How White Women Became The Lazy Bipartisan Scapegoat

The white woman is the ultimate scapegoat. She is a miraculous feat in evolution; a masterful multi-tasker and multifaceted being. At the same time she is oppressing innocent people of color at the park or ruining the lives of minimum wage service workers, she’s also single handedly destroying the West with her libtarded ideals. She is both too racist and too tolerant; too conservative and too liberal. Ran through, but just needs a “good dicking” to reset to factory settings. She’s the American patsy—a punching bag to take our anger out on when things don’t go our way, when we need someone to blame, and when resentment needs a form.

But why did the white woman become a stand-in for all things bad and all of society's ills? First, as the prototypical Karen—a caricature of a power-wielding middle-aged woman with a “let me speak to the manager” haircut who takes out all her frustrations on young people working menial jobs over arbitrary complaints. This meme evolved from “that entitled woman you hope doesn’t come into your check-out line” to a caricature of white entitlement: calling the cops on innocent black kids hanging out at the park, starting problems with unsuspecting small business owners and people minding their own business. It became widely accepted as a real and insufferable archetype, especially in its earlier, less politicized iterations. 

However, the meme quickly became a weapon for the intellectually dishonest to mischaracterize innocent women with real grievances as being harpy shrews or women doing the hard work of policing real anti-social behavior as being privileged racists. This became most notable in the wake of the George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020, a time of racial sensitivity, lawlessness, violence, and activist fantasies. During this time, activists were uninterested in reality, let alone charitability. It led to witch hunts sparked entirely by hearsay, internet rumors, and videos taken out of context but resulted in genuine loss of livelihood for the unfortunate victim. Of course, some of these accused women were actually guilty of what they were accused of, but in the heat of the politically charged air and lack of context, there were casualties of viral vigilantism.

As Wilfred Reilly details in his aptly titled article The Karens Were Innocent, many of these so-called “Karens” were later shown to have been misrepresented entirely but by then, the damage was done. There was no noble goal beyond opportunistic character assassination. These bad actors used the plausible deniability of firsthand accounts shrouded by inflamed social tensions to represent women who did nothing wrong as some strain of Karen: a racist killjoy on a power trip. This gave them the upperhand. It made their any action, remark, or attitude righteous and justified. A clever little trick that went unscrutinized for too long.

We’ve all taken a swipe at the "Karen" prototype at some point, especially in our hospitality toiling youth. But when you grow up, you come to realize that Karens do the thankless job of keeping society functioning as it’s supposed to. They do the invisible work of upholding high standards when they send their dish (improperly prepared or mistakenly substituted for their real order) back to the kitchen. They prevent our communities from devolving into crime-ridden degeneracy when they tell power-hungry pit mommies to put their dog on a leash at the local park or report transparently delinquent behavior. They do all of this not for applause, recognition, or thank yous. They do it out of principle. Because they know that upholding standards is what preserves orderly, livable society.

Some corners of online discourse argue not only that Karen is an unjustly crucified woman of standards, but that she doesn’t go far enough. That she needs masculine reinforcement. A complementary male Karen: a “Darren,” if you will. And while a gleefully inflammatory Substack post known as the Darren Manifesto leans hard into provocation, it does land in one key respect: it upholds rather than dismantles. It demands better.

Personally, I think it overshoots in its condescension toward service workers, though that might be my own trauma speaking, as someone with flashbacks from the frontlines of the industry. Still, the diagnosis isn’t wrong. Service has declined while worker entitlement has surged. You're now expected to tip 20% (or more) not just for mediocre service, but for outright hostility. Tipping is being extracted through shame, aggression, or threats, even in industries that were never historically tipped to begin with. If there’s one line from the Manifesto I can unequivocally endorse, it’s this: “Businesses treating their customers with respect is a basic requirement of living in a functional and high-trust society.” That’s what Karens and Darrens, at their best, enforce.

White Feminism & White Women Tears

But the “white woman bad” leftist take extends far past your archetypal Karen. The progressive white woman takes the fall, too, for seemingly always coming up short. For not being progressive or intersectual enough. Monikers like “white women tears” come to mind, and men conveniently get a magical misogyny pass for rallying people against a woman with the wave of this magical qualifier, “white.” It’s their b-word pass. You see, in any ordinary context, calling a woman a bitch is misogynistic hater stuff, but doing it to a “white woman,” now that’s a different thing, entirely. It’s a trope many others are taking notice of. I’m not one to clutch my pearls over such things anyway, but when your entire identity is wrapped up in feminist allyship, it’s certainly questionable. 

