Empathy is an ancient moral instinct that is relatively new to the English language. From the Greek word Empatheia (meaning passion or emotion) and the Greek Pathos (meaning suffering and profound feeling), the German language produced the term Einfühlung somewhere in the late 19th century — a term describing the projection of one’s own feelings onto other human beings and even onto objects. As language evolved, the English term “empathy” came to signify the capacity to understand the feelings of another person as if they were one’s own. Yet this new term reflected a very ancient bit of moral wisdom. It is strange that in today’s polarized discourse we sometimes discard empathy as if it were the product of experimental social science and not something that in substance echoes all the way back to the gospels and beyond.

There is a story that appears in the first book of Kings in the Old Testament about King Solomon, the wisest king of Israel, and the manner in which he dispensed justice. As the story goes, Solomon was confronted with a dispute between two women, each of whom claimed to be the mother of the same infant boy. The women lived with each other and each had recently given birth to a baby, making their children the same age. During the night as they slept, so one of the women claimed, the other woman rolled over and smothered her own child to death. Waking up and realizing what she had done, the mother who had accidentally killed her son went to the bed of the other woman who lay sleeping with her child, and replaced the living child with the dead one. The woman accused of swapping the children denied this charge. Rather than interrogate the women further to rationally deduce the truth, Solomon, in his wisdom, exposed the heart of a true mother:

“Then the king said, ‘Bring me a sword.’ So they brought a sword before the king. And the king said, ‘Divide the living child in two, and give half to one and half to the other.’” (1 Kings 3:23-25)

Solomon’s command was shocking and terrifying to the woman who was the true mother of the surviving child. She pleaded for the child’s life and relinquished her claim to him, while the other woman was willing to let Solomon follow through on his intentions. Thus Solomon declared, “Give the first woman the living child, and by no means kill him; she is his mother.” By being able to inhabit the feelings of a true mother, Solomon was able to dispense true justice through an act of empathy as much as an act of wisdom.

In the modern moment we don’t usually think about empathy in relation to questions of justice except insofar as it enters the conversation under the heading of social justice. In that context, empathy for the marginalized and downtrodden can translate, in some circles, to a default deference to very liberal policies on immigration, law enforcement, public welfare, national security and DEI — policies that privilege the redistribution of resources while looking askance at the question of accountability for particular groups. It is this tendency that gives rise to a critique of empathy in principle by some on the right, encapsulated by the phrase “toxic empathy.” Criticisms of empathy often focus on the tendency to become so absorbed with the struggle and suffering of others that you lose sight of the interests of people (even in your own country or community) who may be harmed by the policies you support on the basis of empathy. “Open borders” policies are frequent targets: empathy for the developing world has opened up flood waves of migration in Europe and the United States that have resulted in the importation of crime, violence, competition for scarce resources and the uneven application of domestic laws against native-born residents.

These are not trivial concerns, but they have never constituted a good basis for rejecting empathy in principle. “Toxic empathy,” properly understood, does not reveal a destructive excess of empathy so much as a lack of it — a failure to extend compassion to people who exist beyond the groups whose challenges we find it easier to feel. Ethically speaking, it makes all the sense in the world to empathize with the struggles of undocumented immigrants, but a complete sense of empathy would also recognize the suffering of people subject to cartel violence on the southern border or workers in inner cities who have lost job opportunities or whose wages are suppressed on account of lax border enforcement policies. Any feeling heart should grieve for the Palestinians in Gaza, yet a complete sense of empathy would also hold space for the devastating pain of October 7th and how it shaped the perspectives of those who acted in defense of Israel.

This is where empathy meets listening, and where both become civic virtues. In a culture that promotes civil discourse, empathy is more than a feeling; it’s a discipline we must practice to allow ourselves to humanize those who disagree with us. The gospels teach that we are to love each other as ourselves, as if we shared a body together, and as if what you feel, I too in some way feel. That kind of love is not passive. It requires us to listen across differences, to sit with the discomfort of perspectives that unsettle our own, and to resist the temptation to dismiss what we haven’t yet tried to understand. Empathy, in this sense, is the foundation of deep listening, and deep listening is the foundation of democratic life.

The skills that make this possible — perspective-taking, active attention, the willingness to be changed by what we hear — are not mere instincts. They are practices. They can be learned, and they can be lost. Empathy does not require agreement. But empathy does require our love for our country to be reflected in our concern for our neighbors. Empathy requires us to take seriously the reality of the person across from us — their hopes, their fears, and the experiences that shape their convictions. That seriousness is what transforms a conversation into a community, and a community into a democracy.

Let this empathy be the substance of how we practice democracy.

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We invite you join our upcoming webinar, The Lost Art of Listening: Building Empathy Across Differences, with FAIR Advisors John Wood Jr. and Ilana Redstone, moderated by FAIR Executive Director Monica Harris, on Monday, April 27th, at 4pm PT / 7pm ET.

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We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy.

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diverse range of voices and to encouraging compassionate, good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send completed drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

Adolescence has always been one of the most biologically intense periods of human development. The brain is rapidly reorganizing, hormone systems are activating, and emotional processing pathways are maturing. Mood swings, heightened stress sensitivity, and difficulty regulating internal states are not signs of disorder; rather, they are features of a developing mind and body learning to adapt to their environment.

Yet increasingly, these normal developmental experiences are being pathologized. Antidepressant dispensing among adolescents and young adults ages 12–25 increased by 66.3% between 2016 and 2022, driven largely by rising prescriptions among female adolescents. ADHD diagnoses have surged to approximately 11.4% of U.S. children ages 3–17, more than 6 million children. Hormonal contraception is routinely prescribed to teenage girls not for pregnancy prevention but for acne, painful periods, or mood fluctuations. Research from the Guttmacher Institute found that about one-third report using it solely to manage these symptoms while 82% of birth control pill users report taking it for at least one non-contraceptive reason.

Medications can help. The question is whether they are being introduced before other physiological avenues have been explored and whether families are receiving the full picture before they consent.

The Developing Brain Needs Context

One reason adolescent symptoms are so easily mistaken for disorder is neurological timing. The limbic system — which processes emotions and reward — becomes highly active during puberty, while the prefrontal cortex — which governs impulse control and emotional regulation — does not fully mature until the mid-twenties. Adolescents are wired to experience strong emotional signals before the regulation systems to manage them are fully online. This is development, not disease, and it should be the starting point of every clinical conversation about adolescent behavioral and emotional symptoms.

Case One: When Treatment Shifts the Problem

A 12-year-old girl presented with severe anxiety and persistent insomnia. After several months, she was prescribed an SSRI. Her sleep improved; physiologically, this makes sense, as SSRIs increase serotonin availability, and serotonin is a biochemical precursor to melatonin, which regulates the sleep–wake cycle.

About a year later, however, her menstrual cycle stopped.

Serotonin signaling interacts closely with the hypothalamic pathways that regulate reproduction, and SSRIs have been associated with elevated prolactin levels, a hormone that can suppress ovulation. In adolescents, whose hormonal systems are still establishing their long-term rhythms, these interactions carry particular weight: disrupted ovulatory cycles can affect progesterone production and the development of peak bone mass, both critical processes during these years.

This case also opens a broader question about hormonal contraception, which is frequently prescribed to teenage girls presenting with these exact symptoms — irregular cycles, mood changes, acne — as a first-line response. Hormonal contraceptives work by suppressing ovulation and disrupting the brain-ovary signaling axis. Research has shown that women using oral contraceptives often exhibit altered cortisol regulation compared to non-users, reflecting changes in the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis that governs stress response, energy metabolism, and immune function. When ovulation is suppressed, the presenting symptom may improve while the underlying physiological imbalance continues unaddressed, and families are rarely told this is the trade-off.

For this patient, after addressing nutritional gaps — including B vitamins and magnesium, which play documented roles in neurotransmitter synthesis and hormonal regulation — her menstrual cycle eventually returned. But the original question was never fully answered: what physiological factors drove her anxiety and insomnia in the first place? Sleep quality, nutrient status, blood sugar regulation, and stress physiology all influence how the developing brain responds to its environment. These were not part of the initial clinical conversation.

Case Two: When Environment Is Diagnosed as Disorder

A 12-year-old boy was referred for ADHD evaluation after parents and school staff reported difficulty focusing, high physical energy, and an inability to sit still. Stimulant medication was recommended.

A review of his daily routine told a different story: most of his day was spent sitting in class, in front of a computer, or watching television. He had almost no opportunity for sustained physical movement.

Neurologically, this matters. Movement generates sensory input from muscles, joints, and the inner ear that helps regulate the brain’s attention and stress response systems. Physical activity stimulates dopamine production, increases brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), and improves blood flow to prefrontal regions involved in focus and learning. When children spend most of the day sedentary, the brain receives far less of this regulatory input.

Compounding this, the high-intensity digital stimulation this child experienced through video games, and social media, strongly activates dopamine pathways. Over time, the brain adapts by reducing receptor sensitivity through a process called downregulation. Everyday tasks like reading or sitting in a classroom then feel comparatively under-stimulating. This is not necessarily a disorder. It may be a mismatch between environment and neurology.

Stimulant medications address the symptom by increasing dopamine and norepinephrine signaling, but they also activate the sympathetic nervous system and increase cortisol output. For a developing brain that depends on adequate sleep, nutrition, and movement, the downstream effects of appetite suppression, sleep disruption, and altered reward pathway sensitivity can create new challenges even as they resolve the presenting one. Some patients require dosage escalation as the brain adapts, a pattern that warrants honest conversation with families upfront.

Instead of beginning medication, we increased physical activity, introduced regular movement breaks, improved sleep hygiene, reduced screen exposure, and adjusted nutrition. Within weeks, his focus improved significantly.

Informed Consent Means More Than a Doctor’s Signature

Clinicians have an obligation to give families the full picture before a prescription is written. Medicine calls this informed consent. But in adolescent psychiatry and primary care, the standard is too often applied narrowly, covering immediate benefits and common short-term side effects while leaving out the broader physiological context in which these medications operate.

Families deserve to know that SSRIs interact with reproductive hormone pathways. That stimulant medications alter developing reward systems and may require escalation over time. That hormonal contraception changes cortisol regulation and stress physiology in ways not fully reversible on a predictable timeline. These are not fringe concerns. They are documented in the peer-reviewed literature, and they are relevant to any family weighing a prescription for a child whose brain and endocrine systems are still under construction.

Equally important, families deserve to know what has not been evaluated before a prescription is written. Has this child’s sleep been assessed? Their nutrient status? Their physical activity levels? The degree of chronic stress in their environment? When these factors go unexamined, medication may relieve a symptom while leaving the underlying physiology unchanged or introducing new disruptions into systems that are still developing.

The time constraints of modern clinical practice make these conversations difficult. But that difficulty is a systemic problem that should not be resolved at the patient’s expense, especially when the patient is twelve years old.

Rethinking What We Owe Adolescents

None of this argues against medication when it is genuinely warranted. There are situations where pharmaceutical intervention is appropriate and even necessary for suicidal ideation, severe depression, psychosis, or debilitating anxiety that significantly impairs a young person’s ability to function. That threshold exists for good reason.

But many of the symptoms that bring adolescents into medical offices — difficulty focusing, mood fluctuations, sleep disturbances, menstrual discomfort, irritability — are also features of normal neurological and hormonal development. Adolescence is not a disease. Treating it as one, without first exploring the physiological context, does a disservice to patients and families alike.

Before reaching for a prescription, families deserve the opportunity to ask deeper questions:

• Is their child sleeping well?

• Are they moving their body regularly?

• Are they receiving the nutrients their developing brain requires?

• Are underlying stressors being identified and addressed?

Symptoms are not always signs of disorder. Sometimes they are signals from a developing body that needs support and an invitation for clinicians to look more carefully before writing a prescription.

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We invite you join us for a webinar with Dr. Kendra Kautz on Wednesday, May 6th, at 7pm ET, for Part 2 in our series on The Mind-Body Connection: Rethinking How Medicine Approaches Adolescent Development.

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The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diverse range of voices and to encouraging compassionate, good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send completed drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, alien pods overtake people one by one. Each person looks the same but something essential is missing: warmth, individuality, and the emotional presence that makes human connection possible.

Identity politics can captivate minds in a similar manner. Intelligent, well-meaning people with common-sense can be misguided by the rigid framework of “us-against-them;” “oppressor vs. oppressed.” This ideology foments dehumanizing trait categorization, flattens identity, and heightens division.

All of us are vulnerable to collapsing our ideas into ideology, and it appears across the political spectrum. It’s deeply concerning when politicians practice such divisiveness. It’s an abdication of authority when “experts” promote activism. It’s sad when it affects personal relationships. But it’s especially damaging when it enters psychotherapy —a field entrusted with expanding, rather than constricting human understanding. Therapists should be working to simultaneously enhance the better angels of our nature and our culture’s nobler aspects, like the sanctity of individual character.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the confusion begins with the misuse of the word “culture.” Properly understood, culture is a rich tableau through which we grasp and express meaning, and transmit it to the next generation. It includes “high-culture” — art, literature, ritual -– but also involves countless everyday practices that express values just as powerfully: how parents teach children right from wrong, how families resolve conflicts, and how disagreements are handled within communities. Attending to such things carefully is central to good clinical work.

However, “culture” is increasingly becoming equated with identity politics and reduced to immutable identity characteristics such as race. When this happens, culture becomes an over simplified, one-dimensional lens that emphasizes group differences while obscuring individual variation. This is not culture in its full sense, but a diminished version of it.

Many clinicians feel that cultural and political tensions have become pervasive and difficult to navigate. Psychologist Jon Haidt says that, since 2012 or so, we’ve been in a period that’s “Uniquely Structurally Stupid.” I agree and propose that identity politics ideology is a structural part of the problem, (mis)guiding all of society and making it difficult to address ideas intelligently, issue by issue. The ideology is a framework, and as long as the framework remains intact, the individual battles are endless and exhausting.

To address the “Structural Stupidity” problem we must build “Structural Intelligence.” Until we have a structure that is flexible, reciprocal, deep and generative, no efforts will make lasting gains. Psychotherapy once placed greater emphasis on “character structure” — exploring personal psychological patterns with nuance, depth, thoughtfulness, and relational awareness. We must revisit this kind of structural thinking in order to help restore balance in how we approach culture, identity, and meaning in clinical work.

People alienated by identity politics and “the culture wars” often feel demoralized, and the field of psychotherapy, like much in the West, has systematically hollowed out its moral sensibilities. People feel demoralized in the ordinary sense: discouraged, exhausted, and unsure how to respond. But they have also been “de-moralized” in a deeper sense; stripped of the moral language and moral confidence they need to push back. And this is particularly an issue in the field of psychotherapy, where clinicians may find themselves hesitant to engage moral questions at all even when they are central to a patient’s experience.

In contrast, identity politics activists are intensely moralistic. Narratives of critical social justice: white supremacy, colonial oppression, patriarchy, and the like, are delivered with intense moral alarm. If clinicians fail to recognize or accept the moralized terms and tone, then any amount of reason, evidence and civic principles risk being blown away in the moralistic bluster. In fact, a calm tone could be received as dismissive, for implicitly failing to acknowledge the fiery heat of the grievances.

Psychotherapy needs to meet the moral moment. Though our field used to be populated by priests and shamans, the spiritual and moral aspects of our work have been largely stripped away. Some of us are religious believers, but one needn’t be religious to remember that “psyche” actually means “soul.” It’s to our detriment that the values-based, soulful, or spirit-aspects of mental life, identity and relationships have been expelled. This is a major error, and one that must be remedied without sinking into moralism, reactivity, or tribalism. Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory offers one possible framework for rebuilding “structural intelligence” in a balanced and clinically relevant way.

It becomes clear how urgently we must act when we see how identity politics actually distorts clinical work in practice. When politics overrides clinical reality it’s the patients we seek to heal who suffer most.

In one case, a group of colleagues working with Spanish monolingual immigrant families were (at first) clear eyed about the challenges in this community. They spent years decrying clients’ predatory family members who crossed the southern border, often gang members and repeat criminals. They lamented the pattern of those family members being deported only to return again and again, menacing the community and the families we treated. That ended with the 2016 election, when a 180-degree reversal occurred, and those same colleagues suddenly talked in lockstep about how “horrible” it was to enforce immigration laws. Patients suffered as a result, as did the clinical work and thinking required to help these families in truly dangerous, often vexing situations. The ideology had invaded.

In another case, a treatment team struggled to properly engage with a situation involving a mother who repeatedly attempted to murder her young daughter (and who had herself been abused by her mother as a child). People like this woman need their violent tendencies recognized and dealt with properly. However, due to the identity politics framework which views all women as “oppressed” and men as “oppressors,” care-provider attention remained focused on the child’s absent father whose behavior, while relevant, did not represent the most immediate danger. Instead, pre-existing assumptions about gender roles shaped clinical care in ways that limited responsiveness to the actual circumstances.

These examples are not about assigning blame. They illustrate how pre-formed narratives — of any kind — can narrow perception and interfere with careful clinical judgment. Therapists must remain attentive to clinical patterns of emotion and behavior, without relying on oversimplified identity-based narratives.

