James Dobson, Jeffrey Epstein, and the Theology of Abuse
James Dobson’s 1980s article on "forgiving abusive fathers" resurfaced in Jeffrey Epstein’s 2005 emails, sent to groomed minors as manipulative guidance—blaming daughters for anger while excusing male cruelty. Epstein’s interest reflects Dobson’s theology of patriarchal submission, which Focus on the Family exported to post-Soviet Russia via translations and conferences, shaping Putin’s anti-liberal family policies. Epstein files also link Dobson to figures like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, exposing a broader pattern: unchecked male dominance, whether in parenting, governance, or predation, thrives when victims are taught to bear the burden of forgiveness. [Automatically generated summary]
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus and our live stream for today.
We're here to talk about James Dobson and his name appearing in the Epstein files.
So last week, we had a bunch of emails that were released, and they're not all the emails.
They're not the unredacted emails.
They're not any of that.
But they did reveal a bunch of names and a bunch of new information.
And so we'll get into that today.
There's a whole bunch of folks who we now know were communicating with Epstein or talking to Epstein about partying or taxes or whatever.
That includes Peter Thiel.
That includes Elon Musk.
That includes Woody Allen.
That includes a lot of people.
And it's disturbing.
It's hard to think about these folks being in contact with him after he was convicted as a sex offender, as somebody committing sex crimes.
But here we are, Noam Chomsky's in there, all kinds of folks.
Now, what I want to talk about today is basically the fact that in addition to Sergey Brin and Bill Gates and Deepak Chopra, there's a lot of names in there.
David Brooks, Peter Attia, et cetera.
James Dobson's name pops up in the Epstein files.
So I want to sort of get into that and why that's there.
And I want to use that to talk about why Epstein saw Dobson as somebody who was giving useful advice to young women.
So that's a question.
Why is Dobson, a conservative Christian, somebody that Epstein thinks gives good advice to young women?
From there, we're going to go to something that I don't think anyone else is talking about, and that is the connections that Dobson had to Russia and how the Russia connection overlaps with Epstein's interest in Russia.
So all of that is there.
So we're going to start with Epstein and Dobson.
We're going to go to Dobson and Russia, and then we're going to circle all the way back to see how they all fit together.
The absolute best person doing work on James Dobson right now, to me, is D.L. Mayfield.
And so D.L. Mayfield posted this on February 1st.
For the past few months, I've been painstakingly making my case that Dr. James Dobson, a focus on the family, created parenting materials that appealed to pedophiles.
And guess what?
Epstein apparently thought so too, because he sent a Dobson article on forgiving your abusive father to one of the girls he was grooming/slash abusing.
DL Mayfield, Christopher Mayfield at Strong Willed are doing amazing work.
DL Mayfield's writing about this on Substack.
And so if you're interested in Dobson, if you're interested in deep dives about how Dobson's theology and parenting advice was made or at least contoured for people that are pedophiles, that argument is being made by DL Mayfield, and you should go check them out.
They're doing amazing work.
Okay.
So what happens in this email?
So as Mayfield references, we have this email that Epstein sends to one of these girls.
And in it, he mentions James Dobson.
So what's going on there?
Let's pull up the interview here.
All right.
So Epstein is talking to folks, or I'm sorry, Epstein's talking to a young woman who is looking for advice.
And this woman is, if you read the email, is worried about making somebody that she seemed to be seeing feel bad.
And she's wondering why she's willing to spare the feelings of this person she's involved with, but not her own father.
And Epstein goes into this advice about how he says, ask yourself why you're so angry at him, meaning her father.
And he's basically like, you need to consider what makes you angry about your father and why you are willing to take that out on your dad, but not on this person you seem to be seeing romantically, sexually, whatever.
So he then, if you see at the bottom of the screen here, he then says, yeah, go check out this article by James Dobson.
That's the next piece of advice.
So the next question is, well, what is in that article?
And that article is a lot of things, but it's an article Dobson wrote that is giving advice to a woman who had an emotionally abusive father.
A father who did not attend important events in her son's life, who refused to connect with her, was neglectful, and so on.
And so one of the things Dobson says in the article, your dad never met the needs that a father should satisfy in his little girl.
And I think you are still hoping he will miraculously become what he's never been.
Therefore, he constantly disappoints you, hurts you, rejects you.
I think you will be less vulnerable to pain when you accept the fact that he cannot, nor will he ever provide the love and empathy and interest that he should.
