New derisive term for white women spreads after Renee Good killing

1 month ago 21

By Clyde McGrady

January 18, 2026 — 4.08pm

Washington: 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: Good, they have said, was AWFUL.

Renee Good in her car, moments before she was shot dead.

“An AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) is dead after running her car into an ICE agent who opened fire on her,” conservative commentator Erik Erickson posted on social media. “Progressive whites are turning violent. ICE agents have the right to defend themselves.”

From Pierce Outlaw, a cohost on an AM radio show in Orlando, Florida, to an army of internet trolls, the acronym has taken off. 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 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 sceptical of US President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, and that scepticism 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 Holocaust-denying white nationalist Nick Fuentes, the fear among some conservatives was that attacking Jews was inching towards 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,” Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin wrote in a text message.

But for the broader core of 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 Trump’s movement and perceive their place in society slipping, said political scientist Shauna Shames, who co-edited the book The Right Women: Republican Party Activists, Candidates, and Legislators.

The notion of “white replacement” is not new. Far-right protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, were chanting “Jews will not replace us” in 2017. But the president’s mass deportation effort has crystallised battle lines. And gender is rising in that divide, along with race and ethnicity.

People rally in New York to demand an end to immigration deployments after the fatal shooting of Renee Good.

“It’s all come to a head here,” Shames said of Good’s killing.

White, educated women may indeed be a threat to Trump, at least in the electorate. Some 17 per cent of voters last year were white women with college degrees, nearly matching the 18 per cent who were non-college-educated white men.

And in an election in which Trump cut into Democratic advantages among Black, Latino and Asian American voters, Kamala Harris expanded the Democratic lead among college-educated white women, winning 58 per cent of their vote compared with Joe Biden’s 54 per cent in 2020, according to the Centre for Women and American Politics at Rutgers University. Trump’s support from non-college-educated white women held steady at 63 per cent.

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 Good was killed. Conservative critics began attaching it to female protesters at least as far back as last northern summer. Conservatives say there is good reason to key in on such women. Erickson, in a lengthy Substack post on Thursday, called Good’s death a “tragedy”, but one that Good and “her lesbian partner” had brought on themselves.

“Good had been harassing ICE agents much of the day,” he wrote. “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 Good or her partner were involved in the organised protests that have greeted immigration agents in Minnesota. And while administration officials have said she was violent or mentally ill, that description bears no resemblance to the person relatives and neighbours said they knew.

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

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

Protesters outside the Minneapolis City Hall on Saturday.

If liberal academics have their theories, Naomi Wolf, who was once a liberal writer but moved rightward after the COVID-19 pandemic, has hers. Writing on social media, Wolf said liberal men, “disproportionately oestrogenised” 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 said: “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.

Protesters shout at federal law enforcement in Minneapolis on Saturday.

To be sure, white women who fit a traditional mould do enjoy status in American society, Field said. But that mould 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 former Republican congresswoman Barbara Comstock, a fierce critic of the president.

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,” Comstock said.

A photo of Renee Good, who was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis, is displayed at a small memorial at a protest and rally in Seattle last weekend.

When Trump was told in an interview with CBS News that 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 categorisation of 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 Good’s killing. “It’s complicated, obviously, but it’s also very ugly to watch someone shoot a US citizen, especially a woman, in the face,” 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 sympathisers.

“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,” Shames said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.