Extremist Groups Targeting Our Children Online with Senator Chuck Grassley
The Dr. Phil Podcast
Dr. Phil McGraw
4.3 • 13.5K Ratings
🗓️ 10 February 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sits down with Dr. Phil to discuss how violent and extremist networks are targeting children and vulnerable people online. The FBI warns that these groups target victims on social media, gaming and mobile apps, and other online platforms. It is also reported that these networks operate within the United States and globally, using grooming tactics along with threats to coerce and extort victims into producing, sharing, or live-streaming acts of self-harm, sexually explicit content, animal cruelty, and/or suicide. Senator Grassley will discuss how he is fighting to protect victims by the introducing 3 bi-partisan bills that will update federal sentencing guidelines, target violent online criminal networks, and crack down on sextortion threats.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I want everybody to lean forward and listen with both ears |
| 0:08.0 | because this episode of the Dr. Phil podcast is a very important warning for parents, grandparents, |
| 0:16.0 | siblings, anybody in a family, because this is about a silent threat that is lurking in the digital world |
| 0:27.6 | and it's one that you need to know about. Everybody knows that there are predators online, |
| 0:33.6 | but what you may not know is just how sophisticated, how sadistic, how violent these people are getting. |
| 0:45.3 | And there are groups out there right now that have one objective, and that is to destroy your family by attacking your children. |
| 0:58.5 | Now, this isn't something that just happens to somebody you read about in the newspaper. |
| 1:05.6 | And if there was somebody in your neighborhood, if there was somebody in your building, |
| 1:10.3 | if you live in an apartment building or on your block, if you live in a neighborhood, if there was somebody in your building, if you live in an apartment |
| 1:11.6 | building or on your block, if you live in a neighborhood that was coming after children, |
| 1:17.6 | and their objective was to destroy them. And you were hearing these words right now, and |
| 1:25.6 | you were in your car or you were at work, you would stop what you were hearing these words right now and you were in your car or you were at work, you |
| 1:29.7 | would stop what you were doing and you would get home and protect your children. |
| 1:34.6 | I'm not trying to be a fearmonger. I'm trying to alert you that this could be targeting your children as we speak right now because research |
| 1:49.3 | tells us that children teens tweens that are on the internet are interacting |
| 1:57.4 | intersecting with these people at an alarmingly high rate. |
| 2:05.0 | I'm not talking about it's rare, it's occasional. |
| 2:08.6 | The odds are better that they will intersect with these people than that they won't. |
| 2:16.9 | So this is a warning for families to tighten the bonds |
| 2:20.4 | before it's too late. Look, we're just living in a time when familial connections are harder to hold |
| 2:28.6 | because kids spend so much time on their devices. And you can't be there the whole time. You can't be |
| 2:37.5 | looking over their shoulder the whole time. Loneliness is at a historic level, which means that |
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