How hostile actors abroad and ideologues at home
exploit the weaknesses in every system

A woman in my own congregation spends her Saturday mornings carrying groceries to families who, for one reason or another, cannot come to our food pantry. Her motive is simple and idealistic: she sees people she believes are hungry and responds to the perceived need.

She has no idea that the no-questions-asked delivery model she serves was shaped, in part, by people whose aims have nothing to do with feeding the hungry and everything to do with placing a population beyond the reach of the law. She is not a villain in this story. She is its proof.

The most effective way to move a good person toward a bad end is to leave her goodness intact and quietly redirect it.

That is the pattern I want to warn about, and it is important to state at the outset what the pattern is not. There is no committee somewhere orchestrating all of this. No single hand moves the food banks, the courts, the professional associations, the classrooms, and the street protests in unison.

Anyone who tells you a conductor is waving a baton over all of it has lost sight of the truth and will be dismissed the moment a skeptic asks to see the baton.

The truth is more unsettling than a conspiracy, because a conspiracy can be exposed and dismantled. What we face instead is something that emerges — a convergence of many actors with incompatible motives whose combined effect points in one direction: the steady deterioration of the institutions and habits that allow a free people to govern themselves.

Consider a wildfire. No one, other than God, built our native forests, certainly not the arsonist who wants them to burn. He needs only the dry season. The fuel is already on the ground. The wind is already blowing. He needs only to drop his match where the fire will catch. The fire does the work. His contribution is to locate the weakness and exploit it.

This is how decline operates, and it is why the absence of a master plan should be no comfort. Deterioration is less complicated and cheaper than construction. Order in any society — trust, shared language, the rule of law, the authority of parents — must be built and maintained at constant effort and cost, while disorder is the direction things drift naturally when the maintenance stops.

An adversary who wants America to be weaker need not create that weakness. He has only to find it, help it along, and use it against us.

Crucially, most of the people fueling the weaknesses are not arsonists. They fall into two very different groups, and honest analysis keeps them apart.

A small number are wreckers — for them, a diminished and ungovernable America is the goal itself, and they include both foreign rivals and the handful of domestic radicals who want the existing order gone and care little what follows. The far larger group is transformers, who do not want a collapse at all. They sincerely believe they are building something better and more just. The erosion of the things you and I value — national cohesion, verifiable benefit programs, the primacy of parents — registers to them not as damage but as progress.

The deterioration is real either way. That is the whole point. It does not require everyone, or even most people, to intend it.

What makes this pattern especially durable is that it does not merely drift — it ratchets. During administrations friendly to a project, policy is embedded through multi-year grant contracts, career personnel placements, and regulatory guidance specifically engineered to survive the next election. During opposing administrations, the same advocacy network files immediate litigation to hold the gains. The deterioration advances in one direction and resists reversal in the other, so that each cycle leaves the baseline shifted further than the one before.

The wreckers are not hypothetical, and the fire was their image before I used it.

In 1974, the Weather Underground — a group that had already claimed some two dozen bombings, including the United States Capitol and the Pentagon — published a manifesto calling for the violent overthrow of the government. They titled it Prairie Fire, after Mao‘s line that a single spark can start a prairie fire.

The literal spark failed.

One attempt to ignite it killed three of their own, when on March 6, 1970, Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, and Ted Gold were killed in a Greenwich Village townhouse at 18 West 11th Street, New York, where they were assembling a nail bomb intended for a dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey. The device detonated accidentally, destroying the four-story townhome and severely damaging the adjacent buildings, including that of the actor Dustin Hoffman, who lived next door.

The masses never rose, and the federal charges against the leaders later collapsed. The reason is worth noting. Investigators had not acted lawlessly; the warrantless, Attorney-General-approved national-security surveillance they relied on was the accepted practice of the day — until the Supreme Court ruled in 1972, in the Keith decision, that such domestic-security wiretapping required a warrant after all.

Rather than expose its methods under the new standard, the government dropped the cases. The bombers walked free on a change in the law, not a failure of proof.

What everyone should know is what the manifesto’s principal authors did next. They did not recant the goal; they changed the method. Bill Ayers, one of the founders of the Weather Underground, became a professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He described his school-reform work, in his own words, as the unfinished business of the sixties.

Bernardine Dohrn, another founder of the group and Ayers’ wife, was hired at Northwestern University‘s law school, directing a center on children and families. Having failed to set the fire with a match, they spent their careers where the real fuel for revolution is refined — in the education of our youth.

