How ‘Woke’ Became a Weapon — and Who Paid for It

From Lead Belly’s Warning to a 920-Page Government Overhaul

How a Black survival word became the legitimizing narrative for a 920-page authoritarian government overhaul. A source-based investigation into money flows, think tanks, and the question of why a culture war term appears in the foreword of a plan to dismantle workers’ rights.

In the foreword of a 920-page document that details the restructuring of the U.S. federal government, there is a sentence that condenses decades of history: “The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors.” The sentence was written by Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation. The document is called Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise — better known as Project 2025.^[1]

That Roberts chose the word “woke” for the opening line of a plan calling for the elimination of diversity programs, the weakening of union protections, the criminalization of gender-affirming healthcare, and the dismissal of tens of thousands of civil servants is not a rhetorical accident. It is the result of a documented strategy that transformed an African American survival word into the most effective enemy-image term of the 21st century — funded by the same foundations that bankroll Project 2025.

This investigation traces the connection between both processes. Source-based, verifiable, in the words of the actors themselves.

Part I: A Word That Was Meant to Save Lives

2017–2020: Saturation and Tipping Point

Between 2014 and 2017, “woke” functioned as a positive identity marker. Then saturation began to hollow out the meaning — initially within the Black community itself. Journalist Maya Binyam described the “Woke Olympics.” Saturday Night Live aired a 2017 parody ad for “Levi’s Wokes” — jeans that were “sizeless, shapeless, gender non-conforming.” NPR journalist Sam Sanders declared in December 2018 it was “Time to Put ‘Woke’ to Sleep.”

The question is: who picked up the sleeping word and forged it into a weapon? The answer is documented.

Part II: The Documented Strategy — Christopher Rufo and Semantic Warfare

One TV Appearance, One Phone Call, One Executive Order

On September 1, 2020, Christopher Rufo — then a fellow at the Discovery Institute, later senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute — appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show and claimed Critical Race Theory had “pervaded every institution of the federal government.” Donald Trump watched the broadcast. The next day, the White House called Rufo. On September 22, 2020, Trump signed Executive Order 13950 (“Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping”), banning diversity trainings in federal agencies — directly inspired by Rufo’s appearance.^[2]

What distinguishes Rufo from earlier culture warriors is the documented openness of his strategy. On March 15, 2021, he tweeted: “We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”^[3]

On May 24, 2021, he affirmed: “Yes, I envisioned a strategy — turn the brand ‘critical race theory’ toxic — and willed it into being through writing and persuasion.”

He explained his terminology to the New Yorker in June 2021: “‘Woke’ is a good epithet, but it’s too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. ‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain.” He chose CRT because it was more specific than “woke” and could be tied to specific legislation. His goal: to subsume “the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans” under the CRT label.^[4]

This is not a retroactive interpretation. This is the strategy in the words of its architect. Publicly, in real time, on Twitter.

The Amplification Machine

The media amplification followed a precise pattern: Think tanks (Manhattan Institute, Heritage Foundation) produced reports and arguments → activist-intellectuals like Rufo and James Lindsay (co-founder of “New Discourses,” operated by the Christian nationalist organization Sovereign Nations) translated them into media-effective narratives → Fox News (particularly Tucker Carlson, with approximately 3.2 million nightly viewers) broadcast them to a mass audience → politicians like DeSantis and Trump operationalized them in legislation and executive orders → ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) produced model legislation for the states.

Media Matters documented in June 2023 that Fox News had labeled over 200 different things as “woke” — from M&Ms to NASA to mall Santas.^[5] Linguist deandre a. miles-hercules (UC Santa Barbara) identifies two processes at work: semantic pejoration (a word acquires increasingly negative connotations) and semantic bleaching (the denotative content is washed out until the word means everything and nothing). Fox News’ application of “woke” to over 200 disparate phenomena is a textbook example of deliberate semantic bleaching.

