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.
Are any of his books worth reading? Somebody gave me Enlightenment now and The Fourth Chimpanzee. I haven’t read either yet.
@1: Better Angels of Our Nature has been strongly criticized by historians, and Enlightenment Now is apparently even worse. Since he’s using history as data to make his argument, that’s pretty damning. And I liked the former at the time (my copy is even autographed!) — it gave me a little hope that the long moral arc of the universe just might bend, however painfully slowly, towards justice).
I really liked Pinker’s The Language Instinct (1994). That was well within his professional wheelhouse. But when I read The Blank Slate (2004), I thought he was getting polemical and strawmannish (if strawmannish isn’t a word yet, it should be), and I gave up on reading Pinker. I also enjoyed some early stuff from his wife Rebecca Goldstein.
submoron @ # 1: … The Fourth Chimpanzee…?
No such title showed up in my brief searches, w/ & w/out Pinker’s name.
Confusion perhaps with the Third Chimpanzee (1991) by Jared Diamond?
Cancel culture is one of those “Woke 1.0” fads that overplayed its hand and thankfully fell out of style after academia tried using it for the sake of Israel and, later, for people who said bad words about Charlie Kirk. People outside of academia and corporate America utterly loathe it — at this point it’s just backfiring and creating more public interest in its targets (e.g. Hasan Piker).
Normally I would say Pinker will do just fine weathering the storm, but he hasn’t tried to stay relevant for a while. Obscurity will probably get him before an anemic cancel culture does.
Erp @ 5. Thankyou Erp! It was in a pile of books in a dark corner and I saw it next to The Language instinct. I should have used a torch for some light. Mea culpa.
Honestly, a lot of things we do tend to use history to describe them, especially in psychology. This is kind of the problem with psychology as a discipline in general – it relies on examining behavior, almost entirely, while not having an explanation for “how” that behavior arises. Its descriptive, not explanative, in a bloody lot of cases. Still, you can get useful results out of descriptions of behavior, and descriptions of outcomes from trying to adjust that behavior. And, to be clear, there is “some” overlap with biology, in which you can get explanative results, as in, “If X is present, or absent, it can cause Y behavior(s).”, its just.. not an exact thing, and you can get wildly different outcomes, depending on the individual, in reaction to such. So… in simplest terms, I never thought there was any real problem with evolutionary psychology “in principle”, and it could provide real explanative results, eventually. The problem with it was almost always, from the beginning, Pinker, and the people trying to explain multilayer, complex, complicated behaviors, with wildly different sources, but similar characteristics, using one f-ing gene. For example – is the behavior of pack predators the “same” as that of animals living in family groups, or are these convergent, and able to adapt into an overlapping coexistence, that would otherwise not be plausible? We don’t really know, but I am sure some idiot in Pinker’s circle, if they where not so bloody busy trying to excuse misogyny, would have come up with some single gene for it….
Best comparison I can come up with, from my own experience, would be trying to reverse engineer and operating system, and its behaviors, based on observation of how the file system stores porn and right wing rants on physical media, and declaring that the explanation has something to do with a single system call, which totally explains the behavior of how all those “specific” files ended up on their own drives. Silly things like a) the entire rest of the OS, b) the internet, or c) external input – i.e, them writing the bullshit, and surfing porn sites, being somehow “incidental” to how it got there.
Its not that the idea of looking at genetics was bad… just that it became very quickly obvious that they had narrowed its focus so far that their arguments rapidly started sounding like the flat earther I saw a vid on a bit ago, who argued that his utter misunderstanding of how freaking maps work, or get created, meant that humans had not been around to create them, but that, somehow, their “accuracy” was all due to them having been created by gods, and… uh, at that point he completely lost me, since how “we” got them from the gods, if gods made the maps… yeah, no, still getting headache trying to comprehend his nonsense, but.. yeah, same feeling reading Pinker’s idiocy.
The closer you look at Pinker and his scholarship, the worse he looks.
A lot of his books are mostly quote mining, misquoting, making stuff up, logical fallacies, dubious sources, and a lot of pointless insults.
After a while, you realize you have better ways to spend your time and write him off as a kook and fraud.
Data.
There is a lot but this is one example.
If you look up Pinker’s references, most of the time they don’t say what he says they say.
This isn’t scholarship, it is Fox NoNews level propaganda.
I lost interest in evo psych at least a decade ago because there wasn’t anything there worth paying attention to.
