Woke is on the run.
The cultural scourge has stifled free thought, promoted hard Left extremism and corrupted the arts. Now, the pendulum is finally starting to swing in the opposite direction.
As Justine Bateman eloquently <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/justine-bateman-feels-she-breathe-135914542.html?guccounter=1&amp;guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&amp;guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAL59qaEAl5oQrn9Sbhjt_qu8fKo-iKLly0Qx1-59i0ZovkUgRNIkxBmkeb-90BXJs3RGFTKYXYPTw_0PpiYQZ4TC2vvcuf68E0zkXRjgeC_GgEgtbOqvca4Zg9u6iEw0q-H7gvODkFclXkVCbMI5yfWMT2bU8ni8NIdlhYRwH5Zd">put it</a>, it’s like we can all breathe again.
Woke may have been destined to crash and burn on its own. It’s antithetical to the American spirit and goes against basic biology. Plus, it’s often meted out in a cruel, hypocritical two-tier fashion.
Hunter Biden <a href="https://nypost.com/2021/06/08/hunter-biden-repeatedly-called-his-white-lawyer-the-n-word-texts-show/">repeatedly texts</a>  the &#8220;n-word&#8221; — zero punishment. Morgan Wallen calls a white friend the “n-word” in a private moment caught on tape – his career implodes overnight. 
Yet, over the past decade we&#8217;ve witnessed a number of brave souls stand up to the woke onslaught. While there are many on team sanity who deserve a shout out — including the voices at The Daily Wire — here are seven culture warriors who hastened woke’s demise and deserve a curtain call.
<h3>Robby Starbuck</h3>
<div id="attachment_901451" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-901451" class="size-large wp-image-901451" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/Untitled-design-32-1024x576.jpg" alt="Conservative influencer Robby Starbuck prior to an interview in New York, US, on Wednesday, March 5, 2025." width="1024" height="576" />Bess Adler/Bloomberg via Getty Images</div>
The filmmaker/activist became the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/exclusive-robby-starbuck-joins-heritage-foundation-to-continue-fight-against-woke-corporations?author=Spencer+Lindquist&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=undefined&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=EXCLUSIVE%3A+Robby+Starbuck+Joins+Heritage+Foundation+To+Continue+Fight+Against+Woke+Corporations">one person</a> woke companies fear more than anyone else. Starbuck’s crusade to expose corporate shenanigans, like excessive DEI policies, proved shockingly effective in recent years.
Just ask <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/11/27/robby-starbuck-influencer-dei-walmart">Walmart, Target, John Deere, Harley Davidson</a> and more.
A single social media post from Starbuck could send company executives into damage control mode. Sunlight remains the best disinfectant.
Starbuck brings the receipts, too. His recent <a href="https://x.com/robbystarbuck/status/1958868634287161604">exposé on Cracker Barrel</a>, coming on the heels of the brand’s calamitous logo “update,” proved he isn’t done spotlighting woke on steroids.
<h3>Jennifer Sey</h3>
<div id="attachment_457893" style="width: 394px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-457893" class="size-large wp-image-457893" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2022/11/seyspring2022-0562-2-384x576.jpg" alt="" width="384" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2022/11/seyspring2022-0562-2-384x576.jpg 384w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2022/11/seyspring2022-0562-2-200x300.jpg 200w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2022/11/seyspring2022-0562-2-768x1152.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2022/11/seyspring2022-0562-2-1024x1536.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2022/11/seyspring2022-0562-2-1365x2048.jpg 1365w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2022/11/seyspring2022-0562-2-1360x2040.jpg 1360w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2022/11/seyspring2022-0562-2-scaled.jpg 1707w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 384px) 100vw, 384px" />Courtesy of Jennifer Sey</div>
The former gymnast defied her woke overlords at Levi’s and lost, if only on the surface. Sey left her job as Global Brand President after speaking out against pandemic school closures. The woke company demanded she toe the line and not share her opinion publicly. She refused.
She could have licked her wounds or stayed silent. Not Sey. The Colorado resident rolled up her sleeves and kept fighting. She assembled a team to create a documentary detailing just how punishing lockdowns proved for millions of kids, even as we weren’t always allowed to admit it aloud. That upcoming documentary, “Generation-Covid,” is just part of her anti-woke agenda.
She also created XX-XY Athletics, a clothing brand designed for women, not biological men living as women. Her company speaks out against trans women in women’s sports, helping strike a blow against a movement that often shames citizens into silence.
Now, the tide is turning on the subject, with more Americans allowed to speak their minds. Sey helped make that happen.
<h3>Elon Musk</h3>
<div id="attachment_902957" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-902957" class="size-large wp-image-902957" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/GettyImages-2180240111-864x576.jpg" alt="A portrait picture of Elon Musk photographed in Krakow, Poland on January 22nd, 2024 and X, former Twitter, logo are screened for illustration photo in Krakow, Poland on October 25, 2024." width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/GettyImages-2180240111-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/GettyImages-2180240111-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/GettyImages-2180240111-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/GettyImages-2180240111.jpg 1024w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images</div>
He may be “frenemies” with a certain world leader these days, but Musk struck a mighty blow against woke by buying Twitter. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-bought-twitter-over-free-speech-concerns-media-groupthink-2022-12">Partly inspired</a> by the platform’s attack on The Babylon Bee and other free speech punishments, Musk took over and restored many censored accounts. His new, streamlined X let free speech reign anew. Suddenly, users didn’t have to self-censor for fear their unwoke opinions could cost them their digital voice.
The platform is far from perfect, but under Musk’s control, it’s a vastly superior product and a woke-free zone.
<h3>Christopher Rufo</h3>
<div id="attachment_877257" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-877257" class="size-large wp-image-877257" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/Untitled-design-33-1024x576.jpg" alt="Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist and New College of Florida trustee, walks through protestors on his way out of a bill signing event featuring Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who signed three education bills on the campus of New College of Florida in Sarasota, Fla. on Monday, May 15, 2023." width="1024" height="576" />Photo by Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post via Getty Images</div>
Starbuck may be corporate America’s worst nightmare, but Rufo offers a similar service for academics gone wild. Rufo’s relentless pressure campaigns, and fact-based measures, proved highly effective in recent years.
Rufo helped expose former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/claudine-gay-who-resigned-due-to-plagiarism-allegations-to-teach-reading-and-research-class-at-harvard-in-fall">plagiarism scandal</a>, but that’s just a fraction of his recent activism. Here, he describes why he <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/conservative-activist-christopher-rufo-on-his-push-to-scrutinize-higher-education">focuses his attention</a> on Ivy League institutions.
“They&#8217;re promoting from their central administrations racial discrimination, scapegoating and even segregation.”
In some cases, they “were” promoting all of the above. Rufo gets results.
<h3>J.K. Rowling</h3>
<div id="attachment_913089" style="width: 828px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-913089" class="size-large wp-image-913089" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/JK-Rowling-818x576.jpg" alt="JK Rowling" width="818" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/JK-Rowling-818x576.jpg 818w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/JK-Rowling-300x211.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/JK-Rowling-768x541.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/JK-Rowling.jpg 1200w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 818px) 100vw, 818px" />Samir Hussein/WireImage via Getty Images</div>
Many celebrities, even the biggest stars in the galaxy, stand down under intense woke pressure. Remember how <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/07/rub-and-tug-tv-show-our-lady-j?srsltid=AfmBOooqto0TGS1QBSZKn_jSJCQPHkCoAhh3bv_wnxbTxhD4YsIThjEW">Scarlett Johansson buckled</a> rather than accept a role playing a trans character?
Not Rowling. The “Harry Potter” author, an old-school progressive, began <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/j-k-rowling-hilariously-shreds-transgender-activist-over-bra-fitting-boast">questioning</a> elements of the trans agenda in 2020. That put her squarely in the Left’s cross-hairs, and she’s remained there ever since.
Death threats. Endless cultural cancelations. Serial attacks from the same Legacy Media outlets that once praised her ability to inspire young readers.
And Rowling refused to back down. That posture, combined with the work Sey has done on trans matters, allowed others to speak out against biological men in women’s sports.
<h3>Joe Rogan</h3>
<div id="attachment_909823" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-909823" class="size-large wp-image-909823" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-07-PM-2073-1024x576.jpg" alt="Screenshot: Joe Rogan Experience #2303. Dave Smith and Douglas Murray. PowerfulJRE. YouTube.com" width="1024" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-07-PM-2073-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-07-PM-2073-300x169.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-07-PM-2073-768x432.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-07-PM-2073-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-07-PM-2073-2048x1152.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Screenshot: Joe Rogan Experience/YouTube.com</div>
Rogan&#8217;s relentless curiosity, eagerness to let so many voices share his platform, and his dedication to an open, long-form conversation has given free speech a major boost. 
Even more important, Rogan had a change of heart regarding one potential guest. Two years ago, Rogan seemed disinterested in chatting up former President Donald Trump.
Then, as he watched the Democratic Party stifle speech across the culture, he realized his platform could give Trump a boost in the 2024 presidential campaign. It’s likely why other rebel comics did the same with the Trump-Vance ticket, from Andrew Schulz to Tim Dillon.
<h3>President Donald Trump</h3>
<div id="attachment_942191" style="width: 875px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-942191" class="size-large wp-image-942191" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/GettyImages-2222437639-865x576.jpg" alt="President Donald Trump speaks to the media before boarding Marine One outside the White House on July 1, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images)" width="865" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/GettyImages-2222437639-865x576.jpg 865w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/GettyImages-2222437639-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/GettyImages-2222437639-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/07/GettyImages-2222437639.jpg 1024w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 865px) 100vw, 865px" />Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images</div>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIF2rdXnpMo">“Everything woke turns to s***,”</a> The 45th and 47th president once said, slicing through the noise to make perfect sense. He’s right, of course, and he helped make woke retreat to its current, cornered state.
The president’s frank talk, blustery persona and eagerness to speak sans filter did more than burnish his brand. He gave us permission to do the same, to shoot straight and take the consequences.
Plus, he used his executive orders to protect female athletes against biological male competitors and doubled down on Rufo’s efforts to rein in woke colleges. His anti-DEI initiatives will be part of his legacy, no doubt.
<a href="https://get.dailywire.com/subscribe/plus/?utm_campaign=summer&amp;utm_content=editorialsummersale&amp;utm_medium=website&amp;utm_source=editorial">End of Summer Sale &#8211; Get 40% off New DailyWire+ Annual Memberships</a>
Woke is far from gone, despite the work of these culture warriors. Some companies and schools are using sleight-of-hand techniques to keep on discriminating on the basis of race and gender.
The disgraced Gay is still teaching students at Harvard.
Hollywood will keep making movies about five-foot-nothing women beating up men double their size. Gender and race-swapped stories won’t fade to black like 3D movies and found footage shockers.
Still, woke has taken body blow after body blow. And these powerful figures threw some of the heaviest punches.
* * *
Christian Toto is an award-winning journalist, movie critic and editor of <a href="https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">HollywoodInToto.com</a>. He previously served as associate editor with Breitbart News’ Big Hollywood. Follow him at <a href="https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">HollywoodInToto.com</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Robby Starbuck

