Restoring Trust in School Libraries Starts with Transparency
For FAIR’s Substack, Douglas Kechijian writes about how avoiding honest conversations about sexually explicit content in school libraries only further erodes the public's trust.
To rebuild trust, school systems must allow for open, transparent conversations. Officials who object to “book banning” should also be willing to publicly acknowledge and justify the inclusion of graphic materials under their jurisdiction.
The introduction of highly sexualized books into school libraries is a relatively new phenomenon. It happened quietly, often without parental input. Continuing to defend these materials without a broader community mandate risks eroding support for school libraries as a whole.
Plantation 2.0: The Immigration Rebrand
For The Bigger Picture, FAIR Executive Director Monica Harris writes about how America’s addiction to cheap labor reveals uncomfortable truths about our economy and values.
Slaveowners rationalized slavery by asserting that Africans were biologically and mentally inferior, thereby assuaging the guilt that would otherwise arise from exploitation of human beings. Today, Bass and other city leaders insist they’re providing opportunities for people seeking a better life and protecting their families and communities. They emphasize their compassion for immigrants while carefully avoiding discussion of the wage depression and labor exploitation that makes their presence economically attractive, and even necessary, to employers.
How bitterly ironic that a Black mayor is defending the same morally hollow framework that White plantation owners used to justify human bondage 250 years ago.
Why Americans love conspiracy theories
For The Washington Post, FAIR Advisor Shadi Hamid writes about how conspiracies are often fueled by feelings of decline and loss of power.
In this sense, conspiracy theorizing is intimately related to proximity to power — specifically, the perception that power is out of reach. Because liberals have dominated American culture so thoroughly for the entirety of my adult life, they have had less use for the sorts of elaborately constructed theories that characterize the Epstein saga. However, with Trump’s full-frontal attack on the foundations of liberal hegemony — universities, the news media, the bureaucracy — a new culture of liberal conspiracism might emerge.
Whose school is it anyway?
For the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, FAIR Advisor Robert Pondiscio writes about a curriculum controversy in Philadelphia.
Public schools are among our most important civic institutions, essential to both individual opportunity and democratic life. But they cannot be both a core government service and a platform for personal or political expression. The tension between those roles has been allowed to fester unexamined for too long. The result is a steady erosion of public trust—not because Americans don’t value education, but because they can no longer be certain whose interests it serves. If schools want to reclaim that trust, they must first be clear-eyed about the role they play. And then act like it.
The war on ‘woke AI’ just became federal policy
For The Eternally Radical Idea, Greg Lukianoff writes about the ideological bias in Trump’s new executive order.
We absolutely want our AI systems to be truth-seeking and ideologically neutral. Superficially, these two principles, as outlined in the new executive order, leave little to criticize. But having the government decide what those principles mean in practice is where things always get hairy. Oftentimes one’s own biases and ideologies aren’t considered biases or ideologies — they’re just “common sense” and “the right way to be.”
And while DEI is explicitly mentioned in the Action Plan and the executive order, the absence of any right-wing equivalents (which would also indicate potential compromises to truth-seeking and ideological neutrality) should at least raise some eyebrows.
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.
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.