I called in to the Duane Lester Show on KNIM Talk 95.9 Live to talk about my recent post analyzing the rise in left-wing advocacy among white women aged 18-44. I tried to explain what I think the root cause is, and what I think we can do as a society to address it. I was able to make all 6 of my points, but for people listening who are here to check out my blog, I thought I would just go ahead and post the notes I made, along with the sources.

Point 1: Radical Views on Violence

Data: Recent Cygnal polling shows ~24% of Americans overall accept criminal action (including violence) to obstruct federal immigration enforcement (e.g., against ICE). But among white leftist women ages 18-44, it jumps to 61%.

Source: https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2026/01/10/white-leftist-women-really-are-bat-poop-crazy-and-this-proves-it-n4948130

Point: ICE targets criminal aliens (murderers, rapists, etc.), so this majority view means these women are willing to use lawbreaking/violence to protect those criminals over enforcing laws that protect citizens.

To me, it feels like an application of the “don’t judge” slogan, a slogan that is used by people who are underperforming to stop others from judging them.

Point 2: Global Leftward Shift

Data: A recent Financial Times analysis shows that in the 1990s, young men and women (18-29) were similarly mildly leftist. By 2024, men stayed roughly the same, but women shifted sharply further left. And this trend applies across multiple countries (US, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea).

Source: https://spectator.com/article/the-rise-of-toxic-femininity/?edition=us

Point: The women clashing with ICE or supporting obstruction fit this larger, international trend of younger women radicalizing leftward, while men hold steady. Many people think that what’s happening to women is the result of Trump being elected, but that doesn’t explain the hard slide to the left of young women in more leftist countries.

Point 3: Antidepressant Use and Mental Health Decline

Data: A 2024 study published in the journal Pediatrics looked at national prescription data from 2016–2022. And it found that post-March 2020, rates of antidepressant dispensing accelerated sharply:

• 129.6% faster monthly increase for female adolescents (12–17)

• 56.5% faster for young women (18–25)

• No similar surge for young males

Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38404197/

Point: We’re seeing a real, documented crisis in young women’s mental health—exploding use of antidepressants (SSRIs are the most common class here) and higher depression rates. This lines up with the leftward shift we just discussed in point 2. Something is fueling distress in this group.

Point 4: Link Between Leftist Ideology and Mental Health Decline

Data:  Multiple studies find that female leftists show the largest increases in depressive symptoms over the past decade, diverging from conservatives. Young leftist women report higher depression, anxiety, and lower life satisfaction (e.g., only 12% “completely satisfied” vs. 37% for conservative women in recent surveys).

Source:

• SSM Mental Health study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8713953

• Institute for Family Studies study:
  https://ifstudies.org/blog/why-so-blue-liberal-women-are-less-happy-more-lonely-but-why

Point: Left-leaning views often lead to emotion-driven decision-making. These decisions lead to bad outcomes. And leftists deflect responsibility and place blame on others. For example, taking out huge student loans for a degree that does not lead to a good-paying job, or choosing a boyfriend based on appearance who then demonstrates poor character. If the leftist is always the victim of external forces, then the leftist has no reason to develop accurate beliefs to make better decisions. Leftists are not reading books about personal finance or Christian apologetics so that they can choose a major or choose a mate. The pattern of making bad decisions causes anxiety, stress, and anger.

The victimhood that young leftist women experience as they slide further to the left has caused a sharp increase in “Cluster B” disorders, which involve lack of respect, impulsiveness, attention-seeking and narcissism.

Point 5: Young women are choosing non-traditional men

Data: Modern dating shows imbalances: Dating app usage shows that the vast majority of women are targeting the minority of most physically attractive men. This means that this minority of most-attractive men don’t have to treat women well or commit to get sex, since there is always a long line of women interested in them. Addiction to social media makes this focus on the most attractive men even stronger.

