I don’t think it’s just white people doing it’s I think it is specifically GOP think tanks. Many of them in DC and around the beltway are paid to think up slogans, turn ones out there around to have the opposite meaning, and then spread them rapidly through the media, like Fox News. Individuals not in power and without some sort of megaphone don’t have the ability to rapidly spread the phrases that often chanted by those associated by a political party, namely the Republicans. Many of the Fox-like viewers and Trump supporters actively parrot and repeated these phrases quickly and relentlessly. But also now stupidly. I find it that I can’t take the, seriously they are so stupid, like “Woke”, “snowflakes,” “let’s go Brandon.” These I highly suspect were cooked up by political consultants who are paid rapacious amounts embed strategies into these phrases..
Take the word “woke.” It envelopes the idea of liberal and elite, of pretentious posturing. The poor, uneducated Trump followers are using it via Fox like circuits. It’s aimed at empowering the uneducated class to mock the elites, the urban hipsters, the professors. Nowadays that includes many black Americans, Latino Americans, LBTQ+ community members. They kind of people that can actually make a cogent and sustained Socratic argument, like yourself or your “followers.” It allows the, to mock not just the typical white liberals (like me I would like to think), descendants of socialist pacifist professors, but black American educated women like yourself and Judge Brown Jackson, as in recent decades black women were the highest race/gender combo going to college— more than white women or white men. This college education leads to a threatening problem for white supremacist males in particular who are “losing” the economic “class war” by not “upskilling.” They are simply not getting educated or “woke.” To gain power, they mock “elites.” Not a new technique as it is a populist’s way to gain power, by siding with “the people”. But just a rehashed way.
Sadly, or happily depending on what your view is, Democrats in particular are bad at this type of mocking. A liberal leftist linguist professor at Berkeley, George Lakoff, wrote the book on “framing.” But it was the GOP strategists who stole it. Expect new phrases to pop up around election time signaling the same racial and anti-elite connotations as CRT and Woke. I find these phrases silly, though the threat behind them is quite real.