Ep 603 ｜ How CPS & Foster Care Corruption is Killing Kids ｜ Guest： Naomi Schaefer Riley
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 7 minutes
Words per Minute
172.07153
Summary
In this episode, author Naomi Riley talks about the devastating effects of racialized ideology in the foster care system, and how Christian theology and Judeo-orthodoxy can help us address the problem of child neglect and abuse in our communities.
Transcript
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Okay, guys, have I got the conversation for you today?
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We are talking to author of No Way to Treat a Child, Naomi Riley, and she is going to talk
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to us about CPS and the foster care system and how progressive racialized ideology is
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destroying the lives of children in the name of equity, in the name of so-called fairness
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Children, in particular, Black children, are being left in the hands and in the care
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And this was a very stirring conversation for me.
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As we'll talk about, we tend to have a very negative view as conservatives of CPS, and
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But we need to talk about how to make the child welfare system not just go away, but better
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because it is a necessary safeguard for children.
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And so Naomi is going to give us so much insight today.
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You're probably going to be surprised by what you learn as well.
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At times, it's kind of gut-wrenching and mind-blowing.
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But she's also going to leave us advice at the end and some equipment for how we can tackle
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this huge issue of lack of child welfare in our communities.
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This is something that we are called to as Christians.
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As I've mentioned before, and I just think it's kind of a stunning revelation if you've
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never thought about it, Christians, Christianity changed the way the world saw children.
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I think it was a couple weeks ago at this point that when Christianity came about 2,000
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years ago in the ancient pagan world and ancient Greece and ancient Rome, really society was
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set up in kind of concentric circles, the center circle being the adult free male.
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Everyone outside of that, everyone who was a slave, everyone who was a woman, everyone who
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was elderly, everyone who was a child, was really and truly marginalized.
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They were seen as objects to be used and exploited by the adult free male.
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Children, in part, just because they weren't adults and so they had a lower mental and physical
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But also because there was a high child mortality rate at the time, they were very much objectified.
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They were often abused and neglected, especially young girls.
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And then Christianity came along and radically changed that over time.
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It introduced and really universalized this idea that, of course, had existed when ancient
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Israel was established or really at the beginning of time by God, that human beings are made in
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No matter our age, no matter our mental capacity or physical capabilities, we are all of the
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And then Jesus adds to that in this unquantifiably significant way in saying that we are all equally
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And we are all equally alive in Christ and friends with God and made holy and righteous
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So this radical equality through the idea of us all being made in the image of God, no
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matter who we are or where we come from or how much money we have.
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We see throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament that God hates partiality, particularly
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when it comes to law giving to Israel, we see God say multiple times that he believes it
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is an injustice in court to either show partiality or favoritism to the poor or weak person in
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a case or the rich and powerful person in a case.
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There is this radical equality that is introduced by Judeo-Christian thought, but especially by
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Of course, we also see in Jesus' own life of the many, many things that Jesus did, of
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course, we see that the authors of the gospel thought it significant and necessary to include
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the story of Jesus calling the children to himself.
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His disciples wanted to shoo them away, which was probably pretty standard for the time.
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And Jesus actually chastised the adult males, chastised the disciples and said,
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And Jesus actually says, you have to have faith like a child.
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You have to be like a child in order to enter the kingdom of heaven.
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Of course, he's speaking in the spiritual sense, but how much he valued children, not just to
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bring the children to himself, but to say that their faith, their trust in him is something
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When we see the kind of hierarchical roles, not challenged in the New Testament, but redefined
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For example, in Ephesians 5, as again, we talked about a couple weeks ago, that slaves are told
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to serve their masters, not just by way of people pleasing, but actually as they are serving
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the Lord, that would have been radical at the time, not because it said that slaves have
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to obey their masters, but because there is actually an important relationship there that
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So that kind of like heartfelt obedience and then taking care of a bondservant and a slave
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in a respectful way by the master, that would have been seen as radical at the time.
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The passage in Ephesians 5 that talks about children obeying their fathers, that's not
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the radical part, but instructing fathers to then not provoke their child to anger, that
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It wouldn't have been radical, as it says in Ephesians 5 at the time that it was written
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But what was radical at the time was telling husbands in that passage to love their wives as
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Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.
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And so while the gospel doesn't necessarily automatically abolish all hierarchies, it does
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change the way we treat one another in these kind of hierarchical relationships.
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And of course, there is not any kind of condoning of slavery in scripture.
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And of course, the kind of chattel slavery that we saw in the United States is absolutely an
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But what I'm trying to say is that the gospel radicalizes how people in power and people
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underneath power, how they relate to one another through this lens of radical equality of people
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being made in the image of God and everyone needing equally salvation through Christ.
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And so I know that was a rant, but I say all that to say we got to care about this because
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Christians have always been countercultural when it comes to the protection of the most
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Children are always on the altar of adults' whims.
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They're always the first to be sacrificed because they can't stand up for themselves.
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So what we're going to talk about today in the child welfare system is something that we
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We are carrying on the legacy of Christianity, the legacy of true biblical justice by caring
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We'll get into that conversation in just one second.
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Can you tell everyone who you are and what you do?
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I'm a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where I study child welfare.
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I worked at the Wall Street Journal for a while.
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I was a columnist for the New York Post, and I've written a bunch of books.
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The most recent one is called No Way to Treat a Child, and it's about the problems with our
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I'm really looking forward to hearing more of your insight on this.
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Can you first just tell us why you wrote this book?
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Well, there were actually a couple of previous topics that I wrote about that kind of led
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The first one actually was a book I wrote about American Indians called The New Trail of Tears.
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And for that book, I actually ended up traveling to a bunch of Indian communities and reservations
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And unfortunately, for your viewers and listeners who don't know, there are some of the worst
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Some of the highest rates of abuse and foster care and very few places for those kids to
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And the other thing that kind of led me in this direction was I was...
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Some of the worst cases of abuse, you're talking about abuse at the hands of the caregivers and
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So, I mean, there is a lot of dysfunction in a lot of these communities.
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Unfortunately, there are very high rates of alcohol and substance abuse.
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And we know that those are really significantly correlated with rates of child abuse and neglect
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at the hands of caretakers, usually parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles.
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And so, we see that to a very significant degree in American Indian communities.
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And so, when I came back from those trips, I just kind of started to wonder what the child
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welfare system looks like in the rest of the country.
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And I was writing a column for the New York Post at the time.
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And I started to follow some of the high-profile child fatalities that happen in New York City
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for kids, you know, kids who are really known to the system.
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Like, we knew that their parents were not treating them well.
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They had been reported multiple times to the Administration for Children's Services.