Seven Culture Warriors Who Put Woke On The Run

Christopher Rufo

Donald Trump

Elon Musk

J.K. Rowling

Joe Rogan

Twitter

Woke Culture

For so many Americans, Cracker Barrel is a convenient and consistent place to go for hearty meals, kitschy decor, and Southern hospitality. That is, until this week, when one trend-chasing executive decided to greenlight a logo revision, unleashing a backlash across the nation.
Cracker Barrel, <a href="https://investor.crackerbarrel.com/news-releases/news-release-details/cracker-barrel-says-goodbye-founder-dan-w-evins">founded</a> in 1969 by the late Dan Evins, came to symbolize American heritage. The original logo of an elderly gentleman sitting on a chair while leaning against a barrel epitomized that heritage. By removing the nostalgic imagery, the company seemingly put the final nail in the coffin of a treasured piece of Americana.
When current CEO Julie Felss Masino — who previously served as president of Mattel and Taco Bell — <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/cracker-barrel-blasted-for-rebrand-that-scraps-beloved-logo-crime-against-humanity">announced</a> the logo change, she explained that her goal was to get Cracker Barrel out of people’s “<a href="https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/cracker-barrel-ceo-julie-felss-masino-new-logo-controversy-what-know">rearview mirror</a>” and to &#8220;make sure that it was something that really resonates with everybody of today and for tomorrow.&#8221; On paper, that may seem like a good idea, especially as the company is facing declining sales and trying to appeal to a younger demographic. In practice, it’s been an absolute disaster that has <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cracker-barrel-cbrl-stock-down-200-million-loss-new-logo-change/">cost the company $100 million</a> in market value after the rebrand. 
It would be too easy to chalk up Cracker Barrel’s mistake as just another company gone woke. But the truth seems to be more complicated than that. As Andrew Beck, founding partner of brand consultancy <a href="https://beckandstone.com/about/">Beck &amp; Stone</a>, said during an email interview with The Daily Wire, Masino’s flub was likely the result of heeding bad advice. 
“She clearly values the brand and the customer’s feelings about it,” he said. “I do not think her insights are wrong—but I highly suspect the ‘outside help’ she describes as being brought in advised her team to turn left to ‘modern’ instead of right to ‘nostalgia’ at the fork in the road that every company must: what do we keep, what do we kick?”
Beck added, “It takes deep cultural understanding and tactical skill to actualize such an insight, and when I see who was tasked with the redesign—the firm ‘Prophet’—who tattoos their progressive cultural values on their sleeve, I just can’t see them sharing the Cracker Barrel cultural context enough to execute Julie’s vision skillfully.”
<a class="c-link" href="https://get.dailywire.com/subscribe/plus/?utm_campaign=summer&amp;utm_content=editorialsummersale&amp;utm_medium=website&amp;utm_source=editorial" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-stringify-link="https://get.dailywire.com/subscribe/plus/?utm_campaign=summer&amp;utm_content=editorialsummersale&amp;utm_medium=website&amp;utm_source=editorial" data-sk="tooltip_parent">End of Summer Sale &#8211; Get 40% off New DailyWire+ Annual Memberships</a>
That disconnect is not unique to Cracker Barrel. In fact, it fits a growing pattern. Companies chasing sleek, modern branding often leave their loyal customer bases behind. It’s enough to inspire eye rolls whenever a company strips its logo of personality to introduce a slick, minimalist iteration that&#8217;s easily lost amongst a sea of similar corporate logos.
“It is a byproduct of a general decline of the customer experience in the Western world for these middle market service companies,” Beck explained. “These rebrands are meant to signal a positive change, but because of the lack of imagination and ingenuity on the part of their consultants who are supposed to be ‘experts’ on these matters, the sanitized, sterile aesthetics of their environments and communications become reminders to the customer that the company’s better days are behind it.”
This is especially true for a brand like Cracker Barrel, whose entire identity is built on nostalgia and authenticity. Strip those away, and what remains? 
“As I tell our corporate [clients] with legacy American brands. ‘Be who you are. If you are American, be American.’ Problems arise when those being relied on to advise the company do not value their client’s heritage,” Beck said. “Often these are folks who come in and want to impose their own vision on a brand, rather than taking up the company’s historic values as their own. It is difficult to not see ideological influence in these decisions,” the strategist said.
For longtime employees, the decline has been obvious. Erik Russell worked for nearly a decade at Cracker Barrel. He says he did every job in the restaurant and even met his wife there. To him, it was more than just a place to work, and he said the customers felt the same way. 
“Cracker Barrel was more than a restaurant to them, it was home. A place where they felt they still belonged, even as the world changed around them,” Russell <a href="https://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/1958602832111685663">told</a> media personality Benny Johnson in an interview.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
EXCLUSIVE: Cracker Barrel Insider Breaks Silence on the Woke Destruction of an American Institution
Erik Russell spent nearly 10 years working at Cracker Barrel. He’s done every job in the restaurant. Erik even met his wife there. To Erik, Cracker Barrel was a place where… <a href="https://t.co/YDolLTs3dW">pic.twitter.com/YDolLTs3dW</a>
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) <a href="https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1958602832111685663?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 21, 2025</a></blockquote>
But Russell says the business he once loved unraveled after leadership changes. He described how small changes added up to something big, like when brown menus were replaced, uniforms got more relaxed, and alcohol was introduced despite the founders’ conviction that staying dry preserved the family atmosphere. 
“The logo and store redesign is simply the last step in total brand destruction by corporate vandals who seemed to despise the Cracker Barrel core culture,” Erik said.
He said the antiques on the wall were once curated from estate sales to reflect real Americana, but the remodeled stores are using generic reproductions instead. 
“I felt like I was part of something truly American, full of nostalgia and tradition. Now all of that’s being torn down and replaced with just another bland, soulless corporate chain,” he said.
That sense of loss goes beyond new décor. It’s about what Cracker Barrel symbolized for countless Americans. “Cracker Barrel built up decades of goodwill across the country,&#8221; Russell continued. &#8220;We often referred to ourselves as ‘America’s front porch’ after the iconic long storefront filled with rocking chairs and checkerboards where guests would wait to be seated. Each store I worked in felt slightly different, a reflection of their communities.”
For Beck, the lesson here is for businesses not to confuse modernity with progress. “All management is change management. A business must deal with change constantly. What is valuable and what is not? Misidentifying those value propositions, often because of a cultural blindspot on the part of brand ‘experts’ is often at the heart of the failure to manage change,” he said.
When asked if he thinks Cracker Barrel is having a “Bud Light moment,” Beck disagreed, saying the better comparison is Jaguar. 
The legacy car brand recently rebranded with an ultra-modern, futuristic aesthetic and was mocked mercilessly for it. 
“Bud Light became a meme based on a single can,” he said. “The larger business itself was strong and remains so. Jaguar was a disaster from a business POV. A struggling company with a storied brand but neglected product going through big changes jumping the shark, sealing a fate that was not inevitable, rather than changing it.”
“I fear this is another Jaguar unless there is a course correction on the aesthetics and communications across the board,” Beck said. “Right now it is only confirming what the customer base already feared was happening, not exciting them at the prospect of a revived product. I have high hopes that Julie Masino, who has a good relationship with her board, sees this and will do what needs to be done.”
For now, the “America’s front porch” that Erik loved looks more like just another franchise trying to appease consultants instead of remaining a place where families gather to make memories. The food is different, the atmosphere sterile, and the iconic logo is gone. 
What made Cracker Barrel special is slipping away, and the backlash from customers is proof. The irony is that in desperately trying to get out of America’s “rearview mirror,” Cracker Barrel may have veered straight into a ditch.

Cracker Barrel Redesigns Its Logo

Cracker Barrel Didn’t Go Woke With Its Rebrand, They Were Conned By ‘Experts.’

Cracker Barrel Didn’t Go Woke. They Got Conned By ‘Experts.’

America

Americana

Bud Light

Cracker Barrel

Jaguar

In the past year alone, titles like &#8220;Assassin’s Creed: Shadows&#8221; (which featured a <a href="https://notthebee.com/article/new-assassins-creed-game-has-gay-black-samurai-kiss-theythem-character">romance</a> between a bisexual black samurai and a nonbinary Japanese character) and the remastered version of &#8220;The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion&#8221; (which <a href="https://steamcommunity.com/app/2623190/discussions/0/604154245960211414/">replaced</a> the “female” and “male” options from the original game with “Body Type 1” and “Body Type 2”) have drawn significant backlash. 

But forcing woke content into video games isn’t the only way progressives are trying to ruin the gaming industry.
Now, they’re coming for its business model. 
 
Recently, the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP), a <a href="https://www.economicliberties.us/about/#">think tank</a> stacked with progressives, <a href="https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/ninth-circuit-affirms-epic-games-victory-over-google-forces-monopolist-to-lift-app-store-restrictions/">cheered</a> a major court victory against Google’s app store that they aggressively pushed.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Epic Games’ case against Google was legitimate. Per the suit, Google forced developers into a rigid system with up to 30% fees, banning rival app stores and alternative payment methods, hurting both creators and consumers.
But don’t be fooled. AELP’s broader agenda has nothing to do with helping gamers or developers. Its antitrust crusade would shackle gaming — and every other innovative industry — under permanent bureaucratic control.
For example, AELP was the <a href="https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/ftc-must-pursue-administrative-case-against-unlawful-microsoft-activision-merger/">loudest cheerleader</a> for the <a href="https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/2210077-microsoftactivision-blizzard-matter">Biden-era push</a> to block Microsoft from acquiring Activision-Blizzard — a case the Trump administration just killed.
Biden’s FTC, egged on by AELP, claimed Microsoft would make &#8220;Call of Duty&#8221; and Overwatch Xbox exclusives, supposedly “suppressing competitors” in consoles and cloud gaming. They wouldn’t have. Microsoft committed to keeping &#8220;Call of Duty&#8221; <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/16/microsoft-and-sony-sign-deal-to-keep-activisions-call-of-duty-on-playstation.html">on PlayStation</a> and <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/02/21/microsoft-signs-call-of-duty-contract-with-nintendo-pressuring-sony-and-regulators/">bringing it to Nintendo</a>.
Courts saw through the AELP’s claims. A federal U.S. judge <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/11/microsoft-activision-ftc-decision/">rejected</a> the FTC’s suit in 2023, and by May 2025, Trump’s FTC wisely <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trumps-ftc-walks-away-from-microsoft-activision-merger-fight-started-by-biden-131433987.html">dropped</a> the case. Even the ultra-liberal European Union <a href="https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/eu-antitrust-regulators-clear-69-bln-microsoft-activision-deal-2023-05-15/">approved</a> the Microsoft-Activision deal.
Liberal activists like those at AELP may not want to admit it, but the truth is that gaming is a fiercely competitive industry. It doesn’t need Washington activist groups or government bureaucrats picking winners and losers. 
 
