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!” 

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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 organized 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 atomized. 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-center 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.”  

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Renee Good, of course, was married and — at least in the tragic record of her final minutes — cheerful in demeanor. 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.

In the past week, a viral video emerged of Hendrix’s verbal altercation about an African-American child at a Minnesota playground. Hendrix, holding her own infant, is in an argument with a man recording her — asking her why she referred to the black child using the N-word. She defends using the slur to the man and repeats it, arguing that she’s justified because the black child tried to take her child’s things.

The exact timeline of events is not clear. What’s beyond doubt is that she is enraged — and unapologetic about her use of the epithet. The episode thus marks a turning point in America’s video-and-race wars. Not just Hendrix, but her legions of online supporters have dug into their tribal trenches. It’s a reaction to the excesses of racial progressivism in recent years, though no less discomfiting for what it reveals: the evaporation of American liberal universalism.

We’ve all witnessed at least one iteration of this cycle over the past decade: someone, usually a white person, gets caught being racially offensive. Online outrage erupts, followed by some kind of real-world consequence for the offender: losing a job or even facing personal threats.

Hendrix has flipped the script. “My name is Shiloh, and I have been put into a very dire situation”, she begins her fundraising appeal. “I recently had a kid steal from my 18-month-old son’s diaper bag at a park. I called the kid out for what he was.” She then complains of online abuse and solicits financial support: “Anything will help! We cannot, and will not live in fear!”

The appeal became as viral as the initial video. As of this writing, she has raised more than $683,000. Provided she doesn’t have any extraordinary debt, this makes Hendrix many times richer than the median American. Thus we have the first case, maybe in American history, of a woman quickly getting rich as a result of publicly using the N-word.

To Hendrix’s defenders, that’s a blinkered explanation. They aren’t celebrating a racist tirade or trying to turn an ugly moment into a stranger’s good fortune. Rather, they believe they’re turning the tables on years of Left-wing social repression that destroyed people for even minor social transgressions. They have a point.

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During the “racial reckoning”, proportionality was discarded. If someone committed the sin of racism, their life was forfeited. They didn’t deserve a job, friendships, or a moment of peace. They had to be un-personed. This included even those who were merely misperceived as racists, such as the University of Southern California professor suspended for using a Mandarin filler word which sounds like the N-word (but which has nothing to do with it).

I remember how, in 2020, The New York Times turned a brief verbal altercation in Central Park between a black birdwatcher named Christian Cooper and a white dog walker named Amy Cooper (no relation) into a national referendum about racial tensions in the United States.

Christian wanted Amy to make sure her dog was leashed — unleashed canines being a pet peeve of his. Amy refused to do so, and this resulted in a war of words between the two. Eventually, Christian tried to get Amy’s dog to come to him with some treats, resulting in Amy calling the police on him. Speaking to the emergency dispatcher, a clearly distressed Amy made sure to mention that Christian is black.

All of this was recorded by Christian, who uploaded the video and made it go viral. The nation’s news networks and newspapers all jumped on it, tsk-tsking that this was what America had come to: Central Park Karen calling down a police assassination on an African-American man who had inconvenienced her.

Amy ended up going into hiding after losing her job and receiving a mountain of online hate. As far as I can tell, she still lives in hiding today. Christian, by contrast, became a national celebrity. A couple of years ago, he even wrote a bestselling memoir, published by Random House. For much of the progressive Left, this was a perfectly reasonable set of outcomes. A “racist” white lady was shunned into oblivion; her “victim” was rewarded by a karmic load of riches and fame.

But over time, the nuances of the story became more apparent (not least thanks to a podcast feature produced by the African-American journal Kmele Foster). Amy had suffered sexual assault in the past and was clearly triggered by the interaction with Christian, who, it turns out, had a bit of a reputation for accosting people. Was Amy right to cite Christian’s race in the phone call with the police? Maybe not.

But it was also the kind of thing she thought she could say in that moment that would get him to back off. Remember, in 2020, much of liberal America believed that police were systematically murdering black men. If two liberal New Yorkers ran into each other in Central Park, chances were that they shared some variation of that belief. If her assault trauma was triggered, then, she would say anything to get away from the man drawing her dog away from her.

Yet the era of Left-wing racialism didn’t allow for these nuances. It told a simple story of racist white people persecuting minorities. And when you have such a simple story guiding your morality — you can expect a simple response. Maybe a brutally simple one.

All of this cut strongly against how I thought about these issues growing up in a diverse corner of Georgia in the Nineties. My social circle was white and black, Indian and Latino, and it was common to see arguments over race and culture spill over from private to public. People got into heated disputes, then made up the following day; sometimes, they just agreed to disagree. We were making our own way towards a more tolerant world without having every moment judged in a digital Thunderdome.

The viral video ended all that. And what is happening with Hendrix is a sort of middle finger to what came before. It’s a dialectical boomerang, slamming back to the hand that cast it — or the face that forgot it.

