Hey Democrats, That Rage Engine of Yours Is Going to Throw a Rod, You Know

by Scott McKay

I was at lunch Wednesday with one of my non-political friends, and — as often happens, and I swear I’m not the one driving this — a topic of conversation turned  political.

My friend brought up an exhausting pattern which, we agreed, is ramping up in both volume and frequency. Namely, that we as a society are jumping from one unhinged rage to another over things which don’t justify the level of vitriol and over-emotional screeching they’ve produced.

Four of these factored prominently in the conversation, but a fuller picture could include several more. Just this year we had the Renee Good fiasco, the Lindsay Clancy trial, the Cornell 7 orgy controversy, and now the Shane Gillis-gymgirl dustup.

My friend noted that in all of these cases — and, again, there have been several others — it’s generally women who have gotten most torqued up about the topic at hand, and in particular it’s a certain subset of women who are doing it. And TikTok and Instagram are full of rage-bait videos of people going berserk over things which either don’t merit such a reaction or where the truth is a whole lot more complicated than they’d like to make it.

And it was my friend, and not me, who suggested that none of these moral panics are organic, and that this burgeoning rage engine has already exhausted normal folks.

I think my friend is probably right. Outrage fatigue is a real thing. I think outrage fatigue played a role in Donald Trump’s 2024 election — though it was the fatigue normal folks had over the cultural aggressions of the radicals in society. Whether it was Drag Queen Story Hour or trans kids or Tren de Aragua or the abuse of the FBI or countless other things demoralizing them, the normals had enough — and didn’t care what the aggressors had to say about how horrible a person Trump is.

Elections are starting to become something of a barometer on culture, though perhaps an imperfect one. The market has always done that job, but it’s been prevented from giving honest cultural signals for a long time. There’s an ad that dropped this week for Apple’s new, creepy Homeview product which says so much about the wide chasm between real culture and the media culture being imposed on us that it’s probably worth its own column.

If you haven’t seen it, this is it…

I’ve yet to see anybody who thought this was anything other than an abject disaster, and yet they actually released it.

And Netflix actually released this — to a similar reception…

So whether it’s advertising, entertainment, music, or any other medium, the gatekeepers of the culture seem largely impervious to the public’s wishes, and we’re stuck trying to vote our way back from the brink.

And I don’t presume to know what’s about to happen with the midterm elections as a cultural barometer. But my friend suggested that there is a connection between the culture and the  politics here; if so, outrage fatigue might make monkeys out of all these people predicting that a big blue wave will put the Left in charge of Capitol Hill.

More on that below. But if you’re not convinced about the pattern, let’s consider what this year has given us.

The Renee Good fiasco was something of a culmination of a campaign organized by left-wing nonprofits to mobilize angry left-wing women against ICE agents engaged in trying to deport criminal illegal aliens. That isn’t to say all of the people being arrested and deported were criminals (beyond the crime of coming here illegally, I mean); other illegals were caught in those raids. But the priority was gang members, human traffickers, child molesters, and other true undesirables. Blue-city politicians stopped local law enforcement from cooperating with the dragnet, so ICE had to take to the streets, where they were met with “nonviolent” (actually, pretty damned violent) resistance by Hard-Left activists. 

Like Renee Good, who was engaged in blocking a roadway and keeping ICE officers from deporting a criminal illegal alien when those officers were attempting to put her under arrest. And she hit one of them with her car as she was attempting to escape arrest, which got her shot in the head. That’s actually a pretty predictable effect of her actions, and she was hardly the only woman trying to run over ICE officers with vehicles, but the Left did everything they could to turn her into George Floyd. It being Minneapolis, and all. The resulting moral panic wasn’t just a female thing, but the entire scenario was driven by “empowered” leftist women engaging in male actions and becoming angry over male consequences.

