In the days since Renee Good tried to run over an ICE agent in Minneapolis and was shot and killed by an ICE officer, the liberal media has found yet another offensive word to whinge over. 

“The far-right has coined a new derogatory term for white women, which has gained traction following the fatal shooting of Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, in Minneapolis earlier this month,” reports The Independent. 

The objectionable term is the acronym AWFUL, which stands for Affluent White Female Urban Liberal. Another variant is AWFL.

For example:

The New York Times was the first paper to report on this new “offensive” term.

“Beyond labels and name-calling, the death of Ms. Good and the protests and anger in its wake have sparked a response from many on the right that is particularly targeted at white women in the streets, even though men have been just as involved,” the paper wrote. “A majority of college-educated women, including white women, have long been skeptical of President Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, and that skepticism has been growing, according to exit polls after the 2024 election. And for months now, such women are attracting the ire of the president’s supporters.”

The term AWFUL is not the first derisive name targeting white women. People across the political spectrum once gleefully targeted so-called Karens, a term meant to denigrate women — usually white and middle-aged — caught using their privilege to bend the world in their direction.

And the use of AWFUL emerged well before Ms. Good was killed. Conservative critics began attaching it to female protesters at least as far back as last summer.

The acronym so scandalized the New York Times that it even tattled to the Department of Homeland Security about it and its growing popularity. “I’m more concerned with facts on the ground than I am about acronyms,” DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told the paper in a text message.

The Times leaned heavily on academic experts to medicalize and psychologize conservative criticism of affluent white liberal women, transforming political disagreement into pathology. 

But for the broader core of Mr. Trump’s followers, the description of white, urban women as violent radicals obstructing mass deportations seems to reflect older anxieties around race, gender and immigration among the white, non-college educated men who make up the core of Mr. Trump’s movement and perceive their place in society slipping, said Dr. Shauna Shames, a political scientist at Rutgers and co-editor of the book “The Right Women: Republican Party Activists, Candidates, and Legislators.”

[…]

Liberal academics have been diagnosing what they see as the problem. Laura K. Field, author of the book “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right,” said social, demographic and economic changes had left men with a sense that they have lost status.

“Women are, for many of them, the place holder for their ‘stolen’ status,” she asserted.

 While the Times objects to calling affluent white female urban liberals what they are, it recently published opinion pieces comparing ICE to a “secret police” and portraying Trump as a fascist. In the past week, the paper has published columns demeaning Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as “a Virtual Secret Police” and accusing the agency of “Waging War on Blue Cities,”framing routine enforcement as an attack on liberal opposition. Columnist Michelle Goldberg also described Trump’s actions as textbook fascism.

After years of using terms like “Nazi” and “fascist” against Trump and Republicans, the paper’s outrage over AWFUL rings hollow. The acronym simply states observable demographic and ideological facts. Affluent, white, female, urban, and liberal are not slurs. Yes, the acronym is clever, but its implied criticism is far milder than the relentless, extreme rhetoric the New York Times has long published against the right, particularly President Trump.