You present to a physician with severe abdominal pain. He examines you and concludes that your ingrown toenails are the cause of your abdominal distress. He prescribes that you soak your feet in warm water but that does not bring relief to your abdominal pain. Then he suggests that you apply antibiotics to your feet. Still no relief. Then the physician suggests that you wear sandals instead of shoes. Still no relief. The point of this story is that your toenails can be treated until the cows come home, but if there is improper diagnosis, then you are still going to have your abdominal pain.
The former superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, Meria Carstarphen, last year said, “White students are nearly 4.5 grade levels ahead of their black peers within Atlanta Public Schools.” In San Francisco, 70% of white students are proficient in math; for black students, it is 12% — a gap of 58%. In Washington, D.C., 83% of white students scored proficient in reading, as did only 23% of black students — a gap of 60%. In Philadelphia, 47% of black students scored below basic in math and 42% scored below basic in reading. In Baltimore, 59% of black students scored below basic in math and 49% in reading. In Detroit, 73% of black students scored below basic in math and 56% in reading.
“Below basic” is the score a student receives when he is unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and grade level skills. How much can racism explain this? To do well in school, someone must make a kid do his homework, get a good night’s rest, have breakfast and mind the teacher. If these basic family functions are not performed, it makes little difference how much money is put into education the result will be disappointing.
In 2019, the racial breakdown of high school seniors who took the ACT college entrance exam and met its readiness benchmarks was 62% of Asians, 47% of whites, 23% of Hispanics and 11% of blacks. That helps explain a 2016 study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce “African Americans: College Majors and Earnings.” It found that black college students were highly concentrated in lower-paying and less academically demanding majors like administrative services and social work. They are much less likely than other students to major in science, technology, engineering and math, even though blacks in these fields earned as much as 50% more than blacks who earned a bachelor’s degree in art or psychology and social work.
James D. Agresti, the president and co-founder of Just Facts has just published an article titled “Social Ills That Plague African Americans Coincide with Leftism, Not Racism.” Agresti writes: “Among all of the afflictions that disproportionately impact people of color, violence may be the worst. In 2018, blacks comprised 13% of the U.S. population but roughly 53% of the 16,000 murder victims.” The clearance rate for murders, where a suspect was identified and charged, declined from 92% in 1960 to 62% in 2018. For example, in Chicago, the clearance rate fell from 96% in 1964 to 45% in 2018. In Baltimore, the 2019 clearance rate was 32%. In 2015, when Baltimore experienced the highest per-capita murder rate in its history, the average homicide suspect had been previously arrested more than nine times. When crimes remain unsolved, it gives criminals free range and black people are their primary victims. By the way, most law enforcement occurs at the local level. The governments at these local levels are typically dominated by Democrats.
According to statistics about fatherless homes, 90% of homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes; 71% of pregnant teenagers lack a father figure; 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes; 71% of high school dropouts come from fatherless homes; and 70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions have no father. Furthermore, fatherless boys and girls are twice as likely to drop out of high school and twice as likely to end up in jail. Dr. Thomas Sowell has argued, “The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.”
The bottom line is that while every vestige of racial discrimination has not been eliminated, today’s discrimination cannot go very far in explaining the problems faced by a large segment of the black community.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at http://www.creators.com.
Biden has appointed a radical slavery reparations advocate to his Treasury Department transition team. Mehrsa Baradaran, a UCLA professor, advocates reparations as the way to correct “white supremacy.” As I have reported, scholars have concluded that there are probably as many and perhaps more white descendants of slaves in the US than black descendants.
Baradaran misuses the word, “reparations.” Reparations are what a harmed person is paid by the person that harmed them. No living white person has ever owned a slave, and no living black American has ever been a slave. So what Baradaran is advocating is that white Americans be dispossessed so that black Americans can take their assets. In other words, she is advocating a racist act of theft. Her racism against white Americans has not kept her off of Biden’s Treasury transition team or from being a UCLA professor who brainwashes students. As the Democrats intend to open the floodgates of nonwhite immigration, every person of color who enters the US will benefit from the dispossession of white Americans.
But as I also have told you. Facts no longer matter in America. They do not matter in the universities and educational system any more than they do in the media and politics. We live in a world spun out of lies concocted to demonize white people. The punishment for telling the truth is to be cancelled, which is what has happened to the few honest journalists and professors and is what is happening right now to President Trump. White Americans are so brainwashed that they sit there sucking their thumbs while a coup unfolds before their eyes.
Democrats are dumping huge amounts of money into the runoffs for the US Senate in Georgia. Having stolen the presidential election, if the Democrats take these seats, the Democrats will have the entire government, and what is left of the US will be dismantled.
THOMAS Paine played a central role in the American Revolution. As John Adams said, “without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain.” Common Sense was the most widely read pamphlet of the American Revolution. And Paine’s Crisis essays were read by a larger fraction of the population than now watch the Super Bowl.
