It does me good to see one of those hateful anti-woke organizations falling apart, but it’s also dismaying to see how easily radical conservative groups can suck money out of the pockets of the obscenely rich. I guess if you’re extremely wealthy you can easily throw a million dollars here, a half million there, as long as the recipient panders to the bigotry that comes naturally to bloated capitalist nepo babies. Here’s a long story about how a few IDW types built a short-lived organization on connections to the rich. It features Bari Weiss, of course.

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.

OK. The recipe begins with Weiss, Chen, Boghossian, and Ferguson, creating a rather shitty roux that has no taint of progressive values. Then they invented a label and an ambitious agenda.

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.

Wait, wait, wait — FAIR already exists; it’s a progressive media watchdog, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. It’s been around since 1986. I have to assume that the confusion was intentional, and that we’re off to a sleazy start.

The American Civil Liberties Union has been around since 1920. It’s a distinguished organization that has fought for our constitutional rights, including free speech, and these bozos want to replace it with an ideologically biased group of bitter reactionaries? I don’t think so. So they added more extremists.

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.

Kelly, Sullivan, and dear god, Rufo? Can this recipe possibly get any more ugly and unpalatable? Sure can. They needed some rich sugar daddies, and they got ’em.

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.

You should begin to realize that what we’ve got here is a tiny, cozy in-group of destructive, bigoted assholes who have captivated a few bigoted asshole multi-millionaires who were willing to toss them big pots of money. This is the root of our current American problem: we have a surplus of spoiled rich people who know very little but are philosophically committed to the idea that their vast wealth was hard-earned, or they wouldn’t have it. It’s easy to milk them of cash by pointing at some poor people and saying that they’re out to get you.

That’s what this whole story is about, petty bigots with buckets of inherited wealth, and grifters like Weiss who know exactly how to part them from their money. Just repeat “woke, woke, woke” at them and rely on their contempt for others to trigger donations.

Fortunately, the wheels started to come off Weiss’s FAIR gravy train pretty quickly. The thing is, grifters know how to get money, but they aren’t very effective at using it. The organization started to disintegrate in disputes over how nasty and mean they ought to be, and all they would do is talk, talk, talk.

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.”

Oh, good. Please continue bleeding money that accomplishes nothing.

Then the initial crop of assholes started to jump ship.

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.”

Worst of all, the money was dissatisfied.

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.

Oh, dear. Grifters hate to lose a mark, especially a rich, gullible sucker like Crow. Poor Bari! If she gets a reputation for being an ineffectual, obvious money-waster, the rich people won’t talk to her.

Hmmm. Have any of Bari Weiss’s schemes ever accomplished anything? We should be pleased that she’s at the poisonous core of so many PR campaigns for the Right.

The lesson here is that “anti-woke” is a recipe for incompetence and failure — it’s just that it inspires so much suffering in its inevitable decay.

Comrades, I am pleased to report another glorious victory over the running dog lackeys of the regressive Right: Cracker Barrel has been conquered. It is now ours.

As people across the country continue to celebrate Pride Month, one restaurant in particular let it be known that they’re in full support of the month-long commemoration of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender pride.

Earlier this week, Cracker Barrel took some of its customers by surprise when the restaurant shared a photo on its social media accounts of a rocking chair sporting rainbow colors.

The image included the following caption: “We are excited to celebrate Pride Month with our employees and guests. Everyone is always welcome at our table (and our 🌈 rocker). Happy Pride!”

You will also be relieved to know that this triumph does not mean the socialist vanguard is required to shop at Cracker Barrel, just as you are not required to drink Budweiser. This is a victory for the freedom to choose.

Here’s a list of 200+ things that Fox News has labeled “woke”. It includes everything, the Federal Reserve and CIA and capitalism and corporations and Chick-Fil-A and the IRS and NASCAR.

Fox News might have a little problem — they can’t define it, but they’re seeing “woke” everywhere they look.

Minnesota Republicans must be desperately bored. They’ve been steamrolled this year, so they’re itching for something to do. Something…destructive and stupid. So one of them has come up with an idea he calls “The Rocks and Cows Act“.

Representative Matt Grossell (R – Clearbrook) along with fellow Greater Minnesota Representatives have introduced the Rocks and Cows Act. Members with districts along the affected borders have been especially supportive of this bill. This Legislation would create a State Boundary Adjustment Planning Commission to study and make recommendations on a pathway for North and South Dakota to annex desiring counties into their respective borders.

