Dems Make Life Easier for Child Molesters, $23 Billion in Pork, and More: 5 Stories You Missed

The legacy media this week tried to convince readers that the greatest scandal facing America is Justice Samuel Alito’s endorsement of “godliness.” As purported news outlets obsessed over imaginary offenses committed exclusively by conservative Supreme Court justices, they missed far more consequential stories. This week’s overlooked news overlapped in distressing ways. The common thread running through them is the financial, psychological, and often physical pain inflicted by radical, secular ideology.

1. Senate Democrats hold a hearing to promote trafficking minors?

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary,” wrote H.L. Mencken. This week, Senate Democrats once again verified Mencken’s wisdom. They also inadvertently exposed the opposite truth: Politicians invariably cloak the most dangerous policies beneath the least controversial rhetoric.

The Senate Judiciary held a hearing on Wednesday implying pro-life states would make it illegal for pregnant women to cross state lines to get an abortion. Technically, the inquest into “interstate travel for [abortion] after Dobbs” was held by a Senate grouping with the ponderous name of the “Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action, and Federal Rights.” Senate Democrats imagined pro-life states would do to abortion-minded women what blue states did to all Americans in 2020: lock them down.

“Not one state is doing that. Not one state is considering legislation to do that,” noted Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah). Yet Senate Democrats are “willing to imply falsely that states are rendering adults prisoners in their own states.”

Democratic leaders may have called the hearing for the same reason that they promoted the so-called Right to Contraception Act earlier this month: to further their haggard campaign cry of a Republican “war on women” during a difficult election year. But Senator Lee pierced through the rhetoric to single out the people who benefit most under their proposed policies: sexual predators and pederasts.

Senate liberals’ fixation on this non-problem “leads me to wonder whether this is really about the pro-abortion activist community and lobby wanting to allow traffickers and abusers and abortion providers to transport children across state lines without their parents’ knowledge or consent in order to get an abortion,” he said. 

The senator enumerated examples of the abortion industry covering up child molestation, including a Missouri Planned Parenthood that got busted in an undercover sting offering to transport a 13-year-old girl across state lines for an abortion, even volunteering to write a medical note to circumvent the victim’s parents. Sadly, these are far from isolated occurrences, as I documented in my article for The Washington Stand, “The Deplorable History of the Abortion Industry’s Lies and Sexual Abuse Cover-ups.”

In essence, the Left called a show hearing this week that would benefit those predators. As Senator Lee summarized, “That’s messed up.”

“As a civil society, we should want whoever impregnated that girl — which is by definition statutory rape — to be prosecuted,” replied one of the hearing’s expert witnesses, Dr. Ingrid Skop, vice president of the Charlotte Lozier Institute. “The abortion will not fix the girl. It will not restore her innocence. It will merely add trauma to trauma. And we know mental health complications are quite frequent.”

We should, indeed, want traffickers and child molesters to face justice — but prosecution matters little if judges harbor a soft spot for the offenders, as appears to be the case in the next story.

2. Biden appointee saw ‘a lot of good’ in child molester.

President Joe Biden has nominated a judge who cut the sentence of a serial child molester in half, because she saw “a lot of good” in him.

Michael Smith began his years-long molestation of two young girls when one was nine years old and the other was four. Smith, a former officer at the Oxford County Jail, was convicted on 12 counts of unlawful sexual contact with a minor. Last March, he stood before Oxford County Superior Court Justice Julia Lipez for an emotional sentencing hearing.

Lipez, a justice on the Maine Superior Court, “heard written statements Friday from Smith’s two victims, who blamed Smith for night terrors, insomnia, appetite loss, anxiety, flashbacks and post-traumatic stress disorder after years of sexual abuse at his hands,” reported the Sun Journal.

One attributed her illnesses to the fact that Smith still walked the streets. “The stress of my predator being free was eating me alive,” wrote one victim. “Everywhere I go, the feeling of a brick tied to my heart and dragging behind follows.” Smith’s assault “took the color out of a child’s world, then turned it black and white.” The other victim said her friendships had unraveled and she feared having physical contact with other people.

