Basking in Reflected Glory

 Value of Desired Goals

 Most theories of motivation assert that motivation increases as a function of the value or importance of desired goals (Beck, 1983). I’m sure it doesn’t surprise you that people are more motivated to try to attain things that they view as valuable in one sense or another. This is also true of impression-motivation. Given that people think their impressions are relevant to the attainment of certain goals, they will be more motivated to impression-manage the more valuable or important the goal they wish to attain. Several factors affect the value of people’s goals. 

Availability of Resources

 In economic systems, the value of something typically increases as it becomes more scarce, and a similar principle operates in social life. As a result, impression motivation is higher when resources are scarce. You can see this easily if you imagine being interviewed for a job; in which case would you be most concerned about the impressions you make—a job for which only one other applicant was being interviewed or one for which the company was interviewing 15 people? A study by Pandey and Rastagi (1979) showed that people were more likely to ingratiate a job interviewer as competition for the job became more fierce. Similarly, I suspect that impression management to potential romantic partners increases as the pool of potential partners gets smaller. 

Characteristics of the Target

 If you’re like most people, you are probably more likely to impression manage when dealing with people who possess desirable characteristics, and this seems to be true of virtually any characteristic you might imagine. Who are you most likely to want to impress: An attractive person or an unattractive one? A person who is intelligent and competent, or one who is not very bright? A socially skilled person or a socially inept one? Someone who is likable or unlikable? Those of high status or those of low status? An individual with a pleasing personality or an individual with the personality of a planaria? Studies show that people are more likely to manage their impressions when interacting with those who are physically attractive or otherwise socially desirable (Forsyth, Riess, & Schlenker, 1977; Mori et al., 1987; Shaw & Wagner, 1975; Zanna & Pack, 1975). 

 This may be because we value the reactions of people with desirable characteristics more highly than those of less desirable people; put simply, their reactions are more valuable. For one thing, we often assume that attractive, powerful, competent, and high status people are harder to impress. Thus, when we do make a desired impression and receive affirming feedback, we feel better about it. 

 In addition, people with socially desirable attributes are often in the position to mediate important outcomes that we desire. Overall, bright, attractive, skilled, and personable people are more likely to be in positions of power and authority than stupid, unattractive, unskilled, and unpersonable ones. 

The Value of Approval

 Given that people often impression-manage to enhance others’ evaluations of them and to get social approval, we would expect people who particularly need approval or fear disapproval from others to be more motivated to manage their impressions. Because people who have recently suffered a blow to either their self-esteem or to their esteem in others’ eyes value approval more highly, failure, rejection, and embarrassment increase people’s desire for social approval and, thus, their motive to impression manage (Miller & Leary, 1992). In some cases, a person who has been publicly embarrassed in front of one person may be motivated to convey a particularly positive impression in front of someone else (Apsler, 1975). 

Although our need for approval varies across situations, some people are characteristically more concerned about receiving approval and avoiding disapproval. People who score high in fear of negative evaluation worry more about others’ evaluations of them, score higher on measures of approval-seeking, and are more concerned about making good impressions on others (Gregorich, Kemple, & Leary, 1986; Leary, 1980, 1983a; Leary, Barnes, & Griebel, 1986; Watson & Friend, 1969). Similarly, people who score high in need for approval (Crowne & Marlowe, 1964; Paulhus, 1984, 1991) are generally more motivated to control how others see them than people who are low on this trait (Dies, 1970; Jones & Tager, 1972; Leary, 1983c; Millham & Kellogg, 1980; Schneider & Turkat, 1975). 

 People who are high in fear of negative evaluation and need for approva1 tend to have higher impression motivation because they value approval more highly than people who are low on these dimensions. Because they value it more highly, they are more motivated to behave in ways that will gain approval and avoid disapproval, including self-presentation. People high in fear of negative evaluation, for example, work harder on tasks when they believe that hard work will gain them explicit approval (Watson & Friend, 1969). They also are more likely than lows to offer excuses when the possibility of negative evaluation exists (Leary et al., 1986). 

Discrepancy between Desired and Current Image

 The third factor that motivates self-presentation involves the degree of discrepancy that exists between the image one would like others to have of oneself (the desired image) and the image that others appear to hold (the current image). As long as people think they are making the kind of impression they want to make, impression-motivation should be minimal. However, to the degree that people become aware that others are not forming the impressions of them they would like, they will be motivated to manage their impressions to convey the desired images. 

 As a result, people who have made undesired impressions are particularly motivated to impression-manage. In some experiments, subjects have been led to think they failed on an important task or have been embarrassed in front of others. Both failure and embarrassment increase impression-motivation as people try to repair the damage they sustained to their social images (Apsler, 1975; Baumeister & Jones, 1978; Baumgardner, Lake, & Arkin, 1985; Brown, 1968, 1970; Brown & Garland, 1971; Leary & Schlenker, 1980; Modigliani, 1971; Schlenker, 1975; Schneider, 1969). 

 People who perceive a discrepancy between their desired and current images use a variety of self-presentational tactics in their attempts to reduce the discrepancy. For example, they may stress other positive attributes (Baumeister & Jones, 1978; Schneider, 1969) or make self-serving attributions for the events that damaged their images to begin with (Baumgardner et al., 1985; Frey, 1978; Weary & Arkin, 1981). They are also more likely to do favors for others to show what nice people they are (Apsler, 1975) and to associate themselves with other successful people (Cialdini & Richardson, 1980), hoping to “bask in reflected glory.” 

Nonconscious Self-Presentation

 People are not always aware of their motives for doing things. Although we can usually give reasons why we did this or that, the reasons we give may or may not reflect the true causes of our behavior (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). As a result, people’s behaviors are sometimes affected by self-presentational motives even though they are not consciously thinking about others’ impressions at the time and even though they may that entered into their behavior at all. 

 First, some self-presentational behaviors are performed so regularly that they become mindless habits. Although the behavior may have begun because the person consciously wanted to create a certain impression, the person now performs the behavior without consciously thinking about its self-presentational roots. For example, why do you comb your hair? Obviously, there is little reason rather than to make a better impression on other people. Yet, I doubt that you consciously think, “I’d better comb my hair so I’ll look okay today.” Similarly, we are so used to conveying positive, socially desirable impressions of ourselves that we often do so mindlessly, without consciously thinking about our self-presentational goals in doing so. 

 A second reason that people sometimes engage in self-presentational behaviors nonconsciously is that they are simply not consciously aware of the stimuli that are causing their behaviors. One experiment showed that how a subject presented himself or herself to a conversation partner clearly depended on how the conversation partner presented him- or herself: subjects who interacted with self-enhancing partners presented themselves more positively than subjects who interacted with modest partners. Yet, subjects seemed completely unaware that their own self-presentations had been influenced by those of their partners. In fact, subjects insisted that they would have presented themselves the same way in other situations as they did during the study. They seemed unaware of deliberately or strategically changing their self-presentations (Baumeister, Tice, & Hutton, 1989). Thus, people sometimes engage in self-presentational behaviors without being aware of doing so. 

**

Basking in Reflected Glory

 People want to be associated with those who are successful, powerful, attractive, popular, or otherwise esteemed in others’ eyes. By connecting themselves with those whom others admire, they can bask in reflected glory (BIRG). Sometimes, people tout their associations with noted others verbally, such as when they “drop names” or tell about their connections to movie stars, historical figures, or other famous people. Sometimes the linkages are quite loose, such as when a person recounts seeing a rock star on a New York City street or brags that a sports hero was born in his or her hometown. 

 At other times, people connect themselves to others symbolically. One common way in which people bask in reflected glory involves high-lighting their connection to successful athletic teams. By wearing team-identifying apparel, fans can associate themselves with successful teams. Of course, people wear team shirts and jackets for many different reasons. Yet, research shows that university students are more likely to wear apparel that identifies their school after the football team has won a game than after the team has lost. Furthermore, the larger the margin of victory, the more students are likely to wear school-identifying apparel (Cialdini, Borden, Thorne, Walker, Freeman, & Sloan, 1976). 

 Experimental research shows that people are more likely to tout their connections to successful others when their own public images have been threatened, and those others are successful in an area in which they themselves are deficient. They are far less likely to mention their connections to those who are deficient on the same dimensions as themselves (Cialdini et al., 1976; Cialdini & DeNicholas, 1989). 

 People also do the opposite of basking in reflected glory–they cut off reflected failure (CORF) by disassociating themselves from people of disrepute, particularly when the disreputable person’s reactions may reflect personally on them (Snyder, Higgins, & Stucky, 1983; Snyder, Lassegard, & Ford, 1986). My grandfather is the family genealogist, but I’ve always suspected that he only tells us about ancestors who were notable in some way; I have yet to hear about a single horse thief, murderer, or other reprobate in my family tree. Another common example of CORFing occurs after political elections. People who display candidates’ signs in their yards are more likely to take the sign down if the candidate they support loses the election than if their candidate wins (Bernhardt, 1993). Few people want to be publicly associated with a loser. 

 In an extreme case of CORFing, Giovanna Portapuglia, an Italian countess, was kept locked up in a room not much larger than a broom closet for nearly 50 years because her family wanted to preserve the family’s honor and dignity in the eyes of other people. When she was discovered by police in 1980, the 65-year-old woman was emaciated, mute, and mentally disturbed. The family decided to hide her from public view after an illness she had as a teenager left her “different” (“Countess was Chained,” 1980). 

BIRGing at the State and City Level

 People sometimes bask in reflected glory simply by mentioning that a famous person was born in, lived in, or was otherwise associated with their town. Occasionally, entire cities or states get in on the action as they try to bask in the reflected glory of their native sons and daughters. Most commonly, states and cities advertise the fact that a prominent person was born there–even though where famous people were born may have little to do with what they ultimately achieve. 

 I read recently that North and South Carolina have been arguing for over a century about whether Andrew Jackson, the seventh president, was born in their state. Jackson was born a few days after his mother left her home in North Carolina for her brother’s plantation in South Carolina, but experts disagree about precisely where she was when Andrew was bom. South Carolina claims that she made it to her brother’s home before the baby was bom, but North Carolina offers evidence that Andrew was born along the way in another uncle’s cabin in North Carolina The fact that North Carolina has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to strengthen its claim that Jackson was born there attests to the importance to the state’s image of being associated with a U.S. President (“Native Son?,” 1991). 

 Although both individuals and entities such as states and cities BIRG, there seems to be one difference. Individuals sometimes BIRG with well-known people regardless of whether the reason the person is well-known is for being good or bad. We seem to take nearly as much pleasure in telling others that a mass murderer lived on our street as a sports hero. In contrast, cities and states only advertise their connections with those whose claim to fame is socially desirable. For example, I doubt that New Orleans will ever erect a sign at the city limits proclaiming “Birthplace of Lee Harvey Oswald.”

Self-Presentation

 Impression Management and Interpersonal Behavior 

 Mark R. Leary

The “$6K Orphan: Washington's Legal Kidnapping Scheme

Foster raids forge orphans for federal profit.