Developing more structurally intelligent approaches to culture and morality is both possible and necessary. That’s why I have partnered with FAIR to create a Continuing Education course that invites participants to explore frameworks that support deeper understanding, richer clinical thinking, and greater openness to the moral, cultural, and even soulful dimensions of psychotherapy.

Whether you’re a practicing clinician struggling to navigate cultural issues authentically, a trainer concerned about ideological constraints in professional education, or just someone committed to finding a more humane and effective approach to psychological practice, I invite you to join me and other FAIR-minded mental health workers to explore these ideas live on April 8th, or at your convenience through pre-recorded Home Study available now through April 18th.

The task is ambitious and cannot be completed in a single session. But developing a clearer outline and a shared language for these challenges is an important step forward.

Register for Wednesday, April 8th
Register for Home Study

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We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy.

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diverse range of voices and to encouraging compassionate, good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

At the start of 2025, I followed an intriguing link in a Substack article that sent me tumbling, Alice-like, through cyberspace, eventually depositing me on FAIR’s home page. Two clicks later, I felt my eyes well up in gratitude: I had found FAIR in the Arts.

I didn’t know it yet, but this discovery would lead me to re-imagine a new kind of theatre. Actually, it wasn’t “new,” it was the theatre I’d always known and loved: open, accepting, resilient, playful... and dedicated not to individual differences or political preferences, but to creating plays that help us remember our collective humanity.

It may sound like hyperbole, but when I found FAIR, I cried. Yes, my friends will tell you I cry easily—but these tears were hard-won. I had finally found an organization that recognized the unspoken challenges I had faced as a theatre artist since 2020.

Before the world shut down that year, I was gaining traction within the Buffalo, NY theatre world as a director and playwright. I had been hired to work on projects. I had made friends. I had created a writer’s group.

After the world shut down, I hunkered down like everyone else. I took the opportunity of solitude to write a massive play in Elizabethan prose and iambic pentameter about Aemilia Lanier, a possible author of Shakespeare’s works. Every two weeks I brought a few more scenes to the writer’s group, now on Zoom like every other writer’s group during that time.

By 2021 I had finished a first draft, and asked one of my newish theatre friends (I’ll call her Sally) to direct a table read. She said yes, and we worked out the details. I suggested we do the reading outdoors at a park to free everyone from masks. I told her I didn’t want to see my play read by a bunch of faceless actors, and she agreed: too much would be lost.

What I didn’t say was that I didn’t want to wear a mask indoors myself.

Two weeks before the date, Sally contacted me. “I checked out the park. I don’t think it’s going to work — there’s just too much ambient noise, and what if it rains?”

Before I could think of a helpful response, she continued: “But I have great news! I contacted a theatre, and they’re happy to let us use their space! I’ve booked it for the same time and date.”

Stunned, all I could do was thank her and hang up. Sure enough, within the hour, there was an email in my inbox to all of us, explaining the venue change and including something like: “Since we will be indoors, please wear a mask if you’re unvaccinated. I’m sure we all have loved ones we want to protect.”

My heart raced. I was stuck. If I wore a mask, I’d be telegraphing to ten theatre people whom I had worked so hard to befriend that I was NOT ONE OF THEM. If I didn’t wear it, I’d be pretending I was vaccinated.

The day loomed. I didn’t know what to do. I was losing sleep every night, trying to figure out the “right” thing to do.

On the day of, I still didn’t know. I decided to trust my instincts to do what felt right. I knew I wasn’t sick, so that was a plus. I drove to the theatre, parked, and carried in a case of water, sweating profusely all the way.

At the door, Sally greeted me warmly and welcomed me in, keeping her distance. And that was that. I didn’t put on a mask. I didn’t say anything about it. As the other actors arrived, I did the same as Sally — a warm hello, from afar.

It felt lousy.

I had never done that before. I had always spoken up — gently, usually — to share my opinion, even when it was not the prevailing ideology. But this time I caved. I disregarded my integrity, choosing to preserve my working relationship with these people by pretending I shared their beliefs, and all I felt… was sheepishness.

In the end, though, that attempt to “preserve my working relationship” didn’t matter. As the year wore on, I was denied access to all theatres due to my personal health choices. Not only could I not work in any theatre, I couldn’t even set foot inside one.

All the communities that had embraced me – the Waldorf School where I had sent all three children and worked three years as the Administrator/Principal, the yoga studio where I taught, and yes, the theatre community – suddenly felt foreign. Feeling strange, separate, and othered, I faded away from all of them, quietly, with no explanation or remonstrance.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I thought it would all blow over. These communities would soon reach back out, surely, with some version of “We kind of went overboard, sorry, that’ll never happen again. Where’ve you been?”

But that mea culpa never came.

My husband and I debated endlessly: stay or go? Eventually, we lost whatever faith we had left that New York State would operate in our best interests. By October of 2022, we knew what we had to do. As difficult as it was to leave both my sister and the home where my husband and I had raised our three children, we packed up the house and moved to Florida.

There, emboldened by living in an entirely new place, I launched The Art of Freedom, a Substack publication dedicated to freedom in all realms: artistic, individual, collective, and divine. I came to think of myself as an unlabeled, open-minded skeptic who follows the truth wherever it leads, and endeavored to mirror that evolution within my ‘stack, creating a place where readers of any ideology would feel welcome. Through it, I slowly forged an online community that became a lifeline.

The one gaping hole in my life? Theatre. I had no idea how to muster up the courage to get involved again.

Fast-forward to 2025, as I was weeping upon the discovery of “FAIR in the Arts.” I scrolled down the page… and there it was: “Playwright’s Think Tank.” (What the ?!?) I guffawed. A group of playwrights dedicated to discussing works “without the influence of social/political/theological trends, group-think, and personal bias”? Was I dreaming?

I fired off an email to the Playwright’s Think Tank (PTT), sharing my story and desire to be part of a writer’s group again. The facilitator kindly invited me to a meeting the following evening… and I’ve been a member of the open-minded group ever since.

Courage is a funny thing. Just as moving to FL emboldened me to speak up via The Art of Freedom, joining the PTT six months ago gave me the fortitude to reach out to theatres here in the Tampa/St. Pete area. I’m happy to report that opportunities have blossomed.

What I’ve discovered is that bravery is contagious. The playwrights of PTT do not all agree with one another on much of anything, but they speak their minds freely and send their works out into the world, regardless of the reception. And regularly sharing the company of such people has strengthened my resolve to do the same.

My desire to self-censor is all but gone. Now, when fellow theatre artists make political comments that assume consensus on a multitude of topics, I rarely default into, “Why jeopardize these burgeoning relationships?” Instead, I act from, “I’ll bet we can agree on at least some part of this issue.”

Instinctive, preemptive self-muzzling is what I see as the greatest threat to the arts, specifically within the theatre community. Based on my own experience and that of fellow PTT members and other Substackers who left the theatre, I know I’m not alone.

And this is why I was driven to create “Dear US: One-Acts to Bridge the Divide.” I wanted to produce an evening of differing viewpoints within the physical theatre itself, to cultivate thought-freedom in the place that believes it’s fighting for those very freedoms – even as it suppresses them through an assumption of monoculture. I wanted to help others in the theatre community develop the courage that slowly takes root when you’re surrounded by those who speak their minds.

Joining PTT gave me the resolve to rejoin the world of theatre, and hearing about FAIR in the Arts’ grant opportunity sparked some serious goosebumps— which I pay close attention to. Sure enough, the idea for “Dear US” soon fell into my heart.

After years of waiting for the theatre to “take me back,” I realized something: it’s up to me to create the kind of theatre I’m yearning for — a place where everyone is welcome, and the free exchange of ideas is a given.

I have always been a bridge-builder, a person who facilitates connection in the midst of conflict, who reaches for consensus rather than majority domination.

I’m still committed to building bridges, even at this time of our human evolution when it seems that almost everyone else is burning them down. My mission has always been to invite black and white to step toward each other into grey, and with FAIR’s help in the form of this grant, I’m doing just that.

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For more information about the Playwright’s Think Tank, please contact karen.howes@fairforall.org

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy. 

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diverse range of voices and to encouraging compassionate, good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

As a physician, my world was defined by the sanctity of the individual: the quiet, sacred space between a doctor and a patient where human dignity and the preservation of life reigned supreme. My professional life was governed by a singular, sacred commitment: the Hippocratic Oath. This wasn’t just a formality; it was a prescription for a healthy society, rooted in the primacy of the individual and the objective pursuit of scientific truth. I believed that by defending ethical standards in my beloved profession, I was holding the line for Western civilization.

But then the world changed in 2020. The pandemic didn’t just bring a virus; it brought a mirror. As I watched the medical establishment succumb to a suffocating groupthink and a “mob-like” dismissal of heterodox thought, I realized that the rot wasn’t just in the clinics. It was in the marrow of our society. The same ideological forces destroying the sanctity of medicine were already hard at work destroying the minds of the next generation in our K-12 schools.

I realized I could no longer just be a doctor. As a mom, I had to become an advocate for the very foundation of our future: our children.

The Echoes of a Soviet Past

My perspective is not merely academic; it is ancestral. I am a Soviet Jew. My DNA carries the memory of what happens when a society abandons the individual in favor of the collective, and when “the greater good” becomes a justification for dehumanization and violence.

To me, Jewish values are not separate from Western civilization; they are the pillars of it. The emphasis on questioning, the pursuit of objective truth, and the infinite value of a single human life are what built the modern world. When I see the terrifying rise of Jew-hatred in our streets and our schools today, I don’t see a random flare-up of bigotry. I see a direct, coordinated attack on American values. History has shown us that Jews are the “canary in the coal mine” when a society begins to hunt the Jew, it has already begun to eat itself.

From the Nazi Era to the Modern Classroom

The turning point in my transformation from medical advocate to education defender occurred during a webinar I hosted for FAIR titled “Health Professionals in the Nazi Era.” Preparing for that presentation was a chilling experience. I saw with terrifying clarity how the most “educated” professionals of the 1930s, doctors and teachers, were the first to succumb to ideological capture. They didn’t wake up one day as monsters; they were slowly conditioned to prioritize activism over their professional oaths.

I looked at our current K-12 landscape and saw the same patterns. As depicted in the documentary Killing America by Eli Steele, the erosion of merit and the introduction of “social justice” frameworks in schools like those in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I grew up and raised my own kids, mirrored the lowering of medical standards I had fought against. Whether it is lowering the bar for a medical degree or removing honors math for eighth graders, the result is the same: the sacrifice of excellence at the altar of ideology. Unnecessary suffering inevitably follows.

The Neurology of Hate

When my grandfather, Srul, passed away in 2022, just 4 months shy of 101, something broke and reset within me. He was a man who survived the unimaginable, a living link to a world that tried to erase him. After his death, I knew I couldn’t stay silent. I realized that while I was treating patients for neurological disorders, a different kind of pathology was being wired into the brains of millions of children.

As a neurologist, I understand how the brain learns. I know that the neuroplasticity of a child is a gift that can be easily exploited. When schools replace actual education with social justice activism, they are quite literally wiring tribalism and resentment into the developing mind. They are teaching children to see color before character, and power dynamics before humanity. This isn’t just bad teaching; it is unintentional neurological injury to a generation of humans.

A New Oath

I am often asked why a Parkinson’s Disease doctor is so involved in school board battles and curriculum transparency activism. My answer is simple: I am still practicing medicine.

In medicine, we say Primum non nocere - First, do no harm. By allowing our education system to replace the pursuit of truth with ideological indoctrination, we are doing profound, perhaps irreversible, harm to the individual and, inevitably, to society at large.

I have moved from defending the Hippocratic Oath to defending the classroom because the battle is the same. It is a battle for the soul of the West. It is a battle to ensure that no child is ever taught that their worth is defined by their group identity, and that no doctor is ever forced to choose a narrative over a patient. For my grandfather, for my children, and for the country that gave my family refuge, I will not be silent.

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One of the reasons I like Black History Month is its showcase and celebration of the triumphs of black people in the United States from slavery, through Jim Crow, to recent history. These triumphs not only show how resilient figures in black history have been, but also how resilient black Americans can be right now. These historical figures represent the potential of contemporary figures. That said, both black and non-black Americans insist that sufficient representation of black American success is still somehow lacking. For me, that has not been the case. Though Mary Wright Edelman’s claim that “You can’t be what you can’t see” has been widely embraced, I think that embrace is both misguided and a slap in the face of those black leaders who came before us.

When people try to convince me of the importance of demographic representation in professional spaces, I always reply similarly. “Yes,” I say, “ I always make sure another black person is in a restaurant before I walk in.” When they nod in approval, I add, “Before I order the prime rib at a restaurant, I have to make sure I see another black person eating it first.” After they realize my facetiousness, I add, “If I don’t see a black man eating the prime rib, I just point to another black person in the restaurant and say to the waiter‘I’ll have what he’s having.” Clearly, this is a roundabout way of saying the concept of representation is overstated. Yes, I know the need for representation is a real thing for people. My question is, “Should it be?” Is the need for racial representation something to be satisfied, or is it something to be overcome?

I understand the appeal of representation to an extent, especially when it comes to shaping young minds during formative years. For such young minds, racial representation in professional spaces expands their perceived possibilities for future livelihood, reduces what identity-based uncertainty that may have been instilled in them, and effectively signals viable pursuits and belonging. I get that. It’s why I say representation is “overrated” and not just useless.

However, I believe the importance and efficacy of racial representation loses its usefulness after a while, the way training wheels lose their usefulness when a child learns to ride a bike without them. As far as I see it, after a certain age, representation is more of a crutch than anything else. One detriment of this crutch is the demand to see black people in particular fields because they themselves are interested in pursuing that field. But this is a flawed take.

When I was a child, I didn’t need to see black people succeed in a particular field. I needed to see black people succeed, period. When I saw a successful black professional, I knew that I could be a successful black professional as well, not successful in a particular field, just successful. I didn’t need to see a black professor before entering graduate school to earn my Ph.D. In my mind, “successful black professor” was a subcategory of “successful black professional.” All I needed was to see success, and I saw enough to make me think I could be successful too.

What’s more, the need for representation is a self-defeating concept. Somebody has to be the first minority in a field to serve as the initial representation. If every black person needed to see representation in a certain field, they would never get representatives in that field. Someone has to take the first step. Why can’t it be you?

In The Content of Our Character, Shelby Steele coined the term “integration shock,” which is the reluctance of black people to enter white spaces after the Civil Rights Movement, a reluctance born of both fear and unfamiliarity. I think this was understandable in the years following the end of the movement, but I believe the perpetuation of a victim narrative—which provided many rhetorical and political benefits—has kept this concept alive. The need for representation is a symptom of integration shock, which is a byproduct of victimhood.

I am of the mind that the best way to honor black Americans who came before us, who certainly did not have the representation many black people feel they need to move ahead, is to thwart the need to see ourselves in particular professional spaces. What did those black heroes fight for? What is the point of putting all that time and energy into opening doors of opportunity if no one is willing to walk through them? For what did they endure physical, mental, and emotional pain if we’re just going to act like we have it as bad as they did? The need for representation is a sacrilege for two reasons: it downplays the triumphs of black history and shows that black resilience may have weakened when the whole point was to strengthen it.

I plan on honoring the black intellectuals, heroes, and leaders of American history by walking through whatever doors I want, aspiring to whichever goals I want, and focusing on the present and future they fought so hard to give me. Anything else makes a celebration of black history into a mockery of black history.

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You may have heard about increasing calls for library book bans from members of the public. What you may not have heard is that the number of library staff members quietly banning books behind the scenes is increasing.

More than 10,000 books were removed from the H.B. Beal Secondary School Library in London, Ontario, between January and March of 2025, and two years earlier, all books published before 2008 were removed from Peel District School Board libraries (also in Ontario). These book purges were initiated by school and library staff, not by citizens demanding censorship.

The threat of ideological influence within library collections is not new. Since the late 1960s, some library professionals have increasingly seen their role not only as stewards of intellectual freedom but also as agents of social change. A 2022 article in the Journal of Intellectual Freedom & Privacy Journal of Intellectual Freedom & Privacy describes this shift: “If a postwar centrist consensus ever existed within American librarianship, it shattered in the late 1960s in ways that parallel political developments in the country at large.” These librarians reject the profession’s core principles of neutrality and viewpoint diversity in a quest to make society more equitable. This quest has made librarians some of the most prolific censors.

Despite censorship within the profession, librarians celebrate themselves as intellectual freedom fighters every year during Freedom to Read Week in Canada (Feb 22 – 28, 2026) and Banned Books Week in the United States (October 4 – 10, 2026). Both events feature condemnation of book banners and lists of the most banned and challenged books.

While book challenges have recently increased and become more organized, few result in books being pulled from shelves. What Freedom to Read Week and Banned Books Week fail to acknowledge are books that never make it to the shelves because library staff disagree with the content.

“A truly great library has something to offend everyone”, was wisely stated by Jo Godwin, librarian and final editor of the Wilson Library Bulletin, and Ms. Godwin is right. Everyone, including library staff, has the right to be offended but not the right to censor.

