2019–present: emergence of pejorative use
By 2019, opponents of progressive social movements were using the term mockingly or sarcastically, implying that "wokeness" was an insincere form of performative activism.
Woke has been used ironically by the right wing to ridicule perceived left-wing "social justice warriors" and "snowflakes", in connection with mockery of Millennials and Gen Z.
Author Sergio C. Fanjul writes that some leftists, such as writer Daniel Bernabé and philosopher Susan Neiman, criticize wokeness as a form of tribalism which divides the working class and distracts from the universalist class struggle.
The term performative wokeness has been used to refer to social media activity perceived as a self-serving and superficial form of activism, i.e. "slacktivism".
British journalist Steven Poole comments that the term woke is used to mock "overrighteous liberalism". This pejorative sense of woke means "following an intolerant and moralising ideology" according to The Economist.
As in the United States, the term woke is used by those on the political right wing in Canada to discredit individuals and policies they consider to be overly progressive. During a debate in 2023 on the Law Society of Alberta's 2020 adoption of a rule which made certain Continuing Professional Development (CPD) training courses on Indigenous Canadian history obligatory, a lawyer from the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms wrote an op-ed arguing that the course was a form of "wokeness". in the 2025 Canada federal election, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre weaponized the term in his campaign, characterizing "social justice advocacy as an authoritarian threat".
Brazilian federal deputy Kim Kataguiri has accused the government under president Lula da Silva of promoting a "woke agenda" with a proposal to tax streaming services and social media networks while requiring a certain amount of content to come from Brazilian companies with 51% of capital and shareholders belonging to "identity groups".
Among American conservatives and centrists, woke has come to be used primarily as an insult.
Members of the Republican Party have been increasingly using the term to criticize members of the Democratic Party, while more centrist Democrats use it against more left-leaning members of their own party; such critics accuse those on their left of using cancel culture to damage the employment prospects of those who are not considered sufficiently woke. Perry Bacon Jr. suggests that this "anti-woke posture" is connected to a long-standing promotion of backlash politics by the Republican Party, wherein it promotes white and conservative fear in response to activism by African Americans as well as changing cultural norms. Those using the term pejoratively often believe that the extent of social problems have been exaggerated by such movements as Black Lives Matter.
Among the uses by Republicans is the Stop WOKE Act, a law that limits discussion of racism in Florida schools. A program of eliminating books by LGBT and black authors from schools was conducted by the Florida government and by vigilantes calling themselves "woke busters". Florida governor and former presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has frequently used the term, referring to his state as a place "where woke goes to die".
Linguist and social critic John McWhorter argues that the history of woke is similar to that of politically correct, another term once used self-descriptively by the left which was appropriated by the right as an insult, in a process similar to the euphemism treadmill.
Romano compares woke to canceled as a term for "'political correctness' gone awry" among the American right wing.
Attacking the idea of wokeness, along with other ideas such as cancel culture and critical race theory, became a large part of Republican Party electoral strategy. Beginning in the first presidency of Donald Trump, commentators from the alt-right, religious right, moderate liberals, and libertarians have attacked "woke" ideas and the "woke mind virus", a phrase popularized by Elon Musk, as existential threats to American society. Trump stated in 2021 that the Biden administration was "destroying" the country "with woke", and Republican Missouri senator Josh Hawley used the term to promote his upcoming book by saying the "woke mob" was trying to suppress it. According to USA Today, the term woke has been "co-opted by GOP activists".
By 2025, conservative commentators such as Rod Dreher and James A. Lindsay had begun using the term "woke right" to characterize far-right beliefs as a mirror of the far left. Political commentator Jonathan Chait has described paleoconservative commentator Pat Buchanan, who criticized the liberalism of the Obama era in a way that prefigured Trumpism, as the "godfather" of the "woke right". Linguist John McWhorter writes that semantic broadening of the term "woke" resulted in a shift in its meaning to "a conspiracy-focused and punitive orientation to social change", regardless of left–right orientation. Gregory Conti and Aaron Sibarium described the rise of the woke right and "antiwokeness" as having "eroded taboos against open bigotry" and causing conservatives to move "further to the right on race and gender". They argued that conservatives now "increasingly reject as cancel culture any public repudiation of genuinely fringe ideas, creating a subculture of racism, sexism and antisemitism". The term "woke right" has also been used by pro-Israel sources to describe American conservatives who became increasingly critical of Israel during the Gaza war.
Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, right-wing activists and the U.S. government undertook a wide-reaching campaign to punish critics of Kirk for allegedly celebrating his death that soon turned into policing any criticism of Kirk or his ideology. Author Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution has characterized it as a "woke right" campaign paralleling earlier efforts to suppress right-wing speech on college campuses.
