Everybody seems to actually know the game now, even when most people aren't willing to acknowledge it.
Obviously not the same scale or importance of thing, but on a thread yesterday about the new Netflix series, Wednesday, a friend noted that the third episode had a bunch of woke buzzwords crammed into it. It's true. For a couple of episodes, there was a string of lines about the "patriarchy" (at a school run by a woman, in a show where women are the dominant drivers of the action, about a character who lives in a pretty matriarchal household, with a mom who - spoiler - killed someone in self-defense and evaded prosecution because a man took the fall for her instead), and a bunch of other standard tropes.
It's a bunch of garbage ideas thrown into a blender and put in kids' mouths, but what stood out to me was how out of place it all was.
So why was it there?
My guess: Because if it hadn't been included, Netflix execs wouldn't have greenlit the show.
On a more salient note, if you watch stuff like Shark Tank, this grift becomes even more obnoxious. Every business owner who has come on the show for years has had some social activist mission that they highlight in their pitch. Often these missions are meaningless or silly, sometimes they're operating on a model that's actively harmful to the people they're meant to help (eg. Tom's Shoes*). But I don't think the producers will allow people on the show without having something like that to play up.
And it all seems to be driven by this desire to appeal to children (and adult children) who have been fully indoctrinated into the idea that everything must exist as some form of activism.
*Tom's Shoes :
The model of giving away minor consumer goods like shoes to poor foreigners does basically nothing to address the root of the issue of poverty and actually takes away from the functioning local economy that produced these goods to funnel it all through multinationals that teach dependence on foreign aid.
If you want to help poor people in other countries, you’re better off donating to charities that partner with locals to fill productive needs like requests for livestock or even just lend out “micro loans” for entrepreneurs in those countries.