Recent Lowlights in Woke Capture of Our Once-Venerable Institutions

Josh Hammer / March 27, 2023

Lamenting the astonishing success of the activist Left’s centurylong Gramscian march through America’s major institutions is, at this juncture, old hat.

Still, there have been a few recent, powerful examples, coming in quick succession, illustrating the extent to which leading liberal institutions of civil society have been captured by far-left activist wokesters who take opportunistic advantage of their groups’ venerable reputations in an attempt to repurpose them for dubious ends.

Take, for example, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, once one of the nation’s leading lights of the civil rights movement, which in recent decades has increasingly degenerated into a cesspool of grievance politics, intersectionality, race-tinged hucksterism, and crass Democratic Party politicking.

Last week, the Florida chapter of the NAACP asked its national board to issue a travel advisory against visiting the Sunshine State due to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ recent moves to, among other things, extirpate “diversity, equity, and inclusion” racialist indoctrination from public universities and convince the College Board to drop asinine leftist indulgences such as “queer studies” from its model Advanced Placement curriculum in African American studies.

As DeSantis, a Republican, aptly summed it up at a press conference when asked about the NAACP tiff: “What a joke!”

Consider also the American Civil Liberties Union’s steady descent, in recent years, away from the free speech absolutism that was long a hallmark of the organization and led it, back in 1978, to legally argue on behalf of neo-Nazi provocateurs who wanted to march in the heavily Jewish suburb of Skokie, Illinois.

Not so much nowadays, as a 2021 headline in The New York Times put it: “Once a Bastion of Free Speech, the ACLU Faces an Identity Crisis: An organization that has defended the First Amendment rights of Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan is split by an internal debate over whether supporting progressive causes is more important.”

The ACLU’s “internal debate” over whether to err on the side of free speech or progressivism was on full display recently at Stanford Law School. The school’s associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion, Tirien Steinbach, who served as a high-ranking local ACLU official prior to her diversitycrat sinecure, was caught on video asking the ludicrous (and now viral and frequently meme-d) question of whether the “juice” of the heavily protested Judge Kyle Duncan’s right to speak freely was “worth the squeeze” of the “harm” his mere presence allegedly caused congregated students’ snowflake sensibilities.

I also have some personal experience in the modern ACLU’s resistance to open debate: A few years back, I tried to organize a written debate on the hot-button topic of biological male (“transgender women”) athletes competing in women’s sports, and was rebuffed by the ACLU—an organization that has a whole section on its website dedicated to “transgender rights.”

Consider also the Southern Poverty Law Center, another once-iconic organization of the civil rights movement that also has descended in recent years into far-left activism. Earlier this month, a SPLC attorney named Thomas Jurgens was arrested and charged with domestic terrorism for his role in the outrageous mob attacks on Atlanta’s “Cop City” training facility.

Arguably even worse for the Southern Poverty Law Center, last month the FBI publicly rescinded a memo on the alleged dangers of so-called “radical-traditionalist Catholic ideology” (whatever that means). That memo had heavily cited the SPLC’s extraordinarily biased use of “hate maps” and targeting of “hate groups,” and its formal rescission by the FBI was a (much-deserved) blow to the SPLC’s credibility.

Finally, a current radical Biden nominee for a judgeship on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, Nancy Abudu, is the sitting director of strategic litigation for the SPLC. She has made many outlandish statements while there, including saying that the modern American criminal justice system is “practically the same … as during slavery.”

Following the 2019 firing of an SPLC co-founder over alleged racial animus and sexual harassment, one former staffer asserted that the SPLC’s serial, tendentious claims of “hate” amount to a “cynical fundraising scam.” And I would know: The SPLC came after me personally in a series of hit pieces this past fall, including one turgid treatise clocking in at almost 5,000 words. I view that as a badge of honor.

Finally, consider also the recent politicization of leading scientific organizations, which was already evident during COVID-19 but which has intensified of late. Last week, Nature magazine concluded that its 2020 presidential endorsement of Joe Biden led many to lose trust in both science as a discipline and Nature as a journal—and then doubled down and vowed to continue to make political endorsements, anyway.

As the journal tweeted: “Political endorsements might not always win hearts and minds, but when candidates threaten a retreat from reason”—whatever that means—”science must speak out.”

Apparently, Nature’s announcement was so persuasive that Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of rival Science magazine, lauded Nature’s “excellent” decision to double down on political endorsements and bemoaned as “unacceptable”—and thus necessarily requiring rebuke from “elites”—the commonplace policy stance that “climate change may be real, but I don’t think we should have government regulation to deal with it.”

But who in the world, exactly, elected Holden Thorp to tell us what is an “acceptable” opinion to hold about climate policy? Is the Left for free speech and an open exchange of ideas, or is it not?

O’Sullivan’s Law, named after veteran British conservative and former National Review editor John O’Sullivan, stipulates that “all organizations that are not explicitly right-wing will over time become left-wing.” That assertion has never been more vindicated.

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