Why Pride Month is quiet — and why the right must fight on

Every June for the past decade, Americans have endured the same tedious ritual. Corporations, nonprofits, and federal agencies blanketed the country in rainbow iconography to mark the beginning of Pride Month. Logos were recolored. HR departments rolled out slide decks on inclusion. Public spaces were repurposed into temples of the new state religion.

But this year feels different. Pride Month opened with a whimper. Some of the most vocal corporate evangelists dropped the celebration entirely. The cause? Conservatives finally decided to fight. Culture war became something more than a talking point — and suddenly, a chorus of “respectable” voices began warning about the dangers of winning.

The base has learned that victory is possible. Cultural power can be challenged. Political power can be used. The enemy can be made to retreat.

It’s our duty to ignore them.

The warning signs were obvious decades ago. In 1992, Pat Buchanan told the Republican National Convention that a culture war had already begun. If the right failed to take it seriously, he said, it would lose everything else. The GOP didn’t listen. Instead, the party obsessed over tax cuts and nation-building in the Middle East. The Moral Majority of the 1970s and ’80s was treated as a joke — something dated, embarrassing, and politically toxic. Better to focus on free markets and gun rights.

The culture war, we were told, belonged to church ladies and washed-up televangelists. The future of conservatism lay in fusing neocon economics with a libertarian live-and-let-live approach to social issues.

Pride filled the void

Nature abhors a vacuum. Turns out that if you withdraw all Christian influence from the public square, something else takes its place.

Republicans abandoned the culture war. Progressives never stopped fighting it. With almost no resistance, activist groups captured corporations, school boards, and even the military. Their “American Ramadan” took hold of the civic calendar. At first, they had to push. Over time, they no longer needed to. They’d filled these institutions with graduates trained in the new religion. Pride became doctrine.

Then they pushed too far.

The backlash didn’t start with GOP leadership or conservative media figures. Most of them ran for cover, as usual. It started with parents. LGBTQ+ activists had always targeted children, but usually with plausible deniability. Once transgender ideology reached the classroom and children began mutilating their bodies, the pretense collapsed.

Fathers watched daughters suffer concussions in girls’ sports. Mothers feared losing sons to state-mandated transitions. This wasn’t about marginal tax rates any more. This was a fight for their children’s bodies and souls — exactly the battle Buchanan predicted.

RELATED: Let’s build a statue honoring Pat Buchanan

Blaze Media Illustration

Fighting the culture war worked

Eventually, even Republican politicians took notice. Boycotts emerged. Protests followed. For the first time in decades, conservative action had teeth. Corporate boardrooms and school boards felt the pressure.

Some politicians, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, broke from the usual GOP pattern of complaint without consequence. He used political power to defend voters — passing laws, signing executive orders, reshaping public institutions. Conservative pundits and establishment media scolded him for violating “small government principles.” Voters, however, rewarded him. Other governors followed.

Pride Month 2025 looked nothing like the version Americans had come to expect. Under the Trump administration, federal agencies and the military no longer served as public relations arms for the gender revolution. Major corporations — Target, Starbucks, Disney — sat out the ritual queering of their logos. Not every company pulled back. But the most aggressive push came from professional sports leagues, especially Major League Baseball. Ironically, the industries most reliant on red-state consumers seemed the most desperate to humiliate them.

Still, the contrast was undeniable. Conservatives, for once, applied sustained pressure — and it worked.

Much work to be done

No victory stays secure without follow-through.

Progressive ideology still saturates the commanding heights of American culture. The bureaucracy, the universities, the legal system — all remain firmly in enemy hands. Populist uprisings, however welcome, tend to burn hot and fast. They need structure to last. The moment belongs to the right, but momentum means little without organization.

Buchanan’s most famous lines weren’t just about warning — they were about action.

Greater love than this hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friend. Here were 19-year-old boys ready to lay down their lives to stop a mob from molesting old people they did not even know. And as those boys took back the streets of Los Angeles, block by block, my friends, we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.

That vision threatens the GOP establishment more than any left-wing pressure campaign. Republican elites never liked Trump, and they certainly never liked what he unleashed. Populism made demands. It refused to obey. It reminded the base that political power should be used — not just harvested.

The saboteurs wasted no time. They labeled anyone who fights the culture war with actual authority “the woke right.” The term signals their intent: Neutralize real opposition by redefining it as leftist. Restore the old consensus. Return to safe topics and stale slogans.

But the old consensus is dying.

The base has learned that victory is possible. Cultural power can be challenged. Political power can be used. The enemy can be made to retreat.

Of course, this fight won’t end quickly. No amount of virtue-signaling from corporations can erase the damage already done. Children still face ideological capture. Bureaucrats still push gender ideology behind closed doors. Activists still hold positions of influence across major institutions.

But the wall has cracked.

This moment demands more than nostalgia or outrage. It demands strategy. It demands organization. And above all, it demands courage.

The right doesn’t need to beg for permission or apologize for fighting. It needs to press the advantage. Those who warned that the culture war would cost too much should reckon with how much surrender has already cost us.

We’ve seen what works. Now we need to keep doing it — block by block.