Tracking the Extremist Intersectionality from Tikvah Tablet to Rebbiztin Bengelsdorf to the RUFO Institute to Pornographer Thomas, Harlan Crow, and Beyond: FAIR Dysfunction Explodes!
David Shasha
Is It Possible to Be Both Moderate and Anti-Woke?
By: Emma Green
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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.
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.”
Some of the complaints started appearing online. Gabrielle Clark, a Black Texas mom who claimed that her twelfth grader was required to identify himself by his race in a class, did a YouTube interview with Karlyn Borysenko, an anti-woke activist, to talk about her experience with FAIR: she asserted that the organization, which had raised money for a lawsuit on her behalf, asked her to remove positive references to Donald Trump from her Twitter feed. (Bartning denies this.) Borysenko published a series of posts on Substack about FAIR, insinuating that the organization was sketchy. “There is no real anti-woke movement,” she wrote to me in an e-mail. “There are just a lot of organizations competing for money and media attention, constantly infighting and throwing each other under the bus. FAIR seemed to want to rule the space and tried to get as many big names associated with them as they could.”
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.”
In recent months, another conflict had arisen within the organization. A group of staffers and contractors felt strongly that FAIR should take a definitive stance on some of the gender issues that were starting to dominate the news. FAIR had hosted a Webinar about the subject in late 2021, called “Gender Ideology: Problems and Pro-Human Solutions.” The lineup featured figures such as Abigail Shrier, a member of the FAIR advisory board, whose book, “Irreversible Damage,” is about what she describes as a “craze” to convince large numbers of girls that they are transgender. During the introduction to the Webinar, Bartning explained that “we talk a lot at FAIR about the issue of race essentialism. We haven’t really talked much about what some call gender ideology in schools, but from my experience, the two go hand in hand.”
Still, several people who worked at FAIR felt that the organization hadn’t gone far enough. “Internal FAIR meetings that I attended to discuss FAIR’s gender policy were always unproductive, because Bartning had convinced himself that concern over gender ideology was a ‘moral panic’ and that it was ultimately a ‘political question’ that involved ‘conflicting rights’ and thus outside the scope of FAIR,” Colin Wright, a former FAIR senior editor who frequently writes on gender issues, later wrote in a letter. The organization was willing to take a stand against what its legal director, Letitia Kim, later called issues of compelled speech and gender stereotypes—schools requiring students to state their pronouns, for example, or teaching that boys who gravitate toward dolls and princesses could be girls. But it wasn’t willing to touch other questions, such as whether kids who identify as trans should be allowed to medically transition. Wright and his colleagues felt that FAIR was failing its followers by not weighing in on such conversations—in other words, the anti-orthodoxy organization was struggling over how orthodox to be. “Chapter leaders and other volunteers were desperate to know FAIR’s position on gender ideology, because many were parents with young children concerned about their safety,” Wright wrote. “In my experience attending welcome meetings for new FAIR members, the clear majority were primarily concerned about gender ideology over race-related issues.”
By this point, most of the employees who had participated in making the dossier on Bartning had either left or been fired; nothing much had come of the document. But the same issues started coming up among newer employees. “All reasonable concerns were immediately dismissed as wanting to be aggressive, combative, and not ‘pro-human,’ ” Wright wrote. “People were afraid to voice their disagreement because of how they would be portrayed by Bartning behind their backs, or they feared being fired, disparaged, or other forms of retaliation.”
In May, 2022, a half-dozen employees composed a letter to Weiss asking for her help. Despite many appeals that FAIR “take actual positions on urgent real-world issues that touch the lives of millions,” they wrote, “Bartning is instead focused on advocating for an intellectualized concept of pro-humanism that, in practice, consists entirely of policing the language and tone of those who prioritize effective action over highly manicured messaging.” They went on, “Given the amount of reputation you have tethered to FAIR as an early founder . . . we feel an obligation to inform you about FAIR’s severe mismanagement and the likelihood of collapse should Bartning be allowed to remain in charge.” In response, Weiss essentially “threw up her hands and said, ‘I don’t know what to do about this,’ and kind of ignored it,” a writer who publishes under the name Christina Buttons, and who worked on social-media graphics for FAIR before she was fired, told me. (Weiss says she did look into it, and that she attributed the conflicts to general startup chaos.) “It was all a façade,” Buttons said. “All these people who are on the board of advisers—they really had nothing to do with the organization, but they were effective at luring in tons of donors and free labor from volunteers. It started to feel very icky.”
