After the murder of Renée Good, some conservatives despise liberal women

In the days following Renee Good’s killing in Minneapolis, Republican officials and conservative commentators called the 37-year-old white woman “very violent,” a “deranged lunatic” and a “domestic terrorist.”

Some right-wing influencers clung to a different word — or rather an acronym: Ms. Good, they said, was horrible.

“An AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) died after she crashed her car into an ICE agent who opened fire on her,” conservative commentator Erik Erickson posted on social media. “Progressive white people are getting violent. ICE agents have the right to defend themselves.”

From a co-host of 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 appeared on Internet Wiktionary this month as AWFL, without the “U.”

Beyond the labels and name-calling, Ms. Good’s death and the resulting protests and anger sparked a backlash from many on the right, particularly targeted at white women in the streets, although men were 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 grown, according to exit polls following the 2024 election. And for months, these women have drawn the ire of the president’s supporters.

Liberal white women are just the latest group to be the target of right-wing animosity. In late October and November, as Tucker Carlson offered a friendly interview to white nationalist Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, the fear among some conservatives was that attacks on Jews were moving closer to the mainstream of the Republican Party. Last month, Vivek Ramaswamy, the wealthy entrepreneur running for Ohio governor, denounced a wave of bigotry directed against American Indians like himself.

Trump administration officials say they are focused on immigration control efforts in Minnesota, not the taunts of a few of their supporters.

“I am more concerned about the facts on the ground than the 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 supporters, the portrayal of urban white women as violent radicals standing in the way of mass deportations appears to reflect older concerns about race, gender and immigration among the non-college-educated white 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 “Good Women: Republican Party Activists, Candidates and The legislators.

The notion of “blank replacement” is not new. Far-right protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanted “Jews will not replace us” in 2017. But the president’s mass deportation efforts have crystallized the battle lines. And gender is increasing in this divide, as is race and ethnicity.

“Here it all came to a head,” Dr. Shames said of Ms. Good’s murder.

White, educated women could indeed pose a threat to Mr. Trump, at least within the electorate. Last year, 17% of all voters were white women with college degrees, nearly matching the 18% of white men without college degrees.

And in an election in which Mr. Trump narrowed Democratic advantages among Black, Latino and Asian voters, Kamala Harris actually widened the Democratic lead among white, college-educated women, winning 58% of their votes, compared to 54% for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, according to the Center for Women and American Politics at Rutgers University. Mr. Trump’s hold on non-college-educated white women remained steady at 63 percent.

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

And the use of AWFUL emerged long before Ms. Good was killed. Conservative critics began linking it to female protesters at least as early as last summer. Conservatives believe there are good reasons to be interested in these women. Mr. Erickson, in a lengthy article on Substack 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 with a progressive activist group called ICE Watch that encouraged not only obstruction of ICE, but also something they call “dearrest,” which means helping detained illegal immigrants escape.

It is unclear to what extent Ms. Good or her partner were involved in the organized protests that greeted immigration officials in Minnesota. And while administration officials have said she was violent or mentally ill, that description sounds nothing like the person relatives and neighbors say they know.

Liberal academics have diagnosed 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 have left men feeling like they have lost their status.

“Women are, for many of them, the holders of their status as ‘stolen’,” she said.

If liberal academics have their theories, Naomi Wolf, who was once a liberal writer but shifted to the right 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 hungry for a fight.

“The smiles you see on their faces now say it all: White women yearn for an all-out fight with ICE – who tend to be strong, physically confident, masculine men – because conflict is a form of physical liberation for them,” she wrote.

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White men also feature prominently on the streets of Minneapolis. But critics of the attacks on women say male protesters are not seen as a cohort.

Certainly white women who fit a traditional model enjoy status in American society, Dr. Field said. But that’s not the mold the Trump administration and its supporters are responding to in Minneapolis.

“Trump and this administration are heavily misogynistic, and that’s still a big part of what he does,” said Barbara Comstock, a former Republican congresswoman from Virginia who is a staunch critic of the president.

Ms. Comstock pointed to polling that shows a strong majority now disapprove of the president’s handling of immigration, but public opinion is not moderating the administration’s tactics or rhetoric.

“I think the problem is these guys are all talking to themselves and they’re in their own bubble,” Ms Comstock said.

When Mr. Trump learned in an interview with CBS News that Ms. Good’s father was a supporter of his, the president responded: “I would bet you, under normal circumstances, she was a very strong, wonderful person. But, you know, her actions were pretty harsh.”

There are signs that categorizing Ms. Good as radical may not resonate with the general public.

Joe Rogan, the influential podcaster who supported the president in 2024, said he was horrified when he watched the video of Ms Good’s murder. “It’s complicated, obviously, but it’s also very ugly to see someone shoot an American citizen in the face, especially a woman,” Mr. Rogan said on his podcast, which has more than 20 million subscribers on YouTube.

In all of this, race is at play, both for the critics of white women in the streets and for their supporters.

“The idea that you could lose your life, that you too are at risk like black people have been for centuries, I think that’s different,” Dr. Shames said.