Its first essay (opening with “These are the times that that try men’s souls”) was read aloud in every army camp. Paine’s writings, which presented “principles … on which government ought to be erected,” inspired Washington to abandon his allegiance to Britain, Jefferson in drafting the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln in ending slavery. But given how far government today deviates from those principles, we might best honor him by remembering them.
Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
Of more worth is one honest man to society … than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.
Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices … a punisher.
Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.
Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz. freedom and security. Were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver, but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by thesame prudence which in every other case advises him, out of two evils to choose the least.
Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and the greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.
The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind. Governments … pervert the abundance which civilized life produces.… It affords to them pretenses for power and revenue, for which there would be neither occasion nor apology, if the circle of civilization were rendered complete.
Those who oppose an equality of rights never mean the exclusion should take place on themselves.
A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without a constitution is power without a right. All power exercised over a nation … must be either delegated, or assumed.… All delegated power is trust, and all assumed power is usurpation.
We still feel the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grasping at the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised to furnish new pretenses for revenue and taxation. It watches property as its prey and permits none to escape without a tribute.
When…[government] operates to create and increase wretchedness in any of the parts of society, it is on a wrong system, and reformation is necessary. When I contemplate the natural dignity of man, when I feel for the honor and happiness of its character, I become irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools, and can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are thus imposed upon.
Everywhere one looks there are warning signs, from labels on cigarette packs warning that smoking causes cancer, to ridiculous labels on thermometers that read, “Once used rectally, the thermometer should not be used orally.”
Associate Justice Samuel Alito has delivered some serious warnings that too often are ignored by many who believe the freedoms we enjoy are inviolable.
In an address last week to the Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention, Alito touched on several subjects, including COVID, religious liberty, the Second Amendment, free speech, and “bullying” of the Supreme Court by U.S. senators.
Alito made a case for how each issue contains elements that contribute to a slow erosion of our liberties. On tolerance, preached but not often practiced by the left, Alito said: “…tolerance for opposing views is now in short supply in many law schools, and in the broader academic community. When I speak with recent law school graduates, what I hear over and over is that they face harassment and retaliation if they say anything that departs from the law school orthodoxy.” This is not a new revelation, but it bears repeating.
While acknowledging the deaths, hospitalizations, and unemployment caused by COVID, Alito warned: “The pandemic has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty. Now, notice what I am not saying or even implying, I am not diminishing the severity of the virus’s threat to public health. … I’m not saying anything about the legality of COVID restrictions. Nor am I saying anything about whether any of these restrictions represent good public policy. I’m a judge, not a policymaker. All that I’m saying is this. And I think it is an indisputable statement of fact, we have never before seen restrictions as severe, extensive and prolonged as those experienced, for most of 2020.”
Where does this lead? Alito answered when he spoke of “…the dominance of lawmaking by executive fiat rather than legislation. The vision of early 20th-century progressives and the new dealers of the 1930s was the policymaking would shift from narrow-minded elected legislators, to an elite group of appointed experts, in a word, the policymaking would become more scientific. That dream has been realized to a large extent. Every year administrative agencies acting under broad delegations of ‘authority’ churn out huge volumes of regulations that dwarfs the statutes enacted by the people’s elected representatives. And what have we seen in the pandemic sweeping restrictions imposed for the most part, under statutes that confer enormous executive discretion?”
Alito cited a Nevada case that came before the Court: “Under that law, if the governor finds that there is, quote, a natural technological or manmade emergency, or disaster of major proportions, the governor can perform and exercise such functions, powers and duties as are necessary to promote and secure the safety and protection of the civilian population. To say that this provision confers broad discretion would be an understatement.”
Restrictions on how we are told to celebrate Thanksgiving would be another example.
On the erosion of religious liberty, he said: “It pains me to say this, but in certain quarters, religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored, right.” As evidence he mentioned how we have moved from the Religious Freedom Restoration Act passed by Congress in 1993 to the recent persecution by the Obama administration of The Little Sisters of the Poor for their refusal to include contraceptives in their health insurance. The Catholic nuns prevailed in a 7-2 court ruling, but Alito believes the threat to the free exercise of religion remains all too real.
There is much more in his address that should be read in its entirety. Alito’s warnings ring true, but are we listening?
You notice how the politicians keep bragging about a “reset”? They mean to RESET us. As if we’re inanimate objects. As if we’re buttons to be pressed, with no minds, no will and certainly no rights of our own. It’s sick, it’s evil and — if you refuse to fight it — you will pay the price of all prior people who have relinquished their bodies and souls to brutes and tyrants.
Throughout its history, America has faced many deadly external enemies. But the most dangerous today, by far, are inside our country. Even if there was no evidence of massive election fraud, their open intentions of turning the United States into a totalitarian regime devoid of economic freedom, individual rights and rule of law would be enough to treat them as actual enemies. If you value your liberty, these individuals are every bit as bad as any external enemy ever encountered by this country.