It is not easy to insulate yourself in this way.
I'm still working to plug a few vacuums for my own tender years, but it hurts less to expect nothing than to hope in vain.
I would guess that your dad's own childhood experiences account for his emotional peculiarities and can perhaps be viewed as his own unique handicapped.
If he were blind, you would love him despite his lack of vision.
In a sense, he is emotionally blind.
He is unable to see your needs.
He isn't aware of the hurt behind the unpleasant incidents and disagreements, the funeral of your baby, the disinterest in your life, and now Bob's wedding.
His handicap makes it impossible for him to perceive your feelings and anticipation.
If you can accept your father as a man with a permanent handicapped, one which was probably caused when he was vulnerable, you will shield yourself from the ice pick of rejection.
Now, there's a whole lot to say here about Epstein prescribing this article and what this article says.
Grace Baskerville, writing at Life Saving Divorce, I think sums this up really well.
And I don't agree with everything Grace Baskerville believes and does and writes, but here I think Grace did a really helpful job.
She says, what this shows us is this.
Epstein chastises the victim for being angry at her father.
He tells her she knew she was hurting him, and he reframes that anger as a moral failure on the woman's part.
The woman is the one messing up because she's angry at her father.
And he asks her to ask herself, why are you so angry at him, her dad?
He immediately follows this by recommending Dobson's article.
Now, Dobson's article was not neutral advice.
This was not just sort of like, oh, yeah, check this out.
It might be helpful.
It might be not.
As I just read, the article addresses a woman whose father was neglectful and cruel.
This is a father who skipped the funeral of her infant child.
And Dobson, instead of saying, hey, this is abuse, this is neglect, this is a failing on his part.
Here's what he does.
And I just read this, but I think it's worth going over in detail.
He reframes cruelty as emotional blindness or a permanent handicap.
He takes moral agency away from the father.
This is Grace Baskerville still.
He shifts responsibility away from the perpetrator and he places the emotional labor on the victim.
He treats her anger as the central problem to be solved.
And then he shifts the entire moral center of the story by putting the responsibility on the victim rather than on the perpetrator.
In the article, Dobson is basically saying this is a you problem.
The moral issue, the moral agency is with you and with you only.
Your father was hurt in the past, and therefore he has nothing he can offer or do.
He cannot fix that.
He cannot change that.
This is really interesting to think about in the context of Dobson's like parenting advice and the ways that he would think about shaping children.
The idea that you would just end up with somebody who was permanently, emotionally incapable of responding seems to go counter to that, but that's for another day.
Now, for Grace Baskerville, and I agree with her here, by making the woman's anger the problem to solve, not her father's, we find precisely why this framing is useful for predators like Jeffrey Epstein.
He's not just recommending inspirational reading, Baskerville says.
He's actively redirecting a victim's moral compass away from self-protection and toward empathy for male wrongdoing.
And I agree with that.
Like all of the wrongdoing, all of the agency, all of the introspection, it's all her responsibility.
The person that's doing something abusive or neglectful or hurtful is completely exonerated.
And it just so happens to be the father and the abuser.
Baskerville points out that this follows a classic Darvo pattern.
Deny, attack, reverse victim, reverse victim and offender.
And this is what makes Dobson's response useful to Epstein as he's grooming this young woman.
It's the structure of the advice itself.
It's the way that it turns it around on her.
Okay.
So Dobson denies, he minimizes the father's behavior.
He never names it as abuse.
He never calls it something that is toxic or out of bounds.
He simply just reduces it to emotional blindness.
He reframes cruelty as emotional peculiarity or a permanent handicap, and it softens everything involved in the case.
And then attack.
Dobson subtly redirects the problem onto Martha's needs and expectations.
You are still hoping.
You will be less vulnerable.
It hurts less to expect nothing.
Her wanting to be loved is the problem.
Her expecting something reasonable from her father, a parent, is the problem.
You're the problem, not him.
There's never a situation here where he's the problem.
He is the one who gets all the empathy, not her.
There's no sense of her going through this as somehow painful.
There's no sense that Dobson's interested in what she's experiencing, only him.
And you can imagine why this appeals to Epstein.
It's never about her pain.
It's never about her getting what she needs, being safe, being secure, being protected.
It's simply about making sure that the father, the man, is empathized with and exonerated and protected.
All right.
So he then reverses the victim and offender.
He casts the father as the one who deserves sympathy.
It was he who was hurt.
It was he who has wounds that can't be healed.
