You’d be forgiven for thinking this was the frontwoman of one of the North Side’s innumerable hipster punk bands. But the woman behind the microphone was Kat Abughazaleh, and this was a campaign stop on her Illinois congressional bid. The 26-year-old political commentator now has her bright blue eyes set on turning mid-2026 into the real Brat Summer. 

This isn’t a social media stunt, though it sometimes feels that way; it’s a high-stakes scramble for a rare vacancy. For the first time since 1999, Illinois’s Ninth District, which spans from the tony suburbs of the North Shore to the grit of Chicago’s 48th Ward, is an open seat following the retirement of longtime liberal lion Jan Schakowsky. Abughazaleh is now the fundraising frontrunner in a crowded Democratic primary of 15 candidates — including Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss and State Senator Laura Fine. Yet, as she outpaces the establishment in dollars — $2.7 million and counting — and digital reach, a central question looms: who exactly is Kat running for? 

The elephant in the room for the Abughazaleh campaign is that Schakowsky was its reason for existing, and now that’s gone. For months, the young political influencer had framed her run as a generational uprising against a complacent incumbent, Schakowsky, now in her eighties. But then the Congresswoman announced she was retiring and not seeking re-election. It is one thing to primary a 14-term incumbent as a symbol of stagnation and another to compete in a crowded field where almost everyone is some shade of progressive.

The inconvenient truth is that Abughazaleh’s campaign feels less calibrated for the constituents of northeastern Illinois and more for the urban ultraliberals watching her TikToks from Brooklyn to Berkeley.

If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the prototype for the young, female-socialist-outsider-to-Congress pipeline, Abughazaleh is AOC 2.0, recalibrated for the “Dark Woke” era of President Trump’s second term. She is younger, louder, more online (often labeled “The TikTok Candidate”), and more aggressively confrontational than the New York lawmaker, trading the optimistic hopepunk aesthetics of the late-2010s #Resistance for the anarcho-punk snarl of confrontation over coalition. That was certainly the case at the fall campaign event in Chicago, called “Punks for Progress.” At one point, a band shouted lyrics decrying American imperialism and declaring that “nothing lasts forever, even one’s country.”

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Punks for Progress captures the contradictions that haunt Abughazaleh’s candidacy. Like AOC, Abughazaleh is smart and has a natural presence on camera, but the New Yorker has at least attempted the difficult pivot from activist to institutional actor; Abughazaleh appears more comfortable as a full-time antagonist. While she promotes aspects of a Bernie-style democratic-socialist program on paper, the campaign’s emotional engine isn’t policy or the can-do, indefatigable sunniness of New York Mayor Zohran Mandami. Hers is a politics of a raised fist, instead of a handshake — one that runs on an intensified opposition to Trump and to the Democrats’ perceived timidity in stopping MAGA at all costs. “It’s time to drop the excuses and grow a fucking spine,” she said of the Dems in her campaign launch video. As such, the biggest moment of her campaign was being arrested in Chicago last October on trumped-up charges of blocking an ICE vehicle.

Do the majority of voters of Illinois’s Ninth District want a true middle-finger-to-the-system candidate with no experience to represent them in Congress? Not likely. Abughazaleh is currently polling second or third, but has the highest unfavorable rating (36% favorable, compared to 31% unfavorable) according to one poll. The Ninth District is not exactly a bastion of radicalism; it’s one of the safest Democratic seats in the country, represented since before Abughazaleh was born by Schakowsky. Gerrymandering has warped it into a thin finger that stretches from Chicago’s northern lakefront to exurban McHenry County, which Trump won by five points in 2024. Along the way, the district runs through suburbs like Evanston, the unofficial capital of what locals call Lakefront Liberals, a citadel of affluent, institutional Democratic politics. Not far from Evanston lies Park Ridge, where Hillary Clinton was raised. In 2016, primary voters here favored Clinton over Bernie Sanders, a reminder that this district’s liberalism has historically been managerial rather than insurgent. That poses a twofold challenge for Abughazaleh: despite her national online profile, she remains relatively unknown on the ground, and to the extent that voters do know her, it is as an uncompromising antagonist in a district that has often preferred polished pragmatism.

It’s little wonder why she remains a relatively unknown quantity locally. While many Illinois Democrats were debating Clinton and Sanders a decade ago, Abughazaleh was in high school in Texas, endorsing Marco Rubio in her school newspaper during the Republican primary. Her political evolution since then has been swift. In college, she abandoned conservatism and moved decisively Left. By the early 2020s, she had reinvented herself as a relentless critic of Right-wing media, building a following in digital newsrooms and across social-media platforms.

As a researcher for the progressive watchdog group Media Matters in Washington, she built a sizable following while dissecting conservative media, especially Tucker Carlson, as grist for short-form videos (“I watch Tucker Carlson so you don’t have to,” the bio on her X account once read). But in 2024, after Elon Musk sued the organization over a report it released documenting anti-Semitism on X, Abughazaleh was laid off. She then continued her critiques on TikTok, YouTube, and Bluesky, making her something like a mirror image of independent conservative commentators like Carlson — but for radical liberals — with videos like “This Is What DEI Means (And Why Conservatives Get Super Racist With It).”