Around this time, a Daily Wire reporter, Luke Rosiak, started investigating what was happening at FAIR. Rosiak had had a previous run-in with Bartning—they discussed the possibility of Bartning purchasing a Web site that Rosiak had created about K-12 schools, but the deal never went anywhere. As Rosiak’s article approached publication, Weiss convened a Zoom call with Lory Warren, FAIR’s operations manager at the time, and Kim, the legal director, along with an outside communications person, Lulu Cheng Meservey, which was recorded. “This is a five-alarm fire,” she told the others on the call. “There are many people in our broader cultural, intellectual space that have a sense that there’s something bad inside FAIR.” She was anxious that advisory-board members, many of whom had joined because of her, would feel blindsided. For forty-five minutes, Weiss grilled Kim and Warren about what was happening inside the organization, trying to parse the group’s murky ideology. They discussed how FAIR would approach controversial issues, such as transgender athletes competing in women’s sports. “The story that’s very easy to tell is, FAIR is pulling punches on one of the most urgent things happening,” Weiss said. More broadly, Weiss and Cheng Meservey were concerned about the organization’s internal conflicts becoming public; they knew that a lot of people would delight in hearing about dysfunction at FAIR. As Cheng Meservey said, the idea “that the heterodox eat each other, too, is so juicy.”
In the end, the five-alarm fire put itself out. The article was never published.
FAIR claims that it did real work to support its mission. The organization helped to promote the story of Meg Smaker, a documentary filmmaker, whose project “Jihad Rehab,” later renamed “The UnRedacted,” was effectively disavowed by the Sundance Film Festival after critics called it Islamophobic and objected to the fact that Smaker is non-Muslim and white. FAIR pursued a flurry of legal activity—mostly sending letters, such as one to Brown University about a non-credit mindfulness course that was open only to nonwhite teachers. (Brown replied that the course would no longer be offered in that format.)
But money was increasingly tight. FAIR’s donations were half what they’d been the previous year. Bartning, who is independently wealthy and never took a salary from FAIR, asked staff to take pay cuts. The size of the staff had shrunk, too; as people quit, the organization didn’t replace many of them. Meanwhile, members of the advisory board flew around the country on a “pro-human tour.” Chen and Eduardo, the messaging and editorial director, hosted a podcast in which they asked guests to define “pro-human,” with everyone giving a different answer. “I reflexively cringe every time I had to say ‘pro-human’ in intros and outros to every podcast episode,” Chen later wrote.
Behind the scenes, there was deeper trouble. Suzy Edelman, one of the donors who gave a million dollars in 2021, had started asking questions about whether her gift had been used appropriately, requesting FAIR’s receipts and copies of the contracts that it used for volunteers and staff. For months, Edelman had also been questioning FAIR’s approach, particularly on gender issues. “Sex-based rights matter. Single sex spaces for women and girls must be protected. Transgenderism is a fiction designed to destroy,” she had written in an e-mail. She noted that FAIR had positioned its programs as an “alternative” to mainstream D.E.I., or diversity, equity, and inclusion, training, but, she said, “You can’t ‘DEI-lite’ this issue.” (A spokesperson for Edelman maintained that her concerns about FAIR were not related to its politics, only its “governance and use of charitable funds.”)
Weiss and Bartning exchanged terse e-mails about Edelman in August. “I am quite nervous that she has gotten to the Crows, which would be really damaging to me personally,” Weiss wrote, referring to Harlan Crow. (“I leaned on many of my personal relationships and friendships to help launch this nonprofit,” Weiss told me. “I was sick over the idea that their time, trust, and money wasn’t being properly protected.”) Bartning replied that he had recently spoken to Crow’s chief of staff. “She was complimentary of what we have accomplished, but said Harlan wanted to ‘let up on the gas a bit’ since their priorities/focus have shifted to more ‘in your face’ activism (my words, not hers).” (Crow did not respond to a request for comment.) There were other tensions: Eduardo, who was seen by some as a rising star, left the organization after getting into a conflict with Bartning over management styles. Sensing the potential for bad optics, some of FAIR’s senior staff approached Bartning about resigning his leadership role, but he refused, saying he didn’t think the timing was right. (Bartning disputes this description of events.) They realized there was no easy way to get him to step down.
