1. Sohrab Ahmari is an Iranian-born American columnist, editor, and author of nonfiction books.
20 Facts About Sohrab Ahmari
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Sohrab Ahmari is a founding editor of the online magazine Compact.
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Sohrab Ahmari is a contributing editor of The Catholic Herald, and a columnist for First Things.
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Sohrab Ahmari has been criticized by fellow conservatives for receiving funding from Open Society Foundations.
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In 1998, at the age of 13, Sohrab Ahmari moved with his family to the United States.
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Sohrab Ahmari earned a JD degree from Northeastern University School of Law in Boston.
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Between college and law school, Sohrab Ahmari completed a two-year commitment to Teach for America in the Rio Grande Valley region of South Texas.
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Sohrab Ahmari then served as an editorial page writer based in London, writing editorials and commissions and editing op-eds for The Journal's European edition.
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Sohrab Ahmari had previously identified with neoconservatism and criticized politicians such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Marine Le Pen, whom he considered to stand for a global trend towards illiberalism and increasingly polarized populist politics.
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The dispute began on May 26,2019, when Sohrab Ahmari expressed on Twitter his frustration with a Facebook advertisement for a children's drag queen reading hour at a library in Sacramento, California, which he described as "transvestic fetishism".
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The dispute escalated significantly after Sohrab Ahmari published the essay "Against David French-ism" in the conservative religious journal First Things on May 29,2019.
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On September 5,2019, French and Sohrab Ahmari engaged in an in-person political debate moderated by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC, again prompting a flurry of commentaries.
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The dispute centered on their differing opinions on how conservatives should approach cultural and political debate, with Sohrab Ahmari deriding what he calls "David French-ism", a political persuasion he defines as believing "that the institutions of a technocratic market society are neutral zones that should, in theory, accommodate both traditional Christianity and the libertine ways and paganized ideology of the other side".
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Sohrab Ahmari argues that the political realm should be viewed as one of "war and enmity", and that the power of the government should be directly utilized to impose culturally conservative values on society.
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French, by contrast, advocates a conservative libertarian approach in which decency, civility, and respect for individual rights are emphasized, and argues that Sohrab Ahmari's beliefs "forsake" the philosophy of classical liberalism that the Founding Fathers of the United States espoused.
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Sohrab Ahmari placed particular criticism on Ahmari's desire for direct government intervention in the lives of individuals, which he argues is not only antithetical to liberty but is a politically ruinous tactic for conservatives, who would end up on the receiving end of progressive policies if the government were given greater license to interfere in the private lives of individuals.
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Sohrab Ahmari has been very critical of movements that he considers to be part of the "woke right", with special attention being paid to the online persona Bronze Age Pervert such as right-wing historical revisionists plattformed by Tucker Carlson.
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Sohrab Ahmari had been an atheist since the age of 12.
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Sohrab Ahmari was raised to believe that religion was backwards and his parents would secretly consume alcohol while in Iran.
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Sohrab Ahmari is married to architect Ting Li, with whom he has a son and a daughter.