This morning, CBS News reported that well-connected Republican Party activist Josh Duggar was arrested in Arkansas for possessing child pornography. Duggar isn't best know for his real life role as a GOP lobbyist and organizer for Tony Perkins' hate group, the Family Research Council, but as a reality TV personality on 19 Kids and Counting. In real life Duggar had sex with several of those underage kids, his own sisters. Like almost any obsessive Republican you meet, Duggar is a knot of perversions and psychoses. Duggar, an admitted child molester, claimed on TV he didn't even kiss his wife until their wedding day.
His father, Jim Bob Duggar, was a Republican state Rep in Arkansas and Josh was active in the GOP since he was first molesting his pre-teen sisters when he was just 16 years old. As a young man, he simultaneously ran a car dealership and a right-wing political consultancy, Strategic Political Services, and worked for Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum. By 2013 Tony Perkins hired him as executive director of the very shady Family Research Council PAC. Perkins said at the time that "The big part of Josh's focus is going to be building our grass-roots across the country" and that he would be focused on "engaging the grassroots and taking the message of faith, family and freedom all across America." Josh, like most Republicans who have something hideous to hide, is a rabid anti-gay fanatic, but describes his family as the "epitome of conservative values" and advocates for what he terms "family-centered" and conservative Christian right political viewpoints, including opposition to abortion, divorce and gay marriage. The Duggars decided that hard physical labor and stern talks from an Arkansas state trooper friend of the family, James W. Hutchens, would cure Josh of his sexual compulsions. Hutchens may have been the wrong guy to counsel Josh, since he's now serving a 56 year prison term for-- what else?-- child pornography.
Untreated, Duggar's sexual obsessions just got worse and worse, even as politically he went further and further right-- and into Trumpist insanity. In 2015, a prostitute he had paid $600 for lap dances, sued him for assault. And on Thursday, a few days after he and his wife announced they are expecting their 7th child, Josh was arrested for possession of child porn. He is still obsessed with sexual abuse of very young children-- the same ages his sisters were when he was sexually abusing them-- and has been downloading internet porn. The coverups and string-pulling that has kept him out of prison all these years-- while he cultivated relationships with top Republican politicians like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio-- may not be available to him any longer and he faces 20 years in prison now.
CBS News reported this morning that "The family's reality show was cancelled by TLC in July 2015. In a statement, the company said: 'The recent attention around the Duggars has sparked a critical and important conversation about child protection. Over these past weeks, TLC has consulted regularly with leading victims' rights and advocacy organizations in the U.S., including RAINN and Darkness to Light, to discuss how to use this moment to address the issue and make a positive impact. Unfortunately, child sexual abuse is not an isolated issue; it affects many children and families around the world.' That same year, Duggar was accused of having an account on Ashley Madison, a popular website dedicated to discreet encounters and extramarital affairs. Although Duggar didn't address the dating site directly, the former reality TV star released a statement, saying: 'I have been the biggest hypocrite ever. While espousing faith and family values, I have secretly over the last several years been viewing pornography on the internet and this became a secret addiction and I became unfaithful to my wife.' He later changed the statement to read: 'I have been the biggest hypocrite ever. While espousing faith and family values, I have been unfaithful to my wife.'"
Long before he was elected to the Senate, Marco Rubio was known to have been involved with down-market Miami Cuban gay porn operators he hung around with while a teenager. Rubio was the most obsessively homophobic of all the anti-gay Republicans running for president in 2016-- careful to never let Ted Cruz get to the right of him on homophobia-- and was obviously over-compensating to hide his own shady past as a gay-for-pay hooker. Rubio, who had been running cocaine for his entrepreneurial brother-in-law, Orlando Cicilia, when he was just 16, was not quite 19 when he was arrested in Miami's notorious Coconut Grove gay pick-up spot, Alice C. Wainwright Park in 1990. He had flunked out of Tarkio College in Missouri and was back in Miami and in desperate need of money. With brother-in-law Cicilia arrested 3 years previously and then in prison, the family cocaine business was over and Rubio was selling his ass to older gay men, although, for some reason, he never wrote about that episode of his life in his autobiography, An American Son. He claims that when he was arrested in the closed park he was only drinking beer, not looking for a john for some quick cash.
One of the guys arrested with Rubio, Angel Barrios, laughably claimed they were "trying to get pretty girls," although Coconut Grove was well-known as the totally wrong neighborhood for that. In 2016, Miami's New Times interviewed Barrios in regard to Rubio's old life as a gay prostitute. (There are no current allegations that Rubio is still having sex with men, but he is notorious for selling himself to rich older males-- like Sheldon Adelson, Larry Ellison, Norman Braman, Jose "Pepe" Fanjul, Paul Singer, Joe Ricketts, Charles Schwab, Ron Weiser, and the Koch brothers-- for his political career.)
Decades after his legal run-in with Rubio, Barrios was associated with perhaps the most notorious gay porn ring in Miami history, an Edgewater house full of models with names like “Khali Kreme” and “Sincere Luv” who had sex all day in front of dozens of webcams. Couple that with the fact that the park where Rubio was arrested was a well-known gay cruising spot and lurid rumors-- with no basis in documented fact-- have blown up all this week on the internet, eagerly stoked by Donald Trump supporters casting Rubio as a closeted homosexual. Right-wing conspiracy monger Alex Jones devoted a five-minute segment to the allegations yesterday, while posts on the claims have been heavily upvoted on a Reddit page for Trump supporters.
“I have nothing against gay people, but this is just so far from the truth,” says Barrios, who laughs out loud at the idea of having had a sexual relationship with Rubio. “I have kids, and now they’re reading all this garbage online. It’s insane.”
Yet the story does add to a trend for Rubio, who has dealt with multiple news cycles about shady connections and sketchy choices back in his hometown, from a pile of traffic citations to mountains of questionable credit card debt to a brother-in-law convicted of dealing cocaine. Now Rubio can add to the mix a childhood buddy wrapped up in a years-long legal war over gay porn.
Like Duggar, his pal Rubio has always made light of the accusations against him, even when he was caught with a second family in Tallahassee and later when he developed a reputation for having sex with lobbyists seeking political favors in DC. Ask yourself this: can you honestly say you know any Republicans who aren't like Josh Duggar and Marco Rubio?