Source: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/sterile-polygamy

Point: Young leftist women are being indoctrinated in feminist ideology. They see the traditional male roles of moral leader and spiritual leader as “sexist” and “oppressive”. So, they tend to pick men by appearance. They look for permissive men who don’t judge or lead. This minority of permissive, attractive men are not trying to shape the women for marriage roles like wife and mother. They are just there for the temporary sex.

In addition to the missing boyfriend problem, there is just a general lack of male leadership in women’s lives. Fathers are ejected from homes by no-fault divorce. Male teachers are ejected from classrooms. And so on.

Point 6: Men are facing major deterrents to dating and marriage

In addition to women choosing the most attractive men who match their leftist politics and moral relativism, there is also the problem of traditional men dealing with disincentives to marriage and fatherhood.

•  feminist laws and policies deter men from marrying, e.g. – no-fault divorce, false accusations for custody, transing kids

• women get preferential treatment for degrees and jobs, making it harder for men to have leadership from provider role

• young women are being trained to reject accountability for bad choices, e.g. – abortion, single mother welfare, student loan bailouts, lighter sentences for crimes, etc.

• soulmate view of relationships: popular movies and books train women to have unrealistic views of relationships

• leftist political views, (e.g. – abortion, same-sex marriage), are unattractive to traditional men

• possibility of a workplace complaint getting a man fired and potentially blacklisted – can’t support a family

• the male roles of protector and provider are seen as “entitlements” for which men get no respect, so women have no obligations to fuel their men with care

The disincentives faced by traditional men to pursue marriage are typically ignored by social conservatives, who just insist that men embrace husband and father roles regardless of these disincentives. But this isn’t working.

A better way forward is the changes to laws and policies, such as the Kentucky 50-50 custody law: https://dailycaller.com/2025/09/08/mr-right-kentucky-divorce-rates-50-50-child-custody/

Welcome to episode 71 of the Knight and Rose podcast! In this episode, Wintery Knight and his friend Bonnie discuss the school choice and education reform with Keri Ingraham from Discovery Institute. If you like this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We would appreciate it if you left us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Podcast description:

Christian apologists Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss apologetics, policy, culture, relationships, and more. Each episode equips you with evidence you can use to boldly engage anyone, anywhere. We train our listeners to become Christian secret agents. Action and adventure guaranteed. 30-45 minutes per episode. New episode every week.

Episode summary:

Wintery Knight and guest host Bonnie welcome Dr. Keri Ingraham to discuss school choice and education reform. They discuss the public school monopoly’s resistance to innovation and undermining of parental values. Ingraham explains how education savings accounts restore parental authority. She critiques teacher unions and radical ideologies. Ingraham advocates for micro schools, hybrid learning, and vocational paths to align education with family values.

Outline and transcript

Here is a transcript of the show provided by TurboScribe AI. TurboScribe AI allows you to translate the transcript into many, many different languages. You can also export the transcript into many different formats, with optional timestamps.

Episode 71:

Speaker biographies

Dr. Keri D. Ingraham is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute and Director of the Institute’s American Center for Transforming Education. She is also a Senior Fellow at Independent Women’s Forum. Prior to joining Discovery Institute, Dr. Ingraham spent nearly two decades leading within the field of education. Her areas of education expertise include innovation, thought leadership, research, online learning best practices, customized hybrid program development, business model creation, operations effectiveness, and strategic planning for sustainability and scaling. She holds a Doctor of Education degree and a Master of Education degree from Regent University, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from George Fox University. 

Wintery Knight is a black legal immigrant. He is a senior software engineer by day, and an amateur Christian apologist by night. He has been blogging at winteryknight.com since January of 2009, covering news, policy and Christian worldview issues.

Bonnie is a software engineer and a mother of 5 children, ages 4 to 18. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Theology from Prairie College and an Associate degree in Nursing from Jefferson State Community College. She is currently working on her M. Div at Birmingham Theological Seminary. 

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Music attribution:

Strength Of The Titans by Kevin MacLeod
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Do you remember the episode of Knight and Rose Show where we interviewed Dr. Günter Bechly about the Cambrian explosion? We were talking about naturalistic explanations for the explosions of new information at certain points in the fossil record. I mentioned that one paper had argued that the introduction of molecular oxygen into the early Earth’s atmosphere might explain the origin of all these new body plans and organ types.

