Weekly Roundup

Reading List

There's Nothing Wrong with Tucker Interviewing Putin. It's Called Journalism.

For Public, FAIR Advisor Zaid Jilani writes about why nobody should ever apologize for interviewing a newsworthy personality.

Putin is one of the planet’s most influential people, a world leader who is engaged on one side of a conflict that the United States has spent billions of dollars in. If anything, more journalists should be trying to interview Putin and other world leaders who are on the other side of us on major issues; Americans need to be able to consider the views of countries besides our own, even if we have little to nothing in common. 

And despite today’s media climate where so many pundits think it’s anathema to meet with an antagonistic foreign leader, Carlson’s interview with Putin sits neatly in the American tradition of interviewing adversaries.

Whether you call it institutional ‘neutrality’ or ‘restraint,’ the Kalven Report is the best way forward

For FIRE’s Newsdesk, FAIR’s Chairman of the Board Angel Eduardo writes about why universities should refrain from taking political positions.

Whether you call it “neutrality” or “restraint,” the point — and the best way forward — is for our institutions of higher learning to adhere to the Kalven Report’s call to “avoid the push and pull of particular political and social commitments.”

Universities have grown too accustomed to putting out political statements — a habit whose costs many schools are now recognizing. From now on the starting point should be guided by institutional neutrality, which will allow universities to return to their core mission of facilitating debate rather than engaging in it.

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Gender transitions aren’t always right. Medicine must officially recognize detransition.

For The Hill, FAIR in Medicine Fellow Dr. Aida Cerundolo writes about how reclaiming one’s biological gender after a gender transition is so taboo that there is no way to document it in a medical record with an official diagnosis code.

The assumption that gender incongruence is always the cause of gender dysphoria leaves no room for the possibility that some patients may have other psychological stressors contributing to their mental distress — leading them to inappropriate gender transition — and resulting in future detransition. Acceptance of detransition flips the concept of immediate gender affirmation on its head.

Medicine should swallow the truth by acknowledging gender detransition in our healthcare system. We hope the APA and AAP recognize this neglected cohort of patients and agree that safe medicine must always be a priority, regardless of gender identity.

Coleman Hughes on the New Racism

For The Free Press, Coleman Hughes writes about how the rise of a new race consciousness has turned elite American institutions into neoracist strongholds.

At this moment in American history, we have a choice. We can follow neoracists down the path of endless racial strife, or we can recommit ourselves to the principles that motivated the civil rights movement—and not just the civil rights movement but also the abolitionist movement and other movements around the world that oppose unjust discrimination. Those principles include a belief in our common humanity—the idea that what it takes for human beings to flourish has nothing essential to do with our skin color or ancestry or any of the other traits that people have used throughout history to divide themselves. 

Free Speech Aids Racial Justice. Activists Must Defend It.

For The Harvard Crimson, Randall L. Kennedy writes about why a culture that defends even odious expression benefits minority communities that depend upon protest to make their presence and preferences seen and heard.

As new attempts at suppression rear their head today, we must remember that tragic experience and subsequent iterations of ideological and intellectual tyranny. Racial justice activists ought to use those acts of censorship as rallying points to resist all undue encroachments upon freedom of speech, listening, teaching, and learning — because free expression helps, rather than hurts, the fight for racial justice.

A Textbook Case of Social Justice Medicine Run Amok

For Washington Monthly, Dr. Sally Satel writes about a why new volume from the publishing arm of the American Psychiatric Association on gender-affirming care illustrates the problem when ideology trumps science.

Alas, this volume is another instance of activism intruding into psychology and medicine writ large. Perhaps the most well-known example of this social justice trend was using racial categories to determine the distribution of lifesaving COVID-19 treatments. On the psychotherapy front, many counselor education programs are teaching trainees to see patients less as individuals with unique needs and personalities but as avatars of their gender, race, and ethnicity. White patients, for instance, are told that their distress stems from their subjugation of others, while black and minority patients are told that their problems flow from being oppressed. It is especially troubling to see social justice ideology intrude in an area as high-stakes as the treatment of young people with gender dysphoria.  

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