Tucker Carlson's Dishonest Film about the Fatherhood Crisis

Tucker on Fatherhood: Here’s What He Forgot​
TOM GOLDEN

Fatherhood matters.

That’s the message at the heart of Tucker Carlson’s documentary Fathers Wanted—and it’s a message worth hearing.

A man who gives his time, his energy, and his life to his children is doing something deeply meaningful. There’s no controversy there.

But as I watched the film, I kept noticing something else.

Not what it said.
But what it didn’t.

Because by the end, the story felt strangely incomplete—like watching a documentary about lung cancer that never once mentions smoking.

The framing begins immediately.

Within the first moments, we are told that young men are choosing pornography, video games, and drugs over marriage and family. The implication is clear: the problem is not just that fatherhood is declining, but that men are turning away from it—opting for comfort, distraction, and indulgence instead.

That may be true in some cases.

But starting the story this way does something important. It establishes, from the outset, that the primary driver of fatherlessness is male behavior.

Everything that follows is filtered through that lens.

The film goes on to frame fatherlessness largely as a cultural and moral failure.

Men, we’re told, are retreating. Avoiding responsibility. Choosing comfort over commitment. Losing faith. Losing purpose.

By the end, the message is unmistakable:
good men step up, bad men walk away.

And if a father abandons his children, Carlson makes it clear—he deserves contempt.

That’s a powerful claim.

But it rests on a narrow frame.

Because what the film barely examines—if at all—is the system in which modern fatherhood actually exists.

There is no serious discussion of:

family courts

custody outcomes

child support structures

no-fault divorce

or how fathers often lose daily access to their children

These are not minor details.

They are central to understanding what happens to fathers in the real world.

In many cases, fathers do not simply walk away.

They are separated—from their children, from their role, from their identity as fathers—by processes largely outside their control.

A man can go from being an everyday presence in his child’s life to being a visitor—or, in some cases, a paycheck.

And yet, culturally, the outcome is often interpreted the same way:

He left.

But that is not always what happened.

There is another layer here the film only partially acknowledges.

For decades, men have been broadly portrayed as:

oppressive

emotionally deficient

disposable

dangerous

​toxic

These ideas have been reinforced across media, education, and public discourse—under the influence of feminist frameworks that carry a deep skepticism and contempt toward men.

At the same time, we have seen something very different happen on the other side.

Single motherhood has increasingly been framed not as a difficult circumstance to be supported and stabilized, but as something to be celebrated—even idealized. Cultural messaging often elevates the strength and independence of mothers raising children alone, while saying very little about the cost of a father’s absence.

The contrast is striking.

Fathers are questioned.
Their role is diminished.
Their presence is treated as optional.

While single motherhood is often presented as sufficient—sometimes even preferable.

The result is a contradiction we rarely confront:

We tell men they are not needed.
We question their value.
We undermine their role.

And then we ask why they hesitate to step into it.

​When structural forces are ignored, a complex social problem ​can get reduced to a simple moral failure.

And when that happens, the burden of explanation—and blame—falls almost entirely on individuals.

In this case, on men.

Carlson is right about something important:

Fatherhood matters.

But if we want more fathers present in their children’s lives, we need to do more than praise the ideal.

We need to examine the systems that shape the reality.

Because until we do, we will keep asking the same question—

Why aren’t men stepping up?

—without fully understanding what they are stepping into.

MenAreGood Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.


Tom Golden
MenAreGood offers a sharp red-pilled contrast to the default negative cultural views of masculinity.

https://substack.com/redirect/acdfd2c8-e2fb-44b9-a9aa-9d9ef2434d14?j=eyJ1IjoiMXBvcTY0In0.bpX_Ri4UrVVzEcwn2tPJZmntoRqzSx0aLRc9mOX6Iw8

***

StephenBaskerville.com
Tucker Carlson's Dishonest Film about the Fatherhood Crisis
Are we back in the 1990s?

It is truly sad to see Tucker Carlson producing this kind of vapid drivel. Many people admire Carlson, and his influence is enormous. But this is beyond belief.

Carlson just released a new video: “Fathers Wanted”. It may be a tribute to his sense of shame that he refrains from narrating it himself, and he seems to make only two appearances. One (54:00) is to scold fathers for “abandoning” their children.

This is a throwback to the 1990s/2000s. For those too young to remember, we were inundated with propaganda about “responsible” fatherhood and “good fathering”. The underlying message was that most fathers are ir-reponsible and their “fathering” needs improvement. But the insult added to injury was precisely the falsehood that Carlson reserves for himself to utter: Fathers whose children are confiscated by crooked tyrannical family courts have “abandoned” them.

