How the War Against Humanity Kicked Off
‘Somebody must have been telling lies about Josef K. because, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one fine morning.' — The opening sentence of Kafka's 'The Trial'
‘We are all women now!’
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The dismantling of Western justice and democracy was road-tested in the unlikely context of family relationships, using secret courts to test human tolerance to abuses ideologically ordained. Introducing Stephen Baskerville and his forensic, unflinching writings — a meditation of his influence, work and latest book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went ‘Communist’ and What to Do about It. As he says on his Substack page, Stephen offers ‘unconventional perspectives’ on politics, history, religion, law, sex, and higher education. ‘For better or worse, what you read here is definitely "outside the box" and perhaps outside your "comfort zone."‘
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One of the truths about the ‘culture wars’ that came dropping rather slow for me was that nothing was as it seemed on the surface. My own involvement arose because of my pre-existing interest in the treatment of fathers — in the broader context, men — in a culture that ostensibly seemed to be scapegoating them for alleged sins of their forefathers under the guise of advancing the allegedly neglected cause of women. In the mid-1990s, I started to write about aspects of this peculiarity, like twisted family law courts, disproportionately male suicide statistics, rigged domestic violence figures, and related matters. I also wrote about abortion from the father’s/man’s perspective — an utterly ignored question — and marriage as something that appeared increasingly to become a dangerous state for a man to enter into. My general experience at that time was of being consistently opposed by ‘liberals’ — who mysteriously did not extend their much-trumpeted zeal for justice in the direction of men —and left swinging in the wind by ‘conservatives’ who claimed to defend ‘family values’ while somehow excluding men/fathers from any benefit of their protection.
It was only after I began extending my attention into more recent episodes of the ‘culture wars’ that the pennies began to drop. I noticed, back about a decade ago, when I ran afoul of the LGBTQ goon squads for saying in the context of what they considered their argument the same things I had been saying for twenty years, that everybody seemed to have ‘forgotten’ that I was the guy who had always been ‘banging on about fathers’ — my standard citation before that. This, I came to realise, was because it was somehow deemed more appropriate — or perhaps useful — to depict me as a Catholic reactionary rather than a longtime advocate of coherent policies of family protection. I was, as it happened, a Catholic, but none of my positions on this or any other subject owed more than a sporadic deepening of my anthropological understandings on the relevant issues of marital destruction and baby-slaughter. You didn’t need to be a Catholic to be sickened by the idea of the corpse of a namelsss child in a wastebasket being spoken about as somebody’s ‘reproductive rights’. For that matter, precious few representatives of the Catholic Church had ever opened their mouths in defence of the father, despite his morally irrefutable centrality to the concept and reality of family life.
So, in 2104/15, when I was eventually driven out of my job as a newspaper columnist by a mob of queers and former ‘colleagues’ — and, moreover, to the emphatic silence of ‘conservatives’ — those who for years had sneered at my ‘fixation’ with fatherhood remained silent also. They did not wish to connect what was happening to the father issue. It was clear that, whatever else, it was somehow deemed vital that none of what was under discussion at the time be connected to anything broader — to any more holistic consideration of family or any more fundamental concepts of justice. And so, while we were being assured that ‘family rights for gays’ was ‘the most important human right in a generation’, the scapegoating of fathers continued apace, as did the dispensation of ‘justice’ requiring that the children of single or separated/divorced fathers be treated as unequal and undeserving among others.
In the midst of all this, about six years ago, I tried to persuade a particular ‘conservative’ body to host a meeting in Dublin for the American writer, Stephen Baskerville, whom I had become aware of a decade earlier for his writings about fatherhood. I had myself participated in a number of events organised under the rubric of this organisation, though not on this subject, and had been surprised by its capacity to draw in significant crowds across a range of issues and speakers. It seemed to me that defending fathers was central to defending marriage and children, and therefore that what Stephen had to say would be of profound interest to those who were concerned with the drifts in our culture towards a la carte families. The organisation promptly agreed to manage the event, and I anticipated one of its typical assemblies, probably in a city centre hotel, attended by several hundred people from its mailing lists. As the date approached, it became clear to me that what appeared to be in store was a nondescript event in a tiny room in an obscure location in the headquarters of a religious organisation that had never been vocal on the issue of fatherhood. I raised concerns about this and was told that the level of recent activity in other areas had rendered resources somewhat straitened, and there was a fear of ‘issue fatigue’ among the prospective audience. On the night, there were about a dozen people in the room, including Stephen Baskerville and myself, and most of these had been personally invited by me.
At the time, even this lamentable contempt for the father-issue had an ambiguous outward appearance. Half-accepting the predictable excuses for the fiasco I had drawn him into, I apologised profusely to Stephen, but still did not hear the pennies dropping. The reasons for our mutual humiliation might well have included laziness or inattention or busyness with other matters, but looking back now I realise I was being gifted an insight into the true agenda of ‘conservatism’ — just one of what would in time reveal themselves as a host of glaring indicators of a tacit agreement among ‘conservatives’ and establishments that defences of fatherhood were not to be included among the agendas adopted or promoted by them. The purpose of formal ‘conservatism’ was to focus on peripheralities, so that the core machinations of the anti-family revolution would not attract public attention.
This was not the only difficulty I had in seeking to draw public attention to Stephen Baskerville. Not long before that, I had attempted to review one of his books for an American conservative magazine (no quotes here!) and run into similar ‘ambiguities’. The book, titled The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, & the Growth of Government Power, did exactly what it said on the tin. At my own proposal, I wrote a comprehensive review, incorporating mention of all facets and perspectives of the book, but ran into prolonged difficulty with an editor who seemed to wish to confine the reader’s understanding of the scope of Baskerville’s arguments, which have pointedly refused to be confined to the usual victim-pleading on behalf of fathers, in this book seeking — as the title implied — to draw attention to the broader context of father-violation by powerful interests seeking to extend their power. In the end of an extended battle, I managed to achieve publication of what was no more than a token alert to the existence of the book, an endeavour I persisted with in the hope that something would prove to be better than nothing.