Consider the very video game example that AELP loves to harp on — &#8220;Call of Duty.&#8221;
Yes, it’s a mega-blockbuster franchise that has sold over 500 million copies since 2003. But it is far from unstoppable. When &#8220;Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare&#8221; launched in 2016, its <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeF3UTkCoxY">reveal trailer</a> was ratioed with 4 million dislikes to 667,000 likes. 
Four days later, video game developer DICE <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7nRTF2SowQ">unveiled</a> &#8220;Battlefield 1&#8221; — a rival shooter with a World War I setting — and its trailer’s likes outnumbered dislikes 37-to-1. &#8220;Infinite Warfare&#8221; only <a href="https://www.vg247.com/call-of-duty-infinite-warfare-was-the-best-selling-game-of-2016-despite-all-your-protests-but-battlefield-1-was-hot-on-its-heels">outsold</a> &#8220;Battlefield 1&#8221; because it bundled a remaster of &#8220;Modern Warfare.&#8221; Activision learned its lesson and abandoned the futuristic setting.
Market dominance in gaming seldom lasts. AELP <a href="https://www.economicliberties.us/media/vertical-merger-scrutiny-needs-an-upgrade-after-microsoft-activision/">argues</a> that video game consoles “rely on unique intellectual property that cannot simply be replicated,” but that’s simply not true. Blockbuster franchises are frequently copied, challenged, and displaced.
For example, &#8220;Guitar Hero&#8221; ruled the mid-2000s until &#8220;Rock Band&#8221; split the market — and soon after, both faded into irrelevance.
Yet, if regulators used AELP’s &#8220;Call of Duty&#8221; logic, perhaps they would have treated &#8220;Guitar Hero&#8221; like an untouchable monopoly, freezing the industry in place while gamers missed out on the next wave of competition.
Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft have spent decades battling to build their own “killer apps.” Players bought Xboxes for &#8220;Halo,&#8221; PlayStations for &#8220;Uncharted,&#8221; and Nintendo consoles for &#8220;Zelda.&#8221; If Microsoft ever made &#8220;Call of Duty&#8221; exclusive, the proper response from Sony wouldn’t be to run to regulators, it would be to make something better. That is how markets are supposed to work.
Instead, AELP and the far left’s vision appears to be to turn antitrust into a permanent chokepoint for the entire economy, swapping innovation for bureaucratic control.
Unfortunately, the Microsoft-Activision case was just a warm-up for them. After celebrating victory with Epic, AELP continues to push crackdowns on everything from <a href="https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/ain-vetoing-anti-algorithmic-rent-fixing-bill-gov-polis-sides-with-corporate-landlords-over-colorado-renters/">dynamic pricing</a> to <a href="https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/dot-greenlights-united-jetblue-partnership-deepening-airline-consolidation-crisis/">airline partnerships</a> that help travelers redeem miles across carriers.
If AELP succeeds in locking its mindset into law, it won’t just be gamers who lose — it will be every industry that depends on competition and creativity to thrive.
Gamers don’t need Washington lawyers and think tank activists deciding what they can play, and neither does any other sector caught in AELP’s crosshairs. What the market needs is the freedom to build, compete, and win without having to beg permission from the same professional regulators who mistake every successful product for a monopoly.
If AELP gets its way, innovation won’t just stall in gaming — it will stall everywhere. That would be bad news for everyone.
The Trump administration should continue to stand its ground and fight AELP’s agenda tooth and nail. We’ll all be better off for it.
* * *
James Skyles is a legal policy analyst and the principal of Skyles Law Group. He has written for some of the largest legal publications in the United States, including Law.com and Law360.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Friends shouting and cheering while playing the game battle on the playstation

It’s More Than Woke Storylines Ruining Video Games

It's More Than Woke Storylines Ruining Video Games

Blizzard Entertainment

Gaming

Microsoft

Progressivism

Video Games

Trent Sweeney, the brother of actress <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/american-eagle-refuses-to-cave-doubles-down-in-response-to-sydney-sweeney-ad?author=Amanda+Prestigiacomo&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=undefined&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=American+Eagle+Refuses+To+Cave%2C+Doubles+Down+In+Response+To+Sydney+Sweeney+Ad">Sydney Sweeney</a>, celebrated a promotion he received from the U.S. Air Force with a crack about &#8220;good jeans&#8221; — a reference to an ad featuring his sister that has gained the ire of leftists.
On Thursday, Trent posted to his Instagram stories about recently earning his promotion to staff sergeant. In the story, Trent quipped, &#8220;It&#8217;s them good jeans,&#8221; according to a screenshot <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/sydney-sweeneys-brother-makes-cheeky-good-jeans-joke-following-his-air-force-promotion">obtained</a> by Fox News.
Sweeney recently took on an avalanche of hate from the Left for posing in an American Eagle Outfitters ad campaign about “good jeans,” which uses a play on both good genetics and a good pair of blue jeans. Critics said the ad was Nazi-coded and racist, since Sweeney is white and has blonde hair and blue eyes.
The actress has refused to buckle under the criticism, and American Eagle has stood by its campaign.
The Right has championed the campaign for shaking off &#8220;woke&#8221; messaging, and praised Sweeney for not caving to unreasonable critics on the Left.
Trent, 29, also published a general post to his Instagram account about the promotion. &#8220;I&#8217;m excited for this next step in my career and thank everyone that&#8217;s been a part of it so far,&#8221; he wrote.
His sister &#8220;liked&#8221; the post.
<div id="attachment_959063" style="width: 950px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-959063" class="wp-image-959063 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/Screenshot-2025-08-09-at-9.38.34-AM-940x576.png" alt="" width="940" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/Screenshot-2025-08-09-at-9.38.34-AM-940x576.png 940w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/Screenshot-2025-08-09-at-9.38.34-AM-300x184.png 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/Screenshot-2025-08-09-at-9.38.34-AM-768x470.png 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/Screenshot-2025-08-09-at-9.38.34-AM-1536x941.png 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/Screenshot-2025-08-09-at-9.38.34-AM-2048x1255.png 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 940px) 100vw, 940px" />Instagram: Trent Sweeney</div>
In the wake of the Left&#8217;s backlash toward Sweeney, left-wing site BuzzFeed <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/articles/yes-sydney-sweeney-registered-republican-131433446.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a> on the actress&#8217; apparent political party affiliation as a Republican.
The Daily Wire reviewed records that show a Sydney B. Sweeney is a registered Republican in Florida. The middle name of Sweeney, the actress, is reportedly Bernice.
Additionally, the date of registration is June 2024, the same time it was <a href="https://pagesix.com/2024/06/06/lifestyle/sydney-sweeney-buys-13-5m-oceanfront-florida-mansion/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a> that the actress Sweeney purchased a 13.5 million dollar home in Summerland Key, Florida. The registration reviewed by The Daily Wire named Summerland Key as the city.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
BREAKING &#8211; Leftists claim to have dug up Sydney Sweeney’s 2024 voter registration, which lists her as a registered Republican. <a href="https://t.co/OizbACfW32">pic.twitter.com/OizbACfW32</a>
— Right Angle News Network (@Rightanglenews) <a href="https://twitter.com/Rightanglenews/status/1951457004280750345?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 2, 2025</a></blockquote>
When President Donald Trump was <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-delighted-to-learn-sydney-sweeney-is-a-republican-now-i-love-her-ad">asked</a> about the report, he delighted in the news.
“She’s a very hot actress right now,&#8221; he said. “She’s a registered Republican? &#8230; Oh, now I love her ad.&#8221;
&#8220;Is that right? Sydney Sweeney?&#8221; he continued. &#8220;You’d be surprised at how many people are Republicans. That’s what I wouldn’t have known. But I’m glad you told me that. If Sydney Sweeney is a registered Republican, I think her ad is fantastic.”
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/leftists-melt-down-after-report-that-sydney-sweeney-is-registered-republican">Leftists Melt Down After Report That Sydney Sweeney Is Registered Republican</a>

