Conservative Mega-Donors and the Making of a Moral Panic

The New Yorker wrote the story of a group formed when critical race theory was the moral panic of the moment that collapsed because its leader was reluctant to reshape their mission around transphobic propaganda.

by Evan Urquhart

Do you remember, way back in 2021, when American conservatives were still obsessed with critical race theory? As a moral panic, it was all encompassing but also frustratingly vague because exactly what CRT meant could feel a little slippery. Critical race theory is a real academic discipline, but that was never exactly what conservatives meant when they attacked it. Instead, their complaints had something to do with teaching young people about racism, the Civil Rights era, and slavery in America. Numerous laws were proposed to reshape school curricula, whole organizations were formed with this as their founding purpose, and then, quite suddenly, all the CRT talk faded.

Within a few months it seemed like every conservative group had re-tooled to make anti-trans policies their top priority. How did that happen? A reporter for the New Yorker seems to have stumbled, reluctantly, over the answer.

“Is It Possible to Be Both Moderate and Anti-Woke?” is a piece by Emma Green that contains all the evidence needed to understand how conservative donors put pressure on organizations, demanding they reshape their mission around the flavor-of-the-month issue. Green herself did not center this conclusion in her meandering piece which focuses on personality conflicts and back-biting at FAIR, the Foundation Against Racism & Intolerance, founded in 2020 to be a moderate face for the anti-CRT panic. However, it is clear from Green’s reporting that the fundamental failure of FAIR, the controversy that resulted in the removal of its head, Bion Bartning, was that it continued to be an anti-CRT group at a time when the conservative donor class had decided that every organization needed to be doing anti-trans activism.

FAIR was initially a project of Bari Weiss, an opinion editor who quit her role at the New York Times to pursue anti-woke grifting off the conservative donor class. Weiss passed leadership of FAIR to Bartning because she was more interested in starting the Free Press, a right-wing propaganda outlet that poses as a centrist news website.

A wealthy former corporate executive, Bartning’s Jewish and Mexican/indigenous ancestry informs his colorblind views on racism. In his origin story he says that concerns over his children’s elite private school’s approach to teaching students about race informed his desire to shape the educational curriculum on race for all children in the US. Bartning believes that focusing on skin color divides people, and some of his writing also seems to imply deep skepticism about the possibility that society might benefit if wealthy people or their children learned to question and take stock of their privilege. In the New Yorker article he also comes off as a bit of a dip. [insert NYer1]

screenshot from the New Yorker

Under Bartning’s leadership (and with Weiss’ help) FAIR raised a lot of money very quickly from conservative donors. It developed a grade school curriculum on race that emphasized a colorblind approach as well as an alternative approach to corporate diversity training. It also spun off local affiliates who complained of not enough support or direction from HQ and sent “a flurry of letters” threatening legal action against institutions whose approach to race the group objected to. Then something went wrong. Donors began abandoning the group and Weiss mounted a coup-attempt to depose Bartning. Now the organization’s future (and even its current status) are in question.

Green describes a wide range of complaints about Bartning’s management style and the group’s ineffectiveness, but makes it clear that things only came to a head when FAIR resisted pressure to fully re-tool from being an anti-anti-racism group to being an anti-trans rights group. Interestingly, the problem donors and some staffers had wasn’t that FAIR supported trans rights in any way, or even that they failed to oppose trans people actively, but that they weren’t anti-trans enough. This despite hosting a webinar featuring Abigail Shrier which Bartning introduced by condemning “gender ideology” as going hand in hand with his main bugaboo of “race essentialism.”

screenshot from the New Yorker

In other words, while the rest of conservative activism had moved on to the new hotness, FAIR under Bartning resisted, continuing to see itself primarily as the moderate face of the anti-CRT movement.

Unfortunately, the New Yorker piece isn’t particularly clear about this, forcing the reader to put the pieces together using pieces of Green’s narrative, which is more concerned with interpersonal drama than the exercise of power by mega-donors or the reason why the entire conservative movement suddenly became obsessed with trans people. An acquaintance of Weiss’ who recently wrote a sympathetic profile of a social group for wealthy transphobes, Green dances around the subject, the picture that emerges shows that the slow build up of pressure on FAIR to do more and more and more on gender. She describes how, after the webinar featuring Shrier, donors and conservative activists still weren’t mollified. They pushed FAIR to clarify its position on the GOP’s legislative priorities around trans issues. Bartning complied with this, but only partially. He continued to see the group’s core mission as relating to race and opposing progressive anti-racism.

Green never asks why an organization that was founded to oppose CRT in schools would need to clarify the minutiae of their positions on every aspect of transgender issues, though it seems an obvious question. She does, however, report that this was what the group was being pressured over. “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.”

FAIR never once seems to have disagreed with right wing orthodoxy on trans issues, but it didn’t re-tool itself to focus primarily on transgender issues at a time when the rest of the conservative establishment was doing so. This caused the ultra-wealthy conservative donor class first to grumble, then to reduce their donations. Green reports support dropped to half of its previous levels, and highlights in particular the concerns of Suzy Edelman. Edelman began asking questions about whether her million-dollar donation had been used appropriately… but only after she began asking questions about why the anti-CRT group she’d funded wasn’t now jumping to become an anti-trans group.

screenshot from the New Yorker

At some point during this pressure campaign a Daily Wire writer, Luke Rosiak, seemed poised to write an article attacking FAIR as insufficiently pure, ideologically. Rosiak is known for his inflammatory and misleading propaganda relating to trans people, and his attention on FAIR seems to have alarmed Weiss and caused her to take a closer interest. Weiss’ interest again focused primarily on FAIR’s stances on trans issues. According to Green’s reporting, Weiss’ concerns about what Rosniak might print led her to grill members of FAIR on their specific stances on trans issues for 45 minutes.

screenshot from the New Yorker

Conveniently, Rosniak never published. However, word about FAIR’s lack of interest in anti-trans activism was still spreading. Green writes that Weiss was nervous Edelman’s criticisms of FAIR might damage her relationship with mega-donor Harlan Crow, whose relationship with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the financial support involved in it has raised questions about corruption in the highest court in the nation. Green reports that Weiss wrote in an email, “I am quite nervous that [Edelman] has gotten to the Crows, which would be really damaging to me personally.” 

Eventually Weiss mounted a coup attempt seeking to remove Bartning from leadership in her role as a FAIR board member. However, she seems to have failed to have gone through the proper procedures in doing so, making the current status of the group extremely murky. 

Green’s story isn’t interested in exposing the way conservative donors demanded organizations on the right all move in lockstep, or how that might have reshaped the information landscape, making anti-trans lies inescapable. However, she does give us everything we need to understand the way those forces operate on individuals and organizations. Funding on the right is plentiful, counted in hundreds of thousands and even millions, but it comes from rabid culture-warriors who expect the organization they donate to to drop everything and follow their own whims in lockstep, or face the consequences. When an organization created around one moral panic balks at reshaping itself around the next the pressure mounts. If it still will not cave it is abandoned. 

It is, of course, possible that FAIR is just an outlier. Perhaps other conservative individuals, advocacy groups, and publications aren’t funded by these same wealthy trans-obsessed bigots, or perhaps they are, but they’re not being pressured to focus on trans issues in the same way FAIR was. But it seems more likely from everything we can observe, that the conservative organizations that have not collapsed under pressure have been the ones willing to be an indiscriminate mouthpiece for the hatreds of their mega-donors. When those hatreds shift and find a new target, woe-betide the group which remains centered on the last one.