One of the things we’ve seen in videos of the anti-Israel protests is a parade of young, white women with jihadi wraps on their heads, screaming and chanting for the cause of Hamas, a Muslim terrorist sect that proudly tortures, rapes, and kills women just like them.

Looking at these images, Heather MacDonald recently wrote an essay for City Journal, in which she asks the question that is on our minds: Why are all these plump, unhappy white girls protesting for Hamas and against Israel? Ms. MacDonald offers:

One possible reason is that women constitute majorities of both student bodies and the metastasizing student-services bureaucracies that cater to them. Another is the sex skew in majors.

[snip]

In progressive movements, the default assumption now may be to elevate females ahead of males as leaders and spokesmen. But most important, the victim ideology that drives much of academia today, with its explicit enmity to objectivity and reason as white male constructs, has a female character.

The female influence has increased inside and outside of the academy. The left is dominated by a grievance narrative founded on the idea that women are oppressed and that it’s up to the government to keep them safe. Indeed, the women involved have no tolerance at all for risk and no ability to analyze risk, which is an immature approach to life. They are instinctively censorious and intolerant of anyone who would disagree, especially when the disagreement is grounded in the Bible. (Witness the uproar about Harrison Butker’s impressive speech, which is grounded in core Catholic principles.)

MacDonald points out that the women’s craziness has a firm basis in ignorance:

The protesters’ demands for LGBTQ justice extend only to docile Western powers. They give their Middle Eastern idols’ overt homophobia a free pass—if they even know about it.

Thus, these women ignore that they are supporting an ideology that produced 1,400 years of violent conquest and terrorism that impacted women disproportionately because of Muslim sexual habits and misogyny. The result is soft white women cheering for the barbarians who would rape and torture them with exaltation and kill them without a scruple, while hollering Allahu Akbar.

The protests provide a canvas for all sorts of apparent personality disorders, everything from narcissists to dependents to borderlines to histrionics. These gals are the spoiled products of bad parenting and a morally corrupt culture. Once sees no signs of maturity, temperance,  or virtue. It’s just a big tantrum.

Ms. MacDonald concludes:

Theater requires the willing suspension of disbelief. But to take seriously the narcissistic melodramas played out on campus quads today requires active commitment to untruth... These mediagenic morality plays are well-rehearsed; they spring from hundreds of such theatrical interactions over the last several decades between self-involved students proclaiming various forms of victimhood and co-dependent student-services bureaucrats who need performative conflict to justify their jobs.

MacDonald isn’t the only person noticing these things. Rob Henderson, a psychologist, also asked why Western women are moving hard to the left.

Objectively speaking, he notes, women are doing very well whether in academia or the workplace. The differences in earnings have closed and, indeed, younger women often have higher earnings than men in major metropolitical regions. He adds that,

As these gaps [in education and income] have narrowed, we might have expected men and women to become more alike in other ways, including their cultural values and politics. Yet we are seeing the reverse.

Henderson attributes the women’s drift to feminism generally and to the MeToo movement that imbued them with angry grievance and hostility, all founded on a Marxist idea of oppression, with the focus on tarring all men as dangerous and patriarchal (kind of like actual Muslims).

By the end of his essay, though, Henderson simply cops out. He claims that none of what’s happening to women has anything to do with what they’re taught. Instead, he argues that, in an affluent society, when in which gender roles and ideological values aren’t constrained by basic survival needs, women will instinctively seek socialism because they can:

The freer people are and the more fairly they are treated, the more differences tend to grow rather than shrink. Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised that Gen Z men and women are diverging along political lines to a greater extent than earlier generations did.

There is one truism, though, about affluent cultures. In the mid-1970s, Sir John Bagot “Pasha” Glubb wrote something interesting about the rise and fall of empires. The manly virtues are revered in the early stages of an empire/nation. However, as affluence grows, so do pacificism, hedonism, nihilism, and the rejection of the manly virtues. At that point, with women and feminized men ascendant, the culture usually collapses.

If these crazed, ignorant women dominate our culture, we’re doomed.

John Dale Dunn is a physician and attorney in Brownwood, Texas.

Image: Protesters at Cal Poly in Humboldt. X screen grab.