Schrödinger's Race
For FAIR’s Substack, high school sophomore Maitreya Kershner writes a reflective essay on biracial identity, perception, and the limits of categorization. Her piece explores the tension between social labels and individual identity, questioning whether people can ever truly be reduced to fixed categories.
We long for the binary, for simple categories that can be easily explained. We long to understand one another, so we create an array of boxes to place ourselves in. And still we don’t understand. We just create smaller and smaller, ever more specific boxes, hoping we will one day be able to summarize all the perfect complexities of a human being.
Much of this comes from the dualism that runs through our society. We see things as one or the other — right or left, good or evil, black or white — and we deny the gray areas that are always there. We are slowly learning to escape these patterns, but their hold is hard to release. The issue lives not only in the systems we’ve built but in the way we interpret and express our reality. Most of us can’t pull ourselves out of our day-to-day perceptions long enough to see past them. And even when we glimpse a deeper truth, we struggle to put it into words.
Ten Arguments Against Free Speech
For the So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast, FAIR Advisor, and former ACLU President, Nadine Strossen joins FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff to discuss their new book, “War on Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech—And Why They Fail.” These arguments include: Words are violence; Words are dangerous; Hate speech isn’t free speech; Free speech is outdated; Free speech is right-wing; Misinformation and disinformation; About the Holocaust and Rwandan genocide; and more.
Nadine Strossen: “‘Oh, you defend free speech because you take the ridiculous position that words can cause no harm.’ No, no, no, we acknowledge words can do harm, but you pro-censorship people never acknowledge the greater harm that giving the government greater censorial power will do.”
“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 Does Not Include Whites”
For Man of Steele, FAIR Advisor and filmmaker Eli Steele argues that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 no longer functions as a neutral protection against discrimination, but has instead evolved into a broader system of ideological and institutional enforcement.
I saw an X post by New York Magazine that featured the headline, “The White Man Suing the New York Times for Discriminating Against White Men.” The piece described how the plaintiff, a longtime Times editor, claims that he was passed over for a deputy editor job so the paper could meet its diversity and leadership targets. He alleges that, despite his experience, he was excluded from final‑round interviews because he is a white man and the role went to a less qualified candidate.
I thought, good for him. Discrimination is discrimination. Whether the case has merit or not, he should be allowed to exercise his American rights and have his day in court. Then I thought about why this was a story at all. The headline made news for one reason only: the plaintiff is white. A black man suing for racial discrimination today would not be treated with the same level of curiosity. His case would be seen as routine, not remarkable.
Many of the Problems AI Creates for Democracy Can Be Solved With This Basic Change
For The Certainty Trap, FAIR Advisor Ilana Redstone writes about the convergence of AI and democracy, arguing that both AI systems and their users gravitate toward answers that appear definitive, even when reality is more uncertain and contested.
When an AI summarizes a policy debate, it makes choices — based on whatever its training data treats as mainstream — about which framings count as reasonable and which count as fringe…
This isn’t a bug in any particular AI platform—it’s a structural feature of how they work. They take in language, which is saturated with contested moral and causal premises, and produce output that inherits those same premises. This means the question isn’t whether AI systems will encode contested commitments as facts. They already do. It is whether we will teach it to make those commitments visible to the people using them.
Right now, they’re not. And that’s devastating for democracy…
Democracy doesn’t require that citizens agree on contested questions. It requires that the institutions mediating public life — including, now, AI systems — remain legible enough that citizens can see what they’re being asked to accept. The danger isn’t that AI takes positions. It’s that AI takes positions invisibly, at scale, in the voice of neutral authority and factual claims.
Women Terrorized By ‘Trans’ Male Inmate Launch Massive Lawsuit Against Prison System
For the Daily Wire, Megan Brock reports on FAIR’s lawsuit, in partnership with the America First Policy Institute, regarding the Washington State Department of Corrections (WSDC) policy of housing men in women’s single-sex prisons. Our lawsuit asserts that WSDC’s policy violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment and the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.
The lawsuit highlights public data showing that over 50% of males in federal prisons who self-identified as transgender between May 2024 and January 2025 were sex offenders…“The housing of these male inmates with females — including as bunkmates in the same cell — has led to multiple instances of violence and sexual abuse against the female inmates, persistent harassment, and the routine intimidation of female inmates in violation of their fundamental constitutional rights to serve their sentences in safety and without further punishment,” states the lawsuit. “[Washington] DOC’s Transgender Inmate Policy exposes female inmates to a population statistically more likely of having committed a sexual offense, and only females can become pregnant as a result of these offenses.”
The plaintiffs, the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, Inc. [Fair For All], and Faith Booher-Smith, are suing the Washington DOC and Tim Lang in his official capacity as Secretary of the Department of Corrections.
The Fraying Tightrope: When Medicine Abandons the Individual
For her Substack, Dr. Diana Blum reflects on the erosion of trust, judgment, and human connection in modern medicine. Drawing on her experience as a physician, she argues that healthcare systems increasingly prioritize bureaucracy, metrics, liability, and ideological conformity over individualized care and the doctor-patient relationship.
This clinical battle for the individual is a microcosm of the crisis facing the profession itself. Medicine has always required a delicate balance between two distinct poles: the measurable precision of science and the intuitive, often messy, art of human connection. To practice medicine is to walk a tightrope stretched taut between these two anchors, relying on the hard data of biology while never losing sight of the unique human soul it inhabits.
But today, that tightrope is fraying. I find myself fighting a systemic adversary far more insidious than a failing nervous system: a collapse of the moral foundation upon which the healing arts were built. We are witnessing a terrifying disconnection where the individual is being sacrificed to the collective. In our rush toward corporate efficiency and ideological conformity, we have abandoned both the rigorous pursuit of science and the sacred art of the relationship, leaving a hollowed-out system that values the metric more than the human.
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