Why did so many of the protests, often over legitimate grievances, turn into full-blown and violent riots this summer? Can what we saw really be explained by police brutality? Racism? BLM, Antifa, Right-wing militias? 

Writing in First Things earlier this month, American author Mary Eberstadt offered a provocative theory. What we witnessed, she thinks, was an “eruption along a fault line.” That fault line is fatherlessness. 

 “These young people in the streets are sometimes literally fatherless and very often figuratively fatherless . . .,” she told me in an interview on the BreakPoint podcast. In addition to the breakdown of the family, the “fall-off of organized religion…” means that “zoomers and millennials have been disconnected from the idea of a heavenly father,” as well as “disconnected from their patria, their country.”

All of this, Eberstadt says, is “what 60 years of the sexual revolution has wrought.” And that was the subject of our fascinating conversation on the BreakPoint Podcast. Please, come to BreakPoint.org to listen in.