A Problem with White Liberal Women

 In the summer heat of a culture that has long since abandoned any coherent hierarchy of moral wrongs, a peculiar spectacle has taken hold among a certain class of white liberal women. Three little girls lie dead in Southport, cut down by a young man whose name the official narrative once strained to keep muffled. A bereaved mother, herself no stranger to the death of a child, posts a furious, ugly tweet in the raw hours that follow and is promptly locked away for the better part of a year. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, another mother admits to strangling her own three children and finds herself the sudden object of pink-clad rallies, TikTok solidarity videos, and a crowdfunding effort that climbs toward a million dollars. The common thread is not the crimes themselves, but the strange inversion that follows: the women who identify most loudly with the perpetrators, or who treat the lesser offense of speech as the greater sin.

What drives this? It is not simple compassion for the mentally ill, though that is the preferred costume. Postpartum psychosis exists; severe mental breakdown exists. Yet the same demographic that once treated every male offender as the product of systemic forces now performs a selective empathy that reserves its deepest fellow-feeling for the female actor who ends the lives of children. The children themselves become secondary, almost inconvenient. Their names are spoken less often than the defendant's diagnosis, their absence less vivid than the mother's claimed isolation. One watches mothers film themselves cradling their own infants while declaring emotional kinship with the woman who ended three young lives, and the performance feels less like solidarity than a dark rehearsal of permission.

The Southport case reveals the same mechanism from another angle. Lucy Connolly's tweet was crude, vengeful, and directed at a class of people she held responsible for a horror that had not yet been fully named. It was not murder. It did not put a knife in a child's chest. Yet for a cohort trained to view "racism" as the original sin against which all other sins are measured, her words carried a greater moral weight than the act that prompted them. The murderer, born in Britain to Rwandan parents, could be absorbed into the preferred story of individual pathology or failed safeguarding. The white woman who said the quiet part out loud could not. She became the real threat, the one whose release required careful management and whose continued existence as a free citizen still draws ritual denunciation.

This is not random. It is the logical endpoint of a worldview that has spent decades ranking victimhood by identity rather than by the concrete harm done. When the primary moral lens is race and gender rather than the sanctity of a child's life, the white woman who speaks out of turn ranks higher on the list of villains than the non-white man who kills. When female suffering is elevated above female agency, the mother who kills her children can be recast as the ultimate victim of a system that failed her, while the children she killed are quietly demoted to evidence of that failure. The result is a soft, continuous narrative in which the actual dead matter less than the narrative needs of the living.

One can trace the pattern through the language itself. Supporters speak of "relating" to the killer, of recognizing their own exhaustion or despair in her act. They speak of systemic failure, of medication, of a society that does not listen to women. Rarely do they linger on the finality of a five-year-old's last breath, or the irreversible fact that three girls will never grow older. The identification is not with the victims. It is with the power to redefine the crime so that the perpetrator remains the central, sympathetic figure. In this light, the early release of a woman jailed for a tweet becomes almost beside the point; the deeper story is the ease with which some will place a child-killer's feelings above the children's lives, and the equal ease with which they will treat angry speech as a greater public danger than the violence that inspired it.

The continuous narrative writes itself in the comments and the courtroom steps. It is a story in which certain liberal women have been taught that their own emotional weather is the most important weather, that any act committed under its influence can be reframed as the system's fault, and that those who refuse the reframing are the true aggressors. The children, once the moral centre of any such story, have been quietly moved offstage. What remains is a performance of identification that tells us more about the performers than about the crimes they claim to understand.

https://modernity.news/2026/08/18/why-are-white-liberal-women-identifying-with-a-child-murderer/