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And I just became sort of gobsmacked at the fact that we could know about what was going
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on in these homes and make a decision to leave children in those dangerous situations.
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And so, a combination of these things kind of led me down this path to look at really what
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all the child welfare agencies across the country look like, what their policies are like, get
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into family court and foster care and adoption.
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And anyway, yeah, so the result of all that is this book.
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As conservatives, I think that we are automatically distrustful and for good reason of government
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agencies, especially when it comes to dealing with children.
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And I think when the average person, or at least the average conservative, thinks about
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CPS, and maybe I'm only speaking for myself, but I'm probably speaking for a lot of people
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I tend to think, not based on any data, but just based on my impression and maybe some of
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the saddest stories that I've seen on social media, is that CPS is, by and large, taking
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kids away from their parents who don't need to be taken away from their parents.
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That, to me, is the impression that I get, that that's the real problem, that CPS is
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intervening when they don't need to intervene, that maybe a mother is taking their child to
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the hospital because they fell and bumped their head because that's what toddlers do.
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CPS show up and then these terrible things happen where kids are separated from their parents
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But really, what you more focus on in your book, you talk about a wide array of problems.
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What you focus more on in your book is that CPS very often tends to not intervene or intervene
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as much as they should when it comes to cases of child abuse, especially when it comes to
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the Black family for reasons of, I guess, equity.
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What are the real biggest problems that are going on in CPS and the foster care system?
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I know that's a big question, so take as long as you need to answer it.
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So I do want to start with your initial impression because I think you are representative of a
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large swath of conservative and maybe more libertarian leaning folks who think about CPS
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and think this is government intrusion in the lives of private citizens.
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And what I would like to shift the conversation to is thinking about CPS more in a role of law
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enforcement. And I think conservatives understand the place of law enforcement in our society
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and the importance of law enforcement in terms of protecting the most vulnerable citizens in this
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country from violence and crimes at the hands of others.
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And what's happening in these situations with kids is that there is nobody else to protect them
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They are living in families where they're being repeatedly abused and neglected.
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And the only institution that can stand between them and caretakers who are putting them in danger
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And it's interesting because I think what you're seeing increasingly is that certain activists in the
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world of child welfare also liken CPS to law enforcement.
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And in the same way that they want to abolish the police, they'd also like to abolish CPS.
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So we need to kind of think about this in those terms.
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Like, we don't think it's a good idea as conservatives to abolish the police because we understand
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We understand the important role that the police play in protecting our most vulnerable citizens.
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And we need to understand the important role that CPS plays in protecting children.
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So what we have to understand then is, again, making this parallel with the kind of abolish
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There are a lot of folks out there who charge that child protective services and child welfare
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They claim they look at, of course, racial disparities.
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And just as racial disparities don't tell the entire story with regard to law enforcement,
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they're not telling the whole story with regard to CPS.
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So it is absolutely true that Black children in this country are investigated at a higher rate
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The charges against their parents tend to be substantiated at a higher rate than their white
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And they're removed to foster care at a higher rate than their white peers.
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But what these statistics don't tell you is that Black children in this country are twice
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as likely to be abused and they're three times as likely to die from maltreatment as their
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So if you think about it in terms of child protective services, in terms of who it is that we need
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to ensure is safe, you are going to find that there are going to be more Black children who
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And, you know, there are a lot of reasons for that.
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Like, again, whenever we sort of have these very superficial conversations about racial
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disparities, it doesn't take account of really important factors that go into them.
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So, for instance, yes, you could say that Black men, you know, are more likely to have encounters
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They're also more likely to commit many violent crimes in this country.
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Similarly, when we look at the child welfare system, you know, the family structure is a huge
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predictor of whether a child is going to be safe or not.
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And a lot of, you know, sociologists, researchers refer to this as the mother's boyfriend problem.
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If a child is living with a non-relative male, typically, you know, could be a stepfather,
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but more often it's just the mother's boyfriend.
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They are 11 times as likely to be abused as a child who is living with two married parents.
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And it turns out that family structure is not distributed evenly among racial groups
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And Black children, as a result, are not as safe in many instances as white children,
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Yes, and let me just punctuate what you're saying with your own words.
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This is what you wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
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She wrote a book called Torn Apart, and she is arguing basically what you are refuting right
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now, that because of the disparities that we see in the foster care system, because Black
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children are more likely to be taken from their homes and put in the foster care system,
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that shows that CPS is really just an extension of slavery.
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This is kind of the whole critical race theory premise that oppression of Black people really
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And you're absolutely right that they use the police as an example of that, that it's
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just a reiteration or a different iteration of slave patrol, you know, in the slave era.
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And now the police is basically functioning in the same role.
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And they point to disparities in order to prove that.
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Actually, the entire conversation about systemic racism from the left basically boils down to
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pointing to disparities as proof of discrimination.
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But as Thomas Sowell has written so much and so thoroughly on, disparities are not in themselves
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You have to look at all of the other factors, as you mentioned, the makeup of the family.
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But let me get to some of the statistics that you wrote about in the Wall Street Journal.
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You said, according to the latest federal data, 1,750 children died in 2020 as a result of being
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Of those children, 34.9% were Black, though Blacks only make up 13% of the U.S. population.
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Black children were three times as likely to die from maltreatment as white children.
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And the number had gone up 17% from the year before.
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And then you get into Dorothy Roberts's arguments in Torn Apart, which are, as I just talked about,
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basically that these disparities are not because Black children are being abused at higher rates,
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You also mentioned that the communist, Angela Davis, she endorsed this book and said that
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it was great, but actually, and I think you argue this, and so I want you to keep going
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Actually, this kind of thinking puts more Black children in harm's way because it is then informing
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You mentioned that the Biden administration in charge of child welfare compared workers in
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the in this field, in the child welfare field, to overseers on plantations and advise the
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She apparently said save Black children from that knock on the door in that tunnel of child
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welfare out of which they may never see their way.
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So in her opinion, in this official's opinion, CPS is a bigger threat than abusive parents,
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I think a lot of people thought that this whole abolish child welfare discussion was kind of an
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academic conversation that was happening outside of the realm of actual policymaking.
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And a lot of people talk about, you know, critical race theory and these other abstract theories
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as things that, you know, they're just kind of things that happen in law schools and they
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This is an instance where this dangerous ideology is spreading across the country throughout our
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child welfare agencies, and it is harming the most vulnerable kids.
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So let me just give you a couple of examples of kind of what is going on in these agencies.
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The first thing is that they believe it is important, almost no matter what, to keep
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Now, as conservatives, of course, we think, yes, of course, kids should be with their families.