I first became aware of Stephen Baskerville back in 2007, when someone drew my attention to a positive reference to my work in defence of fathers in his just-released book, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage and the Family. That book was a definitive debunking of the American divorce industry, a comprehensive exposé of multiple facets of the divorce/custody machine and of the politics behind the weaponisation of family law as an instrument of ideological warfare, demonstrating why what was at play was much worse than simple ‘gender bias’ against fathers — matters which I had myself been writing about in the Irish context in my column in the Irish Times.
Taken Into Custody went much further, being in fact a thoroughly documented study of the most repressive government machine ever created in the United States, exposing the hoax of the derelict, absconding father, and describing in graphic detail the cultural pogrom against fatherhood that had by then persisted in every ‘modern’ society for several decades.
The New Politics of Sex, which dropped a decade later, took an even deeper dive into the root-structure of that war, situating the treatment of fathers in the context of the ‘gender’-related insanity already manifesting in what at first seemed like a thoroughly unconnected fashion. One of Stephen Baskerville’s central contentions was that the Sexual Revolution was about much more than discarding sexual inhibitions and restrictions — that it was driven, in fact, by revolutionaries seeking power. Through the joint initiatives of feminists and homosexualists, leftism had been re-directed away from the economic and race-theory realms to the social and sexual, where it had set to attacking family, marriage, masculinity and religion. In The New Politics of Sex, he exposed this actually existing dystopia as it manifested in modern America, and explained the origins and dynamics of the driving ideologies behind its signal tendencies, from no-fault divorce to the disaster of ‘equality’ in the armed forces of the US. Baskerville described what was happening as ‘the most utopian project around’ and ‘potentially the most total politics ever devised’. Little wonder that they wished to mute him.
But his analysis cut much deeper than mere ‘gender’ disputation. In The New Politics of Sex, he unmasked what was and remains the most rapidly metastasising and insidious of the cancers afflicting modern society: the stripping out of the rights of ordinary citizens, without presumption of innocence, without due process, often without evidence, sometimes without the accused being told what he is accused of, with the intention and effect of invading that person’s life at its very core, stripping him of dignity and protections, reducing him to the status of latter-day serf — all under the cover of secret courts claiming to protect mothers and children from the bogeyman called Father.
As the Soviet system targeted the political and economic structures, the latter-day leftist tyrants wanted control of intimate and family relationships. ‘To relieve the oppressed,’ Baskerville wrote in that bracing book, ‘the all-powerful state nationalizes not only the private firm but the private family. Romantic and family intimacy — the individual’s last refuge from state power — is not merely a collateral casualty but the targeted enemy.’
His central thesis here was that the mechanisms that developed out of ‘no-fault’ divorce — secret hearings, summary justice, the suspension of normal evidential requirements and pseudo principles like ‘the best interests of the child’ — had spawned sub-stratums within American law-enforcement and justice systems in which, in effect, the law has been suspended. From the persistent agitation of feminists, and — increasingly — homosexualists piggy-backing on the feminist revolution, the legal procedures relating to family life had been cut apart from the mainstream of American justice, and enabled to expand exponentially with negligible political objections. The list of areas into which the new culture of quasi-legality had spread included domestic violence, rape and sexual assault, sexual harassment, stalking, child abuse, bullying, hate crimes, hate speech and sundry others. In each of these areas, guilt could now be established on the basis of an accusation only: the subjective feelings of the accuser were to be the principle determining factor; if the accused pleaded innocence, well, he would, wouldn’t he?
At the very heart of this anti-culture is a monumental lie: that of the delinquent male who is the architect of marriage breakdown and a serial abuser of women and the children he eventually abandons. In fact, the vast majority of divorces in every Western society are initiated by women; independent scientific surveys of domestic violence indicate a 50/50 phenomenon; and the safest place, statistically speaking, that a child can be is in the company of his or her natural father — this for two reasons: women are more likely to employ violence against children and the sexual partners of single mothers represent an exponentially greater sexual risk to children than even theoretically arises in the proximity of their own fathers.
Unlike other court processes, family law since the introduction of ‘no-fault’ divorce has offered little scope for whomever is named as ‘defendant’ to defend himself: ‘guilty’ of having lost the affection of his spouse, he has crossed the line to merit the maximum penalty. ‘No-fault’ divorce soon revealed itself as ‘max-blame’ under the force of the imperative to exact money from breadwinners to pay for the quasi-legal industry that developed.
Baskerville explains: ‘So the “fault” ostensibly thrown out the front door of divorce proceedings re-entered through the back, but with no precise definition. The judiciary expanded its traditional role of punishing crime or redressing tort to punishing personal faults and private differences: suddenly, one could be summoned to court without having committed any legal infraction; the verdict was pre-determined without any evidence being examined; and one could be found culpable for things that were not illegal.’
Just one country in the world imprisons a greater proportion of its citizens than the United States of America: North Korea. An increasing number of incarcerated Americans are imprisoned not because they have done anything wrong but because they have fallen afoul, in the most intimate realm of their existences, of a ruthless but unacknowledged ideological war:
‘Previously, a citizen could be incarcerated only following conviction by a jury for wilfully violating a specific statute, passed with citizen input and after deliberation by elected legislators, that applied equally to all. Suddenly, a citizen could be arrested and jailed without trial for failing to live in conformity with an order, formulated in a matter of minutes from limited information by an unelected judge, that applied to no one but himself, and whose provisions might well be beyond his ability to obey. In effect, a personalized criminal code is legislated ad hoc around each divorced spouse, subjecting him or her to arrest for doing what anyone else may lawfully do.’
