Trump And 'Don't Say Gay' Come For The National Center For Missing And Exploited Children

Remember when they pretended to care about 'save the children'?

Every 10 minutes, America finds a new depth of depravity that the Trump administration will not just sink to, but will plow towards at high speed with all the enthusiasm of a conch diver on her way down to a coral reef or a swarm of Ukrainian drones attacking a column of Russian tanks.

The latest salvo in Trump’s battle against humanity and common decency is against the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, of all damn things. On Thursday night, reports broke that the Department of Justice told NCMEC that it would lose its federal funding if it didn’t scrub all mention of LGBTQIA+ children from all of its public materials. Further, NCMEC was ordered to deadname any transgender kids it might report on, just to give themselves that extra frisson of cruelty towards this tiny marginalized group:

We can see a few problems doing this will cause, the big one being that if you are searching for a missing transgender child using her deadname while she is out there using her chosen name, you have just made it a fuck of a lot harder on yourself to find that kid! Which of course is the point. Too bad for any parents who want to use the kid’s chosen name who are working with NCMEC to find their missing child, we guess.

Kabas later posted a letter that supposedly had gone out to NCMEC employees stating that the organization’s “primary grantor” had given them a Friday deadline to make sure that all public-facing materials and reports are “in compliance with the President’s Executive Orders.” Which, according to The Verge, the group appears to be doing.

Are any of these important in helping missing and/or sex-trafficked children?

[A]t least three documents on its “NCMEC Data” page — including a report on missing children with suicidal tendencies, a report on male victims of child sex trafficking, and an overall data analysis of children missing from care — have been removed since the page’s last archived date of January 24th.

What about this?

Within the same date range, NCMEC removed three guides to recognizing and preventing child sex trafficking. That includes an overview that mentions homeless youth who have been “kicked out due to lack of acceptance of their sexual orientation or gender identity” and a guide for parents that mentions victims of child sex trafficking include “boys, girls, and transgender youth.”

So hey, do you want to stop child sex trafficking, or not?

Implicit in the threat from the “primary grantor” is that NCMEC would lose the money from said grantor, which happens to be the federal government. According to its 2023 tax returns, NCMEC received approximately $49 million of its $61 million in revenues thanks to a grant from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency, which is a division of the Department of Justice.

Or at least, it is a division within DOJ right now. Who knows if it even still exists, or if Attorney General Pam “Evil Barbie” Bondi has already disbanded it. Either way, NCMEC collapses without that money, which means any other good work it is doing to help missing and exploited children also goes away, just so wingnut dipshits can have their way about who gets to use their kids’ bathrooms.

You might wonder if holding back that grant is legal. The answer is, probably not! NCMEC’s money is allocated by a funding grant from Congress. But like everything else spending-related right now, the executive branch is saying it may not disburse whatever money NCMEC is by law supposed to receive, unless the organization throws gay and transgender children under the bus.

What would go away if for some reason the NCMEC did not want to comply? Well, for one thing, the organization runs the government’s CyberTipline, a sort of clearinghouse for reports of child sexual abuse material. NCMEC is the only organization by law that can process CSAM, giving it, according to McGowan, a sort of “quasi-governmental status.” So that would be a huge loss for anti-CSAM efforts. Which, again, the lunatics on the Right claim is a big issue for them. Probably because it is wingnuts who keep getting arrested for violating laws against possession of it.

For a bunch of people who have made saving children from the depredations of child molesters and sex traffickers a rallying cry, wingnuts sure are HIGHLY selective about which children specifically they care about. But then, as NCMEC whistleblower Don McGowan noted in a Techdirt podcast last fall, QAnon types don’t care about children. What they want is to be seen as if they care about children.

McGowan also claims that NCMEC’s board has fallen under the sway of MAGA, which makes the current situation even more absurd:

I do my best when I go off about NCMEC to try and draw a bifurcation between the organization and its staff and the board. My off-going is against its board, which I think has been entirely captured by MAGA positions, and uses itself to make sure that no criticism will be drawn to those positions in ways that it can, and not to take action, not to say bad things with the CyberTipline, or any of the Code Adam work that the organization does, or any of the other great stuff that it does to help actual kids at actual risk.

So you’ve got an organization heavily funded by the federal government whose work is in direct conflict with the grotesque goals of the current administration. And at least some of its board members are politically aligned with that administration. With exploited and at-risk LGBTQIA+ kids caught in the middle.

And within that group, you have transgender children. They are already the group most at risk, and now what is probably the largest group trying to look out for some of them is being told to not do it anymore if it wants to continue to exist.

This is where usually we’d write something pithy as a kicker, so here it is: Fuck these fuckers straight to fucking hell, the fucks.

[Techdirt / The Verge / BlueSky]

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