Hendrix is telling the world that she won’t be broken. In that sense, you can understand why so many conservatives and white people have been rushing to her side. I agree with her defenders that she shouldn’t be subjected to social death. People screw up, and calling a child a racial slur is a big screw-up, even if he did take something that wasn’t his. But people should also be mature and figure out ways to work through screw-ups without inciting a mob to bludgeon the offender into social oblivion.

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That said, Hendrix’s boosters have also learned the wrong lesson from the years of progressive racialism. Many of her backers have compared her case to that of Karmelo Anthony, a black teen who allegedly stabbed a white teen to death in Texas. Anthony’s family has raised more than half a million dollars not just for legal fees, but to support themselves. If Anthony’s family can raise money, why can’t Hendrix’s?

The problem is that both Hendrix and Anthony have been turned into avatars of racial grievance. We have to support “our side” — meaning, white people or black people — even if they happened to be in the wrong in the given case. The co-founder of GiveSendGo, which hosts both fundraisers, had to disable comments on both of them owing to the deluge of racist remarks.

While these currents in American society are marginal for now, we shouldn’t underestimate the anti-American ideology pulsing through them. Contrary to the narratives told by the critical-theory Left and the race-fixated weird Right, America isn’t a country founded for the purpose of defending one race, religion, or creed. It’s not a country based on blood or soil.

Encouraging people to bestow loyalty based on skin or ancestry never ends well in this country, or any other. Both Shiloh Hendrix and Karmelo Anthony are Americans first and foremost, and they should be judged based on their adherence to the law and norms that we all have to abide by.

We should demand the best behavior from anyone, black or white. We should extend grace and mercy, regardless of race, when people fail to meet the standard. What we shouldn’t do is start celebrating and rewarding bad behavior out of some sense of racial revenge. That way lies national perdition.

The #MeToo era was, among other things, a peak moment for what I have called photogenic feminism: a feminism focused on the plight of the young, gorgeous and ceaselessly hassled. While any women’s rights movement needs to concern itself with assaults in the lingerie-modelling audition room, a movement solely interested in stories that just happen to titillate broader audiences can feel limited at best — and at worst, counterproductive. What about all the unsexy issues affecting women: motherhood, menopause, mid-life crises?

Behold, a new book about ladies who have reached the top of the hill and kept going. Hags is Victoria Smith’s alternative to what she calls “non-confrontational, smooth-skinned, pre-menopausal feminism”. It is an alternative, too, to the witchy feminism peddled by writers such as Sharon Blackie, who last year released the similarly-named Hagitude. Where Blackie speaks of “energies” and “journeys”, Smith is decidedly unromantic. Getting older does not automatically bring women into a cosy sisterhood, she argues, but rather highlights disparities when it comes to wealth or care work. She’s not interested in harnessing mysticism, or recycling “you go, girl” platitudes, or supporting the (unconvincing) argument that older women don’t care what people think about them.

Instead, she comes out in defence of Mumsnet, and, more generally, of women who’ve aged out of peak hotness continuing to exist in society. Smith’s hag feminism is about speaking up even when no one is looking at you. It’s about using the wisdom that comes from years of life on this planet as a woman, rather than demurely agreeing to fade into the background. It’s a break from photogenic feminism, with its intense interest in the experiences of the most visible women. But it is also different from the woo-woo world of witchy feminism, with its coven-chic and its inspirational t-shirts.

Smith offers up a thorough survey, backed up by evidence, of the ways women past a certain age become villains. They are “Karens”, demanding to speak with the manager, and sporting the wrong haircut. They are “Terfs”, speaking of female biology rather than gender identity, and, quite possibly, sporting the wrong haircut. Smith writes: “Once upon a time getting a bad haircut might just have meant having to purchase a fetching hat; now a woman might find herself having to record and distribute a public statement claiming a rare mismatch between politics and frumpy appearance.” Throughout the book, Smith is very, very funny. But she’s making a serious point, all the same, about the way that women past a certain age are not merely ignored, but treated as all-purpose antagonists, their flawed faces signs of outdated politics. Not bad guys, but bad gals with the occasional unplucked chin hair.

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Bear in mind that Smith isn’t writing about old women. The middle-aged are her focus, not the elderly. But for women, old can start young. I remember being madame’d in Paris at 27 and knowing that this marked the end of something. Stephanie Cole was hired at 48 to play a firebrand pensioner — in Nineties sitcom Waiting for God — while Graham Crowden, the actor who played her love interest, was 19 years her senior, and therefore the same age as the character he was playing. I am not, to be clear, offended that an actor was cast as a character whose biography doesn’t match their own, but rather am struck by how readily the viewer accepts Cole as an old lady. It seems that 49 and 79 are, in a woman, the same deal: all part of an undifferentiated life stage called “past it”.

