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See, I'm early Gen X/late Boomer, depending where you draw the generational line, and I feel more Gen X. So I see my cohort around me, and they're not making viral videos, but they sure are way more liberal, more woke if you want to call it that, with very little resistance to what is being imported from America.
I honestly cannot emphasise strongly enough the huge sea change in values and social mores over the past forty years, more particularly in the past twenty years. We've gone from the Magdalene Laundries to advice columns in the mainstream media with agony aunts dealing with questions such as "my friend goes after married men for affairs, I feel I can't handle this anymore" and "my husband is no longer interested in sex, should I divorce him or just have an affair?"
That's the 80s kids (Gen X) growing up, becoming adults, and adopting liberal cosmopolitan values from the outside world as mediated to us via movies, TV, the more socially liberal society of the UK next door, and aspirations to be just like the US where a lot of people emigrated to, then maybe returned during the Celtic Tiger era (which again, in the few dizzying years of 'we're rich! properly rich!' meant people got notions, as we say round here).
So, yeah. I'm here to say "it's only a few viral videos" does not cover the whole ground of what is going on.
I'm about the same age as you. I'm going to say that growing up in a country that had the Magdalene Laundries, you probably have seen a much more massive change than I have. That said, how many GenX women in Ireland are going viral like this?
I certainly see many of my generation going woke (especially women) but I see much greater numbers of Millenials, who are the ones I mostly see going diehard woke (along with Gen-Zers, but I'm still not really sure what to make of them yet). Clinton's and Harris's margins over Trump were very slim with GenX women compared to younger generations.
I am not arguing that wokeism "isn't a thing" or that we aren't seeing more radical polarization. Why do you think I have been so gloomy lately about that very thing? I was being very specific about the sort of nutpicking in the OP, who seems to be trying to make a very broad generalization about, specifically, older women. Do I think people protesting Trump or ICE are "a few kids on college campuses"? No. Do I think a few viral Karens, including Renee Goode et al, are? Statistically, yes.
I think we should be skeptical of "pattern-matching" a handful of tragi-comic figures who happen to look like your most mockable archetypal nemeses to some general demographic trend.
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