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Why woke women make terrible leaders
Unreported Truths ^ | 22 Oct, 2025 | Alex Berenson

Posted on 10/26/2025 6:18:35 AM PDT by MtnClimber

It's not just their sanctimony and humorlessness. It's their insistence on feel-good nonsolutions to real problems. The backlash is only beginning.

Wir schaffen das!

In English, the words mean: We can do this! So said Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor from 2005 to 2021, as she hectored her citizens to accept 2 million refugees from Syria and other Muslim countries.

Observe, though: as calls to action go, Merkel’s was watery.

Not: “we must do this” — a categorical demand that might raise the question of why Germany, or any country, should have to house and feed another country’s citizens without limit. No: we “can” do this. That is: these people have come. Rather than looking hard at whether we should encourage them, or the costs of doing so, we’ll just deal with them. Mostly by throwing money at them.

Wir schaffen das was, ultimately, a call to bureaucracy. (In fact, the phrase can also be translated as “we can manage this.”)

(I can do this. But I need your help.)

Except Germany couldn’t, not really.

Merkel’s tenure as chancellor began with an explosion in German manufacturing. It ended with the country’s economy flatlining. The refugee crisis wasn’t the only reason, of course.

Another was Germany’s ruinous decision to embrace a policy of decarbonization while simultaneously closing its nuclear power plants, a key source of carbon-free electricity. Germany now has among the world’s highest power prices, a serious hurdle for a country that relies heavily on manufacturing. The crisis will only get worse as artificial intelligence datacenters become a bigger and bigger drain on the power grid.

Not coincidentally, Germany’s Covid response was also extremely strict, with harsh lockdowns and government pressure campaigns.

(A German government ad from late 2020 — when much of the United States had already reopened.)

In December 2021, days before Merkel left office, Germany even announced a lockdown for unvaccinated people and plans to make Covid vaccinations mandatory. Only the spread of the Omicron variant, which proved the absolute uselessness of shots, undid that effort.

Merkel’s reign ended almost four years ago, but it set Germany in a hole that the country seems unable or unwilling to escape.

In every way, her governing style crystallized the crisis of what the writer Helen Andrews called “The Great Feminization” in an opinion piece that has deservedly received attention in the last week.

Andrews argues that the rise of the political phenomenon Americans call “woke” actually reflects the rise of women in politics, law, medicine, journalism, academia, corporate America, and other power centers:

Wokeness arose around the same time that many important institutions tipped demographically from majority male to majority female.

The substance fits, too. Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition…

Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.

Of course, not every woman feels or acts this way.

Margaret Thatcher, the only female politician in modern history more powerful than Merkel, fought openly and fearlessly with her enemies. But it is obvious to anyone who not entirely blinkered by ideology that, on the whole, men and women interact in profoundly different ways. Men face, and sometimes seek out, conflict; women avoid or sublimate it.

Unfortunately, avoiding or sublimating conflict does not mean ending it. This week, an old clip of NPR head Katherine Maher again popped up. In 2021, Maher said:

“In our messy human hearts, we also know that the truth is something of a fickle mistress and that the beauty of the truth is actually often in the struggle.”

Maher is an easy target, almost too easy.

She’s a living, breathing woke caricature: a white woman from a wealthy Connecticut family who is for Black Lives Matter and against homophobia. She’s against climate change but for transit justice (which I’m guessing does not include arresting riders for menacing their fellow passengers). Christopher Rufo shredded her last year in a piece called Quotations from Chairman Maher, which consists mostly of Maher’s greatest tweets.

(Katherine Maher would like a word)

But she’s worthy of all the scorn that she receives.

Because what Maher’s is arguing is profoundly dangerous.

The truth is not a “fickle mistress.” The “beauty of the truth” is not in the “struggle.” The truth is knowable. Not always, but usually.

The hard part isn’t usually getting to the truth (at least on a broad level).

The hard part is making decisions, realizing that you — as a person or a society — cannot have it all, that you are going to make choices and that those choices will have costs and consequences.

Consider Charlie Kirk’s painful, brutal words about the Second Amendment:

I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.

Was Kirk right? I don’t know. Philosophically, I think so. Every time I hear about a school shooting, I wonder. (Which, of course, is why the media reports so extensively on school shootings.)

Maher does not so much argue with her opponents as insist that she has the moral (and intellectual) high ground, that anyone who would disagree with her is a cretin. Merkel, who had the advantage of formal state power, used its levers more quietly.

But they wind up in the same place. They’re using the same strategy. What Maher pretends is what Merkel pretended: that hard decisions can be elided simply by refusing to consider the possibility that there are two sides at all.

This is a recipe for bureaucratic creep and statism.

Once the refugees have been let in, throwing them out — or even changing admission standards — requires a policy change, for a policy that was pushed through or hardly considered at all. So too with lockdowns. And climate change (though in that case, the strategy has generally been to try to delay the economic impact of the most radical policies years or decades in the future, to give woke politicians and their constituents a moral thrill while again pretending it is cost-free).


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Society
KEYWORDS: leftism

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1 posted on 10/26/2025 6:18:35 AM PDT by MtnClimber
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To: MtnClimber

And Germany may never recover from Merkel.


2 posted on 10/26/2025 6:19:32 AM PDT by MtnClimber (For photos of scenery, wildlife and climbing, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
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To: MtnClimber

They’re not meant to be leaders. They’re proxies imposed upon a conquered people.


3 posted on 10/26/2025 6:20:28 AM PDT by T.B. Yoits
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To: MtnClimber; All

Women are enslaved to their emotions


4 posted on 10/26/2025 6:22:06 AM PDT by SMARTY (In politics, stupidity is not a handicap. Napoleon Bonaparte I)
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To: MtnClimber

“Everybody play nice.”


