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A 30-year-old pregnant nurse attempted to steal a GPS-tracked rental bike from a young black man right outside her workplace, and when a group of onlookers surrounded her and started filming she had the audacity to start acting strangely, call for help, and briefly cry. Don't worry, justice has been served: she has been identified and suspended, and she will never be okay again.
I'll make a few brief observations.
These videos are mostly an American phenomenon. Attempts at blowing up a banal social interaction to a national scandal doesn't happen in Europe. I'm not talking about something going viral on social media because it's funny or whatever. I'm talking about a genuine witch-hunt, invariably on racial grounds. Sure, there's public shaming in Europe but it isn't extrapolated to the person's race like it is in America.
The victims of these witch-hunts are almost always white. I don't think this is a coincidence. For the same reason, when mass shooters are non-white, media interest drops off. For this reason, I think it tells of a societal sickness in the US which is missing in Europe. It isn't just "obsession with race" but rather "obsession with white people", always in a negative way.
Many white women went along with the anti-white bandwagon in the (naive) belief that the mob would spare them. Well, they sure did miscalculate on that one. In fact, I get the sense that white women are often treated worse than white men in the media when there's a pile-on like now. There's a particular resentful nastiness to the "Karen" insult - which again is only applied to white women and not women of other races - which has no real equivalent among white men.
Many people have observed that terms like "Karen" and "white women moment" let people get away with blatant sexism that would be otherwise considered unacceptable. While I think the woke movement has gone too far in general, I think it's a real thing that a vocal minority of people hold anger and bigotry towards women. And where for a little while that bigotry was unacceptable in public discourse, it's situationally acceptable again as long as it's against a white woman.
"Karen" works because it describes a real and common (and gendered, at least probabilisticly) phenomenon. Crying "sexism" isn't going to make it go away, nor should it. Even if a particular person was misidentified.
A phenomenon can be real but also lead to over generalization and excess cruelty because of bigotry. E.g if many HBD theorists are to be believed, black people have lower intelligence than white people on average, as southern racists in the 1800s believed. But southern racists used that to justify unjust cruelty. Similarly, the "Karen" is a real personality archetype among women, but some people use that to justify unjust (mostly online) cruelty towards women. Nowhere near the scale of chattel slavery, but the same principle holds imo.
I rather think you have it backwards. They weren't thinking "Hey, these people are dumb, so it's good to be cruel to them". They thinking "Hey, we like being cruel to these people, they must be dumb and deserve it".
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