Intellectual Refusniks and Renegades
by Ben Shapiro, National Review:
Leftists loathe Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, and other naysayers, but their audiences are growing.
Two weeks ago, philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris had Ezra Klein, who is Vox’s editor in chief, on his podcast, Waking Up. The topic: Klein’s website had labeled Harris a participant in “pseudoscientific racialist speculation” because Harris had had the temerity to host social scientist Charles Murray on his program. Murray, you’ll recall, is the co-author of The Bell Curve, a book that discusses IQ differentials among population groups, among other topics. And Murray himself has been cast out of the good graces of the Left for having the temerity to discuss inconvenient data; last year, a crowd of Antifa hoodlums broke up Murray’s lecture at Middlebury College and injured a fellow professor.
Harris, like Murray, was cast out of the good graces of the intersectional Left just a few years ago, in 2014, when he pointed out that Islam is more of a threat to the peace of humanity than Christianity is. Harris stated, “Islam at this moment is the motherlode of bad ideas.” Ben Affleck responded by calling Harris’s statement “gross” and “racist.” Harris, by contrast, explained, “We have been sold this meme of Islamophobia where every critique of the doctrine of Islam gets conflated with bigotry toward Muslims as people, and that’s just intellectually ridiculous.”
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
