Best of the Program ｜ Guest： Alex Adams ｜ 6⧸1⧸26
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Summary
On this episode of the Glenn Beck Program, Glenn talks about the recent article written by the New York Times on Texas Sen. James Talrico and his lack of patriotism. Also, we talk about foster care in Texas and an update on Iran.
Transcript
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great show for you today it is monday we talk about patriotism uh because of all the crap that's
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going on in this article that i read from the new yorker no offense the guy just doesn't get it
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uh and i understand that the way he was raised etc etc and speaking of that way he was raised
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do you want to understand who james talrico is and what he actually believes you have to know
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how he was raised, what his mother, how his mother raised him, what they went through
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when he was a child, and you will know exactly who he was. Also, we spoke with Alex Adams today
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about foster care. He is with the administration, what's going on there,
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and an update on Iran that is really important for you to be all on today's podcast.
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you're listening to the best of the glenn beck program
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democratic party trying to paint themselves as i i don't i don't know what i don't know what we're
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going to talk about patriotism here a little while because we got lectured by patriotism but i
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i couldn't get further down on this story from the new yorker than just his sources of who he's
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like going to you know i i just looked into some great people that talk about patriotism really
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really because those aren't the sources that i would go to for patriotism but maybe it's just
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me so i want to get into that because everything is being redefined right now patriotism this
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summer because of the summer of 250 uh you know uh we have to redefine this now what is it what
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does it mean well let's start at something simpler what does it mean to be a democrat
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i'm not sure exactly what it means to be a democrat um it certainly does not mean moderate
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uh that's for sure james tallarico is being painted by the democrats as moderate you know
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he's just like any other texan you saw him in his t-shirt right he was wearing a red white and blue
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and he's got his his texas flag shirt and he's eating a turkey leg and he wears cowboy boots
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come on really is that what we're down to yeah and i know who you are because you wear a red hat
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even though it doesn't say mag on it i know what all red hats mean what what does a red hat mean
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simpletons how dare ken paxton take this poor man james del rico his words out of context he's not
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a radical leftist right right neither is anybody in virginia so i asked my researchers you know
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can we look at these claims because i want to see you know i want to be able to present to you
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who james talrico really is in his own words okay now earlier this month he said to cbs news about
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his past statements and paxton's attacks he said this there are some statements that i've made that
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i that i certainly regret there are statements that i've made where i've missed the mark i'll
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be the first to admit that but ken paxton is intentionally clipping my cringy comments
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to distract from his career of corruption okay cringy comments okay first of all let's give
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credit where credit to do anybody makes mistakes we all make mistakes and to be able to say hey
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i've made mistakes and i own up to him unfortunately what he didn't say was which were the mistakes and
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which were the cringy comments that that paxton is taking out of context so let's start one of
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the biggest criticisms of Tallarico is that he believes God is non-binary. Now, we're in Bible
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country. Not really. Not really. I don't think so. Pretty radical. A lot of people on X are sharing
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a short clip of him making that claim on the floor of the Texas Senate or legislature. But
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was that taken out of context? Of course it was. Of course it was. So let's look at the longer clip
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so we can all see. Here it is. The first two lines in Genesis use two different Hebrew words to
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describe God. One is the masculine Hebrew noun for divinity. The second is the feminine Hebrew noun
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for spirit. God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is non-binary.
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In Genesis 1.26, God speaks of God's self in the plural, saying, let us make human beings
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in our image to be like us that's the infinite multitude of god the masculine the feminine
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and everything in between trans children this is our god's children made in god's own image
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he's coming out and stating it like it's just a fact
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if you can make it here you can make it anywhere and frank sinatra just said it and it was just a
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fact it's not a fact it's a line what he's saying is not a fact it might be his opinion but it is
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not a fact okay take more than one bible study class james take take more than one take more
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than one i think there's lots of arguments on what god was talking about there and what genesis means
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by that but maybe this is just one of these statements he missed the mark on because it
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sounds to me like he believes that god's non-binary so i don't know i don't know but here's what he
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told cnn about it listen what is your response to them using that and explain what you were talking
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about well i understand that that comment is a little provocative i said it on the house floor
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when the extremists in the Republican legislature were picking on school kids who were different.
