Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 1183 | KinderCare Cover-Up: New Report Reveals Abuse, Corruption | Guest: Edwin Dorsey

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

In today's episode, we sit down with independent investigative journalist Edwin Dorsey to discuss his recent, disturbing investigation into KinderCare, one of the nation's largest day-care providers. Edwin tells us about how he unearthed evidence of horrible child abuse and neglect, including children escaping day-care centers, staff abandoning children after hours, and one tragic instance of a toddler overdosing on cocaine found in a worker's backpack. And horribly, our tax dollars are funding these day-care centers. We also discuss a similar investigation Edwin published years ago about child-care provider Care.com, where he uncovered that the platform was lying about doing background checks. We also talk about the dangers of Roblox and how the platform isn't actually as safe for kids as it might advertise. Read Edwin's publications on "The Bear Cave": https://thebearcave.substack.com/ Share the Arrows 2025 is on October 11 in Dallas, Texas! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠sharethearrows.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for tickets now! Buy Allie's new book, "Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion": ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://a.co/d/4COtBxy⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ --- Timecodes: (01:18) Edwin Dorsey introduction (03:15) KinderCare investigation (36:25) Care.com investigation (43:11) Dangers of Roblox --- Today's Sponsors: Shopify — Shopify is the commerse platform behind millions of businesses around the world. Get started with your own design studio to turn your big business idea into profit. Go to shopify.com/allie to sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling with Shopify today! Fellowship Home Loans — Fellowship Home Loans is a mortgage lending company that offers home financing solutions while integrating Christian values such as honesty, integrity, and stewardship. Go to ⁠fellowshiphomeloans.com/allie⁠ to get up to $500 credit towards closing costs when you finance with Fellowship Home Loans. Pre-Born — Will you help rescue babies' lives? Donate by calling #250 & say keyword 'BABY' or go to Preborn.com/ALLIE. NetSuite — Gain visibility and control of your financials, planning, budgeting, and inventory so you can manage risk, get reliable forecasts, and improve margins. Go to NetSuite.com/ALLIE to get the CFO's guide to AI and Machine Learning. --- Related Episodes: Ep 577 | Resist Toxic Motherhood & Get Your Kids Off TikTok https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-577-resist-toxic-motherhood-get-your-kids-off-tiktok/id1359249098?i=1000553216640 Ep 989 | Nickelodeon Has a Predator Problem https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-989-nickelodeon-has-a-predator-problem/id1359249098?i=1000653246789 Ep 761 | Is Public School the Best Choice for Christians? https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-761-is-public-school-the-best-choice-for-christians/id1359249098?i=1000601944722 --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://alliebethstuckey.com/book⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Relatable merchandise – use promo code 'ALLIE10' for a discount: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

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That's fellowship homelones.com slash alley, term supply, see site for details, fellowship home loans, mortgage lending by the book, nationwide mortgage bankers, DBA Fellowship Home Loans, equal housing lender, NMLS, number 819382. Kindercare operates over a thousand daycare centers across 41 states. And it has been revealed that there is systemic abuse across these daycare centers and very little, if anything, is being done about it. What's worse, our taxpayer dollars are actually funding this abuse. Today we've got investigative reporter Edwin Dorsey detailing his new and damning report about kindergarten. He will also be detailing his past reports about care.com and Roblox.

Both of these companies have had practices endangering children. Oh, my goodness. The details of what he has discovered over the years, they're absolutely chilling, and we as parents need to know about it. Don't just listen to and watch the entirety of this episode. Share it with every parent, every grandparent, every caretaker that you know. episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to Good Ranchers.com. Use code Alley. It's good ranchers.com code Alley. Edwin, thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Could you tell us who you are and what you do? Yeah, Allie. Thanks for having me on relatable. I write a news letter called The Barricabe, which is a substack publication focused on exposing corporate misconduct. There's two real components to the newsletter. There's a free component where I kind of aggregate the news in finance in the short seller world. So I'll summarize activist short campaigns, highlight suspicious resignations, and linked to interesting articles and tweets. And then there's a paid tier of the newsletter where twice a month, I do some like deep dive kind of investigative journalism, generally looking at a one to $10 billion public company that I think is misleading investors or harming customers. And that's what I do with the newsletter. Okay, how'd you get into this?

So I've been passionate about stocks from a really young age, like second grade. I was all about the stock market. In college, I interned at various hedge funds. And I thought that's the route I was going to take and work for hedge funds and short sellers in particular. However, the fund I was interning for, which was a very large short seller fund that did a lot of investigative research, they were in the process of shutting down my senior year. So I needed to get a job. And I figured that if I started writing smart stuff online, people would want to hire me. So I started this news letter mainly as a way to get a job, but it got really popular, very fast in the pandemic. Brickley became a full-time income. And it's been what I've been doing for the last five years. It's my only source of income reader subscriptions. And, you know, it's been pretty decent. So it's a lot of fun. Yes. So I saw a headline about your research into kindergarten. And I'm a mom of young kids. and we've got a lot of moms out there listening. I've never, you know, interacted with kindergarten.

My kids, you know, didn't go to daycare. But I'm really interested in how a company like this functions. And I was really disturbed by some of the things you've found. So can you tell us, first of all, what tipped you off into looking into kindergarten and then what did you find? So my newsletter has a pretty long history of looking at big public companies that have some issues with child safety. I wrote on care.com five or six years ago over. With the last few years, I've written a lot about Roblox, pretty successfully highlighting safety issues before the mainstream media gets to it.

