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Steven Pinker’s alt-right apologia
Blaming radicalization on “suffocating” political correctness, Pinker mimics the movement’s own narratives
Steven Pinker knows what’s causing so many young men to transform into violent misogynistic racists: political correctness run amok.
Earlier today he tweeted:
Of course, this isn’t the first time that the Harvard professor has advanced this particular theory. At Davos last year, he blamed “left-wing orthodoxy” in academia for “stok[ing]” radicalization by declaring certain topics taboo, giving the alt-right “the sense that there were truths the academic establishment could not face up to.”
His prescription is for far-right beliefs to be openly debated and “countered by arguments that put them in perspective.”
Let’s call this what it is: a naive fantasy.
Pinker accepts as dogma Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ famous doctrine that the “solution to bad speech is more speech” despite all evidence to the contrary.