It was he who must be felt sorry for.
You, the woman, the daughter, you need to lower your expectations.
You need to shield yourself.
Now, Dobson is infamous as the evangelical voice of family, parenting, and gender advice.
He was ubiquitous in the 80s and 90s.
Truly one of the most influential figures in Christian America, despite not being a pastor.
If you grew up in this world, you heard him on the radio.
The books were in your house.
His curricula was taught in your Sunday school.
James Dobson was a voice that was making its way into your family.
He taught corporal punishment.
He taught strict gender rules.
He taught that men and boys are aggressive, uncivilized savages who can only be tamed by a good, godly woman.
He taught that women are more passive than men, that they need to be those who preserve society through their virtue and ethics, and they need to satisfy the sexual needs of their partners so that those partners don't destroy society.
I wrote all about this in my book.
I've been writing about Dobson for a while.
It's in Preparing for War.
There's been great work going back a long time by Audrey Claire Farley and by Sarah Mosliner, not to mention many others.
Here's a couple of quotes from Dobson's book, Bringing Up Girls.
And you can see in here, as you think about Epstein, you can see in here some of the things that might have appealed to Epstein, the groomer, as you think about, as you see these.
If a girl sees herself as a lady, she will expect her escort to behave like a gentleman.
He will respect her if she respects herself.
So who is the responsibility on here?
Who is the one that must be virtuous?
It is the woman.
Women hold the keys to masculine behavior.
Not men.
If you're a man, it's a woman.
It's a girl.
They determine your behavior.
No responsibility.
Don't have to worry about it.
Not your problem.
It's hers.
Guys are inclined to take what they can, meaning guys are inclined to take what they can.
That's how they're built.
If they take what they can and you don't say no or you don't say no loud enough, well, that's how they were made.
That's their nature.
They're aggressive and savage and sexually uncivilized.
And that's just how it goes.
A girl's sense of self-worth and personal dignity are directly linked to what she believes her father thinks of her.
Now, here we go.
A girl's sense of self-worth and personal dignity are directly linked to what she believes her father thinks of her.
And you can just see here all of the like toxic ideas.
There's no doubt that we all want parents, whoever our parents are, fathers, mothers, et cetera, to love us and care for us, to provide a secure attachment and all of that.
But there's just this built-in patriarchal misogynist sense here that a woman's life depends on her father.
And Dobson says in other places that if a young girl can sit on her father's lap and feel secure and hugged and all this stuff, that someday she will be a great partner who pleases her husband.
That a girl's life basically goes from the approval of her father to the approval of her husband.
That is how she's defined.
That is how she's relationally embedded.
That is her destiny and her fate.
Because that's how women were made.
Men were made one way, women were made the other.
And as I'm talking and you're thinking about Epstein, you can just start to feel like, oh, okay, yep, this starts to, this starts to make sense.
Why Epstein Found Dobson's Advice Plausible00:03:11
This starts to make sense a little bit as to why Epstein would be somebody who thought Dobson was giving good advice.
Like, you can start to see something weird, but not shocking, which is that like Epstein, this guy that seems to have nothing to do with religion, whose life is about money and power, whose life is about control and prestige and partying with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and everyone else, Thinks that an authoritarian,
conservative Christian family guru is the guy that he's using to give advice to the girls he's grooming.
That's enough.
I mean, that's enough to think through how this theology, this sense of family and gender and parenting is toxic.
That when you envision the father, as Dobson does, as an authoritarian head of the family whose legitimacy and decision-making are unquestionable, if the father is the voice of God in your home, and if you question him, you question God himself, and therefore you're sinful and you deserve punishment, maybe to be hit.
If you say that as a man, not only do you have the authority, but you also have a nature that is uncontrollable sexually, that you're both supposed to be the responsible head of the family and the church and society, and you are this sexually uncivilized savage who can only be controlled by a woman, who can only be controlled if the woman firmly says no, who can only be civilized if he's in a marital relationship where whenever he wants,
however he wants, sex is to be offered to him by his partner.
And if she says no, that is a failing on her part.
If you're teaching this kind of theology, there's a point when someone, a groomer, a predator, like Jeffrey Epstein is going to come along and say, yeah, that actually tracks.
I want the women who I have under my control or who I am trying to groom to think of me as an unquestionable, legitimate voice that is transcendent and all-powerful.
That is what I'm after.
Like, there's a weird thing here, right, that gets revealed.