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But we don't understand that these are parents who have repeatedly abused or neglected their
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And I just want to pause here to just talk about what neglect is, because there's a lot
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of misinformation out there about what is what constitutes neglect.
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There are people out there who say, oh, neglect is just when you let your eight year old walk
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to the park by themselves and CPS decides that they're in danger and pick them up.
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No, most neglect cases in this country are happening with kids age zero to three.
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They're happening when adults are leaving those kids alone, unsupervised, when those parents are
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so strung out on drugs that they cannot feed or clean or supervise or provide medical care
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Neglect is sometimes when you let an abusive partner come into your home, knowing that that
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person is going to physically abuse your child in some way.
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Neglect is actually responsible for more fatalities, child fatalities in this country than abuse
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So I just want to, you know, sort of bracket that for a second, because so what's going
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on in these agencies is they say it's so important that the child we preserve this
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relationship between the child and the family at all costs.
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And I say to people, you know, it's like if you if you had this policy with regard to
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domestic abuse, you know, the police came because your boyfriend or husband was beating
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Now, imagine if the first question they asked was, OK, guys, how can we get you back together?
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But that is exactly what's going on when a child protective services is coming into this
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They are looking around, trying to figure out any way possible to leave this child with
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the people who are abusing and neglecting them.
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And then even on the rare occasions when that child is removed, the entire driving ideology
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of these agencies and family courts is, OK, how can we get you back together?
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And so we provide all sorts of services to the families.
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We do anger management, addiction counseling, parenting lessons, anything we can think of
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in order to try to reunite this child with their family.
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And often we're doing this over and over and over again.
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The parents, because drugs are such a big issue, are often relapsing multiple times.
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And especially with young children, we are really interrupting their development by constantly
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taking them in and out of their biological home, putting them in multiple foster homes
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so that they cannot form the kind of secure attachment that we know is so important to their
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And with regard to race, what you see is we are even more inclined to leave black children
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in their home because no agency wants to be accused of racism.
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No social worker wants to be accused of racism.
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I did a story on a judge in New Orleans who has been honored repeatedly because she specifically
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will not remove or will not approve the removal of black children from their home.
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And when I interviewed her, she said, I want to know why there aren't more Vietnamese children
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And to me, that's such a silly, it's an absurd question.
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The question is, are the kids in front of you in danger and what difference does it
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And that's the danger of prioritizing this newfangled definition of equity or this left-wing idea
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of representation and diversity in the most superficial sense above what is actually true,
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I mean, again, I see so many parallels, as you mentioned, to policing very often when
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someone commits a heinous crime, like, for example, the Brooklyn shooter who had been on
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It had many run-ins with the police, Sacramento shooters.
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They all share the same race, and they also share a long, violent criminal history.
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The same thing with Daryl Brooks, the terrorist in the Waukesha parade.
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And this is happening across the country, where in the name of equity, in the name of trying
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to disrupt what they would call, I don't know, the school-to-prison pipeline and the disproportionate
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rates of Black men in jail, rather than addressing why these Black men are going to jail, they're
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just saying, well, let's just make sure that they're not in jail so our quotas can look right.
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And as you mentioned, that is really harmful because it's not just that no one wants a
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disproportionate rate of any kind of race in jail, but it's not just that Black men are
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They're also the disproportionate victims of these crimes.
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And so if you actually care about saving Black lives, if Black lives really do matter, then
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it shouldn't matter if a Vietnamese child is in front of you or if a Black child or Hispanic
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You have to ask the question, is this child in danger?
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And so often it seems like so-called social justice and criminal justice is really more
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focused on protecting the perpetrator of the crime, the perpetrator of the violence.
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And besides just having a warped worldview and a warped upside down ideology, which I believe
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progressivism is, it's hard for me to understand why.
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And it's hard for me to understand a judge that you just described, who we know is not
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stupid, why she wouldn't see things as they are.
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Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because you're exactly right.
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Just as the criminal justice system is focused on the perpetrators, so the child welfare system
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is actually focused on the well-being of adults.
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I mean, I tell this to people over and over again, and they don't always quite believe
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But people see adults in the child welfare system as victims in many ways.
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And in some ways, there's a good reason for that.
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Many of these adults have had very difficult lives.
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They have endured poverty, a lack of education, unemployment, substance abuse, homelessness.
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Some of them have even grown up in the foster care system themselves.
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And so when you look at these people and you think, I don't want to add to their problems
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And so they come into this equation with a distinct advantage.
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Adults are much more capable of articulating their views and their issues than children are.
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And so they go into a courtroom or they talk to CPS or they talk to the social worker and
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they say, you know, look at me, feel bad for me.
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And it becomes harder and harder to focus on the well-being of the children.
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Instead, you have more and more agencies and organizations out there that are simply focused
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on what they call the well-being of the family.
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There's a program out there called CASA, Court Appointed Special Advocates, which I think
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You have adult volunteers who come in, meet with a child who's in the child welfare system,
00:28:05.260
and then they come into the courtroom and they talk to the judge and they say, you know,
00:28:11.220
This is what I think is in this child's best interest.
00:28:14.380
Well, there's a move afoot in many CASA organizations across the country now to not be concerned with
00:28:19.900
the child's well-being, but to rather represent the whole family.
00:28:24.160
And it never occurs to these people or they never acknowledge that in there are cases where
00:28:30.060
the child's interests are going to diverge from the family's interests or the adult's interests.
00:28:35.800
And we don't have a, you know, we, in our court system, everyone gets their own representation.
00:28:41.040
And it's not, we don't have this system because we're mean.
00:28:44.240
We have this system because we feel that everyone in that courtroom deserves a voice.
00:28:49.200
And when you just say we're going to be concerned with family well-being, you blot out the child's
00:28:55.940
You start to ignore the child's voice and the child's best interests.
00:28:59.560
And I see this trend throughout the system and it's very concerning.
00:29:02.960
I think especially as conservatives, but as people in general, we do want family reunification
00:29:18.640
I mean, you do insofar as that intact family will provide a stable or not perfect because
00:29:28.880
no family is perfect, but a better environment for that child than foster care, because there's
00:29:36.780
I mean, there are known high rates of sexual abuse and physical abuse and perhaps psychological
00:29:46.340
And we know that there are a lot of problems there.
00:29:49.760
And so I want reunification to be the ultimate goal.
00:29:54.160
But what do you think are some steps that are not being taken right now that should be
00:29:59.440
taken to make sure that before reunification does happen, that CPS, that the child welfare
00:30:07.660
system is ensuring that reunification is best for the child, that the parent is in a position
00:30:16.320
Because we don't want that parent in that family to be beyond redemption because they used
00:30:21.460
to be one way and they're no longer addicted to drugs and they really are on their feet.
