March 22, 2026 - Where There's Woke - Thomas Smith
47:30
WTW121: Trafficking in Fear
Thomas Smith debunks the myth of 300,000 trafficked children in America, exposing how Nancy Mace cynically weaponizes fear while Tim Tebow's anecdote ignores systemic family-based abuse. Citing 2023 data showing 546,000 substantiated maltreatment reports versus vanishingly rare stranger kidnappings, the episode contrasts historical panics with reality where suffocation and drowning kill more infants than homicide. Ultimately, the discussion urges parents to prioritize actual dangers like cars and caregivers over "stranger danger" myths, challenging political agendas that exploit exaggerated statistics to attack opponents or block foreign aid. [Automatically generated summary]
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What's so scary about the woke mob?
How often you just don't see them coming.
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down.
The woke monster is here and it's coming for everything.
Instead of go-go boots, the seductress green Eminem will now wear sneakers.
Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
That sounded weird.
Do it again.
Hello and welcome to.
Okay.
But do it right.
Don't do the mess up again.
Never has Lydia been as assertive as you just heard her just now.
I was literally shocked.
Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
That still sucks.
Now I'm rattled.
I'm so rattled from what I just heard.
Have you been taking assertiveness classes?
And if so, good.
Yeah.
I have, actually.
I bought a new book.
Wow.
Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke, where it is episode 121, and we're going to be talking about more bullshit, kidnapping and trafficking and whatever statistics.
Getting some hard numbers.
It's so interesting.
We knocked out one number in the last episode.
Yeah.
I think it'll be really interesting to truly, I haven't dropped like the bombshell.
There's a bottom line number that is very, very interesting that I can't wait to drop on you.
There's interesting things about the stats.
I mean, obviously it's super depressing, of course, any of this stuff to talk about real cases, but there's also interesting things that you might not consider about things like kidnapping and what gets counted and some of it's encouraging.
Actually, I guess I would say when you're dealing with a topic where a bunch of people think 300,000 kids are sex slaves in America, I guess it's all great news from there.
Let me calm your fears, everybody.
Yeah, it's just not even close to true.
I mean, what do people think kids and or parents are?
Have you met one?
Like, how would there be that fucking many?
Like, it's so funny.
Can you imagine if there were 300,000 sex slaves?
Where would they be?
Like, where?
Child sex slaves.
Have you met one?
Have you met one?
Anyone out there?
Like, unless you think they're all hidden in underground bunkers, to think that there's that many kids that would, it's one thing to think about adults and be like, well, you know, a lot of adults grow up and don't have a lot of connections and who knows what happens to that or whatever.
But like, yes, there's a lot of neglect, but most kids have somebody who really fucking cares about where they are.
Yeah.
You know, totally.
For the most part.
Maybe that's even the government at times, you know, I don't know.
Maybe that's a father.
Teacher.
You know, it could be a number of things.
True.
At the same time, a lot of these systems are where a lot of bad stuff happens, but not being sold into sexual slavery.
That's mostly a myth here.
Not a myth worldwide, but it's mostly a myth.
There's so little of like child selling into sexual slavery in the U.S. that I don't even, I haven't come across any of it, to be honest with you, in all of my everything that I've researched because it's just such a crazy thing.
I mean, think about what would have to happen to have a market of people that would purchase a child for sexual purposes.
You have to have a pretty bad breakdown of society.
And that does exist in places in the world.
But in the U.S., fortunately, we aren't there.
I mean, there might be some random horrible occurrences, but I guess what I'm saying is good news because we're not there yet.
But there is all kinds of bad crap.
And I want to talk about, you know, the good, the bad, and the real numbers.
And most importantly, linking this all back to remember how political this is and how much it gets used for people's political ends, how much it's used within MAGA for different purposes.
And even you mentioned Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Now, that's one thing.
And I do think she's trying to like do this sane act.
Nancy Mace and Cynical Usage00:03:07
Yeah.
But someone like Nancy Mace.
Nancy Mace, yeah, who's like personally affected.
Yes.
But as part of the Minnesota fraud stuff I did over on SIO, which will be out very within a day or two.
Oddly enough, some of those hearings were where she started just making motions for like, let's subpoena this person related to Epstein and whatever.
And she still sucks.
Even in doing that stuff, she sucks.
There was a, I didn't even get to it.
So I'll just mention it now for fun.
She wanted to do a motion to release information about any payoffs, harassment, payoffs in Congress.
She had bipartisan support.
Like in that committee, people were like, yep, no, we support that.
We do.
And then there was people who were like, hey, we need to like do a quick amendment because the way you're wording it, it would dox like victims.
Right.
I do remember reading that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was a technical thing, but it was like, she wants to know whether it's Congress or whether it's staffers.
And it's like, oh, okay, fair enough.
You'd want to know.
But then someone was like, hey, a lot of those staffers, when they're involved in that report, it's because they're the ones who complained.
Right.
They're the victims.
Right.
And so both of that would be captured.
And they were saying, like, even if you don't identify their names, because some of the offices are tiny, I just don't know how that works, but I guess if you're less popular of a member of Congress or you're a rookie or you're whatever, you're newer, they have like two, three people, you know, and you're going to know who it is.
Like it's going to be easy to know who the victim is.
I mean, it is related because it's the cynical usage of this.
Even Nancy Mace, who is making a pretty big showing of being, of caring about that kind of thing, she had an ally of her, an actual Republican ally of hers asking about like the motion and the amendment.
