GOP Megadonor Harlan Crow Gave $500,000 to Bari Weiss to Start ‘Anti-Woke’ Nonprofit

Clarence Thomas' billionaire benefactor giving half a mill to a journalist who paints herself as centrist and independent is pretty interesting.

By Susan Rinkunas | June 6, 2023 | 6:15pm

Politics

GOP Megadonor Harlan Crow Gave $500,000 to Bari Weiss to Start ‘Anti-Woke’ Nonprofit

Here is an extremely cursed sentence: Billionaire and Clarence Thomas benefactor Harlan Crow donated $500,000 to Bari Weiss—one of two journalists Elon Musk handpicked to report out the “Twitter Files” and founder of the “independent” transphobia-peddling outlet The Free Press—to start an “anti-woke” nonprofit.

This tidbit is according to a story in The New Yorker about infighting at the group, called FAIR: The Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism. Weiss and her co-founders created the group in March 2021 in response to their objections over anti-racist theory in schools and implicit bias trainings at workplaces; they reportedly hoped the group would replace the American Civil Liberties Union. FAIR’s board of advisers included former Fox host Megyn Kelly, disgraced writer Andrew Sullivan, and activist Christopher Rufo.

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Crow, who collects Nazi artifacts and has a garden filled with statues of dictators, made his half a million dollar donation in 2021, while several other donors gave $1 million each. FAIR developed its own corporate diversity-training program and a free ethnic-studies curriculum for schools, but it sounds like the organization faced a mutiny from staff and volunteers who wanted it to be more explicit than it was about concepts like critical race theory and to speak forcefully against “gender ideology”—aka acceptance of transgender and nonbinary people.

Suzy Edelman, one of the million-dollar-donors, wrote in a 2022 email to FAIR staff: “Sex-based rights matter. Single sex spaces for women and girls must be protected. Transgenderism is a fiction designed to destroy.” Weiss was apparently concerned that Edelman was airing her grievances to other donors. “I am quite nervous that she has gotten to the Crows, which would be really damaging to me personally,” Weiss wrote to a FAIR cofounder in August 2022, referring to Harlan Crow. Weiss told the New Yorker reporter: “I leaned on many of my personal relationships and friendships to help launch this nonprofit. I was sick over the idea that their time, trust, and money wasn’t being properly protected.” Hmm!

Weiss tries to paint herself as an independent, centrist journalist, but it is not centrist to start an anti-woke nonprofit, let alone one funded by a GOP megadonor—a man whose relationship is so valuable to you that you’re concerned it could be damaged via some emails.

The Free Press, a separate entity that Weiss launched in December 2022, says it was built on the ideals of “honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence”—but the publication is neither fierce nor independent if its founder is coddling billionaire activists.