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.

On the evening of the Obergefell decision that legalized gay marriage, Obama lit up the White House with rainbow lights. The administration knew very well that the decision was one a large portion of Americans would find abhorrent. Rather than take the high road—which Michelle Obama often congratulated Democrats for doing—they decided to twist the knife and spike the football. This was a powerful message: public-facing corporations were made to understand that the government expected not just acceptance of the LGBT agenda, but enthusiastic and demonstrative support for it.