And the Republican said, Nancy, I'm just trying to ask, by the way, this was a black guy, so it might not be a coincidence.
I guess my question would be for the original sponsor of the motion, Miss Mace, is this I guess I'm trying to understand where we're taking this.
And when it comes to the transparency aspects, I'm 100% for that.
We should do that.
Then vote for it.
But Nancy, that's not, I'm not saying I'm voting no.
Like I'm for it, but I'm trying to understand why is it okay to say just the members of the world?
Congresswoman Mace, I do have a title like everybody else in this room.
Come on, Nancy.
We're just trying to have a conversation.
I'm trying to get an assertion.
Mace, I have earned a title and I watched the majority of men in this body just vote down a measure.
Nancy, I have never disclosed that.
Congresswoman Mace, I've never disrespected you at all.
I'm not being disrespectful.
I'm trying to get an assertion.
No, I did not.
You're taking it too far.
I'm trying to get an understanding of what we're doing here.
This is a Republican.
It wasn't a Democrat.
And then later, when there was a Democratic woman who was trying to talk about something like that.
You've already secured your MSNBC spot tonight.
Now your time's required.
Chair recognizes Ms. Mace.
We're going to be sucking her up.
Supporting Ms. Mace.
And this administration, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Chairman, I agree.
She's going to be a great host on MSNBC.
This is my turn.
If I were you, Miss President.
I reclaimed my time.
This is my time.
I wouldn't want to interrupt Miss Mace.
It's her time.
Chair recognizes Miss Mr. Chairman.
She could not get all of her time.
Mr. Chairman, she's a little bit of a chance.
She wants to insult us for 10 more seconds.
Her time has expired.
Her time has expired.
Chair recognizes me.
Reclaiming Time from Miss Mace00:15:09
You're going to be great on TV.
You're really good.
No, baby, you're not.
No, baby, you're not.
You are not in order.
You're out of order.
Goodbye.
You're done.
Okay, you're still a cynical piece of shit.
Like, you don't actually have values.
Yeah.
That little microcosm right there was such an example of like, you are willing to pretend to have these values and utilize feminism or whatever for a second when it's going to make you look good.
Yeah.
And then the minute you get to be sexist toward another woman in the attack you're doing on her, then you're going to utilize those sexist tropes.
She's a very visible example of someone I think is cynically using this right now.
She says she cares, but does she?
I don't know.
Similarly, there are a whole lot of people who pretend to care about child trafficking, blah, blah, blah.
And the way they go about it, though, it's so frustrating to me because even when I think maybe they really do care, they'll talk about like how across the world.
You know, I just watched, I'm not going to have time to get to it, but I watched a heartfelt Tim Tebow interview.
And like this guy, Tim Tebow, I'll be honest, he seems pretty genuine that he believes this stuff.
Oh, yeah.
And he's like tearing up.
He's choking up.
He's like, yeah, he has this bizarre story where he's like, you know how I got involved in this?
Actually, this is worth saying.
We're even in the pre-show, but it's so this was, poof, this was a thing.
Here's how I got into this.
I got a call from my dad one day.
And his dad, I believe, is a preacher or some sort of, you know, probably fucking religious.
Yeah.
And he's like, my dad was in a country where it's not necessarily okay to be a priest or something, some shit, you know, pastor.
And so they were in this underground meeting because like they can't even meet in the open to be Christians.
And all of a sudden, this meeting, someone comes in and is like, hey, I got four girls to auction off.
Oh, wow.
And then he says, yeah.
And so I get a call from my dad saying, hey, I just bought four girls.
What?
And I'm laughing.
I think it might be real.
I mean, that's a bold story or bold lie.
I don't think Tebow's lying.
I could see his dad lying.
Yeah, I don't know for sure.
I'm sorry to laugh, but it was just so bizarre to be like, my dad bought some girls.
And that's how I got into this.
It's just like, oh, boy.
But I think he's genuinely interested in it.
He gets real heartfelt.
He's like, yeah, you know, it's all Jesus.
The Lord wants me to see, you know, he wants, it's so narcissistic, too, because, you know, the Lord Jesus made his dad do that so that the Lord Jesus could then show Tim Tebow something.
And it's like, boy, everything's about you, huh?
It all comes to you.
Always.
But even still, what frustrated me about that is, so then you ought to be against how we just fucking gutted USAID, which is a pittance of our, is a tenth of a cent of our nothing, which of all the nothing we do worldwide, that at least was saving lives and probably helping people.
Because the number one, and Tebow even said the number one source of a lot of this sex trade in other countries is people's own families having to sell them.
And you know what would help that is fucking aid, foreign aid.
And so I look at these conservatives and how upset they, and genuinely so.
Sometimes they're crying.
They're really, and I take them at their word, not all the time, but a lot of the time when they're like, God, that was just so horrible.
And they think, maybe don't support fucking conservatives who don't want to help anyone with anything anywhere in the world.
Yeah, man.
That's a first, right?
It so quickly gets lost.
You know, they can go from crying over this to then in the next breath, they're probably defending gutting USAID because, I don't know, the fucking Nancy Pelosi conspiracy to funnel money to herself through it.
It's just, it's just so useless, you know?
Anyway, sorry, those were some odds and ends that I really want to talk about.
I didn't have time to talk about other things that are loosely related.
I hope you'll excuse that in the pre-show segment that has now run too long, but we will take our break.
