge called it a vile campaign to undermine his credibility. Yet by August 5th, you had opened an investigation into his appointment. What new information did you receive in that one week? And from whom did you bow to pressure?

(The Telegraph, 24 July 2026; University of Cambridge, statement about Professor Arday, 5 August 2026)

Why did you waste resource creating a robust mental health and harassment policy for Jason, but never do anything to stop the named and funded researcher who was targeting him in the first place?

Who was the Cambridge faculty member who handed Jason Arday’s file to Nathan Cofnas, a known race realist who had already been dismissed for his views on racism? And why have you not named, investigated, or disciplined that person?

(Nathan Cofnas, original post identifying an unnamed Cambridge faculty source; Retraction Watch, 27 July 2026)

Why did you allow a researcher who had called for a hereditarian revolution and argued that Black people should disappear from all high-profile positions, number one, examine students, mark papers, represent your institution, and number two, make defamatory claims of plagiarism against your staff?

(Varsity, Cofnas quotations, 7 February 2024; Nathan Cofnas, CV; County Court judgment)

The guy who hates Black people is complaining about the Black professor again. Cambridge University reacts, “We better investigate the Black professor.”

You are racist.

This man had published books that said Black professors at Harvard would reach zero and Black people would disappear from all high-profile positions outside of sport and entertainment. When that guy says that your only Black professor is cheating, he’s a plagiarist, maybe that’s not serious.

(Varsity, direct quotations from “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution”; Nathan Cofnas, allegations against Arday)

When will you publish the outcome of the Leverhulme Trust’s urgent investigation into Cofnas? Or have you already agreed with the Trust that you will both bury that?

They said they were investigating this man in February 2024. Now someone is dead. You want to wrap that up pretty quickly.

Did you receive a copy? Is it confidential? Why should the public ever again believe an institution is taking racism seriously when you are refusing to publish the findings of your own investigation? [snorts]

(Daily Nous, full Leverhulme statement, 15 February 2024)

Why did you clear Cofnas of all 58 student complaints and then open an investigation into this one baseless account that a 10-year-old thesis from another university might have been plagiarised? That you think is worth investigating. But the 58 complaints against the guy who’s accusing him? Nah, don’t worry about that.

(Varsity, Cambridge complaint outcome; County Court judgment; University of Cambridge, Arday investigation statement)

You explicitly told Black students at Cambridge that a funded researcher could argue that they don’t belong there, that their exclusion is natural, and that that would be protected speech. You told your Black students that their safety and their dignity matters less than Cofnas’s convenience.

(University of Cambridge, response to Cofnas blogs, 16 February 2024; County Court judgment, complaint findings; Varsity, University outcome)

What did you expect would happen when this racist turned his attention on your Black professor?

What do you think is going to happen now that that Black professor is dead?

(Associated Press, family statement and death reporting, 15 August 2026)

Questions for the British media on the back of Jason Arday’s death.

The Telegraph broke the story.

(The Telegraph, “Cambridge’s diversity poster boy in plagiarism row”, 24 July 2026)

The first question for The Telegraph: Why did your first article on the 24th of July, headlined “Cambridge’s Diversity Poster Boy in Plagiarism Row”, fail to disclose that the allegations had come from Nathan Cofnas, a researcher who had been dismissed from Cambridge for his racist ideology?

(The Telegraph, first article; County Court at Cambridge, Cofnas v Emmanuel College, 13 March 2026)

This is a man who had called for Black people to disappear from elite positions. Why did you present this as an independent investigation when it was clearly a targeted racial campaign?

(Varsity, direct quotations from “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution”, 7 February 2024; Nathan Cofnas, “DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge”, 21 July 2026)

Your first article identified the row, but not the source. You did not tell your readers that the source, Cofnas, was a self-described race realist who had been terminated for his views on race. You did not tell your readers that he had called for a hereditarian revolution.

(The Telegraph, 24 July 2026; Varsity, Cofnas quotations, 7 February 2024; County Court judgment)

You framed Jason Arday as a poster boy, a phrase that delegitimises him before any finding is made. Why?

Specifically, the author’s name is Gordon Rayner. Gordon Rayner. You can answer questions.

(Gordon Rayner, Telegraph author page; The Telegraph, article byline, 24 July 2026)

The editor of The Telegraph is Chris Evans. Albert Tait and Janet Eastham.

(Telegraph Media Group, leadership page; NewsCord, byline and publication census; Janet Eastham, Telegraph author page)

These are the reporters, the racists who managed to fill 43 follow-up pieces in less than a week. What the [ __ ] is actually wrong with you? You’d want to hope you don’t meet any of us humans in the real world.

(NewsCord, publication and byline census)

Evidence note: NewsCord records 43 Telegraph articles across the 22-day census period. It does not support 43 follow-up pieces within one week.

Who gave The Telegraph Jason Arday’s PhD thesis? Did Nathan Cofnas or his anonymous Cambridge source provide The Telegraph with this analysis? And if so, why did you not disclose it?

(Nathan Cofnas, original post identifying an unnamed Cambridge faculty source; Retraction Watch, source handoff and earlier dossier, 27 July 2026)

Because your article says an analysis of Professor Arday’s PhD thesis for The Telegraph identified more than 100 passages. Show us. Show us the 100 passages, because I have downloaded a copy of his thesis directly from the university. So yours better [ __ ] match.

(The Telegraph, 24 July 2026)

Who commissioned that analysis? Who supplied the materials? Did you independently verify the analysis, or did you just publish what you were told to?

Why the [ __ ] did you publish 43 articles, a smear campaign against this individual, in just 20 days, including articles on the day of his death?

(NewsCord, publication census)

You released an article interrogating his childhood autism a minute before the ambulance was called. Like, what the [ __ ] is wrong with you people?

At exactly 3:11 on the 14th of August, The Telegraph published a story: “Jason Arday says he was an illiterate mute child. His schoolmates remember it differently.”

(NewsCord, timestamped publication census; Associated Press, police and death reporting; LBC, ambulance and police timeline)

So you’re publishing an interrogation of whether this man was or was not autistic enough in childhood while he was literally dying. At the exact same moment that he was dying, you were, you were doing that to somebody else, to another human being.

Let that sit on your [ __ ] conscience for the rest of your life, you horror shows.

The Times, on the day of his death, you also published, you published a mockery column and then you deleted it without any explanation. You said Jason Arday may want to get himself a nice pair of orange trousers. As soon as his death was announced, you deleted the page. No correction, no explanation, no apology.

(NewsCord, archived headline, deletion status and HTTP 410 record)

Why did you delete it? Who wrote it? Who approved it?

Are you okay? Because you don’t seem to be mentally well as an editorial staff at The Times. This is incoherent and brazen behaviour.

You also published an AI detector finding that Arday’s resignation letter, when he resigned on the 5th of August because of the sheer amount of harassment that he was getting from the eugenics staff being funded by Unilever at the University of Cambridge, you said that that letter was machine-written.

(NewsCord, Times coverage record; Leverhulme Trust, Unilever holding and dividends, 2025 accounts; County Court judgment, Leverhulme-funded Cambridge post)

To be honest, even if it was, who the [ __ ] cares? But it was presented as further evidence of his deception during this pile-on that led to his death.

(NewsCord, media chronology; Associated Press, family statement)

If I was resigning from my post as an academic due to the sheer volume of racist vitriol being thrown at me by the staff there, you would be lucky if I even wasted the [ __ ] water getting ChatGPT to say goodbye to you.

Never mind the fact that AI assistance can be a massive support tool for autistic people who struggle with communication. So, on the one hand, you are attacking him for being an illiterate mute child, and on the other hand, you are attacking him for using potentially assistive technology to send a resignation letter to the racists that are harming him.

Are you okay?

You.

And then we get to the Daily Mail. To the Daily Mail.

Why did you publish a column by a psychiatrist who had never met Arday, speculating on his mental health at 1:00 a.m. on the day that he died?

(NewsCord, Daily Mail publication record, 14 August 2026)

That is not journalism. You published about a man you had never met, a psychiatrist speculating that there’s one condition that could explain everything about him. You published psychiatric speculation about a person who, at that point, was still living and had not given you consent, had not allowed an examination, had not met your psychiatrist, and did not require your analysis.

Why did you publish 38 articles about Jason Arday, 30 of them within the first week between his resignation and his death? And why did you frame every aspect of his life as evidence of fraud?

(NewsCord, outlet-by-outlet census)

Evidence note: NewsCord records 38 Daily Mail/MailOnline articles in total and 30 in the nine days between resignation and death.

You questioned his marathon running. You questioned his charity work. You questioned his childhood disability. You questioned his autism diagnosis.

You published a [ __ ] poll asking whether criticism of him was racially motivated. That poll was racially motivated.

(NewsCord, Daily Mail coverage record)

You are a [ __ ] racist.

You are treating the entire career of a Black academic as evidence of a crime. Why? Why? Why? Go outside.

Across just those three outlets, over 200 articles were published in less than 10 days about Jason. That is an average of more than 11 articles a day, accelerating to nearly 21 articles a day after he did resign.

(NewsCord, complete 15-outlet census)

Evidence note: the census records 125 articles from the Telegraph, Times/Sunday Times and Daily Mail/MailOnline across 22 days. The figures of 11.3 articles a day and 20.9 after resignation apply to all 249 articles across 15 outlets, not those three publishers alone.

But you published nothing about the provenance of the allegations, the identity of the accuser, or the fact that Liverpool John Moores University had already investigated and cleared his name.

(The Telegraph, first article and Liverpool John Moores University response; Nathan Cofnas, original post)

The university that awarded Arday his degree concluded that he had not plagiarised his work. This was not reported anywhere across any of these articles.

(The Telegraph, quoting Liverpool John Moores University, 24 July 2026)

Evidence note: the Telegraph’s first article did report Liverpool John Moores University’s position. The universal statement “not reported anywhere” is not supported by that primary article.

Nor was it reported anywhere across any of these articles that the person accusing him had already been dismissed for their racist views, or that that person that accused him was being funded by a trust that holds Unilever shares.

(The Telegraph, first article; BBC, contemporaneous identification of Cofnas as a self-defined race realist dismissed from Cambridge; Leverhulme Trust, Unilever shares and dividends)

Evidence note: the Telegraph’s opening article omitted Cofnas. BBC coverage did identify him as a self-defined race realist dismissed from Cambridge. The claim that no article disclosed this is therefore too broad.

Do I need to remind you of the history of Unilever in the Congo?

(Henriet and Loffman, Lever Brothers in the Belgian Congo; University of Liverpool, Unilever-commissioned archive survey, 2022)

So, man funded by eugenics wealth, studying eugenics, accuses Black man of plagiarism. British media reveals themselves. British media responds predictably as racist.

(Leverhulme Trust, 2025 accounts; County Court judgment; National Human Genome Research Institute, “Eugenics and Scientific Racism”; Nathan Cofnas, allegations against Arday)

Why did you not stop or even pause when Jason did resign, specifically saying that he had faced relentless accusations and personal attacks that were taking a profound toll?

(University of Cambridge, Arday resignation statement, 5 August 2026)

You, you chose to accelerate, publishing another 188 articles in nine days.

(NewsCord, publication census)

At that point, he had already resigned. You got what you wanted. The campaign had taken its profound toll. But you didn’t stop. You didn’t pause. You didn’t slow down. You kept [ __ ] publishing these dirt-[ __ ] aggressive articles.

Anyway, you even published your psychiatric speculation at 1:00 a.m. Go the [ __ ] home.

(NewsCord, Daily Mail publication record)

Jason Arday had already told The Times, “There has been, since I arrived at Cambridge, a very well-orchestrated and coordinated campaign to unseat me from my position.”

Evidence note: the direct Times interview URL is still needed for this quotation.

So, you knew or you ought to have known exactly what you were doing.

You are responsible for this death. You individual human beings who work at these rags, you are responsible for another human being’s death.

(Associated Press, Arday family statement and death reporting, 15 August 2026)

Evidence note: Arday’s family said sustained abuse and misinformation were too much for him. No coroner’s medical finding is public in the current evidence pack.

How Trinity College turns confiscated land, imperial finance and private wealth into authorised knowledge.

“In perpetuity”

Trinity College says its endowment exists to support “the advancement of education, learning, religion, and research”. It says the money attracts “best-in-class Fellows”, funds “groundbreaking research” and delivers “global impact”. It says a £2.5 billion portfolio of global equities and British property will “sustainably serve future generations in perpetuity”. (Trinity College Cambridge, “Endowment”, figures at June 2024)

The phrase is unusually honest.

The object is perpetuity. The College must preserve the property, preserve the authority created by the property and preserve its power to decide what knowledge receives money. “Sustainability” describes the continued life of the fund. It does not describe the continued life of the people, land or relationships from which the wealth came.

Trinity’s own website gives the origin in one sentence. Henry VIII founded the College in 1546. “Most of this endowment was derived from land and endowments that had belonged to dissolved monasteries.” The new College began richer than King’s Hall and Michaelhouse combined. Their joint endowments amounted to less than a quarter of Trinity’s. (Trinity College Cambridge, “Brief history of the College”)

Property taken by the Crown became an academic endowment.

The confiscation disappears inside the noun.

The first conversion

An endowment is property organised so that the institution can spend its income while preserving the underlying capital. The original act can recede into history. The rent continues.

Trinity’s current portfolio produces about £45 million to £55 million each year and pays roughly 75 per cent of the College’s annual expenditure. The portfolio contains global equities, listed and unlisted companies, venture capital and British property. Trinity names the Cambridge Science Park and Felixstowe Docks among its holdings. It gives around £10 million of the annual income to research and other programmes outside the College. (Trinity College Cambridge, “Endowment”, figures at June 2024)

The chain is straightforward.

Land becomes rent. Rent becomes investment capital. Investment capital buys shares and more property. The returns pay Fellows, researchers, students and buildings. Those people and buildings produce knowledge bearing the authority of Cambridge.

Trinity describes the final payment as charity. The description leaves the first acquisition behind.

Empire enters the account

The University of Cambridge has already admitted that the collegiate university “benefited both directly and indirectly from enslavement, the slave trade, and imperialism more broadly”. Its inquiry found that Cambridge institutions invested in Atlantic slavery, received gifts based on income from the trade, educated the sons of slave-estate owners and provided intellectual support for the pro-slavery movement. It concluded that the economic legacy continues. (University of Cambridge, “Legacies of enslavement: report and response”, 22 September 2022)

Trinity appears in the financial record. Cambridge says several of its institutions, including Trinity College, owned East India Company bonds from 1660. The Company traded enslaved people as well as land, textiles, commodities and political power. Cambridge’s account does not provide the size of Trinity’s holdings. It records the instrument and the institution. (University of Cambridge, “Legacies of enslavement: report and response”, 22 September 2022)

The human network also sat inside the College. Stephen Fuller, a former Trinity Fellow, served as Jamaica’s agent in Britain from 1764 to 1794 and became one of the most prominent organisers of the pro-slavery cause. Sir Charles Davers, a Trinity-educated parliamentarian, supported that movement. Trinity fellows included people with direct financial interests in slave companies and plantations: Richard Loving owned Royal African Company stock; the Reverend Richard Smith part-owned a mortgage on the Mapps plantation in Barbados while serving as a Trinity Fellow; and Benjamin Bosanquet came from a banking family connected to maritime insurance for slave traders. (University of Cambridge, The University of Cambridge in the Age of Atlantic Slavery, 2025)

Cambridge educated the heirs of people who owned and traded human beings. The colleges collected their fees. The fellows supplied law, theology, administration and political argument. The endowments held the securities.

The university was part of the operating system.

Trinity’s investigation of itself

In March 2023 Trinity announced that it would appoint a four-year Legacies of Slavery Research and Teaching Fellow. The College said the researcher would examine how Trinity “was linked to, benefited from or challenged the slave trade and other forms of coerced labour”. It identified fees, bequests and College investments as possible routes through which the money entered. It also announced £1 million for Caribbean scholarships over five years. (Trinity College Cambridge, “Trinity College to investigate legacies of slavery”, 17 March 2023)

The language contains its own escape route. Trinity will investigate whether it benefited, while Cambridge has already documented Trinity’s East India bonds and Trinity-linked defenders and beneficiaries of slavery. The research programme turns an institutional account into a question that the institution controls, funds and schedules.

The £1 million scholarship commitment equals 0.04 per cent of the £2.5 billion portfolio described on Trinity’s website. The endowment remains intact. The College retains the land, investments, annual income and authority to decide what repair looks like.

It studies the provenance of its power using the power.

The scientific story

Trinity’s history says the College assumed leadership in seventeenth-century natural science “that it has never lost”. It describes itself as a home of scholars, scientists and mathematicians. It says its endowments allowed it to foster new subjects and attract gifted scholars from around the world. (Trinity College Cambridge, “Brief history of the College”)

This is more than institutional pride. It is a theory of authority.

The story runs from Newton to the present as a continuous accumulation of truth. Money appears as support. Science appears as discovery. The institution that selects the questions, pays the salaries, owns the laboratories and confers the titles disappears from the account.

Selection is the missing verb.

An institution with a large permanent fund can decide which account of the world gets time, equipment, publication, students and continuity. A different account can be dismissed as unscientific before anyone gives it those things. The winning framework then points to its funded output as proof that it alone produces knowledge.

This is how a situated worldview begins to call itself reason.

The rupture in conscience

The split from vitalism matters here as a rupture in conscience.

Vitalism covered different theories in different periods. The conceptual loss was larger than any single theory. Matter became inert. The organism became a machine. Life became something that could be completely known by breaking it into measurable parts. Relationship, purpose, consciousness and obligation became suspect because they could not be handled in the same way.

The method then became an ontology. What could be measured became what was real. What could be isolated became what could be understood. What could be manipulated became what could be used.

Other scientific traditions and other accounts of life did not merely lose arguments. Western institutions removed their authority, resources and standing. “Woo” became a disciplinary word. It placed an idea outside the border without requiring the institution to examine the political work performed by that border.

Mechanistic knowledge suited an extractive order. Land could become acreage. Plants could become chemical feedstock. Bodies could become labour. Human variation could become ranked data. Atoms could become weapons. The scientist could call each object neutral because the moral relationship had been removed before the measurement began.

The same institutions then placed ethics after discovery. Conscience arrived as a committee once the grant, laboratory, patent, weapon or classification system already existed.

Newton as institutional property

Isaac Newton spent his Cambridge academic life at Trinity. The College uses that history as evidence of an inherited scientific authority. In 1988 it gave his name to a trust that directs money across the University. (Trinity College Cambridge, “Brief history of the College”; Isaac Newton Trust, “About the Trust”)

The Isaac Newton Trust says it promotes “education, learning and research”. It says its grants form an important part of Cambridge’s research strategy. It funds early-career researchers, research posts, seed projects and doctoral programmes. It also funds projects intended to attract larger external grants. (Isaac Newton Trust, Trustees’ Annual Report and Financial Statements 2024–25, pp. 2–5)

Newton’s name makes this look like the natural continuation of scientific excellence. The accounts show a financing mechanism.