Back in 2017, Baskerville estimated that divorce cases in the US accounted for 35-50 per cent of civil litigation, at a cost to the public purse of billions of dollars per year. The ‘crimes’ unearthed in these courts might include a father contacting his own children, visiting a house he built with his own hands, failing to meet a child support order far beyond his ability to pay, and on and on. The word ‘arbitrary’ is inadequate to describe the deep nature of family law in modern Western societies, and the husband/father is all but invariably the target of this modern tyranny. It is no accident that family law courts have become forums for the plunder and criminalisation of fathers, and unsurprising that men are increasingly wary of a concept of marriage that could mean that, one fine morning, they could awake to find that they have been arrested, lost their homes, wealth, property and children, and face a battle to stay out of jail.
By Baskerville’s persuasive telling, the ultimate point of this is not simply the avenging of womanhood for (alleged) historical wrongs, or even the creation of an illiberal ‘liberal society’, or the enrichment of the legal profession — although all these are undoubtedly among the collateral consequences. The point is power and control. He explains: ‘The legal systems of the Common Law countries have long recognized the married family as a zone of privacy that is off-limits to the state — what Supreme Court Justice Byron White called a “realm or family life which the state cannot enter”. And the main purpose of this is to allow parents to rear their children according to their own principles free from state interference.’
It is in this sense that the married family has been ‘the guarantor of freedom for the entire society’ — a conservative cliché of which the logic is seldom penetrated. A family ‘creates a zone of privacy that is off-limits to the state and creates an authority that is the only exception to the government’s monopoly on coercive force.’ This is why social workers, judges, divorce lawyers and others seek now to prohibit or curtail the authority of the family to impose increasingly detailed ordinances relating to the rearing of other people’s children: ‘Without parental authority,’ Baskerville writes, ‘government reach is total.’
In addressing the nature of marriage in The New Politics of Sex, Baskerville applied a forensic clarity that exposed why conservative arguments against redefinition of the institution had failed to prevent its dismantling. Contrary to the interminable assertion of defenders of traditional families, the purpose of marriage, he insisted, is not procreation, but fatherhood. The standard conservative argument that marriage exists to rear children is too imprecise. ‘Marriage allows children to have fathers, turning men from sperm donors into fathers and bestowing parental authority on fathers in the same way as mothers.’ It is the presence of the father, he explained, that creates the intact family and thereby the civil institution of marriage itself. Conservatives and church leaders, he asserted, had been failing to recognize these realities and therefore producing inadequate arguments in the face of the LGBT/feminist onslaught on marriage and family. ‘Instead of recognizing the truth,’ he wrote in 2017, ‘conservative sentimentalists labor the cliché that marriage exists to civilize men and control their promiscuity. If so, that is part of a larger function: to protect the father-child bond and with it the intact family.’ The only essential role of the state in relation to marriages, he declared, is to guarantee the rights of the parents, ‘especially the father’. Simple as this: no marriage, no fatherhood, and vice versa. And if marriage establishes fatherhood, divorce has become in effect a system for destroying both concepts.
While conservatives admonished the departing tide of ‘family values’, a revolution was taking place in front of their noses. ’No legislative enactment has spread more turmoil throughout the social order, transferred more power to the state, or done more to debase the legal machinery from a dispenser of justice into a weapon of plunder and aggrandizement of power [than no-fault divorce],’ Baskerville wrote in 2017. ‘Banal as it has been made to appear by euphemisms and platitudes, it has been clearly documented that the divorce epidemic is driven by a deadly, authoritarian ideology that sets aside virtually every legal protection afforded to citizens in democratic countries and has sent massive numbers of innocent people into a legal nightmare that frequently ends in poverty, prison or death.’
Out of the attendant legal machinery had grown also a vast panoply of ancillary bureaucracies, what he called the ‘feminist gendarmerie’: social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists, child protection experts and enforcers, counsellors, mediators, divorce planners, forensic accountants, and so forth. The business of these people is the ‘best interests’ of other people’s children. Yet, they have no authority over families which do not either come to notice through third-party reporting or through the voluntary if unwitting surrendering of the family’s authority by one or other party to the marriage. To be more precise, then, their business is the dismantling of family units and the disposal of family assets. Behind a smokescreen of piety concerning the difficult job they have to do in ‘helping’ or ‘supporting’ or ‘providing services to’ families, their purpose is the human equivalent of the breaker’s yard: they tear asunder the superstructure of the family and then move to the foundations, demolishing the relationships between the parents, between the parents and their children, and even sometimes between the children themselves. ‘Virtually all their power and earnings derive from the harm that divorce inflicts on children,’ Baskerville declared.
‘These political police,’ he elaborated, ‘do not wear uniforms, target men almost exclusively and operate largely free of due process protections.’
And they were — are — mostly females. The promise of a more compassionate and holistic society arising from ‘female equality’ has disappeared into the echoes of historical rhetoric, as the gender gendarmerie uses its virtually total power to trample on the lives of men who have committed no crimes. Feminism has sacrificed ideological purity in exchange for power, and none of the public watchdogs, least of all journalism, has raised as much as a murmur.
‘Harsh as it sounds,’ Baskerville continued, ‘it is undeniable that these officials are united by one overriding interest: having children separated from their parents. Without the power to remove children from their parents — and first and foremost their fathers — this industry cannot thrive, and these officials will have no business. And so it must declare that the parents are criminals and that the fathers have “abandoned” their children, even when this is plainly not true. The first principle of the divorce industry, the basic premise without which it has no reason to exist and without which its operatives derive no earnings or power, the first item of business and the first measure taken when a divorce is filed and before anything is discussed is: remove the father.’
