Great Men never go down without a Fight. The beefier the Man, the fiercer the Fight. Karen Attiah practically dared the Washington Post to fire her beefy ass in 2025, and that's exactly what happened. Like the University of Michigan's robustly masculine ex-football coach, Sherrone Moore, she refused to go quietly.
Attiah announced her dismissal in September with a display of earnest self-regard that rivaled, in its epic scale, the grandiose pretensions of the category's all-time greats: Barack Obama, Jim Acosta, Jasmine Crockett, mainstream journalists. "Democracy Dies in Darkness, but some of us will carry on the light," read the caption on her Substack post, accompanied by a professionally staged photo of Attiah gagging on a rose while burning a copy of the Post—muscles bulging in the amber glow. Days later, Attiah sued for damages. Donald Trump would be proud.
In her last column for the Post, Attiah waxed lyrical about her foray into meathead culture. Like any self-respecting Man of Greatness who has suffered a perceived indignity, Attiah needed an outlet for her all-consuming rage. (Anabolic steroids and exogenous testosterone have also been known to heighten irritability and aggression.) She hit the gym and stacked on 20 pounds of prime mass. In the captions of her locker room selfies, Attiah indulged fever dreams about getting jacked enough to "beat up racists and evade the cops." On leg day, she fantasized about thick, meaty quads powerful enough to "crush men's hopes and dreams."
Hear, hear! Journalism could use more of this Ray Lewis energy. As it stands, Jake Tapper is hardly the only coddled pundit who would be utterly outmatched in a fight with Joe Biden. Attiah embodies a primitive form of manhood that one rarely encounters outside of supermax prisons. It is practically neocon in outlook: Great Men (and Great Countries) exist for the sole purpose of asserting dominance over their enemies.
The Washington Free Beacon is proud to have coined, with Trumpian panache, the moniker by which Attiah will be known in perpetuity: "Radical Beefcake Columnist." We were even prouder to learn she was a reader after the phrase appeared in her X bio. We are prouder still to add another arrow to her quiver: Karen Attiah, you are now a Washington Free Beacon Man of the Year.
Eat your heart out, Mooch.