It’s a novel strategy for secession — we’ll let the border counties nibble at the idea, defecting one at a time to North and South Dakota. It would certainly generate an interesting western border for the state! Those are counties full of rural hicks and MAGAts, so they might even go for it. I notice they aren’t proposing that northern counties have the option to secede and join Canada, though.

Economic relief and hearing the voices of rural communities are important goals of this legislation. As taxes continue to raise and decision-making gets centralized around the metro many are looking for some independence. “We are standing up for the future of our families as Minnesota trends towards such extremes on tax and social policy.” Said Rep. Grossell on the motivation for leading the charge on the Rocks and Cows Act.

The economic argument is total nonsense. These are all lightly populated farm counties, and are basically revenue sinks for the state. They pay fewer taxes than the benefits they get from being associated with the rich counties on the east side.

The real game here is resentment of social policies — Minnesota respects gay and trans rights, and is protecting the right to abortion. That’s what the Republicans really hate. The Dakotas are nasty, conservative states with some of the most regressive policies in the country, so only a slimy troll would want to be part of that.

I notice that Grossell represents Clearwater county, which is not on the border (neither is Stevens county, where I live). He’s not going to disappear his constituents out from under his feet, and he’d probably rather not have to commute to work in Bismarck. Hey, you want to be a North Dakotan? Pack up and move there.

By the way, the governor of North Dakota, Doug Burgum (who?) has announced his candidacy for the presidency of the USA. He doesn’t stand a chance. He’s another negligible and over-confident nitwit rushing to join the early stampede of wacky nobodies trying to get some attention. He’s also a horrible person.

As governor of the state’s fourth-least populous state, he signed measures this year advancing conservative policies on culture war issues. They include prohibiting schools and government from requiring teachers and employees from referring to transgender people by their preferred pronouns, barring transgender girls and women from competing in women’s sports, and banning abortion with few exceptions up to six weeks’ gestation, before most women know they are pregnant.

That’s what Grossell admires.

Tuesday, at 3pm, Donald Trump will drag his sorry butt to a courtroom in Miami.

A seven-count indictment has been filed in federal court naming the former president as a criminal defendant, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a case that has yet to be unsealed. The charges include willful retention of national defense secrets, obstruction of justice and conspiracy, which carry the potential of years in prison if Trump is found guilty.

Don’t get too excited. The cartoon above is from 2019. He’s been here before.

Another great big surge in military violence in Ukraine. I hope Ukraine takes back the occupied land, but citizens must be exhausted from all the back-and-forth, if they’re not dead already.

The Ukrainian troops include specialized attack units armed with Western weapons and trained in NATO tactics. The attacks on the country’s southeast mark a significant push into Russian-occupied territory.
Russian military bloggers also reported heavy fighting in the Zaporizhzhia region, a part of the front line that has long been seen as a likely target of the new Ukrainian campaign. By cutting south through the flat fields of Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv’s forces could aim to sever the corridor of land that connects mainland Russia to the occupied Crimean Peninsula, cutting off crucial Russian supply lines. It could also attempt to liberate the city of Melitopol, which Russia has established as the region’s occupied capital, and Enerhodar, where the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is located.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited parts of the southern region of Kherson on Thursday, touring disaster-hit areas and speaking with evacuated people after damage to the Kakhovka dam caused devastating floods and left many homeless.

I imagine American military leaders are salivating over the prospect of testing Western military gear, doctrine, and tactics against the Russian boogey man.

People used to live here.

Chris Licht, the former head of CNN who pushed that disastrous, mismanaged Trump town hall on us, seems to have faced some kind of rebuke from the men who control the pursestrings. He has undergone some ambiguous lateral transfer or downgrade — he’s not in charge anymore.

Anyway, the guy made no friends with his “let Republicans lie” brand of journalism because, really, that’s not what journalism is supposed to be. It’s supposed to inform people of the truth. CNN’s staff hated what Licht was trying to do. The viewers hated it, and left in droves. Freaking Newsmax started beating CNN in ratings. And the business suits hated it, because if money isn’t being made, what’s the point? In short, he shit the bed.

It’s not much of a consequence, but it’s something. If nothing else, all his rich friends know that he is in disgrace, which is probably what hurts him most. Being outright fired would hurt him better, though.