What the HHS?!!
Robert F. Kennedy’s matter-of-fact statement about human trafficking at HHS was a record scratching moment in the depths of darkness available from the federal government.
I Woke up This Morning
To a clip circulating the socials in which Secretary Kennedy, at the 100 days cabinet meeting, states matter-of-factly that they have “Ended the role of HHS as the vector for child trafficking.” I have had to listen to his statement several times to ascertain it. He said it in such a manner that it seemed to be something everyone in the room already knew was happening, and this was the post-game report on the victory.
Excuse me, what did you say?
“HHS’s role in human trafficking has ended.”
I had no idea they were ever in it! I know the government is awful. I lament about it often, and I make no illusion that it isn’t filled with people and personalities who tend towards the darker aspects of the human experience, but are you serious? Our government, in just the last four years, has been a willing accomplice in the disappearance of 300,000 kids for sex and slavery. Do I live in 2025, or is this some time warp rewind to a presser in Ancient Rome?
Transcript of the Whole Statement:
“We have ended HHS as the role, as the vector, the principal vector in this country for child trafficking. And, during the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking for sex and for slavery, and we have ended that, and we’re very aggressively going out and trying to find these children, the 300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration.”
Go ahead and read that out loud again. Just try to do it without losing your mind.
Maybe it is because I didn’t want to ever look at this because of its atrocity, but the idea that our government was involved in the outcomes of slavery and sexual abuse is a Pandora’s box that can’t be closed ever again. I have followed Mr. Kennedy enough to know that if he is saying this, it isn’t some wild or unproven Infowars-type speculation that will eventually turn out to be close to the truth. He typically has data to back up his claims. If this is true, no one should ever look at government the same, and they should hold a monstrous amount of disdain and distrust against it. This isn’t just men and women failing to live up to ambiguous moral standards. This is pure evil.
I decided to see if there was some kind of known and accepted reality surrounding this, and sadly, there is too much to count.
From the Homeland Security Republicans’ Official Government Website:
“At the hearing, Members heard from HHS whistleblower Tara Rodas about her experience with the vetting process of suspicious UAC sponsors and the lack of federal response to the concerns she raised about children being exploited by gangs, such as MS-13. Members also heard witness testimony from retired U.S. Border Patrol Deputy Patrol Agent in Charge J.J. Carrell, and counter-trafficking expert Alicia Hopper, about how criminal organizations are exploiting unaccompanied alien children for illicit organ harvesting, sex trafficking, and forced labor.”
Nice to see we’ve added organ harvesting to the mix.
How have I looked away this long? If our government is capable of this kind of darkness, it deserves a total dismantling, and a complete starting over. There is no way to tweak a policy about the border or child placement into a better version that has “just a little less sex trafficking of children” in it. In Ms. Roda’s opening statement, she blows the whistle on the Biden administration’s culpability in all of it:
“The Biden-Harris administration placed political aims above the welfare of unaccompanied migrant children who crossed, or were trafficked across, the southern border—releasing unaccompanied children with inadequate vetting and follow-up to avoid the bad optics of crowded facilities. ORR releases children to sponsors in the United States. Thorough vetting of these sponsors is absolutely critical and morally compelled if that is the path you are going to undertake to bring these children across. Unfortunately, the Biden-Harris administration’s push to quickly release migrants resulted in countless cases of migrant children being released to sponsors with major red flags, placing children at risk of exploitation.”
So, to gain a political advantage by having an open border, the government decided that the tradeoffs of sex trafficking, slavery, and organ harvesting were worth it. I want no association with this. It makes me embarrassed to say that I would ever be supportive of the Federal Government, or would ever again pledge allegiance to it.
I certainly applaud Mr. Kennedy for his work on this, and if HHS has truly stopped its role as a “primary” vector for this kind of atrocity, then his appointment is worth whatever it took to get here. But in all honesty, how did we ever get here as a country?
Government’s Allure to Sex
There is a disproportionate relationship to sex and sexualization by people in power. I have always wondered why this very intimate and personal act is so wildly celebrated by people with fame and prestige. It seems to be a much larger part of the conversation in media and culture than it ever should be. Most people will spend more time in their lives in a line at the DMV than they will rolling around in the hay, yet somehow the media fixation on sex has primacy in their coverage. The old adage that “sex sells” seems to be true and indicates a strange relationship in people to voyeurism and vicarious living. It seems to be exponentially higher the closer people are to power. It’s no wonder that government then takes a leading role in sexual fixation.
I don’t actually understand it. I have a very traditional life with a wife and kids, and I don’t battle as some do with the bombardment of boobzillas that flood social media and the internet. I have told my boys, as they are growing into young men, that pornography majors in deceit first and personal pleasure second. The women on the other side of the screen have no interest in us, even though they act as if they do. There isn’t a lonesome, naked twenty-something year old sitting alone in her room with ring lights and feather boas just waiting for our tuning in. The show they put on is for money, full stop. They aren’t going to talk to us. They aren’t going to find our looking in on them the height of their own pleasure. The entire thing is an illusion.
