Stephen Pinker slides down the slippery slope of a public intellectual

Stephen Pinker is in the news again, and again, not in a good way.

The Harvard psychologist and bestselling author Steven Pinker appeared on the podcast of Aporia, an outlet whose owners advocate for a revival of race science and have spoken of seeking “legitimation by association” by platforming more mainstream figures.

The appearance underlines past incidents in which Pinker has encountered criticism for his association with advocates of so-called “human biodiversity”, which other academics have called a “rebranding” of racial genetic essentialism and scientific racism.
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Patrik Hermansson, a researcher at UK anti-racism non-profit Hope Not Hate, said that Pinker’s “decision to appear on Aporia, a far-right platform for scientific racism, provides an invaluable service to an extremist outlet by legitimising its content and attracting new followers”.

He added: “By lending his Harvard credentials to Aporia, Pinker contributes to the normalisation and spread of dangerous, discredited ideas.”

This is just the latest controversy that Pinker has found himself in. Just recently he, along with Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, resigned from the board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation because the foundation removed a blog post by Coyne.
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Musk’s groveling to Trump begins

Like almost all the Republicans who were once critical of Trump for whatever reason, Elon Musk has started his rehabilitation process by groveling to Trump.

Elon Musk is walking back his attacks against President Donald Trump. Just days after a furious barrage of posts on X, the Tesla CEO is trying to make amends.

“I regret some of my posts about President @realDonaldTrump last week,” the former director of DOGE wrote in a late-night post on X. “They went too far.”  
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This might be Musk’s second olive branch. On June 8, Musk shared a post from Trump on X, in which the president declared an “invasion” in Los Angeles, proclaiming that it will be “set free.” Musk added two American flag emojis to his repost.

I don’t think this will be enough. Musk will have to make several abject apologies and also praise Trump to get back into his good graces.

Is LA a rehearsal for the nationwide June 14th protests?

The recent flare up in the Los Angeles area caused by ICE agents sweeping up people for deportation without warrants has escalated as Trump has commandeered the California National Guard, over the objection of California governor Gavin Newsom, and also sent in Federal troops, both moves being of highly dubious legality, only supposed to be done in the case of war or a national emergency. The events in Los Angeles are clearly nothing of the sort. What sending those troops in did was inflame the situation and cause even more trouble.

Trump is as usual lying about everything.

Trump and Newsom’s rift continued with ferocity on Tuesday.

Trump, who has suggested Newsom should be arrested, said he spoke to Newsom by phone “a day ago” and told him: “He’s gotta do a better job.”

“There was no call. Not even a voicemail,” Newsom responded on social media. “Americans should be alarmed that a president deploying marines on to our streets doesn’t even know who he’s talking to.”

But the local community was uncowed by the presence of heavily armed and militarized personnel in riot gear and masks patrolling the streets and forming barricades. They defied the soldiers. Via Pharyngula I saw this image of a young person with a skateboard insouciantly ignoring whatever projectiles and gas grenades were being fired at him and, after dancing in front of the troops, calmly walked away and gave them the finger.

Just before the previous clip, the skater kid was practically taunting the Border Patrol agents by dancing around their munitions shots.

[image or embed]

— Jeremy Lindenfeld (@jeremotographs.bsky.social) June 7, 2025 at 3:47 PM


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NIH scientists risk careers to stand up for the public good

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health have signed a declaration protesting the deep cuts in public health research and sent it to their boss Jay Bhattacharya, the head of the NIH, as well as to RFK, Jr., secretary of Health and Human Services, the cabinet office that oversees the NIH.

Named for the agency’s headquarters location in Maryland, the Bethesda Declaration details upheaval in the world’s premier public health research institution over the course of mere months.

It addresses the termination of 2,100 research grants valued at more than $12 billion and some of the human costs that have resulted, such as cutting off medication regimens to participants in clinical trials or leaving them with unmonitored device implants.

In one case, an NIH-supported study of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis in Haiti had to be stopped, ceasing antibiotic treatment mid-course for patients.

In a number of cases, trials that were mostly completed were rendered useless without the money to finish and analyze the work, the letter says. “Ending a $5 million research study when it is 80% complete does not save $1 million,” it says, “it wastes $4 million.”

Jenna Norton, who oversees health disparity research at the agency’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, recently appeared at a forum by Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., to talk about what’s happening at the NIH.

At the event, she masked to conceal her identity. Now the mask is off. She was a lead organizer of the declaration.

“I want people to know how bad things are at NIH,” Norton told The Associated Press.
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Employees from all 27 NIH institutes and centers gave their support to the declaration. Most who signed are intimately involved with evaluating and overseeing extramural research grants.

The letter asserts “NIH trials are being halted without regard to participant safety” and the agency is shirking commitments to trial participants who “braved personal risk to give the incredible gift of biological samples, understanding that their generosity would fuel scientific discovery and improve health.”

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A plague on both their houses

The fight between Trump and Musk is lasting longer than I expected. This article describes the leverage that each has and the harm that each can do to the other.

The. problem for Musk is that Trump has all the levers of government (especially the justice department) and a pliant Republican party at his disposal. Forced to choose between getting Trump’s endorsement and MAGA support for their election efforts and Musk’s money, they will opt for Trump. The fact that Musk spent $25 million on the race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court seat only to have his chosen candidate lose by double digits will make them think that he is a paper tiger and that his threats to fund opposing candidates in the primaries and general election (or even start a new political party) may not amount to as much as alienating Trump.