Kindercare got on my radar for a somewhat odd reason. I was using ChatGPT Pro. I'm always looking for new companies. And I asked it, can you look through all the recent IPOs of public companies and find ones with high levels of consumer complaints? And it gave me a list of 10. Kindercare was on that list. And when I went through the list of companies with high levels of consumer complaints,

care stood out as the one that had a lot of issues and that, you know, it's kind of, you know, harming the public. So that's how they got on my radar. It wasn't from a person or like any novel researchers, literally just asking chat GPT for companies with high levels of consumer complaints. One thing that I'm very good at is using FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act, to get copies of complaints people are sending regulators. So one common thing I'll do in my research is I'll go to the FTC and see what complaints people are submitting to the FTC and go to the FTC and go to local state attorney general offices and see what complaints people are submitting to state AGs. And when I did that for kindergarten, I kind of got a high level of complaints about the

daycare company, which is the largest daycare company in the U.S. A few hundred thousand kids go to it over 1,500 locations. And the kind of one pattern that stood out to me about kindergarten is they seem to have like a lot of child safety issues. And not the type of stuff you'd normally expect where, you know, maybe a kid like fights with another kid. or somebody has allergies. There was like issues where kids were escaping from the kindergarten care locations. Kids were getting locked in rooms,

you know, with no supervision. Kids were overdosing on drugs brought by the staff. There was just tons of these, you know, local news stories across the board of kindergarten mistreating the kids they're watching. And, you know, that's kind of the crux of my article and why people should pay attention. Okay. Kids are overdosing on drugs.

Can you tell us about, about that? Yeah. So there was one case where a woman, you know, dropped her kid off at kindergarten. Six hours later, she was told, you need to pick up your kid. He's throwing up. He's feeling sick. And she took him home. And she knew right away something was wrong, like the motherly instinct. And so she went back to kindergarten and said, like, what happened? Like, my kid was fine this morning and, you know, now he's very, very sick and, like, has all these bruises and it's like, clearly something's wrong and kindergarten care denied anything was wrong. And, you know, but the mother knew something was wrong. So she took her kid to the hospital and the hospital

did a drug test. And this kid, this, like, two-year-old tested positive for cocaine. And the police got involved and first they pointed the finger at her and are like, you must be doing cocaine in your house and your kid's overdosing on that. So they searched the house and, like, drug tested her. nothing was wrong. And then they went to the daycare at the Kindercare Daycare, and it turns out one of the staff members had brought cocaine to work in a bag, and the kid, you know, had gotten access to this worker's backpack and, like, ingested some of the cocaine. And that's why this kid tested positive for cocaine. And that sounds absurd. And this daycare had been cited for a lot of safety violations in the past. It was ultimately shut down. But this is the type of pattern of misconduct you'll see at

kind of care locations. There's about 70 in the state of Texas. There's hundreds nationwide. You know, it's kind of crazy what goes on when you don't have like good corporate controls to prevent this stuff. And the common theme I see in all these kindergarten cases is the company is never transparent with the parents about what happened. In this case, it only came out because the mom like took four steps to figure out what happened. So that's like one of the more absurd cases that happened just a year ago. Yes, we have a video clip of Kimberly, the mother, expressing regret over sending her child to Kindercare at Stop 4.

Like at the time he was 11 months old. He is so innocent. Like if you knew the baby before, like he was just so happy. His dating routine has been messed up due to, unfortunately, what happened at Kindercare. He has a lot of developmental delays now.

He might be special needs now. I wish I didn't send him to Kindercare that day. I wish that day I wouldn't have. that day just changed everything. Ugh, poor thing. I mean, you can just see the desperation. So that Kindercare, Oak Creek Kindercare, as you said, had prior safety violations that included staff being aggressive with infants,

undocumented injuries, and access to power tools and toxic chemicals. Then there was a woman in April of 2021. She posted a video of a toddler on the streets outside Milford, Connecticut, Kindercare, She alerted the daycare staff. They had, quote, no idea that the child had been missing. The boy's father only learned of the incident after the woman's video went viral online.

So after that happened, kindergarten didn't even inform this at, oh, yeah, sorry, you know, your kid escaped. Yeah, no. So there's two incidences in my article where, you know, a kid literally just escapes the daycare, usually by opening a window and then rolling out. somebody is like, you know, the kid gets far. Like he's walking down busy streets. People are taking videos. Ultimately, somebody like will find the kid.

And no one knows who this like two year old belongs to. So they'll bring it to like a nearby business or something. And kindergarten, when this happens, they don't even notice the kid's missing. They don't inform the parents. It's just like. And even though there's been two cases where this has gone viral on Facebook of someone taking a video of a kindergarten kid escaping, I'm really confident this is happening. lot more at kindergarten locations. There was one complaint I saw to the Ohio Attorney General

that I got through FOIA where a parent was like, my kid escaped from a kindergarten care, and I have no idea until, you know, someone told me. So, you know, I know of at least three cases where kids are escaping from kindergarten. And this is like way more than any other chain. It seems like a pretty simple and basic issue for a daycare. You got to make sure that kids can't escape. And that's going on repeatedly at kindergarten. So yeah, they definitely have some odd issues here and it's always not being transparent with the parents. In every single case, the parents are like, I didn't know what happened. Kinder care didn't tell me, but I found out from someone else. So this definitely seems like a pattern here. And if you look just, you know, in any

state, there's often databases where these daycares are ranked and evaluated, Kinder care is consistently worse than the average, which is the exact opposite of what you'd expect for like a big company that has all the resources to have like good internal controls. Right, because you found that they are receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies. And so they're not hurting for money in addition to having so many paying families that are sending their kids there. And yet they get complaint after complaint. You found that.