Library staff are entitled to their opinions, but must not let these opinions influence what’s on the shelves. Intellectual freedom is only possible when library collections are neutral and offer multiple viewpoints.

David Berninghausen defended library neutrality as chair of the American Library Association (ALA) Intellectual Freedom Committee from 1948 to 1952 and 1967 to 1972. Berninghausen witnessed censorship attacks from the right during the Cold War communism scare and from the left during the 1960s social revolution. His book, The Flight from Reason: Essays on Intellectual Freedom in the Academy, the Press, and the Library, gives readers a sense of déjà vu. We’ve been here before and seen the threat to intellectual freedom when educators and librarians believe only their views are correct and alternate views must be suppressed.

The good news is that more librarians are speaking up about the insider threat to intellectual freedom. In 2023, librarians from across North America began discussing an alternative to existing associations that were pushing the profession towards divisive social activism. The Association of Library Professionals (ALP’s) mission is to uphold neutrality, open inquiry, individual liberty, freedom of thought, speech, and intellectual freedom. The ALP also recognizes the role libraries play in children's healthy development and advocates for age-appropriate books and parental guidance.

FAIR in Libraries (FiL) was also formed to uphold traditional library values and includes members from across North America. FiL focuses on empowering library users, parents, and educators with the support and tools they need to ensure their library remains neutral and offers multiple viewpoints.

Ultimately, intellectual freedom depends not on slogans or awareness weeks, but on consistent commitment to neutrality in practice. Libraries serve the entire public, not a single ideology, political movement, or cultural moment. When collections reflect genuine viewpoint diversity, communities gain the opportunity to think critically, engage respectfully with disagreement, and make informed decisions for themselves. Protecting that balance requires vigilance from librarians, stakeholders, and patrons alike. A truly free library is not one that tells people what to think, but one that trusts them enough to explore ideas openly and decide for themselves.

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If you’ve had the pleasure of reading Jefferson Shupe’s YA novel The Bathwater Brigade, you may remember the scene with a group of college students who set up a table on their campus to celebrate how far America has come on race—a timeline from slavery through emancipation, civil rights, and the election of a Black president, with an arrow pointing to the words “More progress to be made!” Red, white, and blue cupcakes complete the display. Next to the table, two students start arguing about a local police shooting of an unarmed Black man. One insists the officer had no choice. The other can’t believe anyone would defend it. They trade statistics, grievances, and accusations—neither asking a genuine question nor acknowledging the other might have a legitimate concern. It ends with the table tipped over, cupcakes destroyed, and no common ground found.

It’s a scene that plays out daily across American campuses—and increasingly in high schools, on social media, and at family dinner tables. By the time students reach college, habits of adversarial argument are deeply entrenched. What if we could equip young people with better tools earlier?

This question drove Fair for All to develop the American Experience Curriculum—an ethnic studies course that prepares high school students for constructive engagement in America’s pluralistic democracy. Students develop deep civic knowledge and sophisticated civil discourse skills by exploring diverse American experiences—centering historically marginalized voices and the unique challenges various groups have faced alongside the contributions each has made—while also studying the constitutional principles and democratic processes that form our shared civic foundations. The curriculum recognizes that successful democracy requires both honoring diverse experiences and building shared commitments; these foundations create a stable framework for productive disagreement about how to apply principles and address ongoing barriers to participation. Central to this approach is a progression: from the destructive (straw- manning) to the respectful (steel-manning) to the transformative (star-manning).

The Spectrum of Argumentation

Straw-manning is what many of us default to—reducing someone’s argument to its weakest form to make it easier to attack. “So you think cops should just shoot Black people?” It feels satisfying, but you haven’t engaged with their real position. You’ve created an enemy instead of finding understanding.

Steel-manning is the opposite—presenting the strongest possible version of someone’s position before responding. “You believe the officer faced a split-second decision with incomplete information, and we shouldn’t judge without understanding that fear and uncertainty.” The goal: articulate their argument so well that they say, “Yup, that’s right!” This demonstrates respect and opens the door to genuine dialogue.

But there’s still something missing. Steel-manning addresses the argument—but what about the person making it?

Enter star-manning, a concept created by Angel Eduardo, Chair of Fair for All’s Board of Directors. Eduardo coined the term in 2021, inspired by David Bowie’s “Starman.” Star-manning goes beyond engaging with the strongest version of an argument to engaging with the most charitable version of the person, acknowledging their good intentions and shared desires despite your disagreements.

Returning to our debate: a steel man might say, “You believe this shooting reflects a broader pattern where Black Americans face disproportionate use of force, and that better training could save lives.” A star man goes further: “I can see you care deeply about human lives and want encounters between police and citizens to end without harm or loss of life.”

As Eduardo explains:

“The vast majority of us want the same things; our disagreement is always in the details. To star-man is to use this bedrock of commonality as a place from which to build good faith. We can now argue in truly good faith because we recognize not only our opponent’s arguments, but their humanity.”

The progression from straw to steel to star represents a journey from contempt to respect to compassion.

Teaching These Skills Through Ethnic Studies and American History

The American Experience Curriculum doesn’t teach civil discourse as a standalone unit. Rather, it is integrated throughout. The decision to make civil discourse central to this curriculum was inspired by Shupe’s novel. As lead curriculum developer, I integrated Shupe’s civil discourse contributions and Angel Eduardo’s star manning concept, along with a variety of other proven civil discourse methods, progressively across all nine units, ensuring students build skills from low-stakes practice to complex application.

Students begin with accessible scenarios—debates about phones in class and school start times—then apply the same skills to increasingly challenging historical and contemporary issues. Basic skills are introduced in Unit 1, establishing the foundation: active listening, distinguishing civility from politeness, steel-manning, and star-manning opposing viewpoints. Units 2-3 develop intermediate skills, such as identifying logical fallacies, applying the competing goods framework, and practicing historical empathy rather than presentism.

As students advance through Units 4-7, they master advanced skills: using Shupe’s SLEW Framework to genuinely understand different viewpoints; applying his “swap variables” technique to test whether their positions are principled; visualizing through the “Plinko Effect” how people with shared values can reach different conclusions based on small differences in how they weight those values; and finding “hidden third options” beyond binary thinking. Unit wrap-ups develop synthesis skills—strategic complementarity, coalition building, and learning to ask “when are both sides right?” rather than “which side is right?” Finally, the capstone project challenges students to apply all of these skills to digital communication through platforms and projects.

Here are a few examples to show how it works:

In Unit 3, students engage in a mock Constitutional Convention, arguing positions they may personally oppose. Through this exercise, students practice perspective-taking and role-playing across differences by representing different constituencies—including those excluded from the actual Convention. They develop collaborative problem-solving skills as they grapple with the same tensions the founders faced: balancing competing interests and forming unions across deep differences. The simulation also introduces ethical reasoning about compromise, challenging students to consider whether compromise on fundamental questions of human dignity can ever be justified.

In Unit 4, students explore the abolition movement’s strategic debates. Through steel-manning exercises and star-manning exercises, they discover that Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison shared the same goal: ending slavery. Yet they reached different conclusions about whether the Constitution could deliver freedom. By practicing these skills, students learn to distinguish between disagreements over methods and disagreements over values, recognizing that even people who agree on goals can disagree profoundly on how to achieve them.

In Unit 6, students synthesize their learning through the “Plinko Effect.” After examining how diverse groups—European immigrants, African Americans, women suffragists, Japanese Americans, and Mexican Americans—each pursued full citizenship between 1914 and 1945, students visualize how “small differences at the top create big differences at the bottom.” This lesson reinforces suspending judgment, recognizing shared values beneath surface disagreements, and applying charitable interpretation.

In Unit 7, students examine competing civil rights strategies. Using the “When Are Both Sides Right?” framework—a structured approach for identifying legitimate concerns across perspectives—they discover that Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and other leaders shared fundamental American ideals. Students practice charitable interpretation, learning to see strategic differences as reasonable responses to shared challenges rather than evidence of opposing values.

In Unit 8, students tackle contemporary debates about affirmative action, immigration, and criminal justice. A DACA stakeholder simulation places students in roles representing Dreamers, business coalitions, legal immigrants, and rule-of-law advocates—each with legitimate concerns. Through this exercise, students practice perspective-taking by representing positions they may not personally hold, steel and star-manning to understand competing stakeholders, and collaborative problem-solving through structured negotiation to find common ground.

An Inoculant Against Unproductive Discourse

Angel Eduardo calls star manning “an inoculant against our venomous discourse.” His six words of advice capture the spirit of what we’re trying to build: “Be kind; we’re all first drafts.”

We don’t have to wait for the next generation to discover better ways to disagree. The American Experience Curriculum is designed to teach students that understanding someone doesn’t mean agreeing with them, but that democracy requires genuinely grappling with opposing perspectives rather than dismissing them.

When I read Shupe’s novel about students bridging divides, I imagined what could be possible. My hope is that students who participate in this curriculum won’t only learn about the diverse experiences of all Americans and our shared history but will also build the habits of mind our democracy desperately needs: the ability to see ideological opponents as people, disagreements as opportunities, and common ground as something worth finding.

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The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diverse range of voices and to encouraging compassionate, good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking other perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

FAIR in Medicine is dedicated to supporting the scientific method, viewpoint diversity, and rigorous inquiry in the search for objective truth. We believe that intolerance is the enemy of free and open inquiry and respectful scientific debate. FAIR's advocacy for the rights of biological women and girls in sports and other protected spaces is premised on the need for objective scientific truth, but we also recognize the need to advocate for rigorous scientific inquiry beyond issues relating to gender.

As part of this effort, FAIR is launching a two-part series that will examine how nutrition impacts adult mental health. This essay is the first in that series. In Part II, we will explore how these patterns often occur within adolescence, a period of rapid brain, metabolic, and hormonal development. If this topic interests you, please join us on February 4th at 7pm ET for a webinar discussion with Dr. Kautz.

Going forward, we will explore other areas in which scientific debate and inquiry have been stifled by intolerance to the detriment of doctors and patients.

Every day, millions of Americans receive prescriptions for mental health concerns—anxiety, depression, panic, migraines, fatigue—often without a meaningful discussion of sleep, nutrition, stress physiology, or whether the body has the biological resources it needs to function optimally. More than half of American adults now take at least one prescription medication, and many take multiple medications daily, even as rates of mental illness, chronic disease, and metabolic dysfunction continue to rise.

We are intervening more than ever before, yet many people remain increasingly unwell.

What if the issue isn’t that symptoms are being ignored—but that the physiological foundations shaping those symptoms are rarely explained before treatment decisions are made?

This pattern appears repeatedly across different care settings. A postpartum woman struggling with anxiety and physical pain is offered medication without assessing whether pregnancy depleted nutrients critical for nervous system regulation and tissue repair. A woman with panic attacks and migraines tied to her cycle is prescribed pain and anti-anxiety medication without explanation of how hormonal shifts influence immune and neurological sensitivity. A patient with anxiety and infertility is offered ovulation-stimulating drugs without investigation into how stress physiology disrupted reproductive signaling in the first place.

In each case, symptoms are hastily addressed while the biological context driving them remains largely unexplored.

Why Physiology Gets Overlooked in Clinical Practice

This gap does not reflect a lack of scientific knowledge. Rather, it reflects how modern medical training and clinical systems are structured.

Nutrition, metabolism, and stress physiology are primarily taught through acute disease models, within isolated organ systems, and with an emphasis on diagnosis and pharmacologic correction rather than upstream depletion. Within this framework, clinicians are trained to recognize symptom patterns and intervene quickly—often under significant time and reimbursement constraints.

As a result, the complex interactions between metabolic health, hormones, immune signaling, and mental health symptoms are less likely to be thoroughly investigated or clearly communicated before treatment decisions are made. Patients are often offered solutions without being given the biological context needed to understand why those solutions were chosen—or what other contributors may be involved.

How Chiropractic Practice Revealed the Body–Mind Link

This systematic treatment gap became undeniable to me through my clinical practice as a chiropractor, where evaluating the nervous system is central to understanding pain, recovery, and regulation. Early in my training, a chiropractic mentor emphasized that many symptoms commonly treated as purely structural are often driven by underlying physiological or emotional strain.

In school, we were trained to recognize referral pain patterns and red flags indicating serious pathology—such as cancer, appendicitis, or gallbladder disease—and to use neurological findings to localize nerve root involvement or determine when imaging was warranted. What we were not taught was how common hormonal or metabolic imbalances could produce identifiable patterns of muscle weakness, altered recovery, or nervous system dysregulation.

Over time, it became clear in practice that no symptom exists in isolation. Structural, chemical, and emotional stressors continually interact, shaping how symptoms emerge and persist. In mental health, this often means that anxiety, low mood, and impaired stress tolerance reflect underlying biological strain rather than isolated psychological pathology—what I’ve come to recognize as the body-mind link.

Case Study: Postpartum Anxiety and Physiological Depletion

A postpartum mother presented several months after her second delivery with worsening anxiety, low mood, heightened sensitivity to noise, and difficulty sleeping. She described feeling emotionally unfamiliar to herself. Alongside these mental health symptoms, she also experienced persistent back pain and core instability that had not improved with standard strengthening protocols.

What had never been explained to her was how profoundly pregnancy and childbirth affect physiology. Pregnancy significantly increases demands for iron, B vitamins, magnesium, and zinc to support fetal development, placental growth, and expanded blood volume. Labor often involves meaningful blood loss, and postpartum sleep deprivation and breastfeeding further tax the nervous and hormonal systems.

Her labs reflected this cumulative strain: ferritin measured 18 ng/mL, vitamin B12 was borderline low, and magnesium status was suboptimal. Research has linked ferritin levels below 30 ng/mL with increased risk of anxiety, depression, impaired cognition, and reduced stress resilience—particularly in postpartum women.

Instead of this context, she had been offered pain medication for her back and an SSRI for her mood, along with reassurance that her experience was “normal postpartum.” While that statement was technically true, it lacked explanation. Normal does not mean inevitable, nor does it mean untreatable.

When her nutrient stores were replenished and her nervous system supported, her anxiety softened alongside improvements in physical recovery. The change was not psychological or physical alone—it was systemic.

Case Study: Anxiety, Infertility, and Stress Physiology

Another patient in her early 30s presented with persistent anxiety, insomnia, and difficulty conceiving. She had been diagnosed with “unexplained infertility” and told that ovulation-stimulating medication and oral progesterone were the next steps.

Her assessment revealed a consistent physiological pattern. Her luteal phase averaged eight days—shorter than the typical window needed to support implantation. B-vitamin markers were low-normal, fasting glucose fluctuated significantly throughout the day, and progesterone output was low during the luteal phase, when it would normally be expected to rise.

Chronic stress is known to suppress hypothalamic signaling involved in ovulation and progesterone production. These same stress patterns also heighten anxiety, impair sleep, and increase nervous system reactivity—yet this connection had never been explained to her.

Our treatment focus was on blood sugar regulation through nutrition and movement, nutrient repletion with a B-vitamin complex, hormone support using evidence-informed botanical and adaptogenic interventions, and nervous system regulation through chiropractic care. Her anxiety improved, ovulatory patterns normalized, and conception followed.

Case Study: Perimenopause, Panic attacks, and Immune Reactivity

A woman in her early 40s presented with severe migraines and panic attacks that predictably appeared in the days leading up to her period. Each month, she experienced heart palpitations, light sensitivity, and anxiety intense enough to disrupt work and sleep.

She had been told her labs were “normal,” and the primary options discussed were migraine medication and an anti-anxiety prescription—without explanation of why her symptoms followed such a clear hormonal pattern.

In her case, this hormonal vulnerability was compounded by a sustained state of chronic physiological stress that placed ongoing demand on her immune system. This was supported by her history of prolonged sleep disruption, high cognitive and emotional load, and a symptom pattern that closely tracked hormonal fluctuations—suggesting impaired stress resilience rather than an isolated acute trigger.

Estrogen and progesterone help regulate immune signaling, including how inflammatory responses are controlled. When these hormones decline in the luteal phase before menstruation, immune balance shifts, allowing inflammatory signaling to increase. That immune activation can then feed back into the nervous system, lowering the threshold for migraines, panic attacks, and sensory overwhelm. Her symptoms were not random—they were predictable physiological responses to layered stressors.

The Pattern Beneath the Stories

These cases reflect a broader pattern in mental health care: treatment decisions are often made without explaining the biological mechanisms contributing to emotional symptoms, and solutions are frequently focused on short-term symptom relief rather than addressing underlying drivers.

Blood sugar instability, nutrient depletion, sleep disruption, immune activation, inflammation, hormonal shifts, and stress physiology commonly go unmeasured or undiscussed—even though each meaningfully shapes mood, anxiety, focus, and emotional resilience. When these contributors are not explored, medication can feel like the most obvious option—not because it is inappropriate, but because alternative drivers were never discussed.

What Patients Can Ask to Have Evaluated

While no single test explains everything, certain evaluations can offer meaningful insight.

