Is It Possible to Be Both Moderate and Anti-Woke?

In the fall of 2020, Bion Bartning started worrying that his kids were being indoctrinated. His daughter, Liv, and his son, Asher, were enrolled at Riverdale Country School, an élite prep school in New York City, and, in response to the protests that followed George Floyd’s death, Riverdale had made a renewed commitment to allyship. In that year’s curriculum, the school adopted exercises that asked students to think about their skin color as a way of understanding themselves and their racial identity—something that didn’t seem so clear-cut to Bartning, who says he has Jewish, Mexican, and Indigenous Yaqui ancestry, and whose children are mixed-race. Bartning also felt that the curriculum downplayed the Holocaust and antisemitism as examples of racialized hatred, a choice that he found disturbing. He questioned Riverdale’s administration about the new initiatives, but felt that the school dismissed his concerns.

Professionally, Bartning had never worked on issues related to race or civil rights; he was an entrepreneur and investor who had helped American Express launch its online travel business and later helped lead the personal-care company E.O.S. One of his most recent ventures was a failed startup that sought to connect local farms with chefs. But he resolved to do something about what he was seeing at Riverdale—maybe even start an organization to counter it. He read an article in the Jewish magazine Tablet, about the rise of a new ideology on the left—a “mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality”—and another parent offered to connect him with Tablet’s editor and with the author of the article, Bari Weiss.

Weiss had already been talking with a few of her friends about creating a new anti-woke organization. One was Melissa Chen, a writer and the managing director at Ideas Beyond Borders, a nonprofit that takes books about concepts such as liberty and reason and translates them into Arabic, to make them more accessible; she later described herself as a conservative who was forming her trajectory in “the anti-woke space.” Another was Peter Boghossian, a former professor best known for getting absurd papers about subjects such as dogs perpetuating rape culture at dog parks published in feminist and postmodern academic journals to expose what he saw as corruption in scholarship, and who has earned some prominence as a public intellectual defending free speech and opposing illiberalism. Chen and Boghossian had workshopped a pitch to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, for a project to create “a modern-day Death Star” to wage “ideological warfare” on the “enemies of modernity”; their plan involved writing coördinated op-eds and promoting anti-woke content, but it was rejected. Weiss and her friends also sought advice from Niall Ferguson, a historian at the Hoover Institution, about the best way forward.

The group brought Bartning into the fold. As they brainstormed ideas for a new venture together, they were inspired by Jodi Shaw, a former Smith College librarian and administrator who had made a viral video calling out her employer. (“Stop demanding that I admit to ‘white privilege,’ ” Shaw had said, using air quotes for the term, “and work on my so-called implicit bias as a condition of my continued employment.”) They tried and failed to recruit a hundred other people to make similar videos. Bartning also toyed with having Shaw help him build a Web site called the Honest Dish, a kind of alternative to the Drudge Report, but ended up scrapping that project, too.

Eventually, they settled on a name and a strategy. The organization would be called FAIR: The Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism. The name was an initial act of defiance, implicitly painting the group’s opponents, self-described “anti-racists,” as the real racists. The founders’ dream was for the group to replace the A.C.L.U. as America’s new defender of civil liberties—a mission they believed the A.C.L.U. had abandoned. The vision involved a three-pronged approach: legal advocacy, via letters and lawsuits; grassroots advocacy, via a network of volunteers; and education about the issues, spread through projects such as explainer videos and training programs.

Weiss and the other founders recruited an informal board of advisers—a mix of podcasters, journalists, academics, and lawyers. Among them were the media personality Megyn Kelly, the writer Andrew Sullivan, and the anti-critical-race-theory activist Christopher Rufo. In some circles, these people are celebrities: Angel Eduardo, who later joined the staff as the director of messaging and editorial, described one adviser, Daryl Davis, a Black musician known for persuading white nationalists to leave the Ku Klux Klan, as “my Obi-Wan.”

FAIR launched in March of 2021. “An intolerant orthodoxy is undermining our common humanity and pitting us against each other,” Weiss tweeted in an announcement. Bartning was featured in the Wall Street Journal, telling the story of the changes at Riverdale and writing that “millions of American children are being taught to see the world in this reductionist way.” According to Bartning and others involved in the founding, FAIR was immediately flooded with hundreds of inquiries from people who were interested in donating and volunteering, many of whom were worried about their children’s schools. Bartning became the organization’s head—in his view, the whole thing had been his idea. The other founders were fine with the arrangement. Chen had her nonprofit, and Weiss was launching a new media company. They were too busy to run FAIR, anyway.

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.