By Jeffrey Blehar
Tuesday, November 11, 2025
Where does power truly reside? It often resides only
where people believe it does, and only up until the moment people believe it to
reside there. And the Sierra Club — once one of America’s most formidable
ecological activist groups — is giving up the illusion that it wields any power
whatsoever, as it seizes up arthritically and kneels upon broken joints to
display its helpless incapacity to the world. The New York Times is out
with a story that, if you’re an outdoorsman, you may already be
familiar with: “The Sierra Club Embraced Social Justice. Then It Tore Itself
Apart.”
You know the drill from the headline alone. Yes, the
Sierra Club, legendary juggernaut of environmental lobbying from my childhood,
is now a flaming wreck. It has lost a full 60 percent of its paying donors
since a peak moment in 2019, and for precisely the reason that all observers
watching “wokism” progress through left-coded institutions thought it would: It
was devoured by the never-ending financial and political demands of the
progressive omnicause, which encouraged the formerly single-minded conservationist
society to become deeply embroiled in the progressive left’s racial and
sociosexual agenda as an adjunct to its core mission.
In typical omnicause fashion, “social justice” was folded
into the Sierra Club’s mission through its newer, younger leadership and rank
and file, via the now-standard series of semantic sleights of hand:
“environmental justice is racial justice is transgender justice is Palestinian
justice,” etc. And the scattering of its focus has not only left the Sierra
Club flat-footed (and broke) in the new Trump administration, but it has
also rendered it indistinguishable from other “everything bagel” progressive
organizations.
I invite you to read the entire (well-reported) piece, if
only because it’s like listening to the worst and yet most unavoidable rock
group playing through its greatest hits: You’ve heard every single note of this
song before, and even if you haven’t you can guess where the next beat is going
to fall. (My favorite moment, again illustrative of the natural progress of
activist entryism, came when a local Sierra Club member responded to a
volunteer’s suggestion that the club lobby for more protections for wolves:
“That’s fine, Delia. But what do wolves have to do with equity, justice and
inclusion?”)
The Sovietologist Robert Conquest once posited a series
of “laws of politics,” the most famous of which remains his
second: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes
left-wing.” Believe it or not, I used to donate to the Sierra Club myself —
back in the 1990s, when I was but a wide-eyed teenager who liked the outdoors
and figured we ought to preserve it as best we can. (I’ve changed my e-mail
since then, to avoid their fundraising asks.) There is no room left in
organizations like these for people who feel the same way yet never wanted to
fund social progressivism in its entirety. And that’s the way the people now
running them want it.
They got what they wanted. And in so doing, they lost
everything they ever had.
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