Well, before we see the new paper, let’s start at the very beginning. What is the Cambrian explosion?

The Cambrian Explosion refers to an explosive event in Earth’s history. Around 530 million years ago, over a geologically brief window of roughly 5–10 million years, nearly all major animal body plans (phyla) appeared suddenly in the fossil record. These are new, complete body plans with new designs for things like hard shells, jointed limbs, compound eyes, digestive systems, nervous tissue, etc. And they came in without clear transitional precursors from the simpler life forms found in earlier strata.

So, what could have caused this? Well, in my computer lab, when we see new code in the Github repository, we know that a software engineer committed those changes and then pushed them into the code repository. But some people don’t like the idea of a Cosmic Software Engineer, so they try to come up with alternative explanations that are more comfortable for them.

In this case, one of the explanations that keeps coming up is that the introduction of a new gas into the atmosphere must have caused all this code to appear. Which gas? Oxygen!

Here’s the story from Casey Luskin, over at Science and Culture:

For many evolutionary biologists, that trigger is a sudden rise in atmospheric oxygen just before the Cambrian — and the claimed sudden rise of oxygen is enough to satisfy them that the Cambrian explosion is explained (or at least explained away).

Today’s post is about a new paper that gives us reasons to doubt it, and Casey explains:

The oxygen “trigger” theory for the Cambrian explosion has now taken another hit. A new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Breathing life into the boring billion: Direct constraints from 1.4 Ga fluid inclusions reveal a fair climate and oxygenated atmosphere,” suggests that oxygen might have been quite high long before the Cambrian period, casting doubt on the idea that it played a role as a trigger.

Casey quotes an article about the new paper, which explains that the researchers got samples of air trapped in ancient crystals that are 1.4 BILLION years old – much, much older than the Cambrian explosion. And what is in the samples? Molecular oxygen! And yes, this does show that the planet had more oxygen than expected at this much earlier time. Casey notes that if oxygen were the trigger to all this code being written in the blink of an eye, then why didn’t it happen when the oxygen was there 1.4 billion years ago?

Because oxygen doesn’t write code, duh!

And since we’re on the topic, in the episode with Dr. Bechly, I mentioned an article he wrote about an earlier (2023) paper that also disproved the oxygen explanation for massive amounts of new code. This was one of his famous “Fossil Friday” articles. Except here, he is talking about the Avalon explosion, not the Cambrian explosion. It turns out that there are tons of these explosions in the fossil record.

He wrote this:

Now a new study (Ostrander et al. 2023) by group of researchers from Denmark has overturned decades of evolutionary dogma and claims the exact opposite: “oxygen didn’t trigger multicellular organisms” (Anonymous 2023, UCPH 2023). What this study found was instead clear evidence of a lower oxygen content correlated with the Avalon Explosion of the Ediacaran biota. The authors summarize their surprising findings as: “Contrary to a classical hypothesis, our interpretations place the Shuram excursion, and any coeval animal evolutionary events, in a predominantly anoxic global ocean.” Co-author Christian Bjerrum commented “Specifically, it means that we need to rethink a lot of the things that we believed to be true from our childhood learning. And textbooks need to be revised and rewritten.

And again, there are lots of these explosions. He calls them “biological big bangs”. If you want to read his big article about all the different biological big bangs, you can find it here.

And he also did a long presentation on it, which is even better than our podcast episode, because he had pictures and graphs:

Well, that’s something for people to know about. You don’t want to make your view of the world based on speculations.  We know what makes code appear. Software engineers make code appear. So people need to stop grasping at gasses and accept the way the world really is. Designs need a Designer.

If you watch his presentation twice, I’m pretty sure that you will remember it enough to make this case for design. And arguing from scientific evidence makes life more fun. Let the other team do the speculating, you stick with the scientific evidence.

Also, don’t forget about our episode on junk DNA with Casey Luskin.