Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 603 | How CPS & Foster Care Corruption is Killing Kids | Guest: Naomi Schaefer Riley

Episode Date: April 20, 2022

Today we're talking to Naomi Schaefer Riley, author of the book "No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives," about the corruption running rampant throughout Child Protective Services and the foster care system and the woke ideology that's causing it. While many on the Right see CPS as a heavy-handed branch of government bureaucracy, and that is often the case, Naomi points out that there is a flip side to this situation in which CPS takes no action when they really should. The reason for this? Equity. The leftist ideology that's infiltrated CPS suggests that its workers keep a family together at all costs. And while that sounds good on the surface, the reality is that this policy leads CPS to leave vulnerable children with their abusers. Naomi details exactly how leftist corruption in CPS is hurting kids and what she thinks should be done so that CPS can get back to the business of protecting kids, rather than trying to satisfy some ideology. --- Today's Sponsors: Good Ranchers — change the way you shop for meat today by visiting GoodRanchers.com/ALLIE & use promo code 'ALLIE' to save $30 off your order! Annie's Kit Clubs — keep the whole family engaged & creative with hands-on monthly kits. Subscriptions are month-to-month & you can cancel anytime! Go to AnniesKitClubs.com/ALLIE to save 75% off your first month! Birch Gold — text 'ALLIE' to 989898 to protect your savings with gold! No obligation to get this info. Pre-Born — will you help rescue babies' lives? Donate by calling #250 & say keyword 'BABY' or go to Preborn.com/ALLIE. --- Foster Care Organizations & Resources Naomi Mentioned: Project 1.27 https://www.project127.org/ Immerse Arkansas https://immersearkansas.org/ The Call https://thecallinarkansas.org/ --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Hey, guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Wednesday. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to Good Ranchers.com slash Alley for American Meat delivered right to your front door.

That's Good Ranchers.com slash Alley. Okay, guys, have I got the conversation? for you today. We are talking to author of No Way to Treat a Child Naomi Riley. And she is going to talk to us about CPS and the foster care system and how progressive racialized ideology is destroying the lives of children in the name of equity, in the name of so-called fairness and social and racial justice. Children, in particular, black children are being left in the way. the hands and in the care of the people who are abusing them. And this was a very stirring conversation for me. It was a surprising conversation to me. As we'll talk about, we tend to have a very negative

view as conservatives of CPS, and I think in some ways rightfully so. But we need to talk about how to make the child welfare system not just go away, but better, because it is a necessary safeguard for children. And so Naomi is going to give us so much insight today. You're probably going to be surprised by what you learn as well. At times, it's, you know, kind of gut-wrenching and mind-blowing, but she's also going to leave us advice at the end and some equipment for how we can tackle this huge issue of lack of child welfare in our communities. This is something that we are called to as Christians. As I've mentioned before, and I just think it's kind of a stunning revelation.

If you've never thought about it, Christians, Christianity, changed the way the world saw children. And I'll just reiterate what I explained. I think it was a couple weeks ago at this point that when Christianity came about 2,000 years ago in the ancient pagan world, ancient Greece, and ancient Rome, really society was set up in kind of concentric circles,

the center circle being the, the adult free male. Everyone outside of that, everyone who was a slave, everyone who was a woman, everyone who was elderly, everyone who was a child was really and truly marginalized. They were pushed to the side. They were seen as objects to be used and exploited by the adult free male. Children, in part, just because they weren't adults and so they had a lower mental and physical capacity so they weren't seen as useful, but also because there was a high child, a high child, rate at the time, they were very much objectified. They were sexually exploited. They were often abused and neglected, especially young girls. And then Christianity came along and radically changed

that over time. It introduced and really universalized this idea that of course had been, had existed when ancient Israel was established or really at the beginning of time by God, that human beings are made in God's image. Therefore, we are of equal worth. No matter our age, no matter our mental capacity or physical capabilities, we are all of the same worth and of the same value. And then Jesus adds to that in this unquantifiably significant way in saying that we are all equally dead and sin apart from Christ,

and we are all equally alive in Christ. and friends with God and made holy and righteous when we come to him by grace through faith. So this radical equality through the idea of us all being made in the image of God, no matter who we are or where we come from or how much money we have. We see throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament that God hates partiality, particularly when it comes to law giving to Israel, we see God say multiple times that he believes that it is an injustice in court to either show partiality or favoritism to the poor or weak person in a case or the rich and powerful

person in a case. There is this radical equality that is introduced by Judeo-Christian thought, but especially by Christian theology and Christian orthodoxy. Of course, we also see in Jesus' own life of the many, many things that Jesus did. Of course, we see that the authors of the gospel thought it significant and necessary to include the story of Jesus calling the children to himself. The children wanted to come up to him. His disciples wanted to shoe them away, which was probably pretty standard for the time. And Jesus actually chastised the adult males, chastised the disciples and said, no, let the little children come to me. And Jesus actually says, you have to have faith like a child. You have to be like a child in order

to enter the kingdom of heaven. Of course, he's speaking in the spiritual sense, but how much he valued children, not just to bring the children to himself, but to say that their faith, their trust in him is something that adults should model their faith after. That would have been radical at the time. When we see the kind of hierarchical roles, not challenged in the New Testament, but redefined and taken to a different level, for example, in Ephesians 5, as again we talked about a couple weeks ago, that slaves are told to serve their masters, not just by way of people pleasing, but actually as they are serving the Lord, that would have been radical at the time, not because it said that slaves have to obey their masters, but because there is actually an important relationship

there that reflects the Christian and the Lord. So that kind of like heartfelt obedience and and then taking care of a bond servant and a slave in a respectful way by the master, that would have been seen as radical at the time. The passage in Ephesians 5 that talks about children obeying their fathers, that's not the radical part, but instructing fathers to then not provoke their child to anger, that would have been radical. It wouldn't have been radical, as it says in Ephesians 5 at the time that it was written for wives to submit to their husbands.