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But I don't think it's controversial theologically.
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Most Christians would acknowledge that God is beyond gender.
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In fact, the Apostle Paul, in his letter to the Galatians,
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said that in Christ there is neither male nor female.
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And so if someone's got a problem with that statement,
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they shouldn't take it up with me, they should take it up with the Apostle Paul.
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i'm pretty sure that's not what the apostle paul meant but i wouldn't call this an exact
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backtrack okay beyond gender is not non-binary beyond gender means no male or female i mean i'm
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just using your argument here this is not mine but your argument he's beyond gender means there
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is no male or female it just is okay that's not non-binary okay i don't know what you're talking
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about here okay but what's even harder than gender here's a radical claim another one from
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talarico listen to this modern science obviously recognizes that there are many more than two
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biological sexes in fact there are six which honestly representative hefner surprised me too
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surprised me too because i i am you know am not well versed in this this issue area i'm not a
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scientist i'm a politician a lot worse than a scientist ah no scientist clearly you're not
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scientist i you know what i think people who say there are six genders they also are not scientists
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but that's just me a few days ago he tried to walk that one back as well he apparently now quote
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knows there are two sexes a man and a woman but he also suggested that he was referring to a very
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small percentage of people who are born with chromosomal abnormalities. They're born with
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six different genders. I don't know. But God, still non-binary. Okay. He also believes that
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because God is non-binary, he made some children trans. Here he is talking about trans children.
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Something that you love that's not family or friends.
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um i love i'm just saying this because it's on my mind the trans children who showed up
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yesterday at the state capitol to advocate for their humanity they shouldn't have to
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but it was an inspiration to watch okay all right so this is the moderate
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democratic platform in texas this is the moderate version okay he's not an extremist he wants you
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to know, and the Democratic Party, and everybody's screaming, he's a moderate. He also wants you to
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know that some of those trans children will eventually need abortions. Before we go further,
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I want to acknowledge that our trans community needs abortion care, too. Defending trans Texans
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is something we have to do every day at the state capitol. Right. And you better believe I'll be
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giving sermons on that, too. So when I use the word woman, it should not be understood as an
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exhaustive term, but rather as a lens through which to understand, examine, and interrogate
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patriarchy. Ow! Ow, my head hurts. Okay. So when he talks about women that are going to need
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a an abortion he's not he wants you to understand that women is just a lens and not an actual fact
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but it it would be the trans men that would need the abortion you know the ones that are actually
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female that claim to be men they're the only ones that can get pregnant not the trans women
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the trans women were guys they don't have a uterus they don't have ovaries they don't have a vagina
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they have none of it they cannot push a baby out they can't create a baby i don't understand what
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he's more on that later um he was saying this by the way in a church and delivering quote a sermon
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on that but it explains an awful lot about what this guy believes here's something also you may
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not have heard from anywhere else. To Tallarico, the abortion debate is not about what you think
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it is. Because here's what he said later in that, and I'm quoting, sermon. The disagreement
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about the legality of abortion is not a disagreement about life. It's a disagreement
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about personhood. No one disagrees that an embryo is biologically alive. We each have
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trillions of living organisms inside of us right now as we sit and talk in the sanctuary.
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So the question is, is an embryo a legal person whose rights trump those of a woman?
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I don't know many people who would seriously answer yes to that question. Legal personhood
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evolves with life, and life is change without clear or definite boundaries. But the only way
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is if we believe a woman is not a full person.
