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 order, 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 programs and divisive, discriminatory DEI policies.

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 pushback against ESG, DEI, & 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 JPMorgan Chase & Citigroup 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 David Bahnsen and other ordinary investors 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 & 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 & back to business. 

And we’re seeing real results on a whole host of issues. Beyond the debanking issue, we’re seeing companies ditch 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 & privileges afforded to non-religious ones, including through workplace affinity groups and inclusion in charity matching programs. We’re seeing companies like PepsiCo and IBM 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.

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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 @IsaacWillour.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — “Everybody needs to be reading more history.” 

While not a typical applause line, it was a favorite of the crowd of twenty and thirty-somethings listening to Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti speak at the National Young Republican Convention. Skrmetti, fresh off a landmark victory at the Supreme Court, implored the crowd to take seriously their duty to know how America works and leave it better off for future generations. 

“You’re the ones who are coming into this, and you’ve got the future ahead of you, we run the country, and we need to do it wisely,” Skrmetti told the crowd of sharply-dressed attendees in the ballroom of the Sheraton Music City Hotel last weekend. “That means everybody needs to be reading more history. You’ve got to have the perspective of knowing how things have worked in the past.”

Skrmetti, who loves American history and has four young children, praised the Founding Fathers for their sacrifices to build the United States. 

“America is not just a short-term thing where we get what we can get and then run for the hills,” he said. “It is literally created to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity, and we have to have the multi-generational perspective and be looking not just to get short-term wins, but to strengthen our country.”

This year’s convention was attended by more than 1,000 Republicans between the ages of 18 and 40 from all 50 states. It was the largest convention in decades, and the second largest ever, according to organizers. 

Speakers and participants included a variety of Tennessee political staples, such as Governor Bill Lee and Reps. John Rose and Tim Burchett, in addition to sports commentator Clay Travis and conservative CNN commentator Scott Jennings. 

From Thursday to Sunday, attendees milled about the convention space, which featured booths from diverse organizations such as Trump Mobile, PETA, and WinRed. Multiple attendees told The Daily Wire they were there to meet like-minded people. 

Kellie Lynch, a Republican from New York, said that she thought the most significant issues facing young people were the economy, the cost of living, and the rise of artificial intelligence. While much has been made of the gender divide in voting patterns, Lynch said that the GOP did a “great job” reaching out to women. She thought media bias played a major role in some women’s perception of Republicans. 

Booths at the Young Republican convention/ Photo: Catherine Maxwell.

Another attendee, Kyle Mason, an investment property specialist from Texas, said he believed President Donald Trump’s embrace of masculinity was key to the reason many younger men were starting to vote Republican. In his spare time, Mason volunteers with Republican political efforts in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. 

After his panel appearance, Skrmetti told The Daily Wire that he had a lot of older mentors who helped him be involved in civic action, and he now wants to play that role for others. Asked about some young people who see politics as hopelessly corrupt, Skrmetti pointed out that America was founded by men who were skeptical of the government. 

“Cynical people are a critical part of America, and we need them, but we need them not to sit on the sidelines and gripe. We need them to take their cynicism and put it to work on behalf of all the American people,” he said. 

He added that one way to expose corruption and push for change was on the internet, which he said really opened up the national conversation for input from anyone. 

Skrmetti’s sentiment was present in other speeches, including by Governor Lee, who noted that he would probably float into “political obscurity” once his term in office was over.

“You’re the future of America, you have an obligation and a responsibility to wake up every day and ask yourself those questions so you’ll be engaging in the things that matter and that change the lives of the people around you,” Lee said. 

Lee speaks at convention: Photo by: Jonathan Williams | NationalPhotography.us via YRNC.

The National Young Republicans now have chapters in almost every state, with a Delaware chapter being chartered over the weekend, Chair Hayden Padgett told The Daily Wire. The last state needing a chapter is Wyoming. 

Padgett said that the purpose of the Young Republicans was twofold: to build community and to aid in political campaigns.

During the 2024 election cycle, which he described as “wild” in the “best way,” Padgett said a contingent of Young Republicans knocked on the doors of 3% of Montana voters in support of Tim Sheehy, who successfully defeated incumbent Democrat Senator Jon Tester. 

His pitch to young people was that Republican policies would help them achieve the American dream of starting a family, owning a business, and buying a home. Padgett was re-elected as chair of the Young Republicans after a contentious challenge from New York State Young Republicans Chair Peter Giunta.

“If you want to have a better life, if you want to have a family, if you want to have the ability to actually achieve the American dream, we are putting in the policies, and have been for 150 years, whatever it is, that actually make that possible,” Padgett said. “So come join that.”