And then came the Lindsay Clancy trial, where the outrage was on both sides. Normals were, and are, apoplectic over the idea that a woman with postpartum mental illness would be excused from consequences for strangling her three children one after another, but the Clancy trial really turned into an ideological battle of the sexes when female demonstrators in pink started gathering at the courthouse demanding that she be absolved of responsibility for those killings. And it turned out that the jury in the case was dominated by angry feminists trying to strike a blow against “the patriarchy” by acquitting her. Only a holdout male juror who wouldn’t be bullied by the nine women in the room prevented Clancy from getting off for killing her kids; she might still go free depending on whether the prosecution tries again after that mistrial.

Then we got the Cornell 7 case, where a woman engaged in some utterly idiotic behavior at a fraternity house, showing up drunk and then taking ketamine with some low-character men while engaging in group sex, which was far beyond the contemplation of any decent people, and whether she’d given consent to the late stages of the orgy in which she was involved was too hazy for the local prosecutor to charge anyone with any sex crimes. But this case has been weaponized by a class of people who seem to argue the Schrödinger’s Feminist complex — women are strong, independent, and empowered and can engage in any sort of perverse sex they want, but if they suffer reputational or emotional damage based on those decisions they should be pampered by society as though they were children and it’s the men who should be punished.

I’m not defending any of the Cornell 7, mind you. I’m simply saying that everybody associated with this debacle (call it the Cornell 8 scandal, if you want to be accurate) should be in for a dose of condemnation, as their behavior is far below the standard of a functional society. Instead, we have women going online and proclaiming “I Am Jane Doe,” without any apparent recognition that it marks them as low-class, drug-addled, promiscuous succubi.

And then the Shane Gillis controversy shows just how far this goes. Gillis made a self-deprecating joke outing himself as a looky-Lou at scantily-clad women in gyms, but because he used provocative language in describing the gym girls in scrunch-butted neon booty shorts as “dressing like whores,” all hell broke loose. It doesn’t seem to have hurt Gillis much, but the TikTok/Instagram mob has gone utterly ballistic in demanding that men keep quiet about the sartorial choices of women at coed gyms. 

And Schrödinger’s Feminist pokes her head out again. Women can wear whatever they want, but if men notice, it’s the men who are the villains. Which is precisely what Gillis was saying in his offending Saturday Night Live monologue.

There are other examples as well. Half the country has whiplash over the Gillis controversy, seeing as though just two weeks earlier Sydney Sweeney sent feminists and the cultural Left into paroxysms over a sexy ad campaign for the sports betting app Novig; she appeared sans clothes, sensitive areas covered by various items of sports equipment. So which is it? Can women display themselves any which way they want and nobody should say anything, or are there standards by which people should live so that we don’t infect everyone’s eyeballs with pornography? And do women bear any participatory responsibility in creating and enforcing those standards?

The Arch Manning/Holly Rowe kerfuffle was another minor moral panic which suggested that college kids can’t laugh at AI memes on the internet for fear of offending highly-competent, tough professionals in sports media whose AI likenesses might suffer imaginary harm. That came on the heels of a video by Good Good Golf, a YouTube channel which advertised a new Callaway driver as being so good that golfers will defend it with violence even against women who might try to borrow it…

The ad was a joke, and a takeoff on the hit movie Obsession. That’s Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark shoving female golfer Alexis Miestowski to the ground as she reaches for the driver. And the ad brought on a moral panic which has all but destroyed Good Good Golf; the CEO and president resigned over the resulting outrage.

Another example that belongs in the discussion is this week’s firestorm over Ilhan Omar’s D.C. house being raided, which should have surprised exactly no one given she’s been under investigation for immigration fraud and other crimes for seven years now. But the entire Democrat Party is now hyper-ballistic over an “abuse of government power,” and leading that charge are Omar’s fellow congresswomen from The Squad, who are actively stoking outrage in backing the most hated member of Congress.

It really doesn’t seem that this pattern is organic. Maybe it is, and we’re living through an online version of the Salem Witch Trial panic. But my friend and I both believe this has to do with the midterms, and with the Democrats’ efforts to weaponize social media in turning out as many unmarried women as possible to vote for things they otherwise wouldn’t be motivated to support.