That is the pattern’s deeper lesson: the few who truly want to set the fire learn that, when the spark fails, the surer path runs through the institutions that form the next generation.

Nobody should be confused about the intention or guilt of these two. In an interview with journalists David Horowitz and Peter Collier, shortly after he and Bernardine Dohrn surfaced from the Weather Underground in 1980, Ayers bragged:

“Guilty as hell, free as a bird—America is a great country.”

These are two of the wreckers.

The Exploited Virtue

Every effective campaign in this pattern shares one target: human compassion, cut loose from judgment.

Compassion is a faculty of motion. It tells us to act, but it cannot, by itself, tell us whether the action is right or who it ultimately serves. The economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith understood this in The Theory of Moral Sentiments: raw sympathy becomes moral only when it passes through what he called the impartial spectator, the internal judge that asks who benefits and at what cost.

C.S. Lewis put it more sharply in The Abolition of Man, warning of an education that cultivates feeling while dismantling the trained judgment that should govern it. Such an education, Lewis wrote, produces “men without chests” — people at once over-emotional and easy to lead, because the part of them that should mediate between sentiment and appetite was never formed.

This is why the woman delivering groceries can be pointed toward shielding people from federal law enforcement and experience the whole of it as kindness. Her mercy is genuine. It has been detached from the question her mercy cannot answer on its own. And a mercy detached from judgment is the softest target in any free society, because the people exploiting it never have to argue against compassion. They only have to aim it.

The current push to remake American schooling around “social and emotional learning” (SEL) deserves a closer look than it gets, precisely because it arrives wrapped in the language of care.

I do not doubt that many teachers embrace it because they want children to be well. But examine what it does rather than what it promises. It reweights the purpose of school away from the formation of a reasoning mind and toward the management of disposition and emotion. It installs a layer of psychological screening that routes children’s interior lives to vendors and agencies. And it does both under a banner no decent parent wants to oppose.

An education that credentials and cultivates feeling while displacing the slow, demanding work of forming judgment is not a neutral reform. It is, whether anyone intends it or not, the upstream production of exactly the citizen the downstream campaigns require: capable of strong feeling, trained to distrust his own reason in favor of expert sentiment, and therefore movable. The conversion of education from a thinking enterprise into a feeling one is the first link in the chain: it produces a person who can be moved by sentiment — as a child, and as the adult he becomes — because he was never trained to govern it.

Rewriting the Words

A people who lose their shared words lose the ability to reason together, and there is no clearer case study in this whole pattern than the quiet removal of mother, father, man, and woman from professional, legal, and medical vocabulary. It happened without a single vote of any legislature, and it shows the mechanism in clean form: capture the professional bodies that define the language, and the statutes and the courtrooms follow.

The trail in the medical literature runs back to a remarkably small origin. Gender-inclusive lactation language — “chestfeeding,” “human milk feeding,” “birthing parent” in place of mother — traces in significant part to a 2015 article in the Journal of Human Lactation by Aiden Farrow, a lactation specialist who is female and identifies as transmasculine, and to subsequent guidance Farrow helped author.

From an individual’s contested premise about identity, the new vocabulary moved outward through the professional associations that credential the field — the International Lactation Consultant Association and the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine — and into clinical protocol.  The Academy’s Protocol #33 — its full title Lactation Care for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Plus Patients — rests, for its transgender-lactation guidance, on a small number of case reports rather than a body of controlled evidence.

The drug used to induce lactation in transgender women in those reports, domperidone, is not approved by the FDA for any use in the United States; the FDA has warned since 2004 that using it to stimulate lactation carries risks of cardiac arrhythmia and sudden death. The protocol’s own “Future Research” section concedes: “Significant research gaps exist in this field.”

A premise and a drug that thin would not survive a faculty seminar, yet the protocol now shapes how clinicians are instructed to speak to nursing mothers. And it steps past a question it does not answer: the induction regimen includes drugs that pass into milk — domperidone and the antiandrogen spironolactone are both excreted in breast milk — so the nursing infant receives them without consent, and the safety of that exposure, by the admission of the clinicians who have studied it, has not been established.

