The world of anti-woke nonprofits is relatively small. There are the alarmed-parent groups, like Parents Defending Education, which aims to “reclaim our schools from activists promoting harmful agendas.” There are the anti-anti-racist groups, such as Free Black Thought, with its “mission of uplifting heterodox Black voices.” And then there are the catchall groups that purport to oppose any kind of ideological orthodoxy, such as the Institute for Liberal Values.
Few of these groups have true influence. The most effective actors in the anti-woke space tend to be overtly political: the activist group Moms for Liberty, for example, or Rufo, whose rhetoric seems to have single-handedly shaped the way that conservative politicians such as Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, take stands against progressive movements. Their unabashedly partisan approach offers useful ideological clarity: these activists share core values and beliefs, and they know precisely who and what they’re fighting against.
Bartning, though, felt strongly that FAIR should take a nonpartisan stance. “I saw the solution to these issues as something that is relentlessly positive,” he told me recently. He was interested in articulating a mission that wasn’t primarily against things—anti-woke, anti-orthodoxy, anti-critical race theory—but rather for something. He settled on a term: “pro-human,” which he described as “seeing yourself and other people as a unique individual who is connected with everyone else through our shared humanity.”
At first, the money came easily. One Boston-based donor, who asked not to be named, told me that she had come across FAIR on Twitter, where she had started reading about identity politics during the pandemic. fair’s nonpartisan, “pro-human” mission “just really resonated,” she told me. “It was the only organization that was actually trying to do something a better way.” After attending a FAIR meetup in her city, she started getting to know the organization’s leaders, and eventually offered a million-dollar donation—the largest amount that her family had ever given away. Ken Schwartz, a former AIPAC volunteer who supported FAIR, told me that Bartning, “without a lot of experience, raised a hell of a lot of money” for the organization.
But it was Weiss, more than anyone else, who was clearly the group’s big draw. She brought in a half-million-dollar donation from Harlan Crow, a Texas real-estate developer who, ProPublica recently reported, paid for years of undisclosed vacations and private-jet travel for the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Suzy Edelman, another donor, who gave FAIR a million dollars in 2021, wrote in an e-mail to Weiss, “It’s your courage that inspired me to join the movement—not just to reform what’s been captured, but to build new, wonderful things.” I know Weiss a little bit—we’ve hung out in professional settings a few times over the years. When FAIR was founded, she had just left the New York Times in a very public way, and she was focussed on launching new organizations. “I think we are in a moment of profound change in American life, in which many old institutions are crumbling or have lost trust,” she told me recently.
Under Bartning’s direction, FAIR created its own ethnic-studies curriculum, which was free for teachers and school districts to adapt. “Bion, it seemed to me, really pinpointed what our culture needs, which is an understanding of identity that is both culturally nuanced and culturally sensitive, but that also puts that in the context of what we share,” Adam Seagrave, a professor at Arizona State University who helped to develop the materials, told me. In one lesson, called “Our Shared Human Story,” students are presented with cartoons about the overwhelming biological similarities of all humans, including across racial groups. “Students will understand that people are all members of one human race, Sapiens,” the objectives read. FAIR also started developing a corporate diversity-training program—taking a kind of Goldilocks approach, neither woke nor anti-woke, which acknowledged the need for education about diversity while avoiding, for example, separating participants by affinity group. Sodexo, a food-services company that provides school lunches, gave FAIR a contract after Weiss introduced Bartning to one of the company’s executives.
There are roughly eighty FAIR chapters around the country, and the organization claims to have thirty-five thousand members, but it counts everyone who signs up on the group’s Web site, so that figure isn’t necessarily meaningful. The organization named chapter leaders all over America, and made them responsible for starting local groups. The model was challenging: FAIR was trying to achieve professional-level work with volunteers, often inexperienced ones. Some volunteers found it difficult to make much progress. Rob Schläpfer, a volunteer state coördinator in Oregon, told me that he worked on a plan to mobilize parents to attend school-board meetings, but it “didn’t go anywhere. I was just spinning my wheels.” He found it hard to get direction from the national office about what to focus on, or how his chapter’s work should fit into FAIR's mission. As time went on, other volunteer chapter leaders around the country started calling and texting Schläpfer to vent their frustrations. “FAIR was basically virtue-signalling for the anti-woke,” he said. “It was not an organization designed to actually do anything.”
FAIR's main activity was talking about stuff. It produced a series of animated videos, with titles such as “The Media’s Haste to Cry Race,” narrated by Chen, and “The Spiral of Silence in Social Justice,” narrated by the conservative-leaning Brown University economist Glenn Loury. They held Zoom Webinars on subjects such as parental rights in K-12 education. The group started publishing a Substack and hosting panel discussions—the bread and butter of the heterodox crowd. FAIR was preoccupied with language; its leaders discouraged staff, contractors, and volunteers from using terms like “neo-Marxism” and “critical race theory” because they were too charged, for example.
By the summer of 2021, there was discontent brewing. The organization had around a half-dozen staffers and contractors, who mostly answered to Bartning. A few workers started chafing under his leadership, complaining that they felt simultaneously micromanaged and unable to get clear direction on projects. They started calling around to anyone who had had contact with Bartning or FAIR, compiling a dossier of complaints. Jason Littlefield, an employee at the time who contributed to the dossier, told me that Bartning seemed to see other similar organizations as competitors: “It felt like he was trying to corner the market on humanity.” Paul Rossi, a former private-school teacher who helped to compile the dossier, reported that Bartning was “unreceptive to any constructive criticism about how to be a ‘good citizen’ in the movement.” Leaders of other organizations in the broadly defined anti-woke space were willing to promote FAIR's work but felt like FAIR wasn’t willing to promote theirs. Shaw, the former Smith College administrator, who also contributed to the dossier, told me that she came to see FAIR as “a make-work program for journalists and podcasters.”
by Emma Green, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Ben Hickey
