But you said yourself that "woke" was used in "weird ways to validate or differentiate themselves from their peers" once it was on the radar.

Considering that the people doing that were almost exclusively on the far left end of the progressive left, and that those people were already the sworn enemies of the right (unlike black people, who are more-or-less welcome on the right if they have compatible ideology--Sowell, Rice, Powell, etc.), why don't you take this as a completely obvious, straightforward strategy: "take what our enemies call themselves, and demonize, mock, and disparage it"?

You even have prior art with "liberal". This is a word with incredibly lofty origins, and yet the right has been perfectly happy to use it as a label of scorn, wishing to "own the libs" and such things. But the leftward end of progressives have been reticent to give a name to their beliefs, so the right's had trouble with this most juicy of targets. Except then they messed up and started using "woke"--now there's a label to attack!

Of course, if the right cared that much about the rights of black people, they might defer to the value of the older usage and hold off. But you're talking about a perspective that leads to a party that recalls its own Speaker of the House of Representatives because he didn't throw the country into chaos badly enough.

So I just don't buy your interpretation. It's a shame that a word of value to a particular community has been trashed this way, but you haven't connected the dots that would lead us anywhere other than standard partisan linguistic warfare.