GLR July-August 2023

up to his flat and ply her with alcohol—the universal groom ing tool, one supposes—culminating in a sexual assault. Staton was forced to resign from the Texas House but did so without contrition, calling the charges against him “outrageous.” Ap parently all the talk about “grooming” was supposed to apply only to same-sex liaisons, as his speeches in the legislature make clear. And yet, the crime that will probably land him in the slammer was that of giving alcohol to a minor. 2. Dateline Florida Next up is one Michael Dolce, the founder of a Florida lobby group called “Protect Our Chil dren,” who was recently arrested on charges of—you guessed it—downloading child pornography, including 1,997 images and five videos of kiddie porn. To be fair, Dolce’s cause was a legitimate one: protecting minors from sexual abuse by adults, to which end he lobbied for an extension of the statute of lim itations for victims to come forward. Nevertheless, the extent to which his virtue and his vice coincided is quite remarkable. No doubt some profound psychological conflict was in play— Dolce was himself sexually abused as a child—though it’s still hard to explain why a “child-sized doll” was found in his bed by the police. Come to think of it, this discovery could make for a dramatic ending to a modern take on Hitchcock’s Psycho , with a badly beaten doll flashing a deathly grin. 3. Dateline D.C. One of the top organizers in the “Stop the Steal” campaign, Ali Alexander, was accused of searching for nude photos of underage boys, triggering an investigation that turned up evidence of sexual predation going back to 2015. While espousing the usual confection of anti-Semitism, racism, and homophobia, Alexander was the main organizer of the Stop the Steal Rally on January 6, 2021. Right-wing activist Milo Yiannopoulos, who claims to be ex-gay, started to release videos and other evidence revealing that Alexander had sexu ally propositioned adult men as well as two teenage boys. Much evidence turned up about his long-term relationship with Aidan Duncan, who was fifteen in 2017, when Alexander got him to send nude photos of himself on the promise of money and an in troduction to Milo; sexual contact would ensue. In these and other exchanges, one is struck by the brazenness with which Alexander demanded nude photos, and eventually sex, in writ ten communications online. Do people still not get that things in The Cloud are forever, and that Big Brother is watching? 4. Dateline Florida The author of Florida’s “Don’t say gay” bill, former Rep. Joseph Harding (R), is in big trouble for scamming the government out of hundreds of thousands dur ing the Covid pandemic. Okay, so this case doesn’t exactly fit the “mendacity” model, and maybe it’s just Schadenfreude to bring it up at all, but it is quite a twist of fate that the guy who gave us Florida’s notorious, and really quite fascistic, law finds himself out of the House, having been forced to resign in dis grace, and facing a 35-year prison sentence. And perhaps the twocrimes are linked in a way—by their sheer sleaziness. The “Don’t say gay” law was a cheap trick to rally right-wing sup port, and Harding’s schemes to use Covid to grab fistfuls of government money was the lowest form of opportunism. In making this connection, keep in mind that Harding was among those who said that anyone who opposed the “Don’t say gay” lawwas ipso facto a pedophile. July–August 2023

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