I can’t help but see this piece, reporting on the debacle that The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR) has become, as an expression of the New Yorker‘s wokeness. (Yes, the magazine is “politically correct,” as they say.) I found the article not only gossipy, but boring; it’s as if they simply wanted to show that an antiwoke organization could be as divisive and contentious as any woke one—or even more so. But that’s not necessarily true: FIRE (the Foundation for Individuals Rights and Expression), devoted to defending free speech, is not riled with troubles, has stable leadership, and, more important, has done many good things.
On the other hand, FAIR, despite its description below from Wikipedia, hasn’t done all that much, has changed leadership repeatedly (and moved its website), and does indeed appear to be rudderless and ineffectual. Perhaps it’s because the organization’s primary mission was to oppose critical race theory, but it still tried to cater to both liberals, who are in favor of free speech and civil rights, and sometimes endorse CRT, and conservatives (who hate CRT and aren’t keen on civil rights). While some of the advisers below could be classed as on the Left (Pinker, Haidt, and perhaps McWhorter), the rest are either on the right or moving towards it. That seems like an unsustainable mission, and it has proven so.
The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR) is an American nonprofit organization, founded in 2021, that campaigns against diversity and inclusion programs, ethnic studies curricula, and antiracism initiatives that it calls critical race theory (CRT).
FAIR describes itself as a “nonpartisan organization dedicated to advancing civil rights and liberties for all Americans, and promoting a common culture based on fairness, understanding, and humanity.” FAIR’s board of advisers has included activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, musician and activist Daryl Davis, conservative activist Christopher Rufo, former Fox newscaster Megyn Kelly, journalist Bari Weiss, and academics Jonathan Haidt, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, and Steven Pinker.
Click to read (it may be paywalled if you’ve read too much of it without subscribing, and I haven’t found it archived):
The formation of the group:
[Bari] 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 [Bion] 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.
Well, the ACLU has also gone to the dogs via mission creep towards the extreme Left, but at least it had a distinguished history of defending civil liberties. FAIR. . . well, not so much. Another reason beyond ideological squabbling might be that they spent their money on lavish stuff that doesn’t comport with the aims of such an organization. Here’s a bit on the internecine squabbling:
There seemed to be a genuine philosophical conflict within the fair community. In September of 2021, two members of the advisory board, Rufo and the libertarian podcaster Kmele Foster, started squabbling on Twitter about Rufo’s methods for opposing critical race theory in K-12 schools, which Foster described as inviting “all kinds of reactionary hysteria.” Rufo resigned from the advisory board soon afterward. “The question with FAIR that I had was: what are the substantive wins the organization has accomplished? And it was very hard for anyone to explain this,” Rufo wrote to me in an e-mail. fair’s high-profile advisers were “transgressive enough to generate attention, but not transgressive enough to achieve results. It’s almost worse than doing nothing, as it creates the illusion of action and absorbs political energy that would be better spent elsewhere.” Later, in a conversation about fair on Megyn Kelly’s podcast, Rufo criticized the organization’s attempt to create alternative diversity trainings. “It’s such a fundamentally failing strategy,” he said. Speaking of progressives, he added, “It legitimizes their institutional structure. It legitimizes their bureaucratic authority. And it legitimizes the background concepts that they use in order to achieve power and push their ideology.”
Even Weiss, whose name and connections helped fair to get started, quietly pulled back. In June, 2021, she had done a Webinar with Davis, another advisory-board member, charging fair a fee of ten thousand dollars. Afterward, “I was, like, ‘This is just too soft for me,’ ” she told a couple of the organization’s top leaders. “fair is not the way that I communicate. It feels false to me—not false in a malicious way, just not straightforward in the way it speaks. And, frankly, not muscular enough.”
In February, 2022, eighteen fair staffers travelled to Miami for a retreat, joined by donors, volunteers, advisory-board members, and contractors. Many stayed at Mr. C, a luxury hotel in Coconut Grove, helping themselves to their rooms’ minibars. They also took an open-bar yacht cruise around South Beach. “Did I have fun doing that? Yes,” one former employee, who asked not to be named, told me. “Did I and other people look at each other and say, ‘What the fuck are we doing?’ Here’s all of our donors giving us a gift for us to fight racism. It’s, like, we haven’t fucking done anything.”
