There is no end of the kind of cherry-picking people will go to if they want to smear New Atheists. This post gives a prime example, with the target being Steve Pinker. (It’s always either Pinker, Sam Harris, or Richard Dawkins.)

On November 6, Spiked Magazine held one of its “Unsafe Space” events at Harvard, called “Is political correctness why Trump won?”

Here’s the event description, the participants, and, below that, an 8-minute clip of Pinker giving his take on the issue.

The shock election of Donald Trump has sent many looking for answers. Why didn’t his outlandish statements, his ‘locker-room talk’ and his out-there views sink his candidacy in the way it would have sunk others? While many have chalked his win up to racism, xenophobia and misogyny – others suggest it was a revolt precisely against those who so casually throw around those labels. In short, the election was a referendum on political correctness, a choice between the immaculately focus-grouped Clinton and the from-the-hip Trump. Did PC culture get Trump elected? Will his presidency serve as an antidote to offence culture? Or is the thin-skinned Trump, who rankles at any criticism, just a different kind of ‘snowflake’? SPEAKERS: Wendy Kaminer is a lawyer and social critic. She has written about law, liberty and feminism for publications including the New York Times, the Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal. She is the author of eight books, including Free for All: Defending Liberty in America Today. Steven Pinker is a Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He has written for the New York Times, Time and The Atlantic, and is the author of 10 books, including The Better Angels of Our Nature. His forthcoming book, Enlightenment Now, will be published in February 2018. @sapinker Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked and a regular columnist for Reason and the Spectator. He has also written for the LA Times, the Telegraph, the Australian, and more. This year, he was named best online columnist at the Maggie Awards. He is the author, most recently, of A Duty to Offend. Robby Soave is associate editor at Reason and a columnist for the Daily Beast. He has also written for the New York Times, New York Post, CNN,USA Today, and more. He is currently on sabbatical, writing a book on activism in the age of Trump.@robbysoave Watch the first 8-minute video below (ignore the title, which is part of the smear), in which Pinker describes several “politically incorrect” assertions that, while true, may have driven people to the Right because those truths are denied or censored by the Authoritarian Left. These issues, which Pinker says are raised largely by the “often highly literate, highly intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right”, are those that appear in the conservative press but not in the Left-wing press. I’ve often mentioned how the political missteps of the Authoritarian Left are often ignored by the Leftist or mainstream media but highlighted by right-wing sites like The Daily Wire, Campus Reform, or The College Fix. Here are the claims that Pinker says are true but unpalatable to many on the Left: Capitalist societies are better than Communist ones. Men and women are not identical in their life priorities, in their sexuality, in their tastes and interests. The Harvard person Pinker describes as having been excoriated for suggesting such a thing is ex-president Larry Summers (see here). Note though, that Summers’s statement was about “intrinsic aptitude”, not interests, and Pinker doesn’t mention aptitude. Nevertheless, it’s likely that men and women differ in some average “aptitudes”. At any rate, any differences in aptitude are irrelevant to the moral claim that everyone should have equality of opportunity and be treated as equal under the law, which is Pinker’s point (see below). Different ethnic groups commit violent crimes at different rates. The overwhelming majority of terrorist suicide acts are committed by Islamist extremist groups. But here’s the important part. After reciting these Leftist taboos, Pinker, at 3:49, begins to explain how these that these facts do not license unequal treatment of women or ethnic groups—that opposition to racism and sexism is a political and moral commitment and does not rest on any observed differences between groups. This is a point I’ve made often: moral and political equality should not depend on observed group differences, be they be cultural or genetic. For if you rest your claim for moral equality on spurious claims that all groups are equal in every way, you make your moral claims vulnerable to future empirical observation of differences. Pinker adds that the bulk of domestic terrorism (i.e., in the US) is committed by right-wing and not Islamist groups, and that every successful capitalist society has “socialistic” social safety nets. At 6:28, he finally explains why if you’ve never heard these facts—i.e., if they’ve been “censored” because they’re considered politically incorrect—you’ll first feel that universities and mainstream media have withheld the truth from you, and that those venues simply can’t handle the truth. More important, you’ll suffer from not having had the facts put into context. That is, you won’t have heard the progressive argument that, “Yes, these may be true, but here are the reasons why these truths don’t constitute a defense of the right, the alt-right or of any bigotry.” As he says, “The politically correct left is doing itself an enormous disservice when it renders certain topics undiscussable, because then people don’t get the proper context in which they can fit into progressivism.” In toto, then, Pinker’s statement is liberal and progressivist, and its tenor is that true progressives must deal with empirical truths rather than censor or dismiss them. If they don’t do so—and they often don’t—this just enables the alt-right or the right in general. This is Pinker’s answer to why “political correctness” may have contributed to Trump’s election. (I don’t know if he addressed that explicitly).