“Echo Valley” European Premiere – VIP Arrivals

Sydney Sweeney’s Brother Celebrates Air Force Promotion With ‘Good Jeans’ Crack

advertising

Air Force

Sydney Sweeney

As we pass the halfway point of the 2020s, it’s safe to say we’ve all had front row seats to what many people have described as the vibe shift. You don’t really have to pay attention to business to understand that something is changing in corporate America. You don’t have to be looking at stocks every day to realize that the balance of power is shifting away from the heights of wokeness we saw at the beginning of the 2020s. President Trump’s latest executive <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/08/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-guarantees-fair-banking-for-all-americans/">order</a>, prohibiting politicized debanking, is creating massive positive waves for conservatives concerned about losing access to their finances — and investors who don’t want the banks they invest in playing politics. This comes on the heels of other executive orders targeted at biased AI <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/preventing-woke-ai-in-the-federal-government/">programs</a> and divisive, discriminatory <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-radical-and-wasteful-government-dei-programs-and-preferencing/">DEI policies</a>.
These big steps are the results of top-down exercises in executive power. And a frequent criticism I hear, as someone whose job it is to pay attention to business, is that Trump’s executive orders will just create a facade of non-wokeness, under which companies will resume their previous biased policies. As it happens, answering that criticism is a major part of my work in the world of corporate engagement. Because the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-year-the-dei-tide-turned?author=Isaac+Willour&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=10&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=The+Year+The+DEI+Tide+Turned">pushback</a> against ESG, DEI, &amp; corporate wokeness isn’t just coming from the White House. It’s coming from ordinary investors all across this country who want the businesses they invest in focusing on… well, business.
Let’s take debanking as an example. Months before Trump’s debanking executive order came down, banks like <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/major-win-jpmorgan-chase-ends-political-debanking?author=Isaac+Willour&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=3&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=Major+Win%3A+JPMorgan+Chase+Ends+Political+Debanking">JPMorgan Chase</a> &amp; <a href="https://x.com/IsaacWillour/status/1929918865842012351">Citigroup</a> adopted explicit guarantees: no more debanking based on clients’ political beliefs or affiliations. These banks weren’t just anticipating the regulatory and political shift coming from Washington — they were hearing from shareholders. Why? Because when businesses play politics, they don’t just incur the wrath of Republican politicians. These gambles with brand value and deviations from the core business model hurt ordinary Americans, who rightly expect Citigroup to create value for their kids’ college fund instead of opining on gun control through their lending policies.
When JPMorgan Chase debanked Ambassador Sam Brownback, investors took notice. And the investors I work with aren’t the type to sit back and take it. Shareholders like <a href="https://www.wsj.com/finance/my-bid-to-make-jpmorgan-less-woke-progressive-discrimination-conservatives-christians-shareholders-sec-banking-finances-583c7999?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=ASWzDAhg8WubEGKB7cvLlardDDcKkGeJqpUicqcbM1xoLBHMGeBHqpP1w-ZC4shMtQk%3D&amp;gaa_ts=68957d1d&amp;gaa_sig=hpzyOTrRxsQ-AO0cLmG4VpK0q2-FpzuLTXkXA0T73nZM0Iu73898-9shhfsDz68MpAEbFs9tDXU_DvlMbfl-Fw%3D%3D">David Bahnsen</a> and other ordinary <a href="https://investor.bankofamerica.com/regulatory-and-other-filings/all-sec-filings/content/0001193125-24-064529/d529855ddef14a1.pdf">investors</a> were attending annual meetings and putting pressure on these companies from the inside for years, not to be right-wing or give special privileges to conservatives, but to play it neutral: serve everyone, because everyone needs banks. And because banks have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders, there have been real arguments occurring between investors and company reps for years on the debanking issue. Add to this pressure from red state fiduciaries cutting ties with activist banks (turns out, pro-energy states don’t take kindly to banks demonizing the energy industry), and the supercharging effect of an executive order, and you start to see how corporate America is slowly shifting back towards normalcy. And that’s just the debanking issue.
If you had to sum up why the backlash to corporate wokeness is working in one sentence, try this one: the pro-sanity business ecosystem has become too big to ignore, and too committed to fail. Think about it as a coalition. One part is ordinary investors and institutions who invest for return — these aren’t professional activists, a dynamic that companies are only recently having to get used to. Another part is financial professionals, another part are legal advocates like Alliance Defending Freedom, working to make sure companies can’t just ignore their own shareholders (because they try — often). Another part is friendly journalists and X personalities like Robby Starbuck, putting millions of eyes on this issue. Another part is the countless advocacy groups providing the research &amp; data that fuel our ability to talk to these companies, such as Consumers’ Research and the 1792 Exchange. Effective corporate engagement happens when all these forces align on a single aim: getting companies out of politics &amp; back to business. 
And we’re seeing real results on a whole host of issues. Beyond the debanking issue, we’re seeing companies <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/08/us-banks-quit-net-zero-alliance-before-trump-inauguration">ditch</a> anti-energy commitments in droves (turns out, net zero becomes a fantasy the minute you look at the energy demands of the real world.) We’re seeing companies commit to treating their religious employees with the same respect &amp; privileges afforded to non-religious ones, including through workplace affinity groups and inclusion in charity matching programs. We’re seeing companies like <a href="https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/pepsico-puts-out-viewpoint-neutral-media-buying-content-policy-website">PepsiCo</a> and <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/ibm-rolls-back-dei-commits-to-political-neutrality?author=Isaac+Willour&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=2&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=IBM+Rolls+Back+DEI%2C+Commits+To+Political+Neutrality">IBM</a> commit to not using their ad policies to discriminate against conservative news outlets like the Daily Wire. And we have good reason to believe that, as corporate engagement increases, more wins are coming.
So, what about that façade of nonwokeness? Aren’t companies just going to lie? As it happens, vigilance from actual investors is a fantastic way to safeguard against that. People generally have the biggest incentive to do something when it hurts to not do it. So, who has the biggest incentive to make sure businesses aren’t playing politics? The people who own the business: shareholders. The investors we represent have a clear incentive to be in the details — because the problem of corporate wokeness isn’t just a PR or branding issue. It’s an issue that affects the bottom line Americans depend on.
The vibe shift we’re seeing goes far beyond Washington, even though Washington matters. What’s happening in America, in real time, is conservative investors and institutions waking up and realizing that they’ve been leaving their financial influence on the table. And we truly have no blueprint for how much winning is possible when that influence is brought to bear. So, from Washington, to the halls of conservative institutions, to the ordinary mom-and-pop investors sitting at their kitchen table in West Texas — here’s to winning. The best is yet to come.
* * *
Isaac Willour is an award-winning journalist focusing on race, culture, and American conservatism, as well as a corporate relations analyst at Bowyer Research. His work has been featured at outlets including USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Opinion, C-SPAN, and The Daily Wire. He is a member of the Young Voices contributor program and can be found on X <a href="https://twitter.com/IsaacWillour" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@IsaacWillour</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Flag and Wall street sign

Why The Pro-Sanity Coalition Is Winning Again In Corporate America

Banks

Business

Corporations

debanking

Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI)

JP Morgan

Stock Market

Wall Street

Woke ideas, by definition, are fundamentally flawed. These include policies that can either be written off as unworkable — think high taxes, free health care, and open borders — or ridiculous impulses like gender confusion, environmental extremism, defunding the police, and critical race theory.
Over the past two years, the woke left has increasingly taken up a particularly alarming cause — antisemitism. Disturbingly, one of the most vocal proponents of this toxic ideology is perhaps the one best positioned to disseminate it where it does the most damage — in our children’s ears.
With astonishing regularity, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association (NEA), finds itself embroiled in <a href="https://www.wsj.com/opinion/antisemitism-and-the-teachers-union-education-students-k-12-44cd1fa7?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=ASWzDAio3c5Mt0_L59ZPcvOPJickL051h1PbFLp_tScFw0mRoqrmcVgMIOsA6nnyibM%3D&amp;gaa_ts=688aa84c&amp;gaa_sig=LzMqnMYY5GorvJeQbZTzYtBBy9PjR6F0UEtTrKy5NvNssT-_RRcxOWjxtSm_an-HMy0mXn6s6GiAbh0Hv5M_hQ%3D%3D">controversy</a> around its attitude towards Jews and the conflict in Israel.
In late July, the leaders of the 3-million-member union were forced to walk back a <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/07/08/gaza-war-adl-teachers-union-nea-vote">decision</a> made earlier in the month when its 7,000-member Representative Assembly voted to cut all ties with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization that has fought antisemitism and other forms of intolerance for over a century.
The body approved a measure stating that the NEA “will not use, endorse, or publicize materials from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), such as its curricular materials or statistics.”
It reasoned: “Despite its reputation as a civil rights organization, the ADL is not the social justice educational partner it claims to be.”
The hypocrisy is palpable.
A week after its July 6th gathering in Portland, Oregon, members of the union’s Jewish Affairs Caucus penned a <a href="https://www.neajacaucus.org/post/letter-to-nea-leadership">letter</a> to NEA President Becky Pringle, noting that individual Jewish delegates to the event were “vocally mocked, harassed, and threatened in ways that dishonor our union.”
The letter continued, “Most unfortunate of all was how the NEA’s official statement framed the situation, as if U.S. classrooms were an extension of the battleground in Gaza … Presenting human dignity as a zero-sum game is perilous for all minorities. History teaches us that when one minority is deprived of its humanity without comment, others will be, too.”
“Allowing the ADL to determine what constitutes antisemitism would be like allowing the fossil fuel industry to determine what constitutes climate change,” countered NEA delegate <a href="https://labornotes.org/blogs/2025/07/educators-union-rejects-anti-defamation-league-cuts-ties">Stephen Siegel</a> from the assembly floor.
Publicly, Pringle acknowledged the Representative Assembly’s action went too far, <a href="https://www.politico.com/newsletters/weekly-education/2025/07/21/nea-halts-bid-to-cut-ties-with-jewish-organization-00465130">stating</a>, “After consideration, it was determined that this proposal would not further NEA’s commitment to academic freedom, our membership, or our goals.”
Within days, however, the union’s true feelings came to light again when it announced plans to promote a version of Holocaust remembrance that does not even mention Jews, instead referencing, “…victims of the Holocaust from different faiths” and teaching that Israel was founded through “forced, violent displacement and dispossession.”
This wording comes directly from the priorities outlined in NEA’s <a href="https://www.nea.org/">2025 handbook</a>, which the union publishes each year as a guide on the group&#8217;s priorities and strategic goals for its national and state leaders, staff, and members. It includes the NEA&#8217;s bylaws and is updated with any new resolutions and policy positions the union has endorsed.
These aren’t isolated incidents. As ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt <a href="https://www.wsj.com/opinion/antisemitism-and-the-teachers-union-education-students-k-12-44cd1fa7?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=ASWzDAjStdmE5Sn12J-E4JPH8q2Os8fljrQpHJrtRWhjqSbFGcFj3jvZuqRKWEX9bFM%3D&amp;gaa_ts=6890e11f&amp;gaa_sig=U7kbLb2MFLOViXFevR2KtAoLAxq3KPM9ZMb_XqIVIbO7hNpInieKcl1KH8QJS1WpqwlpKvfhq2REB_oFm2qzbQ%3D%3D">wrote</a> in the Wall Street Journal:
<blockquote>Local teachers’ unions in California have provided teachers with an anti-Israel script; in Minneapolis, they’ve labeled Israel as “apartheid.” In Chicago, the teachers’ union voted on anti-Israel resolutions and posted on social media that, “Zionists are not welcome.” In New York, the union representing City University of New York professors voted to divest from Israel. Others have gone so far as to prevent teachers from participating in mandatory antisemitism training. When the San Francisco Unified School District scheduled four such trainings for high school teachers, their union said they would support any educator who decided to skip the sessions.</blockquote>
Against this backdrop, Los Angeles District Court Judge Stephen Wilson, on July 21st, <a href="https://www.dailynews.com/2025/07/30/forced-representation-allows-haters-to-speak-on-behalf-of-their-victims/">dismissed a lawsuit</a> filed by seven Jewish teachers represented by United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) — an affiliate of NEA — alleging the union had engaged in a pattern of anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist activity for years.
The Freedom Foundation, which is representing the teachers, plans to appeal Wilson’s ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and, if necessary, the U.S. Supreme Court.
Sadly, it isn’t likely to be the last time the teachers&#8217; union’s politics of hatred are on display for a public that’s already had a bellyful of it.
* * *
Aaron Withe is the CEO of the Freedom Foundation.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

