There’s stupid, and then there’s really stupid. And while we’ve grown used to the fact that most of our mainstream media has descended into leftist propaganda and ludicrous takes, sometimes we’re still surprised by the idiocy of what some outlets will print.
Behold one of the lowest IQ, man-hating articles I've ever had the displeasure to read. The writer is in a paroxysm of male-hating rage because she didn’t like the way her tree was trimmed. No, really. This is actual output from the Washington Post, the paper that famously uncovered the Watergate scandal:
Why do men kill women’s plants?
Among other things, leaf-blowing gardeners in big cities are notoriously blow-and-go, and yes, their tree-trimming does consist of chop and slice (as I've learned, though, you think they've killed the tree, but a few months later, it grows back and looks fine), but this author's venomous view of men is so full of disgust that I wanted to smack my computer screen.
Our press in the modern age.
But even I was surprised at how truly random and hateful this recent opinion piece by an anger-filled keyboard warrior named Karen Attiah was. She’s listed as a columnist. I would put her down as “Vitriol Queen.”
Her outrage? Gardeners hacked away at a tree in a manner she didn’t like. Her conclusion? All men suck.
my question is often how much of this damage is the result of intentional passive aggression.
— malcolm beith (Janes.com/Small Wars Journal) (@mbeith) August 29, 2023
“Why do men kill women’s plants?” she asks in her headline. Immediately, a plethora of married males will quickly see the flaw in her argument: many wives do not have green thumbs, and plants left in their care will soon wither away. I have long been in charge of our garden, for instance, and have nurtured it into a wonderful and welcoming place. Put a plant in my lovely bride's care, however, and be prepared to soon watch it die (sorry honey, just being honest).
But Attiah—perhaps appropriately being named “Karen”—thinks that men just want to assert their toxic masculinity by killing your greenery. So outraged was this columnist that she hated her own dad for the tree trimming:
I wrote about it at the time, utterly enraged at the landscapers and my father, who had allowed them to mutilate the tree — so angry that I took a pair of scissors and threatened to execute his favorite pothos [a lovely plant with heart-shaped leaves] right in front of him, to give him a taste of how I felt. After that column was published, I was flooded with tweets and stories from women whose spouses, boyfriends, fathers and male neighbors had destroyed their favorite shrubs, flowers, herbs — even plants that had been handed down to them from long-gone relatives.
This is what passes for journalism in our country today, folks. Angry diatribes against entire classes of people for ludicrous reasons that only a “privileged” person would have the time to obsess over. If you're looking for gratuitous hate—look left, not right. Attiah baselessly accuses all of the male gender of being abusive to plants and concludes that it’s a sign of every dude’s “contempt for nature and women.”
Perhaps this gets to a larger point about society, gender and nature that has been a running theme throughout history: the male fear and contempt for nature and women that leads some men to see both as things to be culled, controlled, colonized and wrestled into submission.
How uninformed and offensive. This is what college degrees deliver in this day and age. Men—and, of course, women—have for millennia cultivated and nurtured plants and greenery to benefit humankind as a whole. But this angry woman thinks it’s only one gender that deserves acclaim.
What’s most ironic about her take is that her favored female gender is under an unrelenting assault by progressives in modern times, with leftists not even being able to specify what a woman actually is:
Read: Happy Mother's Day! Now Fight Back on the War Against Women
Way to go, WaPo and owner Jeff Bezos. Maybe stop by and enjoy some lemons from the tree I—a toxic male—bought for my wife for our 25th anniversary and have faithfully nurtured into health. Perhaps the acidity of the lemons will appeal to the bitterness that resides within Attiah—and so many in her line of work.
While this seems like a forgettable, silly piece that should garner no attention, it’s actually more important than that. It shows how our corporate press has become divisive to normal, everyday Americans – including half the population, men.
See also: Why Do We Cover the Mainstream Media’s Foibles? Because 'Democracy Dies in Darkness'