In India, the term is used as a pejorative by Hindutva activists and Hindu nationalists to refer to the critics of the Hindu nationalist ideology who are deemed as anti-Hindu by the Hindu nationalist organizations such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
The term is also synonymous with leftism in news headlines and is commonly used in social media circles by critics of secularism in India.
In Hungary, politician Balázs Orbán stated that "we [Hungary] will not give up fighting against woke ideology".
In Switzerland, members of the youth wing of the right-wing populist Swiss People's Party have criticized Swiss bank UBS for its diversity policies, calling them "woke".
The phenomenon le wokisme (sometimes translated 'wokeism') has also been used in French politics to criticize anti-racist movements and leftist scholarship, particularly since the 2022 French presidential election. Much of the opposition to le wokisme sees it as an American import, incompatible with French values. Mohamed Amer Meziane reported that then-education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer, organized a conference at which he argued "woke" ideology "plots against the greatness of a white European civilization" and is therefore an "anti-Republican political religion". Blanquer established an "anti-woke think tank" in opposition to what is perceived as an export from the English-speaking world. This view also includes a conspiracy theory connecting "wokism" with pre-existing right-wing conspiracy theories of "Islamo-leftism", suggesting that leftists are manipulated by Islamists to replace European white-Christian civilization with Islam. In this context, "woke" is used pejoratively to describe progressive, anti-colonial, and anti-racist positions that are seen as incompatible with traditional French values.
According to French sociologist and political scientist Alain Policar, woke originated from African American communities to describe awareness of social injustices and has been used pejoratively by French politicians from the former republican left, the right and the far right to label individuals engaged in anti-racist, feminist, LGBTQ, and environmental movements. This derogatory usage gave rise to the noun wokisme, suggesting a homogeneous political movement propagating an alleged woke ideology.
French philosopher Pierre-Henri Tavoillot characterizes wokeism as a corpus of theories revolving around "identity, gender and race", with the core principle of "revealing and condemning concealed forms of domination", positing that all aspects of society can be reduced to a "dynamic of oppressor and oppressed", with those oblivious to this notion deemed "complicit", while the "awakened (woke)" advocate for the "abolition (cancel) of anything perceived to sustain such oppression", resulting in practical implementations such as adopting inclusive language, reconfiguring education or deconstructing gender norms.
In the United Kingdom, anti-wokeness discourse is driven primarily by Conservative Party politicians and right-wing media outlets. Conservative papers such as The Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail commonly publish articles critical of what they deem to be woke. The Mail on Sunday publishes an annual "Woke List" criticising public figures for perceived "virtue signalling". The right-wing television channel GB News was proclaimed at its founding to be explicitly anti-woke. Its onetime chairman Andrew Neil has presented a regular segment on the channel entitled "Wokewatch", which aims to be a counter-voice to "woke warriors".
The term woke is often used as a pejorative by conservative figures. During the run-up to the 2024 general election, the governing Conservative Party attracted criticism for attempting to create a culture war based on the woke concept. While promoting her book The Abuse of Power in 2023, former Conservative prime minister Theresa May declared herself to be woke, in the sense of "somebody who recognizes that discrimination takes place".
In a survey by YouGov, 73% of Britons who used the term said they did so in a disapproving way, 11% in an approving way and 14% neither used it in an approving or disapproving way. Columnist Zoe Williams writes in The Guardian that public discourse around cycling has become "the perfect microcosm of the wokeness split in all its forms", with anti-cycling voices portraying cyclists as a "lunatic fringe".
During the 2022 Australian federal election campaign, both Scott Morrison, then-prime minister and leader of the centre-right Liberal Party, and Anthony Albanese, the subsequently elected prime minister and leader of the centre-left Australian Labor Party, insisted they were not "woke".
Peter Dutton, former Opposition Leader and leader of the Coalition, has also used the term several times before.
Members of minor right-wing parties, especially Pauline Hanson's One Nation and the United Australia Party, also frequently use the term.
In the 2025 Australian federal election campaign opposition leader Dutton stated that he wanted to rid the schooling and university system of "woke" policies.
In New Zealand, former deputy prime minister and leader of the New Zealand First Party, Winston Peters, referred to the government led by Jacinda Ardern and the New Zealand Labour Party as a "woke guilt industry". Then–opposition leader Judith Collins also referred to Ardern as "woke".
In March 2025, Peters declared a "war on woke" during his "State of the Nation" speech, taking aim at DEI, sexual education programs at schools, and "Cultural Marxism".