This election is the culmination of a four-year-long coup against the president. Evil, lying, malicious people at home, and abroad, are on the verge of officially pulling off the greatest heist in modern history.
Trump has been deprived of his rightful victory, and Republicans — from elected officials to writers for conservative websites — seem eager to get on board with the overthrow of our government.
The most egregious claim is that there was no election fraud, as if any of these professional do-nothings and disloyal opportunists have conducted investigations.
As usual, integrity, bravery, and a commitment to the truth are in short supply.
A rare exception to the clamoring voices that suggest we should just move-along-there’s-nothing-to-see-here is Sidney Powell, who stated during a Newsmax interview November 17 that it appears that Trump won 80 million votes and describes corruption on such a massive scale that it’s impossible to fully wrap your mind around it.
What Powell presents with increasing detail is a complex and coordinated criminal operation that is staggering in scope. Not only does it appear to involve multiple foreign nations, but we cannot rule out the involvement of our own CIA, among other agencies.
Think about that for a moment.
And if you feel as though that’s too much to absorb, don’t run away from it.
Yes, it is shocking, astounding, and unthinkable. And yet, here we are.
Now is the time to be courageous.
The left is working overtime to threaten anyone who stands for the truth. Those who do are put in grave danger. Many are left to choose between country and personal safety. This is not the kind of choice anyone should face in a free society.
“By any means necessary” is being played out every minute of every day as the left silences our voices and threatens those who stand in its way.
We must do everything in our power to get this right. And we must do it now.
We are trembling at the precipice with our toes right on the edge. Pulling back before we go over is all that matters.
Let’s push the truth out into the public sphere as boldly and as persistently as we can. That includes being unwilling to use the 72 million number, which, every time it’s stated, legitimizes the left’s narrative. And it means using language that is truthful.
If you were lucky enough to attend America’s premier academic institution, Harvard University, you would receive most days, as I do, the Harvard Gazette. The Gazette generally cloaks its pieces in the mantle of “news”; but really its principal function is to find ways for us Harvard people to congratulate ourselves on how brilliant we are, while at the same time heaping scorn and derision on the the ignorant deplorables who are always getting in the way of our plans to perfect the world.
You only need to read a few of these things before you start to realize that what might seem like the very “smartest” people — the ones with the fanciest degrees and the fanciest professorships at the fanciest universities — are actually painfully stupid.
Anyway, today’s Harvard Gazette arrives with some joyful news: Science is back! After four dreadful years of the “anti-science” Trump, we are now going to see, with Biden, the restoration of “science” to its rightful place in the formulation of public policy. This news is right there in the lead story, headline and sub-headline: “Is science back? Harvard’s Holdren says ‘yes’/Ex-Obama adviser says, unlike Trump, Biden and Harris will embrace factual analysis.” From the first paragraph:
[T]he incoming Biden-Harris administration has moved quickly to reinstall science as a foundation for government policy after four years of a president who disdained accepted scientific wisdom on subjects from wildfires to hurricane tracks, climate change to COVID-19.
The Gazette has learned that “science is back” by their usual method, which is by interviewing the leading Harvard professor on the subject. In this case that is John Holdren. Do you remember him? Holdren’s current title is “Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and professor of environmental science and policy in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.”
But before that he was “[A]ssistant to the [P]resident for science and technology and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy,” a position in which he served for the entire eight years of the Obama presidency. You may remember that Holdren was confirmed unanimously by the Senate in March 2009, after minimal scrutiny of his background.
So give us an example, John, of how a Biden administration will prove to be more “pro-science” than that deplorable Trump:
GAZETTE: What is an example of a classic, successful government policy backed by good science? . . . .
HOLDREN: I would point to the Paris Agreement, which was an immense step forward in which 195 countries all across the world committed to take constructive steps toward reducing their climate-altering emissions going forward. . . .
Now, as anyone who has read the Paris Agreement knows, the entire developing world — home to about 90% of the world’s people — made no commitments whatsoever in that document, nor did they even agree to any non-binding goals, toward “reducing their climate-altering emissions going forward.” Emissions from the developing world are rapidly increasing, and will continue to do so, Paris Agreement or no Paris Agreement, thus rendering any U.S. efforts to limit emissions completely futile. Holdren is either completely ignorant on this subject, or he is intentionally trying to mislead the readership. Or it could be some of both. You be the judge.
And by the way, might Holdren have some conflict of interest here that may be relevant? None is disclosed as such in the article. But you might happen to recognize that the funder of Holdren’s Harvard professorship, Teresa Heinz, is the wife of John Kerry. Kerry, of course, is the former Secretary of State who was in charge of negotiating the Paris Agreement, and who more recently co-chaired the panel that drafted the Biden energy program, and who undoubtedly is expecting some big position in an incoming Biden administration. But don’t worry, conflicts only apply to Republicans, so there is no need to mention any of this.
