I don't think this is true - my sense is that 10-20 years ago, claiming "in the future, the FSF will destroy itself because RMS waded into a controversy he didn't know how to back down from" would have gotten responses of "oh, yes, of course," and at least as far back as Gamergate, "the FSF will get caught up in the broader 'culture war'" would have sounded totally plausible too. (I'm not sure "culture war" is exactly the term I want to use, but it serves the right denotational purpose here.)
Relevantly, "is RMS subject to the LibrePlanet code of conduct" seems like a thing that also touches on the "culture war" - and that was an issue in 2017. https://announce.asheesh.org/2018/12/libreplanet-speakers-as...
Oh, and people had accused free software of being socialist/communist as far back as the '90s. The whole reason the "open source" movement got started was to rebrand free software in a corporate-friendly way.
This is an excellent way to view recent events. My compliments to the author!
> I still think the FSF is a valuable institution worth helping and saving
Worth saving, as is heading towards implosion and it need to be saved.
If you told members of the FSF Board of Directors that FSF would destroy itself over a political dispute over a question like "was metoo a media frenzy", it would had sounded silly. If I would had said after the 2016 election that FSF would need to take a side, left or right, no one would even consider it. FSF a year ago would never had said if they are pro-feminism, pro-MRA, pro-socialism or pro-liberalism. The closest to a political affiliation that FSF had done in the past has been their occasionally aligning with the goals of the natural allies EFF and ACLU, but even there it has only been in technical topics such as patents, copyright, forced backdoors, and crippling of software. To my knowledge FSF has never commented on non-technical ACLU work.
One thing I completely disagree with the above quotes however is the implication that he equally advocated his political views on sex as with free software. I have been to a couple of his talks and seen several on video, and sex is not a topic he mentioned. His talks are often transcripted and put online so I am open to be proven wrong, but here is a few examples: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-digital-society.html, https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-versus-community.ht..., https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/danger-of-software-patents.ht...