Tucker Carlson’s Dishonest Film about the Fatherhood Crisis

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more

StephenBaskerville.com

Tucker Carlson’s Dishonest Film about the Fatherhood Crisis

Are we back in the 1990s?

Stephen Baskerville

Apr 30
READ IN APP

It is truly sad to see Tucker Carlson producing this kind of vapid drivel. Many people admire Carlson, and his influence is enormous. But this is beyond belief.

Carlson just released a new video: “Fathers Wanted”. It may be a tribute to his sense of shame that he refrains from narrating it himself, and he seems to make only two appearances. One (54:00) is to scold fathers for “abandoning” their children.

This is a throwback to the 1990s/2000s. For those too young to remember, we were inundated with propaganda about “responsible” fatherhood and “good fathering”. The underlying message was that most fathers are ir-reponsible and their “fathering” needs improvement. But the insult added to injury was precisely the falsehood that Carlson reserves for himself to utter: Fathers whose children are confiscated by crooked tyrannical family courts have “abandoned” them.

Vice-President Al Gore initiated a White House program, and many state governors and even foreign governments followed suit: conferences, books, articles, films, TV shows — all filled with the same sentimental cliches and empty platitudes as Carlson’s video, scolding and nagging men to practice their officially accepted version of this “fathering”. (Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently displayed similar dishonesty by recycling the deception.) Federally funded scholars like David Blankenhorn and David Popenoe produced books touting the party line. The media credulously joined the witch hunt. We heard no objections from anyone (except feminists, ironically and perfunctorily), though of course fathers themselves were never allowed to be heard — as they are not in Carlson’s film.

None of the “fatherhood advocates” explained how government officials could “promote” fatherhood or “encourage” good fathering — or (another theme) “reconnect fathers with their children”. It turned out that “good fathering” meant feminist-approved fathering and feminist psychotherapy, and “reconnecting” with your children meant paying child support.

Meanwhile governments intensified ongoing efforts to disconnect more children from their fathers in order to fill their coffers with more child support. President Bill Clinton’s “Welfare Reform” tried (in vain) to reduce the welfare roles by “cracking down” on alleged “deadbeat dads”. Here too the media showed credulity rather than scepticism or scrutiny toward the government. Journalist Bernard Goldberg said, “We’ve done a million stories at the networks on deadbeats dads…but almost none on how too many divorced women use custody and visitation as weapons to punish their ex-husbands.” And absolutely zero on how family court judges were ripping millions of children away from fit and legally innocent fathers in order to plunder them for the “child support” that was really judge support, because it funded their own salaries and those of other functionaries.

This, not fathers “abandoning” their children, is the cause of this crisis — entirely.

Now, according to Carlson, fathers are to blame even when they are not fathers, because they refuse to marry unappealing, litigious women and find their children judicially kidnapped by juridical gangsters. The message is the same: Fathers cause problems when they are present, when they are “absent”, and even when they are never fathers in the first place. And still not a word about the corruption of family courts or injustices of the divorce industry.

It is hardly surprising that, 30 years on, the problem is worse than ever, because those programs could never do anything other than make it worse. Even amid Covid, election rigging, multiple forever wars, and impending economic catastrophe, former gang leader John Turnipseed still calls fatherlessness “the biggest problem we have in the nation”, and Jason Whitlock, Candace Owens, and Larry Elder say the same. (DeSantis recently showed, yet again, how to evade and worsen it.)

This should provoke a major outcry from throughout the “Manosphere”. If men can coalesce around rejection of this lie, this film may do some good in getting the abuses that Carlson avoids onto the public agenda.

~~~

This is by far the most dishonest and cowardly thing I have ever seen from Tucker Carlson.

I have criticized him repeated for his dishonesty on this topic and for his obvious fear of the divorce industry. But until now, I have tried to be charitable. He has long given indications that this topic interests him deeply. Little asides in his commentaries, hinting at things he dares not say. On other other hand, I happen to know that he is well aware of the real cause of this ongoing crisis, but like the rest of the mainstream media he chooses mendacity instead of truth.

By this, he signals that he is part of the problem: pretending to address a problem by blaming those who suffer under it because you fear offending those who are perpetrating it.

I have also published numerous articles about this dirty scam in mainstream and scholarly journals, as well as my books, starting with Taken Into Custody: The War on Fathers, Marriage, and the Family:

Sadly, none of these are out of date, because nothing has changed, except for the worse.

If you want to read more analysis that will push you to think “outside the box,” you will find it in my recent book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” — and What to Do about It — available from Amazon.

Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics (retired) at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw. His books and recent articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.