The Silent Prescription: A Neurologist’s Journey from the Hippocratic Oath to the American Classroom
This week on FAIR’s Substack, Diana Blum writes as both a physician and a mother, sharing her concerns about K–12 education—and what led her to advocate for reform at her children’s school.
The turning point in my transformation from medical advocate to education defender occurred during a webinar I hosted for FAIR titled “Health Professionals in the Nazi Era.” Preparing for that presentation was a chilling experience. I saw with terrifying clarity how the most “educated” professionals of the 1930s, doctors and teachers, were the first to succumb to ideological capture. They didn’t wake up one day as monsters; they were slowly conditioned to prioritize activism over their professional oaths.
I looked at our current K-12 landscape and saw the same patterns. As depicted in the documentary Killing America by Eli Steele, the erosion of merit and the introduction of “social justice” frameworks in schools like those in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I grew up and raised my own kids, mirrored the lowering of medical standards I had fought against. Whether it is lowering the bar for a medical degree or removing honors math for eighth graders, the result is the same: the sacrifice of excellence at the altar of ideology. Unnecessary suffering inevitably follows.
New York Theater Settles Case That Argued Discounts Were Discriminatory
In The New York Times, Michael Paulson reports on a recent lawsuit brought by FAIR in the Arts member Kevin Lynch (represented by Consovoy McCarthy), who challenged a “BIPOC night” at Playwrights Horizons. The theater has agreed to a settle out of court, and we applaud Lynch for his success.
A prominent nonprofit theater in New York has settled a lawsuit claiming that a discount offered to people of color was racially discriminatory.
Playwrights Horizons, an Off Broadway company…offered an apology to Kevin Lynch, a white musician from New Jersey who sued over last fall’s “BIPOC night”…
“Playwrights Horizons regrets that Mr. Lynch felt excluded because of his race,” the theater said in a six-sentence statement issued jointly by both parties on Tuesday. The statement did not specify whether the theater paid any money to Mr. Lynch, but said, “Playwrights Horizons and Mr. Lynch have agreed to resolve the matter out of court.”
…Lynch, in a statement…said he was pleased with the outcome. "Race-based ticket pricing violates all our civil rights, regardless of which race is on the receiving end of the discrimination…I consider it a victory for civil and human rights.”
The quiet radicalization of the American library
In the Washington Examiner, Bethany Mandel argues that the American Library Association has abandoned institutional neutrality. She highlights the rise of the Association of Library Professionals, which promotes a vision of librarianship grounded in neutrality and community trust rather than ideological advocacy—and recommends FAIR’s Library Neutrality Toolkit.
Organizations outside the traditional library establishment have begun offering tools for citizens who want to evaluate whether their local libraries are living up to principles of neutrality and viewpoint diversity. One example comes from [FAIR], which recently released a public tool kit designed to help community members assess library policies and practices. The tool kit encourages citizens to ask straightforward questions about collection development, programming, and institutional policies. Are multiple viewpoints represented in book collections? Are libraries hosting speakers from across the political spectrum? Are policies applied consistently regardless of ideology?
These questions should not be controversial. For much of the 20th century, they would have been understood as basic elements of professional librarianship. The fact that they now provoke debate reflects how far the conversation has shifted.
The DEI scourge in K-12 education has only gotten worse since I blew the whistle on my own school
Writing in the New York Post, Dana Stangel-Plowe (former Director of FAIR in Education) reflects on how education has changed since she blew the whistle on her school. In her view, it has become more ideologically rigid, less tolerant, and increasingly focused on activism over academics.
Within my left-leaning profession, I know that most teachers are not radical activists. But their good intentions make them susceptible to the path of least resistance paved by those who are. In a captured system, the politicization of education becomes the air that teachers breathe.
They often perpetuate the ideology without recognizing what it is: political. It may sound like an abstraction to say the ideology fuels hostility toward anyone it casts as an oppressor, but it’s all too real.
In my school, the more radical and often younger educators aggressively insisted on this new approach. They pushed the school to reduce complex issues, such as racial or gender inequities, into moral binaries and treat contested conclusions as settled truth.
Harmed by Medical Transition
For Inspecting Gender, Genspect director Stella O’Malley explores the four stages of detransition, describing a process far more complex than commonly understood.
These include psychological detransition, which involves a shift in beliefs and internal self-understanding; social detransition, which involves changes in presentation, roles, and relationships; legal detransition, which involves reversing formal identity markers such as name and sex designation; and medical detransition, which involves reducing, stopping, or managing the physical consequences of medical interventions. These domains are not steps in a sequence, and individuals may experience one, several, or all of them. Many remain within a single stage without ever entering others. Taken together, they provide a framework for understanding detransition as a complex human experience that reaches into the mind, the body, and the structures that govern social and legal recognition. In this sense, detransition is best understood not as a simple reversal, but as a re-engagement with reality, embodiment, and personal agency at a pace and depth unique to each individual…
[The four stages] provide a descriptive framework for understanding the varied realities of detransition. They are not prescriptive, but intended to help individuals, families, and professionals recognize and respond to this experience with greater clarity.
The Politics of Linguistic Evasion
In The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain, Helen Pluckrose examines why ideologues often resist labels that accurately describe their beliefs.
Firstly, there is the issue where these terms have been abused and fired at people whether they apply or not as a condemnation by activists of the Critical Social Justice movement. When a descriptive term becomes synonymous with ‘bad person’ this will produce instinctive ‘No, I’m not!” denials from people who are driven more by vibes and feelings than by definitions and reason. It also enables people with a more sophisticated but intellectually dishonest mindset who know very well what words mean to cynically redefine them as ‘terms that identify their speaker as the worst of our political opponents” to dismiss the accusation without addressing it. Wilfred Reilly is correct to note that this functions as the same kind of trap used by activists of the CSJ movement.
Is Systemic Racism a Thing of the Past?
For Free Black Thought, Kevin Briggins reflects on his grandfather’s legacy as a prominent figure in the Civil Rights Movement, and how the broader fight against systemic racism has evolved in recent years.
If my great-grandfather were alive today, he would likely marvel at the real racial progress that has been made. Certainly, disparities still exist, but it is overly simplistic to allege “systemic racism” as the unproven boogeyman lurking behind every disparity. We would do better to heed the words of Dr. Lionel Newsom, another prominent man from my great-grandfather’s generation. In the same year the Civil Rights Act was passed (1964), he wisely noted that the freedom that comes with equal opportunity (unsegregated facilities, no formal discrimination in hiring, etc.) does not necessarily lead to equality (the same outcomes as other ethnicities). Rather,
“Equality can come only through individual efforts. In order to achieve equality people must be able to communicate, to understand and appreciate each other, and to give and take. One must strive for excellence in every undertaking in order to build self-esteem and respect from others. These are the things that finally lead to equality. Freedom may be granted but equality must be achieved.”
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