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.

The Times got around to mentioning Westman’s gender identity only halfway through the story, carefully framed by the information that “conservative activists” on social media would use the data to portray transgender people as violent or mentally ill. Other mainstream liberal news outlets have treated the issue in a similar manner. A BBC News story described the shooting as an “anti-Catholic hate crime” and avoided pronouns altogether.

Westman killed two children and injured 14 more children and three adults, who were attending an opening-of-school Mass at at Annunciation Catholic School, where his mother until recently worked. Like all such shooters, he became contested terrain in the culture wars the minute he opened fire. The most obvious battleground is his transgenderism. Mainstream outlets like the Times, operating for the defense, have elected to suppress the trans angle. Minneapolis’s progressive mayor, Jacob Frey, chose to get out in front, speaking out at a news conference against transgender hate and in favor of gun control. The Right-of-center New York Post, meanwhile, took what the gender activists no doubt saw as a gleeful opportunity for trans-bashing, with the headline “Minneapolis school shooter confessed he was ‘tired of being trans’: ‘I wish I never brain-washed myself.’”

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Without avoiding the shooter’s trans-ness or blaming it, however, we might instead acknowledge that the transgender mass shooter is uniquely telling of the mass-shooting phenomenon, and of our times. The Westman crime happens in the same month as an excellent article by Sam Kriss in The Point magazine. It locates March 30, 1981, as the moment “John Hinckley brought us into the world we all live in today. He did it by firing a .22 ‘Devastator’ round into the chest of the president of the United States.”

Kriss argues that Hinckley’s attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan was the first such event to divorce the target from the goal. In 1981, Americans responded to an act of public violence by worrying about “things that used to matter,” such as who was in charge of the country, and if the shooting was a Russia-designed first stage of a nuclear attack. But the real story was elsewhere, in proto-incel Hinckley’s frustrated masculinity and desire for self-expression. Hinckley wasn’t political (and Westman, with his confused jumble of signifiers, isn’t political in any meaningful sense either). The cultural shorthand is that Hinckley, inspired by Taxi Driver, shot Reagan in order to impress Jodie Foster, who starred in the Scorsese film. But Kriss contends that this merely conceals the seismic event of a young man discovering “the door through which you can walk right out of the world and into eternity.”

Mass shootings allow the perpetrator to achieve the ultimate modern currency of selfhood — celebrity. “If you want to make yourself visible to the apparatus of electronic media,” Kriss writes, “you don’t need to be good at the guitar. You don’t need to sing. You don’t even need to drink the same peach brandy as a Scorsese character. All you need to do is kill and die.”

It’s true, but celebrity is fracturing these days, and Westman’s actions may be less about achieving fame and more about simply achieving something — a concrete, visible and indubitable accomplishment in a world in which young men are increasingly at sea. The action must happen on camera to exist, that’s a given, but it’s no longer about the camera, it’s about imposing and expressing himself, about making himself, finally, matter. This is not to say that the victims of the crime don’t matter in the real scale of things. Of course, they do. But they didn’t matter to Westman.

There’s nothing more male than a mass shooter. Demographically, they are overwhelmingly white, disenfranchised, isolated, young, angry, too online, caught up in paranoias and fringe causes, living with Mom and Dad, have failed to launch, are total losers. The Kriss piece refers to Hinckley as “Mr. Toxic Shock,” allegedly because this was the nickname Foster and her roommates at Yale gave him (he was so unfuckable that you’d go into toxic shock if you tried it). Westman fits perfectly, and the “mystery” of his motivations is no mystery at all. Attempts to attach him to the Left or the Right, a Trump-hater or a Satanist, are irrelevant. It’s perhaps slightly less irrelevant that he worked for a cannabis dispensary and had claimed on social media that the weed was driving him insane. “I cannot control myself, and have been destroying my body through vaping and other means,” he wrote in a journal page circulating on social media.

Nonetheless, the motivation is the condition itself: a man experiencing the complete failure of masculinity. Westman does not represent all trans people any more than mass shooters represent all men, but a transwoman, both by choice and definition, is also a very sad man. In this quintessentially gendered crime, “she” as a perpetrator was inevitable.

So what should we do about the pronouns? Noah Rothman of National Review posted on X that since “honorifics” are withheld from convicted criminals, “denying attempted mass child murderers their preferred pronouns should be similarly observed.” From one viewpoint, the suggestion is an erosion of trans rights and Rothman is just being an evil conservative. Then again, excluding men like Westman — who are experiencing, fundamentally a crisis of masculinity — from the ranks of women, trans or otherwise, doesn’t seem like such a terrible idea.