Vice-President Al Gore initiated a White House program, and many state governors and even foreign governments followed suit: conferences, books, articles, films, TV shows — all filled with the same sentimental cliches and empty platitudes as Carlson’s video, scolding and nagging men to practice their officially accepted version of this “fathering”. (Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently displayed similar dishonesty by recycling the deception.) Federally funded scholars like David Blankenhorn and David Popenoe produced books touting the party line. The media credulously joined the witch hunt. We heard no objections from anyone (except feminists, ironically and perfunctorily), though of course fathers themselves were never allowed to be heard — as they are not in Carlson’s film.

None of the “fatherhood advocates” explained how government officials could “promote” fatherhood or “encourage” good fathering — or (another theme) “reconnect fathers with their children”. It turned out that “good fathering” meant feminist-approved fathering and feminist psychotherapy, and “reconnecting” with your children meant paying child support.

Meanwhile governments intensified ongoing efforts to disconnect more children from their fathers in order to fill their coffers with more child support. President Bill Clinton’s “Welfare Reform” tried (in vain) to reduce the welfare roles by “cracking down” on alleged “deadbeat dads”. Here too the media showed credulity rather than scepticism or scrutiny toward the government. Journalist Bernard Goldberg said, “We’ve done a million stories at the networks on deadbeats dads…but almost none on how too many divorced women use custody and visitation as weapons to punish their ex-husbands.” And absolutely zero on how family court judges were ripping millions of children away from fit and legally innocent fathers in order to plunder them for the “child support” that was really judge support, because it funded their own salaries and those of other functionaries.
This, not fathers “abandoning” their children, is the cause of this crisis — entirely.

Now, according to Carlson, fathers are to blame even when they are not fathers, because they refuse to marry unappealing, litigious women and find their children judicially kidnapped by juridical gangsters. The message is the same: Fathers cause problems when they are present, when they are “absent”, and even when they are never fathers in the first place. And still not a word about the corruption of family courts or injustices of the divorce industry.

It is hardly surprising that, 30 years on, the problem is worse than ever, because those programs could never do anything other than make it worse. Even amid Covid, election rigging, multiple forever wars, and impending economic catastrophe, former gang leader John Turnipseed still calls fatherlessness “the biggest problem we have in the nation”, and Jason Whitlock, Candace Owens, and Larry Elder say the same. (DeSantis recently showed, yet again, how to evade and worsen it.)