00:30:28.240
Like, what do you think is the disconnect happening?
00:30:30.600
How can we change that so reunification can actually be good for the child as well?
00:30:37.240
So I think that one of the things we need to focus on is the timelines for kids, which is
00:30:43.800
to say, yes, we don't want to say anyone is beyond redemption or that they can never clean
00:30:52.680
But we have to ask a very hard question in the child welfare world, which is how long
00:30:59.940
And when a child is, you know, 10 or 12 years old and they have like a bond with their parent
00:31:06.260
and, you know, this parent was rendered, you know, for a couple of years or a year incapable
00:31:11.220
of caring for them and that child still has a strong relationship with that parent and
00:31:16.240
they can go back to them, you know, that's amazing.
00:31:19.240
When you have a child who is, say, born to a mother and that child is born substance exposed,
00:31:25.060
you know, that is already with drugs in their system.
00:31:27.880
And then that child goes home with a parent who has an addiction problem and month after
00:31:33.580
month and year after year, we keep saying to that parent, okay, come back for more services,
00:31:38.760
for more treatment, for another stint in rehab, you have to understand that child's timeline
00:31:46.680
When a judge says to that child, you know, come back and see me in six months and that
00:31:52.680
child is two or three years old, that is a huge chunk of a child's life and it is a
00:31:58.140
huge chunk of the important developmental years that we are frittering away with not just,
00:32:04.500
you know, bureaucracy, but even attempts to give the parents one more chance.
00:32:08.940
So as much as we have to have sympathy for the parents and provide whatever we can to
00:32:14.300
help them, we also have to say at some point, this has to stop and this child deserves to
00:32:23.860
So the other aspect of what you were just asking about is what can we do to ensure that there
00:32:30.700
are more quality foster families out there? Because it's true. There are a lot of foster
00:32:36.160
families who are in this for the wrong reasons. I should say that the likelihood of being abused
00:32:41.700
in foster care is much lower than the likelihood in the general population. So I think as much as
00:32:48.660
those headlines catch our attention, because of course, the state has stepped in and put that
00:32:53.620
child in that situation, and we should absolutely be outraged by these situations. It's also important
00:32:59.440
to say that the vast majority of foster care situations are safe for kids. But still, we could
00:33:07.020
be doing much better. And part of the book is really an exploration of organizations, non-profit
00:33:13.200
organizations, and a lot of faith-based organizations out there, and churches that are doing amazing work
00:33:19.520
in this area that have really revolutionized the way that we recruit and train and support
00:33:25.880
foster families so that when a child does have to be removed, we have an appropriate, safe, and loving
00:33:34.020
And I want to talk to you a little bit more about that, because you've also written about
00:33:37.800
the efforts to undermine faith-based foster homes, group homes, and efforts to actually make children
00:33:45.500
secure. So I'll ask you about that in just one second. But I realized I kind of didn't finish my
00:33:50.500
thought earlier, and it's more on this kind of equity piece that we were just talking about.
00:33:55.640
When I was saying that typically, when you see someone who commits a violent crime, they have had
00:34:01.400
run-ins with the police, and they really should be in jail. These people shouldn't be on the street,
00:34:06.240
but because in the name of equity, they're released. And then we see the same thing in these
00:34:12.540
CPS situations that there were actually several times where the children should have been taken
00:34:19.720
away permanently. And then by the time that child is reunited the last time, it's too late.
00:34:26.300
One case that I'm reminded of is Melissa Lucio. She's actually on death row right now in Texas.
00:34:32.620
Her case is getting a lot of attention because of the Innocence Project, which my audience knows
00:34:36.940
is a big problem with how they do things. I think they're very deceitful and propagandistic.
00:34:43.060
In their relaying of the people's stories that they are advocating for. And this is one case that I
00:34:49.520
think is certainly indicative of that. She had had several interactions, 14 children. She had had
00:34:56.600
several interactions with CPS from the early 90s to the 2000s. In the early 2000s, CPS came 2004. They
00:35:04.500
came to her home. They found out that all of her children were neglected. None of her babies had any
00:35:09.100
diapers on. They were covered in dried feces. They looked like they had even maybe been physically
00:35:15.560
abused at times. The baby had ants crawling all over her. The baby tested positive for
00:35:21.580
cocaine. And so her children were taken away from her, I think rightfully so. But then the children
00:35:28.240
were reunited with her two years later, even though she was probably still on cocaine. Well, that little
00:35:34.360
infant who had been covered in ants at the beginning of her life was abused and then murdered
00:35:39.720
by her mother. And, you know, now she's dead. And she never really should have been reunified
00:35:47.520
with her children. She had a long history of neglect. But I don't know if it was in the name
00:35:52.440
of equity or what it was, CPS made the decision to give her back her children. And this is just one
00:35:58.340
of many examples. I mean, you can just search for these kinds of stories, not just in the U.S.,
00:36:04.400
but also in the U.K., where social services knew that this child was being abused. And then,
00:36:10.180
as you said, it's typically not a biological parent. It's typically a partner, a boyfriend,
00:36:15.860
you know, a live-in, whatever it is, someone who is not actually physically related to that child,
00:36:23.780
then going on to abuse them, despite other outside family members trying to sound the alarms
00:36:29.580
about these children. What else is the driving force besides just woke ideology and equity and social
00:36:39.700
justice? What else is driving CPS to reunify families at the expense of the safety of children?
