AWFUL intense: Left media outraged by new acronym for liberal white women

Analysis by WorldTribune Staff, January 18, 2026 Real World News

In the past week, The New York Times has referred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as a “Virtual Secret Police” who are “Waging War on Blue Cities,” and columnist Michelle Goldberg described President Donald Trump’s actions as textbook fascism.

But when conservatives trotted out a new acronym for the liberal white women who revel in blocking ICE from taking criminal illegals off the streets and scream at others carrying out legal activities such as duck hunting (see below), that is too much for the Times and other lefty media outlets to handle.

The new acronym is AWFUL — Affluent White Female Urban Liberal. Or the shorter AWFL to cover non-urbanites.

The lefty media’s response to the acronym is, well, AWFUL intense.

“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,” The Independent proclaimed.

Actually, as Zero Hedge noted, “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 triggered the leftists at the New York Times that it the paper tattled to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) 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 Times in a text message.

The Times whined: “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.”

The paper even cited academic “experts” to, as Zero Hedge put it, “medicalize and psychologize conservative criticism of affluent white liberal women, transforming political disagreement into pathology.”

Th Times wrote:

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.

Zero Hedge concluded: “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.”

Related: The duck lady: Portrait of the American Left?, June 29, 2025

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