The Raid

At 4:17 a.m. on a Tuesday in Bloomington, Illinois—crisp autumn air still clinging to the maples outside—a fist hammered the Ramirez family’s front door like the tolling of some irrevocable bell. Maria Ramirez, 34, bolted upright in her queen bed, her husband Javier already whispering fragmented prayers in the hall. Their daughters, Sofia (7) and Luna (5), stirred in the next room, dolls clutched like fragile talismans against the encroaching unknown. No warrant fluttered in the harsh flashlight beams; just badges from the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), voices sharp as shattered glass: “Open up—child endangerment.”

What unfolded was a quiet cataclysm: Drawers yanked open with clinical efficiency, the fridge rifled for signs of “neglect” (a half-empty milk carton deemed evidence enough), Sofia’s whimpers swelling into raw screams as a caseworker pried her from Javier’s desperate arms. “Mommy, why are they taking us? Did we do something bad?” Luna’s small voice pierced the chaos like a shard, lingering as the girls were bundled into the chill of a state van, destined for a stranger’s couch forty miles away. Maria collapsed against the doorframe, Javier’s sobs the only echo in the sudden void of their home. This was no crime scene, no fevered nightmare—yet it evoked that heart-pounding, nausea-inducing mind fuck of terror, a modern-day Hitchcockian nightmare unraveling where innocence meets the gavel’s indifferent fall.

This is the hidden machinery of what I’ve come to call the $6K Child racket—a federal fraud factory where safe homes are stripped bare for reimbursement dollars, transforming the quiet bonds of family into prosecutable poverty. The “$6K Child” isn’t jargon; it’s the stark arithmetic of incentive, the approximate federal “entry bounty” states pocket upon placing a child in foster care, a kickstart to the annual reimbursements that can swell to $25,000 or more per head. It’s the poison pill at the heart of a system that rewards rupture over repair, orphaning not just bodies but the very soul of childhood. Maria’s story, though, is the quiet thunder that follows—where one family’s quiet defiance begins to fracture the facade.

The Poison Pill: CAPTA’s Toxic Legacy

It began, as so many American tragedies do, with the whisper of good intentions laced through the halls of a Watergate-shadowed Congress. On March 13, 1973, Senator Walter F. Mondale—then a rising Minnesota Democrat, voice of the heartland’s quiet crusaders—introduced S.1191, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), a bipartisan salve for a nation still tender from revelations of hidden cruelties in homes and headlines alike. Hailed as a bulwark against the unthinkable, it poured federal millions into state coffers for hotlines, training, and shelters—tools to identify and treat, not evict. Erin Pizzey, the trailblazing founder of the world’s first domestic-violence refuge, glimpsed in it a fragile dawn: Protect the fragile without pulverizing the family. Six months after Nixon’s ‘73 veto of broader child welfare (a casualty of his fiscal hawks), the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee forged ahead, delivering PL 93-247 to the Oval Office. On January 31, 1974, the President—embattled, yet unbowed—affixed his signature, marking CAPTA’s birth as the first national torch against child maltreatment

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Yet woven into this act’s noble weave was a subtler venom, one that would course like slow poison through the veins of policy. Federal matching funds—75% for investigations, unlocked by mandatory reporting—tethered salvation to scrutiny, birthing a machinery where probes proliferated unchecked. States, hungry for grants, inflated caseloads tenfold by 1985, transforming poverty’s whisper into peril’s roar. No caps on the hunt, but a cruel asymmetry: Prevention via Title IV-B? Bottled at meager allotments, even as removals flowed free. This calls out “all the co-conspirators... exposing ugly truths to corrode the corrupt $100-billion-a-year American divorce cartel—more focused on keeping money flowing than on the best interests of our children.”

The metastasis came six years later, in the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980, a Carter-era codex scripted in the House by Rep. James Corman, a California Democrat championing the underclass through Ways and Means. Introduced April 4, 1979, as H.R.3434, it birthed Title IV-E: Open-ended federal reimbursements for foster care - 50-83% matches on boarding, therapy, the bureaucratic churn - averaging $25,000 per child annually, with that fateful $6,000 “entry bounty” as the gateway toll.

Signed June 17, 1980, it promised “permanency” bonuses ($4,000-12,000 per adoption) to stem the foster drift, yet rigged the scales: Uncapped dollars for out-of-home exile, time-bound scraps for in-home healing. The scam unfurled like a ledger’s dark arithmetic, a syndicate’s sleight-of-hand where broad “neglect” certifications - triggered by evictions, ER fevers, or a sitter’s fleeting shadow - unlocked billions in IV-E flows, swelling to $8B+ yearly by 2025, while prevention languished under IV-B’s $200M ceiling.

Removals surged 33% in the act’s wake, with predatory incursions into low-income zip codes spiking 70%, turning forgotten corners into fertile ground for federal harvest. And in the subsidy shadows, fraud bloomed unchecked: Adoptive parents hoarding blood-money checks for “disrupted” bonds, siphoning $100M+ as bewildered children cycled back into the churn—a grotesque carousel of cash disguised as care. What Mondale and Corman forged as shield became syndicate: A $100 billion hydra where “best interest” bends to best billing, CAPTA’s vial of venom injected into the Adoption Act’s eager vein.

The Human Toll: Data That Bleeds

To grasp the wreckage, one must linger in the ledgers, where cold numerals pulse with the warmth of stolen mornings. In 2023 alone, 176,340 children cascaded into foster care—a relentless tide of 483 souls severed daily from the rhythms of home, yanked not always from peril but from the frayed edges of circumstance: an eviction notice, a midnight ER visit for fever, a mandated reporter’s fleeting suspicion. This is the echo of CAPTA’s half-century shadow, entries cresting at 267,000 in 2000 before a scandal-scarred dip of 33%—yet the scars endure, etched into 24 million American children, fully a third of our youth, adrift in single-parent homes that Warren Farrell has mourned as the quiet cradle of crisis.

Estimates paint a broader devastation: Thousands of children - upward of 4,000 on the most harrowing days, per advocacy tallies - lose meaningful contact with a parent each day in the zero-sum arena of family courts, their worlds cleaved by rulings that prioritize procedure over presence. Not mere statistics, these are mornings without pancakes, bedrooms echoing with absence, the slow erosion of trust that festers into lifelong fractures. Consider the ripple: Over a year, that’s more than 1.4 million ruptures, each a thread pulled from the nation’s fraying tapestry.

America, for all its professed guardianship of the innocent, leads the world in this quiet orphaning—not through malice alone, but through mandates that conflate risk with ruin. Poverty probes inflate removals by 70% in low-income enclaves, per forensic audits from the Barton Institute, transforming “best interest” into best billing. In the hush of my book The Respondent, I mapped this not as anomaly, but as alchemy: The courtrooms where children are “kidnapped in plain sight,” their parental rights upended under a system’s unblinking gaze. It is a toll that bleeds not red, but the deeper crimson of potential—lives ledgered away, one dawn raid at a time.

Defiance in the Dark: The Ramirez Reunion

2

Maria Ramirez was no headline maker until the headlines found her. A line cook in Bloomington, piecing together $32,000 a year amid the grind of double shifts, her file was born of a whisper: A mandated reporter’s tip about Javier’s overtime leaving the girls with a sitter twice weekly. No bruises marred their skin, no shadows of belts or blows, just a fridge audit flagging “insufficient proteins,” a poverty tax disguised as prudence. The dawn raid that followed was surgical: Girls spirited away, Maria bound by a no-contact order, her days dissolving into a haze of court dates and CPS “service plans” - parenting classes she juggled at the cost of wages she couldn’t spare.

For two years, the machine ground on, relentless, its web of “unfortunate outcomes”- judges, mediators, social workers tangled in dysfunction. Then came the fracture…

Enter Lena Vasquez, Bloomington’s understated sentinel against DCFS overreach, who had already liberated five families that year through the fine art of evidentiary jujitsu. Vasquez unearthed the rot: A caseworker’s bonuses tethered to placements, leaked emails whispering of quota pressures from on high. “They didn’t raid for rescue,” Maria confides now, her voice a quiet thunder over a shared Zoom screen, “they raided for revenue.” Sofia had ceased her drawings, those vibrant bursts of crayon childhood; Luna posed the unanswerable: “Are we bad forever, Mommy?” The home, once alive with laughter, echoed with what the experts term “living grief”—holidays as hollow rituals, birthdays shadowed by ghosts, the extended-family brutality that targets the resilient.

The hearing unfolded like a drama long deferred: Neighbors’ affidavits painting a portrait of thriving (”The girls were the light of our block”), pay stubs dismantling the myth of instability, even Sofia’s school counselor’s tender testimony: “The trauma of removal wounded deeper than any imagined risk at home.” The judge’s gavel fell as grace - a full reunification, DCFS sanctioned for $15,000 in restitution.

Today, the Ramirez’s weave “reunion picnics” into their weekends, mending the brutal severances that ripple through extended kin, much like the quiet wars of alienation I chronicled in my own fractured nights. Maria’s refrain carries the weight of survival: “They dimmed our light, but we became the flame.” One victory begets a chorus; Vasquez’s caseload swells with the emboldened, a subterranean rebellion etching cracks in the cartel’s unyielding stone.

Cracking the Cartel: Bills, Petitions, and the Dawn
Yet even in this engineered twilight - where dawn raids shatter the innocent like fragile eggshells under boot heels, and ledgers tally the lost as mere line items in a profit parade - glimmers of reckoning pierce the gloom of 2025, fragile as the first light filtering through a cracked courtroom blind, catching the dust motes of forgotten teddy bears and crumpled crayon drawings. These are the slivers of dawn for children who wake screaming from nightmares that are all too real, for families whose laughter has been audited into silence, their holiday tables set for ghosts, their bedtime stories rewritten as case files stamped with “endangerment.”

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President Trump’s November executive order, a blunt instrument forged in the fires of belated fury, modernizes the fractured pipeline of foster transitions, funneling $500 million into the starved veins of youth autonomy and kin-first placements. No longer shall aunts clutch empty doorframes, their whispers of lullabies lost to the state’s cold calculus; no longer shall cousins become strangers, their shared blood dismissed as an inconvenient variable in the bounty equation. This decree dares to utter the radical heresy that once echoed in every nursery rhyme: Blood ties, not bureaucratic bounties, must anchor the uprooted - those tiny hands reaching for the familiar curve of a mother’s neck, the steady rhythm of a father’s heartbeat, the unbreakable weave of siblings tangled in a single blanket fort.

Echoing that defiant pulse, H.R. 2438’s Foster Tax Credits rise like a battering ram against adoption’s ironclad fiscal walls, slashing the barriers that have turned grandmothers into spectral visitors peering through visitation glass, uncles into footnotes in a stranger’s file, and the sacred circle of family into a shattered mandala of strangers. Meanwhile, Title IV-B’s renewal surges prevention coffers by $200 million - a tentative but tenacious tide, swelling against the relentless flood of removals that has drowned safe homes in suspicion for half a century, where a half-empty milk carton becomes grounds for exile, and a father’s overtime shift a verdict of neglect. These are not mere line items in a congressional ledger, etched in the indifferent ink of policy wonks; they are lifelines, fragile threads spun from the raw silk of a child’s first word, a family’s whispered “I love you” across a courtroom divide - clawing back the incentives that have monetized misery, transforming CAPTA’s noble intent into a half-century shadow play of profit over protection, where the wail of a toddler torn from her crib echoes louder than any gavel’s fall.