Part III: The Money Behind the Word — the Financial Architecture of the Anti-Woke Discourse

DonorsTrust, Bradley, Koch: The Dark Money Infrastructure

Behind the semantic warfare stands a dense network of conservative foundations. DonorsTrust — called the “Dark Money ATM” by critics — serves as a central pass-through station. Between 2020 and 2022, DonorsTrust channeled $600,000 to the Manhattan Institute, $2.6 million to Hillsdale College, and $5.8 million to the Discovery Institute, where Rufo was previously a fellow. DonorsTrust itself received $92 million in 2022 from the 85 Fund — the financing vehicle of conservative network architect Leonard Leo.^[6]

The Bradley Foundation (assets exceeding $900 million, more than $1 billion distributed to conservative causes) gave $2.1 million to the Manhattan Institute, $1 million to the Heritage Foundation, and $400,000 to the Claremont Institute between 2020 and 2023.^[7]

The Koch network finances an ecosystem of hundreds of organizations. An analysis by UnKoch My Campus found that Koch-affiliated think tanks produced 79 articles, podcasts, and videos about CRT between June 2020 and June 2021 — the Manhattan Institute alone contributed 43 of them.^[8]

Here is the critical point: these three funding networks — DonorsTrust, Bradley Foundation, Koch — are identical to the principal financiers of Project 2025. The same checks that paid for the semantic transformation of “woke” are paying for the 920-page plan to restructure the U.S. government.

Part IV: From Rhetoric to Government Program — the Bridge to Project 2025

What Is Project 2025?

Project 2025 is a transition project for a conservative government published by the Heritage Foundation in April 2023. It comprises four pillars: the 920-page policy document Mandate for Leadership, a personnel database for staffing government positions, an online training academy, and a 180-day playbook for the first phase of a presidency. Over 100 conservative organizations sit on its advisory board. More than 140 former Trump staffers participated in its creation.^[9]

As of February 2026, the Trump administration has implemented or initiated 283 of 532 identified measures from the document — that is 53 percent within twelve months, according to the Center for Progressive Reform.^[10]

“Woke” as the Framing Narrative of Government Restructuring

Throughout the Mandate for Leadership, the document rails against “woke progressivism,” “woke culture warriors,” “woke bureaucrats at the Pentagon,” “woke extremism,” “woke propaganda,” the “woke agenda,” “wokeism,” the “woke-dominated system of public schools and universities,” “woke revolutionaries,” and “woke gender ideology.” The declared primary target is described as “the totalitarian cult known today as ‘The Great Awokening.'”^[11]

This is more than rhetoric. It is the legitimizing structure. The chapter on the Department of Labor states: “Much of American labor and employment policy has become institutionally oriented toward ‘woke’ goals.” The solution: rollback of DEI programs — alongside the erosion of overtime protections, the weakening of child labor laws, and the creation of employer-friendly alternatives to unions.^[12] The anti-woke framing legitimizes a restructuring that extends far beyond culture war.

The Personnel Bridges

The connection between the anti-woke strategy and Project 2025 is not a loose correlation. It consists of personnel and institutional identities:

Christopher Rufo — key architect of the anti-CRT strategy — was a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the same organization leading Project 2025. He is a “distinguished fellow” at Hillsdale College, a member of the Project 2025 Advisory Board. The Heritage Foundation awarded him the 2024 Salvatori Prize — an explicit institutional reward for his role as anti-CRT and anti-DEI activist. Heritage president Roberts praised Rufo’s “tireless efforts” in the fight against “woke ideologies.”^[13] Rufo’s chief of staff, Armen Tooloee, appeared at Heritage panels titled “Seizing the Moment to Defeat DEI” that advanced Project 2025’s goal of DEI elimination.^[14]

Russell Vought — key architect of Project 2025 and founder of the Center for Renewing America (Advisory Board member) — now heads Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, which he has described as the “nerve center” of presidential power. Vought stated that Trump had “blessed” his organization and that distancing from Project 2025 was “just politics.”^[15]

Stephen Miller — co-founder of America First Legal (Advisory Board member, funded with $27 million from the Bradley Impact Fund) — is Trump’s deputy chief of staff and orchestrates the anti-DEI executive orders.^[16]