They also got balled up in gender ideology: was it within or outside the scope of the organization? Although FAIR managed to corral some big-money donors (one gave a million bucks), the donors started worrying about whether they were getting any bang for their buck(s). Several said they wouldn’t give any more money until the organization straightened up and flew right. There were legal battles within the organization (ultimately settled by mediation), lots of other instances of disagreement, and, ultimately, a successful attempt to get rid of Bion Bartling, the founder of FAIR.
Now the organization is in shambles, it seems. I can’t really think of much it did, and it appears to have frittered away its donations without anything to show for them. This is near the end of the piece:
Bartning told me that he thought the battle over fair’s future was ultimately driven by the ideological conflict that had dogged the organization from its beginning: even among people who agree that the American left has become overly orthodox, there are big disagreements about the best way to take on that problem. “I’d say that, in the first few months of starting fair, I didn’t realize the degree to which this was being politicized,” he told me. “Getting this issue tied up in a culture war between two political parties is dangerous and could end up pushing things toward a more dehumanizing approach, because people get locked into their position.” He feels that some of fair’s donors, just as much as its clashing staff and advisory-board members, were responsible for ratcheting up the conflict over the organization’s direction. “There are too few in the donor class who want to bolster moderation,” he said. “That’s part of what’s happening in our culture. You have a lot of people with an extreme amount of wealth driving an extremist agenda.”
Weiss has her regrets. “I took on far too much at once,” she told me, listing off all the things she had going on while she was trying to start fair: launching a media company, becoming a parent, and more. But she thinks that she did what was necessary, both in founding fair and in trying to save it. “I believed the country desperately needed an organization that defended civil liberties and equality under the law in this moment,” she said. “I still think it does.”
It still does, indeed, but that organization isn’t FAIR. FIRE comes closer, and there’s also the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA), which has done some good stuff (though when I needed their help in an academic freedom matter they blew me off).
The lesson of this sad and rather boring, gossipy tale is fourfold:
1.) Don’t form an antiwoke organization with people all over the political spectrum. Such people may be able to cooperate in writing letters or papers (as was the case for our paper defending merit in science), but they’ll have a hard time working together as a stable group. The ACLU imploded when they decided to make their mission creep towards the extreme Left; exactly the same thing happened to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a once estimable group that also went to ground when it became woke, accusing both Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz of being members of Islamophobic “hate groups.” (Nawaz sued and won a cool $3.4 million dollars.) Mission creep is deadly for organizations like this, and I doubt the ACLU will survive in anything like the form it had for decades.
2.) Antiwoke people are human, and we’re not immune to liking power, fame, and dominance. But the success of an antiwoke organization is inversely proportional to the degree of self-aggrandizement of those who govern it. The group that runs FIRE, for instance, is refreshingly free of this stuff.
3.) There is a much better article to be written about the dynamics causing traditional Left-wing and pro-liberal organizations to fold: the SPLC, the ACLU, and the AFA. There are common features of these downfalls that could have been usefully explored.
4.) The New Yorker didn’t write such an article because it was too engrossed in publicly dismantling, in a tedious way, an antiwoke organization that was never that important to begin with. They did this, I suspect, because they wanted to show the instability of antiwoke organizations. In the end, the answer to their title question is “no.”
Freddie DeBoer wrote a column about that New Yorker piece and it’s much worth reading.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-real-media-bias-is-writing-for
There’s a archived copy here. [If you paste any link into the box on this archive website and click on the “Save” button it will either show you an already archived copy or else create a new one.]
https://archive.ph/sbbLj
Some good people were involved, it’s a shame that nothing constructive came out of the money and effort expended.
On a side note, it was interesting to be reminded of Jodi Shaw and her battle with Smith College – do we know what happened to her case?
Speaking of Jodi Shaw, I purchased one of her CDs during her Smith ordeal. It’s not half bad. I’m ashamed to admit that that was the extent of my intended support of her. I have no idea how she ultimately made out.
