In the days since a federal agent killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, Republican officials and conservative commentators have called the 37-year-old white woman “very violent,” a “deranged lunatic woman” and a “domestic terrorist.”
Some right-wing influencers have latched onto a different word — or rather an acronym: Ms. Good, they have said, was AWFUL.
“An AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) is dead after running her car into an ICE agent who opened fire on her,” the conservative commentator Erik Erickson posted on social media. “Progressive whites are turning violent. ICE agents have the right to defend themselves.”
From a co-host on an AM radio show in Orlando, Pierce Outlaw, to an army of internet trolls, the acronym has taken off. Mr. Outlaw called AWFULs “the scourge of polite society.” The term popped up on the internet Wiktionary this month as AWFL, without the “U.”
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. 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.
Liberal white women are only the latest group to be on the receiving end of right-wing animus. In late October and November, as Tucker Carlson offered a friendly interview to the Holocaust-denying white nationalist Nick Fuentes, the fear among some conservatives was that attacking Jews was inching toward the mainstream of the Republican Party. Last month, Vivek Ramaswamy, the wealthy entrepreneur who is a Republican candidate for governor in Ohio, was calling out a surge of bigotry directed at Indian Americans, like himself.
Trump administration officials say they are focused on immigration enforcement efforts in Minnesota, not the taunts of a few of their supporters.
“I’m more concerned with facts on the ground than I am about acronyms,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, wrote in a text message.
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.”
The notion of “white replacement” is not new. Far-right protesters in Charlottesville, Va., were chanting “Jews will not replace us” in 2017. But the president’s mass deportation effort has crystallized battle lines. And gender is rising in that divide, along with race and ethnicity.
“It’s all come to a head here,” Dr. Shames said of Ms. Good’s killing.
White, educated women may indeed be a threat to Mr. Trump, at least in the electorate. Seventeen percent of all voters last year were white women with college degrees, nearly matching the 18 percent who were non-college-educated white men.
And in an election in which Mr. Trump cut into Democratic advantages among Black, Latino and Asian American voters, Kamala Harris actually expanded the Democratic lead among college-educated white women, winning 58 percent of their vote compared with Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 54 percent in 2020, according to the Center for Women and American Politics at Rutgers University. Mr. Trump’s hold on non-college-educated white women held steady at 63 percent.
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.
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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. Conservatives say there is good reason to key in on such women. Mr. Erickson, in a lengthy Substack post on Thursday, called Ms. Good’s death a “tragedy,” but one that Ms. Good and “her lesbian partner” had brought on themselves.
“Good had been harassing ICE agents much of the day,” he wrote, continuing, “Good had been involved in a progressive activist group called ICE Watch that encouraged not just obstruction of ICE, but also something they call ‘de-arrest,’ which means helping detained illegal immigrants escape.”
It is not clear how deeply Ms. Good or her partner were involved in the organized protests that have greeted immigration agents in Minnesota. And while administration officials have claimed that she was violent or mentally ill, that description bears no resemblance to the person relatives and neighbors said they knew.
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.
If liberal academics have their theories, Naomi Wolf, who was once a liberal writer but moved rightward after the Covid pandemic, has hers. Writing on social media, Ms. Wold said liberal men, “disproportionately estrogenized” and “physically passive,” had left liberal women sexually frustrated and eager for a fight.
“The smiles you see on their faces now say it all: white women long for all out combat with ICE — who tend to be strong, physically confident, masculine men — because the conflict is a form of physical release for them,” she wrote.
On Thursday, Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of the social media site X, jumped in, amplifying a post to his 232 million followers that asserted, “Liberal women will divorce their husband and only let him see his children once a month, then cry about how ICE hurts families.”
White men have been prominent in Minneapolis streets as well. But critics of the onslaught of attacks on women say male protesters are not being singled out as a cohort.
To be sure, white women who fit a traditional mold do enjoy status in American society, Dr. Field said. But that mold is not what the Trump administration and its supporters are responding to in Minneapolis.
“Trump and this administration are heavily misogynist, and that’s always a big part of what he does,” said Barbara Comstock, a former Republican congresswoman from Virginia who is a fierce critic of the president.
Ms. Comstock pointed to polling that shows that strong majorities now disapprove of the president’s handling of immigration, but public opinion is not tempering the administration’s tactics or rhetoric.
“I think the problem is these guys all talk to themselves, and they are in their own bubble,” Ms. Comstock said.
When Mr. Trump was told in an interview with CBS News that Ms. Good’s father was a supporter of his, the president responded, “I would bet you that she, under normal circumstances, was a very solid, wonderful person. But, you know, her actions were pretty tough.”
There are signs that the categorization of Ms. Good as a radical may not be taking hold among the broader public.
Joe Rogan, the influential podcaster who endorsed the president in 2024, said he was horrified watching video of Ms. Good’s killing. “It’s complicated, obviously, but it’s also very ugly to watch someone shoot a U.S. citizen, especially a woman, in the face,” Mr. Rogan said on his podcast, which has more than 20 million subscribers on YouTube.
In all of this, race is at play, for critics of the white women in the streets and for their sympathizers.
“The idea that you could lose your life, that you too are at risk in the way that Black people have been for centuries, I do think that’s different,” Dr. Shames said.
Clyde McGrady reports for The Times on how race and identity shape American culture.
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