‘Woke’ Cal Twitter Is Taking Over College Football. Meet Its Extremely Online Posters

Auburn University football fans felt pretty good going into a home game against UC Berkeley this month. After all, Cal — an afterthought in the power conference realignment that blew up the Pac-12 and rocked college athletics — was traveling to the heart of the Southeastern Conference, where fans say “it just means more.”

Unfortunately for the Tigers faithful, they seemed to have poked the wrong bear: X’s “Calgorithm.”

College football smack talk is nothing new; many schools have a coalition of fan accounts that post memes, scores and predictions ahead of Saturday games. But the posts coming out of Cal Twitter, as the community on the social media platform now called X is known, have quickly garnered national attention amid the Golden Bears’ hot start.

Before the teams’ Sept. 7 matchup, Auburn and Cal fans jabbed back and forth on social media, with some pro-Auburn posts remarking that Cal wasn’t likely to have a big group of supporters traveling to the game. They were “likely too busy thinking of a new woke topic that hurts their feels to travel to Alabama,” one X user said.

But Cal pulled off an upset 21-14 win at Jordan-Hare Stadium — now “property of antifa,” as one meme declared — where the stands seemed to have a small but mighty blue and gold contingency. Cal Twitter responded, leaning into the “woke” stereotypes about Berkeley.

“The reputation that Cal has as a fairly left leaning progressive institution since a long time ago — people try to use it against us, especially in the South,” said Mike Davie, known as “Mike the Hot Dog Mayor” on X.

“We kind of flipped the script on that, like, ‘That’s right, and we’re coming armed with pronouns and woke flags.’”

After the game, a meme showing a Democratic-winning election map overlaid with images of Kamala Harris, a rainbow, players including quarterback Fernando Mendoza, and mascot Oski the bear circulated within Cal’s community of “burner” accounts on X. “You just lost to the woke agenda,” it declared.

More memes started flowing, riffing on jokes about Cal students’ reputations for holding far-left and even communist beliefs.

“Pretty quickly it went from just like small California or Alabama stereotypes to just full on ‘We’re going to make fun of you for being quote-unquote “out of touch,” and then at the same time, we’re going to make fun of ourselves a little bit for for going a little too far into the woke ideology,’” said the person behind the X account “Liberal Calgorithm,” who uses the handle @wokemobfootball to keep posts separate from work and personal life and did not want to be identified. “I think by the time we had won, all hell had broken loose, and the ‘Antifa Stadium’ [meme] had been dropped.”

Now, Bears fans are focused on another road trip to unfamiliar territory ahead of Saturday afternoon’s game at Florida State. The memes have included AI-generated photos of FSU fans cheering while holding rainbow Pride flags at Tallahassee’s Doak Campbell Stadium — make that “Woke” Campbell Stadium — and promoting spirit game themes like “pronoun awareness” and “pride celebration.”

Cal has had a surprisingly strong season so far, going 3-0 ahead of its Atlantic Coast Conference debut, while FSU, a preseason top-10 team, is 0-3.

On X, the Bears have been even more dominant. “Never seen a fanbase so organized and so locked in on trolling their opponents,” one college football fan from Iowa posted. “Hand Cal the natty, they’ve earned it.”

While Cal’s presence in the football Twittersphere has exploded recently, the “burner community,” as Davie refers to them, has been around for years, posting memes and interacting online with one another and with the separate “Write for California” Substack, which says it posts content by, for, and about the Golden Bears.

One of the burners’ first coordinated meme campaigns came last year when the football team hired former interim head coach Jake Spavital to be the new offensive coordinator after the 2022 season.

“He was very public that he’s going to target offensive linemen, [also known as] hogs,” Davie said. The meme on many burner accounts became centered on the team needing more offensive linemen for Spavital, or #hogs4spav, the Daily Cal reported.

Lots of burners have been around since then, but even more have joined the ranks in the past few weeks.

The person behind the @wokemobfootball account grew up as a Cal fan and has attended a few games a year since college, but she said she didn’t end up in the Calgorithm until this season after “Cal tweets started creeping up on my main Twitter page.”

To the outside world, many of the burners are anonymous, but @wokemobfootball said they have group chats where they workshop memes, quote tweet and comment on each other’s content actively, and even meet up IRL.

Davie said he started going to “Write for California” tailgates and met other burners there.

“That becoming the burner tailgate is something that just happened this year,” he said.

The team has even gotten in on the action, he said. Team staffers Marshall Cherrington and Benji Palu have dropped by one of their tailgates, and the quarterback, Mendoza, appeared for a post-game interview wearing a T-shirt from a line started by one of the burners.

One player’s dad even said he thought the memes about his son were hilarious.

Davie said being connected to the wider community helps make sure that burners are kept in check when they post edgier jokes.

Many of the accounts meme-ing about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and communist ideology are also interspersed with left-leaning political content — links to Kamala Harris’s campaign website, for example, and a repost of the Miami Heat denouncing disproved claims about Haitian immigrants after former President Donald Trump falsely said during a Sept. 10 debate that they were eating pets in Ohio.

“I think one of the best ways that we have of ensuring that we toe the line is that we do have a very diverse group of people in our community who all have very wildly different experiences and can kind of jump in,” @wokemobfootball said. “What we aim not to do is punch down on people, whether they’re people of color or gay or trans — the point of the joke is mostly specifically to make fun of the other person’s ideology.”

While the torrent of posts threatening to bring communist football and California’s woke agenda doesn’t seem likely to let up anytime soon, Davie said at the end of the day, it’s all for the love of the game.

“If this whole thing was for a Cal [versus] Florida State game in Berkeley this Saturday, we would welcome Florida State fans,” he said. “’Hey, have a beer, have a shot of Malört, we have a massive food spread and enjoy yourselves.’ We’re good people here.”