And I think many of you listening and watching know this already, but it's worth saying.
If you claim to be the representative of authoritarian God in your home or in your marriage, if you claim to be the stand-in for God, at some point, your ideas are going to cross over with gross predators who claim to be God and have control over.
Absolute control.
Disgusting.
Just despicable control over other people's bodies.
To have the right to torture them, to have the right to groom them, to have the right to take them away to an island and do things where no one will see.
That's going to come.
So if you're interested in more on this, I cannot recommend D.L. Mayfield's work enough.
DL and me and Crispin Mayfield have a podcast called Strong Willed.
Russia's Values Shift00:15:27
you can go to their newsletter as well.
And there's more there to see.
I want to turn though to something that I don't think other folks are talking about.
And that is the ways that all of this sort of ties into Russia and Putin.
And you're like, Brad, this is a big jump.
What's going on here?
How are you going to land that plane?
Let me say a couple of things first.
Epstein was, if you read the emails, was overwhelmingly interested in trying to connect with Putin.
And there's a lot of different rabbit holes to go down on the internet and ways that you can try to track these relationships down.
I'm not going to claim to have a detailed, like minute understanding of all that.
I have not spent the time on that side of the Epstein files.
What I have spent time getting through the material is this.
Epstein was trying hard to connect with Putin.
He was connecting with Putin's allies and lieutenants.
There were folks brokering meetings.
There's some people that think he was a Russian spy who was doing things like running a honeypot trap for Putin and the Russian government.
I'm not going to sit here and say I have a definitive take on that or that I know that.
But I do want to draw a link between Putin's authoritarianism, Putin's theology of the family and sex and gender, James Dobson, and Jeffrey Epstein.
So if you'll hang with me here for a few more minutes, I'm going to do that.
There's a great book that a lot of people don't know about, and I'm going to put it on the screen, but I'll also hold it up right now.
It's called The Moralist International, The Moralist International.
Okay, it's by Christina Stokel and Dmitry Usliner.
And this book does something that I haven't really seen in many other places.
It shows that at the end of Soviet communism.
So some of you all got to do some history with me.
Some of you lived through this.
Some of you didn't.
Hang with me.
At the end of Soviet communism, there was a kind of moral crisis in Russia.
So think through this with me.
We're talking about 1989, 1990.
This is the end of the Soviet era.
Things are not going well.
It's crumbling.
The Berlin Wall falls.
And in 89 and 90, you have this sort of like communism at its last breath.
And eventually things fall apart.
1991, the Soviet Union, in essence, disbands.
And what happens there is something really interesting and something that really sets the stage, I think, for the rest of today.
The list of collective grievances at the end of communism was long.
How do people, how does a society, how does a church find the language to address these grievances?
So people at the end of communism were fed up.
They were resentful.
They were grieved.
They were tired.
They were exhausted.
They were looking for stability.
They were looking for a new way forward.
And in many ways, they were looking for freedom and liberty from an authoritarian state, from a murderous state, from an oppressive regime.
But what they say here is this, three decades after the end of the Soviet Union, the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church settled on the language in the story.
What Russia really needs is a return to traditional values and to faith in God and the fatherland.
The enemies, liberalism, individualism, secularism.
Now, you might be thinking, that sounds a lot like what I hear American conservatives saying.
And you would be right.
So one of the arguments that they make in the book is that what Russia experienced in the 1990s was what most of Western Europe and the United States experienced in the 1960s.
Igor Khan, who is a Russian sociologist, claimed that Russian society experienced everything that took place in the West in the 1960s with a delay of 25 years.
If we follow Khan, then Russian moral conservatism emerged as a reaction to the dislocations of the 1980s and 90s, the country's dramatic encounter with the spirit of the 60s.
The resulting moral panics and the rise of conservative ideology is not unique to Russia.
Rather, it's a reflection of the global pattern of a society facing the process of the formation of new sexual erotic norms and values.
To translate that, 1960s, whether it's 1968 France or the Summer of Love in the United States, saw new forms of family, sexuality, and love emerge.
Maybe not new, but at least making their way to the mainstream.
The sexual revolution, women's liberation, queer liberation, and so on.
And if you know the history of James Dobson, if you know the history of the religious right, if you know the history of white evangelicalism in this country, you know that the 1960s are the moment where they think everything went wrong.
That that is when they lost the country.
That is when God lost the country.
That is when we went away from our founding as a Christian nation.
