Going Against the Current

There are few lines in modern poetry that have been worn more threadbare from repetition than those in the first stanza of William Butler Yeats’ The Second Coming:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold ...
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Words get requoted for a reason, though, and Yeats’ warning rings in the modern ear. Monica Harris ’88 says she hopes to hold the center, which is a tricky place to be these days. She espouses the classical liberal values of tolerance, respectful discourse, and faith in our shared humanity. Sometimes sounding a hopeful note in a time of deep polarization, she insists that there is still more that unites us than divides us.

Since 2023, Harris has been the executive director of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, known as FAIR. It would seem like an easy post to fill. After all, who isn’t against intolerance? Or racism? Or being unfair?

FAIR says it advocates “for all individuals denied equal protection, free expression, and other fundamental rights, regardless of their personal background or immutable characteristics.” All this is done with the goal of promoting “a pro-human culture based on our shared values of universal equality, fairness, understanding, and common humanity.” But — and here is where things get contentious — FAIR’s particular enemy is the identity-based politics that have dominated the culture over the past decade or so, based in critical race theory and gender theory and (in the opinion of some) a censoriousness that is commonly referred to as “wokeness.”

Though FAIR is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) organization, the purported excesses of wokeness have been fodder for commentators across the spectrum. Some political scientists believe that the Left’s embrace of so-called radical race and gender theories cost Democrats the 2024 presidential election, rendered the party toxic in much of white, rural America, and even weakened its support among Black and Hispanic voters.

Although FAIR has been funded largely from the Right since its founding four years ago, it has drawn an ideologically diverse group of supporters. Nadine Strossen, former president of the ACLU and a member of the group’s advisory board, says she believes FAIR can serve as “an important counter to an unfortunate tendency to see the world in binaries. You’re either a racial minority or you’re not. You’re an oppressor or you’re a victim.”

Danielle Allen ’93, a Harvard professor who has championed civics education, is not affiliated with FAIR but says she believes it is on the right track in trying to build a campus community that respects divergent viewpoints. “I appreciate their embrace of the pluralism framework,” she says. “I think Monica is doing important work.”

Many who have found themselves alienated from both political extremes might rally around a flag planted between the social justice left and the MAGA right, analogous to the “vital center” historian Arthur Schlesinger once described between communism and fascism after World War II. What does the center even look like anymore and is FAIR interested in occupying that space? At times, the group seems unsure.

Harris herself might be a model of today’s unaffiliated middle. She is Black, a woman, a lesbian, and the mother of a biracial child. All these facets help define her, but she does not want them to pigeonhole her, so add some others to paint a richer picture. She grew up in a working-class household, the daughter of two civil servants who sacrificed to send her to private school, to Princeton, and then to Harvard, where she served on the law review with Barack Obama. More than a decade ago, after a successful career as a Hollywood entertainment lawyer, Harris and her partner decided to quit the rat race and move their family to Bigfork, Montana, an unincorporated community of 5,000 people not far from Glacier National Park.

Express surprise that a mixed-race gay couple could find community there and Harris responds that she encountered much more racism in deep blue Southern California than she ever has in Big Sky country. In her 2022 memoir, The Illusion of Division, Harris asserted that much of the political polarization that wracks our country is artificial, ginned up by corporate-owned media companies and the political fringes who profit off it.

“I truly believe most Americans are centrists,” she says now. “We’re common-sense folks. We all want the same thing, regardless of what we look like.”

Here are a few more details to add to the mix. Talking about the Founding Fathers can sometimes bring Harris to tears. Her hero has always been Martin Luther King Jr., who dreamed of a country in which we would be judged by the content of our character rather than the color of our skin. For more than a decade she did not vote, until the populist Bernie Sanders campaign reengaged her in 2020.

Today, the politicians Harris finds most interesting are Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

Why? “They ask questions.”

And questions may now be something that you have, too.

“There are too few in the donor class who want to bolster moderation. You have  a lot of people with an extreme amount of wealth driving an extremist agenda.”

— Bion Bartning, FAIR Founder

FAIR, which emerged from the culture wars of the last decade, fights mostly on its shell-scarred battlefields, in education, the arts, and medicine.

