You see a specific example here: https://www.city-journal.org/walmart-critical-race-theory-tr.... It's also part of the larger zeitgeist. In my heavily left-leaning social circle, being a Reaganite who hates taxes and regulations will raise no eyebrows. Nobody complains about Wall Street. But someone's racist uncle in rural Illinois? He's the real problem with America.
You saw his dynamic play out in the professional class's (including the media's) reactions to Trump. You'd expect Democrats to hate Trump for the things he shares with Bush or Romney: tax cuts for the rich, trying to repeal Obamacare, etc. But even from the beginning, that's not what outraged people the most. They hated Trump far more for the things he shared with his working class voters. Indeed, the media rehabilitated Bush and Romney--bombing Muslim countries could be overlooked; saying nasty things about Muslim refugees could not be.
Above the Law is a manifestation of this. It used to be a non-political legal gossip site. These days, it's got a heavy dose of left-wing articles--all revolving around racism, sexism, etc.--juxtaposed against cheering six figure bonuses for 20-somethings. Never will you find any criticism of the work these firms do turning the gears of corporate America, or even the a milquetoast center-left ditty on raising taxes on these ever-growing bonus checks.
I think you're running this argument 100 yards past the end zone. Is there overheated rhetoric about racial equity in liberal communities and in the broader business world? Yes, obviously. Do suburban crypto-leftists equity-wash arguments to get their way or establish status? Yes, that is clearly a thing that happens ("we need a city-block-sized covered farmer's market, not more luxury housing!").
Where I snag on this is that I don't believe anyone takes the DEI-speak in that REI syllabus seriously; a long stretch of it --- not coincidentally the part that Rufo chose to highlight --- is almost verbatim the same content that the Smithsonian was forced to apologize for posting in a display about whiteness vs. blackness. The documents start with a framing (that most people would find risible, though it's mostly accurate) that "white" doesn't mean what you assume it means, but is rather a artificially constructed category deliberately design to exclude outgroups. That's true! It's not well argued, and nobody is going to pay attention to it, and it's a terrible flaw in the pedagogy, but it's also not valid to suggest that the document is saying you're automatically a white supremacist by dint of e.g. being a Minnesotan of Nordic heritage. The whole syllabus is shoplifted from other people's work, but probably 80% of it is stuff you agree with, or at least have in the past professed to agree with.
Isn't it enough just to call out hucksters making a buck off clueless corporate initiatives, or status-obsessed Very Online people trying to score Twitter points? The idea that white people are routinely attacked at their places of work for an unexpurgated original sin of racism is just not plausible.
What are you talking about here? What's a scenario where this happens?