The Women’s March is in real trouble.
The movement, which sprung up in direct response to the election of President Trump, has hemorrhaged Democratic support following a December 2018 investigative report showing rampant anti-Semitism in its leadership.
On Friday, the march lost yet another left-wing supporter, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., who explained in a USA Today op-ed that she can no longer be associated with a group that so obviously harbors discriminatory beliefs.
“I walked away from the Women’s March on Washington two years ago absolutely electrified by the promise of what a movement built around sisterhood and solidarity could accomplish,” the congresswoman and former chairperson of the Democratic National Committee wrote. “Today, sadly, I must walk away from the national Women’s March organization, and specifically its leadership.”
“While I still firmly believe in its values and mission, I cannot associate with the national march’s leaders and principles, which refuse to completely repudiate anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry. I cannot walk shoulder to shoulder with leaders who lock arms with outspoken peddlers of hate,” she adds.
The op-ed comes not long after other left-wing groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, EMILY’s List, and the Democratic National Committee, opted to put space between themselves and the march. The Washington State Women’s March also publicly criticized the march’s leadership, stressing its failure to “apologize for their anti-Semitic stance.”
Even the woman who got the march going in the first place with a Facebook post has called on the movement’s leaders, Bob Bland, Linda Sarsour, Carmen Perez, and Tamika Mallory, to resign, writing that they’ve allowed, “anti-Semitism, anti-LBGTQIA sentiment and hateful, racist rhetoric to become a part of the [march’s] platform.”
Among the chief examples of the march’s dance with anti-Semitism is the praise and continued defenses that Mallory has showered on Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who very clearly hates Jews.
[Read more: Women’s March president defends her praise of Louis Farrakhan]
“It should not be difficult to condemn this hate speech and the person who constantly voices it,” writes Wasserman Schultz, who is herself Jewish.
“Yet, at almost every turn, Mallory has failed to clearly denounce Farrakhan. Instead, she has attended Farrakhan’s speeches and posted her support for him on social media, referring to him as the [Greatest Of All Time],” the congresswoman adds. “Just this week, she was repeatedly asked on national television to clearly condemn him, and she instead dodged the question, taking issue with the words he chose and the fact that Minister Farrakhan is male, rather than acknowledging the hurtfulness of his rhetoric toward Jews and the LGBTQ community. “
Then there’s Sarsour, who once criticized “folks who masquerade as progressives but always choose their allegiance to Israel over their commitment to democracy and free speech.”
And so on.
As the group’s leaders seem entirely uninterested in addressing their bigotry problem, Wasserman Schultz writes, the march’s supporters would do well to focus on local chapters instead.
Supporters may not have a choice. At this rate, with the main organization continuing to lose so much support, the Women’s March as a unifying body may not exist for much longer.