In principle it could explain things because we are products of genes and environment.
It hasn’t worked yet.
The problem with evo psych is that human behavior is very flexible so it explains nothing.
A lot of human behavior is shaped by upbringing, learning, and cultural environment, not genetics.
We don’t even know what the limits are to human behavioral and cultural flexibility.
Hmm…
Heffernan’s article contains a lot that’s interesting, and pretty damning of “Edge” but also this:
Which is, to put it politely, a load of crap. They are simply a problem-solving technique in computer science, which sometimes works well, and sometimes doesn’t. Heffernan should be more careful not to make silly pronouncements in areas where she knows nothing.
The sad thing is that the New York Times (cf. https://archive.ph/xzo9c) cites Pinker as having stated that he was “voted off” the Epstein island, whereas in the article you linked (and where there is also mention of a Virginia Giuffre reference to a “Professor Stephen”, who was almost certainly mentioned only in speech, for otherwise his second name would have been given, where she claimed that she was forced to mate with him) Pinker claims to never have entered Epstein’s island.
The disappointment (if the accusation is true) would be bitter. I must have listened to half a dozen YouTube speeches of the guy, including one on good science writing.
The one glimmer of hope is that Pinker argued against starvation and reduced healthcare as proposed by Epstein.
I’m not sure how to judge this case. For one thing, nothing is quite proved yet, though it looks dim. For another, if the speculation is true, what were the circumstances? How old was Giuffre at the time? Could Pinker have known about her age? Or her suffering in her position? Did she propose the mating in that encounter after being asked to do so by Epstein?
Since I’m having a nasty cold, I’ve taken the time of watching one of his recent interviews: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zhK8X2zGes
I’m not ready to judge the man by one possible mistake (that due to age he’s unlikely to re-commit).
He still seems to fit the bill for liberal intelligentsia as far as I can tell.
#11: I agree. Unfortunately, the association of a group of racist pedophiles with a legitimate computational technique is poisoning that field — another harm that these guys have done.
No.
We, meaning PZ Myers and almost all of Pharyngula and Freethoughtblogs are part of the liberal intelligentsia.
Pinker is not one of us!!!
He is at best a pretender and falls more into the category of fake scholar and fake neoliberal.
He is like Richard Dawkins, right on one or two things and wrong on a whole lot more.
Crediting Pinker with founding evolutionary psychology is a little problematic — the basic concepts were developed in the 1970s, when Pinker was still a student, and Donald Symons is usually cited as the originator of the field, esp his book The Evolution of Human Sexuality — and some historians, of course, trace the roots of Evo Psy to sociobiology by 1975. As far as I recall, Pinker didn’t start working on anything that would count as evolutionary psychology until 1990. Just a quibble….
Wow. Naked well-poisoning right there. Informative.
“anti-woke” is enough of a label for me.
#6 Beholder if that was your way of saying that shaming does not work on the rich & powerful , yes we know. It is not necessarily a good thing.
I guess I gotta do something to dissuade Pinker’s bulldog from linking the OP, but he might be out of commission due to cataract surgery today and maybe a few more. Been there. All I gotta say for PSA purposes is keep an eye out for posterior vitreous detachment a few years down the road and subsequent concerns of retinal involvement.
As for Punker, I wish Gould was still alive. He was the bogey of that set given exaptation and spandrels threw too much complexity into ev psych theorizing to take the field all that seriously. No wonder Gould was demonized and Pinker became more a polemicist than serious intellectual. His wife had interesting stuff to say on PBS Closer to Truth, but that show wound up being itself way too close to Epstein and became too much religiously oriented woo for me to continue watching. Sad stuff.
There was actually some Templeton funded free will stuff from FSU (I think) that was worthwhile.
Also that dingbats like Pinker and Coyne posed as knowledgable on Critical Theory while not knowing Habermas from Benhabib from Marcuse is a travesty. They bought Lindsay and Rufo hook, line, and sinker and conflated Frankfurt school with French pomo like the ignorant pseudointellectual slobs they are. They personify the right wing pipeline perfectly.
Also the thing I was expecting that didn’t happen. Weird ass PVD ocular anomalies instead. A scary ring of light in the periphery. This could still be next:
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24737-posterior-capsular-opacification
Also called secondary cataract. Fun stuff.
Speak for yourself. I hold a few liberal values (free speech, free inquiry, free association, freedom of movement, and bodily autonomy), but the ongoing failure of free markets and free trade cannot be ignored. Liberals are worse than useless when proposing solutions to environmental problems for this reason.
