The Patriot Post® · Good News: Leftist Layoffs
Joe Biden is out there touting the wonderfulness of Bidenomics, but not everyone on the Left is picking up what he’s laying down.
How so? It seems some leftist groups have been hit with layoffs recently — including the agitators at Justice Democrats, the unwashed, unshaven organizers who gave us Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow Squad members. As the Huffington Post reports, “Faced with a shortage of funds, the group laid off nine of its 20 staff members in mid-July, a move that took many prominent progressives by surprise.”
Said one sad-eyed staffer: “We have huge champions like Bernie Sanders, AOC, Ilhan Omar, who are able to be successful political fundraisers. But movement-wise, we’re not in a great place right now.”
Ya hate to see it.
What’s the reason for these layoffs? As Hot Air’s John Sexton quips, “It seems high profile leftist groups are running out of other people’s money.”
Indeed, as the HuffPost continues: “Thus far in this election cycle, political donations, small and large, have decreased across the board ― a state of affairs that campaign finance insiders attribute to, among other things, a kind of exhaustion after Donald Trump’s presidency and a cooling of the stock market that has struck a blow to some well-heeled donors’ asset wealth. Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club, pillars of the center-left infrastructure, have laid off significant percentages of their staffs this year.”
The Sierra Club’s board voted recently to approve a 2023 budget that “will require creating new positions, eliminating some old positions, and re-imagining other positions,” the organization’s Deputy Executive Director Ana Yáñez Correa told staff in an internal email.
When leadership trots out euphemisms like “re-imagining,” you can bet the news isn’t good.
Elsewhere, according to the HuffPost, a climate change activist group called the Sunshine Movement had to let go of 35 of the 100 people on its team, and Middle Seat, a progressive fundraising group, has also cut staff this year.
There’s also a tension on the Left between its wealthy center-left donors and its fringy hard-left foot soldiers. This tension is perhaps best embodied in its policies toward Israel, which the former generally supports and the latter generally hates. “It’s much harder to question American empire than it is to question American inequality,” said a progressive House aide to the HuffPost.
As for the baby killers at Planned Parenthood, their union officials were told recently “to expect layoffs affecting 10 to 20% of the national workforce.”
Every bit helps. As NPR grimly reports: “In a joint statement from unions representing employees in New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., union officials expressed dismay at the news, saying that Planned Parenthood leaders are ‘pushing out some of our movement’s brightest minds. This comes at a time where reproductive freedom is in jeopardy and when our members are struggling under difficult economic conditions.’”
As for the Left’s dismay that its abortion-on-demand industry is struggling to make ends meet, one of our astute readers makes an excellent point: Rather than watching pregnant women everywhere flock to the abortion mills of Planned Parenthood, the pro-life community wants them to instead give birth to their babies, and therefore give all of them a chance to grow up, to become the “brightest minds,” to reach their God-given potential, and to make a difference in the world.
Layoffs on the Left. They might not be good news for the political fortunes of Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats, but they’re unequivocally good news for the unborn, for Liberty, and for our Republic.