More white women voted for Donald Trump in 2020 than in 2016. Optimistic liberals had thought that, just maybe, the sexual assault allegations, the refusal to condemn white supremacy, the children in cages and the profound mishandling of the pandemic would cost Trump some white-female support. As someone who has known many conservative white women, I was not surprised to see the opposite occur.

Conservative women have historically been viewed as simplistically family-oriented voters: They’re pro-cop because they’re pro–safe neighborhoods, pro-life because they’re pro–family values. However, these assumptions are merely manifestations of the racist, insidious myth of the inherent goodness and purity of the American white woman. Consider the insurrection on January 6. Images of the violent riot that killed five people are replete with angry, white female faces. These women clearly cannot be dismissed as simply mild-mannered housewives manipulated into supporting Trump out of concern for their families, or somehow ignorant of or indifferent to the profound heartlessness of conservative policy—they are clearly in active, militant support of it.

So how did we go from the Phyllis Schlafly model of the conservative white woman—all prim cardigans and simpering family values—to violently storming a federal building? The short answer is that Trump capitalized on the existing rage of conservative white women in a way that had never been done before. Trump took the comparatively subtle ways conservatives provide scapegoats (such as dog-whistle racial messaging) and subtracted any nuance by completely detaching from reality and going full-on conspiracy theorist.

This begs another question: Why were conservative women so ready to embrace these insane conspiracy theories (such as those pushed by QAnon) that now define Trumpism?

To answer this, we must understand how these women can be primed from a young age to do just that. Consider how conservative women routinely vote against their own self-interest, such as in the 1970s when Schlafly and her supporters defeated the Equal Rights Amendment, a law that would have codified constitutional protection against sex-based discrimination. The conservative woman is historically defined by ideological hypocrisy: She is pro-life, but pro–death penalty and anti-BLM; pro-family but pro–separating families at the border; pro–community safety but anti–gun control.

Misogyny is clearly baked into the tradition-obsessed ideology of American conservatism; consider its emphasis on women’s traditional roles or its placement of unborn fetuses’ rights above existing women’s. Under conservative thought, women are dehumanized as a matter of course. The conservative woman must constantly work to reconcile the paradox of her support of these ideologies. So why do it?

Feminist theorist Andrea Dworkin wrote extensively about right-wing women and their willing participation in a system that openly oppresses them. Dworkin identified self-preservation as the first link in the chain that leads to wholesale support of self-oppression. In an overwhelmingly patriarchal society, and particularly in red areas, conformity is safety. From a young age, most American women are well aware that their safety is dependent on being acceptable to men: Men are the lawmakers, the most dangerous strangers, the visible faces of power at the highest levels.

When a girl can be sent home from school for wearing clothes that make the boys (or male teachers) feel a certain way, she gets the message loud and clear: Her survival is dependent on not provoking those in power. Conformity may be unpleasant, but there’s a forever-lurking “something worse” that could happen if she doesn’t conform (for example, what it is implied the boys will do if she doesn’t change into a longer skirt). Under patriarchy, the experience of female childhood is one long process of aversion therapy aimed at discouraging transgressions of the rigid boundaries defining appropriate female behavior.

This is how conservative white women can be so easily manipulated by fear: They’ve always been afraid. They’ve seen transgressors punished, victim-blamed and slut-shamed. To lose male approval is to lose safety, their potential future as a wife or mother. To rebel against this reality is to reject the foundation upon which their lives have been built. And if this system is not challenged early, doing so later in life can be simply too destabilizing.

A conservative woman can try to excel within the system, becoming what Dworkin refers to as a “militant conformer” (see: Amy Coney Barrett). But the lurking undertone of fear that motivates conformity still exists as the very foundation upon which she built her life—and the resultant anxiety now requires a “safe” outlet.

This is how today’s conservative ideology becomes so enticing to women: Republicans are excellent at providing boogeymen for all one’s projecting needs. It’s not that coal is an unsustainable industry; it’s that environmentalism is a scam perpetrated by liberals. It’s not that corporations took their business overseas to pay lower wages, but that immigrants stole manufacturing jobs. To conservative women, it’s not that they live in a culture that devalues, objectifies and limits them, it’s that liberals are trying to erode what would be a utopia if they just let good Americans be.

The conspiracy theories pushed by conservative online communities and Trump himself— Democrats stole the election, a cabal of pedophiles runs the world, the pandemic is a hoax—have the capacity to become the ultimate boogeyman. To be a woman forced to conform to a patriarchal society is to be plagued by a creeping sense of existential unease. Accepting conspiracy as reality provides a balm for that constant tension and anxiety: Yes, you knew it all along, it wasn’t just you—something is fundamentally wrong with your world. “Baby-eating Satanists” is as plausible an explanation as any if security within your society depends upon refusal to acknowledge reality—and the person spreading this “truth” now feels like a savior.

This leads us to the central superpower of the conservative white woman: her capacity for paradoxical victimhood. Let’s break down one of her most famous iterations, the fearsome “Karen.” The Karen can be defined by one core paradox: her ability to believe herself a true victim, while actually victimizing someone else. Karen screams at a delivery person over the restaurant’s mistake. Karen calls the cops and falsely claims that a Black man who asked her to leash her dog is assaulting her, so convinced of her victimhood as a woman that she has no qualms about weaponizing her privilege as a white person.

See also Elizabeth from Knoxville, Tennessee, a white woman interviewed during the January 6 insurrection. Footage shows her weeping and indignant about being pepper-sprayed for breaking into a federal building as part of a violent mob. “And why did you want to go in?” asks the interviewer. “We’re storming the Capitol! It’s a revolution!” cries Elizabeth, sniffing with self-pity. She gasses up the transgressive nature of her “revolutionary” actions and admits to an actual crime, while simultaneously being genuinely upset about reciprocal action being taken against her. We can only guess how she would feel if BLM activists did the same thing. Herein lies the pure essence of Karen: unironically juggling an identity as both oppressor and oppressed, victim and victimizer.

I see this same paradoxical thinking from the white female conservatives I have known. They don’t like taxes, so it’s fair to do what it takes to vote out liberals. Affirmative action is racist against their white sons. Kids in cages are fine, because immigrant parents should have followed the rules—just as these women have been doing their whole lives, to minimal reward.

This is why conservative white women have been so perfectly primed for Trumpism. The conspiracy theories explain the victimhood they feel but do not dare name. Distrust of all established things—science, medicine, logic—explains their daily unease. Displaced feelings of tension and fear under systemic patriarchy—and the resultant anger—are constantly roiling beneath the surface, awaiting some patriarchally approved expression that will relieve but not endanger her. The conservative white woman suffers from a victimhood that she cannot and will not name, and that those in power in her world—the men who make the rules—are thus free to name for her. When she is selfish and ignorant enough to willingly take up that mantle, a political Karen is born.

Trump may have created bigger and badder boogeyman for Karens to justify increasingly hateful behavior, but endemic patriarchy combined with ignorance, selfishness and white supremacy created them both. Those conditions are still undeniably present in American society. Trump’s Karens aren’t going anywhere.