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   > 2023   
      
   Proof that Republicans are Pedophiles:   
      
   The Republican party is obsessed with children – in the creepiest of ways   
   This article is more than 1 year old   
   Osita Nwanevu   
      
   For all their posturing about defending children from abuse, their record   
   tells another story   
   Wed 30 Mar 2022 08.46 EDT   
   Last modified on Fri 1 Apr 2022 11.32 EDT   
      
   Republicans have kids on the brain. Over the course of the last year,   
   conservative activists and Republican state lawmakers have been whipping up   
   a set of interrelated moral panics over the supposed indoctrination of   
   children in our schools and child abuse – from the notion that elementary   
   school teachers are raising up junior divisions of the Black Panthers with   
   critical race theory to the insistence that trans people, who today   
   comprise less than half a percent of high-school athletes in the United   
   States, might soon bring an end to girls’ sports. The word “grooming” is   
   now in wide circulation on the right ? – a dogwhistle that implies basic   
   education on LGBT identity and sex is priming kids for predation, perhaps   
   at the hands of the Satanic sex traffickers at the heart of QAnon’s   
   conspiracy theories.   
      
   All of this spilled into last week’s confirmation hearings for US supreme   
   court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, which Senate Republicans did their   
   best to derail by mischaracterizing her sentencing on cases on child sexual   
   abuse images. As has been widely reported, those sentences had been   
   entirely in keeping with sentences delivered by most federal judges in   
   comparable cases, including sentences delivered by Trump judicial   
   appointees with broad Republican support. But that mattered not a whit to   
   Republicans on the Hill. “Every judge who does what you’re doing is making   
   it easier for the children to be exploited,” Lindsey Graham told Jackson in   
   a heated exchange. Ted Cruz accused Jackson of “a record of activism and   
   advocacy as it concerns sexual predators that stems back decades”.   
   TOPSHOT-US-POLITICS-ELECTION-TRUMP
TOPSHOT - US President Donald Trump   
   arrives to speak to supporters from The Ellipse near the White House on   
   January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC. - Thousands of Trump supporters, fueled   
   by his spurious claims of voter fraud, are flooding the nation's capital   
   protesting the expected certification of Joe Biden's White House victory by   
   the US Congress. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN   
   SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)   
   Judge says Trump ‘likely’ committed crimes in bid to block Biden victory   
   Read more   
      
   And Josh Hawley, best-known for defending Donald Trump’s allegations of   
   election fraud and cheering on the rioters at the Capitol on January 6, led   
   the pack with a fusillade of similar attacks on Jackson at the hearings and   
   on social media. “I’ve noticed an alarming pattern when it comes to Judge   
   Jackson’s treatment of sex offenders, especially those preying on   
   children,” he tweeted ahead of the hearings. “Judge Jackson has a pattern   
   of letting child porn offenders off the hook for their appalling crimes,   
   both as a judge and as a policymaker.”   
      
   Again, the Republican attacks on Jackson’s record, like the rest of their   
   fearmongering about kids these days, have been ludicrous. It is true,   
   though, that one of our parties has proven itself remarkably willing to   
   defend sexual predators in recent years.   
      
   Here’s a genuinely alarming pattern the senator should take an interest in.   
   In 2016, former Republican speaker of the House Dennis Hastert ?was   
   convicted for trying to pay off men he had sexually abused as a high school   
   wrestling coach. His victims had been boys between the ages of 14 and 17 at   
   the time. After Hastert had pleaded guilty to making a set of payments,   
   Hastert’s legal team compiled 41 letters in defense of his character from   
   friends and former colleagues, including Republican congressmen David   
   Dreier, Porter Goss, John Doolittle, Thomas Ewing, and the former   
   Republican House majority whip Tom DeLay. “We all have our flaws, but   
   Dennis Hastert has very few,” Delay wrote. “I ask that you consider the man   
   that is before you and give him leniency where you can.” Unmoved, US   
   district judge Thomas M Durkin sentenced Hastert to over a year in prison.   
   “Nothing is more stunning,” he said, “than to have the words ‘serial child   
   molester’ and ‘speaker of the House’ in the same sentence.”   
      
   The Hastert case might have stunned more people if Americans hadn’t been   
   busy following the 2016 campaign, with its flurry of sex and other   
   scandals, at the time. But the sexual misconduct allegations that had piled   
   up against Donald Trump, from well over a dozen women by the year’s end,   
   have since been mostly forgotten by the press and the public ?– including   
   allegations from five contestants in Trump’s Miss Teen USA pageants that he   
   would walk into dressing rooms while girls as young as 15 were changing.   
   Notably, Trump had previously boasted to Howard Stern that he would   
   intentionally walk in on undressing contestants in the adult Miss USA   
   pageants. “You know, they’re standing there with no clothes,” he’d said in   
   an appearance on Stern’s show. “And you see these incredible-looking women   
   ?– so I sort of get away with things like that.” ?In fairness to Trump, a   
   number of Miss Teen USA contestants either directly disputed the   
   recollections of his accusers, or told reporters they couldn’t remember   
   Trump being present in the dressing rooms.   
      
   What is not in dispute is that Trump also happened to enjoy a friendship of   
   well over a decade with Jeffrey Epstein. This past December, a former Miss   
   Teen USA contestant testifying at the sex-trafficking trial of Ghislaine   
   Maxwell told the court that she had met Trump through Epstein at the age of   
   14. That raises more questions about whether Trump knew of Epstein’s   
   activities ?– in 2002, he’d told a reporter that Epstein liked women “on   
   the younger side” ?– although it’s not at all obvious how much he would   
   have cared if he had. After Maxwell’s arrest in July 2020, Trump told   
   reporters that he had interacted with Maxwell socially “numerous times” but   
   hadn’t been following the case closely. “I just wish her well, frankly,” he   
   said.   
      
   Incredibly, Maxwell wasn’t the first accused accused sexual offender Trump   
   had wished well from the White House. In 2017, Alabama’s Republican Senate   
   candidate Roy Moore was accused of romantically and sexually pursuing   
   teenagers while in his 30s, including a woman who told the Washington Post   
   that Moore had molested her when she was 14. “On a second visit, she says,   
   he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes,” the Post   
   reported. “He touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided   
   her hand to touch him over his underwear.”   
      
      
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