Yet that illusion converts to something much darker in many. Our relationship to sex seems to become about acting out the fantasies that the voyeuristic world presents. Its insatiability clouds judgment and celebrates pathways to dishonesty. Men are notorious for their foolishness related to sex. The list is long of destroyed marriages, relationships, and lives because men couldn’t find the restraint necessary to keep their zippers zipped.
Power, money, and sex seem to be a trifecta of our current timeline. While I make no claims that there was some time in the past in which this wasn’t the case, the difference in our modern moment is that we have, by almost any cultural standard, decided that those sexual pursuits should never be of children. So, to find out that our government decided to toss all of those once ironclad social mores out the window is not just shocking, it is devastating to the narrative that the government has the best interests of the people at heart. If they could allow such a barbarity to satisfy their lust for power, it means the institution that they serve is beyond morally bankrupt. Their desire to retain their offices and positions in politics, and the blatant dismissal of sexual harm to children, should be disqualifying at the least, and more likely, moving to imprisonment and the ruination of their lives for their crimes.
As much as I would like to disbelieve that any of this happened, our fixation on sex within government over the last 20 years is front-facing proof that what has happened in secret is darker than any of us would ever want to admit. If they have been willing to openly discuss the sexualizing of our culture to the degree they have, one can only imagine what is happening behind closed doors or open borders. Normalizing the sexual mutilation of children through transgender ideology, the relentless press to sexualize everything to our children in the education system, and the inexorable press to normalize any sexual behavior at any age through sexual celebrations and government sponsored holidays means that their complicit-ness in this tragic action of trafficking isn’t out of the blue. While I don’t believe that HHS or any other governmental department was doing this for their own sexual exploits of these kids, their overt advocacy of all things sexual seems to make them, at the very least, complicit in this awfulness.
I had chosen to ignore it for the complications it creates for my hopes that the government might have some good left in it, but their actions compel me to be honest about that reality.
Primary Vector
With Mr. Kennedy’s pronouncement that they are actively trying to recover the 300,000 kids who ended up in that cacotopia, it means that we had better figure out how to fix this in a way that isn’t predicated on who is in office. If our government has been capable of this, my guess is that it isn’t just a phenomenon of the Biden administration. His moth-eaten mind may have been part of why it accelerated so dramatically, but a government agency does not become a “primary vector” for child trafficking simply because a president can’t find his way to the podium. It appears that this has been going on for quite some time, and many in government knew it to be a standard defect in the process at HHS.
Senator Chuck Grassley seems to have been the biggest advocate for exposing this unspoken crime. It should say something, and not in a good way, that the defense of our children has become dependent on a 91-year-old Senator. As I researched his committee work on this, I realized the gratitude he is owed for saying this stuff out loud and for trying to call the public’s attention to this disaster.
“HHS, Congress, and the American people must face the facts: HHS’ UC program has glaring defects that are harming innocent children. The records I’m releasing today are the kind the government fights tooth and nail to withhold from the public, and they ought to send a chill up every person’s spine. I’m not going to stop fighting until the UC program is fixed, and HHS and its contractors end their obstruction and fully respond to my oversight requests. I’m also doing everything in my power to ensure federal law enforcement leaves no stone unturned in the pursuit of justice for lost and abused unaccompanied kids.” Senator Grassley, July 2024
The Senator has been chasing this down since 2014, which means that this has been going on through all kinds of administrations; Republican and Democrat. Reading the documents that Grassley released last summer, it appears that this isn’t just bumbling bureaucrats making innocuous mistakes, but instead is by design in order to cover up bad optics.
Can a government agency that has created a system in which it becomes a primary vector for one of the most fiendish abuses of our most innocent ever be trusted again with such a massive responsibility? My answer would be no. All blessings to Mr. Kennedy in this, and thank God he is willing to step into what is likely harm’s way, to try and stop it, but as I described above, people will do terrible things for the pursuit of power and sex. So, stopping it now does not mean that once the current group is gone in four years, that this conveyor belt of ruination doesn’t start right back up again.
Our country has suffered deeply because of an open border. While I realize that this is a much more complex issue than simply one about the border being open or closed, and that much more is at play in the conversation about a country’s autonomy, it cannot be ignored that this is the leak in the dam that started this road of abhorrence. It cannot be looked past, that if the results of this policy are that hundreds of thousands of kids have been subjected to this heartbreaking tragedy, we need to have a “come to Jesus” conversation immediately. Even if those who were overseeing this are given the benefit of the doubt, and this was just simply an oversight or mistake, there has to be a direct consequence for its sheer scale. Hundreds of thousands of children should not be missing in our country, and they certainly shouldn’t be lost because our own government decided that the tradeoff was worth it for the optics and political yield.
If what Mr. Kennedy says is true, we have a much bigger issue on our hands about what kind of government we are living under. It’s nothing I want to be a part of.