The Financial Identity

A DeSmog analysis found that networks linked to just six family fortunes have funneled over $120 million into Project 2025 advisory organizations since 2020. The Bradley Foundation and the Bradley Impact Fund alone donated over $50 million to 29 different Project 2025 organizations — the same Bradley Foundation that funds Rufo’s Manhattan Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Claremont Institute.^[17]

The Diana Davis Spencer Foundation — whose CEO sits on the Heritage board — donated $15 million to 16 Project 2025 organizations. The Adolph Coors Foundation funded 22 Advisory Board groups. DonorsTrust — the “Dark Money ATM” of the anti-woke infrastructure — continues to channel millions to Heritage and its partners.^[18]

It is the same money. First it financed the semantic weapon. Then the government restructuring that the weapon legitimizes.

Part V: From Slogan to Law — the Political Operationalization

Before Project 2025: State-Level Model Legislation

UCLA documented 563 anti-CRT measures at federal, state, and local level between 2021 and 2022. Forty-four states introduced bills against CRT instruction; 20 passed restrictions. A FiveThirtyEight analysis showed that two-thirds of these bills contained language that was “essentially identical” to Trump’s Executive Order 13950 — evidence of a template-based strategy.^[19]

Ron DeSantis made “anti-woke” the core of his political brand. On April 22, 2022, he signed the Stop W.O.K.E. Act (officially: Individual Freedom Act, Florida HB 7). Federal judge Mark Walker blocked central provisions and called the law “positively dystopian” — opening his 139-page ruling with a quote from Orwell’s 1984.^[20]

DeSantis’s own legal definition of “woke” revealed the strategy: “The belief that there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them” — the mere acknowledgment of inequality was declared the enemy.

PEN America documented over 22,800 book bans across 45 states since July 2021. A Washington Post study found that just 11 people were responsible for 60 percent of all book challenges in the 2021–22 school year — coordinated through groups like Moms for Liberty (Heritage Salvatori Prize recipient and Project 2025 advisor).^[21]

After Project 2025: Executive Orders in the White House

On the first day of his second term, Trump signed executive orders ending DEI programs across the entire federal government, ordering the deletion of the terms “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” “gender,” “gender equality,” “sexual orientation and gender identity” from all federal regulations, and halting federal funding for gender-affirming treatments.^[22]

Within 100 days, high-ranking minorities in the military were dismissed, military academies were ordered to eliminate race-conscious admissions, and thousands of images honoring diversity and minority milestones were flagged for removal. Russell Vought, the lead architect of Project 2025, directs the implementation as OMB director. Peter Navarro, who wrote Project 2025’s trade chapter, is Trump’s trade adviser. Brendan Carr, who wrote the FCC chapter, now runs the agency. Of the 40 named authors of the Mandate for Leadership, 32 have ties to past or current Trump administrations, according to FactCheck.org.^[23]

Part VI: The Transatlantic Export — How the Infrastructure Came to Europe

Budapest as the Hinge

This investigation would be incomplete without the transatlantic vector that carries the anti-woke infrastructure to Europe — through precisely identifiable channels.

CPAC Hungary — held annually in Budapest since May 2022 — serves as a central platform. The Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), a state-funded Hungarian think tank that receives nearly as much funding as the entire Hungarian higher education system combined, finances grants to U.S. conservatives through the Danube Institute — including Christopher Rufo. The Danube Institute is run by John O’Sullivan, a former Heritage Foundation staffer. Heritage and the Danube Institute co-hosted the Danube Geopolitical Summit, where Heritage adviser James Carafano stressed “the importance of building transatlantic connectivity.”^[24]

The National Conservatism conferences of the Washington-based Edmund Burke Foundation have taken place in Rome, London, and Brussels. The Atlas Network (approximately 600 partner organizations in 100 countries) connects the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute with European offshoots like Policy Exchange and the Free Speech Union in the UK.

