April 22, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
26:51
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| If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too, if you can wait and not be tired by waiting or being lied about, don't be alive. | |
| Hello everyone, Wizard of Cause here. | |
| Sargon was kind enough to extend to me this guest spot on his channel, and for it I am very grateful. | |
| I will be honest, I had a bitch of a time thinking up what a good topic might be to cover in this video. | |
| Flitting through matters of antifa, the degradation of the left, and liberalism by extension, and the evolution of radical ideologies, all of which are topics I generally cover on my channel rather routinely. | |
| But in my thinking upon it and thinking all the way back to what initially drew me to channels such as this and those of people such as Dr. Random McCam and Baring and so on and so forth, I realize that a topic that I have noticed go woefully under discussed, especially in light of regular unpacking of feminist bullshit that goes on here on YouTube, are the more specific and direct realities of how feminist legislation and the family courts have taken fathers out of the home and put them on leashes. | |
| Now we hear a lot from MRAs, anti-feminists, and fathers' rights groups about this topic, glazing over it with general statements about how children are ripped away from their fathers who were in turn made into indentured servants. | |
| But in general, I have heard little about how this actually happens. | |
| So for this video, I will be drawing on my own experiences here in my home state of New Hampshire, where I unfortunately was forced to spend the better part of six years battling my way through the system myself. | |
| So the first noteworthy point in respect to the process that this unconscionable meat grinder engages in typically has to do with protective restraining orders. | |
| While to many the notion of a restraining order is one wherein a party who has been threatened or harassed obtains an order which effectively threatens immediate and severe legal repercussions if those under said order violate it by making contact, and is therefore a good deterrent against harassing or dangerous activities, these very same orders are a central weapon in what many fathers' rights campaigners call a war on fathers. | |
| The abuse of orders, at least in my state, works pretty much like this. | |
| A plaintiff, typically the ex-wife or mother in these family cases, files for an order of protection, citing anything from an outright claim of threatening or violent behavior, right up through a general credible fear. | |
| This credible fear part is the first point things get interesting, however, we'll hold off on that just for a moment. | |
| Following the filing, a temporary restraining order is immediately put into effect, resulting in sheriffs serving papers to the door of the recipient and often searching their homes. | |
| This search is carried out to find and confiscate any weapons or anything that sheriffs deem to be a weapon. | |
| Following this, a court hearing is scheduled, which in my own experience only lasts typically 15 minutes or so, in which the plaintiff is allowed to reiterate their cause for seeking said order and, at least on paper, the respondent is given a chance to defend themselves in line with their due process rights. | |
| This usually results in there being roughly 10 minutes given to the plaintiff to express their credible fear, followed by two to three minutes for defense when accounting for time in which the judge, in this case called a marital master, might seek to ask questions and deliberate. | |
| In my own experiences, and in those of many others who I've spoken to during my time working on this issue, these hearings are effectively simply for show, as the vast majority of domestic restraining orders applied for are granted, at least in the state of New Hampshire. | |
| Once under such an order as these, individuals are forbidden from having any contact with the petitioner, naturally, which in the case of custody battles typically means no contact with children outside of whatever visitation time the court allows and under whatever provisions a given judge may tack on to such an order, including visitation under the supervision of state social workers. | |
| Beyond this, all that is required for an alleged violation is for the person under the order to be accused of making contact in some way. | |
| Once this claim is made, police are dispatched immediately to arrest the individual and hold them without bail until they're brought before a judge. | |
| Violations can range simply from walking down the wrong sidewalk at the wrong time and being unknowingly in proximity of the other party, up through simply having an allegation of such made without any evidence to support such at all. | |
| In either case, once the report is made, the individual under the order is sent to jail and denied bail until arraignment. | |
| Now, at this point, if you know anything about criminal law, you may be scratching your head just a bit. | |
| Certainly, you would think that in the hearing following the filing of an order that some burden of proof in due process might interfere with the establishing of an order made as a result of a claim that a crime such as domestic violence or threat thereof has been made. | |
| However, this is where at least one element to the constitutionally questionable nature to the family courts is best found. | |
| This is because, whereas one may believe going in, that as they are under what is in effect a criminal accusation, that criminal burdens of proof would need to be met, and were family courts actual courts of law, one would be correct. | |
| But it is here that we find the main method by which such courts get around due process, in that family courts are by nature not actually courts of law, but courts of equity, civil courts. | |
| In these courts, judges are largely free to make whatever orders they choose, often without much in the way of legal appeal or redress being made available. | |