Trinity gave the Trust £2,457,441 in the year ending June 2025. Other donations came to £14,292. Trinity was therefore responsible for more than 99 per cent of its donation income. The Trust calls Trinity its “main donor”. Trinity also supplied £12 million for a five-year doctoral programme. Trinity’s Council appoints one or two Trinity Fellows as trustees, receives the annual report and remains embedded in its administration. (Isaac Newton Trust, Trustees’ Annual Report and Financial Statements 2024–25, pp. 3–6, 19 and 29)

The Trust also holds £7.6 million in the Cambridge University Endowment Fund. It receives income from investments and has agreements with Cambridge Enterprise for a share in the exploitation of intellectual property. Research produces patents and other rights. Those rights can return income to the machinery that selects more research. (Isaac Newton Trust, “About the Trust”; Isaac Newton Trust, Trustees’ Annual Report and Financial Statements 2024–25, pp. 4 and 24)

Money selects knowledge. Knowledge produces property. Property funds more selection.

Newton supplies the halo.

The Leverhulme junction

The Isaac Newton Trust has match-funded Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships for Cambridge since 2007. In 2024–25 it approved 15 new fellowships and recorded £816,846 in net Leverhulme fellowship commitments after write-backs and refunds. Its formal priorities include matching “prestigious external fellowships”, most notably those awarded by the Leverhulme Trust. (Isaac Newton Trust, Trustees’ Annual Report and Financial Statements 2024–25, pp. 3–5 and 20)

Leverhulme pays the first year of an Early Career Fellowship and half of the salary in years two and three. Cambridge must guarantee the balance before an application enters the national competition. At Cambridge, the Isaac Newton Trust undertakes to provide that match up to £28,000 a year in years two and three. (Isaac Newton Trust, “Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships”)

Nathan Cofnas held a Leverhulme-funded post in Cambridge’s Faculty of Philosophy from 1 September 2022 to 31 August 2025. A 2026 court judgment records his research area as “the biological basis of moral norms”. During that institutional period his public work promoted hereditarian accounts of race, intelligence and hierarchy. Cambridge gave the work a salary, an address, teaching opportunities, examining authority and the descriptive power of “Cambridge researcher”. (County Court at Cambridge, Cofnas v The Master, Fellows and Scholars of Emmanuel College, judgment, 13 March 2026; Nathan Cofnas, curriculum vitae, May 2025)

Two old fortunes meet at this point.

Leverhulme brings wealth preserved through Unilever, descended from Lever Brothers and its colonial extraction. Trinity brings wealth preserved through confiscated land, imperial securities, property and accumulated investment returns. One external trust awards the fellowship. The Cambridge system guarantees and routinely matches the salary. The University converts the funded position into academic authority.

The formal project title does not contain the whole public function of the post. A salary buys time. An affiliation buys credibility. Teaching and examining confer power over other people’s education. The Cambridge name travels into newspapers long after the fellowship ends.

The benefactor

Trinity still commemorates Sir William George Pearce as its most generous benefactor. Pearce inherited the chairmanship of Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering from his father. He left the residue of his estate to Trinity. The contemporary biographical record valued it at more than £150,000 and called it probably the largest addition to Trinity’s endowment since Henry VIII founded the College. (Trinity College Choir, “Commemoration of Benefactors”, 17 March 2017; Dictionary of National Biography, “Pearce, William George”, 1912 supplement)

This is another standard conversion.

Inherited industrial ownership becomes personal property. Personal property becomes a charitable bequest. The bequest enters an endowment. The endowment loses the history of the ships, contracts, materials, labour and imperial system that produced it. Trinity remembers the giver. It does not put the industrial supply chain into the annual commemoration.

The person becomes generous. The institution becomes deserving. The workers become background.

What “groundbreaking” means

Trinity says its endowment funds “groundbreaking research”. The word sounds as if important questions announce themselves.

They do not.

A funding system establishes importance by repetition. It gives a field permanent posts, laboratories, journals, conferences, prizes and students. The resulting volume becomes evidence of maturity. Approaches outside the system receive little money, produce less institutional output and are then judged by the absence the system created.

This matters in physics, biology, psychology, economics and philosophy. It matters wherever a narrow model of matter or human life can present itself as the whole world. It matters when the model makes extraction, ranking or control appear technical rather than political.

The issue is larger than whether one theory is right or wrong. Trinity has the material power to decide which disputes become disciplines, which remain curiosities and which are dismissed as “woo”. Its money does not sit outside the production of truth. It determines who receives the institutional conditions required to speak as an authority.

The inversion

Trinity’s public language can now be read in full.

“Endowment” means property separated from its provenance.

“Perpetuity” means the institution’s claim to the returns never expires.

“Independence” means accumulated private wealth can direct research without democratic control.

“Groundbreaking” means selected, financed and institutionally reproduced.

“Public benefit” means the institution chooses how much of the income to distribute, to whom and on what terms.

“Sustainability” means preserving the capital that preserves the institution.

“Excellence” means the authority produced by centuries of unequal access to money, time, publication and appointment.

“Academic freedom” means little if private wealth determines who first receives an academic life.

The College does not hide this structure. It publishes the pieces on different pages. The history page describes the confiscated monastic land. The endowment page describes the £2.5 billion portfolio. Cambridge’s enslavement inquiry records the East India bonds. The Isaac Newton Trust accounts record Trinity’s donations and its role in selecting research. The fellowship terms explain how private trusts assemble a Cambridge salary.

The laundering happens in the gaps between the pages.

What is established

• Trinity’s founding endowment came mainly from land and property taken from dissolved monasteries.

• Trinity held East India Company bonds from the seventeenth century.

• Trinity fellows and students participated in the financial, political and intellectual machinery of enslavement and empire.

• Trinity now controls a portfolio of roughly £2.5 billion that produces £45 million to £55 million a year.

• Trinity established the Isaac Newton Trust and remains overwhelmingly its main donor.

• The Trust match-funds Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships and helps decide which researchers receive Cambridge posts.

• Cofnas held a three-year Leverhulme-funded Cambridge research post while promoting hereditarian racial hierarchy.

What follows from the structure

• Trinity’s wealth and scientific authority did not develop on separate tracks. Property financed scholarship, and scholarship legitimised the order that protected property.

• The endowment converts historical seizure and extraction into present control over knowledge.

• The Newton story presents that control as the inheritance of genius rather than the exercise of wealth.

• Research funding does more than support ideas. It creates the people who are permitted to embody institutional truth.

Trinity says the endowment will serve future generations in perpetuity.

It does not say whose future. It does not say whose property. It does not say who gets to define knowledge.

The accounts answer all three.

Sources

• Trinity College Cambridge, “Endowment”, https://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/about/endowment/

• Trinity College Cambridge, “Brief history of the College”, https://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/about/historical-overview/in-brief/

• Trinity College Cambridge, “Trinity College to investigate legacies of slavery”, 17 March 2023, https://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/news/trinity-college-cambridge-to-investigate-legacies-of-slavery-1-million-to-support-caribbean-scholarships-plus-new-academic-post/

• University of Cambridge, “Legacies of enslavement: report and response”, 22 September 2022, https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/legacies-of-enslavement-inquiry

• University of Cambridge, The University of Cambridge in the Age of Atlantic Slavery, 2025, https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/6BC358D69084C40CBF93B4A5FC1CE3AB/9781009652544AR.pdf/The_University_of_Cambridge_in_the_Age_of_Atlantic_Slavery.pdf?event-type=FTLA

• Isaac Newton Trust, “About the Trust”, https://www.newtontrust.cam.ac.uk/about

• Isaac Newton Trust, “Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships”, https://www.newtontrust.cam.ac.uk/ECFs/LeverhulmeECF

• Isaac Newton Trust, Trustees’ Annual Report and Financial Statements 2024–25, https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/about-the-register-of-charities?p_p_id=uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet&p_p_lifecycle=2&p_p_state=maximized&p_p_mode=view&p_p_resource_id=/accounts-resource&p_p_cacheability=cacheLevelPage&_uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet_objectiveId=A18319687&_uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet_priv_r_p_mvcRenderCommandName=/full-print&_uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet_priv_r_p_organisationNumber=5203734

• County Court at Cambridge, Cofnas v The Master, Fellows and Scholars of Emmanuel College, judgment, 13 March 2026, https://bfsp.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Cofnas-v-Emmanuel-College-judgment.3.26.pdf

• Dictionary of National Biography, “Pearce, William George”, 1912 supplement, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1912_supplement/Pearce,_William_George

• Trinity College Choir, “Commemoration of Benefactors”, 17 March 2017, https://trinitycollegechoir.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/2017-03-17.pdf

Dr. Jason Arday studied how British education reproduces racial inequality. He studied how British universities decide whose knowledge counts (Cambridge Faculty of Education).

One of his final papers “The routes to intellectual authority in a prior colonial empire” studied the exact machinery now surrounding his death: who gets treated as a legitimate scholar, whose mistakes become institutional crises and whose authority the British university system protects (Belluigi, D. Z., Arday, J., & O’Keeffe, J. (2025)).

From the day he arrived at Cambridge, another researcher, Nathan Cofnas (who was funded through colonial Unilever wealth to do eugenics research) targeted him.

Cofnas complained to his contact at The Times, and the British press produced 249 articles in 22 days targetting Dr. Arday.

Dr. Arday resigned because of the pressure.

Then he died. His family said the pressure was “too much”.

He was 41 years old.

Dr. Jason Arday

The institution and media system that caused his death is the exact same system his papers examined.

There was a clear institutional motive to discredit him.

Dr. Arday’s work described how British universities reproduce colonial power:

• who receives research funding;

• who becomes a professor;

• whose knowledge counts;

• how Black academics are pushed into insecure employment;

• how racism damages their mental health;

• how elite universities protect intellectual authority.

He documented the broken funding pipeline for Black PhD students (Durham repository) and the mental-health consequences for Black university staff (Higher Education).

Motive is clear

Nathan Cofnas supplied the opposite argument to Dr Arday’s. He claimed Black exclusion from elite positions would be the natural outcome of meritocracy. Arday said the university system excludes Black people through structural power. Cofnas said their exclusion proves inherited inferiority.

Then look at what happened:

1. Unilever-derived money funded Cofnas through Leverhulme.

2. Cambridge gave him status and academic authority.

3. Cofnas targeted a Black professor whose research directly contradicted his racial programme.

4. The Telegraph framed Arday as Cambridge’s “diversity poster boy”, turning him into a symbol of supposedly fraudulent inclusion (Telegraph).

5. The opening article concealed Cofnas’s identity, funding and documented racism.

6. Fifteen outlets produced 249 articles in 22 days, while Cambridge’s provisionally upheld plagiarism case involving a senior white academic produced nothing comparable (NewsCord).

7. Arday resigned and died during the campaign. His family said the sustained abuse and misinformation were “too much for Jason” (Associated Press).

That establishes interest, alignment, opportunity and benefit. Discrediting Arday damaged a scholar whose work exposed the racial and colonial structure of British academia. It also allowed the press to recast structural racism as a story about an allegedly undeserving Black professor.

The motive hypothesis is straightforward:

Arday’s scholarship challenged the legitimacy of Britain’s academic hierarchy. Destroying his credibility protected that hierarchy and converted him into evidence against the equality programmes his research defended.

Who Funds Nathan Cofnas

Direct funding record

• Hong Kong Research Grants Council: Before Cambridge, Cofnas disclosed that his work on intelligence research was supported by a fellowship from Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council (paper funding statement).

• Leverhulme Trust, 2022–2025: Leverhulme paid for his three-year Cambridge Early Career Fellowship. His official project concerned the “biological basis of moral norms,” although he continued publishing and speaking about race, heredity and intelligence while occupying that funded position. The Trust stated that the award was not formally granted for race-and-IQ research (varsity.co) (dailynous).

• Ghent University, 2026–present: Ghent hired Cofnas as a temporary postdoctoral researcher for a project controlled by Professor Bouke de Vries concerning how liberal societies should deal with growing numbers of “non-liberal citizens”. de Vries selected him personally (brusselstimes).

The Leverhulme money chain

The financial chain is brutal:

The Trust was created from William Lever’s Lever Brothers shares. It continues to hold Unilever shares, and its board is largely drawn from current and former Unilever executives (leverhulme.ac).

In 2023, the Trust held £1.783 billion in Unilever shares and received £70.44 million in Unilever dividends. Its total investment portfolio was £3.756 billion (register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov).

Lever Brothers obtained vast Congolese palm-oil concessions and benefited from coerced recruitment, forced labour, child labour, low wages and violence against Indigenous workers. The plantations also secured the raw materials required by its soap empire (royalafricansociety).

Leverhulme therefore converted corporate wealth accumulated through colonial extraction into a privately controlled research endowment. That endowment then paid Cofnas’s salary and gave institutional support to a career that includes racial-hereditarian research.

The Numbers

• Leverhulme received £72.77 million in Unilever dividends in 2025, held £2.027 billion of Unilever shares, jointly employs its staff with a Unilever subsidiary, and is chaired by former Unilever CEO Alan Jope (Charity Commission accounts).

• Unilever is reported to have sold 956 billion sachets in 2022. Its persistent flexible packaging is concentrated in low-income markets and is practically impossible to recycle (Greenpeace).

• Leverhulme’s fellowship scheme pays the first year’s salary and half the following two years; Cambridge’s Isaac Newton Trust provides matching funding of up to £28,000 annually. Cofnas occupied that Cambridge post from 2022–2025 (Isaac Newton Trust).

• Cambridge openly prices permanent named professorships at approximately £4 million, while at least one corporate donor retains a right to nominate a member of a chair’s Board of Managers (Cambridge Faculty of Classics; Varsity).

• The Arday campaign produced 249 articles across 15 outlets in 22 days, including 188 between his resignation and death. The Times subsequently deleted a mocking column without a correction, explanation or editor’s note (NewsCord audit).

• Arday’s family described “a campaign of harassment,” “sustained abuse,” and said the campaign “was too much for Jason.” His death remains officially described as unexpected but not suspicious; no medical or coronial cause has yet been published (Associated Press).

Bottom line

Cofnas has been funded by Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council, the Leverhulme Trust, and now Ghent University. Leverhulme’s money comes directly through the Lever Brothers–Unilever capital chain. The exact account currently paying him at Ghent remains undisclosed; the available evidence points to a de Vries-controlled project, with an ERC connection reported but not proven by the public grant record.

The Handoff Into the Media

The public record now shows a deliberate handoff from inside Cambridge to Cofnas.

• On 13 June 2026, an unnamed Cambridge faculty member contacted Cofnas and told him: “There is a plagiarist and fabulist on the faculty.” Cofnas said the source was dissatisfied with Cambridge’s response (retractionwatch).

• Cofnas described the person as an “anonymous whistleblower” and said the source feared being identified and “clobbered” by Cambridge’s administration (youtube).

• Cofnas said his immediate response was that there was a problem involving “an education professor and DEI hire.” That shows the racial and political frame existed at the beginning of his investigation, before publication (youtube).

• Cofnas published “DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge” on 21 July. His opening stated: “I was recently contacted by a faculty member at Cambridge, whose name I will not reveal” (ncofnas).

• The Telegraph launched the national campaign three days later, on 24 July, with “Cambridge’s diversity poster boy in plagiarism row.” Its first article did not identify Cofnas or explain the Cambridge-to-Cofnas handoff (The Telegraph).

Nathan Cofnas Public Disclosures

Isaac Newton Trust names Cofnas

The Isaac Newton Trust’s 2022 annual report lists:

Dr Nathan Cofnas | Philosophy | LECF

“LECF” means Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. This places Cofnas inside the Cambridge matching-fund programme.

Isaac Newton Trust Annual Report 2022[newtontrust.cam.ac]

The Trust’s 2023 annual report lists him again in the 2022–23 cohort:

Nathan Cofnas | Philosophy

Isaac Newton Trust Annual Report 2023[newtontrust.cam.ac]

Cambridge discloses his research title

The Isaac Newton Trust’s official fellowship cohort page lists:

Dr Nathan Cofnas The Biological Basis of Moral Norms Philosophy

Isaac Newton Trust, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow Cohorts [newtontrust.cam.ac]

Cambridge’s own matching-fund trust publicly records him, his programme and his department.

What this establishes

1. Leverhulme awarded Cofnas an Early Career Fellowship.

2. Cambridge employed him in its Faculty of Philosophy.

3. The Isaac Newton Trust recorded him within its LECF programme.

4. Cambridge identifies his project as The Biological Basis of Moral Norms.

5. The Isaac Newton Trust exists to supply Cambridge’s required matching finance for externally awarded early-career fellowships.

The Trust describes its role directly:

“The Trust supplies, on behalf of the University, the matching funding that allows post-doctoral researchers selected by external fellowship competitions to hold their awards in Cambridge.”

Cambridge Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Research Office, Isaac Newton Trust

Cambridge directly co-funded Cofnas

The Isaac Newton Trust 2022 Annual Report, page 15, lists:

Dr Nathan Cofnas
Philosophy
LECF

The surrounding text says these are “22 new INT Fellows” welcomed to Cambridge that year.

Isaac Newton Trust Annual Report 2022, page 15

The report explains exactly what “LECF” meant

Pages 16–17 state:

“The Isaac Newton Trust’s commitment to providing the necessary institutional match-funding for Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships is one of the Trust’s longest-standing and most successful contributions.”

It says the Isaac Newton Trust:

• ran Cambridge’s internal selection competition;

• used subject-specific academic panels nominated by Cambridge’s Schools;

• selected candidates for guaranteed matching funds;

• guaranteed salary support if Leverhulme selected the candidate nationally;

• allocated £1 million annually to this fellowship programme.

For the 2022 cohort, Leverhulme paid the full first-year salary contribution. The host supplied 50 per cent of the salary costs in years two and three.

Isaac Newton Trust Annual Report 2022, pages 16–17

The 2023 report makes it explicit

Page 19 of the Isaac Newton Trust 2023 Annual Report contains a list headed:

“Our Leverhulme/INT Early Career Fellows resident in 2022–23 were:”

The list includes:

Nathan Cofnas — Philosophy

“INT” is the Isaac Newton Trust.

The same report states:

“Successful candidates are provided with a guarantee from the INT of salary support to match the Leverhulme Trust’s contribution for up to three years.”

Isaac Newton Trust Annual Report 2023, page 19[newtontrust.cam.ac]

This removes the remaining ambiguity. Cofnas was not merely listed in a generic fellowship directory. Cambridge’s Isaac Newton Trust identifies him as one of its jointly funded Leverhulme/INT fellows.