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again this is the moderate Texas this is the moderate that they're trying to sell you okay
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where do I even begin on that one okay so we have a ton of living organisms in us is that like
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we might have a tapeworm so like the baby could turn into a tapeworm I'm not I'm not really sure
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how to where to go with that one that organism that's living inside of you it is a baby it's a
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baby. It might not look like a baby at the beginning, but it turns into a baby. The tapeworm
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stays a tapeworm. So I want you to understand, yes, abortions do kill humans, just not necessarily
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full humans. Well, now let's just get into that. Let's just get into that. As a dad with a child
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of special needs let's just get into can you define what a full human is what is a full human
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is a full human somebody who has a fully functioning body arms legs brain eyes ears
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nose mouth what is a full human because once you get into well that's not really human well that's
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not really life then you get into well that's not a life worth living and then you could just kill
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anybody. So denying women the right to elective abortions is akin to enslaving women. And Jesus,
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who was, quote, a radical feminist, empowered women to kill their own babies whenever they
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wanted to. I guess because screw the patriarchy. What? What? By the way, it is not in line with
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Christianity. It used to be called the quickening. It wasn't called abortions. Look it up. It wasn't
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called an abortion. They didn't know. They didn't know when they were pregnant. They didn't have a
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pregnancy test. They didn't sit, cop a squat, and look at the color. Is it a plus sign? Is it pink?
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Is it blue? What is it? They didn't do that. They didn't have any of that. They only knew they were
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pregnant when it was called the quickening, when something happened inside of them and the woman
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could feel it. Then you throw yourself down the stairs, you're going into colonial jail
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because you're intentionally trying to kill a baby you know is in there. Hello?
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Hello? So what's going on here? Does he actually believe all this stuff? And there's a lot more.
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The answer is very clear. Once you learn where this guy, learn this, okay? Because in that same
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sermon, Tallarico gave his testimony, not for his decision to follow Christ, but why he became
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a radical feminist. And it actually starts with a tragedy, a real tragedy. And I want to share that
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so you can understand him. And you know when he's lying and when he's not, when he's saying,
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oh, no, I'm really just like you. Look up my Texas flag shirt. No, no, no. We didn't have
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all the experiences that you had, James, and I feel badly that you had these, you were horribly,
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horribly misled. And I can understand how it happened, but the rest of America and certainly
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the rest of Texas needs to know this story. You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
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I saw something on patriotism from the New Yorker that is really sad.
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But I think a lot of Americans might feel this way.
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But then you introduce the typical raising of the typical American.
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And you put them even back into a time period that is before my time period where you were fighting the, you know, the hippie movement and the Vietnam War and all of that crap.
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but then you add modern elitists on top of it and you get the new yorker's uh essay how problematic
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is patriotism and i just want to show you how to spot things uh quickly in this then i want to talk
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to you about patriotism because it is june we're in the summer of 250 america's uh 250th birthday
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uh i went to church yesterday and i my my faith did an hour just on the constitution i was so
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happy to see that. Thank you for that. And it was really heartwarming and positive and a way to not
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only celebrate, but also remind us that we are here to form a more perfect nation, meaning we're
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not perfect. We never have been perfect. We need to try to strive to that perfection, knowing that
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we'll always fall short as a nation but let's admire some of the things that we have done right
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you know just at least for the birthday party you can hate grandpa all you want for some of the
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things grandpa did but on his birthday maybe we should all get together and say hey grandpa you
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know i know we disagree on a lot of stuff but there's a lot of great things that you did in
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your life and celebrate those things can we do that apparently some can the elitists don't want
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you to we'll get into that here in just a second first let me tell you about the burner launcher
00:18:16.600
there is um i mean here's how much time usually do you have to make a decision in a dangerous
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situation usually it's about that much time just a snap of a finger not very long you don't get
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time to go home think about it come over come back with a plan whatever happens happens fast
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and that's why i've always believed that the time to think about everything that you do the decisions
00:18:40.020
you make and especially your personal savior uh safety you have to and savior your personal safety
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you have to make those things in advance. That's what I like about Berna. Berna makes
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non-lethal self-defense launchers that can help you protect yourself and your family from a
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distance. They are legal in all 50 states. They don't require a permit, and they are designed to
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give you an option when you need one most. Because when a bad situation arrives, you have to be
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ready. You have to make that decision. And, you know, a plan is not one that just has you standing
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there hoping things work out you really have to have a plan make it long before the moment
00:19:17.340
and that is by calling Burna right now go on to a Burna's website Burna.com slash Glenn look at
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it's Burna B-Y-R-N-A dot com okay so let me just give you a little bit of this this essay from
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the new yorker it says i did not grow up loving america not because i thought i didn't it didn't
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deserve love but because i didn't think about it america was the pledge of allegiance and the
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star spangled banner it was maverick and gun smoke it was ed sullivan and high school dances and big
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cars with big fins it was soda fountains and elvis and stickball it was valley forge and george
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washington was also white mostly male and invincibly middle class and i hardly gave it a
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thought with race or class as much for that matter. Depending on where you hail from, America could be
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the evening sky above Northfield, Connecticut, or the fields of Blue Bonnets in Texas. To a teenager
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living in New York in the 1960s, America was pretty great. It had saved the world from fascism
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and now stood as a bulwark against communism. Mickey Mantle good, Nikita Khrushchev bad. My
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memory may be faulty, but I can't recall anyone I know declaring a love for America, not anyway,
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until I was 25 and living in Charleston, South Carolina.
