Everybody loves my posts about my father. The relationship I had with him was profound and made me who I am. But why do people perceive it as unique? Why don’t more men have profound relationships with their children?

When a child is born, the mother bonds to it immediately and powerfully on a physical level. At the same time, for many women, the birth of a child is the first opportunity in their lives to feel like the authority and the expert on something important. Both first-time parents are absolutely clueless about how to handle a newborn but the woman has an edge because the infant’s food comes out of her and her presence is immediately soothing. From the start, the father learns to look to the mother for guidance as to how to handle the baby. It flatters the mother’s ego, so she exaggerates her competence. Soon enough, this relationship – the expert / the kid / the expert’s occasional helper – solidifies.

The father never starts to build his own relationship with his child because he has no idea that’s an option. At best, he carries out the mother’s orders regarding the child. But the father and the child don’t have a relationship in which the mother doesn’t play a role as an instigator, planner, reminder, and a hovercraft.

The father starts noticing that something exists between his wife and his child that doesn’t exist between him and either of them. It’s his child, he’s supposed to be feeling it but he clearly sees that his wife is getting something out of being a parent that he’s not. Within his own family he feels excluded, and that’s a pretty uncomfortable feeling.

To get rid of this unpleasant feeling, the father often attaches himself to the mother-child dyad in the capacity of the child’s older brother. This way, he can at least love his child in some way. The problem is that the child never gets a Dad, the Dad never experiences the father’s role, and the wife invariably loses some of her respect for the husband who acts like her older son. This is one of the most frequent complaints one hears from mothers. “I feel like a mom of three, with my husband being the eldest kid.” Or not even the eldest.

In other cases, the father withdraws from the family into his work, his hobby, his male peer group – or, if he’s particularly dense – into a new relationship where he’ll recreate the same pattern.

People recreate this pattern because that’s what they see growing up. And everybody ends up being robbed. In order to break the pattern in a healthy way, you need a mother whose ego is so well-fed that she doesn’t try to compete with the father for authority over the child and the father who’s either a bit on the autistic side and doesn’t know how other people do things or has a very strong personality and great emotional competence. Have you noticed that many of the best dads are somewhat autistic? Mine was.

Of course, there are situations where the mother has mental issues, doesn’t bond to the child and the father has to step in. But that creates the exact same problem with the excluded, resentful mother.

It’s rare that I agree with something completely but this article in National Review comes as close as it gets. I wanted to quote something from it but it only works as a total, and it’s really spot-on.

The true leader of these extreme MAGAs I’m talking about is clearly an FBI operation. It’s quite smart because it keeps them from voting and soothes their sky-high anxiety through the narrative of a worldwide benevolent force called “the White Hats” that controls everything and ensures that everything will turn out right. Every state has this kind of counterintelligence (or Deep State, as Americans call it) operations to keep the most disaffected and high-anxiety segments in check.

Here’s what worries me, though. The Q-Anon MAGAs have a left-wing counterpart. This far-far-left is, in many ways, identical to the far-far-right. They even believe in some of the exact same things. One of these things is the global Jewish conspiracy led by the Rothschilds that the White Hats (or the world revolutionaries, in the far-far-left imaginary) are battling and will eventually defeat. Both groups believe that the US is the heart of world evil because it either was turned into a corporation (far-far-right) or because it’s the source of capitalism (far-far-left). Both groups are very high-anxiety. But I’ve never seen any traces of a counterintelligence operation aimed at controlling and channeling into something less angry this far-far-left MAGA type. I didn’t see it 20 years ago and I don’t see it now.

Nobody is studying the MAGAs, but they are a fascinating, continuously evolving and very misunderstood movement. For instance, their attachment to Trump is a lot more provisional and weak than many people think. In last week’s election, they humiliated him by not showing up to vote because their real leader told them not to. Most Trump-endorsed candidates tanked as a result but MAGAs are completely indifferent to that fact. “Those were bad candidates,” they say stonily. “And there’s no real voting anyway until we recover our constitution.” [They believe that the US stopped being a country and became a corporation over a 100 years ago and every election since then has been a sham. Even Trump’s because he wasn’t elected but installed by a military junta.]

True MAGAs’ narrative on Trump is “I still believe he’s not corrupt and I’ll support him until I hear otherwise.” The moment the true leader tells them otherwise, they’ll dump Trump and move on.

I’m talking about the hardcore MAGAs here. The adrenochrome adepts. If you don’t know what that is and can’t name the true leader I’m referring to, you aren’t one of them.