This should provoke a major outcry from throughout the “Manosphere”. If men can coalesce around rejection of this lie, this film may do some good in getting the abuses that Carlson avoids onto the public agenda.
~~~
This is by far the most dishonest and cowardly thing I have ever seen from Tucker Carlson.

I have criticized him repeated for his dishonesty on this topic and for his obvious fear of the divorce industry. But until now, I have tried to be charitable. He has long given indications that this topic interests him deeply. Little asides in his commentaries, hinting at things he dares not say. On other other hand, I happen to know that he is well aware of the real cause of this ongoing crisis, but like the rest of the mainstream media he chooses mendacity instead of truth.
By this, he signals that he is part of the problem: pretending to address a problem by blaming those who suffer under it because you fear offending those who are perpetrating it.
I have also published numerous articles about this dirty scam in mainstream and scholarly journals, as well as my books, starting with Taken Into Custody: The War on Fathers, Marriage, and the Family:

• “Is There Really a Fatherhood Crisis?” www.independent.org/tir/2004-spring/is-there-really-a-fatherhood-crisis/
• “The Failure of Fatherhood Policy” www.lewrockwell.com/2004/09/stephen-baskerville/the-failure-of-fatherhood-policy/
• “The Federal Bureau of Marriage” www.academia.edu/34065959/The_Federal_Bureau_of_Marriage
Sadly, none of these are out of date, because nothing has changed, except for the worse.

If you want to read more analysis that will push you to think “outside the box,” you will find it in my recent book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” — and What to Do about It — available from Amazon.

Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics (retired) at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw. His books and recent articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.










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StephenBaskerville.com

Tucker Carlson's Dishonest Film about the Fatherhood Crisis
Are we back in the 1990s?
STEPHEN BASKERVILLE
APR 30

 




READ IN APP
 
It is truly sad to see Tucker Carlson producing this kind of vapid drivel. Many people admire Carlson, and his influence is enormous. But this is beyond belief.


Carlson just released a new video: “Fathers Wanted”. It may be a tribute to his sense of shame that he refrains from narrating it himself, and he seems to make only two appearances. One (54:00) is to scold fathers for “abandoning” their children.

This is a throwback to the 1990s/2000s. For those too young to remember, we were inundated with propaganda about “responsible” fatherhood and “good fathering”. The underlying message was that most fathers are ir-reponsible and their “fathering” needs improvement. But the insult added to injury was precisely the falsehood that Carlson reserves for himself to utter: Fathers whose children are confiscated by crooked tyrannical family courts have “abandoned” them.

Vice-President Al Gore initiated a White House program, and many state governors and even foreign governments followed suit: conferences, books, articles, films, TV shows — all filled with the same sentimental cliches and empty platitudes as Carlson’s video, scolding and nagging men to practice their officially accepted version of this “fathering”. (Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently displayed similar dishonesty by recycling the deception.) Federally funded scholars like David Blankenhorn and David Popenoe produced books touting the party line. The media credulously joined the witch hunt. We heard no objections from anyone (except feminists, ironically and perfunctorily), though of course fathers themselves were never allowed to be heard — as they are not in Carlson’s film.

None of the “fatherhood advocates” explained how government officials could “promote” fatherhood or “encourage” good fathering — or (another theme) “reconnect fathers with their children”. It turned out that “good fathering” meant feminist-approved fathering and feminist psychotherapy, and “reconnecting” with your children meant paying child support.

Meanwhile governments intensified ongoing efforts to disconnect more children from their fathers in order to fill their coffers with more child support. President Bill Clinton’s “Welfare Reform” tried (in vain) to reduce the welfare roles by “cracking down” on alleged “deadbeat dads”. Here too the media showed credulity rather than scepticism or scrutiny toward the government. Journalist Bernard Goldberg said, “We’ve done a million stories at the networks on deadbeats dads…but almost none on how too many divorced women use custody and visitation as weapons to punish their ex-husbands.” And absolutely zero on how family court judges were ripping millions of children away from fit and legally innocent fathers in order to plunder them for the “child support” that was really judge support, because it funded their own salaries and those of other functionaries.

This, not fathers “abandoning” their children, is the cause of this crisis — entirely.

Now, according to Carlson, fathers are to blame even when they are not fathers, because they refuse to marry unappealing, litigious women and find their children judicially kidnapped by juridical gangsters. The message is the same: Fathers cause problems when they are present, when they are “absent”, and even when they are never fathers in the first place. And still not a word about the corruption of family courts or injustices of the divorce industry.

It is hardly surprising that, 30 years on, the problem is worse than ever, because those programs could never do anything other than make it worse. Even amid Covid, election rigging, multiple forever wars, and impending economic catastrophe, former gang leader John Turnipseed still calls fatherlessness “the biggest problem we have in the nation”, and Jason Whitlock, Candace Owens, and Larry Elder say the same. (DeSantis recently showed, yet again, how to evade and worsen it.)

This should provoke a major outcry from throughout the “Manosphere”. If men can coalesce around rejection of this lie, this film may do some good in getting the abuses that Carlson avoids onto the public agenda.

~~~

This is by far the most dishonest and cowardly thing I have ever seen from Tucker Carlson.

I have criticized him repeated for his dishonesty on this topic and for his obvious fear of the divorce industry. But until now, I have tried to be charitable. He has long given indications that this topic interests him deeply. Little asides in his commentaries, hinting at things he dares not say. On other other hand, I happen to know that he is well aware of the real cause of this ongoing crisis, but like the rest of the mainstream media he chooses mendacity instead of truth.

By this, he signals that he is part of the problem: pretending to address a problem by blaming those who suffer under it because you fear offending those who are perpetrating it.

I have also published numerous articles about this dirty scam in mainstream and scholarly journals, as well as my books, starting with Taken Into Custody: The War on Fathers, Marriage, and the Family:

“Is There Really a Fatherhood Crisis?” www.independent.org/tir/2004-spring/is-there-really-a-fatherhood-crisis/

“The Failure of Fatherhood Policy” www.lewrockwell.com/2004/09/stephen-baskerville/the-failure-of-fatherhood-policy/

“The Federal Bureau of Marriage” www.academia.edu/34065959/The_Federal_Bureau_of_Marriage

Sadly, none of these are out of date, because nothing has changed, except for the worse.

If you want to read more analysis that will push you to think “outside the box,” you will find it in my recent book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” — and What to Do about It — available from Amazon.


Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics (retired) at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw. His books and recent articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.

If you liked this post from Stephen Baskerville's Newsletter, please share it.

