Friday, March 09, 2018

So what's Steven Pinker's alt-right gang up to now?

I've pointed out on this blog that the apparent aim of alt-right Claire Lehmann's Quillette is to rebrand Ezra Levant's alt-right views: anti-black, anti-feminist, anti-Muslim, anti-Left as "centrist."

Here we see Razib Khan promoting the idea that Christina Hoff Sommers and Steven Pinker are "centrists."
To be honest these forays by centrists (Sommers is a registered Democrat with libertarian leanings, similar to Steven Pinker) into the academy are starting to remind me of those ridiculous “debates” that Jews had to have with professional anti-Jews (mostly apostates) in the courts of medieval European monarchs. There were the outward forms of debate, but everyone knew what it was about (since Sommers and Pinker are from Jewish backgrounds perhaps that’s apposite).

Or as this Twitterer observed a couple of years ago:




And Steven Pinker constantly attacks the left, as when he claimed that academia and the media are "radicalizing" the alt-right when it's actually he who is doing just that. Not to mention his good buddies, professional racists Razib Khan and Steve Sailer, who are also pals together as seen recently on Twitter.


I predict that Pinker will continue to lean ever further right, his hereditarian views are much too popular with the right and alt-right to avoid such a fate. 

And Pinker loves anybody who proclaims him brilliant and who promotes his bullshit Blank Slate theories.

Pinker doesn't do a very good job hiding where his real sympathies lie.

As a recent review of Pinker's most recent, "Enlightenment Now" by David A. Bell in The Nation noted:
But he wraps his arguments up in such a thick layer of exaggeration and misinterpretation that the book does more harm than good. It makes use of selective data, dubious history, and, when all else fails, a contempt for “intellectuals” straight out of Breitbart.
No big surprise there. Both of Pinker's good buddies Khan and Sailer were identified as leaders of the alt-right in Breitbart by none of than Milo Yiannopoulos.

And they have allies at the New York Times. In addition to Jesse Singal, Pinker fanboy and Razib Khan's buddy, there's Bari Weiss, who wrote a column decrying rude college students as the work of the Left and "Official Antifa" which turned out to be a hoax site. As reported in Mediaite:
New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss — a self-described Iraq War-supporting “outspoken Zionist” — took a narrative from the alt-right in her newest column, and used Tweets from a phony account in order to do it. 
The op-ed, which suggests the political left is intolerant and does not believe in free speech on campus “at all,” used two tweets from a fake “Antifa” account run by online trolls to prove that young leftists were attacking new-right personality Dave Rubin for being anti-LGBTQ, despite the fact that he is gay. 
Weiss wrote the following regarding Rubin’s experience with college activists:
“[Leftists] seem to believe that the real cause for concern are the secret authoritarians passing as liberals and conservatives in our midst. Among them: Dave Rubin, a liberal commentator who favors abortion rights, opposes the death penalty and is married to a man, yet is denounced as an ‘Anti-L.G.B.T. fascist’ and a ‘fascist lieutenant’ for criticizing identity politics.” 
Upon clicking on the links attached to the terms “Anti-L.G.B.T. fascist” and “fascist lieutenant,” readers will find the parody account @OfficialAntifa is behind the claims — not an actual youth leftist organization.
I think it's pretty obvious that the right-wing and alt-right media have decided a good strategy is to promote right-wingers like James Damore and Christian Hoff Sommers at colleges, and when some of the more obnoxious students - or in Damore's case, not even students, just rando outsiders - make a fuss, use this to claim "the left" is intolerant and anti-free speech. My guess is that Weiss didn't realize "OfficialAntifa" was fake because not only is she a lazy, awful journalist, just like Jesse Singal, but in the alt-right online circles she travels in, there's little concern over whether "Official Antifa" is real or not - if they can get away with using fake news to smear their enemies, they'll do it. 

Naturally Weiss identifies Sommers as a "feminist" in spite of the fact that Sommers' entire career has been devoted to attacking feminists. 

And Steven Pinker makes common cause with these freaks. Anybody who knew anything about Sommers' career could have predicted she would be leading the backlash to #metoo. That's what the fucking Koch brothers pay her for.