Carlson almost blurted out the most taboo truth in Washington, the unutterable heresy that the political class suppresses more ruthlessly than any other.  He asked us to consider — after eliminating all the standard leftist cliches and a few rightist ones  — why do these young shooters keep committing mass murder?  What characteristic do they all share?  What is going on here, and why can we not even discuss it?

Carlson knows the answer.  He knows because he is too intelligent not to know.  Furthermore, he knows because I have written about it in his newspaper.  He even invited me on his PBS show to discuss it, just before they canned him.  So he also knows full well that if he states it, he will be eliminated from Fox News as fast as — well, as fast as I was dismissed from multiple university posts when I persisted in writing about it.

It seemed almost as if he was inviting someone to say what he could not.  So I will oblige him.

The shooters, the mass murderers, even most of the terrorists  and essentially all violent criminals (plus many drug addicts and a majority of the homeless) share this one quality: they are all fatherless. 

The shooters are the products of government policies that intentionally remove children from their fathers and proliferate single-mother homes.  They are the offspring of the two hatcheries that breed fatherless children: the welfare state and the divorce industry.

Virtually every major social pathology can be laid at the door of fatherless homes and communities — not race, not poverty.  Single parent homes.  That means crime, truancy, addiction, and more single parents. 

The problem will certainly not be ameliorated by feel-good palliatives like those implemented by the Clinton and Bush administrations.  These programs claim to confront fatherlessness but in reality funnel more money to the welfare apparatchiks and divorce operators so they can create more fatherless children, on which their business depends.  So diabolical is the political class in both political parties that it devises measures to exacerbate the problem in the very process of pretending to address it.

If conservatives do not like the liberals’ explanations and solutions for the shootings (gun control) — and they should not — they had better come up with their own, and it had better be something more plausible than ever more incarceration.  Sometimes the left and right seem to compete (or collude) in seeing who can devise the most authoritarian punishments, rather than face reality and accept the only solutions.

The multiple excuses we devise is the proof that so far we lack the courage, as Carlson says, even to discuss it.

Note: Stephen Baskerville is professor of political studies at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw