The rise of the Keffiyeh Karen

When Black Lives Matter created the figure of the Karen, it was a sign of that movement’s darker, bullying qualities. What exactly was wrong with a white middle-aged woman who asked to speak to the manager when things were unsatisfactory? The answer seemed to be in the white part and the woman part, and perhaps also in the middle-aged part. In short, the Karen was a racist, sexist, ageist construct, and as a middle-aged white woman myself, who makes her dissatisfaction known from time to time, I felt extra defensive.

But if that original Karen caricatured the wrong person, then there are some modern female types that deserve closer scrutiny. There is the person I like to call the Keffiyeh Karen — the female student with a bare midriff and her head wrapped in the black or red and white patterning of Palestinian liberation, yelling anti-Zionist slogans with manic passion on elite college campus quadrangles and lawns.

The Keffiyeh Karen is related to a broader epidemic of the Gen Z Mean Girl

In her ready and confident fury, her rudeness, her iron-fisted appetite for confrontation over infractions of what she deems political and moral gospel, the Keffiyeh Karen is related to a broader epidemic of the Gen Z Mean Girl. These Mean Girls have graduated from running the schoolyard to terrorizing the workplace. If there is one type to be afraid of in modern offices, it isn’t the lech or the shouty, hungover male middle manager. It’s the twenty-three-year-old gluten-free vegan graduate, wet behind the ears. We know what these misanthropic misses are capable of — we’ve seen the Phoebes and Annas of Just Stop Oil chuck soup on Van Gogh.

Several good friends of mine who work in corporate settings have told me tales to chill the blood — women in their early twenties conducting bullying campaigns, being proudly insubordinate to their bosses. They never face consequences.

I’ve noticed their boldly aggressive style myself in the astonishingly disrespectful tones in which they harangue those they disagree with on social media. At recent talks I’ve given, the only rude, confrontational questions I’ve fielded have come from a nose-ringed, tattooed, bespectacled Mean Girl.

This uptick in righteous aggression appears to have two main causes. One is #MeToo, which did sterling work in illuminating the sheer scale of predatory sexual behavior facing women. But in setting up a “guilty because I say so” system, turning Twitter into an open-air arena in which slander and accusation took on rapid real-life consequences and gave the accuser instant power and fame, #MeToo armed young women with new and magnificent powers to accuse and destroy.

The other cause is the massive shift leftwards of young women. Forty percent of women aged eighteen to twenty-nine identify as “liberal” (which often means anything but) — opening a sizable gap with men of the same age, according to Gallup data. That gap is five times larger than it was in 2000. It’s not that right-wing ladies can’t be aggressive — see Ann Coulter, Katie Hopkins, Giorgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen. But there is something particularly humorless and stern about the self-styled progressive Lefty Lass — nothing is ever proper enough for her, or miserable enough, or righteous enough. Even when racism and transphobia have been stamped out in her sight, and microaggressions and misgendering slips of the tongue properly punished, she’ll mock you for forgetting for even a moment that the world is ending because of your climate profligacy. The revolution must come. Net zero needs to be achieved yesterday.

If the majority of these youthful political vigilantes are young women, is it any wonder that they not only act like they run the show, but actually run it? After all, the terror of being caught committing a microaggression, an act of trans hate, racism, fatphobia or god forbid sexual indiscretion makes plenty of decent people, higher up the professional pecking order or not, quake and submit.

Which is how these Miserable Misses took over, spreading their Mean Girl power, and making life unpleasant for workers or students trying to go about their business. It takes an old-school Karen to spot them at work, and an old-school Karen to stand up to them.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.