co-opts

Verb

co-opt (third-person singular simple present co-opts, present participle co-opting, simple past and past participle co-opted)

1. (transitive) To elect as a fellow member of a group, such as a committee.
2. (transitive) To commandeer, appropriate or take over.
   • Artists' engagement with bleeding-edge tech will always have the potential to critique its destructive civil and military applications, as well as the potential to be co-opted by them—as propaganda or R&D—as the rise of the so-called knowledge economy has amply demonstrated.2009, chapter 2, in Josephine Berry Slater, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, editors, Proud to be Flesh, →ISBN
3. (transitive) To absorb or assimilate into an established group, movement, category, etc.
   • In the resolution between the culture and the counterculture, it is impossible to tell who co-opted whom, because in reality the bohemians and the bourgeois co-opted each other. They emerge from this process as bourgeois bohemians, or Bobos.2000, David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise […] , Simon & Schuster, →ISBN, page 43