Abughazaleh left DC and arrived in Chicago in July 2024 alongside her boyfriend, Ben Collins, the former NBC reporter who famously pivoted to becoming the CEO of the parody news site The Onion. They took up residence in an apartment in Streeterville, a touristy neighborhood just north of the Loop, where the average two-bedroom apartment runs about $4,000 a month — notably outside the district she sought to represent. 

That’s why the label “carpetbagger” keeps getting attached to her campaign. In Chicago, a city that treats your neighborhood like a personality test, geography still carries weight. You are from somewhere, or you are not. “I will vote for my dead grandmother before I vote for a 26-year-old carpetbagger influencer from Texas with zero experience who comes here to try to game the political system,” wrote one Illinois voter on Reddit.

Where Abughazaleh is most popular isn’t the Ninth District; it’s a cloud-based constituency of hyper-partisan, very-online liberals assembled in the placeless sprawl of social media. She announced her candidacy in Rolling Stone magazine, and her launch video racked up millions of views within days. The national liberal media followed with countless glowing profiles, including one in GQ that asked rhetorically: “Can Kat Abughazaleh Help Democrats Grow a Spine?” Likewise, her fundraising hauls come largely from small-dollar donors who are as likely to be in Brooklyn or Austin as in Chicago’s Wrigleyville. The comments under her videos read like a digital pep rally: You’re so brave. Drag them, queen.

But when the front-facing camera is off, Abughazaleh is prone to showing that she’s truly 26, with zero political experience, and not ready for one of the most important jobs in America. After no-showing for a campaign event in Chicago in January, she released a cringeworthy, dog-ate-my-homework statement blaming it on one of her “sleep attacks” due to narcolepsy. Imagine what she’d say if she slept through an important vote in Congress. 

When the Chicago Tribune asked her to sit down for an interview with its editorial board, she refused, saying, “Because while I’m about coalition building, I want to make sure that coalition reflects my values.” It’s the kind of decision that adds to the feeling that, for Abughazaleh, unlike Schakowsky, northeastern Illinois is merely a stepping stone to somewhere bigger and better.

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To complicate matters further, her main competitor is Daniel Biss, the mayor of Evanston and not exactly a corporate Democrat. In 2018, when Biss ran for governor against JB Pritzker, he was the one seen as the too-radical Left-wing candidate. He briefly selected Chicago Alderman Carlos Rosa, a Democratic Socialist, as his running mate before party pressure forced a recalibration, and his campaign events featured celebrity surrogates such as Russian protest band Pussy Riot and actor Jesse Eisenberg. 

When I covered his campaign back then, Biss felt like a Midwestern echo of the Sanders wave; a bookish math professor turned progressive crusader. Since then, Biss has done something that Abughazaleh has not: he has governed. As mayor of Evanston, he has navigated the unglamorous terrain of zoning fights, public safety, and municipal budgets. In other words, the frontrunner in this race is a version of what Abughazaleh could potentially become in the 2030s.

That’s why Abughazaleh’s attacks on Biss are so absurd. In one ad, a video captures her being thrown around by an ICE agent while Biss, who also protested ICE’s presence in Chicago, spectates a couple of dozen feet away. The implication is that Biss is a lame wimp for not being cuffed by authorities. This is where Abughazaleh’s campaign becomes a revealing case study in the perverse incentives of the present moment: the edgy aesthetic, the unapologetic vulgarity, the sassy callout all read as resistance during the rise of Dark Woke. 

Similar to Texas candidate Jasmine Crockett, the folk hero of viral clapbacks, Kat satisfies the Left-liberal audience’s desire to see someone speak the unspeakable in a political arena sick of the decorum theater that once defined the Democrats.

But the problem with running what’s been called “a punk rock campaign” is that punk is, by instinct, a youthful anti-authority posture, suspicious of anyone in power and reveling in defiance — a way of sneering at the powerful, rather than replacing them. It thrived on negation and defined itself by what it opposed. And eventually, it was absorbed, flattened, and resold in malls or as a soundtrack for a car commercial. 

Punk is no blueprint for effectively opposing MAGA in office, much less securing earmarks for federal funds and projects in northeastern Illinois. Ironically, the Kat Abughazaleh of 2016 might have agreed. In her editorial supporting Marco Rubio for president, she warned against a Bernie presidency because “a Sanders presidential term would be constant conflict between parties with little action.”

It is a strange fate to become a harsher version of the candidate your younger self warned against.

The New York Times defined “Dark Woke” last year as “an attempt to step outside the bounds of the political correctness that Republicans have accused Democrats of establishing.” In the Gray Lady’s telling, it “requires being crass but discerning, rude but only to a point.” Examples range from Gavin Newsom’s meme warfare to Jasmine Crockett’s alliterative insults (“Will a vindictive, vile villain violate voters’ vision?”). GQ, meanwhile, observed that the objective is to “subvert the qualities that people think made wokeness cringe — the virtue policing, the polite ‘when they go low, we go high’ posturing — and go Joker mode to make Democrats cool again.” 