Notably on the problems posed by anthropogenic global warming and the resulting climate change, liberals aren’t even trying to provide answers. They still claim that it’s not really happening. It’s been a liberal retreat from reality on that front, which allows eco-fascism to sneak in and provide an alternative framing that walls ethnostate franchises off in little fortresses, secured from the threat of immigration.
It’s going to take some decidedly illiberal approaches to solve humanity’s great challenges this century. Liberals had all the resources available to make their strongest case and they have failed.
beholder, you do amuse with your schtick.
Nonsense. Your yearning for authoritarian despotism is duly noted.
You are saying they have failed to ‘make their case’.
Heh.
Despite having .
Ignoring that half the population is below average (by definition) is convenient, no?
Like you, rather clueless as to the reality.
People literally voted Trump into power for a second term, and you for sure didn’t vote strategically, did ya?
You literally exhorted people to not vote for the alternative to Trump. This is factual.
But fine, you want a tyranny? A kleptocracy? An autarchy?
(care to specify which illiberal regime you claim is needful? I think you are a bit too cowardly for that)
@beholder
Fixed it for ya.
Although I can’t really tell whether this is sarcasm or you are trolling. And besides, it all just depends on what definition of “liberal” you are using. Your US “liberals” at best are centrists or right of center here in Europe. But in no way are they what you described in your little screed.
Best for you to just go away.
As a complete aside, I am again disappointed that “the former Prince Andrew” seems to have become the accepted form, when the far more amusing “the Andrew formerly known as Prince” is right there.
Dave Taylor #17:
Yeah, I’d trace the beginnings of “evolutionary psychology” to at least “Sociobiology” EO Wilson 1975, long before Pinker got into it.
@ 26. M’thew: I strongly second that last recommendation for our Trump supporting troll here.
“Beholder” is a known Trumpist troll – they are trolling. They are NOT here in good faith and are misrepresenting who they are although with an ever thinner façade. They aren’t even bothering to deny their support for Trump much these days.
.***
@ The Trump supporting bad faith troll “beholder” – 22nd September 2026 at 10:51 pm
Yet you betrayed those values completely by supporting Trump over Kamala Harris and took those away or greatly eroded all those things, traitor.
Who is ignoring that exactly? Trump has made things worse NOT better when it comes to those – yet you support him still.
Liar. Yes liberals (in the USoA-ite sense of that word) and have provided answers. See :
https://www.dncclimate.org/policy-agenda
Trump and the Repugs OTOH, are Climate Deniers and environmental vandals of the very worst and most extreme sort and yet you support Trump still.
The retreat from reality here is by you and your Trumpist side of politics – also Jill Stein& Wets retreat from the political reality that there are only two parties that will take the office of POTUS and control Congress either the non-Fascist Democratic party or the Fascist Repug Trump cult party. You Trumpy troll ”beholder” put ecocidal Climate Criminals in power by working to undermine the Democratic party and Kamala Harris’es presidential campaign and nobody should ever let you memory hole that.
What “eco-fascism” exactly? Whose “eco-fascism” precisely?
Immigration? Thought we were talking about Global Overheating here. You cannot wall states off from changes that effects our entre planetary atmosphere, cryosphere and hydrosphere. Ultimately nations do need migrants economically and the totalitarian model will lead to catastrophe. Are you somehow saying migrants are the problem here ecologically or with Global Overheating disingenuous troll “beholder?”
So you oppose liberal approaches and prefer totalitarian ones then. I am not surprised. Its increasingly obvious what sort of evil person you are.
Have they tho? You think Trumpist fascism will succeed instead?
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BTW HAPPY EQUINOX everyone!
(Well, everyone except the trolls.)
@16 people like Beholder, neo-liberalism, and other water-muddying efforts have pretty much eliminated any clear meaning to the word liberal. At this point, unfortunately, unless you list specific policies, the word no longer works as a short-hand to explain what you support.
Good point.
People don’t even use the word “liberal” much any more.
More often we are progressives.
Conservative has had a meaning shift as well.
It is now more like fascist or authoritarian.
@raven:
‘Conservative’ has always had different meanings in different countries, too.