Support other rantings and real podcasting at patreon.com slash where there's book.
Lydia has some great ones coming up for you, and we really appreciate your support and your listenership.
Patreon is where there's woke.
I did that for you.
Thank you.
Okay, so when we last left, our heroes, I don't know.
We also can tie up a loose end in terms of the end of our Ashton Kutcher story because I completely forgot something.
Mr. Puchar.
I probably remember right when I start talking about it is he eventually had to leave his human trafficking organization.
Because of Danny Masterson.
That's right.
Yeah.
Oh, I know.
I knew you would know.
I'm sure a lot of people forgot.
I forgot.
I mean, once it was mentioned, I was like, oh, yeah.
But the complexity of humans, because I just watched not hours, but almost an hour of stock.
Yeah, that's 70.
Studio's my car.
No, of him giving these impassioned speeches where he's darn near crying and crying.
He cares very deeply about it.
Yeah.
And I don't have any reason to directly doubt that.
And yet when it's his friend in a Me Too situation in a worse than, I mean, rape situation, right?
Really bad.
Awful, awful stuff.
Serial.
Yeah.
Multiple people.
He and Milakunis, they wrote a letter to the judge, like a character letter.
Yeah.
I mean, it's not good.
And it became public.
And then their apology was that it was never intended to become public.
It was just intended for the judge.
It's like, okay.
But everybody knows about it.
So what?
So now what?
That was so bad.
It was really, really bad.
I think it's such an interesting like ability to examine like the human condition though.
And we see situations like that with like Sarah Silverman reflecting on her friendship with Louis C.K. after the allegations for him came out and all of that stuff and grappling with who you thought you knew when they're doing something that's so inexcusable, especially if it's something that like matters so much to you, so much that Ashton Kutcher started an entire nonprofit organization to protect people from stuff like that.
Yeah.
It's amazing how close it is to the thing he's talking about too.
How crazy is that?
Yeah.
This is crazy.
Some of the quotes described Masterson as a quote role model, quote, outstanding older brother figure.
Dear God.
And quote, extraordinarily honest person.
And Kutcher noted in it, Kuchar noted in his letter that he did not believe Masterson posed an ongoing harm to society.
And here's this, despite the letters from them and roughly 50 others.
Who the fuck were these people?
I remember this thing.
Hollywood.
Why?
What is in it for you?
What in the world?
Do people care about their friends that much?
I'm going to go ahead and tell them myself.
I don't care about my friends that much.
That if they are convicted of rape, that I'm going to be like, yeah, but all, but they're, they're cool, though.
What?
That's crazy.
Someone who dedicated at that point, that was 2023.
At that point, for at least 12 years, he had been just passionate about this thing.
And it wasn't a minor thing.
It wasn't like, oh, he mentioned it a thing.
He had a position to step down from this organization that wasn't just a get out the info organization too.
They worked on like technology thorn was the name of it.
And he had to, he had to resign from that because like, what is with people?
It's so weird.
So weird.
Anyway.
It's like when he left punked, you know, it's like probably the same.
Did you ever watch punk?
No.
Oh my God.
I watched it all the time.
I'm sure it was like the same gravity.
Point is as such a just bizarre way to end that story.
Yeah.
Just so bizarre.
Okay.
So 50,000 is where we were.
We got the 50,000 number that I don't know.
John Walsh just like said, I don't even know where the fuck he got that.
I'm not actually sure that there's a better accounting of where that came from other than he pulled it out of his ass.
Now that was the Senate in 1983.
I don't think we need to issue a trigger warning for any of this because the whole thing is pretty obvious trigger warning.
But his quote was, quote, the country is littered with mutilated, decapitated, raped, strangled children.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
Subtle.
This is the kind of panic we're talking about.
That's on C-SPAN, you guys.
Probably, yeah.
Yeah, gross.
Then the milk cartons, as of 1986, there are 3 billion milk cartons.
And then somebody pointed out, like, it's only 106 different kids.
Boy, the milk cartons is an interesting thing.
There's a lot of debate about that because it's hard to pin down.
It might have led to like one or two kids being found, maybe.
But think about in a real way, is that worth the fucking cost of how scared that made everybody all the time?
Yeah.
I mean, I think it's not crazy to say that's actually just not worth it.
Like it's just not worth it.
Like every day, children see photos of missing kids on the fucking milk they're drinking.
Like imagine the psychological effect of that.
And this is, this is what, this is what we're talking about.
Like this panic endures to this day.
Well, I can tell you like something that our daughter has noticed is they have billboards up right for missing kids.
It's a picture of a kid and they're missing and it's a huge billboard.
This has happened multiple times now where our daughter will notice it and like try and learn as much information as she can about the kid.
And then she's like, do you think we can try and like go find them?
I hope they're found.
I hope they're okay.
Yeah, it's happened a couple times.
And she has a huge heart, but I just know like the milk carton, like she would have just been obsessed over that, like wanting to find those poor kids.
Yeah.
I mentioned before that this shit was debunked in 1985.
Yeah.
So a mere two years later, the Denver Post wins the Pulitzer.
Now, this article is not accessible, except I weirdly then found it in the LA Times as some sort of reprint, but I guess I can't be certain that it's the whole thing because it's super short.
And I mean winning a Pulitzer for like a fifth century.
That's what I'm wondering because like it's very, very short.