The United Kingdom: The Blueprint

In the UK, the Heritage Foundation, Claremont Institute, Manhattan Institute, Federalist Society, and Hillsdale College are networked through the Centre for Heterodox Social Science (CHSS) at the University of Buckingham — led by Matthew Goodwin, who is simultaneously a visiting professor and parliamentary candidate for Reform UK. In September 2025, Nigel Farage spoke at Hillsdale College’s Constitution Day celebration in Washington — an event featuring panels on “DOGE and the Constitution” and “The Conservative Legal Movement.”^[25]

Researchers Davies and MacRae (Race & Class, 2023) mapped a dense British anti-woke network: the most influential institution by network centrality is the online magazine Spiked, followed by GB News; central think tanks include Policy Exchange and the Legatum Institute.^[26]

France and Germany: Local Adaptations

In France, anti-woke sentiment was grafted onto the laïcité tradition. President Macron warned in October 2020 against American social theories that “break the Republic in two.” Education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer founded the Laboratoire de la République in October 2021 as an explicitly anti-woke think tank. The irony: much “woke” theory traces back to French Theory — Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze — exported to the U.S. in the 1970s and now reimported in transformed form.

In Germany, the discourse was adopted more slowly. The gendering debate — whether and how gender-inclusive language should be used — became the specifically German battlefield. Sahra Wagenknecht founded the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) in January 2024 with an explicitly anti-identity-politics orientation — a European anomaly of left-wing anti-woke critique. Friedrich Merz (CDU) posted in June 2023: “With every gendered newscast, a few hundred more votes go to the AfD.”

The direct financial connections between U.S. networks and the German anti-woke scene are less documented than those to the UK or Hungary. What is documented are the discourse channels: CPAC conferences, Atlas Network partners, and the reception of U.S. framings in German media.

Part VII: Failure as Campaign Strategy, Success as Government Program

DeSantis’s Lesson

A USA Today/Ipsos poll from March 2023 showed that 56 percent of Americans understood “woke” positively as awareness of social injustice. Even more than a third of Republicans shared this assessment. When DeSantis made “anti-woke” the center of his presidential campaign, he failed: from an initial approximately 40 percent approval among Republicans, he fell to approximately 15 percent and dropped out on January 21, 2024. Trump himself undermined the strategy in June 2023: “I don’t like the term ‘woke.’ Half the people can’t define it.”^[27]

In the UK, a YouGov poll found that 62 percent of the public saw through the culture war rhetoric as a political tactic.

Erykah Badu commented on DeSantis’s and Trump’s use of “woke” in 2023 with a single sentence: “I think they mean ‘Black.'”

The Paradox

Here lies the critical distinction that is often lost in public debate: anti-woke rhetoric fails as a central campaign message — DeSantis is the empirical proof. But it works as a legitimizing framework for government policy once the government is already in office.

Project 2025 did not use “anti-woke” as a campaign slogan. It inscribed “anti-woke” as justification into legal texts, executive orders, and agency directives. When the Department of Labor classifies DEI as “woke,” concrete dismissals, eliminated programs, and dismantled protections follow. This requires no majority opinion — only a government order.

The semantic weapon no longer works in the campaign. But within the government apparatus, it still cuts.

Part VIII: What Communication Science Has to Say

Lakoff’s Warning

George Lakoff directly analyzed the weaponization of “woke” in his FrameLab newsletter in 2023. He identified the central paradox: “If the word has no universal meaning, why do so many people use it?” His answer: the indeterminacy is the feature, not the bug. “Woke” functions as a cognitive frame that activates conservative moral intuitions — associations with permissiveness, weakness, and moral corruption that resonate within Lakoff’s “Strict Father” moral model.^[28]

Critically, Lakoff warns: even using an opponent’s frame — even to refute it — reinforces it. Progressives defending “wokeness” stabilize the conservative frame.

