Weekly Roundup

Reading List

Why We Shouldn't Cancel Pro-Hamas Protesters

For FAIR’s Substack, Julian Adorney writes about why he believes this moment is an opportunity for us to show our political opponents that they have no reason to fear us as we have feared them.

For one thing, all of the arguments that free-speech advocates have made over the years decrying cancel culture still hold now that the shoe is on the other foot. Cancel culture isn't justice; it's just an online mob formed to punish someone based on a tiny snapshot of their life. Cancel culture also offers no opportunity for repentance and growth. If we blacklist the protestors, we give them little opportunity or incentive to learn from their mistakes. We might even radicalize them further.

Turnaround is not, in fact, fair play. Destroying people’s lives for speaking their opinion is not moral, and that doesn't change just because it's our political opponents in the crosshairs. If those of us who have lamented the rise of cancel culture for years succumb to our baser instincts and try to destroy these protestors' lives, then we can no longer claim to be better than the people across the political spectrum who would do the same to us.

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How global pandemic and the social justice movement have undermined America

For her Substack The Bigger Picture, FAIR’s executive director Monica Harris writes about why no one is safe in a society that thrives on fear and victimization.

The absurdity of believing that the world consists solely of victims and oppressors, the powerful and the powerless, the dangerous and the endangered, is a corrosive mindset that poses an existential threat to any civilized society. When we give ourselves permission to punish people we despise or we’re told to despise — by any means necessary — we run the risk of surrendering our collective humanity to forces that may not have genuine concern for our welfare. Once that happens, the quest for social justice, safety and freedom becomes an illusion.

If attitudes don’t shift, a political dating mismatch will threaten marriage

For The Washington Post, the Editorial Board, including FAIR Advisor Shadi Hamid, write about ideological polarization in American politics and its effect on marriage rates.

The marriage dilemma reflects a broader societal one: whether people can find ways to adapt to a new normal of ideological and political polarization, instead of hoping — against all evidence — that it will dissipate. Unfortunately, Americans have not equipped themselves to discuss, debate and reason across these divides. Americans have increasingly sorted themselves according to ideological orientation. They are working, living and socializing with people who think the same things they do. Particularly on college campuses, a culture of seeking sameness has set up young Americans for disappointment. They expect people to share their own convictions and commitments. But people’s insight and understanding about the world often come from considering alternative perspectives that may at first seem odd or offensive.

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The American Academy of Pediatrics is doubling down

For UnHerd, Eliza Mondegreen writes about how evidence of medical harm among minors is still being ignored.

Critics and young people who’ve come to see being affirmed in their transgender identity as a form of medical harm beg to differ. Just last month, FAIR in Medicine smuggled dissent into the heart of the Academy’s annual conference, renting a booth in the exhibition hall to bring pediatricians face-to-face with detransitioners. While some pediatricians were eager to learn more, others were furious to be confronted with the underside of gender-affirming care, “refus[ing] to look at any materials, responding with ‘I already know all that, I already know.’ They were sure they knew what we had to say, sure they’d been fully informed, sure that anyone who wanted to talk was a bigot and a transphobe and nothing more.” 

Liberals Once Embraced Interracial Marriages Like Mine. What Changed?

For The Free Press, Paul Kix writes about how progressivism has abandoned its open-mindedness and color blindness approach in favor of a more race essentialist framework.

That summer and fall, you could feel everything shifting: the same people who had once celebrated Sonya and me were now convinced that overcoming race was impossible. Our color blindness, like our liberal sensibility, was a problem. To make real progress, we had to dive deeply into our racial differences.

It was now the job of white people to acknowledge race everywhere. They all seemed to have absorbed Robin DiAngelo’s 2018 book White Fragility, the core argument of which is that black and white people are pretty much different species, and that white people need “guidelines” to overcome their “racial frame.”

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