“The loudest voices in the temple are not always the holiest. Sometimes, truth walks barefoot while virtue rides in a limousine.”
In every age, the powerful have sought to appear righteous. In ours, that performance often comes wrapped in tweets, speeches, and statements from people whose lives are far removed from the consequences they lament.
There’s a strange contradiction playing out on our screens. Millionaires in designer clothes standing on stages or in front of perfectly arranged bookshelves, solemnly warning us that democracy is hanging by a thread, or that their rights, as the most privileged among us, are under siege.
What do we call this phenomenon?
Performative activism.
This is the era of performative activism, a moral theater in which celebrity voices echo with urgency, but rarely with depth. It’s not activism rooted in sacrifice or lived experience. It’s not the quiet, uncomfortable work of change. It is activism as performance: curated, branded, and delivered for applause.
These statements often emerge not from hardship, but from press tours. And somehow, the people saying them rarely seem to live by the policies they champion.
True activism isn’t glamorous. It’s gritty. It involves sacrifice, often in silence. It looks a lot more like the unknown woman showing up to her local school board meeting or volunteering at a shelter, people who act without cameras rolling.
So the next time someone from behind the gates of Malibu tells the rest of us what justice looks like, maybe it’s okay to ask:
Is this really about the cause, or just another performance?
Celebrity hollow activism. No real skin in the game. Rehearsed, disconnected, virtue-signaling with a twist of self-promotion and conveniently timed with publicity, dressed up as moral clarity not reality.
c 2024 Chu The Cud
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Chu The Cud 