Tucker Carlson almost said it. He went right up to the edge and then drew back. He wheeled the cannon on stage, but he did not fire it.
Carlson almost blurted out the most taboo truth in Washington, the unutterable heresy that the political class suppresses more ruthlessly than any other. He asked us to consider — after eliminating all the standard leftist cliches and a few rightist ones — why do these young shooters keep committing mass murder? What characteristic do they all share? What is going on here, and why can we not even discuss it?
Carlson knows the answer. He knows because he is too intelligent not to know. Furthermore, he knows because I have written about it in his newspaper (repeatedly), and so have others. So there is no need to prove it again now. He even invited me on his PBS show to discuss it, just before they canned him. So he also knows full well that if he states it, he will be eliminated from Fox News as fast as — well, as fast as I was dismissed from multiple university posts when I persisted in writing about it.
It seemed almost as if he was inviting someone to say what he could not. So I will oblige him.
The shooters, the mass murderers, even most of the terrorists, and essentially all violent criminals (plus many drug addicts and a majority of the homeless) share this one quality: they are all fatherless.
And no, fatherlessness is not intractable. These destructive and self-destructive adolescents are not victims of impersonal forces that defy remedy — still less of "irresponsible" fathers who "abandon" them, as the political class invariably reports without evidence. These falsehoods provide the politicians with excuses to throw up their hands in despair or devise useless, self-serving programs that actually make the problem worse. The shooters are the products of government policies that intentionally remove children from their fathers and proliferate single-mother homes. They are the offspring of the two hatcheries that breed fatherless children: the welfare state and the divorce industry.
The social science is unequivocal. Virtually every major social pathology can be laid at the door of fatherless homes and communities — not race, not poverty. Single parent homes. That means crime, truancy, addiction, and more single parents.
Decade after decade, the problem only worsens until we are left with not only social chaos, but, increasingly, political chaos, too, and even tyranny. It is easily demonstrable that the BLM riots in 2020 that prepared the way for the leftist takeover of the U.S. government were perpetrated by dysfunctional, violent, and fatherless adolescents.
The problem will certainly not be ameliorated by feel-good palliatives like those implemented by the Clinton and Bush administrations and recently once again enacted in Florida. These programs claim to confront fatherlessness but in reality funnel more money to the welfare apparatchiks and divorce operators so they can create more fatherless children, on which their business depends. So diabolical is the political class in both political parties that it devises measures to exacerbate the problem in the very process of pretending to address it.
If conservatives do not like the liberals' explanations and solutions for the shootings (gun control) — and they should not — they had better come up with their own, and it had better be something more plausible than ever more incarceration. Sometimes the left and right seem to compete (or collude) in seeing who can devise the most authoritarian punishments, rather than face reality and accept the only solutions.
Conservatives do have a better explanation readily at hand — the only one. It is a stock conservative platitude that family breakdown will mean civilizational breakdown. Yet now that it is happening, they ignore the fulfillment of their own prophecies. Instead, they enact pointless programs designed by the liberals: fatherhood and marriage "promotion," psychotherapy, child support enforcement, and other make-work for functionaries.
Why? Because "fatherhood" and "pro-family" groups also make money on these programs that do more harm than good. Because Republican lawyers (including "Christian" ones) amass huge sums looting families through divorce. Because conservative leaders fear feminists and lack the spine to stand up to them. Because vast powers accrue to judicial operators, including Republican ones, as the divorce juggernaut systematically rolls over every limitation on expanding judicial power.
Fatherlessness is not insoluble, and neither is mass violence. They can be overcome, but not on the cheap. We must summon the courage to confront the divorce and welfare lobbies, especially within the Republican Party. The multiple excuses we devise is the proof that so far we lack the courage, as Carlson says, even to discuss it.
Stephen Baskerville is professor of political studies at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw and the author of The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Government Power (2017) and Taken into Custody: The War against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (2007), where the points in this article are documented.
