How Corporate "Wokeness" Gave the Far Right Its Favorite Talking Point and the Left a Crippling Identity Crisis
Let’s all take a collective moment to honor the passing of Brand Purpose™ — a noble creature that once roamed advertising boardrooms freely, grazing on mission statements and guzzling down DEI buzzwords like a unicorn with a marketing degree. It died as it lived: painfully misused, pitifully misunderstood, and ultimately sold out in a BOGO deal next to ethically sourced tampons and rainbow-wrapped mayonnaise.
For the better part of the last decade, marketers tried to do the impossible: turn social justice into a subscription service. It was like trying to download empathy through a QR code on a cereal box. And for a while, we all pretended it worked. Nike put Colin Kaepernick on a billboard. Ben & Jerry’s dropped white supremacy-flavored press releases. Hellmann’s mayonnaise somehow became the Greta Thunberg of condiments. (“End food waste,” it cried, as if hoarding emulsified egg yolk in your fridge was an act of resistance.)
But now the jig is up. Brands have quietly backed out of the culture war like that friend who disappears when the bar tab arrives. ESG? Downgraded. DEI? Ghosted. Social responsibility? Rebranded as “Too Risky, Might Offend the Facebook Uncles.”
Meanwhile, the far right — that eternally aggrieved group of khaki-clad rage bloggers and incel podcasters — is dancing on the grave of performative progressivism like it’s Coachella and Ben Shapiro just dropped a sick bass line about paper straws.
Why? Because marketers handed them the perfect villain: not Big Oil, not billionaires, but corporate wokery. The horrifying idea that somewhere, some middle manager in a fleece vest added pronouns to their email signature, and now society is collapsing faster than Twitter’s codebase. (Elon would like a word, but only if it fits within 280 characters of narcissistic incoherence.)
In one of the greatest ironies of modern life, these far-right darlings — many of whom have never held a job more strenuous than “influencer” or “nepo baby turned ‘thought leader’” — have rebranded themselves as anti-establishment warriors. Yes, the same people defending oil companies, billionaires, and the very corporations they claim have “gone woke.” Somehow, it’s now punk to love ExxonMobil and bully minimum-wage baristas over their enamel pins.
Let’s be clear: this didn’t happen to marketers. It happened because of marketers.
You see, marketing folks — bless their hearts — thought they could Trojan Horse justice into capitalism. Just sneak it right in there between seasonal latte ads and cloud-based workflow solutions. If Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream, well, surely it was to be posthumously paraphrased in a Dodge Ram commercial.
But instead of sparking real change, we just cheapened activism into aesthetic. Made it digestible. Digestive, even. You could now literally eat social justice. (Looking at you, Juneteenth ice cream.)
We convinced people that buying a $50 t-shirt stitched by underpaid workers in Bangladesh but printed with “Feminist AF” was enough. That liking an Instagram post with a rainbow flag was activism. That signing up for a loyalty program at a fast-fashion sweatshop was somehow solidarity.
It’s no wonder people got cynical. No wonder they saw through the paper-thin hypocrisy and started asking, “Wait a second… if this is what progress looks like, why does everything still suck?” Rising rents, stagnating wages, climate collapse, and somehow my shampoo bottle now comes with a lecture on microaggressions but contains less shampoo.
And oh, the guilt. Every product now came with a side of moralizing. Bought the wrong razor? You support the patriarchy. Drank from the wrong coffee shop? You’re funding apartheid. Ordered Uber Eats instead of cooking a locally sourced vegan stew using ingredients harvested exclusively by queer co-ops? You are literally killing the planet.
And yet none of this did a damn thing to stop actual injustice. We turned social change into a branding opportunity and then acted shocked when the backlash came like a tidal wave of "anti-woke" hysteria. Because, surprise: when you commodify values, you teach people to discard them like expired coupons.
So here we are. The marketing gods have abandoned their temples of progressive jargon. The same execs who once quoted Angela Davis in board meetings are now scrubbing their LinkedIn profiles clean of anything that might upset Ron DeSantis.
Meanwhile, the political left is stuck trying to explain why identity-based virtue signaling doesn’t replace labor rights, housing reform, or actual redistribution of wealth. (Hint: Because it doesn’t.)
But if there’s a silver lining here — and God help us, we need one — it’s that the great mask-off moment has arrived. Brands are back to doing what they’ve always done best: pretending they’re cooler than they are, selling you things you don’t need, and jumping on trends two years too late.
The fantasy is over. The office kombucha taps are dry. The Slack emojis are meaningless. And your "Chief Social Impact Officer" has been laid off and replaced with a ChatGPT plug-in that generates PR statements when Texas passes new anti-trans legislation.
In this new era, maybe — just maybe — the space left behind by corporate cowardice can be filled with actual movements. You know, the kind that don’t need to sell you a tote bag with your revolution. The kind that demand policy change, not press releases. That organize, strike, vote, resist, and refuse to be rebranded every Pride Month.
So here’s to clarity. To knowing the difference between what’s real and what’s market-tested bullsh*t. To finally understanding that buying a latte in a compostable cup is not going to save the world — but collective action might.
And if nothing else, let’s agree on this:
The revolution definitely does not go better with Pepsi. It doesn’t even go better with Hellmann’s.
