My own insight about woke revolutions is that they happen most intensely in places that need them the least. That's not to say anyone really needs them, but if in theory someone did it wouldn't be far left enclaves where these woke uprisings regularly happen. 

It's not a coincidence that the first big woke uprising most people became aware of happened at the most progressive college campus in Washington state (Evergreen State College). More recently, it explains why Columbia University is the site of building takeovers by masked, pro-Hamas students rather than some less progressive institution.

Why are so many left-wing advocacy groups struggling internally with woke criticisms (to the point that many can barely operate)? That's because, ironically, the woke are colonizers who start their uprisings in the places they feel most welcome.

All that to say, it's no surprise that when all of America started moving left because of BLM, especially in the summer of 2020, Hollywood was primed to take everything too far. And now some of the companies that jumped on the DEI/CRT bandwagon are starting to back away.

Among the companies changing their approach to DEI are The Walt Disney Co., which recently announced that it was ending “Reimagine Tomorrow,” an initiative intended to promote stories from underrepresented communities. And it’s not alone. Amazon and, just last week, Paramount and WBD walked back programs that embedded DEI in hiring and promotion practices.

The general sense is that President Trump is forcing these companies to reconsider.

For now, Trump is in charge and exerting his power and influence. In the face of federal probes and potential penalties, experts believe the entertainment industry will continue to dial down explicit efforts to diversify its workforce in favor of vaguer goals of promoting inclusivity.

“If companies say they are just making sure that everyone has an even playing field, that’s probably OK because the law of the land is you cannot discriminate,” says Jared Slater, a partner at Ervin Cohen & Jessup specializing in labor law. “If they talk about having a certain percentage of minority talent working on movies or in their executive ranks, they’re going to have difficulties.”

No doubt Trump is a factor but it's fair to say that many of these companies started backing away even before he assumed office. The NY Times Magazine published a story in December about Hollywood's "Awkward 'Diversity Era'" coming to an end.

Think back several years: Do you remember packed theaters giving Black-power salutes at screenings of “Black Panther”? Do you remember when an all-female version of “Ghostbusters” was treated as a pioneering development? Do you remember when the writer of a “Star Wars” film described the Empire as a “white supremacist (human) organization” after Donald Trump’s 2016 election? Has enough time now passed to say that was all a bit strange?

Looking back, you can see a period when identitarian politics were in cultural ascendancy; you can spot the moments when our media overlords — on their back feet over rage at the crimes of Harvey Weinstein, the paucity of nonwhite nominees at the Oscars, the aftermath of George Floyd’s death — vowed to change their ways and atone for their past...

Say what you want about the flaws of Schwarzenegger’s or Sergio Leone’s oeuvres, but they have survived the changing times because they are fun, something the P.C. blockbuster rarely had going for it. It’s conceivable that the close of this era will involve Hollywood’s backsliding away from any inclusion in films — that Shang-Chi was the last Asian hero and that we will return to Tom Cruise’s flying in to save the day. At least we no longer have to pretend to like something because it has the right politics, or because the people most vocally against it are Nazis.

Well, no, just no. People didn't tune out lady Ghostbusters and lady Star Wars and lady Thor and lady Black Panther and lady Hawkeye and lady Hulk and the upcoming lady Iron Man and woke Snow White because they were Nazis. They tuned them out because they were tiresome, preachy imitations of better movies and characters that people actually love.

It should go without saying that this same audience rejecting those films isn't interested in white Black Panther or male Black Widow. Those would also be abominable, but somehow Hollywood is smart enough not to make those films.

Even so, the backtracking on DEI is not a small thing in far-left Hollywood. Vanity Fair wrote an article highlighting some of the complaints. It suggested the backsliding started long before Trump's return to office.

“I honestly think we’re in a pretty poor place, which is really disappointing after seeing all those huge commitments,” says Kristen Marston, a cultural consultant who advises many entertainment companies and worked on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and The Little Mermaid. “George Floyd was such a big news-cycle moment that everyone wanted to jump on it…. I was getting invited to do presentations and go into writers rooms consistently, and that has dropped drastically in the last few years.”...

Alarm bells clanged for people of color in Hollywood when a spate of high-profile DEI executives either stepped down or were caught up in budget cuts in 2023. One canary who didn’t survive the coal mine was Karen Horne, who created the blueprint for many talent-pipeline programs in the industry. Most recently, she was Warner Bros. Discovery North America’s senior vice president for DEI, before she was laid off as part of the company’s restructuring. The timing of these executives’ departures might have been partly coincidental, but the frustration they triggered was severe.

Those who were laid off and those who left of their own volition agree that most DEI setups are ineffectual. Says Horne, “The systems that are in place don’t support success.” Jeanell English, who was the executive vice president of impact and inclusion at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, resigned in June 2023. “In 2020 there was a lot of pressure for organizations to hire these roles, but not a real understanding of what the jobs were,” she says. “You’re bringing me in to really challenge, question, rebuild, dismantle the systems that your organization has been built on. And that is fundamentally uncomfortable if you’re not ready to receive and respond to that level of critique.” Fast-forward to 2023: “You have [DEI] people who are burnt out from pushing to implement things that they thought would be welcomed,” says English. “You have the [community] frustrated, because they don’t see enough change. And then you have these organizations who—how do you justify a job that maybe you didn’t even really want? So you start to see roles being cut.”

Some woke employees are still fighting back. A few days ago, employees at Paramount published a blistering letter reprimanding their own employer.

“As employees of Paramount Global, we are extremely disappointed — but not surprised — by the senior leadership team's decision to roll back our commitments to DEI. This capitulation reflects the profound hypocrisy in extracting labor from diverse communities, creating content from and for diverse communities, targeting the dollars of diverse communities... while committing to the erasure and exclusion of those very same diverse communities...

As a private corporate entity that sits and operates outside the federal government structure, we cannot continue to yield preemptively to unethical policies that do not apply to us in order to curry political favor. Continuing to kiss the ring and pay off mob bosses so they don't interfere in business leads us down a path we cannot come back from. We are tired of being passed around from billionaire to billionaire, never seeing the fruits of our labor, and instead watching profits distributed to the wealthy. Meanwhile, we're forced to say goodbye to countless talented and brilliant colleagues through rounds after rounds of layoffs — colleagues that are overwhelmingly from underrepresented and underestimated demographics.

It really reminds me of the uprisings inside various newsrooms (another far-left environment colonized by the woke). We've seen outbursts at the LA Times, the Washington Post and the NY Times over various issues. In each case the woke demand that the companies woke on, but frequently the owners are more interested in creating a product that is at least balanced enough to break even instead of demanding a constant infusion of cash.