Anyway, if you think that John Holdren might be an appropriate person to weigh in on issues of the role of “science” in public policy, you may want to consider some of the man’s previous writings on the subject.
For example, in 1977 Holdren co-authored with Paul and Anne Ehrlich a textbook titled “Ecoscience.” We know that “Ecoscience” was about “science,” because it’s right there in the title; therefore we can be secure in understanding that this is a good place to look for Holdren’s views as to what using “science as a foundation for public policy” will entail. A principal theme of the book is that overpopulation is about to engulf the world (“science” has shown it!) and therefore governments are justified, and indeed required, to take the most extreme possible measures to prevent the impending disaster. In 2009, shortly after Holdren’s confirmation as Obama’s “science” advisor, a website called Zombietime collected a top-ten list of quotations from “Ecoscience.” Here are a few of my favorites:
Involuntary fertility control. . . . A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men. The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.
If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children, and if the need is compelling, they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility—just as they can be required to exercise responsibility in their resource-consumption patterns—providing they are not denied equal protection.
In today’s world, however, the number of children in a family is a matter of profound public concern. The law regulates other highly personal matters. For example, no one may lawfully have more than one spouse at a time. Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?
Toward a Planetary Regime. . . . Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. . . . The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market. The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits.
Now that I think of it, “painfully stupid” barely begins to describe the opinions of this man. Maybe we should go with “moral monster.” Or you could try another book that Holdren co-authored with the Ehrlichs — “Human Ecology,” from 1973. In 2014 the website CFACT compiled a collection of choice quotes from this one. Again, I’ll give you just a few of my favorites:
There is good reason to believe that population growth increases the probability of a lethal worldwide plague and of a thermonuclear war. Either could provide a catastrophic “death-rate solution” to the population problem; each is potentially capable of destroying civilization and even of driving Homo sapiens to extinction. . . . Perhaps more likely than extinction is the possibility that man will sur¬vive only to endure an existence barely recognizable as human-malnourished, beset by chronic disease, physically and emotionally impoverished, sur¬rounded by the devastation wrought by an industrial civilization that could not cope with the results of its own biological and social folly.
Political pressure must be applied immediately to induce the United States government to assume its responsibility to halt the growth of the Ameri¬can population. Once growth is halted, the government should undertake to influence the birth rate so that the population is reduced to an optimum size and maintained there.
A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environ¬ment in North America and to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation.
In another post, this one from 2009, CFACT noted that Holdren had also managed to take alarmist positions on climate change both in warning about global warming and also about global cooling — and that he had managed to take both positions simultaneously. CFACT concluded:
Holdren is a “doom peddler” who latches onto the nightmare-scenario-du-jour — overpopulation, nuclear holocaust, global cooling, global warming (all of which he’s trumpeted at various points in his career) — and then wildly exaggerates it in order to scare the public into adopting his politicized “solutions.”
Or, to put it another way, “science is back”! De-develop the United States? Forced population control? A “planetary regime” to control all “resources”? The “science” requires it! All the “smart” people from Harvard know that. You can understand why Holdren is excited about a Biden presidency. Are you?
PATRICK Henry’s March 23 “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech helped spark revolution in Virginia. But the influence of “the Voice of the Revolution” was greater than that. Henry was the first to raise his voice against England against taxation without representation. He led the attack against the Stamp Act in 1765, as well as being a leader in every protest against British tyranny and every movement for colonists’ rights afterwards. He helped draft the Virginia Constitution and the May 1776 declaration favoring independence. He was the first governor of Virginia. He led in the fight for a bill of rights. He was offered posts as Chief Justice and Secretary of State, which he turned down because of failing health.
Most Americans today know little about Patrick Henry. But he was central to our heritage as an advocate of the principles that created America and an actor in making our nation a reality. It is worth honoring him by reflecting on his commitment to liberty.
[We are] engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty. We wish to be free … we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending.
[Do not] bind our posterity by an improvident relinquishment of our rights. Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.
Liberty is the greatest of all earthly blessings … the dearest rights of man … the time has been, when every pulse of my heart beat for American liberty;… [with] a counterpart in the breast of every true American.
Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel.
Be extremely cautious, watchful, jealous of your liberty; for instead of securing your rights, you may lose them forever.
Liberty ought to be the direct end of your government. When the American spirit was in its youth … liberty, sir, was then the primary object … the foundation of everything. Nations who have gone in search of grandeur, power, and splendor … lost their freedom.… What can make an adequate satisfaction…[for] the loss of their liberty?
I address my most fervent prayer to prevent our adopting a system destructive to liberty. Grant power with a niggardly hand. In the language of freemen, stipulate that there are rights which no man under heaven can take from you. The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government—lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.
