“There are certain social principles in human nature, from which we may draw the most solid conclusions with respect to the conduct of individuals and of communities.” —Alexander Hamilton (1788)

Over the last three years, there have been downward trends in corporate support for leftist woke agendas and efforts to identify with progressives and social justice activists. Hit hardest are corporate campaigns promoting gender confusion and diversity, equity, and inclusion agendas. Those declines started in the Joe Biden years and have accelerated under Donald Trump.

Community and corporate support for so-called “Pride Month” celebrations has been trending downward for several years, driven in part by the Demos’ ever more deviant transnormalcy agenda — especially promoting the Demo/LGBT advocacy for so-called “gender-affirming” care for children, which is code for “gender mutilation” of children.

As our managing editor Nate Jackson concluded during last year’s Pride Month: “Maybe it’s a reaction to the overreach of leftist culture warriors foisting ‘pride’ on everyone through increasingly lewd public displays, often billed as ostensibly ‘family friendly.’ Maybe it’s simply that more people are figuring out that Pride Month is gross.”

And the question now, especially given the high-profile increase in mass violence perpetrated by those suffering from gender-disorientation pathology, is this: Will the gender cult implode?

There was more evidence of the cultural shift this week in the latest national analysis indicating that high schoolers are much less likely to identify as homosexual or bisexual than they were over the last five years. The decline is most evident among teenage girls, as the share of ninth graders expressing gender identity issues dropped from 30% in 2021 to 17% this past year. While the decline among older high schoolers has been slower, the declines are across the board.

The reasons for the decline have yet to be determined, but it is good news for the mental health of young people.

And there is good culture news beyond high school.

There is a rising trend at colleges and universities to restore civility on campus, and students from coast to coast are being drawn to those institutions. That trend includes the selection of commencement speakers with messages promoting family and faith at major universities.

Of course, that has not stopped the cancel culture crowd from going after even left-leaning individuals who have demonstrated the courage to stand alone, and who have dared speak out against leftist woke orthodoxy.

The Rainbow Mafia is still after famed author J.K. Rowling, who has become one of the leading voices on the planet defending the rights of women against men who pretend to be women. Of the whole sordid so-called “transgender” movement and the arguments their protagonists make, she declared: “‘What a woman means has changed over time’ makes as little sense as ‘what the sky means has changed over time.’ No amount of fashionable jargon, pseudo-science or religious belief will alter the nature of women or the sky. You are not God. Reality exists independently of you.”

The next logical step for Rowling, and for all people and organizations subjected to cancel-culture suppression by social media platforms and other institutions, is to move to the front lines defending freedom of speech.

The Patriot Post has been subjected to massive social media suppression since 2021, and that suppression is still thriving.

Since our inception 30 years ago, we have closely tracked political and cultural trends for our readers, and the latest cultural trends are not anomalies.

Sometimes, corporations under good leadership respond to those trends; other times, they learn the hard way that they are out of sync with their customers.

Retailer Target and Anheuser-Busch’s Bud Light beer brand suffered substantial losses because of their woke virtue-signaling pandering.

And recall a year ago how Cracker Barrel’s elitist CEO thought she was smarter than the marketplace, but quickly found out she was not, resulting in a desperate attempt by the restaurant chain to delete its “Pride” and “DEI” promotions and restore its family-friendly corporate image.

That brings me to this week’s big loser: a corporation so entrenched in its woke agenda that it has lost $215 BILLION in market capitalization and is only now struggling to right its cultural course.

I’m talking about Nike, of course — the once-iconic American brand headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, which was at one time the world’s largest athletic footwear and apparel manufacturer and distributor. Its “swoosh” logo is recognized worldwide, including on the Nike Air Max shoes worn by the DC pipe bomber, which helped the FBI track him down.

Despite being one of the most successful and recognizable brands anywhere, the company’s stock has plunged more than 80% from $179 five years ago to $35 this week — a collapse that caused the company to be booted off the S&P 100 list after nearly 20 years. (Full disclosure: I have never owned anything in my life with a Nike logo on it, even during my years playing college sports.)

Fox News’s Kayleigh McEnany asked the key question last weekend: “Where did things go wrong?”

Well, Nike’s marketing clown show commenced in 2018, when it made a degenerate NFL has-been, Colin Kaepernick — he of the disgraceful protests against our national anthem — the new face of its once-popular “Just Do It” ad campaign.

Maybe it was in 2019, when the company tried to offset its Kaepernick blunder by launching its Betsy Ross Flag sneaker — and then withdrawing it after Kaepernick complained. Of that decision, commentator Jonah Goldberg noted: “Nike is doing it wrong. I don’t mean the shoemaking. ... No, Nike is doing it wrong because it managed to do something that all the neo-Nazis, Klansmen, alt-righters and other denizens of the lowest coprophagic phylum of our political life could never do: It turned the Betsy Ross flag into a racist symbol.”

That was the same year Nike was accused of siding with the Chinese Communists rather than the Hong Kong freedom protesters.

Then, after the death of violent Minneapolis thug and career criminal George Floyd in 2020, OutKick sports commentator Dan Zaksheske noted that Nike launched its “For Once, Don’t Do it” ads, which included lines like “don’t pretend there’s not a problem in America,” and “Don’t turn your back on racism.” The message: America is racist.

What followed was Nike’s backing of the Marxist “Black Lives Matter” race-baiters, before that corrupt charade imploded in 2022. During that same time period, Nike was beset by charges of human rights abuses for having benefited from forced labor by the Uyghur minority in China.

Maybe it was partnering with Dylan Mulvaney, the gender-confused man pretending to be a woman who was at the center of the Bud Light fiasco. (Remember when Bud Light ran its brilliant “Real Men of Genius” ads? Somehow, the “real men” part got lost.)

To that end, could it have been that Nike waited too long to get off the “Pride” gravy train? One industry analyst notes, “Nike became the first major footwear brand to release a Pride Month collection in support of the LGBTQIA+ community.” Nike ultimately withdrew its gender-cult-pandering “Be True” merchandise, but it was too little too late.

Then there was its 2026 “strength is found in diversity” campaign, which ran ahead of the World Cup. Not surprisingly, Nike has also dabbled in other culture issues, like the suppression of parental rights.

Last week, after its market-cap wipeout, the S&P downgraded Nike’s credit rating. In a memo to Nike employees, Nike CEO Elliott Hill declared: “Over the past year, we’ve put sport at the center of everything we do. We’re seeing encouraging signs of progress, but we have more work to do to win over the long term.”

And not a minute too soon.

He should have included a few famous words from basketball legend Michael Jordan, who had a major role in Nike’s meteoric rise to global empire. At one point, when asked to support a Democrat candidate from his home state of North Carolina, Jordan replied, “Republicans buy shoes, too.”

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

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