As with the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the radicalism of the woke movement will end up destroying itself. In yesterday’s post, I half-jokingly suggested that maybe the movement is being funded by a right wing billionaire. Today, I encountered a long article at The Intercept by Ryan Grim that makes a similar point:

Another leader [of progressive organizations] said the strife has become so destructive that it feels like an op. “I’m not saying it’s a right-wing plot, because we are incredibly good at doing ourselves in, but — if you tried — you couldn’t conceive of a better right-wing plot to paralyze progressive leaders by catalyzing the existing culture where internal turmoil and microcampaigns are mistaken for strategic advancement of social impact for the millions of people depending on these organizations to stave off the crushing injustices coming our way,” said another longtime organization head. “Progressive leaders cannot do anything but fight inside the orgs, thereby rendering the orgs completely toothless for the external battles in play. … Everyone is scared, and fear creates the inaction that the right wing needs to succeed in cementing a deeply unpopular agenda.”

In my previous post I criticized Will Stancil’s claim that almost all of the opposition to woke excesses comes from white men.  Grim provides supporting evidence:  

The pushback against callout culture, which might be surprising on a surface level, is bubbling up in Black movement spaces. “In the movement for Black lives, there is a lot of the top leaders saying, ‘This is out of control. No one can be a leader in this culture. It’s not sustainable. We’re constantly being called out from the bottom,’” said one white movement leader who works closely with Black Lives Matter leaders. “Nowadays, there’s an open conversation — not open, there is a large conversation — about the problems of this, and it’s being led by people within the movement for Black lives,” he said. “We didn’t have that three years ago, and if we did, they were a minority and were totally isolated. Now it’s so bad that there’s now a growing backlash within our own movements.”

Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, called the phenomenon out in the book “How We Fight White Supremacy,” writing, “People don’t understand that organizing isn’t going online and cussing people out or going to a protest and calling something out.”

Critics of woke excess are not suggesting that no one deserves to be called out.  The real problem is that the wrong people are being called out.  The radical progressives are destroying themselves.