FAIR in Conversation Past Materials

Against the Machine

by Paul Kingsnorth

Amid today’s highly technical, material, and fast-paced world, it is easy to lose sight of the thing that matters most – our common humanity and where it is headed. In pursuing FAIR’s work of promoting a pro-human culture based on common and shared values, the October FAIR in Conversation highlights the increasingly popular book, Against the Machine.

In Against the Machine, “furiously gifted” (The Washington Post) novelist, poet, and essayist Paul Kingsnorth presents a wholly original—and terrifying—account of the technological-cultural matrix enveloping all of us. With masterful insight into the spiritual and economic roots of techno-capitalism, Kingsnorth reveals how the Machine, in the name of progress, has choked Western civilization, is destroying the Earth itself, and is reshaping us in its image. From the First Industrial Revolution to the rise of artificial intelligence, he shows how the hollowing out of humanity has been a long game—and how your very soul is at stake.

Join FAIR in Conversation as we take momentary detours from our mechanized lifestyles and reflect on the ideas and values that have truly enabled us to flourish as humans.

Frederica Mathewes-Green, author of Facing East says about Against the Machine:

“Something in our common life has long seemed bewildering, even ominous, and Paul Kingsnorth makes it finally clear what we’re up against. The gears clanking around us are not working at random but with increasing inhuman intent. Now I see what I must do. Now I understand.”

The Psychology of Totalitarianism

by Mattias Desmet

Three years after its 2022 publication, Mattias Desmet’s The Psychology of Totalitarianism feels more urgent than ever. By unearthing the psychological roots of totalitarian thinking, Desmet offers a profound analysis of a world strained by isolation, anxiety, and techno-dominance. His work challenges us to recognize the depths of the waters we have been submerged in—and to ask what it takes to stay awake.

Together, we’ll probe Desmet’s concept of mass formation and connect it to the realities of our own time:

The Covid pandemic (which should never be forgotten)
Today’s polarized climate
The distinctions between dictatorship, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism
The looming rise of artificial intelligence
The MAHA movement

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Social Justice Fallacies

by Thomas Sowell

The quest for social justice is a powerful crusade of our time, with an appeal to many different people, for many different reasons. Social Justice Fallacies reveals how many things that are thought to be true simply cannot stand up to documented facts, which are often the opposite of what is widely believed. But crusaders with an utter certainty about their mission are often undeterred by obstacles, evidence or even fatal dangers.History shows that the social justice agenda has often led in the opposite direction, sometimes with catastrophic consequences.

The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas are Killing Common Sense

by Gad Saad

Evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad establishes the argument that certain ideological movements undermine rational thought and stifle intellectual diversity. Employing the metaphor of a parasite to describe how these harmful ideas infect our minds and are spread through cultural institutions to distort our ability to engage in critical thinking, Saad examines postmodernism, identity politics, radical feminism, and cultural relativism, claiming that these ideas not only encourage censorship and erode individual freedoms but also threaten the foundational principles of Western civilization, including reason, scientific inquiry, and freedom of speech, expression, and thought.

Date and Time: July 23rd, 2025, 7:00PM ET

Register here

To get familiar with “Parasitic Mind” by Gad Saad, here are a few resources that echo and expand on Saad’s main arguments·

Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith, and Resistance in a New Dark Age

by Naomi Wolf

From New York Times bestselling author Naomi Wolf, Facing the Beast is a devastating, detailed account of wrongthink, deplatforming, and an unexpected political, personal, and spiritual transformation that followed during one of the most divisive times in American history.

In this uncompromising investigation into today’s most urgent issues, Naomi Wolf uses her own wildly politicized pilgrimage—from New York Times bestselling author and high-level Democratic consultant to a journalist cast out from the elite political and social circles she once moved through—as a stunning narrative framework that is both chilling and incisive.

Wolf’s sin? Doing the job that good journalists once prided themselves on: asking questions, challenging authority, and, during one of the most politically divisive moments in modern history, exposing the many failures of the public health response during the COVID-19 pandemic by chronicling the dangerous descent of our democracy into tyranny, censorship, and totalitarianism.

Unable to remain silent in the shadows and unwilling to collude with the mainstream, Wolf bravely covers topics that few other writers dare to address critically for fear of being deplatformed. Facing the Beast explores reproductive rights, medical freedom, the uncurious thought-policing of the “progressive” left, the Second Amendment, the criminal relationship between the FDA and Pfizer—Wolf’s clear writing repeatedly shines light in the dark corners of our fractured society.

Lawless: The Miseducation of America's Elites

by Ilya Shapiro

In the past, Columbia Law School produced leaders like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now it produces window-smashing activists.

When protestors at Columbia broke into a building and created illegal encampments, the student-led Columbia Law Review demanded that finals be canceled because of “distress.”

Law schools used to teach students how to think critically, advance logical arguments, and respect opponents. Now those students cannot tolerate disagreement and reject the validity of the law itself. Rioting Ivy Leaguers are the same people who will soon:

Be America’s judges, DAs, and prosecutors
File and fight constitutional lawsuits
Advise Fortune 500 companies
Hire other left-wing diversity candidates to staff law firms and government offices
Run for higher office with an agenda of only enforcing laws that suit left-wing whims

In Lawless, Ilya Shapiro explains how we got here and what we can do about it. The problem is bigger than radical students and biased faculty—it’s institutional weakness. Shapiro met the mob firsthand when he posted a controversial tweet that led to calls for his firing from Georgetown Law. A four-month investigation eventually cleared him on a technicality but declared that if he offended anyone in the future, he’d create a “hostile educational environment” and be subject to the inquisition again. Unable to do the job he was hired for, he resigned.

This cannot continue. In Lawless, Shapiro reveals how the illiberal takeover of legal education is transforming our country. Unless we stop it now, the consequences will be with us for decades.