By Judith Sullivan

If suburban liberal moms who like their white wine (who doesn’t these days?) are AWFL, well then I’m proud to be awful.

This is the latest the right uses to peg the women they don’t like or understand. Women like most of my friends. I guess because we support decent education, healthcare equality and Americans’ freedom to drop their kid off at school without being shot in the face.

The term AWFL, for Affluent White Liberal Women, has gained traction since the unnecessary Jan 7 death of Renee Nicole Good. PJ Media, a right-wing outlet, on that same day labelled AWFLs ugly, shrewish, and guilty of “suicidal empathy.” The comments on the PJ article prompt the reader to wonder if it’s not satire. I will leave you to go down that particular rabbit hole but I warn you it ain’t pretty.

Something called The American Thinker last fall blamed AWFLs for everything from single men not finding dates to families breaking down to promoting racism.

These allegations, such as they are, are grave enough to have caused New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg to examine this blaming of women, gay and straight, for many of the ills facing Americans today. Especially vulnerable, the right argues, are those poor ICE agents. Good, some claim, brought her early and tragic demise on herself. Too liberal, too caring, too woke. It was bound to happen.

Even the National Review got in on the act, Goldberg noted, citing a column by Rich Lowry in which he blames Good and her fellow peaceful protesters for “creat[ing] an atmosphere of violent intimidation.” My only response to that is to quote Good’s widow. “They have guns, we have whistles.”

Susan Faludi’s Backlash came out 35 years ago, which now feels like an eternity. We are now in back-back-back lash land. If women weren’t so darn uppity, so bloody opinionated, so annoyingly well-educated, everything would be dandy. Or so matters appear to what we can only hope is a teensy deluded group on the fringes of the right.

We can hope.