Thursday’s Amanpour and Company demonstrated everything wrong with public broadcasting by using hushed and solemn tones to offer up the most incendiary hot takes. This particular hot take came from feminist, gender, and sexuality studies Prof. Kate Manne and NPR’s Michel Martin as they tried to tie conservatism to the recent mass stabbing in Australia.
As Manne acknowledged, the perpetrator was “a diagnosed schizophrenic who had recently, according to his family, discontinued medication, and he was living in a way that was largely itinerant.” However, “But I think we can recognize that when it comes to that question of why he targeted girls and women and why it is invariably a Joel rather than a Jane, a man rather than a woman, who has this kind of horrifically violent eruption after romantic or sexual disappointment, then we can recognize that his father's explanation is, again, helpful that he was motivated by the sense of entitlement to women's labor and to be ministered to and cared for by women.”
Later, Martin started the process of trying to tie this schizophrenic woman-hater to conservatives, “Some people feel like there's kind of a worldwide movement of trying to sort of reclaim male dominance. Like, for example -- like in South Korea, for example, there's like a whole political movement to kind of fight feminism, right? The argument that there are like political parties and political leaders whose main organizing principle is that. And I'm just wondering, do you see something worldwide? And if so, what is it?”
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