First thanks for that article. While it did what was needed (defend Harvard) it still was a full throated defence of the line of reasoning that “Yes, the Left has gone too far. But Harvard is still good” Which is the most bullshit type of defence his alt-right loving, race science defending, gene-centric obsessed “heterodox” self can come up with. It falls along the same lines that he’s been pushing for decades; that the left is banning science (race science), discussion (more race science), and reason from the public sphere.
I will congratulate Pinker for doing the BARE MINIMUM by defending Harvard. He doesn’t get anymore credit then that. He drummed “the left is taking over and destroying reason in academia” fear mongering for more than a decade. In fact, Pinker and a collection of 39 of these anti-left anti-woke scaremongers have a book coming out in July banging that very same drum (YES, EVEN TO THIS DAY THEY MILK THAT COW) “The War on Science: Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process”.
Pinker has ties to the internet Alt-right going back decades, and popularized and wrote in alt-right rags like Quillette to defend ideas that are basically race science. I’ll link to posts I made 4 and 16 years ago about his ties to Steve Sailer (an internet White Nationalist leader of dumbass racialists). But in truth his support goes much deeper than contributing to a racialist think tank, and voicing support for academic racists on twitter. Pinker was apart of an army of Internet wannabe “rationalist thinkers” who led us into the world of Alt-right racialist wing-nuttery for decades.
He did it through idiotic straw man books like “the blank slate” and outright lying about the state of higher education with fear mongering. These actions lead to the very same open conspiracy theories that Trump uses to CRUSH DISSENTING VOICES, FREE ACADEMIC RESEARCH, AND PARTICIPATION OF RACIALIZED MINORITIES and VULNERABLE FOREIGN STUDENTS.
It is a direct line from “the woke left is crushing free thought and muffling universities” to what Trump is doing.