Musk mainly has his money (although that is considerable), his social media platform Twitter/X, and the companies like SpaceX and Starlink that the government is dependent upon. While Musk can harm the government by withdrawing the Dragon space program from NASA and not providing Starlink services to various parts of the world (like Ukraine), he will also be hurting himself since they provide a huge source of revenue in the form of government contracts. Meanwhile Trump does not give a damn about who else Musk hurts, even if he targets major US government programs. He only cares about his own power and money and ego.
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Finally! Kilmar Ábrego García (and another) returned after illegal deportations

When El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele visited the White House, he and Trump seemed to be treating the case of Kilmar Ábrego García, who had been wrongly deported by Trump to that country and was being held in a controversial mega-prison, as a joke. Trump coyly said that there was nothing he could do since Ábrego García was now under the jurisdiction of Bukele, and Bukele in turn said that he would not be released, despite demands from a US federal judge that he be returned. Then suddenly today, Ábrego García was brought back.

But that is not the end of his ordeal. The attorney general Pam Bondi has said that he faces criminal charges here.

In a press briefing on Friday, the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, said that a federal grand jury in Tennessee had indicted the 29-year-old father on counts of illegally smuggling undocumented people as well as of conspiracy to commit that crime.
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In a statement to the Hill on Friday, Ábrego García’s lawyer Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg accused the Trump administration of having “disappeared” his client “to a foreign prison in violation of a court order”.

“Now, after months of delay and secrecy, they’re bringing him back, not to correct their error but to prosecute him,” he added.

Sandoval-Moshenberg also said: “This shows that they were playing games with the court all along. Due process means the chance to defend yourself before you’re punished – not after.”

Sandoval-Moshenberg said the White House’s treatment of his client was “an abuse of power, not justice”. He called on Ábrego García to face the same immigration judge who had previously granted him a federal protection order against deportation to El Salvador “to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent” there.
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Ábrego García also had no criminal record in the US before the indictment announced on Friday, according to court documents.

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The circus monkeys are running wild

When I posted yesterday about the Trump administration having rapidly moved into chaos territory, I wondered whether I might be overstating the matter. I need not have worried. Today saw a sudden explosion of social media posts between Trump and Musk where they go at each other like two bratty children who once jointly bullied everyone else but now suddenly find themselves at each other’s throats.

I was initially skeptical that this feud was genuine. I had a suspicion that Musk was worried because his Tesla company was in free fall because of anger over his cavalier wrecking of many agencies of government. This was supposedly to cut costs and eliminate the nearly two trillion dollar deficit but now has analysts saying that at best it might cut just $150 billion in the short term and even that might disappear when the final accounting is done, while the long term costs will be considerable. Since many of the people who buy electric vehicles are doing so over concern of the environment and are thus more likely to identify with liberal politics and the Democratic party, I thought that Musk might be trying to ingratiate himself with those same people. That might still be true but the level of venom that Trump and Musk have publicly spewed forth in such a short time suggests that this is not some manufactured conflict where they are still buddies behind the scenes. It is hard to realize that just a short while ago, Trump was acting like a shill for Tesla cars, promoting them at an event at the White House.
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The double pendulum as a metaphor for the Trump administration

Trump seems to be careening ever-more erratically day by day. He started out by seeming to have some kind of plan, such as imposing tariffs, getting rid of anything that addressed the needs of marginalized groups such as DEI programs, deporting huge numbers of people for the flimsiest reasons, firing as many government employees as he could, and cutting research funding for science. While these measures were disastrous for the general well-being of the country, they were within the framework of the agenda of the extreme rightwing nutjobs who had his ear.

But then as the pushback came, as it surely would, with judges especially thwarting his efforts because of their blatant illegality, Trump seemed to go utterly berserk, responding to each and every setback with new executive orders that border on the farcical. His multiple reversals on tariffs are but one example. His war with Harvard University is not the most serious of his rampages but is emblematic. He seems to be furious with that university because they have stood up to his actions so he responds with even more absurd executive orders, such as forbidding visas for any foreign students hoping to enroll there. To issue an executive order targeting a single university is a sign of a deranged mind.
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Trump reveals his weakness with China

Trump has been boasting that the large tariffs he slapped on many countries (and then reduced, and then reintroduced, and then suspended, and then … well, you get the idea) had the effect of the heads of those countries begging to talk to him and make deals that would be favorable to the US. Maybe, maybe not. So far there have been few concrete deals announced.

But one place where that has definitely not happened is with the most important trading country of all, and that is China. They have clearly called his bluff and now it is Trump who seems to be pleading with the Chinese premier Xi Jinping to take his call but Xi is playing it cool.
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Musk’s costly trail of damage

Elon Musk and Donald Trump made grandiose promises on the campaign trail about by how much they would cut the federal budget. After starting with the preposterous figure of two trillion dollars, they later reduced it to a smaller but still preposterous figure of one trillion, a figure that Susan Glasser writes that no one who had spent a day in Washington gave any credence to. In fact, these DOGE cuts may end up costing the government more money.

Musk is leaving government (so he says) and people are looking at the wreckage he leaves behind.

The reviews of Musk’s rampage through Washington have been, deservedly, vicious: Who, during the past few crazy months, could have possibly failed to take note of his toxic combination of entitlement and ignorance, his vastly overstated claims, and his move-fast-and-break-things ethos that has resulted in wreckage that will take years to fully assess?
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In a round of exit interviews this week, Musk has sounded all the predictable notes of a naïve billionaire businessman mugged by Washington’s political reality.
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In an interview on “CBS News Sunday Morning,” he started the messy work of separating himself from the President. “I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly,” Musk admitted, given that Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for the poor will add trillions of dollars to the budget deficit. Stating the obvious, which, these days, counts as an act of lèse-majesté among the Republican sycophants who surround Trump, Musk added that the measure “undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.”
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