So either they didn't republish the whole thing or maybe it was that short, but it was just that groundbreaking.
But it's pretty wild.
Diana Grigo and Lewis kills her 1985.
Some selected quotes here.
Well, actually, maybe we can have you read something.
That's nice.
This is really interesting.
It's a blast from the past.
Why don't you start reading this?
Worry about missing children has escalated into a national epidemic of fear.
The faces of the missing stare back at us from television screens, utility bills, milk cartons, and grocery bags.
Utility bills?
Huh?
Wow.
Yeah.
I didn't know they had milk on those things.
Various groups warn us that as many as 1.5 million children disappear each year.
Each year.
And that strangers kidnap as many as 50,000 of them.
What the fuck are you doing?
And the group say as many as 4,000 children are murdered after being abducted.
Wow.
However, law enforcement officials, joined by leading missing children experts, say that those numbers are grossly exaggerated.
One missing child is too many.
The family tragedy of having a child kidnapped and murdered cannot be diluted by numbers of any kind.
Yet the inflated numbers themselves are damaging the lives of millions of parents, affecting how they feel about their children's safety and what they should teach their children about the society they live in.
Yeah.
Quote, parents are scared.
They think there's someone on every street corner waiting to grab their child, said Jack McEnvoy, a family relations psychologist.
Quote, it's making children paranoid too.
There's a difference between healthy respect and caution and what's going on now.
It's not healthy anymore.
There's a great quote later on in this that I find so funny.
Their figures are impossible, said Bill Carter of the FBI's Public Information Bureau in Washington.
More than 50,000 soldiers died in the Vietnam War.
Almost everyone in America knows someone who was killed there.
The numbers I've seen from missing child groups on abducted children range from 5,000 to 50,000.
Do you know a child who's been abducted?
That should tell you something right there.
Yeah, it's a good point.
Oh boy.
Crazy.
So that was the kidnapping scare more specifically.
Now, I would like to have you venture a guess when there was, from what I can tell, the first really well-done estimate of how many kids are abducted in that sense, in the sense that you think of in the movies.
So actually, I'll give you a definition.
The study looked at stereotypical kidnappings.
I mean, I looked at different ones, but that's one of the categories.
Defined as abductions perpetrated by a stranger or slight acquaintance and involving a child who was transported 50 or more miles, detained overnight, held for ransom, or with the intent to keep the child permanently or killed.
So that's like that.
That's the TV show, the movie thing.
Room.
Yeah.
Don't know.
The transport 50 or more miles is kind of weird.
I don't know if, I don't know why you'd need that to be true.
I feel like they should have left that part out because it doesn't really matter how far they were.
Yeah, I mean, they could be down the street and it's still kidnapping.
Exactly.
I can't really tell if that, like, how many does that leave out?
Were there a bunch that were only 30 miles?
I don't know if that, I can't tell.
But setting that aside, the years of the data was roughly 1997 to 1999.
And then they annualized it, basically.
Okay.
How many do you think were those stereotypical kidnappings nationwide in a year?
1,072.
It's a pretty good guess.
You know, you have a lot of indicators from everything we've talked.
115.
Oh, wow.
115.
Yeah.
We've got stories of 50,000.
We've got John Walsh saying that kids are decapitated in the streets or whatever the fuck nonsense he was saying.
Yeah.
And then this study, this, from what I can tell, this very important study that is actually DOJ, national incident studies of missing, abducted, runaway, and thrown away children.
God, that's freaking sad.
Yeah, yeah, it's awful stuff.
It seems to be like the thing that everybody cites is like, this put this whole idea to rest.
115.
Yeah.
Now it did go up after that, but here's what I'm thinking.
What do you think that is nowadays with the with the implementation of cell phone technology and tracking?
Like it is so much fucking harder and just cameras everywhere.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, it still happens, but like, I wouldn't be surprised if that number is like 20 now of the, of this kind of kidnapping.
Who knows?
That's just a pure ass guess.
I don't know.
Population's higher by a bit, I guess.
But like, other than that, I mean, there's so many ways for people to be caught at this stuff that there weren't before.
Just so much data.
And so it's, it's kind of a harder thing to try to even get away with.
This is where I want to say, I mean, this is obviously going to get in.
I'm not going into details or anything, but I do want to talk about some of the things that are counted a different way because it is interesting.
And this is obviously the worst of the worst thing that could possibly happen.
Really heartbreaking.
I have to just kind of keep a distance to even be able to function and read some of this stuff.
This is not in the lines of ha ha ha.
This is obviously horrible stuff, but I want I want to talk about it because that's fucking insane.
Keep in mind, more than half our country thinks there's 300,000, whatever the fuck, sex trafficked children, I guess.
Yeah.
And it was 115 in 1999.
I mean, that is a, that's a level of distortion from reality that is staggering.
Now, here's the thing.
There are an estimated 58,000 child victims of non-family abduction.
Sorry, say that again.
58,000.
58,200 child victims of non-family abduction, defined more broadly to include all non-family perpetrators, friends and acquaintances as well as strangers, and crimes involving lesser amounts of forced movement or detention in addition to the more serious crimes entailed and stereotypical kidnappings.
And so when I saw that, I was like, wait a minute, 58,000.
I mean, that's kind of a lot.
Like, what the fuck?
But when you look at what that kind of thing is, it really is a different thing.
Like, for example, some of these children are gone for less than an hour.
Oh, wow.
They like walked off with somebody.
