It’s the kind of necessary conversation that takes place all the time within activist groups: someone calls out a bigoted statement or points to a pattern of bias in the organization. Now, everyone has to work to address the problem. In this case, a trash fire has been raging over an inexplicable fondness for Louis Farrakhan — a conservative, anti-semitic, and patriarchal kook — on the part of some organizers of tomorrow’s Women’s March. This sort of thing happens every day, especially in groups like the Women’s March, which are racially and ideologically diverse. Always a huge deal for the people involved, often widely tweeted, it’s almost never a news story of global import.

However, this controversy became much bigger and more public than such disputes usually do. Mike Allen of Axios reports this morning that several likely 2020 presidential candidates who attended the 2017 march will not be in attendance this year, including Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar. In New York City, there will be two different marches, with a breakaway event (the “Women’s March Alliance”) protesting the supposed anti-semitism led by Kathryn Siemionko, who has worked for JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. Organizers have denied the charges of anti-semitism, and a group of rabbis has signed a statement supporting them. But the kerfuffle — kicked off by a bewilderingly long article in Tablet, a publication backed by figures close to the rightist political establishment in Israel — has taken a toll.

Why should the global 1 percent and its media and politicians care so much about the Women’s March? And what makes this offense so uniquely intolerable? Why not simply suck up — or quietly correct — the Farrakhan association, the way left feminists undoubtedly would a fellow activist’s association with Hillary Clinton or JP Morgan?