From here it has been an easy step to the redefinition of parenthood from biological to political concept, with the state enabling a variety of eccentric ‘family’ types while continuing to demolish the core kind. This means that, in substance and effect, the state becomes the ultimate ‘parent’ of every child. Baskerville cites Susan Shell, from her book The Liberal Case Against Gay Marriage: ‘The right to one’s own children . . . is perhaps the most basic individual right — so basic we hardly think of it.’ Baskerville (again, writing in 2017) warned that, unless prevailing trends were arrested, we would very soon find ourselves in our liberal democracies in a generalised new dispensation whereby children would be akin to commodities to be redistributed at the whim of judges and officials. A parent would be someone appointed or rubber-stamped by the state, his or her ‘parenthood’ the diktat not of biological fact but of legal definitions. Susan Shell, he noted, had observed: ‘No known government, however brutal or tyrannical, has ever denied . . . the fundamental claims of parents to their children. . . . A government that distributed children randomly . . . could not be other than tyrannical. . . . A government that paid no regard to the claims of biological parenthood would be unacceptable to all but the most fanatical of egalitarian or communitarian zealots.’
Yet, that is where we have now arrived, as a result of the altering of age-old definitions of marriage, family and parenthood, and the usurping of the legal protections formerly enjoyed by families and parents — all in the guise of extending individualised rights to children or parent-status to non-parents, including couples biologically incapable of parenthood. Those who claimed that, as a result of gay marriage, the sky would not fall are coming ever closer to being proved wrong. Baskerville comments: ‘What [Susan Shell] regards as a dystopian nightmare into which “no known government” has ever ventured has today become precisely the routine practice of governments throughout the Western democracies.’
And mostly built on lies. The hoax of the absconding father, writes Baskerville, ‘rationalized and leveraged a massive expansion of state power through emotional blackmail. It was nothing less than a declaration of judicial and bureaucratic war against the foremost feminist enemy, the literal embodiment of the hated “patriarchy”: fathers.’
The constructive banishment of fathers on trumped-up allegations has facilitated the advancement of the welfare state to create a growing culture of single-motherhood that now threatens the security and economies of many western countries. Single parenthood used to be a syndrome associated with never-married working class women but divorce has caused it to spread to the post-marriage middle-classes. Unilateral no-fault divorce, says Baskerville, brought the gender war ‘into every household in the Western world and beyond’. And these developments are the primary cause of the social ills that governments must engineer their own growth to address. Fatherlessness — not poverty or race, Baskerville observed elsewhere, ‘is the leading predictor of virtually every social pathology among the young. Without fathers, adolescents run wild, and society descends into chaos.’ With the father out of the way, the state moves in, its functionaries taking over and usurping the role previously played as matters of duty and love by the now banished parent.
In his latest book, the recently-published Who Lost America?: Why the United States Went ‘Communist’ and What to Do about It, Stephen Baskerville expands and deepens the insights and analyses of his nearly two decades as one of America’s most formidable public intellectuals to provide a depiction of modern society remodelled according to the deeper intentionality behind the war against fatherhood. The central plank of his thesis is that American (and by extension Western) society has been feminised to an extent whereby masculine logic and masculine values like physical courage have been all but obliterated by the incessant war on masculinity and the growth of the female gendarmerie in all countries, with an unacknowledged matriarchy having become the keynote of public policy virtually everywhere. ’We are all women now,’ he says.
‘I hardly need to describe how feminization pervades all our institutions. Women now dominate all lettered professions: journalism, education, academics, civil-service posts, unions, churches, critical sectors of the law and business — all in addition to ruling the home. They control not only the Democratic Party but increasingly the Republican. Whereas men are made to feel guilty when they dominate, the ascendant women feel no such inhibition. A triumphalist publishing industry unashamedly gloats about how “women are taking control of everything” and “the future is female”. This elicits no critical examination, let alone any remedial measures such as ideologues continue demanding to redress the “balance” in favor of women and curtail male “privilege”.
There is more, of course, as he will go on to expose. Some of us have been monitoring these developments for many decades now, and seeing tiny groups without significant membership or mandate being treated as though they spoke for almost everyone. A coalition of feminists and LGBT stormtroopers has laid waste to the social agendas of most Western societies, usurping public debate by dint of intimidation and cancellation, and weaponising blackmail fodder that can be leveraged against conservatives scared of being called names. But Baskerville insists that these agendas are ‘symptoms, not causes’. The most salient elements of the ‘liberal’ victory have been the divorce industry and the creation of massive state bureaucracies which dispense welfare, which have enabled feminists and their allies to wrangle their way to power and ‘devastate the lives of tens of millions, wreak untold havoc on our social structure and economy, and have now reached the scale of state repression, all with silence from conservatives.’
His primary focus is America, but in a manner that presents that country as an emblem of the human future, as America escalatingly exports its poisons to a wider world still unsure what it is importing, but already half-persuaded by propaganda that this is the way of the future. ’Older leftist agendas,’ he notes, ‘are now feminized and sexualized, to the point where they serve as fronts for feminists and other sexual radicals. We have shown that groups like Black Lives Matter, that exploit racial resentment to propel themselves to leadership of the Left, are operated not by armed militants ready to lay down their lives for the cause, as in the days of the Black Panthers, but by affluent, comfortable women. Likewise, it is black feminists in the schools who push Critical Race Theory. Whatever the obfuscations, it is sex, not race and not class, that forms the cutting edge of today’s Left.’