1. Nutrient Status

Several nutrients play direct roles in nervous system regulation, stress tolerance, and neurotransmitter function. Patients may consider asking about:

• Iron studies, especially ferritin (not just hemoglobin)

• Vitamin B12 and folate

• Magnesium (RBC magnesium can be more informative than serum)

• Vitamin D

• Zinc (when indicated by immune, digestive, or hormonal symptoms)

Low or borderline levels in these markers have been associated in research with anxiety, depression, cognitive fatigue, and postpartum mood symptoms.

2. Blood Sugar Regulation

Blood sugar instability is a common and underrecognized driver of anxiety, panic symptoms, irritability, and fatigue. Helpful markers may include:

• Fasting glucose

• Fasting insulin

• Hemoglobin A1c

When blood sugar fluctuates, stress hormones rise, increasing nervous system reactivity and emotional instability.

3. Hormonal Patterns

Hormones strongly influence emotional regulation and nervous system sensitivity. Depending on symptoms and life stage, evaluation may include:

• Progesterone and estrogen patterns, particularly in the luteal phase or during perimenopause

• Thyroid markers (TSH, free T3, free T4, and antibodies when indicated)

• Cortisol rhythm, ideally assessed across the day rather than with a single blood draw

Even subtle hormonal shifts—within “normal” lab ranges—can meaningfully affect mood, sleep, and stress resilience. Estrogen and progesterone regulate key neurotransmitter systems involved in emotional regulation, including serotonin and GABA. Research shows that fluctuations in these hormones across the menstrual cycle and perimenopause are linked to changes in anxiety, mood stability, sleep quality, and stress sensitivity—even when hormone levels fall within standard reference ranges. This helps explain why people may experience significant emotional symptoms despite being told their labs are “normal.”

When Medication May Be Appropriate

Medication can play an important role in mental health care, particularly in acute or destabilizing situations—such as severe panic, major depression with suicidal ideation, psychosis, or anxiety that significantly impairs daily functioning. In these cases, pharmacologic support may be necessary to stabilize symptoms and ensure safety.

Medication may also be appropriate when the foundational contributors that have been discussed within this article have been explored, yet symptoms remain inadequately controlled. For some individuals, neurochemical support may be an essential layer of care.

At the center of this discussion is informed decision-making. Patients deserve a clear understanding of what medication is intended to address, what it may not resolve, and what other biological factors could be influencing their symptoms. That context allows treatment decisions to be collaborative rather than reactive.

When care includes explanation—not just intervention—symptoms are less likely to be experienced as personal failures and more likely to be understood as meaningful signals. That understanding often changes not only how people feel, but how they engage in their own healing.

Coming Next In This Series:

In Part II, we’ll examine how these patterns often occur within adolescence, a period of rapid brain, metabolic, and hormonal development. We’ll explore how SSRIs and hormonal contraceptives are frequently prescribed to teens navigating normal developmental changes—often without thorough evaluation of nutrient status, sleep quality, blood sugar regulation, or overall metabolic health. We’ll also consider how altering neurotransmitter and hormone signaling during these critical windows may have downstream effects on mental, metabolic, and reproductive health later in life.

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We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy. 

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diverse range of voices and to encouraging compassionate, good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking other perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

On January 18, 2026, protesters disrupted a church service to demand “justice” for Renee Good and an end to immigration enforcement, violating a social norm that most people still regard as basic. Scenes like this have become less unusual in recent years. As protests against ICE continue, sometimes escalating in troubling ways, I find myself, along with many others, caught in an uncomfortable position. I agree that ICE has overreached, violated long-standing norms, and in some cases may even have crossed legal boundaries. And yet, despite sharing many of the protesters’ substantive concerns, I often find myself unable to support the way those concerns are being expressed.

This feeling isn’t new. I’ve experienced it with left-wing protest movements since at least 2020. There is something about them that feels misguided and unserious, even when the cause itself is serious. I notice it in my own reaction: a sense of discomfort when I see peaceful anti-ICE demonstrations, raised fists, and familiar slogans, even though I broadly agree with their message. At the same time, that same reaction doesn’t surface when I think about the events of January 6, 2021, which struck me as tragic and dangerous rather than performative. Nor did I feel it watching the Hong Kong protests of 2019—a movement that still fills me with admiration for the protesters’ courage and sadness over their defeat. Why does one form of protest inspire respect, while another—closer to home—elicits unease? Is this simply bias, or something more structural?

I think it is more than bias, and that understanding the difference matters. If we want to draw attention to injustice, and to real risks of authoritarian drift in the United States, we need protest movements that persuade rather than alienate.

By “left-wing” protest movements here, I mean familiar examples: anti-ICE demonstrations, Black Lives Matter protests and the unrest associated with them, and recent anti-Israel protests. What unites many of these movements is not their goals, but the way those goals are pursued. Too often, moral seriousness is replaced by moral performance. Emotional expression, symbolic disruption, and a sense of assumed righteousness are elevated over discipline, proportionality, and concrete, achievable change.

Many protesters clearly see themselves as heirs to the civil rights movement. But the comparison often falters. When we look back at Birmingham in the 1960s, we see protesters who faced violence and humiliation with restraint and dignity, exposing injustice without reveling in it. Today’s protests frequently project a tone of sarcasm, contempt, and theatrical outrage. Rather than appealing to the conscience of broader society, they often signal belonging to an in-group that already agrees.

There is also a difference in risk that matters. The protesters in Hong Kong faced a genuine authoritarian state, one willing to permanently destroy their futures. In contrast, American protesters—while sometimes unfairly arrested or mistreated, which should never be minimized—generally operate in a system where most will return home safely at the end of the day. Scale matters. Recognizing this does not diminish legitimate grievances; it grounds them in reality. When demands are framed in sweeping, absolute terms—“Abolish ICE,” for example—without clear legal pathways or specific reforms, the movement can appear less focused on solutions than on the act of protest itself. The result is a cycle where symbolic expression becomes the goal, and concrete outcomes remain secondary.

This tendency is reinforced by the use of extreme language. Allegations that ICE has violated due process rights are serious and alarming on their own. They do not need amplification through comparisons to the Holocaust or other historical atrocities. Hyperbole weakens credibility and signals that the primary purpose of the protest may be emotional release rather than persuasion or reform.

So where does that leave us, when political expression so often becomes a contest of outrage rather than a search for solutions? This problem is not unique to the left, but it is particularly visible there right now. A first step may be to disengage from social media environments that reward emotional escalation and flatten complex moral issues into slogans. We should also reaffirm basic civic norms. Sacred spaces exist, and they deserve respect. If the concern is government overreach, that concern should be expressed in ways that uphold, rather than corrode, shared public life.

Societies weaken when protest becomes primarily an outlet for rage, and when spectacle replaces persuasion. Protest is most powerful when it appeals to our shared humanity—when it treats even opponents as people capable of being convinced, rather than obstacles to be shamed.

If we can return to forms of protest that are disciplined, humane, and oriented toward real change, then exercising the right to dissent might once again feel like a serious moral act rather than an empty performance.

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We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy. 

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diversity of voices and encouraging compassionate and good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking other perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

Editors Note: Below you will find a long-form essay by Mary McDonald-Lewis. We generally don’t publish long-form content on our Substack, but Mary’s voice and experience are so timely and important that we feel compelled to share this in its original form.

On December 18th at 7pm EST, Mary and Monica Harris will explore the human cost of cancellation, the spiritual and emotional dimensions that often go unseen, and the importance of building a culture where disagreement does not mean disposability. Mary will share her story, her losses, her resilience, and her hope for a better future. If Mary’s story moves you, please consider joining us.

It was a brisk September San Francisco morning, and the brunch joint was jumping. The moment had come. She had to know, in case what I feared was going to come to fruition. I pushed aside my maitake soft scramble, took a deep breath, and told my lovely daughter, as carefully as I could, that I had lost “purpose” in my life.

But what I meant was, I had lost the will to live. What I meant was, I was considering suicide.

How did I get here?

This is the third of three essays for FAIR, the first two of which track my initial cancellation in theater, and my subsequent cancellation and continued hounding. This one tells the story of my escape across the country... and my last cancellation. In the first, I ended up hoping to return to my art. The second concluded with the suspicion that my torment would continue, should I try to make art again.

It did. And it got me canceled for that third and final time.

So here is the only story I am permitted to tell now: my life sentence as an exiled artist, how it led to thoughts of suicide over eggs and cappuccino, and what happened after that brunch.

A little back story. After a dozen years as their resident dialect coach, in 2019 I was fired from both of Portland Oregon’s largest Equity theater companies for refusing to use demanded pronouns. Following this, from Oregon’s most popular coach I became the most reviled: dropped from every other theater in the state, stage work dried up entirely. But I was busy with film/television jobs and voice-over gigs, my union pensions and Social Security had kicked in, and theater never paid much anyway. Still, it was my local community, and most in it had begun to abandon their friendship with me, too. Cancellation #1.

About four years later, in 2023, I pitched a longtime friend and colleague on adapting Shakespeare’s Macbeth to a shorter, lens-down version—The Macbeths—which focused on the relationship between Mackers and Lady M. Other than the loss of work and friendships, it had been fairly quiet, especially with COVID-19 carving a firebreak through the, well, firestorms of the woke Portland theater community.

But as soon as the leftists discovered I was working on a new project, they attacked it by promoting me as a transphobe, racist, Zionist, and so on all over social media; by pushing my partner and the director to abandon me; by promising to destroy the reputations of anyone associated with the show; and by threatening pickets at the theater on opening night.

It worked.

My show was boycotted, I was betrayed by my partner and the director, kicked out of the theater space, damned in Willamette Week, Portland’s local left-wing rag, and attacked and threatened by the community.

The show shut down two weeks from opening, and I immediately made plans to move. Cancellation #2.

(Nota bene: See the end of the essay for more on The Macbeths.)

After 32 years in Portland, 70 days later I pulled up to my new home, 3,000 miles away in the Mid-Atlantic South. Once I was tucked into my cozy new neighborhood, an old writing partner living nearby reached out and proposed we start a readers theater company—that’s a staged reading operation where actors perform with script in hand, often simply at music stands. I’d had my own staged reading company for 20 seasons in Portland, and thought that was a splendid idea. So just as with The Macbeths, I got busy. I designed the logo, prepared the marketing, publicized auditions, met with the actors, began to solidify the cast, located a performance space... but when I let an interested actor know I only used standard pronouns on my stage, it happened all over again.

The actor leapt to various local theater pages on Facebook, declaring me a TERF (and a racist, for some reason), demanding the company be killed, and encouraging others to pile on—which they did by the dozens on those social media sites. They found the Willamette Week article about The Macbeths and published it widely on Facebook. They connected with the leftist actors in the Pacific Northwest and followed their playbook to the letter. Though inaccurate and hyperbolic in the extreme, Dustin K. Britt posted on several pages:

“Mary McDonald-Lewis has come to (my location). A known racist and TERF, she’s crisscrossing the country trying to get awful plays produced. She’s raised enough money to try and get readings here. It’s important that (the staged reading company) never become an entity in this community or any other.”

A typical reply was:

“It’s wild that she thought she could come to the Triangle and be successful with her disgusting views.”

This inspired Beau Clark’s suggestions:

“Everyone should post on all your own local pages tagging both (the company) and (the theater space). Let them see (this is from) the vast majority of the triangle theater community. Flood both of the ‘mentions’ sections with indicators that by aligning with Mary Mac, any patronage will equal being complicit in transphobia. Also, they have a staged reading on Oct 16th. Ready up some signs and flood the sidewalk outside.”

Britt and the mob went on to both condemn and pressure my partner to bail, and to threaten the theater space with boycott. Within days, I was blocked from all area theater social media pages, we lost the performing venue, the company folded, and the project was dead. It was chapter and verse the exact same cancellation plan as that which killed The Macbeths. Cancellation #3.

This was underscored soon after by an old-school, late-night obscene phone call wishing me all kinds of nasty harm, hoping, oddly, that both the president and I would die of “blood clots,” and by an encounter I had in a local dog park, where a man offered to introduce me to the storytelling community. I was thrilled and eagerly provided him my name and contact information. Within an hour he texted me: “Mary, I’ve done a bit of looking at social media and reading article published in Oregon. I’m sorry to say I don’t think you would care much for many of my views,” and he wished me luck. A dog park cancellation for dessert!

The bright spot was, my former partner remains my steadfast friend, though we are no longer producing together.

The dark spot was, I had finally learned the truth: after three vicious cancellations, it was clear that I was exiled forever from making art. And that’s what made me feel like there was no point in living any longer.

And there are very real reasons for this feeling.

We are born confused, with not much to go on other than cling to your mother and mimic everything you see (for better or for worse). We are also born with a need to tidy up that confusion, to recognize patterns and strive for harmony—that is, to somehow rhythm and rhyme the chaos outside, and inside, us. So we set out to organize our world in deeply personal ways. Grappling with the immensity of infinity, Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli expressed one facet of his organizing framework in Ars Conjectandi, written in the late 1600s, this way:

Even as the finite encloses an infinite series.
And in the unlimited limits appear,
So the soul of immensity dwells in minutia.
And in the narrowest limits no limit in here.
What joy to discern the minute in infinity!
The vast to perceive in the small, what divinity!

Rather than look outward, Benoît Mandelbrot’s search for harmony took him inward, to discover what became known as the Mandelbrot set, a system described by Quanta magazine’s math editor Jordana Cepelwicz in The Quest to Decode the Mandelbrot Set, Math’s Famed Fractal as “more than a fractal, and not just in a metaphorical sense. It serves as a sort of master catalog of dynamical systems—of all the different ways a point might move through space according to a simple rule.”

Like Vespucci at the edge of the Amazon, Mandelbrot sought to discover the mouth of the river, the font—something, anything—that organized the way a point—us—might move through space, hopefully according to a simple rule. From Pythagoras of Samos to Jackson Pollock of Cody, we are all searching for a Theory of Everything, and we describe it in the way our mind dictates, often through art. We struggle to compose the music of the spheres, we wrestle with words to write about the mystery and with numbers to decode it, and with molten metal to form our Thinker. Ecce homo. As the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling soars nearly 70 feet above us, Michelangelo’s God reaches to Adam, his hand outstretched, and Man is touched, created, born. Millions have sighed at its beauty, but below the immediate appreciation is the relief at the artist’s explanation: here we are, moving through space, accompanied.

Now take away Bernoulli’s pen, Mandelbrot’s microscope, Vespucci’s sails, Pythagoras’ voice, Pollock’s paintbrush, Rodin’s bronze, Michelangelo’s lapis lazuli. Banish them from their art. Two things have been accomplished: you have driven these men to madness, and you have deprived us of all that they gave us, and everything that came after it.

It is a nearly perfect crime, for two reasons. First, because the hand of the assassin is not seen—the figurative or actual death accomplished through the denial of essential personhood. Profound depression follows, and in the end, the artist conspires with their tormentors and does the silencing themselves. Second, because every time one artist is censored, canceled, fired, deplatformed, doxed, swatted, threatened with rape or murder, or actually harmed, most of the rest of the arts community either joins in the mob or doubles down on their silence. No perpetrator, no witnesses, no outrage, no justice. Simply the little loss of one artist, and the monumental loss of that artist’s voice.

Given that our articulated purpose, married, if we are lucky, to an abiding way of expressing it, approaches the sacred, then rendering it mute rises to that measure as well. It is a theft that is close to stealing the soul. But the canceled artist loses even more. After his work is taken from him, he loses his tribe: family, friends, colleagues turn their backs on him, and he is both silenced and utterly alone.

Shunning is a practice used in some churches and all cults, and cancellation is its modern sinister application. A recent Psychology Today article, How Religious Shunning Ruins Lives, details the damage: “Research has shown that shunned individuals often experience feelings of depression, helplessness, hopelessness, low self-esteem, suicidal ideation, and self-harming behaviors.”

Shunning—cancellation—according to Dr. Kipling D. Williams, professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University, “is like a social death penalty—and studies prove this point. Exclusion has been found to cause pain that cuts deeper and lasts longer than a physical injury.” The brain registers the rejection as a physical wound, with the distinct disadvantage that while bodily harm heals, brain harm is far more difficult to resolve. This is particularly true as shunning attacks four basic human needs: belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence. What follows is hopelessness, loss of health, home, and possibly life. Shunning is malevolent violence of the cruel and unusual kind.

Williams, author of Ostracism: The Power of Silence, expands on the research on this podcast.

The artist who has their organizing principle taken from them no longer has a means of creating and maintaining harmony. They face nothing but chaos, and they are shunned, left alone in this state. Is it any wonder that abandonment in this dark and howling landscape can lead to thoughts of self-destruction? From the same article: “Humans have a primal need for social support. Without a sense of belonging—a feeling of emotional safety and context—people come to fear that their very lives are at risk. They lose the ability to trust and connect with others, instead becoming consumed by the task of surviving alone.”