Research title

Cambridge’s official cohort page identifies Cofnas’s project as:

The Biological Basis of Moral Norms

Isaac Newton Trust, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow Cohorts

Aggregate expenditure

The Isaac Newton Trust spent £1.447 million on Early Career Fellowships in 2022–23.

The reports do not break that total into individual payments, so Cofnas’s exact payment remains undisclosed.

Unilever dividends funded Leverhulme. Leverhulme funded Cofnas’s first-year salary and half of years two and three. Cambridge’s Isaac Newton Trust supplied the matching institutional salary support. Cambridge’s Faculty of Philosophy hosted him and covered or guaranteed any remaining shortfall.

The Isaac Newton Trust’s own annual report names Nathan Cofnas as a Leverhulme/INT fellow.

Two private-wealth systems combined to install Cofnas at Cambridge.

The Isaac Newton Trust says it receives almost all its income from Trinity College, with additional returns from investments held in the Cambridge University Endowment Fund and income from intellectual property agreements with Cambridge Enterprise.[newtontrust.cam.ac]

Cambridge actively selected him

Cambridge did not merely provide a building after Leverhulme chose Cofnas.

The Isaac Newton Trust’s annual report describes a two-stage process:

1. Cambridge ran its own internal competition.

2. Subject-specific academic panels nominated by Cambridge’s Schools chose which candidates would receive guaranteed matching funds.

3. Those approved candidates entered Leverhulme’s national competition.

4. Anyone who won nationally could rely on Isaac Newton salary support.

The report says this internal process selected “the very best scholars wishing to conduct postdoctoral research in Cambridge.”

Isaac Newton Trust Annual Report 2022, pages 16–17

Cofnas passed both gates:

• Cambridge’s internal selection;

• Leverhulme’s national selection.

The Isaac Newton Trust then listed him among “22 new INT Fellows” and later among “Our Leverhulme/INT Early Career Fellows resident in 2022–23.”

This was a Cambridge selection followed by Leverhulme approval, with both institutions supplying money.

Cambridge had his research record

Candidates had to submit:

• a curriculum vitae;

• a list of major publications;

• a statement of current research;

• a detailed statement of proposed research;

• references;

• departmental support.

Cambridge’s own fellowship guidance shows that its internal panel saw this material before promising matching funds (Cambridge fellowship process).

By 2022, Cofnas had already published work defending research into racial differences in intelligence. Cambridge’s student union branch later said his CV clearly showed his commitment to race science.[ucu.cam.ac]

Cofnas himself claimed Cambridge knew about his “controversial interests” before hiring him.[varsity.co]

Cambridge therefore had more than a project title. It had his CV, publications, current research statement, proposed programme and references.

The selection was competitive

The Isaac Newton Trust says Leverhulme made 148 national awards in the 2022 competition. Fifteen went to applicants seeking Cambridge posts.

Seven were in arts, humanities and social sciences.

Cambridge had made approximately 50 preliminary offers of matching support. Its average success rate in the national competition was about 40 per cent.

Cofnas was one of the candidates Cambridge chose to put through this process.

The Trust allocated approximately £1 million annually to Leverhulme matching support and described the programme as one of its largest contributions to Cambridge’s “intellectual capital.”

Isaac Newton Trust Annual Report 2022

Who controlled the Cambridge money

The Isaac Newton Trust was created by Trinity College in 1988. At the time of Cofnas’s appointment, it was a connected institution of Cambridge.

Its trustees were senior Cambridge academics. The public trustee records include:

• Frank Kelly;

• Ash Amin;

• Rae Langton;

• John Marenbon;

• Ann Dowling;

• David Baulcombe;

• Loraine Gelsthorpe;

• Ben Simons;

• John Pyle;

• Jean Thomas.

Charity Commission, Isaac Newton Trust trustees[register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov]

The Trust says subject-specific panels nominated by Cambridge’s Schools made the preliminary fellowship selections. The names of the panel that approved Cofnas have not been published.

Who controlled the Leverhulme money

Leverhulme’s Board decides grants with advice from a panel of approximately 40 UK academics.

The Trust’s governance remains tied to Unilever:

• Alan Jope, former Unilever chief executive, chairs it.

• Former Unilever CFO Graeme Pitkethly is a trustee.

• Former Unilever marketing chief Keith Weed is a trustee.

• Trust staff are jointly employed with a Unilever subsidiary.

• The accounts record a Unilever director in common with the Trust during relevant years.

Leverhulme Trust accounts[register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov]

What Cambridge bought with the money

The fellowship did not merely fund private reading.

Cambridge gave Cofnas:

• a Faculty of Philosophy position;

• a Cambridge email and address;

• students to supervise at Wolfson, St John’s and St Catharine’s;

• an MPhil examining role;

• a first-year philosophy examination appointment;

• access to Cambridge’s publication repository;

• the transferable public identity of a Cambridge philosopher.

Varsity[varsity.co]

His Cambridge title then travelled into media and political spaces:

• a podcast on race differences in intelligence;

• a programme on “The Jewish Question”;

• discussions about ending wokeness;

• talks defending inquiry into population differences;

• race-and-IQ interviews promoted using his Cambridge fellowship.

The institutional credential was part of the product.

The investigation disappeared

In February 2024, Leverhulme announced an “urgent investigation” into Cofnas.

It said his grant was not for research into race and IQ.

No public outcome has been located.

The Trust continued financing the fellowship until its scheduled conclusion. Cambridge continued employing him. The University published its own decision only after the three-year post had ended.

The sequence is:

1. Cambridge reviewed his publications and proposed research.

2. Cambridge selected him for internal matching support.

3. Leverhulme selected him nationally.

4. Unilever-derived money and Trinity-derived money paid for the post.

5. Cambridge converted the money into teaching, examining and public authority.

6. Cofnas used that authority while promoting racial hereditarianism.

7. Leverhulme announced an investigation.

8. Leverhulme never published the result.

9. The contract ran to its end.

The broad finding

This was not an external funder imposing an unwanted researcher on Cambridge.

Cambridge selected Cofnas internally. Trinity’s Isaac Newton Trust guaranteed the matching money. Leverhulme approved him nationally. Unilever dividends financed Leverhulme. Cambridge’s Faculty of Philosophy employed him and distributed academic authority around him.

Philanthropy is the conversion layer

How industrial fortunes survive politically:

• The owner places part of the fortune in a tax-advantaged foundation.

• The foundation stops looking like the company.

• It enters universities, research, law and public policy as charity.

• The money gains moral authority while retaining institutional power.

That is Leverhulme.

It is not separate from Unilever in any meaningful financial or operational sense:

• the endowment came from Lever Brothers shares;

• those shares became Unilever shares;

• Unilever dividends finance grants;

• Trust staff are jointly employed with a Unilever subsidiary;

• former Unilever executives govern the Trust.

The charitable structure does not break the chain.

It cleans the presentation.

The four knowledge-control functions

The Architecture of Invisible Control has four operations:

• Suppress research damaging to elite interests.

• Contest threatening findings by funding credentialled counter-research.

• Commission work that reaches preferred conclusions while appearing independent.

• Administer knowledge by controlling journals, grants and university chairs.

Jason and Cofnas sat on opposite sides of that machinery.

Jason researched:

• colonial authority in British universities;

• Black exclusion from PhD funding;

• insecure employment;

• the shortage of Black professors;

• mental-health harm;

• who receives intellectual authority.

Cofnas argued:

• racial inequality reflects inherited ability;

• Black professors would approach zero under meritocracy;

• Black people would disappear from elite positions;

• racial barriers should preserve group differences.

One body of work exposed the system.

The other naturalised its results.

The university funded and credentialled the second. The first was the subject of a gross racial smear campaign and is now dead.

Information laundering completed the operation

Layer one: Money

Unilever and Trinity wealth finance the academic position.

Layer two: Academic legitimacy

Cambridge selects Cofnas internally, employs him and gives him authority.

Layer three: Ideological output

Cofnas turns racial hierarchy into “hereditarianism”, “meritocracy” and “philosophy of biology”.

Layer four: Inside source

A Cambridge faculty member selects Cofnas and hands him allegations about Jason.

Layer five: Private publication

Cofnas publishes DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge.

Layer six: Mainstream conversion

The Telegraph converts “DEI fraud” into “Cambridge’s diversity poster boy”.

Layer seven: Distributed amplification

Fifteen outlets publish 249 articles.

Commenters repeat the frame as independent public opinion.

Layer eight: Institutional validation

Cambridge reverses its public position, announces a new investigation and begins reviewing how Jason was appointed.

The campaign manufactures the institutional response that is then cited as evidence that the campaign was justified.

This is a closed loop.

The chemistry and colonial context

Cofnas’s phrase “the biological basis of moral norms” performs the old colonial knowledge separation trick.

It sounds abstract.

It’s not. It’s just racist. He studied:

• inherited intelligence;

• racial hierarchy;

• meritocratic exclusion;

• racial barriers;

• removal of Black people from positions of authority.

The formal title is laundering.

The racial programme is the institutional application.

Cambridge elevates racists. Racists harass a Black Professor. People act horrified when someone ends up dead.

The correct frame

This is not:

A charity and a university happened to fund a controversial philosopher.

It is:

Two private wealth systems converged at Cambridge to finance and credential a researcher whose work biologised racial hierarchy. An internal Cambridge source then used that researcher to target a Black professor whose scholarship exposed the colonial allocation of intellectual authority. British media converted the attack into an apparently independent national scandal.

Core documentary chain

County Court at Cambridge, Dr Nathan Cofnas v The Master, Fellows and Scholars of Emmanuel College, claim L04CL172, judgment, 13 March 2026, available at: https://bfsp.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Cofnas-v-Emmanuel-College-judgment.3.26.pdf.

The Judiciary of England and Wales, ‘Dr Nathan Cofnas of Faculty of Philosophy v The Master, Fellows and Scholars of Emmanuel College’, official judgment listing, 22 March 2026, available at: https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/dr-nathan-cofnas-of-faculty-of-philosophy-v-the-master-fellowes-ad-scholars-of-emmanuel-college-anonymity-order/.

Leverhulme Trust, Trustees’ Annual Report and Financial Statements for the year ended 31 December 2025, Charity Commission filing, available at: https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/charity-search?p_p_id=uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet&p_p_lifecycle=2&p_p_state=maximized&p_p_mode=view&p_p_resource_id=/accounts-resource&p_p_cacheability=cacheLevelPage&_uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet_objectiveId=A19069567&_uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet_priv_r_p_mvcRenderCommandName=/full-print&_uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet_priv_r_p_organisationNumber=5053028.

Leverhulme Trust, Trustees’ Annual Report and Financial Statements 2023, Charity Commission filing, available at: https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/charity-search?p_p_id=uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet&p_p_lifecycle=2&p_p_state=maximized&p_p_mode=view&p_p_resource_id=/accounts-resource&p_p_cacheability=cacheLevelPage&_uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet_objectiveId=A15558051&_uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet_priv_r_p_mvcRenderCommandName=/full-print&_uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet_priv_r_p_organisationNumber=5053028.

Unilever, The Formation of Unilever, Unilever Archives, available at: https://archives-unilever.com/media/_file/website-documents/the formation of unilever booklet.pdf.

Isaac Newton Trust, ‘Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships’, available at: https://www.newtontrust.cam.ac.uk/ECFs/LeverhulmeECF.

Isaac Newton Trust, ‘Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships: Frequently Asked Questions’, available at: https://www.newtontrust.cam.ac.uk/ECFs/LeverhulmeECF/LECFFAQ.

Cofnas, N., ‘DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge’, 21 July 2026, available at:

.

Cofnas, N., curriculum vitae, May 2025, available at: https://nathancofnas.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/CV-May-2025.pdf.

Cofnas, N., ‘Still No Evidence for a Jewish Group Evolutionary Strategy’, Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2023, available at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-022-00352-x.

Jason Arday: academic work

Arday, J., ‘Fighting the tide: Understanding the difficulties facing Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic doctoral students pursuing a career in academia’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2021, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1777640.

Arday, J., ‘“More to prove and more to lose”: race, racism and precarious employment in higher education’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 43(4), 2022, pp. 513–533, available at: https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/270719/1/270719.pdf and https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2022.2074375.

Arday, J., ‘No one can see me cry: understanding mental health issues for Black and minority ethnic staff in higher education’, Higher Education, 83, 2022, pp. 79–102, available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-020-00636-w.

Arday, J., ‘The Black Professoriate: Assessing the Landscape within British Higher Education’, On Education, 2022, available at: https://www.oneducation.net/no-13_april-2022/the-black-professoriate-assessing-the-landscape-within-british-higher-education/?output=pdf.

Arday, J., ‘Understanding Mental Health: What Are the Issues for Black and Ethnic Minority Students at University?’, Social Sciences, 7(10), 2018, available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci7100196.

Arday, J., ‘Understanding Mental Health: What Are the Issues for Black and Ethnic Minority Students at University? Correction’, Social Sciences, 12(12), 2023, available at: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/12/12/672.

Arday, J., ‘Understanding race and educational leadership in higher education’, Management in Education, 2018, available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0892020618791002.

Arday, J. and Jones, C., ‘Same storm, different boats: the impact of COVID-19 on Black students and academic staff in UK and US higher education’, Higher Education, 2022, available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00939-0.

Arday, J. and Mirza, H. S. (eds), Dismantling Race in Higher Education: Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, available at: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-319-60261-5.pdf.

Belluigi, D. Z., Arday, J. and O’Keeffe, J., ‘The routes to intellectual authority in a prior colonial empire: continued racialised, geopolitical inequalities in the academic staff composition and employment conditions of UK universities’, Race Ethnicity and Education, 28(2), 2025, pp. 303–329, full text available at: https://pureadmin.qub.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/629794670/Belluigi_Arday_2025_routes_to_intellectual_authority.pdf; journal record available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13613324.2024.2398491.

Belluigi, D. Z., Thomas, D. and Arday, J., ‘Attempting to break the chain: reimagining inclusive pedagogy and decolonising the curriculum within the academy’, 2021, record available at: https://scispace.com/papers/attempting-to-break-the-chain-reimaging-inclusive-pedagogy-396wsc0dox.

Leading Routes, The Broken Pipeline: Barriers to Black PhD Students Accessing Research Council Funding, 2019, available at: https://leadingroutes.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/The-Broken-Pipeline-Report-Sept-2019-120919-1.pdf.

Lewis, C. J. and Arday, J., ‘We See Things They’ll Never See: Sociological Reflections on Race, Neurodiversity and Higher Education’, The Sociological Review, 2023, available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/00380261231184357.

Maylor, U., Roberts, L., Linton, K. and Arday, J., ‘Race and educational leadership’, Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 2021, available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17411432211022770.

Stoll, N., Yalipende, Y., Arday, J. and others, ‘Protocol for Black Student Wellbeing Study’, BMJ Open, 2022, available at: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2021-051818.

The Black Curriculum, The Black Curriculum Report, 2020, available at: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f5507a237cea057c5f57741/t/5fc10c7abc819f1cf4fd0eeb/1606487169011/TBC+2021++Report.pdf.

University of Cambridge Faculty of Education, ‘Jason Arday appointed Professor of Sociology of Education at Cambridge’, 23 February 2023, available at: https://news.educ.cam.ac.uk/230223-jason-arday.

Jason Arday, background reference record, available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Arday. [Background lead; use the papers and official records for substantive claims.]

Nathan Cofnas: original records and research

Cofnas, N., academic website, available at:

https://nathancofnas.com/

.

Cofnas, N., ‘DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge’, 21 July 2026, available at: .

Cofnas, N., curriculum vitae, May 2025, available at: https://nathancofnas.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/CV-May-2025.pdf.

Cofnas, N., ‘Still No Evidence for a Jewish Group Evolutionary Strategy’, Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2023, available at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-022-00352-x.

County Court at Cambridge, Dr Nathan Cofnas v The Master, Fellows and Scholars of Emmanuel College, claim L04CL172, judgment, 13 March 2026, available at: https://bfsp.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Cofnas-v-Emmanuel-College-judgment.3.26.pdf.

The Judiciary of England and Wales, official listing for Cofnas v Emmanuel College, available at: https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/dr-nathan-cofnas-of-faculty-of-philosophy-v-the-master-fellowes-ad-scholars-of-emmanuel-college-anonymity-order/.

University of Cambridge, ‘University response to recent blogs by Dr Nathan Cofnas’, 16 February 2024, available at: https://www.cam.ac.uk/notices/news/university-response-to-recent-blogs-by-dr-nathan-cofnas.

Cofnas, N., interview with David Starkey, 2026, available at: .

Nathan Cofnas, background reference record, available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Cofnas. [Background lead.]

Eugenics, hereditarianism and scientific racism

Akbay, O., ‘Hereditarianism: a century of the science of inequality’, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 22 July 2026, available at: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42487107/.

HOPE not hate, ‘A short history of the Pioneer Fund’, available at: https://investigations.hopenothate.org.uk/history-pioneer-fund/.

Institute for Social Research and the Humanities, ‘A new race science network is linked to a history of eugenics that never fully left academia’, available at: https://isrf.org/blog/a-new-race-science-network-is-linked-to-a-history-of-eugenics-that-never-fully-left-academia-1.

National Human Genome Research Institute, ‘Eugenics and Scientific Racism’, available at: https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘Eugenics’, available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/eugenics/.

‘Race realism goes both ways’, open-access paper, available at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11811463/.

‘The risk of biological race’, open-access paper, available at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12310801/.

Richard Lynn, background reference record, available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynn. [Background lead; use Akbay, NHGRI, ISRF and HOPE not hate for core claims.]

Lever Brothers, colonial extraction and Unilever

Henriet, B. and Loffman, R. A., ‘“We Are Left With Barely Anything”: Colonial Rule, Dependency, and the Lever Brothers in the Belgian Congo, 1911–1960’, accepted manuscript, 2019, available at: https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/58520/Henriet-Loffman ‘We Are Left With Barely Anything’ Colonial Rule, Dependency, and the Lever Brothers in the Belgian Congo, 1911-1960 2019 Accepted.docx?sequence=6.

Port Sunlight Village Trust, Racism, the Belgian Congo and William Lever, July 2022, available at: https://portsunlightvillage.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/PSVT-Racism-the-Belgian-Congo-and-William-Lever-Booklet-July-2022.pdf.

University of Liverpool, Executive Summary of Unilever-Commissioned Scoping Survey, May 2022, available at: https://royalafricansociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/University-of-Liverpool-Executive-Summary-of-Unilever-Commissioned-Scoping-Survey-1900-1930-published-May-2022.pdf.

University of Liverpool, Executive Summary of Phase Two Research, February 2025, available at: https://royalafricansociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/university-of-liverpool-executive-summary-of-unilever-commissioned-phase-2-research.pdf.