60s, when women demanded equal rights in the workplace, when no-fault divorce became legal, when families became something other than simply what they called the traditional family, which was never traditional and never permanent or evergreen, but nonetheless, the nuclear family of a man and a woman in a heterosexual relationship with children, this was held up as the bedrock of civilization.
If you read Chelsea Ebens' work, if you read my forthcoming book, American Caesar, this is laid out in detail.
But the 1960s are this moment where they're like, no, no, no, we got to get this under control.
And as I argue in preparing for war, the 1960s are the time where they come up with this idea of the nuclear family as the bedrock of civilization.
The nuclear family as the divine institution.
And the nuclear family becomes the basis of Christian doctrine.
And the nuclear family is how you decide that abortion is murder.
Feminism is evil.
Homosexuality is an unforgivable sin.
And so on and so on and so on.
But the argument here is this.
Russia experienced that kind of sexual liberation in the 90s, 1990, 1991, 20, 30 years after the United States, after France, after other places.
So in light of that, there was all of these people, these powerful men, just like in the United States, or in the United States where he had big business and the religious right and Catholic intellectuals all worried.
How do we get control of society again?
Because the people of color and the immigrants and the women and the gays, they all have too much representation and rights.
And this is getting out of hand.
How are we going to stop them?
And that continues today.
It's not like that's ever stopped, but it emerges in the 60s.
How are we going to stop?
All of these women and gays and immigrants and people of color and Asians and black people and Latinos and everyone else, they are just, they just kind of think they're like, I don't know, they have rights and representation that they, I don't know, have as much say in this country as we do.
What are we going to do?
That's what's happening in Russia in the 90s.
Okay.
So one of the ways they get control in the wake of communism, which was, some of you know this, some of you don't.
Communism in Russia was overwhelmingly atheistic.
The church was suppressed and all that is to bring in a discourse of family values, God, and the homeland.
If you listen to Putin now, if you listen to Russian state propaganda now, it is all about family values, traditional marriage, the spiritual heritage of Russia, the Christian identity of Russia as part of a great civilization.
That's not an accident.
As they show Usliner and Stokel in their book, where did they get the framework for a patriarchal, Christian-sanctioned, heteronormative idea of the family as the bedrock of a strong nation?
Where did that come from?
You guessed it.
James Dobson.
The American Christian organization, Focus on the Family, was active in Russia in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The first contacts between Russia and Focus on the Family go back to the late 1980s.
Dr. Dobson answers your questions, one of his books, was translated into Russian in 1991.
If you read the entire book, the picture you get is this.
Russian academics and sociologists, those who also had a say in how public discourse was shaped, those in government leadership, and eventually the Russian Orthodox Church, they saw the American discourse on family values, gender, patriarchy, family, as the way to stabilize Russian society and control it.
They invited Dobson to speak in Russia.
They wanted and welcomed the World Congress of Families to bring its anti-abortion activism to Russia.
They wanted American evangelicals to show up and to bring with them these ideals of the nuclear family, of heteronormative men and women in a stable bedrock of civilization kind of family.
This was the way forward to make sure that Russia didn't descend into the democratized, egalitarian.
Everybody has a say kind of pluralist society that they feared the most.
Co-mission, focus on the family, and the pro-life activism of the World Congress of Families all share the same pattern.
In the late years of Perestoika in the early 1990s, Russian society experienced a moral crisis.
But the Russian Orthodox Church was not yet a serious contender on the new free market of ideas, or rather, it was one among several.
This allowed foreign actors, especially American evangelicals, to step in and fill the gap of moral teaching on traditional Christian values.
So to finish up this section and then to do some big takeaways for today, and then I can answer a couple of questions if there are any.
If you examine what Putin says today about abortion, about family, about immigrants, gays and lesbians, about queerness, if you see the way he frames it as appealing to the sacred family, appealing to Christian heritage, appealing to the civilization of Russia and its proud Russian Orthodox Church.
One of the ways to trace where those ideas come from is in the 80s and 90s through organizations like James Dobson.
James Dobson was held up as a guru, as a paragon of morality, as the one who would bring the right framework to Russia.
And 30 years later, you see that adopted in Putin.
Now, let's stop and let's make the whole thing fit together.
Okay?
You ready?
Dobson, Epstein, and Putin.
Here's what I'm not saying.
I'm not saying that there's some like triangle where Epstein and Dobson and Putin were all communicating with each other.
I'm not saying that there's some secret conspiratorial set of communications among them.
