By Wani Ninala
Washington D.C. – Reports of Nike’s recent oust from the S&P 100 rippled through the New York Stock Exchange earlier this fall signaling a 12 year low for the struggling brand and a new reality for corporate activism.
Nike’s boot from the roster of leading companies in the country, though partially symbolic, was not unforeseen as the brand’s steady decline has been on full display for the better part of a decade. Nike and nearly all of corporate America went all in on left wing political activism triggering a perpetual freefall and self-inflicted process of learning the hard way.
The more companies took political sides in favor of a left-wing agenda the more irrelevant they became. Nike’s aggressive push to become what amounted to a sinkhole of virtue signaling, pontificating, and lecturing consumers led to a years-long downturn as one the market’s biggest losers to date.
Price shares dropped to a low of $36.86, a nearly 80% drop or $200 – 230 billion dollar loss in market value, for the sportswear brand whose shares once capped at $179. The Nike-owned brand, Converse, also showed major market losses in just over 12 months.
Nike became known more for controversy than cultural influence. Its politics seemed an aversion rather than an asset. Its leftist agenda became as much a part of the brand as its swoosh logo. In a nutshell, Nike became a cautionary tale to corporate enterprise.
Following a string of marketing debacles that failed to resonate with consumers, the unseated brand learned the hard way to never underestimate the power of the silent majority. Nike chose to endorse perhaps one of the most divisive figures in professional sports history, former 49er Colin Kaepernick, for kneeling during the National Anthem.
While patriotism and love of country has always been an integral part of American sports, Nike’s use of Kaepernick as brand emissary led to widespread backlash and sparked a counter wave of pro-American fervor.
Customers boycotted the brand, posting Tik Tok videos of products being burnt and swooshes removed. Instead of taking the hint and receiving the message loud and clear, Nike doubled down on a left-wing agenda and Woke ads that just did not sit well with American buyers.
Blending the brand with Kaepernick’s performative gesture of kneeling on the field in a moment when millions of Americans choose to honor the American flag and what it stands for proved to be a move the company could not recover from.
It wasn’t just performance. Many took it as outright dishonor for the National Anthem and our very values as a nation. A nation that brought prosperity and privilege to numerous athletes of different backgrounds.
Nike’s missteps of anti-American sentiment did not stop there but continued when the company chose to pull a 4th of July themed Air Max sneaker featuring the Betsy Ross flag due to concerns that the patriotic shoe could “unintentionally offend.” Kaepernick reportedly objected to the design, created to honor the patriotic roots of our nation, and the shoe was shelved.
A company who’s marketing strategy was built around American athletes, made the decision to disassociate with a flag that signified the nation’s founding, claiming it to be too offensive to sell for Independence Day.
Another major miscalculation came when Nike featured trans-identifying male influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, to promote women’s wear and leggings. Even as more consumers were willing to spend on athleisure and sportswear, the irony was not lost on consumers.
While claiming to be a champion of women’s empowerment, Nike used a biological male to sell women’s clothing, and in its first Superbowl commercial in decades Nike ran a controversial ad featuring WNBA point guard Caitlin Clark.
Dylan Mulvany was already at the center of corporate backlash after a bungled Bud Light promotion that caused such significant decline in sales that it knocked the beer brand out of its top selling slot. Absurdly enough, Nike decided to move forward with the Mulvaney ad despite the Bud Light fallout.
Not content to merely celebrate “Pride month” as other companies do, the Nike corporation even went a step further in its effort to oversell wokeism and an LGBTQ agenda. In 2025 Outkick reported that Nike had funded a study on “transgender” youth athletes as young as 12 years of age. The research was designed to track athletic and physiological changes among young people undergoing so-called “gender-affirming care.”
While most media outlets failed to report news of the study, Nike also funded research on the future of girls’ sports, involving the use of puberty blockers on children and cross-sex hormones. The company has since made an effort to distance themselves from involvement in the research while left-wing media has partnered with the company to sweep news of the troubling research under the rug.
In a current climate of leftist anti-American sentiment companies must harness the vast power of middle America to survive. Brands like Nike, Bud Light, Colgate Palmolive, Facebook, Bed Bath & Beyond and the list goes on – instead broke the cardinal rule of business – “the customer is always right.”
More and more, consumers let their collective voice be heard by spending their hard-earned money elsewhere. Aggressive political messaging and the corporate push to tell consumers what to think has proven to be huge downfall for big business which has effectively gotten too big for their proverbial corporate britches. They presumed to call good – bad and bad – good hoping consumers would buy it hook, line, and sinker. Note to Nike, never underestimate the power of everyday Americans.
Corporations that were once burgeoning brands are now paying the price for political pretention. The devil always overplays his hand and as a result has reawakened the sleeping giant of the moral majority.
Quite literally, the devil was in Nike’s controversial and perhaps most revelatory move when it decided to come out with a special edition Air Max 97 sneaker dubbed the “Satan shoe” which featured a bronze pentagram on the laces and an inverted cross.
Reports circulated that the shoes were made with 60 ccs of ink and 1 drop of human blood. Created in 2021 in collaboration with rapper, Lil Nas X, and MSCHF, an art collective – 666 pairs of the shoe were produced at $1,018 a pair and displayed a reference to the biblical passage, Luke 10:8, where Jesus said “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.”.
While Nike would like the public to forget this small reveal of who they are and what they stand for, the damage has been done. The Church of Satan, incidentally, gave Nike its full approval for the shoe design and its use of satanic imagery. The monumental misstep, met with widespread disapproval and denouncements from Evangelical leaders and others, further alienated customers and proved just how out of touch the brand has become.
Nike increasingly interjected into cultural and political debates, in the process positioning themselves on the wrong side of important issues. While alienating much of their customer base they became the opposition for traditional American values and the voice of identity politics.
They continued the trend in the wrong direction all while “Go woke or go broke” became the rallying cry for everyday Davids who were forced to take on the corporate Goliaths of our time. Much like the media, most retail outlets with Nike, one of the most visible, had become an arm for the far left.
Nike stopped being a brand for everyone and made the disastrous decision to bombard consumers with radical left virtue signals and extreme positions on what they deemed social justice causes. Americans, as a result, finally fought back and hit Nike’s retail where it hurt the most – their dollars and sense.
As blue-chip companies distanced themselves from traditional values in favor of far left ideology that never aligned with most Americans to begin with, they were met with an obvious but unexpected fall from grace and descent into corporate demise. They forgot to remember, the bigger they are the harder they fall.
While some might argue that Nike’s precipitous decline involved other factors such as weak performance on some platforms such as digital direct-to-consumer as well as the Chinese market the fact remains that the brand’s identity has taken a major hit that has proven likely irreversible.
Let this be a lesson to Nike and other self-entitled corporate entities who have dared Americans to take a stand. Self-important companies who have provoked a call to action with impertinent platitudes that do not align with our moral code and monetary values: it’s time to get back to innovation not ideology.
Sell good products not sects and systematic codes of beliefs. To Nike and the corporate universe, when it comes to turning your back on hard-working Americans and the morals, decency, and values they hold dear, just don’t do it.
1,468 words, 8 minutes read time.
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