Unilever, The Formation of Unilever, Unilever Archives, available at: https://archives-unilever.com/media/_file/website-documents/the formation of unilever booklet.pdf.

Unilever, Q4 and Full Year 2025 Results: Full Announcement, available at: https://www.unilever.com/files/ir-q4-2025-full-announcement.pdf.

Unilever, ‘Plastics’, corporate sustainability disclosure, available at: https://www.unilever.com/sustainability/plastics/.

Unilever, Sustainability Statement, available at: https://www.unilever.com/files/unilever-sustainability-statement.pdf.

Greenpeace, Uncovered: Unilever’s Plastic Playbook, July 2024, available at: https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/ENG_FINAL_Uncovered_Report_GPI_WEB_accessible.pdf.

Competition and Markets Authority, ‘Fast-moving consumer goods: environmental claims’, case record, available at: https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/fast-moving-consumer-goods-fmcg.

BBC News, ‘Persil advert banned over environmental claims’, 2022, available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62726666.

Unilever PLC, foreign-issuer filing record, available at: https://www.stocktitan.net/sec-filings/UL/6-k-unilever-plc-current-report-foreign-issuer-f47e0d7a0a49.html. [Commercial filing mirror; use Unilever’s own results document where possible.]

DutchNews, ‘Unilever buys out co-founders’, May 2014, available at: https://www.dutchnews.nl/2014/05/unilever_buys_out_co-founders/.

Huileries du Congo Belge, background reference record, available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huileries_du_Congo_Belge. [Background lead; use Henriet and Loffman, Port Sunlight and the commissioned archive reports for core claims.]

Leverhulme Trust: accounts, governance and grants

Leverhulme Trust, Trustees’ Annual Report and Financial Statements for the year ended 31 December 2025, Charity Commission, available at: https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/charity-search?p_p_id=uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet&p_p_lifecycle=2&p_p_state=maximized&p_p_mode=view&p_p_resource_id=/accounts-resource&p_p_cacheability=cacheLevelPage&_uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet_objectiveId=A19069567&_uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet_priv_r_p_mvcRenderCommandName=/full-print&_uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet_priv_r_p_organisationNumber=5053028.

Leverhulme Trust, Trustees’ Annual Report and Financial Statements 2023, Charity Commission, available at: https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/charity-search?p_p_id=uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet&p_p_lifecycle=2&p_p_state=maximized&p_p_mode=view&p_p_resource_id=/accounts-resource&p_p_cacheability=cacheLevelPage&_uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet_objectiveId=A15558051&_uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet_priv_r_p_mvcRenderCommandName=/full-print&_uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet_priv_r_p_organisationNumber=5053028.

Leverhulme Trust, historical Charity Commission record, charity 288371, available at: https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/charity-search/-/charity-details/288371/full-print.

Leverhulme Trust, ‘Early Career Fellowships’, available at: https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/early-career-fellowships.

Leverhulme Trust, ‘Grant listings’, available at: https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/listings.

Leverhulme Trust, ‘Contact us’, available at: https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/contact-us.

Daily Nous, ‘Leverhulme Trust to investigate one of its philosophy fellows at Cambridge’, 15 February 2024, available at: https://dailynous.com/2024/02/15/leverhulme-trust-to-investigate-one-of-its-philosophy-fellows-at-cambridge-updated/.

Accenture, ‘Alan Jope: Board of Directors’, available at: https://investor.accenture.com/corporate-governance/board-of-directors/alan-jope.

Theirworld, ‘Graeme Pitkethly’, available at: https://theirworld.org/people/27329/.

Keith Weed, background reference record, available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Weed. [Background lead.]

Leverhulme Trade Charities Trust, ‘Trust board’, available at: https://www.leverhulme-trade.org.uk/about-trust/trustboard.

Leverhulme Trade Charities Trust, Annual Report 2024, available at: https://www.leverhulme-trade.org.uk/sites/default/files/LTCT/2024_Report.pdf.

Leverhulme Trade Charities Trust, Charity Commission accounts and annual returns, charity 1159171, available at: https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/charity-search/-/charity-details/5053172/accounts-and-annual-returns.

Cambridge funding and purchased academic authority

Isaac Newton Trust, ‘Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships’, available at: https://www.newtontrust.cam.ac.uk/ECFs/LeverhulmeECF.

Isaac Newton Trust, ‘Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships: Frequently Asked Questions’, available at: https://www.newtontrust.cam.ac.uk/ECFs/LeverhulmeECF/LECFFAQ.

University of Cambridge Faculty of Classics, ‘Support and endow academic posts’, available at: https://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/directory/support/endow-academic-posts.

University of Cambridge, ‘Endowing named professorships in architecture’, available at: https://www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-cambridge/arts-and-humanities/architecture/endowing-named-professorships.

University of Cambridge, Committee on Benefactions and External and Legal Affairs, ‘Terms of reference’, available at: https://www.governanceandcompliance.admin.cam.ac.uk/university-committees/committee-benefactions-and-external-and-legal-affairs/terms-of-reference.

Queens’ College Cambridge, ‘Announcement of the Rokos School of Government’, 2026, available at: https://www.queens.cam.ac.uk/about-us/news-events/announcement-of-the-rokos-school-of-government-to-the-university-of-cambridge/.

Future of Life Institute, ‘$15 million granted to new AI research center at Cambridge University’, available at: https://futureoflife.org/recent-news/15-million-granted-to-new-ai-research-center-at-cambridge-university/.

Varsity, ‘Cambridge agrees to rename Schlumberger Professorship’, 8 December 2023, available at: https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/26670.

Varsity, report on anonymous donations to Cambridge, 9 April 2024, available at: https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/27373.

Varsity, report on the Guild of Cambridge Benefactors and donor opacity, 31 October 2025, available at: https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/30552.

Observer, ‘Billionaire Chris Rokos makes record donation to Cambridge’, April 2026, available at: https://observer.com/2026/04/billionaire-chris-rokos-record-donation-cambridge/.

The Guardian, report on the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, 29 April 2026, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/apr/29/oxford-university-stephen-schwarzman-centre-for-the-humanities.

Cambridge statements about Jason Arday

University of Cambridge, ‘Statement about Professor Arday’, 5 August 2026, available at: https://www.cam.ac.uk/notices/news/statement-about-professor-arday.

University of Cambridge, ‘Statement to media’, 2 August 2026, available at: https://www.cam.ac.uk/notices/news/statement-to-media-02-august-2026.

University of Cambridge, ‘Statement from the Vice-Chancellor’, 12 August 2026, available at: https://www.cam.ac.uk/notices/news/statement-from-the-vice-chancellor-12-august-2026.

University of Cambridge, ‘University response to recent blogs by Dr Nathan Cofnas’, 16 February 2024, available at: https://www.cam.ac.uk/notices/news/university-response-to-recent-blogs-by-dr-nathan-cofnas.

Origin and distribution of the allegations

Cofnas, N., ‘DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge’, 21 July 2026, available at: .

Retraction Watch, ‘Exclusive: News outlet killed story on plagiarism allegations after legal threat’, 27 July 2026, available at: https://retractionwatch.com/2026/07/27/cambridge-jason-arday-plagiarism-allegations-times-higher-education-exclusive/.

Channel 4 News, ‘The extraordinary case of Professor Jason Arday’, 6 August 2026, available at:.

Plagiarism Today, ‘Race, Cambridge and the Jason Arday plagiarism scandal’, 28 July 2026, available at: https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2026/07/28/race-cambridge-and-the-jason-arday-plagiarism-scandal/.

Cofnas, N., interview with David Starkey, 2026, available at:.

Media publication record and accountability

NewsCord, ‘The Jason Arday Pile-On’, August 2026, available at: https://newscord.org/editorials/jason-arday-pile-on.

NewsCord, ‘Action: Jason Arday Pile-On’, August 2026, available at: https://newscord.org/action/jason-arday-pile-on.

The Telegraph, ‘Cambridge’s diversity poster boy in plagiarism row’, 24 July 2026, available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/07/24/cambridges-diversity-poster-boy-in-plagiarism-row/.

The Telegraph, Gordon Rayner author page, available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/authors/g/gk-go/gordon-rayner/.

The Telegraph, Janet Eastham author page, available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/authors/j/ja-je/janet-eastham/.

Telegraph Media Group, ‘People’, available at: https://telegraphmediagroup.com/people/.

The Telegraph, ‘Journalist questioned by police for investigating Cambridge’, 4 August 2026, available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08/04/journalist-questioned-by-police-for-investigating-cambridge/.

Times Higher Education, ‘Editor’s note: the Jason Arday case and Times Higher Education’, August 2026, available at: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/editors-note-jason-arday-case-and-times-higher-education.

The Guardian, ‘Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding Cambridge professor Jason Arday’, 1 August 2026, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/education/ng-interactive/2026/aug/01/playbooks-plagiarism-pigs-head-new-claims-surrounding-cambridge-professor-jason-arday.

The Guardian, report on Cambridge academics rejecting the University’s response, 7 August 2026, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/aug/07/cambridge-academics-reject-universitys-attempt-to-end-row-over-jason-arday.

The Guardian, report on Jason Arday’s memoir claims, 6 August 2026, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/aug/06/jason-arday-claim-memoir-publisher-simon-and-schuster-cambridge.

The Atlantic, report on Jason Arday, Cambridge and his memoir, August 2026, available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/08/jason-arday-cambridge-academic-memoir-resignation/688206/.

Daily Mail, report on withdrawal of support letter, available at: https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-16025369/President-Cambridge-college-quietly-withdraws-open-letter-support-plagiarism-row-professor.html.

Daily Mail, report on cancelled Jason Arday events, available at: https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-16040009/Jason-Arday-events-cancelled.html.

BBC News, report identifying Cofnas as a self-defined race realist dismissed from Cambridge, available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c78gmp7zylvo and https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78gmp7zylvo.

BBC News, report on Cambridge hiring review and academic response, available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c05q0nznq24o.

BBC News, report on the Metropolitan Police response, available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo.

Observer, ‘Nathan Cofnas: the man at the centre of the Arday plagiarism row was dismissed for views on race’, 16 August 2026, available at: https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/nathan-cofnas-the-man-at-the-centre-of-arday-plagiarism-row-was-dismissed-for-views-on-race.

Hacked Off, press accountability organisation, available at:

https://www.hackedoff.org/

.

Retraction Watch, UK retractions archive, available at: https://retractionwatch.com/category/uk-retractions/.

Wentworth Report, commentary on Cambridge, available at: https://wentworthreport.com/2026/08/12/cambridge-university-are-the-laughing-stock-of-the-world/. [Commentary; not a core evidentiary source.]

Death, family statement and public response

Associated Press, ‘UK academic Jason Arday dies amid Cambridge plagiarism storm’, 15 August 2026, available at: https://apnews.com/article/britain-jason-arday-cambridge-death-burnham-b9e2463ca6b474ac90cc6196ed668238.

LBC, report containing the ambulance and police timeline, 14 August 2026, available at: https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/jason-arday-cambridge-dead-5Hjdg58_2/.

Al Jazeera, report on the response to Jason Arday’s death, 15 August 2026, available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2026/8/15/uk-pm-burnham-reacts-to-death-of-former-cambridge-professor.

BBC News, ‘Jason Arday’s family still coming to terms with his death as vigil held’, 17 August 2026, available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ceqe87lelvgo.

The Guardian, ‘Tens of thousands pay tribute to Jason Arday at Trafalgar Square vigil’, 17 August 2026, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/aug/17/tens-of-thousands-pay-tribute-jason-arday-trafalgar-square-vigil.

Evening Standard, report on the Trafalgar Square vigil, 17 August 2026, available at: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/mourners-trafalgar-square-cambridge-university-professor-jason-arday-national-gallery-b1293729.html.

Cambridge plagiarism and institutional comparison

The Telegraph, ‘Cambridge academic plagiarised PhD student’, 30 January 2025, available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/30/cambridge-academic-plagiarised-phd-student/.

The Telegraph via Yahoo, ‘Cambridge University protected plagiarist, former student claims’, 25 September 2024, available at: https://www.yahoo.com/news/cambridge-university-protected-plagiarist-former-203405752.html.

Honig, B. and Bedi, A., ‘The Fox in the Hen House: A Critical Examination of Plagiarism Among Members of the Academy of Management’, Academy of Management Learning & Education, available at: https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/amle.2010.0084.

The Tab, report on Cambridge colleges and an investigation into a professor’s sexual misconduct, 24 April 2026, available at: https://thetab.com/2026/04/24/cambridge-uni-colleges-not-informed-about-investigation-into-professors-sexual-misconduct.

Varsity, report at URL https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/25148. [Title should be checked against the page before publication.]

Varsity reporting on Cofnas, funding and Cambridge

Varsity, ‘“Race realist” fellow investigated’, 7 February 2024, available at: https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/27035.

Varsity, ‘“Race realist” fellow: Uni was aware of my controversial interests’, 16 February 2024, available at: https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/27106.

Varsity, ‘Uni clears don accused of “abhorrent racism”’, 3 October 2025, available at: https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/30360.

Varsity, ‘Cambridge agrees to rename Schlumberger Professorship’, 8 December 2023, available at: https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/26670.

Varsity, report on anonymous Cambridge donations, 9 April 2024, available at: https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/27373.

Varsity, report on Cambridge benefactors and donor opacity, 31 October 2025, available at: https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/30552.

This investigation concerns:

• suspected state-level human trafficking;

• organ harvesting and commercial extraction of human cells;

• eugenic and class-based control of scarce biological resources;

• corruption and political conflicts of interest;

• securities, accounting and disclosure misconduct;

• regulatory evasion;

• asset transfers designed to reduce scrutiny.

The record begins with a signed declaration of interests. It leads to human organs, hospital processing, a Nevada public company, state research, unnamed customers, missing accounts and companies operating across several countries.

The original records appear beside the findings.

Full Dossier is here: https://alimcforever.com/orgenesis-investigation

As the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen must publish a declaration of interests. Ursula signed her current version on the 20th of November 2024. Under her own personal financial interests, the form says not applicable. That does not mean she has no money. This form asks about work, assets, debts, property, political membership, and professional interests. But it excludes ordinary bank accounts, family homes, personal goods, and investments managed by a third party. Not applicable only means Ursula has no personal assets under the form’s narrow reporting rules. (European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen’s declaration of interests, signed 20 November 2024)

Then we reach her husband, Heiko von der Leyen. His section is much busier. Heiko von der Leyen is the medical director at a biotechnology company called Orgenesis. (European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen’s declaration of interests, signed 20 November 2024) Orgenesis is a company that transports and commercially processes human organs. A surgeon cuts the pancreas out of a sick person. The organ travels from the hospital to an Orgenesis processing center. Workers at that center break the organ down, remove its insulin-producing cells, and turn those cells into a product called Kyslecel. That Kyslecel then gets sold on the open market. Kyslecel has one advertised use: returning the patient’s own islets after surgery. (Orgenesis, Investor Presentation, May 2024, p.19; Orgenesis, 2024 Form 10-K, Kyslecel programme) But human pancreatic islets have several wider uses. They are used in transplantation, diabetes research, drug testing, genetic research, stem cell development, and bioprinting. (US National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, Pancreatic Islet Transplantation; Nature Communications, bioprinting of islet-specific niches, 2025) These same human cells can be used as a treatment, as research material, as a drug testing platform, as genetic data, as a model for manufacturing replacement tissue, or as somebody’s commercial intellectual property. The Kyslecel pilot generated $2 million in private sales revenue for Orgenesis. (Orgenesis, Koligo Therapeutics acquisition announcement) The patient supplies their own organ. Orgenesis turns the cells taken from that organ into a commercial product and earns revenue from returning it to the hospitals through the open market. Human pancreatic islets are obviously very scarce and they are genuinely needed for transplant programs, universities, and biotechnology companies. This private company sells those islets on an open market. This means that doctors are having to compete for rare resources that they need to treat sick patients against wealthy private companies, pharmaceutical firms, and state-backed research programs. The same material that could save someone’s life can also be turned into products, patents, and political power. (Orgenesis, 2024 Form 10-K, therapies, hospital services and patent sections)

Ursula von der Leyen is the president of the European Commission. Her husband, Heiko von der Leyen, is the medical director of Orgenesis. (European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen’s declaration of interests) Orgenesis is a company that transports and commercially processes human organs, cells, and tissue. Orgenesis didn’t actually start as a biotechnology company. It actually started as a Nevada-based shell company called Business Outsourcing Services. It originally registered with the SEC as a general business services company. And still today, its SEC classification has nothing to do with biotechnology. (SEC, Orgenesis issuer record) The original Business Outsourcing Services had one employee, no subsidiaries, no patents, no trademarks, no biotechnology, just a website that said “still under construction” and plans to provide online bookkeeping. Singapore-based men controlled it: Guilbert Cuison, a network engineer working for Citigroup, and Jerome Golles, a sales executive at Kenwood Electronics. Together, they owned 69.9% of the shares. (Business Outsourcing Services, Form S-1, 2009; filing records 69.6%) The company’s registration statement openly said it might accept a sale, merger, or acquisition. This was a public shell waiting for another business.

On the 28th of June 2011, Oded Shvartz, an Israeli-Romanian businessman, bought 317,912 restricted shares. The agreement also gave him the option to buy another 309,742 shares that placed as much as 30% of the company within his reach. (Oded Shvartz, Schedule 13D, filed 7 July 2011; filing calculates 27.29%) The SEC identifies this person as Oded Shvartz, a citizen of Israel and Romania, president of Amraz Romania SRL, with a business address at 130 Biruinței Boulevard, Pantelimon, Ilfov, Romania. February 2014 Orgenesis OTC certification lists him at the same Romanian address, only this time he has 21.8% of ownership. (Orgenesis, OTCQB certification, February 2014) Amraz Romania, the company that he is also the president of, is actually the Romanian subsidiary of an Israeli packaging company owned by Ampa Group and Coca-Cola Israel’s Central Bottling Company. He was running the Eastern European arm of an Israeli plastics conglomerate when he bought his positions in Orgenesis. (Ampa Group, Amraz industrial holding; Globes, Amraz sale report, 6 July 2010)

In October 2022, the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) confirmed that it had opened criminal investigations into the European Union’s purchase of COVID-19 vaccines. (European Public Prosecutor’s Office, ongoing investigation into the acquisition of COVID-19 vaccines, 14 October 2022) The EPPO investigates offenses affecting the European Union’s financial interests. As of the 30th of July 2026, the EPPO confirmed that this investigation remains active. As it’s still a live investigation, the EPPO has not published its evidence, suspects, or legal theory. (European Public Prosecutor’s Office, investigation clarification, 17 May 2024; written EPPO confirmation to alimcforever, 30 July 2026, preserved with the case file) But the procurement records explain why this is a criminal investigation.

