Angry America
Hugh Hewitt > Blog
Wednesday, November 12, 2025
Currently, I don’t enjoy following politics. I have to – nature of writing for this space, but it is not much fun. Our issues are animated by our hatreds and opposition, not by visions of good, better, best. I remain conservative, but I no longer feel like I am building a better America, instead I feel like I am on a rescue mission, just trying to keep the nation’s collective head above water. Each move ends up crashing on the rocks of some juvenile leftist stunt and each time it happens some conservatives either walk away frustrated or just start yelling and stunting themselves, thinking such is a counter-measure.
These thoughts arose as I read Dominic Green in The Jewish Chronicle writing about the antisemitism on both sides of the aisle – still fringy on the right, but now mainstream (Mamdani) on the left. Green is right – the right has to reject this stream on antisemitic thought with force and vigor lest we too become the ugly, angry mob that leftism has descended into.
That said, I am not shocked we are here. We have been descending into this abyss for some time. Two articles I found through Instapundit make that plain to me. One is a self-reflective essay about the wreckage of a life produced by a broken family of origin, and the utter fiction that drives most Disney films these days – that family can be created outside the boundaries of tradition. The piece is almost disturbingly secular in its approach, but is refreshing in its observations that traditional family, with all its difficulties and pitfalls is the only thing that comes close to working. As the author says, “This idea of creating family ignores how humans have been doing business for hundreds of thousands of years. It ignores evolution and biology.” And, I add, God’s created order.
Many of these young men are fatherless. Most of them spent their youths being told that as whites, and especially as white males, they are what’s wrong with the world.
Which brings me to the second thing I found this morning, a tweet about the experiences of a parent attending a parental orientation for the child entering the band at school and the complete immersion that involved into precisely what Dreher described so pithily – the idea that white heterosexual males are what is wrong with the world:
To begin, the boys are treated almost as though they are defective girls. The feminine modes of interaction and socialization are treated as though they are the only legitimate modes of interaction and serve as the taken for granted way to properly interact and navigate the world….My son often comes home from school and expresses utter frustration at the fact that his preferred way of communicating, as well as the things that are aligned with his temperament are treated as though they were somehow inferior.
Broken families replaced by entirely broken ideas of family. Young men nullified. It is no wonder we are descending into a miasma of hatred and opposition.
There are things that people can only learn in the context of family – a whole family with a mother and a father. But long before divorce became as unfortunately common as it is, families broke mostly through the early demise of a parent. Yet we did not produce this unholy mess of a society. What has changed?
My father lost his mother when he was just pre-adolescent. His mother, wholly uneducated and barely able to speak English, nonetheless saw to it he was well-raised. His father was a good man, but not too available as the demands of feeding and housing my father and his older brothers were tremendous for a man with no formal education. So, with her last breaths as she died of cancer she, in my father’s young presence, charged the local Lutheran pastor with seeing to my father’s education and training. Thereafter that pastor exhibited an iron will, often having to forsake his congregational duties to physically hunt my father down and drag him to school. My father ended up as a lawyer and established an endowment for that Lutheran school before he passed away. Something worked.
The church gave my father a good substitute for a family when his broke. Can we say that about today’s broken families?