And it's only after several complaints where I guess the news starts reporting on something that happened at one of these local branches that they end up shutting down. Why is it that there is so much grace for these kindergarten centers that repeat? that repeatedly are receiving these kinds of very serious complaints. Allie, that's a great question. And I don't know, but it definitely should change. And that's a great point about taxpayers paying for this. So, Kindercare largely caters to working families.

They also have a program to watch the children of kids whose parents are in the military, so service members. And about 35% of their revenue comes from the U.S. taxpayer, which is their largest source of revenue through the Child Care Development Block Grant, which was started in 1990 under George H.W. Bush, with the idea being that early childhood education, having kids in like informative daycare is so beneficial to early childhood education and to kids' development, that the government should be subsidizing it. And the reality is it's kind of like the opposite. Kids in kindergarten, in addition to all these safety issues and ingesting cocaine and roaming the streets,

you know, it doesn't not seem like it's like beneficial for your development to have 20, kids in a room supervised by someone earning $12 an hour in a corporate environment that just doesn't care about these kids. So it's a complete, you know, abuse or taxpayer funds. The government has huge ability to flex on these centers and not just shut them down or withhold state subsidies for these centers. You know, I think there is kind of an element of regulatory capture that exists across corporate America where the big companies, you know, ultimately control the regulators. Because kindergarten is so large, they have the ability to push back harder than any other entities.

So if, you know, a lot of daycares are just, you know, one-offs owned by somebody or a nonprofit, and that gets shut down, they might not have the resources to fight back. But what you see in kindergarten care is sometimes they get shut down, but then there's an appeal process. And kindergarten will be really good at the appeal process and how the best lawyers and fight back. It's something you see on Reddit threads where kindergarten or employees talk is they say they're very good at just roping everything together, properly right before licensing and inspections, and then things fall apart right after.

So I think there's kind of a corporate strategy around like pulling things together just for inspections and then laxing all the standards after. There's a corporate strategy of fighting back aggressively on suspensions. And I think regulators also aren't doing their jobs. So I think those three factors is why this continues to exist. And it's kind of bizarre because it's not just a private company. It's a private company getting hundreds of millions a year in taxpayer subsidies. to do our first sponsor for the day is a new sponsor it is shopify shopify is the commerce platform

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Yeah, no, it's very, very, very low. working in early childhood education is very, very low-paid field, partly because there's not a lot of credentials required for it. Now, it might vary by state. But yeah, these are very low-paying jobs. They've extremely high turnover. And, you know, one of the bigger issues here is kindergarten, you know, is now publicly traded. And for the last 10 years, I've been owned by like a Swiss private equity firm. And if you look at just kind of the private equity playbook, you know, anytime that, you know, they get in healthcare or childhood education is you need to increase profits and you can't necessarily raise the prices of watching these kids. Partly because the subsidies are capped at a certain rate,

partly because it's just like a standardized thing and you can't, you know, be priced above market. So your profits come from cutting costs. And the way you cut costs is you lower the wages, people are paid and you reduce the numbers of workers. So kindergarten has largely grown through acquisitions. They acquire an existing facility. And When they do, they lay people off and they typically lower the pay. So, Kindercare is not a leader in compensation. And as a result, you have the higher turnover. So there was one study by the Women's Law Center that found these private equity-back daycares tend to have the highest levels of a turnover, way higher than independently owned ones or nonprofit ones, which is problematic because if you got a new person coming in every six months, you're not going to be able to build relationships with them. How do you know if you can trust them? So that's kind of one issue. with kindergarten care. And yeah, I think that's a kind of a big factor that contributes to the low quality of care people are getting is these people are paid low. They're paid lower than anyone else in the industry and their significant turnover. Yeah. They are, I guess, people who at times are

just desperate for work. Maybe they don't have credentials. And since you don't have to have credentials to work in a place like Kindercare, they get this job and they have no interest in children. They don't even have the temperament some of these people for children. And so you get the people who should at least be working with children, working with children, who obviously can't defend themselves, are in very vulnerable situations. And it sounds like kindergarten realizes that this is a problem, but they have all of the mechanics in place to protect themselves as much as possible. Exactly. And you know, you're going to get everybody who's been fired or couldn't get jobs at the better daycares. There might be like some low levels of licensing and training

required, but I read a lot of the forums where these former employees talk, and they talk about not being prepared. And one kind of common thing with kindergarten is there's a lot of rules around staffing. You need to have a certain number of staff members for kids, and you can't, like, be out of ratio. And kindergarten care is constantly out of ratio. And now the government isn't going to really know unless there's like inspection exams that kindergarten might like send an extra employee or two there for the inspection exam. So because kindergarten is constantly out of ratio, it's, like tough to hire people in any environment, then you get desperate for anybody, which is how you have people bringing cocaine to a daycare or a two-year-old's going to overdose and then the mom's going to be

blamed. And like, you know, it's a total mess. It's a total disgrace. And then a lot of the people, you know, one common theme I found just looking into a lot of companies and doing this a lot, getting consumer complaints, is it's always the working class people who are getting taken advantage of the most and who are least equipped to defend themselves. So, you know, if you're, did this with, you know, upper-class families who have access to lawyers and maybe more of an educational pedigree, this would get shut down so fast, they'd go to reporters, they'd hire lawyers, they'd sue. You know, back to your clip with the woman Ms. Hobson whose son overdosed, I don't think she mentioned hiring a lawyer. I don't think she even mentioned suing them.

