Weekly Roundup
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America is exporting its worst ideas across the Atlantic
For FAIR’s Substack, Faisal Saeed Al Mutar writes about how American divisions are negatively impacting our allies overseas and what we can do to right the ship.
If we value our reputation as a world superpower, we need to be taken seriously by the rest of the world. In order to be taken seriously, we must effectively counter extremism at home. Two clear actions we can take are to invest in organizations that combat polarization, and to promote education for young Americans that gives them a comprehensive view of history and America’s place within the global community.
We must reject extremism in every form. Whether it is wokeism, far right authoritarianism, or religious fundamentalism. America once represented a beacon of hope and democracy, and it’s not too late to return to that. The time to right the ship was years ago, but we’ve arrived at a critical moment in which we have a choice to make: continue down the path of extremism and watch the American experiment become consigned to the dustbin of history, or do the hard work of uniting the American people, and by default, our international allies, around principles of freedom, democracy, and decency.
The First Amendment Is the Greatest Defense for the Powerless and Marginalized
For the Daily Beast, FAIR Advisor Jacob Mchamanga and former President of the ACLU Nadine Strossen write about the importance of the First Amendment.
While it’s true that the First Amendment permits speech that many progressives find abhorrent and discriminatory, that’s a feature not a bug of robust and principled free speech doctrine. And it’s not based on “white supremacist” or “right-wing” ideology. Rather, this doctrine is informed by a potent mix of universalist ideals and the lived experience of a nation, including groups and individuals who have felt the oppressive consequences when these ideals have been violated or selectively applied.
Thurgood Marshall’s illustrious career highlights the mutually reinforcing relationship between free speech principles and the fight for racial justice. Marshall was the legal mastermind of the NAACP’s highly successful campaign to transform the First Amendment into a legal shield for the civil rights movement’s ability to protest peacefully.
Marginalizing Protected Groups in the Name of Equity and Inclusion Is the "New Normal"
For her blog Unplugged, FAIR Advisor Monica Harris writes about why womens’ and lesbian rights are minimized in efforts to promote equality for transgender Americans.
DEI initiatives have essentially equated transgender rights with the rights of women and lesbians — even though their experiences, struggles, and priorities are very different. This “piggyback” strategy was no doubt intended to foster strength through unity, but it’s undermined decades of progress. Because the transgender struggle is not, and has never been, the same as the struggle of biological women or lesbians. And herein lies another irony of DEI initiatives: while they purport to recognize the differences and unique challenges that diverse groups face, they often ignore and even trivialize these differences and challenges by conflating them with those of other groups.
Equality should never be a zero-sum game. All Americans of every color, sexual orientation and identity deserve fair and equal treatment. We should be able to make the human rights pie bigger without taking slices from other people. But that’s not what’s happening now. Increasingly, we’re being forced to accept the idea that creating equality for one group may require taking rights from another.
How to Break Up With The News
For his Substack, Democracy and Other Problems, FAIR Advisor Shadi Hamid writes about why he’s trying to change his relationship to politics—and why you should too.
Unless you have a job that requires you to know things, however, it’s unclear what the news—good or bad—actually does for you, beyond making you aware of things you have no real control over. Most of the things we could know are a distraction from the most important things that we already know: family, faith, friendship, and community. If our time on Earth is finite—on average, we have only about 4,000 weeks—we should choose wisely what to do with it.
Family, faith, friendship, and community: the core four. We all sort of intuitively know this to be true. These are the things that matter. These are also the things that make us happy. Which is a pretty great combination when you think about it. But it’s hard to live this way, even when we know it’s the right way to live. I don’t exactly have the answer of how to make this real in your own life, or for that matter in mine. At some level, it’s a matter of will. We have the knowledge. We can, I believe, feel it in our hearts, if not necessarily with our minds.
The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling Continue
For Quillette, Holly Lawford-Smith dissects a lengthy YouTube attack on gender-critical feminists.
Gender-critical feminists also are worried about girls responding to societal sexism by choosing an individual response (transition) rather than a collective response (feminism). And we see a conflict of interests between minority groups (for “minority” here, read disadvantaged groups, regardless of size), whereby some of the demands of one group—trans activists speaking on behalf of trans people, in this example—run at cross purposes to the interests of other minority groups—lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, women, and children.
Gender-critical feminists want a response to that conflict of interests that takes all minority groups’ interests seriously, rather than simply giving one group whatever it demands, on the specious grounds that doing otherwise would negate their “basic inclusion in society.” The demand for a debate that hears all voices is hardly comparable to religiously-motivated antipathy toward one particular minority group.
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