But glimmers demand guardians, for in the quiet hours when the raids recede and the ledgers close, it is the children who bear the unledgerable weight - their trust fractured like a dropped porcelain doll, their futures shadowed by the PTSD that claims 85% of these stolen souls, one silent scream at a time. One child killed every six days in the custody wars that the system ignites, their tiny graves unmarked footnotes in the $100 billion feast. Families have paid the ultimate price too long - their mornings hollowed by the echo of absent footsteps, their holidays haunted by chairs pulled empty at the feast, their hopes ledgered into oblivion under a system that rewards rupture over repair, pitting love against law in a zero-sum slaughter where a parent’s plea is drowned by the chime of federal reimbursements.

The $100 billion American Divorce Machine - this hydra of hollowed hearts - feasts on our frayed familial fabric, devouring the gold standard of childhood: that unbreakable under-one-roof sanctuary where fathers toss sons skyward and mothers braid daughters’ dreams, where the world outside fades to the safe harbor of shared breaths and secrets. But not anymore. From the shadowed corridors of Chiswick refuges, where Erin Pizzey first sheltered the storm-battered only to watch the storm summoned anew, to the emptied bedrooms of Bloomington, where Sofia’s crayons lie gathering dust and Luna’s questions hang unanswered - ”Are we bad forever, Mommy?” - from my sons’ unspoken pact across the void to your unyielding roar in the face of this engineered orphaning, we rise. Not as victims, their playthings in a profit parade, but as the dawn itself - fierce, unrelenting, reclaiming the hearth one ignited heartbeat at a time.

Greg Ellis
https://substack.com/redirect/47da87d4-c261-42ff-a6aa-623a302e3926?j=eyJ1IjoiMXBvcTY0In0.bpX_Ri4UrVVzEcwn2tPJZmntoRqzSx0aLRc9mOX6Iw8

If we can take a break from complaining about women, we might consider a truly serious (but largely hidden) consequence of feminism: the child protection gestapo, which specializes in tearing children from their parents. As Greg Ellis indicates, this contributed to the creation of the divorce machinery and affects fathers far more than mothers, though both are targets, and of course the main victims are children. Without action, this gendarmerie is the future feminism has in store for all of us.

Trump’s recent Executive Order may help, but it will have zero effect if not followed up. We cannot count on the tradcons or even the alternative media. Ellis provides some background, and more can be found in my books, Taken Into Custody and The New Politics of Sex (StephenBaskerville.com).

Divorce-Court Demolition

The Respondent: Exposing the Cartel of Family Law
by Greg Ellis
Köehler Books
240 pp., $17.95

If Americans understood how crooked their courts really are, they would not be surprised at the current travesties of justice—like concocting patently groundless quasi-criminal accusations against former President Donald Trump and everyone associated with him. Commandeering the public justice system to wreak vengeance on our personal or political enemies did not start with judicial grandees sitting atop the commanding heights of our august federal courts.

No, as Greg Ellis shows in The Respondent, perverting justice for private gain and public tyranny was refined by what even the high-minded jurisprudential aristocracy look down upon as lowlife hacks who administer the ethical cesspool of family law. In fact, today’s vendettas against Trump are rendered possible and plausible only by decades of judicial persecution of ordinary, defenseless citizens.

Ellis, a prominent Hollywood actor who played supporting roles in the Pirates of the Caribbean and the new Star Trek franchises, was caught up in the family court wringer after being anonymously accused of planning some unspecified future “harm” to his own children. Without warning, he was summarily questioned—without a lawyer—by police, handcuffed, forcibly removed from his home. He was interrogated again behind closed doors, kept from his children, plundered of almost everything he possessed, rendered unemployable, incarcerated in a psychiatric facility, and left homeless. His young children were also interrogated with leading questions suggesting, without evidence, that he had sexually molested them.

All standard procedure in family law. Presuming people guilty and ruining their lives is all in a day’s work. Similar accounts more obscure (because not written by Hollywood stars) in self-published books, unpublished articles, rejected civil-rights suits, social media discussions corroborate this one—and some of those accounts make this one look relatively mild.

And they are true. I can say this not only because I have read and heard thousands of such accounts or because I have witnessed some in person. When one understands the politics driving family law courts and dictating the twisted ethics therein, one quickly grasps that their perverted rules constitute an open invitation to inflict persecution and plunder on people like Ellis and others. The procedures we permit make it impossible for these abuses not to be happening. In fact, no one denies that it is all routine. They simply cover it with euphemism and launch personal attacks against anyone who criticizes.

No-fault divorce did not remove “acrimony” from family law or any other legal process, and it was never intended to do so. No-fault justice simply eliminated the rule of law in the United States by allowing legal proceedings against innocent people—citizens neither charged nor suspected of any legal wrongdoing, who can be made to feel the full force of the penal apparatus, minus the standard safeguards enjoyed by accused criminals. Courts that launch legal actions against private citizens without telling them their infraction (“fault”) are dispensing not justice but systematized injustice and tyranny. That the main tools of their peculiar trade are other people’s children renders those courts to be nothing less than horror chambers. Ellis experienced the logical result. Once we crossed this line into legal nihilism, the degeneration of the justice system into an extortion racket became inevitable.

Ellis found himself in a Kafkaesque nightmare, where guilt is determined and punishments like expropriation and incarceration are inflicted not by rules of evidence and due process of law but by psychotherapists spouting psychobabble and by social workers implementing the ideology they learned in women’s studies courses. It is a world where having family members incarcerated without trial is not only possible but rewarded as a shrewd litigation strategy. It is a legal underworld where no punishment is so unjust, cruel, or unusual that it cannot be rationalized as being “in the best interest of the child.”

So much destruction proceeds from the government’s divorce machine that the damage is difficult to convey in less space than a book. The foundational institutions of our civilization are all eviscerated: marriage, family, privacy, freedom, constitutional government, professional ethics, social stability, and economic solvency.

The catastrophe is so massive on so many fronts that enumerating them is like battling a Hydra. There are ruined lives, severed relationships, and emotional horrors inflicted on innocent people, especially children. There is the social anomie in communities where millions of fatherless youth grow into delinquents, dropouts, addicts, criminals, derelicts, terrorists (yes, school shooters too), plus the next generation of single mothers. There is the massive expansion in the size and scope of government, including bureaucracies for law enforcement, incarceration, health, education, and housing. There is the open violation of almost every constitutional safeguard and civil liberty by the very courts that exist to protect those rights. There is the perversion of professionals like lawyers, psychotherapists, and social workers into lackeys and bureaucratic gangsters. And there is the cowardice bred into all of us, as we studiously look the other way.

Ellis himself genuflects to political correctness perhaps too often in some of his language, but it would be wrong to hold this against him. Writers on this topic know that most publishers and editors demand such weasel words. Instead, readers should appreciate how Ellis slips in the truth in all its horror. This often takes the form of pithy phrases: family court is “a state-sanctioned kidnapping campaign,” he writes in one chapter titled, “The Mass Kidnapping of American Children.” Elsewhere, he writes that private investigators “commit crimes for lawyers who don’t want dirt on their hands.” At one point, he observes accurately that “the courts determined a need to reward the parent who brings in the business with a finder’s fee.” And he quotes other victims to the effect that “the whole thing is … a system of organized crime.”

Some points merit more attention, like his discovery that social workers “had threatened Dana [his wife] with taking our boys and placing them into foster care if she did not immediately procure a restraining order and file for divorce.” This may not excuse her taking advantage of the corrupt system, but it does illustrate that women too become its prisoners. Having enlisted social workers to eliminate the fathers, many mothers find that the goons then remove the children from them as well.

Psychotherapy figures prominently throughout this book in various ways. The Soviet Union pioneered the weaponization of legal and mental health systems to suppress dissent. Yet American courts have devised even more creative techniques. Gratuitous evaluations, never justified in the first place, gave Ellis an unequivocal clean bill of mental health but were withheld from him and his lawyers and summarily dismissed by judges. Ellis also engages in voluntary self-analysis, using candor to rationalize the abuses he experienced.

Ellis sometimes gives divorce operatives the benefit of the doubt, but his own account belies any suggestion that they deserve it. At one point, he suggests that “judges who are better educated” might help. But no amount of education will change these operatives’ well-honed ways. They are not ignorant or poorly trained (and they are certainly not “underfunded,” as they self-servingly claim). They know precisely what they are doing, because they are the beneficiaries of their scam, and they enact it with ruthless efficiency.

Early on in his travails, Ellis suspected that his lawyers were not working in his interest. Attorneys exchanged daily letters over nothing, driving up their fees. Ellis made some 80 court appearances—none serving any purpose other than fees for lawyers and other hangers-on. His lawyers coached him to recite a script of exact words and phrases and told him that was “just how things were done.” In other words, just rulings were not an option, because the proceedings were scripted and outcomes pre-determined. Robert Seidenberg corroborates Ellis’s experience in a chapter of his book, The Father’s Emergency Guide to Divorce-Custody Battle (1997), titled “Your Lawyer, Your Enemy.”

It would be a shame if this important work followed others like it into obscurity, such as the book by Ellis’s colleague Alec Baldwin, A Promise to Ourselves: A Journey Through Fatherhood and Divorce (2008). First-rate journalists have also risked their careers to expose family court scandals, including Melanie Phillips of Britain’s Daily Mail, John Waters at The Irish Times, Donna Laframboise at Canada’s National Post, and the late Phyllis Schlafly in her book, Who Killed the American Family?

We are now seeing the results of ignoring this horror for decades. No nation can remain free that harbors within itself an underworld of legal tyranny—or that raises its children according to such principles.

Stephen Baskerville
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/reviews/divorce-court-demolition/

The Mystery of Life Origin

 FOREWORD Robert J. Marks and John West

In 1984, three courageous scientists—Charles  Thaxton,  Walter Bradley, and  Roger Olsen—published a rigorous reassessment of then-current scientific theories about the origin of life.  Published by the Philosophical Library (the publisher of works by Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, and many other eminent scientists and thinkers), The Mystery of Life’s Origins challenged the scientific orthodoxy of the time and provoked significant interest in the scientific community. Long-time NASA scientist Robert  Jastrow hailed the book as “a very well thought-out and clearly written analysis,” while  Robert Shapiro, Professor of Chemistry at New York University, lauded it as “an important contribution to the origin of life field.”

The book’s core message was startling: Current approaches to the origin of life were abysmal failures, and wholesale re-thinking was required. As the authors put it:

the difficulty is fundamental. It applies equally to discarded, present, and possible future models of chemical evolution. We believe the problem is analogous to that of the medieval alchemist who was commissioned to change copper into gold... You can’t get gold out of copper, apples out of oranges, or information out of negative thermal entropy. There does not seem to be any physical basis for the widespread assumption implicit in the idea that an open system is a sufficient explanation for the complexity of life.

At the end of the book, the authors suggested that the origin of life might have required what philosopher Michael  Polanyi called “a profoundly informative intervention” or what they themselves called an “ intelligent cause.” Most scientists of the time did not want to hear that revolutionary proposal; but the authors’ words inspired a new generation of scientists and scholars who were dedicated to seeking evidence of purpose and  intelligent design throughout nature.

