Republican voters don't give a damn about our daughters and granddaughters

The threat is far bigger than Epstein

TAT readers,

Today’s essay is a painful one and quite personal. I suspect it is the same for most Americans who not under the spell of Republican ideology in the Trump/ MAGA era. I write today’s work to support what the Republican Party will not, the protection of our women, children and those with the myriad of gender types, foreign and evil to the GOP.

In our unnecessarily chaotic times, the fully MAGA Republican Party and their voters, are guilty of imposing all manner of unconstitutional threats onto the backs of the American people. Some are heinous from a national security perspective and others, about their willingness to ignore the constitution and our courts. Some like today’s essay, are deeply personal and have caused, the deepest of wounds between family and friends. Today I will discuss how painful it is that today’s brainwashed and cowardly Republican Party, voted a lifelong sexual predator and likely pedophile into our highest office.

As a “girl dad” and a grandfather with granddaughters, I am deeply pained that our insurrectionist GOP regime, refuses to protect America’s women and children, just so they can protect their president and stable of sexual predators in high positions. Republican voters knew this when they voted Republican, but didn’t give damn. This is a powerful indicator of just how depraved that Republican ideology has become. They are neither conservatives nor Christians, if they don’t have the moral spine to protect our women, children or those with gender definitions, different from the Christian Nationalists.

I am fond of saying that, “people, organizations and nations, are what they do, not what they say.” Bluntly, this means that today’s Republican voters have no claim to family values, Christian values and American values, especially when it comes to women, girls and all other things regarding gender. Last year I wrote a deep piece, explaining in detail that their misogynism and gender obsessions come from Russian, far-right ideology. It is worth reading this as well. Today though, this essay is personal and I make no apologies for discussing this as one painfully wounded by the Republican voters in my life.

Onward

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Like most parents, I have always been protective of my children and now, my grandchildren. I wasn’t a so-called “helicopter parent” rescuing my children from everything petty, but focused on the threats to their actual safety from outside forces that could dramatically alter their lives and mine. If they were late for school, it was their problem but if they were planning on going anywhere or doing something risky, we asked the right questions and said no as often as not. I suspect that many of the Epstein victims, had similar parents. They, their families and friends are devastated and their lives irrevocably and painfully altered, all because powerful men condoned and protected the abusers. Today’s GOP protects the perps, not the victims.

Of course, protecting Epstein and his fellow pedophiles, has been going on for decades. The victims were ignored, shamed and intimidated into silence. Not all stayed silent, a credit to their emotional and physical resilience. Epstein and his fellow “johns” did stay silent, and did all possible to bury their heinous proclivities with money and power as their tools of intimidation. It worked for years, until the tenacity of a reporter named, Julie K. Brown took on the story. Her work work on the Epstein case would earn her a Pulitzer nomination, not her first. Alan Dershowitz, one of Epstein’s legal team, would torpedo her Pulitzer nomination in order to protect Epstein, and himself. Now, it’s the entire Republican Party rushing to Trump’s rescue from further investigation. People with nothing to hide, don’t require protection.

"One of Giuffre’s toughest critics and someone who has also attacked Brown – going so far as to write a letter to the Pulitzer prize committee requesting that they not consider her for the prize – is Epstein’s lawyer, the Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. Giuffre has said that Dershowitz was one of the men she was instructed to have sex with by Epstein – a claim the lawyer vehemently denies."

- Meet Julie K Brown, the woman who brought down Jeffrey Epstein
- The Guardian
- Andrew Anthony
- July 25, 2021

I believe that media has not done enough to support victims of Epstein and are far more interested the Trump connection to Epstein. These days, with mainstream media kowtowing to Trump and Republican intimidation, they handle anything negative about the White House and a Republican-led Congress, with kid gloves. Apparently, they don’t care much about their First Amendment rights and those of their audience either. One thing is for damn sure, is that their cautious reporting, puts more children at risk.

And of course, when billionaires and otherwise powerful men break the law, lots of money is involved. Epstein and his posse of child abusers moved billions around the world, largely to fund a global network of sex tracking, largely of minors. Most Americans these days only hear, see or read about Virginia Giuffre and a handful of other abused minors. There were hundreds counted and most likely well over a thousand all together. Imagine that, powerful men who can buy hundreds of children for sex, and then you realize just how disgraceful today’s Republicans are in putting him and some of his cabinet with a sexual predation background, in office… again.

I doubt that there are very many American voters, who haven’t been following this Epstein and Trump debacle for well over a decade. The Republicans put him in office again anyway, and everyone else is appalled at their insane absence of morality. There is no voice in the Republican administration calling for justice for those hundreds of abused children. Yes, read that last sentence slowly and let it roll around between your ears for a minute or two, and you will likely feel sick to your stomach. I do just writing it. Our family and friends that we’ve known throughout our lives, placed a lifelong sexual predator in charge of our daughters, granddaughters, nieces and the other women in our lives. Where I come from, this would be described as, “putting a fox in the henhouse to keep it safe from other foxes.”

