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Notes -
"SJW" was never used all that much, and was mostly used in online and nerdy discourse. Nerds are much worse at playing the social games of verbal politics, and their strategy of reclaiming the term backfired.
And I think it also has to do with social justice discourse spreading much wider than the original, core movement, and gaining ground among people who weren't familiar with the core activists. These ideas were introduced to them as just decent things decent people are doing, there's no politics here, this is just about being a good person, and when they were questioned they found it confusing and impolite, and white-collar professionals hate nothing more than impolite things. This attitude got back-filled in to the activists themselves, because it was useful, and then became the official line against any accusations of woke politics. Then "woke" became something Republicans in the Senate ask judicial nominees, which just bewildered and offended the elite professional jurists who thought they were above such trivialities.
I also don't think "woke" was ever really used as a descriptor for the movement, it was more of a meme, like "it's hard to be woke in a sleeping society" or something by someone vaguely affiliated with the social justice movement. So for normie liberals who got interested in woke politics, it rather sounded like the opposite-side verison of civil rights groups getting very angry about Pepe the frog memes and calling Pepe a white supremacist symbol, because some people on 4chan used Pepe in racist memes. So everyone on the left side of the fence sees the "woke" descriptor as eminently silly, even though they refuse to give anyone a better one.
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