Cal Golden Bears fans are poking fun at 'woke' jabs from Southern schools

UC Berkeley’s Golden Bears are embracing the “woke” label as a rallying cry this football season, turning what was meant to be an insult from some Southeast rivals into a meme.

The traditionally middling college football program joined the Atlantic Coast Conference this year, meaning its team will play games in parts of the country that it rarely visited in years past.

Or in other words, the Bears are visiting locales that don’t quite resemble their habitat in the onetime hippie hotbed and free speech capital of Berkeley, California.

Some fans at rival schools have welcomed the Bears by mocking them as far-left radicals online, bringing the culture wars to the already scorched-earth digital battlefield of college football memes.

A catalyst of the campaign appears to be a meme, “You just lost to the woke agenda,” which was posted by an X user shortly after Cal’s upset win at Auburn two weeks ago. The post has drawn more than 5 million views on X as of Friday afternoon.

The meme’s creator, 24-year-old grad student Miles Goodman, said he’d been thinking for months about how he wanted to answer conservative mockery of his school.

“It was very impulsive (posting that meme) but at the same time, it also wasn’t,” Goodman told NBC News on Friday night. 

“By taking it on from a satirical lens, I think it let a lot of Cal fans take ownership of that label and allow us to embrace it on our own terms. And simultaneously, it pokes fun at  how other fans across the country have historically perceived the university."

Efforts to tag Cal fans and their football team as dangerous leftists have been greeted with glee by Bears backers, who in the last week have flooded social media feeds with memes that poke fun at what some of their rivals think “woke” culture is.

Cal fans embraced a “Calgorithm” challenge by taking to social media to support just about every hot-button issue that’d boil the blood of any conservative culture warrior.

“Our fan base is so self-aware of how we’re perceived, we don’t always think that that’s correct, but it’s just been easier for each of us, especially lately, to not fight against these labels,” said Cal fan Nam Le, a 33-year-old high school English teacher who is among the meme posters on X.

“The reality is Cal football has fans that are anarchist, leftist, left leaning, liberal, centrist, right leaning, probably not any MAGA, but it’s a big tent of people here despite these stereotypes that exist.”

Memes posted by Cal fans have included images of rainbow flags or joked about climate change, gender identity and pronoun use.

“FSU has announced a Stripe Out this Saturday vs Cal!” one account on X wrote, sharing an image of the Florida school’s stadium edited to add a rainbow across the field and in the stands.

The post added: “Check your row number:

60s: Marxist Red

50s: Orange

40s: They/Them Yellow

30s: Capitalism is a Crime Green

20s: Atlantic Coast Blue

0-19: Open Border Purple.”

Some users have also joked about immigration, DEI policies and critical race theory.

Le, the Cal fan, said he’s hopeful the football-fueled meme culture war could lead fans to better understand each other.

“It’s important that the memes are always in a place that is so exaggerated and absurdist that hopefully it’ll actually dispel some of it [stereotypes] through meeting us on the ground [at games],” Le said. “They’ll see we’re just polite and normal people, and that we can interact and represent ourselves well across the country. This might do some good to close some of this political gap.”

Cal will face the Florida State Seminoles on Saturday at 7 p.m. ET.