Once banished, the artist begins to manifest the trauma. Having lost both their coping mechanism and their community, they can feel isolated, lonely, and paranoid. For me, in Portland before I fled, those rare times I went to the theater I was nervous, awkward, not knowing who my friends or (as far as they were concerned) enemies were. It becomes hard to be one’s self, as we second-guess all interactions. The unreturned phone calls, texts, emails seem proof of yet another abandonment, whether true or not. And new friends feel impossible to make. Remember, Maslow places “love and belonging” in third place in his hierarchy of needs—between survival and safety, below, and esteem and self-actualization, above. This makes sense to me: connection is a kind of fulcrum, a psychological/emotional on-off switch which informs the other four.

And this brings me back to that table in the noisy bistro, considering suicide.

I was carved out by my final cancellation. Defeated. I used to say my motto was “Tell a story, save the world,” and now I was never going to tell a story again. I was this close to giving up. I confessed to my daughter, in so many words, that I didn’t want to live; I made my way back across the country, went inside, and closed the door.

But then I recalled the voice that spoke to me during my second cancellation, and which ended my second essay for FAIR. “I didn’t come here to have an easy time,” it told me. So, fending off the demon thoughts persecuting me, I did something I don’t usually do: I asked for help. I reached out to FAIR again, to write this essay to all of you. And from my conversation with Brent Morden, Director, FAIR in the Arts, came my salvation.

I told Brent I was lost—adrift in purpose, awash in hopelessness. I had no compass for a path forward, and my scripts, both figurative and literal, had been torn to pieces. “Time to improvise,” Brent said. “Have you ever read Albert Murray? He says improvisation is the hero’s journey.” I was instantly interested. Phone cradled to my ear, I hopped online and ordered his collected essays and memoirs immediately.

Murray (1916–2013) was a novelist, essayist, biographer, literary and music critic, and teacher. His passions were the blues, jazz, and literature, with a special love for Duke Ellington and his friend Ralph Ellison, and for Hemingway and Thomas Mann. He was also a thinker of colossal and prodigious status. The Hero and the Blues is his long essay on the subject Brent brought up.

Consider the jazz break, Murray says, as the moment the hero is called to improvise. Every other musician on that stage is silent, and it’s up to the sax player to make his case. He moves into the void, calling on everything inside him: the sweet and the sour, the lost and the found, the grief and the grace to make something new. Brand new, and brave, and healing, and an aid to everyone who hears it.

God touches Adam’s hand, and with an infant’s gasp, he comes to life. Improvising.

And it’s needed. Moving from the jazz man to the scribe, “It is the writer, as artist, not the social or political engineer, or even the philosopher, who first comes to realize when the time is out of joint. It is he who determines the extent and gravity of the current human predicament, who, in fact, discovers and describes the hidden elements of destruction, sounds the alarm, and even… designate the targets.”

There’s plenty in the way of this artistic improv, maybe more than ever before. But (agreeing with Aurelius here) Murray tells us the obstacle is the way. He calls it “antagonistic cooperation, a concept which is indispensable to any fundamental definition of heroic action, fiction or otherwise. The fire in the forging process, like the dragon which the hero must always encounter, is of its very nature antagonistic, but it is also cooperative at the same time. For all its violence, it does not destroy the metal which becomes the sword. It functions precisely to strengthen and prepare it to hold its battle edge, even as the all but withering firedrake prepares the questing hero for subsequent trials and adventures.”

To engage in the artist’s quest is Quixotic, to say the least, especially today. The leftist theater community on both coasts of this country stole my storytelling and imperiled my life. But since every day, as Murray told one interviewer, “is like either … cut your throat or be down at the Savoy [Ballroom] by 9:30,” I’m going to pick up my sword, thank God for antagonistic cooperation, and tell this story: What this movement does is immoral and base, a cowardly, carnivorous thing. Many thousands of artists are suffering because of it. It has malignant intentions for our country, and will rot the heart of us to achieve them. But if we are brave. If we refuse to be silenced. If we recruit more and more artists to this cause, we will endure this darkness, we will emerge from it, and we will triumph in the light. “Indeed,” says Murray, “...in the final analysis the greatness of the hero can be measured only in scale with the mischief, malaise, or menace he can dispatch.”

So in my own small way, I’m going to try and be great. I’m going to do that, instead of filling my daughter with dread over a nice meal on a bright San Francisco day. I will not die because of everything they have done to me, my dear and beautiful child. I will live for the very same reason.

I closed my last essay with a poem. I’ll close this one with a song I chart my course by.

Unsinkable, by Sail North

Unsinkable

Aim high, swing hard, leave it out there, no regrets
My blood is in the water and the sharks are taking bets
They circle are waiting for my final breath
But they won’t see me drown
I hoist my sails for the treasure in the sea
The winds that blow behind me take me where I’m supposed to be
I’m raising hell for the ones who don’t believe
Their words can’t drag me down

When the wind rips the tide
I will sail
Reach the other side
Let the storm roll on wild
I was born for this
I’m unsinkable.

Nota bene 1: My fundraiser, Speak up for a Silenced Artist, has raised money for a staging of my play, The Macbeths. Because of the cancellations and to prevent further harassment, I cannot share specifics, but these donations will be put to use in the designated way.

Nota bene 2: Alluded to here is the concept of “soul murder,” which was “first used in the legal code of Saxony in the early 19th century and later by playwrights Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg to describe the destruction of a person’s vitality or love of life.” The term became more commonly known through the work of psychoanalyst Leonard Shengold in his 1989 book, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation.

The Toll of Cancellation on the Human Spirit

On December 18th at 7pm EST, we will explore the human cost of cancellation, the spiritual and emotional dimensions that often go unseen, and the importance of building a culture where disagreement does not mean disposability. Our guest Mary McDonald-Lewis will share her story, her losses, her resilience, and her hope for a better future—one marked not by fear, but by exchange, openness, and shared humanity.

Register

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy. 

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diversity of voices and encouraging compassionate and good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking other perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

K–12 education in the United States has undergone an unprecedented degree of politicization. Educators’ personal opinions and political advocacy have increasingly become focal points in the classroom. Instead of emphasizing academic rigor, critical thinking, and preparation for college or vocational paths, some districts now issue formal political statements, promote one-sided narratives, and overlook laws that prohibit using classrooms for personal advocacy.

This politicization spans multiple subject areas. In math, some districts have replaced traditional curricula with “equitable math,” eliminating honors classes and teaching that mathematics has been “used to disenfranchise people and communities of color.” (Seattle Math Framework, 2019) Under the banner of “equity,” many districts have removed advanced courses altogether.

History curricula have also shifted. Traditional objectives such as “Understand the founding ideals of American democracy” have been replaced with directives to “challenge outdated dominant narratives that reinforce hegemony in modern American history.” (San Mateo, 2024)

Ethnic Studies—especially in California—has become a national case study in how activist educators can reshape how students learn about identity, history, and civic engagement. Instead of maintaining the classroom as an academic environment, the course, in its “Liberated” form, is often used to advance educators’ personal political beliefs and biases. Where states require Ethnic Studies, the class typically replaces a semester of World History or U.S. History.

To the general public, Ethnic Studies is understood as an opportunity for students to learn about diverse communities, their histories, and their contributions to American society. In practice, however, many districts have adopted radicalized curricula focused almost entirely on power structures while promoting a narrow ideological framework without critical analysis. In San Francisco Unified, students are taught “essential” Ethnic Studies vocabulary such as “indoctrinate,” “oppress,” “marginalized,” “system,” and “privilege.” They are then instructed to categorize their own immutable characteristics—race, ethnicity, body size, sexuality, and economic status—and identify themselves as either “powerful” or “marginalized,” with no alternative categories. (SFUSD, 2024) This approach is often referred to as “Liberated Ethnic Studies.”

By contrast, Constructive Ethnic Studies centers on the contributions of ethnic minorities to the development of the United States. This approach encourages student inquiry, presents multiple viewpoints, and includes analysis of race and racism—historically and in the modern era—without reducing students to predetermined roles. It helps students see themselves in the curriculum while fostering understanding of their peers without stereotyping or assigning blame.

Politicized Ethnic Studies models, on the other hand, encourage students to adopt specific ideological positions, engage in radical activism, and view themselves and others through a victim–oppressor framework. In some districts, students are asked to identify “oppressors” in their own lives—including their school, parents, or religion. (Mountain View, 2023)

The Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies (ACES) was formed to help parents, educators, and communities navigate the rapid expansion of politicized Ethnic Studies programs. Most public schools in California have adopted some form of Ethnic Studies instruction, and a growing number of states are implementing their own guidelines or requirements. As a result, districts nationwide are overhauling history and social science curricula—often with limited transparency and minimal parent involvement.

ACES supports parents and collaborates with school districts to ensure that curricula remain academically rigorous, legally compliant, and free from political indoctrination.Recognizing this urgent need for balanced alternatives, FAIR has developed The American Experience curriculum—a comprehensive high school course that meets California Ethnic Studies standards while exploring diverse American experiences through constitutional frameworks rather than divisive power structures. FAIR’s curriculum uses primary sources and civil discourse techniques to help students understand what it means to be American in a pluralistic society. During our upcoming webinar, we’ll explore how this constructive approach provides the academically rigorous, legally compliant instruction that communities are demanding.

Please join us to learn how ACES and FAIR are working to protect students, promote constructive and high-quality education, and support communities seeking depoliticized, balanced instruction.

The Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies is a diverse, nonpartisan coalition working to remove narrow ideological agendas from curricula and foster K–12 Ethnic Studies that inspire mutual respect, counter racism, and celebrate the accomplishments of all ethnic groups.

Depoliticizing K-12 Education: What to Know, What to Do

K-12 schools nationwide are increasingly becoming infused with political agendas. Learn what politicization looks like throughout curricula, including in subjects such as Ethnic Studies. On December 16th at 8:30pm EST, join us to find out how ACES and FAIR are working to protect students and promote constructive, quality education, and what YOU can do in your own communities.

Register

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy. 

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diversity of voices and encouraging compassionate and good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking other perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

A Politico report recently revealed how Americans see our country and the American dream, and the results are bleak. A plurality of respondents believe that our nation’s best times are behind us. Forty-six percent of respondents agree that “The American dream no longer exists,” and those numbers are even higher for younger generations. Fifty-two percent are so dispirited by the state of our country that they say that “we need radical change” in order to “make life better in America.” Again, those numbers are higher for younger generations.

What’s going on? Why are so many of us, especially my generation and younger (I’m 34), in despair about the state of our nation—and, by extension, the state of our own lives? The report posits several explanations, from a struggling economy to a dearth of meaning in our lives to toxic polarization.

I think there’s truth to many of these explanations, but one key piece of the puzzle isn’t being discussed: fewer and fewer of us feel seen.

Feeling seen and acknowledged is a foundational human need, up there with food and water and shelter. In 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey argues that the need to feel seen and listened to on a deep level is so acute that he equates the feeling of being listened to with breathing in “psychological air.” As a quote widely attributed to Covey goes, “The deepest desire of the human spirit is to be acknowledged.”

In Anatomy of the Soul, psychiatrist Curt Thompson says that the experience of being deeply seen is an essential aspect of the good life. He writes:

“The process of being known is the vessel in which our lives are kneaded and molded, lanced and sutured, confronted and comforted…[i]t is the communal container in which the information about the mind and relationships that we will explore in this book takes its shape and gives birth to the graces of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

But our modern society gives us fewer and fewer opportunities to be deeply known.

For one thing: as more and more of our entertainment and our lives becomes mediated through screens, we’ve started to lose the types of deep relationships that our ancestors took for granted. Writing in 1999, Robert Putnam documented how the rise of television had contributed to a society that bowled alone, because more and more of us were spending our evenings in front of the television set rather than going out and interacting with our neighbors. Since then the problem has gotten exponentially worse.

In Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, then-Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy wrote that, “People began to tell me they felt isolated, invisible, and insignificant.” He recounts Americans across economic and racial divides telling him that they felt like, “if I disappear tomorrow, no one will even notice.”

To put numbers to this disturbing phenomenon, Murphy reports that: “In recent years, about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness. And that was before the COVID-19 pandemic cut off so many of us from friends, loved ones, and support systems, exacerbating loneliness and isolation.”

Americans today—especially young people—might have more casual friendships, especially because social media puts us in touch with hundreds of people every day. But those casual relationships don’t provide the “psychological air” that Covey describes. They don’t offer us the opportunity to be deeply seen, in all of our complexity and messiness, by another human being. Only close friendships do that, and close friendships are on the decline. A report by the Survey Center On American Life found that 12 percent of Americans reported having no close friends in 2021, up from 3 percent in 1990. An astounding 49 percent report having three or fewer close friends in 2021, up from 27 percent in 1990. Some of that increase is due to the pandemic, but some is also caused by societal shifts towards atomistic lives.

If the problem is that fewer and fewer of us feel seen, we might think that what I call “vulnerability culture” would provide an antidote. “Vulnerability culture” is the new trend of opening up, often on social media, about our worst mental or physical problems. Younger Americans especially are participating in “vulnerability culture” in ways that one would think would lead to us feeling seen. So why doesn’t it work?

For one thing, a lot of this “vulnerability culture” is mediated online. When Simone Biles dropped out of the 2020 Olympics in order to prioritize her mental health, she became the subject of glowing news articles and social media adoration. But most of this attention came online, from strangers. It came from people who only saw a tiny slice of Biles’ life, and whose lives in turn she saw only a tiny fraction of. This kind of adoration may sound like it should make us feel seen, but it rarely does because it’s so shallow.

This has been my own experience. For decades I struggled with intense depression and with the grueling after-effects of being abused as a child. When I opened up about my struggles, I got lots of validation and attention on social media. But none of it made any real difference, because it was from strangers.

Thompson talks about the importance of seeing someone seeing you. For example, a child with her loving mother: the mother sees the child, and the child is deeply and intimately aware of her mother seeing her. That kind of seeing can make a real difference to peoples’ mental health. It’s not the kind of thing that can be replicated via online attention and social media. Quantity cannot make up for quality.

There’s also a more pernicious aspect to “vulnerability culture.” Sometimes the focus is not only on seeing peoples’ despair; sometimes the focus is on keeping people in that state of despair. Misery loves company, after all. In 2022 Suzy Weiss reported on the phenomenon of “spoonie” culture, a frequently toxic subculture for young women who are sick. This subculture can help people with brutal diagnoses to feel seen and validated in their pain. But, as Weiss reports, there’s a dark side: the community seems set up to keep people sick. She quotes psychiatrist Mark Sullivan, who worries that the Internet has created “communities of grievance” in which patients can adopt “victim mentalities” for attention and validation.

Spoonie culture struggles to help people who are suffering to feel seen, because it can only see part of them. It can see their illness and their pain. But it has a harder time seeing their fortitude, their drive to get better, or even their humanity outside of their sickness. As Sophie Jacobson, who was active in the spoonie community at the time, told Weiss, ““Someone asked me recently, ‘Who are you outside of being sick?’ and my jaw dropped. I had absolutely no idea how to answer that question.” Such communities struggle to offer their members the “psychological air” that Covey says that we all need.

If spoonie culture obsesses over our sickness, then the polar opposite would be the well-meaning (and generally older) people who deride the problems that young Americans face as simply stemming from entitlement and privilege; i.e. as being “first world problems.” To be clear, this mindset does come with some benefits. After I spent a year in Kenya seeing abject poverty up close, I decided that I was never going to complain about money again, even through the financial vagaries of being a freelance author. I’ve mostly kept to that decision, and it’s been good for me. Sometimes, when we get upset that our Netflix shorted out or that we don’t have money for a brand new phone, reminding ourselves that we’re suffering from first world problems can give us some perspective.

But as philosopher Alan Noble points out in You Are Not Your Own, the modern world comes with its own enormous challenges. We face obstacles that our ancestors didn’t. We might not deal with a high infant mortality rate or with wondering where our next meal is coming from, but we face existential problems of our own: a dearth of meaning, a lack of feeling of belonging, a culture that conflates our financial success with our worth as a human being. As Noble argues, these problems can cause profound pain: he suggests that they’re behind a huge part of the spike in mental illness among young people, as well as a driver of deaths of despair. If our goal is to be seen, then sweeping these problems under the rug or dismissing the angst that comes from them as stemming from privilege and entitlement is profoundly counterproductive.

So if much of our societal despair is caused by not feeling seen, what can we do about the problem?

The good news is that we don’t have to wait for our broken society to fix itself. Each of us, in our own lives, can take two powerful steps to be seen more fully and to experience the mental health benefits thereof.

First, we can consciously invest in deep offline relationships. We can log off of social media and rekindle old friendships. We can make the small sacrifices to invest in and grow relationships—missing an hour of sleep in order to listen to a family member who’s going through a hard time, making the courageous decision to open up to a casual friend about something deeper in our own lives.

These relationships cannot be built quickly, because intimacy takes time to cultivate. It requires a hundred small decisions, a thousand small investments. But these investments are worth the cost. As Thompson notes, being fully seen by another human being is essential to integrating our prefrontal cortex. Integrating our prefrontal cortex leads to a slew of benefits, including “Emotional balance,” “response flexibility” (essentially, the ability to respond calmly to a situation rather than react), a reduction in fear, and “living with a sense of vitality, expectation, and hope.”

The second step that we can take, if we are so inclined, is to cultivate a relationship with the divine.

