The first thing I checked was the number of people under 18 in the US. It's roughly 80m, which means 1 in every 200 kids disappeared last year. You'd have to be monumentally stupid to accept this as fact, uncritically. My high school population was ~2000. Someone died in a car crash and it was, understandably, a huge deal for months. Now imagine if 10 kids went missing every year and were never found.

The worst part about this is that I've seen similar claims of widespread missing children repeated a few times in the wake of Andrew Tate's arrest, usually somehow implicating the current presidential administration, and it feels like the laziest possible astroturfing campaign imaginable. It's probably been knocking around longer than that, but the fact that people dumb enough to fall for this shit have massive megaphones and seats in Congress is an existential threat to society.