There's no sense that Epstein knew Dobson.
There's no sense that Dobson knew Epstein.
There's none of that.
So I'm not saying any of that.
But what I am saying is this.
Number one, Epstein sends one of Dobson's articles to a young woman he's grooming.
And I went over all the reasons why that article fit into Epstein's understanding of power, of patriarchy, of control.
That Dobson's theology of exonerating the patriarchal male, putting all the agency on women, giving the sense that men and women have these God-given roles to play and the woman's role is submission.
That appeals in varying degrees to Jeffrey Epstein.
Now, Epstein, for his part, was trying very hard in the latter years of his life to get into the circle of Vladimir Putin.
And if and where and how he was successful, I'm not going to go into right now, okay?
But he clearly saw in Putin somebody that he wanted to be connected to.
He saw power.
He saw prestige.
He saw money.
He saw control.
Now, he was also, Epstein, incredibly invested in working with people like Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel.
Emails Peter Thiel at one point talking about a new tribalism and the collapse of the West and the collapse of democracy and the ways they were going to use that to snatch up control and power, that collapse meant opportunity, that the rubble of the United States and democracy and Western civilization meant opportunity for men like them.
There was a sense that they could be among the pantheon of elites who could control everything.
That's clearly how they saw Putin.
And so for me, today is about this.
All three of these men share the idea that there are certain people in the world who deserve to control others and that the authority of those few should not be questioned and that they have a natural right, a God-given right, something to have complete and absolute dominance of the women they groom, of the families they counsel, of the daughter sitting in the chair across from the dinner table,
or if you are Vladimir Putin, the Russian people, and dare I say, all of Europe.
There's a sense for them that authority and power and control are their destiny.
And Dobson teaches it in a theological vein.
Epstein, of course, is engaged in this disgusting, rampant, predatory behavior.
And Putin is the authoritarian leader par excellence, the one who uses the language of Christianity and spirituality as a vehicle for dominance, for control, for violence.
But it's all built in.
Like the overlaps there are all shared.
Again, I'm not saying that they all knew each other and they conspired and this or that.
I'm saying it's not an accident that Epstein sent Dobson's article to this woman.
It's not an accident that Epstein was doing everything he could to get with Putin.
And it's not an accident that Putin's language of spiritual heritage and family values came ancestrally from James Dobson.
Those are not accidents.
What we see there is a pattern of abuse.
What we see there is a pattern of control.
What we see there is a pattern of power without accountability.
Pattern Of Control00:02:53
Power that preys on other people.
There's more to say about this, but I'm going to stop there for today.
There's a couple of questions in the chat here.
So one person says that they thought about Dobson as responsible for abuse, corporal punishment, patriarchy, and teaching people that their bodies are not their own.
And I think that's something that, you know, that statement right there is really important.
That if you're taught that your body is not your own, then you're being groomed for abuse.
Now, that happens with Dobson.
It happens with Dobson's theology and his parenting advice, right?
Your body's not your own.
God created you a certain way.
You're a girl.
You're a woman.
You're a child.
You need to submit to your patriarchal father, who's a stand-in for God.
Your body is not your own.
You don't have control over your body.
If you're a young woman, that control is your dad's and then it's your husband's.
It's never yours.
Same with Epstein.
I mean, it's same, it's basically saying to young women, your body is not your own.
It's mine.
I am God in this equation.
And the same with Putin.
I think that's all very clear to me.
Okay.
Theo says that Dobson targeted his teachings to new parents who were anxious to know about what to do with their children.
And I think that's a really good comment.
I have young children.
I have a two-year-old who's right in the middle of the terrible twos.
It's not easy.
I'm always looking for advice.
I'm always looking for things to do.
And again, you can see, I used to see this all the time.
I used to see people I went to high school who are in our teenage years had no interest in Jesus.
They wanted to go party and drink beer and have a good time.
By the time they were young parents and age 27 or 29, they were like super into church.
And a lot of that was like, I'm a dad now.
I'm a mom now.
I need to find a place to raise my kids.
What am I going to do?
Who's going to help me do that?
Well, the church seems to be like a good place.
Well, that's there too in terms of Dobson's appeal to young families.
But again, I'll just make the comparison.
It's also part of his appeal to, I'm sorry, it's part of Epstein's appeal to young women.
There's this sense of like the email I just examined today is him giving advice to a young woman who clearly is asking him for it.
Those crossovers are there as well.
All right, y'all.
That's it for today.
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