President Donald Trump's crusade against DEI advocacy and “woke” social philosophy is not only rhetorical — it’s reshaping our institutional culture.

This reversal follows years of aggressive momentum in the opposite direction. Diversity officers flooded campuses and corporate offices, enforcing a rigid ideological orthodoxy. Student activists didn’t just protest disfavored speakers; they blocked them from speaking altogether. Meanwhile, employees at major media outlets and tech companies pressured their bosses to align with their own political demands, often through coordinated campaigns of public shaming and internal revolt.

If we take the time to understand history, we can prepare ourselves for some highly potent threats.

In recent months, the DEI juggernaut has improbably slowed and nearly ground to a halt. Various organizations have announced changes in policies or reductions in the number of positions devoted to woke initiatives.

Most notable, perhaps, was Meta's announcement that it would stop throttling political content and engaging in censorious fact-checking practices.

The reversal is viscerally shocking because the major platforms had become comfortable using censorship tactics, silencing anyone who dared to deviate from the approved narrative — even banning Trump.

Why the sudden change?

One explanation for the rapid change is that Trump's decisive victory in the 2024 presidential election gave permission to various elites to discern a new consensus in the broader society.

I believe there is something more significant than some kind of radar telling executives that the woke movement somehow overreached. Certainly, it is the case that social movements go too far and have to consolidate their gains before further advance. But there is something different here that everyone should consider.

The great management thinker Peter Drucker’s first book was called “The End of Economic Man.” One of the key insights from his book was in recognizing similarities between fascist and communist approaches to controlling a society. Both evolved single-party structures that ran parallel to already existing government and corporate (even if state-owned) institutions. That means that while a police force or factory or school would have a hierarchy of leadership, there would be another chain of authority that was political accompanying it. The parallel party authority had the responsibility of ensuring that the prerogatives of policing or producing or educating never won out over the political imperatives.

Whether we are talking about Nazis or Soviet communists, the same dynamic was operative.

Anyone aware of those powerful forces and realities that existed in Germany, Russia, and in other places should be able to readily see that the various philosophies (race, gender, anti-Israel, climate, etc.) uniting under the banner of woke have been cohering into a similar kind of movement in the United States. With gathering momentum, they constructed parallel powers within American institutions.

Those wielding the woke authority have been pushing hard to make their priorities the strongest and most undeniable in any organization. It was the same for Nazi or communist ideology. This is true even in some American churches where Black Lives Matter and Pride flags often seem to have displaced the cross and the Bible almost entirely.

This argument doesn’t rely on comparisons to Nazis or totalitarians for shock value. I’m not trying to score an easy win through historical name-calling. Instead, I offer a straightforward observation: Powerful movements in the 20th century gained influence by capturing institutions. Today, we’re witnessing similar strategies from modern social movements.

If we want to avoid building a society where ideological activists dictate how every institution operates, we must stop enabling their rise and expansion.

Thanks, Elon

Some American elites — perhaps most notably Elon Musk, who took real social and professional risks — seem to have recognized the threat. Whether they act out of principle, instinct, or self-preservation, they’ve begun to push back.

This doesn’t mean CEOs will start waging open war against the woke movement. But we are seeing a quiet deflation. The cultural balloon has started to lose air. Enough people remember the mistakes of the last century to help steer us away from the edge of the woke cliff.

Former Secretary of State George Shultz once remarked of the political battle of ideas and initiatives, “It’s never over.” That’s true. Even if the woke alliance suffers setbacks, there is little doubt that some other event or some other charismatic figure will manage to infuse life into something earlier believed to be moribund.

But the good thing is that if we take the time to understand history, we can prepare ourselves for some highly potent threats because we know what human beings have done before and can perhaps inoculate ourselves against intellectual viruses with particularly destructive impact.