00:36:49.540
So aside from the ideology of just reunification at all costs, which I think is really there,
00:36:55.160
and the racial aspect of it, I think what we don't understand is that a lot of the people making
00:37:00.960
these decisions are really not capable of making them. They're young, they're inexperienced,
00:37:06.760
they're not properly trained, they're not well compensated. Some child welfare agencies in
00:37:11.900
this country have a 40% turnover rate. And people don't understand what this job is when they get
00:37:18.280
into it. And they don't have enough training or information in order to make these life or death
00:37:25.500
decisions, frankly. Just kind of imagine yourself as like a, you know, 22-year-old recent college
00:37:32.600
graduate, you know, you're sent out to investigate some of these situations. You're being put in
00:37:38.880
physical danger often. You know, you're going into, say, a public housing project, you're knocking
00:37:43.540
on the door, you don't know who is on the other side, you are going to ask some very difficult
00:37:48.860
questions of the people inside that apartment. You have to worry about whether you're going to be
00:37:54.600
threatened. And at the same time, you have to be taking in all this information about what is going
00:37:59.340
on in the apartment, trying to assess what the kids would tell you if you could get them alone for a
00:38:05.140
minute. It's really hard work. And I don't think these people know how to do it. Now, when you think
00:38:12.240
about that work, the way I've described it, it sounds to you like this is the work that police do,
00:38:17.960
that we ask them to do every day. But we don't treat CPS the way we treat law enforcement in a lot of
00:38:25.360
ways. And we don't train them the way we train law enforcement to do these kinds of investigations. And we
00:38:31.320
also see them as kind of optional, like you saw during the pandemic, actually, quite a number of states
00:38:39.140
actually furloughed CPS workers, or told them that they could do their jobs over zoom, or that they could
00:38:45.780
just pull up in front of the house and say, hey, show me the kid, I'll stand over here. And I'll see if like, I
00:38:52.140
think anything is going wrong. It is, it's, it's outrageous what happened during the pandemic, a lot
00:38:58.180
of kids were being abused more because of the, you know, remote situation. Many more families were
00:39:04.840
isolated, they weren't being seen by teachers or doctors or neighbors. And our attitude with CPS was,
00:39:10.920
well, you know, we'll get back to that work when the pandemic is over. So I think part of it is,
00:39:16.140
again, we saw child abuse rates go up. I mean, obviously, the nurses and doctors who didn't take a break
00:39:21.560
during the pandemic, they attested to the fact that they saw some of the worst cases of not just
00:39:26.780
child abuse, but also just mental health deterioration among really young kids, suicidal
00:39:31.840
attempts among five year olds. And so we're talking about a whole range of abuse that increased during
00:39:38.620
the pandemic, in part, in large part, because of what you're talking about, because all of the little
00:39:43.560
accountability structures that we have, whether it's school, you've got teachers who are mandatory
00:39:48.660
reporters when they see when they're suspicious of abuse, and then doctors, social workers, all of
00:39:54.820
that that was taken away from kids and the people who said that they were caring for the most vulnerable
00:39:59.860
were the pro lockdown people. And once again, I don't know why, even though kids are the most
00:40:06.220
marginalized and the most vulnerable and the most subject to abuse class in the entire world,
00:40:11.660
they are very rarely considered by the social justice, empathy warriors to be in a truly oppressed
00:40:19.820
class that we need to advocate for. It's very strange. Yeah, the slogan safer at home is a joke for
00:40:26.600
these kids. I mean, it was just, you know, and like I said, you have the mandated reporters, but you also
00:40:31.780
have kids who just weren't even seen by their neighbors. I mean, once you tell everyone, you just lock your
00:40:37.440
doors and stay at home. I mean, families that already had substance abuse issues, those were
00:40:42.740
increased, and they didn't have any outlet for getting counseling for helping with that. And what
00:40:49.120
you saw, I mean, one national study found that you saw three times as many severe abuse cases coming to
00:40:55.360
our emergency rooms. I mean, because what you know, in under normal circumstances, you might have like a
00:41:01.200
progression, you know, things that start out more minor, once they get to the emergency room, those are
00:41:06.920
severe abuse cases. And by that point, for many kids, it's almost too late. So to answer your
00:41:14.340
question about, you know, why it is that we are making these decisions, and it's true, if you look
00:41:18.760
at the statistics on fatalities and near fatalities, you know, in some states, two thirds of these kids
00:41:25.280
have already either already been in the system, and maybe their case was already dismissed. Many of
00:41:30.640
them have open cases, and we know what's going on in these homes, and we are failing to act.
00:41:35.740
There are, I think, some things that we could do better in terms of information. You know, many
00:41:41.860
industries have been transformed by the use of big data. And I talk in my book about using some of the
00:41:48.420
information we have on these families to make better decisions. So for instance, we might know if a child
00:41:54.760
hasn't shown up to school in the last 30 days, if a family hasn't picked up their food stamps or used
00:42:00.920
them. If someone who was recently incarcerated has listed that family's address as their new residence,
00:42:09.660
these are signs that when they're kind of plugged into a computer, you know, alert us not definitely
00:42:15.680
abuse happened or definitely abuse didn't happen. But they tell us who needs to be most urgently
00:42:21.480
investigated and which kids need to be seen very soon. And I think that a lot of states could be
00:42:27.360
making much better use of those tools to give some aid to these people who are we're asking to do
00:42:33.800
these jobs. And, you know, one sociologist I talked to said to me, these decisions that are being made,
00:42:41.120
I think conservatives are rightly hesitant to trust CPS when we think about, I think especially
00:42:54.640
over the last two years, our distrust of the government has really grown. And we have seen
00:42:59.440
how government and government agencies are really weaponized against certain perspectives. And there
00:43:05.640
really is an animosity towards things like homeschooling or parents who choose an alternate
00:43:10.740
vaccine schedule. And so I think especially with COVID and the restrictions surrounding that, a lot
00:43:16.180
of parents are worried that CPS is going to come after them simply because of their worldview, because
00:43:23.740
of their politics, because they're deciding to raise their child with maybe a religious or political
00:43:29.640
perspective that the government doesn't agree with.
00:43:33.020
And I think that there's maybe a healthy fear there. I don't think that that is what is happening
00:43:37.760
necessarily right now. Although we are seeing in places like Canada, parents who refuse to call a
00:43:43.660
child by a different pronoun or go along with the child's transition, those parents are under attack
00:43:50.860
by the government. So I think it's okay for us to have a healthy fear like any bureaucracy, things can get
00:43:57.080
out of control, things can be weaponized against people because of their beliefs. And so I want
00:44:05.100
people to understand that what we're talking about is having a healthy safety net and hedge of protection
00:44:11.840
for children who really need it. And the ideology and just I guess the common practice right now of CPS is
00:44:20.300
actually putting kids at risk in the name of creating, you know, a safer and more equitable
00:44:26.300
world. And one of the ways that they are doing that, one of the ways that they are undermining their
00:44:31.320
stated mission is by undermining the efforts of faith based organizations who are trying to help
00:44:40.040
kids in the child welfare system. So can you talk more about what is going on there and why?
00:44:45.980
Sure. So I think you're exactly right about the healthy skepticism that conservatives have here.
00:44:53.180
You know, there are definitely cases in which child welfare agencies are trying to sort of do
00:44:59.400
social engineering, like they don't want foster parents. In California, it's hard to be a foster
00:45:05.220
parent unless you agree to support your foster child's gender transition. So there are absolutely big
00:45:12.380
problems with the system. But what worries me is that conservatives have very much taken a hands-off
00:45:18.760
approach to child welfare for a long time now. They have conservative legislators and governors have
00:45:26.440
sort of allowed child welfare agencies to kind of operate on their own. And they are completely
00:45:33.680
populated by a certain kind of person with a certain kind of ideology. And that is not helpful.