| In the state of New Hampshire, where my own experience took place, the only body empowered to hear appeals to family court judgments is the state Supreme Court, who as a rule typically do not interfere with or review family courts' rulings or orders, despite being the only body actually empowered to do so. | |
| Now these restraining orders, which family courts hand out like Halloween candy, generally requiring little or no evidence in order to uphold the initial claims aside, another significant area where courts abuse power is in respect to child support. | |
| Now we often hear endlessly about deadbeat dads and how the state needs to crack down upon them for the good of their children. | |
| When framed in such a way, one is naturally inclined to conjure up images or ideas of fathers who, upon pregnancy or birth, abandon the mother and child selfishly, which is sadly a reality in many cases. | |
| What we do not hear about, however, is the manner in which courts issue orders of support and how such orders can be abused, as well as the questions of whether or not so many of these runaway fathers aren't actually running away from courts and vindictive exes as much as their children. | |
| Child support is for the most part throughout most American states, at least technically speaking, set as a portion of income that is ordered to be paid from a non-custodial parent, usually a father, to the custodial parent, typically a mother, based upon their gross pre-tax income. | |
| This means that while the courts require the filing of financial affidavits from both parties outlining gross and net pay, expenses, and so on, it is only the gross pre-tax income of the obligore, those being ordered to pay, that is really given consideration. | |
| On paper, at least, the state of New Hampshire is empowered to take a percentage of gross income from the obligor with set limitations should they be below the federal poverty line. | |
| In practice, however, family courts may issue orders according to their own discretion, jacking the totals to meet what court of officers may feel ought to be the obligor's income. | |
| Discretion-based orders such as these can be made if the courts deem that an obligor could or should be making more than they do, with this being almost entirely up to the attitude of the judge or hearing officer in question, and again, being such that cannot be adequately appealed in many states. | |
| Should, while under a support order, regardless of whether it is realistic or in tune with the actual income, an obligor fall behind in their payments, the state becomes empowered to garnish wages, audit bank records, revoke driving privileges, and even order obligors to jail for failure to pay for up to one year. | |
| All of this, again, based upon orders made by judges who are often accountable to no one but themselves, made after 10 to 15 minute hearings and all in a court of civil equity. | |
| So at this point you may be nodding along, thinking, okay, so these courts have some powers that go beyond the normal scope of civil courts and can rescind personal liberties without the due process of law. | |
| That is messed up, but how is it related to feminism? | |
| Well, firstly, I had mentioned earlier that the phrase credible fear was an interesting part of the whole restraining order dynamic. | |
| This is because in some cases, simply uttering the words credible fear can be itself enough to warrant the issuing of an order. | |
| In many jurisdictions, this rather low burden of proof is routinely emphasized by social workers, women's advocates, and others within the court system so as to maximize the use and regularity of protective orders. | |
| In one personal instance, wherein I was back in court filing a change of income paperwork, I personally witnessed a badged social worker working on behalf of the court badgering a woman seeking nothing more than a petition for legal separation to invoke credible fear as a means to obtain a restraining order. | |
| Despite the woman assuring the social worker repeatedly that there was no violence in the home and that the separation was merely as a result of the relationship not working out, this individual, whose position is likely funded by federal grant money, which we'll get into shortly as well, urged her to consider petitioning for such an order, highlighting that it could give her a, quote, substantial advantage in divorce and custody proceedings down the line. | |
| Considering that these sorts of orders, both of the protective and discretionarily based support varieties, both possess the immediate power of restricting and rescinding constitutionally protected liberties, | |
| right up to literally imprisoning individuals, one would think that if not outright allowing only criminal courts with their burdens of proof being beyond reasonable doubt would be mandated by due process protections that at the very least some level of material evidence would be required. | |
| But again, as this is a court of equity, it ultimately comes down to the judge's discretion. | |
| When this discretion is then considered in the light of federal funding schemes in play under both the Violence Against Women's Act of 1994 and the Title IV-D programs of the Child Support Recovery Act of 1992, things start to make a different kind of sense. | |
| Under VAWA, the Violence Against Women's Act, a veritable buffet table of federal grant programs are made available to the states, including discretionary programs such as, quote, consolidated grant program to address children and youth experiencing domestic and sexual assault and engage men and boys as allies, and formally authorized programs such as engaging men in preventing sexual assault, | |
| domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking program plus, end quote. | |
| Despite data showing rather resoundingly that in cases of domestic violence, half were reciprocally violent, meaning that both parties were engaged in violence against one another, and that in non-reciprocal cases that women accounted for upwards of 70% of violent instigators, | |
| as well as the fact that in same-sex cases that female couples experience more domestic violence rates than gay men, one would think that federal legislation and the funding programs which throw millions of dollars at states would attune, at least, their grant programs to reflect the realities of the issue. | |