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He talks about how he grew up, you know, in the era of the draft,
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and, you know, he was singing about draft dodging,
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you know, flee to Canada or Europe, blah, blah, blah.
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Vietnam was the first time he actually thought about, you know, the war,
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I mean, he grew up in a really bad period in America.
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And I can understand if that is what you grew up seeing all the time.
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um that's how you can get to where you where you are but then you add on top of that you live the
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life of an elite because i want you to listen to this he talks about you know the history of
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patriotism the concept if not the word probably emerged during the formation of you know the
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greek polis in the 8th century bc blah blah blah blah blah and then he talks about um you know
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Johann Gottfried Herder's notion of the Geist des Volks all made national pride seem like a
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rational outcome of shared habits, traditions, and language. So he goes right to Germans and the
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German Volk. And the Germans, you know, it's interesting how the Germans get a really bad rap
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because the Germans were the ones that came up with the doctoral system that we have here in
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America. I mean, in the late 1800s, early 1900s, if you wanted to be a doctor, you would go to
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the best German schools. And the German schools were teaching you all of this crap. Okay, that's
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how we got progressivism introduced here into America. We went over and we got it from the
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Germans. But then he goes back into patriotism. He says, since then, writers have spilled a great
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deal of ink over patriotism. Mark Twain, who was an American, had written about it. Okay, so
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Mark Twain, good guy, American, 1800s, got it. Then he goes into H.L. Mencken, he said,
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and also H.L. Mencken, who is that? Well, this guy was a deep critic, fierce critic of democracy,
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progressivism, and the New Deal, and mass politics. But he was also an elitist, and real
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key here anti-eglitarian how do you say this word sounds like such a moron all the time
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egalitarian egalitarian thank you um egalitarians
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um they believe egalitarian means that you believe in the principle that all people are
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created equal. That's America. But he was an elitist and an anti-egalitarian. That kind of
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guy believes that it's ruled by the best. It's ruled by the best. Inequality is good. This is
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a modern progressive because some people are smarter and they should tell everybody what else
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to do. Okay, so you don't listen to that guy for patriotism. He also admired Nietzsche. Okay,
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problem. George Bernard Shaw is the next on this guy's hit parade list of people he looked to for
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patriotism. George Bernard Shaw was an Irish Fabian socialist, advocated for socialism.
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His views are so extreme for eugenics. He also loved certain dictators. He's the guy who
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literally came up with gas chambers for the unfit that would later be used by the nazis so you
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immediately throw this person out then he goes to ursula k uh k leguin okay she distrusted patriotism
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uh yeah i bet she did she was an anarchist she liked socialism she was a feminist uh she was a
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critic of capitalism, okay? Her fiction that she wrote explored anarchist and anti-authoritarian
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themes. Of course, she didn't like patriotism. Then the next one on his hit parade is Tolstoy.
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He likened it to slavery. Tolstoy was also Christian, anarchist, pacifist. He was a Russian.
