Weekly Roundup
The "Tribe of One" Mentality Is Spiritually Destructive
For FAIR’s Substack, Julian Adorney and Mark Johnson write about the “Tribe of One” mentality and how it can be harmful to our mental health.
We now have empirical evidence to suggest that the "tribe of one" ideology is a major contributor to loneliness and poor mental health. Several studies have shown a consistent pattern wherein conservatives report better mental health than liberals. For example, the 2022 American Family Survey found that 36 percent of conservatives age 18-55 are "completely satisfied" with their mental health. By contrast, that number for liberals age 18-55 is just 18 percent. Much of this gap seems to be driven by the far-left, where the “tribe of one” ideology is most pervasive Political scientists Zach Goldberg and Eric Kaufmann note that an astounding 38 percent of white "very liberal" respondents said that a doctor or other healthcare provider has told them that they have a mental health condition—far higher than for any other race or ideological group.
McMaster’s Imaginary Sex Ring
For Quillette, FAIR Advisor Jonathan Kay writes about how “a Canadian university tore up its psychology department in search of a non-existent network of sexual predators.”
This isn’t the first journalistic investigation of a campus witch-hunt I’ve helped investigate, whether as editor or writer. But it is the first such case I’ve examined in which accused individuals and a critical mass of their colleagues—men and women alike, it should be noted—pushed back against administrative overreach in a vigorous and sustained manner.
In part, this seems related to the absurdly severe—and, to many PNB observers, gratuitously cruel—restrictions placed on respondents. The fact that three of the seven investigated individuals were women also seems to have played an unspoken role.
Another factor worth noting is that this campus scandal, unlike various others of its general type, did not overlay upon any apparent pre-existing political schism or power play within the affected department.
Individualism is a social justice issue
For Discourse Magazine, FAIR Advisor Erec Smith writes about the need to treat “true individualism” as a social justice issue.
Group identification devoid of true individualism is one of the main obstacles to real social justice because it suggests a dogma that, by definition, does not take into consideration the details and distinctions of an individual life. By extension, such group consciousness hampers our ability, as a society, to have generative conversations across ideological differences…
So individualism is not a symptom of a divided society but one of its remedies. It is more conducive to self-actualization (as opposed to group actualization), and it actually fosters communication across differences.
A New Paper Sheds Light on Transition Regret and Detransition
For Reality’s Last Stand, The Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine writes about a new paper, published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, that
highlights studies and personal testimonies of detransitioners who do deeply regret their transition, mourn the physical changes made to their bodies, and feel betrayed by the clinicians and medical institutions that offered hormones and surgery as antidotes to their gender confusion and distress. For this group of young people, internal factors such as “worsening mental health or the realization that gender dysphoria was a maladaptive response to trauma, misogyny, internalized homophobia, or pressure from social media and online communities,” were the primary drivers of their decision to detransition.
Anatomy of a scientific scandal
For City Journal, Colin Wright does a deep dive into the retraction of an academic paper on Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), and the calls for Dr. Kenneth Zucker, the editor of the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, to be replaced for his decision to publish it. On May 5th, FAIR in Medicine wrote an Open Letter in Support of Dr. Kenneth Zucker and the Need to Promote Robust Scientific Debate which garnered many signatures in support of open inquiry in science and healthcare practice.
An alarming recent event highlights the vulnerability of the scientific endeavor to politics. ASB is a primary target for activist researchers who will not tolerate dissent from their views, and a months-long campaign by activists to pressure Springer Nature into retracting an ASB paper that they didn’t like has culminated in success. While the activists’ desire to censor inconvenient research should come as no surprise, Springer Nature’s capitulation to their demands represents a profound betrayal of scientific integrity and the publisher’s commitment to truth.
FAIR News Podcast
For audio versions of our FAIR News and FAIR Weekly Roundup newsletters, subscribe and listen to FAIR News Weekly on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or via RSS feed.
Join the FAIR Community
Join us, and become a member of FAIR.
Become a FAIR volunteer, or join a FAIR chapter.
Take the Pro-Human Pledge and help promote a common culture based on fairness, understanding, and humanity.
Sign-up for a Welcome to FAIR Zoom information session to learn more about our mission.
Share your reviews and incident reports on our FAIR Transparency website.