From the clinic, the language entered the law. The Uniform Law Commission‘s 2017 Model Parentage Act was co-chaired by Jamie Pedersen, who simultaneously served as chair of Lambda Legal’s National Leadership Council, a position he has held continuously since 2005. Pedersen co-chaired the ULC drafting committee that produced the gender-neutral statutory template, and then personally sponsored Washington State’s adoption of the model act, making him simultaneously the advocacy organization, the drafting authority, and the legislative sponsor. In Illinois, House Bill 2568, which began life as routine trust-and-unclaimed-property legislation, ended by striking the word mother from the statute books 55 times and the word father 34 times.

It is worth noting that the very concept underwriting all of this is younger than most of the people debating it. The term gender identity was coined by clinicians Robert Stoller and Ralph Greenson around 1963 — an invention of mid-century psychiatry, not a discovery of permanent fact. That is not an argument against taking anyone’s distress seriously. It is a caution against treating a sixty-year-old clinical construct as a truth so settled that the words mother and father must be deleted to accommodate it.

The Capture of Childhood

The same premise — that the body is raw material for an inner sense of self — has reached into the care of children, and here the stakes are highest because the evidence has reversed.

For a decade, American medicine moved toward an affirmation-only model for gender-distressed minors: affirm the stated identity, and proceed to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. Other countries that started down the same road have since pulled back hard. In April 2024, the Cass Review — a four-year, independent examination commissioned by England‘s National Health Service and built on systematic evidence reviews from the University of York — found the evidence for puberty blockers and hormones in minors to be, in its own phrase, “remarkably weak,” and called for extreme caution, recommending psychotherapy and ordinary mental-health treatment as the first line of care.

England ended the routine prescribing of puberty blockers for minors; Sweden and Finland had already restricted the practice. The countries with socialized medicine and no conservative culture war to fight looked at the data and stepped back. That reversal is the strongest reason to question the American consensus, and it owes nothing to anyone’s religion.

Two further developments complete the picture. The first is the removal of parents. Guidance in several states, Illinois among them, has instructed schools to transition a child socially — new name, new pronouns — without informing the parents. In June 2025, in Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Supreme Court held six to three that parents have a religious-liberty right to opt their children out of instruction on gender and sexuality, a rebuke to the assumption that the school may form a child’s convictions over the parents’ objection and behind their backs.

The second is the closing of the counseling room. More than twenty states — Illinois enacted its version in the Youth Mental Health Protection Act of 2015 — barred licensed therapists from helping a minor explore any path but affirmation, making it lawful for a counselor to affirm a stated identity but unlawful to question it, even when the family asked for the latter. On March 31, 2026, in Chiles v. Salazar, the Supreme Court held eight to one that such a ban — Colorado’s Minor Conversion Therapy Law — regulates speech based on viewpoint and must face the strictest constitutional scrutiny.

Writing for the Court, Justice Gorsuch was joined by all but Justice Jackson; the majority held that when the “therapy” consists solely of conversation, the First Amendment does not permit a state to license one viewpoint while prohibiting another. The Court did not pronounce on which therapy works; it held that the state may not station itself in the consulting room and permit only one answer.

That is the defensible principle, and it is enough: a family and the counselor it trusts should not be forbidden by law from a careful, non-affirming, exploratory conversation about a child’s distress. Children deserve clinical caution and unhurried judgment rather than a single state-mandated outcome — and parents, not agencies, hold the first authority over which help their child receives.

The Judgment No Expert Can Make

Beneath every one of these fights — the curriculum, the clinic, the counseling room, the consent form — lies a single question that is seldom asked aloud: who decides what is good for a child, and on what authority? It is worth asking aloud, because the answer the age now takes for granted is the wrong one, and most of the rest follows from that error.

The phrase that governs these disputes in law is “the best interest of the child.” It sounds like a finding — something a credentialed person could determine and write down.

It is nothing of the kind.

To say what is best for a child, you must first know what a good human life is made of: which virtues are worth forming, which goods are worth wanting, what a person is ultimately for. Those are moral questions, and a free people does not agree on the answers. No instrument measures them; no degree confers them.

A physician can tell you what a treatment does to a body, but not whether the life it aims at is the good one — that judgment sits beyond anything his training covers. The expert can speak to the means. He has no privileged access to the end.

That single fact decides who should hold the authority. It belongs to the parents — not because parents are wise, or right, or expert, since many are none of these, but because the good of a child is a moral matter, no neutral judge of it exists, and the parent is the one person who both loves the child and will answer for being wrong.