By republishing The Mystery of Life’s Origin on the occasion of its 35th anniversary, we seek to recognize the signal accomplishment of its original authors, plus the hard work of  Jon Buell of the  Foundation for Thought and Ethics, who helped bring the book to reality. In the new introduction by  David Klinghoffer, you will get to read the behind-the-scenes story of how the book came to be written—and the transformative impact it had on many. The original text has been lightly updated. The fact that only light updating was needed is a testament to the meticulous scholarship of the authors and to the enduring nature of the problem they identified in origin of life studies.

Although the text of the original Mystery of Life’s Origin forms the first part of this volume, this book is much more than an historical appreciation. Its second half, “The State of the Debate,” includes new chapters assessing the state of origin of life research today by chemist  James Tour of Rice University, physicist  Brian Miller, astronomer  Guillermo Gonzalez, biologist  Jonathan Wells, and philosopher of science  Stephen C. Meyer. Those who want to understand not only the history of science’s quest to understand the origin of life, but its current status, will find this book an invaluable guide.

(...)

INTRODUCTION:  INTELLIGENT DESIGN’S ORIGINAL EDITION David Klinghoffer

How does life emerge from that which is not alive? This elicit mystery exercises a peculiar fascination, with the power to elicit remarkable feats of imagination. As the novelist Mary Shelley recalled, her invention of the story of  Frankenstein traced back to conversations she witnessed between Lord Byron and her husband  Percy Shelley. Holidaying in Switzerland in the summer of 1816, they spoke late into the night, past the “witching hour,” about “the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated.” Up for discussion was gossip about “experiments of  Dr. Darwin” (Erasmus, the grandfather of Charles) who “by some extraordinary means” produced “voluntary motion” in a length of spaghetti. The poets alluded to “galvanism,” electrical experiments by  Luigi Galvani, spurring thoughts that “a corpse would be reanimated.”1 Later, sleepless in her bed, Mrs. Shelley would experience a vision, receiving the seed for one of the great horror novels.

Less horrific but hardly less imaginative are scenarios of unguided “chemical evolution,” or abiogenesis, featured in high school and college biology textbooks, taken as gospel by the media and preached as such by a range of authoritative popular and scholarly figures in the culture. Simple experimental work by  Louis Pasteur in the early 1860s demonstrated that life does not spontaneously generate itself, not from spaghetti, not from anything. Instead, life comes from life. How then may science explain the origin of the very first life?

 Charles Darwin in 1871 famously speculated in a letter to  Joseph Hooker, “But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity etcetera present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes.”2 The “warm little pond” generating “protein compounds” is not far off from textbook orthodoxy today. Students are taught that a prebiotic soup gave rise to key biotic chemicals, amino acids, stimulated by atmospheric electricity—galvanism in a modern guise—as demonstrated in the famed  Miller-Urey experiment of 1952. One feat of imagination here lies in conceiving by what “extraordinary means” such building blocks came together, unguided, in precisely the right order to give rise to biological information, the digital code of DNA and RNA, that underlies all life on Earth.

In 1969, San Francisco State University biologist  Dean Kenyon would give the theory of chemical evolution its then most up-to-date presentation, in an influential text,  Biochemical Predestination. By 1984, Kenyon had abandoned the theory altogether in favor of what would later be called intelligent design. His public confession of apostasy came in the Foreword of a short yet remarkable book, The Mystery of Life’s Origin: Reassessing Current Theories, by chemist  Charles B. Thaxton, materials scientist  Walter L. Bradley, and geochemist  Roger L. Olsen.  Discovery Institute Press is delighted to offer this new version of the book, the Ur-text or original edition of the modern theory of intelligent design, along with supplementary essays by scholars updating and extending the work. These new chapters, by synthetic organic chemist James Tour, physicist Brian Miller, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, biologist Jonathan Wells, and philosopher of biology Stephen Meyer, present the current state of the debate that Thaxton and his co-authors sparked in 1984. The enigma they identified remains, hardly resolved by further technical research amplified and distorted by press releases and hysterical headlines, but rather, if anything, compounded as science has advanced.

For anyone familiar with today’s  intelligent design theory, to read The Mystery of Life’s Origin is to experience a powerful sense of déjà vu. Surely we have walked these halls before. Or rather, Mystery is the hall down which ID walked before it emerged into history as “intelligent design.” The now familiar phrase appears nowhere in the text. But other phrases, persons, and motifs, the stock-in-trade of the modern ID theorist, are present. That is most notably, thickly so in the book’s Epilogue, authored by Dr. Thaxton, where the technical details are left behind and a forthright argument for a design hypothesis is offered. Stephen Meyer has been forthcoming about his intellectual debt to Thaxton. In a sense, Mystery is a daring first draft of what would become Meyer’s own work, especially in  Signature in the Cell. Here we have the “principle of uniformity,”3 “the present is a key to the past,”4 adducing what “we know by experience” about how “intelligent investigators” act,5 the role of the “idea of creation” in the “origin of modern science,”6 the injunction to “follow the evidence where it leads,”7 how “certain effects always have intelligent causes,”8 Shannon information,  Michael Polanyi, “ specified complexity,”9 taking Darwin himself as a historical precedent in one’s argumentation, conceiving of the search for truth about biological origins as akin to the work of a detective in a murder mystery, and more.

A separate article could be written tracing the influence of such themes from Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen on Meyer alone, reflected in his books including the forthcoming  The Return of the  God Hypothesis. That last formulation, the “God hypothesis,” first used by Meyer in the title of a 1999 essay in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, itself appears in the Epilogue of Mystery.10 Thaxton uses it to contrast different theaters of scientific investigation, “ operation science” versus “ origin science,” where consideration of a transcendent intelligent agent as being at work in causing certain events either doesn’t belong at all, or might in fact be permissible. In Signature in the Cell, Meyer would later write that this “terminology” was “admittedly cumbersome.”11 For “origin science” he substitutes “historical science.”

When I spoke to Thaxton recently, he explained that the “God hypothesis” was simply the shorthand way professors talked about the idea when Thaxton was a post-doctoral student at Harvard in the philosophy of science. Other key ID concepts and habits of thought came to him from this same period in his post-PhD studies. For example, looking to Darwin as a model or precedent for one’s arguments, as Meyer does, was something he picked up from historian of science  Reijer Hooykaas (1906–1994), whom he came to know at this time. “ Uniformitarianism” is via the geologist  Charles Lyell (1797–1875), but Hooykaas wrote a book about it in 1963,  The Principle of Uniformity in Geology, Biology, and Theology. Shannon information was from information theorist  Hubert Yockey (1916–2016), referring to mathematician  Claude Shannon (1916–2001), and “specified complexity,” now much associated with mathematician and intelligent design proponent  William Dembski, from chemist  Leslie Orgel (1927–2007). The advice to “follow the evidence where it leads,” or as it is sometimes found, “We must follow the argument wherever it leads,” a staple of writers on intelligent design, is a paraphrase from Socrates in Plato’s Republic. In Allan Bloom’s translation (394d), “[W]herever the argument, like a wind, tends, thither must we go.”12In other words, the interest of The Mystery of Life’s Origin lies partly in the question of an idea’s origin. Meyer and Thaxton form a link with scientific and philosophical investigations of the 20th century, the 19th century, and before, much as intelligent design more broadly connects Greek philosophy, especially  Anaxagoras (5th century B.C.), with the thinking of Darwin’s colleague turned rival,  Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913). Without going into needless detail, or searching too far back into the past, this Introduction will sketch some of the immediate historical background behind the writing of Mystery and its subsequent influence on the evolution of the theory of ID.

It is impossible to fully disentangle the study of biological origins from reflections and speculations of a theological nature. Proponents of Darwinian evolution habitually advance arguments about God in support of their theory: “God, if he exists, and there seems to be no reason to think he does, surely wouldn’t have done it this way.” Much of the curiosity we feel about how life originated similarly derives from the observation that a purely naturalistic explanation is not what a theist would expect, and an explanation incorporating design or teleology is not what a materialist or an atheist would expect. Today, some of the most prominent exponents of  neo-Darwinism are also outspoken and evangelizing atheists. Which is fair enough. That fact by itself does not invalidate their scientific thinking. So there is no shock or scandal in the fact that the idea for the book that became The Mystery of Life’s Origin was first discussed among a group of friends and colleagues affiliated with  Probe Ministries, operated by  Jon Buell and his associate  James Williams to advocate a Christian worldview. Buell would go on in 1981 to launch the  Foundation for Thought and Ethics, in Dallas, Texas, publishing books on scientific, historical, and ethical subjects. This publishing work was absorbed in 2016 as an imprint of Discovery Institute Press.

Buell knew Mystery co-author Walter Bradley from Bradley’s days as a PhD student at the University of Texas. In 1975, Buell was seeking an author for a rigorous book on evolution, and he proposed it to Bradley, then a professor at the Colorado School of Mines. Bradley wasn’t interested in that focus, so he made a counter-proposal: a book on the origin of life. As he told Discovery Institute’s  John West in an interview, he suspected that could be the “ultimate barrier to this whole question of life and evolution,” the “hardest step,” “how you get started from scratch”—meaning, life from nonlife.13 The study of the origin of life is by necessity multidisciplinary. It joins biology to fields with which Bradley’s expertise, materials science, is more closely linked: biochemistry, physical chemistry, chemical kinetics, thermodynamics. “Interestingly enough,” he says, “most of the people that I have met, who are doing work as biologists, seldom know very much about what I think of as more fundamental and theoretical chemistry. And so a lot of what they do is pretty qualitative.”

Qualitative speculation was what Bradley wanted to avoid. Talking and teaching about the subject, including a 1974 guest lecture he gave on “Thermodynamics and the Origin of Life” at Colorado State University, convinced him he was onto something. One key question, the atmosphere of the early Earth, seemed to call for training in another field: geochemistry. For this, he sought out the collaboration of a co-author,  Roger Olsen, then a PhD student in geochemistry at the Colorado School of Mines. “Some of the ideas of what people would want to believe about  abiogenesis are very dependent on what the initial atmosphere was like,” Bradley recalls of his thinking at the time. “For example, if you have too much oxygen, then there’s no hope.” Olsen’s research could shed light on this. “Roger concluded that we never did have a reducing atmosphere,” as the  Miller-Urey experiment assumed, an assumption that “didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.” An oxidizing atmosphere spelled doom for life’s presumed chemical forerunners.

Bradley and Olsen had been working on their origin-of-life manuscript for six months when  Charles Thaxton moved down to Dallas from Boston, where he had done post-doctoral studies at Harvard and Brandeis Universities, in the history of science and molecular biology, respectively. The text of The Mystery of Life’s Origin furnishes a single brief autobiographical reference, in the Epilogue, but it is an intriguing one. It reflects Thaxton’s experience: “When we are asked to consider ‘far out’ or ‘strange’ ideas such as  Special Creation, as were the authors just a few years ago, typically the response is exactly that mentioned by [David] Bohm as cited earlier.” This response is one of “violent disturbance.” Moreover, “The process… can sometimes be painful (it was to one of the authors) but the quest for truth has never been easy, and has on more than a few occasions been known to make one unpopular.”14Thaxton, introduced to religious faith by his mother, had in college gone through a period of disbelief. Scientific knowledge seemed to crowd out any role for a deity. It was as a graduate student in physical chemistry at Iowa State that he first delved into the problem of abiogenesis. Until that point, he had thought that chemistry fully accounted for life’s origins. The assumption turned out to be too simple. The pain and disturbance he referred to in the book was, first, the feeling of having betrayed his mother, and, second, the feeling of having betrayed those who looked to him as respectable materialist.

