An Evangelical family civil war goes ultra-viral
The Hart family really isn’t getting along
It’s like my favorite new T.V. show. An Evangelical family tears each other apart on social media. I watch as the Harts make viral videos, spilling facts and receipts.
There’s Madi Hart, a young blonde woman in Hollywood, trying to get a job as a screenwriter while doing stand-up comedy and social media videos. She posts her monologues about her family:
“I actually grew up super conservative and Christian. I grew up going to church four times a week. The first man to ever call me clingy was God. I gave my first ever blowjob in my childhood home, in the basement, in front of my mom’s framed picture of Ronald Reagan.”
Madi is is the “shocking” one. She tells the truth sometimes.
Madi is often talking about growing up Evangelical.
I like her bit about being a bisexual atheist going home for Thanksgiving. If they thought her soul was damned, she wondered, why wasn’t her family trying harder to ‘save’ her?
She goes on about it, sketching out the scene. The daughter trying to shock them. The family doing their religious act—but not as hard as she’d like.
“Where is your urgency? Like if you actually think I’m going to Hell, don’t just give me the side eye at Thanksgiving. Get in there! I take it personally. I’m like begging my Republican family to hate crime me. I’m like, ‘Do you guys even like me?’”
But is Madi mostly talking about her mother?
To tune into the Hart family wars, there is often the invisible, untouchable subject. The mother. I’m left, on my own, looking up details about the woman once named Betsy Canfield. She grew up in Chicago. She loved Jesus and Ronald Reagan. When Reagan lost his first run for president in 1976, she’d recall, she was ‘devastated’.
Betsy was a conservative Christian, anti-feminist, anti-gay, anti-abortion, so Reagan was her man. In 1980 won the presidency. In 1984, he ran for re-election, and by then she was chairman of ‘Youth For Reagan’.
In 1985, Betsy got a job in Washington D.C. at the White House.
She married into a famous conservative family.
Her husband was Ben Hart, the son of Jeffrey Hart, a noted writer for National Review. After Reagan’s presidency was over, she launched a career in conservative media. She had a syndicated column.
Throughout the 1990s she was often on T.V. She was on Fox News, CNN, CSPAN, and daytime talk shows. She was a repeat guest on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect. Betsy Hart was the conservative Christian woman with a hot take on everything.
In 2004, her world was upended.
Her husband asked for a divorce. In her column, she discussed becoming a single mother of four children, never specific about the causes of the divorce, except to say that her husband had fallen into “sin.”
She looks back in 2005:
“There were times as events unfolded, starting over a year ago now, that my shock, and pain and anger, were overwhelming to me. But through this ordeal, I’ve also come to see more than ever that sin is powerful and blinding.”
As she talked about her divorce, her column’s popularity exploded.
Then she wrote about being a single mother, then dating again. She met Tom, a chemistry professor. She found herself smiling, she writes, “since just about the moment we started dating.”
She published two books, collecting her columns. She had a radio show, a website, a podcast, Gospel Mindfulness (with her pastor). On an appearance on CBN, she talked about surviving her divorce:
“Fortunately I had a wonderful support network. I had a wonderful church life and was already walking with God and then He used that to come in and draw me, I think, so much closer to Himself…”
She re-married, and lived in a $2.4 million home.
She worked at a pro-life organization, and went to church all the time. She was again living the Evangelical dream.
Meanwhile, her daughter Madi was posting videos on social media sites. At first she talked about being young and dating. She moved to L.A. to become a screenwriter and her channel filled with media-ready commentary on life and relationships.
In early 2023 she had a big hit with a video about a date where the guy paid for everything—“and I felt the feminism leaving my body,” as she says. She frames it like a demon was exorcised from her.
The clip went superviral in conservative media.
She was on FoxNews and other right-wing outlets as proof of what happens to young women when young men treat them properly. Then the same clip was covered in liberal media when Madi said she’d been joking.
She’d talk about having “daddy issues.”
She had a video about that in 2023 (“So my dad left my family when I was really young, it’s fine, get over it…”) Months later, in February 2024 she had a big hit in a full-on take-down of her father.
“What’s a piece of trauma you have that’s funny?” she begins, as she talks about how her father “abandoned my family when I was five-years-old” to pursue a career in amateur breakdancing.
Quirky, heartbreaking, it seemed the set-up, many observed, for a sitcom. Across platforms it got, as far as I can tell, some 20 million views.
She didn’t give her dad any heads-up.
Ben Hart just woke up to see he’d been named and shamed all around the Internet as a “deadbeat dad.” He asked Madi to take her video down. She refused. He asked if she’d post a reply from him. She refused that too.
He set out to do a reply video anyway. It was tricky, since there were a lot of facts to manage. Producing receipts, he showed that he’d paid Betsy $2 million upon the divorce, and as much in later alimony, child support, medical bills, college costs, etc.
It was Betsy who’d moved away with the kids.
Before the divorce was finalized, Ben said, she’d taken the kids and returned to Illinois to be near her family. He’d followed later, buying a house down the street from her, to keep up a relationship with his kids. He had photos and videos of his ongoing visits.
“Was I at fault in the divorce?” he says. “I would say I was about 70% at fault. I own that. Madi’s mom and I were really not compatible in many ways.”
He remarried to Wanda, a woman he actually got along with. He took up breakdancing years later.
Ben’s reply video went super-viral.
It had 33 million views on X alone, with a comment by Elon Musk (“You are awesome”) and was covered widely in right-wing and tabloid media. On social media, hot takes on the drama abounded.
The Internet—if not the world—was tuning in.
But the drama had barely begun!
Seeing his reply video, Ben later said, Betsy “freaked out,” sending him a flurry of text messages. She demanded he take the reply video down. He refused. Then he learned that Betsy was again contacting clients at his business, trying to get them to drop him.
All three of his daughters cut off communication, as Madi posted a second video about him, calling him “lying” and “unhinged and delusional.” He was a “completely absent father,” she insisted.
In a next video, Ben dug deeper in to the divorce.
“My kids have never heard the whole story of what happened,” he said. “They’ve heard one side, one side from their mom.”
He made more videos, opening more layers of the story, though he noted he’d not get into “who cheated on who and who cheated first.” He adds: “We can get into all that later if Betsy wants to.”
Ben Hart got to really know his wife, one might say, after they divorced. “Betsy is not who she presents herself as,” he says.
When they agreed to divorce in 2005, he’d given her nearly all their money. Then he found her using the money to hire lawyers to destroy him. She pelted his clients with subpoenas to find out if he was somehow hiding money. His clients got spooked and dropped him.
Betsy kept pressing for payments of child support.
With his business failing, it was hard to stay current. A female judge identified him as a “deadbeat dad” and put him in prison.
Scene by scene, in gruesome detail, Ben showed Betsy going to extraordinary lengths to prevent him from seeing their children.
Then she’d wanted him blamed for being a ‘deadbead dad’ before the world.
It’s the family who feels like…America?
As the Harts lived out Evangelical Christianity and right-wing politics, it was a public theater, scripted by Betsy to favor herself.
Then it became an exposé, video by video, that revealed the horror happening behind the scenes. Ben promises “a “full treatment on the real Betsy” soon.
I can’t wait. 🔶