As long as we can preserve our inalienable rights, we are in safety. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by … frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.
The first thing I have at heart is American liberty. If our descendants be worthy of the name of Americans they will preserve and hand down to their latest posterity the transactions of the present times … to preserve their liberty.
We give little thought to whether our founding fathers would think our commitment to liberty worthy of the name Americans. But Patrick Henry would face us with that question. With liberty still contested daily, and often in retreat, his words bring us back to the core of what once made America a beacon of hope in the world.
“The State is an inherently illegitimate institution of organized aggression, of organized and regularized crime against the persons and properties of its subjects… a profoundly antisocial institution which lives parasitically off the productive activities of private citizens.”
“The State is a coercive criminal organization that subsists by a regularized large-scale system of taxation-theft.”
The Trump administration’s recent designation of several American cities as “anarchic jurisdictions” may turn out to have been nothing more than a quixotic gambit in the supercharged run-up to November 3. But the fact that it was thinkable in the first place points to a truth beyond electoral politics: The frenzy that has been enacted in city after American city since May 2020 demands more scrutiny than it has yet received.
It is true that most protests have been peaceful. It is also true that the exceptions—marked by violence and biliousness and unreason and, well, anarchy—have been far more common than many people have understood, at least until recently. As of late September, a USA TODAY/Ipsos poll reports that two-thirds of respondents believe that “protesters and counterprotesters are overwhelming American cities.” The majority is on to something.
According to the first thorough examination of the street protests triggered by the death of George Floyd, undertaken by Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project in conjunction with the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton, more than 10,600 incidents of what is benignly called “unrest” were recorded between May 24 and August 22. Of these, some 570 involved violence. Of those, most have involved Black Lives Matter activists. Preliminary insurance estimates show that the damage will surpass the $1.2 billion in damages accrued during the 1992 Rodney King riots. And then there are the atmospherics that separate these protests from many that have gone before: lusty screaming, ecstatic vandalism, the menacing of bystanders.
The ritualistic exhibition of destructive behaviors in city after city is without precedent in America. Neither the civil rights demonstrations nor the protests against the war in Vietnam looked remotely like this. The differences demand explanation. Blame what you will on the usual bête noirs: Donald Trump, cancel culture, police brutality, political tribalism, the coronavirus pandemic, far-right militias, BLM, antifa. All these factors feed the “demand” side of the protests and rioting, the reasons for the ritualistic enactment. But what about the “supply” side—the ready and apparently inexhaustible ranks of demonstrators themselves? What explains them?
The answer cannot be “racism.” The spectacle of often-white protesters screaming at sometimes-black policemen undercuts anything dreamed of by Critical Race Theory. So do the actual statistics concerning cop-on-black crime. So do public attitudes. In 2017, according to Pew Research, 52 percent of respondents said that race “doesn’t make much difference” in marriage, and another 39 percent said that interracial marriage is “a good thing.” When 91 percent of the public shrugs at or applauds interracial marriage, it is absurd to speak of a spectral racism that permanently and irredeemably poisons society.
So, here’s a new theory: The explosive events of 2020 are but the latest eruption along a fault line running through our already unstable lives. That eruption exposes the threefold crisis of filial attachment that has beset the Western world for more than half a century. Deprived of father, Father, and patria, a critical mass of humanity has become socially dysfunctional on a scale not seen before.
This is especially true of the young. The frantic flight to collective political identities has primordial, not transient, origins. The riots are, at least in part, a visible consequence of the largely invisible crisis of Western paternity. We know this to be true, in more ways than one.
First, a syllogism: The riots amount to social dysfunction on parade. Six decades of social science have established that the most efficient way to increase dysfunction is to increase fatherlessness. And this the United States has done, for two generations now. Almost one in four children today grows up without a father in the home. For African Americans, it is some 65 percent of children.
Some people, mainly on the left, think there’s nothing to see here. They’re wrong. The vast majority of incarcerated juveniles have grown up in fatherless homes. Teen and other mass murderers almost invariably have filial rupture in their biographies. Absent fathers predict higher rates of truancy, psychiatric problems, criminality, promiscuity, drug use, rape, domestic violence, and other less-than-optimal outcomes.
Here’s another pertinent, albeit socially radioactive fact: Fatherlessness leads to a search for father substitutes. And some of these daddy placeholders turn out to be toxic.
The murder rates in inner cities, for example, are irreducibly familial phenomena. That’s because the murder problem is largely a gang problem, and the gang problem is largely a daddy problem. As the Minnesota Psychological Association put it in a study published in August:
A high percentage of gang members come from father-absent homes . . . possibly resulting from a need for a sense of belonging. Gaining that sense of belonging is an important element for all individuals. Through gangs, youth find a sense of community and acceptance. In addition, the gang leader may fill the role of father, often leading members to model their behaviors after that individual. . . . Having a father in the child’s life greatly reduces the likelihood of a child joining a gang . . .
