Pride Month has returned, but in 2025 it comes more like a lamb than the lion it was only a year or two ago. For half the country, this is a step in the right direction. But the legacy media is horrified and angry. No surprise there. More interesting are their attempts to explain why Pride events are now starved for funding and why corporate enthusiasm for the rainbow flag has dimmed.

The explanation they are selling is that the Trump administration has made major corporations afraid of getting on the wrong side of the president, fearing that they may be investigated, censured, or denied federal contracts and money. There is probably some truth to that. But the media commentators seem unable to follow that line of thinking to its conclusion.

They pretend that the state pressuring the corporate world to take sides in the culture war is something that started only last January. The larger truth is that it was the political left, particularly the Obama and Biden administrations, that pioneered the campaign of state intimidation aimed at forcing public demonstrations of fealty to the state’s ideology.

On the evening of the Obergefell decision that legalized gay marriage, Obama lit up the White House with rainbow lights. The administration knew very well that the decision was one a large portion of Americans would find abhorrent. Rather than take the high road—which Michelle Obama often congratulated Democrats for doing—they decided to twist the knife and spike the football. This was a powerful message: public-facing corporations were made to understand that the government expected not just acceptance of the LGBT agenda, but enthusiastic and demonstrative support for it.

There were many other ways that Biden and Obama made clear that public opposition to the LGBT agenda may have negative consequences for businesses refusing to wave the rainbow flag or even not waving it with sufficient gusto. Yet all of this is ignored and the core takeaway from the media’s current attempts to explain the new indifference to Pride is that they apparently believed—and still believe—that the rapid expansion of corporate LGBT promotion that occurred from 2015 to 2024 was totally organic.

It is as if they actually believe there was a decision one day, in every corporate boardroom in America, to converge around the idea that they must align with LGBT advocacy and demonstrate that alignment publicly—as though the supersonic institutionalization of Pride was a genuine grassroots phenomenon. It wasn’t something conjured by the state—it was just the natural result of being on “the right side of history.”

The reality, of course, was that the avalanche of rainbows throughout June (and the other LGBT “holidays” that dot the calendar) was always a series of performative gestures made on the basis of strategic self-interest. If a large organization is truly committed to an idea, a value, or an issue, they don’t back away from it because the political winds change direction. Chik-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby remain closed on Sundays.

Still, the muted response to Pride 2025 is undeniable. This alone should be enough to make it obvious to journalists that the corporate gestures of the past few years were never authentic expressions of support or affinity.

Why does any of this matter? It’s because the blizzard of corporate advocacy for left-wing causes isn’t limited to the LGBT movement. Far-left ideology (colloquially known as “wokeness”) saturates all of public culture, from the “diversity” fetish to the disparagement of masculinity to the mockery of religious tradition. So, the fact that state power was used to astroturf public support for LGBT causes begs an important question: How much the institutionalized enthusiasm for other leftist shibboleths is an illusion?

There are many reasons for the apparent “defeat” of wokeism, and many individuals sacrificed time, money, and reputation to bring it to heel. But that defeat (which may itself be illusory) appears to have been so sudden and so thorough that it cannot be fully explained by pointing to some mystical “vibe shift.” The truth is that all of it—the unavoidable worship of every leftist cause across the public sphere—was engineered by state power.

To informed observers, this may seem an obvious insight. But the implications are important. The culture war is a war because the issues that animate it are ones that deeply divide Americans. Our government, of course, is meant to represent all Americans. But attributing the sudden collapse of the woke superstructure to a new president shows that prior to 2025 the state was actively taking sides in the culture war. The government was working to institutionalize the perspectives of Democratic elites, punishing those who challenged these perspectives, and coercing those who don’t share them.

If the Trump administration is using state power to tamp down this cultural incursion, it’s not a new phenomenon. They’re playing by the rules that the Obama and Biden administrations wrote. And after a quarter century of bullying by the left, a silent majority of Americans welcome the relief.