The white women turning to ‘Dark Woke’ They turn private despair into public rage

Dark Woke won’t be vanquished. In the wake of Renee Good’s death in Minneapolis, the movement is reasserting itself from the Midwest to the Pacific coast, pushing Democrats to embrace combative cultural stances — and white, Millennial women are its shock troops.

The New York Times defined “Dark Woke” last year as “an attempt to step outside the bounds of the political correctness that Republicans have accused Democrats of establishing”. In the Gray Lady’s telling, it “requires being crass but discerning, rude but only to a point”. Examples range from Gavin Newsom’s meme warfare to Jasmine Crockett’s alliterative insults (“Will a vindictive, vile villain violate voters’ vision?”). GQ, meanwhile, observed that the objective is to “subvert the qualities that people think made wokeness cringe — the virtue policing, the polite ‘when they go low, we go high’ posturing — and go Joker mode to make Democrats cool again”.

These aren’t mutually exclusive definitions. Dark Woke is a meme with amorphous contours. Sometimes, it’s merely rhetorical; other times, it offers serious strategies to challenge MAGA with a dose of its own post-liberal medicine. Either way, it’s rooted in the same demand posed by grassroots Democrats to the party establishment: throw some punches, or we’ll primary you into oblivion.

Since Good’s demise on the icy streets of Minnesota, videos of enraged anti-ICE protesters are proliferating on social media. In one clip posted by the Fox News reporter Matt Finn, an ICE agent goes up to two shiny SUVs blocking traffic, warning the women in them not to “make a bad decision”. The women, both of whom appear to be Millennials, aren’t intimidated. “I think I’m making exactly the right decision,” one says. When the officer signs off with, “Thank you, have a good day,” she replies with a grin: “I hope you have a terrible day.” In another viral clip, a gaggle of whistling women surround a reporter; one gleefully taunts him as another screams, “Nazi!”

Or there’s the TikTok video circulating on X, in which a blue-eyed, salt-and-pepper-haired woman who describes herself as a 42-year-old single mother and “relationship anarchist” slips sexily into her Carhartt overalls while spelling out a “dating-profile request” for a man whom she can “call, right now, and say, ‘Hey, get in the passenger seat and let’s go fuck some shit up’.”

These street soldiers aren’t the antifa types torching cars or the rioters looting stores. They are, like Good, Millennial moms in the Midwest. They’re people from normal quarters of American life who are spending time during the workday putting their bodies and vehicles on the line to protect illegal migrants, some with serious criminal records, from deportation. And they see ICE as a neo-Gestapo that calls for more than rhetorical condemnation.

The Washington Post this week wrote about the growing activist coalition: “as the Trump administration deploys thousands of federal immigration officers and agents around the nation, a loose-knit but increasingly organised network of activists is tracking their whereabouts and documenting arrests.” With whistles and messaging apps, these ICE “watchers” or “verifiers” are often trained by nonprofit groups, according to the Post article, which adds that they are “dispatched to spot arrests, record interactions, and, where possible, get contact information for family members of those arrested”.

This partly explains why Dark Woke is growing amid President Trump’s immigration crackdown. Tracking ICE supplies a sense of agency and community at a time when people feel powerless and atomised. It is also a clue as to why there are so many upscale white women in the ranks of the Dark Woke army.

Last fall, the GOP pollster Alex Tarascio “asked likely voters if they agreed that it’s acceptable to go beyond peaceful protest in response to ICE enforcement, even if it breaks the law”, as he put it in an X post. “Overall, just 24% of Americans agreed. But among white women, 18 to 44, who identify as liberal? The number shoots up to 61%.” Half that number, only 30%, disagreed. Among all liberals, the number was nearly 20 points lower, at 42%. And among all likely voters, the number dropped to less than a quarter of the population.

Why are white liberal women especially eager for battle? People like Good are motivated by a sincere commitment to social justice, to be sure. Good was so moved by the prospect of ICE deportations in Minneapolis that she joined a midday protest after dropping off her 6-year-old at school.

However, there is also no shortage of research in recent years showing that young women on the Left struggle more with mental health than do other cohorts. In 2024, Times columnist Thomas Edsall dug into studies on the “happiness gap”, noting “one of the findings emerging from this research is that the decline in happiness and in a sense of agency is concentrated among those on the Left who stress matters of identity, social justice and the oppression of marginalized groups”.

In 2025, a study published by Zach Goldberg at the Right-of-centre Manhattan Institute found that “females and liberals tend to rank higher than their male and conservative counterparts in certain personality traits that are associated with greater susceptibility to internalizing symptoms. These symptoms are characterized by inwardly directed emotional distress, including feelings of sadness, worry, and fear, which can manifest as conditions like depression and anxiety.”

Research from the Institute for Family Studies has likewise found that “when we control for education, race, age, and income, …  liberal women ages 18 to 40 are over three times as likely to report frequent feelings of loneliness compared to their conservative peers”.

Renee Good, of course, was married and — at least in the tragic record of her final minutes — cheerful in demeanour. Unhappiness and lapsed agency may or may not explain her personal decision. However, it’s fair to speculate that rational disapproval of Trump is not the only explanation for why more and more young progressive women are training as “ICE watchers” and joining physical protests. Tellingly, the Institute for Family Studies found that “a large part of [the] loneliness gap comes from different rates of marriage and church attendance. … Adding controls for marriage and church attendance, ideology becomes less important, with marriage being the strongest predictor of feeling less lonely.”

Feelings of misery and powerlessness, especially acute on the young female Left, will ensure Dark Woke lingers, and reemerges as opportunities for catharsis present themselves. These opportunities will be especially compelling when they offer a perceived sense of community, or of self-sacrifice for the common good.

Satisfaction, though, will prove illusory, because the source of the young women’s pain is not really injustice, except in the sense that a grave injustice has been committed against happiness in the destruction of our communities, social bonds, and overall humanity.

---