Liberals Found a Trad Wife They Like

In New York’s June Democratic primaries, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s socialist machine showed its muscle: candidates backed by Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America won up and down the ballot, including Aber Kawas, a Palestinian-American Muslim running for state Senate in Queens, and Darializa Avila Chevalier, a Muslim convert who toppled Rep. Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th Congressional District.

Aber Kawas, a hijab-wearing Muslim woman in the Ilhan Omar model, won the Democratic primary for the New York State Senate in District 12 in Queens, putting her on track to become the first Palestinian Muslim woman in that state’s government. Of course, it is unclear if Kawas is an actual wife; she mentioned a “partner” in the campaign, so who knows, maybe she’ll be the first Muslim lesbian in the New York legislature. I advise her to be careful visiting the parts of the world whose politics American progressives romanticize from a very safe distance.

Kawas is the child of illegal Palestinian immigrants. She wants to abolish ICE, naturally, and has said that 9/11 was America’s fault because of our “system of capitalism, racism, white supremacy and Islamophobia.” She has also been photographed with the green ribbons and symbols associated with Hamas.

On the same day, a Muslim convert named Darializa Chevalier won the congressional primary for New York’s 13th District and is expected to win in the fall, which would make her the sixth member of the Squad. Both Kawas and Chevalier are far-left activists who made names for themselves as anti-Israel, pro-Palestine protesters after October 7, when Hamas massacred Israeli families and teenagers. Chevalier is on record as a prison abolitionist, which means there is apparently no crime she finds worthy of prison time.

We don’t even need to get into Minneapolis politics, where Ilhan Omar is only one of several area figures who has shown how easily religious traditionalism can be laundered through progressive politics.

So where, exactly, are the feminists? Where are the liberals who spent years decrying religious patriarchy, warning about theocracy, and treating every Christian woman in a long skirt as though she needed to be rescued from a compound?

Ever since the term “trad wife” became an internet meme, liberals have railed against the archetype: a woman who respects her husband, wants children, raises them herself, believes in chastity before marriage and monogamy within it, rejects feminist indoctrination, dresses modestly, practices her religion devoutly, and teaches that faith to her children. To liberals, such a woman is not making a choice. She is an oppressed victim of the patriarchy who must either be rescued by female liberation theology — or destroyed.

I wrote a whole book about the movement, but I call these women “domestic extremists.” The joke is that liberals think of trad wives as actual extremists, but they’re not. They’re just extremely domestic.

But things have changed, friends. There is now, in the American zeitgeist, a different sort of trad wife making her way to the political fore. She carries many of the same outward markers liberals claim to fear in religious women, but she arrives wrapped in the approved vocabulary of “global south” grievance, “Western colonial oppression,” and “stolen land.”

This is the acceptable modern trad wife, closer to the revolutionary poster girl of the global left than the prairie-dress influencer of liberal nightmares. Her visible piety reads as authenticity. Her conservatism reads as resistance. Symbols that would be mocked as cultish or oppressive on a Christian woman become, when attached to the right politics, badges of moral authority.

She is an extreme trad wife; her favorite new American hobby is using feminist girlbossism to boss her way into elected office.

Traditional Muslim societies often hold views on marriage, sexuality, family, and gender roles that are far more conservative than anything posted by the average Christian mommy blogger in a linen apron. Yet in America, Muslim women who embody visible religious traditionalism are revered by liberal feminists, while Christian women who do the same are treated as though they need to be rescued from a compound.

Of course, not every Muslim woman in politics is personally living like a Saudi housewife, and not every convert is signing up for the full Taliban honeymoon package. That is precisely what makes the liberal double standard so revealing. The same people who treat a Christian woman’s submission to tradition as brainwashing become suddenly sophisticated anthropologists when the symbols are Islamic and the politics are anti-Western.

Is the hijab being used as a political costume for global-south revolutionaries smuggling anti-Western ideology into American civic life? Obviously. And, pay attention: The costume will stay fashionable for exactly as long as it serves the revolution.