More of my work can be found at www.StephenBaskerville.com.

Anarcho-Tyranny Strikes Again in Scandinavia

For many decades following World War Two, Sweden was presented to an impressed but gullible world as the very model of a safe, tolerant, liberal, progressive, welfare-state paradise. Now, it seems to many outsiders like myself to have become much more of an unsafe, unfree, intolerant, intolerable, failed-state dystopia instead.

Granny, Get Your Gun

A harmless 80-year-old Swedish woman is currently being prosecuted for illegal weapons possession after a long-forgotten antique hunting rifle she had borrowed from a shooting club and failed to return for some reason was found locked away in a sealed storage unit dating back to the 1960s when it was being cleared out. No license was needed for such things back then, so the woman was committing no offence whatsoever when she shut it away. However, as the item still works, by absent-mindedly failing to apply for a permit in the interim, she has technically now been rendered a massive gun-criminal. Common sense would dictate the Swedish state should just have thrown this whole issue aside without any comment or censure. But common sense no longer applies in the deliberately ruined legal systems of the contemporary West.

The whole debacle has raised the question of whether or not the senior will receive a jail term. If so, as the crime of possessing an unlicensed firearm carries with it a potential punishment of five years, it is a safe bet the Swedish state would essentially be sentencing the pensioner-prisoner to die in despair behind bars.

No such worries for the 13-year-old “Swedish” (or, more probably, “Swedish from a migrant background”) boy apprehended for shooting six people in the town of Gävle with a rather more consciously illegally acquired firearm during the very same week the 80-year-old gangsta granny was reported as being questioned by police. The boy will not be tried as an adult, even though facing charges of attempted murder, so is most unlikely to spend the rest of his (regrettably) rather longer remaining lifespan rotting away inside a Swedish cell. Instead, said early reports, “It is unclear whether he will be kept in custody” at all, despite being an alleged gunman.

Moves are afoot to lower Sweden’s age of criminal responsibility from the current age of 15 to 13, and begin incarcerating minors, but this will surely come too soon to treat the bullet-happy teen from Gävle in this fashion. And many malevolent forces in society don’t want this measure to happen at all. Even in spite of the currently unfolding immigration-fueled national adolescent crimewave, still liberal do-gooders from left-wing organizations like Sweden’s Children’s Rights in Society (BRIS) warn that the proposed move “could backfire, pushing gangs to recruit even younger children.”

Presumably there’s a limit to how young they can go? Once Sweden’s babies begin killing people, we will know the country really has been successfully third worldificated by mass immigration.

Political Vehicle

Being both legally a child and, most probably, an ethnic minority one, the accused from Gävle is much more likely to be treated as a victim than as a criminal. And that is a deliberate ruling-class policy decision. As many readers will know, the phenomenon is called anarcho-tyranny, a term coined by the writer Sam Francis, and it has been a widespread strategy across Sweden—and wider Europe and North America—for many years now. Most present Western governments hate their own people, and love their intended outside replacements, and it should be no surprise today’s criminal justice system reflects this fact accordingly.

Chosen randomly from amongst innumerable others, we have the German girl sent to prison for calling a foreign gang-rapist a “pig” and a “disgusting freak” online, whereas the foreign gang-rapist himself emerged without any jail time whatsoever. Or the father in England who says he was thrown into a cell by police for daring try to rescue his daughter from a Muslim rape-den. Also in Britain, there was the recent case of a former Muslim charged with hate-crimes offenses for burning a Koran, whilst the Muslim who consequently attempted to stab him to death for “blasphemy” was let off with a non-custodial sentence by a judge on the grounds the initial book-burning must have quite naturally caused him to have “lost his temper”, a classic case of two-tier justice in the land of Two-Tier Keir if ever there was one.

Within Sweden itself, an absolutely classic illustration came as far back as 2013, during a prolonged outbreak of rioting and arson in the capital Stockholm over the course of several nights, mainly at the hands of yet more imported non-Swedish youths whom the state strangely chose to hardly bother arresting. As the youths also torched police stations, maybe there was just nowhere available left to hold them?

Stockholm’s then-Chief of Police, Mats Löfving, openly explained his force’s distinctly stand-offish tactics to Swedish newspaper Expressen at the time as follows: “Our ambition is really to do as little as possible.” Mission achieved! And so Stockholm burned, in particular its cars, with Löfving more than happy to stand there and idly warm his hands by their exploding engine-flames:

We go to the crime scenes, but when we get there we stand and wait. If we see a burning car, we let it burn if there is no risk of the fire spreading to other cars or buildings nearby. By doing so we minimize the risk of having rocks thrown at us.

