Josh Hawley Scolds Us

In the supreme act of treachery, Republicans grandstand over the family while endeavoring to destroy it.

Dissident conservatives see Senator Josh Hawley as one of the good guys.  Not a radical Democrat nor a “RINO” Republican, Hawley objected to the certification of Joe Biden’s election in 2020, which he considered stolen, and voted to acquit Donald Trump in both impeachment proceedings, which he called a kangaroo court. 

But if we really want to understand the depravity of American politics, and why it has succumbed to the control of the far Left – and, moreover, if we want to do something constructive about it – then we cannot ignore the subterfuges of politicians like Hawley.   

In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Hawley takes American men to task, telling them to man up, get married, and start a family.  “We need them to go get married, have families, and be responsible husbands and fathers,” he feels the need to tell them.  “This society is impoverished because too many young men are too despairing, are too checked out on social media or porn to be doing what we need them to be doing.”  Wholesome stuff, no doubt.  

Well, no actually.  Hawley’s moralizing reflects the most destructive trend in America today.

Shocking as it may sound, it is no exaggeration to say that Hawley is part of a devious political machine whose aim, in fact, is nothing less than to destroy American families in huge numbers.  It is two-faced politicians like Hawley, more than anything, that enables the machine to accomplish its aims.

Conspiracy theory?  How many times have we heard that lately?  Do we want to understand why the far Left took control of the United States government, or do we want to wag our fingers at the bad guys?  We either accept incontrovertible facts, or we do not.

Of course, the left attacks Hawley, and Aaron Renn has already criticized him from what might be called the thoughtful conservative perspective.  Renn sees Hawley as well-intentioned but misinformed.  I will be less charitable.  More is going on here than meets the eye.  And Hawley is guilty of more than self-righteous grandstanding.

First, Senator Hawley needs to hold his tongue and see to his own responsibilities.  We do not elect US senators to scold us.  We elect them to run the government, and when that government abuses its power, we expect them to correct it.  This case involves perhaps the most evil government machinery ever devised in the United States, but rather than make any effort to fix it, the Senator tries to divert attention from his own complicity and blame, not his fellows from the political class, but ordinary Americans who cannot defend themselves:

Somebody’s got to be honest and tell the truth to these young men. And the truth is that what the porn industry is selling them is a total lie. And the truth is, American society needs them. We need them to step up. …  It’s time to call…young men, to be something more. …  Somebody needs to tell them the truth.

Somebody needs to tell the truth, all right.  But the Senator prefers to wag his finger.  

The truth is that young men fail – actually, they quite deliberately and predictably refuse – to follow this unrequested advice because getting married and starting a family for men can easily become a one-way ticket to jail, poverty, and homelessness.

The moment a man has a child he loses all his constitutional rights.  Because of unilateral and involuntary divorce laws, his children can be taken from him by state functionaries through literally “no fault” of his own.  Without having committed any legal transgression, he can be prohibited from seeing them – ever – on pain of summary incarceration.  His home, bank accounts, and all other assets can be confiscated, also summarily, and he can be forced to pay unlimited amounts – yes, amounts exceeding his salary – as “child support” to the people who have stolen his children.  If he is unable, he is again liable to indefinite incarceration without trial, in which case he will never have a salary again, and he will never escape from the penal system.  If he is falsely accused of “child abuse” or “domestic violence” (standard scams to rationalize separating fathers from their children), he is further liable to being evicted from his home and incarcerated without any semblance of due process of law.  But he will not be jailed forever.  Eventually he will be released onto the streets, where he will remain.

I have provided overwhelming evidence for all this elsewhere.  But proving it is unnecessary, because no one denies it (and comments under the YouTube video fully bear me out).  Like the Senator, the political class simply ignores it.

It gets worse.  Diabolically, government officials like Hawley themselves have financial incentives to tear as many fathers as possible away from their children and make sure they stay away. 