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That's the most important thing. He didn't even understand America, okay? George Orwell was
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kinder than most he writes patriotism he wrote devotion to a particular place or particular way
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of life which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon people
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good that's that's good you be patriotic like that the problem is nationalism which he maintained
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was inseparable from the desire for power well yeah in some people i just because i really love
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my country doesn't mean i want to crush all other countries you again you're talking to the elitist
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the average person that is patriotic loves the flag loves america loves the bill of rights the
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declaration of independence loves our history but they don't want to dress their kids up into
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uniforms put guns in them and tell them go take over the world we're tired of that you know it is
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the progressive elites, mainly in the State Department, that have always been pushing this
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stuff that we've got to go, this is a Republican progressive idea, that we've got to go and spread
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democracy. You know what? The best way to spread democracy is the way we used to do it.
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Do you know what? I've told you the story about the Statue of Liberty a million times. France
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didn't give it to us because they liked us. They were fighting Marxism in their own country and
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they were trying to show America has the best idea. Why does the Statue of Liberty have a broken
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chain on her foot? Did you know that? She wears a shackle and it's broken. Why? Why does the
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Statue of Liberty have a chain around her foot. Because America broke that chain. Not at the
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beginning. With the Civil War, we broke the chain of slavery. And how did we do it? Here's a tip.
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With what's in her hand, hand by her side, she's holding the Declaration of Independence
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and the Constitution. That's why it says July 4, 1776 on the statue right there on the book.
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That is the idea of independence and all men are created equal that breaks the chain of slavery.
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And what makes man man? The ability to invent, the ability to dream, the ability to do.
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That's the torch. The torch is imprisoned lightning. That's what they used to call
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the electric light bulb it was imprisoned lightning and so it's the imprisoned lightning
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it's the free man that can come here under the law and dream that can light the entire world
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so anyway he goes into george orwell by the way george orwell was a democratic socialist so again
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I don't think I'm going to him. Or Voltaire, which is a French Enlightenment. Where did the
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French Enlightenment get us? And more recently, the philosopher Richard Rorty, capable of
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defending patriotism. Richard Rorty, he is much more, again, of a, he's an American, but much more
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of a continental thinker okay and then martha nesbaum martha nesbaum a popular philosophy
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who advocates cosmopolitanism over strong patriotism and emphasizes global justice
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and often aligns with progressive left liberal academic thought so throw this entire thing out
00:28:51.600
this guy grew up in the 1960s where there there were real scars and america was really wrestling
00:29:00.380
but up until barack obama we were making real progress on that we were healing those scars we
00:29:08.740
were starting to have color blindness and then barack obama and his progressives came in
00:29:13.540
and they started saying no no no you've got to notice color no you don't you don't
00:29:50.400
it's the it's the steady bone deep love of the country that raised you
00:29:57.940
even when it didn't get things right do you hate your parents because they made mistakes
1.00
00:30:08.900
i didn't plan on telling you this but i'm going to tell you this because i'm
1.00
00:30:21.540
My father was horribly abused when he was a kid, horribly.
00:30:29.820
He ran to the YMCA in Los Angeles where he was repeatedly raped.
00:30:40.840
He spent his whole life trying not to be his father.
00:30:44.560
And so, when you try not to be something, you're just not there.
00:30:50.120
And my father wasn't there when I was growing up.
00:30:55.620
He never abused any of us, yada, yada, but he was just not his father.
00:31:00.200
And when he told me this, when I was in my 30s, I began to understand him.
00:31:05.700
He was just not my father because he was not his father.
00:31:17.100
And he abused and she abused my sisters, both my mother and my stepmother.
00:31:37.480
We're on the phone all the time with each other.
00:31:40.580
then abuse started again of my sisters again older as they have children
00:31:49.900
and i saw that this was going to be passed on and i said to my dad dad you got to stop it right now
00:31:59.220
because if you don't i will i will stop it but it will cause so much damage we won't we won't
00:32:04.360
see each other again it just please please and he said son you have to do what you have to do and i
00:32:10.400
said, you're telling me, dad, that you agree with me stopping this, but I'm telling you, please,
00:32:17.600
please help me so we don't have to go through that. Well, he didn't. And my father and I had
00:32:22.920
a horrible breakup. You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck podcast.