but what was radical at the time was telling husbands in that passage to love their wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. And so while the gospel doesn't necessarily automatically abolish all hierarchies, it does change the way we treat one another in these kind of hierarchical relationships. And of course, there is not any kind of condoning of slavery and scripture. and of course the kind of chattel slavery that we saw in the United States is absolutely an abomination and evil. But what I'm trying to say is that the gospel radicalizes how people empower and people underneath power, how they relate to one another, one another through this lens of radical equality of people being made in the image of God and everyone needing equally salvation through Christ. And so I know that was a rant, but I say all that to say, we got to care about this because Christians have always been countercultural when it comes to the protection of the most vulnerable, the protection of children. The world doesn't care about children. They don't. They say they do, but they don't. Children are always on the altar of adults' whims. They're always the first to be sacrificed because they can't stand up for themselves. So what we're going to talk about today in the child welfare system is something that we should great.

care about. We are carrying on the legacy of Christianity, the legacy of true biblical justice by caring about these subjects and caring for children. All right, we'll get into that conversation in just one second. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the Day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's

unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day Show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Naomi, thank you so much for joining us. Can you tell everyone who you are and what you do? Sure. I'm Naomi Schaefer Riley. I'm a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where I study child welfare. I've been a journalist for about 20 years. I worked at the Wall Street Journal for a while. I was a columnist for the New York Post. And I've written a bunch of books. The most recent one is called No Way to Treat a Child, and it's about the problems with our child welfare system.

And that's what we're going to focus on today. I'm really looking forward to hearing more of your insight. on this. Can you first just tell us why you wrote this book? What first interested you in this subject? Sure. Well, there were actually a couple of previous topics that I wrote about that kind of led me to this. The first one actually was a book about, wrote about American Indians, called The New Trail of Tears. And for that book, I actually end up traveling to a bunch of Indian communities and reservations across the country. And unfortunately, for your viewers and listeners who don't know, there are some of the worst child welfare outcomes in those communities, some of the highest rates of abuse and foster care, and very few places for those kids to go,

unfortunately. And the other thing that kind of led me in this direction was I was... So I'm sorry. When you're saying some of the worst case... No, that's fine. One of the worst cases of abuse, you're talking about abuse at the hands of the caregivers and parents, not abuse in the foster care system. So when you're saying... Exactly. Okay. Got it. Yeah. So, I mean, there is a lot of dysfunction in a lot of these communities. Unfortunately, there are very high rates of alcohol and substance abuse. And we know that those are really significantly correlated with rates of child abuse and neglect at the hands of caretakers, usually parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. And so we see that to a very significant degree in American Indian communities. And so when I came back from those trips, I just kind of started to wonder what. the child welfare system looks like in the rest of the country. And I was writing a column for the New York Post at the time. And I started to follow some of the high-profile child fatalities that happened in New York City for kids, you know, kids who are really known to the system. Like, we knew that their parents were

not treating them well. They had been reported multiple times to the administration for children's services. They had been investigated. And unfortunately, they still died. And I just became sort of gobsmacked at the fact that we could know about what was going on in these homes and make a decision to leave children in those dangerous situations. And so a combination of these things kind of led me down this path to look at really what all the child welfare agencies across the country look like, what their policies are like, get into family court and foster care and adoption. And anyway, yeah, so the results of all that is this book.

As conservatives, I think that we are automatically distrustful and for good reason of government agencies, especially when it comes to dealing with children. And I think when the average person or at least the average conservative thinks about CPS, maybe I'm only speaking for myself, but I'm probably speaking for a lot of people in my audience too. I tend to think, not based on any data, but just based on my impression, and maybe some of the saddest stories that I've seen on social media is that CPS is by and large taking kids away from their parents who don't need to be taken away from their parents. That to me is the impression that I get that that's the real problem, that CPS is intervening when

they don't need to intervene, that maybe a mother is taking their child to the hospital because they fell and bumped their head because that's what toddlers do. CPS show up and then these terrible things happen where kids are separated from their parents for months. But really, what you more focus on in your book, you talk about a wide array of problems, but what you focus more on in your book is that CPS very often tends to not intervene or intervene as much as they should when it comes to cases of child abuse, especially when it comes to the Black family for reasons of, I guess, equity. So can you talk more of? about that. What did you find? What are the real biggest problems that are going on in CPS and the

foster care system? I know that's a big question, so take as long as you need to answer it. So I do want to start with your initial impression because I think you are representative of a large swath of conservative and maybe more libertarian, leaning folks who think about CPS and think this is government intrusion in the lives of private citizens. And what I would like to shift the conversation to is thinking about CPS more in a role of law enforcement. And I think conservatives understand the place of law enforcement on our society and the importance of law enforcement in terms of protecting the most vulnerable citizens in this country from violence and crimes at the hands of others. And what's happening in these situations with kids is that there is nobody else

to protect them in these situations. They are living in families where they're being. being repeatedly abused and neglected. And the only institution that can stand between them and caretakers who are putting them in danger is CPS. So I sort of liken it to law enforcement. And it's interesting because I think what you're seeing increasingly is that certain activists in the world of child welfare also likened CPS to law enforcement. And in the same way that they want to abolish the police, they'd all.

also like to abolish CPS. So we need to kind of think about this in those terms. Like, we don't think it's a good idea as conservatives to abolish the police because we understand whatever abuses may occur here and there. We understand the important role that the police play in protecting our most vulnerable citizens. And we need to understand the important role that CPS plays in protecting children. So what we have to understand then is, again, making this parallel with the kind of abolish the police movement, there are a lot of folks out there who charge that child protective services and child welfare agencies and family courts are racist. There are systemic racism they claim. They look at, of course, racial disparities.

