From the Brownstone Institute

By  Laura Rosen Cohen

It wasn’t that long ago that America’s strongest and most important export was American culture and the global dissemination of the American Dream. From movies to music, from blue jeans to drive-in movies, and from fast food to fashion, there wasn’t a single country in the world or a single cohort of teenagers and young adults that didn’t want what America was offering.

Unfortunately, throughout the progression of the Vietnam War, American culture started to cannibalize itself. The anti-war, hippie, and protesting counterculture took the reins. American cultural institutions and artists pivoted away from patriotism and moved toward anti-Establishment and anti-Western positions for a variety of reasons, both ideological and financial.

Protest became the foundational position of a generation of artists, musicians, and thinkers. As a result, America’s most powerful civil export was completely defenestrated. The left took ownership of American culture and rebellion. And since then, the American left has adopted an increasingly aggressive and metastasizing woke ideology. The result has been the near complete ideological capture of most of American civil society.

Undeniably, there has been a near ideological capture of public education, public health administration (as evidenced by the Covid years), the legacy media, and the judiciary to name a few spheres of DEI influence. Woke ideology has arguably been the most noxious and dangerous export that America has ever sent out into the world and it didn’t seem like there was an end in sight.

But then, remarkably, in November 2024, America rolled out a blockbuster, the likes of which have never been seen before. It was the greatest comeback story in American history: The Return of President Trump. And in an instant, faster than a speeding bullet, faster than you could sing a chorus of YMCA, led by President Trump, American politics and corporate America began a slow and steady retreat from DEI policies.

These toxic notions have not only poisoned civic life in America and throughout the Western world but have also resulted in public policy decisions that have resulted in catastrophic loss of life and property. The apex of this policy disaster can clearly be seen within the raging blaze of fire in Los Angeles and in all the DEI policies that led to a Dante’s inferno in America. Los Angeles, where the Mayor was in Ghana  when disaster hit. Where there was no water in the hydrants, the infrastructure was crumbling, and where diversity was the policy priority for the LAFD and where $1 million of civil service salary buys precisely three woke hires named Kirsten, including one Kirsten who says it’s your fault if you end up in a fire, and where the Governor of California prioritized fish over humans.

Over the past several decades large swaths of corporate North America were bullied by a loud and vocal woke minority into adopting some of the most aggressive and ridiculous DEI and ESG policies on earth. Some corporate converts set their compasses to DEI like a north star and flopped spectacularly. Many, like Bud Light, are still licking their wounds from their predictable and avoidable “Go woke, go broke” fiasco  while other companies like Jaguar remained impenetrably thick-skinned and were rightly ridiculed and mocked for brand murder, dare we call it brandicide?

But now, the vibe shift is impossible to miss or ignore. In recent weeks, we have seen President Trump set his sights on DEI in the military and American corporations like Apple and Volvo starting to sing from the new hymn sheet, along with retail giants like Costco. 

And incredibly, this was just the tip of the anti-woke iceberg. In early January, following an earlier, fall visit by Mark Zuckerberg to Mar-a-Lago, Facebook announced that it would be discontinuing its third-party “fact-checkers” (i.e. “censorship”) program and cutting its DEI hiring initiatives. And now, they are dropping like flies! McDonald’s and Amazon are the latest to axe their DEI programs.

Unfortunately, the astonishing and heartbreaking scenes in Los Angeles are a direct result of abject mismanagement of the city and state and exacerbated by unqualified hires and anti-human, anti-common sense policies that should never, ever have been permitted to escape the faculty lounges, let alone leap into civic life. The woke petri dish has already created colossal havoc in every element of civil society in America and in much of the rest of the Western world. Deep reflection and immediate change are needed.

If the deep blue voters of California recognize the folly of their choices and the destruction-driven bent of their elected leaders, if they demand answers and repudiate their woke ways, perhaps there is hope. For the good of the country, and indeed the entire Western world, America’s most poisonous export must be put to pasture once and for all.

Author

Laura Rosen Cohen

Laura Rosen Cohen is a Toronto writer. Her work has been featured in The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, National Post, The Jerusalem Post, The Jerusalem Report, The Canadian Jewish News and Newsweek among others. She is a special needs parent and also a columnist and the official In House Jewish Mother of internationally best-selling author Mark Steyn at SteynOnline.com