After Renee Good’s Murder, Wine-Mom Gangs Are Now the New Antifa
“We’re middle-aged,” podcaster Jennifer Welch says of herself and
her cohost Angie Sullivan. “We’re Fox News–coded.” The Fovibe can leave people
uneasy, she says. “‘Oh, shit, where were these women on January 6?’”
But the J6 impression doesn’t last. On their
hugely popular podcast I’ve Had It, Welch and Sullivan waste no time in
uncorking woke sass. Last August, Welch went viral, saying, “I’ve had it with white people
that triple-Trumped, that have the nerve and the audacity to walk into a
Mexican restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, an Indian restaurant, go to perhaps
their gay hairdresser—I don’t think you should be able to enjoy anything but
Cracker Barrel.” Welch’s mean-girl nickname for Trump—“Canks,” for his
swollen calf-ankles—won her more praise for gall, as has her ruthless criticism
of moderate Democrats.
Being leftists in Fox’s clothing turns out to be
an excellent political niche. Last year, left-wing Gen Z podcaster Matt
Bernstein admiringly interviewed Welch on a show called “The Liberal Wine Moms are
Radicalizing.” Rad streamer Hasan Piker praised the
Welch-Sullivan show as “the most radical
progressive podcast in North America.” With their down-home accents and
brassy style, Welch and Sullivan seem to have resurrected Ann Richards, the
iconoclastic pro-choice governor of Texas in the 1990s. They have millions of followers on
TikTok and YouTube, and their show is often at the very top of Apple
Podcast ratings.
But they and other Fox blondes with left-wing
views are also exploiting a truth now universally acknowledged. With white
women in America, it’s always a coin toss.
White women will simply never live down the fact
that a majority of them triple-Trumped. And of course the biggest MAGA hams are
white women: ICE Barbies, trad wives, MAHA mothers, racist Karens, and anti-feminist belles in porny, Mar-a-Lago makeup. The
presumption of MAGA sympathies among white women has even made space for Iyoncé, a popular
Black social-media creator. Iyoncé advises potentially
MAGA-presenting white women on how to signal that they’re “safe,” meaning
antifascist. For a safe look, she recommends wearing a crossbody bag, looking
tired from doomscrolling, and refusing to cover gray hair.
These are excellent tips for many white women.
But Welch and Sullivan—and fellow lefty podcasters Amy Poehler, Nicolle Wallace, and Glennon Doyle—don’t look
tired or have gray hair. That’s why their clique of white women is
uniquely threatening. Matthew Bernstein is right: They’re the dreaded wine
moms, the sardonic Yellow Tail consumers who can blend in with Christian
nationalists in segregated MAGA spaces. Mere rumors of their presence can
destabilize white families, communities, institutions. If antifascist
protesters now wear MAGA caps and dress like far-right frogs to confuse
ICE, the wine moms who costume themselves as trad wives may have pioneered this
form of undercover sabotage.
It’s no wonder MAGA Megyn Kelly is set off by fellow white women like
Poehler; her book-club manner conceals liberal commitments, making her a traitor to
the master-race ladies’ auxiliary club. And surely Tucker Carlson had wine moms
in his sights in 2022 when he said, “The archetype of
the person that I don’t like is a 38-year-old female white lawyer,” adding: “I
hate you.”
So wine moms have the right enemies. But they
can also give Vichy vibes. Wine moms can present to Black women as the 2021
Women’s March did: a bunch of rich white knitters, brunchers, and pick-me girls. But like
Zohran Mamdani keeping a poker face beside Donald
Trump in the Oval Office, wine moms are practiced in staying Sphinxlike as
MeToo bosses and trad sisters preach right-wing madness. Only later do they
turn tactical and become “the skunk at the garden party,” as Welch now
describes herself.
Still, after 10 years of patience, protests, and
panic, wine moms are drunk on pain. Last week, one of their number, Renee Good,
was shot three times at point-blank range by ICE officer Jonathan Ross, who
then said the loud part louder: “Fucking bitch.”
So wine moms have turned their pain to rage.
At the same time, in the paranoid and spiraling
Trump administration, wine moms have managed to gain a reputation as outright
terrorists.
In a vile January 11 column for Fox News, Canks
supporter David Marcus warned: “What we are
seeing across the country [is] organized gangs of wine moms [who] use Antifa
tactics.” He then lied that Good, who had been murdered just days earlier, was
“a trained member” of just such a phantom wine-mom gang.
Marcus of course had no evidence. To him, the
problem was Good’s race and gender. He cited a zombie poll without a link:
“Only 24% of Americans believe that it is acceptable to go beyond peaceful
protest in response to ICE enforcement. But among White women 18-44, that
number leaps to an astounding 61%.”
So now Fox News is framing a majority of
white women as terrorists. Perhaps one day an ICE officer will be asked in a
hearing where exactly the wine-mom gangsters were headquartered; what their
training consisted of; where their WMDs were; and just how dangerous they were
such that they merited being preemptively murdered for attending a protest.
This panic about moms is somewhat anomalous in
repressive regimes. Two years ago, a Cambridge University
study of protesters found that while women-dominated protests are put down
less often than those dominated by men, the level of violence also depends on what kind of
woman is involved. “Feminists are deemed more deserving of repression” than
“women who highlight their roles as mothers and wives.”
Feminists, it turns out, also have children these days. They’re the bad
kind of moms.
In eighteenth-century
London, gin was known as “Mother’s Ruin,” and enterprising working-class gin
moms were feared as menaces to society. Similarly, the 1960s white ladies
drawn to Mother’s Little Helpers agitated the
patriarchy. They did too much skipping of chores, consciousness-raising, and
leaving of husbands.
Wine moms today might or might not drink wine.
But like their bygone sisters in gin and pills, they might prove ungovernable.
