deride

That rise has occurred amid pressure from conservative and far-right politicians to harden a justice system they have often derided as too soft and sluggish.

If you’ve spent much of your adult life deriding the concept of states’ rights, that moment would have complicated your view.

Dating apps are frequently derided as fruitless exercises in ego-demolition, but the encounters and relationships depicted here make the anonymity and distance apps provide seem like a warm, protective blanket.

Recall how Republicans derided the Biden Environmental Protection Agency’s green-energy money as a “slush fund.”

But Internet Explorer was widely derided, and it opened up an opportunity for Google to fill that hole with Chrome.