She said the, like, happiest day she'd experienced was the day the kind of care was shut down. So when you're taking, like, advantage of working class people who have, you know, just less wherewithal to defend themselves. And then it's like especially abusive. So just across the board, you know, when I look at companies that are hurting children, it's almost always working class families who just have a ton on their plate. They can't devote as much time to this. They don't have as much money to, you know, devote to this.

And the most infuriating thing is this is literally being paid for by taxpayers. And even though there's a lot of local media reporting on it, there's been no mainstream media reporting on it. And I know one big theme with Relatables, the failures of the mainstream. media. And I would point to this as another one. This is very relevant. It's national. It's happening nationwide. It involves taxpayer funds. And we haven't seen a single national paper right about this, even though it's been going on for a while. Okay. So some of the scenarios that you described, October 2021, an infant died after being sick all day at a kind of care. And, you know, they denied

that there was any negligence. But then the same daycare in Ohio. face two formal complaints around child injuries. As of April 16th, that kindergarten care in Ohio is still operational. In February 2022, a kindergarten in southern Florida locked a two-year-old inside alone because the mom was 15 minutes late. The mom had to call the police to open the door to get her two-year-old who was standing on a chair screaming for help. Two years old, that's a baby. In August of 2022, police officers, arrested a Florida kindergarten teacher for child abuse after, quote, yelling at the child victim and repeatedly punching the child with an open and closed fist to the back inside of the head. Oh, my gosh, April 2023, two parents in Texas sued a sewed. Okay, sewed a recording device into their 20-month-old

toddler's jacket. The recorded audio captured a kindergarten employee threatening the children saying, I'm going to beat both of y'all. That's what I'm going to do. I'm about to throw some B-I-T-C-H swings at some of y'all right now. Get up and move. Sit down. There's a baby that wimpers. Sit your A-S-S down. Come sit down. Touch it and you die. Just get away from me because I will end up in jail. That was a teacher talking to babies, talking to toddlers at a Kindercare in Texas. And not all of these facilities have been closed down even after these things have become public, right?

Oh, yeah. Almost none of them have been closed down. You know, there's a local media reporting. There's some outrage. They fire the person if there is like media reporting. And it's so like comically absurd. There was one case in which, you know, that you didn't mention in which the, the kindergarten, like, there was like nap time.

The kids were sleeping. And the kid isn't doing anything. Like the girl is completely asleep like a two-year-old. And one of the kindergarten employees is just like pouring water on her forehead to wake her up and she wakes up and falls back to sleep. And they're just like pouring water like sadistically on these kids while they're sleeping. And they think it's funny. So the other kindergarten employee is literally like videotaping it and uploading it to Snapchat, them just like literally messing with the kids in their sleep. And this is what happens when you have no like controls.

This is what happens when you don't care about kids. This is what happens when you have like a bunch of like immature 20 year olds like just watching kids messing around. This is what happens when there's like no accountability. And that facility isn't shut down. And they're going to say it's a one off and they fire their people. But yeah, it's absurd. And it happens at a much higher rate at kindergarten versus any of these other facilities. And it's a big problem.

And, you know, I think, you know, I don't know all the rules around licensing, but it seems to be very friendly to these daycares. They have so many opportunities. and to appeal and defend themselves. And one big problem is evidence. So, you know, in any large corporation, you generally see the corporation trying to create a lot of documentation to protect themselves. With kindergarten, it's the opposite.

Kinder care facilities really have cameras internally or externally. And, you know, the joke I've seen on forums is they don't want cameras because they don't want, like, to get sued because the cameras are going to show their employees doing stuff badly. So a lot of daycares, they want cameras. So as things go wrong, you can say, no, look, this kid tripped or we're not negligent. But here, kid or care intentionally doesn't want cameras because they know they're going to be negligent and would contribute to lawsuits.

And for a lot of parents, it's like they have an intuition, something's wrong. They have an intuition to sew a recording device on their child. But they, like, you know, absent that, how do you gather the evidence? It's like really tough to kind of prove abuse in these closed door facilities where you can't know what's going on. in which there's no video footage to back you up, even if you went to the police. You know,

so, you know, you'll have a lot of stories where parents are like, my kids really didn't want to go there. But as a mom, I just assumed that, you know, my kid didn't want to go to daycare. And it's like that at every daycare, but she just loves being home.

But then they realize there is some abuse going on. And they're like, actually, you know, I wish I noticed this sooner. There is something really wrong about the kindergarten care facilities. And one way you'd expect this to manifest. You'd expect a lot of online reviews. and negative stories.

And like any large corporation, Kindercare is trying to play games to smooth over their image and suppress the story. So one thing I found looking at a lot of online complaints, especially complaints to the FTC, is, you know, I see parents

going to the FTC and saying, look, I had a bad experience with kindergarten. The reason I went to go to Kindercare is they have a ton of positive online reviews on Google, but I later learned that Kindercare would email all the parents repeatedly, offering them $50, tuition discounts if they posted positive reviews. So part of the reason this happens is

kindergarten care, you know, I'm pretty sure against the law is offering discounts and subsidies to people just to post positive reviews to deceive more parents to coming into the kindergarten ecosystem. Yeah, I just can't get over the fact that they are purposely targeting and manipulating. I'm guessing in many cases economically desperate people. A lot of single parents who they can't, they would love, maybe they'd love to stay home, but they can't stay home because they are the income earner or just low income people who have they can't afford a nanny they can't afford the nicer daycare maybe they don't have the option of staying home i don't know but it is taking advantage of poor or working class families and that is how they know they can get away with this kind of

abuse and because they don't want to cut into profits they continually hire people that should not be around children and that is very disturbing to me Next sponsor, fellowship home loans. If you want to work with people that align with your values, if you don't want to have to worry if they secretly hate you because you're a Christian, especially when you're making a really big purchase, like the purchase of a home, then you need to work with a mortgage company that actually aligns with your principles. That's fellowship home loans.