In March 2021, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen began preliminary negotiations with Pfizer Chief Executive Albert Bourla. The European Union already had a formal vaccine negotiation system. A joint team made up of Commission and member state officials normally conducted preliminary negotiations with pharmaceutical companies. A steering board supervised that team. The European Court of Auditors found that the joint negotiation team did not participate in Ursula’s preliminary discussions with Pfizer. The normal steering board meeting did not take place. The steering board only received the outcome of Ursula’s discussions, but they still agreed to launch the formal procurement procedure. The resulting contract covered 900 million doses of the Pfizer COVID vaccine with an option for another 900 million. (European Court of Auditors, Special Report 19/2022, paragraphs 48–50) The European Commission never actually published this contract’s full price, but investigative journalists put the price at €19.50 per dose, putting the value of this contract at €35.1 billion. (Deutsche Welle, EU seals new BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine deal, 8 May 2021) And before a single dose was even supplied, Pfizer received an advance payment from the EU of €2 billion. (European Commission, EU Vaccines Strategy, describing the €2.7 billion pooled Emergency Support Instrument rather than a €2 billion Pfizer-specific payment; European Court of Auditors, pooled advance payments; no €2 billion Pfizer-specific payment identified) This was the largest COVID-19 vaccine contract signed by the EU. The Commission signed 11 vaccine contracts between August 2020 and November 2021. Combined, these contracts covered up to 4.6 billion doses and had an expected cost of almost €71 billion. (European Court of Auditors, Special Report 19/2022, paragraphs 6 and 48–53)

The auditors asked the Commission for the Pfizer preliminary negotiation record. The Commission refused to supply any minutes and it refused to supply any terms. It did not supply any documents that showed what Ursula and Bourla discussed before the formal procurement process began. (European Court of Auditors, Special Report 19/2022, paragraphs 48–50) Journalists later requested the text messages exchanged between Ursula and Bourla. The Commission searched only for messages that staff had formally registered as Commission documents. It treated text messages as short-lived communications that didn’t need to be normally entered into the public register. The European Ombudsman found maladministration and told the Commission to conduct a proper search. The Commission did not confirm that it had done that. (European Ombudsman, Case 1316/2021/MIG, decision 12 July 2022) So The New York Times took the Commission to court. On the 14th of May 2025, the EU General Court annulled the Commission’s refusal. The court found the Commission had supplied changing or imprecise information and had failed to give a plausible explanation for why it did not possess these text messages. (Court of Justice of the European Union, Case T-36/23, press release 60/25, 14 May 2025) These criminal investigations remain open. The preliminary negotiation record remains unavailable. The text messages remain unavailable. The price, liability, indemnity, and delivery terms discussed privately between Ursula and Pfizer remain unavailable.

On the 12th of February 2021, the European Union created the Recovery and Resilience Facility. This became the main spending instrument inside NextGenerationEU. (Regulation (EU) 2021/241 establishing the Recovery and Resilience Facility) The official narrative states that NextGenerationEU was the EU’s post-COVID recovery fund. A more accurate framing would be that NextGenerationEU was the vehicle that turned the COVID emergency into a new European debt system. The Commission borrowed hundreds of billions of euros in the EU’s name. It borrowed that money on financial markets from private investors backed by EU budgets. Future EU budgets and member states will carry these repayments until at least 2058. (Council Regulation (EU) 2020/2094)

The Recovery and Resilience Facility gave the Commission power to approve national plans and release this money as grants to governments if and when they met certain conditions. To access this money, every EU member state had to submit a spending plan. The EU’s official statement is that none of the 27 national plans was finally rejected. By the end of 2025, every member state had received some money. And while it did eventually approve every plan, it then delayed, froze, or partially suspended payments when it said the government had not completed the required conditions. (European Commission, Recovery and Resilience Scoreboard; Council of the European Union, country disbursement figures, 2026)

Italy received more recovery money than any other EU country. The official explanation is that Italy had been the first EU country to experience a large outbreak. European institutions describe Italy as one of the countries hit hardest by the pandemic, but that description does not explain the full 191.5 billion euros. The EU funding formula did not actually count hospital admissions or deaths. It calculated grants based on population, relative poverty, unemployment, and economic damage. Italy qualified for 68.9 billion euros in grants. It then requested another 122.6 billion euros in loans. Almost two-thirds of Italy’s original recovery package was debt. (European Commission, Italy Country Report; European Commission Joint Research Centre, Recovery and Resilience Facility allocation analysis)

Italy called its spending plan the PNRR. Part of that plan paid universities, hospitals, and private companies to develop research that would become commercial products. To achieve this, Italy created several large research networks. One of them was the National Center for Gene Therapy and Drugs based on RNA Technology. The Italian Ministry of University and Research gave that center a budget of 320 million euros. This brought public universities, hospitals, and private biotechnology companies into the same funding network. (Italian Ministry of University and Research, National Centre factsheet) One of the private biotechnology companies that received its own project inside this network was Orgenesis Italy. That project was allocated €967,810. (Italian Government OpenCUP, project B23D21012140004; €967,810 project cost and €383,905 planned public financing)

Heiko von der Leyen is Ursula von der Leyen’s husband. In December 2020, Heiko became the medical director of Orgenesis. (Heiko von der Leyen, public employment record) In July 2021, the EU approved Italy’s recovery plan. This included approving the funding decisions for Orgenesis Italy’s project. Then in June 2022, the Italian ministry published the 320 million euro national center program. (Italian Ministry of University and Research, National Centre factsheet; Italian Government OpenCUP, project B23D21012140004) Then in September 2022, Orgenesis announced that Heiko would be taking on the center’s supervisory committee role and also serving as the medical director for Orgenesis Italy. By the time Ursula declared her declaration of interest in November 2024, she reported that Heiko held these roles plus over 14,000 stock options. (European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen’s declaration of interests, signed 20 November 2024) This matters because Ursula led the institution that was controlling Europe’s recovery money. He then represented the same company inside the wider 320 million euro program. He also held options in this company that would become more valuable if Orgenesis gained EU funding and research and was able to hold the patent and commercial opportunities for themselves. This all happened while the European Public Prosecutor’s Office was investigating the EU COVID vaccine purchases for possible crimes affecting European public money. Ursula led the institution controlling those funds. Her husband worked for the company receiving them.

The Commission and the Italian government hold the conflict checks, the funding decisions, the payment records, and the meeting minutes. They are yet to produce them. The issue here is that the EU Commission controls too many parts of its own accountability system. It controls which executive communications even enter the document register, how it searches for requested records, how commissioners declare household conflicts, whether an internal conflict check requires recusal, how national recovery plans receive approval, and whether governments have met conditions for later payments. The Ombudsman found maladministration. The General Court found that the Commission had given changed or imprecise information and no plausible explanation for why it did not possess the text messages. (European Ombudsman, Case 1316/2021/MIG; Court of Justice of the European Union, Case T-36/23)

Italy’s PNRR structure creates another layer. The Commission can say Italy selected the individual project. Italy can say a national research center administered the project. The center can say Orgenesis Italy received one project inside of a larger network. Orgenesis can say Heiko only held a temporary committee position. The declaration places each relationship in a separate box, which means the full sequence record disappears between the institutions. The practical concern exposed here is that the institution responsible for examining the conflict is part of the conflict. It controls the records and it decides what explanation the public receives. (Regulation (EU) 2021/241; Italian Government OpenCUP; European Commission declaration)

The European Commission has a legal job. It must serve the general interests of the European Union. It must enforce European law. It must manage European programs and public money responsibly. It must maintain records so that its citizens, auditors, courts, and parliament can examine the decisions that were taken. (Treaty on European Union, Article 17) In the Pfizer case, this Commission did something else. Its president personally conducted preliminary negotiations for the largest vaccine contract in history. The normal negotiation team did not participate. The Commission gave auditors no records of those discussions. (European Court of Auditors, Special Report 19/2022) When journalists requested Ursula’s text messages with Pfizer, her office searched only a small registered amount. The Ombudsman had to step in. They found maladministration. The Commission continued to defend and deny and refuse. The General Court eventually found that its explanation was inconsistent and implausible. (European Ombudsman, Case 1316/2021/MIG; Court of Justice of the European Union, Case T-36/23) This Commission has spent years protecting the absence of records instead of just producing the record. That behavior shields only Ursula from accountability while transferring the work of the European oversight committees onto journalists, citizens, auditors, and courts. I am doing the European Commission’s job on TikTok. This is humiliating for Europe.

Why is that woman still in post? Ursula remains in office because the Commission president does not have an ordinary employer who can dismiss her. But the European Parliament can force the entire Commission to resign through a motion of censure. If they won’t get rid of her, then we need to get rid of them. The European Parliament has the legal power to remove this entire Commission. Article 234 allows Parliament to pass a motion of censure. If two-thirds of the votes cast, representing a majority of all MEPs, vote in favor, the entire Commission must resign. (Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, Article 234) European citizens now need to demand that their MEPs use that power. Ask your representatives: Will you support a motion of censure against Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission? Will you demand the complete Pfizer negotiation record? Will you demand an independent investigation into von der Leyen’s household connections to European recovery funding and biotechnology? Every MEP should answer those questions publicly.

If you want to do something about this, go to alimcforever.com/eu. I’m putting all of my evidence, the European Parliament’s powers, and a simple editable letter into one place. You’ll be able to find your MEP, copy the letter, change what you want, and ask them directly.

https://alimcforever.com/orgenesis-investigation

In 1961, the Moroccan monarchy put a cash price tag on its own citizens.

King Hassan II needed cash, weapons, and protection for his palace. Across the Mediterranean, the Zionist project was expanding onto newly acquired land. It needed raw physical muscle to build infrastructure and hold territory.

So the two states struck a deal. The official story called it a “humanitarian rescue mission” but really, this was human trafficking. It was named Operation Yachin.

Here is how the money worked.

Israel and the Moroccan monarchy agreed on a direct per-head price tag for human beings. To open the extraction pipeline, a $500,000 cash retainer went directly into Hassan II’s royal treasury (Abécassis, Questions about Jewish Migrations from Morocco, HAL SHS, citing Bin-Nun 2009).

After the retainer, the Moroccan state received $100 per head for every Jewish citizen it permitted to leave, up to 50,000 people. Once the count passed 50,000, the unit price jumped to $250 per head. (Frédéric Abécassis, Questions about Jewish Migrations from Morocco, 2012, citing Yigal Bin-Nun)

Sovereign states do not write public receipts that say “payment for human beings.” To disguise the financial ledger, they used an American front organisation called the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS).

HIAS served as the financial and operational cover mechanism, moving roughly $50 million directly into Moroccan state accounts over three years. (Abécassis, Questions about Jewish Migrations from Morocco, 2012; Operation Yachin, Wikipedia)

On the ground in Casablanca, an undercover Mossad unit called Misgeret registered families, photographed them, and prepped them for movement. Between 1961 and 1964, this system extracted between 90,000 and 97,000 people—more than half of Morocco’s entire Jewish population. (Middle East Eye, How a Zionist migration programme split Moroccan Jewish families, 2021; Operation Yachin, Wikipedia)

King Hassan II monetised his own population, collected a per-head fee at the border, and handed those citizens over to a foreign power.

When an unlicensed broker does this, international law calls it human trafficking. When a monarch does it with an intelligence agency using a charity as a bank, official history calls it statecraft.

The Machinery

The Document Trap and One-Way Transit

To maintain a captive workforce, a state must eliminate that workforce’s ability to leave. That requires stripping their legal identity and revoking their return rights.

In Rabat, Raphaël Spanien, the HIAS representative in Morocco, met with General Mohamed Oufkir, the head of Moroccan internal security. Together, they engineered the document trap. (Abécassis, HAL SHS)

The Moroccan state legally barred Jewish citizens from receiving individual national passports. Instead, Oufkir’s Ministry of Interior issued collective group passports. A single sheet of paper listed dozens of families at a time. (Abécassis, HAL SHS; Eurasia Review, Emigration of Jews of Morocco to Israel in 20th Century, 2018)

When families reached the staging sites in Casablanca, state and agency operatives confiscated their individual identification papers.

Fanny Mergui, who was taken from Casablanca as a child in 1961, recorded the procedure:

“We left Morocco with a collective passport, and the Jewish Agency took the papers of those who had them.” (Fanny Mergui, Marocaine avant d’être juive, UJFP, 2016)

Without an individual national passport, a migrant cannot book a commercial ticket, cross an international border, or request consular protection. Their legal status exists only on a group sheet held by state handlers.

Mergui stated the outcome directly: “It was a one-way trip.” (Middle East Eye, 2021)

Labor Assignment: Dimona, Potash, and Buffer Towns

When the ships from Casablanca docked in Haifa, state agencies did not take families to urban homes. Officials sprayed disembarking passengers with DDT chemical pesticide, loaded them onto open flatbed trucks, and drove them into the desert under cover of night. (Middle Eastern Studies, Ma’abarot: Israeli immigrant transit camps revisited, 2024); (Jerusalem Post, Neighborhood watch, 2015);

State agencies routed this imported workforce directly to strategic military, industrial, and territorial sites:

• The Dimona Nuclear Complex: State planners established Dimona as an isolated outpost in 1955 and rapidly expanded it during the early 1960s. Officials placed thousands of Moroccan immigrants in Dimona to build public housing, dig desert foundations, and provide a captive manual workforce for maintenance and construction at the nearby secret Negev Nuclear Research Centre; (Dimona, Wikipedia); (Oren Yiftachel, Social Control, Urban Planning and Ethno-class Relations, IJURR, 1998)

• Mining the Dead Sea: State managers sent men directly to worker barracks at the Dead Sea Works (Mif’alei Yam HaMelach) in Sodom. Workers shoveled raw potash and cleaned toxic evaporation pans in 45°C heat, supplying key chemical feedstocks for commercial fertilisers and military munitions. (Dimona, Encyclopedia.com); (Dead Sea Works, Wikipedia); (Yehouda Shenhav, The Arab Jews, Stanford University Press, 2006)

• The National Water Carrier: Imported labor dug the trenches and laid the heavy steel pipelines for HaMovil HaArtzi, diverting the Jordan River south to irrigate newly claimed territory in the Negev. (Central Zionist Archives, The National Water Carrier); (National Water Carrier of Israel, Wikipedia)

• Human Buffer Outposts: State planners constructed “development towns” (Ayrot Pitu’ach)—including Dimona, Yeruham, Beit She’an, Kiryat Shmona, and Sderot—directly along armistice lines and perimeter corridors.[3]; (The Kibbutz and Development Cities in Israel, JSSJ)

Moroccan families were dumped in these outpost towns and handed raw concrete blocks. They functioned as physical buffer zones, positioned on the perimeter to absorb border clashes and protect European (Ashkenazi) elites living in Tel Aviv and Haifa; (Middle East Eye, 2021)

Fanny Mergui documented the reality on the ground:

“Once in Israel, Moroccan Jews were segregated into desolate areas where if you wanted a roof you had to build one yourself.” (Middle East Eye, 2021)

European administrators ran the state ministries, financial institutions, and military commands. The imported North African population provided the physical labor that dug the trenches, mined the chemicals, and guarded the perimeter.[3]; (+972 Magazine, Anti-Mizrahi discrimination was official Israeli policy)

Weapons, Bugged Hotels, and Political Hits

The cash paid to King Hassan II was only the initial down payment. Israel paid the rest of the bill in heavy weapons, military training, and state security services. (Times of Israel, A look at Israel’s decades-long covert intelligence ties with Morocco, 2020)

In February 1963, Mossad directors finalized a secret security pact with General Mohamed Oufkir. Mossad opened a permanent intelligence station in Rabat. Israel delivered French-built AMX-13 armor to the Moroccan army, trained Moroccan air force pilots, and organized the personal protection unit for Hassan II’s royal palace. (Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First, 2018); (Jewish exodus from the Muslim world, Wikipedia); (Bar-Zohar & Mishal, Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service, HarperCollins, 2012 — print)

In September 1965, Hassan II returned the favor.

The Arab League held a secret military summit at a hotel in Casablanca to assess troop readiness. A joint Mossad and Shin Bet team code-named The Birds (Tziporim) installed listening devices throughout the conference rooms. (Ynetnews, Mossad listened in on Arab states’ preparations for Six-Day War, 2016); (1965 Arab League summit, Wikipedia)

Moroccan intelligence delivered the complete audio recordings directly to Israeli Military Intelligence (Aman). The tapes confirmed that Arab military coordination was non-existent and Egypt’s armored divisions were unready for battle. (Ynetnews, 2016)

Former Aman director Shlomo Gazit confirmed that these recordings provided the key operational intelligence used to execute the pre-emptive air strikes of the 1967 Six-Day War. (Ynetnews, 2016); (IntelNews, Mossad had prior knowledge of Six-Day War plans, 2016)

One month after the summit, Morocco collected another service. At Oufkir’s request, Mossad located exiled Moroccan opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka in Paris. French and Moroccan agents abducted Ben Barka outside a brasserie and killed him in a villa outside the city. Mossad operatives assisted in disposing of the body. (Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First, 2018); (Mehdi Ben Barka, Wikipedia)

Hassan II traded his population’s exit rights for military armor, palace guards, intelligence tools, and political hits against his domestic rivals.

When the two states signed the public Abraham Accords in December 2020, diplomats presented it as a breakthrough. It was simply the public codification of a trade ledger established in 1961.

The Pattern & The Legal Shield

If an unlicensed operator takes money to move people across an international border, international law defines it as human trafficking.

If a sovereign state takes $250 a head to hand 90,000 people to a foreign intelligence service, international law calls it a bilateral migration agreement.

Here is how states drafted anti-trafficking statutes to grant themselves total immunity.

In 2000, state officials drafted two major international legal standards: the UN Palermo Protocol and the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA). (UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Palermo Protocol, 2000); (US Congress, Public Law 106-386, 2000)

The authors—state prosecutors, interior ministry officials, and border police administrators—built two specific exemptions directly into the legal code:

The Non-State Actor Filter: The UN Palermo Protocol operates under the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. Article 2 restricts its legal application to offenses committed by an “organized criminal group”—defined strictly as an informal, non-state syndicate. A sovereign state, royal ministry, or national intelligence agency is definitionally excluded from this criminal classification. (UNODC, UNTOC Treaty Text, 2000)

The Post-Arrival Filter: Under Title 22 of the United States Code, Section 7102 of the TVPA (spoken as “Under twenty-two U-S-C, section seventy-one zero two, of the T-V-P-A”), recruitment or transit is classified as trafficking only if the individual experiences forced labor, debt bondage, or commercial sex after arrival. The law intentionally ignores per-head cash payments and passport confiscations conducted by governments at the border. (Cornell Law Information Institute, 22 U.S.C. § 7102, 2000)

When a government monetizes exit permissions, collects a per-head fee, and confiscates national passports, statutory law classifies it as routine statecraft—provided the receiving state issues the arrivals legal paperwork upon landing.

