The AVI household hasn't experienced any difficulty with the Audubon Society. Of course, it's mostly my wife participating in the bird count and getting some mailings, or occasionally going on one of their walking trails. Or maybe it's just New Hampshire that remains sane, as usual. I expect that they are mostly environmentalist, and therefore mostly liberal, but it doesn't affect me much.
Kevin Williamson over at NRO takes them as an example of one more organisation becoming more leftist over time, and has some insight as to why.
The desire to enforce social and political homogeneity within an organization through personnel action — the desire to intentionally institutionalize bias — is the basis of what we call “cancel culture.” It is neither surprising nor coincidental that the most important and high-profile cancel-culture episodes have been in-house headhunts (as at the New York Times and Yale) rather than the result of external pressure. Cancel culture is in no small part a result of organizational capture, the situation in which the people who are supposed to serve an institution use the institution to serve themselves, pursuing their own interests (financial, cultural, political, sexual) rather than the mission of the institution.
I'm not sure his argument is that strong in singling out Audubon in particular. One of their people made a stupid tweet with the usual unthinking biases, but that's not evidence it's widespread there. Also, he takes a swipe at both prison guards and funeral directors trying to be funny but mostly just being a jerk. Still, the concept is right. and I did like the line "...the desire to be a crusader precedes and supersedes the commitment to any particular crusade." He does point out pretty convincingly that their contributions at the 99.72% to Democrats makes them likely liberal, and I guess I'll take his word for it that the magazine has become strident in generalised leftism.
3 comments:
I gave up on NRO in 2015. I think you'd know/understand why.
I have always considered Audubon to be leftist. They may have become more demonstrably so, I haven't subscribed to their magazine for years. I doubt they would money or money otherwise.
Then there is The Nature Conservancy, which conspires with state actors to strongarm private property owners into selling to them on the cheap. They could put the Mafia to shame at how well they play that extortion game.
"Nice piece of property you have here. Shame if the government condemned it and tried to take it through eminent domain."
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