I truly don’t know how Republican voters sleep at night over issues like this. I never read, hear or watch a story about these victims that I don’t picture my own daughters and now granddaughters. Even in prison, child sexual abusers, are despised and at-risk. How is it that some of our worst, imprisoned criminals, have more morality regarding child-sex abuse, than Republican voters? It’s not a rhetorical question. This is but one reason that on the right side of the aisle, we have Christian Nationalists, not Christians. The numbers of trafficking victims is staggering and every single one, is a tragedy for family, friends and communities.

DOJ report on child sex trafficking in the US

Even though the Trump administration has put their name on an action plan, (of course) their plan is actually the Biden administration’s 2021, National Action Plan to Combat Human Trafficking. In Trump’s first term, 2016 - 2020, human trafficking arrests declined significantly. There is little reason to believe that it will improve in his current administration. Besides, he has a congress run by his spineless Republican Party, that refuses to follow the law, constitution and any reasonable approach to any crisis, not blessed by their very own Epstein buddy, Donald Trump.

What's a parent to do with such immoral men running the country? Besides being a parent and grandparent, a significant piece of my own combat-zone, PTSD, revolves around being unable to protect children from violent extremists. Epstein’s shadow still falls long across the Trump administration, and I have no doubt that family and friends of victims are similarly affected. Their cowardice in releasing the full documents, doesn’t ease my pain or that of the victims and their families. Their dismal attempts to use ruses like the Ghislaine Maxwell statement charade to distract from justice for these victims, simply reinforces the stark immorality that defines the administration and its party. As for those we’ve long counted as family and friends, their silence is deafening.

How is it that anyone claiming a moral backbone and to be deeply religious, can stay silent in the face of such egregious child sexual abuse? Why won’t a party that was partially elected on releasing the Epstein files, actually follow through on their promise? Isn’t it American values to protect children? Sure as hell is in my home and the home I was raised in. Why is protecting the most vulnerable young girls, a partisan issue? Why can’t and won’t, Republicans be supportive of justice for such grievously abused victims of these primarily, old, rich white men? Trump and henchmen prefer to blame everything on immigrants but more than 90% of those arrested for child, sex-trafficking are US citizens and male. Are Republican voters protecting a demographic, their political party or both? The rest of us want to know.

As we go about our lives, maybe we should just all ask the Republicans in our lives, why they voted for a decades-long sexual predator, with more than a decade of close friendship with Epstein. If the question makes them squirm, so be it. Ask them what they would do if it was their daughters and granddaughters, among the roughly one thousand victims of Epstein and Maxwell’s network. So much for their “party of family values” nonsense. If they refuse to protect children from the most wicked crimes, how can we trust them to be in our children’s lives? For that matter, how can we trust them to be in our lives at all?

The last thing that I will say in regards to this delicate topic is, yes, I’m triggered by and appalled at Republican voters’ callousness, when it comes to other people’s children. To them, victims are merely unaddressed statistics. To me and likely most of you, I see a threat to all of our children by allowing Republicans to run the country. Draconian abortion laws here in Texas, are killing women in and near childbirth. Women’s healthcare in general, is at risk all across our state and beyond. Limitations on certain types of drugs regarding pregnancy, are another threat to women.

"Pregnancy became far more dangerous in Texas after the state banned abortion in 2021, ProPublica found in a first-of-its-kind data analysis.

The rate of sepsis shot up more than 50% for women hospitalized when they lost their pregnancies in the second trimester, ProPublica found.

The surge in this life-threatening condition, caused by infection, was most pronounced for patients whose fetus may still have had a heartbeat when they arrived at the hospital.

ProPublica previously reported on two such cases in which miscarrying women in Texas died of sepsis after doctors delayed evacuating their uteruses. Doing so would have been considered an abortion.

The new reporting shows that, after the state banned abortion, dozens more pregnant and postpartum women died in Texas hospitals than had in pre-pandemic years, which ProPublica used as a baseline to avoid COVID-19-related distortions. As the maternal mortality rate dropped nationally, ProPublica found, it rose substantially in Texas.

ProPublica’s analysis is the most detailed look yet at a rise in life-threatening complications for women losing a pregnancy after Texas banned abortion. It raises concerns that the same pattern may be occurring in more than a dozen other states with similar bans." 

- Rates of pregnancy-related sepsis and deaths grow in Texas after abortion ban
- Texas Tribune
- By Andrea Suozzo, Sophie Chou and Lizzie Pressler, ProPublica
- February 20, 2025

Women here in Texas and now nationally in the Trump/ MAGA era, have been experiencing dramatic increases in misogynism, in both numbers and severity. State legislatures like Texas, habitually diminish the civil rights of women and often, in the most draconian fashion. Apparently, Republicans don’t give a damn about women or their girls. If they don’t care about their own, they sure as hell don’t care about ours. I’m still waiting for those errant GOP voters, to do something to protect women and girls. Until they do, we must protect our own girls and women. A father protecting his daughters and granddaughters, is a formidable foe and if this Epstein, Trump and Republican gaslighting continues, they will find out just how formidable!

Back later in the week,

Paul