1) New threat to American Democracy in country X!
2) Anyone who questions this narrative is unpatriotic/traitor.
3) Victory is imminent and guaranteed.
4) Victory will take time but is worth it.
5) If we don’t redouble our efforts, we will lose.
6) Setbacks were inevitable.
7) Internal doubts and a lack of staying power cost us the war.
8) Press blackout on country X. (Never that important.)
The government cannot force public colleges to derecognize Students for Justice in Palestine chapters. That's just what State University System of Florida Chancellor Ray Rodrigues, reportedly at the direction of Gov. Ron DeSantis, is trying to do.
FIRE did not issue this statement because it is taking sides regarding the Middle East conflict. FIRE doesn't take sides regarding the substance of disputes. What FIRE does with unrelenting consistency is to advocate for free speech for all sides of every dispute.
"An ideological movement is a collection of people many of whom could hardly bake a cake, fix a car, sustain a friendship or a marriage, or even do a quadratic equation, yet they believe they know how to rule the world."
~Kenneth Minogue
As I've written here, the end game to wokeness is Evergreen State. There is no interest in addressing human suffering, no means to enhance human flourishing. For example, BLM and its allied CRT partners have not shown any interest in improving education. They offer nothing to the many schools where almost none of the students are proficient in math or English, other than to eliminate grades (and thus accountability), as in Portland.
Keep in mind that a magazine is not necessarily about science just because the word "Science" appears in the title. As economist Thomas Sowell pointed out: "When examining institutions, it is critically important "to distinguish between (1) examining issues and institutions in terms of their process characteristics versus (2) examining them in terms of their proclaimed goals or ideals…." Knowledge and Decisions (1996).
George Orwell, once again, is spot on in his quote:
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?
To echo Orwell's concern: Wokeness is power-seeking in the absence of any plan for what happens after existing institutions are hollowed out. It is Chesterson's Fence on steroids. It's a blind faith that one can achieve more than the Enlightenment merely by wishing and hoping.
When you come across the longstanding magazine, Scientific American, you could be forgiven for assuming that scientific truth would play a pivotal role in its output.
But not any more, it seems. Scientific American, founded in 1845, is the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. It has previously featured work by Albert Einstein, among others. However, in recent years, it appears to have been taken over by contributors who consider themselves activists first and scientists second. The magazine’s ethos now includes the express aim of ‘sharing trustworthy knowledge, enhancing our understanding of the world, and advancing social justice’ (my emphasis). It has also started to intervene in electoral politics, too. In 2020, Scientific American broke with a 175-year history of non-partisanship to endorse Joe Biden in the US presidential election.
Worst of all, when its articles touch on questions of gender and biological sex, Scientific American seems to have abandoned objective facts entirely, in favour of trans-activist pseudoscience.
As Jonathan Haidt warned, universities (and here, science magazines) can only have one telos. To do otherwise gives rise to a conflict of interest that corrupts the main mission.
If one wants to know what sex is or how many sexes there are, just ask a real life trained biologist, such as my friend Luana Maroja, who has no conflict of interest. She takes pride in being a real-life legitimate biology professor who know that there are two (and only two) human sexes because there are two (and only two) types of human gametes:
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