I wonder if it might be useful to define some of these terms. “Woke” is a slang term that means being alert to social injustice and discrimination. On it face, this does not seem like such a bad thing and certainly not something that is inherently “evil.” Perhaps the impulse to exaggerate and vilify those with whom we disagree lies at the heart of the problem. John McCain’s reflexive and immediate defense of Barack Obama’s character at a town hall during their contest for the presidency comes to mind as an example of the value of pausing to recognize the integrity and good intentions of those with whom we disagree.
Thus, the goals of those who identify as being “woke” are not inconsistent with those who might identify themselves as being “anti-woke” (i.e., a sincere concern for fairness and social justice for all). However, Kendi and others’ claims that current discrimination is the only effective remedy for past discrimination, breaches the boundaries of rationality. As Freddie DeBoer has suggested, this is a “redo of high school where some of the sad and lonely kids (try) to invert the popularity pyramid and become the new bullies.” Thus, the Woke become dangerous when weak administrations use their own power to grant hecklers a veto over viewpoint diversity.
Might we agree that either side is wrong (or maybe even “evil”) when it tries to censor, cancel, or vilify individuals with diverse political or intellectual perspectives? I think this is what Jesus was suggesting when he admonished his disciples to “resist no evil” (Matthew 5:39). We must be careful not to let the manner of our own resistance increase animosity and injury. I have found the most effective way to persuade others of my view is to work hard to understand their view. The refrain of James McMurtry’s sad ballad, Jackie, asserts, “I just have two rules if my conscious be known: don’t lie to me, don’t bring me nothin’ home…” Translating these words to organizational and political contexts would indicate that honesty and transparency are fundamental and that actions intended to injure the relationships among us are unacceptable.
I have explained before (you’re new here right?) thta I use “woke” in the pejorative sense as “social justice” action that is largely performative and iineffectual. Please don’t lecture me on how to use words here Further, because wokeness is largely religious (cf. McWhorter), trying to use rationality to persuade the woke to change course is largely a fool’s errand.
My apologies, I did not intend to lecture or offend.
However, I think rationality, despite its limitations, is our best weapon against fascism and oppression from either the left or the right. As Carl Sagan pointed out in his analogy about science being a small candle inadequate to fully illuminate a giant cavern, “we may all recognize its limitations, but we dare not blow it out…”
I like that Sagan quote, but I have searched it without success. Do you have a source?
The question we should be asking ourselves is what is the best way to build a stable, prosperous multi-racial and multi-ethnic society that treats all citizens equally.
Do we follow the path of Martin Luther King, Jr. or of Ibram X. Kendi?
I personally fear that if we follow the path of Kendi it will lead to disaster because for one thing it will cause whites to start thinking of themselves as an ethnic identity group. That would be a terrible development.
One problem that I see is that the anti-woke people on the left are not anti-woke to the point of wanting to do anything about it except talk. Is there an actual anti-woke policy that anyone on the left supports? If so, I don’t see it.
If you don’t see large numbers of white folks already seeing themselves as an oppressed minority you are not paying attention. “Woke” is a strawman, a fable that the likes of DeSantis, can use to enrage those same white folks and to scare them. He never defines it, nor can his followers; and I see no reason for anyone to try to defend or disparage a mirage. Of course there are policies advocated that are counterproductive or simply insane, but that is true of both sides of the political spectrum, but dividing the world into pro- anti- and couldn’t care less about- woke is useless.
You’re about as wrong as you can be. I am not DeSantis, and you, my patronizing friend, are gone.
The New Yorker article on FAIR discussed here does a good job of defining what is meant by “woke”: a “mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality”.
The Woke apparently cannot define what “the patriarchy” or “white supremacy” are, either, and that doesn’t seem to stop them.
On the other hand, I think that a fairly clear definition of Woke can be given. How about “a worldview that considers all relevant problems to be caused by the oppression of one identity group by another, and the relevant characteristics of a person not to lie in their individual character, life choices and experiences, but in their combination of identity groups.”
