Alex Berenson Talks New Book "The Fatherhood Manifesto"

**Nigel Bryan Alvey** (0:00)
The Hammer and Nigel Show, my name is Nigel Bryan Alvey. Filling in for Hammer, we'll bring on one of our favorite guests, Alex Berenson. He's an author, he is a journalist, and has a new piece out about Father's Day. His substack is called Unreported Truths.
But Alex, what is this? And we'll get to your settlement of the lawsuit against the government here in just a second, too. I want to hear all about it. But tell me again, just in time for Father's Day, what is the Fatherhood Manifesto? And why did you decide to write it?

**Alex Berenson** (0:30)
Sure. So the Fatherhood Manifesto is really a pamphlet, about 10,000 words, which is like a long magazine article, not a book, but longer than a newspaper article. And I decided to write it. I have three kids. And I basically got tired of seeing over and over again in the children's books that I read to them or on television, on shows, in ads, dads being constantly portrayed as morons, as incapable of helping take care of their kids. And there really is this feminist version of life, which doesn't seem to have anything to do with the life that I see, and the life that I see in my friends' families, where fathers are basically useless. And then there's a bigger issue, right?
Which is gentle parenting, which is this idea of, you're never supposed to really discipline your kids. You're just supposed to negotiate with them endlessly. And I think that's ridiculous, okay? And I don't think it's good for moms or dads, but I think it's really bad for fathers. And I think it leads to children who, you know, who are undisciplined, who kind of give up at the first sign of struggle, and who, you know, oftentimes they wind up in therapy, that's where this goes, and then they just talk about themselves even more.
I think our culture has lost any sense that stoicism and masculinity are virtues. And by the way, the worst part of this is that sometimes then you get these, like, these, what I would call parodies of men, these Andrew Tates, who, you know, who are so over the top trying to reclaim something because normal masculinity has kind of been taken from men and from fathers. And so that's what The Fatherhood Manifesto is. That's what I decided to write. And it's, you know, the first part of it is this, you know, not super long, kind of what I just explained to you, philosophy of parenting or of fatherhood. And then I combine that because I thought, you know what, I got to sort of explain to people what I mean in reality. Here are 50 tips.
And so, you know, and some of these things, a lot of these things may be obvious to anybody who's a decent dad or decent parent, but I still thought it was important to put them down.

**Nigel Bryan Alvey** (2:51)
And isn't it sad that you have to write a book like this, almost?

**Alex Berenson** (2:55)
That's right. That's exactly right. It's not, it's not that what I'm saying is revolutionary. It's the fact that I have to say it at all that's revolutionary.

**Nigel Bryan Alvey** (3:03)
And you know what, we're speaking with Alex Berenson, author of The Fatherhood Manifesto. You can find it anywhere, books and pamphlets, Amazon, Kindle, Audible.
Everything is sold and I trace it back to I just turned 50 and I, you know, I used to grow up watching Married with Children, Al Bundy, all right. You know what I mean? Do you talk about some of the television shows that have kind of portrayed these dads as just doofus weaklings that, that, you know, I kind of respected Al Bundy in a way. He, you know, he was a shoe salesman and provided for his family for sure, but they treated him like crap in that show. And do you talk about that?

**Alex Berenson** (3:45)
It really started there. It started with that and with The Simpsons. And, you know, those were really the first, I mean, you can even go back to Archie Bunker, but Archie Bunker was definitely the head of that house, right? And so, you know, what happened was it's one thing to portray, you know, a father or a man as a jerk, but it's when on top of that, portraying him as completely ineffectual and useless, that that's where it goes. And I didn't really go, I mean, I could have gone, you know, chapter and verse on this. There are, you know, there's no end to these. And for a while, you know, in the offs, I think, as we were, you know, or in the 2010s, as we were approaching kind of peak woke, there was literally not a television ad that didn't portray a father as a doofus. I mean, I'm exaggerating slightly, but really, everyone out there knows it.