Like an Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood member running for the Senate in Michigan, for example.

Stoke people up enough and get them to hate straight white men, and you might just get them to forget what they’re voting for.

We already know that there is a vast delta between single women and married women in terms of voting. In the last midterm cycle, which was the 2022 elections, single women stuck out in a mind-blowing manner as an electoral outlier. While married men were R+20 and married women were R+14, and single men were R+7, single women were D+37.

You can analyze that giant gap between married and single women as structural. Women who really like men and share their  political leanings will tend to pick one and marry him; women who don’t fit that description generally won’t.

And if you’re on the Left, as virtually all of our cultural gatekeepers are, you want to do everything you can to keep those single women from getting married and crossing that 51-point delta. So far, what they’re doing seems to be working; everybody is recognizing how much trouble we’re having with family formation right now. If you’re looking for why the cultural output seems designed to make a mockery of traditional families and to present both men and women as unattractive to each other, this is as good an explanation as any. 

All of the above controversies paint men, and principally though not exclusively straight white men — the ICE agent who shot Renee Good, Patrick Clancy, the plurality if not majority of the Cornell 7 (though it sounds like the worst offender might have been the black kid), Arch Manning, the white guys at Good Good Golf, the white guys running DHS and DOJ, Shane Gillis — as the villains.

And of course, THAT’S a pattern EVERYONE recognizes.

Create pop-culture outrages which get everybody fighting over picayune things, and then clone that model to obscure the fact that the cultural Left’s position is utterly fringe (abolish ICE, “Believe All Women,” “Same, Lindsay,” there is no such thing as immigration or welfare fraud), and maybe you can torque up a voting base to win a turnout-driven midterm election.

Sounds like genius — until you account for the effects.

Because if my friend is right that outrage fatigue is going to ultimately trump ginned-up online outrage, and eventually one has to expect that it will, this strategy is too smart by half. There isn’t a huge body of polling on outrage fatigue per se, but the polls which are available show that most people are drowning in political  news, which is all outrage, all the time, and less than happy about it. For example, a Change Research poll back in June — remember, we’ve gone completely off the rails with online moral panics since then — had 77 percent of registered voters saying that “I feel exhausted by how much is happening politically” describes them a lot or somewhat. Younger voters were higher, at 81 percent of 18–34-year-olds.

Change Research is a leftist polling outfit. And yet we’ve gotten nothing but “more cowbell” since that poll, both with pop-culture outrages and political ones.

Will enough normals get so fed up by all of this that they see voting in the midterms as their best way to send a message that they’ve had it? If so, all of the predictions you’ve heard might go straight out the window. There are people who will tell you that’s what’s happening. It’s already known that Republicans have largely stopped answering polls. I’d argue that’s related to this stuff; lots of normals have had it with the entire cultural/political ecosystem, which is built on anger and frustration, and simply refuse to be bothered with it anymore. What we don’t know is whether that extends to disengaging with voting as well.

If it doesn’t, Election Night in less than three weeks is going to shock a lot of people.

But if it does, the cultural Left is going to take the midterms as a signal that rage-baiting every current event they can find is their ticket to political hegemony as well as the cultural kind, and we’re going to get the “more cowbell” treatment because they’re going to believe they’ve succeeded in demoralizing the public at large. That gives you an AOC as the Democrats’ nominee in 2028, and it makes the screeching Very Online Feminist an even more prominent poster child for that party. They will double down, and double down again.

And eventually, outrage fatigue will wash over so many people that it’ll be undeniable what a drag this tactic is.

This isn’t organic, I don’t think, and it’s definitely not sustainable. Maybe it wins one election cycle, but that win will come at a very princely cost.

https://spectator.org/hey-democrats-that-rage-engine-of-yours-is-going-to-throw-a-rod-you-know/