Meanwhile, Weiss, Chen, and a few others in the organization were nurturing their own suspicions about Bartning and FAIR’s governance. He had started talking about spinning off an L.L.C. for the FAIR corporate diversity-training program, believing that the incentive structure would be better in a for-profit company. Before Bartning founded FAIR, he bought the domain name that eventually became the group’s Web site; much of FAIR’s intellectual property was arguably his, not the organization’s. Myles Mendoza, a nonprofit consultant who had unsuccessfully pitched FAIR on a paid gig, had talked with a few of FAIR’s leaders and suspected that the organization might be vulnerable to self-dealing if Bartning decided that he wanted to use FAIR’s I.P. to start his own for-profit company.
It wasn’t easy to get insight into FAIR’s financials. When FAIR was founded, Bartning incorporated it as a New York nonprofit organization, with himself, Weiss, and Chen as the members of the board of directors—although Weiss and Chen claim they didn’t know until much later that they were even on the board, a role that comes with legal and fiduciary responsibilities. FAIR had not secured independent status with the Internal Revenue Service as a not-for-profit, 501(c)3 organization, which meant that FAIR wasn’t legally obligated to release a Form 990 detailing its assets. Instead, it was operating as an institution fiscally sponsored by United Charitable, an umbrella nonprofit. This arrangement, although not uncommon for nonprofits, kept the organization’s internal workings opaque.
Bartning was also in the process of incorporating the organization in Florida, where the political environment was more favorable. Early on, he started raising money for a (c)4 organization, which could do more political advocacy than a nonprofit, and later recruited donors and supporters to serve on the board. This was one of Edelman’s primary concerns about FAIR: she believed that her charitable donation had been used, possibly illegally, to pay legal fees to incorporate the (c)4. (Bartning wrote, in an e-mail, “As fiscal sponsor, United Charitable had full control and was the sole decision-maker on disbursement of funds related to the FAIR program. To my knowledge, there is no merit to Suzy Edelman’s claim.” United Charitable wouldn’t comment on the matter.) All the money for the c(4) went straight into an account belonging to Michael Trollan, an I.T. guy who had helped to launch FAIR. (Trollan called this arrangement temporary, although it lasted until October, 2022; he also said he didn’t spend any of the money.) Melissa Chen, who had brought Trollan into FAIR after working with him in another setting, had previously vouched for Trollan’s trustworthiness. But neither Bartning nor anyone else at the organization had access to this account, which eventually came to hold more than three hundred and fifty-eight thousand dollars.
At the beginning of 2023, Weiss, Chen, and Mendoza formed a war room. Their goal: to free FAIR. Chen and Weiss had looked at FAIR’s incorporation paperwork and discovered that they were on FAIR’s New York nonprofit board of directors, and thus had the power to vote Bartning out of his leadership position. On January 24th, Chen invited Bartning and Kim, FAIR’s legal counsel, to a Zoom call the next day. When Bartning and Kim logged on, they were surprised to see Weiss and Mendoza on the call, too. Chen and Weiss made a motion to remove Bartning from the board of the New York nonprofit and his role as the program manager of FAIR, which made him the point person for United Charitable. They put Mendoza in Bartning’s place on the New York board. Chen sent around an e-mail afterward, falsely announcing that Bartning had stepped down, and thanking him for his service. (Chen claims this was a way to preserve Bartning’s dignity.) Bartning quickly denied that he had stepped down at all.
Everything at FAIR immediately devolved into chaos. Trollan, the I.T. guy, deactivated several official FAIR e-mail accounts, including Kim’s and Bartning’s. Kim’s incoming e-mails were automatically forwarded to the company server; Trollan had access to this server, creating the potential for attorney-client privilege to be broken. Trollan also changed the passwords to FAIR’s social-media accounts, its Substack, and its 1Password account. Behind the scenes, Chen was circulating the allegations about Bartning’s supposed self-dealing and bad governance to FAIR supporters, trying to explain why they had taken steps to remove him from power. For those who hadn’t known what was coming, the events were disorienting. “A small, self-interested coup attacked FAIR,” Warren, the operations officer, wrote in a letter to United Charitable. “The only way I can describe the fallout of that day is to compare it to a train coming to a slow, screeching, sickening halt.”
To Warren and others who supported Bartning, the allegations against him made no sense. United Charitable processed FAIR’s financial transactions and required receipts for all of them; Bartning couldn’t have stolen money if he wanted to. He and Kim paid for their own expenses and travelled to FAIR events on their own dime. “They worked—uncompensated—to build a movement, not out of a desire to protect a career or build a personal brand in the ‘freedom business,’ but out of a sense of duty to ensure the liberties that are their and their childrens’ birthrights,” Brian Kors, FAIR’s head of development at the time, wrote in a letter to United Charitable.
