PebHmong Discussion Forum
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: Visualmon on September 22, 2026, 06:59:05 PM
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The number one consumer of sex trafficking. Not just brown skin Latino ppl doing this. White people especially Christian wannabes also doing this particular malicious activity on innocent kids.
https://fb.watch/v/72_V0jowY/
Missouri summer camp CEO, embroiled in child sexual abuse scandal, is retiring
The CEO of Kanakuk Kamps, a Christian summer camp in southwest Missouri plagued by a history of sexual abuse, is said to be retiring later this year.
In a letter to camp families, Joe White, 77, reportedly said he would retire Aug. 31 after decades of overseeing the camp that has brought thousands of children to Branson. He cited medical treatments that followed his leukemia diagnosis in 2000.
“Thirty-five anesthetized surgeries later, it is time to pass the baton to the next very capable generation,” White wrote in the letter, which was posted online by D Magazine in Dallas, Texas.
Kanakuk and White did not respond to requests for comment by The Midwest Newsroom.
White’s announcement comes almost a year after Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe signed a bill — named after a former Kanakuk camper — into law that voids non-disclosure agreements reached in child sexual abuse cases. It was named after Trey Carlock, who was sexually abused by former Kanakuk director Peter Newman. Carlock signed an NDA and in 2019 died by suicide.
Carlock’s sister, Elizabeth Carlock Phillips, called White's retirement letter “disappointing” — it omitted the “very publicly known child sexual abuse” that occurred at the camp under his leadership, she said.
“This isn’t retirement; it’s a cop out,” Phillips said in a statement to The Midwest Newsroom, adding there has not been real accountability for the abuse survivors. “This is yet another PR move, and survivors are neither surprised nor appeased by Joe White stepping back cowardly.”
Phillips has been advocating for other states to pass their own “Trey’s Law.” U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has also introduced a federal version of the law.
In Kansas, four Republicans this year sponsored legislation to make past and future NDAs unenforceable in child abuse cases, but it died in committee. Todd Latiolais, director of policy and advocacy for No More Victims alliance, said the group would advocate for it next session.
“The unanimous passage of Trey’s Law in the House sent a clear message: Survivors of child sexual abuse and trafficking in Kansas should not be muzzled by a system meant to hold bad actors accountable,” Latiolais said in a statement.
One of the largest evangelical camps in the country, founded in 1926, Kanakuk has been plagued by allegations it covered up sexual abuse.
In 2010, Newman pleaded guilty to seven counts of sexual abuse, though prosecutors said his victims might have numbered in the “hundreds.” Newman, who was hired by Kanakuk in 1995, is now serving two life sentences, plus 30 years, at the Jefferson City Correctional Center.
A 2022 lawsuit filed by Logan Yandell, who as a child was abused by Newman, alleged camp leadership concealed knowledge about Newman’s behavior, which influenced his family’s decision to settle and sign an NDA.
As early as 1999, the camp received reports that Newman engaged in nude activity with young boys, according to an affidavit by Newman’s former supervisor. He recommended Newman be fired in 2003 but instead, Newman was later promoted.
Kanakuk and White continue to face lawsuits by former campers, including one filed last year by a woman who said she was abused by Newman.
“Faced with overwhelming evidence of illegal sexual misconduct involving a minor, Joe White and Kanakuk took no action to terminate Newman,” wrote the attorneys for another Newman survivor, who won a $5 million judgment against Newman and who is now suing the camp.
Camp leadership has called Newman a “master of deception” and denied past knowledge of his abuse.
In a statement on its website, Kanakuk said many kids had their “happiest memories” there, but the camp acknowledged for others, “a dark chapter” in its history continued to cause pain.
“We wish that chapter in our history didn’t exist, and we also wish we hadn’t added to the pain and hurt written within,” the camp wrote. “We now know we did, and for that we are sorry.”
A 2021 investigation by journalist Nancy French in the Springfield News-Leader revealed the abuse spanned decades. Other men tied to Kanakuk, French reported, had been convicted of sex crimes, including a counselor who abused three campers ages 9 to 12.
Speaking in 2022 on St. Louis on the Air, French said Newman was one of the “most prolific serial abusers” she’d ever heard of.
“I started digging into it,” she said, “and realizing that many of the camp leaders, including the ones that are still running the camp today, were aware of a lot of this abusive behavior and looked the other way — not only looked the other way, but promoted him repeatedly.”
My experience at Kanakuk, a Christian cult camp
Personal Story
As a now 20 year old, I am able to look back at my experiences as a teenager and the lasting effects that it has on me today in my views on religion as well as the effect it has played in who I am as a person.
I attended a camp called Kanakuk Kamps from ages 12-17, where, at the time, I thoroughly enjoyed my experiences and always looked forward to going back each summer. Tens of thousands of kids attend this camp each summer and it seems to be only growing. The kamp (as it is spelled by staff and kampers) sessions lasted 2 weeks for me each summer and I made lots of friends and still remain friends with them now. Many of them have returned to be kounselors, but at age 17 I had realized the dangerous religious behavior that staff encouraged us to act out in our daily lives after we left kamp.
There were many things I was taught over the years that made my behavior nearly intolerable to my friends outside of kamp. Here are some highlights:
-Being gay is a mindset and a sin. Anyone can change if they try hard enough, and you should encourage your gay friends to turn to God.
-Only have Christian friends. If your friends are another religion or don’t believe in God, bring them to church and try to convert them. If they don’t convert, then you cannot be friends with them.
-Everything about the rapture. They terrified me as a young child that I could be left behind on Earth without my “true Christian” friends and family who would teleport to heaven during the rapture, and I would burn in hell for eternity. I was 12.
-Science is a scam! The scientists that tell us evolution and the Big Bang are all agents of the devil and are on Earth to tempt us.
Those are just a small number of the things I learned at kamp and was shocked when I came home and my Jewish friends didn’t want to go to youth group with me. I told them they were going to go to hell if they didn’t go with me. Needless to say I had very few Jewish friends.
Not just this, but Kanakuk has an extensive history of sexual misconduct that they try VERY hard to conceal. I never learned much about this because every time it was brought up at kamp, we would get in trouble by kounselors for talking about it. Link to article about sexual misconduct
This has nothing to do with the religious aspect of kamp, but they would split us up into four Native American tribes, the Kiowa and Kickapoo for girls and the Cherokee and Choctaw for boys. We did real Native American rituals on real former Native American land that the kamp is built on. The kampers and kounselors, by the way, are nearly all white people. Very rarely did I ever see people of color at kamp. The purpose of the tribal stuff was for competitions and random tribal events that they would have every so often, but it felt super weird when a bunch of white kids and adults would come out in headdresses and tribal paint for seemingly no reason.
The weirdest thing about kamp was the kamp director. His name is Joe White. Yes actually. And he is like 70-something who will go in front of the kamp like 3 times per session and give these really passionate speeches for multiple hours about saving yourself for marriage and devoting your entire life to the cross and how science isn’t real and humans walked alongside the dinosaurs and stuff like that.
It was a kult. Or close to one.
EDIT: I forgot to mention! They remained open and fully operational during the summer of 2020, which as we all know is when COVID was definitely still very much a thing and there were no vaccinations available. My state was still on lockdown while kamp was open.