Exposing the Corruption of the "Family Values" Party
Ryan Utterback is an anti-gay activist and advocate for banning books. He was featured on rightwing media until he was arrested for distributing pornography to a minor and child molestation. He was also charged with domestic assault. Three different incidents with children are described in the police probable cause statement.
Jim Rostberg was a Minnesota state representative. In 2000, he was arrested and charged with three counts of criminal sexual conduct. The complaint alleged repeated sexual assaults of a child, the daughter of family friends, over several years. The child was fourteen when Rostberg was arrested. When her mother confronted him, Rostberg said he felt bad about it.
Edward Burgess was a city councilman in Carlisle, Ohio. He was also president at the Lions Club where he fondled a child. He was arrested and charged with gross sexual imposition. The child molester originally claimed that the eight-year-old girl “came on to him.” For that alone, his sentence of thirty days is woefully inadequate.
Jack Strain was the Sheriff of St. Tammany Parish in Louisiana. He was elected in 1995 as a Democrat but switched to the GOP in 2003. In 2015, he was defeated in an election for his sixth term. He was accused of raping four boys. There were five victims. He was convicted two counts of aggravated incest, four counts of aggravated rape, misconduct with a child, and sexual battery. Other victims contacted the prosecutor but were not needed for the trial. Strain asked judge to set aside the conviction, but that did not happen. He was sentenced to four life sentences with no parole.
Luckey was arrested, charged with sexually abused a ten-year-old and offering an enticement to a minor under sixteen. He pleaded guilty to misdemeanor offenses of sexual battery and attempted sexual battery in a plea deal. He was sentenced to two years in jail, one year for each offense. Then the jail sentence was suspended. So the only time he served was the time between his arrest and being released on bail – eighteen days. He has two years probation and must register as a sex offender.
Philip Godlewski is a Q-Anon insurrectionist. He made a lot of money in Q-Anon social media and traffic payments for his videos on YouTube, Telegram, and Rumble. He would ramble about Democratic pedophiles drinking baby blood and other ridiculous conspiracies. Then he sued a local paper for defamation and the discovery revealed he was convicted for corrupting a minor.
Daryl Brooks has run for Congress and the Senate in New Jersey. He was one of those perennial unserious candidates who would file $75 to see their name on the ballot. In 2020, he performed at Rudy Giuliani’s infamous press conference claiming to have witnessed voter fraud in the electorally critical state of Pennsylvania. At the press conference, he identified himself as a Philadelphia resident, not a New Jersey resident and swore he personally witnessed shenanigans. He is also a sex offender.
Kevin Garn was the House Majority Leader in the Utah legislature. In 1985, when he was 28, he took a fifteen-year-old girl who worked for him, his business partner’s daughter, to Salt Lake City and took her hot-tubbing. He got in the tub naked. He claims that is all that happened, but she said there was more to it and characterized it as sexual abuse and a long-term adult-child relationship.
Josh Duggar is one of the famed Duggar family who had a reality show on The Learning Channel called 19 Kids and Counting. Duggar also worked for the Family Research Council, a sanctimonious anti-gay organization. He molested five girls and his parents knew and covered it up, even though some of those he molested were his sisters. Even though he knew his own son was a molester, Jim Bob Duggar, his father, said “rape and incest represent heinous crimes and as such should be treated as capital crimes.”
Tyler Smith, a member of right-wing militia group Patriot Prayer, was featured in the reality show in Season 3, Episode 4 of Doomsday Preppers, a show that amplifies the paranoid, reactionary, and the radical right. His group is called The Marauders because they plan to steal their supplies. They showed him with firearms which led to his arrest for illegal possession of firearms. He is not eligible to have weapons because he is a convicted sex offender.
National Geographic didn’t mention he was a convicted child molester but they did show him saying he was an apex predator. Perhaps he meant sexual predator. Is molesting a 14-year-old girl apex?