Karen, in other words, is the nosy Mrs. Olson of Liberalworld. She is the first to stand up in the HR meeting and decry the lack of diversity in accounts receivable. She demands to know what the CEO is going to do about the fact that sodomy continues to be outlawed in Uganda. She has a separate Twitter account just for virtue signaling, the way that other white liberals have a separate BMW just for making trips to the store for ice cream. Karen wraps herself in the rainbow flag and bothers everyone the way that people passing out tracts by Jack Chick used to bother people riding the bus to work. Karen is in everyone’s face about the horrible way they are living their lives—especially her own kids, which is why “Karen,” the helicopter parent extraordinaire, ought to be called “Sikorsky” instead. Karen knows best, you see, and if any gross colored people show up and try telling her otherwise, why, by Nellie, Mrs. Olson, I mean Karen, is just going to let you know all about it.
It is obvious to the ten or so people left in America who still have a conscience and a sense of humor that Karen is a ridiculous function of liberalism. Everything goes in liberalism, except when everything goes in a liberal’s backyard, and then it’s Karen bar the door and Heaven help the chastised. Hell hath no fury like a triggered liberal. Ha ha.
This would all be better than reruns of Hawaii Five-O on cable were it not for Karen’s counterpart, the black woman liberal. The black woman liberal loves pointing out—rightly—that white women liberals are preposterous creatures who probably need floaties to go down waterslides and who sanitize their hands every time they even think about the fact that not everyone in the world went to Groton and Yale. Yes, this is all a scream if you’re not Karen Black. But black woman liberals have been stewing under white-Karen-tyranny for a long time, and they have had just about enough.
Take Karen Attiah, for example. (Yes, her name is actually “Karen”.) Karen Attiah is an editor with the Washington Post (for those who aren’t familiar, it’s like the comics section of Pravda). This here Karen Attiah recently took to Twitter to do battle with the SUV Karens of the world by posting this rather troubling potshot: “White women are lucky that we are just calling them ‘Karen’s.’ And not calling for revenge.”
Umm, OK. You can’t really blame Karen Attiah for going after Karen Wholefoods because white liberal Karens are truly annoying and it’s almost gratifying to watch someone stand up to them and ask them to calm down. Almost gratifying, that is, until you realize that this whole thing is a warmup for race war and that we are headed for the real thing at warp speed in this country. That is what the Dueling Karens above are really saying to one another. “Back off,” says unhinged WaPo editor to Karen of the Baby Gap Return Counter. “Ooohh, HELP, sumwun hoorting meeee!” wails Wicks ‘n Sticks Karen back to Karen the Editorial Barbarian. But when intel decodes the two messages they are exactly the same, because they were both written directly from the exact same one-time pad:
“OTHER RACES INTOLERABLE STOP”
Now this is getting nasty, and I think we ought to give it a rest. I would rather not spend the next ten years soaking the ground of the United States in the blood of fellow Americans over something as profoundly silly as subcutaneous melanin content. But Karen One and Karen Two can’t stop, because they are both liberals, and liberals and charity are like Cher and modest clothing. Just in separate universes and never the twain shall meet. Karen Black and Karen White loathe one another and wish violence across the Twitter line each to each, and they are bound and determined to see the whole world killed just to spite the little harridan who had the nerve to spout up on an otherwise perfectly other-race-free Twitter feed.
This could perhaps all be solved if Karen the First and Karen the Second would just duke it out behind the gym like high school jocks, but neither wants to give up her wine of the month club membership to spend time in Sing Sing, so instead The Karens hide behind race and act as though that, and not just human distaste for other humans (the devil’s specialty, but as America is a post-Christian country now I won’t mention all that), was the real problem. And so here we are, six inches shy of World War Klan. Just great.
However, the more Karen A and Karen B lob Greek fire at one another and accuse one another of racism, the more it becomes obvious that race has nothing to do with anything. Liberals just plain hate people, period, and so they can do nothing other than ram whole millions of people into meaningless groups—White, Black—and then police the edges of the artificial grouplines by accusing anyone who steps out of being a race traitor. “You Karens had better watch your back,” say the Karens of the world to one another. “Anyone who goes outside the line I have set is a quisling and is going to pay.”