 After moving to Dallas with his wife and first son, Thaxton went to work with Jon Buell. It was late 1975, and, as Thaxton told John West in an interview, “Buell came in one day and presented me with a manuscript that he’d had on his desk.”15 It was by Walter Bradley and Roger Olsen, the first draft of what would become The Mystery of Life’s Origin. “So I read through it,” Thaxton says, “and my first reaction was, wow, this is kind of interesting. But why is there not more chemistry in it?” He noted this objection to Buell, who invited him to come on a visit to meet with Bradley and Olsen in College Station, Texas, where by this time Bradley had moved to teach at Texas A&M. In Bradley’s living room, they discussed the book, and Buell encouraged Thaxton to share his reservation about the dearth of chemistry. Bradley and Olsen both almost simultaneously spoke up and said, “Well, you’re the chemist. You write it!”

And that is essentially what he did. Bradley was teaching and the now Dr. Olsen had switched to private industry. Thaxton was the “fresh man” on the project with the time to further develop the book. “I had a lot of studying to do, and I did,” he says. “Night and day for weeks and weeks and months, and it turned into several years in fact, before it was all done.” Olsen had written about the atmosphere of the early Earth in Chapter 5 (“Reassessing the Early Earth and Its Atmosphere”), while Bradley wrote Chapters 7, 8, and 9 (“Thermodynamics of Living Systems,” “Thermodynamics and the Origin of Life,” and “Specifying How Work Is to Be Done”). “Then Thaxton wrote the majority of the rest of it,” according to Bradley, including the Epilogue which departs from pure scientific discussion and drew most of the fire once the book came out.

One problem was that the chapters seemed to reflect different voices, different terminologies and ways of arguing. As Thaxton recalls, it needed to be largely rewritten to sound “like a science book, not an engineering book.” So, “I redid the whole manuscript, just started from scratch, just started over. And we completely went through that process at least two or three times.” By 1978, it was done, and ready to be sent for scientific review, by a dozen or more scientists, some friendly to the thesis, others unfriendly.

One prominent scientist specializing in the origin-of-life field, presumed to be unfriendly but a fair critic nonetheless, was Dean Kenyon. Kenyon, exchanging letters with Thaxton in 1981, had read the book in its manuscript form and was interested enough to invite Buell and Thaxton to visit with him. They flew to San Francisco for the meeting. Thaxton did not know at the time that Kenyon had privately come to doubt his own chemical evolutionary theory.

“My stomach was all the way up in my throat as we sat in Kenyon’s office that day,” Thaxton recalls. “I remember asking him what he thought of the book.” In response, Kenyon fixed him with a stern look, then smiled and said, “I thought it was terrific.” This emboldened Thaxton, for he had come with an additional plan, beyond asking Kenyon for his view of their work. He was going to ask Kenyon to write the Fore-word. He plunged in. “Well, then why don’t you write the Foreword to the book?” Thaxton asked. “And he said, ‘Well, I was hoping you would ask.’”

In the opinion of historian Ronald Numbers, in his book The Creationists, Kenyon’s contribution, a leading origin-of-life theorist “confessing that he no longer believed in naturalistic evolution,” was the “most striking feature of their book.”16 As Kenyon wrote, “It is very likely that research on life’s origins will move in somewhat different directions once the professionals have read this important work.” He concludes, “All scientists interested in the origin-of-life problem would do well to study this book carefully and to evaluate their own work in the light of its arguments.”17 Such an endorsement, for the three authors, was a coup that almost could not be topped.

The process of reviewing having been completed and needed changes having been made, it was time to seek a publisher. This task fell to  Jon Buell. The goal was to reach a secular audience, not a religious one, and the style of the book indicates as much. To be strictly avoided, says Thaxton, was anything that sounded remotely “religious.” He notes, “We wanted to make sure we weren’t preaching.” Yet finding a publisher was no simple matter. Then as now, the faintest hint of “creationism” was enough to set teeth on edge, even though the Thaxton book clearly did not support creationism in its most precise meaning of recruiting science on behalf of Biblical literalism. It probably did not help that a prominent Supreme Court case involving “creation science,”  McLean v. Arkansas, was being argued about this time, in 1981. The case was decided in January 1982, finding that teaching creationism in public schools violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

As of late 1982, Buell was still in search of a publisher. Cornell University Press and MIT Press had both expressed initial interest, with “almost identical” final results, as Thaxton recalls. At Cornell, two internal reviewers read the book and delivered a split opinion, in favor and against. So a third was called in, a prominent scientist. Thaxton wonders if it was  Carl Sagan. The acquisitions editor involved,  Eric Halpern, wrote to Buell with the bad news, indicating that, “As you will see, the report falls far short of giving us the basis for a favorable recommendation to our faculty Board.”18 The “masked” report is indeed scathing, blasting the book for its “superficial” arguments, though interesting in how it shows how little has changed in conventional thinking about life’s origin over the past four decades. The anonymous Cornell reviewer harrumphs, “Because the experiments have not yet produced a cell in the laboratory it is unrealistic to dismiss the effort.” Researchers are still saying the same today, in very similar terms. Astronomer  Abraham Loeb at Harvard, for one, writing in 2019 in Scientific American, considers the prospects of “produc[ing] synthetic life out of raw chemicals” in the lab, but concedes “even if we dismiss these prospects as unrealistic with our current technologies, another civilization that happened to be billions of years more technologically advanced than we are might have” done so.19By return mail on  Foundation for Thought and Ethics letterhead, Thaxton responded to Halpern, noting that while expert review was only to be expected from a university publisher, “it is difficult to escape the feeling that we have been sandbagged by someone who feels threatened by criticisms raised” in the book. He pointed out that their book had been sent accompanied by endorsements from “noted chemical evolution scholars,” organic chemist  Gordon Shaw at the University of Bradford in England, as well as  Dean Kenyon. The reviewer had dismissed the manuscript as “a complete misrepresentation,” lacking originality or comprehension. Yet Kenyon had called it “one of the best critical analyses of origin-of-life I have read to date.” Thaxton asked why Halpern had not wondered at the stark discrepancy of views: “[C]onsider the implication of the allegations of your reader. To accept his word that we have submitted a shallow, often answered critique, is to charge the readers we cited in our Prospectus with having their critical faculties so numbed they could not detect superficial criticisms. And these are noted scholars.”

Writing to Halpern at Cornell, Thaxton included an independent analysis from the editor at the MIT Press who had been “enthusiastic” about the book, only to lose his job because the publisher cut its division devoted to the life sciences. The editor,  Grahame J. C. Smith, had particularly praised Walter Bradley’s coverage of thermodynamic issues. These chapters were “so good that the rest of the book might be geared to cohesiveness with that part of the book.”20 He particularly liked Chapter 8, which he called “really excellent” and “Wonderful!” He had many helpful editorial suggestions and criticisms.

Thaxton had asked Halpern at Cornell to reconsider, but Halpern, in a final reply on December 23, 1982, courteously refused. With his masked “distinguished scholar in the field of chemical evolution” harshly opposed, he would have needed to seek additional support from Cornell scientists, and he did not want to take that course.

In the end, Buell and Thaxton went with an old and distinguished New York publisher, Philosophical Library, which while not a university or strictly scientific press could boast an impressive list of authors, prominent scientists and others. They have published a collection by Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years (1950), and their backlist features books by Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, even Charles Darwin, including a range of Nobel Prize winners.21 They also allowed the  Foundation for Thought and Ethics to market the book. Far from a religious publisher, Philosophical Library was an appropriate choice for a scientific audience. A second edition of the book was published by Lewis and Stanley, in Dallas. The move was made, says Thaxton, simply because “we can do everything much faster, without having to have big turnarounds, and waits, and so on.”

The book came trailing endorsements besides Kenyon’s. The back-cover highlights praise from astronomer  Robert Jastrow of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (“a very well thought-out and clearly written analysis”) and from one of the best-known scholars on the origin of life, chemist Robert Shapiro at New York University (“an important contribution,” “brings together the major scientific arguments that demonstrate the inadequacy of current theories,” although “I do not share the final philosophical conclusion”). Shapiro published his own book on the topic two years later,  Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth (1986).

The subsequent reception by scientists helps to explain the spark that The Mystery of Life’s Origin provided for a nascent  intelligent design movement. The reception did not come immediately. In fact, the anxious authors were initially troubled by the lack of a response. “It was dead silence,” says Thaxton. “Nobody said anything. And I was so dejected, and disappointed. It was like you drop it out there and — not a ripple. Nothing. No effect at all.” The publisher was reassuring. “‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘it takes a year’” for a book like this to get its due.

So they waited. And while they did, we can pause briefly to remember how, for skeptics of evolution, whether chemical or biological, it was a different world from ours. In 1984, the full array of resources deployed today to intimidate dissenters didn’t exist. There were no evolution professors speculating on their blogs about pre-publication books and poisoning the well against new ideas. Nor were there any pseudonymous Darwinist reviewers on Amazon posting enflamed reviews of books they hadn’t purchased much less read. Everyone wrote under his own name, and named editors served in the role of gatekeeper, thus taking responsibility. It was a fine thing to be alive before the Internet. Interest had to build organically, more honestly, via typescripts and printed matter transiting through the U.S. mail. As a side benefit, there was no Wikipedia with its unknown yet wildly influential editors, many bearing fantastical pseudonyms instead of real names, disseminating misinformation about any controversial subject and on call 24/7, at a moment’s notice, to undo an earnest effort to correct misstatements. As of 2017,  Walter Bradley himself was among those ID scientists to have their Wikipedia entry disemboweled or erased by Wiki editors. Even Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has called the encyclopedia’s treatment of intelligent design “appallingly biased.”22 This is how opinions on profound subjects are developed and spread now.

Is what I have just recounted an irrelevant aside? No, it’s not. I bring it up because, despite the aggravating interaction with Cornell University Press, the response from expert scientists to The Mystery of Life’s Origin is impressive for how relatively relaxed, if not necessarily open-minded, the scientific establishment was. And in fact, the publisher’s estimate of a year was about right. “So that was what happened,” says Thaxton. “When the reviewers started, wow, it was like they all started coming at once.”

Among the most significant voices to be raised was that of biochemist  Sidney W. Fox at the University of Miami, a leading origin-of-life researcher. Thaxton calls him a “propagandist” for the naturalistic interpretation of  abiogenesis. His June 1985 review in The Quarterly Review of Biology was loaded with ridicule, sniffing that of the writers, “Not one is listed in American Men and Women of Science, 14th edition.”23 Yet there is also a hint of grudging respect: “the authors of The Mystery present antievolutionary arguments with force.”

Fox, as Thaxton recalls, was “more significant than  Stanley Miller [of Miller-Urey fame] was, in the early days, in promoting all the origin-of-life materials in the high school textbooks and so on. In the late Fifties, early Sixties, it was all  Sidney Fox. Everywhere. All the time.” So despite the dyspeptic tenor of the review, it was an honor to get one from Fox at all. And despite the shot at their lack of status in the establishment pecking order, Thaxton notes the irony that they had a somewhat intimate connection: He inherited Fox’s old office at Iowa State from when Fox was a postdoctoral student there. “In fact,” Thaxton remembers, “I had to clean out a lot of stuff that it turns out was his.”