‘Yet equally important is how feminization also pervades the opposition, including traditional cultural institutions and conservative political organizations, including previous centers of male leadership like churches, police, and military. Conservatism and its bastions today are thoroughly feminized and likewise — there is no other word for it — emasculated. Conservative leadership today lacks men of strength and courage who will face down the militants. Unlike other ideologies, feminism neuters its own opposition.’
This, he claims, is at the core of what has happened to Western democracies in the last four years. He liberally cites Janice Flamengo, a former feminist who exposes the fraud and harm of feminism on her Substack page, The Flamengo File.
‘Feminization,’ says Baskerville, ‘changes all of us in subtle ways. Most recently, it renders us susceptible to mass hysteria of the kind we have experienced not only for the last four years, but in some social sectors longer than that. Hysteria, doctors will tell you (uncensored ones), is a specifically feminine complaint, though that hardly prevents today’s men from contracting it. Here Janice Flamengo has spoken the unspeakable, demonstrating how Covid policies are “closely aligned with feminist ideology, elevating feminist values and dismissing masculine ones.” “The state as the all-knowing mother” demands docility from naturally outgoing men, she explains, inhibits and prohibits masculine endeavors like work and civic leadership, and appeals to feminine fear, encouraging “a feminized identity, one that values security above all.” Feminism does not eliminate sexual “stereotypes,” she elaborates, so much as it politicizes them:
‘…it was feminist politicians who pushed hardest for lockdowns and all the rest, doing so because women — feminist women — said it was what they wanted. And they wanted it in the holy name of safety. From the feminist point of view, Covid mania was the definition of caring. Who screamed the loudest on Twitter about masking, hand-sanitizing, distancing, keeping children out of school, staying in one’s bubble, switching the world to Zoom, keeping out the potentially-contaminated at Christmas, and so on? Who waited in line most patiently for Covid tests and clamored for vaccines to be offered to children? Who was most adamant about the need to shame, isolate, exclude, and penalize the unvaccinated? Feminist women.’
‘Many women seem hard-wired to seek a “safe” rather than a free world, Flamengo adds, ‘…and to prefer collective rather than individual solutions to problems.’
There is here, as Stephen Baskerville correctly observes, a paradox. Because men have been drawn into this miasma of passive-aggressive tyranny by their fear of offending against feminist diktats, women have been the ones who, as the ‘pandemic’ proceeded, have felt freer to baulk and resist, to be sceptical and level-headed, while many men hesitated to speak out. The point, as he says, is that ‘[t]he reign of feminine characteristics, especially when politicized and collectivized by ideology, encourages men to adopt them and forego masculine ones.’
All this began, Baskerville argues, with a virtually unremarked assault on the African-American male, ‘the canary in the mineshaft’ of the present totalitarian escapade — ‘that pivotal character in the American tragedy: the neglected, demonized, and manipulated black male.’
‘The young African-American male is truly an extraordinary figure. His culture in large measure distinguishes that of the United States itself, and he has spread it all over the world — in music, films, sports, religion, and politics — where it inspires widespread imitation. Today it is largely a culture of anguish, impotence, and rage. For in his own homeland he remains a figure of fear and contempt, despised by both the Left and Right but also exploited by both as a pawn to advance their agendas. No sooner did the slaveholders and segregationists finish with him than the liberal elites who bestowed his freedom themselves connived to re-enslave him. And they used his women to do it.’
Women were first to be extended an unconditional ‘liberation’, support by state power and financed by the taxpayer. Black women benefitted from additional bounties: affirmative action, gender quotas, for stamps, child benefits, single mothers’ allowances, and preferential treatment in housing projects.
‘Though these programs are invariably rationalized and enacted by exploiting the violent deaths of black men like George Floyd and Tyre Nichols, they do not benefit black men in any way. They enable black women to proliferate single motherhood, emasculate black men, and drag black children into poverty and self-destructiveness.
‘To top it off, the women can then build careers on it all as petty functionaries in the apparat that elevate them still higher above the men and even turn them into the men’s jailors. These young women can be seen on the Washington Metro in dreadlocks, carrying thick textbooks with titles like Administration of Criminal Justice, which train them to lock up the men they should be marrying. (Needless to say, all this renders both sexes mutually incompatible as spouses.) Some grow up to be Kamala Harrises, Lori Lightfoots, and Muriel Bowsers: models of feminine “empowerment” who preside over entire cities and now a nation descending into chaos, driven by the systematic, willful destruction of black men.’
By the early 1990s, African-American working women had attained the largest income gains relative to men of any ethnic group, producing new options for black women, inside or outside marriage, but increasingly outside.
Long before the Sexual Revolution reached its ideological apogee, Baskerville elaborates, ‘welfare had already given the low-income black female the two prizes most coveted by middle-class sexual revolutionaries: sexual freedom first and foremost, plus a measure of economic and political power. The same state apparat that degrades the black male by usurping his role as a provider and protector, and then targets him as a criminal malefactor, simultaneously liberates his female counterpart, subsidizing her infidelity (“independence”) and even employing her as an official.’
And this early subjugation of the male African-American ‘by the welfare matriarchy and the criminal injustice apparat’ has now become the experience of growing numbers of white and other middle-class men. As this social revolution was unfolding in the black communities, white women were watching, taking in the implications of the growing array of benefits available to black women, in effect subsidies of single-motherhood and disincentives to incorporating fathers into the lives of their own children.
‘During the decades of black male degradation, white women enjoyed unprecedented affluence, privilege, and increasing leverage over their own men. They were hardly “oppressed,” as feminists later claimed, but increasingly they were bored, especially with their own chastity. Feminists saw how thoroughly welfare had sexually emancipated their black sisters and emasculated their men, while granting them positions of power in the incipient Deep State as functionaries and gendarmes.