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When you use my link, you'll get a $500 credit towards closing cost. That's fellowship homelones.com slash alley nationwide mortgage bankers, DBA Fellowship Home Loans, Equal Housing Lender, NMLS, number 819382. Do you know anything about the CEO or the CEOs of the past? Has this ever, has there ever been an? effort that you know of to change the culture of what's going on here. I know there's been some turnover at the executive level. They've only been public for less than a year.

They were bought by a Swiss private equity firm in 2015 Partners Group. And that's when, as far as I can tell, things started to go, you know, much worse. For a long time, it's always been the cheapest, lowest paying daycare. But I think this private equity model, growing through acquisitions, cutting costs, especially over the last 10 years of Partners Group is where there's been an issue. I don't think it's limited to one CEO. I think it's like the culture of the organization. As far as I can tell, it's like, you know, it's just about maintaining licensing.

I don't think there's been any concerted effort to really improve the quality of care there because there's no financial incentive to do so. Now, I want to kind of revisit the past point you made, Allie, and this is praying on working class people because that's absolutely true. They're often the lowest cost provider in any state. I think it's even deeper than that. So one thing I see in complaints is people will say, look, the director offered parents to pay cash directly to the director

at maybe a slightly inflated rate, and then the director would pay electronically out of their own bank account for kids. So because kindergarten officially will only accept checks and electronic payments, but there's a lot of paying under the table and cash to the directors. And to me, whenever I see that, I think they're dealing with undocumented immigrants or people who don't have bank accounts, and those kids are being watched in kindergarten care.

So I kind of suspect that it's probably the daycare of choice for undocumented immigrants who need to pay cash kind of under the table to kindergarten directors. That's what you see from consumer complaints. You know, you see a lot of complaints about billing. So not only do they give low quality of care, they charge people after the kids have left. They charge early termination fees or continue.

They bill you, even if you don't have a kid in the system. They promise to refund you and they won't. You know, I saw one complaint in which it's like literally military service members and they have a special program dealing with military families and they get deployed and they need to like move their new army base and kindergarten won't let them out of their daycare contract. I'm like, how can you like advertise yourself and promote yourself to military service members and then not let the kids out of contracts and be like you need to move to a new military base? It's so absurd. It appeals to, you know, working class families where both parents are working. type of behavior you want in America, subsidize the government to harm the exact type of working class families you should be trying to help. And there has been problems repeatedly,

2017, 2021, 2003, multiple 2023, 2004, also 2020, where kindergarten care teachers have been accused of producing child sex abuse material and also just possessing child sex abuse material, but endangering the children that they're actually working with because of what they're trying to create the kind of content that they're trying to make. Yeah. If you're like, you know, a bad person and want access to young kids, like there's no better place than a kindergarten. And, you know, if the internal controls are really bad, like this is the exact type of environment where it can go on for a long time and people look the other way. One thing you see constantly in kindergarten is they never want to write formal reports. They never want to notify parents. They never want to,

like create an incident report and this type of world where like there's no documentation and no cameras and it's like the perfect breeding ground for you know sex offenders and demented people yeah so you know i don't know how severe it is compared to other daycares but like you know it's just kind of obvious you don't want just and it's always men it's almost never the woman it's always men and it's like if you're a man who's taking a job at like a very low paying kindergarten with a history of abuses. It's like, I don't know. All the red flags, the reddest of flags. The reddest of flags. On an earnings call last month, you reported that Kindercare CEO, Paul Thompson, told analysts that roughly 35% of the company's revenue comes from the Child Care and

Development Block Grant. That's the federal program that sends money to stay subsidized child care for working families. 35%. That's a lot. Yeah. It's hundreds and of dollars. And there might be changes under the Trump administration to this. So it's been rumored. Doge is going to want to look at this program and cut costs. However, you also see the opposite in some of the things President Trump is saying, where he wants to incentivize more babies being born and wants to give a credit if you have a kid. And, you know, if you really want to incentivize people to have more kids, maybe you try to subsidize child care more. The issue to me is like large bureaucracies, federal government, state government, it's like a kind of approach

it and just subsidized child care and don't do enough to like, you know, discriminate among the child care providers. But you should in theory be giving huge subsidies to the person that's giving, you know, great food to the kids, a great learning environment, letting the kids form friendships. Like that is good for long-term development. And you should be giving practically no subsidies to private equity back firms that are just trying to make the most amount of money possible. It drives me nuts that taxpayers fund this nonsense. I'm going to do everything possible to have Elon Musk watch or listen to this episode, just so Doge can get to this one thing because I care so much about child safety.