UTLA protest in Los Angeles, CA

When Unions Teach Hate: Inside The NEA’s Descent Into Antisemitism

When Unions Teach Hate: Inside NEA’s Antisemitism Problem

Anti-Semitism

Education

Jewish

National Education Association

Teachers Unions

The following excerpt is taken from the new book &#8220;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/War-Science-Thirty-Nine-Scientists-Scientific/dp/B0DWLP2VTZ/ref=sr_1_1?crid=22E4UEYSZLK9L&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.7OpVlvjzAMkKLRoafpVC5BbfjWiiv_d1HNPN1kmFXABtw90xnU8oHEEAF-C1mFSw.m6gzq7MX5HeMeyZUsEzNWkKLTJiFGUtfa6NHjZv0eDw&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=the+war+on+science+lawrence+krauss&amp;qid=1754574679&amp;sprefix=the+war+on+sc%2Caps%2C111&amp;sr=8-1">The War On Science</a>,&#8221; edited by Lawrence M. Krauss (Post Hill Press, 2025), with contributions from Jordan B. Peterson, Niall Ferguson, Richard Dawkins, Gad Saad, and many more. 
* * *
<h3>The Archetypal Fate Of The Universities</h3>
The institutions of higher education in the West are administratively top-heavy, in precisely the manner allowing that very administration to prey upon the future earnings of the students they hypothetically serve. Furthermore, the faculty itself leans very heavily in the radical direction despite being the dubious beneficiaries of administrative expansion. Student-to-faculty ratios have increased dramatically. The status and autonomy of the faculty have been very badly compromised. None of this seems to have made the professors and researchers any more forthcoming in their resistance or any more skeptical about the self-righteous “progressive” ideals they advocate. Finally, the students themselves have been infantilized, as well as taught outright that progressive radicalism is identical to virtue. It is, therefore, very difficult to imagine anything approximating an across-the-board improvement in behavior at the universities, in consequence. There are no imaginable circumstances under which the extant Ivy League institutions, for example, would be likely to dispense with the 80 percent of administrative staff and a somewhat lesser but still high proportion of the faculty that would have to disappear for any real change in orientation to occur. 
There have been recent initiatives, most famously in the states of Texas and Florida, to push back against the diversity, inclusivity, and equity bureaucracy-mob, but a simple name change is no trouble for the serpentine Machiavellians of the radical fringe to manage. This means that the same old corrupt players can just change their ideational camouflage, and at the surface level, just as they did when the revelations of Communist excess became too self-evident to deny in the 1970s, and Marxism metastasized into the intersectional oppression idiocy of today. It is, therefore, highly possible that the academy in the West is rotting because it is, in fact, dead and cannot be revived in anything resembling its current form. In that case, the flame will have to be kept burning at new institutions, whether in the classic bricks-and-mortar and in-person guise, if that proves possible (and I doubt it), or electronically, if the major changes in the conceptualization of education and the technology necessary to offer mass higher learning prove capable of delivering on their obvious but by no means certain promise.
<div id="attachment_958091" style="width: 394px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/War-Science-Thirty-Nine-Scientists-Scientific/dp/B0DWLP2VTZ/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.uHHyjHn4r9-5D55ze0R9Gk-xy5AIFtAEK7qQ4oR-WpQLi51rBu79jgtR88ZY5U4VgKNq4guJpjpfz4JBsu0CN4ZKfzsmHlY2xOTX5ypfus0dPolpFU3YLRuD1JycE93FkmrEi8sJQT_-K9sN8c2aXpVu9KANTbLiCQ7kDTygeqz7Oh8iBp7BWNSPZkoE6i9QqlYnHbmAMe8OQScq8S7oi0FoZ5cX6CV4hwRSurj_rO8.zNhWL4XZiBpgI8rDMadnYyGjqoUHGwS4_vcJYlypv18&amp;qid=1754575409&amp;sr=1-1"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-958091" class="wp-image-958091 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-09-35-AM-9729-384x576.jpg" alt="Credit: Post Hill Press" width="384" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-09-35-AM-9729-384x576.jpg 384w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-09-35-AM-9729-200x300.jpg 200w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-09-35-AM-9729-768x1152.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-09-35-AM-9729-1024x1536.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-09-35-AM-9729-1365x2048.jpg 1365w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-09-35-AM-9729-1360x2040.jpg 1360w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-07-Aug-2025-09-35-AM-9729-scaled.jpg 1707w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 384px) 100vw, 384px" /></a>Credit: Post Hill Press</div>
Is there a way out personally, psychologically, or conceptually? Or, more specifically, what is presently incumbent upon those who are currently or will in the future be engaged in the university teaching or research enterprise? We can turn, once again, to the Enuma Elish account to elucidate the archetypal pattern. It is always in the very darkest hour that the redeeming hero emerges. Deliverance comes to the faithless murderer-children of chaos and order in the story in question in the hero-form of Marduk, the Mesopotamian savior-son-of-God. After Cain and Abel, we are presented with the cataclysm of the flood, as well as the erection of the Tower of Babel, the totalitarian edifice which is a structure of value with the wrong value at its pinnacle. Those are the twin fates of the descendants of Cain, the parasites who will not sacrifice properly and who undermine what even they themselves most truly value and depend upon. What are these fates? The descent of the world into the primordial waters of chaos that reigned before the beginning; alternatively, the worship of the false idols of the Luciferian intellect that likewise produce disunity and confusion — in the latter case, the eventual inability of those who aim wrong to even understand or utter the same words. “What is a woman?” — indeed. What is the way forward in the biblical narrative — perhaps running parallel to the Mesopotamian story? 
Careless pride eternally comes before a fall, but the humility that is its medicament is the attention that leaves nothing out of its purview and can, therefore, perceive the proper course forward. We could consider the account of Jonah, the everyman alerted by his conscience to speak the words of truth that set society straight. He flees, initially, from the requirement — who wants to risk standing against the mob? — but upon encountering the abysmal consequences of maintaining silence when there is something that demands to be said, he reconsiders his cowardice, turns his voice over to the control of the divine, and redeems the corrupt city of his enemies. What is the moral of such stories for the timorous, ideology-addled professors of today — or for those who enable them through their silence or even “allyship”? What might be done by forthright and faithful believers in the redeeming quality of truth and sacrifice when the walls we relied on to protect us have been breached and the barbarians have entered the gates? And have they? Here’s a telling data point: it is none other than the despicable Michel Foucault, darling of the Luciferian radicals, who is by some accounts the most cited “scholar” in the world.
What might be done, indeed? We professors, scholars, and researchers could open the eyes and the mouths God has given us instead of continuing to take each of the thousands of small steps backward that have enabled the devouring ideologues at our institutions. We could forthrightly note the chaos that looms and identify and hold to account its purveyors and acolytes. We could do the duty required of us by the people who have charged the inhabitants of the academy with the responsibility of preserving and seeking the truth, and we could call out the frauds, hucksters, Machiavellians, and outright charlatan-psychopaths of the faux disciplines and idiot theories of oppressor and victim. We could, by so doing, speak the words of truthful magic that redeem the fragmented world and position the foundation back in its place. Alternatively, we could remain frozen in the corner like the petrified rabbits we have far too often revealed ourselves to be and let the parasitical rabble attain their temporary and inevitably self and society-destroying “victory.” What did the great Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn say so effectively in his all-out and eventually successful assault on the predatory tyrants and parasites of the envious and ideology-possessed radical world? ONE WORD OF TRUTH SHALL OUTWEIGH THE WHOLE WORLD. The protected professoriate pays for the opportunity and protection historically granted by the community to the academic endeavor with the vow to protect what is true, beautiful, and good. If we once again found the courage to be the standard-bearers of such value, the mad and ideological mob would be rapidly defeated. 
Will we do what needs to be done? We have failed so far, and it would take a mad bit of optimism to suggest that the course could be reversed. Nonetheless, the situation is far from hopeless. Here is another bit of traditional mythology to consider with regard to such a situation. When Abraham is informed by God of the latter’s decision to destroy the sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, the great prophet objects, making the case that wholesale destruction is no temperate and proper response to the sins even of the many (Genesis 18: 22–33). God agrees to spare the threatened cities if even fifty righteous people might still be found dwelling within their walls. Abraham persists in his objections, even after receiving such consideration from God, bargaining the divine down to forty-five, then forty, then thirty, then twenty — then ten. What does this strange story indicate? Nothing less than this: an entire polity, and all of its denizens, can be saved even from an impending, dire, and deserved fate if even a tiny number of its inhabitants remain willing to risk the great adventure of the truth.
The moral of the story for the current denizens of the academies of higher education? It would not take a great number of professors, researchers, and students even now to speak and turn the tide. The moral, even more specifically, even more personally? It is incumbent on each and every one of us engaged in such enterprise to risk being one of the redeeming ten. We should remember, too, when considering such things: it is indeed a risk to see what is in front of our eyes and to say what needs to be said. It is also true, however, that willful blindness and failure to speak when there is something to say are ventures with perils of their own. The ten in question may find themselves in trouble when they speak, but they are simultaneously saving themselves and all those around them from the invisible hand of doom, threatening the future. This is an existential fact, alluded to in the great story of Jonah. It is not by mere chance that the fleeing prophet finds himself drowning when he holds his tongue after being commanded to speak — and then, worse, devoured by the beast of the abyss. There is indeed a descent into hell that threatens, both psychologically and socially, when conscience is ignored. It is the wisdom of the ages that the risk of seeing and speaking, all things considered, is much less than the risk of hiding and silence. There may be a price that is to be paid for the former — but the price of the latter is both soul and society. The true spirit of the academy is the prophetic voice that redeems. We abandon that at our great peril and to the detriment of all that depends on education itself. 
See, therefore, and speak — or pay the inevitable price.
* * *
This excerpt is published by permission of Post Hill Press. “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/War-Science-Thirty-Nine-Scientists-Scientific/dp/B0DWLP2VTZ/ref=sr_1_1?crid=22E4UEYSZLK9L&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.7OpVlvjzAMkKLRoafpVC5BbfjWiiv_d1HNPN1kmFXABtw90xnU8oHEEAF-C1mFSw.m6gzq7MX5HeMeyZUsEzNWkKLTJiFGUtfa6NHjZv0eDw&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=the+war+on+science+lawrence+krauss&amp;qid=1754574679&amp;sprefix=the+war+on+sc%2Caps%2C111&amp;sr=8-1">The War on Science: Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process</a>,” edited by Lawrence M. Krauss. (Post Hill Press, July 2025).
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-role-of-the-holy-spirit-distinguishing-between-your-will-and-gods-will" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. Jordan B. Peterson</a> is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He is the international bestselling author of “Maps of Meaning,” “12 Rules For Life,” “Beyond Order.” Be sure to order his newest book, “We Who Wrestle with God” (Portfolio/Penguin).
Lawrence M. Krauss is an internationally renowned theoretical physicist, bestselling author, and acclaimed lecturer. A passionate advocate for science and reason, and the public understanding of science, he is the author of twelve popular books, including the international bestsellers &#8220;The Physics of Star Trek, A Universe from Nothing,&#8221; and his most recent book, &#8220;The Edge of Knowledge.&#8221; He received his PhD from MIT and then moved to the Harvard Society of Fellows. He is currently President of The Origins Project Foundation, Chair of the Board of the Free Speech Union, Canada, and host of The Origins Podcast.

Jordan Peterson

The Academy In The West Is Dead. Speak Anyway.

