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Steven Pinker’s alt-right apologia

Blaming radicalization on “suffocating” political correctness, Pinker mimics the movement’s own narratives

4 min readJun 12, 2019

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Official faculty portrait. ( Rose Lincoln / Harvard University )

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.

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Justin Ward
Justin Ward

Written by Justin Ward

Journalist and legal writer specializing in policing, criminal law, and civil litigation. Bylines at SPLC, The Baffler, GEN, USA Today, and HB Litigation.

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