In Search of Furious Liberals

If angry liberals don't exist, they will be manufactured

Sorority rush dances are back, and liberals are FURIOUS.

If you don’t believe me just listen to Joe Kinsey - a guy whose schtick appears to be ‘Temu Barstool Sports’ - who had the originating post for this trend stating “The purple hair lesbians have to be furious that SEC sororities ARE BACK”. Other conservatives quickly realized how mad liberals were about these sorority sisters doing choreographed dances and gleefully posted about it. ThePatriotOasis posted how a sorority was wearing ‘Good Genes’ and “liberals are OUTRAGED online”. Brigitte Gabriel says that dancing means “America is BACK and the Democrats hate it”. MAGA fan account ‘usanewsreal’ says “This sorority recruitment video is going viral after liberal women lashed out” and OldRowOfficial posted yet another video of dancing college girls asking “At what point do you just give up if you’re a lib?”.

Everyone is very, very sure that the liberals are angry at videos of young, attractive sorority girls doing coordinated dances. The only thing missing is a single example of an angry liberal.

The trend is even stranger than it appears for two reasons. First, only a year ago conservatives were tweeting about how Rush recruitment dances were a sign of moral degeneracy.¹ And second, there was a very similar 2024 video of young women doing silly dances that you might remember called Gen Z Boss and a Mini which caused the online Right to go thermonuclear with rage. Why is there such a different reaction between Rush dances and the Gen Z Boss and a Mini video?

There are some obvious angles at play here. The sorority dances are clearly performed in skimpy clothing for the male gaze, while the Gen Z Boss was more of an inside joke among female coworkers. And a lot of conservatives really only believe in women attending college if they’re on track to get an MRS degree. Women in the workplace are shrill HR ladies, they have Fake Email Jobs, they are in ‘female daycare’, etc. The modern right is heavily influenced by incel ideology so of course they lust after hot college girls but are bitter at those same women for graduating and getting jobs.

But beyond all of that, I think there’s something even more interesting going on. Conservatives, from the bottom of the pyramid to the top, have a constant need to find outraged liberals.

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There’s an entire ecosystem for finding and amplifying outraged liberals. It starts with aspiring right wing influencers who throw all kinds of nonsense into the discourse to see what sticks. These accounts are often small-to-medium in size, are mostly trying to go viral for the purpose of gaining clout in the right wing ecosystem, and they move quickly from one culture war slop battle to the next.

If something gains traction, it moves up the chain to larger and more influential right wing accounts like Libs of TikTok or End Wokeness, and usually ropes in some prominent media personalities like Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, etc. Those big personalities and accounts are constantly monitoring the lower-level accounts to see what’s trending, and will jump on any culture war slop that gains traction. And if the content is still blowing up after the big accounts post about it, you’ll start to see hosts on Fox News discussing it, and from there it’s a very short jump until members of Congress and the White House are talking about something that started with PATRIOT_EAGLE_MAN_88 on X.

This is exactly how the Sydney Sweeney controversy happened. There were a small handful of accounts on the left complaining about it, but it wasn’t a topic of wide discussion and it certainly wasn’t something mainstream Democrats cared about at all. It didn’t become a topic of wide discussion until right wing accounts successfully pointed out the few ridiculous posts and boosted them into virality, at which point it became all anyone could talk about.

If the liberals aren’t outraged enough, this machine will simply invent the outrage. That’s what’s happening in the case of the sororities - as best I can tell the number of liberals angry at sorority dances is literally zero. In cases like this it’s much harder for the outrage to really climb the ladder all the way to the top, but it doesn’t stop them from trying.² If the liberal fury doesn’t exist, it will be manufactured.

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The examples to this point have all been silly culture war slop, gendered nonsense that’s downstream of MAGA’s roots in GamerGate and incel culture. The people at the bottom of the influencer pyramid are mostly trying to farm engagement, and the algorithms that make up our social media systems are built to amplify this kind of faux ‘controversy’. There’s obviously an aspect of trollishness here.

It may seem like this is all stupid, and it is. But it’s a consequential kind of stupid. It’s hard to overstate how much Make The Libs Mad culture has infected all of right wing politics. The online right would exist in some form or another no matter what our politics looked like, but if Mitt Romney was president you could at least take solace in the fact that the White House wasn’t dominated by hyper-online fever dreams. That’s not the case in the Trump era. Trump’s administration is staffed by people who essentially went from full-time internet shitposting directly to positions in the federal bureaucracy. High level positions are dominated not by Republican traditionalists, but by highly-online conspiracists like Kash Patel and RFK Jr or Fox News hosts like Pete Hegseth and Jeanine Pirro. These people are all still part of the ladder of manufactured outrage - they just graduated to a high position on the ladder.

This is why you see the Department of Homeland Security posting like an edgelord on 4chan:

For one thing, the staffers manning the account probably did have their political awakenings on 4chan. But more importantly, this is how modern right wing politics operates from the very bottom to the very top. Nothing is more important than making liberals furious. A policy’s success is judged not by its material impact on the world but by how many Democrats wail and moan about it. It’s part of the reason you see so many coded nods at extremist content like Pete Hegseth endorsing a video that says women shouldn’t vote or DHS sending 1488 signals - they know liberals will notice this stuff and get mad.

The sorority rush dance ‘controversy’ is best understood as just another way for the online right’s outrage machine to manufacture furious liberals out of thin air. It doesn’t matter whether liberals are actually angry. What matters is that they can be portrayed as angry, because that boosts engagement, reinforces in-group identity, and ultimately justifies whatever stunt or policy comes next. “We’re replacing the Chair of the Federal Reserve with Catturd, are you gonna cry about it? 🤣🤣🤣Look how mad the liberals are!” This is the future of American governance.

1. And some accounts still are! There’s a handful of right wing accounts still talking about how sororities are ‘passed around by the football team’ or or ‘getting piped by chads’, because they didn’t get the memo that sorority girls are now right wing icons instead of godless Jezebels.

2. Some accounts are still stuck on Sydney Sweeney and are trying to manufacture furious libs in response to a Baskin Robbins ad.