The only time I ever agreed with MSNBC’s Joy Reid was when she declared the Left victorious in the culture wars following the hyper-woke Grammy Awards on CBS in February 2023.
“Culture wars are over, and the Left won, like total defeat,” she declared on her newscast the following evening. “Despite the almost hysterical war the Right is waging to take the culture back to the John Wayne era, they’re not just losing. They literally cannot win. Cultural progression is relentless. Once people get a taste of modernity, they almost never go back willingly.”
And who could blame her for the burst of hubris? After all, singer Sam Smith’s infamous staging of a satanic ritual at the Grammys, brought to you by Pfizer, sure felt like a cultural sea change.
What’s more, it all felt somehow normal. Shocking, yes. But predictable — even conventional. Smith strutting in a red dress and dog collar with masked dancers brandishing whips wasn’t an aberration. It was who we had become.
Or so it seemed.
Over the preceding 21 months, the cultural ground shifted quietly beneath the nation’s feet. The cultural phenomenon commonly referred to as “wokeness,” which had captured every major non-religious institution in America (and some religious ones, too), began to lose its grip on the public imagination and, by extension, on power. Now, it appears on the verge of extinction.
The national “vibe shift” in the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s decisive electoral victory appears to be sweeping through the cultural institutions captured by progressivism.
In academia, where the tenets of “wokeness” had been adopted and enforced explicitly over the previous decade through diversity, equity, and inclusion practices, a discernible correction is underway. The University of Michigan, which constructed the nation’s leading DEI bureaucracy by pouring a quarter of a billion dollars into its DEI initiative since 2016, announced last week that it would no longer require faculty applicants to issue “diversity statements” as a part of the application process.
Following a report by the New York Times that found the University of Michigan had become less “inclusive” in the previous decade despite hiring a gobsmacking 241 workers in DEI-related offices, the university dropped the requirement because of its “potential to limit freedom of expression and diversity of thought on campus.”
It would have been difficult for the university to detonate its DEI program more thoroughly than by citing “freedom of expression and diversity of thought on campus” as the cause behind its decision. Free speech and viewpoint diversity are fundamentally incompatible with the tenets of DEI, which demands fealty in the form of things such as “diversity statements” to maintain power.
For prospective students and employees in the past decade, it has been impossible even to get a foot in the door at places such as the University of Michigan without pledging loyalty to the woke revolution. But that era is now over.
The University of Michigan isn’t alone, either. In the past year, the public university systems in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Missouri have cut their diversity statement requirement, as have the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
How dead is the DEI revolution? Consider the crickets emanating from these campuses in the wake of these decisions. Had you told me even a year ago that such a move wouldn’t spark protests and even riots, I wouldn’t have believed you. But the death of DEI has been met with a shrug from students and faculty alike.
If the academy was the brain behind the woke cultural revolution, the legacy news media were the mouthpiece. And they, too, are facing a reckoning for their embrace of woke programming.
At the Los Angeles Times, which had published pieces that accused a black Republican candidate of being “the black face of white supremacy” and mocked the deaths of people who refused to take the COVID-19 vaccine, a new editorial board is being assembled to fit the times. They’ve even brought on famed Democrat-slayer Scott Jennings to help balance the scales.
“When the President has won the vote of the majority of Americans then ALL voices must be heard,” wrote Patrick Soon-Shiong, the paper’s owner, following Trump’s reelection. “I will work towards making our paper and media fair and balanced so that all voices are heard and we can respectfully exchange every American’s view, from left to right to the center.”
Yes, you read that correctly: The owner of the Los Angeles Times just used Fox News’s famous slogan as its new mission statement.
Reid’s own MSNBC has seen its ratings collapse following the election. And following the announcement of a “corporate reorganization” that will decouple the cable network from NBC News, the future of the network appears to be in jeopardy.
CNN, too, appears headed toward extinction. Last week, the cable network at the heart of numerous culture war stories of the past decade, including the Covington Catholic controversy and the Jussie Smollett race hoax, saw its ratings overtaken by the Food Network and the History Channel.
Hollywood, which has served as the center for woke conditioning over the previous decade, has also seen its cultural clout severely diminished.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign tapped Hollywood’s mega stars to rally the Democratic base. Taylor Swift, for example, endorsed Harris following the presidential debate, which was supposed to change the game. Beyoncé spoke at an abortion-rights rally in Texas that was supposed to rally women. Jennifer Lopez, mustering every ounce of her acting ability, wept about the possibility of mass deportations. Katy Perry performed at a Harris rally on the eve of the election.
All of these efforts proved meaningless, and there has been a debate among Democrats about whether celebrity endorsements should even be emphasized.
It’s difficult to recall a time when the entertainment industry had less political clout than it does now. In a rare blink of self-awareness for a liberal celebrity, comedian Sarah Silverman recently vowed to become less political because “no one wants to hear from celebrities right now.”
But what really capped the comeback for conservatives in the culture war was the way Trump won. According to the legacy media, academia, and Hollywood, the Trump-led GOP was supposed to stand for the forces of oppression and white supremacy — this is how the Left framed this battle of the culture war for the past decade. Meanwhile, the Democrats, led by a vibrant young black woman, were supposed to stand for the oppressed.
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But Trump’s stunning improvements with the minority and youth vote detonated this theory of the case from the inside. Following these results, it is impossible to take this narrative seriously. And now, liberals will have to start from scratch with their battle plans for the next phase in the culture war.
At this point, it seems fair to say, with a tip of the cap to Reid, that this battle of the culture war is over, and the Right won. Despite the almost hysterical war the Left is waging to take the culture to the Beyoncé era, they’re not just losing — they literally cannot win.
Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner and a staff writer for the National Catholic Register.