And I just hate the thought that we are subsidizing with hundreds of millions of dollars, this kind of child endangerment. Your taxpayer dollars are going to a woman who's bringing cocaine to a daycare and where a two-year-old is going to overdose on it. And it's so wrong. And so the way the federal grant works is I think money goes to the states and then the states can choose how to disperse it. And, you know, some states have gotten a little smarter where they'll like rate. I think Ohio state rates the day cares, you know, bronze, silver, and gold based on the quality

of care being delivered. And if you're giving higher quality care, then in theory you're going to get slightly higher subsidies from the government. And I think that's smart. And in those models, kindergarten gets a little less money. But, you know, you need to aggressively. tier it more. And this is just where it's like private equity so exploitative. They're going to be like perfect at like doing this playbook to figure out how to get the most amount of subsidies and just

like, you know, you know, fit the check the box narrative that some inspector is going to use to distribute subsidies, but they're not going to actually deliver great care. And then the independent practitioner who actually cares about kids, but is less, you know, nuanced in the system, they're going to get less subsidies for developing better care. So yeah, I would love Elon and Doge to, you know, take an ax of this, you know, get a few hundred million dollars back from kindergarten and say, like, you can't be abusing kids with taxpayer dollars. I think that is very, very, very needed. It would make me very happy. Next sponsor is pre-born. So we're talking about the importance of protecting children. That doesn't start when they're outside of the loom.

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is great. Maybe it's $2.80 or maybe it's $28,000. Whatever God is putting on your heart to donate, I encourage you to do that. Go to preborn.com slash Alley to make that donation. That is preborn.com slash alley. Okay, you mentioned care.com. And I know this was, you said five or six years ago that you were reporting on this, but I'm curious about what you think. found because this is kind of the same category of people don't know care.com you can go there and try to book a nanny or a babysitter it's basically like a kind of like a matching service for people who are seeking babysitters right yeah so care dot com played a huge deal in my like professional development i was a college student when i started talking about it and this is what i would say made me a little

famous or like gave me credibility where people cared what i had to say that hedge funds wanted to pay for my newsletter to see who i'd criticize the care dot com incident in college is really what you know, I would say put me on the map in some ways. So care.com, it's a huge babysitting platform for parents to find babysitters and babysitters to advertise their services to parents. And a huge thing for any babysitting platform is safety. You got to make sure the people are who they say they are. You got to make sure they're not sex offenders.

You've got to run some background check on them. And care.com claimed to be a very safe place to look for babysitters. And they claim to be running background checks. But I had a friend, and this is my, I think, sophomore year of college, who was a babysitter on the platform and said, look, you should look into them. I get the sense that something is wrong. So I decided to try to test becoming a babysitter on care.com. And the way I tested their process is by trying to sign up as Harvey Weinstein,

who was in the news a lot at the time. So I use a photo of Harvey Weinstein. I use the email Harvey the babysitter at gmail.com. I made up a social security number. I documented all this process. I just made everything up as Harvey Weinstein. And I can send it to their background check. on care.com to be a licensed babysitter on there.

And they said they'd run the background check and get back to me in 48 hours. And to my amazement, I was approved. Hello, Harvey. I got a verification badge. And as Harvey Weinstein, as a student in college, I was like applying to babysitting jobs on care.com. They said I had a CPR certified.

It was clear they're not running the background checks they claim to do. I made a different account as Duffy Duck and got approved. It's like they're telling parents are running background checks. They're charging people for background checks. And then they're not running the background checks. background checks. And there had been like some like local news reporting around lawsuits where parents

alleged defective background checks, but here I had like concrete evidence that they weren't doing that. So I wrote one article as a college student and that went a little viral. And then the company, like they called my college to get me in trouble. They like sent some legal letter to my parents' house. And that made me dig in more. So then I went to every state attorney general to get consumer complaints to people that filed on care.com. And I saw tons of safety. And I kind of like noticed this pattern. First, things will appear in, you know, complaints to state AGs. Then there'll be local media reporting. And then ultimately there'll be a national story. So I became obsessed with care.com. I go to every state AG for consumer complaints. I even go to some like, you know, police departments. And I ask for all 911 calls that had care.com mentioned in the transcript because I want to see like how extensive all these abuses are. And, you know, there's a lot of people who have criminal histories who are approved to babysit on care.com. There's a lot of people who had their kids taken away from them who then go become babysitters on care.com. There's people who've been banned from running daycares who are, you know, listing their services on care.com.

There's people with DUIs and battery charges advertising themselves on care.com. And all unbeknownst to parents. And ultimately, there were eight kids who, you know, were given to care.com babysitters with criminal histories where the parents didn't know and the kids ended up dying. They're abused. They're beaten up. They're drowning in a pool. And I got obsessed with this. I called email like 100 reporters.

And then Gregory Zuckerman at the Wall Street Journal got involved. We talked for a while. And nine months later, he had a front page story about a care.com babysitters, not passing background checks with criminal histories and killing like several children, just because this company wasn't doing their job. And then that put me on the map. That's why people kind of cared about my news letter, even though I was really young. The stock collapsed, the CEO, CFO, and general counsel all resigned.

And they got new management. And from what I can tell, the safety issues have kind of been fixed. It's not that extreme now. But that was another company that had a lot of issues. And, you know, it kind of made me obsessed with this idea that literally just anybody, if you see a lot of local news reporting in different states and cities of these issues, it's just going to be a while before the national media catches up. And even though it, like, matters a lot.