5 posted on 10/26/2025 6:26:52 AM PDT by gundog (The ends justify the mean tweets. )
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To: T.B. Yoits
My observation is two-fold:

1) Women aren't comfortable with leadership. They generally feel comfortable making passive aggressive suggestions, which is not leadership. If they do want to be explicit in their leadership, they don't know how to do it and end up being Boss Bitches who just order people to do things on a whim.

2) Women aren't comfortable with following. Hey! Why aren't they in charge?? Who made you the boss? Her ideas are perfectly good! Fight the patriarchy and put her in charge!! She's not going to do what you say -- she's going to do it her way!

This can result in a crazy pendulum effect: I should be in charge! OMG! I can't handle this responsibility -- you should be in charge! Hey! Who made you the boss?I should be in charge! OMG! I can't handle this responsibility -- you should be in charge! Hey! Who made you the boss? I should be in charge!

I really think we need to find a way back to a one-income family. Find a way to make that work. Women an have total control of the home, and men can have control of the workplace. I suppose I'm a jerk, but after long observation, I am convinced that this makes the most sense.

6 posted on 10/26/2025 6:30:05 AM PDT by ClearCase_guy (Democrats seek power through cheating and assassination. They are sociopaths. They just want power.)
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To: MtnClimber

Katherine Maher used USAID’s 48 billion dollar budget on social media to overthrow countries and then became the head of NPR which had their funding cancelled.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/katherine-mahers-color-revolution
100% Of NPR’s ‘Editorial Positions’ Are Held By Registered DEImocrats.
NPR Refused To Cover Hunter Biden’s Laptop.
Here Are 12 Reasons Why NPR And PBS Deserved To Be Defunded
The Federalist ^ | 05/02/2025 | BRIANNA LYMAN
https://thefederalist.com/2025/05/02/here-are-12-reasons-why-npr-and-pbs-deserved-to-be-defunded/


7 posted on 10/26/2025 6:34:55 AM PDT by Haddit
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To: ClearCase_guy

I agree with your sentence number three because you do not use the word “most” instead of implying “all.” I had many bosses over a long career, two of whom were outstanding female leaders.

I also had male bosses, some of whom who were outstanding leaders and two who were the opposite.


8 posted on 10/26/2025 6:40:14 AM PDT by Freee-dame
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To: MtnClimber

Isaiah 3:12

My people—infants are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, your guides mislead you and they have swallowed up the course of your paths.


9 posted on 10/26/2025 6:41:06 AM PDT by delta7
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To: MtnClimber
Apologies to our female FReepers, but most women in general make terrible leaders and bosses.

There certainly are exceptions, but just that. Exceptions.

10 posted on 10/26/2025 6:48:01 AM PDT by AAABEST (That time Washington DC became a corrupted, existential threat to us all...)
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To: MtnClimber

Golda, Thatcher, Melon.


11 posted on 10/26/2025 6:51:05 AM PDT by avital2
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To: avital2

*Meloni.


12 posted on 10/26/2025 6:51:38 AM PDT by avital2
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To: ClearCase_guy
I suppose I'm a jerk Yes sir you are!
13 posted on 10/26/2025 6:51:53 AM PDT by txlurker
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To: MtnClimber

Woke women are only great in their own minds. Most are incompetent and silly fools.


14 posted on 10/26/2025 6:52:45 AM PDT by dforest
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To: MtnClimber

Woke men are any better?


15 posted on 10/26/2025 6:55:35 AM PDT by 9YearLurker
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To: MtnClimber

Because they’re basically lazy, they end up teaching, or in politics, and here we are.


16 posted on 10/26/2025 6:58:03 AM PDT by Fireone (1.Avoid crowds 2.Head on a swivel 3.Be prepared to protect & defend those around you 4.Avoid crowds)
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To: MtnClimber

Of course, there are always outliers in any stereotyped group such as female executives. But, the vast majority of women do not know how to disagree in a business or non-romantic setting.

They are genetically destined to be manipulators, and consensus builders and then rigorously trained to those same characteristics in the interest of being compassionate, ladylike, and cooperative.

Men have the opposite genetics and train themselves with almost constant physical and verbal conflict as children.

The result? Women cannot lead. They can only dictate and are not very good at that.


17 posted on 10/26/2025 6:59:15 AM PDT by anton
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To: MtnClimber

“as Kirk right? I don’t know. Philosophically, I think so. Every time I hear about a school shooting, I wonder. (Which, of course, is why the media reports so extensively on school shootings.)”
Of course Charlie Kirk was right, there’s no valid debate.
Nearly every school shooter was known to police. Most are mentally ill, brainwashed trans idiots, who’s parents should have prevented from becoming brainwashed, trans idiots.
There is no perfect situation, there’s collateral damage to some extent.


18 posted on 10/26/2025 7:03:29 AM PDT by Fireone (1.Avoid crowds 2.Head on a swivel 3.Be prepared to protect & defend those around you 4.Avoid crowds)
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To: AAABEST

“Apologies to our female FReepers, but most women in general make terrible leaders and bosses.”

They are also very bad at picking leaders, that’s why the 19th has been a disaster.


19 posted on 10/26/2025 7:04:20 AM PDT by aquila48 (Do not let them make you "care" ! Guilting you is how they. control you. )
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To: MtnClimber

Good article.

About time these Sorority Hires get called out.

They have made the workplace miserable for well over a decade.

Incompetent yet ever ascending.


20 posted on 10/26/2025 7:08:14 AM PDT by CaptainPhilFan (God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do things which are improper and repulsive, Rom 1:28)
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