As a cognitive scientist, it’s surprising that Pinker doesn’t seem to understand how focus and emphasis are key aspects of reason. If someone doesn’t like rap or hip-hop, that’s their prerogative. If someone frequently talks at length about how much they despise rap and hip-hop, and all the reasons they believe these to be inferior forms of music, that person might have some issues. This is why Fox News, Breitbart, DailyWire, and so on (F-B-D), cover every news story they can find about any undocumented immigrant committing any crime. And this is why F-B-D plus WSJ-NR-Q, cover every story they can find about a campus controversy involving a Title IX witch hunt or some SJW students yelling at a professor. Do some undocumented immigrants commit violent crimes? Have some students gotten angry over something a professor said without appreciating the nuance of their position? Yes, such things have happened. The question is whether they deserve anywhere near as much attention, emphasis, focus, and media coverage as they are getting, and the answer is of course not.

Radical centrists believe everyone else is politically motivated, while they occupy a space of inhuman, cyborg neutrality. Everyone else has impaired abilities to use reason and judge evidence because of their emotional attachments to certain values, while radical centrists are scientific beings of pure logic. If any of this were remotely true I might have some respect for radical centrists, but in reality they are people who are moderately informed about politics, don’t have any personal reasons to dislike the status quo, and are blinded by the Dunning-Kruger effect from seeing their own motives. For example, they like to believe that they know anecdotes are not evidence, but they will share literally every anecdotal story from WSJ-NR-Q about a campus SJW controversy. They switch between the systemic/statistical and personal/anecdotal as it fits their purposes, just like everyone else. They cherry-pick. They conflate sex and gender because they personally happen to like the traditional gender roles in their society, while simultaneously acknowledging social construction as it applies to other things. They believe economics is a sound science (it’s not) that forms the basis of their policy preferences (it doesn’t), but all other social sciences are hopelessly biased by the devoted Marxism of their practitioners (there’s no reason to believe they are any more biased than economics). Evolutionary psychology, perhaps the least scientific, least experimental branch of psychology, is given credence above all other types of psychology, simply because it can help them justify their own preference for traditional gender roles. Humanities are worse than worthless, unless we’re talking about the histories of certain communist countries, then they can suddenly take on a mythological level of importance (in the sense that nobody has actually read them but they still believe they know the moral of the story). I could go on, but this is getting boring even for me.

Radical centrists also tend to be naive about the nature of anyone’s actual political motives. They think everyone else is conspiratorial, but the truth is they just really can’t put two and two together or follow the money, ever. For example, even though Charles Murray’s ideas are absolute junk science on par with phrenology, radical centrists still think it’s irrelevant that he’s funded by a literal eugenics think tank that was started by a nazi sympathizer. They still think he should be invited to campus to share his garbage ideas so students can critically evaluate those ideas- meaning they should also ignore who funded Murray and focus only on his words. Similarly, when the same Koch-funded astroturf student groups keep inviting controversial speakers to campuses, and the Murdoch-owned WSJ keeps reporting every resulting controversy, radical centrists respond every time with the same disappointment, condescension toward students, and alarm over the death of free speech and inquiry, never recognizing any pattern about how the story was generated or ended up on their screens.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the radical center is how much it benefits from affirmative action. Consider how utterly unoriginal the #GoogleMemo was, and then go and check how many followers James Damore has on twitter. Watch the clips of him on national TV promoting the idea that, *gasp*, some women might not want to be engineers. Why are we even paying attention to Steven Pinker’s opinion about the alt-right? Has he studied the movement? Does he have any special insight into it? No, he’s just another radical centrist whose voice gets magnified no matter how mediocre his arguments are. One reason for this is that radical centrists tend to be extremely privileged (especially the prominent ones), hence (1) their affinity for the status quo, (2) their smooth (and often nepotistic) paths to success, and (3) the guaranteed elevation of their voices. Another reason is that, if one is comfortable with the status quo, there’s no urgent need to accomplish anything, so radical centrists judge merit more subjectively. For example, when Chris Cillizza or Megan McArdle write a column with an idea so bad nobody has ever voiced it before they can be credited for originality. Finally, the most important reason is probably that they are useful to the established systems of power because of their reliable support for the status quo. This makes them both unbearably boring and unjustifiably popular, and makes me tired of this.