And just as racial disparities don't tell the entire story with regard to law enforcement, they're not telling the whole story with regard to CPS. So it is absolutely true that black children in this country are investigated at a higher rate than their white peers. The charges against their parents tend to be substantiated at a higher rate than their white peers, and they're removed to foster care at a higher rate than their white peers. But what these statistics don't tell you is that black children in this country are twice as likely to be abused, and they're three times as likely to die for maltreatment as their white peers. So if you think about it in terms of child protective services, in terms of who it is that we need to ensure is safe, you are going to

find that there are going to be more black children who are caught up in the system. And, you know, there are a lot of reasons for that. Like, again, whenever we sort of have these very superficial conversations about racial disparities, it doesn't take account of really important factors that go into them. So for instance, yes, you could say that black men, you know, are more likely to have encounters with police. They're also more likely to commit many violent crimes in this country. Similarly, when we look at the child welfare system, you know, the family structure is a huge predictor of whether a child is going to be safe or not. And a lot of, you know, sociologist researchers refer to this as the mother's boyfriend problem. If a child is living with a non-relative

male, typically, you know, could be a stepfather, but more often it's just the mother's boyfriend, they are 11 times as likely to be abused as a child who is living with two married parents. And it turns out that family structure is not distributed evenly among racial groups in this country and black children as a result are not as safe in many instances as white children, unfortunately. Yes. And let me just punctuate what you're saying with your own words. This is what you wrote in the Wall Street Journal. You were reviewing a book by Dorothy Roberts, she wrote a book called Torn Apart, and she is arguing basically what you are refuting right now, that because of the disparities that we see in the foster care system,

because black children are more likely to be taken from their homes and put in the foster care system, that shows CPS is really just an extension of slavery. This is kind of the whole critical race theory premise that oppression of black people really has it lessened since 1619. it's just kind of changed forms. And you're absolutely right that they use the police as an example of that, that it's just a reiteration or a different iteration of slave patrol, you know, in the slave era. And then it changed during Jim Crow. And now the police is basically functioning in the same role.

And they point to disparities in order to prove that. Actually, the entire conversation about systemic racism from the left basically boils down to pointing to disparity. is proof of discrimination, but as Thomas Sol has written so much and so thoroughly on, disparities are not in themselves proof of discrimination. You have to look at all of the other factors, as you mentioned, the makeup of the family. But let me get to some of the statistics that you wrote about in the Wall Street Journal. You said, according to the latest federal data, 1,750 children died in 2020 as a result of being abused or neglected.

of those children, 34.9% were black, though blacks only make up 13% of the U.S. population. Black children were three times as likely to die for maltreatment as white children, and the number had gone up 17% from the year before. And then you get into Dorothy Roberts' arguments in torn apart, which are, as I just talked about, basically, that these disparities are not because black children, are being abused at higher rates, but because of this racist system, you also mentioned that the communist, Angela Davis, she endorsed this book and said that it was great, but actually, and I think you argue this, and so I want you to keep going on this. Actually, this kind of thinking puts more

black children in harm's way because it is then informing policy. You mentioned that the Biden administration in charge of child welfare compared workers in this field, in the, in this field, in the child welfare field to overseers on plantations and advise the public not to call child protective services. She apparently said save black children from that knock on the door in that tunnel of child welfare out of which they may never see their way. So in her opinion, in this official's opinion, CPS is a bigger threat than abusive parents, boyfriends, step parents. Yeah. It's it's pretty shocking. I think a lot of people thought that this whole abolished child welfare discussion was kind of an academic conversation that was happening outside of the realm of actual policymaking. And a lot of people talk about, you know, critical race theory and these other abstract theories as things that, you know, they're just kind of things that happen in law schools and they don't necessarily affect real people's lives.

This is an instance where this dangerous ideology is spreading across the country throughout our child welfare agencies and it is harming the most of the most of the most. vulnerable kids. So let me just give you a couple of examples of kind of what is going on in these agencies. The first thing is that they believe it is important almost no matter what to keep kids with their families. Now, as conservatives, of course, we think, yes, of course. Kids should be with their families. That sounds like a great idea. But we don't understand that these are parents who have repeatedly abused or neglected their children. And I just want to pause here to just talk about what neglect is because there's a lot of misinformation out there about what constitutes neglect. There are people out there who say, oh, neglect is just when you let your eight-year-old walk to the

park by themselves and CPS decides that they're in danger and pick them up. No, most neglect cases in this country are happening with kids age zero to three. They're happening when adults are leaving those kids alone, unsupervised, when those parents are so strung out on drugs that they cannot feed or clean or supervise or provide medical care to those children. Neglect is sometimes when you let an abusive partner come into your home, knowing that that person is going to physically abuse your child in some way. These are all instances of neglect. Neglect is actually responsible for more fatalities, child fatalities in this country than abuse is. Neglect is very dangerous. So I just want to you know, sort of bracket that for a second.

Because so what's going on in these agencies is they say it's so important that the child, we preserve this relationship between the child and the family at all costs. And I say to people, you know, it's like if you had this policy with regard to domestic abuse, you know, the police came because your boyfriend or husband was beating you. Now, imagine if the first question they asked was, okay, guys, how can we get you back together? But that is exactly what's going on when a child protective services is coming into this home. They are looking around trying to figure out any way possible to leave this child with the people who are abusing and neglecting them. And then even on the rare occasions when that child is removed, the entire driving ideology of these agencies and family courts is, okay, how can we get you back together?

And so we provide all sorts of services to the families. We, you know, do anger management, addiction counseling, parenting lessons, anything we can think of in order to try to reunite this child with their family. And often we're doing this over and over and over again. The parents, because drugs are such a big issue, are often relapsing multiple times. And especially with young children, we are really interrupting their development by constantly taking them in and out of their biological home, putting them in multiple foster homes so that they cannot form the kind of secure attachment that we know is so important to their development. And with regard to race, what you see is we are even more inclined to leave black children in their home because no

agency wants to be accused of racism. No social worker wants to be accused of racism. I did a story on a judge in New Orleans who has been honored repeatedly because she specifically will not remove or will not approve the removal of black children from their home. And when I interviewed her, she said, I want to know why there aren't more Vietnamese children in my courtroom. And to me, that's such a silly, it's an absurd question. Right. Who, that's not the question. The question is, are the kids in front of you in danger? And what difference does it make what their skin color is? Right. And that's the danger of prioritizing this newfangled definition of equity. or this left-wing idea of representation and diversity in the most superficial sense above what is actually true, above reality.