00:45:40.900
Conservatives need to be at the table for discussions about child welfare policy. Sometimes when I talk
00:45:47.040
to legislators, I get the sense that they don't want to be at the table because they don't want to
00:45:52.080
be called racist and they don't want to be called cheap for not giving more money to child welfare. So
00:45:57.380
they just stay away. But what happens is then you create a vacuum and that vacuum is filled by people
00:46:03.740
who want to, as you say, weaponize the child welfare system. So we need to be at the table. And one of the
00:46:09.520
ways that conservatives and I think people of faith in particular have been at the table and have been
00:46:15.860
showing up for these kids in the last number of years is through these faith-based foster agencies
00:46:21.920
and programs that recruit and train and support foster and adoptive families. So I just want to kind of
00:46:28.140
give a little bit of a sense of how they have really transformed this area before I talk about kind of the
00:46:34.440
ways that I think people are trying to push them out of it. The first thing that they recognized is
00:46:39.660
that our recruitment of foster parents is just, it was terrible. Putting up a picture of a child on the
00:46:45.720
nightly news and saying, does anyone want this kid, is not a good way to find foster parents. But foster
00:46:51.440
parents were calling agencies and they weren't even getting their calls returned. So a lot of these
00:46:56.520
agencies and churches, megachurches, particularly in the Midwest and the South, said, okay, well,
00:47:00.980
how can we help? We will act as kind of the go-between and we will have pastors actually go
00:47:07.320
and say to people, these are the six kids in our zip code tonight who need homes. That is a very
00:47:12.680
urgent and important message and people really took them up on it. A lot of these agencies also
00:47:17.560
volunteered to do training. You know, the state says, oh, you need to know things like how many fire
00:47:23.100
extinguishers to have in your home. And these agencies says, fine, we'll tell them how many fire
00:47:27.820
extinguishers they need to have, but we're also going to teach them how to handle kids who have
00:47:31.860
been traumatized. That is a much more important skill in many ways than handling a fire extinguisher.
00:47:38.600
And the last thing they did is they supported foster families. About half of foster parents quit within
00:47:43.720
the first year. And one of the reasons is because they're not supported. They feel like they're in
00:47:48.300
this by themselves. And so a lot of these groups now sort of say, you have to bring other people with
00:47:54.480
you, your neighbors and friends who will volunteer to do respite care, to help you build furniture at
00:48:00.480
the last minute, or just to pray for you during these times, which are going to be really trying.
00:48:05.880
So this has been a hugely successful effort in terms of recruiting middle class American families
00:48:13.060
of faith into these efforts. But now you have these activists in state and federal governments,
00:48:18.440
you know, who are saying, well, if these agencies are not placing kids with gay families in particular,
00:48:25.740
then we want to run them out of business. And you actually had a Supreme Court case last last year,
00:48:31.740
where Catholic Charities was fighting the city of Philadelphia, the city said, we don't want you
00:48:36.880
helping these kids anymore. As if you know, there's some excess of people to help these kids.
00:48:42.440
Um, and, and Catholic Charities won. But it's amazing, because despite the fact that they won,
00:48:48.000
we're almost a year out of that decision. And there are still people all over this country who
00:48:52.780
are trying to sue these organizations out of existence.
00:48:56.580
Mm hmm. And once again, this goes back to what you were saying is that, um, it'll at least the
00:49:03.380
progressive side of this system and many systems in the US is really thinking about the wants,
00:49:12.280
not even the needs, but the wants of adults, not the needs of children. What is going to make
00:49:17.940
adults feel better? What is going to be less likely to hurt a gay couple's feelings? Uh, not,
00:49:25.800
well, what is in the best interest of children? And wow, we could get into so many things that I know
00:49:30.280
is not the point of your book, like the whole reproductive and fertility industry that also does
00:49:36.420
the same thing, sacrificing a child's well-being at the expense of whatever adults want.
00:49:42.040
And it's basically this giant social experiment. We like to say that children are always the
00:49:47.040
unconsenting subjects of progressive social experiments, and really always have been dating
00:49:51.840
back to almost the beginning of humanity. There's always been a form of child sacrifice. There's always
00:49:58.040
been, um, a form of exploiting children because they always have been physically and mentally, um,
00:50:07.240
defenseless. And then there's also, there's also this, um, a part of this, this undermining of a
00:50:13.820
child's wellbeing, going back to the equity conversation, that there is a push among these
00:50:19.220
activists going all the way back to Malcolm X, maybe before to not place black children with white
00:50:26.100
parents. Is that something that is pretty pervasive and is preventing black children from
00:50:31.580
having safe homes? It is shockingly pervasive. Um, we actually have a federal law in the book
00:50:38.780
called the multi-ethnic placement act, which was passed in the 1990s by a bar bipartisan group in
00:50:44.220
Congress that says you may not discriminate when it comes to placing a child for foster care or
00:50:50.720
adoption. And that law is routinely flouted. It is amazing. You hear judges openly talking about
00:50:57.700
race matching in court. Um, you hear social workers talking about it in front of parents and a lot of
00:51:04.360
foster parents, unfortunately, and adoptive parents are not aware of the laws on the books. And so they
00:51:09.420
don't understand, you know, how to press their, um, you know, the, the best interest of the child here,
00:51:15.360
according to the law. Um, and, and what's amazing is that since that law was passed,
00:51:20.820
tens of thousands more black children have been able to find homes, but groups like the National
00:51:26.360
Association of Black Social Workers basically say that they would rather have kids in group homes or
00:51:32.680
just remain in foster care indefinitely rather than be placed with a family of a different race.
00:51:38.420
Or probably just remain with the, their biological family who is mistreating them. I would guess that
00:51:45.440
that is also their preference to going with a safe home of someone of a different race.
00:51:50.420
Yes, that's absolutely true. And, and I should say, because I think a lot of people are very nervous
00:51:54.440
about this topic. They feel like, well, wouldn't it be better? Wouldn't we could have more cultural
00:51:58.700
sensitivity? They'd be able to talk to their kids more about Trayvon Martin or whatever. I mean,
00:52:03.620
if you look at the longitudinal studies on adoption, there is absolutely no difference in the outcomes
00:52:11.180
for black children who have been adopted by black families and black children who have adopted by
00:52:16.320
white families, no difference in educational outcomes, income outcomes, even things like self-esteem.
