Rex Kerr
2 min readNov 16, 2023

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Maybe, but the timing is wrong for your triggers.

The thing that the American right wing was against after George Floyd specifically was "critical race theory", not "woke". The response was spearheaded by Christopher Rufo (this is well-documented: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory), and you can see the spike when he talked about it on Tucker Carlson in September 2020: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=critical%20race%20theory&hl=en

The thing that the American right wing was talking about when Me Too came onto the scene in a big way again (2016) was "social justice warriors", not "wokeness". And there's no sizable bump in searching for wokeness after Me Too--the term was gradually increasing in prevalence (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=wokeness&hl=en). There was a big bump in "social justice warriors" searches right after George Floyd.

So your explanations for what, if anything, had changed are not convincing. The triggers that you list may have prompted SJW and CRT, and right wing responses to that, but not "woke".

Indeed, the right was kind of missing the trend for a while. There was a huge spike in "stay woke" around the first (but not second) sudden prominence of Black Lives Matter in 2016-2017. This suggests that it was the American left who was picking up the term and using it; "stay woke" isn't the kind of phrase that you find among the right.

The question is: why did it take until mid-2022 for "anti-woke" to really catch on? I don't have a clear answer, but your answers don't really comport with the historical data. If it is a reaction to something new, either it wasn't the triggers that you stated, or it needs to be situated within a larger trend of reactionary anti-left thinking that touched on a variety of other terms.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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