The August 1985 Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine was another story. Professor  James F. Jekel, in the Yale School of Medicine, was warmly congratulative. “To all who share the comfortable assumption that the scientific problems of abiogenesis are mostly resolved, this book will come as a real surprise,” he wrote. He concluded: “The volume as a whole is devastating to a relaxed acceptance of current theories of abio-genesis. It is well written, and, though technical, much of the book is within the reach of the informed non-scientist.” It is “strongly recommended to anyone interested in the problem of chemical and biological origins.”24An eminent scientist at Yale, biophysicist  Harold J. Morowitz, had a fascinating mixed response. Morowitz testified in the 1981  McLean v. Arkansas “creation science” trial and was no friend of what would be come to be called intelligent design, writing in 2005 in the Chronicle of Higher Education that “Only creationists support the theory of intelligent design.”25 According to his New York Times obituary in 2016, “He was best known for applying thermodynamic theory to biology, exploring how “the energy that flows through a system acts to organize that system.”26 So he was in a strong position to evaluate the section of The Mystery of Life’s Origin, authored by Walter Bradley, that dealt with that subject. Some years after Mystery was published, through a lucky personal connection, Charles Thaxton was able to get his book in front of the eminent Dr. Morowitz. “I contacted Morowitz about reading it,” says Thaxton. “I thought, well, gee whiz here’s a way to find out what he thinks about what Bradley has done. But I didn’t tell him that that’s what I was interested in.”

Morowitz wrote a two-page private review.27 He dismissed the Epilogue as “philosophically naïve,” and “philosophically unfair,” noting that it contains no mention of Bishop Berkeley or Benedict Spinoza. As to the science behind the book, however, he wrote, it is a “very substantial effort,” a “scientifically useful critique of a very sizable literature,” and “the authors have certainly succeeded in showing that we are very far from a convincing experimentally verifiable understanding of how something as complex as the simplest contemporary cells could have arisen.” Yet the “assumption that the problem lies beyond present-day natural science seems premature.”

There was one thing missing from the review, and it was odd given Morowitz’s own expertise. Thaxton sought an opportunity to ask him about it by phone. Thaxton said, “I’m very curious. You said some positive things about our book. But you were the expert on thermodynamics at the Arkansas trial, and yet you had not one thing to say about our treatment of thermodynamics in The Mystery of Life’s Origin. Can you tell me why?” As Thaxton remembers, over the telephone line, “There was a long, long pause. I mean, very disturbingly so. Long pause. And I said, ‘Are you still there?’ And he said, ‘Yes. I’m just thinking.’ And I said, ‘Well, can you answer?’ And he said, ‘Well, I didn’t see anything wrong with it, so I didn’t say anything about it.’” Morowitz is still today held up as a champion against “misuses of the second law of thermodynamics,” as the Darwin-lobbying  National Center for Science Education puts it.28 Yet Thaxton draws the evident conclusion from Morowitz’s response: “That means he agreed with what Bradley said. Right?” It seems so. (...)

THE MYSTERY OF LIFE’S ORIGIN

THE CONTINUING CONTROVERSY

CHARLES B. THAXTON, WALTER L. BRADLEY, ROGER L. OLSEN, JAMES TOUR,

STEPHEN MEYER, JONATHAN WELLS, GUILLERMO GONZALEZ, BRIAN MILLER, DAVID KLINGHOFFER

On Jacob Burckhardt

Life Burckhardt was born in 1818 into a family which was a minor branch of one of the great burgher clans of Basle: the name of Burckhardt had been prominent in the city since the fifteenth century.2 His father was a Protestant minister who had been much influenced by Schleiermacher’s theology.

Basle was a patrician city, conservative and increasingly prosperous, at the same time as being detached from the turbulence of European political events; Burckhardt belonged to its intelligentsia. He completed a degree in theology at Basle, but ceased to be religious, having become convinced by his youthful studies that the life of Christ was a myth. In 1839 he went to Berlin to study history under Ranke, Boeckh and Droysen; but his closest friend and greatest influence was Franz Kugler, the bohemian professor in    the new subject of art history. In another friend, Gottfried Kinkel, he found one of the last of the great Romantics; he moved into the circle of Kinkel’s mistress, the divorced Johanna Matthieux, and of Bettina von Amim, who had once loved Goethe and who lived in Berlin with her sister, the widow of the great legal historian F. C. von Savigny. Burckhardt was Kinkel’s best man at his wedding with Johanna in 1844; but he distanced himself from him during Kinkel’s subsequent career as a revolutionary. Kinkel was con- demned to death in 1848, and escaped with his wife’s help to exile in London, where Johanna finally committed suicide.

Burckhardt was safely back in Basle in 1844, where he served for eighteen months as editor of the main conservative newspaper, the Basler Zeitung.

He was already lecturing at the university on the history of painting, where he caused offence in religious circles by criticizing the dominant Nazarene School, a group of German religious painters in Rome who served as a model for the later pre-Raphaelites. In 1852 he resigned from the university and left for Italy, where he wrote the immensely popular Cicerone (1854), ‘a guide to the enjoyment of art in Italy’, which remained the standard guidebook to Renaissance Italian architecture, sculpture and art for three generations and went through seven editions during his lifetime. On the basis of this he was given a post at the Zürich Polytechnic. In 1858 he was appointed Professor of History at Basle, where he was required to lecture both at the university and at the high school; from 1874 he was also Professor of the History of Ar t. The first post he held until 1885, and the second until 1893. He was a conscientious and assiduous lecturer in both history and history of art, who taught as much as ten hours weekly, and also gave many lectures for the general public.

Burckhardt never married (although as a young man he was in love and wrote poetry to a girl whose parents disapproved); his youthful German friends drifted away, and in his thirties he confessed to being lonely beyond all expectations. He had a few close friends with whom he corresponded, and lived a regular and uneventful life in two rooms above a baker’s shop, devoting himself to his lectures, his books and his travels.

Politically Burckhardt was a natural conservative, who disliked and despised the new industrialization and the development of the national state: he foresaw in the course of his own lifetime the coming of an age of ‘terribles simplificateurs’ and demagogues, who would control the masses and bring ruin to Europe. This pessimistic conservatism is characteristic of a reflective historian, who cultivated irony and distance from the enthusi- asms of contemporary nationalist historians. In so far as he foresaw the development of industrial society towards the totalitarian popular regimes of National Socialism and Marxism, he was of course a prophet out of his time, standing against the tide of history. But he was not a political thinker; and these prejudices, however clear-sighted, are merely the regrets of a marginal observer over the decline of the patrician order to which his own family so clearly belonged. Hence his attack on the vice of reading news- papers and concerning oneself with the agitations of the present in the introduction to the present book.3 It is not Burckhardt’s political views or his pessimism in regard to the future which matter, but his conception of historical method; as he wrote already in 1846:

But, my dear friend, Freedom and the State have lost nothing in me. States are not built with men like me; though as long as I live I mean to be kind and sympathetic to my neighbour; I mean to be a good private individual, an affectionate friend, a good spirit; I have some talent in that direction and mean to develop it I can do nothing more with society as a whole; my attitude towards it is willy-nilly ironical; the details are my affair. . . we may all perish, but at least I want to discover the interest for which I am to perish, namely the ancient culture of Europe.4 So he developed the mask of a dilettante, immersed in his work and his few friends, and devoted to the study of European culture, by which he meant the artistic, literary and spiritual achievements of the past, placed in their context and explained as the result of the forces of history. History was the contemplation of the past: ‘leisure, the mother of contemplation and of the inspiration that springs from it’ (writing from London); ‘Listen to the secret of things. The contemplative mood.’ ‘How is the collector of inscriptions to find time for contemplative work? Why, they don’t even know their Thucydides! Don’t bother about others.’5

Early Works

In the 1840s, while still a student, Burckhardt rebelled against the prevailing conception of history, ‘the one-sidedness of the present that only wants to have a biassed history (Tendenz-Geschichte), just as it has a biassed poetry and a biassed art’.6 ‘For me the background is the chief consideration, and that is provided by cultural history, to which I intend to dedicate myself,’ Burckhardt wrote in 1842.7 From the start his conception of history was concerned, not with actions and events or the great men who appeared to have caused them, but with the cultural context in which such events occurred, a context which might explain the changes far more satisfactorily than by ascribing them to the actions of individuals or the workings of chance. How had Constantine converted the Roman Empire to Christianity, and what did that mean to contemporaries? This was the subject of his first book, The Age of Constantine (1852); it was translated into English a century later (1949),8 and had an enormous effect on my generation of historians, who were in the process of discovering, for the first time in the Anglo-Saxon world since Gibbon, the inexhaustible fascination of late antiquity; for he taught us how to see the age as a cultural phenomenon, rather than in terms of its politics and power structures, or its governmental organization, as more recent historians had interpreted it.

In this book the arrangement is already around three thematic centres - politics, religion and culture. Politics in this period is a necessary evil, a defence against barbarian invasion and internal anarchy. Culture is in decline: literature is reduced to dependence on power (in panegyric) or religion; art is an adjunct of religion: ‘the relevant myths were represented as symbolic husks of general ideas, and the separation between kernel and shell could in the long run only be injurious to art’.9 Philosophy is a solitary pursuit, even if as Themistius said, ‘the value of a philosopher’s discourse is not diminished if it is delivered under a solitary plane tree with none but cicadas to hear’.10 The Christian Church was already a powerful corpor- ation. In this picture Constantine is simply a man of his age, almost irrel- evant to the revolution in consciousness which he brought about; he belongs firmly in a world of mixed pagan and Christian beliefs, and his conversion simply ratified a formal division of equality between two cultures which already existed. The core of the argument lay in Burckhardt’s portrayal of the dominance of religious modes of thought. Late antique paganism was an immensely complex set of rituals and beliefs trying to make sense of the spiritual world:

Christianity was bound to conquer in the end because it provided answers which were incomparably simpler, and which were articu- lated in an impressive and convincing whole, to all the questions for which that period of ferment was so deeply concerned to find solutions.11

Burckhardt’s most famous book, on which his reputation still rests, was The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Lord Acton, the founder of modern historical studies in Cambridge, described it as ‘the most pen- etrating and subtle treatise on the history of civilization that exists in literature’.1 2 It is indeed this book which still shapes and challenges all subsequent attempts to explain the central phenomenon in European history. Burckhardt set out to present an analysis of the new forces at work in the period, and how they interrelate. The first part treats of politics and warfare under the provocative heading, ‘The State as a Work of Art’. That is to say, political life was no longer determined by traditional forms of government or by underlying forces revealed by the modem historian, but by the conscious knowledge of protagonists that there existed a science or art of government, which could be discovered either by experiment or by reflection. The catalogue of murder, treachery and tyranny which ensues shows the consequences of believing in the power of reason rather than tradition: it is a view of the history of events which places the new political science of Machiavelli at its centre; yet whatever its consequences in terms of anarchy and suffering, Burckhardt showed how politics had never before or since been conducted at such a high intellectual level by leaders with such practical and theoretical talents.