Second, the language of BLM itself suggests that daddy issues are an ingredient in the political mix that has exploded in cities across the country. Before it was removed in late September, one section of the BLM website declared: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”
Note the missing noun: fathers. It is as if fathers—as distinct from “parents”—had ceased to exist. And indeed, for at least some of the people drawn to BLM’s ideology, fathers have ceased to exist. In this sense, BLM is a direct heir of the founding document of identity politics, the Cohambee River Collective Statement put forward by black feminists in 1977. That manifesto spoke of women and children only—never of fathers, brothers, or sons.
What does it tell us that these seminal declarations of identity politics are shot through with “the presence of the absence” of fathers? At minimum, the politics of identity are not operating in isolation from the disappearance of paternal authority.
Third, the biographies of at least some of today’s race-minded trailblazers suggest a connection between fatherlessness and identity politics. The author of the bestseller White Fragility was a child of divorce at age two. The author of the bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race reports that her father left the family and broke off contact, also when she was two. The author of another bestseller, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, was raised by a single mother. The author of another hot race book, The Anti-Racist: How to Start the Conversation About Race and Take Action, was raised by his grandmother. Colin Kaepernick’s biological father left his mother before he was born, but he was then adopted and raised by a white family. James Baldwin, a major inspiration for today’s new racialist writers, grew up with an abusive stepfather; his mother left his biological father before he was born. The list could go on.
So what? A skeptic might say. Maybe family breakup is just part of many peoples’ kitchen wallpaper by now. True. But it may also be motivating the formation of identitarian political groups that operate as functioning families do, by providing protection and community—just as family breakup in the inner city lures many fatherless kids to gangs.
Biographies on the alt-right and far-right offer similar suggestive evidence. The founder of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa is a child of divorce. The neo-Nazi who founded the alt-right media network The Right Stuff is a child of divorce. George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, was a child of divorce. Timothy McVeigh, the poster boy and prototype for today’s violent far-right aspirants, was a child of divorce who was raised largely by his father. This list, too, could go on. An Atlantic profile of neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin concluded: “Like so many emotionally damaged young men, [he] had chosen to be someone, or something, bigger than himself on the Internet, something ferocious to cover up the frailty he couldn’t abide in himself.” Exactly.
Consider a fourth proof that AWOL fathers have something to do with this summer’s social crackup: Portland.
The city that has been ground zero of nonstop protests and riots for months now is not just any American town. For more than thirty years, abandoned children and runaways have been a unique part of the city’s culture. And, for thirty years, documentaries and other reports on these lost children have abounded. It was Portland’s permissive approach to runaways that created the nation’s best-known subculture of “teen hobos,” “teen homeless,” and “street teens.” In Portland, the link between dysfunctional kids and absent authority figures has been clear for a long time now. As one researcher summarized: “The inability to emotionally connect with parents is a thread of commonality linking the narrative of street kids and travelers in Portland.”
Lacking family ties, Portland’s feral children have bonded since the 1980s in “street families,” complete with “street moms” and “street dads.” Some of the most grotesque crimes in the city’s history have ensued thanks to “laws” about “family” loyalty—including last year, when a group of three boys from such a “family” shot and killed a man as he was collecting cans, then took his car on a joyride. “Street families” are an especially toxic variant of the current voguish phrase, “chosen families.” Street families are like gangs: poor and desperate substitutes for the real thing, called into being by the absence of the real thing.
In the violent Neverland that is a part of downtown Portland, the lived connection between social breakdown and family breakdown has been inescapable since long before the death of George Floyd.
But the story of the long, hot summer of 2020 is much more complex than the subplot concerning missing dads. More and more Americans, especially young Americans, have suffered not one but several ruptured connections to authority and community simultaneously.
That fact explains why even the young who do come from intact homes are affected to some degree by the crisis of Western paternity. The institutions that once anchored teenagers and young adults in paternal authority are in free fall. Their concomitant collapses generate a social anxiety that is contagious. This dynamic renders the occasional spectacle of well-off protesters from unbroken homes smashing people’s property more intelligible than it appears at first. The saying “People, not property” inadvertently points to what ails young America most: a people deficit.
Christianity, to name one institution that has connected Americans to other generations and one another, began a stark decline around 1963. That decline has accelerated with particular speed among the young. In 2019, 44 percent of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-nine were “nones.” “None of the above” is now the fastest-growing religious subset in the United States.
There is evidence that the loosening of family ties and the loosening of religious ties are linked—especially among practitioners of identity politics. A 2016 study of white nationalists by the University of Virginia’s Family Policies Institute turned up at least two suggestive findings. One was that subjects were much more likely to be divorced than to be married or never married. Once again, family rupture and extremist identity politics appear to be related.