The 2000 anti-trafficking statutes created a strict operational binary:

Unsanctioned human transport by private brokers is criminalized as human trafficking.

State-sanctioned human extraction using per-head indemnities and corporate cut-outs is protected under sovereign immunity.

States designed the legal framework to criminalize non-state competitors while legally insulating state-level human transactions.

Sources

Abécassis, Frédéric. “Questions about Jewish Migrations from Morocco.” (HAL SHS, 2012). https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00778664/document

Bin-Nun, Yigal. “La négociation de l’évacuation en masse des Juifs du Maroc.” In La fin du Judaïsme en terres d’Islam (2009), pp. 303–358. Summarised in: Moreshet Morocco, Juifs marocains – le prix de l’exil

Bar-Zohar, Michael & Mishal, Nissim. Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service. (HarperCollins, 2012). Print.

Bergman, Ronen. Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations. (Random House, 2018). PDF

Cornell Law Information Institute. 22 U.S. Code § 7102 - Definitions (Trafficking Victims Protection Act). https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/22/7102

Middle East Eye. “’Everyone lost’: How a Zionist migration programme deprived Morocco of its thriving Jewish community.” (2021). https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/everyone-lost-how-zionist-migration-program-deprived-morocco-its-thriving-jewish-community

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and the Protocols Thereto. (2000). https://www.unodc.org/documents/treaties/UNTOC/Publications/TOC Convention/TOCebook-e.pdf

United States Congress. Public Law 106-386: Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000. https://www.congress.gov/106/plaws/publ386/PLAW-106publ386.pdf

Ynetnews. “Mossad listened in on Arab states’ preparations for Six-Day War.” (2016). https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4866702,00.html

Eurasia Review. “Emigration Of Jews Of Morocco To Israel In 20th Century.” (2018). https://www.eurasiareview.com/05032018-emigration-of-jews-of-morocco-to-israel-in-20th-century-analysis/

Jerusalem Post. “Neighborhood watch: The market’s looking up in the South.” (2015). https://www.jpost.com/metro/neighborhood-watch-the-markets-looking-up-in-the-south-392284

Jewish Voice for Peace. “Jews from the Middle East Fact Sheet.” (2015). https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/JVP-Jews-of-the-middle-east-fact-sheet.pdf[2]

Khazzoom, Aziza. “The Great Chain of Orientalism: Jewish Ethnic Stratification in Israel.” American Sociological Review, Vol. 68, No. 4 (2003), pp. 481–510. JSTOR record

Middle Eastern Studies. “Ma’abarot: Israeli immigrant transit camps revisited.” (2024). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13537121.2024.2367883

Quest: Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. “Space of Transit, Place of Memory: Ma’abarah and Literary Landscapes of Arab Jews.” (2022). https://www.quest-cdecjournal.it/space-of-transit-place-of-memory-maabarah-and-literary-landscapes-of-arab-jews/

Safah Hadasha. “The Nuclear Reactor in Moroccan Judeo-Arabic: Upper Dimona.” https://safahadasha.co.il/the-nuclear-reactor-in-moroccan-judeo-arabic/[1]

Shenhav, Yehouda. The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity. (Stanford University Press, 2006). https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=3552

Shohat, Ella. “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Point of View of Its Jewish Victims.” Social Text, No. 19/20 (1988), pp. 1–35. JSTOR record

Yiftachel, Oren. “Democracy or Ethnocracy? Territory and Settler Politics in Israel/Palestine.” Middle East Report (MERIP), No. 207 (1998). https://merip.org/1998/06/democracy-or-ethnocracy/[3]

Yiftachel, Oren. “Social Control, Urban Planning and Ethno-class Relations: Mizrahi Jews in Israel’s Development Towns.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 22, No. 1 (1998), pp. 82–113. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-2427.00255

I regret premiering the original video series as ‘Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft’ because mostly this is about American bankers… no, European bankers…, not really.. hmm Jewish bankers? no that’s arguably racist. Stop. Lets be SPECIFIC. This is about The Warburgs and not at all about Kaiser Wilhelm.

This essay forms part of my broader (work in progress) Banker’s Wars Dossier.

The rabbit hole started with a question about the Chemistry lab, and oh boy how we travelled.

The other Banker’s War essays are here:

Truly is one big club.

Enjoy.

A

PEER REVIEW IS LITERAL. READERS YOU ARE MY PEERS.

This research is raw. It still needs review. It will be reviewed. You are invited to check the sources.

But please do not attack me about it.

Look at the sheer volume of evidence here.

I work alone and I have ADHD, these archives are routinely being attacked, links can break. Sources can contradict other sources. I’ve stuck with primary sources as much as possible.

If you think I have information wrong, before you irritate me, check is my source closer to primary than yours? If you challenge me and then quote wikipedia, how will that go for you?

If you notice any broken links or error you can report them here: review@alimcforever.com

This email is for broken links and genuine errors, not because you want to debate the frame. Email me black and white items with concrete fix proposals.

Do not email me anything grey, subjective, editorial or ideological please.

And do not get pedantic. I do not give a shite about feedback like “technically, JP Morgan’s yacht was 250ft not 300ft” … IFTHAT’SYOURONLYCOMMENTEATSHIT… if you send me an email like that I will report you for harassment.

Take what you need from my findings and go ahead write up your own versions with all of those exact measurements then. I’m not editing this for you, I’m moving on with my research and if that imperfection bothers you, you can either read someone else’s substack wait for publisher’s reviewed and final version of my book that I may or may not write some day.

GOD SPEED.

Part 1: Trans-Atlantic Capital in Berlin in 1902

On January 11th, 1911, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany formally established the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, Max Planck Society 1911: Founding of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, Max Planck Society This is the parent organisation for the research institutions in Berlin. The emperor provided his name and his imperial protection, but that’s about it. Nature, Vol. 86, 16 March 1911, No. 2159 This institution was not actually paid for by the German state. It was funded privately by industrialists. Die Gründung und Finanzierung der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, MPRL Proceedings Vol. 6 This was new for Germany. Before 1911, all German science was done in state funded institutions under the Humboldt model. The Humboldt model had been introduced in 1810 by the education reformer Wilheim von Humboldt. Wilhelm von Humboldt, On the Internal and External Organization of the Higher Scientific Institutions in Berlin, 1810 (English translation), German History in Documents and Images / GHI Washington This is still the template for modern research universities. History of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin — Wilhelm von Humboldt, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Before Humboldt, European universities operated a teaching only method. And they only taught specific trades Humboldt replaced that trade school model with four core ideas. He didn’t agree with passive teaching. He believed that teachers must be active working professionals, researchers in their field, lives outside of class. He said that students do not just learn by memorizing facts. They learn by taking apart real science in real life with real researchers. And he believed that those professors should have academic freedom. They should be allowed to research whatever they want without State or religious interference. Total radical, I know. the purpose of higher education is to cultivate critical thinking, independent judgement and human character. Rather than providing a narrow job training. And he believed in institutional autonomy. The state provides the funding, but state officials should stay out of academic decisions. Wilhelm von Humboldt, On the Internal and External Organization of the Higher Scientific Institutions in Berlin, 1810 (English translation), GHI Washington

When the pre-war German economy gets pointed at as a powerhouse of innovation and technological advancement, it is because of the hundred years of Humboldt system, not the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft When industrial cartels established the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft in 1911, they deliberately broke from the Humboldt method. They said they wanted to “liberate elite scientists” from the burden of having to teach undergraduates. The Birth of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, Max Planck Institute for Chemistry This structurally regressed Germany back into a silo where researchers and teachers don’t meet. This placed the researchers inside private, tightly controlled laboratories strictly designed to produce industrial patents. The emperor provided public land in Berlin-Dahlem and gave the institution a tax exempt legal status. Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, Deutsches Historisches Museum, LeMO The funding came from 83 industrialists who were offered the opportunity to buy a membership. 1911: Founding of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, Max Planck Society Standard membership Had an entrance fee of 20,000 gold marks plus 1,000 gold marks per year, while life membership was a single up front payment of 40,000 gold marks. Nature, Vol. 86, 16 March 1911, No. 2159 (contemporary account of the KWG statutes) Die Gründung und Finanzierung der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, MPRL Proceedings Vol. 6 For context, in 1911 an average German factory worker earned about 1,000 marks a year, Die durchschnittlichen Jahresverdienste von Arbeitnehmern in Industrie, Handel und Verkehr (1871–1913), Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich, via German History in Documents and Images / GHI Washington so buying a single seat on the board at the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft would cost an average worker 40 years wages. That paywall kept the public, the parliament and the trade unions out. The people who bought themselves a seat on the board at the KWG were the ones who decided what research institutes got built, which directors were appointed and how the research budgets were then allocated. That membership gave them direct control over the outputs. It gave them exclusive first access to the research, proprietary formulas, to the patent rights been generated in these laboratories. But it also gave them total insulation from public oversight. Because it was structured as an eingetragener Verein, a private registered association, it was governed solely by its financial members. Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, Deutsches Historisches Museum, LeMO Die Abzeichen der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, Virtuelles Ordensmuseum (confirms registration in the Vereinsregister, Königliches Amtsgericht Berlin-Mitte, 17 February 1911) That structure meant no politician, no trade unionist, no public university official could have a say in how the cartel ran its research city. The original list of 1911 subscribers is preserved in the Archives of the Max Planck Society Claudia Bergemann, Mitgliederverzeichnis der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften, Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Hausreihe Bd. 3/1 (1990) When you examine the full list of 83 founders, Far from being a collection of random wealthy donors, this original founding circle was a tight syndicate of monopoly directors, private merchant bankers, arms dealers and imperial state enablers. Four men drove the creation of this research apparatus, and none of them were scientists.

Carl Duisburg was the managing director of Bayer AG. Carl Duisberg Biography, Wollheim Memorial By 1904, he had already merged Bayer, BASF and AGFA into a chemical cartel. Carl Duisberg Biography, Wollheim Memorial (“In 1904, Bayer entered into a strategic alliance with Agfa and BASF, a three-member league known as the Dreibund”) According to his own biography, Duisburg ran into a structural problem. State universities were too slow, university professors spent so much time teaching undergrads, and their budgets were so tightly controlled by parliament. So he published a lot of papers and lobbied a lot of state ministries arguing that Germany needed its own dedicated full time research laboratories with zero students and zero public oversight. He wanted laboratories that operated like industrial processing plants, designed solely to turn raw materials and coal tar into commercial patents.

Leopold Koppel was the owner of Bankhaus Koppel & Co. Leopold Koppel, Gedenktafeln in Berlin He was the majority shareholder in Auergesellschaft His firm processed monazite sand to extract rare earth minerals like thorium and uranium. Koppel put up a million gold mark endowment to construct a physical chemistry institute with one condition. Koppel, Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (“Koppel verausgabte eine Million Mark für das Institut sowie weitere Zuschüsse in Höhe von jährlich 35.000 Mark”) History of the Fritz Haber Institute, Max Planck Society His chosen chemist, Fritz Haber, was to run it. History of the Fritz Haber Institute, Max Planck Society Koppel also personally paid Albert Einstein’s salary from 1913 so that he could research without having to teach students. Leopold Koppel to Walther Nernst, 3 June 1913, and Leopold Koppel to Max Planck, 28 January 1914, cited in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 5, Doc. 579, Einstein Papers Project, Princeton University

Eduard Arnhold was the director of the Caesar Wollheim firm. Eduard Arnhold, Deutsche Biographie This firm held a monopoly over Silesian coal extraction and distribution. Eduard Arnhold, Deutsche Biographie (“gelang es dem Unternehmen… den Absatz der oberschlesischen Steinkohle… weitgehend zu monopolisieren”) Arnhold controlled the raw fossil fuel extraction that was fueling Berlin’s industrial expansion and supplied the carbon feedstocks for these chemical synthesis Laboratories

Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach was the Head of the Krupp Heavy steal and armament empire. Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach and Bertha Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, thyssenkrupp Corporate History These are the core four industrialists who petitioned for the creation of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft. Other notable founding members include Franz von Mendelssohn of Bankhaus Mendelssohn & Co., senior partner of Berlin’s premier private merchant bank. He became the first treasurer. Franz von Mendelssohn, Mendelssohn-Gesellschaft (“whose finances he oversees from the organization’s founding in 1911 until his death”) Franz von Mendelssohn, Berlingeschichte (“wurde M. deren erster Schatzmeister”) Wilheim von Siemens, head of the Siemens electrical, telegraph and heavy machinery empire. August Thyssen and Hugo Stinnes. These two were the “undisputed titans” of the Ruhr Valley coal mines and heavy steel mills. Paul von Gontard was the director of Germany’s largest private arms ammunitions manufacturer. Paul von Gontard, Deutsche Biographie (“Generaldirektor der Deutschen Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken in Berlin”)

Now here’s where it gets a bit weird, the industrial funders to the Kaiser Wilheim were not all German. In 1902, J.P. Morgan created the International Mercantile Marine Trust. This was a massive American shipping monopoly designed to control the transatlantic trade. This trust was incorporated in New Jersey Original Ownership Interests, corporate history reference, rms-republic.com (“IMM was incorporated under the laws of New Jersey on June 6, 1893, as the International Navigation Company; the company’s name was changed to International Mercantile Marine by amended certificate of incorporation dated October 1, 1902”) and it absorbed White Star Lane, Atlantic Transport Line, Red Star Line, Leyland Line, American Line, Domination Line, the international navigation company, the Hamburg American Packet Shipping Joint Stock Company and Norddeutscher Lloyd. I’m running out of time. Go to part two.

Part 2: Morganization

On July 1st, 1902, JP Morgan’s 300 ft steam yacht dropped anchor in Kiel Harbour on the Baltic coast and Kaiser Wilheim rode out from his own yacht, the SMY Hohenzollern to meet him. John C. G. Röhl, Wilhelm II: Into the Abyss of War and Exile, 1900–1941, pp. 210–214 These two met on yachts because JP Morgan had just bought control of the North Atlantic shipping lanes and the German emperor wanted to know what Wall Street intended to do with them. U.S. House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, Report on Steamship Agreements and Affiliations in the American Foreign and Domestic Trade under H. Res. 587 (1914) Morgan had just launched a $120 million trust called the International Mercantile Marine Company, the IMM U.S. House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, Report on Steamship Agreements and Affiliations in the American Foreign and Domestic Trade under H. Res. 587 (1914) This was an attempt to privatize and monopolize all transatlantic shipping. U.S. House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, Report on Steamship Agreements and Affiliations in the American Foreign and Domestic Trade under H. Res. 587 (1914) $120 million in 1902 is about roughly $4.7 billion today. Morgan’s IMM was incorporated in New Jersey and it absorbed White Star Line, Atlantic Transport Line, Red Star Line, Leyland Line, American Line, Dominion Line, and the International Navigation Company. U.S. House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, Report on Steamship Agreements and Affiliations in the American Foreign and Domestic Trade under H. Res. 587 (1914) Morgan now had his sights on the HAPAG the Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Actien -Gesellschaft and the Norddeutscher Lloyd U.S. House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, Report on Steamship Agreements and Affiliations in the American Foreign and Domestic Trade under H. Res. 587 (1914) To understand why this Wall Street banker was buying foreign steamships, you have to understand how JP Morgan made his money. JP Morgan’s business strategy was so aggressive that financial dictionaries had to invent a verb for it. ‘Morganization’ was JP Morgan’s formula for taking over an entire industry and killing off the free market. Investopedia defines it as ‘restructuring an industry to eliminate competition’. In reality, morganization was the blueprint for corporate cartelization. Morgan would find industries with lots of competitors, buy them all, roll them all up into a trust and control the entire supply chain, top to bottom. U.S. House Committee on Banking and Currency, Money Trust Investigation: Report on the Concentration of Control of Money and Credit (1913) You might think that the market looks free and full of competition, but all of these rivals have been brought into a room with Wall Street money. And they were no longer competing. They were all owned by the same parent entity. U.S. House Committee on Banking and Currency, Money Trust Investigation (1913), Exhibit 134-B Morgan didn’t just buy the factories, he also bought all of the raw material and all of the distribution network, the transport. If the industry was iron ore mining, then Morgan owned the mine, but also the steel mill, the railroads, the port docks. So that basically anybody working in that industry would have to pay Morgan a toll at some point just to have their goods moved. United States v. United States Steel Corporation, Petition, U.S. Circuit Court for the District of New Jersey (1911) Morgan also understood that he didn’t need to own 100% of the company to control it. So in exchange for financing or rescuing a company, he would demand seats on the board of directors for himself and his business partners. This is how a tiny group of Wall Street bankers ended up sitting on almost every corporate board in America. And that is how they were able to coordinate prices and market access behind closed doors. U.S. House Committee on Banking and Currency, Money Trust Investigation: Report on the Concentration of Control of Money and Credit (1913) Morgan didn’t care about building better ships, or making better steel, His business strategy was an engineering system designed to financialize industrial assets. His goal was eliminate price competition, lockdown entire supply chains, and extract guaranteed returns through board level cartel control. U.S. House Committee on Banking and Currency, Money Trust Investigation: Report on the Concentration of Control of Money and Credit (1913) In 1901 Morgan had bought out Andrew Carnegie and combined over 200 competing steel manufacturing plants into US Steel, the world’s first billion dollar company. United States v. United States Steel Corporation, Petition, U.S. Circuit Court for the District of New Jersey (1911) He did the same thing with American Railways, reorganizing the Erie, the Pennsylvania, and the New York Central lines until a handful of men in his New York office set the freight rates for the entire country. U.S. House Committee on Banking and Currency, Money Trust Investigation (1913), Exhibit 134-B After all of this mainland United States consolidation, the next logical step for Morgan was what’s called vertical integration. So what is vertical integration? Imagine you own an apple orchard. If you pay a trucking company to haul your apples to the city, and then you pay a grocery store to put them on the shelf, those two middle men take a cut of your profit. But if you buy the trucking company and the grocery store, you get to keep every penny of profit from your apple tree. You also get to choose who else’s apples get picked up or put on the shelf. So if a rival farmer tries to sell his apples, you’re gonna charge him double for transport. That was JP Morgan’s greedy logic. Once he had control of all the steel and all the railways, he took control of all of America’s port terminals and then set his sights on transatlantic shipping. Morgan’s logic was if he owned all the ocean ships, then he could offer factory owners a single contract that covered the train, the port, and the voyage across the Atlantic. Independent ship owners who only owned their ships, not the railways and the ports couldn’t compete with this. JP Morgan was offering an all in one supply chain. U.S. House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, Report on Steamship Agreements and Affiliations in the American Foreign and Domestic Trade under H. Res. 587 (1914) Between 1900 and 1902 JP Morgan went on a European ocean liner buying spree. He bought the British White Star Line. This is the company that would later build the Titanic. He bought this for £10 million, which was roughly double its market value. The National Archives, Board of Trade company file BT 31/15981/38204 He bought the Leyland line, the Red Star Line and the Atlantic transport line. U.S. House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, Report on Steamship Agreements and Affiliations in the American Foreign and Domestic Trade under H. Res. 587 (1914) Before we go back to Kaiser Wilheim, I want to pause here. I want you to think about this. What are the implications of a private American banker buying up all of Britain’s naval merchant infrastructure? Shipping was the vascular system of the British Empire. This was a Wall Street banker in 1902 buying up the logistical engine of British power. When the British Parliament realised that a private Wall Street bank now owned their auxiliary naval reserves, they panicked. House of Commons debate, 19 February 1903 To stop the last major British transatlantic line falling to JP Morgan, the British government executed a public bailout. They gave the Cunard line a £2.5 million state backed loan and an annual £150,000 subsidy to build two state backed superliners. House of Commons, North Atlantic Shipping Bill debate, 7 March 1934 The fact that this company was in such deep financial trouble that it needed that massive state loan tells you a lot about JP Morgan’s strategy. These companies did not fall into deep financial trouble randomly all at the same time on their own JP Morgan was manipulating global trade markets. House of Commons debate, 19 February 1903 The British political class were aware of this and panicking, but most working class taxpayers never noticed the difference. These companies continued to wave Union Jack flags. This was state theatre. The British admirality actually insisted that these JP Morgan owned ships continue to fly the Union Jack and hire British sailors. House of Commons debate, 19 February 1903 This was saving face. The sailors on these ships still wore British uniform, but every ££ in revenue flowed straight to New York City. U.S. House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, Report on Steamship Agreements and Affiliations in the American Foreign and Domestic Trade under H. Res. 587 (1914) Britain never recovered it’s maritime independence after this. By the time World War 1 broke out, Britain was entirely dependent on Wall Street’s merchant fleets and JP Morgan’s credit lines to even feed its population or transport its military. After merging all of the British ships into his new trust, JP Morgan set his sights on Germany. He fully expected the German shipping giants to fold just as the British did. He expected that these companies too would sell out or collapse under the pressure of his railway network. He was wrong. These German companies already had an economic weapon that Wall Street couldn’t touch. They had control over Eastern European human migration. U.S. House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, Report on Steamship Agreements and Affiliations in the American Foreign and Domestic Trade under H. Res. 587 (1914) The primary profit driver for these companies was carrying people, Jewish people. These ships moved what’s called steerage passengers. Millions of displaced people fleeing violent pogroms. Key Documents of German-Jewish History, On the Road with Ballin—Experiences Made by a Russian Emigrant In the 1890s, HAPAG Managing Director Albert Ballin had struck a deal with the Prussian government. Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Prussian Ministry of the Interior, Rep. 77, Abt. XIII, Nr. 20, Vols. 16–17, Überwachung der Auswanderung über die preußischen Grenzen The Prussian state had set up Kontrollstationen at every railway crossing on the eastern German border. Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Prussian Ministry of the Interior, Rep. 77, Abt. XIII, Nr. 20, Vols. 16–17 Prussian police stopped all migrants trying to enter Germany. And if the migrants did not hold a prepaid ticket to one of these ships, they were either turned around or detained. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Bestand 371-8, Auswanderungsamt Hamburg, files II E I 1a 7, Grenzsperre und Durchwandererkontrolle Ballin turned Imperial checkpoints into a guaranteed passenger pipeline for his ships. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Bestand 373-1, HAPAG-Archiv, and Bestand 371-8, Auswanderungsamt Hamburg And I’m running out of record time again, so go to part three.

