By Sam Silvestro, assistant editor at Commonplace

The Right feels ascendant. President Trump’s job approval rating is the highest it’s ever been in either term of his presidency. Young Americans are flocking toward the Republican Party. The working-class coalition that propelled Trump is now the heart of the GOP. Unorthodox conservative institutions and politicians are growing in prominence while the organizations that prop up the dead consensus slowly lose prominence. And Trump has pursued now-countless executive actions including limiting birthright citizenship, pardoning January 6th and peaceful pro-life protestors, and ending federal DEI mandates. Many of these proposals were just pipedreams wishcasted by Twitter personalities only a few months ago, and now they’re the law of the land.

Commentators like the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson have opined that “we’re very clearly in the middle of a cultural vibe shift to the right.” Podcasts are flush with this “vibe shift” narrative, and one can read almost daily columns about how America’s cultural institutions, from the NCAA to Facebook to colleges and universities, are slowly bending the knee at the foot of the American Right now that Trump is back in office. And conservatives—who haven’t seen a single cultural shift to the right for decades—are eating it all up.

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But many of these supposed shifts aren’t actual victories for conservatives. On the heels of a decades-long culture of losing, the Right has lost its sense of what real victory looks like. And, as a result, some conservatives are now celebrating the moves by progressive tech billionaires like Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg as evidence that these tycoons are “moving toward the Right,” even as they continue to fund progressive politicians, open-borders lobbying groups, and left-leaning media outlets. What they really are is strategic business decisions to survive Trump’s return.

The NCAA’s alleged capitulation in the wake of Trump’s recent executive order prohibiting men from participating in women’s sports crystalizes the flimsiness of this supposed change-of-heart. This order directed the Secretary of Education, under her Title IX enforcement powers, to ensure that all colleges and universities that receive federal funds ensure that they comply with this order, or risk losing access to those monies. While the NCAA did change their policy on transgender athletes in women’s sports, they didn’t do this because they had some epiphany that their previous policy was immoral. Rather, they were forcibly dragged to this change by the Trump administration, which was able to effectively wield federal authority to compel this specific action, lest they lose their monopoly on college sports.

Even a simple read of NCAA President Charlie Baker’s statement announcing the policy change reveals this. Baker writes that the NCAA’s Board of Governors believes “that clear, consistent, and uniform eligibility standards would best serve today’s student-athletes instead of a patchwork of conflicting state laws and court decisions. To that end, President Trump’s order provides a clear, national standard.”

It makes clear that the NCAA isn’t concerned with the actual conservative position on girls’ sports. What they care about is ensuring that “uniform eligibility standards” were implemented in order to prevent the chaos of “a patchwork of conflicting state laws.” This isn’t some capitulation to the years of persuasive lobbying by the activists and organizations who have fought the good fight on protecting women’s sports and spaces. Rather, the NCAA is just trying to preserve its institutional credibility in the eyes of the public, while also ensuring that it can still function as an organization without the specter of the federal government, the threat of various lawsuits, bad news headlines, and social media mobs.

Their lack of genuine conviction on this issue becomes even more evident in the language they use within the statement. The vernacular wouldn’t look out of place in a progressive pamphlet in 2020. Baker peppers it with references to “sex assigned at birth” and calls for the importance of “inclusive” athletic cultures. That doesn’t sound like somebody who has become conservative on transgender issues overnight!

If the NCAA was convicted about the need for the policy change, then they wouldn’t have used the polluted language of the gender ideologues who are still intent on destroying sexed reality. Their organization is still internally stacked with progressive activists who would gladly overturn this policy the day that the Right loses power. But, in order to get to that day, they have to insulate their organizations right now.

Likewise, Amazon’s recent decision to return Ethics and Public Policy Center President’s Ryan Anderson’s seminal book on gender, When Harry Became Sally, to their e-shelves also brought massive conservative cheers with some even commenting that “perhaps our household will now end our Amazon boycott” because of the decision. But this “shift” is much the same; superficially interested in skating by.

Anderson’s experience was a flashpoint in the culture wars. A few years after the book’s publication, Amazon banned Anderson’s book because it “violated [their] guideline[s] prohibiting books that promote hate speech.” In their original explanation, Amazon stated that they “have chosen not to sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.” However, less than four years later, and less than one month after Trump’s second inauguration, they reversed course after concluding that they “erred on the side of being too restrictive” in their 2021 decision.

Amazon hasn’t had an epiphany about whether Anderson’s book contains “hate speech” or “anti-LGBT messages.” In fact, they practically admit in their recent statement that they still believe his book contains “hate speech” when they write that “balancing free speech and content that could be construed as hate speech is one of the most difficult adjudication decisions we make as a company.”

Americans are right to wonder what is causing this sudden corporate shift. It makes sense why the NCAA would want to continue their hold over college athletics, but why did Meta change their DEI policies or why did Amazon suddenly decide to sell Anderson’s book? These shifts weren’t happening before Trump’s victory after all.

The timing of it all suggests that these corporations simply want to remain in the administration’s good graces. And so they’re willing to make some cosmetic concessions to the Right to do so. But we can’t forget that these are businesses with massive financial stakes that are tied to future actions that the Trump administration could take. Amazon and Meta are both currently immersed in multiple lawsuits that they’d surely love to see the administration take their side in. Or, at least, they’d prefer to avoid regulatory scrutiny from an administration willing to use the tools at its disposal. These entities aren’t interested in making meaningful reforms that could rebuild American industry, protect the rights of consumers, and deplatform pornography from their platforms, so they’ll make these changes and hope that it’s enough for the Right to prevent drawing Trump’s ire.

While average Americans may be slowly shifting to the cultural right, we shouldn’t confuse these moves by corporate elites as a parallel. What they’re doing is responding to this changing environment by making the correct business moves for the Trump era. They’re the exact same institutions as they were until what Steve Bannon told the New York Times’s Ross Douthat was their “Damascene moment between 10 and 11 o’clock on the evening of Nov. 5 when the Trump movement won Pennsylvania.” They just know it’s valuable to have a bit of MAGA gloss on their corporate appearance. They’re still the same leftist organizations, staffed by progressives, whom the American people elected Trump to send packing. Conservatives shouldn’t be fooled into thinking otherwise.

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They’re Not Really Bending the Knee