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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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There is something very interesting going on with middle-aged White women, you see it with the hosts of this podcast and with all the recent ICE protests too. Obviously, I get middle-aged women being the moralizing demographic of Christian moms protesting video games, but recently White women seem to be radicalized with a degree of violence that is unfamiliar and shocking to me. Now, they aren't going out and committing mass shootings but they seem to have an open bloodthirst that seems very uncharacteristic. Anyone have any theories what is happening here?

Edit: The fact that Jennifer Welch is a divorced divorce attorney probably puts her in the 99th percentile for hatred towards men.

Anyone have any theories what is happening here?

Internet outrage is inherently futile. You can doomscroll through endless provocation, but no short form video is ever going to give your ape brain the catharsis it wants. That's why these same women go on Scream Retreats and post videos of themselves having unhinged meltdowns. And that's why they spiral into more and more extreme rhetoric (and eventually, action) - because no amount of performative fury spewed into a screen ever actually scratches that itch. Combine that with a total lack of experience with real violence, and the end result is this nonsense.

One of the notable things about the MN shooting was how hard people went giving Good the benefit of the doubt. Even most people who think it was a justifiable shooting presume she couldn't have really had a murderous intent. I doubt that's a valid presumption. We don't have info about her media habits, but given who she was associated with and what she was doing, it seems very plausible that she was mainlining deranged homicidal ideation towards ICE agents, in the form of videos and posts from women and soyboys who think of the situation as something between a Marvel movie and a 7 year old daydreaming about fighting off bandits.

Why not run the ICE agent over? They're basically Nazi Death Eaters. None of the videos in which some septum-pierced crazy person loomed at the camera while calling for the deaths of federal agents ever raised the possibility that they were people, or might leave a real corpse. They're basically CGI robot aliens that don't even bleed.

Now, they aren't going out and committing mass shootings but they seem to have an open bloodthirst that seems very uncharacteristic. Anyone have any theories what is happening here?

Retvrn to ancient tradition of Germanic Screeching Women.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3ullteTvPiw

I suspect it's a sign that an era is coming to a close. Usually, women have other men who would do the dirty work for them. If they feel that they have to do it themselves, something is probably collapsing.

I don't think it's a sign of collapse, feminism has had its share of radical rhetoric for decades now and that hasn't slowed it down. The more worrying explanation is that it's just a sign of a more general radicalisation, and if even seemingly normal women are willing to get locked up or shot for their cause that's all the more moral sanction for the men in that group to take it further.

It's not a rigorous historical point but I would think an exhausted radical movement looks something more like nationalism in Northern Ireland just before the fighting stopped, where the women are marching for an end to the violence and only a few stubborn men remain committed to it.

I am not sure this is really very surprising, to be honest. I'm not sure I can put it better than Kipling:

Man propounds negotiations, Man accepts the compromise. Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.

but

She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast May not deal in doubt or pity—must not swerve for fact or jest.

One could go a bit further and speculate that the arrangement Kipling describes:

So it comes that Man, the coward, when he gathers to confer With his fellow-braves in council, dare not leave a place for her

Has broken down and been washed away, particularly as the older Christian gender norms Kipling was familiar with have increasingly been forgotten, and commensurate with this breakdown we might expect to see ever stronger evidence that "the female of the species is more deadly than the male."

Now that one of their own has been killed they want others to commit bloodshed on their behalf?

There's something to this. Death was meant to be suffered by the others. The Karen class as never meant to endure the ultimate consequences of their actions. No wonder so the post-shooting protests were so virulent. The group that makes up the majority of progressive organisers has finally been attacked.