American Universities

Bible

Books

College

Communism

Leftists

Marxism

A conservative watchdog group is demanding the Trump administration investigate one of the nation&#8217;s biggest satellite television provider over its promotion of DEI and other political activism.
Consumers’ Research sent a letter on Wednesday to the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission arguing that DISH has “entrenched discriminatory practices” that may violate President Donald Trump’s executive orders on DEI. The letter pointed to various employee trainings and initiatives that focused on race and gender. 
“Rather than focusing on consumers, DISH has instead promoted race- and gender-based ideologies in violation of President Trump’s executive orders aimed at eliminating divisive and discriminatory DEI programs in both the public and private sectors,” Consumers’ Research Executive Director Will Hild wrote in a letter obtained by The Daily Wire. 
Consumers’ Research launched a <a href="https://consumersresearch.org/woke-alert/woke-alert-dish-network/">campaign</a> in July to highlight some of DISH’s woke efforts. 
On a now-deleted <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240721195539/https:/careers.dish.com/about/diversity-inclusion">webpage</a>, DISH said that it wanted to embed DEI into its recruiting efforts, data and analytics, learning and development, talent identification and development, and organizational processes and systems. 
“DISH is committed to embracing a diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace where every team member is empowered to realize their full potential. While there is still work to be done, our five-part strategy aims to improve diversity, equity and inclusion at all levels — especially systematic — in order to be a workplace representative of the communities we live, work and serve in,” an archived page of the webpage reads. 
Hild’s letter also pointed to an <a href="https://www.facebook.com/dishcareers/posts/2145362812209762">unconscious bias</a> training session hosted by DISH’s employee resource groups. This training focused on how companies “need bias interrupters” and taught that “being on a diverse &amp; inclusive team is being on a winning team.”
Employee resource groups hosted by DISH include identity-focused collectives like &#8220;Out at DISH,&#8221; &#8220;African American Network at DISH,&#8221; &#8220;DISH Women’s Impact Network,&#8221; and &#8220;Adelante con DISH.&#8221; Many of these groups have promoted political agendas. 
For example, Out at DISH <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DBAISaWuvx5/">promoted</a> the Trevor Project’s “Coming Out Handbook,” which promotes radical gender ideology to kids. That same group also celebrated “Transgender Day of Visibility,” <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6915292412047233024/">urging</a> employees to “take some time to learn more about the transgender community and how you can be an ally.”
Hild’s letter also referenced previously-scrutinized donations from DISH founder Charlie Ergen, which came before the Biden Justice Department dismissed a $3.3 billion civil fraud lawsuit against the network. As the New York Post <a href="https://nypost.com/2024/03/22/us-news/doj-moved-to-dismiss-3-3b-fraud-suit-against-dish-after-chairman-charlie-ergen-donated-113k-to-biden/">reported</a>, the Justice Department moved to dismiss the suit in March 2024, just months after Ergen donated $113,000 to the Biden re-election effort.
A spokesman for Echostar, DISH’s owner, argued at the time that the fraud allegations were without merit and pointed out that Ergen regularly donated to members of both parties. 
“As a company subject to FCC oversight and benefiting from federal spectrum allocations, Consumers’ Research urges the DOJ and FCC to investigate DISH’s DEI initiatives for potential violations of President Trump’s executive orders and to assess whether the political activism of the co-founders has improperly influenced regulatory outcomes,” Hild wrote. 
The FCC has already opened up DEI-related investigations into broadcast companies, including Comcast and NBC Universal. FCC Chair Brendan Carr said that the promotion of DEI may be in violation of federal civil rights laws. 
Hild would like to see similar investigations into DISH. 
“Subjecting their employees to DEI training and especially their promotion of radical gender ideology to children is in violation of President Trump&#8217;s policies and DISH should be investigated immediately by the DOJ and FCC,” Hild told The Daily Wire. &#8220;DISH Network needs to be held accountable for turning its company into a vehicle for far-left activism. From DEI mandates to gender ideology and climate activism, it is clear the company has embedded woke politics into every part of its business.”

Dish Network Satellite television company logo seen

Trump Needs To Investigate DEI Push From DISH, Watchdog Insists

Department of Justice

Trump Administration

The following article was originally posted on “<a href="https://thenewjerusalem.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&amp;utm_medium=email" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The New Jerusalem</a>” on Substack.
* * *
In October, 2015, Vanity Fair magazine ran a feature story about television’s late night comedy talk shows. It was headlined “Host-to-Host Sensation.” The accompanying fold-out photo of ten top talk show comics caused a sensation of its own. Much imaginary ink was as if spilled over the shocking fact that all the hosts were men. But, of course, there was nothing shocking about that. Women aren’t funny. Even the funny ones aren’t that funny. As many another foolishly honest man has pointed out, women don’t need to be funny, not at a professional level at least. Overlooked, unathletic, angry high school boys need to be funny. If they’re not funny, their genetic strain will likely die with them. That’s the kind of urgent motivation that’s required to create a grown man with the insane courage to make jokes onstage and risk being met with dead silence.
But there was something that really was shocking about the Vanity Fair picture, something very few people who were not me bothered to mention. Every single comedy talk show host depicted — all ten of them — had exactly the same political opinions. They were all Left-wingers, and they would all come to detest and despise Donald Trump.
Now, you might say that was to be expected. The Venn Diagram of overlooked, unathletic, angry little men and Left-wing men is basically a circle with a small crescent of Nazis bulging out of one side. But what was shocking — and really kind of despicable — was this: the corporations who platformed these angry little funny leftists apparently saw no reason, financial or otherwise, to hire anyone to entertain the half of the audience who held more conservative views. Their idea seemed to be that they could make all the profits they needed by amusing one half of the audience at the expense of the other. They must have thought that was good business. They must have thought it was morally acceptable. They must have thought: “Screw you, half of America. We hurl disdain in your general direction!”
Well, strange to say, this business model did not perform all that well over time.
Listen, I’m a Christian man. I try very hard not to take pleasure in the misfortunes of my philosophical opponents. But in this case, I just can’t help it. The smug entitlement of an elite monoculture that despised the common man and woman — the men and women who, in the words of George Bailey, “do most of the working and paying and living and dying” in this country — was just begging for a comeuppance. And that uppance has come.
Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show on CBS has been cancelled and will go off the air next May. The show was making 40 million fewer dollars a year than the 130 million dollars it cost to produce. And while Colbert’s paltry ratings were the highest among his Left-wing colleagues, he and they were regularly being beaten by Greg Gutfeld, the libertarian smart aleck on Fox News. That’s cable, where the shows reach around half of the network audience, and where production costs are considerably lower.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-andrew-klavan-show">WATCH: The Andrew Klavan Show</a></h3>
Now, Colbert was not born talentless. His Jon Stewart spin-off show, The Colbert Report, in which he satirized conservative commentators like Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, was often amusing. But once he landed the CBS late night spot in 2015, the laughter died. Maybe it was the big money. Maybe it was the Trump Derangement-fueled rage. Maybe it was being flattered by hand-picked audiences cheering wildly for unfunny rants. But something went sour inside Colbert. Lines like “The only thing Trump’s mouth is good for is being Putin’s cock holster,” might have seemed hilarious to the kind of ten-year-olds who laugh through their noses. But to adults — especially adults weary of having self-satisfied show biz millionaires insult them with a wholly undeserved tone of moral superiority — they seemed a tad juvenile.
But Colbert’s abilities are beside the point. Stephen Colbert was bad for America. Not on his own, maybe. On his own, he was just another Hollywood putz who mistakenly thought he had something important to say. But as a brick in a solid wall of Left-wing entertainment, he did more damage than any laughter could rectify.
Networks broadcast on airwaves that are a public trust. Their stations are licensed by a federal agency, the FCC. If the monologues on network late night comedy shows can be said to have any kind of higher purpose, surely it has something to do with bringing us together, helping us laugh in the evening at the politics and passions that drive us apart during the day. If you ridicule Barack Obama, then I’ll be willing to see what’s ridiculous about Donald Trump. If you make jokes about Ted Cruz, then maybe leftists will be able to find something funny about AOC. Fair both-sides comedy has the power to soften our angry certainties with self-awareness and humility.
But if instead, you declare late night a one political party zone, what comity can your comedy produce? If you think a crafty Chicago machine pol like Obama is so perfect that there is “not a flaw or hook that you can caricature,” (as one Saturday Night Live writer put it), why should I be amused when you hammer Trump for his many peccadillos night after night after night?
During the monologue in which Colbert announced his cancellation, he turned to the camera and told President Trump, “Go f&#8212; yourself.” But hadn’t he been saying exactly that for these many years to all the tens of millions of Americans who voted for Trump, who thought him, in their good will and wisdom, a better choice than the candidates Colbert supports?
What exactly did Colbert think he knew that allowed him to dismiss so many of his countrymen? Insult each night so many of his countrymen? Disparage and belittle so many of his countrymen by continually mocking their candidates while at the same time using his mouth as a cock holster for any lying, corrupt, incompetent, third rate Democrat lucky enough to come on his show?
What angel visited Stephen in the quiet of his cultural sequestration and told him it would be all right for him — and for every single one of his corporate comedy colleagues — to consider those tens of millions of Americans as nothing more than the butts of their jokes? If they had intended to convince those voters to change sides, wouldn’t it have been wiser to spread the jokes around even just a little? But that wasn’t their intention. They despised those voters. They hectored them out of the audience. They sent them a clear message: You are not worthy of being amused.
And, of course, it’s not just the comedians. It’s every morally flatulent entertainer who ever accepted his or her Oscar or Emmy or Grammy with a speech denouncing the politicians half the electorate prefers. As the writer tells the actress in the classic show biz film All About Eve: “I shall never understand the weird process by which a body with a voice suddenly fancies itself as a mind.”
For more than twenty years, I’ve been making speeches to conservatives, telling them they should pay more attention to the arts. To movies, to novels, to music and so on. I quote James Joyce to them: artists “forge the uncreated conscience” of a people. I quote Percy Shelley: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” I tell them that complaining about movies and music and publishing will get them nowhere. The arts can only be redeemed by those who love them.
But maybe I was talking to the wrong people. Maybe I should have gone to the artists themselves. The arts aren’t leftist by nature, but they are liberal by nature. They find worth and dignity even in the Other. In the West, they always have. The Greeks mourned for the Trojan women. The Crusaders sang the nobility of their Muslim foes. Shakespeare reinvented the stock Evil Jew of the medieval Easter Play by granting him his full humanity.
Is there nothing of that spirit left in Hollywood? Or in publishing? Where conservative actors and writers have to talk in whispers? Where even to be a white male is to risk being barred from your vocation? No. They will not even award the Pulitzer to an iconic photograph depicting Trump’s courage under fire. They will not even put our glamorous First Lady on the covers of their fashion magazines. Ideology has made our cultural gatekeepers petty and small and mean.
Well, forgive me if that meanness has made me mean as well. The backlash is coming and has come, and I am glad to see it. With all my striving toward good will, the best I can muster for Stephen Colbert is to repeat to him the immortal words of a man more relevant, more daringly counter-cultural and, yes, a whole lot funnier than he is: “You’re fired.”
* * *
The following article was originally posted on “<a href="https://thenewjerusalem.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&amp;utm_medium=email" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The New Jerusalem</a>” on Substack.
Andrew Klavan is the host of “The Andrew Klavan Show” at The Daily Wire. Klavan is the bestselling author of numerous books, including the Cameron Winter Mystery series. The fifth installment, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/After-That-Cameron-Winter-Mysteries/dp/1613166869/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3EGZUC370LG46&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Y_NI0mDOKeowShheDQTVx5NH-fAeimJoCD56_T0Acpl8C0mup7uJf-nGGSRLEItaaekoDnvS2vWLMa4Zd2UBXQ8Y-g-P502jOWz-Y8IX3ZQsdlO7WMLrg1xIhNoKmjCorSWUR4C2l_RbiZ7apJ1MfPzGOrrEf7AdAXX6xwnJRVP_XqUfWuMuVthTWscaU3P4vgmS86-96n-721enHfX12CFQWTajqFbVnrsDkexfUf4.6_gTH6h1Bb9Pn375QdF_VAVZSayDvjQBBKGXE-MTiFo&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=klavan&amp;qid=1754049918&amp;sprefix=%2Caps%2C80&amp;sr=8-1">After That, The Dark,</a> is now available for Pre-Order. Follow him on X: <a href="https://x.com/andrewklavan" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@andrewklavan</a>
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

Stephen Colbert Was Bad For America

Andrew Klavan

comedian

Comedy

Stephen Colbert

As a clinical psychologist, I help people find the words to express what they’re feeling. For most of my career, this was a straightforward process — mostly supporting clients with anxiety and relationship or career issues. But over the past few years, I’ve noticed a shift. More and more, clients arrive not just with anxiety — but with speech anxiety. They’re not afraid of public speaking. They’re afraid that voicing a viewpoint could harm others — or be interpreted as harm itself. 
 