Look up the Wikipedia page for ‘Red Tory’. It has always been a branch of conservative thinking in Canada, but not really in the U.S. Short version is that these are very much paternalistic ‘noblesse oblige’ conservatives; people who take the ‘socially liberal, fiscally conservative’ concept seriously and try to make it work, rather than just using it as a platitude to get people to vote for them. You can crack down on criminals but everybody should have the chance not to be one. Differences in social strata are fine as long as the people on top make sure that the people on the bottom still have opportunities.
Granted, the Red Tories haven’t been a significant force here for a while now. Brian Mulroney was our version of Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, a leader who took Conservatism in the country off in a more individualistic/libertarian direction and largely abandoned the older community aspects.
Jenora Feuer @32: Yeah, for old farts like me (unless memory is playing tricks), Bill Davis, Peter Lougheed, Joe Clarke and Hugh Segal come to mind.
Then you can’t tell very far.
Well liberal is a quite polysemic word. After FDR it came to mean something more along the lines of the progressives as they (and some socialists) previously sullied themselves in a creepy eugenic circle jerk.
The classical liberals were kinda dovetailing with what libertarian means in the US now. Liberal may still mean pro-capitalist now. Mont Pelerin and the subsequent advent of neoliberalism and Clinton/Blair third way didn’t help nail the term down outside the derision of conservative polemicists still caught up in a McCarthyite fervor.
After all that I’d rather call myself center-left or progressive (sensu current era) though the DSA has some appeal for me. Liberal seems too old guard, Boomer, and reactionary for my tastes.
[meta]
Yes, the label is fraught.
Not relying on the bot, but using it as a sounding board (Googlebot, the freebie), which of course is always wrong and always slop. For entertainment purposes only.
Iteration 1: ‘The liberal intelligentsia refers to the social stratum of educated professionals including academics, writers, journalists, artists, and scientists who champion and disseminate liberal political and cultural values.’
But that is circular, no?
Iteration 2: ‘The liberal intelligentsia refers to the social stratum of educated professionals such as academics, writers, journalists, and artists who use their intellectual status to promote individual rights, empirical skepticism, secular governance, and social progress through institutional reform.’
But that restricts it to old-fashioned enlightenment values, so:
Iteration 3: ‘The liberal intelligentsia is a social stratum of intellectual professionals who critique traditional, nationalist, or authoritarian power structures by advocating for reformed state institutions, systemic equity, and evidence-based policy, while continually debating the balance between individual liberties and collective welfare.’
Well, I nearly stopped there. But we don’t want a surfeit of asymptotic approach, do we? :)
Erp @5 of submoron @1:
That’s another popsci author to avoid. Notably Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) and Collapse (2005) were received poorly by experts. Dunno about that book.
Wikipedia – Jared Diamond
@ ^ CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain & #5 Erp : This book ? See :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Chimpanzee
Then there’s The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris.
StevoR @38: I linked the author for an overview of all his books’ reception. Third Chimp was listed first. Wikipedia didn’t mention a backlash to Third Chimp over inaccuracies, and I hadn’t read it myself.
…but the ongoing failure of free markets and free trade cannot be ignored. Liberals are worse than useless when proposing solutions to environmental problems for this reason.
Which “liberals” are you talking about?
Aw, thanks! You too, StevoR.
It’s not that complicated. My usage of the term “liberal” can be inferred from context. You know, free markets, free trade, the free world. The Limbaugh-era boomers may have forgotten what it meant, though.
Liberals are individualistic. “No one can tell me what to do with my [X].” My speech, my body, my choices, my reading material, my money, my property, my transactions. I agree with some of these values.
A liberal worldview and a planet’s delicate life support systems do not mix. Fundamentally illiberal practices are needed to safeguard the environment — the need to step in and say, “No, you can’t do that.”
We really need a political vocabulary overhaul. No idea how to pull it off, though. When a wingnut calls me a liberal, I’m fine with that. When a self-described liberal berates me for refusing to compromise with MAGA and/or Trump on basic civil rights, I hate them.
My usage of the term “liberal” can be inferred from context. You know, free markets, free trade, the free world.
Sounds like you’re a libertarian. They’re not “liberal” at all, they’re America’s version of fascism. And yes, fascists have always pretended to be “individualistic” too: brave heroes boldly taking what they want and brushing aside all the Nattering Nabobs of Negativism who stand in their way — including uppity workers, unions, elected officials, democratic institutions, and civil society itself.