There's a lot of group thinking media. They're kind of slow to, like, finding these issues out themselves. But you can really try to make a difference if you identify it early. Absolutely. Now, when it comes to Kindercare, I know that she mentioned there's been no mainstream reporting of this, and it's a really big deal. It's getting our tax dollars. It's a huge company. We've got military families involved in this. Do you think it's one of those things where it's like, okay, they're just slow and they will catch up to your reporting eventually, or do you think there's something else underneath that? Do you think there's a reason they're not reporting on Kinder care? Well, I don't think it's like corruption and sinister and the media wants to see kids abuse. I did, you know, actually one bigger reporter reached out to me, like, you know, after this, but they were so slow and they had so many stories. And, you know, I think they're like, it's infuriating looking at the media. There's going to be like 50 stories about some like minor Trump thing. And there's going to be 100 stories like trying to take down Elon Musk. And then the thing that can actually make a big societal difference, you know, highlighting these abuses, getting Congress involved, changing the tax incentives, zero media reporting. And I just think. There's a lot of group think in media, and I know one big pot theme with Relatable is independent thinking, and there's very little that in, I think, mainstream media. These stories are also difficult.

It's easy to write a headline about Trump and Elon and some small thing and then get a lot of clicks. It's a lot, lot, lot more work to do this type of research, to spend six months on it and talk to former employees and get corporate records and really demonstrate the abuses. is. So this is the type of thing that's a lot of work, not a lot of clicks. It may, you know, drive some subscriptions of people very much value independent journalism. But it's like, for whatever reason, I think the media has a tougher time putting it together. The media is very like tips-based. And if one parent just says, oh, I've had a bad experience at this, I don't know if it'll click to them that it's actually systemic because it's tough for an outsider to really say, like, is this systemic or is it a one-off when it is systemic for kindergarten?

So yeah, I would love to see more mainstream media write about kindergarten. But for now, I'm happy to go on your podcast alley and talk about it. Yeah. Yeah. Me too. Okay. Another story that involves kids is Roblox. And we've talked a little bit about Roblox and just the capabilities that it has,

the vulnerabilities that it has. We've talked about how predators use Roblox. But you found a lot of disturbing stuff that's going on. Yeah. So Roblox is, I think, the absolute worst. let me put it this way. Roblox is the best way for sex offenders and abusers to meet kids. Just across the board, you can literally look at interviews with like, you know, pedophiles and stuff. They say they like meeting kids through Roblox.

Now, the reason Roblox is so dangerous, it's a game where young kids play online six to 14 is that, you know, there's a few things. One, there's a lot of open messaging. You can easily message people back and forth. it's easy to like fake being young. So anybody can go on Roblox. You can be 40. You can say you're 12. You make a little avatar. You can make three different avatars and then you can start talking to kids and manipulating them. It's easy to get their contact info and move off platform. Parents kind of assume it's safe even though it's not. And then just over and over and over and over again, you see like a registered sex offender. They go on Roblox. They typically make a few accounts. They pretend to be multiple different people, but it's like a registered sex offender. You see like a registered sex offender. They go on Roblox. They typically make a few accounts. They pretend to be multiple different people, but it's like it's like a all the same person. And they start talking to like a seven year old or something, convince them that they're their friend, convince them to like, you know, get out of the house and like go down the block. And then like essentially kidnap them and like drive like 500 miles across state lines.

And you know, I think I've seen like two dozen incidences like this. And, you know, again, everyone kind of writes it off as a one off, but it's like systemic within Roblox. And there's a, there's a few other issues that make it really bad on Roblox because the kids are so young to sign up to make a Roblox account, all you need to do is give a username and password. You often don't need an email and you're not required to give a phone number. And just that distinction versus most of social media is actually a huge issue. Because there's no limit to the number of usernames and passwords you can make. You can make a Roblox account, get caught inappropriately messaging kids, get banned,

make a second Roblox account, make a third Roblox account, make a hundredth Roeblocks account. There's nothing Robox can really do to shut you down versus if you require a phone number at sign up, there's only so many phone numbers you can have. You can only get banned so many times before it becomes a nuisance to keep obtaining new phone numbers. So that's like one very simple thing that makes Roblox so much more dangerous than other platforms. Yeah, I think parents really underestimate the dangers of Roblox. I think the kindergarten stuff is slightly worse. People know like kids online you need to be like wary of things. But yeah, Roblox is a ton of these issues of like just young kids, you know, being manipulated by these like older adults and like being kidnapped.

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of games on Roblox. And Roblox has historically claimed they care a ton of about content moderation. Every item, every game is going to be reviewed by a human before it's uploaded, but that's clearly not the case. And like what I found just like looking into it a little bit and like kind of going down the Reddit rabbit holes and stuff is there's all games that are totally inappropriate. There's like Holocaust reenactment games. There's literally like school shooting games where you can play as a school shooter in like a replica of a school and like see how many kids you can kill like, you know, within roadblocks. It's super, super, super, super. It's super, messed up. And it's just a sign that they're not doing moderation. What happens is the games go viral,

you know, kids are being immature and bad and like playing the games. And then once it gets a lot traction, Robox will ultimately shut it down, but then someone will just make another account and re-upload it. And it's like absurd that this platform, like if you want to play like school shooting games, the way it's like most accessible is on the platform for like really young kids. And it's not just like, you know, hypothetical, like real school shooters have. like mentioned their like you know love of roblox and playing on roadblocks so you know i i you know it's a very sensitive topic and i i'm not the most informed on it but it's kind of absurd that you've a game playing play thousands of times on roblox being reuploaded constantly where like you can you know

role play as a school shooter it's like that is yeah and nothing happens to the company right and kids can access that so you've got a six-year-old boy who can access that they can access all kinds of pornographic material. They can be talking to a predator who might pose as, you know, another seven-year-old boy, but is really an adult. And as you said, there's really no safety mechanism in place to make sure you are who you say you are, that you're the age that you say you are. There was this 87-page whistleblower document that was shared with you from employees saying, yeah, the company knows that these issues exist. Yeah. So I've been writing my role. for the last three years.

