Pride Month came and went this year, a wilted version of the weeks-long rager activists are so used to enjoying. But as dejected as the Left must be over the cultural and corporate retreat from their cause, you can’t blame them for hoping that this tsunami of grassroots change is temporary. Or did everyday Americans, who went from feeling powerless to bringing the biggest brands to their knees, actually accomplish the impossible — reverse-engineering the woke for good? The answer, experts say, is somewhere in the middle.

One reason for that, they’ll tell you, is how we got here. Look, Jerry Bowyer, CEO of Bowyer Research and the Head of Corporate Engagement for ProsprAligned, is quick to remind people, “The other side showed up for 30 years, and conservatives basically were a cheap, cheap date for management.” We assumed, he told the audience at a recent Heritage Foundation event, that businesses were automatically on our side. “And we didn’t show up, and then things got out of whack.”

None of this happened overnight, Bowyer insisted. The Left is savvy. They’re “extremely good at using the administrative state and hacking the rules in secret in sort of technical ways in order to accomplish social change … these kind of extremist, political agenda items.” For three decades, they flew under the radar in their long march through the institutions. It was genius, the Manhattan Institute’s James Copeland chimed in. Invading America’s companies and education system was one way they could “get things without going through our bicameral Congress and having to convince the president and get a broad national consensus…” Instead, he explained, “You’ve got these small teams of engagement managers and asset management companies leaning in on corporate America. And for a while there, from about 2017 to 2022, they were leaning in in bad ways.”

But Americans woke up spectacularly in 2023, thanks to six cans of beer. Their frustration with these ultra-radical agendas had been boiling under the surface since the first Trump administration and on into 2020, when businesses started wading into the Georgia election law debate. Ultimately, though, it was Anheuser-Busch that broke the dam with their spectacularly stupid partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, a trans-identifying “influencer” who only ended up influencing Bud Light’s bottom line by billions of dollars — kick-starting a nationwide backlash that hasn’t stopped to this day.

Now, dozens of corporate concessions, stock losses, and apologies later from the likes of Target, Disney, Rip Curl, Doritos, John Deere, Tractor Supply Co., Ford, Coors Light, Jack Daniels, Harley Davidson, Walmart, and others, the script has flipped in a way that most executive boardrooms never saw coming. So is ESG, DEI, and general LGBT activism on the run or just evolving and rebranding?

Some, like Copeland, believe it’s in retreat — but “hibernating. It’s going to return. A lot of [the current success is] due to [the Trump] administration,” he believes. “A lot of it is due to the Left overplaying its hand. A lot of that is due to the efforts of people like [Jerry Bowyer who] are actively pushing in the other direction…”

Bowyer himself was quick to say that no matter what happens, the Left will never have the luxury of taking advantage of America again. “I don’t think we’re ever going back, because we’re awake now,” he underscored. “We just slept through the takeover of corporate America by shareholder activists who basically harassed and cajoled them to take one side in a culture war based on the idea that the future inevitability will be wokeism. And they found out that there’s a snapback,” he said. “We didn’t know what was going on. Now we know [and] we’re never going to forget. We know the rules. We’ve got our own institutions [to push back] now. [Conservatives] are not going to forget and say, ‘We’re not going to fight this anymore.’ The red states are awake. They’re not going to say, ‘Oh, it’s okay now. We passed a couple of laws.’ They’re going to keep on top of it. Careers are being built on fighting ESG. You’re seeing state auditors become state treasurers [and then] become members of Congress. So [now], that’s a guarded space. We’re not going to go back.”

In his mind, the woke wars are going to be like the rest of American politics, “going back and forth.” But, Bowyer reiterated, “We have one huge advantage: our ideas are sane.” So, like Capitol Hill and statehouses all over the nation, this will be “just another contested space in American life. … And I’m content with that,” he shrugged. “… If one side goes too far, then the people kind of go in the other direction.”

And yet, one area where conservatives have an enormous opportunity is local legislation. “The blue states have been voting in accordance with their ideology — [and] the red states have [also been] voting in accordance with the blue states’ ideology.” But Bowyer sees red states “every day waking up.” Even so, of the 26 red or purple states, he estimates there are “maybe five or six that are on top of this. So the possibility [for gains] is huge. This is really early innings for us. So when we get to that 50/50 over the next five years, there [are] a lot of wins on the way.”

In other words, now isn’t the time to let up on the gas pedal, Stefan Padfield urged on The Washington Stand’s “Outstanding” podcast. In a lot of these cases, decisions about Bud Light cans or trans benefits for children or Pride sponsorships weren’t necessarily made with the CEOs’ blessing or even knowledge. “Higher up the food chain in terms of the executive offices and so on, I think a lot of them don’t know. They basically just hand [their policies] off to the insurance provider [or HR director]. Now somewhere, someone is making an express decision to include this [wokeness], and I think it’s going to take a little more work to figure out exactly where to pinpoint the pressure and where this is happening. But I do think it is in many cases, [this was not] not front of mind with the board of directors, with the CEO.” Now, in one of the most significant wins for Americans, it is.

Obviously, Padfield notes, there will always be “the true believers” behind brands, the activists “who actually don’t care if they burn down the business, as long as they can go home at night and look in the mirror and say, ‘I’ve been advancing the cause.’ The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution,” he said. “But then you also have the opportunists, you have the useful idiots, you have the cowards, right? And all of those basically have played a role.”

Bowyer is asked all the time how companies can resist the Left, and his message is simple: “grow a spine, and we’ll have your back. That’s it.” He talked about watching BlackRock’s Larry Fink on Fox this summer, who conceded that “the pendulum” had swung too far to the Left. “I was glad to see him acknowledge that,” Bowyer said. “[But] … the problem is that we’re thinking of it as a pendulum. Fiduciary obligation,” or stewardship, “is a sacred obligation enshrined in thousands of years of law. It’s in the Constitution. It’s in the Declaration of Independence. It’s in the Torah. It’s in the New Testament. It is not negotiable. It comes from the biblical tradition. It is not just a moral. It’s, in my opinion, a theological obligation, basically. Board members, you’ve got one job. That’s it.”

And Americans — conservatives specifically — who have businesses’ backs when they roll back some of this lunacy will start experiencing even more success. “What I find is when we show up [is] they are often willing to stand up … because they really [got into] business to do business. And this stuff is a distraction. And we help them [by saying], ‘Okay, let’s get the distraction out of the way and go.’”

In the meantime, the question we should be asking isn’t whether we’re winning or losing. It’s: are we engaged? Are we using our voices and platforms and dollars to make a difference? There’s always this temptation, Stefan admits, to “oversell how much success we’ve had. ‘Oh, Trump got elected. DEI is over. ESG is over.’ Well, that’s not the case. On the other hand, we can get black-pilled, where we wake up and every day it just seems like these companies [are] … just lying low until the next opportunity. And so, I think both of those things we want to avoid. We want to look for the hope, right?” And one of the biggest takeaways of the last three years is how strong and impactful our movement can be. “[T]hese companies have to take us seriously, [because] if they go too far, we can literally destroy shareholder value. … All of this,” he stresses, “we can view through the lens of hopefulness. We have this power, and we can be effective.”