Weekly Roundup

Reading List

Canadian Parents (Finally) Push Back Against Gender Cultism

For Quillette, FAIR Advisor Jonathan Kay writes about Canadians who are simply tired of living in a society that gaslights citizens.

If one didn’t know that a large majority of Canadians supported the protesters’ principal demand, one might have thought that our cities were being overrun by white supremacists. But of course, that’s the point of this kind of propaganda: to discourage dissent through collective public shaming.

This dishonest PR strategy won’t save the gender cult in the long run. In fact, it’s hard not to notice the somewhat desperate-seeming nature of the rhetoric being hurled at the protesters—not to mention the heavy whiff of class snobbery.

A New Cohort of Transgender Kids

For Persuasion, FAIR Advisor Lisa Selin Davis writes about how working out how to properly care for transgender kids means changing the debate.

That’s why we need more research, and for it to be better quality. Because at this point, there should be no question that this cohort exists—and that we don’t know the proper way to care for it. I know this personally because I’ve been talking to these kids and their parents, as well as to concerned clinicians and trans people, for six years (I’m working on a book about the youth gender culture war­.) It’s clear in the rising prominence of detransitioners, who were affirmed and medically transitioned and later felt it was a mistake; their bodies are permanently changed, often damaged. By one estimate, this feeling of regret can take an average of about eight years to develop, so it makes sense that we’re hearing from more of them after the 2015 spike in cases of gender dysphoria.

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Why Is TED Scared of Color Blindness?

For The Free Press, Coleman Hughes writes about how the organization’s tagline is “ideas worth spreading,” but yet they still attempted to suppress his talk on color blindness.

Either my TED content is performing extremely poorly because it is far less interesting than most of TED’s content, or TED deliberately is not promoting it. A string of evidence points to the latter explanation: unique among the TED talks released around the same time as mine, my talk has still not been reposted to the TED Talks Daily podcast. In fact, it was not even posted to YouTube until I sent an email inquiry. 

According to its website, TED’s mission is to “discover and spread ideas that spark imagination, embrace possibility, and catalyze impact.” They claim to be “devoted to curiosity, reason, wonder, and the pursuit of knowledge—without an agenda.” My experience suggests otherwise, with TED falling far short of those ambitions and instead displaying all the hallmarks of an institution captured by the new progressive orthodoxy. TED’s leadership must decide whether it wants to do something about it—or let the organization become yet another echo chamber. 

Whether Ibram X Kendi wasted millions is not the point

For The New Statesman, Peter Boghossian writes about why the author’s misguided ideas matter more than the inquiry into his Center for Antiracist Research.

But now we have an opportunity to grow up. We can sit at the adult table and have honest, evidence-based discussions about the issues Kendi is trying to address: how should we solve literacy disparities between African Americans and other racial groups? Is equity – redistribution based upon historical oppression – the best way to address economic disparities? Is every disparity in outcome due to systemic racism? Is racism the ordinary, everyday state of affairs? What role, if any, should anti-racism play in our government and in our institutions? Is, as Kendi writes, “the only remedy to past discrimination… present discrimination [and] the only remedy to present discrimination… future discrimination?” Should diversity and “proportional representation” be a goal in university admissions?

History Matters

For Quillette, Joel Kotkin writes about why a restoration of history, in all its complexity, is critical to escaping the polarized, rigid, and often insane political environment we now inhabit.

History is more than the story of remorseless white oppression—it is a shifting narrative of rising and falling power and changing contingencies. Cruelty has never been the province of one people or civilization. The African monarchs, the Chinese emperors, the Mongol warlords, and the Native American tribes all practiced brutality and mass enslavement of their enemies. At one time or another in their histories, most cultures have had the chance to dominate or have been made to experience domination. As Herodotus, the father of history, noted: “Human prosperity never abides long in one place.”

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