His state, like all states, fills its coffers by collecting “child support.”  To collect it, the government must first separate as many children as possible from their fathers.  This is done by the welfare agencies and family courts, who share the spoils.  So if pesky legislators cut off the money or reduce taxes, child support will still supply plenty of revenue to sprinkle around.  “If the state needs more highway funding,” writes one commentator, accurately, “all they need to do is raise the state’s level of child support and they can spend their resulting welfare incentive increases on highway projects and remain in perfect compliance with the relevant programs funding requirements.”  

Single-parent homes and fatherless children are enormously lucrative for state governments and politicians like Hawley (including Republican ones), incentivizing them to encourage as much divorce and create as many fatherless children as possible.  Ratcheting up child-support awards to extortionate levels has the double effect of increasing the lucrative revenue stream and offering an irresistible bribe to entice single-mothers-to-be into filing for divorce.  For fathers, it has the added effect of sending them straight to jail when they cannot pay the impossible sums.

Would you marry and have children under these circumstances?  Of course not, which is why the men are refusing, and no amount of scolding will persuade them.

Child support enforcement has repeatedly been exposed as a dishonest and destructive bureaucratic boondoggle that creates the very problem it claims to solve by encouraging more fatherless homes with all the social pathologies that ensue.  The system has been plagued with numerous ethical improprieties, conflicts of interest, and scandals, including criminal fraud, as well as for its unconstitutional and authoritarian practices that violate Americans’ constitutional rights.  Advertised as a program to provide for children whose fathers have “abandoned” them, the reality is a system where “a father is forced to finance the filching of his own children.”

It is inconceivable that Hawley does not know all about this.  Like most politicians, he is a lawyer and judicial entrepreneur.  Most important, he is former attorney general of Missouri.  The office of state attorney general is the highest law enforcement official and a steppingstone to higher office.  Famed reporter John Gizzi of Human Events once wrote a scathing article (since taken down) on how this office corrupts both Democrats and Republicans.

Attorneys general oversee the divorce and child support machineries.  Their job is to use the penal system to maximize the revenue that the state receives from tearing children away from their fathers.  A cynic might suspect the Senator of urging more men to marry and have children so that their subsequent involuntary divorces will supply further bounty for Missouri and its functionaries. 

Tucker Carlson normally shows more discernment than this, though if he did probe this abuse forthrightly he would quickly be shown the door by Fox News.

To rub salt a bit further into our wounds, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is another engineer of the machine.  DeSantis recently signed a breathtakingly dishonest bill that claimed to “restore fatherhood.”  In fact, the law is a throwback to Clinton-era programs that, far from returning children to their fathers, would make sure they stay apart, while subjecting them to feminist-approved psychotherapy to make them more like mothers and, you guessed it, collect more child-support. 

Florida’s legislature approves this because, like every state house in America, it is controlled by lawyers, with a heavy contingent of divorce lawyers from both parties who have no desire to bring the divorce epidemic under control.  Like Missouri, Florida is filling its coffers off the backs of fatherless children.

A more ruthless family-destruction machinery could hardly be devised – replete with the financial payments that co-opt and corrupt potential opposition groups.  It is why – decade after decade – the fatherhood crisis never abates but only worsens.

As always, government programs create the problem they claim to be solving, enriching and “empowering” welfare apparatchiks.  Yet conservative Republicans readily sign on.

Finally, this also provides the model for today’s bureaucratic takeover of the US government.  The far-left insurrections of 2020 were overwhelmingly driven by rebellious, dysfunctional, and fatherless adolescents, who have been effectively raised by the functionaries of the welfare state.  This is every bit as irrational as Covid lockdowns, lethal injections, and avoidable wars in Ukraine, and it probably accounts for them.

With friends like Hawley and DeSantis, the family hardly needs enemies. 

Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Political Studies at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw.  He has served on Virginia’s Child Support Guideline Review Panel and is the author of The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Government Power (2017), and Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (2007), where the points in this article are documented.