I sat there watching that CNN panel the other night and felt my eye start to twitch in the way it only does when someone tries to rewrite reality on live television.
And rewriting it poorly.
Terry Schilling made the perfectly ordinary observation that decades of overwhelming support for Democrats have not exactly produced glowing results in a lot of black communities, and he pointed to the stubbornly high rate of kids growing up without their dads as one piece of evidence. Reasonable point. Then Ashley Allison jumped in like she’d just been handed a stopwatch and a script.
Watch:
"I don't think voting in Democrat super majorities has worked out for the Black communities. The fatherlessness rate is way too high." "Woah. Black fathers are in the home at a disproportionately higher rate than other fathers." Ashley Allison makes up fake statistics on CNN. https://t.co/JY58MhTzIF
— Thomas Hern (@ThomasMHern) November 10, 2026
She informed everyone that black fathers are actually in the home at a disproportionately higher rate than other fathers. Umm ... that’s not a close call or a matter of interpretation. Census numbers have shown for years that roughly 44 percent of black children live in homes without a father present. Compare that to about 24 percent for Hispanic kids and 16 percent for white kids, and the direction of the numbers is not subtle.
Nonmarital birth rates tell the same story.
Allison’s response was the classic pivot: call the actual data a stereotype, then offer the fact that her own father was around as if that settles anything for the rest of the country. I have a chainsaw in my garage; that does not mean most American women are out clearing timber on the weekends. One household is not a national trend.
What got me was the confidence. Not “the numbers are complicated” or “involvement among resident fathers looks different in some studies.” Just a flat denial of the residence numbers that everyone from the Census Bureau to Barack Obama has talked about for years. CNN let it sit there. No correction, no follow-up, just the usual panel shrug while the claim floated out into the world.
Father absence tracks with worse outcomes on poverty, education, and crime. Pretending the disparity does not exist because it is politically inconvenient does not help a single kid. It just keeps the conversation stuck on whether you’re allowed to notice the obvious. I notice it. So do a lot of other people who actually care about the numbers instead of the talking points.
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