This is not a popular recommendation in certain circles, but I think it’s one that deserves our serious consideration. If God does exist, then He is the one being in the entire universe who would know us with perfect clarity. He would know every hair on our heads, every thought that’s ever passed through our hearts—because He created us. And, He would love us infinitely (1 John 4:8). If part of our societal malaise is not being seen and known, what could be more healing than to be seen and known perfectly by God?

Indeed, Thompson says that helping his patients to feel known and loved by God has been essential to their healing. He tells the story of “Laura,” a composite of many patients he has seen over the years who struggle with intense depression. Part of how Thompson helped Laura was traditional psychotherapy, together with helping her to see and feel seen by other human beings. But Thompson stresses that a key part was reshaping her relationship with the divine: helping her to listen to and believe God’s “voice” when it told her: “’You are my daughter—one I love. I am so very pleased you are on the earth.’” Thompson says that this combination helped Laura to get to a place where her depression “no longer plagued her to any degree of serious consequence.”

Perhaps this combination of feeling deeply seen by other humans and also deeply seen by God can combat our societal malaise in the same way that it combatted Laura’s depression.

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In these fractured times, when American democracy faces unprecedented challenges from both within and without, I declare myself a radical moderate. This may sound like an oxymoron—how can one be both radical and moderate simultaneously? Yet in our current environment of extreme polarization, where the loudest voices often represent the narrowest perspectives, choosing moderation has become perhaps the most radical act of all. It is a stance that demands we embrace what is needed most: a full and radical commitment to democratic discourse itself.

When I describe myself as a radical moderate, I am not advocating for the wishy-washy centrism of those who cannot make up their minds. Rather, I invoke something closer to the Buddhist “Middle Way” or Aristotle’s “golden mean”—a principled position that recognizes extremes as both excessive and deficient. The “radical” component of my identity reflects the courage required to hold this ground in an age when nuance is mistaken for weakness and complexity is dismissed as indecisiveness.

This positioning has become radical precisely because a tiny but vocal minority has hijacked our political landscape, as research reveals. According to the 2018 More in Common “Hidden Tribes” study, those holding extreme views—combining both the far-right “devoted conservatives” (6% of the population) and far-left “progressive activists” (8%)—represent merely 14% of Americans. Yet these groups wield disproportionate influence, particularly on social media, where 70% of progressive activists and 56% of devoted conservatives regularly share political content.

The remaining 86% of Americans—the exhausted, silent majority—find themselves without adequate representation in our national conversation.

The data reveals something even more troubling: these extreme groups share disturbing similarities beyond their outsized voices. For instance, research from Queensland University of Technology found that both radical left and alt-right adherents score significantly higher on measures of the “Dark Triad”—psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism—as well as authoritarianism and entitlement. In contrast, centrists who hold pro-social values and respect others’ choices showed no correlation with these antisocial traits.

The urgency of reclaiming the center becomes clear when we consider recent events that have shaken American democracy to its core. When marauding looters dedicated to chaos rioted in 2020 after George Floyd’s murder, a populist mob rose from within the body politic on January 6, 2021, and algorithms are engineered to exploit and widen political divisions for profit, the stakes could not be higher. More recently, the Democrats, currently the minority party in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, have been wrestling with whether to tack towards the center, for example, Josh Shapiro, or the populist Democratic Socialism of NYC mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. For their part, MAGA Republicans have been grappling with the antisemitism and white nationalism of Nick Fuentes and his Groypers.

Add Large Language Models (LLMs) to the mix, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) beginning to replace white collar knowledge workers, and the stage is set for social and economic unrest and deepening psychological anxiety across generations. In this context, radical moderation doesn’t represent compromise for its own sake, but a fierce commitment to preserving the pluralistic values fundamental to our multiethnic democratic experiment.

My radical moderation seeks to leverage core values from left, right, and center, while also recognizing that worldviews such as traditionalism, modernism, and postmodernism contribute essential viewpoints while harboring dangerous shadow elements.

Traditionalism honors religion, family, and patriotism, but risks devolving into ethnocentrism and discrimination. Modernism champions scientific advancement and economic progress while potentially disregarding inequality and environmental destruction. Progressive postmodernism rightly emphasizes social justice and environmental protection, yet can slide into rigid identity politics that undermine individual liberty and other Enlightenment values.

The integrative approach I embrace respects the good in all these worldviews while remaining vigilant about their limitations. At the same time, I’m pragmatic in my embrace of key values and aspirations of the left and right. I lean center-left on some matters, sharing the progressive vision of expanding America’s social contract to include everyone. At the same time, I align center-right, valuing individual liberty, personal responsibility, and free enterprise systems that reward entrepreneurship. In fact, in local elections in my town in Fairfield County, Connecticut, I have cast votes on both sides of the aisle. This is not ideological inconsistency, but principled flexibility coupled with the ability to think independently rather than simply echo partisan talking points.

Perhaps most importantly, radical moderation recognizes that structural and systemic change requires not only political action, but inner personal work and skillful ways of relating across differences. As economist Glenn Loury reminds us, “All human development takes place inside social institutions... in between persons in the context of human interaction—the family, the school, the peer group.” The quality of our connections creates the context in which developmental resources reach individuals and communities.

This insight draws me to the Omni-American wisdom of Albert Murray and the blues idiom—what Murray called “affirmation in the face of difficulty, improvisation in the face of challenge.” Murray described this attitude as acknowledging that “life is a low-down dirty shame yet confronting that fact with perseverance, with humor, and above all, with elegance.” This stance of tragic optimism, also posited by cultural critic Stanley Crouch and psychologist Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, offers a template for democratic engagement that neither denies life’s difficulties nor surrenders to despair.

The journey toward such wisdom requires the cultural skill to facilitate deep democratic conversations across worldview codes, from indigenous and traditional to modern and postmodern. Having lived in alignment with each of these codes at different points in my 62 years—from Pentecostal fervor in my teens to an Afrocentric spiritual community in my twenties, and from critical theory graduate study in my thirties to the integration of jazz, business, and philosophical thought I exemplify today—I’ve learned that authentic dialogue requires both intellectual rigor and emotional intelligence.

The path forward also demands that independents—now representing 34% of Americans according to recent polling, with 60% identifying as moderates—find our collective voice and collaborative power. We must resist the pressure to always choose one side in manufactured culture wars and instead model the respectful disagreement democracy requires. This means exercising what philosopher and cognitive scientist John Vervaeke calls “dialogos”—conversations that seek understanding rather than victory.

Such dialogue becomes possible when we honestly admit that most Americans, regardless of political affiliation, experience the pain of loss and the blues of life. Indeed, this is the human condition. So, whatever our leanings, and even while rejecting the views of extremists, we should relate to other Americans with respect and deep empathy, grounded in shared cultural citizenship and civic leadership. This is not naïve optimism but hard-won wisdom about what democracy actually requires to function.

In our current environment of extreme polarization, fed by media bifurcation and algorithmic manipulation, speaking for the exhausted majority in the middle has become a radical act. It requires courage to stand against the thought-policing that characterizes both extremes, where expressing openness to opposing views brings backlash from one’s own cohort. But this is precisely what democratic citizenship demands: the willingness to think independently, speak truthfully, and listen generously.

The choice before us is stark: we can allow America to be torn apart by small factions representing loud, online minorities but wielding outsized influence, or we can reclaim the democratic center where most Americans actually reside. The latter path requires embracing radical moderation—not as mushy compromise but as fierce commitment to pluralistic democracy.

As Thomas Chatterton Williams writes in the Afterword of Summer of Our Discontent:

Genuine liberals, as well as their moderate and center-right partners, have no choice but to reclaim the abandoned moral high ground. We must identify and disown the means of extremism—even when they manifest themselves in pursuit of ends we may agree with. That is the most basic prerequisite for democracy.

If politics is the art of the possible, then the extremes have made real politics nearly impossible. They have reduced our national conversation to rhetorical warfare, which has morphed into political violence against politicians on both sides. Sadly, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated this past September. This horrific predicament of violent behavior and illiberal rhetoric serves no one except those who profit from division. But if we independents and moderates work together, increase our numbers, and raise our voices against this destructive polarization, we can move society toward our shared values of civil discourse, mutual respect, and democratic problem-solving.

The stakes are too high for anything less than this radical commitment to a democratic center. Our republic’s survival depends not on choosing sides in culture wars but on reclaiming the middle ground where “E Pluribus Unum”—out of many, one—remains more than a motto. It can become our lived reality, but only if we have the radical courage to be moderate in an age of extremes.

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A new Politico report on what Americans think of our lives and country was released this week, and the results are bleak. Forty-six percent of respondents agreed with the statement that “The American dream no longer exists,” compared with just 26 percent who disagreed. Forty-nine percent agreed with the sentiment that our best times as a country are behind us, compared to just 41 percent who said they are yet to come. Fifty-two percent of respondents are so unhappy with the state of our nation that they agree with the statement, “To make life better in America we need radical change.”

And it’s not Democrats who feel disaffected under the current administration. Forty-six percent of Trump supporters agreed that our country needs radical change.

In short, most of us are pessimistic and unhappy about our country’s prospects.

Why do we feel this way? One cause that’s often discussed, and that the report goes into (to be fair, the report also goes into other possible causes) is economic. Politico quotes political scientist Jennifer McCoy, who says:

“[Y]oung people especially ... are feeling that, feeling that they can’t buy a house, they can’t afford to have children, they still have student debt, all of these things.”

This explanation sounds superficially appealing, but I’m not convinced that economic concerns are driving our societal pessimism. For one thing, hard numbers show that Generation Z (who the survey found to be most pessimistic about the state of our country) are the wealthiest generation in human history. A report by The Economist shows that, even adjusting for inflation, Gen Z out-earns members of every previous generation.

For another, social science shows that money isn’t what makes us happy. A study published in The Journal of Socio-Economics analyzed 10,000 people over 18 years to determine which factors contributed the most to human happiness. The authors’ answer? Not money. The authors note that: “Income only plays a small part in influencing our well-being.” In fact, you would need to earn an extra $150,000 per year in order to receive as much additional happiness as you would from having just one additional close friend.

As a freelance writer, I’ve had my share of financially difficult years, and I’m not discounting the impact of poverty on folks’ well-being. But all the same, if we see happiness as a pie, then money seems to account for only a small slice.

So if a struggling economy isn’t behind our malaise as a country, then what is? I think the answer is that our society is broken in more foundational ways. One of these ways which isn’t discussed enough is that our society is structured such that most of us struggle to experience beauty in our day-to-day lives.

Philosophers throughout history have recognized the importance of beauty when it comes to living the good life. Ancient philosophers described the good life (kalokagathia) as a fusion of what was good (agathon) and what was beautiful (kalon).

One benefit of introducing more beauty into our lives, as philosopher Claus Dierksmeier points out, is that beauty gets us out of our own heads. Dierksmeier notes that the act of trying to create something beautiful frees us from our “self-centered perspective” in pursuit of an ideal. I would argue that the same is true of experiencing beauty: when we’re on top of a mountain or listening to a transcendent piece of music, our petty fears and anxieties can fade away for a moment. We become less self-obsessed, which is to say less focused on our own pain, and when we shift our perspective outwards we find that our pain becomes less dominant.

Another benefit of introducing more beauty into our lives is that there’s something about beauty that helps us to live higher and more esteemed lives. Beauty gets us closer to the sacred, however we define that. Dierksmeier notes that modern philosophers consider beauty to be “a conduit to the deeper meaning and destination of life” and a key way “to realize one’s true human potential.” He writes that:

“The coincidence of opposites that the beautiful accomplishes—the harmonious fusion of disparate elements such as order and irregularity in the beautiful object, the merger of toil and pleasure in the producer, the combination of concentration and relaxation in the beholder, and so on—are still seen as betokening something special (a grace, a faculty for bestowing life, starting afresh, creating something novel, combined with a spirit of elevation/generosity/superabundance or supererogatory giving) that enables human life to transcend itself and its animal nature.”

The final benefit of beauty is that it can help us to cope with modern life.

Whatever good may be said of modern life, most people agree that it’s exhausting. Our to-do lists are a mile long. Technology makes it easy to tackle each individual task (for instance, I can schedule an oil change for my car with a few clicks of a mouse), but there are also an inordinate number of tasks. Burnout and fatigue are some of the hallmarks of modern society: most of us feel exhausted, and at the same time we feel—like Sishyphus—that there’s still an infinite amount that needs doing.

Some of the most common phrases in modern life are “I need to do XYZ” and “I should really do XYZ,” both of which suggest that the speaker has far more on their plate than they seem able to actually accomplish.

Faced with that, experiencing beauty can provide a balm. As Dierksmeier notes, experiencing beauty is “reinvigorating” and even “soul-saving.” When we spend a day in a beautiful forest, it can replenish our energy levels and provide rest to our weary souls. When we make experiencing beauty a daily part of our lives, we can find that it offers a sort of spiritual rest: we don’t feel as burned out and fatigued as we once did.

The problem is that modern society often leaves us parched for beauty.

For one thing, while wonderful art is still being made, AI slop is starting to drown out the type of human-created beauty that can restore our souls. A recent analysis found that half of all English-language articles are written by AI, and another analysis found that half of long-form LinkedIn posts are AI-generated. AI slop is getting turned into books, too; Amazon has had to limit people to posting a maximum of three books per day in part to limit the spread of slop.

The spread of slop can seem inevitable when AI tools can generate 100,000 words with the click of a button: Mike Todasco reveals that his AI alter ego has published 17 books “of mostly unreadable slop” on Amazon in the past three years (including a new one appropriately titled This Is Slop!), all in less time than it takes some of the great authors to produce a single novel. It can feel hard to escape the spread of AI slop for another reason too: social media algorithms actually boost AI-generated content, ensuring that we see more of it.

Even a lot of human-generated content is hardly artistic. We’re in the age of the influencer, and a lot of the most popular videos on Instagram and TikTok are simply next-gen reality TV: influencers mining their conflict and intimate moments in order to offer us brief amusement. As Gen Z author Freya India writes of her generation: “We are now turning our lives into mindless entertainment.”

It can also feel like we have fewer media for experiencing truly transcendent art, too. 2025 has seen the release of some incredible movies, but the theaters that let us truly experience these films are dying. During the pandemic, box office sales cratered, and they never quite recovered even after the pandemic ended: Variety reports that “Ticket sales in 2024 fell to $8.7 billion, a 23.5% drop from pre-pandemic levels.” When I go to the theater these days, I consider it a big showing if I see more than four or five other people in the seats.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with watching movies at home. But the best films are masterpieces of art and sound; watching Guillermo del Toro’s new visually stunning Frankenstein, or hearing the haunting warbling of Bruce Springsteen in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, is simply a more transcendent experience when we’re engaging with these films on the silver screen than when we’re squinting at the same films on our phones. The decline of theaters and the rise of streaming may have all sorts of upsides, but it’s hard not to also see this trend as the decline of a traditional way to experience beauty.

Throughout history, one of the most reliable ways to experience beauty was by immersing ourselves in nature. There’s something about a pristine forest glade or a raging river that speaks deeply to our souls. But as more and more of us choose to live in cities, experiencing nature can feel harder and harder. We’ve traded craggy mountains for concrete jungles, ancient forests for the perfectly manicured front lawns of suburbia, and I’m not sure the trade has been worth it. For many of us living in the heart of the city, even getting to nature can require an all-day excursion.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the deepest sense of malaise in Politico’s report is experienced among young people. Sixty-four percent of respondents aged 18 to 24 said that “To make life better in America we need radical change,” and those numbers go down for each successive age group. Generation Z is known as the terminally online generation. It’s not just that these young men and women spend less time outside than members of previous generations, which means they’re less likely to experience the transcendent beauty of nature. They’re also much more distracted than previous generations (19 percent say they’re on YouTube “almost constantly”), and it’s hard to experience beauty on anything deeper than the surface level when we’re constantly distracted.

So if experiencing beauty is an essential part of living the good life, and if our society is set up to discourage us from experiencing beauty, what can we do about the problem?

The good news is that we don’t have to transform society. Instead, our experience of the world is in our hands. Modern society may make it harder, but we can absolutely still fill our lives with the kinds of transcendent beauty that rejuvenates our souls and that buffers us against the aches and pains of modern life.

For one thing: no matter how bad the ratio of slop to beauty gets, true art will still keep being made, and that means that we can seek it out. All that’s required is for us to be conscious about the media that we consume. We should avoid watching slop or soulless content just as background noise or to fill the empty space. Instead, we should think deliberately about what we put into our souls. If we watch a film or a TV show, it should be because we find what we’re watching enriching and rejuvenating on a soul-deep level. If we listen to a song, it should be with an ear towards deeply appreciating what we’re hearing. Art should be an experience that we cherish, not simply background static.

Another solution is for us to spend more time in nature. Carve out a Saturday to go hiking through an old forest. Get up half an hour early so that you can sit outside and watch the sun rise. Spend less time online, and cultivate more outdoor hobbies; spend less time looking at pictures of the world on your phone, and more time planning excursions to see those same sights in breathtaking person.