I mean, again, I see so many parallels, as you mentioned, to policing very often when someone commits a heinous crime, like, for example, the Brooklyn shooter who had been on the terrorist watch list until 2019, it had many run-ins with the police, Sacramento shooters. There was another mass shooter in Colombia. They all share the same race. And they also share a long violent criminal history, the same thing with Daryl Brooks, the terrorist in the Waukesha Parade. And this is happening across the country where in the name of equity and the name of trying to disrupt what they would call, I don't know, the school to prison pipeline and the disproportionate rates of black men in jail. rather than addressing why these black men are going to jail, they're just saying, well, let's just make sure that they're not in jail.

So our quotas can look right. And as you mentioned, that is really harmful because it's not just that no one wants a disproportionate rate of any kind of race in jail, but it's not just that black men are disproportionately committing these crimes. They're also the disproportionate victims of these crimes. And so if you actually care about saving black men, lives, if black lives really do matter, that it shouldn't matter if a Vietnamese child is in front of you, or if a black child or Hispanic child is in front of you. You're exactly right. You have to

ask the question, is this child in danger? And so often it seems like so-called social justice and criminal justice is really more focused on protecting the perpetrator of the crime, the perpetrator of the violence and not the victims and the potential victims. And besides just having a warped worldview and a warped upside down ideology, which I believe progressivism is, it's hard for me to understand why. And it's hard for me to understand a judge that she just described who we know is not stupid. Why she wouldn't see things as they are. It's very confusing to what you have to, yeah, I mean, it's interesting because you're exactly right. Just as the criminal justice system is focused on the perpetrators, so the child welfare system is

actually focused on the well-being of adults. It's incredible. I mean, I tell to people over and over again, and they don't always quite believe me. But people see adults in the child welfare system as victims in many ways. And in some ways, there's a good reason for that. Many of these adults have had very difficult lives. They have endured poverty, a lack of education, unemployment, substance abuse, homelessness. Some of them have even grown up in the foster care system themselves. And so when you look at these people and you think, I don't want to add to their problems by taking away their children. And so they come into this equation with a distinct advantage. Adults are much more capable of articulating their views and their issues

than children are. And so they go into a courtroom or they talk to CPS or they talk to the social worker and they say, you know, look at me, feel bad for me. And it becomes harder and harder to focus on the well-being of the children. Instead, you have more and more agents. and organizations out there that are simply focused on what they call the well-being of the family. It's interesting. There's a program out there called CASA, court-appointed special advocates, which I think in principle is a great thing. You have adult volunteers who come in, meet with a child who's in the child welfare system, and then they come into the courtroom, and they talk to the judge and they say, you know, this is what I found out about this kid.

This is what I think is in this child's best interest. Well, there's a move afoot in many CASA organizations across the country now to not be concerned with the child's well-being, but to rather represent the whole family. And it never occurs to these people or they never acknowledge that in there are cases where the child's interests are going to diverge from the family's interests or the adult's interests. And we don't have a, you know, we, in our court system, everyone gets their own representation. And it's not, we don't have this system because we're mean. we have the system because we feel that everyone in that courtroom deserves a voice. And when you just say we're going to be concerned with family well-being, you blot out the child's voice.

You start to ignore the child's voice and the child's best interests. And I see this trend throughout the system and it's very concerned. I think especially as conservatives, but as people in general, we do want family reunification to be, the goal. I mean, you do insofar as that intact family will provide a stable or not perfect because no family is perfect, but a better environment for that child than foster care because there's a lot of danger with foster care too. I mean, there are known high rates of sexual abuse and physical abuse and perhaps psychological abuse that happens in foster care. And we know that there are a lot of problems there. And so I want reunification to be the ultimate goal, but what do you think

are some steps that are not being taken right now that should be taken to make sure that before reunification does happen that CPS, that the child welfare system is ensuring that reunification is best for the child, that the parent is in a position to take care of that child again, because we don't want that parent in that family to be beyond redemption because they used to be one way and they're no longer addicted to drugs and they really are on their feet. Now, we do want reunification. In that case, like, what do you think is the disconnect happening? How can we change that so reunification can actually be good for the child as well? So I think that one of the things we need to focus on is the timelines for kids, which is to say, yes, We don't want to say anyone is beyond redemption or that they can never clean up their act. But we have to ask a very hard question in the child welfare world, which is how long should a child have to wait? And when a child is, you know, 10 or 12 years old and they have like a bond with their parent and, you know, this parent was rendered, you know, for a couple of years or a year incapable of caring for them, and that child still has a strong relationship with that parent.

can go back to them, you know, that's amazing. When you have a child who is, say, born to a mother, and that child is born substance exposed, you know, that is already with drugs in their system. And then that child goes home with a parent who has an addiction problem. And month after month and year after year, we keep saying to that parent, okay, come back for more services, for more treatment, for another stint in rehab, you have to understand that child's timeline is different from an adult's timeline. When a judge says to that child, you know, come back and see me in six months and that child is two or three years old, that is a huge chunk of a child's life. And it is a huge chunk of the important developmental years that we are frittering away with not just,

you know, bureaucracy, but even attempts to give the parents one more chance. So as much as we have to have sympathy for the parents and provide whatever we can to help them, we also have to say at some point, this has to stop, and this child deserves to be in a safe, loving, permanent home. So the other aspect of what you were just asking about is, what can we do to ensure that there are more quality foster families out there? Because it's true. There are a lot of foster families who are in this for the wrong reasons. I should say that the likely, of being abused in foster care is much lower than the likelihood in the general population. So I think as much as those headlines catch our attention, because, of course, the state has stepped in and put that

