This is The Reason Interview with Nicoleseby.

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My guest today is Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, a best-selling champion of enlightenment values.

Lord knows we need that. And a staunch critic of identity politics and the woke left.

We talk about whether DEI mandates and the anti-free speech forces on campus are really being

rolled back in higher education since last fall's election.

And we talk about the new threats to academic freedom and independent thinking that Trump

administration poses not just a Harvard, but every other college and university.

In a moment when many, many, many public figures and public intellectuals are calling for a religious revival,

Pinker makes the unapologetic case for secular humanism as the foundation for a flourishing

society.

And he also previews his forthcoming book on Common Knowledge, titled When Everyone Knows Everyone Knows,

and Out in September, the book explains everything from

political revolutions to moral panics to why sleepy Joe Biden finally bowed out of the 2024 race.

Here is the Reason interview with Steve Pinker.

Stephen Pinker, thanks for talking to Reese.

Nice to talk you, as always.

Let's start off by taking, I want you to take a victory lap, maybe a short one, but in December

2023, you wrote for the Boston Globe a five-point plan to save Harvard and by extension, higher education, the things you were saying, you know, and this was in

the wake of, you know, a couple of decades of kind of weird drift towards very authoritarian,

kind of left-wing, you know, extreme positions on a bunch of things, as well as the October

...