When a question cannot be settled by expertise, it falls to the one with the deepest stake and the longest accountability. Hand it to the state instead, and the moral judgment does not vanish; only its owner changes — the verdict of the people who love the child traded for the verdict of strangers who will move on to the next file. That is not neutrality. It is one contested vision of the good, carrying the force of law.

Here, the difference between teaching the moral and teaching the scientific does real work, because it marks where each authority ends. The forming of a child’s loves and loyalties and convictions — his moral world — belongs to those raising him; that is the whole meaning of the old principle that a child is not the mere creature of the state.

The teaching of what is actually known — that water is two parts hydrogen, that the earth circles the sun — is a shared enterprise, and the school is its ordinary instrument. The trouble enters at the seam, and it is always the same trespass: a contested claim taught as settled science, or a moral verdict slipped in wearing a lab coat.

When an identity theory is presented to children as biology, or affirmation is taught as health, or an ought is dressed as an is, the state has crossed into the parents’ territory without seeming to move at all.

Strip away the disguise, and the trespass is clear. The state may teach a child what is known; it may not, under that cover, decide what he should revere, desire, or become.

There is a real limit on the parents’ side. Their authority is a presumption, not a blank check, and it has always stopped where genuine harm to the child begins; the same tradition that placed a child’s upbringing in his parents’ hands also holds that parents are not free to make martyrs of their children.

Some parents are themselves the danger, and a society that could not act on that would not deserve the name. So the whole contest narrows to the meaning of one word: harm. Hold it to its honest sense — demonstrable injury to the child — and the structure stands: parents decide, the state guards against real damage, and the boundary between them holds. Stretch the word until a parent’s refusal to embrace the reigning fashion is itself counted as injury, and the protective exception quietly devours the rule, until “the best interest of the child” becomes a warrant to take the child from anyone who dissents.

Erasing the Parent

American law has long affirmed what logic demands. For a century, it has been recognized that the authority to direct a child’s upbringing, education, and care belongs first to the child’s parents. The Supreme Court said so in Meyer v. Nebraska in 1923 and again in Pierce v. Society of Sisters in 1925, and it reaffirmed the principle as a fundamental liberty in Troxel v. Granville in 2000. That authority is not a courtesy the state extends; it is a right the state is bound to respect, because no institution loves a child the way a parent does, and none is better placed to protect her.

This displacement of the parent is among the oldest moves in the collectivist repertoire, and its history is worth recalling — not to accuse anyone living of plotting a revolution, but to recognize a logic that keeps returning.

Marx and Engels, in 1848, listed the family among the bourgeois institutions to be swept away. The Soviet state built a youth cult around Pavlik Morozov, the boy said to have denounced his own father to the secret police; the tale was largely a myth, but the lesson the regime pressed on every Young Pioneer was the point: the good child belongs first to the state.

Mao’s Red Guards were set loose to denounce their parents and teachers; the Hitler Youth were taught to carry a father’s disloyal words to the Gestapo.

These movements shared nothing and despised one another, yet each made the identical move, because each was a total project, and a total project cannot abide a rival claimant on a child’s loyalty. The family is that rival — the one institution that shapes a person’s loves before the state can reach them. Any movement bent on forming the citizen itself must therefore get between the parent and the child.

The point is not that today’s advocates are Bolsheviks; most would be appalled at the comparison and believe they are freeing children, not capturing them. The point is that the move recurs under flags that agree on nothing else — not because a dead regime is issuing orders, but because the logic is the same wherever the ambition runs toward total state control.

That settled principle is being dismantled piece by piece, and the instrument is the quiet expansion of “minor consent” — the doctrine that a child may make grave and sometimes irreversible decisions about her own body while her parents are never told.

The clearest single example is in my own state.

In 2022, Illinois repealed its Parental Notice of Abortion Act, a modest 1995 law — itself delayed by ACLU litigation until 2013 — that required only that one parent be told, forty-eight hours in advance, before a minor’s abortion, with exceptions for abuse, emancipation, and medical emergency, and with a judicial bypass for any girl who could not safely tell her family.

The repeal swept away even that. Today, a physician in Illinois may end the pregnancy of a girl of eleven without notifying a single member of her family and without the approval of any judge.