It wasn’t clear who was in charge now. According to New York law, nonprofit board members are required to provide at least ten days’ notice before any meeting at which official business is to take place. Chen had texted Bartning only the night before, and she hadn’t mentioned a board meeting. As a result, neither Bartning nor Kim accepted the votes as valid.
Weiss and Chen didn’t seem interested in leading FAIR in Bartning’s place; they appointed Dana Stangel-Plowe, a former teacher and FAIR staffer, as the new program manager. “I am more than happy to step down from the board of the C3 as long as we reach a negotiated agreement on the future of FAIR’s governance,” Weiss wrote in an e-mail. “I want to eliminate the idea of there being sides of any kind here. The only side is FAIR.” But there were two sides, and they were both still campaigning within FAIR circles to claim the moral high ground. The Florida (c)4 board members declared themselves “moral witnesses” to what was happening; several of them told me that they spent hours every day trying to mediate the conflict. Bartning sent a fourteen-page letter to staff on February 9th detailing why each allegation against him was false, complete with sixty-one pages of attachments. “Another translation of Proverbs 18:17 reads, ‘There are two sides to every story,’ ” he wrote. Both groups wrestled for control of FAIR’s Web site. Bartning, who owned the domain name, attempted to get his e-mail access restored, which led to the site becoming disabled. Trollan purchased a similar domain name, fair-for-all.org, and later began redirecting the site’s traffic there; he removed Bartning’s picture and bio from the site, replacing them with his own and that of Stangel-Plowe. Trollan, who at that point worked as a contractor, also billed the organization for the hours he had spent orchestrating the leadership takeover.
According to Kors, United Charitable shut down FAIR’s fund-raising during this period; several donors, including the person who had made the largest gift to the organization, said they would not give again until the situation was resolved. A group of staff members wrote a letter asking Bartning to voluntarily step away from the organization, and circulated it to colleagues to sign: “We fear that anything less than you amicably resigning will result in FAIR ceasing to function,” they wrote. Warren, who did not sign the letter, observed, “We became these tribal people. We’re supposed to be the organization fighting against tribalism. And that’s what we seemed to become.”
At the end of February, the dispute went to mediation before a judge in D.C. The parties agreed to form a new nonprofit board in New York, with each side getting to pick three trustees and that group voting on a seventh. Bartning would step down from leadership, and Weiss, Chen, Mendoza, and Bartning agreed to resign their official board positions, although Bartning, Chen, and Weiss would remain on the informal advisory board. Bartning got thirty thousand dollars for lawyers’ fees and five thousand for the FAIR I.P. that he owned. And they agreed not to disparage one another.
“FAIR has produced a lot of original content to help educate the public of its message and sure, it has at times failed to live up to those values,” Chen tweeted a few days after she resigned from the board of directors. “FAIR’s entering a new phase. I hope FAIR 2.0 will earn your respect.”
I recently met Bartning at the Marlton Hotel in Greenwich Village. He wore a suit with no tie and a red string Kabbalah bracelet that his wife had brought back from Israel. Bartning denied that FAIR had suffered from any significant governance issues. Sure, the 501(c)3 application had been slightly delayed, but that was owed to disorganization, not malice. He openly acknowledged that he thought FAIR should probably make its diversity-training program into its own for-profit operation, but he denied wanting any role in leading it. When I asked him about the allegations concerning his management style—people feeling micromanaged and bullied—he maintained that he tries “hard to be accommodating and kind with the people who work for me.”
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.”
The drama isn’t over. Several people at FAIR have recently resigned, and the organization, which finally received its independent 501(c)3 status from the I.R.S., is under audit by United Charitable. The new Bartning is Maud Maron, a former public defender who was called racist by some of her colleagues at the Legal Aid Society for writing critically about a New York City Department of Education anti-bias training session. Weiss trusts and admires Maron, whose story she has written about. On Twitter, Maron isn’t shy about her opinions. She seems to care deeply about gender issues: “Trans activists and allies need to grapple honestly with what a violent movement it has become,” she wrote in March, shortly before she publicly accepted the job at FAIR. I asked her whether FAIR will continue to be a “pro-human” organization moving forward. She told me the organization is still evolving.
From The New Yorker, June 6, 2023