00:52:21.840
And there is no acknowledgement that what these kids need, no matter what their skin color is a safe,
00:52:28.340
loving, permanent home, because these racial activists are so concerned with skin color and
00:52:33.760
race matching. And what seems to really be the differentiating factor in these families, white or
00:52:42.460
black or whatever their racial background is, versus families who are not adopting is actually the faith
00:52:48.780
aspect. I mean, Christians, particularly evangelical Christians, people of all faiths, of course,
00:52:53.580
adopt and become foster parents. But there is a disproportionately high number of evangelical
00:53:00.340
Christians, black and white, who adopt. And so really, it looks like that is probably one of the deciding
00:53:09.140
factors in the well-being of children who end up in these homes, not the racial makeup of the family.
00:53:15.940
Are you going into a secure home, a loving home? But also, are you going into a home that has values,
00:53:22.460
that sees you as someone who is valuable and is worth loving, who can model unconditional love to
00:53:28.240
you? And a lot of people get that from Scripture and from their faith community. And so it's tragic to me,
00:53:36.520
it's tragic to me that those efforts are being undermined, both in the name of, you know,
00:53:42.180
I don't know, anti-homophobia, but also anti-racism. Again, the sacrifice that's being made as a child's
00:53:51.800
Yeah, absolutely. The faith is so important. And it really plays in two particular ways. One is,
00:53:57.340
as you say, guiding families, the values that they're raising children with, the feeling that
00:54:03.500
they're being called to do this very hard thing. It's really important to say, you know,
00:54:08.540
a lot of ordinary people, if you ask them, like, would you take a stranger's child into your home
00:54:13.200
and raise them as your own? A lot of people would say, that's just too hard. Nobody is asking me to
00:54:18.440
do that. But a lot of the evangelical Christians I meet say, God has asked me to do this. I feel this
00:54:24.020
calling. And the other thing is a little bit of what I was mentioning before, which is when they are
00:54:29.000
part of that church, they get the support that they need from their community to do this work.
00:54:34.420
It is really hard to be a foster parent in a vacuum. It's not enough to just say, like,
00:54:39.820
I have nice neighbors. Because when push comes to shove, you need people who are really going to
00:54:44.700
step up and do some hard work with you. And the church communities, they're not the only group
00:54:50.580
that's ever going to do that. But they are the group that seems to be most reliably doing it.
00:54:55.540
Yeah, I agree with you. But it seems like just like everything else, the efforts that are
00:55:01.100
coming in a form progressives don't like are, they're just kind of pushed to the side and
00:55:07.600
they're undermined. And it doesn't matter what the outcomes are. Again, it's the same thing with
00:55:11.680
abolishing the police. It doesn't matter that violent crime is up everywhere, that homicides
00:55:17.280
are up everywhere, especially in the cities that have taken funds away from the police. It doesn't
00:55:21.920
matter that disproportionately the victims of these crimes and the perpetrators of these crimes are
00:55:26.940
black Americans, the very people, these same, these same left wing activists say that they care about
00:55:32.920
it with progressivism, it is always the intention, not the conclusion of their policy. So if their
00:55:40.780
intention is so called inclusion, or empathy, or diversity, or equity, it really doesn't matter if
00:55:49.780
the conclusion of those policies is catastrophic, if it actually harms the very people they set out
00:55:55.560
to protect. It's almost, in my opinion, every progressive policy is like that. But it's
00:56:00.740
particularly devastating when you're talking about children. Can you talk a little bit more just about
00:56:06.640
what changes specifically you would like to see? Like if you could describe your ideal child welfare
00:56:12.600
system that really takes care of children and families, what would that look like?
00:56:18.540
So I think, you know, child protective services, I think we would get better, well-trained people to be
00:56:24.900
doing this work. I think we would be using data to better understand which kids are most at risk.
00:56:30.120
I think family courts would be transformed into courts that are actually following the laws that
00:56:36.700
are on the books, both in terms of the timelines, ensuring that kids are not languishing in foster
00:56:41.580
care forever, ensuring that we're not making decisions based on their race. I think we probably
00:56:46.580
need a lot more judges. I think we need a lot more oversight of family court. Family court decisions
00:56:51.900
are very rarely appealed because people don't really understand what the law is. And there are
00:56:58.280
endless delays in these courts, which are just putting kids' lives on hold. I think we need to do
00:57:03.040
a better job of replicating the models that these faith-based organizations are engaged in to make sure
00:57:10.480
that everywhere in the country there are high-quality, well-trained foster parents who could take in these
00:57:17.360
kids if they need homes. We should have a surplus of these families. We should be ensuring that when
00:57:24.520
a child enters the system, there are a bunch of places that are options for that child. You know,
00:57:30.480
because right now you might have one child enter the system and there might be one open foster bed.
00:57:36.040
That family might not be prepared to take in a teenager or a baby, and it doesn't matter. They're just going
00:57:41.120
to shove you into that system because that's the only place they have left. You know, in a couple of
00:57:47.020
states now, over the summer, for instance, you had in Texas, 400 kids were sleeping in offices because
00:57:53.040
we don't have appropriate places for them. We have stopped recruiting foster families. We have stopped
00:57:58.880
funding congregate care, even for kids with serious mental health and behavioral health needs.
00:58:05.500
We are not thinking about what these kids need. All we're thinking about is what the adults want. So
00:58:11.420
ultimately, I think we need to reorient the child welfare system around the best interests of children.
00:58:21.540
Wow, you've given me a lot to think about. And honestly, I feel more sure to get involved in it. And
00:58:27.620
my kind of preconceived notion or impression of what I've seen on social media is CPS kind of being
00:58:33.680
exclusively heavy handed and the taking away of children has really been challenged by what I
00:58:39.060
read in your book and, and what you said today. And it made me realize something that I already
00:58:43.640
knew is that so many of the cases of child murder that we see of child abuse that we see is at the
00:58:49.160
hands of people who have already been investigated by the police or CPS social services many times and
00:58:55.040
those children are reunified with really no logical reasoning beyond, well, we want to reunify a
00:59:03.560
family that can't be the highest goal that can't be the only goal, the, the, the main goal has to be
00:59:11.560
the well being of the child. But we also have to define well being in very clear terms. Because again,
00:59:18.280
that can be weaponized. If this is a progressive bureaucracy, and they see well being as transitioning
00:59:24.360
a child's gender, or being indoctrinated in a certain ideology, or being forced to go to public
00:59:29.580
school, rather than homeschooled, well, that can definitely be weaponized, but the answer for
00:59:36.080
conservatives, and this is why this is also a really, like, precarious issue, because I could
00:59:42.460
actually see the left and the right uniting on this move to abolish CPS, or to like take power away
00:59:49.660
from CPS, and maybe in some ways, you know, for good reason, the suspicion, at least. But I think
00:59:56.480
we have to be more thoughtful, as you said about that, that just like so many parts of the government,
01:00:01.280
it may not be in itself bad, it may actually be very useful. And so abolition is not the answer,
01:00:10.380
but thoughtfulness is the answer, which means, as you said, conservative politicians have to be
01:00:14.640
involved. There is a very prominent conservative in our area who is on the board of CPS, which I'm so
01:00:21.360
thankful for, like, I feel very comforted knowing that she's there. But the rest of us have to stop
01:00:26.500
just seeing CPS in the same way that a lot of people see public education as exclusively something
01:00:32.720
to demonize, and something that we actually need to infuse goodness into. And, you know, we like to say
01:00:39.140
raise a respectful ruckus about and really get involved in ourselves. Do you have any more tips
01:00:44.420
for people who are realizing, wow, okay, I need to know more about this and get involved in it and
01:00:49.040
realize maybe there are steps that we can take just as average people to make this thing better for kids?