Think what that means, because it exposes the whole logic. An eleven-year-old cannot be pregnant by anything other than a crime; her pregnancy is, on its face, evidence of felony sexual assault. A system that receives that child, ends the pregnancy, and sends her home — without telling her parents, without a judge, and too often without any serious inquiry into who did this to her — is not guarding her privacy. In the worst cases, it is laundering the evidence of her abuse and returning her to the person who caused it.

I want to be fair about why such laws exist, because the strongest argument for them is real: some children are abused by the very parent the law would notify, and for them, a notice requirement is a danger rather than a shield. That is true, and it is precisely why the old Illinois law carried a judicial bypass — a path to a judge who could authorize the abortion and was positioned to see that a child was in peril. Abolishing notice altogether does not solve the abusive-parent problem; it discards the safeguard along with the parent, and it does so for every child, including the great majority whose parents are their protectors rather than their predators. The major medical associations oppose parental-involvement laws, citing the worry that some teens will avoid care; that concern deserves a hearing, but it cannot erase the documented cost.

And the cost is documented.

Medical providers are mandated reporters of child abuse — the answer defenders reach for first — yet the trigger is uneven from state to state. In several states, a minor’s pregnancy does not by itself require a report at all. Worse, the reporting that should catch these crimes has a record of failure. Court files document cases such as that of a California father who raped and impregnated his thirteen-year-old daughter; she was taken for an abortion, advised only to abstain for three weeks, and returned home, where the abuse continued until a second pregnancy and a second abortion — the crime coming to light only when her older sister, herself long abused by the same man, reported him to police.

A 2002 undercover investigation by Life Dynamics, later entered into the Congressional Record, reported that more than ninety percent of the Planned Parenthood and National Abortion Federation clinics it telephoned were willing to help conceal a relationship between a thirteen-year-old girl and a twenty-two-year-old man. When the parent is cut out, the reporting duty is uneven, and the procedure itself removes the physical evidence, the result is a machine almost built to make a child rapist’s crime disappear.

The same impulse permeates the rest of the minor-consent project — including the recent action to strip puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and chemical-abortion drugs from the Illinois Prescription Monitoring Program, erasing the very record a parent or a later physician might use to learn what a child has been given. Crucially, the bill as written would not merely exclude future prescriptions from reporting; it would require the deletion of existing records already on file by January 1, 2027 — not privacy protection, but the active destruction of medical evidence that families, physicians, and investigators might one day need.

The state advances on two fronts at once: it installs itself in the parent’s chair, and where it does not, it abandons the child to her own immature judgment on matters she cannot undo. Both are transfers of authority away from the party with the deepest stake in the child’s good, and both, like everything else in this pattern, are carried forward by a familiar advocacy network.

The legislative templates for expanding minor consent have been distributed for years by the National Center for Youth Law, an Oakland, CA organization that drew tens of millions of dollars in government funding — federal, state, and local — over the past decade while authoring the playbook states use to write parents out of their children’s lives.

The institutional parallel at the federal level deserves exposure. Just as the state installs itself between parent and child, so a class of government-adjacent contractors installed themselves between the federal child welfare system and the children it was paid to protect — and then enriched themselves on the proceeds. Of more than 475,000 unaccompanied children processed during the last administration, over 300,000 remain unaccounted for, while approximately $17 billion went to a handful of NGO contractors at an average of roughly $43,000 per child.

The organizations that lost those children paid their leaders handsomely, almost entirely using public money. One contractor’s top officer received more than $1.17 million; another’s received more than $1.23 million, routed through affiliated entities in an arrangement whose evident purpose was to make the money harder to trace.

Like the defense industry, this industry also has a revolving door with the government. The official who helped design the federal vetting system departed government, worked for the Biden transition team, and joined one of the contractors. That contractor then received a $529 million no-bid contract three days after submitting an unsolicited proposal, an arrangement a federal inspector general later confirmed had bypassed competition rules.

What Fuels This and How It Hides

None of this operates on enthusiasm alone. It takes money, and the money flows through a small number of organizations whose defining feature is opacity. They are engineered to conceal the donors and prevent their public exposure.

The largest and most familiar is the network founded by George Soros. The Open Society Foundations, established in 1993, has reported expenditures exceeding $24 billion over its history and was recently restructured under Alexander Soros to provide larger, longer, more flexible grants; the United States remains its single largest focus, funding progressive advocacy across immigration, criminal justice, and family policy. Open Society is, at least, comparatively visible — it publishes much of its grantmaking.