It’s not only evil, anti-social dogpiling behavior, but its effects are counter-productive. For every Chappell Roan or Taylor Swift type they bemoan as being a “white feminist”—a term that means nothing besides “this person doesn’t ramp up their hyper-leftist rhetoric sufficiently about a very niche issue that matters specifically to me so I’m going to reductively invoke the fact they have supposed privilege to make them out to be the villain,” they’re doing the right’s work for them. 

Speak up and you’re a white savior, stay quiet and you’re complicit in oppression.

You can find this attitude basically everywhere in leftist spaces. I came across such an example at random in one of these prototypical rambling video essays titled Peak White Feminism: The White Savior Rebrand. It starts off criticizing Chappell Roan for having the humility to challenge the notion that she, as a pop star with minimal time for political education, should be referred to as an authority on public policy. Basically, “I’m a pop star, not a politician.” 

This creator claims, "For a lot of white women, activism is a trend and a phase, not a long-term commitment to learning, growth, and making lasting change for those who need it." Ironically, she then tries to preemptively rebut arguments she anticipates, like "Well, what about men? You’re only saying this because it’s a woman. If it were a man, you wouldn’t care."

Amusingly, she condescendingly suggests everyone Google what "whataboutism" is, as if that isn’t literally the entire foundation of the "white feminism" critique (which is basically: "Well, what about black women?"). She snarkily adds, "If any of those thoughts just crossed your mind, that’s your personal PSA to start your own channel, no one is stopping you." She insists, "You don't actually care about the harm these men cause. You're only bringing it up to deflect and say women should also be able to do harm without question." Interesting. I wonder if this logic also applies to black women who demand that any random white woman speaking on a separate issue of marginalization pivot everything back to them.

Lani prefaces her thesis by clarifying she isn't anti-allyship, but anti-performative allyship and pro-accountability. But what exactly does “accountability” mean in this context? According to her, it means “not centering yourself,” not using your platform to speak on things you “aren’t qualified” to talk about, and not reducing complex issues into viral digestible soundbites, all while complaining about various white women for failing to make viral, digestible soundbites for clout. She laments white women boosting their careers or social standing via surface-level activism, but refuses to articulate what “real” activism looks like beyond some vague notion of “unglamorous labor.”

She launches into a rambling mess of contradictory non-arguments. People of color don’t need to be saved by white people, but if you’re not using your platform to save people of color then you’re participating in white feminism. She offers no tenable solution for how white women should navigate this impossible double-bind. Speak up and you’re a white savior, stay quiet and you’re complicit in oppression. Using your platform to highlight an issue is centering yourself and talking over those with lived experience, but refusing to speak at all is white silence emboldened by privilege. 

The endless, self-contradictory rants about “white feminism” are a public hazing ritual to induce guilt, obedience, and endless self-flagellation.

What an exhaustingly futile rhetorical maze, transparently designed to ensure white women are a priori wrong, no matter what they do. The endless, self-contradictory rants about “white feminism” aren’t a good faith attempt at progress (a term never actually defined and seemingly an infinite project with no finish line). They’re a purity spiral masquerading as moral critique. A public hazing ritual to induce guilt, obedience, and endless self-flagellation. It’s precisely the kind of regressive identity politics or, as it's more commonly called today, “that one friend who’s too woke” that forced my self-eviction from the left a decade ago. It is thankfully falling out of fashion with the “decline of woke.” 

The Right’s Demonization of White Women

At the same time the left is demonizing middle aged women for being racist Karens though, the right is convinced it’s young white women who are sending America to hell in a handbasket. Whether it’s women robbing them of their earning potential by taking up station at the fake email job factory or refusing to date them or sometimes seemingly for no other apparent reason other than just existing without visible misery, white girls have become persona non grata in both left and right wing male spaces. 