Rob Grigjanis @#33:
Honestly, Mark Carney is pretty much an old-school Red Tory. It’s just that the modern Conservative party in Canada no longer really has any place for them, so a number of the folks who are what used to be Red Tories are in the Liberal party instead. Many of the actual Red Tories (like Joe Clark) ended up trying to hang on to the old Progressive Conservative party as long as they could, or ran as independents, before retiring.
Raging Bee @#43:
In the essay “Guided by the Beauty of their Weapons” back in 2015 or so (as part of the whole Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies thing where loud Conservative writers tried to brigade the Hugo awards for Science Fiction), El Sandifer described fascism and neo-fascism as less a political position and more an aesthetic, involving:
– A myth of a lost Golden Age
– A feeling of being stabbed in the back to lose that Golden Age
– The existence of a Strong Man who is more powerful than mere laws and who will defeat the traitors to bring back the Golden Age by force
For an essay written before Trump got into power, it describes the whole MAGA movement rather well. Because, frankly, we have seen this all before. As the same essay notes, this is a thing that tends to show up every few generations, occasionally taking power, and when it does, always disastrously because while it’s great at weaponizing people’s feelings of dissent, it never really has good plans to fix the fundamental problems that they claim are somebody else’s fault. It’s not really a philosophy at all so much as a cover for personal grievances, and as such can never really build anything long term.
Fascism is the ultimate ‘vibes’ politics.
Not really, no. I’m too Marxist for their antisocialism, but congratulations for figuring out what I mean when I talk about liberals.
@45: So…you’re congratulating me for figuring out that you’re full of shit? Okay, compliment taken I guess…
Marxist-Maoist or Marxist-Leninist? :)
But fine. You want to get rid of private ownership.
Therefore, you advocated for not voting against Trump, in order for the workers’ paradise to happen.
Fair enough, too. Definitely progress towards illiberalism, just not your preferred version.
But then, we already know your polemic always tends towards accelerationism — vote the worst way possible, so that change may come sooner. Agitate against the more reasonable politicians, that the loons will gain ascendance.
—
Here, for you: https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/illiberalism-as-anti-liberalism/
But then, we already know your polemic always tends towards accelerationism — vote the worst way possible, so that change may come sooner…
I remember seeing a bumper-sticker in 1972 that said “Hasten the revolution – vote Nixon!” Spoiler-alert — lots of people voted for Nixon, and the revolution didn’t get hastened. That was the extremist political gamesmanship of last century: each extreme aggravating and highlighting the other extreme to justify or excuse their own, and ganging up on all “moderates” while pretending to be mortal enemies. And (ironically?) yester-century’s far left support of far-right fascism may have been engineered in large part by far-right COINTELPRO manipulation.
I think that part of the cause of the confusion about the meaning of “liberal” in the USA specifically goes back to the time of FDR and the New Deal. The New Deal included some policies that were moderately socialist or at least social democratic, but the term “socialist” had already been badly smeared in the USA by the 1930s. Supporters of the New Deal supposedly adopted the term “liberal” as an alternate label to describe themselves that would resonate with a wider part of the public. This caused confusion because the rest of the world continued to use the original 19th century political meaning of “liberal” – a believer in strong individual rights but also strong property rights and minimal government intervention in the economy, closer to “libertarian” in modern US terms. Then in the late 20th century the terminology got still more confused in the USA when advocates of deregulation and privatization started calling themselves “neoliberals”, even as the New Deal-derived definition of liberalism which advocated strong government regulation continued to be used by most people. And of course the political right succeeded in demonizing “liberal” for many people in the same way their predecessors had once demonized “socialist”.
@ Trump Supporting Disingenuous Troll “beholder – #41, #45, #24 :
You can pretend to be whatever but your actions, your years and continuing constant attacks on ONLY the Democratic Party prove you are a MAGAt.
I notice you hardly bother even denying that these days.
FWIW Liberalism wikipage here :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
Not to be confused with Australia’s Liberal party which is actually regressive / “conservative” one.
@ ^ Clarity fix :
The Trumpy bad faith troll “beholder” can pretend and claim to be whatever but their words and actions over many years and counting of constant attacks on ONLY the Democratic Party and their candidates ignoring Trump being the vastly worse sole option prove the Trumpist Troll “beholder” is a MAGAt.
PS.
As a troll “beholder” you were explicitly excluded from those wishes and you know it.