The Tides Foundation, which has operated since 1976, is built differently. It functions as a pass-through funder and fiscal sponsor: donors route money through Tides, which then directs it onward, often through donor-advised funds that keep the original giver’s name off the destination. Tides reported $382.1 million in grants in 2024 across more than 2,100 grantees. Its own founder once described anonymity as central to the model. The paper trail between a gift and its result is quite literally washed away.

Tides describes its mission in the language of equity and “trust-based philanthropy,” and funding advocacy is entirely legal. The concern is not that the giving exists. It is designed so that no one needs to answer for where it lands.

The most consequential of these machines was assembled by Arabella Advisors, a for-profit consultancy that managed a constellation of nonprofits — the New Venture Fund, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the Hopewell Fund, and the Windward Fund, among them. The New York Times in 2021 called it a leading vehicle for “dark money” on the left, a daisy chain of groups that obscures who is funding whom. The network spent well over a billion dollars in the 2020 cycle alone, with the Sixteen Thirty Fund spending some $410 million that year — a sum Politico reported went to defeating the sitting president and helping Democrats win back the Senate, as well as state ballot measures and judicial-nomination fights.

Its donors have included Soros’s Open Society Policy Center, the Wyss-funded Berger Action Fund, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative‘s advocacy arm. As of late 2025, Arabella’s operations were folded into a new entity called Sunflower Services — a reminder that such structures dissolve and reappear faster than the public can track them — which is itself the point.

The family-language campaign drew on the same kind of structure.

The funders behind the degendering of medical and legal vocabulary include the Open Society network, the Ford and MacArthur foundations, the Arcus Foundation (built on the Stryker medical-device fortune), and the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund — a vehicle whose principals concealed their identities for years through a network of shell companies and pass-through donor-advised funds.

Investigative reporting by Bloomberg Businessweek, confirmed through Capital Research Center analysis and InfluenceWatch documentation, identified three hedge-fund billionaires behind Wellspring: Andrew Shechtel, David Gelbaum, and C. Frederick Taylor, founders of TGS Management, who used a single law firm to create more than a dozen anonymous foundations funded through shell LLCs bearing generic names designed to resist tracing.

Where public money was available, it flowed too: the Centers for Disease Control funded both the American Psychological Association and Advocates for Youth, from the same program office, to the tune of several million dollars each.

The people behind these networks are, in the main, transformers rather than wreckers. They are pursuing a vision of the country they believe is just. The deterioration that concerns me is the byproduct of that project, not its stated aim — and a writer who claims otherwise about a named living person, without proof of intent, has crossed from analysis into defamation. What the evidence does show, in filings and in mainstream reporting, is a system engineered to move enormous sums while diffusing accountability across legal layers. As one analysis of the Tides model observed, this requires no bad actors and no conspiracy; it requires only incentives that reward distance from consequence.

The Wages of Compassion

There is a second motive that runs alongside ideology, and it is older and plainer: money. A striking number of the organizations that carry this work do very well by it, and they do it on the public’s dime.

The hunger-relief system is the clearest illustration. The chief executive of Feeding America, the dominant force in food distribution, has drawn compensation of around $1.1 million; the head of the Greater Chicago Food Depository, almost $500,000 — salaries that outrun what comparable logistics work commands in the private sector, paid by an enterprise sustained by federal commodity programs and donations given in good faith by people who imagine every dollar reaches the hungry.

The child-welfare contractors are starker still, because their pay is almost entirely public money, and their performance was a catastrophe. Of more than 475,000 unaccompanied children processed during the last administration, over 300,000 remain unaccounted for, while roughly $17 billion went to a handful of contractors — an average near $43,000 per child.

The organizations that lost those children paid their leaders handsomely. Southwest Key Programs, which drew 99.8 percent of its revenue from the federal government, compensated its top officer more than $1.17 million. The leader associated with the BCFS and Compass Connections network, at 99.9 percent federal dependency, received more than $1.23 million routed through related entities — an arrangement whose evident purpose was to make the money harder to trace. Global Refuge, the former Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, and Family Endeavors each paid their highest officer roughly $700,000.

I do not say these people broke the law by earning a salary. I say that an industry built on the relief of suffering has, in places, become an industry built on the perpetuation of the conditions that justify its budget — and that a leadership class enriching itself, while the children it was paid to protect vanish, has surrendered any claim to the benefit of the doubt. The love of money is not a foreign weapon. It is a domestic vulnerability, and it feeds the deterioration as surely as any ideology.