We’re living in a cultural moment where phrases like “words are violence” have moved from the margins into the mainstream. The instinct behind the idea is understandable. It’s rooted in compassion and a desire to protect others from emotional pain. But as someone who works with people in distress, I can say this: equating speech with physical violence doesn’t foster safety. It fosters fragility — and avoidance of the very emotional tools we need to thrive. 
 
Yes, words can hurt. They can be cruel, dismissive, even traumatizing but to label words as violent collapses a crucial distinction. Physical violence is something we’re biologically wired to avoid at all costs. It triggers a primal response — fight, flight, freeze — that can be lifesaving, in the right context. But when we teach people to respond to challenging conversations as if they’re being physically attacked, we inadvertently hijack that same physiological stress response. We turn everyday discomfort into a perceived emergency. 
 
This distinction isn’t just philosophical — it’s embedded in clinical ethics. As a licensed psychologist, I’m legally required to break confidentiality if a client discloses an imminent threat of physical violence. But if a client tells me they plan to say something rude, offensive, or even hateful, I’m not only permitted to keep that information confidential — I’m obligated to do so. That’s because speech and violence are fundamentally different categories of concern. One may call for a conversation. The other may call for an intervention. Blurring that boundary in everyday life creates confusion, not clarity. 
 
This can lead to serious emotional fallout. Clients tell me they’ve ended friendships, distanced themselves from family, or left jobs because of political or social disagreements that they once would have handled with a spirited discussion. They often say they feel “unsafe” around people with differing views — not because of any actual threat, but because of what those views might represent. That interpretation leads not to empowerment, but to chronic anxiety. 
 
Over time, this kind of hypervigilance doesn’t just shape relationships, it reshapes the self. In therapy, I see people move through the classic defense mechanisms we’re trained to watch for: suppression, repression, and denial. Suppression is when you’re aware of a thought or feeling but actively push it down. Repression is when the mind buries those thoughts so deeply that you’re no longer even conscious of them. Denial occurs when a person distorts their view of reality to avoid an uncomfortable truth. 
 
When people feel they must stifle their thoughts or language to remain socially acceptable, suppression is often the first step. But if suppression becomes a habit, it can slide into repression — people lose access to parts of themselves. Eventually, they may engage in denial: reframing a difficult relationship or viewpoint not as a difference of opinion, but as a danger to be avoided. From a mental health standpoint, this is where we start to see symptoms escalate — more anxiety, more relational conflict, and a diminished capacity to process emotions with nuance. 
 
This dynamic also connects to a broader societal trend. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37792968/">declared loneliness</a> a public health epidemic. We are more digitally connected than ever — and yet we feel increasingly cut off. That’s partly because people are afraid to express themselves authentically. If you’re always editing what you say — or editing who you are — you’re not really connecting. You’re performing. And performance doesn’t build intimacy. 
 
The goal isn’t to dismiss emotional pain or encourage rudeness. Psychological abuse is real, and words can leave deep scars. But we must be careful not to overextend the concept of harm to the point where disagreement feels dangerous. When that happens, people don’t just walk away from conflict — they walk away from each other. 
 
We also risk missing the bigger picture: that open dialogue is one of the most effective tools we have for growth, both individually and socially. Research in conflict resolution shows that meaningful change often begins with conversation — not censorship. Even in extreme cases — such as hate group de-radicalization — studies repeatedly show that dialogue, not silence, is what moves people out of entrenched thinking. 
 
What we need now is a more balanced framework — one that acknowledges the emotional impact of speech without mistaking it for physical harm. We should be equipping people with emotional skills: the ability to tolerate discomfort, name their feelings, and respond with clarity instead of retreating in fear. These are the building blocks of psychological resilience and they’re far more protective than trying to sanitize the world of anything potentially upsetting. 
 
In my work, I’ve seen that when people stop fearing their own voices — and stop fearing others’ — they grow stronger. They communicate better. They form deeper, more authentic relationships. That doesn’t happen when we treat words like weapons. It happens when we remember what words are for: understanding, connection, and sometimes, respectful disagreement. 
 
Words can hurt. But they can also heal. Let’s not confuse one for the other — because when we do, we risk losing the ability to use language as the powerful, human tool it’s meant to be.
* * *
Dr. Chloe Carmichael is a clinical psychologist, USA Today bestselling author of &#8220;Nervous Energy,&#8221; and a visiting fellow at Independent Women. Her <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/151078490X/ref=cm_sw_r_as_gl_apa_gl_i_BPB78R7NVWK0ZVAJQ088?linkCode=ml1&amp;tag=ivba-20">upcoming book</a> &#8220;Can I Say That? Why Free Speech Matters and How to Use It Fearlessly&#8221; (Skyhorse, Nov. 2025) explores the mental health benefits of open dialogue and the costs of self-censorship.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Medium shot of businessman discussing project with colleague

Words Are Not Violence And Here’s Why That Matters

Anxiety

Free Speech

Hate Speech

Opinion

Psychology

Violence

Bill Burr, the comedian — or perhaps I should call him an ex-comedian —is still pretty angry at me.
That’s because all the way back in February, I said that he had gone rogue. He got really sad. That was after he suggested that the healthcare CEOs of America might deserve to be murdered.
On Thursday, Vulture — which still surprisingly exists — published an <a href="https://www.vulture.com/article/bill-burr-woke-politics-billionaires-left-right.html">interview</a> with him.
“I want to ask about politics because it has been an interesting few months for you in this arena. You’ve had a few things happen, including Ben Shapiro talking about going to one of your shows and complaining that you’re becoming ‘woke,’” Vulture began. 
 
“He doesn’t even know what that word means,” Burr insisted. “His definition of woke is white liberals’ definition of woke, and they didn’t even know what it was; they just took the word from black people. That’s the worst thing about our people — not only do we take from other cultures, we don’t even take the time to understand the definition. He went there to be annoyed so he can then have something to talk about and then he can make money off dividing his own country. Those people, it’s treasonous what they do.”
“The fact is that it worked for what his goal was: for it became a thing online where a certain portion of the right complained about how you’re woke —” Vulture posited.
“Racists. They’re racists,” Burr complained. “They send pictures of monkeys to me and my wife. They’re f***ing horrible people. And they’re cowards, and they never say it to your face. &#8230; What I’m finding is that people keep trying to categorize what it is that you’re doing. Like that idiot Ben Shapiro: ‘He’s woke now!’ That f***ing guy. He was trying to bring me into his fold. At one point, the guy liked me. And then when I didn&#8217;t, all of a sudden I&#8217;m a, I mean, I&#8217;m supposed to look at that guy like he&#8217;s an adult?’
Vulture: “Do you feel misunderstood if people take your words one way or the other?”
“No, I&#8217;m not, mis — I’m deliberately misunderstood,” Burr moaned.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2251-member-exclusive?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=The+Ben+Shapiro+Show&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
Okay, a couple of quick housekeeping notes there. First, I don&#8217;t need to pay to go to your comedy show to be annoyed. There&#8217;s a lot of stuff in the world that annoys me. And typically, I don&#8217;t shell out hundreds of bucks and then take my wife and my friends to a show in order to be annoyed. I&#8217;m sorry; you did a bad show, and a bunch of people didn&#8217;t laugh in Florida, and then you fussed like a child and then walked off the stage. It was really ridiculous.
That&#8217;s on you, dude. You probably should give the people refunds because they paid for Bill Burr at Red Rock. Instead, they got Joy Behar at some dive bar.
You used to do jokes like this. “Look at the WNBA. They&#8217;ve been playing in front of 3 to 400 people a night for a quarter of a century. Not to mention it&#8217;s a male-subsidized league. We gave you a league. Where are all the feminists? That place should be packed with feminists wearing jerseys, flashing it &#8230; going nuts like the guys do in the upper deck &#8230; ‘Me on the jumbotron. Am I doing it?’”
Or: “Women failed the WNBA. Ladies, ladies, name your top five all-time WNBA players. Name five WNBA teams. Name the WNBA team in your city. You can&#8217;t do it.”
Or: “You don&#8217;t give a f*** about them. They play night in and night out in front of nobody. It&#8217;s a f*** tragedy.”
That&#8217;s what you used to be. But now your latest material is like this: “Then they&#8217;re talking about looting, but CNN and Fox News are not going to bring up the insurance companies that are just going to keep everybody&#8217;s premiums and still give themselves a bonus. Free Luigi!”
Or: “For conservative people to act like they&#8217;re not the biggest babies also is hilarious. Have you seen this? My people? Whitey, we&#8217;re all upset. There&#8217;s enough of us to get it going, trending, anyway. (laughing) We&#8217;re upset about the new Cinderella movie. ‘The actress playing Cinderella isn’t white. There&#8217;s no prince. They changed the story. What am I gonna tell my kids?’ The things my people get upset about. ‘What am I going to tell my kids?’ Well, talk around it the way you do, the way we talk around the real history of this country.”
I&#8217;m glad he&#8217;s laughing at himself because nobody else is. Man, what a fall.
Not liking your show isn&#8217;t “treason,” you doof; you&#8217;re not the president. You&#8217;re the guy who came in second in the Billy Corgan lookalike contest because you showed up sloppy drunk and forgot to shave again.
Here&#8217;s what I mean by wokeness: There is a definition, and I&#8217;ve explained it over and over and over again on the show. It&#8217;s not my definition. It&#8217;s the definition that Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic — who literally wrote a book on Critical Race Theory — laid out in explaining the basic principles that match up with wokeness.
One: racism is ordinary, not aberrational.
Two: Our system of white over color-ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material.
So you put those together for wokeness. What that means is that the system of America is designed to create racially disparate outcomes. Any proof of racially disparate outcomes is evidence of the malignancy of the system.
There&#8217;s another element of wokeness that is self-contradictory here, that there is a racial essentialism that stops you from criticizing as unfactual the viewpoints of others. “You don&#8217;t understand because you&#8217;re not black,” or ‘You can&#8217;t understand because you&#8217;re not gay.”
This ends conversations and contradicts the fundamental basis of wokeness, because the basis of wokeness is that everybody is basically the same, which means all group outcomes should be the same, which means any inequality of group outcome is evidence of systemic inequity.
But then wokeness will also posit that racial groups are so different that you can&#8217;t even talk to one another. You can&#8217;t even criticize the viewpoints of members of another racial group. It&#8217;s a bizarre defense mechanism.
I call Bill Burr woke because he is. He believes that America is a deeply racist place and that it&#8217;s embedded in all of our social systems, and the evidence of that is our economic inequality, and therefore, it&#8217;s probably okay to shoot healthcare CEOs.
And if you criticize him as woke, it&#8217;s because you don&#8217;t really understand the term “woke” because black people invented that term, and when white people use the term “woke” as a descriptor, it’s cultural appropriation.
Oh, how times have changed. 
Bill Burr used to tell this joke: “The black guy who brought up leg-shaking, saying, ‘Elvis took leg-shaking from us.’ It&#8217;s like, ‘Really? Leg-shaking? No, nobody thought to do this. Black people came up with that. You telling me that? I&#8217;ll even give you that. Let&#8217;s say you came up with that. Where did that black dude learn how to do it? Didn&#8217;t he watch some older black guy do it because he&#8217;s the same color? He&#8217;s not stealing. He&#8217;s just carrying on the tradition. But if Elvis does it. Oh, what the f***. Now he&#8217;s the biggest thief ever.’ That doesn&#8217;t make any sense to me.”
The current Bill Burr would presumably call that Bill Burr insensitive and unresponsive to the needs and definitions of black people, which is amazing, because Bill Burr is whiter than a painting of a polar bear in snow on a white canvas.
He&#8217;s the most annoying form of a woke person: a white lib, the kind he likes to criticize. The white person who apologizes for being white by pretending that he can speak on behalf of black people about the systemic privileges of being white.
While pulling down millions of dollars to be an angry thumb of a human.
So Bald Rumpelstiltskin over there — who gets mad when you call him by his real name — is still pissed off. I didn&#8217;t enjoy his comedy show last year, and he thinks that my wife and I and our friends paid to attend his show just so that I could criticize him.
Here&#8217;s the thing. On a random weekday night, if I&#8217;m going to a comedy show, I&#8217;m going because I want to laugh. We paid to attend your show because you used to be funny, and then you transed yourself and turned into a white, bald, allegedly male version of Sunny Hostin on The View screeching at me about income inequality and racism.
You&#8217;ve decided that you&#8217;re a victim and that everyone you know is a victim and that America is cruel and nasty, and you&#8217;re deliberately misunderstood just because you won&#8217;t put on a great show anymore.
I used to enjoy watching Bill Burr. But now watching him is like watching Robin D&#8217;Angelo, but even whiter and even faker and less funny and with a screechy Boston accent to boot.
You turned into Billy, the piss-drunk woke leprechaun. Good luck with that, dude.
Listen, I hope you turn it around. I really do, because the world needs better comedians, and I like a lot of comedians that disagree with me, including Louis C.K. and Dave Chappelle.
But we don’t need 57-year-old men trying to earn street cred with fellow kids by turning into a human embodiment of those stupid “In this house” lawn signs. That makes me sad. It does.
And yeah, you&#8217;re being a woke jackass.