Finally, we can spend more time consciously unplugged. A lot of us live lives of endless distraction: keeping one eye on our phones when we’re eating or working or even hanging out with friends. But these distractions stop us from experiencing the sheer magnificence of the world. When we are fully present, we can find in almost any moment something radiant and wonderful. The soft interplay of light coming in through our windows. The crunch of gravel underfoot. The crisp bite of an apple, and feeling the juices and the sweetness explode in our mouths. The world is a beautiful place, if we’re willing to let go of our electronic distractions long enough to see it.

To be clear, seeking to experience more beauty in our lives is unlikely to be the silver bullet that will fix our society. Our social problems are deep and complex, and there is no single solution. But we were made to live lives in which we bask in the transcendent beauty of the world, and consciously choosing to do more of that might do more to cure our malaise than we expect.

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In November 2020, at the height of the “woke” movement, I became a casualty of what I call revenge culture. It destroyed my livelihood, shattered my reputation, and upended my life. For five years I’ve struggled to rebuild what was taken from me, warned by lawyers not to speak out for fear of lawsuits or court sanctions. But I can no longer remain silent. People must understand how devastating this culture of vengeance can be for ordinary individuals who have done nothing wrong.

In the fall of 2016, after fourteen years of exemplary teaching in the Seattle School District, I achieved my dream job as an elementary school assistant principal. The following year, I was promoted to principal. By the spring of 2019, our school was recognized as one of the district’s top performers, with outstanding feedback from students, staff, and families. We worked tirelessly to create a welcoming, inclusive, and culturally responsive environment—and it was paying off. Washington State’s Educational Opportunity Gap Oversight and Accountability Committee honored us multiple times for our work in eliminating opportunity gaps.

But even as we celebrated our success, troubling changes were taking root across the district.

By 2019, a sweeping ideological shift had taken hold, redefining what it meant to pursue equity and anti-racism in Seattle schools. At a principal meeting that fall, a district administrator stated that only white people were capable of racism because “white people created racism.” During a subsequent district DEI training, the instructor told our staff that “all white people are racists,” and urged attendees to write “I’m a racist” on a sign, wear it, take a photo, and post it on social media as an act of acknowledgment. He even showed a photo of a participant who had done so.

As Luke Rosiak later documented in his book Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education, in January 2020 a Seattle School District Ethnic Studies Program Manager wrote to a senior official, “You’re just a white person at the central office, so everything that you say is racist.” Such rhetoric created an environment ripe for weaponization—where accusations could easily replace facts.

In the fall of 2020, I had to place a teacher on progressive discipline for repeatedly arriving late and leaving her kindergartners unsupervised, frightened and alone. Soon after, she retaliated by leaking false claims to a local NPR reporter, accusing me of discrimination and even of “caging” a black student. The truth? The student and I were playing ball in the fenced court pictured below:

When the district learned of the allegations, they told me they needed to “save face” and would be letting me go. Since they found no evidence to support the claims, they couldn’t fire me—but they paid out the remainder of my contract and forced me to leave the job I loved.

Shortly after my departure, KUOW (Seattle’s NPR affiliate) published a sensationalized, one-sided article describing the playcourt as a “cage.” The story went viral, picked up by The New York Post, The Washington Post, and other outlets. Other than the original story, not a single reporter reached out to me for comment—not even when it became the lead story on local evening news.

The media frenzy triggered investigations by both Seattle Public Schools and the Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI). Twenty-six staff members were interviewed, including eight staff of color. Not one person could corroborate any claims of discrimination or misconduct. One even described me as “very much an anti-racist.”

After three grueling years, I was fully exonerated. Both Seattle Schools and OSPI dismissed the investigations for lack of evidence and credibility. I retained my teaching and principal certifications with no reprimands.

Seattle Schools concluded:

“The investigator’s findings indicate that although [teacher] expressed concerns about a number of alleged events, she was unable to recall specific dates, times, or details to support that the incidents occurred or to support a finding of discrimination... The investigator was unable to find any supporting evidence for those allegations.”

OSPI stated:

“OSPI has dismissed this case because we have found that the evidence does not support a violation.”

But by then, the damage was irreparable. My name was forever tied online to the phrase “caged a student.” In my hometown of Seattle, where I’d lived all my life, everyone—from old classmates to members of my childhood church—had seen the lies. My reputation, painstakingly built over decades, was in ruins.

For five years I have been unable to find full-time work. One school district told me:

“The determination has been made to not move your application for substitute teaching forward... based on a review of your background and previous employment.”

Another wrote:

“Your Applicant Disclosure form excludes you from employment with our district.”

Despite being cleared of all wrongdoing, I was effectively blacklisted from education.

The repercussions went far beyond my career. In 2022, a neighbor began building a fence near my property line (an extension of my front yard). When I politely informed him it was illegal, he and his wife weaponized the old news stories, shouting, “It’s time for you to go back to work—I know you caged kids and got fired!”

Soon after the city ordered them to remove the fence, an anonymous letter appeared in neighbors’ mailboxes. It began, “Hello, it is important that you know who you live around and allow around your children…” It included my photo, address, and links to the false articles. Though I met personally with each neighbor to tell them the truth, the harassment hasn’t stopped.

The cruelty even reached my children. Recently, my son told me with a trembling voice that his friend’s mother found out about the articles. She told her child that they were not allowed at our house or anywhere around me. Hearing that nearly broke me. My family—my innocent wife and children—have suffered because of lies.

Since the story broke, I’ve endured public humiliation, death threats, lawsuits, and a deep depression I’d never known before. I lost my livelihood, my passion, and my sense of purpose. I felt like a log in a raging river, tossed and powerless.

Now, as I approach my 60th birthday, instead of preparing for retirement, I’m starting over. After countless rejections from both the private and public sectors, I found solace in volunteering at a local nonprofit. That volunteer work became a part-time job, earning a fifth of my previous salary, but it restored a glimmer of meaning to my life. I help people in need every day. It gives me purpose, but it’s not enough to support my family. And I still ache for the profession that once defined me. Education wasn’t just a career—it was my calling.

Even after being completely exonerated, Seattle Schools has refused my repeated requests to be rehired.

My story is not unique—but it’s proof of what happens when truth is sacrificed to ideology, and when vengeance replaces justice. No one should ever have to endure what I did for simply doing their job.

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In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diversity of voices and encouraging compassionate and good-faith discourse.

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I live in Massachusetts. Recently, the local chapter of Democrats for Informed Approach to Gender (DIAG) hosted a pie social. No speeches, no panels—just a friendly meet-and-greet for critics of gender ideology. As has become common, the announcement did not include the venue address. Attendees had to register online and wait for an email revealing the location. Experience has taught us that publicizing venues can invite trouble from trans activists who monitor such events.

DIAG’s attempt at discretion proved futile. Shortly after the location notice went out, the organizer sent a follow-up email warning that trans activists were planning to protest.

My first thought was: Not again. Protests by trans activists at events challenging their ideology have become routine. Earlier this year, I attended a Moms for Liberty talk by Leor Sapir. It was a small gathering, and the organizers tried to keep the venue secret. Still, activists found out—they subscribe to newsletters of ideological opponents to track upcoming events.

After a sigh of exasperation, my next thought was: Seriously? They couldn’t leave us alone for a pie social?

When I arrived, a large group of masked activists dressed in black stood outside, waving the Progress Pride flag and blocking both entrances. For a moment, I felt unnerved—but I refused to let fear drive me away. I steeled myself and walked toward the crowd. A police officer stationed in front of the venue pointed me toward Evelyn Ullman, DIAG’s Massachusetts State Coordinator, who was standing in the parking lot.

According to Ullman, two groups—the Waltham Trans Alliance and the Mass Feminist Struggle Committee—had organized the protest. When DIAG’s private security failed to show up, the venue owner became upset and asked everyone to leave. They then called the police to clear the property.

The absurdity of the situation astounded me. Police had to be called—for a pie social.

In the end, we regrouped at a nearby café. A young woman who had detransitioned shared her painful, heartfelt story. We ate pies, talked, and enjoyed each other’s company. But the whole experience left me wondering: at what point does political opposition become harassment?

Harassment, in fact, is the goal. These activists came to threaten and intimidate. There is no shortage of accounts of people—especially women—being threatened or even attacked by trans activists at demonstrations. In London, a 60-year-old woman was punched and kicked at Speaker’s Corner. A man was also punched in Los Angeles, and a videographer chased and kicked at a protest over males entering female-only spaces at Wi Spa. In New Zealand, British women’s rights speaker Kellie-Jay Keen was swarmed and doused in tomato juice at her Let Women Speak rally. For any woman attending a gender-critical event, the risk of attack is real. It is frightening to walk alone through a hostile crowd screaming at you, knowing things could turn violent at any moment.

Renée, another attendee at the pie social, recounted her terrifying experience at a DIAG discussion with Jamie Reed, hosted by the MIT Open Discourse Society last May. Trans activists made such a racket that organizers had to relocate the event mid-session, and campus security was called in so it could continue.

Afterward, DIAG’s speakers and supporters went to dinner nearby—but the activists followed. About seventy-five of them surrounded the restaurant, masked and dressed in black, blowing kazoos, pounding drums, and making thunderous noise. Renée found herself caught outside, flanked by only a few police officers.

“There was no way to engage them,” she said. A male protester lunged at her, shouting, “I f—ing hate you!” Another, appearing to be a trans man, waved a Transtifa flag threateningly. Renée feared the individual might strike her with the pole. One protester stared at her while smacking a water bottle against their palm, as if preparing to hit her. A young woman holding a “Dykes for Trans” sign approached, cocking her head and rolling her shoulder like a pro wrestler psyching up for a fight.

“I was terrified,” Renée said. Only when motorcycle police arrived did the crowd disperse, but not before one protester waved her sign in Renée’s face while her son screamed, “F— you! F— you!”

The intimidation doesn’t stop with attendees. When trans activists learned that Moms for Liberty was hosting Leor Sapir’s talk at a local pub, they called the owner, harassed the staff, and pressured the venue to cancel. The event had to be moved to a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall. Of course, activists showed up there too. Organizers had to arrange security to protect both attendees and property. Before the talk began, I overheard one organizer say, “I wish they would come inside and hear [Leor] out. It’d be better if we could debate them.”

But these activists aren’t interested in debate. They don’t show up to exercise free speech; their goal is to prevent us from exercising ours.

I’m fed up. Why must we sneak around? Why must we choose between concealing our identities or risking doxxing? Why do we need police protection just to eat pie? We’re not doing anything illegal. Why must we operate like underground dissidents and outlaws when they can organize openly?

I’m a free-speech absolutist. I will defend anyone’s right to speak, short of inciting immediate harm. I support trans activists’ right to voice their views in public forums, and I expect the same for myself. Peaceful, respectful argument is how society moves forward. But when these activists show up, they don’t seek conversation. They seek to stop conversation.

“They say they’re standing up for their ‘rights,’” Ullman said. “But when pressed about what exactly those rights are, they can’t articulate much beyond the right for males to claim female spaces, institutions, and sports, and the right to have doctors perform damaging procedures on children and themselves—funded by taxpayers and insurers. I’ve yet to hear a good argument for why anyone should destroy their genitalia or lie about their sex.”

A week after the DIAG pie social, conservative advocate Charlie Kirk was brutally assassinated while speaking at a Turning Point tour event. The scale of violence is incomparable, but the underlying impulse is the same: to use fear and threat to silence opposition. A man is now dead because someone believed they had the right to stop others from gathering to talk.

How much longer will we tolerate this culture of intimidation? How long will we allow one group to forbid another from assembling through threats and harassment?

“If they want to win this battle,” Ullman said, “they need to win it the right way—with arguments that persuade the public and legislators.”

She’s right. It’s time we call these “protests” what they are: harassment designed to deprive others of their freedom to assemble. These tactics should be universally condemned. A society that cannot tolerate dissent cannot remain free.

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It feels odd contributing to this series, because my own “American experience” lasted only five years. In 1994, I moved from Montreal to New Haven, Connecticut, where I attended Yale Law School (YLS). Three years later, I graduated, moved to New York City, and became a tax lawyer. Two years after that, I realized that my talents lay elsewhere, so I moved back to Canada and became an ink-stained wretch while my law-school classmates went on to successful careers as professors, law-firm partners, judges, and hedge-fund managers. I still travel often to the United States, but I haven’t lived there since Bill Clinton was president.

Nevertheless, those five years were memorable, and I think about them all the time. This was an era when many Canadians imagined urban life in the United States through the lens of Seinfeld, Friends, and Sleepless in Seattle. The United States was then seen as a promised land for ambitious Canadians, and my friends were jealous that I was getting my shot.

Though I never made much of my legal career, law school itself was a blast—in large part because Yale attracts interesting and talented people from all over the United States. My friends included observant Christians from Mississippi and Oregon, a Jewish feminist from California who dragged me along to abortion-clinic defenses, a fellow video-game addict from upstate New York, an affable trivia nerd (and successful Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? contestant) from Michigan, a Minnesotan who’d grown up in a cult, an alt-musician from the Philadelphia suburbs, a Puerto Rican baseball fanatic who’d drive into New York with me to see Mets games, and a conservative Italian-American culture warrior who recruited me to create a local Federalist Society web site (this being the mid-1990s, I was the only one around who knew anything about HTML).

At the time, I imagined Yale Law School as a very “political” place. When I’d return to Canada during vacations, I’d regale my Canuck friends by describing vigorously contested classroom discussions about affirmative action, hate speech, and the O.J. trial. (O.J. Simpson was acquitted on October 3, 1995. I remember the day because I watched it on TV with my above-referenced friend from Philly. We both gasped at the verdict, then walked over to the law school, where a special presentation was made on the subject by my criminal-procedure professor, Steven B. Duke.)

By today’s standards, however, these discussions were reasonably civil, in part because they were conducted exclusively in person, not on social media (which didn’t yet exist). YLS is a tiny place (a third the size of Harvard’s law school) and so you had to keep in mind that your debating opponent might also be your friend, law-journal colleague, roommate, softball-team teammate, or racquetball partner (yes, that sweatband-and-Tab sport was still a thing back then). These real-world social and civic connections kept your tongue in check.

In my case, I got a good-faith hearing when I speechified about freedom of speech and conscience, civil liberties, due process, and all the other causes that I now make my living writing about at Quillette. When classmates thought I was wrong, they told me so. And I returned the favor. But then we’d get on with life.

At this point, you might think I’m just some ageing Matlock fan warbling on about how much better and simpler things were in the old days, when Everybody Loved Raymond and you could buy chili dogs at Wawa for seventy-five cents (which you could). And yes, I do believe that the intellectual climate of the 1990s—even at progressive elitist enclaves such as YLS—left a lot more space for political ecumenism than today. Unless someone was a classroom blowhard—as I sometimes was—or (quite literally) wore their politics on a T-shirt, it was possible to go through the full three-year program without getting any inkling of where people stood on the political spectrum. It’s one of the reasons I created so many lasting friendships with so many different kinds of people.

But this pluralism and diversity only went so far. Almost all of us were sons and daughters of privilege (to use the modern term). So yes, it was wonderful that our arguments about John Rawls’ Social Contract Theory didn’t prevent us from then gaily tossing frisbees to one another around the quad. But just blocks beyond that quad was a hardscrabble urban landscape where, as in many rust-belt American cities, a large share of the population grappled with poverty, crime, drugs, and racism. And we didn’t know that much about it. New Haven was (and remains, I am told) a classic college-town example of “town and gown,” with each group maintaining its isolation from one another.

To their credit, some of my classmates did try to bridge this divide, and dedicated time to helping at-need locals with volunteer legal clinics. But most of us treated townie territory as flyover country between Yale’s neo-gothic citadels of learning and the leafy bedroom communities on New Haven’s outskirts. There were no smartphones and little in the way of alternative media. No doubt, New Haven had its George Floyds and Freddie Grays. But unless you picked up a copy of the New Haven Register at the drug store, you never heard about them.

Yes, I came back to Canada with some “lived experience” concerning the racial and class divide in the United States. But the experience was superficial and essentially touristic. Culture critics on the right often talk about how Ivy League elites are hypocrites because they spend their time broadcasting “luxury beliefs” instead of thinking about the real problems faced by poor people. But that’s not a new problem. It’s just a lot more obvious now that everyone’s on Instagram.

In 2022, I returned to New Haven for my YLS’97 twenty-fifth reunion. Before the trip, I’d worried that I might get the cold shoulder from former classmates because of some of the heterodox political opinions I’d posted on social media. Plus, I’d just done a controversial, widely circulated podcast episode with Trent Colbert, a then-second-year YLS student who’d secretly recorded a bombshell meeting with the school’s Diversity Director. Moreover, the whole atmosphere at YLS was somewhat fraught at the time, as the school had just witnessed a fracas in which more than 100 students tried to shut down a Federalist Society speaking event featuring a speaker they accused of being “anti-LGBTQ.”

Thankfully, my worries proved misplaced. As is typical at this sort of thing, we all reverted to some version of our old selves, and I had a wonderful time. As reported at Quillette, I even managed to convince one of my old pals to come out with me to play disc golf.