In the arts, for example, FAIR contends that too many organizations now prioritize the racial or gender identity of the artist rather than the quality of the art, warping who gets funded and what gets staged or exhibited. It opposes efforts to restrict which books libraries can offer but has also argued against what it considers attempts to radicalize school curricula. In that light, it sent a letter to the principal of a New York City public elementary school questioning the use of a book in first grade classrooms that taught students that white people had invented racism to “justify slavery, colonialism, and genocide.” FAIR now publishes a recommended reading list that is heavy on kid-friendly biographies of American heroes such as Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, but also includes the autobiography of Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakastani woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.

All attempts to group people by race are suspect, if not outright unconstitutional, no matter how well-intentioned, FAIR claims. It is willing to follow that belief to what may seem like dogmatic ends. When Harvard’s medical school created an orientation program that broke students into subgroups based on race, gender identity, and religion in order to discuss their own experiences with racism, FAIR called it out in an angry letter. It also sued to prevent the New York City health department from prioritizing nonwhite residents for the COVID vaccine, alleging that doing so was discriminatory — against white people.

In medicine, FAIR contends that doctors and public health officials sometimes push a political agenda that lacks scientific support and then seek to silence anyone who challenges it. In practice, that has meant opposing efforts to provide legal protections for transgender people or to recommend gender transitioning treatments for minors. This has led the Southern Poverty Law Center to accuse FAIR of helping to “disseminate pseudoscientific disinformation” about LBGTQ people.

As these cases illustrate, FAIR’s favorite weapons are letters, sometimes prompted by whistleblowers, whom it encourages to report suspect behavior. Its website, fairtransparency.org, includes often-anonymous complaints about companies, local school boards, universities, nonprofits, and government agencies. On occasion, FAIR also files lawsuits or amicus briefs of its own.

On the flip side, there is another dimension to FAIR that seems to be in tension with the more combative side. The group’s website features numerous articles supporting civil discourse and viewpoint diversity. A video series titled “What if both sides are right?” has a diverse set of actors presenting different sides of contentious social issues such as whether gender is binary or abortion should be criminalized, modeling how to debate difficult topics respectfully.

In one of its most ambitious undertakings, FAIR has developed an “American Experience and Civics” school curriculum, which Harris hopes will be rolled out in the fall. Much of it reads like the sort of lesson plans common in American schools a generation ago. A summary says it promotes knowledge of key historical figures while also exposing students to their critics, such as comparing the approaches to civil rights taken by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. But there is no sense of balance to a separate initiative called Teaching About Identity, which asks what students can learn from historical examples of ways in which school environments have influenced racially, ethnically or politically divided societies. Here, FAIR choses only three heavily loaded examples: Hitler’s Germany, Mao’s China, and 1980s Rwanda.

Education, in fact, was where FAIR began, and where a tension in its mission originated. The group was founded in 2021 by a New York businessman, Bion Bartning, who was alarmed to find that the private school his children attended was teaching students as young as 5 to “acknowledge racial differences” and encouraging parents to join racial or gender-based affinity groups. Bartning, who has described himself as a liberal independent, formed FAIR to chart a middle course, but from the beginning the group attracted those who leaned to the right, sometimes hard. Early members of its board of advisers included former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly; authors Bari Weiss and Abigail Shrier, who frequently skewer progressive views on gender; and conservative gadfly Christopher Rufo. Billionaire Harlan Crow, a major donor to President Donald Trump, gave FAIR half a million dollars in seed money.

According to a profile of FAIR in The New Yorker in early 2023 with the headline, “Is It Possible to Be Both Moderate and Anti-Woke?” the group went through a tug of war in its early years between those who wanted to offer a positive alternative to racial essentialism and those who wanted to take a sledgehammer to it. Bartning criticized the group’s more aggressive turn following his ouster in early 2023.

“There are too few in the donor class who want to bolster moderation,” he said. “You have a lot of people with an extreme amount of wealth driving an extremist agenda.”

After a brief interregnum, Harris, who had already joined FAIR’s advisory board, was named its new executive director in October 2023. Though the board still boasts a number of prominent names, including Strossen, blogger Andrew Sullivan, author Jonathan Haidt, and Princeton professor Robert P. George, FAIR is a small organization even by the standards of public advocacy groups. Harris herself receives only a nominal salary, and the three members of its board of directors are unpaid. Everyone works remotely. According to public tax returns, FAIR accepted less than $1 million in donations in 2023. By comparison, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which also speaks out for free speech and was founded in 1999, took in $36 million and has a much larger staff, with many employees highly paid.

Monica Harris ’88 speaks at a TED X event in Breckenridge, CO.