Part 3: The Privatization of Prussia's Eastern Border

In part two, I told you that J.P. Morgan sailed his yacht into Kiel Harbor in July 1902 to have a meeting with Kaiser Wilhelm. John C. G. Röhl, Wilhelm II: Into the Abyss of War and Exile, 1900–1941, pp. 210–214 That meeting was between J.P. Morgan, Kaiser Wilhelm, Albert Ballin, the director general of HAPAG, Heinrich Wiegand, the director general of Norddeutscher Lloyd, and Lord William Pirrie, the chairman of Harland & Wolff. U.S. House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, Report on Steamship Agreements and Affiliations in the American Foreign and Domestic Trade under H. Res. 587 (1914) Now, yesterday in part two, I said that J.P. Morgan went on a European ocean liner buying spree and that after buying up all of the British liners, he set his sights on Germany. U.S. House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, Report on Steamship Agreements and Affiliations (1914) I said that J.P. Morgan expected these German shipping giants to fold just like the British did. And I said that these German companies already had an economic weapon that Wall Street couldn’t touch.

I need to pause here and correct that framing. This hostile takeover story is corporate propaganda. When you follow the primary documents, this framing of Wall Street versus the German shippers completely falls apart. J.P. Morgan did not hit a wall in 1902 that blocked him from buying these German liners. These German liners were already controlled by Wall Street. U.S. House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, Report on Steamship Agreements and Affiliations (1914)

Guess who I found sitting on the supervisory board at HAPAG from 1901 onwards. This is Max Warburg. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Bestand 373-1, HAPAG-Archiv, supervisory-board minutes and registers And he wasn’t just an investor. Albert Ballin’s private villa guest book records Max visiting his home at least 43 times. Albert Ballin, Handwritten Notebook, 1902–1918 Ballin was the godfather to Max’s son. Eric M. Warburg inscription to John J. McCloy, 13 April 1967, described in Johannes Gerhardt, The Kaiser, Dignitaries, and the Press as Guests of Albert Ballin

Now look across the ocean to Wall Street. Running the New York investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Company were Max’s two brothers, Paul and Felix. American Jewish Archives, Jacob H. Schiff Papers, Kuhn, Loeb & Co. partnership registers and correspondence Max was a senior partner at M.M. Warburg & Co. M.M. Warburg & Co., official bank history This bank still exists, and it’s still privately owned by the same Warburg family that owned it 220 years ago. M.M. Warburg & Co., official corporate portrait and ownership history

Max sat on the HAPAG advisory board and he was the personal financial adviser to Kaiser Wilhelm while his two brothers, Paul and Felix, were in New York running the investment bank that was funding the transcontinental railways. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Bestand 373-1, HAPAG-Archiv, and Bestand 622-1/27, Familienarchiv Warburg / M.M. Warburg & Co. In Hamburg, Max financed the ocean liners. And in New York, Paul and Felix financed the trains taking passengers from the docks to the Midwestern factories. U.S. House Committee on Banking and Currency, Money Trust Investigation, Exhibit 134-B (1913)

The primary cargo that moved through this loop was human beings, specifically Eastern European Jewish refugees fleeing violent pogroms. Key Documents of German-Jewish History, On the Road with Ballin—Experiences Made by a Russian Emigrant Albert Ballin is quoted as saying, “Without steerage passengers, I would be bankrupt in a matter of weeks.” Bernhard Huldermann, Albert Ballin (1922), HAPAG participant account

In 1892, there was a cholera outbreak in Hamburg that killed 8,000 people. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, records of the 1892 Hamburg cholera epidemic The Prussian state blamed this on poor Russian Jewish refugees. They declared this a public health emergency, and the social panic around diseased Jewish refugees was leveraged to deregulate and strip away public oversight. Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Ministerium des Innern, Rep. 77, Abt. XIII, Nr. 20, Vols. 16–17, Überwachung der Auswanderung über die preußischen Grenzen

The state’s border functions were privatized and handed to this corporate syndicate. HAPAG and Norddeutscher Lloyd were handed massive state contracts to build, staff, and fund a network of border control stations (Kontrollstationen). It was agreed that these shipping lines would hire medical staff and install steam disinfection machinery. Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Prussian Ministry of the Interior decree of 18 September 1894, Rep. 77, Abt. XIII, Nr. 20, Vols. 16–17

In return, the Prussian Ministry of the Interior stationed Prussian border police at these private facilities. Prussian border police—the Grenzpolizei, sorry—stopped every immigrant entering Prussia. If a refugee held a valid ticket for one of these liners and they passed a medical inspection, they were then placed onto sealed Auswandererzüge immigrant trains. They were then transported from that border stop directly to Hamburg or the Bremen docks so that they didn’t set foot in any Prussian towns. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Bestand 371-8, Auswanderungsamt Hamburg, II E I 1a 7, Grenzsperre und Durchwandererkontrolle

If one of these refugees held a ticket for any competing non-German shipping line, such as the British White Star or Cunard, Prussian police turned them back under the pretext of medical unfitness. Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Rep. 77, Abt. XIII, Nr. 20, Vols. 16–17 That alone should tell you. They said that this was a pandemic, but then they turned people away if they held a ticket for a competing shipping line. Regardless of how sick they were, these people weren’t sick. This is disaster capitalism.

I will explain what disaster capitalism is, but first I want to show you who was involved in this. Botho von Eulenburg was the Prussian Minister President and Minister of the Interior. This is who authorized the initial privatization of state border control functions. Ernst von Köller was the Prussian Minister of the Interior who signed the formal administrative decree expanding station police powers. Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Prussian Ministry of the Interior decree of 18 September 1894, Rep. 77, Abt. XIII, Nr. 20, Vols. 16–17 They had worked with Albert Ballin, the director of HAPAG, with Heinrich Wiegand, the director of Norddeutscher Lloyd, and their banker Max Warburg. He had arranged the credit lines that built both of these steamship fleets and the transit station infrastructure. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Bestand 373-1, HAPAG-Archiv, and Bestand 622-1/27, Familienarchiv Warburg / M.M. Warburg & Co.

When J.P. Morgan tried to enter the transatlantic trade with his International Mercantile Marine Company trust, Ballin and Warburg already held the legal contracts for the Prussian border stations. If Morgan tried to fight HAPAG, then the Prussian border police would simply block any IMM-ticketed passengers from crossing the border. Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Rep. 77, Abt. XIII, Nr. 20, Vols. 16–17

This forced Morgan to sit down with these men in Kiel Harbor in 1902 and sign an Interessengemeinschaft (community of interest) agreement. This officially brought J.P. Morgan into a profit-sharing network built on 1894 Prussian border decrees. U.S. House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, Report on Steamship Agreements and Affiliations (1914)

In the next video, I want to talk about what happened to these refugees when they arrived on Ellis Island. And I want to tell you about the history of Kuhn, Loeb & Co.

The same year that the Prussian state declared a health emergency, the United States also passed the Quarantine Act of 1893. U.S. Congress, An Act Granting Additional Quarantine Powers and Imposing Additional Duties upon the Marine-Hospital Service, 27 Stat. 449, 15 February 1893 This looks like it’s in reaction to the surge of immigration bringing cholera to the United States, but in actuality, it created an excuse to round up and detain people without question on the basis that they might be sick. U.S. Congress, Quarantine Act of 1893, §§ 3 and 7

I mentioned that this looks like disaster capitalism. I did a video about a year ago that explains this in full. It was removed from TikTok, but it’s available here on YouTube if you want to watch it. Disaster capitalism is a phrase most closely associated with the author Naomi Klein. She uses this phrase “disaster capitalism” in the book The Shock Doctrine. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine

Disaster capitalism is a term for the way states and corporations use crisis, war, coups, natural disasters, economic crashes, climate shocks to push through privatization, to push through deregulation, to push through anything that under normal conditions you would say fuck no to. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: An Excerpt from the Introduction

In the context of 1892 Hamburg, a cholera outbreak was killing people. That’s the disaster. 8,000 people have died. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, records of the 1892 Hamburg cholera epidemic That disaster event can be legitimate. There really is a cholera outbreak. Or it can be manufactured. A crisis strikes and it creates a policy vacuum. The state panics about health costs and immigration liabilities, and the oligarch steps in with the solution. How close the oligarch was to manufacturing the crisis is usually hard to distinguish, but they always have an answer.

In this case, Albert Ballin and Max Warburg step in and offer to build private disinfection hubs at train stations. In return for their help seemingly managing this health crisis, the Prussian state handed over its border police. And those border police were used to block any refugee holding a ticket for a competing shipping line and force them onto these HAPAG ships. Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Rep. 77, Abt. XIII, Nr. 20, Vols. 16–17; Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Bestand 371-8, II E I 1a 7 So the original cholera crisis was converted into a permanent state-enforced human trafficking network.

Let’s get into what actually happened to these people when they arrived in the United States and who benefited from…

Part 4: The Immigrant Debt Trap

If you open a small shop and your product fails, you lose your money. That’s called free market risk. Now imagine a different kind of system. Instead of taking a risk, you lend your money directly to the government. In return, the government hands you a piece of paper called a bond. To make sure you get paid back with interest, the government uses its police and its tax collectors to extract money from working-class citizens. That is not free market capitalism. This is sovereign usury. It is a system where private bankers use state power to guarantee their own profits. And no investment bank in American history perfected this system quite like Kuhn, Loeb & Co. U.S. House Committee on Banking and Currency, Money Trust Investigation: Report on the Concentration of Control of Money and Credit (1913)

In the previous video, I showed you how Max Warburg of Hamburg filtered Jewish refugees through private border stations onto transatlantic steamships. Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Ministerium des Innern, Rep. 77, Abt. XIII, Nr. 20, Vols. 16–17, Überwachung der Auswanderung über die preußischen Grenzen When these refugees arrived in New York City, Max’s brothers, Paul and Felix Warburg, were waiting as senior partners at Kuhn, Loeb & Co. American Jewish Archives, Jacob H. Schiff Papers, Kuhn, Loeb & Co. partnership registers and correspondence To these men, every single refugee stepping off those ships was an economic unit.

On the 1st of July 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act. Pacific Railway Act, 12 Stat. 489, enrolled act, National Archives, Record Group 11 This act granted 10 miles of public land for every 1 mile of railway track laid down. Not 10 miles for the whole project. 10 miles of free land for every one mile of railway track that you laid down. Pacific Railway Act, §§ 2–3, 12 Stat. 491–492 That means if you laid 2,000 miles of railway, you got 40,000 square miles of free real estate. That is an area larger than the entire state of Indiana handed to a private corporate board for zero dollars. And that’s before I mentioned the cash subsidies.

The government also handed out cash bonds paying anywhere between $16,000 and $50,000 per mile. And this is in 1864 money for the transcontinental line. Pacific Railway Act, § 5, 12 Stat. 492–493; amendment of 2 July 1864, 13 Stat. 356 The US Treasury issued over $53 million in direct state bonds, as in cash payouts to private oligarchs. U.S. Treasury, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Treasury on the State of the Finances for the Year 1898, Pacific Railroad accounts Put that into today’s money and the federal government handed out over a billion dollars in cash to its mates. Then in 1864, Congress authorized the railway bosses to issue another $53 million in private bonds. That brought the total amount handed out to oligarchs up over two billion. And that created over $100 million in tradable Wall Street paper debt backed by 40,000 square miles of Indigenous land. Union Pacific Railroad Company v. United States, 99 U.S. 402 (1878)

When you add up all the railway acts that passed between 1862 and 1871, Congress handed private rail cartels a total of 273,000 square miles of public territory. That’s larger than the entire state of Texas. U.S. House Committee on Public Lands, Taxation of Railroad Lands, H. Rep. 474, 43rd Congress, 1st Session (1874), reproducing the Commissioner of the General Land Office report And the state used military force to clear the land for these private owners. The state funded the construction, and Wall Street bankers kept the paper, the land, and the profits. U.S. House Committee on Banking and Currency, Money Trust Investigation (1913)

To clear this land, the US Army deployed troops, slaughtered over 30 million bison, burned Native villages, and forcibly drove Indigenous nations onto barren, military-guarded reservations. William T. Hornaday, Map Illustrating the Extermination of the American Bison (1889), digitised by the Library of Congress This is America’s genocide. It happened between 1860 and 1880. Wall Street bankers could not sell paper debt secured by land that Indigenous nations physically controlled. The state used military violence to extinguish Native occupancy and create a legal patent that private corporations could monetize. National Archives, Bureau of Land Management records, Record Group 49

Kuhn, Loeb & Co. were the syndicate managers for the railroad land grants. U.S. House Committee on Banking and Currency, Money Trust Investigation, Exhibit 134-B (1913) They set up marketing offices across Europe and the US Atlantic ports. Library of Congress, Land Grants, Railroad Maps, 1828–1900 Jacob Schiff was a senior partner at Kuhn, Loeb & Co. American Jewish Archives, Jacob H. Schiff Papers When the panic of 1893 mysteriously bankrupted all major American rail lines, Jacob Schiff and his client Edward Harriman formed a syndicate and paid $58.4 million in cash to settle the federal government’s claims and buy the Union Pacific out of receivership. U.S. Treasury, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Treasury on the State of the Finances for the Year 1898, Union Pacific settlement accounts

Kuhn, Loeb & Co. then reorganized that company into the Union Pacific Railroad Company and they underwrote $100 million in new first mortgage bonds and $75 million in preferred stock. Union Pacific Railroad Company annual-report figures reproduced in the Commercial and Financial Chronicle, 28 December 1901 Those bonds were secured against the actual physical railways, like the value of the steel in the ground. Meaning if the bank ever defaulted on these bonds, you’d have to pull up the physical railways. Union Pacific Railroad Company v. United States, 99 U.S. 402 (1878)

This business model depended on converting land into continuous cash flow. Without a lot of settlers buying little plots of land in the Midwest and paying freight tariffs, then the railroad would not be able to service the interest on its Wall Street bonds. U.S. House Committee on Public Lands, Taxation of Railroad Lands, H. Rep. 474 (1874) It is the railroads that established these marketing agencies in Europe. Library of Congress, Land Grants, Railroad Maps, 1828–1900 They were offering mortgages. All of that free land that the railroads got from the federal government, that the federal government stole from the Indigenous nations, was divided into thousands of tiny little plots. And these desperate refugees were then offered 10- and 15-year mortgages on those plots—on that land they had gotten for free. Burlington & Missouri River Railroad land-purchase application, 9 June 1874, ten-year credit terms, Railroads and the Making of Modern America archive

Then once settled, farmers were geographically locked into using the single rail line servicing their area, and freight rates on those railways were set to generate the operational revenue necessary to cover the annual interest on Kuhn, Loeb’s bonds. U.S. House Committee on Banking and Currency, Money Trust Investigation (1913) It wasn’t just Jewish refugees that were targeted with mortgages. The railways had agents across Germany and Eastern Europe, but also Scandinavia, Ireland. Library of Congress, Land Grants, Railroad Maps, 1828–1900

But Kuhn, Loeb didn’t just fund the railways. They underwrote the entire industrial supply chain. U.S. House Committee on Banking and Currency, Money Trust Investigation, Exhibit 134-B (1913) If an American worked at a factory, turned on a light, or even bought meat at a butcher, a tiny fraction of that money was going back to Kuhn, Loeb.