As I was touring the law school building, reminiscing about my time as a student, I noticed a flyer taped to the wall, titled A Message to the Yale Law School Alumni Community on the Culture of Free Speech at YLS. This manifesto read, in part, as follows:

“As widely publicized events over the last year have demonstrated, Yale Law School is defined by a call-out culture intolerant of any—politically left, right, or center—who would refuse to toe the line. Some of our fellow students—truthfully, a minority—have lost sight of that commitment to open dialogue and free debate. They shout down speakers with whom they disagree. Worse, they have been in the past supported by a law school administration who, when faced with the choice to stand for free speech or cave to the demands of the mob, chose to threaten a student’s [i.e. Trent Colbert’s] bar admission and pre-write him a groveling, insincere apology. But many, many more students are sick of it. They—and we—want to be able to voice contrarian opinions without fear of official reprisal.”

Wow, I thought. These people are speaking my language. On a whim, I emailed two of the signatories—both students in their third and final year of study at YLS. It struck me that, in their outlook, they sounded a lot like much younger versions of the Jon Kay who’d once roamed these halls.

As it turned out, they’d both heard my podcast with Colbert, and were happy to meet. Within a few hours, the three of us were parked in a café, trading stories about our respective law school experiences.

Neither student had any kind of dramatic “cancellation” story to share with me. (And, as a LinkedIn scan attests, both have gone on to gilded careers—one as a Circuit Court clerk, the other as an associate at a top-tier New York law firm.) But they did lament the lack of connection they had with many fellow students.

In part because of the COVID-19 pandemic (which pushed their courses online during their first year), and in part because of the tribalizing effects of politics and online discourse, there were a lot of classmates at YLS who simply wouldn’t engage with them. One of the two (a libertarian more than a movement conservative) was so determined to bridge this divide that he actually set up a little Ask-Me-Anything booth in the cafeteria, which, he hoped, would become a venue for dialogue and understanding. But no one ever came over, he told me. He just sat there by himself.

In recent months, my Canadian friends have taken me to task for visiting the United States so frequently. (Since this year began, I’ve gone hiking in Nevada, biking in Vermont, and boardgaming in Tennessee.) That’s because Donald Trump’s tariffs have turned Canadians into overnight nationalists, and so there’s a drumbeat of pressure to “keep our money in Canada.” But life is short, and I’m not going to let Trump dictate where I vacation—even indirectly. Plus, while I’ll always be a proud Canadian, I still love the United States—in part because of all those enduring friendships I made during law school.

But I do wonder if that would have been the case if my Yale experience were shifted a quarter century into the future. In the hashtag era, would my time-traveling classmates and I still have been able to keep our politics in parentheses as we embarked on our law school adventure? Or would I be sitting alone in a corner of the cafe, inviting conversations that would never happen?

What worries me more about today’s America isn’t the common complaint that the country is “divided”—it has always been divided in important socioeconomic ways—but that, thanks to communications technology, those divisions now manifest themselves as powerful social barriers. Had those barriers been erected 30 years ago, my own American Experience would have been a lot less joyful.

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These days, vitriol is both ubiquitous and addictive for those spewing that vitriol (it feels good to vanquish one’s enemies) and spectators who see the spewing as a form of entertainment. People would rather shoot insults—or worse—at those with whom they disagree, and others take joy in watching those people do so. None of this is particularly civil in nature. For most, this may portend the end of civil discourse. However, many people who feel that way may inadvertently equivocate the meanings of the word “civility.” The common meaning of the term is politeness. However, the political meaning denotes public engagement guided by reason toward mutually advantageous ends; this does not necessarily involve being polite. Thus, I believe we can have civil debate without being civil. What might this mean for civil (in both meanings of the word) society?

I believe the revilement induced by the verbal sparring we see in lieu of dialogue can be transmuted into something good. Also, I believe compassion and active listening are important, but they are not everything. A famous Bible passage (and song lyric) says, “there is a time for every purpose under heaven.” Every purpose. That includes caustic language as well as congenial language. Ultimately, the problem is that focusing solely on compassion or anger, respectively, is a woefully incomplete rhetorical education. I contend that rhetoric must be taught in a way that sees particular modes as situationally contingent rather than morally fixed. For civil society to work, civility and incivility must have their places.

There is a Time and Place for Everything

An important term in rhetorical theory and practice is “Kairos,” often translated as “window of opportunity,” or the confluence of time, place, subject, and audience, and its impact on how we speak and act. One of the implicit lessons in the term is the idea that “appropriate or inappropriate” is the primary dichotomy to consider, “not right and wrong,” per se; the time, place, subject, and audience will dictate what one should or should not say for the utmost persuasiveness. So, most situations call for a level of civility, but some may not. Even I have made the conscious decision to add causticity to an argument based on my “kairotic” assessment of a situation; they saw civility as weakness, so I made my point in less civil ways. This is what Aristotle was getting at when he defined rhetoric as the ability, in any given situation, to discern the available (i.e., appropriate) means of persuasion.

I bring this up because, recently, Politico published an article titled “Winning Is the Only Thing: My Journey Into the Viral, Vicious World of Political Online Debate.” Politico’s Catherine Kim writes of two self-proclaimed “debate bros,” Andrew Wilson and Brian Atlas, who see debate as a particularly masculine contest of domination; using dialogue to enhance and get to the truth of a matter is not really their goal. For Wilson and Atlas, debate is verbal combat, a martial art all would do well to master. This is the raison d’être of Debate University, their set of courses for learning how to “dominate any discussion.” “Debate Bro rhetoric” seems to be about embarrassing another person and prioritizing antagonism (destructive enmity) over agonism (constructive and honest dialogue across differences)—the person who does the best job of humiliating the other “wins” the debate. To be clear, humorous degradation, not persuasion, is the objective.

Anger and Erudition

Wilson and Atlas’ embrace of invective is not novel. In fact, ancient philosophers saw the importance of being able to spew causticity effectively. Entertaining the benefits of anger—both having it and manipulating it—was a salient aspect of classical Greek rhetorical education. Though Plato and Socrates were not enthusiastic about rhetoric as a learned skill (They thought eloquence and persuasion were part of the natural demeanor of a virtuous philosopher), Aristotle and his contemporaries recognized that persuasion could necessitate vitriol or congeniality if the Kairos dictates it.

In Book II of Rhetoric, Aristotle writes, “The Emotions are all those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgements, and that are also attended by pain or pleasure. Such are anger, pity, fear, and the like, with their opposites” (My emphasis). You can see that no emotion should go ignored; certain emotions can affect judgments in certain ways, and anger can be just as rhetorically appropriate as civility. Aristotle elaborates with anger in particular:

We must arrange what we have to say about each [emotion] under three heads. Take, for instance, the emotion of anger: here we must discover (1) what the state of mind of angry people is, (2) who the people are with whom they usually get angry, and (3) on what grounds they get angry with them. It is not enough to know one or even two of these points; unless we know all three, we shall be unable to arouse anger in any one. The same is true of the other emotions. (My emphasis)

We see here that Aristotle expects those who aspire to be effective speakers to acquire the ability to arouse anger, not necessarily mitigate it. Apparently, sometimes we may want our audience to be angry; it can be quite the motivator, disrupter, and distractor. It should be no surprise, then, that “invective,” typically understood as insulting or abusive language, was part of formal rhetorical education in ancient Greece; it was one of the 14 exercises that make up the Progymnasmata, a favored form of rhetorical education.

Clearly, it was seen as a necessary skill, something that every speaker should have in his or her pocket just in case the Kairos suggests its use.

All this said, would Aristotle approve of Debate University’s emphasis on humiliation? Not quite. Using the word “insolence” to describe the act of deliberately shaming someone solely for the pleasure of oneself and/or others, Aristotle writes:

Insolence is also a form of slighting, since it consists in doing and saying things that cause shame to the victim, not in order that anything may happen to yourself, or because anything has happened to yourself, but simply for the pleasure involved. The cause of the pleasure is that he thinks himself greatly superior to others when ill-treating them. One sort of insolence is to rob people of the honour due to them; you certainly slight them thus; another is to act for the mere pleasure of it; hence boys and rich men are insolent, as they are happy and think themselves superior when they behave thus.”

Although Aristotle does not condemn insolence outright, the implications are there: the fact that it is done solely “for the pleasure involved” seems less than virtuous for Aristotle, and attributing the act specifically to boys and rich men implies that insolence is the tool of those who don’t take life seriously, either because they don’t know any better (boys) or are so untouchable they don’t care who they insult (rich men).

Aristotle believed there is a time and place for everything, and instructors of rhetoric should teach as much of that “everything” as possible. Aristotle, who taught his own course on rhetoric, would approve of an institution that approached rhetoric more holistically. He would disapprove of an institution that focused on a single tactic, which, for Debate University, is mordant humiliation. The problem with Debate University is that it is too one-dimensional.

So, How Should We Look at Debate University?

I am of two minds about Wilson and Atlas’s take on debate.

On the one hand, and as I’ve discussed, basing education on shaming, humiliating, and other slights is inappropriate if taught for their own sake and not as kairotic considerations. But perhaps we should recognize the fact that Debate University is exposing the power and skills of rhetoric to an otherwise uninterested audience. Kim writes that Debate University “isn’t your nerdy debate club from high school, where buttoned-up students. . . hope that the extracurricular scores them a spot at an Ivy League school.” No, it isn’t, and that seems to be by design.

Wilson and Atlas show some rhetorical savvy of their own, taking the concept of audience consideration seriously. How can we expose rhetorical skill to a wider audience, an audience not as academically inclined as “nerdy debate club” members? Wilson and Atlas found an answer: speak their language. Lean into the anger already festering in our society. It is the anger that gets them in the door. It places them in a space of rhetorical learning that is sold as antagonistic but may also expose people to argument and counterargument, the formality of traditional debate, the occasional benefits of humility, and the need to do research and know what one is talking about before speaking on it. Though this last one is done as preparation to, as Wilson says, “counter punch and hit really, really hard,” knowledge of others’ viewpoints and understanding why they have them may be another positive side effect. (If the importance of research is all that Wilson and Atlas succeed in instilling in people, they will be heroes in my book.) Lastly, Debate University dedicates a video warning people to choose one’s battles and refrain from caustic argumentation with friends and loved ones. There is a silver lining to Debate University’s cloud of toxicity.

On the other hand, humiliation for its own sake and not for a greater cause—e.g., clearing the way for a genuine search for truth—may be a waste of time and energy for all involved. Yes, anger and calumny can be explored for their rhetorical efficacy, but isolating shame and humiliation as a central point—or the only point—in debate is misguided. Regarding Debate University, my issue is not with the fact that Wilson and Atlas promote incivility and vitriol to embarrass opponents. My issue is that they mainly do that and seem to care nothing for the truth. They teach logical fallacy—something inherently detrimental to any search for truth—as a weapon to be used, not a cognitive distortion or misunderstanding to be avoided. Though they are also in erudite company with this idea (the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote a whole book encouraging the use of logical fallacies to “win” an argument), the one-sided presentation of the multi-sided phenomenon of rhetoric is a mistake.

One could say my issue with Debate University is teleological; their goal, not necessarily what they teach, is the issue. They teach the right things (e.g., thorough research) for the wrong reasons (to hit “really, really hard.”) Ultimately, Debate University’s contribution to rhetorical education is tragically lopsided.

There is No One Facet to Rhetoric

To be clear, I think it is a mistake to “lop” any one particular side. Focusing solely on civility for its own sake can also be problematic. As much as I appreciate organizations like Braver Angels, an organization that claims it is “looking for common ground and ways to work together” and “support principles that bring us together rather than divide us,” its exclusive focus on civility and mutual understanding, though direly needed, is not the entirety of persuasion and active civil life. For example, Braver Angels is an organization that promotes sharing viewpoints with substantially less emphasis on persuasion, to emphasize inclusion, empathy, and balance in conversations between conservatives and liberals. This is good and a necessary part of a good speaker’s repertoire. However, it is not the whole story and, frankly, can’t be. Sometimes, we need to settle on the truth or an appropriate course of action moving forward. Agreeing to disagree is not always an option.

To Braver Angels’ credit, they published an article criticizing their practices on their own blog. In “A Mild, Sympathetic Critique of Better Angels Debates,” political scientist Michael Harrington writes that Braver Angels’ approach is noble but limited. He argues that Braver Angels’ debate model is admirable for its attempts to foster civility and empathy. Still, it discourages rebuttal and active persuasion in a way that, according to Harrington, actually reinforces polarization. Harrington proposes a concept he calls “satisficing,” which is “a term that bridges ‘satisfy’ with ‘suffice’,” to meet the demands of civil society. Harrington makes the point that differences are why we have politics in the first place; we need politics to manage the inevitable differences that emerge in a free and pluralistic society. Forgetting about the differences to focus on commonalities, though noble, is only part of the idea of persuasion, not the whole. To seek “a greater truth,” we must sometimes go beyond congeniality.

Neither incivility nor a focus on compassion—instead of persuasion in general—are inherently bad things, but focusing solely on one or the other is misguided. The persuasive potential of a variety of rhetorical modes should be taught.

My central argument is that rhetorical education should be holistic, not one-dimensional. Rhetoric, understood through Kairos, includes both civility (in both senses of the word) and incivility as potentially valid in certain contexts. For organizations like Debate University and Braver Angels, their common error is isolating one rhetorical mode—e.g., humiliation and compassion, respectively—and presenting it as intrinsically right and worthy of solitary focus. Rhetorical training should encompass a wide range of persuasive strategies, including both vitriol and empathy. Again, Kairos does not necessarily determine right or wrong, but appropriate and inappropriate. Thus, I promote a holistic and kairotic pedagogy of rhetoric for effective communication in civil—that is, public and participatory—society.

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In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diversity of voices and encouraging compassionate and good-faith discourse.

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Last month, Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, was shot and killed during a Turning Point event at Utah Valley University.

Not long afterward, I found myself wondering:

• Had Charlie Kirk written any books?

• Were his books available through my local library system?

• And were libraries responding appropriately by purchasing additional copies to meet the sudden surge in demand?

It turns out the answers are:

• Yes, Charlie Kirk has written several books. His most recent, Right Wing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West, was published in 2024.

• Yes, every Charlie Kirk book in my state’s library system appears to be on hold.

To answer the third question—how libraries are responding to what we might call the “Charlie Kirk Book Challenge”—it helps to examine “holds ratios.” This metric compares the number of patrons’ holds on a book to the number of copies available within a library consortium. When a sudden spike in interest occurs, libraries are expected to purchase additional copies to meet that demand. Comparing the holds ratio for available copies versus available plus “on order” copies shows whether libraries are responding effectively. If they are, the second ratio should be significantly lower.

Figure 1 illustrates this for Right Wing Revolution, Kirk’s most recent title. I looked at Massachusetts library consortia with a large proportion of public libraries—academic libraries are not a good fit for a book like this. A high holds ratio indicates that demand greatly exceeds supply; a ratio of around 1:1 is ideal, meaning one patron waiting per copy.

Most, but not all, Massachusetts consortia are responding adequately. Either the existing holds ratios are reasonable, or libraries are ordering more copies to meet demand. Unfortunately, the NOBLE (North of Boston Library Exchange) system has zero copies of Right Wing Revolution and, as of now, no plans to purchase any—disregarding the clear interests of some of their patrons.

Elsewhere, the situation is worse. The Allegheny County, Pennsylvania library system, with roughly 75 libraries, has only one copy of Right Wing Revolution—and 53 holds. One more copy is on order, which will still leave a ratio of 26:1. At that rate, the last person in line could wait six months to a year. Montgomery County, Pennsylvania has no copies at all, and a retired librarian in Oregon told me that there is just one public library copy in the entire state.

This year, the American Library Association (ALA) has designated October 5–11 as “Banned Books Week.” During this annual event, libraries across the country celebrate their supposed courage in resisting “book bans” and “censorship.” Many claim that left-wing censorship doesn’t exist—though most of us know better. In blue states, librarians often deride other states for their supposed intolerance, while promoting “banned book” lists that, in reality, consist of titles readily available everywhere. These lists function more as marketing tools than statements of principle.

So, will libraries include Charlie Kirk’s books in their “Banned Books Week” displays this year, praising their own bravery for defending the “freedom to read”? I doubt it. Instead, they’ll proudly display titles like Randi Weingarten’s Why Fascists Fear Teachers—for which the Allegheny County system has 15 copies to satisfy just 11 holds. For many librarians, personal sympathies clearly align with Weingarten’s views, not Kirk’s.

What will compel libraries—such as NOBLE in Massachusetts or Allegheny County in Pennsylvania—to treat all patrons fairly, regardless of ideology?

I propose total transparency, enforced by legislation. Each year, libraries should be required to publish detailed reports showing the number of items purchased, weeded, lost, and checked out. If purchasing decisions reveal ideological favoritism rather than responsiveness to patron demand, that would be evident in the data.

The issue is urgent. Many libraries are actively “weeding” books that conflict with prevailing ideologies. Once removed, these books are unlikely to return. The time to demand accountability—and to legislate transparency—is now.

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In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diversity of voices and encouraging compassionate and good-faith discourse.

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