By Rod DREHER
This is fairly trivial, but it is such an excellent example of how wokeness has conquered the collective brain of the Left that I can't pass it by. It was flagged on N.S. Lyons's excellent Substack newsletter, The Upheaval.
It's a call for grant proposals by the Ploughshares Fund, a major philanthropy funding projects that combat nuclear weapons proliferation, and advance the goals of peace. Nothing wrong with that. But look at what the San Francisco-based philanthropy is after in the 2022 funding cycle:
"Challenging racism and white supremacy in nuclear policies and institutions"? Like, I dunno, the fact that nuclear-armed powers don't have their missiles pointed at African countries, thus othering them? What about Chinese nukes? Are they problematic? Should we send nuclear weapons to Africa and Latin America for the sake of equity? Are we trying to avoid a future headline: "US-Russia Nuclear Exchange Causes Global Apocalypse; BIPOCs, LGBTQQIA+ Worst Affected"?
More:
Wow. You can get up to $75,000 if you can figure out how to extend the woke grift to (checks notes) the nuclear proliferation cause. You don't even have to have experience in the field! Just be a BIPOC or LGBTQQIA+, and be able to string intersectional jargon together, and these agonized woke philanthropists will open their purse and throw money at you.
In case it isn't clear to you yet that this is a scam to separate wealthy leftie do-gooders from their money, and redistribute it to wokedom's Chosen People:
What's funny about this is that Ploughshares signals that it is not serious about spending its resources to figure out ways to reduce the likelihood of nuclear war, which is says is its reason for being. It is more concerned with appeasing its own woke conscience by buying indulgences with woke constituencies. Are the donors - both individuals and philanthropies - cool with that? Look, Ploughshares can do whatever it wants to with its money, but it means something when the purpose for which the organization exists takes a back seat to advancing woke goals. They would rather throw cash behind a third-rate grant proposal that ticked all the right intersectional boxes than actually advance the work of nuclear non-proliferation.
In this, though, they are no different than Woke Capitalists, who are less interested in their theoretical prime directive - making money by providing top-quality goods and services - than they are in feeling virtuous about themselves. It's fun and easy to laugh at these ideologues for wasting their money on virtue signaling, but the loss of a sense of mission within companies, institutions, and organizations, all led by people who have gone crazy for ideology, is yet another sign of decadence.