These aren’t mutually exclusive definitions. Dark Woke is a meme with amorphous contours. Sometimes, it’s merely rhetorical; other times, it offers serious strategies to challenge MAGA with a dose of its own post-liberal medicine. Either way, it’s rooted in the same demand posed by grassroots Democrats to the party establishment: throw some punches, or we’ll primary you into oblivion.

Since Good’s demise on the icy streets of Minnesota, videos of enraged anti-ICE protesters are proliferating on social media. In one clip posted by the Fox News reporter Matt Finn, an ICE agent goes up to two shiny SUVs blocking traffic, warning the women in them not to “make a bad decision.” The women, both of whom appear to be Millennials, aren’t intimidated. “I think I’m making exactly the right decision,” one says. When the officer signs off with, “Thank you, have a good day,” she replies with a grin: “I hope you have a terrible day.” In another viral clip, a gaggle of whistling women surround a reporter; one gleefully taunts him as another screams, “Nazi!” 

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Or there’s the TikTok video circulating on X, in which a blue-eyed, salt-and-pepper-haired woman who describes herself as a 42-year-old single mother and “relationship anarchist” slips sexily into her Carhartt overalls while spelling out a “dating-profile request” for a man whom she can “call, right now, and say, ‘Hey, get in the passenger seat and let’s go fuck some shit up.’” 

These street soldiers aren’t the antifa types torching cars or the rioters looting stores. They are, like Good, Millennial moms in the Midwest. They’re people from normal quarters of American life who are spending time during the workday putting their bodies and vehicles on the line to protect illegal migrants, some with serious criminal records, from deportation. And they see ICE as a neo-Gestapo that calls for more than rhetorical condemnation.

The Washington Post this week wrote about the growing activist coalition: “As the Trump administration deploys thousands of federal immigration officers and agents around the nation, a loose-knit but increasingly organized network of activists is tracking their whereabouts and documenting arrests.” With whistles and messaging apps, these ICE “watchers” or “verifiers” are often trained by nonprofit groups, according to the Post article, which adds that they are “dispatched to spot arrests, record interactions, and, where possible, get contact information for family members of those arrested.”

This partly explains why Dark Woke is growing amid President Trump’s immigration crackdown. Tracking ICE supplies a sense of agency and community at a time when people feel powerless and atomized. It is also a clue as to why there are so many upscale white women in the ranks of the Dark Woke army. 

Last fall, the GOP pollster Alex Tarascio “asked likely voters if they agreed that it’s acceptable to go beyond peaceful protest in response to ICE enforcement, even if it breaks the law,” as he put it in an X post. “Overall, just 24% of Americans agreed. But among white women, 18 to 44, who identify as liberal? The number shoots up to 61%.” Half that number, only 30%, disagreed. Among all liberals, the number was nearly 20 points lower, at 42%. And among all likely voters, the number dropped to less than a quarter of the population.  

Why are white liberal women especially eager for battle? People like Good are motivated by a sincere commitment to social justice, to be sure. Good was so moved by the prospect of ICE deportations in Minneapolis that she joined a midday protest after dropping off her 6-year-old at school.

However, there is also no shortage of research in recent years showing that young women on the Left struggle more with mental health than do other cohorts. In 2024, Times columnist Thomas Edsall dug into studies on the “happiness gap,” noting “one of the findings emerging from this research is that the decline in happiness and in a sense of agency is concentrated among those on the Left who stress matters of identity, social justice and the oppression of marginalized groups.”

In 2025, a study published by Zach Goldberg at the Right-of-center Manhattan Institute found that “females and liberals tend to rank higher than their male and conservative counterparts in certain personality traits that are associated with greater susceptibility to internalizing symptoms. These symptoms are characterized by inwardly directed emotional distress, including feelings of sadness, worry, and fear, which can manifest as conditions like depression and anxiety.” 

Research from the Institute for Family Studies has likewise found that “when we control for education, race, age, and income, …  liberal women ages 18 to 40 are over three times as likely to report frequent feelings of loneliness compared to their conservative peers.”  

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Renee Good, of course, was married and — at least in the tragic record of her final minutes — cheerful in demeanor. Unhappiness and lapsed agency may or may not explain her personal decision. However, it’s fair to speculate that rational disapproval of Trump is not the only explanation for why more and more young progressive women are training as “ICE watchers” and joining physical protests. Tellingly, the Institute for Family Studies found that “a large part of [the] loneliness gap comes from different rates of marriage and church attendance. … Adding controls for marriage and church attendance, ideology becomes less important, with marriage being the strongest predictor of feeling less lonely.”

Feelings of misery and powerlessness, especially acute on the young female Left, will ensure Dark Woke lingers, and reemerges as opportunities for catharsis present themselves. These opportunities will be especially compelling when they offer a perceived sense of community, or of self-sacrifice for the common good. 

Satisfaction, though, will prove illusory, because the source of the young women’s pain is not really injustice, except in the sense that a grave injustice has been committed against happiness in the destruction of our communities, social bonds, and overall humanity.