The same study also confirmed that those drawn to white nationalism are unlikely to attend church (indeed, most white nationalists fervently oppose both Christianity and Judaism). Thus, religious rupture and extremist identity politics also appear to be related. The same seems true of BLM, which as a Marxist movement would oppose Christianity in principle. It seems unlikely that antifa members are tithing or spending Sunday mornings with a hymnal, either. Identitarian bands seem to function as “street families” for the soul.
If fatherlessness and secularization are two aspects of the decline of the paternal principle, there remains a third: attachment to country. Here, too, Millennials and Gen Z stand out. For many years, the decline of American patriotism among the young has been charted in surveys. Gallup reports a fifty-year decline in Americans’ trust in both political and non-political institutions (the military, the police, organized religion, the media). A headline last year summarized the point: “Poll: Patriotism, Religion, Kids Lower Priorities for Younger Americans.”
Plainly, weakened bonds in one phase are not an isolated phenomenon; they encourage weaker bonds elsewhere. Filial piety, perhaps, is like a muscle that is strengthened by different forms of exercise.
We are only beginning to understand how filial piety operates, such that loss of patriotism, loss of faith, and loss of family each seem to encourage breakdown in the other parts of the triad. In his groundbreaking 1999 book, Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism, sociologist Paul Vitz analyzed one way in which the father-Father connection might operate. He examined prominent atheists across four centuries and argued that each had experienced some form of “defective fatherhood,” such as absence or abuse. Anger at fathers, Vitz theorized, was translated into anger at God. In 2013, my book How the West Really Lost God connected godlessness and fatherlessness to argue that secularization amounted to fallout from the sexual revolution. Together, Vitz’s book and mine suggest an avenue of research: Does lacking an earthly father make it harder to believe in a supernatural Father? And might the reverse also be true?
To understand better how these simultaneous attenuations of filial attachment play out, consider two imaginary characters: William, born in 1950, and his grandson Brandon, born in 2000:
A member of the Baby Boom generation, William grew up in an intact home. His parents took him and his siblings to church. Two adults in the home meant twice as many warm bodies for driving and organizing. This meant that William, like his siblings, belonged to Boy Scouts, Little League, high school sports, the church youth group, marching band, and other activities.
Though William wasn’t much of a flag-waver, he wasn’t a flag-burner, either. This was true, in part, because almost every male authority figure William knew had served in World War II or the Korean conflict, and, of course, some of his contemporaries served in Vietnam. The Star-Spangled Banner was played without incident before every football and basketball game at his high school.
William married young and had a family. He and his wife found an evangelical church to their liking. He didn’t always attend with her, but he did volunteer in the church’s soup kitchen. It made him feel good. William also coached Little League, volunteered with the local ambulance corps, and played regular poker games. William smoked cigarettes, especially with friends on his work breaks. His favorite TV show, which he watched with his family, was Star Trek. He thought it would be cool if his children or grandchildren ended up traveling in outer space.
William’s grandson Brandon, a Zoomer, was born in 2000. His mother—William’s daughter—married Brandon’s father. The pair split up when Brandon was three. Brandon has no siblings. He rarely saw his father, or his father’s side of the family, after the divorce. Given what he has heard from his mother, he doesn’t much want to. He thinks of his father, who eventually remarried, as a two-time loser. At age twenty, William has already decided that he won’t let any woman entrap him in a marriage. Thanks to the Internet, he has other outlets for sex, anyway.
Having a single mom put certain activities off the table. Brandon never joined Little League or the Scouts or other youth groups. He played soccer for his school and loved it. But logistics placed other possibilities, such as travel-team sports, beyond reach. Since he graduated high school, most of Brandon’s “irl” activity—like much of his activity, period—has been solitary.
Brandon’s mom swore off religion at the time of her divorce, so he’s rarely been inside a church. When his mom’s boyfriend moved in, Brandon started spending most of his time in his room or out of the house. He doesn’t pay much attention to politics, but he does watch lots of sports. He likes Colin Kaepernick’s FU attitude. Brandon smokes pot by himself. His favorite video game, which he plays alone or with others online, is Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition.
Like other young adults, Brandon spends a lot of time on the Internet. During high school, two of his favorite sites were Reddit and 4chan. For a while, Brandon was drawn to the alt-right; he liked that they had an FU attitude, too. As of summer, 2020, though, he’s been following social media about antifa with growing interest. He likes the action of their protests and riots and street fights with the cops. He might move to Portland someday for the politics, or maybe to Colorado for the pot. Brandon thinks it would be cool to skateboard with a real gun.
As these imaginary lives convey, a generational divide has opened between the Boomers and the Millennials and Zoomers. It is a wealth gap over social capital. And it is enormous.
As is plain in retrospect, William’s attachments to entities other than himself, and larger than himself, were not neutral coordinates of human geography. They informed and enriched his life, not least because they put other people in it—people from whom he could learn, with whom he could connect and network, and through whom he could learn commitments and make common cause.
