America needs real dads

OPINION:

Last month, it was a woman named Holly who was punched in the face and left unconscious in downtown Cincinnati. Last week, it was the brutal beating of a 19-year-old man named Edward Coristine, who, while protecting his girlfriend during an attempted carjacking, was left bloodied and shirtless on the streets of the District of Columbia.

Why are these stories becoming so commonplace? Why are hordes of young men, from Seattle to San Diego and from Minneapolis to Miami, now taking over America’s cities like a pack of rabid wolves? Whatever happened to chivalry, honor, moral restraint and self-control? Where did this culture of hate, vengeance and bloodlust come from?

In a recent essay written for the website Christ Over All, Will Spencer suggests the answer to all these questions is simple: Western culture is suffering the consequences of a crisis of fatherhood.

One of the greatest threats facing the United States right now is fatherless homes. Millions of boys have no male authority figure in the house to help raise them. In homes where the biological dad does exist, a hyper-feminized culture has, more often than not, left that father so emasculated that any vestiges of his positive masculinity are little but a quaint memory from days gone by.

The bottom line is this: America is suffering from what Mr. Spencer calls a “Father Famine.”

“For three generations and counting,” he says, “Western men have experienced a crisis of fatherlessness [with] the percentage of children living with single parents [rising] dramatically from 9% in the 1960s to [approximately 40% in 2023] and a Pew Research study now shows that a single mother leads 80% of those homes.”

Mr. Spencer goes on. This fatherlessness, he says, combined with feminism’s emasculation of men in general, has left America suffering the consequences of what he calls a “digital substitute for dads,” where “for the first time in history, men can find substitute fathers on handheld devices [where they can] browse forums on social media, watch videos on YouTube, or participate in men’s chat groups.”

This online world, which now serves as a surrogate dad to tens of millions of boys, is known as “the Manosphere.” According to Mr. Spencer, “it is a decentralized network for under-fathered boys [who] discuss what it means to be a man.” A place where moral training and responsible masculinity have been replaced by “the Nietzschean pursuit of power — physical, financial, and sexual.”

Mr. Spencer continues to describe this dark digital dad by referring to what he calls the “red pill’s false promise.” The “red pill” is a reference to the crimson capsule taken by Neo (Keanu Reeves) in the movie “The Matrix.” It is a drug that awakens him from the deception and lies of the matrix, revealing the truth of what is real.

By taking the Manosphere’s “red pill,” says Mr. Spencer, “the truths boys learn [are that men] only embody the nice guy archetype because they’ve been manipulated by their feminist mothers and culture. Men who never question their programming end up as ‘blue-pill betas,’ effeminate suckers deprived of their masculine birthright.”

By contrast, men who enter the Manosphere and “take the ‘red pill’ … grow in physical, financial, and sexual power. The promise is that by shedding ‘beta’ programming and becoming ‘alphas’ [they can] triumph over the feminist spirit of the age.”

Mr. Spencer points out that millions of young males are finding their substitute dad in the dark digital world of the internet and that this is a breeding ground for extremism. “The magnitude of the bitterness towards devouring feminist mothers and abdicating Boomer fathers,” he says, is coming home to roost via “the viral ideologies [that are a] far more pernicious threat than we realize.”

Mr. Spencer concludes by saying that the answer to these violent gangs and wayward adolescents does not lie in more coddling but rather in strong male role models. Boys need faithful fathers who model biblical wisdom, self-discipline and moral character. Without this, they will search out the definition of their masculinity elsewhere and find it in the dark world of street gangs, thuggish mobs and the dark rabbit hole of the “manosphere.”

We have bred an entire generation of foolish and undisciplined young men who now think their most prurient and violent instincts define their manhood. The solution is not more single-parent homes or affirming blue-pilled betas but instead strong and present dads who are willing to do their God-given jobs to “train up their sons in the way they should go, so that when they are old, they will not depart.”

Young men need real dads, not more feminism and its consequent “digital fathers” of porn, power and revenge.

• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery). He can be reached at epiper@dreverettpiper.com.