The second part describes ‘The Development of the Individual’. This was a constant preoccupation of nineteenth-century post-Hegelian thought: how had the modem idea of the individual arisen from the tribal and religious stages of history? Burckhardt does not explain: he simply describes the forces which separated individuals from their communities, the creation of the ideal of ‘the universal man’ and the modem conception of fame, together with its antithesis, the modem idea of wit and satire:

Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation - only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all the things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such.13

So Burckhardt establishes that ‘it was not the revival of antiquity alone, but its union with the genius of the Italian people, which achieved the conquest of the western world’.1 4 His third section concerns ‘The Revival of Antiquity’ and the education of this new man through contact with ancient literature and culture. The discovery of the New World is treated in a section which relates it to the inner exploration of the psyche, to the development of poetry and biography, and to descriptions of the external world, in ‘The Discovery of the World and of Man’.

Under ‘Society and Festivals’, Burckhardt treats of how men and women actually lived in this new world, the principles of courtesy, good manners and outward refinement, styles of language and conversation, lovemaking, physical exercise and music, the equality of men and women within a masculine ideal of the courtier, and the development of a style of official popular festival, which was modelled on conceptions of ancient triumphs and bacchanals. Finally ‘Morality and Religion’ seeks to relate this new age to the medieval religious forces which it never wholly superseded, so that the last chapter concerns the mixture of ancient and modem superstition which led towards the inevitable disintegration of belief.

It is this work which marks the definitive establishment of a new form of history, which has come to be known in German as Kulturgeschichte, ‘cultural history’.15 Each theme is seen from an entirely new viewpoint, which is on the one hand descriptive and concerned with the details, and on the other corresponds to an underlying view of the basic elements which through their interrelation make up the idea of a culture. In this book Burckhardt was able to discard the determinism inherent in the philosophical problem of the meaning of history for the development of the human spirit, as Hegel had formulated it, while using contemporary philosophical concepts (such as the State, religion and the individual) to structure his description of reality. At the same time he avoided the trap of historical positivism, which consists in believing that the meaning of history is con tained in a chain of cause and effect, and in the certification of the truth or falsehood of alleged events or facts. For Burckhardt the explanation of events lies not in their causes but in the interrelations between them, of which the idea of cause is only a partial and pseudo-scientific two-dimensional reflection. Societies are not linear series of events, but highly complex and interconnected systems, where a change in any element may provoke multiple effects elsewhere. Moreover what people believe and how they behave are far more important than whether their beliefs are true or usefu l: it is not the event which matters, but the perception of that event as a ‘fact’, which is neither true nor false, but simply believed.

It is a valid criticism of Burckhardt’s view of culture that he concerned himself essentially with high culture, with the expression of values contained in the activities and beliefs of an educated elite. His concept of cultural history is therefore fundamentally different from that prevalent in modem universities, where ‘cultural studies’ means the investigation of popular culture and especially minority cultures. Even so the appropriation of the nineteenth-century term by this new modern discipline points to the fact that the tradition begun by Burckhardt opened the way to the study of gestures, customs and behaviour patterns, festivals and other forms of popular expression. Even if Burckhardt might not have relished it, he is in a sense also the father of this discipline, derived from a multicultural and egalitarian conception of society. But it is important to realize that the techniques, concepts and archival materials necessary to make this leap into the future were not available in Burckhardt’s day; and that the great strength of his own reliance on the elite culture is that it was this culture which was self-conscious and fully realized, recorded in the literature and art of the period.

At one time the Constantine and the Renaissance had been intended to be the beginning and end of a great study of the development of European culture from antiquity to the start of the modem age.16 But The Civilization of the Renaissance was the last book published by Burckhardt during his lifetime. Burckhardt came to believe that teaching was far more important:

‘in my experience learned authorship is one of the most unhealthy, and mere teaching (however troublesome it may be and however detailed the studies and preparations need to be) one of the healthiest activities in the world’.17 Behind this ironic withdrawal from the duty to publish, and his refusal to accept that teaching and writing are part of a continuous process of communicating ideas, lay a deeper distaste for the activities of his academic contemporaries, with their unreadable multiple volumes, their obsession with detail and facts, and the pompous arrogance of ‘the viri eruditissimi in their professorial chairs’ whom he refused to join in 1872, when he turned down the offer of Ranke’s chair in Berlin. Heinrich von Sybel proclaimed the programme for the first number of the new historical journal Historische Zeitschrift in 1859: it was to be devoted to the true method of historical research, which was to be combined with a special place for modern history rather than older history and German history rather than the history of other peoples.18 Increasingly Burckhardt could accept neither the political purpose nor the conceptual method of this new history. He no longer believed in the way positivist historicism was going, and could not bring himself to betray his vision of history as contemplation.

The lecture hall in Basle was the one place where it was still possible for a professor to meditate on history rather than making political propaganda or writing boring books designed to kill the interest in his subject. As he said in conversation with his successor Heinrich Wölfflin:

A teacher cannot hope to give much. But in the first place he can keep alive belief in the value of spiritual things. And secondly he can awaken the conviction that there is real happiness to be found in such things.19

The Greeks and Greek Civilization Lectures
Jacob Burckhardt
Edited and translated by
Oswyn Murray and Sheila Stern

Hell, natural destination of treacherous women?

 Parental alienation is a part of divorce steeped in maddeningly nebulous psychological jargon rendering the underlying information impenetrable. For instance, the WHO describes parental alienation as “substantial and sustained dissatisfaction within a caregiver-child relationship associated with significant disturbance in functioning.” 

I learned that parental alienation is sometimes referred to as “malicious mother syndrome” because women are more often found to engage in its behaviors. The diagnostic criteria for divorce-related malicious mother syndrome reads as a veritable blueprint for Dana’s successful assault on me:

A mother who unjustifiably punishes her divorcing or divorced husband by:attempting to alienate their mutual child(ren) from the father;

involving others in malicious actions against the father;

engaging in excessive litigation.22

A mother who specifically attempts to deny her child(ren):regular, uninterrupted visitation with the father;

uninhibited telephone access to the father;

paternal participation in the child(ren)’s school life and extracurricular activities.

The mother’s behavior is pervasive and includes malicious acts towards the husband, such as:telling the child(ren) lies about the father;

telling others lies about the father;

acting against the father in ways that violate the law.

The syndrome is not specifically due to another mental disorder, but another disorder may coexist (in Dana’s case, panic disorder).

Chills assemble at the base of my spine when I read this clinical, nearly academic description of precisely what happened to me. Translated into plain English, parental alienation is where a spiteful and/or mentally ill parent brainwashes a child to reject and hate the other parent.

Dana conscripted our boys into every single one of these targeted attacks on me, and there was nothing I could do because the professionals of the family law system were either inadequately trained to spot the signs, or would simply turn a blind eye to them.

I endured systematic alienation from Smith and Charlie as Dana hijacked my relationship with them. Week after agonizing week, I was a forced participant in the process of being dissociated from my boys. They would arrive for a visit, chaperoned by the desultory monitor, and for the ensuing two hours it would become clear that Dana had enlisted all three as agents in her war against me. The boys would ask strange, pointed questions, clearly at Dana’s instruction and with the understanding that the answers would be reported back to her—with the monitor serving as a would-be court reporter, recording every word. 

“I just want to live a normal life. A mom and dad, in a home,” Smith had told me. This comment was made during the same visit where Smith had informed me that, “Mum got a trained Germen shepherd attack dog. She said it’s to kill you if you come to the house.” Upon arrival for the following week’s visit I was shocked to see bruises, scars and stitches on Smith’s face. The dog had apparently pinned Smith down and mauled him, causing unspeakable psychological trauma. (At the hospital he had to be held down by restraints because he was so hysterical. Dana chose not to inform me.) 

“We’re scared for Mosely,” said Smith. Mosely was our family dog, a boxer puppy I’d brought home when the boys were six and four years old. The new dog didn’t like her.

Dana had been ordered by the judge to allow Mosely to join the boys on our visits, but after only a few occasions she put an end to that. Four years later, at the bottom of an email from her attorney, was a p.s. Mosely died. This news, and the method of delivery, was another emotional blow that was hard to recover from. Having been denied access to my boys, as well as my dog, I was now forced to imagine how Mosely had died, how much pain she may have been in, and where she was finally laid to rest.

(...)

The scope of this diplomatic deception was profound, but to extend the metaphor to its logical conclusion, this is precisely the form of deception that Dana inflicted on me, and which is the foundation of the family law system. Deceive and subdue your spouse (soon to be the enemy) to complacency during the prelude to hostilities while setting in motion an attack at the same time.

The Six Silver Bullets of High Conflict Divorce

No one I know who has endured this process has not come out the other side deeply traumatized. The Silver Bullet in this maze of madness is the false allegation that I have spoken so much about.

My journey into the dystopian nightmare of high conflict divorce actually included six Silver Bullets speeding at me in quick succession, like that infamous scene in The Matrix—except with me displaying reaction times akin to those of the dead guy in Weekend at Bernie’s, as opposed to the magic bullet-dodging game of Neo. 

These collective munitions of high-conflict divorce have become the battle-tested superweapons for disgruntled spouses who want to get rid of their primary partners immediately, and men in particular are vulnerable to their force. They debilitate husbands and can prove deadly to fathers. Such is their lethality that I have read of many men who, facing the crosshairs, have taken their own lives as a result.

Fathers, husbands, and men in crisis who have or may unwittingly become the Respondent are branded the familial black sheep, the proverbial systemic scapegoat, targeted by a Reputation Savage and shot through with these Silver Bullets.

Scape·goat: a person blamed for the faults of others, especially for reasons of expediency.

At their conceptual core, the six Silver Bullets are projectiles forged with innate, deeply ingrained psychological compounds; primed with the incendiary intergenerational dogma of the shooter’s family system of origin; encased in the human kryptonite of anticipatory shame and propelled by reputation savagery—word of mouth, hearsay, made-up stories, and spoken truth inversions.

In the hands of one devoted to destruction and retribution, the chamber unloads like this:

Silver Bullet 1: The Incarcerating Incident

This is the false allegation at the core of my story. A menace to every Respondent, the incarcerating incident is the moment when the stealth attack is revealed in the sunlight. The unsuspecting perpetrator, bathed in smug ignorance, becomes the victim, tagged with a defining mark that will haunt him for the remainder of the proceeding. No amount of context, explanation, or exculpatory evidence can overcome the emotional impact of the incarcerating incidence. Once a perp, always a perp. And the “perp” rarely expects the opprobrium that comes with his newfound title—he is blind to the coming tsunami of both legal and figurative contempt and thus cannot reconcile himself to the inverted circumstances in which he finds himself. By the time he regains his footing, he is swept under a ferocious current and the only imperative is bare, raw survival. All else must give way. 

Mine was a particularly apropos example of this principle. Dana’s swiftness and efficiency in having me detained and designated a threat to the boys placed me in a legal canyon that I could never traverse. My ability to contest the divorce—or meaningfully fight for my rights as a father—were effectively exterminated before I ever walked into a courtroom.