Kuhn, Loeb & Company didn’t help build America. They placed their private financial tollbooth on every acre of land, every mile of track, and every ship that arrived in the docks. U.S. House Committee on Banking and Currency, Money Trust Investigation: Report on the Concentration of Control of Money and Credit (1913) And this family’s history, the Warburg family, their history goes quite far back. So we’ll have to look at that in the next part.

Part 5: del Banco

In 1513, the Venetian Senate granted a formal charter, a condotta, to a merchant named Anselmo del Banco. Marino Sanuto, I diarii di Marino Sanuto, 1496–1533, transcribed from the Venetian autograph manuscripts His Hebrew name was Asher Levi Meshullam. His family ran loan counters across Venice and Padua. Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Senato, Deliberazioni, Registri In medieval Italian, the word for a merchant’s wooden bench was a banco, and that trade descriptor became the family’s surname, del Banco, literally “of the bank.” Archivio di Stato di Venezia records reproduced in Preludio al Ghetto di Venezia

When Venice established the world’s first formal ghetto, Anselmo del Banco served as the chief negotiator between the Jewish communities and the Venetian state. Archivio di Stato di Venezia records reproduced in Preludio al Ghetto di Venezia He was also deeply involved with the Jewish community in Jerusalem. He frequently sent money back and forth on behalf of the Jewish community in Venice and helped those who sailed there from Venice. National Library of Israel, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, correspondence received from Jewish community councils in Eretz Israel

On the 14th of July 1555, Pope Paul IV declared a papal war on Jewish banking. He issued the papal bull Cum Nimis Absurdum. This bull revoked property rights, forced Jews across the Papal States into walled ghettos, banned Jewish physicians from treating Christians, and imposed severe caps on commercial loan interest rates. Paul IV, Cum nimis absurdum, reproduced in Bullarum diplomatum et privilegiorum sanctorum Romanorum pontificum The Jewish community remember this as living under the “evil Pope.” I understand imposing caps on commercial loan interest rates; making money off loan interest is banned in the Torah. Deuteronomy 23:20–21 Usury is also not a line of business that was accessible to the majority of European Jews. It was del Banco and his brothers that was upsetting the Pope. Why this Pope is called the “evil Pope” is because the rest of this papal bull is just racist. Paul IV, Cum nimis absurdum

A specific Jewish banker was causing chaos with commercial loans. His community didn’t know what he was doing. He had their trust. When Venice pushed them all into a ghetto, he stood up and spoke for them. Archivio di Stato di Venezia records reproduced in Preludio al Ghetto di Venezia In theory, actually, no, he didn’t. He fled to Germany. As raids intensified and Italian Jews were persecuted, del Banco’s family fled into the Habsburg Empire. They shut down their remaining loan banks in Padua and Venice. And first they moved to Bologna as a temporary staging point to consolidate liquid capital. Prince-Bishopric of Paderborn and Westphalian municipal records discussed in Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal, The Warburg Family

Consolidating liquid capital means selling off any physical real estate, calling in all of their debts, and moving reserves from their satellite banks across Italy into one secure vault. Anselmo’s direct descendant is recorded in Italian records as Simon del Banco. He led the core branch of the family across the Alps into the Holy Roman Empire. He then established a residency in Kassel, the capital of the Landgraviate of Hesse. Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg, sixteenth-century charter and municipal collections Here the family were given a protective residency charter, Schutzbrief in German, and this was issued by Philipp I of Hesse. And from this point on in local tax records, he is known as Simon von Kassel. Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg, Urkunden and Kassel municipal records

Following Simon’s death, his two sons relocated approximately 30 miles north to a trading center in the Prince-Bishopric of Paderborn. This is where the family formally adopted the town’s name as their surname. Stadtarchiv Warburg, municipal, tax and family-history records That is a name certain clock apps don’t like.

They named it the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (KWG). (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, History of the KWS)

Kaiser Wilhelm II did not back the society out of scientific curiosity. The Imperial Crown was locked in an aggressive naval arms race with the British Empire and expanding its colonial footprint across Africa and the Pacific. The Prussian state provided imperial authority, tax shelters, and expropriated public land in Berlin-Dahlem.

In return, heavy industry and private banks funded a private research apparatus operating completely outside parliamentary oversight, dedicated to military metallurgy, dual-use chemical extraction, and industrial monopolies.

The society's founding statutes (§ 4 and § 5) built a strict financial wall around the governing board:

• Standard voting membership required an entrance fee of 20,000 gold marks, plus 1,000 gold marks a year.

• Life membership required a single upfront payment of 40,000 gold marks. (Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Hausreihe Band 3/1, p. 7)

In 1911, an average German factory worker earned roughly 1,000 marks a year. Buying a single chair on the board of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft cost forty years of a worker's wages.

This financial paywall served both the Crown and the cartels. The state received a military-industrial development engine off its official public balance sheet. The cartels received state backing, monopoly protection, and guaranteed military contracts.

What 'contract research' means in plain terms:

When a university makes a scientific discovery, the knowledge enters the public domain.

When a private corporate cartel funds contract research, it gives a scientist a laboratory to solve a specific technical problem. The scientist gets prestige and a salary. The cartel gets the patents, the chemical formulas, and the commercial monopoly.

The founding syndicate

The 1911 funding drive raised almost 10 million gold marks. German heavy industry and private banking pooled the capital to build a private research campus in Berlin-Dahlem where they owned the scientific output.

The men who built the syndicate were the directors of Germany's primary industrial monopolies:

Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, head of the Krupp arms empire in Essen, paid the fee and became first Vice-President on 23 January 1911. Krupp crossed from armaments manufacturing into scientific governance, using the society's laboratories to outsource high-risk research into high-strength steel alloys, heavy artillery shells, and naval armour plating for the Kaiser's battle fleet. (Deutsches Historisches Museum, KWG Overview)

Carl Duisberg, managing director of Bayer AG, bought a seat to secure a private chemical research pipeline. Duisberg moved from dyestuffs management into cartel architecture: in 1904, he initiated the Dreibund alliance between Bayer, BASF, and Agfa. He wanted dedicated laboratories where chemists could develop synthetic dyes, fertilisers, and explosives without university teaching duties. (Wollheim Memorial, Carl Duisberg Biography)

Leopold Koppel, an investment banker who owned Bankhaus Koppel & Co. and held controlling shares in the Auergesellschaft chemical firm, provided a single gift of 1 million gold marks through his foundation. Koppel linked private banking to chemical extraction, attaching one condition to his gift: his preferred physical chemist, Fritz Haber, had to be appointed institute director. Koppel also personally paid Albert Einstein's salary from 1913 so Einstein could conduct research without teaching duties. (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, History of the KWS)

Franz von Mendelssohn, senior partner at Berlin's Bankhaus Mendelssohn & Co., took the role of Treasurer, managing the capital flows between private banks and the laboratories from 1911 until his death in 1935. (Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Hausreihe Band 3/1)

The dual-use chemistry of war

The imperial design of the society proved functional almost immediately.

Before 1914, Germany imported Chilean nitrates (saltpetre) to manufacture gunpowder and explosives. A British naval blockade would cut off Chilean imports and collapse the German army's ammunition supply within months.

Fritz Haber's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute solved the blockade problem. Haber developed synthetic ammonia processing—a chemical reaction extracting nitrogen directly from the air. In peacetime, ammonia produced synthetic crop fertilisers. In wartime, it provided the raw nitrates required for high-explosive artillery shells, making the imperial war effort independent of maritime trade routes.

When World War I began in 1914, Haber placed his institute directly at the service of the German War Ministry. In 1915, Haber stood in the trenches at Ypres supervising the first large-scale military release of weaponised chlorine gas. Carl Duisberg at Bayer celebrated the deployment, lobbying the War Ministry for larger chemical weapon contracts while advocating for the forced deportation of Belgian civilian workers to supply labor for German factories. (Wollheim Memorial, Carl Duisberg Biography)

In 1925, Duisberg consolidated this cartel structure further. He merged Bayer, BASF, Hoechst, Agfa, Cassella, and Kalle into IG Farben—the largest chemical conglomerate in the world.

To maintain funding through post-war economic crises, the society drew in American capital. The Rockefeller Foundation became the primary foreign funder of the Dahlem campus, paying for international stipends and directly financing the physical construction of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, History of the KWS)

The cartel takes the chair

By May 1937, theoretical physicist Max Planck was eighty years old. He stepped down as President of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft.

The board did not replace him with a scientist. They handed the presidency directly to Carl Bosch—the founder and chairman of IG Farben.

Bosch bridged academic science, chemical manufacturing, and state political finance. The official record of the society states that the appointment was made explicitly "to strengthen the society's industry ties." (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, History of the KWS)

IG Farben had already secured its relationship with the regime. In February 1933, Bosch and his fellow directors had attended a private meeting in Berlin with Adolf Hitler, where IG Farben contributed 400,000 Reichsmarks to the Nazi election campaign fund—13 per cent of the total raised.

When Carl Bosch died in 1940, the presidency passed to Albert Vögler.

Vögler represented the fusion of heavy mining, steel production, research governance, and fascist political finance. As chairman of Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel Works)—Europe's largest steel and coal trust—Vögler had been funding Hitler's political campaign since 1932 while serving as Treasurer of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft. (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Albert Vögler Biography)

When nuclear fission was experimentally observed in Dahlem in December 1938, the laboratory was not an independent scientific sanctuary. It was an asset owned and governed by the chairman of IG Farben, about to be inherited by the chairman of United Steel Works.

Military requisition

Ten months after the discovery of nuclear fission, Germany invaded Poland.

In October 1939, officers from the Heereswaffenamt (Army Ordnance Office) entered the Dahlem campus and requisitioned the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics.

They presented the institute's Dutch director, Nobel laureate Peter Debye, with an ultimatum: renounce his Dutch citizenship and declare allegiance to the German state, or leave the facility. Debye chose to leave for the United States. (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, History of the KWS)

The Army installed Kurt Diebner as administrative director and brought in Werner Heisenberg and Otto Hahn to run the Uranverein—the secret military project investigating nuclear reactors and atomic weapons.

In 1942, KWG President Albert Vögler met with Reich Armaments Minister Albert Speer. Vögler executed a bureaucratic transfer, moving the Reich Research Council out of the Ministry of Education and placing it directly under Hermann Göring as supreme commander of the Luftwaffe. (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Albert Vögler Biography)

The private research apparatus built by imperial industrial capital was now integrated directly into the military command structure.

Insurance, banking, and Wall Street

While steel and chemical executives ran the research institutes, private insurance houses and Wall Street banks built the financial scaffolding around them.

August von Finck Sr. crossed from private merchant banking into state-sanctioned expropriation and insurance. As senior partner at Merck, Finck & Co., he joined the Nazi Party in May 1933 and led the forced "Aryanisation" and liquidation of Jewish private banks, including the takeover of S.M. von Rothschild in Vienna in 1939. His bank co-founded both Munich Re and Allianz, securing the financial reserves of the regime. (Wollheim Memorial, Aryanisation Records)

Kurt Schmitt completed a three-way crossing between corporate insurance, the SS, and the state cabinet. As General Director of Allianz, he served as an SS-Oberführer and Reich Economics Minister under Hitler in 1933. Schmitt linked the private insurance market directly to state war finance, underwriting industrial property and concentration camp infrastructure before returning to his executive post at Munich Re. (Allianz Corporate History)

Across the Atlantic, IG Farben established a corporate shell called American I.G. Chemical Corporation in Delaware in April 1929.

The board of directors brought Wall Street executive power directly into the cartel:

Hermann Schmitz served as CEO of IG Farben and sat on the board of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

Walter C. Teagle, President of Standard Oil of New Jersey, signed the JASCO cartel agreement with IG Farben to share patents for synthetic fuel, high-octane aviation lead, and synthetic rubber.

Edsel Ford, President of Ford Motor Company, ran the German branch plant in Cologne that built one-third of the military trucks used by the German Army.

Charles E. Mitchell served as Chairman of National City Bank of New York.

Paul M. Warburg served as Director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, while his brother Max Warburg sat on IG Farben’s supervisory board in Hamburg. (NARA RG 131, Records of the Office of Alien Property)

In 1939, Standard Oil and IG Farben transferred their shared patents into Standard's name, giving them an American appearance to prevent wartime seizure by the US government.

The post-war re-absorption

In April 1945, as American troops arrived at his estate, KWG President Albert Vögler committed suicide, avoiding capture.

The directors of IG Farben were arrested and tried at Nuremberg in 1947 for plunder, mass murder, and constructing the Monowitz concentration camp at Auschwitz. Men like Fritz ter Meer and Otto Ambros were sentenced to prison terms at Landsberg.

Then came the structural re-absorption.

On 31 January 1951, US High Commissioner for Germany John J. McCloy announced executive clemency for 89 convicted war criminals held at Landsberg Prison.

McCloy was not an outsider to this corporate network. He was the ultimate sector-crossing operator, executing a five-stage career across law, war administration, military occupation, commercial banking, and global energy cartels:

1. Pre-war legal representation (1930s): As a corporate lawyer at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York, McCloy represented IG Farben in American legal proceedings and advised German industrial firms on transatlantic patent structures.

2. Wartime military administration (1941–1945): As US Assistant Secretary of War, McCloy managed military procurement and refused requests to authorise the bombing of railway lines leading to Auschwitz.

3. Occupation governance and clemency (1949–1952): As US High Commissioner for Germany, McCloy issued the 1951 Landsberg clemencies, restoring the confiscated industrial estate of Alfried Krupp, commuting sentences for SS death-squad commanders, and releasing the convicted directors of IG Farben. (Cambridge University Press, McCloy and Landsberg)

4. Commercial banking leadership (1953–1960): McCloy stepped straight from High Commissioner into the chairmanship of Chase Manhattan Bank—the same bank that had maintained active accounts for the German Embassy and Nazi firms in occupied Paris. (Der Spiegel, Chase Manhattan History)

5. Petroleum cartel representation (1960s): McCloy acted as legal counsel to the "Seven Sisters" international oil majors—including Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, and Chevron—representing them in nationalisation disputes and price negotiations with OPEC and Saudi Arabia. The lawyer who advised IG Farben pre-war and freed its executives post-war was now banking and representing the oil majors that inherited Standard Oil's IG Farben-linked patent network.

The German executives McCloy freed returned directly to the executive boards of West Germany's re-established corporate giants:

Fritz ter Meer, who had chaired the technical committee that approved the construction of the Auschwitz-Monowitz plant, was released from prison in 1950. In 1956, he was appointed Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Bayer AG, holding the seat until 1964 while sitting on the boards of Commerzbank and the German Chemical Industry Association. (Nuremberg Military Tribunals, Case 6)

Otto Ambros, the chemist who co-developed sarin nerve gas and selected the site for the Auschwitz-Monowitz plant, was freed by McCloy in 1951. Following his release, Ambros moved seamlessly between public defence and private pharmaceuticals, serving as a technical consultant to the US Army Chemical Corps, Dow Chemical, W.R. Grace, and Grünenthal during the development of thalidomide. (Nuremberg Trial Records)

Friedrich Jähne, a managing board member of IG Farben convicted at Nuremberg, was released in 1950 and appointed Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Hoechst AG in 1955. (Wollheim Memorial, Friedrich Jähne Biography)

The structural reveal

The discovery of nuclear fission was not an isolated event inside an academic sanctuary.

The laboratory in Berlin-Dahlem was constructed by a joint venture of imperial statecraft and merchant capital behind a 40,000-mark financial paywall.

Its presidency passed from theoretical physicists directly to the CEO of IG Farben, and then to the CEO of United Steel Works. Its physical facilities were requisitioned by Army Ordnance to develop nuclear weapons.

When the war ended, John J. McCloy—the Wall Street lawyer who represented IG Farben in the 1930s—signed the clemency orders that freed its convicted directors in 1951, before stepping into the chairmanship of Chase Manhattan Bank and representing the global oil majors.

The German executives returned to run Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst. The American lawyer went on to bank and legally represent the oil cartels.

The laboratory stayed where it was. The capital stayed in the room.

Sources

• Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (Berlin-Dahlem): Repositur V. Abt., Rep. 13 (Senatsprotokolle 1911–1943); Claudia Bergemann, Mitgliederverzeichnis der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften, Bände 3/1 & 3/2 (1990/1991): https://www.archiv-berlin.mpg.de/205689/hausreihe_3-1.pdf

• Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Institutional History: History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society: https://www.mpg.de/195494/history-of-the-kaiser-wilhelm-society

• Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Biographical Records: Albert Vögler: https://www.mpg.de/8241517/albert-voegler

• Wollheim Memorial (Frankfurt am Main): Carl Duisberg Biography: http://www.wollheim-memorial.de/en/carl_duisberg_18611935

• Wollheim Memorial: Friedrich Jähne Biography: http://www.wollheim-memorial.de/en/home

• Deutsches Historisches Museum: Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft: https://www.dhm.de/lemo/kapitel/kaiserreich/wissenschaft/kwg

• Harvard Law School Nuremberg Trials Project: Case 6 (IG Farben Trial): https://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/nmt_6_intro

• Cambridge University Press: John J. McCloy and the Landsberg Cases: https://resolve.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/4B671C23FA069528C47A98DF2FBDE78D/9781139052559c21_p433-454_CBO.pdf/john_j_mccloy_and_the_landsberg_cases.pdf

• National Archives and Records Administration (NARA): RG 131 (Records of the Office of Alien Property, American IG Case Files): https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/131.html

• Allianz SE Corporate Archives: History of Allianz 1933–1945: https://www.allianz.com/en/about-us/history.html

• Der Spiegel Historical Archive: Chase Manhattan and Nazi Accounts: https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/chase-manhattan-gute-kontakte-zu-nazis-a-112192.html

China has a written rule that says: if a mineral is going to a military user, or being used for military purposes, it does not leave the country. Full stop. That rule is not new, it is not a threat, and it was not part of the recent trade deal. It has been sitting in force since December 2024, and it still applies today. (Ministry of Co…

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Part One: The 10-to-1 Male Invasion

Read more

Here i…

Read more

Taylor Swift — the highest-grossing solo touring artist in recorded history — is the great-great-granddaughter of a man named Charles Carmine Antonio Baldi, who died on December 28, 1930, in a South Philadelphia apartment. When Baldi died, the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini sent a personal condolence teleg…

Read more

Bethanie Carney Almroth, ecotoxicologist at Gothenburg University, is presenting her research on the health effects of plastic chemicals to delegates. A man working for a US plastic packaging company interrupts. He shouts across the room that she is fear-monge…

Read more