00:32:30.820
Hear more of this interview and others with the full show podcast available wherever you get
00:32:35.400
podcasts there's a lot going on we have to talk to you about iran there's some uh breaking news
00:32:41.040
happening uh with that i don't think it's necessarily good but let's let's take it step
00:32:47.100
by step um also bill gates is in the news what a fraud this guy is um now we find out that he is
00:32:55.880
he's actually paid people to help create this mr rogers kind of version of him he's a terrifying
00:33:03.620
guy quite honestly um and we have uh alex adams on he is the hhs assistant secretary for family
00:33:10.460
support the president has taken the administration for children and families um and they are
00:33:20.440
launching a a a new initiative to make sure that no child is left behind and this is
00:33:29.060
specifically talking about families that are foster care families and this was a hard decision
00:33:38.740
to have Alex on not because it's not worthy or anything else but because I know so many
00:33:43.620
people that have been raised in foster care that had the worst most horrific movie style kind of
00:33:52.700
upbringing that i've ever heard of and i'm very interested to see how we're fixing all of this
00:34:00.740
and what we're doing to make sure that we don't leave children behind but we also don't put them
00:34:05.760
into foster care that is a horror show we'll talk to uh to alex about that here in just a second
00:34:13.260
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realestateagentsitrust.com alex welcome to the program the assistant secretary for family support
00:35:30.800
from hhs alex adams alex excited to have you on as i said a minute ago i have so many friends that
00:35:39.460
have grown up and co-workers that grew up in foster families that were just from hell uh and
00:35:46.760
i'm sure there are good ones out there i know there are but how what are we doing to make sure
00:35:51.780
that we increase the number of people that want to take children in for foster care and also
00:35:57.840
catch the bad guys for sure well thanks for having me glenn uh last november president trump and
00:36:05.840
First Lady Melania Trump signed an executive order called Fostering the Future.
00:36:09.840
It was a whole-of-government approach to improve child welfare across the board.
00:36:15.600
My agency, the Administration for Children and Families, has a specific role.
00:36:19.560
We launched a campaign called A Home for Every Child, where we're trying to increase the ratio of foster homes relative to the number of foster kids.
00:36:30.440
If 100 foster kids come into the system, we only have 57 homes to care for them.
00:36:35.840
And what happens to the remainder is they get placed in bad situations.
00:36:40.500
Many of them get placed in Airbnbs, short-term rentals, government office spaces, places that are not conducive to a safe, stable, loving family environment that many of us were fortunate to grow up in.
00:36:52.440
So we're trying to get states to commit to increasing their ratio of homes to kids.
00:36:58.820
First is to recruit and retain better, higher-quality foster families.
00:37:03.120
The most important way to do so is to shrink the number of kids coming into foster care
00:37:08.900
As President Trump said, the best foster care system is one that is not needed, and we're
00:37:14.280
looking to ensure that foster care is used as a tool of last resort when it is in the
00:37:21.440
best interest of the child, when it is necessary to protect them.
00:37:25.500
But the first and foremost goal is to preserve families, keep families together when it is
00:37:32.540
Okay, so how do you make that judgment? Because, I mean, you get into foster care, how? Because either you have no relatives left and your parents either abandoned you or died, or most likely it's because the Department of Children and Families comes in and says, we've got to get these kids out of here. It's a dangerous situation, right?
00:37:54.540
Yeah, well, most states define neglect and abuse. And in cases of abuse, if a court makes a finding, the child can be removed from the family and enter into foster care.
00:38:09.560
I used to run a state child welfare system. I'm from Idaho as well, so we're neighbors, Glenn.
00:38:16.300
And one of the things that we started doing is we started building predictive analytics into the hotline.
00:38:26.060
So usually the first step in a child welfare case is a medical professional or a school personnel calls a hotline alleging neglect or abuse of a child.