Yikes.
Now, nobody likes to be talked down to like this (Bed, Bath, & Beyond Karen ought to have figured this out before calling the cops on a black kid running a lemonade stand within two hundred yards of her cheese-and-macramé lawn party), and so human beings, being who they are, are just bound to overstep the boundaries laid down for them by other busybodies. This just won’t do. Ooooh, the nerve. I’ll show those race-nonconforming rebels who’s boss. Mrs. Olson, Nellie’s mom, and Mrs. Olson, Jemele’s mom, therefore need to—how did the great scholar Melissa Click put it?—bring in some muscle. Cue the vandals. So let it be Tweeted, so let it be done.
The idiotic and utterly senseless destruction being played out in the streets today is thus the direct product of the Karens—that is, liberals—of the world being unable, by nature, to practice anything resembling forgiveness and repentance. Karen Dee and Karen Dum escalate their Twitter feud into full-blown urban warfare, turning the Macy’s in Manhattan into downtown Kabul in one hour flat. Both Karens issue orders on Twitter like Napoleon sending riders down into the fray from his perch on a distant hilltop, surveying the carnage through a telescope.
Oh, how glorious to watch one’s hatred burn in effigy in high-end department stores! It’s almost like being a liberal in Stephen King’s Firestarter. Just squint, and the world will go up in flames just like you wish that wretched Karen (who probably had a nose job and who surely has extensions!) would.
The vandals, who all went to public school, are too clueless to figure out they are pawns in a liberal death match. But that’s the whole point. It’s all about the liberals. While the country is reduced to ash by the products of Gender Studies 101, both Karens repair to their respective workplaces (where they have both won the Inclusion and Allyship Award for the past three years running), work up some good tears, choke out a heartfelt “black lives matter,” and then go home at night, close the door to their Karenlair, fire up Twitter, and renew the hatefest that has so far set black businesses in three dozen cities ablaze.
Reality check. None of this insanity is going to come anywhere near stopping until we cut through this liberal morality play and address the lies in which the melodrama is rooted. The race war that liberals are trying to foist on us is not based on a true story. 1619 Riots, indeed. America may or may not be a racist country, but the past is completely beside the point. Whatever is wrong, it is going to be fixed only by the Holy Ghost filling our hearts and enkindling in us the fire of His love. The conflagration in Seattle and elsewhere will not be put out by Joe Facetattoo and his gun moll, Sally Precinttorcher, battling it out in the Showdown at Ft. Target. This is not a war of attrition, wherein the Whites and the Blacks murder and pillage until one side has nothing left. This is a war of contrition, wherein those who have done wrong ask for pardon, and those who have borne wrong soften their hearts. Karen Potpourri and Karen Kentecloth, will you both please quit with the hate-mongering so that the priests can triage the wounded and begin administering, what was it?, the love of Christ to a badly broken nation?
We have let Karen have her say long enough. Instead of Karen this and Karen that, why not give another lady a hearing? Why not Mary instead?
Mary knew a thing or two about losing a loved one to a cruel system, after all. She knew what it was to be mocked in her grief, shunned and scorned. But she didn’t call for an armed mob to settle the score. The armed mob had already broken her heart by demanding that her Son be crucified. And anyway revenge was not why He had come into the world. It was the opposite, in fact. Mary didn’t cherish anger and hate. She was full of grace, you see. Her sacred heart conquered what no armed mob could ever touch.
The devil, whom the Woman crushed, is always trying to get us to play his game. Hate, kill, burn, destroy. We must reject all of that empty show, as God’s Mother did, as Her Son taught us all to do. There is no hope in Karenism, the devil’s latest act. There is only sorrow without redemption. Turn instead to the Lady who watched her Son bleed to death for the sake of the people who murdered Him—the Lady who knew from the very beginning that her agony would be transformed by the One Whom the mob killed.
That is real hope. Everything else is Karens, quislings, vandals, and lies.
--Jason Morgan is associate professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, Japan.
