It seems 2025 is getting off to a great start in terms of corporations moving away from the radical leftist infection they've been plagued by for so long.
As my friend and colleague Joe Cunningham wrote, McDonald's recently announced that it's ditching its DEI policies and moving toward a more merit-based way of doing business. This is one of many in a long line of corporations that have been pressured with exposure from conservative activist and filmmaker Robby Starbuck. While McDonald's isn't the first corporation to do this, it's definitely the largest.
(READ: McDonalds Becomes Latest Corporation to Walk Away From Woke)
In Silicon Valley, we also have Mark Zuckerberg making announcements that Meta's platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, will be moving toward a more X-like approach to content. Censorship will be greatly reduced, the third party fact-checkers have been let go, and a community notes system is going to be implemented.
This is all really great news, but I'm definitely going to look a gift horse in the mouth here. Very few corporations, if any, are driven by principle. Any who say they are literally trying to sell you something.
Let's look at the facts.
Corporate America has taken a severe beating over the past couple of years, and a lot of it has been the end result of ESG compliance and radical leftist alignment. Thanks to "wokeness," corporations have lost billions of dollars, valuable employees, and have welcomed in an erosion of product quality. It doesn't matter what the business or corporation did, it suffered. Arts, entertainment, airplanes, food service, etc., it all took a dive.
This was best highlighted by Bud Light, a company that hitherto integrated itself into blue collar customer bases and sporting events, but decided to put a transgender activist on one of its cans and soon found that it was the straw that broke the camel's back. What resulted was a boycott that cost the company, not just billions of dollars, but millions of customers.
And other corporations were watching. That's why when Starbuck sent them letters saying he was going to expose their DEI, ESG, woke-infused agendas, they were all too ready to announce they were stepping away from it all very publicly.
The thing that needs to be understood is that, while wokeness affected the bottom line of corporations, it affected the American people personally. They lost jobs, watched as things they loved were abused and perverted, and endured preaching and finger-wagging they never asked for. On a political level, the people are still enduring laws and regulations that have driven our economy into the dirt and made our streets more dangerous.
This is terrible for PR, as the Western world has, more or less, soured on this politically infused way of doing business. It's bad for business, and so logically, it's better to step away from this and move back toward what was working before. And it's a great time to do this, too, since the people have unequivocally made it clear via Donald Trump's election that they're done with whatever the left was serving up.
So is the age of woke dead?
Yes... well, this one is.
The people hated this age of wokeness so much that it caused the pendulum to swing hard to the other side, but at some point, it will swing back the other way. How hard is something no one can predict at this point, but the law of undulation is absolute. This age of un-wokeness will end as well, and leftism will creep back in. At that point, I sincerely doubt that these corporations stepping away from all the things that hurt them will stand on principle and resist the push to adopt more leftist ideals. They will do what they believe will make them money.
In the end, money is all a corporation cares about. It doesn't care about diversity, equity, or inclusion. It only cared about what that could help them do in terms of getting more green to stay in the black. Even now, it doesn't care about moving away from all that because they found out it was morally wrong. They're doing it in hopes it will repair PR with you so that you'll go back to buying their product.
So, enjoy this age of non-wokeness while we have it. Leftism will creep back in under a different name, and with different concerns and causes, and the cycle will begin again. How far it goes this time is anyone's guess, but it will happen.