Courtesy of Monica Harris ’88

Like Bartning, Harris’ experience with the antiracist curriculum at her own child’s school served to radicalize her against it. She recalls an afternoon in 2017 when her son returned home from sixth grade. “I just want to stop talking about race,” he said.

“Here I am, raising a biracial son in Montana who wants to stop talking about race,” Harris recounts. “But in Hollywood, with all my white peers, that’s all they wanted to talk about.”

Equally troubling to her were some of the lessons she says her son was being taught about white supremacy and supposedly toxic “white values” such as punctuality and linear thinking. How, Harris asks, could she explain to her son “that it’s OK for people to say horrible things about his white mother, but it’s racist if they say the same things about me?”

Harris was raised in Los Angeles and attended private school before going to Princeton, where she majored in the School of Public and International Affairs and served as opinion editor of The Daily Princetonian. Returning to LA after earning a law degree at Harvard, she tried private practice for a few years before jumping to an in-house legal position with Disney. Eventually, she rose to be a senior vice president at the music channel VH1, living the supposedly good life in Santa Monica. After a decade, she had burned out on the pressure, the taxes, and the long commute. Harris and her partner left California in 2011 for a slower-paced life in Montana, building a house deep in the forest above Flathead Lake.

Although she did legal work remotely for her former entertainment clients until she joined FAIR, Harris also began to develop her thoughts about the direction of the country. She first published them as a collection of essays before developing them into her book. She also gave two TED talks in 2022.

Somewhat in the way she dropped out of the Southern California power lifestyle, Harris says she had already “drifted off the political spectrum.” She had known Obama casually from law school, but did not vote for him because she thought he was too beholden to wealthy donors. She also believes the country took a wrong turn during the Obama years, as Democrats began accentuating racial divisions rather than trying to move past them. White privilege does exist, she acknowledges, but it is class that forms the real American divide.

The country Harris describes in her book is dystopian. She likens her political awakening to the one in the 1999 sci-fi thriller, The Matrix, where the lead character suddenly becomes aware that the world he thought he understood was a mirage created to keep society pacified. Harris, too, believes that “our collective reality has been distorted to create illusions to convince us to believe we live in a world we don’t live in.”

Choice, Harris writes, is an illusion: Our society is rigged to maintain the neoliberal ruling class. The free press is an illusion: Most news outlets are owned by wealthy corporations committed to keeping viewers distracted from the true state of the country. Elections are an illusion: No matter who wins, the same dominant interests are served. Even the rule of law is an illusion, Harris says, citing the Supreme Court’s 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore.

Meanwhile, the people she calls “excellent sheep” defend a corrupt and tottering system. Though the expert class has discredited itself over the past 20 years, she writes, it still seeks to silence anyone who tries to question the latest orthodoxy. Perhaps Harris’ most controversial assertion is that many on the left deliberately use race-baiting to divide the country, blanketing the airwaves with stories about hate crimes while downplaying the ongoing erosion of the middle class. “We aren’t outraged because we take our cues from the media that tell us what we should get worked up about,” she concludes, “and they aren’t running breaking headlines about our economic despair.”

Today, Harris says she gets most of her news from the website The Free Press, as well as from Substacks and podcasts. As previously noted, she likes questioners, particularly on the right. One of her favorite podcasts is “Dark Horse” with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, evolutionary biologists who have critiqued the effectiveness of the COVID vaccine. Like a growing number of Americans, Harris avoids the mainstream media, watching just enough cable news to get a sense of the day’s headlines.

“I honestly don’t believe anything they’re saying,” she insists.

“I continue to think that, in principle, what [Trump] is trying to do makes sense.”

— Monica Harris ’88

Where do Harris and FAIR go in 2025?

Three years ago, Harris wrote about the revitalized America she longed to see. “Now more than ever, we need leaders who are good citizens first and don’t place themselves above the law,” she wrote. “People who question those with money and power instead of trying to seize money for themselves. People who identify fundamental problems in our institutions and offer meaningful solutions instead of superficial fixes.”

Given this prayer for the country, you might be skeptical that Harris would have much good to say about President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, but don’t be too sure. (She declines to say who she voted for last year, calling it “a tortured decision.”) Harris is broadly supportive of efforts by Musk, the world’s richest man, to fire thousands of middle-class government employees, saying that something needs to be done to shrink the bloated bureaucracy. “I would ask anyone who questions DOGE to say, how do you sustain a $36 trillion debt?” she asks.

