Maybe you’re just not good at convincing people via reasoning? I have

• Convinced several creationists that their ideas are radically incompatible with plentiful evidence from numerous scientific fields (thereby causing them to stop shouting about “your science is wrong, creation science is true”)
• Convinced at least one hard-core PETA activist that (1) animal studies provide critical information for medical science and (2) the animals can often be treated quite humanely, and certainly far more humanely than most farmed animals (against which they protest far less)
• Convinced a number of “Python is the best language ever!” advocates that strong static typing can provide immense benefits for rapidly creating robust software
• Gotten one white nationalist to agree that the largest possible difference between average innate capabilities of different racial groups is so small as to be irrelevant when it comes to setting policy

and so on.

People are (sometimes) convinced by reasons. There are lots of ways to derail the conversation, and people will only go as far as their emotions permit (e.g. the creationists didn’t become atheists), but reasons work.

Good reasons work. But I didn’t find the reasoning in this post convincing at all.

You’re making a bunch of emotional appeals backed up by no evidence, often including ad hominem attacks, against a respected academic (who may be wrong; but if we’re going to accept stuff on authority instead of reason and evidence, we should go with him, not you).

He claims that suffocating PC can lead to radicalization via a “you can’t handle the truth” feeling. You don’t provide any evidence to the contrary; you just state you don’t think so.

Your argument from incredulity that you could convince someone of something is counter to my experience (see above).

Your argument that memes aren’t refuted by the clear evidence collected against them is missing the absolutely crucial evidence that the people who believe the memes have been confronted with this evidence in detail and repeatedly. If this isn’t true, then Pinker’s idea might be exactly right instead of exactly wrong: the garbage is already refuted and the problem is that it’s just not obvious enough to everyone yet.

Your argument for why Pinker is an apologist is bizarre, apparently boiling down to “he understands what people say about why they believe the things they do.” If you are going to claim that what people say about the reasons for their beliefs is uncorrelated with what they believe, then I reserve the right to do the same to you and object that you say all this blah blah blah about Pinker, but you’re actually just offended that someone prominent isn’t on board with your personal set of prejudices.

You also misrepresent Pinker’s statement about smart young men. He didn’t say in what you quoted that all alt-right supporters are smart. He said that smart young men get drawn in via this pathway. This is a very basic point about group membership (if some B’s are A, it doesn’t follow that all B’s are A). (In case this is too opaque: if some white nationalists are smart young men drawn in this way, it doesn’t follow that all white nationalists are smart young men drawn in this way.) Everything you say on the topic is irrelevant because you’re attacking the blanket-statement straw man instead of Pinker’s statement.

So this whole thing you wrote is, in my estimation, so bad that it’s actively harmful. Pinker may well be wrong, but this doesn’t show it. (See the writings of Scott Atran to see a really good analysis of what causes radicalization in the case of Islamic terrorism.) You might actually be opposed to alt-right ideas, but as far as I can tell the impact of what you’re writing is to support them by fracturing and fragmenting the non-alt-right by making aggressive emotional critiques instead of using calm and clear reasoning — or inclusive emotional appeals — to draw in rather than alienate people.

If you’re not just trolling — I haven’t noticed you before, so I can’t tell at this point (and I don’t care to risk subjecting myself to more stuff of this quality)— please be more mindful of your conduct. Good intentions aren’t enough to have a positive impact. Fortunately, there are a lot of ways to have a positive impact. I imagine you’re well on the positive side overall if you’ve been trying, and you can continue to be with a bit of care.

If you are just trolling, well, nothing I say will matter anyway, so carry on. The discriminating reader will be on to you eventually; hopefully that will be enough.