You’re Not a Lunatic? Thank Your Daddy.

What do the violent extremes on the Left and the Right have in common?
They tend to come from fatherless or divorced homes.
That’s Mary Eberstadt’s observation in “The Fury of the Fatherless” in the current issue of First Things.
She recites the well-known statistical facts about fatherlessness in the inner-cities (65% of blacks are born into fatherless homes) and that “absent fathers predict higher rates of truancy, psychiatric problems, criminality, promiscuity, drug use, rape, domestic violence, and other less-than-optimal outcomes.”
She then points out that the BLM movement itself seems almost intuitively drawn to promote a society without fathers.
The BLM website at one point 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.”
Eberstadt: “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.”
Alt-Right Daddy Problems
She also points to anecdotal evidence that it’s not just a Leftist problem, though her instances are all pointed at divorce only, which can be, but isn’t normally, the same thing as being born entirely out-of-wedlock or with no father in the picture:
“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, … Read the rest