It’s a broad label for anything they don’t like (LGBTQ+, feminism, DEI, etc.), but doesn’t “woke” mean you are awake? Would that imply that things that are not “woke” or are “anti-woke” are “asleep”?
Then they go on about conspiracies (“climate change is not real”, “deep state”, “5G is harmful”, “vaccines cause autism”, the list goes on unfortunately…) where they’re claiming that you need to “wake up to the truth”. Surely they don’t consider “woke” to be “the truth”, so shouldn’t they call it something like “asleep”, “sleepy”, “snoozy”, or similar?
I needed to use a lot of quotation marks there…
Have you heard the term virtue-signaling?
Selfish people want to paint people better than them as bad, so they try to adjust the narrative to suggest that those better people are actually faking it. The term virtue-signaling suggests that these virtuous acts are actually just for appearances, and insincere.
The term woke has a similar implication. It’s like “this person is trying very hard to appear to be virtuous, and in doing so, they’re going too far, and doing more harm than good.”
That’s my intellectual take on it, anyway. Plebs just adopt the term without understanding the implied meaning. “Other team == woke == bad” is all 95% of them think.
I came here to say this. You worded it better.
Buried in your argument is the assumption that people accused of virtue signalling are actually being virtuous. In many cases they’re actually just doing harm in order to appeal to their own tribe. This is virtue signalling and there’s nothing virtuous about it.
People who walk around calling everything woke are virtue-signalling to their right wing tribe, for example. It’s classic social bullying.
Only douchecanoes use the term unironically, so it follows the person they are criticising is likely doing something morally right.