‘White feminists (again leading clueless conservatives by the nose) began extolling the black matriarchs: their “no-nonsense” authoritarianism, “tough love,” and other clichés, gloating in the government-engineered destruction of their men.
‘Here once again, the decisive innovation came from the feminists, who engineered the most staggering coup of all: the most subversive legal innovation ever instituted in the western democracies — a measure so diabolical that, at a stroke, it decimated the integrity of both the family and the judiciary, overthrowing the entire Common Law system that had safeguarded freedom and private life for centuries. This was the oxymoron of “no-fault” justice, which they borrowed from car insurance to legally abolish civilization’s most fundamental institution: marriage.
‘Few even noticed what happened. The country was preoccupied with civil rights and Vietnam, and the incipient Sexual Revolution was already acculturating people to radical sexual liberation and experimentation. No debate was held at the time or since. Dishonest propaganda promising divorce “by mutual consent” fooled almost everyone into acquiescing in what was really involuntary divorce . . . This allowed one spouse to abrogate a marriage agreement unilaterally, without agreement or any transgression by the other and without incurring any responsibility for the consequences to the other spouse or children. The National Association of Women Lawyers had devised this legislative sleight-of-hand back in the 1940s and were just waiting for an opportunity to unleash it. California Governor Ronald Reagan signed the first bill in 1969 without understanding it and later regretted it. A measure so extreme that its only precedents were during the French and Russian revolutions (both of which were forced to repeal it because of the social chaos it caused) swept through the US and the western democracies with almost no opposition or even discussion.’
‘The full impact took decades to work through to its logical conclusion. But in the end, the underclass had become middle-class, similarly pervaded by embittered single mothers, rebellious and self-destructive children, and ejected, emasculated fathers teetering on the edge of criminalization and homelessness — their lives and relationships likewise administered by the feminized functionaries of the welfare state.’
The mainspring of this effectively totalitarian sub-culture was the astonishing concept of no-fault divorce, which enables the most vital and sacred contract of human society to be dispensed with unilaterally and on any whim or none.
‘“No-fault” divorce was breathtaking in its nihilism. “No-fault” justice is a contradiction in terms and a guaranteed formula for systematic injustice. Such a concept is not possible in any just legal system or free society, and it could not be applied anywhere in the judiciary without legal chaos, which is precisely what ensued. That celebrated legal minds have failed or refused to understand this for more than a half-century testifies to the debasement of our jurisprudence. To apply such a formula to society’s most important contract — the marriage contract — is madness on a prodigious scale and a prescription for civilizational suicide.
‘Yet even its harshest critics — who focus understandably on the torn-apart families and ruined lives that resulted — have mostly missed the larger nightmare dimension: the virtually unlimited power over individuals and private life it confers on the state. Whatever they were already doing in practice, no-fault justice granted courts the explicit statutory power to punish innocent people. For the first time under Common Law, courts could summon legally innocent citizens, assume control over the most intimate corners of their private lives, and inflict on them devastating measures — in effect, punishments — for conduct that is perfectly legal: dissolve their marriages without their consent or grounds; evict them from their homes; seize control of their children; restrict their movements; raid their bank accounts; confiscate their houses; attach their wages; forcibly extract fees for people they never hired for “services” they never requested; summarily confine them to psychiatric facilities; seize their passports, driving permits, and professional licenses; and jail them indefinitely without trial or even record.
‘Not surprisingly, this led to the most authoritarian and repressive government machinery ever created in the United States. Bit-by-bit, officials took full advantage of their new powers, including mass incarcerations without trial or due process of law, summary confiscations of children and goods, open violations of the most basic civil liberties and constitutional rights by the very courts whose responsibility it is to safeguard them — all against American citizens suspected of no legal infraction.’
These conditions, in a sense applicable to any individual within society, were for a long time impacting a minority (of men, mainly) which ipso facto did not manifest as a ‘social concern’. But the methods and logic road-tested in the family law gulags has now been mainstreamed, potentially allowing the criminalisation of anyone for virtually anything the state decides is unhelpful to what laughably continues to be called ‘democracy’.
‘No country that unleashes such totalitarian measures against a sector of its population can possibly quarantine the tyranny and prevent it from corrupting its other institutions and enslaving its other citizens. On this point, the testimony of African-American intellectuals has proven especially prophetic. Martin Luther King famously insisted about segregation that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and Frederick Douglass had expressed the same principle when he warned that under slavery, “The white man's liberty has been marked out for the same grave with the black man's.”
‘Americans had the foresight to heed these warnings and abolish slavery and segregation before these prophecies were fulfilled and the injustices engulfed and smothered constitutional government altogether. By contrast, the sexual Left’s family-destruction juggernaut of welfare/divorce, tested and refined on low-income minority Americans, rolls onward unchallenged and undebated and shows itself readily capable of trampling down white and other middle-class communities.
‘For those who fall into its clutches, the Deep State in all its horror had well and truly arrived. Those who have experienced this nightmare are not in the least surprised at the nihilistic coup since early 2020. The Deep State now had the weapon it needed to take control of the nation and western society: It had neutered the fathers and taken possession of the children. Even the mothers had effectively been turned into paid quasi-functionaries: “primary caretakers” in the jargon of the trade. In the words of the poet, “The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.”
‘With this toehold in family law, Deep State architects began transforming other sectors of the judiciary and from there the machineries of law enforcement, security services, intelligence agencies, and the military. All became instruments for controlling an increasingly feminized population.’
And this has ceased to be merely a ‘cultural’ problem, becoming increasingly an existential one.
