Free Republic

I’ve been a member of the American Psychological Association (APA) for years, and a fellow for the past six or seven years. I sat on their Council of Representatives, which theoretically sets policy for the APA, for three years. I am just ending my term as president of the APA’s Society for Media and Technology, where I have met many wonderful colleagues. Yet, at the end of 2021, I decided to resign my membership in the APA. My concern is that the APA no longer functions as an organization dedicated to science and good clinical practice. As a professional guild,...

For several years now, David Cole has been a minor celebrity in the Northern Territory of Australia on account of his colorful conspiracy theories. While few people take anything he has to say seriously, many of us in the Territory enjoy wondering what he’s going to come up with next. Cole believes that the Hillsong Church in Sydney carries out child sacrifices, that Australia is a registered corporate entity of the Vatican…. It is hardly a surprise, then, that Cole’s statements about the pandemic have been monumentally confused. He believes that sunlight can cure COVID-19; that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is...

Boston Pride is one of the oldest gay-rights organizations in the United States, with its first parade having taken place in 1971. Last year would have marked the 50th parade, but the event was cancelled due to the pandemic. This year’s events also didn’t materialize, but not entirely because of COVID-19. Rather, Boston Pride celebrated a half-century-plus of existence by collapsing into social panic and cancelling itself. I mean this literally: Boston Pride no longer exists. The organization was dissolved from within in July, when its board of directors released a statement that read, in part: It is clear to...

For most of the past two centuries, the Left has been identified with science and against obscurantism; we have believed that rational thought and the fearless analysis of objective reality (both natural and social) are incisive tools for combating the mystifications promoted by the powerful. … Theorizing about “the social construction of reality” won't help us find an effective treatment for AIDS or devise strategies for preventing global warming. Nor can we combat false ideas in history, sociology, economics, and politics if we reject the notions of truth and falsity.~Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, “Fashionable Nonsense” (1997)Nowhere is the politicization...

A headline on Newsweek’s web site grabbed my attention in early May: “Wokeness Has Come for Adoption. It’s the Children Who Will Suffer.” This is a subject I know well: My wife and I have fostered three child refugees—from Zimbabwe, Guatemala, and Honduras respectively. These foster children are functionally adopted, and have become full-fledged members of our family. The article noted that a vice-president at Bethany Christian Services, the largest Christian adoption agency in the country, had told a reporter that allowing white families to adopt black children from the foster care system “can cause a lot of harm to...

Last month a professor at Georgetown Law named Sandra Sellers was fired after video came to light of some comments she made about the black students in her classes. Adjunct professors Sandra Sellers, who taught at the prestigious Washington, D.C., law school for nearly 20 years, claimed her Black students routinely grade lower than others in a conversation with colleague David Batson. “I hate to say this. I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are Blacks, happens almost every semester,” she said in the recorded conversation posted to Twitter last week. “And...

At a recent gathering, a daughter’s friend told us, “I’m probably trans because I don’t like female puberty.” This instantly got my attention, because I have known this child for years, and I never saw any indication of her being trans. I innocently asked her why she would say that. Was it a joke, perhaps? She replied, “I don’t like my boobs growing, and Reddit says I’m probably trans.” That night, I tracked down these Reddit exchanges, and my jaw dropped when I saw how many people and organizations were heavily pushing the possibility of her being trans. But perhaps...

Quillette has been under fire since it was founded by Claire Lehmann in 2015. The old guard doesn’t like a fresh face, so when Lehmann launched and was then lauded by Jordan Peterson, the media lined up to take shots. Quillette may not have been the birthplace of the so-called Intellectual Dark Web, but it’s been an essential publication for the documenting of free speech concerns and heterodox ideas. It also made space for voices that had been cancelled and writers and intellectuals who had been unpersoned in their communities. Publishing both controversial ideas and controversial people made it a...

More than two years have passed since Britain voted for Brexit. Ever since that moment, the vote to leave the European Union has routinely been framed as an aberration; a radical departure from ‘normal’ life. Countless journalists, scholars, and celebrities have lined up to offer their diagnosis of what caused this apparent moment of madness among the electorate. Russia-backed social media accounts. Shady big tech firms like Cambridge Analytica. Austerity. The malign influence of populist ‘Brexiteers’ like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. The Brexit campaign exceeding its legal spending limit. Or a much-debated claim, written on the side of a...