Debunking the 50,000 Statistic00:15:52
Could be.
Yeah.
And one of them is like, there's a bus driver where there was one kid left in the bus and the bus driver drove them around for a while.
You know, it's like, oh.
Why did they?
Yeah, it is weird.
I mean, they were in the middle of a conversation.
They got in trouble.
Yeah.
But like, who knows?
Yeah, it says a four-year-old boy was taken on a 20-mile joyride by the school bus driver after the rest of the children had been dropped off at their homes.
No force or threat was used to transport or detain the child.
However, the bus driver concealed the child's whereabouts.
When the child did not come home at the usual time, the alarmed caretaker called the school and bus company to locate the child.
Then upon finding out where the child was, the caretaker contacted the police to recover the child.
The episode lasted seven hours.
Okay, so that one, I mean, that's serious.
Yeah, weird.
There's other ones too, where it's like, oh, here's one.
Babysitter refused to let three children ages four, seven, and 10 go home until she was paid for babysitter.
Oh, it's awful, but it's like.
I think what happens is in all our minds, we all boil it down to the fucking kidnapping on TV.
We're all like, oh, it's a bad guy grabbing a kid.
There's so many different weird ways.
It's still really bad, of course.
But like, it's important to know what we're afraid of.
Cause if we whip ourselves up into a fear and we're all fearing a thing that is actually fucking vanishingly small, and then we lose sight of other things that are dangerous.
Yeah.
The babysitter detained the children against their will and did not allow the alarmed caretaker to contact the children because she did not answer the phone.
And keep in mind, we're in the 90s here.
When the babysitter finally answered the phone, she lied, telling the caretaker that the children were on their way home.
The caretaker called the police to recover the children from a known location.
Now, there's other ones.
And again, we're talking about bad stuff here.
I'm not, none of this is meant to downplay any of this.
It's just to put proper context around it and understand.
There's instances, horrible stuff.
17 year old girl on a date with a 17 year old boy who took her in a car basically somewhere and tried to rape her.
She was essentially there and detained by force and sexually assaulted for some period of time.
Technically, like they were abducted.
Right.
But, you know, so it goes into a location without their consent.
Right.
If there's a bunch of stuff like that going into these stats and then some MAGA is telling you that a bunch of people are taking your five-year-old from a park or something, it's like, that's just not the same thing.
Right.
Exactly.
Now, I do worry that maybe this has over debunked it in terms of that number because some of this stuff is what I'd consider like, okay, well, actually, that is what I'd worry about.
It is still hard to categorize this stuff, but there's one that, you know, this is awful, like a 10-year-old girl lured by an 85-year-old male neighbor, sexually assaulted.
Oh my God.
In that case, the caretaker didn't even contact police because she had no concrete evidence and the child was not injured.
So the child was one way or another returned, not injured.
So I would still be very worried about that, obviously.
That goes down as abduction, but it's not the stereotypical kidnapping is the point.
So if you're, if you're worried about the guy snatching your kid and doing the ransom thing or just like taking them forever, that number is very low.
Again, it's not zero, but it's actually very low.
Yeah.
And the overwhelming majority, this is something we all already know, but it's really important to talk about the actual numbers because even though we all know that it's overwhelmingly someone you know, it's so fucking overwhelmingly someone you know to the point where like we really should not be talking about this virtually in any other way.
Like the thing that we should talk about is family members.
Like that's just over and above.
And then of course like other expanded circle of trusted people, coaches, you know, doctors.
Coaches, teachers.
Yeah, stuff like that.
Family friends.
And again, this is nowhere in the realm of downplaying any of this.
I don't, none of this is, I want to be very clear, not downplaying any of that.
It's properly categorizing it so that we know how to solve it.
Yeah.
That's the point.
This is all horrible, but I'm not hiring a guy with a gun to shoot the uncle.
I mean, maybe after the fact someone wants to do that, but like, that's not how you are preventing sex abuse in the family.
It's not a former green beret that's going to come in.
Yes.
You are not preventing this.
And it's important because it is so skewed to take all of these kinds of examples and overhype it by a factor of like 100 and say that it's a stranger danger.
You know, remember when the guy was like, you know, I was thinking about that target in Brentwood.
That's near the interstate.
Think about that in retrospect.
Like that's just a normal dude.
I mean, I guess that guy's not normal.
Well, I mean, he kind of is.
He's more normal than you or I in this fucking country.
Unfortunately, that weird Christian guy whose show we listened to or I listened to or watched like four times.
Yeah.
He's just talking about a conversation he had with someone else too, where he's like, yeah, so that target by the interstate, that's a hotspot because you can just grab someone and be on your way.
And then you think about it and you compare that with the stats where it's like, well, there's 115 of those.
Like the idea that you would be thinking in terms of like, where are the hotspots for this thing that never happens?
You know, but they are thinking in terms of where the hotspot for this thing that happens all the time, of which there's 300,000 missing kids.
Yeah.
If you think there's 300,000, yeah, maybe there are hotspots.
There have to be hotspots.
Where the fuck is this happening?
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
It's important.
Where is it happening?
That like, and then also no one knows anyone that it's happening to.
Yep.
Also.
The important thing about this was it was a survey.
So it wasn't merely relying on police statistics.
And that's why you might have heard me say it wasn't reported.
This was a survey that was, it was a comprehensive survey.
It was asking, was there ever a time when anyone tried to take your child away from you against their wishes?
