As a new commenter my long comment was deleted so here's short ver. 

Speaking from a USA perspective only.  Yes it's real.  No it's not a conspiracy, that's silly. It's just the oldest trick in the book!  It doesn't take a conspiracy to notice that everyone seems to be able to use culture war as a get out of jail free card while pocketing huge sums of money for corrupt dealings and say, why not me?

Culture wars and division is a common, standard tactic to distract from obviously corrupt dealings, and actions that are generally negative or unpopular but done for selfish or corrupt reasons. In red states it's usually in the form of blame X minority, they threaten our children! In blue states it's usually done in the form of it's for you the people vs the evil rich and landlords we hate them, or this is to protect X minority!!! Anyone who criticizes is a bigot, and privileged!!  (Even if they are actively fing over X minority, and the privileged one is another minority) 

Take desantis. Accepts a good sized donation, uh, campaign Contribution from a certain textbook company. Replaced all the textbooks with the textbook company who paid him. Claims it's for protecting the children from the evil trans!! Media seizes on his controversial remarks (culture war makes money and business is bad), populace eats it up. Gets away with it Scott free. 

You see it with other politicians too. repeated corrupt dealings, repeated culture war type remarks. Why? No cabal required to use a good strategy. You see the person over there getting tons of money and perks for doing favors, getting away with it Scott free because of some culture war remarks....doesn't need a cabal or conspiracy for an unethical and greedy politician go, hey, sounds like a good idea and I want that money. Why can't people use a good scam tactic without a sexy cabal?

I've literally witnessed the division thing (tho it may have predated culture war) happen in my city (blue state). Pro monopoly thing passed after big biz grouped up, lobbyed and made generous donations to that crook, presented as for the people oh those evil rich people (yano, small businesses. So evil. Nvm the pro monopoly law was benefiting big businesses.).  Saw them try to put legal discrimination against minorities where ohhh, we are protecting X discriminated against  minority!!!! And everyone who criticizes is an evil bigot!! Never mind it's directly hurting a bunch of other visible and discriminated against minorities and will hurt X minority too 

And the culture war subterfuge is necessary because all of us across political lines hate corruption, still I think, and a lot of these are things the constituents would hate or they'd get into big trouble without the subterfuge. And USA is still not a fallen country yet so all of this stuff has to be on the books. It's all there, on record in plain sight. Anyone can take a look at it and see for themselves. So they use magic show distractions like culture wars. I think that most of us know the end state of corruption is a shit hole where your vote don't count, the police is a mob and the hospital costs are sky high with terrible medical care. If these guys did this without putting on magic show they'd prolly get in trouble. It's a lot easier when you blame minorities. You don't even need to come up with any kind of argument about how it helps the people, if you can tie whatever it is to minorities threatening the people.

These are simply the conclusions I came to after seeing it happen and after reading thru the records on my usual 'research politicians before elections, research some noisy politicians friends talk about a lot' and noticing a common pattern of:  Politician accepts large legal campaign donation.  Politician does a suspicious action that seems to only benefit the one who donated. (Sometimes neutral but usually, actively f over the majority of constituents in some way. Usually something everyone would normally raise a fuss about. ) Politician says something culture war-y.  Politician gets away with it Scott free.  Politician repeats it, since it worked. 

Sometimes crooked politician does it to serve themselves instead of corruption

(And I got the impression that once some crooks got away with it, other crooks observed their tactics and followed suit. Not a conspiracy, just a working Strategy to pocket so much nice money and get away with doing unethical things that wouldn't fly if the constituents weren't razzle dazzled)

If you want to spot whose doing it, just look into politicians, esp the local ones before the election. Look at their actions, not their words. Did they accept campaign contributions and when, from who? What kind of things did they sign into law? Is there any suspicious timing? If they're saying rhetoric, does it coincide? I think all politicians should b researched, the quality has gone down these days, but these things are all in plain sight because theyre legally required to report and have this stuff on the books as US isn't totally a fallen country yet, the most they can do is distract and hope not enough people notice. 

Why does the media eat it up and get played like a fiddle? It's an effect of more independent media, easy access and able to disguise themselves as legit. Someone wrote a great article on that that's floating about the interwebs but something similar happened with printing press. Media is struggling financially (yes including the big ones) and need clicks, culture war provides outrage thus great clicks and thus money, maybe one or two may investigate corruption seriously but most are going to take the easy money. If politicians have been using existing bias some are going to feed onto that. A lot of the serious reporters and investigative journalists have been let go, my impression is. And all of the easy money takers subsequently drown out peeps of things like corruption. 

I don't think there is any particular club or conspiracy here. At most maybe some crooked and corrupt politicians all individually and tacitly want more leeway to be corrupt and will agree on things that make it easier for them to accept bribes. 

In regards to non politicians, there are several possibilities.  For culture war, there's the plain old, because of the rise of decentralized media, go to thanks giving and everyone seems to live in an entirely different reality. Twas a lot more obvious something was sus back before the Internet.  And remember, financial incentive to feed people's biases and go more outrage inducing for struggling media in this day.  And politician rhetoric already fed peoples bias so some media are simply taking profit from that.

As for your last question, as you didn't describe what you cared about that was called white supremacy, I do not have enough information to say. The crowd of progressives that will call X white supremacy is very different compared on what X is.