Welcome to a new level of crazy in the culture wars.
Somehow the M&M’s spokescandies have been swept up in the crusade against “wokeness,” forcing everyone to suffer through an entire news cycle focused on the aesthetic choices of anthropomorphized chocolate-candy cartoon characters.
It’s an episode that seems engineered to illustrate just how unhinged the outrage machine has become. But it also signals the start of an unwelcome new branding strategy — one in which companies may be poised to not only capitalize on but also feed into a highly polarized society in ways that do more harm than good.
It all began early last year when M&M’s parent company,