01:00:55.480
Yeah. So I think that, you know, one of the areas that I really am concerned about, like I said,
01:01:01.060
is family court. And although there are some CASA organizations that are going a little crazy,
01:01:06.000
I think a lot of CASA organizations are great opportunity for people to get a good view of
01:01:11.140
what's going on in the system, to understand whether these children's interests are being
01:01:16.380
properly represented. A lot of the and the other thing is that I want more eyes on what's going on
01:01:23.560
in the system. I want, you know, ordinary, you know, middle class, you know, educated people to go
01:01:30.320
into these courtrooms and look around and say, is this the court that I think we should have in this
01:01:35.600
community? Are they following the law? Is this like a kangaroo court or something? Or what's going
01:01:41.060
on here? So just getting involved in that way. Also, I should say that a lot of these faith-based
01:01:45.840
organizations, when I say that they're doing foster care, they have also acknowledged that not everyone
01:01:51.120
is going to take a child into their home and foster them. But there are all sorts of other ways that
01:01:56.840
you could help foster kids, even if you are not personally responsible for one. Supporting foster
01:02:03.040
families, making your church or your community more foster friendly, so that that child feels like
01:02:09.540
they are welcome, not just by that individual family, but by the whole community. Understanding
01:02:15.400
what it's going to be like if your neighbor takes in a traumatized child, what that child might behave
01:02:20.680
like, offering to babysit that child if that couple needs to, you know, go out to dinner one night to get
01:02:26.700
a break. So there are, I think, all sorts of ways that we can kind of get involved. There's another
01:02:32.160
organization that actually tries to match the needs of kids going into foster care with church
01:02:39.840
communities. So one thing that a lot of child welfare workers waste time doing, or not waste time, but
01:02:45.100
you know, they often are the ones who have to go to Walmart to pick out clothes or to pick up a car
01:02:50.700
seat or something like that. There are groups that now say, like, if you put this need online,
01:02:56.860
we have whole communities that could probably fill that need instantly, because so many of our families
01:03:02.140
have these things just sitting in their basements or their kitchens. So I think that there's a lot we
01:03:07.440
can do both to fulfill the needs of these kids literally, but also to make sure that these systems are
01:03:13.840
operating in a way that we would want them to operate if our kids were in them.
01:03:18.280
Yes, absolutely. And do you happen to know the names of a couple of those organizations that
01:03:23.780
people can look up off the top of your head? If not, it's okay. We can include links in the
01:03:28.880
description if you can send to us later. But if you know some of them, would you mind listing them?
01:03:33.400
Yeah. So one of my favorite organizations is called Project 127. It's based in Colorado,
01:03:38.700
and it does a lot of great work in terms of recruiting and training and supporting foster families.
01:03:44.800
There are a few interesting organizations that are in Arkansas that I've written about.
01:03:50.740
One is called Immerse. One is called The Call, which recruits foster families. And they also have
01:03:58.360
programs for youth who are transitioning out of care. One of the biggest problems many people know
01:04:03.940
about in the foster care system is kids aging out with any kind of family connection. And so in Little
01:04:10.580
Rock, there are these programs where kids are, they help kids find housing, education,
01:04:18.280
a place to do laundry, take driver's license exams, all sorts of things that we don't think about with
01:04:25.100
our own kids when they reach that age, because we've trained them to do all these things and we
01:04:28.980
navigate these systems for them. But older kids in foster care don't have those people. So I'd recommend
01:04:35.040
them too. And I'm just curious, I wonder what local churches are doing. Lots of churches have lots of
01:04:40.480
different programs. Not every church can do every single kind of ministry, but maybe that's something
01:04:46.420
that we can think about, that the audience can think about. Certainly that I'm thinking about is
01:04:51.080
what can my local church do in our own small but significant way to help these kids who are
01:04:56.720
transitioning out or to get our families involved in child advocacy and foster care and some of the
01:05:02.820
organizations. Everyone can do something. Not everyone can do everything. That's not what
01:05:09.120
we're called to, but everyone can do something. And gosh, if we care about the most vulnerable in our
01:05:14.640
society, if we truly care about the voiceless, we've got to care about children. And it just, gosh,
01:05:21.560
it just goes to show we could have a whole other 30 minutes talking about the dangers of this ideology.
01:05:26.400
But when you see the world through the lens of this kind of critical race theory, progressive
01:05:34.980
lens, when you see it through that of white, evil, black, oppressed, and you view the world and every
01:05:46.780
system and the idea of right and wrong through that lens, you actually end up hurting people.
01:05:52.140
When you think that the biggest threat to people is white supremacist evangelicalism,
01:05:58.280
you are failing to see things as they are. You are failing to see all the different forms of
01:06:03.240
oppression that come in all different kinds of colors and socioeconomic backgrounds. And then you
01:06:08.120
are failing to actually help victims. As you said poignantly a few minutes ago, the question should
01:06:13.260
always be not just for the judge, but also for us, for politicians, for average people is,
01:06:17.520
is this child in danger? That is the question that we have to ask. And you've asked that and
01:06:22.720
answered that really well in your book. How can people find you and support you?
01:06:27.780
So I work at the American Enterprise Institute and I have a webpage there, AEI.org. They can order my
01:06:34.280
book on Amazon, of course, and reach out to me through the AEI page. I'm happy to connect with people
01:06:39.820
who are interested in getting more involved in this world. We have some videos up that kind of
01:06:45.520
demonstrate some of the problems in the system that I'd love for people to share. And get involved
01:06:52.440
in any way that you think is appropriate for you. Because there are so many kids out there who are
01:06:59.420
in need of adults, not only direct mentorship and help, but also adults who are willing to get their
01:07:07.920
hands dirty and be at the table to influence these important policy decisions.
01:07:13.320
Thank you so much. This was very informative and I know people are going to learn a lot. So I