Concept Creep and Floating Signifier

Nick Haslam’s concept of “Concept Creep” (Psychological Inquiry, 2016) describes how terms expand horizontally (to new phenomena) and vertically (to less extreme cases). Applied to “woke,” a bidirectional process emerges: progressives expanded the term from racial to all social injustice; conservatives then expanded it further — to environmental policy, banking, space exploration, and chocolate marketing.^[29]

The landmark study by Bleich et al. (Political Studies, 2025) introduces the concept of “politicized pejoration” — a strategic, ideologically motivated form of semantic change that differs from natural language evolution. Ernesto Laclau’s discourse theory provides the theoretical framework: “woke” functions as a floating signifier — a sign whose meaning is contested between rival political projects — and tends toward the empty signifier, emptied of specific content to represent a chain of conservative grievances.^[30]

Part IX: The Chain — A Summary

What is documented here does not describe a conspiracy theory. It describes a documented strategy in the public words of its actors, financed through traceable foundation networks, implemented in published legal texts and government orders. The chain looks like this:

What Remains

The case of “woke” is arguably the most significant instance of politicized semantic warfare in the 21st century — a case study in how a single word that once helped Black people survive a racist system was systematically transformed into the legitimizing narrative of an authoritarian government program.

Academic research — from Bleich et al.’s “politicized pejoration” to Lakoff’s framing theory to Haslam’s Concept Creep — shows that this process was neither natural nor inevitable, but the result of strategic planning, massive financial investment, and institutional coordination.

George Lakoff warns: even refuting a frame reinforces it. Media scholar Meredith D. Clark (University of Virginia) described the pejorative use as “a form of anti-Blackness — a quick way to signal to others that what those people over there are saying is not real.”

The counter-strategy cannot lie in defending the term “woke” — but in exposing the mechanics. In documenting the money flows. In naming the actors. In refusing to use the semantic weapon, not even in self-defense. This text is an attempt at exactly that.