Shaq’s Fun House

Bill Burr Went Woke. Now He’s Whining About It.

Ben Shapiro

Bill Burr

In 2017, “Saturday Night Live” uncorked a riotous “‘Woke Jeans’ commercial” tied to the growing woke movement.
The clip proved an exception to the mainstream comedy rule. Woke was more or less off limits to “SNL,” Late-Night hosts, and film comedies, despite a dearth of material.
Insane cultural rules. Virtue-signaling politicians. Identity Politics gone wild. The comic possibilities seemed endless.
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Levi&#039;s Wokes - SNL" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/adPXDTvADD0?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
&nbsp;
Nothing to laugh about here. Move along. Only Comedy Central’s “South Park” regularly targeted the cultural scourge via PC Principal, trans athletes in women’s sports, and related gags.
Now, things are changing. It’s suddenly acceptable to mock the progressive overreach.
The new movie “Eddington” takes direct aim at woke, along with COVID-19 restrictions, conspiracy theorists and BLM sloganeering.
Director Ari Aster’s film isn’t one-sided or brimming with lectures. It takes us back to May 2020, a time when the George Floyd riots were raging across America and government rules made citizens mask up to stop the virus’ spread.
<div id="attachment_955565" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-955565" class="wp-image-955565 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-01-Aug-2025-11-14-AM-5738-1024x576.jpg" alt="Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal in “Eddington” (2025) A24. Square Peg Productions. 828 Productions. IMDB." width="1024" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-01-Aug-2025-11-14-AM-5738-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-01-Aug-2025-11-14-AM-5738-300x169.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-01-Aug-2025-11-14-AM-5738-768x432.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-01-Aug-2025-11-14-AM-5738-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-01-Aug-2025-11-14-AM-5738-2048x1152.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal in “Eddington” (2025) A24. Square Peg Productions. 828 Productions. IMDB.</div>
The story unfolds in a fictional small town in New Mexico, one about to be rocked by dueling social contagions.
It’s uncomfortable to watch and often hilarious, mocking both Alex Jones types and white teens desperate to be woke. The latter ape the progressive talking points of their big-city peers, desperate to fit in and appear cool.
Heck, one newly woke teen just wants to “get” with a pretty girl, and he’ll virtue all the signals he can to make that happen.
The film’s biggest laugh? A white teen explains his “privilege” to his parents, and his father snaps back at him.
“Are you a f***ing retard? You’re white.”
Aster’s films aren’t blockbusters, but his arthouse musings represent mainstream artistic values. And, yes, he went there. So much so that a New York Times <a href="https://x.com/matthewschmitz/status/1947120245329576009">film critic</a> literally <a href="https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/ny-times-eddington-director-mocking-blm/">cursed him out</a> for inserting those gags in his film.
<blockquote>“F*** you, Ari Aster. Really, seriously. It’s so easy to mock these things. People are still dying from COVID. We may no longer be living in a pandemic… I just don’t find it funny, and I find it really important for people to, I think white people should interrogate their f***Ing whiteness, and I think Ari Aster should start.”</blockquote>
Triggered.
<div id="attachment_955653" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-955653" class="size-large wp-image-955653" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/GettyImages-2215538204-864x576.jpg" alt="CANNES, FRANCE - MAY 17: (L-R) Emma Stone, Pedro Pascal, Ari Aster, Joaquin Phoenix and Austin Butler pose during the &quot;Eddington&quot; photocall at the 78th annual Cannes Film Festival at Palais des Festivals on May 17, 2025 in Cannes, France. (Photo by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/GettyImages-2215538204-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/GettyImages-2215538204-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/GettyImages-2215538204-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/GettyImages-2215538204.jpg 1024w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Andreas Rentz/Getty Images</div>
The recent horror-comedy “Ick” from provocateur Joseph Kahn also tees-off on woke overreach. The story follows another small town where calamity strikes. This time, the danger comes from a mysterious plant-like substance that goes from benign to deadly.
The menace allows Kahn to satirize American culture, conspiracy mongers (again) and that woke mind virus. Virtue signaling takes it on the chin, as do students talking like an unproduced Lena Dunham sitcom.
It’s far from flattering.
Those eager for a deeper dive into woke excess can read “The Sandersons Fail Manhattan.&#8221; Author Scott Johnston’s biting satire follows a rich New York family caught up in the city&#8217;s progressive mania. A fancy prep school is desperate to recruit its first trans student, while the story&#8217;s patriarch must learn if his colleague is gay enough to satisfy key DEI requirements.
<div id="attachment_955657" style="width: 394px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Sandersons-Fail-Manhattan-Novel/dp/1250384788"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-955657" class="size-large wp-image-955657" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-01-Aug-2025-12-42-PM-5680-384x576.jpg" alt="Cover Credit: St. Martin's Press" width="384" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-01-Aug-2025-12-42-PM-5680-384x576.jpg 384w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-01-Aug-2025-12-42-PM-5680-200x300.jpg 200w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-01-Aug-2025-12-42-PM-5680-768x1152.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-01-Aug-2025-12-42-PM-5680-1024x1536.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-01-Aug-2025-12-42-PM-5680-1365x2048.jpg 1365w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-01-Aug-2025-12-42-PM-5680-1360x2040.jpg 1360w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/MixCollage-01-Aug-2025-12-42-PM-5680-scaled.jpg 1707w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 384px) 100vw, 384px" /></a>Cover Credit: St. Martin&#8217;s Press</div>
While “Eddington” and “Ick” take shots at woke, “Manhattan” is a full-on assault against Identity Politics and its cultural tendrils. No apologies.
Even comedians can shred woke pieties from major platforms without fear of reprisal and tell jokes that the woke mob deemed off limits.
Last year, the comedy roast format roared back to life with Netflix’s “tribute” to NFL great Tom Brady.
More recently, stand-up comic Shane Gillis proved that anew. Gillis, starring in Netflix’s rowdy comedy “Tires,” is a walking, talking testament to woke’s cultural decline. The comedian got hired, and promptly fired, by “SNL” for crude comments tied to Asian culture. Rather than fade into obscurity, Gillis went back to work, rebuilding his career.
His star rose so high that “SNL” invited him to host the program – twice – without censoring his rebellious streak.
<div id="attachment_955665" style="width: 835px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-955665" class="size-large wp-image-955665" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/GettyImages-2225471382-825x576.jpg" alt="HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA - JULY 16: Shane Gillis speaks onstage during the 2025 ESPY Awards at Dolby Theatre on July 16, 2025 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)" width="825" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/GettyImages-2225471382-825x576.jpg 825w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/GettyImages-2225471382-300x209.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/GettyImages-2225471382-768x536.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/08/GettyImages-2225471382.jpg 1024w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 825px) 100vw, 825px" />Kevin Winter/Getty Images</div>
More recently, he emceed the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/shane-gillis-destroys-the-espys-and-wokeness">ESPY Awards</a>, mocking woke sacred cows like former soccer player Megan Rapinoe, a progressive scold synonymous with virtue signaling.
“Megan Rapinoe could not make it tonight … nice.”
A few media outlets grumbled about his “problematic” material. No Cancel Culture-style punishment ensued, nor was he forced to make a “hostage”-style apology.
Now, a rare voice eager to mock the woke mindset returns to do more of the same. “Beavis &amp; Butt-head” creator Mike Judge took an early swing at woke with his failed 2009 ABC sitcom “The Goode Family.” The show proved ahead of its time, teasing a hard-Left clan who strained to be better than, well, everyone.
Now, Judge is using his “King of the Hill” reboot to satirize gender fluidity, cultural appropriation and more on Hulu starting August 4.
Judge isn’t as merciless as Johnston, but his “Hill” gags give the game away. One episode finds wokesters attacking Bobby Hill, now a young man and overseeing a fusion restaurant. The menu in question sparks cries of cultural appropriation, leaving the Hill clan confused and upset.
The show finds a resolution, albeit one that illustrates the wobbly nature of woke criticism.
Has the pop culture dam finally broken on all things woke? The re-election of Donald Trump pushed the pendulum, hard, in that direction. We’re seeing the fruits of that shift now in pop culture.
More may follow.
And, if “SNL,” late-night TV and mainstream comedies continue to avoid these juicy targets, their cultural clout will diminish even further. Just <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/nyc-were-with-colbert-rally-draws-tens-of-people-even-cops-go-home">ask Stephen Colbert how that works</a>.
* * *
Christian Toto is an award-winning journalist, movie critic and editor of <a href="https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">HollywoodInToto.com</a>. He previously served as associate editor with Breitbart News’ Big Hollywood. Follow him at <a href="https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">HollywoodInToto.com</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

MixCollage-01-Aug-2025-11-14-AM-5738

Triggered Yet? Pop Culture’s Woke Takedown Has Begun

Triggered Yet? Pop Culture's Woke Takedown Has Begun

COVID

Entertainment

Film

Film Reviews

Hollywood

Movies

Saturday Night Live

Menu