In the beginning was a Dane Cook special. This was 2005 Dane Cook, bestride the world of comedy long enough to give us a movie with Jessica Simpson, years before we had to do uncomfortable math about when he first started dating his current girlfriend, and the first known reference to a Karen.

Cook’s theory was that every friend group had one, and “she is always a bag of douche”. A year before that, there was Mean Girls and the line, “Oh my God, Karen—you can’t just ask people why they’re white”.

But Karen as a meme wouldn’t take off until 10 years later, and soon there was the “Can I Speak To A Manager” haircut, and its most notable proponent Kate Gosselin, with the kind of energy that said “No one gets paid enough for the level of pain I’m about to dish out in this Panera”. Then Karens went and got all racist, and the subreddit “celebrating” all things Karen came to life in 2017.

Now that it’s 2024, we’re seeing the Karenification of everything, a sociological offshoot of Cory Doctorow’s enshittification, as people we would normally classify as grown ass adults have amassed themselves Voltron style into an amalgamation of stupidity and confidence that’s assumed Biblical proportions, because at some point whoever’s running this simulation is going to have the pull the plug just to keep the ignorance in the middle of the petri dish.

They’ve all swapped their haircuts for tinfoil hats, bouncing from one conspiracy theory to the next: today vaccines cause autism, yesterday raw milk was going to save us, a few months ago the Democrats could control the weather, and before that the current president-elect bellowed on national television that people in Springfield were eating dogs.

That’s because as former Twitter employee Edward Perez put it in an op-ed about Elon Musk’s election concerns, “Everything looks suspicious when you don’t know how anything works.” In a video exploring issues with his ballot, Hank Green put it even better: “Everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t understand how anything works.” And even better: “Everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t trust anything.”

Except Hank Green, being a person of integrity and intellectual curiosity, didn’t stop there, but looked into his ballot, learned a few things, and stepped back from turning into a tinfoil loving Karen. Which is the flipside of what people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, RFK Jr., Elon Musk, and Jenny McCarthy do: instead of looking deeply enough into things and finding that their ideas may be wrong, they spend a great deal of energy and frankly taxpayer dollars finding ways to reinforce their beliefs, however harebrained they may be.

They do their research with the same scientific vigor as the licking lab over at Tootsie pop, and there was a time when the only time we’d hear from these people would be on Springer or on late night AM radio with Art Bell. Now they’re being handed the keys to power as the civil discourse is being derailed by people we should never have let leave the Supercuts.

Sources