I hope you get all you voted for and all the very worst possible consequences of the evil Orange Dictator you inflicted upon the entire world. I have little doubt sadly that you are too privileged and spoiled and well off for this to be the case and the suffering you have inficted upon those who unlike you do NOT deserve it is incalculable hence my well-justified fury at you and your ilk. Sometimes I really wish karma was real. Atho’ it’s hard to think of any adequate karmic fate for those who have killed us all by working to make Trump the tyrant he now is in his current position of total unaccountability, unchecked power and tyranny.
I wonder at what point “beholders” already exposed and obvious trolling will become enough to bring down the banhammer on them?
Gee, I wonder why that is?
StevoR, are you angry that I’m not region-locked to the silly U.S. usage of the term? That I use the term “liberal” the way the rest of the world does when I criticize them?
Happy equinox, StevoR!
No, beholder, we’re contemptuous of you because you’re using the word in the same deeply dishonest and malicious way as libertarians do. If you’re speaking to a mostly Anglo-American audience, you should use words according to what they mean to Anglo-Americans, not some other group. (Also, I seriously doubt “the rest of the world” uniformly uses that word as you say they do.)
Generally speaking, “liberal” means someone who wants to increase people’s liberty. Once upon a time that meant free markets and minimal government intervention in people’s lives (and actually that old historical narrative/myth has been credibly disputed). But circumstances have changed a LOT since then, and “liberal” more recently means much stronger state intervention to protect the weakest of us, enforce individual rights, regulate predatory business enterprises, and sometimes go to war to crush murderous tyrannical regimes abroad. Which is why people who OPPOSE increasing people’s liberty have started demonizing “liberals” in much the same way as they demonize “socialists.” And this is also why libertarians, and their uber-rich owners, try to co-opt the word “liberal” to pretend they want to liberate people, when in fact they only want to liberate themselves from the obligations of civil society.
QUESTION FOR PZ MYERS – Am I allowed to respond again here or do I need to wait for X other commenters to post here first and show “restraint” despite being blatantly trolled?
Do you see what the Dishonest Trump supporting troll “beholder” is doing here and are you okay with or happy about it?
Can’t help feeing the calls for restraint and multiple comments suggestion isn’t being applied consistently when some of us (eg birgerjohansson,John Morales & myself) get told to stop whilst others e.g. Silentbob as noted here :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/09/13/oh-no-ive-been-erased-from-history/#comment-2312344
get no such interventions. I do love your blog and commenting here and, of course, it is your blog, your rules / suggestions which I do try to follow but must admit I’m feeling aggrieved here.
@52. The Trump supporting bad faith toxic troll “beholder” :
Because Australian political history and the way words change over time and vary based upon context.
In the USA because of their political history, cultural evolution and the woefully low educational level of their populace “liberal”= left wing. As you well know and ignore using it to play silly semantic games and ignore the political realities.
You know what’s even less likely than the creationist mythology of how the universe began? The idea of a third party candidate being anything OTHER than a spoiler in a USA Presidential election. That’s the political reality denialism that you engage in and have done for years here. Yes, politically you and the rest of the Purity Disunity mob are the political equivalent of YEC creationists, anti-vaxxers and Climate Deniers.
No. I’m rightly furious that you are a bad faith Trumpist troll who has spent years working to make our world vastly WORSE. That you helped put Trump in power by undermining the left wing, liberal, decent humane alternative to him which was Kamala Harris and the Democratic party. That you are a disingenuous evil troll that has no place on this blog community and are blatantly pretending to be something you aren’t.
As you well fucking know already.
Intresting admission that you criticise “liberals” there. Because of course you are not a liberal in the sense of being at all left wing and you claiming otherwise shows you are on the other side of politics and again are NOT here in good faith on what is a liberal, left wing blog.
Its not the equinox now & you again are utterly dishonest and trolling. You have made every equinox for everyone but the Trump cultists & billionaires like Musk, Adelson & Thiel a far worse one needlessly. I hope you experience the full negative nightmarish consequences of the regime you have inflicted on us all.
Sadly, I have no doubt that you belong to categories that are too privileged to suffer the worst consequences you deserve.
You have, of course,frex made the genocide in Gaza far worse by putting Trump in charge thus ending the world of multilateral international law and ushering in the “jungle times” of Trump’s might makes right mindset. But also of course, you never actually cared about Gaza at all despite your cynical lies to the contrary and demonizing the better candidate and party on Gaza which was Kamala and the Democratic party.
Then there’s the Climate consequences, the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Trans people and migrants due to Trump’s fascist tyranny and so very much more.