It's the dog that didn't bark. 

In fact, very few people are using "woof" as a pronoun these days, and as far as I can tell, there are very few rainbow logos out there. It's almost like everybody is acknowledging the sexual dimorphism of the human race. 

The Pravda Media is portraying this as Trump cracking down on gay people--CNN calls Trump a "threat" to the gay community--but that is just bloviating. Trump's administration is chock-full of gay people. It's just that they are presented as individuals, not avatars of some moral movement that equates non-standard sexual preferences as evidence of moral superiority. 

Check out "https://t.co/RoXlhjycB4"

After a quarter century of bullying from the left, Americans welcome the relief, writes@1HereticalTruth Adam Ellwanger.

— Chronicles Magazine (@ChroniclesMag) June 16, 2025

The Associated Press presents the pullback from tuck swimwear as a sign of the apocalypse. I view it as a return to normality. 

WASHINGTON (AP) — When he first ran for office, Donald Trump appeared to be a new kind of Republican when it came to gay rights.

Years earlier, he overturned the rules of his own Miss Universe pageant to allow a transgender contestant to compete. He said Caitlyn Jenner could use any bathroom at Trump Tower that she wanted. And he was the first president to name an openly gay person to a Cabinet-level position.

But since returning to office this year, Trump has engaged in what activists say is an unprecedented assault on the LGBTQ+ community. The threat from the White House contrasts with World Pride celebrations taking place just blocks away in Washington, including a parade and rally this weekend.

“We are in the darkest period right now since the height of the AIDS crisis,” said Kevin Jennings, who leads Lambda Legal, a longtime advocacy organization. “I am deeply concerned that we’re going to see it all be taken away in the next four years.”

Trump’s defenders insist the president has not acted in a discriminatory way, and they point to public polling that shows widespread support for policies like restrictions on transgender athletes.

The case for gay rights was always based on the arguments that gays are not fundamentally different from heterosexuals; they just swing a different way in their private lives. Is it a surprise that when people started displaying their genitals while wearing bondage clothing, people might recoil? It was a refutation of the argument that won them over. 

I guarantee you that most of us don't want to think of the sexual preferences of others, unless that fact directly impacts us. Pride celebrations are inherently about sex, and many pride parades feature explicitly sexual displays or even practices in public. We don't want to see it, and don't want to go shopping, having to avert our eyes from celebrations of such things. 

Pride Month has returned, but in 2025 it comes more like a lamb than the lion it was only a year or two ago. For half the country, this is a step in the right direction. But the legacy media is horrified and angry. No surprise there. More interesting are their attempts to explain why Pride events are now starved for funding and why corporate enthusiasm for the rainbow flag has dimmed.

The explanation they are selling is that the Trump administration has made major corporations afraid of getting on the wrong side of the president, fearing that they may be investigated, censured, or denied federal contracts and money. There is probably some truth to that. But the media commentators seem unable to follow that line of thinking to its conclusion.

They pretend that the state pressuring the corporate world to take sides in the culture war is something that started only last January. The larger truth is that it was the political left, particularly the Obama and Biden administrations, that pioneered the campaign of state intimidation aimed at forcing public demonstrations of fealty to the state’s ideology.

The backlash to Pride really picked up steam with the introduction of "family-friendly" sexual displays. It was one thing to be annoyed about an entire month dedicated to celebrating some of the most privileged and celebrated people on earth as if they were an oppressed minority; it was quite another to see children being groomed by perverted adults. 

Corporate backing for Pride was a response to political pressures from NGOs and the Democratic Party, and when Trump won on, among other things, pushing back against alphabet ideology, corporations got the message. Bud Light and Target were canaries in the coal mine, but an entire presidential election won partly on the basis of a backlash to the pendulum having swung too far made them throw in the towel. 

It is as if they actually believe there was a decision one day, in every corporate boardroom in America, to converge around the idea that they must align with LGBT advocacy and demonstrate that alignment publicly—as though the supersonic institutionalization of Pride was a genuine grassroots phenomenon. It wasn’t something conjured by the state—it was just the natural result of being on “the right side of history.”

The reality, of course, was that the avalanche of rainbows throughout June (and the other LGBT “holidays” that dot the calendar) was always a series of performative gestures made on the basis of strategic self-interest. If a large organization is truly committed to an idea, a value, or an issue, they don’t back away from it because the political winds change direction. Chik-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby remain closed on Sundays.

Still, the muted response to Pride 2025 is undeniable. This alone should be enough to make it obvious to journalists that the corporate gestures of the past few years were never authentic expressions of support or affinity.

There is no MAGA backlash against gays, per se. A large fraction of the MAGA influencer base is gay, as are some of Trump's most influential Cabinet members and advisors. Scott Presler, who helped Trump win Pennsylvania, is openly gay and one of the most popular figures in the MAGA movement. 

I've never seen his genitals, and that makes me very happy. Although I wish he would get a haircut. Hey, hippie! 

There are many reasons for the apparent “defeat” of wokeism, and many individuals sacrificed time, money, and reputation to bring it to heel. But that defeat (which may itself be illusory) appears to have been so sudden and so thorough that it cannot be fully explained by pointing to some mystical “vibe shift.” The truth is that all of it—the unavoidable worship of every leftist cause across the public sphere—was engineered by state power.

To informed observers, this may seem an obvious insight. But the implications are important. The culture war is a war because the issues that animate it are ones that deeply divide Americans. Our government, of course, is meant to represent all Americans. But attributing the sudden collapse of the woke superstructure to a new president shows that prior to 2025 the state was actively taking sides in the culture war. The government was working to institutionalize the perspectives of Democratic elites, punishing those who challenged these perspectives, and coercing those who don’t share them.

Pride month is about the promotion of an ideology, not a call to be more tolerant of people's differences. I fully support the second, and am infuriated by the first. Alphabet ideology is an offshoot of communism and revolutionary theory--that's why you see alphabet people marching for Islamists. The goal is the overthrow of Western culture. 

Most gays want the American dream, not access to children or the overthrow of the United States. 

The backlash against Pride is a part of the larger backlash against DEI and Critical Theory because they all amount to the same thing. Most people are sick of it and sick of their promoters. 

So dropping "pride" is just good business.