Two Families, Two States, And One Difference

**Tony Brueski** (0:00)
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:07)
Shiny or shady?
In talking about the Siders recently, this is a family with 16 kids that were in the 12 by 12 room. And naturally, what kind of came to mind was the Duggars, the, you know, 19 kids in county and just the sheer amount of kids. But do the comparisons end there solely on having a ridiculous amount of children? And at first, I'm like, yeah, that's probably about it. You know, I mean, come on. I mean, look at the condition that the Sider family children were found in versus how the Duggars grew up. I mean, you know, very different environments, without a doubt. But at its core, are they really all that different? They really all that different? I'm going to talk about it today. I'm going to get your thoughts in the comment section on Substack and YouTube. Follow me through this year.
Obviously, it's all opinion.
But I'm kind of in wrestling with this. And the more I've been thinking about it, the more I'm like, oh, God, oh, God. And you go, oh, oh, God. The Attorney General of Ohio looked at one family and called it pure evil. That would be the Siders, the shady, if you will, in our graphic. A cable network looked at another family every week for 10 years and sold it as the wholesome heart of American television. Two labels at absolute opposite ends, supposedly of the moral universe. Peel the labels off, set the two families side by side.
And they're kind of looking at the same machine twice. One of them lived in a room the size of a parking space. Nobody knew until it was almost too late. The other one lived in front of cameras and nobody knew until it was almost too late either. Both of these families are in front of a judge.
So here's what actually happened. In Ohio, four people share one last name and one indictment. Gary Siders Sr., 73 Christina Siders, 67 Gary Siders Jr., 36 Elizabeth Siders, 33 Each of them charged with 16 counts of endangering children after deputies found 16 kids in a house in Hamden on June 13th, the 2026 All four pled, of course, not guilty. Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson called it pure evil. The Vinton County Sheriff said livestock had been kept in better conditions. In Arkansas, very different family.
A name most of America already knows, Joseph and Kendra Duggar were each charged with four counts of endangering the welfare of a minor and four counts of imprisonment. The state removed all four of their children, both pled not guilty. Joseph separately faces two felonies in Florida involving a child under 12, and has pled not guilty there as well.
Two families, two states, 20 children pulled into state custody between them. It's exactly one thing that separates these families from each other, and it has nothing to do with the children, and it does not show up until the very end. A couple of other things worth watching for along the way. Everybody already knows what kind of family the Siders are, and nobody can find the document that says so. And one of these two grandfathers put a single word in writing about a child endangerment charge. We're going to get to that.
The first thing these two families have in common is that outside of the household, nobody ever actually laid eyes on the children. In Ohio, that was done by disappearing. Investigators believe the Siders lived in multiple Ohio counties going back to 2008 And in Wisconsin at one point, and that the family largely avoided creating medical and government records the entire time. Venting County Schools has no enrollment record for these kids, no homeschooling record either. Some of the children could not speak. The oldest 18-years-old could not spell her own name. In Arkansas, it was done in plain sight.
19 children ran through the Advanced Training Institute, the homeschool program built by the Institute in Basic Life Principles. No outside teachers ever walked in. No school nurse, no guidance counselor, nobody inside that house who was legally required to pick up a phone if something looked wrong. Because, well, isolation prevented that. Same result, opposite methods. One family hid the children by vanishing off the map. The other hid them by putting them on a stage and called it religion. Either way, the only adults who ever saw those kids up close were the adults running the house.
And here's the shiny version. Might actually be worse, not better. The Duggar method was legal. Ohio stripped most of its homeschool verification requirements in 2023 Arkansas asked the family for one notice of intent a year, with no testing and no teaching credential. The shiny family did not break the rule. The rule was written to let them do exactly this, out in the open on basic cable with a studio audience. The Siders had to run and hide to keep their children off the books. Duggar's got to do it on camera and call it a lifestyle. And there's a fact that each of those households ran on one man.