Garbage psuedointellectual analysis.
Absolutely ridiculous to compare the Warren Commission to established scientific theories. Months before Kennedy's assassination, Allen Dulles, the man who turned the CIA into an organization that specialized in assassinating world leaders and covering it up, was fired by JFK. After his death, Dulles was placed on Warren Commission, in charge of investigating the event. Aside from this blatant conflict of interest, the commission proceeded to make an absolute joke of the proceedings, with key evidence such as the bullet that killed him having a breach in the chain of custody. There are real causes to be suspicious of the official story, and it's not really possible for anyone to conduct an independent investigation, basically the whole thing requires the assumption that Dulles is above suspicion.
Science does not do that. In science, you don't have to trust any one individual, because experiments are meant to be replicated and subject to peer review. By placing these things on the same level, Pinker is lending credibility to the US government and intelligence community at the expense of science.
He then goes on to lend credence to ridiculous COVID conspiracy theories and minimizes far-right, pro-Trump conspiracy theories, including Alex Jones.
Then he starts talking about Russia, "You see that Russia has tsars, then the Soviet Union, then Putin, so there's this historical continuity there," which an absolutely insane thing to say, arguing that Russians are just innately prone to rejecting "Enlightenment values" and to "authoritarianism." It's an extremely trite and lazy analysis which simply doesn't care about the vast historical differences between those three forms of government of the vastly different philosophical framework behind each. Has Stephen Pinker considered the possibility that the reason smart people believe stupid things is that overconfidence causes them to make broad sweeping judgements about fields outside their expertise without doing a thorough investigation?
Stopped watching as they start going into AI, not worth my time.