I kind of get obsessed with these companies. And sometimes what happens when you write on them a lot and start publishing information is former employees will reach out to you and say, actually, it's really bad. And here's more evidence. So there is these kind of internal messages, kind of like in a slack, but like internal message boards where, you know, Roblox employees say, I wouldn't let my kids play these games. These games are not safe. There's so much worse than other places on the internet.

So I got a copy of that. and it's like pretty bad, like, bad. It's like you could, they know it's bad. And the thing with Roblox is it would be so easy to improve the safety. It's not like this is a complicated issue. You require phone numbers at signups. Maybe you require people to verify IDs or in order to have the ability to chat with other people.

You need to verify your ID first so anybody can play. But if you want the chat functionality, which is really like the stepping stone for abuse, you need to verify your ID. Doing those little steps of friction. and hurt the company. It's maybe a little less likely people will sign up, but it would totally transform safety because then you could permanently ban people.

Then you could cross-reference with the sex offenders list. You make sure people are an appropriate age. You don't have a 40-year-old talking to an 8-year-old. Very, very, like, low-hanging fruit to just transform the safety of the platform. It just comes with cost and, you know, lower user growth. And so easy transformation. They're just not going to do it.

And I kind of hope if there's more media reporting on it, the company will be shamed into doing it. The other thing they could do is just invest more in moderation. It should be that every game uploaded to Roblox is reviewed by a human. So you don't have like school shooting or reenactment games. But that's just not the case right now. And I know over the years they used to advertise, we look at every item, we look at every game. And they kind of softened the language around that because I can tell they're afraid of getting sued and they don't want like to have as strong of a language. where they still present themselves in a very safe platform when they're not.

Yeah. Edwin, I'm just sitting here listening to you and wondering if you have ever received any threats over your reporting. Yeah. So ironically, the worst one was probably Care.com. So I was the student at Stanford, and they literally somehow, I think like some donors were on Care.com's board. They like got a hold of the Dean of Students and were complaining about me. And as like a sophomore, the Dean of Students. calls me in and I'd never really been in trouble before and they're like you're violating our

you know Wi-Fi policy and you're impersonating other people at all like you can't do this using Stanford Wi-Fi will you take the article down and it's like that's the first time I got a taste of like how the world works the backdoor shenanigans I was like kind of floor that they weren't supported me and then care.com also sent a private investigator to my house where my dad you know calls me one day. And he's like, yeah, some guy with like a body cam showed up to our house and was asking questions about you. You know, I typically have, I've done this a while. So I kind of know which guys are like the really bad actors who are going to like really go after you versus when you go after large corporations, the kind of standard thing is they might mess around. They might send you

a cease and desist. They might sue you, but they're not going to like kill you, you know, where if you go after international companies, the standards there are a lot different where that it's, very less tolerant of criticism. But if you're going after large U.S. listed companies and you're not saying anything incorrect and you're backing it up with information and I'm not trading the stock, you know, I think I'm somewhat protected. You know, one issue is when the companies actually have issues, there's going to be discovery and litigation. So they sued me. They might end up exposing more about themselves. I think I have an advantage kind of being young and having a little bit of an internet following where if I did get sued, it's going to be a lot of bad headlines for

them and again, draw more attention to the issues. One thing I try to do to mitigate, like, legal risk is I really try to be understated. You see this trend in the media and, you know, sometimes in finance where people want to be sensationalistic and, you know, just like fraud, scam, red letters, exclamation point, it's going to zero. I do none of that. I really try to let the evidence speak for itself and just kind of lay out the facts and let people draw their own conclusions. Doing that kind of protects me a little, but you still get, nonsense from time to time. You know, I don't know if I would say death threats, but I get occasional emails being like dead Edwin walking. And it's like, that's not, you know,

pleasant to receive. Right. You get, you get, I got an acer sis or sister to over the years, but I've never been sued. I'm not too worried because it's, again, large U.S. companies where the most they're going to do, I think, is sue me. And I think as long as I'm saying stuff that's truthful and understated and have evidence, I don't think they're going to do that. And fortunately, the Bear Cave Newsletter has been kind of successful where I could probably afford one lawsuit. Not that I'd want to spend a lot of money on it, but I could probably afford like one big fight. Yeah. Okay. Well, just in case you have lawsuits coming your way, everyone needs to subscribe. So you could maybe afford two lawsuits if needed. Hopefully that will

never be necessary. But everyone should subscribe to your substack anyway, just because, I mean, you're the only one I know that's giving this kind of information. Maybe there are other independent journalists out there that are also doing it. But I appreciate you, especially that you also focus on companies that are endangering children that's relevant to people, no matter your political persuasion, but especially as parents out there, like, we just really need to know what's going on. So thank you so much, Edwin. I really appreciate it. Yeah, and Ali, thanks so much for having me on your show. I think independent media like yours is so, so, so important. It's the way these stories can get told. So I think you deserve a lot of credit, too, for how to you.

having me on, letting me share some of these issues. So thank you. Thank you, Edwin. I appreciate it. Quick reminder to sign up for Share the Arrows. Get your tickets at ShareTheAros.com. If you are a Christian woman, this is the conference for you, hard hitting solid theology, apologetics training, encouragement and edification as moms, as any woman in any stage of life, will even be talking about how to live biblically healthy lives. So go to share the arrows. That's share the arrows.com, October 11th, Dallas, Texas. That's where you can get your tickets. That's share the arrows.com.