Rewriting the Law Without a Vote

The most durable damage is done not by passing bad laws but by quietly rewriting how existing laws are applied — changing the meaning of a statute without ever amending its text, where no election can easily reach.

The instrument is what the Competitive Enterprise Institute calls “regulatory dark matter”: guidance documents, agency memos, policy statements, and circulars issued outside the formal notice-and-comment process the law requires for real rules. They carry no force of law in theory and function as binding commands in practice. Federal agencies have accumulated more than a hundred thousand such guidance entries, and an outgoing administration learned to dismantle the public portals that would let a successor even inventory them — ensuring that an incoming administration cannot quickly find, let alone reverse, the thousands of sub-regulatory changes embedded in its predecessor’s final years.

The pattern is visible across the programs I have investigated. Take the federal food programs, where statute and enforcement have been pried apart over a quarter-century without a syllable of the law itself being changed. The Food and Nutrition Act still restricts benefits to citizens and “qualified aliens”; what was dismantled was never that limit but the verification that made it real, and it was dismantled in increments, across administrations of both parties, so that no single vote and no single author can be held to account for the result.

A 2000 statute quietly dropped the requirement that every member of a household be checked, leaving only the applicant; a 2002 USDA memo, drafted by career staff during a Republican administration and lost in the post-September 11 noise, instructed states to assure applicants their information would not be shared with immigration enforcement. Later guidance recast documentation and identity checks not as integrity measures but as “barriers” to be removed. The capstone came on October 31, 2024, when a USDA final rule barred states from treating address, length of residency, or identification documents as eligibility criteria at all.

Income fares no better: under TEFAP rules, a distribution site is forbidden to ask for a pay stub, a tax return, or any proof of earnings — even where the ceiling is generous to the point of meaninglessness, reaching in Illinois, for a family of four, roughly $99,000.

The result is that a person collecting federally purchased food today can be asked for little more than a name and a signature — no identification, no address, no proof of income — and no one is permitted to test either the citizenship the statute requires or the income the program nominally caps.

In the statute, these limits remain on the books, intact and unrepealed. They have been made impossible to enforce. This is repeal by attrition — the consent of the governed withdrawn not by changing a law but by making it impossible to apply.

The Constitution’s Take Care Clause commands the executive to faithfully execute the laws. That command is being ignored at will.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement, whose statutory mission is the protection of children, removed child-vetting safeguards over the written objections of its own staff. The Antideficiency Act forbids spending beyond what Congress appropriated; a $529 million no-bid contract was awarded to a favored contractor three days after an unsolicited proposal, an arrangement that a federal inspector general later confirmed bypassed competition rules.

These are not gray areas of policy preference. They are the deliberate substitution of administrative preference for written law, and where they are done knowingly, they shade from maladministration into corruption. When the meaning of the law can be changed by memo, the consent of the governed has been quietly canceled, and the machinery keeps running no matter who wins the next election. Multi-year grant contracts, front-loaded in an administration’s final months, finish the job — obligating money and litigation that carry a policy forward through an opposing term, so that the deterioration ratchets in one direction and never the other.

Where the Foreign Hand Becomes Visible

In most cases, foreign adversaries are not the authors but the beneficiaries — they exploit divisions they did not create. The 2025 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community describes exactly this: Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea waging gray-zone influence campaigns designed to gain advantage while avoiding open war, seeking opportunities to exploit existing narratives and grievances. They look for the dry season. They do not plant the forest.

There is, however, a point at which the foreign hand is not merely inferred but documented, and it is worth examining because it reveals the whole pattern in miniature.

In August 2023, a New York Times investigation traced a global web of pro-Beijing messaging to an American tech mogul, Neville Roy Singham, who built his software firm, Thoughtworks, in Chicago and now operates from Shanghai. Through shell companies and donor-advised funds, Singham’s network channeled tens of millions of dollars into American activist groups.

Code Pink, the anti-war organization co-founded by his wife, received roughly $1.4 million — about a quarter of its funding — and over the same period reversed its posture on China, dropping its criticism of Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghurs and launching a “China Is Not Our Enemy” campaign. Singham has categorically denied taking orders from any government, saying he is guided solely by his own long-held beliefs, and that denial belongs in the record.