child in that situation, and we should absolutely be outraged by these situations, it's also important to say that the vast majority of foster care situations are safe for kids. But still, we could be doing much better. And part of the book is really an exploration of organizations, non-profit organizations, and a lot of faith-based organizations out there and churches that are doing amazing work in this area that have really revolutionized the way that we recruit and train and support foster families so that when a child does have to be removed, we have an appropriate, safe and loving placement for them. And I want to talk to you a little bit more about that because you've also written about the efforts to undermine faith-based foster homes, group homes, and efforts to

actually make children secure. So I'll ask you about that in just one second, but I realized I kind of didn't finish my thought earlier, and it's more on this kind of equity piece that we were just talking about. When I was saying that typically when you see someone who commits a violent crime, they have had run-ins with the police, and they really should be in jail. These people shouldn't be on the street, but because in, you know, the name of equity, they're released. And then we see the same thing in these CPS situations that there were actually several, several times where the children should have been taken away permanently. And then by the time, you know, that child is reunited the last time, it's too late. One case that I'm reminded of is Melissa Lucio. She's actually on

death row right now in Texas. Her case is getting a lot of attention because of the Innocence Project, which my audience knows is a big problem with how they do things. I think they're very deceitful and propagandistic in their relaying of the people's stories that they are advocating for. And this is one case that I think is certainly indicative of that. She had had several interactions, she has 14 children. She had had several interactions with CPS from the early 90s to the 2000s. And the early 2000s, CPS came 2004.

They came to her home. found out that all of her children were neglected. None of her babies had any diapers on. They were covered in dried feces. They looked like they had even maybe been physically abused at times. The baby had ants crawling all over her. The baby tested positive for cocaine. And so her children were taken away from her, I think rightfully so. But then the children were reunited with her two years later, even though she was probably still on cocaine. Well, that little infant who had been covered in aunts at the beginning of her life was abused and then murdered by her mother. And, you know, now she's dead.

And she never really should have been reunified with her children. She had a long history of neglect. But I don't know if it was in the name of equity or what it was. CPS made the decision to give her back her children. And this is just one of many examples. I mean, you can just search for these kinds of stories, not just in the U.S., but also in the UK where social services knew that this child was being abused. And then, as you said, it's typically not a biological parent.

It's typically a partner, a boyfriend, you know, a living, whatever it is, someone who is not actually physically related to that child, then going on to abuse them, despite other outside family members trying to sound the alarms about these children. what else is the driving force behind, besides just woke ideology and equity and social justice, what else is driving CPS to reunify families at the expense of the safety of children? So aside from the ideology of just reunification at all costs, which I think is really there and the racial aspect of it, I think what we don't understand is that a lot of the people making, these decisions are really not capable of making them. They're young, they're inexperienced,

they're not properly trained, they're not well compensated. Some child welfare agencies in this country have a 40% turnover rate. And people don't understand what this job is when they get into it. And they don't have enough training or information in order to make these life or death decisions, frankly. Just kind of imagine yourself as like a, you know, 22-year-old, recent college graduate. You know, you're sent out to investigate some of these situations. You're being put in physical danger often. You know, you're going into, say, a public housing project. You're knocking on the door. You don't know who is on the other side. You are going to ask some very difficult questions of the people inside that apartment. You have to worry about whether you're going to be

threaten. And at the same time, you have to be taking in all this information about what is going on in the apartment, trying to assess what the kids would tell you if you could get them alone for a minute. It's really hard work. And I don't think these people know how to do it. Now, when you think about that work, the way I've described it, it sounds to you like, this is the work that police do, that we ask them to do every day. But we don't treat CPS the way we treat law enforcement. in a lot of ways. And we don't train them the way we train law enforcement to do these kinds of investigations. And we also see them as kind of optional. Like you saw during the pandemic, actually, quite a number of states actually furloughed CPS workers or told them that they could do their

jobs over Zoom or that they could just pull up in front of the house and say, hey, show me the kid, I'll stand over here and I'll see if, like, I think anything is going wrong. It is, It's outrageous what happened during the pandemic. A lot of kids were being abused more because of the, you know, remote situation. Many more families were isolated. They weren't being seen by teachers or doctors or neighbors. And our attitude with CPS was, well, you know, we'll get back to that work when the pandemic is over. So I think part of it is again. And we saw child abuse rates go up. I mean, obviously the nurses and doctors who didn't take a break during the pandemic, they attested to the fact that they saw. some of the worst cases of not just child abuse, but also just mental health deterioration among really young kids, suicidal attempts among five-year-olds. And so we're talking about a whole range of abuse that increased during the pandemic in part, in large part, because of what you're talking about, because all of the little accountability structures that we have, whether it's school, you've got teachers who are mandatory reporters when they see, when they're

suspicious of abuse, and then doctors, social workers, all. of that that was taken away from kids and the people who said that they were caring for the most vulnerable were the pro-lockdown people. And once again, I don't know why, even though kids are the most marginalized and the most vulnerable and the most subject to abuse class in the entire world, they are very rarely considered by the social justice empathy warriors to be a truly oppressed class that we need to advocate for. It's very strange. Yeah, the slogan, safer at home is a joke for these kids. I mean, it was just, you know, and like I said, you have the mandated reporters, but you also have kids who just weren't even seen by their

neighbors. I mean, once you tell everyone, you just lock your doors and stay at home, I mean, families that already had substance abuse issues, those were increased, and they didn't have any outlet for getting counseling, for helping with that. And what you saw, I mean, one national study found that you saw three times as many severe abuse cases coming to our emergency rooms. I mean, because under normal circumstances, you might have like a progression, you know, things that start out more minor. Once they get to the emergency room, those are severe abuse cases. And by that point, for many kids, it's almost too late. So to answer your question about, you know, why it is that we are making these decisions. And it's true, if you look at the statistics on