00:38:35.560
that sends off an entire cascade of events. That cascade of events can change the entire
00:38:40.940
trajectory of the child's life and the family's life. And it was very interesting to me how
00:38:45.740
subjective that whole process felt. So a couple counties had experimented with predictive analytics
00:38:52.940
where it brings additional data into the decision-making. It helps triage and it helps
00:38:57.440
right-size the response from the agency. Idaho is the first state to go live using predictive
00:39:04.040
analytics and uh based on that experience and others my agency the administration for children
00:39:09.800
and families just announced uh competitive grants to allow up to 10 states to experiment
00:39:14.520
with predictive analytics as well we think that will right-size responses and allow agencies to
00:39:23.160
focus on the most egregious cases where safety is truly at risk so
00:39:29.320
so this predictive analytics it's not to uh widen the scope it's possibly to narrow the scope because
00:39:39.280
i know people who have you know their baby fell off of the bed which my son did broke his uh
00:39:44.820
collarbone uh i know i have a friend who same thing happened in a different state and man they
00:39:49.920
were all over and a good parents and they were broken i mean you know um and the state was all
00:39:55.500
over them for months and months and months, and there was nothing going on. So is this to try to
00:40:01.540
weed those kinds of things out and get to the most serious? Certainly the goal. The goal is to
00:40:08.100
right-size the agency's response to the cases where there is true situations going on where
00:40:14.600
a child's safety is at risk, where foster care may be appropriate. So that's one of the things.
00:40:20.920
I mean, certainly, you know, we talked about preventing entry into foster care, but recruiting and retaining good, high-quality foster homes is another.
00:40:31.440
And too many states have larded up foster care licensing with red tape.
00:40:38.220
Let's do child abuse and neglect registry checks and all of those things.
00:40:43.720
But too many states larded up foster care licensing with just superfluous things like requirements for pet vaccines and other things where when I was a former state child welfare agency director, when my choice was having a child stay in the red roof in or putting them at the family's home, who is a good, high quality family, but we don't know the vaccine status of their pet rabbits.
00:41:12.180
you know we we had a lot of red tape like we required foster homes to have four foot fences
00:41:18.700
around every body of water i bet no farm in weston has four foot fences along all of the irrigation
00:41:24.620
canal let's uh let's roll up the carpet and let's make it easier to get good high quality foster
00:41:30.920
families into the system okay so so tell me about the orphan tax yeah it's another thing we've been
00:41:39.380
focused on. And I always say this is something straight out of a Charles Dickens novel,
00:41:45.520
where essentially a child's parents died, that child's parents had worked. So they were
00:41:53.260
entitled to some social security through earned benefits through work. Traditionally,
00:42:00.020
the child would be eligible for the survivor's benefit. But in 29 states, when that child
00:42:07.740
entered foster care, the state was saying, we are now the parent of that child. We're going to take
00:42:13.360
that survivor's benefit from them. And they're essentially taxing it at 100% and using it to
00:42:20.480
offset permanent costs. These states were essentially stealing from orphans and using it
00:42:27.020
to cover government bureaucratic overhead. So we sent a letter to 29 states asking them to end that
00:42:33.400
practice, which I find morally objectionable. And luckily, 10 states changed their laws this year.
00:42:40.280
Governor Pillen in Nebraska, Governor Landry in Louisiana, Governor Braun in Indiana right away
00:42:45.780
signed an executive order saying, we are going to end this. Other states took legislative action.
00:42:52.300
In Kentucky, the Republican legislature ran a bill that Governor Beshear vetoed. But luckily,
00:42:58.980
the legislature in an overwhelming bipartisan fashion absolutely steamrolled Governor Beshear,
00:43:04.500
and I think the House vote was 91 to 3, so his scheme to tax orphans has been effectively ended
00:43:10.740
in that state. But we still have a number of states to go. Probably the most pernicious one
00:43:17.620
is Minnesota. During the campaign, Governor Walz talked about how he was a recipient of
00:43:23.300
survivors benefits and how it gave him quote-unquote dignity but he is removing that dignity
0.93
00:43:30.260
from his own orphans and his foster care system presumably to give it to somali
00:43:34.820
pirates or whatever so we still have a long way to go and we're going to continue pushing on states
00:43:43.380
a safer ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my card doesn't get stolen
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