Silver Bullet 2: The Order of Restraint

This is the legal equivalent of a film treatment, the moment when the basic morality play of every divorce is scripted in short form. The Respondent is a danger, threatening to his spouse, and thus is eternally condemned. Then comes the second sucker punch. The whole dynamic shifts once the scarlet letter of a protection order is seared on your chest. There is now a paper trail indicating that you are dangerous or unworthy. You have been made the villain, and it’s now incumbent upon you to prove otherwise. Temporary restraining orders abound, obtained quickly and easily—but only 15 percent of temporary orders are replaced with permanent orders after further examination by the courts, and that might tell you all you need to know about the validity of the temporary ones. Protection orders rip you from your home, your worldly possessions, your routine, your friends and neighbors, and your children. The firing of Silver Bullet 2 increases the potency and lethality of Bullets 3, 4, and 5 exponentially. 

Again, Dana proved a skillful practitioner of this component of the faux melodrama of divorce court. She quickly seized on my detention and nefarious designation—both based on falsehoods she perpetrated—and slapped a restraining order on me before my mind had cleared the cobwebs of the Del Amo nightmare, swiftly hammering another permanent nail into my coffin.

Silver Bullet 3: The Security Lock

After securing the family home, the securing of everything else must immediately follow. Change all the locks, passwords, and codes. Put a virtual lockbox around the world, cutting the cord to children, devices, and paperwork. No computer, no cell phone, no connection.

Chalk up another notch on Dana’s championship belt—she accomplished each of these with withering speed.

Silver Bullet 4: The Private Investigation

Now amateurs and professionals alike can commence the poking and prodding detective work. Knowledge is power and information is paramount. The Petitioner dispatches the CIA of family war, the “Untouchable Cartel” of private Investigators—third-party facilitators who seek to promote and propagate the conflict.

In my case, when it wasn’t Dana or her mother, professionals were deployed to do their dirty work. Private eyes float around the fringes of the courts, experts at exploiting the cracks in the system and more than willing to commit crimes for lawyers who don’t want dirt on their hands. Dana went for the jugular here, as she did at every opportunity in our case. She retained the services of a dark master of the marriage dissolution arts named John Nazarian, a private investigator who once created a series of YouTube videos with titles like, “How to Get Your Husband Arrested.” He is a California barracuda adept at helping disgruntled spouses fire off Bullets 1 and 2.

But Nazarian’s presence wasn’t merely nefarious in my case, it was genuinely bizarre because, alas, and in a particularly toxic “coincidence,” I eventually discovered he was related to the monitor whom Dana and Judy had asked the court to appoint to accompany me on my visits with Charlie and Smith.

You cannot make this stuff up. The monitor, Michael Valdavinos, was a dour young man who betrayed no apparent personality, but who routinely appeared at my doorstep—with the boys in tow—in new cars, typically tricked-out SUVs with a self-consciously meretricious look to them. I labored to forge some kind of relationship with him, but he would have none of it. Were that all of it, I would be sick to my stomach. But there’s more, amazingly. Valdavinos was . . . wait for it . . . the offspring of John Nazarian, the PI who Dana had hired to turn over every stone of my life. 

That extraordinary connection to Nazarian, Dana’s investigatory hitman, was never disclosed to me. I uncovered it doing a spot of my own amateur sleuthing, which I was prompted to do after three years of my visits with the boys being disrupted by Nazarian’s process servers handing me legal papers—in the boys’ presence—on Judy Bogen and Dana’s behalf. I initially was too overwhelmed to consider the fact that Nazarian always seemed, uncannily, to know my whereabouts while I was on these Valdavinos-monitored visits. But over time the frequency of these disruptions were simply too great to be a coincidence, and I became suspicious. That suspicion was compounded by Valdavinos’s arrogance and contempt for any sense of protocol and fair play. He unilaterally changed the means of my payment, announcing at one point that he would no longer accept checks. He would demand payment for amounts that were not yet due, under threat of canceling pending visits. After the infamous poppyseed muffin incident and the court prohibiting me from driving the boys myself, Valdavinos suddenly informed me that he would no longer drive me and the boys on any visits, blaming this inexplicable change on his insurance company—that change, notwithstanding that he had previously imposed a car cleaning fee on me by which I paid to have his various gangster SUVs cleaned after every visit, left me entirely captive to him during the visits. And, as if to emphasize the middle finger he so enjoyed directing my way, he would cancel visits minutes before the boys’ scheduled arrival and then charge me for the visits he had canceled.

All of which heightened my suspicion of what was transpiring, and facilitated my fleeting foray into the dark world of investigation. There I discovered not only Valdavinos’s paternity, but a great deal more about this obviously troubled individual whom Dana and Bogen had placed in charge of the boys. He apparently had a past criminal history, maintained a long series of aliases, and used to be a woman called Sonya. I repeat, this tale is beyond the capacity of the human imagination. It seems impossible, and yet it’s true. And while I’m not one to challenge the scruples of another man, if I were a wagering bloke I would lay down my life savings—an admittedly paltry sum after being almost cleaned out during my stint at Del Amo—on the proposition that Valdavinos reported everything he observed on my visits to Nazarian. An incestuously toxic stew, and Rod Serling would have rejected it as too outrageous for The Twilight Zone. But this was the man whom Dana wanted driving the boys around and monitoring my visits with them. Welcome to the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. 

So, be keenly sensitive to Silver Bullet 4, because the private investigation might not only entail your soon-to-be-ex-wife ripping through your computer files and performing all sorts of insidious actions with your finances, but additionally placing a veritable mole in your midst in the form of a monitor with a connection to the investigator, which brings me to Silver Bullet 5.

Silver Bullet 5: The Financial Recounting

Creative bookkeeping that would make even the hardened cynic whistle is central to the pre-packaged destruction at the core of the divorce strategy. A cunning divorcée gets to this early and finishes the job after you are kicked out of your home. She and a team of forensic accountants cook the books some more, slicing and dicing the spoils of a lifetime of work. With the proper team at work, a financial picture can be bent into any shape. This creative historical bookkeeping is done in preparation to slant the diss-o-master—the computer software program used in family law proceedings that generates support guidelines based primarily on a party’s earnings and time share with the children, often in favor of the Petitioner.

Dana, at the risk of repetition, made quick work of our finances, appropriating all our bank accounts and passwords while I desperately sought escape from Del Amo. I was, from that point on, at her financial mercy—and she showed me none.

Silver Bullet 6: The Legal Retention

While I put this bullet last, it often comes first—the Respondent does not feel the pain until the other five bullets land. It is a stealth team of pros that packages and presents the results of the onslaught. It is the most awe-inspiring inversion of victimhood, the ultimate offensive team pretending to play defense. By the time this team of legal gunslingers ties everything up in a twisted bow, the Respondent is bleeding out on the floor, riddled with subversive shots.

In my case, Dana hired Judy Bogen.

The new social currency is victimhood, and its economy is booming.

This weaponized blueprint is, theoretically, gender neutral on its face. But no matter what you’ve been led to believe, my direct experience—and my extensive research of the broader system—is that the majority of the violent destruction of a family is done by women. I can hear some say, “That’s correct, sir! Smart women have learned they don’t have to accept a bad situation. They are going to exercise their right to walk from the oppressive marriage institution if they’re not getting what they need.”

That sounds pretty lean-in-cool and girl-power-chic, but if this empowerment was at the heart of it all, then these strong, modern women would be willing to walk away from the marriage carrying only what they brought into it and agreeing to a 50/50 parenting arrangement for the good of the kids. They would not become the Petitioner, sheltering themselves in victimhood and blanket immunity. They would not explode from the line with minds full of premeditated subterfuge, preconscious betrayal, and dark visions of winning the gold medal in the Limbic Olympics of family law.

All of which is to say that women—particularly smart, educated women—may have won the battle while losing the broader war. They have harnessed the plentiful tools of the family law system to empower themselves in its peculiar vacuum and exact breathtaking retribution on their former partner’s life. But in doing so, they may be perpetuating the conceit of a victimhood culture, one conserving the very social presumptions the women’s movement has fought against for decades. The result is tragedy and victimhood for everyone. This name-blame-and-shame game is now pathologized in the institutional monster.

That said, the system provides little incentive for women to evolve their present strategy. Were it rooted in a genuine search for truth, and not rotting with institutional prejudice, perhaps the Petitioners would lay down the smoking gun and put their doomed relationship out of its misery humanely. But it instead facilitates a synthetic morality play, where the threat potential of men is metastasized into a virtually irrebuttable presumption of actual menace—hence, an imaginary crime immediately becomes, in the eyes of the authorities, true by mere virtue of a woman making a charge against a man. Due process is for chumps.

So it was for me, writ large. I had no history of violence, no criminal record, no prior arrests, and there were zero instances of physical abuse in our twenty years of marriage. Dana’s first Silver Bullet, the incarcerating incident, was purely a figment of her imagination—a fabrication with no morsel of evidence. And yet, the consequences to me were devastatingly incalculable.

•••

I am one of millions of men who have suffered this fate, a statistical blip in a system built on my destruction and that of others like me. The problem is not simply the mechanics of family law—it strikes deep into the core of social pathology, and how men have become this corroded patriarchal caricature. The “frenzy whip” of collective Munchausen-by-proxy is evident in our modes of relating. There is currently no event horizon of apology in our present public discourse, as echoed in the smoke-and-mirror chambers of the adversarial family law system and amplified in our cancel culture wars.

The Silver Bullets strategy exploits this convenient and dismissive generalization and is so successful because of the power of social conceits. It is the ultimate magic trick, where only the magician knows the secret to the hoodwink. Even if the magician chooses not to reveal the trick, the audience believes them. They never see where the cards really are. They know it cannot be magic, yet when the effect is presented perfectly, it works like a charm.

And, like all magic, it leaves you questioning what is real. After Dana fired the first Silver Bullet, I still believed in miracles. I still trusted Dana; I refused to believe she would betray that trust. I give her credit for that, but the speed with which she moved to destroy me has—despite its strategic and tactical merit—shattered any residual belief I had in the choices we’d made and the life we’d built. She had obliterated all of it with such a withering indifference to the consequences that I could no longer trust the propriety of anything we’d promised each other, or the boys.

That notion of trust is critical, because trust is a basic biological necessity. It is impossible to imagine functioning as living organisms if we live in mistrust of each other. We could not only not make a choice, but we could not act effectively. Before we can make a choice and act, some degree of surety and faith must exist.

Once shattered, however, reconstructing the psychology necessary to trust is an immense challenge. If you’re a husband or father jettisoned into the noxious firestorm of high-conflict divorce, hold on tight to your faculties, dig deep into your emotional resources, and prepare to be pulverized in ways you could never conceive if your life depended on it (which it does). I have been in your positional purgatory; I have experienced the unrelenting death squads of family law, who pile up the bodies and line their pockets for their needy, greedy “greater good.” The system has scant mercy for good fathers and offers little, if any, meaningful relief to any male Respondent. I have endured, and continue to endure, the trust crisis that naturally accompanies this pathological system.

Rest assured, you are not mad. You are not insane. You are just stuck in an adversarial system whose sole purpose is to represent you as insane. Family law is, in that regard, a reflection of our society’s collective shadow self, and currently suffers from a pathogen of madness perspective.

per·spec·tivo mad·ness: an attitude or point of view that someone else is severely mentally ill.

Greg Ellis

The Respondent