fatalities and near fatalities, you know, in some states, two-thirds of these kids have already either already been in the system and maybe their case was already dismissed. Many of them have open cases and we know what's going on in these homes and we are failing to act. There are, I think, some things that we could do better in terms of information. You know, many industries have been transformed by the use of big data. And I talk in my book about using some of the information we have on these families to make better decisions. So for instance, we might know if a child hasn't shown up to school in the last 30 days. If a family hasn't picked up their food stamps or used them, if someone who was recently incarcerated has listed that family's address as their new residents,

these are signs that when they're kind of plugged into a computer, you know, alert us not definitely abuse happened or definitely abuse didn't happen, but they tell us. who needs to be most urgently investigated and which kids need to be seen very soon? And I think that a lot of states could be making much better use of those tools to give some aid to these people who are asking to do these jobs. And, you know, one sociologist I talked to said to me, these decisions that are being made, they're no better than the flip of a coin. I think conservatives are rightly hesitant to trust CPS when we're.

we think about, I think especially over the last two years, our distrust of the government has really grown. And we have seen how government and government agencies are really weaponized against certain perspectives. And there really is an animosity towards things like homeschooling or parents who choose an alternate vaccine schedule. And so I think especially with COVID and the restrictions surrounding that, a lot of parents are worried that CPS is going to come after them simply because of their world deal, because of their politics, because they're deciding to raise their child with maybe a religious or political perspective that the government doesn't agree with. And I think that there's maybe a healthy fear there. I don't think that that is what is happening

necessarily right now, although we are seeing in places like Canada, parents who refuse to call a child by a different pronoun or go along with the child's transition, those parents are under attacked by the government. So I think it's okay for us to have a healthy fear. Like any bureaucracy, things can get out of control. Things can be weaponized against people because of their beliefs. And so I want people to understand that what we're talking about is having a healthy safety net and hedge of protection for children who really need it. And the ideology and just, I guess, the common practice right now of CPS is actually putting kids at risk in the name of creating, you know, a safer and more equitable world. And one of the ways that they are doing that, one of the ways that they are undermining their stated mission is by undermining the efforts of faith-based organizations who are trying to help kids in the child welfare system.

So can you talk more about what is going on there and why? Sure. So I think you're exactly right about the healthy skepticism that conservatives have here. You know, there are definitely cases in which child welfare agencies are trying to sort of do social engineering. Like they don't want foster parents. In California, it's hard to be a foster parent unless you agree to support your foster child's gender transition. So there are absolutely big problems with the system. But what worries me is that conservatives have been, very much taken a hands-off approach to child welfare for a long time now. They have conservative legislators and governors have sort of allowed child welfare agencies to kind of operate on their own. And they are completely populated by a certain kind of person with a certain kind of ideology.

And that is not helpful. Conservatives need to be at the table for discussions about child welfare policy. Sometimes when I talk to legislators, I get the sense that they don't want to be at the table because they don't want to be called racist and they don't want to be called cheap for not giving more money to child welfare. So they just stay away. But what happens is then you create a vacuum in that vacuum is filled by people who want to, as you say, weaponize the child welfare system. So we need to be at the table. And one of the ways that conservatives and I think people of faith in particular have been at the table and have been showing up for these kids in the last number of years is through these faith-based foster agencies and programs that recruit and train

and support foster and adoptive family. So I just want to kind of give a little bit of a sense of how they have really transformed this area before I talk about kind of the ways that I think people are trying to push them out of it. The first thing that they recognized is that our recruitment of foster parents is just, it was terrible. Putting up a picture of a child on the nightly news and saying, does anyone want this kid is not a good way to find foster parents. But foster parents were calling agencies and they weren't even getting their calls returned. So a lot of these agencies and churches, mega churches, particularly in the Midwest and the South, said, okay, well, how can we help? We will act as kind of the go-between. And we will have pastors actually go and say to people,

these are the six kids in our zip code tonight who need homes. That is a very urgent and important message, and people really took them up on it. A lot of these agencies also volunteered to do training. You know, the state says, oh, you need to know things like how many fire extinguishers to have in your home. And these agency says, fine, we'll tell them how many fire extinguishers they need to have, but we're also going to teach them how to handle kids who have been traumatized. That is a much more important skill in many ways than handling a fire extinguisher. And the last thing they did is they supported foster families. About half of foster parents quit within the first year. And one of the reasons is because they're not supported. They feel like they're in this by themselves. And so a lot of these groups now sort of say, you have to bring other people with you, your neighbors and friends who will volunteer to do respite care, to help you build furniture at the last minute,

or just to pray for you during these times, which are going to be really trying. So this has been a hugely successful effort in terms of recruiting middle-class, American families of faith into these efforts. But now you have these activists in state and federal governments, you know, who are saying, well, if these agencies are not placing kids with gay families in particular, then we want to run them out of business. And you actually had a Supreme Court case last year where Catholic Charities was fighting the city of Philadelphia. The city said, we don't want you helping these kids anymore, as if, you know, there's some excess of people to help these kids. And Catholic Charities won. But it's amazing because despite the fact that they won, we're almost a year out of that decision. And there are still people all over this country who are trying to sue these organizations out of existence.

Mm-hmm. Once again, this goes back to what you were saying, is that at least the progressive side of this system and many systems in the U.S. is really thinking about the wants, not even the needs, but the wants of adults, not the needs of children. What is going to make adults feel better? What is going to be less likely to hurt a gay couple's feelings? not, well, what is in the best interest of children? And wow, we could get into so many things that I know is not the point of your book, like the whole reproductive and fertility industry, that also does the same thing, sacrificing a child's well-being at the expense of whatever adults want. And it's basically this giant social experiment. We like to say that children are always the unconsenting subjects of progressive social experiments and really always have been dating back to almost the beginning of humanity. there's always been a form of child sacrifice. There's always been a form of exploiting children because they always have been physically and mentally defenseless.