Except by the cars’ angry owners, perhaps. But then, the cars’ owners were likely to be ordinary law-abiding citizens, rather than angry violent immigrant mobs, and thus rather easier to simply ignore: or, indeed, to actively police into oblivion. Out surveying the destruction one morning, a reporter from Swedish news outlet Fria Tider —often identified as a far-right “junk news” outlet, which probably means you can trust it—was astonished to see a traffic warden from local parking company P-Service issuing a fine to a burnt-out vehicle with a smashed windscreen and severe internal fire damage but, crucially, a still-legible license plate.

That the car was now clearly undrivable was “irrelevant”, according to the warden. The vehicle lacked the necessary permit-paper on display proving its parking had been paid for—probably because it had just been burnt to cinders by a petrol-bomb—so the letter of the law said the owner had to be punished by the courts without fail. Petty rules had been broken, and the usually law-abiding citizen must be forced to pay for this fact, whilst non-petty rules being broken, like an immigrant setting the car on fire in the first place, were evidently far less worthy of immediate enforcement.

The photograph of this event taken by the Fria Tider reporter really does say a thousand words. If you had asked AI to generate an image emblematic of precisely how European race-based anarcho-tyranny looks in action, the dangerous online disinformation-spewing picture-bot couldn’t have done any better than this.

Stockholm Syndrome

An even worse manifestation of anarcho-tyranny is when someone law-abiding has a serious crime committed against them by a privileged state-protected “victim” group, and then ends up being arrested and punished themselves, merely for complaining about the fact.

The classic example within a Swedish context occurred in 2016, when a 65-year-old pensioner, Christina Nilsson Öberg, who had foolishly ventured outside without packing her illegal 100-year-old hunting rifle, was beaten, hospitalized and mugged by a gang of youths during a bicycle ride. Unfortunately, the youths happened to be non-white Afghans, not white Swedes, so the police closed the case without prosecting anyone and apprehended Öberg for subsequently complaining about this sad chain of events online.

Calling the robbers “black mold” and “beardless youths”, besides asking for their deportation, Öberg had no idea her Facebook page was being secretly monitored by an online Stasi-style thought-police spying operation called Näthatsgranskaren (Net Hate Examiner), who make it their business to seek out the social media pages of people who have suffered crimes at the hands of Mohammedans and then make sure they dare not tell anyone the truth about the fact.

The Swedish police may not have been able to apprehend the Afghan robbers, but handcuffing a 66-year-old who had typed the highly offensive word “beardless” about a Muslim was an altogether easier case to crack, with Öberg’s phone and iPad being seized as evidence, her home being searched, the old woman being interrogated, and a lengthy 200-page report on her activities being compiled as a “preliminary investigation”. Öberg had the presence of mind to claim it was not her who had typed the offending comments, however, but someone else unknown and unnamed with access to her accounts, so a doubtless highly disappointed judge felt he had to let her off, the “crime” being thereby technically non-attributable.

However, unlike with the actual mugging, dogged hate-crime investigators did not give up the trail and, sometime later, Öberg was summoned to appear before an appeals court, where she says she was sentenced to three months in jail on eight separate counts (i.e., eight separate Facebook comments) of “committing hardship against an ethnic group”. The Swedish government should have been sentenced themselves for committing an exactly similar crime against their own people.

Öberg’s later account of her imprisonment amongst drug-addicts and other actual criminals was harrowing indeed:

We have a sick legal system in Sweden, it is the truth [i.e., the innocent] that should be rewarded and it is evil [i.e., the guilty] that should be punished … [Non-white prisoners] bullied me because [the state said] I was a RACIST. They hit me into a pole, so my teeth broke out … I was denied help with my teeth by the correctional services, they had made up a lie and I was not allowed to appeal. However, could I sue the state??? If I had been from Afghanistan, I would never have been imprisoned, and I would have obviously received my compensation without having to fight for it. I am Swedish, I have no value in my own country. Seeing how Sweden is being crushed day by day because of incompetent people who should be locked up, how much should WE Swedes tolerate?? I can’t stand it anymore, we live in a war-zone where foreign criminals set the rules.

No, Europeans today live in a war-zone where white-hating anarcho-tyrants in government set the rules, the foreign criminals are just the fortunate ones who happen to benefit from the whole fact.

Sweden, a model for the world? More like a model for the end of it.

Steven Tucker
https://counter-currents.com/2025/10/anarcho-tyranny-strikes-again-in-scandinavia/