Brandon’s more tenuous attachments make his existence very different from his grandfather’s. His days are lonelier. His enthusiasms are less tempered by familial and communal influences, and hence more volatile. The deficit lies not merely in Brandon’s fatherlessness. It is arithmetical, beginning with the subtraction of his father’s entire side, which effectively halves the number of Brandon’s relatives. The diminution of kin continues with the shrinking number of family members on his mother’s side.
As a result, there are fewer people in Brandon’s life from whom he might learn essential skills such as negotiation, diligence, compromise, teamwork, delayed gratification, and self-control. If and when the time comes for Brandon to become a father, he will have less to impart on all these fronts, as well. In sum, Brandon is a poster boy for the trends mapped in Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone, a book that appeared in the very year that our imaginary Zoomer was born.
Of course, there are other variables that diminish Brandon’s chances in life. Millennials and Zoomers face economic problems the Boomers did not, especially staggering college debt and the continuing effect on capital of the financial crash of 2008. But dollars and cents may not be the only reason for the wealth-and-opportunity divide. Perhaps the relative economic success of the Boomers is not a matter of business cycles alone. Perhaps the social skills attained through respecting and negotiating with different kinds of authority are valuable training for a productive life. Perhaps having more siblings rather than fewer, more social ties rather than fewer—more contemporaries and others of all kinds, from whom “social learning” becomes possible—are lifetime pluses.
This much we do know. The streets of Portland—and Kenosha, and Baltimore, and Rochester, and all the other cities serving as proscenia for today’s mob explosions—are full of Brandons. And in a curious coda at a time when race seems to be everywhere, note that it does not matter whether William and Brandon are black, white, or other. The demographic trends that shape their stories and the resulting social wealth gap remain the same.
This brings us to the point that has been missed so far, not only during the long summer of 2020, but throughout the many recent discussions of American disarray, or American unraveling, or just plain what the hell is happening to America?
What is happening to America is an excruciatingly painful truth that life without father, Father, and filial piety toward country are not the socially neutral options that contemporary liberalism holds them to be. The sinkhole into which all three have collapsed is now a public hazard. The threefold crisis of paternity is depriving many young people—especially young men—of reasons to live as rational and productive citizens. As the Catholic theologian Deborah Savage put it recently, reflecting on America’s youth: “They have been left alone in a cosmos with nothing to guide them, not even a firm grasp of what constitutes their basic humanity, and no means of finding the way home.”
All manner of accelerants have made matters worse: the Internet, social media, racial prejudice, lax political leadership, scandals within the churches, the coarsening of political conversation, the polarization of the media into clashing armies. So has the metastasizing of the Civil Rights Act, as Christopher Caldwell has observed. A feverishly partisan intellectual class has stoked the flames with Critical Race Theory, charges of “fascism” in America, and other debased characterizations of the country. What Jeane Kirkpatrick called “blaming America first” has become the standard classroom narrative for practically every humanities major under the age of seventy. Doubtless, such intellectual hooliganism has something to do with declining faith in authority of any kind—and with diminishing patriotism, too.
Still, summer 2020 signals something new. The triply disenfranchised children of the West have achieved critical mass. They have slipped the surly bonds of their atomized childhoods; they have found their fellow raging sufferers and formed online families; and they have burst as a destructive force onto the national consciousness en masse, left and right, as never before.
Like Edmund in King Lear, who despised his half-brother Edgar, these disinherited young are beyond furious. Like Edmund, too, they resent and envy their fellows born to an ordered paternity, those with secure attachments to family and faith and country.
That last point is critical. Their resentment is why the triply dispossessed tear down statues not only of Confederates, but of Founding Fathers and town fathers and city fathers and anything else that looks like a father, period. It is why we see generational vituperation toward the Baby Boomers, like the diss of “OK, Boomer” and the epithet “Karen.” It is why bands of what might be called “chosen protest families” disrupt actual family meals. It is why BLM disrupts bedroom communities late at night, where real, non-chosen families are otherwise at peace.
Resentment of the Edgars of the world is also the unbidden method beneath the seeming madness of BLM protesters surrounding a home in suburban Portland and demanding that the American flag be taken down, as happened in September. That the homeowner was black, and a veteran, did not matter. The men and women who think they have no country cannot abide those who have a country, any more than the illegitimate son in King Lear can endure his half-brother’s enjoying a patrimony.
The dispossessed children who roam the streets in search of yet more destruction may not be large in number compared to the rest of America. And to understand them is not to exonerate them—far from it. But they will not go away until the crisis that has unhinged them, and severed them from their own, is ameliorated. In one of the most chilling passages in all of Shakespeare, Edmund calls on the gods to stand up for bastards. As gun sales double within a year, and as America navigates the results of what may be the most contentious election in the country’s history, we are about to find out whether they will.
Mary Eberstadt is a senior fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute.
