Epstein and Dobson

 Trigger warning, obviously. 

Sometimes the things that "go without saying" need to be said. At top volume. 

I am disgusted with the Epstein Files and everything they reveal.

No, actually. Disgusted is far too mild a word. I know a lot of words, and I don't know one that even begins to convey the level of enraged, nauseated, sad terror and helplessness I feel.

Every day brings new revoltations. Today we learn J.K. Rowling has some level of involvement with the sex-trafficking financier. She, of course, denies this vehemently. There are reports on social media, yet to be verified, that the logs for her yacht Samsara have been scrubbed, against maritime law. 

For what it's worth, this hateful woman is on record calling Lolita ""a tragic love story". I've read that book. What Mein Kampf was to the Holocaust, Lolita is to the holocaust of child sexual exploitation. 

The level of depravity knows no bounds. Rapes, murders, torture and snuff films....it's sickening. More sickening is the realization of who was involved: very rich and powerful people on both sides of the political aisle (but, so far, heavily implicating the right, including Trump and his cabinet). These are people lavishly rewarded in life, many of them in positions of great power and prestige -- and all of them acting as if they'd never be caught. Or if caught, they'd never face justice.

And in many cases, they seem to be right. Just to add to my fury.

Vladimir Putin's name appears in the files more than a thousand times -- but never in the context of abuse. This strongly supports blackmail and lends credence to the stories that Trump was recruited by the KGB in 1987 and given the code name "Krasnov", Meanwhile, Trump has surrounded himself with people utterly loyal to him, many of whom have reason to block any investigation.

And most of his followers haven't even blinked.

I sincerely thought this might rattle some of them. You really can't imagine more heinous crimes than the ones these files show Trump was heavily involved in. His name appears 38,000 times and that's just the files we know about. I had thought they would cheekily redact every mention of him, but they're even more brazen than that. Gloating. Look what we did.

And something I've only seen a few people say: it's almost certainly still going on. ICE is busily filling concentration camps with potential victims. While we watch. While nothing is done. 

The anger. It burns. Strongly enough that I want to take a step back from the abuse and, ahem, "focus" on one name that caught my attention in the files: James Dobson. Like Putin and scores of other individuals mentioned in the files, there's no record of his assaulting or abusing women. But Jeffery Epstein sent a link to a woman asking him how to deal with resentment towards her father, and that link advocates a toxic attitude at the root of abuse.

James Dobson was your standard "Christian" evangelist, among the most popular of them, with the scare quotes around "Christian" very much intentional. He had the requisite hatreds:

• gay people. Dobson resigned from the American Psychological Association when they stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder, and he believed in discredited "conversion therapy" (which is still happening in 48 states. Not, thankfully, in Canada, 
• trans and nonbinary people. Here's his take.  It reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of who trans people are (it's not a matter of "belief") and he claims there's not a single study showing hormone treatment improves lives. (The regret rate for transition surgery is between one and two percent. 
• women. Dobson would not agree:the framing he'd have used is that women serve a very important role. Please bold, italicize and underline "serve". He had the unmitigated gall to write a book called "What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women" back in 1975, because as a man he's of course qualified to write such a thing.
• children, and here's where we get into the Epstein/sexual abuse connection.

You have to understand the reach here. Dobson and his hate group "Focus on the Family" were and are the preeminent "Christian" authorities on parenting. (I'm sorry-not-sorry for the scare quotes; Dobson's Christianity was fully inverted.) What matters is that millions of people take his advice as, well, gospel.

According to Dobson, you should spank your child starting at 15 months. The child must never even suspect they can win a battle of wills with you. Your authority as a parent is absolute. 

His advice: when fathers "act out' and abuse you or neglect you, they can't help it. It's because they themselves are "broken" and the correct emotion to feel in response to their brokenness is pity and forgiveness. If you get angry, you're just hurting him further. He's not the problem: you are!

This is a famous abuse pattern called DARVO: 

• Deny. Abuse is not abuse, it's something like "irregular behaviour" or "emotional handicap".
• Attack (the victim). The problem isn't abuse, it's your longing for proper behaviour from a father 'incapable' of showing it. Why would you expect love from your father? This is YOUR fault.
• Reverse Victim and Offender: the abuser shouldn't change their behaviour (they "can't); the victim should simply accept the abuse, or they are the 'real' problem

Again, this is not some random crackpot. This is from a man with serious influence, offering a template for abuse that agreed with the world's most famous abuser.

James Dobson may never have sexually abused a child. But he sure offered child abusers a great template.