Smith faced 12 years in prison, but Lipez reduced his jail term to six years.

“People are complicated,” Lipez explained at the hearing, adding she had been “offered very little insight as to how or why this happened.” (Note to Justice Lipez: Read Genesis 3.) Although she called the actions of Smith “reprehensible” and harmful, Lipez deemed the molestation “a very tragic situation of a person who has a lot of good in him.”

President Joe Biden thought this record deserved a promotion. On May 23, he nominated Lipez to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, saying she is “devoted to the rule of law and our Constitution.” The judicial activist group Alliance for Justice rejoiced that her confirmation would increase the “gender diversity of the federal courts.” Lipez is the daughter of Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Kermit Lipez, who was named to the First Circuit Court of Appeals by President Bill Clinton in 1998.

The younger Lipez’s kindness to child predators should not to be confused with that of another Biden judicial nominee, Sarah Netburn, who sent a 6’2” male serial child rapist into a women’s prison, because he identified as a woman. Netburn tried to evade the grasp of biological reality again at her Senate hearing earlier this month: When asked if it is “possible to determine a person’s sex only by analyzing their chromosomes,” Netburn replied, “I have never studied biology and therefore I am unqualified to answer this question.” This echoed Biden’s then-Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s plea that she cannot define a woman, because “I’m not a biologist.”

The Left keeps holding hearings that would help sexual predators cover up their crimes and nominating judges to high office who go soft on child molesters. Maybe liberals see judicial activists’ sanguine view of pedophilia as a bug; maybe they see it as a feature.

Netburn’s nomination leads directly to our third story…

3. Female prisoners speak out against sharing cells with male sex offenders.

The Biden administration’s commitment to radical transgender ideology knows no bounds, even inside prison. As real women suffer abuse at the hands of male prisoners who identify as female, Joe Biden has sued the state of Utah for refusing to place a transgender-identifying man inside a women’s prison. Netburn would bring a similar judicial philosophy to the federal bench.

Now, current and former female inmates who have witnessed male criminals exploit transgender ideology to prey on the weak are speaking out. They have addressed letters to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which recently held Netburn’s hearing. National Review’s Caroline Downey quotes one of their letters:

“As a former inmate in the California state prison system, I share your concern about how women’s rights are being pushed aside compared to the interests of men who are self-identifying as women and gaining entry to facilities meant for women,” former female inmate Amie Ichikawa wrote to the committee in a letter sent by the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) and obtained by National Review.

“Most incarcerated women have already experienced sexual trauma and violence during our lives,” she added. “We are trying to heal and prepare to be productive citizens after serving out our sentences. Having men in our prison systems disrupts all of this. We fear for our safety.”

Transgender mania has placed dozens of men into women’s prisons in California alone. The Independent Women’s Forum is highlighting the voices of those threatened by this policy in its video series, “Cruel and Unusual.”

In their more pharisaical moments, Christians may be tempted to look away, since the victims are also victimizers. (The most recent episode features convicted mass murderer Dana Gray.) But people of faith must understand that justice means making the punishment fit the crime — and no one deserves to be sexually assaulted, much less in the name of a secular, biology-denying, taxpayer-funded faith.

4. You paid for $23 billion of pork, billions more on ‘overlapping’ programs, last year.

As the Left continues to demand more taxpayer dollars to finance its agenda, two new reports highlight how liberal politicians do little to keep government bureaucrats from wasting your money. In 2023, taxpayers spent $23 billion on pork barrel spending, while being fleeced billions more for useless or overlapping government programs.

The first report, Citizens Against Government Waste’s 32nd annual Pig Book, records 8,222 earmarks totaling $22.7 billion. CAGW notes the needless nature of so much government spending and, if read with discernment, how left-wing politicians redistribute wealth from taxpayers to their wealthy supporters. Consider two examples:

• “The FY 2024 earmarks include $500,000 for the Vergennes Opera House in Vermont by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). The opera house’s website contains a laundry list of needs ranging from a new heating boiler to new seating and estimates the total cost would be $178,000. Thanks to Sen. Sanders’ earmark, the Vergennes Opera House can address everything and pocket the extra $322,000.”
• CAGW awarded its “You Cannot Be Serious Award” to “Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) for $1,750,000 for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, which held net assets of $5 billion in 2023.”