‘So hideous has forced feminization become — as if to validate the most gruesome fears about anti-male feminism — that young boys are being indoctrinated to believe they are girls and required to undergo castration and other physical mutilation on orders of feminist judges.’
As to ‘what to do’ about it all, Baskerville’s proposal is a return to full citizenship, a category of which the married father used to be the epitomic example. We are no longer functional citizens — our citizenship having atrophied when a new professional political class displaced and marginalised the citizenry itself. Purporting to be our advocates, they become our replacements, and then our jailers.
‘As if afflicted by an autoimmune disease, we are left debilitated by the very powers that claim to be protecting us,’ Baskerville warns. We must wrest control back from the professionals and ‘restore a healthy understanding of citizenship’, and from there to re-mobilise the men who have become debilitated by decades of debasement.
‘The only proven whole, fully functional and effective citizen — anywhere in the history of stable and free societies — is the married male head of a family. He is the citizen in a union with a woman that is both covenantal and contractual — that is, sworn by an oath and sanctioned by law. He is motivated by the well-being of children recognized to be his by that same covenant-contract. He acts in combination with other citizens, preferably who also exist in their own covenantal association with one another through what they recognize as a sacred association of worship and service. If truly complete, he also owns property and bears arms in defense of his home and homeland.
‘Resurrecting this figure will not be achieved simply by telling everyone what a good idea it is. It requires no further chit-chat, no pretentious sociological or psychological studies, no expensive but useless government programs, nor other measures emanating from state officials that are less likely to be solutions than sabotage. The necessary action is straightforward, but without it freedom is impossible. And only a single role — a minimal and basic one — is necessary and legitimate for the state to undertake, but it is essential: The state must be compelled by the citizenry to re-establish real marriage by once again enforcing it as a legal contract. The state must be forced to repeal the indefensible oxymoron of “no-fault” divorce and reimpose a presumption of father custody over children.’
The word ‘Kafkaesque’ has been so over-used, misused and abused that its meaning has become both clichéd and confused. Varying definitions refer to menacing complexity, the bureaucratic labyrinth of illogical authority, the unnecessary complication of what ought to be straightforward, the terrors of endless interrogation, omnipotence slightly out of focus, the surrealism of senseless power, the nightmare of (un)reason, the hopelessness of trust and the folly of hoping, the actualisation of paranoia, and so forth. But almost all definitions of the Kafkaesque overlook what is probably its most potent and emblematic characteristic: the state’s arrogation to itself of a right to intrude impertinently into the most intimate realms of human intimacy without evidence of actual wrongdoing. The opening line of Kafka’s astonishing novel, The Trial, is: ‘Somebody must have been telling lies about Josef K. because, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one fine morning.' The most disturbing moments of the opening section of the book relate not to the official mission or intentions of the warders who come to arrest K., but the way they deliberate over the quality of his nightshirt — telling him that he will have to wear ‘a less fancy one now’ — and going on to devour his breakfast.
This is close to capturing the essence of what occurred on a quasi-global basis in the spring of 2020: states everywhere, as though rehearsing for months or years, began ordaining and implementing policies which assumed total rights over the most private and personal aspects of the lives of citizens. As though by the stroke of a dictator’s pen, the state could enter into your home and count the number of people sitting on your living-room sofa; it could name a distance from your home which you were permitted to travel, and beyond that distance be liable to arrest; it could order that your grandmother be isolated in a nursing home and forbidden visits of any kind; it would ordain a specific distance (two metres) which you were required by ‘law’ to maintain between your body and that of another person; it could dictate how many members of your family were permitted to attend your sister’s wedding or funeral, or how many could be at your father’s bedside as he breathed his last; later on, it was able to insist that, in order to enter a coffee shop, restaurant or cinema, you had to be wearing on your face a piece of synthetic material which countless research papers had found was at best useless, and most likely a health hazard — all arbitrary concoctions without any basis in law, logic, medicine or science. In time, the state also gifted itself the right to insist that you take an untested injection or lose your job. The Kafkian world had been born into actually living reality.
To me, having at that point been writing and speaking about the obscenities of family law for half a century, this seemed all too familiar. Though in one sense utterly shocking, it seemed in another as though I had been here already, and yet, at a conscious level this seemed implausible, since I could not remember anything like it. How could I, when it was unprecedented in democratic societies?
Except that it wasn’t — not quite. I had indeed been there before, when, some 20 years earlier, I had been summoned before family law courts and, stripped of functional human rights or acknowledgement of dignity, rendered subject to the arbitrary ordinances of capricious judges, social workers, and child ‘experts’ (psychologists/psychiatrists) whose word was, by definition, law, and therefore imposed upon me beyond any right of questioning. It took some time for me, in that spring of 2020, to recognise the connection, which came by way of a feeling rather than of facts or precise memories. The feeling I had was of powerlessness and humiliation —’Can they really do this?’, the same question as, twenty years earlier when, seeking to love and protect my own child, I found myself treated in the manner of a criminal by people who had to consult their notes to ‘remember’ my daughter’s name. To be forced to sit and listen to the pontifications of such people is finally to live the reality Franz Kafka was painting in his dark but vibrant colours.
For what may not immediately seem obvious reasons, the modern family court is now coming into focus as a prescient representation and most revealing and irrefutable microcosm of the emerging culture of totalitarianism that — it is now clear — has been in preparation for many years as the actual and realistic holding conditions of the populations of the former democratic West. The family court had been the arena in which the truth about power relations in the modern world emerged first and forcefully — in which the interests of women (and other ‘minorities’) predominated, not because of any official love of womanhood, but because any category capable of being presented as a protectable victimhood functioned as a wieldable sledgehammer to break down the structures of our now condemned civilisation.