Your definition of Woke does not differentiate between it and the far-right fascists. In other words, fascists believe they are oppressed as much as the Woke and identity politics is the way they react. The Trump cult is a perfect example. A definition of Woke needs to include the specific groups that subscribe to its worldview and their specific grievances. We live in a country where identity politics, although always present to some extent, has become the vehicle of how all too many people characterize themselves and their politics. There may come a critical tipping point when enough citizens define their identities by race, religion, or ethnicity that a stable, harmonious society will be impossible. That is the danger that must be resisted at all costs. The center must fight back.
Given horseshoe theory, I’m not sure that your comparison of woke people and far-right fascists is that much of a problem. Wokeness does indeed have large similarities with fascism: it divides society into an in-group and an out-group, and regards denigration and demonisation of the out-group as acceptable, and sees over-riding of fairness and due process in order to get their way as entirely acceptable.
Professor Coyne’s definition of woke (i.e., “social justice” action that is largely performative and ineffectual) distinguishes between the fascists on the left and those on the right. While it is true that the MAGA mob also may use words like “justice”, “fairness”, and “freedom,” the meaning of these words is often just the opposite of the meanings ascribed to them by progressives. As Madeleine Albright suggested in her book, Fascism; A Warning, the danger to democracy posed by those who would deny others the right to speak are equally grave whether from the right or left. It is fascism itself, rather than the political perspective by which it is justified, that is the greatest threat.
For this reason, I think it is problematic to include “performative and ineffectual” in the definition of “woke.” For many true believers (on both the right and the left), their actions are as sincere as they are dramatic. I suspect there are a few individuals who use their respective movements for personal gain or aggrandizement, but they are not the majority. As for “ineffectual,” fascists on both sides already have seriously damaged the fabric of our democracy. Right wing fascists pose the greatest external threat to higher education. However, internal damage to academic freedom and due process throughout higher education has already been inflicted by the wokesters on the left.
For me this is personal. Despite my tenure, strong student ratings (consistently in the top 10%), and a distinguished record of facilitating student research (30 state/regional awards for undergraduate research quality in the previous decade), I was summarily banished, bound, gagged, and dismissed for cause by an administration that precipitously sided with hysterically woke grievants: The Sad Case of David Porter and His Fight for Academic Freedom (substack.com) My crime was having the audacity to convey the truth about the College’s Title IX program by conducting a survey asking questions about academic freedom and protection from hostile environments. Nothing “ineffectual” here…
I used “performative and ineffectual” as the RESULTS of woke recommendations, not as intentions (though they can be part of intentions). As I mention in the post I’m writing now, the intention of woke language-changing is generally good–to make society better–but what they actually do doesn’t result in that at all.
I disagree with describing Wokeism as fascist or as a religion. My view is not a defense of the Woke, but rather it is an attempt to diminish the bastardization of the language. Fascism grew strong in Europe in the 1920s based on certain assertions, only some of which can be attributed to the Woke of today. Likewise, religion has always connoted a belief in a deity or some higher power. This is not essential to the Woke belief system although parts of it can have religion-like elements. One can certainly criticize the Woke without using descriptions that erode the precision of language.
As with most organizations, FAIR is, quite frankly, “too big to succeed”.
New nonprofits are like new businesses; some succeed, some fail, and much more depends on the founders than on money. I think it’s quite possible to have a “big tent” organization so long as it focusses one getting specific things done rather than talk and writing. Talk and writing inevitably lead to internal arguments, and while helpful to getting things done, don’t get things done by themselves– only as adjuncts to intelligent pressure on specific people for specific objectives. Money, in fact, is counterproductive. It attracts grifters, and unless you have clever leaders who know how to spend it, it’s useless. YOu can hire staff, but you need to tell them what to do and watch that they’re doing it.
“Many stayed at Mr. C, a luxury hotel in Coconut Grove, helping themselves to their rooms’ minibars.”
Yes, short of their having attending valets, they would necessarily have to help themselves.
Perhaps next time they can meet the New Yorker’s standards by making use of the more economical and abstemious Southern Baptist retreat facilities at Ridgecrest, NC and Glorietta, NM.