Now what have people done with this clearly progressive spiel? They’ve taken it out of context to make Pinker appear to be conservative or even alt-right! The most odious: the Nazi publication The Daily Stormer ran this piece (click on screenshot to see it):

Then right-winger Alex Witoslawski posted a 55-second excerpt just using Pinker’s opening. It makes Pinker look like an alt-righter, for it omits his important take on why we have to absorb the truths into Progressivism without altering our moral commitments:

Harvard Psychologist Steven Pinker: Alt-Right are highly literate, highly intelligent, media and internet savvy pic.twitter.com/TZq0zYZmAp — Alex Witoslawski (@alexwitoslawski) January 9, 2018

Finally, P. Z. Myers at Pharyngula has posted a 3-minute clip of Pinker’s words, totally omitting Pinker’s important conclusions and just taking issue with the four facts adduced at the beginning. That excerpt is below. Myers links to the whole clip later on in his post, but I believe he added that link later (I may be wrong). At any rate, the title of Myers’s post is “If you ever doubted that Pinker’s sympathies lie with the alt-Right.” I can’t believe that anyone could watch the full eight-minute clip and come to that conclusion. Pinker’s sympathies clearly do not lie with the alt-right, as is palpably evident from his conclusion. He’s a classical liberal and progressive. He just doesn’t gloss over truths inconvenient to the Authoritarian Left, which is why people go after him. But inconvenient truths are not the same thing as truths that must create bigotry. It’s time that Authoritarian Leftists like Myers took this on board.

Here’s the truncated clip shown on Pharyngula:

One example of how Myers distorts Pinker’s words, and why I think he heard the full clip only later, is what P. Z. wrote on Pharyngula about capitalism vs. communism:

Capitalist societies are better than communist ones. How odd. I don’t see anyone insisting on that: instead, I see a lot of academics who point out the flaws in capitalism, which, apparently, are lies and don’t exist. Then he makes it worse by using as more specific examples the difference between North and South Korea (I’ve never met anyone who thinks North Korea is a better place to live than South Korea.) or between East and West Germany before the fall of the Berlin wall. You will rarely encounter a more pure and absolutely dishonest straw man.How about if the comparison is between, say, a ragingly capitalist country like the USA, and a socialist democracy like Sweden? It gets a bit less obvious.

But, as you see above, Pinker actually makes this point at 5:50 of the full video!

Nevertheless, Myers, like many others, ignores the inconvenient last half of the video, so determined is he to smear Pinker. This is from Myers’s public Facebook page, touting his post and adding a few pungent (and false) words:

But one issue remains: Who are the “highly literate, highly intelligent” people who gravitate to the alt-right, as Pinker describes them? I know of none—at least not if you characterize the alt-right as those Rightists who are infused with white supremacy. I haven’t asked Pinker who he meant here, but I assume that, since the definition of “alt-right” is a bit nebulous, Pinker is using the conception of “alt-right” that I used to have: the extreme right. Under that notion, there are smart and literate people on the extreme right. I can’t think of many, because I don’t know many hyperconservatives, but Ben Shapiro comes to mind.

Since most people think “alt-right” means “white supremacists on the right”, Pinker may have made a tactical error here. But so what? The main point of his spiel is that there are facts about the world that are being censored or dismissed by the Authoritarian Left and many colleges; that those facts and their denial, if not properly put into context, could lead people toward the right or even the alt-right; and that progressives have to face those facts and show the world how they don’t erode progressive liberalism one bit. To concentrate on one awkward statement about the “alt right” is to deliberately ignore Pinker’s message in order to smear him. It’s no surprise that the clips used to tar him cut off after three minutes.

Here’s another take on Twitter:

Pinker: the alt right is bad and we need to develop strategies to stop otherwise intelligent people from being drawn to them

idiots: OMG PINKER SAID THE ALT RIGHT IS FULL OF GENIUSES THAT DIRTY WHITE SUPREMACIST — evidence-based vulnerable fetus diversity (@andre_finger) January 10, 2018

UPDATE: Grania called my attention to a new article at Concrete Milkshake that analyzes misrepresentation of both Pinker’s and Sam Harris’s views, including the Harvard video: “Playing dumb: The masochism of misrepresentation.”

And there’s a new short piece by Pinker in Time Magazine: “Harvard professor Steven Pinker on why we refuse to see the bright side, even though we should.” It’s his explanation about why people remain pessimistic in a world of progress. (h/t: Enrico)