Tens of thousands of marchers participate in New York's second annual Women's March to protest against President Donald Trump on January 20, 2018, in Midtown Manhattan. | Andrew Lichtenstein/ Corbis via Getty Images

A new villain has emerged in right-wing discourse: the Affluent White Female Urban Liberal, or AWFUL.

Talking heads on Fox News and right-wing YouTubers describe AWFULs as smug, entitled, and even “a cancer on the nation.” AWFULs, their argument goes, are the reason that ICE activities in Minnesota have become so violent. These women are driven by their sexual frustration, their lack of real problems, their empty, childless lives. ICE Watch is full of them. Renée Good was one, which is why her death, while tragic, is ultimately not the fault of the man who shot her.

The acronym appears to have emerged around the end of the Biden years. In 2024, the Washington Examiner was bemoaning the influence of AWFLs (no U) on the mayor of Alexandria, Virginia, and musing over whether this demographic was “so annoying and repulsive that they’re driving centrist voters, particularly men, away from the Democratic Party.”

The idea appeared to be that rich white liberal women had gotten too preachy, too virtue-signaling. They wanted people to wear masks and get vaccinated during the Covid pandemic. They marched and protested over the death of George Floyd. They kept talking about the climate crisis. How annoying!

Liberal men did that too, but that wasn’t the point: The point was that all of this behavior felt feminine; it reminded people of their moms, who, by their nature, are not cool. The Washington Examiner cited the Democratic strategist James Carville, who theorized that Democrats were dominated by “too many preachy females.” The party’s talking points, Carville told the New York Times in 2024, were all, “‘Don’t drink beer. Don’t watch football. Don’t eat hamburgers. This is not good for you.’ The message is too feminine: ‘Everything you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.’”

The AWFUL label emerged into the mainstream in January, after the shooting of Renée Good. Conservatives rushed to position not just Good, but also her entire demographic, as the villain of the encounter. There was, right-wingers agreed, something about how smug these women were; they needed to be taken down a peg.

Fox News’s David Marcus described Good and other liberal white women as “organized gangs of wine moms,” adding, “The video of Good and her partner heckling and, let’s be honest, goading ICE officers with an obnoxious smugness that makes most people’s skin crawl, is just one of many. We see these self-important white women doing it in video after video after video, taunting cops, insulting journalists or even bystanders, often with a weird and disturbing glee.”

That there’s no equivalent term for the white liberal men resisting ICE points to the fact that misogyny is at the core of the right’s problem with AWFULs. But it’s also worth noting that they got this playbook from the left. The AWFUL script is a direct copy of the progressive disdain for white women in the past decade.

The right is going after white women because the left showed them how to do it. Here’s how they got here from there.

Evolution of an acronym

2017: The first Women’s March makes headlines.

2018: The second Women’s March is........

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