The second report is the annual report U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), which points out billions more dollars frittered away on bureaucratic programs with “fragmented, overlapping, or duplicative goals.”

This year’s waste report contains 112 new recommendations covering 42 areas not covered by last year’s report, such as:

• The GAO notes the federal government could save more than $2 billion over the next 10 years by verifying that student loan recipients who report having no income actually had no earnings. The Biden administration has instead decided to transfer a total of $7.7 billion in student loans from the debtors to taxpayers.
• In a concerning passage, the report states that the Office of Science and Technology Policy should do a better job “identifying foreign ownership of research entities” to prevent the expropriation of American technology from hostile powers.
• Bureaucratic leadership could reduce expenses by at least $10 million over five years by taking efforts “to help identify and reduce underused office space.” The Pentagon could save the same amount if it got rid of “overlapping management activities.”
• The GAO also advises the IRS to hold more audits targeting small business. The GAO encouraged the IRS (which needs no encouragement) to “improve sole proprietor tax compliance.”

The report states that it aims to replace “duplicative goals or activities” with “efficiency and effectiveness.” Good luck with that. The federal government had yet to take action on one-third of the 1,878 recommendations the GAO had made over the last 13 years. (It “partially addressed” another 7%.) Implementing them all would have saved taxpayers $667.5 billion. Several recommendations remained unfinished so long that they no longer applied. “Further steps are needed to fully address the matters and recommendations GAO identified from 2011 to 2024,” said the GAO modestly.

The free market system allows people to sustain ourselves by using our God-given talents to create products and serve others. Wages, which are the just reward of such work, belong to those who earned them. The government should not force others to labor unnecessarily to fund trivial, duplicative, or harmful programs. Americans at all levels of government might remember this truth better had they observed, or even heard about the annual observance described in the next story.

5. On Friday, the world ignored the victims of communism.

Although Joe Biden has issued an eviction moratorium and numerous proclamations on student loan “forgiveness” that our Constitution render effectively meaningless, all of society passed a heartrending holiday without notice. June 14 marks not only Flag Day but the Roll Call of Nations, a day dedicated to remembering the victims of communism.

On Friday, the 17th annual Roll Call of Nations Wreath Laying Ceremony and Dissident Human Rights Award presentation took place at the Victims of Communism Memorial on Capitol Hill. Yet you likely did not hear the details — and may not have known the event even exists … much like the victims of communism themselves.

From the Gulag Archipelago, to the blood-soaked snows of Katyn, to the killing fields of Pol Pot in Cambodia, communism’s atheist-centered philosophy has reaped a grim harvest of human death. The fact that most people would have to Google any one of those terms demonstrates the ignorance-laden indifference America’s secular education and media establishment show to anti-communist dissidents and human rights activists.

Thankfully, on Friday, some made good on the West’s promise to never forget. Rep. Michelle Steel (R-Calif.), whose parents fled North Korea during the Korean War, commemorated the “100 million people dead from Communism” over 100 years — a toll that, sadly, continues to rise. Communism still dominates the world’s second-most populous nation, China, as well as North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos. More than 1.5 billion people continue to live under communism today — roughly the same number as those enslaved to Marxist regimes in 1980, at the high-water mark of Soviet expansionism under Jimmy Carter.

“In China, from the genocide of Uyghurs, repression of Tibet, the persecution of Falun Gong, and Christian house churches … it’s clear that the nature and the danger of Communism remains unchanged,” saidKatrina Lantos Swett, the daughter of Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.).

Yet as of this writing, Joe Biden has yet to make a statement, although he commented on the passing of liberal writer and cable news commentator Howard Fineman. Left-wing ideology that strips God and humanity’s spiritual element out of its analysis of world problems inevitably forces suffering on the innocent. Perhaps that explains why those on the Left labor so valiantly to hide the human cost of their utopian dreams.