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‘Toxic Intersectionality’: Sierra Club in ‘Downward Spiral’ After Pivot to Social Justice Warrioring

“It issued an ‘equity language guide,’ which warned employees to be cautious about using the words ‘vibrant’ and ‘hardworking,’ because they reinforced racist tropes.”

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Legal Insurrection:

The New York Times published a fascinating read Friday detailing how the Sierra Club went from being a singularly focused, highly influential environmental group with big money backers like former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg to one wracked with “internal chaos,” sexual harassment scandals, and an obsession with social justice warrioring, the latter of which appears to have been the catalyst for the “implosion” some current and former members say it is experiencing.

The group has lost 60 percent of the four million members and supporters it counted in 2019. It has held three rounds of employee layoffs since 2022, trying to climb out of a $40 million projected budget deficit.

The write-up also shared how, as President Donald Trump took office and began taking a bulldozer to what the Times called “environmental protections,” the Sierra Club was too distracted by infighting and sexual harassment scandals to fight back:

While Mr. Trump boosted coal power, canceled wind farms and rolled back pollution limits, the club was consumed by internal chaos, culminating when the board fired its executive director, Ben Jealous, a former president of the N.A.A.C.P.

“Sierra Club is in a downward spiral,” a group of managers wrote in a letter reviewed by The New York Times to the club’s leadership in June.

That spiral helps Mr. Trump. But it was not his doing. The Sierra Club did this to itself.

And how did they do that? The Times went on to explain:

During Mr. Trump’s first term, when the Sierra Club was flush with donations, its leaders sought to expand far beyond environmentalism, embracing other progressive causes. Those included racial justice, labor rights, gay rights, immigrant rights and more. They stand by that shift today.

This expansion into social justice warrioring caused the group to lose that singular focus.  As a result, “the club had exhausted its finances and splintered its coalition” by 2022.

The idea behind the hard-left pivot was to bring in a younger generation of environmentalists while also trying to drag members along with the woketivism. That turned some folks off because, at the time, the Sierra Club had a sizable number of members who were not hardcore leftists but who nevertheless agreed with their stances on issues like coal and green energy.

Then, there was the “equity language guide”:

After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the group called for defunding the police and providing reparations for slavery.

One Sierra Club volunteer told the newspaper that she remembered a conversation with a staff member who she said was more interested in DEI than saving wolves:

Ms. Malone … recalled an incident when a club staff member had scolded her for saying that the club should lobby Colorado’s legislature for more protections for wolves.

“One of the staff said, ‘That’s fine, Delia. But what do wolves have to do with equity, justice and inclusion?’” Ms. Malone said.