Regarding RFK Jr., Harris also supports shaking up a health system that has produced high rates of obesity, diabetes, anxiety, and suicide, particularly among children. “You can’t just rubber stamp what the CDC and FDA are doing, because whatever we’re doing is not working,” she contends. She also does not consider RFK to be anti-vaccination, but rather “pro-safety.”

Probably not coincidentally, one of FAIR’s new initiatives is a three-part series, called “The Dangerous SSRI Experiment on Developing Brains,” about the overprescription of antidepressants to adolescents. “We felt we needed to step into this space because we knew of no other organization doing this work,” Harris says. RFK Jr. also has promised to investigate SSRIs as part of his Make America Healthy Again initiative.

From FAIR’s standpoint, the Trump administration has already delivered three great victories: rejecting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), reasserting the gender binary, and cutting off federal funding for gender transitioning minors. In all three cases, though, the group seems to be aware that it may be riding a tiger, endorsing Trump’s policies while expressing reservations about his approach.

“I continue to think that, in principle, what he is trying to do makes sense,” Harris says. “But what concerns me, and my concerns have grown, is that the way he is trying to accomplish this is so heavy-handed that it potentially alienates a lot of people who might otherwise be receptive to his message.”

That heavy-handedness even extends to DEI. While she hates DEI as an ideological project, Harris says she is concerned that the administration now often paints any woman, gay person, or racial minority in a position of responsibility as unqualified. She also says she worries that Republicans in five states have introduced legislation to roll back gay marriage.

If FAIR’s original concerns have been addressed, it is reasonable to ask if new ones have emerged, and whether the group is interested in taking them on. Some of FAIR’s conservative donors have stepped aside since the election, board president Angel Eduardo admits. “A lot of them are saying, ‘This isn’t my fight anymore. The things I cared about are done, so I’m good.’”

One would think that an organization dedicated to protecting academic freedom, freedom of speech, and freedom of conscience would have something to say about the administration’s efforts to end Harvard’s tax-exempt status, place Columbia under a consent decree, and cancel the visas of foreign students who have supported an unpopular cause yet committed no crime. But as of early May, FAIR has largely been silent.

Harris admits that she has been wrestling with these issues, though her personal inclination is to say that a university’s tax-exempt status, like a foreign student’s study visa, “is a privilege, not a right.” Given the lack of viewpoint diversity on college campuses, she wonders if the federal government ought to get out of funding higher education altogether.

When asked about FAIR’s response to these issues, Harris turns lawyerly, suggesting that it might be better for groups such as FIRE, which are dedicated exclusively to promoting civil liberties, to take them on. FAIR, she explains, focuses only on denials of free expression or academic freedom that are identity-based. Along the same lines, while the Trump administration may be violating the First Amendment by rescinding the visas of foreign students who support Palestinian causes, they are doing so based on the nature of the speech itself, not the identity of the people expressing it.

“Put simply,” she writes in an email, “these cases lack the intersectional legal nature that’s core to FAIR’s mission,” perhaps unwittingly using a favorite word, “intersectional,” from the progressive lexicon. Harris elaborated on these thoughts in a post on FAIR’s website May 8.

There are, however, small signs that FAIR may be finding a voice that can be critical of the Trump administration, too. On April 23, Gabriel Nadales, head of its legal advocacy group, posted on a Substack saying that, while the administration probably could legally deport foreign students for their speech, that doesn’t mean it should. “[W]hen the government starts defining ‘problematic’ speech however it sees fit, no one is safe,” he wrote. “If we start punishing people for peaceful speech, we risk becoming the very thing we claim to stand against.”

In poll after poll, Americans embrace a centrist viewpoint when it comes to particular issues, supporting legal immigration, for instance, while opposing an open border. But in another light, the center is more than just splitting policy differences. It’s about embracing pluralism, compromise, and institutional checks and balances, which are supposed to be the genius of the American system. Championing an authoritarian right to counter a self-righteous left is a choice, but not one likely to advance the country.

At times, Harris makes a similar point, writing back in early March that as the political pendulum swings from one extreme to the other, we must try to catch it in the middle. “We won’t retain credibility to effectively challenge intolerance and racism on the left if we ignore the same behavior on the right,” she wrote.

The vital center is a noble ideal. It might even be a place where Americans across the political spectrum could rally.

Or maybe it’s just another illusion.

Mark F. Bernstein ’83 is PAW’s senior writer.