Multiple congressional committees and a federal interagency review are now examining whether his network violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Notice what the money did and did not do. It did not invent Code Pink; the group already existed. It found an established piece of American activist infrastructure and turned it. That is the pattern entirely: not creation, but capture of something already standing.

There is a second node, harder to see because it operates through criminal rather than financial channels — but documented in federal court, congressional testimony, and intelligence community assessments. The same cartels that charged $6,000 to $15,000 per person to deliver migrants to the American border operated from Venezuelan territory under the protection of Venezuelan soldiers, interlinked with the Tren de Aragua gang, and connected to Iranian and Hezbollah financial networks through the same Venezuelan hub that Cuba, Russia, and China used as their primary Western Hemisphere forward operating base.

The federal government then paid roughly $43,000 per unaccompanied child to the NGO contractor network to receive them on the American side. Cartel and charity were, functionally, two halves of the same supply chain — with the children the commodity moving through it — and the hostile state actors who maintained operational presence in Venezuela had an ongoing interest in keeping that pipeline open and the domestic political conditions favorable to its continuation. The NGO contractors did not conspire with Caracas. They did not need to. They needed only the regulatory and political environment the transformers built — and the wreckers, both foreign and domestic, found it ready.

What Honesty Requires

Two admissions keep this argument honest. The first is that opaque money is not the property of one side. The right has its own pass-through vehicles and anonymous donor funds, and a critique of dark money that sees only the left is not a critique; it is a team jersey. The principle has to be the principle: money that shapes public life should be traceable to the people spending it, whoever they are.

The second is the distinction I have tried to hold throughout — between the witting and the unwitting. The volunteer with the groceries, the teacher who believes she is helping anxious children, the small donor who gives to a cause with a reassuring name: these are not the architects. They are the exploited. To treat them as the enemy is both unjust and self-defeating, because they are precisely the neighbors we need to reach. The architects are the few who engineer the exploitation, the leaders who enrich themselves on the proceeds, the officials who rewrite the law by memo — and, fewer still, those who want the weakness for its own sake. Keep that line bright, and the argument indicts a system without slandering the kindness of the people caught in it.

What to Do

The remedy begins where the mechanism is weakest: in the light.

Demand transparency, and back it with law. Support state and federal disclosure requirements that pierce the donor-advised-fund veil, and insist that the Foreign Agents Registration Act be enforced against networks that route foreign-aligned money into American political life. Where federal dollars are involved — in the food programs, in the child-welfare contracts — verification is not cruelty; it is stewardship, and you may say so without apology.

Insist that laws be changed by votes, not by memos. Ask your representatives to require that agency “guidance” carrying the force of a rule go through the process the law demands, and to make every such document public and searchable. A statute whose meaning can be rewritten in a back office is not a law; it is a suggestion the powerful may revise at will.

Engage the school where you live. Go to the board meeting. Ask what your district’s social-emotional curriculum teaches, what data it collects on your child, and which vendor receives it. Ask to see the screening instruments. Ask, plainly, whether the school would alter your child’s name or pronouns without telling you — and remember that the Supreme Court has now affirmed your right to opt your child out of instruction that crosses your convictions, and your right to seek the counsel you choose for your child rather than the single answer a state prefers.

Restore the parent to the room. Support the return of parental notice — paired, as the old law was, with a judicial bypass and a genuine abuse inquiry — so that no child’s pregnancy is ended in silence with no one asking who harmed her. Press for reporting laws that treat the pregnancy of a young child as what it plainly is: an automatic cause to investigate. A society that will not ask an eleven-year-old how she came to be pregnant has decided not to know, and deciding not to know is its own kind of complicity.

Govern your own mercy. Give generously, but give through channels you can hold accountable — your church, your local pantry whose leadership you know by name, organizations that publish their financials without requiring a forensic accountant to follow the money. When you support food distribution, consider giving directly to local church-based pantries that operate outside the Feeding America network and receive no federal TEFAP commodities; they maintain genuine charitable independence and answer directly to the congregations and communities they serve, rather than to a $4.9 billion federal distribution monopoly sustained by public dollars.

And speak. The single greatest asset this pattern enjoys is the quiet of decent people who assume someone else is watching. No one is conducting this. That is exactly why it falls to citizens, and not to some imagined authority, to notice the dry season, to put out the match, and to keep any fire from taking hold and spreading.