FAIR enough

 

As the Woke ideology consumes more and more of our formerly venerable institutions and corporations, those of us that value a liberal society are seeking refuge and camaraderie with like-minded individuals.

I think I have found one such organization—The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism or FAIR (www.fairforall.org).  I was initially attracted to it via a tweet from exiled journalist Bari Weiss and another tweet that called it a “non-woke ACLU.”  And it has an interesting and diverse array of public intellectuals as supporters and contributors—Bari herself, Columbia’s John McWhorter, Brown’s Glenn Loury, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Melissa Chen, among others.

I attended the FAIR Loving Day Celebration, marking the Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia that knocked down miscegenation laws.  The event was organized by Chicago Chapter co-leader Takyrica Kokoszka (an African American) and her husband, Larry (white), both teachers in the Chicago Public School System.

Here are some of the highlights:

·        Several people talked about the loss of friends over Wokeness and feeling alone.

·        One person alikened FAIR to a “secret society” which I echoed, referring to similar secret societies in the writings of Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Benda in Community Czechoslovakia.

·        A born Brit that expressed his shock and dismay that free speech was under assault in the U.S.

·        Another University of Chicago educated woman that talked about her devotion to principles of free inquiry that she adopted at U of C that are now being threatened.

·        A woman physician that talked about her family’s experience as Holocaust survivors and her revulsion at the fact that she now is considered “privileged.”   She also talked about CRT invading her profession and interfering with her ability to take patients as they are.

·        Another gentlemen talked about his desire to “defund the universities, not the police.”

·        When one gentleman introduced himself as a U.S. history teacher, someone joked, “Which one?” (reference to 1619 Project.)

·        There was a woman from the old Soviet Union and a woman from Poland that were able to talk about what life in those societies were like.

·        A highlight for me was actually getting to spend some time getting to know Takyrica, a bright, enthusiastic, optimistic woman with a winning smile.

But here is the real punchline:   I did not detect any real partisanship in the room.  Of approximately 50 people in the room, I could not reliably predict the party affiliation of any of them.  Most spoke about free speech and the indoctrination going on in our educational system.  There was not a single mention by anyone of Trump or Biden.  That fact alone filled me with hope.

The next day, I listened to the full interview of Bari Weiss, one of the founders of FAIR, with Jordan Peterson.  Weiss, a self-proclaimed left of center journalist, said “I really believe that the fight for liberalism (I don’t mean that in the partisan sense but I mean that in terms of the values we’ve been describing in this conversation), that is more important than any amount of popularity, any amount of accolades on Twitter, than anything  else, and so I had to leave the institution in order to fight for liberalism, and that I see as the mission of my life.”

Conservatives and libertarians like me need to join hands with “liberals” like Bari Weiss, just as blacks must join hands with whites if we are to defeat the forces of illiberalism.   We cannot remain on the sidelines as our institutions fall one by one.  FAIR, I think, is a great step in the right direction.

I urge you to join and to listen to Weiss’s entire interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFTA9MJZ4KY)