If you ever thought Steven Pinker was a member of the liberal intelligentsia, think again. That was his carefully maintained facade, an illusion built on his politeness and careful speech, but underneath it all, he really is a kind of troglodyte with regressive views. Like so many right-wing podcasters, he’s been hiding behind free speech absolutism; whenever some horrid troll says something that ought to get them slapped down hard, here comes little Stevie, the Harvard professor, to defend them with a shout of “Free Speech!”

He’s had a long history of playing this gambit, and it’s starting to catch up with him. Virginia Heffernan lays out all the evidence, prompted by yet another book from the man. It must be hard on him to see his legacy dissolve.

But something’s not right. Pinker’s off his cognitive game. He’s admittedly had a hard stretch over the past few years, during which his reputation has sustained slow-rolling but significant damage. His glory days – from The Language Instinct in 1994 to his selection by Time magazine as a top evo-psych influencer in 2004 – may simply be behind him now. And though Bill Gates, Joe Rogan, Richard Dawkins, Jordan Peterson and other masters of the manosphere continue to look up to him, Pinker’s also at the centre of a cyclone of academic catastrophes.

For one, he’s still smarting from a six-year-old petition that tried in vain to get him removed from a linguistics association for alleged racist statements. “In the old days,” he said of cancellation culture on a recent podcast, “there were public hangings, public crucifixions, burnings at the stake. The electronic equivalent is the internet petition with 600 signatures.”

There’s the weak point of all those “free speech” claims. It’s really ‘free speech for me, not for thee’ if, when someone exercises their free speech to accuse him of racism, why, that’s comparable to a public crucifixion in his mind. These days he’s remarkably busy, since so many of his friends have done so many odious things, and he has to race around defending them all while trying not to muss his hair.

In his hard-won role as a public intellectual, Pinker has taken it upon himself to defend the freedom of anti-woke darlings to say and do whatever they want. These include the British philosopher and alleged sex pest Colin McGinn, the American academic fraud Marc Hauser, and the American “race realist” Nathan Cofnas, who ignited the media campaign against Professor Jason Arday.

Notably, too, Pinker worked with his friend Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard lawyer, on the legal defence of their associate, the eugenicist and child rapist Jeffrey Epstein.

And now his intellectual child, evolutionary psychology, is in trouble.

And if stumping for the outlaw brotherhood weren’t taxing enough, Pinker’s domain of study has quietly collapsed. Evolutionary psychology, which he pioneered, came under a cloud after the exposure of its iffy methodology (in which its claims can’t be disproven), and controversies over race science (in which racial hierarchies are biological) and rape apologetics (in which rape is a reproductive strategy). Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED, yes, PED), where Pinker was a regular, closed ignominiously in 2021.

News of the death of evolutionary psychology may be premature — that collection of ugly misinterpretations of science is remarkably resilient, drawing as it does on the never-ending wellspring of racism and sexism. I wouldn’t count it out just yet, even if I do wish it would truly go away. I don’t think Pinker is the knight in shining armor who will rescue it. His reputation is finally being tarnished.

In 2019, Pinker’s reputation took its biggest hit when his clandestine ties to Epstein surfaced. It seemed that Epstein had hosted Pinker on his jet, nicknamed the Lolita Express, and the men appeared in friendly photos together. Part of their relationship was Pinker’s starring role at Edge, a masculinist network of billionaires and academics that Epstein bankrolled and used to advance his plans for a master race. (I was a lesser light in Edge; that story is told here.)

Then there’s something darker: the evidence that Pinker helped Dershowitz with Epstein’s legal defence in 2007 – and did so knowingly, as was recently reported by the anthropologist Cathryn Townsend in Liberal Currents. (Pinker says he didn’t know which of Dershowitz’s clients he was helping.) Then in 2015 he tweeted out Dershowitz’s defence of Epstein and the former Prince Andrew.

Follow that link to the story of Edge — I was also a lesser light in that community, and wasn’t involved long enough to perceive how dark and evil that group was. But wow, did I ever dodge a bullet there.

He can’t help himself. He tends to ally himself with the worst people who are eventually exposed, and he’s left holding a bag of excuses.

Pinker, who never met an anti-woke campaign he didn’t like, recently joined the crusade of “race realist” Cofnas against Arday, the onetime Cambridge sociologist and suspected plagiarist who died last month. On X, Pinker grieved not over Arday’s presumed suicide but the fact that he and Cofnas had been been “tarred” with charges of racism for their attacks on him.

Metaphors that turn speech acts into medieval torture have become Pinker’s stock-in trade. For a man whose academic field was built largely on faulty studies (a devastating 2015 study found that more than half of psychology studies could not be replicated) to ignore the intellectual fraud in his circle and lash out at people like Arday for bad scholarship – well, psychologists used to call that projection, but Lord knows if those studies hold up.

Heffernan does not recommend Pinker’s latest book.

Skip the new book. The once-sharp Pinker has trouble landing a point these days, and it’s even a little worrying to see a don of his stature reduced this way. Pinker already blocks me on X for pointing out his ties to Epstein, so I’m sure he won’t see this piece and fear me as a hangman. (See “Free Speech Crusader Blocking Anyone Mentioning His Epstein Ties.”) But if he does, I will be careful not to say something violent. You read this piece, Professor? Perhaps you felt your blood pressure rise…

Thanks for the suggestion, but reading anything by Pinker has not been on my to-do list for many years. I will skip it. I’m not at all interested in anything by an Epstein apologist.