By Stephen Baskerville’s systematic unwrapping, feminists created, in effect, a honey-trap using the Sexual Revolution to draw men into their web with the promise of uncomplicated and inconsequential sex. They weaponized sexual desire, particularly male sexual desire, in the manner of a judo foot sweep, yielding to the opponent’s energy so as to use his own force against him. But each short ejaculation contributed its share to the growth of feminist power and in the end the consequences of free sex became very complicated indeed. It proved, in time, a short skip to rendering this into an entirely new system of what would be termed ‘law’ and what would therefore pass for ‘justice’. By buying into the promise of free love, men had left themselves open to losing their reputations, wealth, property, jobs and even their freedom, creating the greatest threat to civil liberties in our time. And similarly, by placing their faith in political systems to be the caretakers of the most vital stanchions of human freedom, the peoples of the onetime Western havens of liberty had surrendered their most precious protections in what they fondly imagined was the cause of freedom.
Stephen Baskerville’s work in this area is a scrupulously researched body of investigation and reflection, devastating in its depiction of what is essentially a totalitarian takeover conducted under the conventional radar of democracy. Among the things it tells us is that virtually everything the vast majority of us have come casually to believe about the relationships between the sexes (if one can even use such a term anymore) — that divorce results from philandering men; that women are in grave danger of violence by men all the time, even in their own homes; that the most dangerous place for a child is the nuclear family — is completely, monstrously wrong. That so many people have come to believe these assertions is a tribute to the success of feminist propaganda, all of it paid for by the taxes of citizens who may at any moment become the casualties of the systems consequently emerging. Bulwarked by the utterances of celebrities, the acquiescence of cowardly politicians, the push of vested interests and latterly the intimidatory spleneticism of cyberanonymous SJWs, these industrialised lies have remained at the core of the official belief systems of our societies for almost half a century. Now, with the onset of phases q-z — transgenderism, to be followed by polyamory and even the attempted legitimisation of previously taboo matters like paedophilia and — why not? — bestiality, the totalitarian ambitions of the ideologies enter their late phases.
From time to time, those of us who suffered under this tyranny of Omnipotent Victimhood may have paused to wonder if it could really be happening, whether the blindness and deafness of the alleged watchdogs upon freedom could be real and genuine. All we could say with certainty was that it seemed to be so — we felt compelled to extend the benefit of our clamouring confusion of doubts. And in that fateful spring of 2020, we awoke with a similar question humming around our heads: Could this even be happening? Surely there will be an outcry, a revolt, a coup by the good and the decent? But there was not, and now it grows later and darker, and still the silence continues.
Across the full range of his output, Stephen Baskerville demonstrates that, long before 2020, the concepts of ‘equality’ and ‘human rights’ had become so perverted that they no longer bore the remotest resemblance to their natural and ordinary meanings, and in some respects had turned into their very antitheses. Having reconstructed the public sphere so that there was no longer a place for whatever percentage of the human species failed to qualify for protection under some listed 'victim' heading — female, homosexual, black, et cetera — the population-at-large was now in a situation analogous to that suffered by countless fathers — and those fathers’ children — for perhaps half a century. Just as it was an error to see this as the ‘neglect’ of men and their ‘rights’, or as simply the failure to include men in ‘equality’, or indeed as any kind of oversight that had not been carefully planned, it was an error to see what was happening now in the broader arena of society as anything other than deliberate. It is not that the shiny new equality train had gone off the rails, but that what stood before us was a completely different kind of train: the kind of train that had been seen before in history, whose destination was always shrouded in mystery, and seemed to be part of the kit and kaboodle of totalitarian ambition.
When I stumbled across some of these tendencies in my own, presumed democratic country, Ireland, about 20 years ago, my first thought was that I had tripped across some overlooked vein of the human rights agenda that all my fellow enthusiasts for freedom and justice had simply not gotten around to pointing out. But then, as I began writing tentatively in my weekly column in the Irish Times out of my observations of — and consternation at — family law injustice and the overwhelming preponderance of male suicides, I couldn’t help noticing that those advocating rights for women, gays and other minorities, far from seeking to join my campaigns, seemed anxious to shut my mouth, regularly denouncing me publicly and forming delegations to demand that my newspaper’s editor relieve me of my responsibilities. I had made the naïve error of assuming that concepts like ‘justice’ and ‘human rights’ were indivisible and still had more or less the same meanings as in the dictionary. In the spring of 2020, I noticed that many of those who had been my most enthusiastic attackers in that context were precisely the categories of public actors who fell silent in the face of the seizing of the most fundamental rights of human beings, or constructed, by way of self-justification, tortuous and elaborate rationales for the necessity to protect the common good.
It is now more than a quarter-century since I rather prematurely announced that we had arrived to the Age of the Omnipotent Victim. Kafka in The Trial, I wrote all of two decades ago, had made visible the phenomenon of absolute and arbitrary power exercised anonymously, perhaps the great tyranny of the age then just departed. But in the age about to unfold, I went on: ‘the greatest tyranny will be the spectre of absolute power in the hands of the apparently defenceless victim’:
‘We stand on the threshold of an era when, by virtue of being black, female, or the claimed sufferer of abuse or deprivation, the Omnipotent Victim will be set beyond justice, morality, fairness and the law, and anyone she accuses will be automatically convicted. In this future, if you come into conflict with someone whom our various ideologies designate as victim, by virtue of sex, race or origin, you had better have your affairs in order in advance of the hearing. Victims are never guilty of anything, and those they accuse never innocent.’
What I did not at the time anticipate was that this constructed culture of victimhood would one day result in the abolition of human freedom at the most intimate level of human existence, and that this too would pass largely unremarked.
To read Stephen Baskerville on Substack, click here