Was there ever a time when anyone tried to sexually molest, rape, attack, beat up the child?
But it's further than that.
It's like in the past 12 months, was anyone attacked or threatened in any of these ways?
Was there a time when an older person, such as an adult, an older teenager babysitter, deliberately touched or tried to touch?
So like it goes down kind of all ends of the spectrum from the horrible to the like, was your child ever out of sight for a little period of time that might have, you know, so it's trying to capture all that stuff and using statistical methods, get a good handle on that.
And then I think it uses because they also can ask people whether or not they reported it, I believe they can use those statistical methods to like normalize that to like the amount of reports they have.
And they can, so it's different statistical methods to be able to try to get as close a picture as they can.
And so that in theory, you know, it's not 100% accurate, obviously.
No stats ever are, but it's one of those like 95% confidence interval things.
And it's capturing stuff that's reported and not reported.
And so if this survey is to be believed, and I think it is, now you're not to the point where you can say, well, okay, we know about the such and such thousand, but you never, it could be like a million we don't know about.
It's like, no, this should pretty much do it.
If this number is wrong, it's not wrong by 10 times.
Right.
Right.
It could be instead of 58,000 of the total, total, total number, the confidence interval is from 24 to 92,000.
But that was the one that was like all kinds of abductions for any amount of time.
Right.
And in terms of the confidence interval for the stereotypical kidnapping, that interval is 60 to 170.
Oh, wow.
You know, like that, I mean, stats are powerful.
I mean, unless there's something really wrong with how they did it, and I don't think there is, this should be pretty decisive.
And yet.
And yet.
We are here.
Yeah.
But okay, so here's what's funny, though.
When I was reading that 1985 article that I had you read some of, what I found so funny was down at the bottom.
Well, actually, there's some other good stuff here.
I think you read the like 4,000.
So it said, well, that would be four times the number of kids that were murdered for any reason.
Like, you know, all homicides for children under 15.
So it's like, that's just a, and that was in the Senate.
It said that was Senator Paul Simon.
So I don't know if that was based on the other testimony we talked about because I think that had the same number.
But anyway, so why has there been such an inflation of missing children statistics?
This person asks in 1985.
Part of the problem is how they are reported and interpreted.
In March, for instance, listen to this, 27,489 missing juvenile reports were entered into the FBI's computer, computer, 1985.
But by the end of March, 27,520 cases had been removed, including ones from prior months.
However, some groups have taken such a single month's total reports and multiplied that number by 12.
There you go.
Without allowing for cases cleared, they come up with more than 300,000 missing children.
I was going to guess 300,000, but I didn't trust my math.
Isn't that funny, though?
Yeah.
Because I saw that the origins of that 300,000 thing was that 2001 report based on 1990s data.
And then in this 1985 article, literally there's another instance where using some flimsy math.
Yeah, where bad math can get you to the same, to a similar number.
Yeah.
Yeah.
300,000 missing children.
So that 300,000 thing just keeps going.
You know, it like persists.
It was, it was around even then.
And that whole thing about the instances of missing whatevers, that's a big one because sometimes you'll see there are 800,000 missing kids in this country right now.
And that'll be based on like all reports of any missing anything in this system or whatever.
And that could be the same kid.
It's not an accurate count of kids.
People will frequently mistake reports of something for like individual cases.
Right.
Unique.
That's a very common way that this gets misreported.
I randomly found also in this that I want to just mention some sort of article from youthtoday.org from 2006.
I'm just like going through the archives and it's somebody raging, Bill Trainer.
I didn't look too much into them, but it was just, I was kind of searching for stuff around this NCMEC kind of thing.
And it was someone just raging because it was talking about the caucus that was for like the NCMEC, like the congressional caucus that was that.
Oh, yeah.
And then talking about how a bunch of Republicans involved in that have been outed as predators and stuff.
Yeah.
This was like kind of a little before I paid much attention.
So I didn't know much of this.
Rep Mark Foley from Florida.
It's always Florida.
Resigned after, you know, these like messages to young male staffers.
Yeah, of course.
And then there is another one, Denny Haster.
I do remember that.
This person was outraged about NCMEC's funding back then, you know, and like talked about all the money it gets and also like the money that this caucus full of Republicans.
There's also some Democrats involved, of course, but like they would fear monger on this and be a bunch of funding.
And then he was saying that the people at NCMEC were like overpaid and, you know, he's alleging there's a bit of griff there.
But it's just funny to see like in this 2006 angry, angry article being like, can you believe these fucking people?
Interesting.
It's talking about the ranks of the uninsured skyrocketing.
Something that really is harming kids is not having fucking health insurance.
Shortly after that, Democrats tried to actually do something about that, called Obamacare, and then it's been dismantled to the point where I think it's going to be dead in a minute here.
Yeah.
There's a lot of bad stuff that happens to kids and there's a lot of bad stuff that happens to kids in this country.
And so I want to close by looking.
I think the main thing that bugged me about all of this was how much this fear mongering is for the exact wrong people.
The goal and the outcome, I think, is to get a bunch of parents who care about their kids to be scared, right?
I mean, don't you think that's what happens?
Yeah.
I mean, even when I looked at, I didn't want to read them because it's too sad, but like in that thing I was reading, that survey, there are the examples of the actual stereotypical kidnapping.
And those are fucking horrible.
And when I read them, I'm like, God damn it.
