To the young Republicans in attendance, the vernacular feels a bit cringe. “We don’t really use ‘woke’ as our term,” says Evan Masse, a student at the Community College of Rhode Island. Chris Johnson, the managing director of Young Conservatives for Carbon Dividends, likened its use to how an out-of-touch uncle might search for the words to describe a nephew at the Thanksgiving table. “I think a lot of older folks use it if they don’t really know what they’re referring to,” he says. “It’s a catchall colloquialism.”

Several young conservatives I spoke with at CPAC echoed some version of that criticism of party elders. Some worry that going so hard on “woke” — a term now used almost entirely derogatorily by Republican detractors — will turn off upcoming generations of voters already disinclined to support the GOP. Others simply said it had lost its meaning, as many once-favored slang terms do, when the septuagenarians in Congress started punctuating their Fox News hits with it. This next generation of GOP activists nevertheless support the principles behind the “woke” wars — the market basket of education- and gender-related policies being passed in red states across the country. They just really wish the Olds would stop saying “woke.”