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Yes this is a fantastic description of something of a core what I think the "woke" is. The affluent talking down on regular people. The culture war has never been liberals vs conservatives. The recent boycotts are not conservative campaigns, in essence is the less affluent go "WTF" and not buying any of it. The affluent don't shop at Target or drink Bud Light. The virtue signaling is worthless for the less affluent because they know they won't have a higher status if they follow the signaling.
I've also considered why all of this virtue signaling is backfiring right now. And I have three interacting reasons which more or less (perhaps not at all but hey I'm only a midwit on the internet with a pseudonym)
The woke thumb on the scale disappeared from Twitter when Elon took over. So the attempts at socially engineering the tiny percentage of people who has had the time for Twitter and not have the promotions and/or punishments to the adherence to the message isn't trickling in to peoples media. The coordination for the journalists is simply gone to affect their biases in reporting.
The cheap access to credit that has propped up non-profitable aspects of woke has dried up. So Buzzfeed News and Vice has been dependent on that a lot of money has sloshed around in the monetary system, and in hard times the bottom line actually matters. All of a sudden DEI becomes corporate waste because it doesn't help the bottom line.
The affluent managed to isolate themselves with everything that they consume through their media thinking that their project is going just fine. But they manage to censor out the real thoughts of less affluent people and not knowing that their social engineering only worked on themselves. People don't watch the tv-shows or movies they promote because they aren't any good, not because they are "conservative". And we would be doing ourselves big disservice buying into their narrative. The little mermaid live remake is not made for children solely based on the run length of the movie and the art style. Anyone blaming the "right" for failing just don't understand children should be catereted to when making a family movie.
I’d add a fourth which is that the entire thing feels coercive from the bottom. It’s always couched as “of course this is just human decency” and with accusations of various forms of bigotry— the implied threat being that “bad things might happen if people found out you’re a bigot”. And increasing needs to perform, especially as connected to schools and jobs, again is coercion from the bottom-view. As are the incessant training modules that nag about privilege to a working class that knows it’s not true.
The truest meme I’ve ever seen was a 4chan meme. The left side is a kid with an old outdated computer in his bedroom, and this is labeled privileged white male. On the right is a very large skyscraper with a corporate logo, and this is labeled the oppressed. And this is what I think is driving the wars. It’s the sneering at the lower class that’s driving the rebellion. It’s a way to punch down at those poor stupid people that aren’t good enough to be elite like them. Their stupid backwards religion, their stupid folkways, their sexual prudishness, and their stupid, backwards desire for autonomy are proof they’re unworthy. It’s not like even if they agreed that a Yale graduate would actually want to get to know an auto service tech from Georgia. But being able to sneer at him makes this class hatred much more socially tenable. It’s not that he ugh works with his hands, no. It’s that he believes in crime-think.
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Also their most likely heterosexual parents, I'd be more inclined to take my kids if everyone is easy on the eyes.
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I think the money aspect is the one that really affects the DEIB project. When there's lots of cheap cash sloshing around, you can afford diversity co-ordinators and hiring people in programming socks because it's a small amount of the budget and you need those sweet, sweet ESG scores. When money gets tight, people start considering their spending. Maybe they can't afford that trip to Disneyworld after all. Certainly they will look at cancelling their streaming service subscriptions. Or maybe they buy your competitor's cheap watery beer because you were a bit too clumsy openly expressing your disdain for them, and all of a sudden the best time of the year for sales starts looking the opposite.
This is when companies discover that in reality, the trans population is 0.1% of the total, and there are a lot more ordinary people who might be okay with Pride parades but get a bit woozy when faced with Fairy Godmother Apprentices interacting with their young daughters, no matter how fabulous the TikTok mommies think he is.
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