Wine Moms Gone Wild
White Women: the right's new Public Enemy #1
Congratulations, middle-aged white women! We did it! We have successfully crossed over from delicate little flowers in need of protecting no matter what into Public Enemy #1.
Basically ISIS. FeminISIS, if you well.
WomAntifa.
We are fighter jets with LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE stenciled on the side. A threat to the very existence of the republic.
It didn’t take long.
After Renee Good’s broad-daylight killing by ICE officer Jonathan Ross, the Trump administration, rather than disavowing the actions of the officer or expressing any remorse for Good’s grieving family, lied over and over to protect her killer and spent a news cycle smearing the victim. And just to make sure that ICE’s charm offensive would have the shelf life of a mayo-forward potato salad in the sun, MAGA media has decided that, for good measure, they’d smear everybody who sees themselves in Renee Good.
That’s right, thanks to the administration’s crisis coms strategy around the killing of Good, if you have anything in common at all with her— if you’re a gay woman, a white woman, a white mom— you deserve what happened to her, too.
Dubbing white women the enemy du jour is an odd choice for a political party that needs to stop losing white women’s votes (or stop needing votes entirely) in order to survive. But, as Michelle Goldberg– the last remaining reason to read the New York Times– noted in her column today, this administration is “speed running” through that poem that goes, “first they came for the…”
MAGA has gone from demonizing Somali fraudsters to white suburban moms in Honda Pilots in a month’s time.
Like I said in last week’s newsletter: it’s almost refreshing that the right is no longer trying to pretend there’s a carve out for white women in their hate.
The Trump administration’s so-called “immigration enforcement” isn’t popular. The federal government is terrorizing the people of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Indiscriminately. Cruelly. And, frankly, in a manner that betrays the fact that the current administration is too sloppy and lazy to be compared to actual Nazis. (Say what you will about the Third Reich, at least they were capable of keeping track of paperwork.)
No reputable popular opinion poll shows this playing well for Trump, for ICE, for MAGA in general. But MAGA-affiliated media has decided that the best way out of their self-inflicted popularity freefall is to declare white women the enemy.
Like all enemies, white women are now both pathetic and all-powerful. Minnesota women standing up to ICE are simultaneously silly Karens who don’t know what they’re doing and dangerous insurrectionists that deserve whatever abuse a federal agent decides is appropriate punishment for sassing a cop.
Even though it doesn’t make sense, they’re all-in on this PR tactic.
Fox News has declared that white women protesting in Minnesota are “deranged wine moms”— an interesting assertion for an outlet that is probably passed out in front of, wine box-drunk, more than any other news network.
Voices on the right have labeled white women’s anti-ICE activism as cringe (or Tucker Carlson’s favorite insult, “childish”), and the right’s army of identical bottle blondes are trying to Cool Girl-differentiate themselves from the white women upset that their neighborhoods have been turned into war zones. (If this were 2023, we’d call it Pick Me behavior.)
In one particularly egregious example, twentysomething National Review schoolmarm Carolyn Downey, writing for The Telegram, declared “Angry Young Women are the Vanguard of the Left’s Toxic Empathy.” Accompanying the social post of that article is a photo of an unarmed woman being dragged from her car by police. The woman was actually not protesting; as journalist Eric Michael Garcia pointed out on X, the woman in the photo was autistic and trying to get to the doctor, and the officers ripped her from her vehicle and dragged her across the street anyway. (Might want to get in touch with the photo editor about that, CD.)
In the piece, Downey, whose psychological bona fides include being the editor in chief of a digital fashion magazine for conservatives, patronizingly diagnoses the problem with women on The Left.
“Women tend to be blessed with a deep capacity for empathy. But when that empathy becomes toxic, morphing into a disproportionate, blinding compassion for supposedly marginalised groups, it can manifest in deeply self-destructive and irrational behaviours, all justified under the banner of being humane and then broadcast in viral clips online.”
Downey’s concern is phony. Her analysis is hackish. And her prose, in addition to being purple, is a sociopathic tell.
If you can’t understand why watching other human beings being hunted, beaten, and imprisoned causes you distress, there’s something broken in you.
If you believe that shouting at agents causing human suffering is justification for being beaten or worse, but being so out of control that you cannot resist beating an unarmed civilian is manly and righteous, you’re deranged.
If you believe that violations of civil liberties will stop before they get to you because you’re a member of a protected group, you’re a fucking idiot.
If you think the correct way to respond to a chaotic terror campaign waged by losers is to stay home and mind your own business, there are plenty of dictatorships around the world that would be lucky to have you.
In the recent past, the right seized on the opportunity to call for white women put off by too much Woke to head on over to the comfortable cocoon of the GOP. (Or, if you’re one of those “both sides are equally bad” types, you could call yourself a libertarian but vote exactly like how a Republican would vote so that you can still fancy yourself as something cooler than a bootlicking supplicant.) The woke left is too mean and angry, the line went, the right won’t make you apologize for who you are.
This sales pitch must have worked at convincing some white women on the fence to break to the right. Maybe it encouraged those already on the right to break even further right to avoid the leftist meanies who think all white people are bad. There are plenty of fragile people out there, and even the most fragile among us can vote.
But why is the right insulting white women, a group that notoriously favors Republicans in every presidential election? A group that is increasingly trending away from them, in a way that will make the party’s electoral survival difficult in the future? Only a party bent on nihilism would spurn a generation of its potential base.
Maybe there is no strategy. Maybe deciding white women are bad is less a strategic move and more like a coordinated tantrum.
The right has turned its sights on activist white women because that sliver is dangerous. MAGA needs white women insomuch as they serve as justification for violence.
In the Trump era, the imagined threat to the safety of white women comes from trans athletes, from brown people who didn’t fill out the proper paperwork, from brown people who did fill out the proper paperwork but happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, from brown people who were never supposed to fill out paperwork but are, unfortunately, brown, and thus pose a threat, from anybody who the state feels like terrorizing. (That’s also why MAGA-poisoned media erupts with disturbing zeal every time a white woman is killed by an undocumented immigrant.)
If white women across the country do what they’re doing in suburban Minneapolis, MAGA is in trouble. If enough white women reject the “protection” of the state, if they reject the preemptive violence done in their name, they’re not just inconvenient. They are a clear and present danger to the power structure.
When it’s widely understood that the real threat to women’s safety is actually the good guys with the guns, and that the self-anointed protector class is actually not protecting anybody from anything at all, their excuses fail like an ICE agent hitting a patch of black ice.
Call me Pollyanna if it makes you feel big, but I believe, when it comes to white women’s political allegiances, we’ve reached the point of no return. The Fucking Bitch is out of the bag.