FT Reports: Earlier this month, Barbara Furlow-Smiles pleaded guilty to criminal charges that she embezzled some $4mn from Facebook while serving as a top diversity executive at the tech company. That tawdry episode seemed a fitting end to the year the woke wave crested. In 2024, it is likely to recede.

The term “woke”, of course, has been twisted to the point of deformity. It can mean an awareness of one’s surroundings, usually related to racial and social injustice. Or, it can be stretched to cover such things as critical race theory and identity politics, and a conviction that most problems are systemic and must be addressed as such. At its most pejorative, it tends to denote a censorious and performative progressive tribe.

As a middle-aged, white-ish man, I may not be best placed to pronounce the decline of woke. Still, I can see its problems mounting.

In the corporate world, leaders have come to see that being woke is not necessarily profitable. Disney chief executive Bob Iger recently suggested that its creatives’ insistence on shoehorning progressive social messages into its films helped to account for their poor box office performance. “We have to entertain first,” said Iger. “It’s not about messages.”

Bud Light has been made to crawl since its move earlier this year to partner with Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender influencer, prompted a conservative boycott led by musician Kid Rock that knocked it from its perch as America’s top-selling beer. (How Bud Light could be the top-selling beer anywhere is a subject for a separate column.)

Its parent company made amends by launching a bro-ey ad campaign featuring professional footballers and paying up to again become the official sponsor of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Rock seems satisfied and has been spied necking Bud Light again.