| Instead, however, men and boys are regarded in nearly all of these programs as abusers or potential abusers by default, who require training to be made into allies in a fight that seems solely centered on violence against women. | |
| These grant programs carry over into the areas of support as well. | |
| With the Title 4-D programs empowered by the Child Support Recovery Act, which allot millions each year to states who can demonstrate that they are aggressively pursuing and enforcing paternal support orders. | |
| In respect to the specifics of what states must supply as evidence of their aggressive enforcement efforts, little is really detailed. | |
| However, when one considers that court costs, filings, orders issued, the fact that in some cases men with more than 50% of custodial parenting time are often still required to pay support to the mothers, | |
| and then of course, sanctions ranging from revocation of driving privileges up through jail time can all be rendered as evidence of such, the incentives for courts who often operate without judicial oversight to issue discretionary-based orders that can be in excess of what an obliger actually takes home suddenly start to make a little more sense. | |
| It is due to the thundering crusades by organizations like the National Organization for Women and the League of Women Voters, both of whom enjoy substantial lobbying and electoral influence, | |
| as well as countless other feminist political organizations, that legislation has been thus passed, which has created situations such as this one, where a man was sentenced to six months in jail for overpaying his child support and seeing his son in excess of what the court had allowed him following a secret hearing, which modified his visitation rights without his knowledge. | |
| In another instance of the family courts with their feminist legislative backing going too far, we have this case from Ohio, where a man was ordered to post a lengthy Facebook apology for going on an online rant about his experiences in divorce court, all under threat of two months in jail. | |
| But hey, perhaps isolated news incidents of court overreach might not convince you. | |
| And that is fair. | |
| So let me now offer you one of my own personal experiences, wherein, after being told by a judge in a support hearing that my work as a contractor in the political field was not stable enough and that I'd, quote, need to decide if I wanted to be a father or work in politics, end quote, I left the field and took a part-time minimum wage retail job that a later court officer would actually insist upon in a similar hearing. | |
| It was at this juncture, however, that upon taking up said stable part-time employment, this child support referee, who was nothing more than an ump-jumped clerk with a jurisdoctorate on the payroll of the court who itself is sustained largely by federal grant funds, invoked a case precedent involving a career physician who closed down his practice so as to lower his mandated support order as evidence that I was intentionally underemployed. | |
| This finding on his behalf resulted in an order mandating that one-third of an income of a 40-hour week at $12.50 an hour be paid out from an income that was a mere $7.50 an hour, with an average week ranging to a maximum of 35 billable hours. | |
| When I appealed this finding, I found my appeal rejected outright, discovering later that though the family courts themselves exist on an actual district level, they were classed as being superior courts and had their judicial oversight handed over from the legislature to the Supreme Court entirely in the 1970s at the height of the women's live movement. | |
| This, of course, came only after a dozen or so other vexatious claims of abuse, neglect, and accusations of kidnapping plots that had been leveled against me, all being heard and considered in the same 15-minute discretion-based hearings. | |
| But to get into that story, I would require far more time from Sargon than I feel a guest spot truly warrants. | |
| These examples of abuse and exploitation, however, those of restraining order exploitation and a child support system geared towards maximizing federal grant payouts that see men as literal chattel, are but two tiny slivers of ice poking out from the water belonging to a far larger iceberg that remains hidden beneath the surface. | |
| These and other family law issues are quite often tied directly to the epidemics of male suicide which plague many Western nations, with both the epidemics themselves as well as these amongst many other causes remaining generally disregarded. | |
| Denial of access to children, be it the denial of even court-ordered visitation or outright parental alienation, is not only common and generally unaddressed by courts, but is not at all even regarded by campaigners who claim to be advocating for the best interests of children outside of the fathers and parents groups who oppose family courts. | |
| Reliance on the Duluth model, which has been routinely regarded as utter garbage by all but feminist campaigners and their allies in government, remains Remains largely at the center of many, if not most, domestic violence and family law considerations, with the presumption of violence being an inherently gendered topic, with men as the universal aggressors and women as the universal victims. | |
| And beyond yet even these, another central and crucial reality, which goes routinely unaddressed, is the effect that fatherlessness has on children. | |
| With the state more than happy to put fathers on a leash by way of either restraining orders or child support, allowing them a nearly standardized four days a month visitation, it often baffles the mind to compare the rates of state-mandated fatherless homes with the ever-present demands by the campaigners who push the courts to act as they do for men and fathers to step up and be more active with their children. | |
| Studies have conclusively shown that homes with single mothers are more likely to result in adolescent and adult criminality, mental illness, substance abuse, and emotional disorders in children raised without their fathers. | |
