It's about the fact that institutions (incl. corporations) hold all the power in the world, and the people within them are recruited from academia. If academia becomes (is) an indoctrination school, it will produce mainly activists and those who don't mind submitting to activists. These people will then eventually rebuild this system in their workplaces (since 'wokeism' is an inherently corruptive and hard-to-resist system). After this, you will start to see the fruits of their labor pop up all around - OpenAI censoring their model to oblivion, movies selecting for overtly activist plot points, social media companies beginning to censor more and more stuff...
You wouldn't see activism in normal everyday discussions, though, due to people being rather agreeable in real-life face-to-face conversations. Political undertones, no matter how strong, are always in the background, not forefront, of conversations anyway. You wouldn't expect people to proactively discuss Putin with you if you went to Russia, for instance.
And yet, if the general public either agrees with or is neutral towards ideals which DON'T conform to real reason, those ideals can be weaponized in the fringes. And they indeed are.
(Note: Below, I'm using the term 'fascism' to describe the societal phenomenon. I'm NOT referencing nazism nor saying that the current political atmosphere is anywhere close to it.)
Westerners are conditioned to think about fascism as originating from one well-defined party, mainly due to the fact that autocracies of the world do indeed operate that way, but fascism is just the blind power-hunger and violence of the human condition enabled by any group of people and accepted by the majority. The hallmark of fascism is that it is never hostile to the majority, but continuously extremely violent to whoever happens to be the edge case at the time. It guides the general discourse through these edge cases, not the center. Thus, if you are in the center, you don't really see anything bad happen to you - as long as you course-correct every once or twice from the edge cases.
You wouldn't see activism in normal everyday discussions, though, due to people being rather agreeable in real-life face-to-face conversations. Political undertones, no matter how strong, are always in the background, not forefront, of conversations anyway. You wouldn't expect people to proactively discuss Putin with you if you went to Russia, for instance.
And yet, if the general public either agrees with or is neutral towards ideals which DON'T conform to real reason, those ideals can be weaponized in the fringes. And they indeed are.
(Note: Below, I'm using the term 'fascism' to describe the societal phenomenon. I'm NOT referencing nazism nor saying that the current political atmosphere is anywhere close to it.)
Westerners are conditioned to think about fascism as originating from one well-defined party, mainly due to the fact that autocracies of the world do indeed operate that way, but fascism is just the blind power-hunger and violence of the human condition enabled by any group of people and accepted by the majority. The hallmark of fascism is that it is never hostile to the majority, but continuously extremely violent to whoever happens to be the edge case at the time. It guides the general discourse through these edge cases, not the center. Thus, if you are in the center, you don't really see anything bad happen to you - as long as you course-correct every once or twice from the edge cases.