Weekly Roundup
Reading List
The Dialectic of Freedom
For FAIR’s Substack, FAIR Advisor John Wood Jr. writes about how America exists as an outgrowth of the dialectic of freedom, with profound American experience and history existing on both sides.
How meaningful is freedom without greater equality? Though it would seem undeniable that one’s personal choices affect the course of one’s life outcomes—one’s “pursuit of happiness”—is there an intellectually honest way to suggest that circumstances we do not choose have nothing to do with these outcomes? That those who suffered in slavery were merely unwilling to overcome the difficulty of their circumstances to achieve the American dream? And though slavery may be over today, are we certain that obstacles are surmounted by will and drive alone in the absence of collective commitments to the common welfare in the form of government action?
Is Trump’s near-death experience part of God’s plan?
For The Washington Post, FAIR Advisor Shadi Hamid writes about what a nation can expect when a leader is nearly assassinated.
Perhaps Trump is doing the same. Less than 24 hours after the bullet grazed his ear, he told reporters that he had a “brutal” speech ready for the Republican National Convention but “threw it out” in favor of something more unifying. Displaying an unusual level of self-awareness, he explained: “I think it would be very bad if I got up and started going wild about how horrible everybody is and how corrupt and crooked, even if it’s true.”
The youth don’t have any culture
For her Substack, FAIR in the Arts Fellow Rosie Kay writes about why artistic youth are protesting.
But the fact is that ideology has become the new disco. Chants and slogans are the new fashion. Sticking your fingers to concrete the new street fashion. If young people have no creative outlet, no way to shine or fail or experiment in reality, with each other, with their minds and bodies in space and time together, then this is the appalling culture we are left with. Empty, performative, dopamine addicted little activists, smug in their superiority, but bereft of their own creative destiny.
Why the Left Gets J.D. Vance Wrong
For Compact, FAIR Advisor Zaid Jilani writes about what the left gets wrong about J.D. Vance.
It will be a slow and agonizing process, as political change tends to be. But if decades from now, we try to identify the moment when the Republican Party started to become a little bit more sympathetic to workers and a little less slavish toward big business, it might turn out to be the moment Vance went from scolding the people he left behind in Ohio for the benefit of the liberal press to concluding that maybe all this time they had been on to something.
Ep. 62 - Star-Man Your Enemies
Angel Eduardo and Connie Morgan talk about creativity, ending race and assuming the best about your ideological opposites. Angel works as Senior Writer & Editor for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), and serves as Chair of the Board of Directors for the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR).
Doctors Should Leave Their Politics at Home
For Washington Monthly, FAIR in Medicine Fellow Sally Satel writes about why medical professionals who want to oppose or fight for some cause should do it on their own time.
However, when medical schools with diverse student bodies—heterogeneous not just in terms of ethnicity but ideology—or national physician associations take a particular stand on social policy divorced from their mission, they are not putting patients first. They’re putting their notion of social justice first. No matter one’s beliefs, those of us in medicine should not burden our patients with our passions. They have enough to worry about.
Getting a Home Depot Employee Fired for Calling for Trump's Assassination Is Still Cancel Culture
For Reason Magazine, Billy Binion writes about the rise of cancel culture on the right after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
It's ironic that the people leading this mob are some of the same individuals who have repeatedly—and rightly—decried mob justice over the last several years. In some cases, their careers and fame are grounded, at least in part, in that very concept. "Cancel cancel culture," Riley Gaines, the swimmer and activist who has pushed back on biological men competing in women's sports, said in August of last year. Gaines, who has been the target of some illiberalism herself, was singing a different song this week, celebrating the termination of a man whose firing also came at the behest of Raichik.
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Yeah, we really don't need to see a photo of a scantily-clad minor in the Weekly Roundup.