Showbiz In a League of Their Own


Nonprofit campaigns against diversity and inclusion programs — but its members pay a steep price.


A BY ALICE GIORDANO


lthough the founda- tion Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR) might sound like a left-wing orga-


nization, it’s everything but. Members of the nonprofit, founded


in 2021, include Hollywood actors who say they were blacklisted for not being woke, along with Black educators accused of being white supremacists by not supporting race-based issues such as reparations and quotas. Among them is voice artist and


actress Mary McDonald-Lewis, who says she suffered through years of being shunned for her traditional views and having a recent show canceled. “I think I could have gotten the dogs


called off if I’d stepped down as Lady Macbeth and cast a trans woman in the role,” says McDonald-Lewis, best known as the voice of Lady Jaye in the animated series G.I. Joe and for her role as Frau Pech in the NBC television drama Grimm. In late February, the Milagro The-


atre in Portland, Oregon, axed The Macbeths, a play by McDonald-Lewis, who was also a costar, citing “dispar- aging gender transition” remarks it claimed she made in the past. The theater, which bills itself as offer-


ing “authentic” shows, announced that it was updating its rental procedures to add background checks and adopting new contractual clauses to keep people like McDonald-Lewis off their stage. The backlash, says McDonald-Lew- is, stems from a quote she posted on


social media from a Substack article written by Transsexual Transgender Transhuman author Jennifer Bilek criticizing men in women’s spaces such as bathrooms. One of the lines from the quote


includes “these men are coming for womanhood itself, while getting off on performing our sexual subordination.” McDonald-Lewis says she began


to “lose friends by the dozens” and was being con- stantly shamed for not embrac- ing woke cul- ture. A member of


McDONALD-LEWIS


the liberal art- ists union SAG- AFTRA — to which she pays dues — penned a


letter demanding McDonald-Lewis be removed from the union’s national board, calling her a “sinister, cult- ish Stalinist and authoritarian pro- pagandist” for opposing causes like Black Lives Matter, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and transgender awareness. Longtime educator Tabia Lee, a UC Irvine/Cal State LA graduate who has worked as an education consultant for prominent colleges including Notre Dame, says she was bullied into quit- ting her new job as DEI director for a community college in California after she rejected race-based initiatives and refused to refer to Latinos as Latinx. Lee was called a white supremacist


McDonald-Lewis says she began to “lose friends by the dozens” and was being constantly shamed for not embracing woke culture.


54 NEWSMAX | AUGUST 2025


by other faculty members for enact- ing workplace performance standards and accused of “whitesplaining,” a term used to describe a white person explaining racism to a person of color in a condescending or blaming way. For the record, Lee is Black. George Maurer, author of the book Critical Race Theory in Your School: How to Fight Back, heads up FAIR’s California chapter. His group recently filed a petition


with the body that sets academic stan- dards for California’s college system challenging a proposal to mandate an anti-white ethnic studies as an admis- sion requirement and to change words like history to “herstory.” In one of the nation’s most liberal


states, the petition garnered 2,500 sig- natures “pretty quickly,” says Maurer. FAIR does not consider itself a right-wing group but more a push- back against “acceptable discrimina- tion” that has “erased core principles of equality.” It takes special umbrage with the arts. “Divisive identity politics has


become a de facto code of conduct in the arts,” it says on its website. “Artists feel alienated by intolerance, group- think, and lack the freedom and sup- port to produce work that is inspired and unfiltered.” In addition to chronicling stories


of discrimination on fairforall.org, the group also fights them in court. Last October it filed a federal law-


suit against the state of Washington for having affordable housing pro- grams, including a zero-interest mort- gage loan program, extended to first- time homebuyers based on their race — specifically excluding Caucasian, Japanese, and Jewish Americans, even if they otherwise met the pro- gram’s eligibility criteria. In the pending suit, FAIR asks the


court to declare the race-based eligibil- ity criteria unconstitutional and issue a permanent injunction against it.


MCDONALD-LEWIS/JESSE GRANT/GETTY IMAGES FOR DISNEY


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