And then there's also this, a part of this, this undermining of a child's well-being, going back to the equity conversation, that there is a push among these activists going all the way back to Malcolm X, maybe before, to not place black children. children with white parents. Is that something that is pretty pervasive and is preventing black children from having safe homes? It is shockingly pervasive. We actually have a federal law in the book called the Multi-ethnic Placement Act, which was passed in the 1990s by a bipartisan group in Congress that says you may not discriminate when it comes to placing a child for foster care or adoption. And that law is routinely flouted. It is amazing.

amazing. You hear judges openly talking about race matching in court. You hear social workers talking about it in front of parents. And a lot of foster parents, unfortunately, and adopted parents are not aware of the laws on the books. And so they don't understand how to press their, you know, the best interest of the child here according to the law. And what's amazing is that since that law was passed, tens of thousands more black children have been able to find home. homes. But groups like the National Association of Black Social Workers basically say that they would rather have kids in group homes or just remain in foster care indefinitely rather than be placed with a family of a different race. Or probably just remain with their biological family who is

mistreating them. I would guess that that is also their preference to going with a safe home of someone of a different race. Yes, that's absolutely true. And I should say because I think a lot of people are very nervous about this topic. They feel like, well, wouldn't it be better? Wouldn't we could have more cultural sensitivity? They'd be able to talk to their kids more about Trayvon Martin or whatever. I mean, if you look at the longitudinal studies on adoption, there is absolutely no difference in the outcomes for black children who have been adopted by black families and black children who have adopted by white families. No difference in educational outcomes, income outcomes, even things like self-esteem.

And there is no acknowledgement that what these kids need, no matter what their skin color, is a safe, loving, permanent home because these racial activists are so concerned with skin color and race matching. And what seems to really be the differentiating factor in these families, white or black or whatever their racial background is,

versus families who are not adopting, is actually the faith aspect. I mean Christians, particularly evangelical Christians, people of all faiths, of course, adopt and become foster parents. But there is a disproportionately high number of evangelical Christians black and white who adopt. And so really, it looks like that is probably one of the deciding factors in the well-being of children who end up in these homes, not the racial makeup of the family. Are you going into a secure home, a loving home, but also are you going into a home that has values that sees you as someone who is valuable and is worth loving, who can model unconditional love to you? And a lot of people get that from scripture and from their faith community.

And so it's tragic to me, it's tragic to me that those efforts are being undermined, both in the name of, you know, I don't know, anti-homophobia, but also, anti-racism, again, the sacrifice that's being made as a child's well-being. Yeah, absolutely. The faith is so important, and it really plays in two particular ways. One is, as you say, guiding families, the values that they're raising children with, the feeling that they're being called to do this very hard thing. It's really important to say, you know, a lot of ordinary people, if you ask them, like, would you take a stranger's child into your home and raise them as your own, a lot of people would say, that's just too hard. Nobody is asking me to do that.

But a lot of the evangelical Christians I mean say, God has asked me to do this. I feel this calling. And the other thing is a little bit of what I was mentioning before, which is when they are part of that church, they get the support that they need from their community to do this work. It is really hard to be a foster parent in a vacuum. It's not enough to just say, like, I have nice neighbors, because when push comes to shove, you need people who are really going to step up and do some hard work with you. And the church communities, they're not the only group that's ever going to do that, but they are the group that seems to be most reliably doing it. Yeah, I agree with you.

But it seems like just like everything else, the efforts that are coming in a form progressives don't like are, they're just kind of pushed to the side and they're undermined. It doesn't matter what the outcomes are. Again, it's the same thing with abolishing the purpose. police, it doesn't matter that violent crime is up everywhere, that homicides are up everywhere, especially in the cities that have taken funds away from the police. It doesn't matter that disproportionately the victims of these crimes and the perpetrators of these crimes are black Americans, the very people, these same left-wing activists say that they care about.

With progressivism, it is always the intention, not the conclusion of their policy. So if their intention is so-called inclusion or empathy or diversity or equity. It really doesn't matter if the conclusion of those policies is catastrophic. If it actually harms the very people, they set out to protect. It's almost, in my opinion, every progressive policy is like that. But it's particularly devastating when you're talking about children. Can you talk a little bit more just about what changes specifically you would like to see? Like, if you could describe, your ideal child welfare system that really takes care of children and families, what would that look like?

So I think, you know, child protective services, I think we would get better, well-trained people to be doing this work. I think we would be using data to better understand which kids are most at risk. I think family courts would be transformed into courts that are actually following the laws that are on the books, both in terms of the timelines, ensuring that kids are not living. in foster care forever, ensuring that we're not making decisions based on their race. I think we probably need a lot more judges. I think we need a lot more oversight of family court. Family court decisions are very rarely appealed because people don't really understand what the law is

and there are endless delays in these courts, which are just putting kids' lives on hold. I think we need to do a better job of replicating the models that these faith-based organizations are engaged in to make sure that everywhere in the country, there are high-quality, well-trained foster parents who could take in these kids if they need homes. We should have a surplus of these families. We should be ensuring that when a child enters the system, there are a bunch of places that are options for that child. You know, because right now you might have one child enter the system and there might be one open foster bed. That family might not be prepared to take in a teenager or a baby, and it doesn't matter.

They're just going to shove you into that system because that's the only place they have left. In a couple of states now, over the summer, for instance, you had in Texas 400 kids were sleeping in offices because we don't have appropriate places for them. We have stopped recruiting foster families. We have stopped funding congregate care, even for kids with serious mental health and behavioral health needs.