To liberal men, young white girls represent “white feminism” which is a fake concept meant to force young women into feeling white guilt for failing to perform enough nonsensically far left identity politics like “intersectionality” in the face of something completely unobjectionable, like distinguishing between women and trans women. The right views them as traitors, often blaming them for political outcomes they don’t like despite white women being an invaluable voting bloc for conservative policies, and loathing them for economic and sexual resentments. 

These resentments have festered in online right-wing male spaces to the point where many can barely hide their contempt for anything these women do. Whether they date, don’t date, have children, don’t have children, work, don’t work, or simply enjoy themselves in the company of other women while producing and marketing products to a female audience, it’s like this demographic’s happiness fuels their anger. Nothing illustrates this better than the viral blip of 2024: “Gen Z boss and a mini.”

It’s like this demographic’s happiness fuels their anger.

The Australian skincare brand TBH Skincare jumped on a harmless TikTok trend where groups of women made playful videos describing what they were wearing in a half-singing chant. The TBH girls gathered in a circle, each delivering a playful phrase: “Gen Z boss and a mini,” “itty little titties and a bob,” “5'3 and an attitude,” “secret product and a trench,” “new Frank Green and a sneaky link,” “fake tan hands and a hoop.” Each line repeated in that girlish, rhythmic chant: “fake tan hands and a hoop; fake tan hands and a hoop.”

To say that the gimmick was “not that serious” would be an understatement. To say it had anything to do with men or male office culture or longhousing men would be schizophrenic paranoia. And yet, that’s exactly the discourse we got. Incessantly. I recall the tweets projecting on this harmless group of women. Women they know nothing about, for whom they have no further context about than a 20 second nothingburger video. But this didn’t stop them from getting wildly carried away with their speculation and extrapolating all of their context specific grievances onto these unsuspecting normie women participating in a harmless TikTok trend to promote their products. Products, by the way, that are designed by and for women. 

Sargon of Akkad prefaced his analysis of the TikTok trend with this statement, “On the surface, it seems quite unreasonable to have such a strong reaction to a TikTok trend video made by a small women's skincare company which was just doing its own thing: marketing products for women to women using a trend made by and for women (you’d think he could just stop there). Clearly though, this struck a note which resonated more deeply than this superficial analysis would indicate.” He then goes on to pontificate about how a little 20-second TikTok jingle made by and for women is emblematic of women's self-absorption which he so charitably grants “could have been ignored in isolation” but “there's a wider social context in which this was produced and one that has been generating a great deal of resentment.” 

He goes on to cite how women are being artificially propped up in the job market through DEI hiring programs, and begrudging the systematic discrimination against men that is leaving them feeling disillusioned. This flagrant display of cavalierness, he argues, is rubbing it in their faces. 

These women, he claimed, “represent the flippant nature of all-female groups which exclude male concerns about professional gravity, excellence, consideration for others, and fair play.” He warned men to imagine being “put in front of a tribunal of women who validate themselves with TikTok dances,” describing this as a “soft tyranny” where “any appeals to masculine virtues would be laughed out of the room as you lose your livelihood to a bunch of solipsistic women with the emotional maturity of schoolgirls.” Holy projection, Batman. And is the soft tyranny in the room with us?

Not only is this rant rife with hysterical projection, but it’s just shamelessly wrong. It’s dishonestly mischaracterized as containing self-affirming epithets about being girlbosses. You’d think they were chanting “yasss mama, you are the baddest bitch in the world” but reality is less salacious. What they really chanted was far less inflammatory and self-aggrandizing; merely playfully descriptive. “Fake tan hands and a hoop” doesn’t get more literal than that. She did, in fact, have fake tan hands and was wearing hoop earrings. 

Wait, It’s All Just Copium? Always Has Been

What prompted me to expand on this topic in the first place was a series of tweets I came across by The New York Times Opinion writer and host of Crooked Media’s What a Day podcast Jane Coaston, who made an astute observation about white women over the age of 40 becoming a near-universal social pariah—that it’s become a bog standard bipartisan view that “they’re the absolute worst.”

She brought the receipts: "On the right you get this" she says, linking to a trail of disenfranchised right wing men lamenting how white women have ruined civilization via their economic independence, voting record, lack of discernment, and naive politics. “On the left, you get an apparent sentiment that misogyny is okay as long as you preface the word "woman" with "white." 

