FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) has received major funding from groups which primarily support conservative and libertarian causes, including the Bradley Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Charles Koch Institute.
In 2017, FIRE was listed as one of the sponsors of the conservative campus group Turning Point USA's Student Action Summit, according to tax records.
FIRE president Gregory Lukianoff authored "The Coddling of the American Mind" for The Atlantic discussing whether or not trigger warnings are harming college health. Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt later released a book version of The Coddling of the American Mind.
Lukianoff appeared in the film Indoctrinate U, a 2007 American feature-length documentary film written by, directed by and starring Evan Coyne Maloney. A New York Sun profile in 2005 said that Maloney "may very well be America's most promising conservative documentary filmmaker."
Did you know that most of the Wikipedia, from which you essentially copy and pasted this [1], is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license which requires proper attribution? [2]
As a Wikipedian, I thank you for defending that license. Attribution is not an onerous requirement, but people think it's free for the taking, and giving credit where credit is due is an essential element of keeping Creative Commons free.
That being said, a few paragraphs may be a fair-use-sized excerpt, but it's still extremely rude to steal!
I'm not sure how conservative funding makes FIRE less credible.
To make my point, first, I'm not sure whether the Wikipedia article you are quoting is misrepresenting the demographic of FIRE's donors (i.e. by omitting left-leaning ones). I'm not going to adjudicate that, so let's assume that FIRE's donors are mostly conservative.
Then, does having conservative donors imply that FIRE supports conservative causes under the guise of free speech? To adjudicate this, we have to ask (1) why does FIRE have mostly conservative donors (2) assess their track record with respect to the cases they've taken up.
For (1), one could argue that major cultural institutions in the US lean left (i.e. universities, academic and professional societies, major newspaper outlets, big tech, etc.) and that has led to the silencing of conservative views. This is evident in attempts such as comment, which tries to nullify the credibility of FIRE through guilt by association, as opposed to any actual criticism of substance. Your attempt also highlights the fact that conservatives have a negative reputation within a large circle of people, large enough for you to have the expectation that people would write FIRE off if you portrayed them as being conservative (sans any argument of substance). In light of this, is it really a surprise then that FIRE attracts conservative donors, whose views can be written off on the basis of their political stance? As for their relationship with TPUSA, why not read that for yourself [0]?
As for (2), the same Wikipedia article you quote also mentions FIRE's defence of Nikole Hannah-Jones, a figure who is prominent on the left. Furthermore, the link that this Hacker News discussion is created for also mentions FIRE's opposition to DeSantis' "Stop WOKE" act, of which DeSantis is a prominent figure on the right. In light of this (and their non-partisan past track record, which is publicly available), is it really fair to write FIRE off by associating them with conservatives?
With that, I make my case that even if FIRE's donors are largely conservative, that information does not reliably inform about the nature of FIRE's work and reputation. More broadly, I want to call out your employment of guilt by association; how is FIRE's current president's appearance in a 2007 documentary made by a conservative filmmaker a problem? Lukianoff is a self-described liberal democrat, and trying to portray him as a conservative just so you can discredit him and his organization is nothing short of a spectacular display of intellectual depravity, a masterclass in writing off your opponents without an iota of substance; surely you can do better than that?
Why not credibly? What's your case? Why not state it?
Your inability to do so is consistent with the intellectual dishonesty that was evident in the guilt by association arguments you employed earlier. And here I thought you could do any better.
In 2017, FIRE was listed as one of the sponsors of the conservative campus group Turning Point USA's Student Action Summit, according to tax records.
FIRE president Gregory Lukianoff authored "The Coddling of the American Mind" for The Atlantic discussing whether or not trigger warnings are harming college health. Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt later released a book version of The Coddling of the American Mind.
Lukianoff appeared in the film Indoctrinate U, a 2007 American feature-length documentary film written by, directed by and starring Evan Coyne Maloney. A New York Sun profile in 2005 said that Maloney "may very well be America's most promising conservative documentary filmmaker."