ORWELL KNEW: The rise of the Keffiyeh Karen.
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.
Read the whole thing but first, Orwell: “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.”