Fighting is Easy. Persuading is Harder.

For FAIR’s Substack, Jefferson Shupe writes about Benjamin Franklin’s example of influence and coalition building.

While a fist-pounding speech against tyranny and injustice is as American as the Liberty Bell, so is the Franklin example of influence and coalition building. It’s not that there is never a time to rise up with passion, but we would be wise to look to our hundred-dollar founding father most of the time.
Benjamin Franklin wasn’t superhuman—he had to force this humble way of arguing as it didn’t come naturally at first. It doesn’t for me, either. But I’ve found that it’s worth it. Since trying this in earnest, I have felt less stressed about politics, burned fewer bridges, and have more friends, all while making more progress than ever to advance the policies and principles that I think are the best for my country.

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One of the Good Ones

For FAIR’s Substack, Ari Blaff writes a tribute in memory of Richard Bilkszto. Richard played a pivotal role in establishing FAIR in Canada, first volunteering with the Ontario Chapter and then leading the Toronto Chapter. We are deeply grateful for his dedication and efforts.

Shortly after the encounter, Richard stopped teaching. His reputation, he feared, was destroyed. If no one spoke up for him, surely, he must have been woefully ignorant. His social circle shrank in the months following his public defenestration, and a massive hole in his heart was left where the meaning he put into the kids went. “It’s about helping kids out,” he told me at one point. “You know, trying to support them, providing programming so that they can be successful.”
That remained Richard’s guiding light throughout his life and even after his encounter with Ojo-Thompson: helping kids. Fostering a new generation to think independently, to question thoughtfully. To be kind. He was exactly the kind of teacher we so desperately need today.

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Gender-distressed youth deserve the truth about the science

For The Hill, FAIR advisor Lisa Selin Davis writes about the politicization of science at the expense of gender-distressed youth.

Levine, a transgender woman, has repeatedly referred to these interventions as “lifesaving” and “medically necessary.” But we can all now plainly see that there is no good evidence to support those statements. Many experts publicly supporting the statements know them to be untrue. But families making decisions about how to treat youth gender dysphoria need to know the truth about the evidence, or lack thereof.
Democrats and Republicans, advocacy groups and activists need to stop funneling science through a biased lens. Every gender-distressed youth in America deserves this.

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American History Has Been Captured by the Left, Not the Right

For National Review, FAIR advisor Wilfred Reilly provides an adaptation from his latest book, Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me.

To read many leftist scholars, you’d come away thinking non-Western slavery was basically a fun vacation. The opposite is true. The most significant thing that was unique about the practice of slavery in the early modern West was that the nations of contemporary Europe and North America set out to end the institution globally, and largely did so. British oceangoing fleets blockaded slaving ports around the world, sinking at least 1,600 slave ships and freeing 150,000 slaves — in what was explicitly an attempt to minimize or end the so-called peculiar institution. Notably, in sizeable nations of color where trod only briefly the Western galosh, slavery still often endures. The practice exists rather openly in Mauritania, and slavery/chattel serfdom was only banned in Saudi Arabia in the 1960s.

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Tabletop Gaming’s Anti-Israel Meltdown: The Strange Tale of Waffles and Syrup

For Quillette, FAIR advisor Jonathan Kay writes about the CEO of a boardgame awards show who boasted publicly that she’d be disqualifying all nominees who identify as Zionists.

Indeed, the politics of the role-playing-game community have now become so puritanical that some employers in the sector no longer even bother using euphemisms when enforcing discriminatory hiring criteria. One full-time professional who spoke to me on background, for instance, told me that during a recent job interview, she was instructed that successful applicants would be required to formally pledge that they weren’t supporters of Donald Trump.
The list of punishable offences in this world now includes not only racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and Trumpism, but also Zionism. Connie Chang (“they/he/she, threading queer drama w/ black-hearted apocalyptica”), the influential creative director of a popular noncolonial, anti-orientalist “all-transgender, people of color-led dark fantasy TTRPG channel” called Transplanar, has denounced Zionism as “a colonial, ethnonationalist, imperial project founded in white supremacy, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.” The above-referenced Rowan Zeoli, who operates a social-justice gaming-themed publication called Rascal, goes further, referring to support for the Jewish state as “a plague on all of our souls.”

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Universities Should Promote Rigorous Discourse, Not Stifle It

For RealClear Politics, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Wesley J. Smith write about how efforts to stifle heterodox thinking are harmful to open discourse required for the healthy functioning of a democratic society.

Second, if universities took “official positions” on matters of public controversy and on-campus debate, it would stifle the expression of unpopular or heterodox opinions by faculty that disagreed with officially sanctioned opinions and materially chill the free and open exchange of ideas required for academic freedom to thrive. Even tenured faculty with job security would be reluctant to disagree with the university’s institutional position openly. After all, a university can punish a professor in many ways besides losing a position. These include restricting lab time, making professors teach undesired classes, social shunning, and other means to create a hostile work environment. And what chance would there be for untenured faculty or adjunct professors with little job security to contest the university’s institutional opinion? Slim and none.

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