It really is foolish and lazy to use a demographic like white women as a bipartisan scapegoat and not expect them to eventually crash out or retaliate. At some point, it would be logically self preservative for them to vote in their own interests. We constantly hear that Democrats need to "win back" young men and alter their messaging after years of scapegoating them as privileged oppressors (which I wholeheartedly agree with). But few talk about the right's equally self-destructive strategy to actively alienate young white women: the very group that secures them electoral wins and is in their assortative dating pool.

Despite being some of the most vocal champions of progressive causes, white women still get hammered as "Karens" and "white feminists" on the left. Meanwhile, on the right, they're painted as cultural traitors for inviting unchecked immigration from the third world into our country, supporting utopian socialist politicians, and voting against their own interests of societal safety and cohesion. 

Of course, I've noticed both the left and right tend to conflate these two groups of white women with the other when it serves their righteous indignation. Right wing white women are hardly voting for Zohran Mahmdani, but they're castigated all the same by being lumped into the catch-all "ugh white women, amirite" bemoaning. Likewise, shitlibs are constantly alienating their biggest allies by imposing impossible to meet litmus tests on them. They cop it from every direction.

If young men's visceral backlash to leftist messaging has taught us anything, it's that people eventually snap. They withdraw, realign, or start spite voting in retaliation. If you think white women won't do the same, that they'll just keep apologizing forever while you make them your designated sacrificial lamb, you're mistaken. Plus, there's the elephant in the room: group dynamics vs individualism. The left is socially more collectivist, so this comes as no surprise they can't discern between an individual white woman and all white women as being morally separate agents.

The right, however, picks and chooses when to exercise this insight. Historically, they were proud individualists. But as a knee-jerk response to the left’s identity politics, they've selectively embraced collectivism of their own. Not necessarily the cartoonish neo-Nazi skinhead caricature, but something more subtle: the foil to your archetypal Black Lives Matter activist. "If they can care about black interests," the logic goes, "then why can't I care about white interests?” It’s likewise manifested itself in American vs global interests, but most notably, in male vs female interests.

In this shift towards collectivist action, there's also been a rise in the cultural cachet of acknowledging group-wide trends, like say crime rates broken down by racial demographics or generalizations like “most of x group do y.” I have, however, noticed a hypocrisy in that this is only ever wielded in a way that is ideologically self-preserving (in the sense that it preserves what the person already wanted to believe). 

You might have some guy trolling a lib girl’s Twitter mentions with FBI crime statistics with a clear racial implication, but the next minute, they’re whining in a radical feminist’s mentions because she dared observe that men, statistically speaking, pose a palpable threat to women’s safety. They might even call her hypervigilance concerning risk of sexual assault “hysterical” despite the obvious implicit differences in size and propensity for serious damage between men and women, let alone the fact that men make up the vast majority of violent and sexual crimes. Or they’re a little too defensive about the “I choose the bear” meme. Then, suddenly it’s #NotAllMen vibes. I’m not necessarily investing a stake in the bear side of this debate, I’m just establishing the inconsistency.

The Thankless Work of a Certified White Woman Respecter

It’s important that those of you reading this understand I’m addressing a specific archetype that's become an incredibly popular disposition, especially prominent on right wing Twitter. When dealing with groups they dislike or who symbolize unpalatable ideological positions, they eagerly revert to collectivist logic. If some white women behave a certain way or vote for certain things, resentment against all white women becomes justified. Yet, when their own in-group faces the exact same uncharitable collective guilt-tripping, suddenly individualism is urgently revived.

This is, frankly, a low-IQ philosophical framework. Because group trends can be broadly accurate, sure, but they have never had necessary bearing on any given individual, just as the individual doesn’t negate a group-wide trend. Even if 99 out of 100 people in a particular group align ideologically or temperamentally, the existence of a single outlier inherently renders treating that person as fully representative of their group logically invalid.

I fear that exposure to bell curves, breakfast hypotheticals, and memes depicting women as solipsistic bimbos has become the average right wing discourse bro’s entire exposure to women. Maybe that’s why they can’t actually distinguish between real women and the strawmen wojaks or fake scenarios they’ve concocted in their heads. So, until the tide changes and people stop using them as an avatar for all of society’s ills, I will for the foreseeable future be taking the brave position of being a certified white woman respecter.