Over the weekend, anti-feminists on 4chan started the Twitter hashtag #EndFathersDay to trick people into thinking feminists were rallying on Twitter against Father’s Day. Despite there being zero evidence of a sincere anti-fatherhood movement in this country, Fox News decided to buy into the hoax in order to run a segment accusing “feminists” of trying to end Dad’s special day.
Though Tucker Carlson admitted at the top of the Fox & Friends segment that the hashtag “started as a joke,” he then proceeded to claim, without a shred of evidence, that it was “picking up steam with feminists online.” (A perusal of the hashtag shows mostly a combination of people calling it out as a hoax and gullible people denouncing the “feminists” who they falsely believe started it.) To guard against the danger that common sense or human decency might accidentally slip into the segment, Fox brought on Susan Patton, the “Princeton mom” who managed to turn a crank letter about how women become unmarriageable after college into a book deal.
The made-up feminists were sure in for a tongue-lashing! Patton got the ball rolling with: “They’re not just interested in ending Father’s Day. They’re interested in ending men.” Carlson tripped over himself to agree. “There’s a reason there are more women in poverty now than in my lifetime: [It] is because there are more unmarried women,” he said. He offered no evidence for his insinuation that women are, en masse, abandoning marriage out of an ideological hostility to men, rather than the likelier explanation, which is they simply don’t have anyone currently to be married to. “When you crush men, you hurt women,” he self-righteously added, offering no details on this mysterious man-crushing.
It went on like this for a while, with Patton working herself into a froth attacking the “antagonistic women” who say Father’s Day is “a celebration of male oppression” and the “antagonistic feminists” she believes are running this hashtag because they “don’t even have men in their lives, probably.” Indeed, I would say that they certainly don’t have men in their lives, due to the fact that the feminists in question are imaginary, making it difficult for men to start relationships with them. (Yet another example of man-crushing, I know.)
“Without fathers, there would be no mothers,” Patton added, laughing ruefully at the foolish women in her head who believe they can reproduce through parthenogenesis. Well done, Fox & Friends. You really showed those fake feminists that their nonattacks of fathers will not be tolerated.
