What happened to DEI and LGBT?

Politico reported last August:

The Republican crusade against Disney, Bud Light and climate-friendly Wall Street investing practices may be hitting its political ceiling.

Recent polls show limited enthusiasm among the public for the “anti-woke” culture war that GOP politicians have launched against corporations’ handling of environmental and social causes — including among many Republican primary voters.

The data comes as candidates who have anchored their campaigns in attacking big business — including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy — are struggling to gain significant traction against former President Donald Trump, who leads the field by a wide margin in the polls.

GOP pollsters say the recent data shows that many voters on the right, in line with the traditional conservative ideology, don’t want government meddling in business.

(Anchorman chuckle.) Oh those foolish MAGAts.

That was then. This is now. Politico reported:

These conservative attacks on DEI have sent a chill across the tech sector. University science and engineering programs have curtailed race-based admissions and scholarships after last year’s Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action. Tech companies like Meta and Google have rolled back corporate DEI efforts. And venture capital investments in black-owned startups have dropped.

The hostile political environment is also posing new hurdles for organizations that train young women and people of color for tech careers. One cautionary tale: Last month, Girls in Tech closed its doors after 17 years in operation, citing a lack of funding from tech firms that have suffered financial setbacks and cut back on DEI efforts.

What changed in that one year? Dylan Mulvaney’s destruction of Bud Light was already in full swing when that first story appeared.

Likely Politico was too blind by its bias to see the Bud Light fiasco for what it was: a return to sanity.

Media devotion to the LGBT and DEI causes is unwavering. Black is always uppercased now while white remains lower cased in news stories. Men in drag are called she and confused children who cannot handle puberty are called they or whatever the heck they want as a pronoun.

Minority rights have become minority orders.

In a slobbering piece about Mister Mulvaney, Forbes let it slip that the actor raked in $2 million last year from product endorsements. Bud Light killed that grift.

Forbes said that he’s “more picky than ever when choosing brands to work with and will pass quickly on opportunities she doesn’t feel are truly supportive.”

Sure, he’s the one turning them down.

Axios had a different take on it, reporting, “Diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, was the hot thing in corporate America a few years ago. Now: not so much.”

Those three magic words sprung up in corporate earnings reports in the wake of liberals burning urban neighborhoods following George Floyd’s overdose death while in police custody. According to a chart by Axios, mentions were made by top 500 companies in more than 300 quarterly earnings reports.

Four years later, that dropped to 74.

Johnny Taylor, president of the Society for Human Resource Management told Axios, “The backlash is real. And I mean, in ways that I’ve actually never seen it before. CEOs are literally putting the brakes on this DE&I work that was running strong.”

Bloomberg reported, “Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has made a surprising change to its Possibilities Summit for Black college students: It’s opened the program to White students.”

Oh no. Inclusion is including white guys who ain’t gay or wearing dresses.

Mulvaney did two things. The most obvious was show that conservative boycotts work. But he also tethered DEI to LGBT, which undercut the argument that conservative opposition was straight-out racism.

On top of that, the tranny movement is killing LGBT because so many of the men in drag really, really hate women. Elitists side with these men. In the Olympics you had two men beating up women in boxing matches to claim a gold medal.

Riley Gaines and JK Rowling have become conservative heroines by standing up for women, a status that likely amuses the latter who is extremely liberal. She just doesn’t want women to be replaced by men. She is part of an LGB without the T movement.

The feeling is mutual as trannies dismiss real women as TERFs — a misogynist acronym for feminists who actually don’t have a Y chromosome.

The turmoil dampened Gay Pride Month this year.

CBS complained:

55 years after a raid on New York City's Stonewall Inn sparked riots that catalyzed the gay liberation movement and became a cornerstone of modern LGBTQ advocacy, Pride celebrations are bigger and bolder than ever. Meant to commemorate the Stonewall uprising each June, Pride Month in many parts of the world has grown into a four-week extravaganza marked by parades, parties, concerts and an array of cultural events that pay homage to its roots in free expression and identity.

Corporations have cashed in on the festivities, especially since the U.S. legalized marriage equality in 2015.

But this year, public-facing Pride campaigns at some of the world's largest brands were quieter than usual. At other companies that previously had them, they were completely absent. Fewer public campaigns mean less visibility, which LGBTQ advocates and consumers in the community say can be dangerous in myriad ways.

Is there a straight community? Are there straight advocates? Straight consumers?

The Donald Trump factor is at work in two ways. Those three justices he appointed and a Republican Senate confirmed were unafraid to uphold the 14th Amendment in the Students v. Harvard case which ended affirmative action in college admissions. This ended 50 years of systemic racism against Asians.

Also, Trump’s fearless defiance of the media and the federal government encourages others to stand up and be counted. I doubt Elon Musk would have bothered buying Twitter if Jeb Bush were the 2016 Republican nominee as the Davos-DC crowd had scripted it.

And then there is the Robby Starbuck factor. He’s exposing woke companies to consumers who were asleep at the wheel. Once exposed, the cockroach CEOs scurry for cover.

CNN tried to downplay his success:

Starbuck is both riding a wave of right-wing hostility to DEI programs and corporate advocacy on issues like climate change and LGBTQ rights and advancing the opposition himself. He has channeled energy on the right to target specific brands popular with politically conservative customers — Harley-Davidson, Tractor Supply Co. and John Deere — and relentlessly drawn attention online to their past publicly-stated policies. Starbuck has also claimed credit for Brown-Forman and Lowe’s internal announcements in recent weeks to scale back some of their diversity and inclusion programs.

Starbuck has selected brands whose programs on some of these issues were only implemented in recent years and may be less likely to resist pressure. The full impact of his activism is not entirely clear, but companies are rethinking their programs amid a changing political environment and online pressure.

Starbuck is using the left’s tactics and following Saul Alinsky’s No. 1 rule for radicals: “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”

The Bud Light boycott shook up the woke-friendly companies.

I cannot pin the change in attitude toward LGBT and DEI on any one factor but I can enjoy the fact that sanity is returning because it gives me hope for this crummy century.

Don’t let the Never Trump cruise ship celebrities ever tell you again that conservatives cannot win on social issues. We can. We are.