Now I'm worried that's going to happen because it gets to the forefront of your brain, you know?
Yeah.
And you're worried about like that could happen.
It's just so easy.
Humans are so good at like, oh shit, that's a possible danger.
I'm going to visualize that happening to my kid.
Now it's real.
Well, we also have like, we have visual examples of that kind of stuff already from movies and TV and everything.
So then you read about a real situation.
And if it evokes any of those visual memories from media, then now all you have to do is it makes it feel more real and more likely that your kid's going to end up in that position because now you can actually picture it.
Yeah.
It's so hard to not even me, like a very data-minded person.
It's still like, oh, but that feels like it could happen.
And it does happen to some tiny number of people.
And that fucking is horrible.
But like, again, it's not that you shouldn't ever worry about anything.
That if you're gonna worry about stuff and you want it to maybe be effective, like as in maybe you want to protect your kids, it's important to be worried about the right things.
Worry about kids, I don't know drowning or getting in a car accident or the stuff that actually water is a big big yeah, but you know, it's funny is even that is actually was a question.
Yeah I, I and I picked that one up from Freakonomics oh, because that was cited as like this huge danger, silent drowning.
That was like a yeah, I mean it is, but like that was another one of those things where it is also overblown, like you know probably, like wearing sunscreen appropriately is like like that might be the biggest bang for your buck, honestly for protecting your kids yeah, and car seat safety.
So remember when I talked about the missing kids, like the reports that get cited, the FBI reports I just mentioned, where they they cite the records as being like unique, right people.
I mean that number is huge.
Yeah, it was 800 000.
That was a claim i've seen made.
The actual, the number that is at least related to a real thing says there were 533 000 missing person records entered in 2024.
So that's where people get that oh, there's 500 000 missing kids.
Well, those are missing persons records.
Yeah, records entered.
Yeah, and then when you sort that to then be children, then you've got 258 000 records.
Again, that's records.
And so that's not numbers, that's records.
Yeah, more than halves it.
Now here's some stats on that, 95 of those 95 runaways ah, there you go.
One percent abducted by the non-custodial parent, 0.1 percent of those records, by the way.
So even when it's just records and we've seen how, how overblown that can be that can be by a factor of like 10, you know, only 293 are abducted by strangers.
Oh, wow.
So what really bugs me about this is there is a whole bunch of abuse there's, but it's it's often parents, or there's a lot of abuse within, like the foster system.
Yeah, you know, there's child homelessness.
It's awful stuff.
But what these folks are doing, and what a lot of people are doing is, as parents, they're scared, like you and I, if we're like oh, our kids, something's gonna happen to our kids, isn't it really backwards to be worried about something?
And then people cite real stats.
Well, you know, this many kids are abused or this many kids are sexually assaulted.
But if that's happening because of their parents, like.
Overwhelmingly, the people who abuse their kids are parents.
That's where the overwhelming amount of abuse comes from.
Yeah, and so it's one thing, if you want to be like hey, don't abuse your kids sure, but that's not what they're doing.
They're making you afraid.
They're using all these things about kids being abused, kids being sexually assaulted or kids running away.
If they make you and I afraid of this stuff, and then it turns out the overwhelming and we're not talking about a factor of two times or five times or even 10 times.
It's like a hundred times more likely to be our kid running away.
Well, that's a different kind of fear.
That's a different course of action we should take.
Oh 100, you know?
Yeah, those numbers are mixed in the runaway numbers, which is overwhelmingly the missing kids.
Yeah, it actively would harm you and I as parents to get us afraid that someone's going to snatch our kid based on runaways.
Now, our kid could run away, But if they do, anything we did out of fear of them being snatched is not going to help that.
Yeah.
What we should be doing is everything we can to keep them in our lives and be good parents and do it.
You know, there's no 100% prevention.
But like largely speaking, you don't need to be afraid of an external thing harming your kid.
You need to not harm your kid yourself.
Like that's overwhelming.
Real Risks vs Stranger Danger00:06:51
There's something so frustrating about that to me.
When I looked at all the numbers, and if you want to do some crude math, when we talk about the very limited numbers that are like sex trafficked or whatever, it's girls.
Like there's like 1% boys.
Like really drill down into the risk factors.
Yeah.
1% boys, maybe, but like, okay, that's 99% girls.
The perpetrators, men, or there's actually a large number of girls who are perpetrators, but it's because it's because they're also victims.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They've been made to.
They're kind of made to groom them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because they've also been groomed into it.
Yeah.
By the time you get done multiplying this all out, like if you just, again, do back of the envelope stuff, it's so vanishingly rare.
You can start with a big number, like, oh, here's how many kids are harmed in some way in our country.
And if you take out stuff that's their own parents, because again, if you're a parent and you're trying to prevent something, oh, I can do that.
I can prevent me hitting my kid.
I'll just not do it.
So there's no need for me to donate to anything.
There's no need for me to be scared about that.
I just have to not do it.
Or the runaway thing is a little different, but still related.
Or the being homeless thing.
Again, that's horrible.
And I'm not blaming people for being homeless, but I am saying I'm not going to pay someone with a gun to prevent homelessness.
Rather than putting money into these cowboys, we should be putting money into government fucking programs to help people.
Or if you really want to start a charity to do that help, okay, that's fine.
But that's very different.
So I was just curious to look at the actual things we should be worried about.
Again, this is dark stuff, but in the spirit of if you want to be worried, what should you be worried about?
