The other day, Robert P. George, one of the world’s foremost intellectuals (and a conservative at that), reposted an old thread on Twitter/X, specifically to note how dramatically the culture has shifted in just four years. His original thread was about Dr. Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago, who, in October 2021, was disinvited from presenting a prestigious lecture at MIT because he had previously questioned the merits of DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. As Professor George wrote at the time, the woke “mob” successfully silenced a brilliant scientist, preventing him from speaking on the subject of his expertise (“climates of extrasolar planets”) because he held completely unrelated political beliefs that were, nevertheless, deemed unacceptable by the leftist intellectual elites. That, George pointed out in his update, was “when we were hitting peak Woke,” but mercifully, “there really has been a vibe shift” since those dark days.

In response to Professor George’s post and his assertion that the days of “peak woke” are behind us and that the broader culture has returned to something more akin to sanity, I’d like to do a couple of things. First, I’d like to confirm that he is right. I imagine that neither he nor you, gentle reader, really needs me to do this. The signs are all around us, after all, and are fairly obvious.

Last week, for example, the Vice President of the United States appeared at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference and told the crowd that DEI is over and done with, that the American people have had enough of it. As if to prove his point, Vice President Vance went on to say that “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.” All the usual suspects immediately decried Vance for his “coarseness” and insisted that they had no idea what he was even talking about. “When,” they asked, almost in unison, “has any American ever had to apologize for being white?” And while it is possible to think both that the vice president was, perhaps, more inflammatory than was necessary and that his critics were obviously and inarguably disingenuous in their response, the most important and noteworthy thing here is that such disingenuousness was the most potent retort they could muster. Four years ago, after such a comment, Vance (and his boss) would likely have spent the next several days, weeks, and months fighting charges that he was a racist or a “white supremacist.” By extension, his future political prospects would have been severely damaged. He would, almost certainly, have been effectively “cancelled” over a comment that, while provocative, was hardly racist. As it is, less than seven days later, the entire episode is nearly forgotten. By next week, no one, save the most ardent Trump/Vance haters, will even remember he said anything, much less that he intentionally confronted the woke mob and effectively poked it right in its collective eye.

Professor George wisely tempers his report of woke’s demise by stating that “Things are certainly not all fine and dandy,” and I agree with that as well. Woke is not merely a fad or a trend or an intellectual curiosity. It is the current manifestation of a century’s worth of cultural revolution initiated by the post-World War I Marxist revisionists, who sought to upend the bourgeois economic system by first upending its “cultural hegemony.” Defeating it will require many years and decades of concerted and continuous effort. Still, we, as a civilization, have made considerable progress over a very short time, and that is worth acknowledging.

And to that end, the second thing I’d like to do in response to Professor George’s tweet is to say, “You’re welcome.”

Now, to be clear, when I say that, I don’t mean to imply that I, personally, saved the world from woke and am owed a giant debt of gratitude. Obviously, that’s not the case. That said, I think it’s vital to understand and to acknowledge that the most effective and compelling aspects of the pushback against woke ideology and its near-stranglehold on our society have rather obscure and largely overlooked origins.

In 2019, Justin Danhof, who is now a senior policy advisor in the Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration, was the director of the Free Enterprise Project and the senior counsel at the National Center for Public Policy Research. As such, he was the lone full-time shareholder activist fighting back against the left-wing politicization of capital markets known as ESG—Environmental, Social, and Governance investing. Danhof and a tiny group of others, namely James Copland at the Manhattan Institute, were aware of the left’s efforts to abuse capital markets by forcing corporations to enact policy measures that were “necessary” for the “common good” but too unpopular to win political support.

That summer, I put Danhof on a call with my clients—mostly large institutional investors—and had him explain how this benign-sounding investment technique was being used to undermine the electoral system and push corporations to favor ill-defined “stakeholders” over shareholders. Many of those institutional investors—some who had been in the business for decades—were shocked. They knew that ESG was a rising trend in their world, but they didn’t understand all of the implications.

After that call, Danhof and I formulated both a theory of the stakeholder/ESG attack on business and capital markets and a strategy to respond to it. As we understood it, the Marxist revisionists (noted above) had been exceptionally effective in their effort to undermine the existing culture by taking over the institutions of cultural transmission: education, the news media, the entertainment industry, and even mainstream religion. The only notable institution that remained uncaptured was business. And ESG represented the left’s flagship effort to change that.

A few months later, at a large conservative gathering, another friend—a very kind, very astute, and very well-connected non-profit CEO—put Danhof and me in a small conference room with representatives of a large funding organization and a few think tanks and let us make our case. Of course, when I write “us,” I mean “Justin,” who utilized his knowledge, experience, and rhetorical skills to convince the broader conservative movement that this fight was one in which it needed to be involved.

That day, I mostly just watched Danhof’s tour de force presentation. My contribution to the cause came a few months later, when the inimitable Roger Kimball and Encounter Books published my book-length effort to raise awareness of the issue and its importance. The Dictatorship of Woke Capital became the tip of the spear in the pushback against the politicization of business and markets, as well as one of The Wall Street Journal’s Top 5 books of the year, “an exceptionally useful presentation of the intellectual origins and present-day lunacies of woke capitalism.”

By the spring of 2021, the conservative movement was fully engaged, as were many in academia and in capital markets themselves. Fittingly, the movement saw this as a political fight, but one with non-political goals, the ultimate of which was to purge politics from business and to push it “back to neutral.”

Scott Shepard and Stefan Padfield, Danhof’s successive successors at the Free Enterprise Project, continued and expanded his work. Andy Olivastro, now the Chief Advancement Officer at The Heritage Foundation, brought his organization into the fight. Allen Mendenhall, the brilliant polymath who has since joined Olivastro at Heritage, became deeply involved in the academic study of the subject. Will Hild at Consumers Research and Richard Morrison at the Competitive Enterprise Institute added their efforts and expertise. Jerry Bowyer, the CEO of Bowyer Research and a longtime market analyst, devised ways for his operation and its clients to advocate for shareholder-friendly alternatives to ESG. Derek Kreifels, then the Director of the State Financial Officers Foundation, brought state treasurers and auditors into the discussion, alerting them to the risks that ESG poses to state pensions and pensioners. Andy Puzder, the longtime conservative legal expert, former CEO of CKE Restaurants, and current U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, brought his towering intellect to the fight, as did National Review’s erudite financial editor, Andrew Stuttaford. Russ Greene—currently the prophet of rebellion against Total Boomer Luxury Communism—adopted the cause and harnessed his talents to challenge the libertarian consensus that ESG was just normal market operation.

In short, by the time Vivek Ramaswamy published his Woke Inc. in August 2021, generating massive public awareness of the ESG issue, the conservative movement was already working diligently to undermine the “investment strategy” and the DEI it engendered.

Countless others whom I have not named here—either because of my forgetfulness/negligence or because they would prefer to remain anonymous—joined the effort to undermine and undo “woke” in business and markets. And while that effort is far from finished, it is far more advanced than any of us could have imagined five short years ago.

Moreover, I firmly believe that this effort—based on the idea that the long march back through the institutions had to begin with the one institution not yet fully captured—paved the way for the rest of the de-wokification effort.

A massive vibe shift, indeed.