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character's name as a pseudonym while
writing in support of race pseudoscience.
It's too perfect that a Pinker ally
identifies with a humanoid weasel.
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Although Steven Pinker was originally dubbed the
world's most annoying man by someone else, I originated
calling him a weasel. But I confess that while reading some of Pinker's latest book "
When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows..." I found the flagrance of his weasellitude so breathtaking I'm amazed I was able to write about it outside of an oxygen tent.
In the chapter "The Instinct to Cancel" Pinker argues that it were better if we not discuss race and intelligence in public.
Fear not, Pinker has not given up on race pseudoscience.
I was alerted to Pinker's position by those who have the greatest self-interest in talking about race and intelligence because they have staked their entire careers and livelihoods on the issue: the neo-Nazis at Aporia Magazine.
In an article in Aporia called 'Pinker is wrong. We should "go there"' neo-Nazi Bo Winegard says:
Few topics inspire bad arguments as reliably as race differences in intelligence. So often have I responded to them that I have plausibly been accused of obsession. But as long as the bad arguments persist, someone must respond. Consider it a public service.
But of course Winegard is not doing anything as a "public service" - this is his full-time job. He works for Emil Kirkegaard's race pseudoscience and Nazi network, so brilliantly exposed by Hope not Hate a year ago:
In recent months, however, Aporia has dropped its pretence of balance, as evidenced by the interview that eventually took place with (Jared) Taylor in May 2024. Taylor’s interlocutor was Bo Winegard, Aporia’s new executive editor, who, on the website, has called upon his readers to “embrace” white identity politics and believes racial stereotypes are “reasonably accurate.”
That's not to say that Winegard is only doing it for the money. I'm prepared to accept that Winegard is such a dullard he truly believes in race pseudoscience, that collection of pre-20th century European folklores presented as science from Social Darwinism to eugenics to Nazism to sociobiology to evolutionary psychology to behavioral genetics.
I'm in favor of publicly discussing race and intelligence claims so that people who are not right-wing psychologists can gasp in wonder at how stupid race pseudoscience really is.
In the next paragraph, Winegard states why Pinker is so useful to the cause of race pseudoscience:
The latest comes from Steven Pinker’s new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… It deserves attention precisely because it comes from Pinker, a celebrated academic and an outspoken defender of free speech and open inquiry. This is not some indignant progressive who made a career of castigating “racist pseudoscience”, but a rational centrist who has long argued against the left’s denial of human nature.
Pinker's also been called a "celebrity intellectual" by the New York Times.
In "When Everyone Knows...," Pinker makes the case for race pseudoscience while pretending to weigh the pros and cons of discussing the issue:
The case for not going there, to be sure, has many problems. It’s almost impossible to enforce. It faces the polar bear paradox: telling people not to think about an idea forces them to think about the idea. It may be hard to draw the line around the no-go zone so that it doesn’t swallow up neighboring territories, like the study of intelligence or of continental ancestry. It forecloses the possibility of obtaining decisive evidence that racial differences are wholly environmental and eliminable, with all the social benefits that would bring.
And it may be too late. Our era is obsessed with racial differences, attributing them unquestioningly to racism, which only invites curious people to wonder whether they might be attributed to other causes, intensifying the regime that criminalizes such curiosity. As the writer Coleman Hughes has argued, there are good reasons for even the most open-minded people to want to keep the issue of race and intelligence out of mainstream conversation. But that tacit agreement should be a part of a larger commitment to color-blind policies in public and private life.
Coleman Hughes is in a tough spot - he's Black but has taken money from race pseudoscience-promoting
Quillette - so it is in his self-interest to "want to keep the issue of race and intelligence out of mainstream conversation." With Pinker's apparent approval, Hughes offers a deal on behalf of hereditarians along the lines of: "
we won't mention that Blacks are genetically inferior if you promise to stop making efforts to ameliorate systemic racism via programs like DEI."
For Pinker, being a true believer in race pseudoscience has only ever been a minor inconvenience in his progress as a celebrity intellectual. I've found only three times when the issue was raised by the mainstream press:
I am convinced that Pinker's strategy, in order to promote race pseudoscience while maintaining a career as a celebrated academic/rational centrist/celebrity intellectual, is to loudly claim he is opposed to racism - he told the Guardian that racism was stupid - while at the same time promoting the careers of racists
who will go there for him, from Sailer, to
Razib Khan, to
Linda Gottfredson to
Claire Lehmann to
Richard Hanania to
Bo Winegard.
Because that's just the kind of weasel that Steven Pinker is.
The book's reference section includes racists, hereditarians, evolutionary psychologists and right-wing reactionaries:
Lee Jussim,
Nathan Cofnas,
Roy Baumeister,
David Buss,
Richard Dawkins,
Alice Dreger,
Jonathan Haidt,
Carole Hooven,
Eric Kaufmann,
Greg Lukianoff,
Donald Symons,
Lawrence Summers,
John Tooby, Leda Cosmides and
Matt Yglesias.
Pinker talks about journalists muzzling themselves:
Journalists, too, despite their ironclad commitment to freedom of the press, muzzle themselves in particular circumstances. They may, for example, choose not to identify confidential sources, juvenile suspects, the victims of sexual assault, or details surrounding prominent suicides. They may decline to publish the manifestos of rampage shooters, or train a camera on sports fans running onto the field.
But he doesn't seem to appreciate how this has helped his career, how his weasellitude is enabled by most journalists being too chummy with celebrity intellectuals to dare ask anything potentially embarrassing. After all, Pinker might get huffy as he did when the Guardian dared ask:
Angela Saini, a science journalist and author of Superior: The Return of Race Science, told me that “for many people, Pinker’s willingness to entertain the work of individuals who are on the far right and white supremacists has gone beyond the pale”. When I put these kinds of criticisms to Pinker, he called it the fallacy of “guilt by association” – just because Sailer and others have objectionable views, doesn’t mean their data is bad. Pinker has condemned racism – he told me it was “not just wrong but stupid” – but published Sailer’s work in an edited volume in 2004, and quotes Sailer’s positive review of Better Angels, among many others, on his website..
I know exactly how high the bar is for journalists to care about the pro-racism activities of celebrity intellectuals like Pinker. Back when the New Yorker was helping to
promote behavioral genetics via a glowing profile of Kathryn Paige Harden, I had a brief exchange of emails with the profile's author Gideon Lewis-Kraus, a frequent New Yorker contributor. He said:
If you have emails between Pinker and Sailer, I will gladly review them. Otherwise, I think I'll hold my own counsel on the stories that I do...
Now we
do know about letters between
E. O. Wilson and ultra-racist
J. Philippe Rushton, which did seem to
convince some people that Wilson was a racist. But the reason the correspondence was
significant was that it provided evidence that Wilson used his celebrity intellectual powers to help advance Rushton's career.
But we don't need emails between Pinker and Sailer, there is plenty of evidence that Pinker has
helped to promote the career of Sailer and many other racists as I've documented for the past seven years on this blog. And by the way, Pinker could be seen
promoting Rushton too, on Boing Boing in 2009.
For journalists like Lewis-Kraus, which is almost all of them, Pinker can promote all the racists and appear on all the neo-Nazis podcasts in the world, he will always be acceptable as long as he doesn't record a precise declaration of his beliefs. The rest of us are forbidden from drawing conclusions based merely on a quarter century of Pinker's activities.
But if Pinker making common cause with neo-Nazis does not faze journalists (except the Guardian), I doubt anything will.