Sources and References

Primary Sources and Key Documents

1. Heritage Foundation: Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (2023). The foreword by Kevin Roberts, p. 4, states: “The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors.” The document rails against “woke progressivism,” “woke culture warriors,” “woke bureaucrats at the Pentagon,” “woke extremism,” “woke propaganda,” the “woke agenda,” and “woke gender ideology.” Source: project2025.org; analysis: Ms. Magazine, Feb 8, 2024. ↩︎
2. Rufo’s Fox News appearance and the resulting Executive Order 13950 are documented in: Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory,” The New Yorker, June 18, 2021. Rufo’s own account confirms the timeline. See also: Wikipedia, Christopher Rufo. ↩︎
3. Christopher Rufo, Twitter/X, March 15, 2021 (archived). The tweet reads: “We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.” ↩︎
4. Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory,” The New Yorker, June 18, 2021. Rufo’s quote: “‘Woke’ is a good epithet, but it’s too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. ‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain.” ↩︎
5. Media Matters for America, June 2023, documented over 200 disparate things Fox News labeled as “woke.” ↩︎
6. Walker Bragman, “The Big Money Behind Chris Rufo’s Right-Wing Agitating,” EXPOSEDbyCMD / Center for Media and Democracy, May 14, 2024. exposedbycmd.org. DonorsTrust’s $92 million from the 85 Fund is documented in the same investigation. ↩︎
7. Bradley Foundation funding figures from EXPOSEDbyCMD and DeSmog analyses of IRS Form 990 filings, 2020–2023. ↩︎
8. Koch network CRT output data: UnKoch My Campus analysis, cited in multiple sources. ↩︎
9. Wikipedia, Project 2025; ACLU, “Project 2025, Explained”. Over 140 former Trump staffers: CNN report, cited in ACLU analysis. ↩︎
10. Center for Progressive Reform / Governing for Impact, “Project 2025 Executive Action Tracker,” updated February 2026: “The Trump administration has initiated or completed 53 percent of Project 2025’s domestic administrative policy agenda.” progressivereform.org. ↩︎
11. Ms. Magazine analysis of Mandate for Leadership: the document’s main target is identified as “the totalitarian cult known today as ‘The Great Awokening.'” msmagazine.com. ↩︎
12. Media Matters for America, “Project 2025 laid the foundation for Trump using DEI to target USAID staff and level a broader attack on workers.” The Mandate chapter on the DOL states: “much of American labor and employment policy has become institutionally oriented toward ‘woke’ goals.” mediamatters.org. ↩︎
13. Heritage Foundation, “The Heritage Foundation Awards Christopher F. Rufo The 2024 Salvatori Prize for American Citizenship.” Roberts: “Woke ideologies are infiltrating America’s institutions.” heritage.org. ↩︎
14. Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, “Project 2025 March 20th Update,” 2024: Heritage panels on “Seizing the Moment to Defeat DEI” featured Tooloee. globalextremism.org. ↩︎
15. PBS News / The 19th, “Tracking how much of Project 2025 the Trump administration achieved this year,” Dec 17, 2025. Vought described OMB as the “nerve center.” 19thnews.org. See also: Wikipedia, Project 2025, on Vought’s statement that Trump “blessed” CRA. ↩︎
16. DeSmog, “6 Billionaire Fortunes Bankrolling Project 2025,” Aug 14, 2024: Bradley Impact Fund donated $27.1 million to America First Legal. desmog.com. ↩︎
17. DeSmog, ibid.: “Since 2020, donor networks linked to just six family fortunes have funneled more than $120 million into Project 2025 advisory groups.” Bradley Foundation and Bradley Impact Fund: over $50 million to 29 Project 2025 organizations. ↩︎
18. United Methodist Insight, “Want to Know Who’s Behind Project 2025? Follow the Money through the Swamp,” July 25, 2024. Diana Davis Spencer Foundation: $15 million to 16 organizations. um-insight.net. Coors Foundation: 22 advisory groups funded (DeSmog). ↩︎
19. UCLA CRT Legislative Tracker, 2021–2022: 563 anti-CRT measures. FiveThirtyEight analysis of template language. PEN America book ban data. ↩︎
20. DeSantis’s Stop W.O.K.E. Act (Florida HB 7), signed April 22, 2022. Judge Mark Walker’s ruling described the law as “positively dystopian.” The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the block of workplace provisions in 2024. ↩︎
21. PEN America: 22,800+ book bans since July 2021. Washington Post: 11 individuals responsible for 60% of challenges in 2021–22. Moms for Liberty received the Heritage Salvatori Prize and is a Project 2025 advisor. ↩︎
22. Guttmacher Institute, “Year One of Project 2025: Tracking the Trump Administration’s Devastating Campaign Against Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights,” Feb 2026: Trump signed executive orders on Day 1 terminating all DEI programs. guttmacher.org. ↩︎
23. FactCheck.org, “Trump, Project 2025 and the ‘Dismantling’ of the ‘Administrative State,'” Sept 2025: 32 of 40 named authors have ties to Trump administrations. factcheck.org. ↩︎
24. Truth Wins Out, “Project 2025 – The Heritage Foundation,” Nov 2025: Danube Institute grants to Rufo; John O’Sullivan’s Heritage connection; Danube Geopolitical Summit with Heritage’s James Carafano. truthwinsout.org. ↩︎
25. ZNetwork, “Reform’s Plans to Import Trump’s Authoritarian ‘Project 2025’ Blueprint to the UK,” Feb 2026: Heritage, Claremont, Manhattan Institute, Federalist Society, and Hillsdale networked through CHSS. Farage spoke at Hillsdale’s Constitution Day, Sept 2025. znetwork.org. ↩︎
26. Davies & MacRae, anti-woke network analysis, Race & Class, 2023. ↩︎
27. USA Today/Ipsos, March 2023: 56% of Americans understood “woke” positively. DeSantis’s decline from ~40% to ~15% among Republicans, exit Jan 21, 2024. Trump quote: “I don’t like the term ‘woke.’ Half the people can’t define it” (June 2023). ↩︎
28. George Lakoff, FrameLab newsletter, 2023: analysis of the “woke” weaponization and the “Strict Father” moral model. ↩︎
29. Nick Haslam, “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,” Psychological Inquiry, 2016. ↩︎
30. Bleich et al., “Politicized Pejoration,” Political Studies, 2025. The study introduces the concept of strategically motivated semantic change. See also: Ernesto Laclau’s discourse theory on floating and empty signifiers. ↩︎