| While advocates for fathers' rights and family law reform quite often call for reforms such as default shared custody, wherein both parents maintain equal rights and access to children, feminist campaigners on the other side, such as the groups mentioned before, continue pressing for harsher controls and restrictions to be laid upon men and fathers while calling also for increased government intervention to offset such issues by increasing support for the lionized single mother. | |
| Throughout all of this, and the other seemingly countless issues surrounding family law and its anti-father bias, as well as, of course, the observable and verified social detriments such policies have helped create, nearly every attempt by men's rights or fathers' rights groups to raise these issues in public are met with a claim that is as ridiculous in this case as it is common in most debates with feminists. | |
| This claim is, of course, patriarchy. | |
| If you are to ask your average political feminist what causes family law injustices, you will find, provided you're even able to get them to acknowledge such exist as a problem, the insistence that patriarchy is behind said legislation, and that patriarchy is what drives opposition to reform. | |
| As always, when something is wrong with the world, and especially when to one degree or another feminism is to blame, it turns out that the ominous specter of patriarchy is actually behind it all. | |
| One would think that as feminist blogs and talking heads chattered endlessly about the difficulty for women to, quote, have it all, meaning a stable career and children, that as rates of criminality and delinquency become increasingly tied to children being raised without fathers in their lives, and even that as academic and legal experts continue to admit that domestic violence is not as gendered an issue in the ways that many have been led to believe, | |
| that the concept of reforming judicial and state agencies to regard fathers as being more than simple indentured support mechanisms with limited rights and access to their children might be something that the gender justice crusaders of the world might give a moment's consideration to. | |
| However, as with all matters in regards to men, boys, and feminism, the feminist movement, with its substantial lobbying and political machinery, continues to double down on the lines that children being solely with their mothers, and that fathers' duties are to support mother and child regardless of matters of fitness or ability on the part of either parents, remain their central lines. | |
| Thankfully, though, things are beginning to show signs of change. | |
| Numerous states throughout the United States have begun mulling over or passing legislation on matters such as default shared parenting, an end to lifetime alimony, and a re-evaluation of the current child support system. | |
| Anecdotally, following my own years-long trials and tribulations in family court, Friends who found themselves in similar situations have reported having judges in their own cases make it clear that their courts are gender neutral and that the phrase best interest of the child is genuinely aimed at what is in the child's best interests. | |
| Likewise, upon learning more about what the courts are herself, MyONEX has thankfully, recently, opted to cease hostilities and work towards getting us out of court entirely. | |
| Naturally, all of these reform efforts throughout the nation remain staunchly opposed to by feminist groups such as the ones I mentioned earlier. | |
| However, I for one often feel that none of this would have been possible were it not for the groups and individuals out there promoting the causes of men's and fathers' rights, which in respect to their anti-feminist stances have actually seemed to stir broader national debates throughout countries such as the US, UK, Israel, and Australia, just to name a few. | |
| While these and other issues, such as male suicide rates, which are often tied to matters of paternity and family court overreach, go generally unaddressed by much of the media and political establishment, it has been by virtue of finding channels such as the one you're watching now and other anti-feminist and men's rights channels, that individuals such as myself, who have actually been on the brink of suicide as a result of these things, | |
| have found camaraderie and support in the knowledge that we are not in fact alone, that we have not simply slipped through some cracks, that things did not simply turn out poorly for us, but that this is in fact the way the system is built to work, but that we are not alone in opposing it. | |
| There is a long, long road ahead to fight for the rights of fathers and men in respect to family law, and most of it will likely be a continued uphill battle. | |
| Likewise, as has been realized recently with the drama surrounding certain unhappy MIGTOWs and their small cults of fanatics, many of whom are actual rabid misogynists, | |
| giving in the course of their own campaigning a bad name to those who seek to fight for real reforms, the need for vigilance in respect to those who may appear as allies remains as crucial an aspect to the political and public relations battles that are to come as being able to recognize the players who maintain the status quo to begin with. | |
| So, as there is no easy road ahead in respect to these badly needed conversations and reforms, there is cause to remain optimistic and hope that in generations to come the old ways of regarding fathers as walking ATM machines with a bothersome but easily ignorable handful of actual rights will be a thing of the past, and children will be allowed to grow up with two parents in their lives, enjoying all of the love and support they so rightly deserve. | |
| So, I'd like to thank Sargon once again for offering me this platform before you all in which to discuss this unconscionable reality facing fathers throughout my country and many others. | |
| So here is to hoping that by raising our voices on issues such as these, that perhaps a brighter future awaits generations to come. | |
| So cheers to If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too, if you can wait and not be tired by waiting, or being lied about. |
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