If you want to just look at the 10 leading causes of injury deaths by age groups, well, we know what's going to kill babies.
It's going to be some kind of suffocation, you know, accidental suffocation, that kind of thing.
That's overwhelming.
That's 10 times the next highest thing.
One to four, unintentional drowning is number one.
Unintentional traffic related is next.
And it's pretty close.
Trampoline.
Still, yeah.
Lawn darts is number two.
Unintentional suffocation is still up there.
One to four.
You know, you figure it's still possible.
There's some other things, but when you get to like some sort of homicide fractional of that, I mean, there are also just, there aren't that many deaths at these ages.
So in 2023, like we're talking a total, like 73 homicide unspecified.
That's the actual number, you know?
Yeah, that's quite low.
Five to nine, then the number one becomes traffic related.
Right.
I think it categorizes like any car traffic related thing.
Whether you were in a car or not.
Pedestrian or something.
Yeah.
And that was 277 deaths, five to nine in 2023.
Next highest, unintentional drowning at 145.
Next highest, homicide with a firearm.
Yeah.
That's 91.
Then there's like unintentional fire, suffocation.
By the time we get to like, you know, homicide, there's 23.
It's vanishingly rare.
And that's, that's the real number, 23.
Yeah.
Traffic is just really going to be the number one.
What's odd is I look at the column to the side.
I was like going to look real quick to see, oh, what are the totals?
The overwhelming total is unintentional poisoning, but that's because like that's what all the old people die.
That's what once you get to 25 and up, it's unintentional poisoning somehow until 65 when it becomes unintentional fall.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Does unintentional poisoning include like drug related?
Yeah, that must be it.
Yeah, it must be.
But yeah, wow.
So that's like the number one kind of cause for a lot of age groups there.
Yeah.
But if you're trying to look for like, okay, we're worried about like, I would say zero to nine is what I think about is like kidnapping.
Once you get to like teens, it's, it's, I fear that less.
I guess you, you know, just like stereotypically fear that less.
But yeah, cars, drowning, firearms.
Choking on your food.
Yeah.
Well, this, and the suffocation, I mean, yeah, obviously there's so much around that.
We were definitely afraid of that.
I mean, kind of still am like with kids.
So it's stuff that like our fear of our baby suffocating at least matched the reality that that was the overwhelming most likely way our baby would die.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
And so you can talk about how much should we be afraid, you know, how much of your waking hours should you spend afraid of these things.
That's a different debate.
But at least we were afraid of the right thing.
Exactly.
Like if you are going to be afraid of something, that's, again, we're parents who really, really care about our kids.
I want to at least be afraid of the right things.
You know, and I'm looking on these, these causes and it's like, be careful around fucking cars, water, firearms, you know, and some other random weird stuff.
Like it takes a long time until you get to, well, the criminal from the cop show is going to get him.
What's interesting too is like those are the typical questions on all the well child questionnaires too, about asking about car seat safety, asking about attending your child whenever they're around a body of water, bath time, pools, anything like that.
Just asking about those particular things, the things that are most dangerous to children, reminding parents during the World Child questionnaire, you know, hey, not shaming you if you've like looked away or something like that, but here's a reminder.
This is really important that you do this.
Please say that you do it.
And when I look at a really depressing real number, which is child maltreatment, 546,000 substantiated reports in 2023 from what I'm seeing.
That's horrible.
Yeah.
That's by caregivers.
So again, it's not to dismiss it by any fucking means.
That's overwhelmingly more what you should be worried about, but you should worry about you, your partner, or anyone else who is caring for your child.
Same goes with sex abuse.
You should not be worried about the fucking border and the illegals and all this crap that they've created.
It's just, it's garbage.
All right.
Well, I'm sure I forgot 500 things I wanted to talk about, but I think in the end, I hope the message comes through.
This is such a racket and it's such a, it's a pervasive myth, the stranger danger.
It is just so, even when you adjust for like, okay, here's the realities of actual crimes against kids, which, you know, there is a reality.
When you get to the real number, which is a lot lower than they're saying, but still real, if you then take out stranger danger, it's, it is just, it's not a half.
It's not a fifth.
It's not a 10th.
It's maybe not even a hundredth.
You know, like we're dealing with fractional percentages that are stranger dangers.
You should be worried about, I won't even say you should be worried.
If you're going to be worried, you should be worried about the people in your kid's life.
And you should be willing to question whether or not those people are good people.
Yeah.
You know, you should be willing to entertain the idea that someone might be bad.
You know, that like don't be devoted to the idea that it's not possible for someone near you to be abusing a kid.
I guess would be like a takeaway.
Yeah.
Because I think that's where it's coaches, it's, it's parents, it's others.
Entering the Idea of Bad Players00:01:26
It's Danny Masterson.
God, that's a good point.
It's literally him, like specifically him.
He's responsible for most of it.
So don't go near him.
All right.
Well, there's a lot more that'll be a little more fun than talking about horrible stuff in terms of this and the groups and tracing some of the money, all this kind of stuff.
More debunks to come along the lines of the human trafficking, child trafficking panic.
Been really fascinating to look into.
Hope you've gotten something out of this.
Thanks for listening.
Thanks for lydiaing.
Anytime.
I'll lydia every day of my life.
Yeah.
All right.
we'll see you next time.
Maybe don't support fucking conservatives who don't want to help anyone with anything anywhere in the world.