In a column published Monday at American Thinker, writer Olivia Murray makes a deliberately provocative case: the women most hostile to leftist feminism are not men, but other women — specifically, women like her.
The essay, titled “Leftist women don’t understand who their biggest enemy actually is,” opens by rejecting the usual targets of progressive gender critique. “It’s not the ‘patriarchy’ or ‘toxic masculinity’ leftist women need to worry about,” Murray writes. “It’s women like me who have had enough of their wickedness.” A version of the piece, the outlet notes, first ran in its subscriber newsletter.
Two viral stories set the tone
Murray anchors her argument in what she describes as a week of news that undid a recent vacation to the Bahamas. She points to two social media episodes in particular, both framed as evidence of something she sees as a deepening moral crisis among women.
The first is a TikTok post in which, according to Murray, a pregnant woman claimed to have scheduled an abortion after learning she was carrying a boy. Murray acknowledges uncertainty about whether the post was genuine or engineered for virality, but argues the reaction is damning either way: the post, she says, drew roughly 433,000 likes. She also describes a commenter who claimed to have done the same with each of her sons and told her husband she had suffered miscarriages, then accepted a spa trip to recover — a claim Murray calls depraved.
The second involves a parenting “trend” in which mothers filmed themselves being abruptly harsh toward very young children to capture their reactions. Murray describes clips of a mother slamming dishes down in front of her children, a daughter asking “Mommy, what’s wrong?” and a boy flinching. In some videos, she notes, the mothers ended the stunt early to comfort their children. She links to a compilation of the videos, which she says she could not watch in full.
Both episodes, in her telling, are symptoms rather than isolated incidents. She ties them to the case of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother whose case has drawn widespread commentary, arguing it “awakened the demonic presence in these women.” She characterizes the mothers in the videos as “textbook sadists” and asks, pointedly, how such behavior squares with claims that men are the toxic and aggressive sex.
The core claim: rage is coming from inside the sisterhood
From there, Murray pivots to her central thesis. Whether because men have an instinct to protect women or simply because they are less vindictive, she writes, men are not the ones feminists should fear. “The people with the most internalized rage against them are… other women. Like me.”
She frames her own reaction as a kind of involuntary transformation. Murray describes herself as an empath by nature — “no credit to myself,” she adds, attributing it to God — but says that exposure to this material flips a switch and turns her into “a wrathful monster.” Only her Christian faith and what she calls Western convictions, she suggests, keep her impulses in check; she jokes about pleading the Fifth rather than elaborating.
The column then lands on its most striking admission: the behavior she describes has pushed her, she says, toward a position that is “radically anti-women’s rights” — more extreme, she claims, than the men in her orbit. The blame for that, she insists, lies with the feminists themselves.
She also quotes approvingly a post from an X account she follows, which asserts that feminism “has unleashed a demonic spirit among women” and that mothers who once loved their children are now “a bunch of serial killers.” Murray endorses the sentiment without qualification.
What the piece is and isn’t doing
It’s worth being clear about the evidentiary basis here. Murray is building a cultural argument on social media content of uncertain authenticity — she concedes as much about the abortion post — and on video compilations that readers cannot independently verify from the column alone. The claims about commenters’ behavior and the scale of engagement come from her description, not from any documented reporting.
That doesn’t make the essay incoherent as a piece of opinion writing; it makes it a piece of opinion writing. Its force comes from the rhetorical inversion at its center: rather than defending women against a patriarchal culture, Murray positions conservative women as the real opposition, animated by disgust at what they see as progressive women’s cruelty. The argument is less about policy than about moral revulsion, and it treats that revulsion as a political resource.
There is also a tension the column doesn’t resolve. Murray’s stated objection is to women being abusive toward children and cavalier about human life. Yet her proposed response is to outdo the men in hostility toward women’s rights — a leap that she asserts rather than argues. And the self-portrait of an empath driven to wrath by other people’s wickedness sits uneasily alongside the language she uses for the women she’s criticizing; at one point she acknowledges that her actual thoughts on one commenter are “unpublishable.”
The claim that men are not vindictive creatures, meanwhile, is offered as a passing aside rather than a defended premise. It functions as a setup: if men aren’t the threat, then the threat must be internal, and the sisterhood becomes its own worst enemy.
Why it lands where it does
The essay is likely to read very differently depending on where a reader starts. For American Thinker’s audience, the two TikTok episodes — a viral post about aborting a boy and a parenting prank trend — may function as confirmation of a broader claim about cultural decay, and Murray’s willingness to name her own anger as a political force will read as candor rather than excess.
For skeptics, the column will look like a familiar move: take the worst content social media can surface, treat it as representative of a political coalition, and derive a sweeping conclusion from it. The evidence is anecdotal by design, and the author’s own uncertainty about whether the originating post was real is acknowledged and then set aside.
What’s harder to dispute is the column’s framing of the fight. Murray isn’t arguing that leftist women have been misled by men or by structures. She’s arguing that they are being watched, judged, and increasingly opposed by women who share none of their premises — and that this opposition, not any patriarchal ceiling, is the force they’ve failed to account for.
Whether that’s a political analysis or a confession of personal fury is left to the reader. Murray, for her part, doesn’t seem interested in the distinction.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/leftist-women-don-t-understand-who-their-biggest-enemy-actually-is/