We are not thinking about what these kids need, All we're thinking about is what the adults want. So ultimately, I think we need to reorient the child welfare system around the best interests of children. Wow, you've given me a lot to think about. And honestly, I feel more sure to get involved in it. And my kind of preconceived notion, just or impression of what I've seen on social media, CPS kind of being exclusively heavy-handed and the taking away of children has really been challenged by what I read in your book and what you said today. And it made me realize something that I already knew is that so many of the cases of child murder that we see, of child abuse that we see is at the hands of people who have already been investigated by the police or CPS social services many times. And those children are reunified with really no logical reasoning beyond while we want to reunify a family that can't be the highest goal. That can't be the only goal. The main goal has to be.

the well-being of the child, but we also have to define well-being in very clear terms, because, again, that can be weaponized. If this is a progressive bureaucracy and they see well-being as transitioning to child's gender or being indoctrinated in a certain ideology or being forced to go to public school rather than homeschooled, well, that can definitely be weaponized,

but the answer for conservatives. And this is why this is also a really, like, precarious issue, because I could actually see the left and the right uniting on this move to abolish CPS or to like take power away from CPS and maybe in some ways, you know, for good reason, the suspicion at least. But I think we have to be more thoughtful, as you said about that, that just like so many parts of the government, it may not be in itself bad. It may actually be very useful. And so abolition is not the answer. but thoughtfulness is the answer, which means, as you said, conservative politicians have to be involved. There is a very prominent conservative in our area who is on the board of CPS, which I'm so thankful for.

Like, I feel very comforted knowing that she's there. But the rest of us have to stop just seeing CPS in the same way that a lot of people see public education as exclusively something to demonize and something that we actually need to infuse goodness into. And, you know, we like to say raise a respectful. about and really get involved in ourselves. Do you have any more tips for people who are realizing, wow, okay, I need to know more about this and get involved in it and realize maybe there are steps that we can take just as average people to make this thing better for kids? Yeah. So I think that, you know, one of the areas that I really am concerned about, like I said, is family court. And although there are some CASA organizations that are going a little crazy, I think a lot of CASA

organizations are great opportunity for people to get a good view of what's going on in the system to understand whether these children's interests are being properly represented. And the other thing is that I want more eyes on what's going on in the system. I want, you know, ordinary, you know, middle class, you know, educated people to go into these courtrooms and look around and say, is this the court that I think we should have in this community? Are they following the law? Is this like a kangaroo court or something or what's going on here? So just getting involved in that way.

Also, I should say that a lot of these faith-based organizations, when I say that they're doing foster care, they have also acknowledged that not everyone is going to take a child into their home and foster them. But there are all sorts of other ways that you could help foster kids, even if you are not personally responsible for one. Supporting foster families, making your church or your community, more foster friendly so that that child feels like they are welcomed not just by that individual family, but by the whole community, understanding what it's going to be like if your neighbor takes in a traumatized child, what that child might behave like, offering to babysit that child

if that couple needs to, you know, go out to dinner one night to get a break. So there are, I think, all sorts of ways that we can kind of get involved. There's another organization that actually tries to match the needs of kids going into foster care with church communities. So one thing that a lot of child welfare workers waste time doing or not waste time, but they often are the ones who have to go to Walmart to pick out clothes or to pick up a car seat or something like that. There are groups that now say, like, if you put this need online, we have whole communities that could probably fill that need instantly because so many of our families have these things just sitting in their basements or their kitchens. So I think that there's a lot we can do both to fulfill the needs of

these kids literally, but also to make sure that these systems are operating in a way that we would want them to operate if our kids were in them. Yes, absolutely. And do you happen to know the names of a couple of those organizations that people can look up off the top of your head? If not, it's okay. We can include links in the description if you can send to us later. But if you know of them. Would you mind listing them? Yeah. So one of my favorite organizations is called Project 127. It's based in Colorado.

And it does a lot of great work in terms of recruiting and training and supporting foster families. There are a few interesting organizations that are in Arkansas that I've written about. One is called Immerse. One is called The Call,

which recruits foster families. And they also have programs for youth who are transitioning out of care. One of the biggest problems many people know about in the foster care system is kids aging out with any kind of family connection. And so in Little Rock, there are these programs, you know, where kids are, you know, they help kids find housing, education, a place to do laundry, you know, take driver's license exams, all sorts of things that we don't think about with our own kids when they reach that age because we've trained them to do all these things and we

navigate these systems for them, but older kids in foster care don't have those people. So I'd recommend them too. And I'm just curious. I wonder what local churches are doing. Lots of churches have lots of different programs. Not every church can do every single kind of ministry, but maybe that's something that we can think about, that the audience can think about, certainly that I'm thinking about, is what can my local church do in our own small but significant way to help these kids who are transitioning out or to get our families involved and child advocacy and foster care and some of the organizations, everyone can do something. Not everyone can do everything.

That's not what we're called to, but everyone can do something. And gosh, if we care about the most vulnerable in our society, if we truly care about the voiceless, we've got to care about children. And it just, gosh, it just goes to show we could have a whole other 30 minutes talking about the dangers of this ideology. but when you see the world through the lens of this kind of critical race theory, progressive lens, when you see it through that of white, evil, black oppressed, and you view the world in every system and the idea of right and wrong through that lens, you actually end up hurting people.

When you think that the biggest threat to people is white supremacist, evangelicalism, you are failing to see things as they are. You are failing to see all the different forms of oppression that come in all different kinds of colors and socioeconomic backgrounds. And then you are failing to actually help victims. As you said, poignantly a few minutes ago, the question should always be not just for the judge, but also for us, for politicians, for average people is, is this child in danger? That is the question that we have to ask. And you've asked that and answered that really well in your book. How can people find you and support you? So I work at the American Enterprise Institute and I have a web page there, AEI.org.

You can order my book on Amazon, of course, and, you know, reach out to me through the AEI page. I'm happy to connect with people who are interested in getting more involved in this world. We have some videos up that kind of demonstrate some of the problems in the system that I'd love for people to share. And, you know, get involved in any way that you think, you know, is appropriate for you. because there are so many kids out there who are in need of adults, not only direct mentorship and help, but also adults who are willing to get their hands dirty and be at the table to influence these important policy decisions.

Thank you so much. This was very informative, and I know people are going to learn a lot. So I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us. Thank you. I appreciate it. Hey, this is Steve Dase. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issue,

facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV

or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.