https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/5 ... -to-prison
Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar may have put Josh on a path to prison
Long before Donald Trump came down the Trump Tower escalator, the religious right seemed to have a nasty habit of picking some really bad people as heroes. Without a doubt, two of the worst pre-Trump examples were America’s most infamous babymakers, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar. In 2015, it emerged that the oldest of their 19 children, Josh, had molested five girls while he was a teenager in 2002-03—including four of his younger sisters—and Jim Bob and Michelle dragged their feet in reporting it.
And yet, when this writer and others in the blogosphere and mainstream media pointed this out, we were pilloried for it. After all, if you were a regular viewer of 19 Kids and Counting on TLC, you saw a family that seemed to be the very model of wholesome Christian living. As the story went, those evil libruls just didn’t like that, and would do absolutely anything to tear them down. Indeed, someone I was dating at the time ruled out any prospect of us going any further because of my criticism of Jim Bob and Michelle. As she put it, I was “not only not building the kingdom of God,” but “actively working to tear it down.”
Well, what remained of that myth blew apart on May 5, when Josh was released on bail after pleading not guilty to federal charges of receiving and possessing child pornography. He’d been arrested on April 29, two years after a Little Rock police officer discovered images of child sex abuse material—some of which depicted kids as young as 12 years old—being downloaded to a computer at Josh’s used car dealership in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The subsequent two-year federal investigation by the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations turned up a trove of over 200 images, some of which were extremely graphic.
At the hearing, HSI agent Gerald Faulkner revealed that Josh had installed a program called “Covenant Eyes” on his computer in order to help combat a porn addiction that he’d disclosed in 2015, when he admitted to trolling for affairs on Ashley Madison even though he was married. The program captured screenshots on his work computer and sent them to Anna, his wife, who would call him out if he was surfing inappropriate sites. However, according to Faulkner, Josh had installed a password-protected Linux network on his work computer, creating a portion of his hard drive that Covenant Eyes couldn’t track. It was there that Faulkner found what he described as one of the five worst cases of child porn he’d ever seen.