Weekly Roundup
Reading, watching, & listening list
Choosing the truth while choosing each other
For Focolare Media, FAIR Advisor John Wood Jr. writes about the courage to hold onto relationships in a post-election season.
I do not blame people who, in moments such as this, feel the need to remove certain people from their lives. The stakes of politics are high enough to justify this. We should not look down on people for feeling tempted towards this choice. And we should not be ashamed of ourselves for feeling such temptations even at Braver Angels.
Yet still, we must remember that the higher road calls upon us to speak truth to power and truth to our friends, even while remembering that our friends and family are still people we love and that democracy is not served by destroying our own opportunity to influence the people we may disagree with for the better (or be influenced by them should they have truths to speak that we need to hear).
Nancy Mace and Sarah McBride Present Us with an Important Opportunity
For her Substack BROADVIEW, FAIR Advisor Lisa Selin Davis writes about the recent conflict on Capitol Hill regarding using bathrooms according to sex instead of gender identity.
As philosophy professor Holly Lawford-Smith explains in Gender-Critical Feminism: “From a gender-critical perspective, there is no automatic right to inclusion, because these spaces are part of a package of political provisions designed to improve women’s participation in public life.” We created women’s-only spaces for women, to advance their interests, to rectify discrimination, to protect their needs. In fact, it took decades for female representatives to get a bathroom of their own anywhere near the House floor. We may need to create spaces for males who transition, for their interests and needs, too—but they do not automatically earn entry into women’s spaces by way of proclamation, identity, or even physical alterations to themselves.
Lessons from a Teachers-College Battle Over Free Speech and ‘Decolonization’
For Quillette, FAIR Advisor Jonathan Kay writes about the University of Western Ontario’s violation of a student’s rights who’d asked awkward questions about Indigenous reconciliation.
The Associate Dean also told Munn that she’d be initiating an investigation, and sharing her findings about Munn with “central”—Hibbert’s shorthand term for the university’s centralised EDI department, its Office of Indigenous Initiatives, and its administrative units charged with implementing UWO’s Code of Conduct and Policy on Gender-Based and Sexual Violence.
Munn remembers feeling blindsided. Yes, she’d aired a handful of mildly heterodox opinions about controversial topics during classroom discussions. As the evidence would later show, however, she’d said nothing that even remotely resembled the “hate speech” alleged by the EDI committee.
Did Our Side Win?
A post-election conversation with FAIR Advisor Lisa Selin Davis, Ben Appel, Cori Cohn, Eliza Mondegreen and Jamie Reed. Five residents of the gender rabbit hole dish on what Trump’s win means for the movement.
The Case for Unabashed Black Patriotism
For Free Black Thought, Glenn Loury offers a Thanksgiving message.
The narrative we blacks settle upon is crucial. Will we regard the U.S. as racist, genocidal, and illegitimate? Or will we see our nation as the greatest force for human liberty on the planet? Emancipation and incorporation of African-descended people were monumental achievements.
Why we at FIRE are thankful for free speech this Thanksgiving
For his Substack The Eternally Radical Idea, Greg Lukianoff and his team at FIRE give thanks for free speech.
Freedom of speech is necessary for the discovery of truth. Absolutely necessary. You don't have a chance in hell of finding out what's actually true if people aren't allowed to say what they really think, express their doubts, dissent, and engage in thought experimentation, devil's advocacy, and counterfactuals. Without this, you have zero chance of knowing the world as it is. But even with that, you still need additional steps — whether those are the scientific method, academic freedom, or Jonathan Rauch's broader concept of “liberal science.”
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