I say “are” but should really have used the past tense. One of Smith’s most interesting points is that nowadays our ability to look young into old age means that looking — and even feeling — one’s actual age reads as a choice. Where once it was only celebrities like Barbra Streisand who were commended for things like choosing to “keep” her nose, today — with hormone replacement therapy and anti-wrinkle injections — any 49-year-old women can choose to look like a 29-year-old. People who are middle-aged these days, unlike in previous eras, don’t look it unless they nobly eschew cosmetic measures — or cannot afford them. As Smith writes: “When Sex and the City was rebooted for the 2020s as And Just Like That… much was made of the fact that the now middle-aged characters were older than those in the first season of Eighties sitcom The Golden Girls yet looked much younger.” A trip to the hair salon and a good 10 hours a week at the gym and you, too, could be a “glammie”. This makes looking young forever seem both plausible and — due to such dull factors as time and finances — frustratingly out-of-reach.

Add to this the handwringing over whether a good feminist should love her hard-won wrinkles, or, conversely, do what she can to mitigate visible signs of ageing, so as to stay viable in the sexist and ageist workforce. It can feel as though it went from being anti-feminist to wear lipstick, to being a feminist imperative to look as you did 20 years prior. This new order has been sold to older women as empowerment. Visibly ageing is no longer seen as going the natural (or frugal, or low-maintenance) route; it is seen as conforming to negative, outdated stereotypes about what an older woman looks like. As Smith writes: “it is easier to justify lookism — and the attendant moral judgments — if you can convince yourself that looking like a middle-aged woman is a genuine choice.”

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The crux of the problem for Smith is that she’s pleading with an unyielding audience: younger women who’ve internalised society’s ageist misogyny, and who have convinced themselves that older women are those other ladies, and not themselves in a few years’ time. “Hawking a non-ageist feminism is like hawking life insurance to people who’ve been promised eternal life.” Smith presents herself as a recovering Cool Girl, a woman who reviled older women in her own youth, only to realise how wrong she’d been. This is partly an age-old, gender-neutral question of young people deeming their elders dorky and out-of-touch, but is also a specific issue in feminism, where younger women view older ones as avatars of a retrograde past that they are, or want to be, well rid of. It’s not clear to me that any cohort of young women will ever feel differently, but it’s also unclear that Smith anticipates that outcome. Given how much of a young woman’s power often derives from her youth, it seems unlikely that a cross-generational solidarity is imminent.

There are others to whom Hags might not get through. It is not going to reach, for instance, an audience of people who think that, actually, it’s men these days who have it worse, that it’s boys who are really suffering. And that’s fine, lots of people can be right about different things that seem to contradict one another but maybe do not. Which gets us to that other thing. You know the one. The real audience Hags stands to alienate will be those who have correctly assessed which team Smith is on when it comes to the only feminist issue anyone seems to care about these days: trans stuff. She’s with J.K. Rowling and not Owen Jones.

Most of Hags isn’t even about gender identity, but all books about women and girls are obliged to take a side these days. I find this unfortunate. Surely both sides agree that the vast majority of violence against women comes from male-identified men, and not from men claiming womanhood to sneak into women’s spaces? Surely they agree, too, that the vast majority of violence against trans women comes from men, and not from middle-aged ladies who roll their eyes at the expression, “people who menstruate”? Wouldn’t it be simpler, more accurate, and better for women if feminism reminded itself frequently of these facts?

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But the “Terf” label is as much about age as actual ideology, and “Terfdom” can serve as a pretext to label older women generally irrelevant yet potentially dangerous to listen to. Smith is onto something when she mentions the refrain, which I’ve also seen circulating, about how trans women look more like women than “Terfs” do. This is meant as a pro-trans rallying cry, equating beauty with goodness, and implying that gender-critical feminists are all sitting around wishing they looked like Barbie dolls, as though their non-resemblance to them were not intentional. What it winds up doing is defining true womanhood, cis or trans, as, to use Smith’s phrase, “femininity-fertility-fuckability”.

Photogenic feminism wavers between insisting that it’s empowering to devote your resources to looking like a pin-up, and decrying the objectification faced by those with hourglass physiques. Hag feminism, meanwhile, is not, as one might suspect, about the right to be seen as young and gorgeous when one is very likely neither of these things. (If you’re expecting Hags to be about the importance of putting ordinary-looking 50-year-old women on the cover of Vogue, you’ve got the wrong book.) It simply skips that focus in favour of the right to be respected and understood as having an inner life regardless of whether the typical man wants to sleep with you, or whether the typical woman hates herself for not resembling you physically.

Old-lady feminism, then, has plenty to offer young women. It might even benefit them at least as much as their seniors. It is, after all, young women who tend to experience the most severe angst regarding their appearances. This is easy to forget once you reach the Botox pros and cons life stage yourself, when it can feel as if virtually anyone younger than you is gorgeous and has nothing to complain about physically. But if anything, it’s the young women posting hot gym videos of themselves on TikTok — the same generation of women forming strong opinions about their “buccal fat” — who might stand to benefit the most from a feminism whose focus shifted towards women’s self-actualisation and away from an exhausting analysis of what men see when they look at us. What hags lack in collagen, they — we? — more than make up for in their ability to just get on with it.