MAGA’s Sickening Hypocrisy: From ‘Save The Children’ To ‘Defund The Org That Actually Saves Children’

After years of screaming “save the children” while baselessly accusing others of exploiting kids, the Trump administration is now trying to destroy the actual infrastructure that saves children. This one crosses from standard MAGA hypocrisy into genuinely evil territory.

I’m one of those people who doesn’t think you can (or should) call most people inherently “bad,” but if you support what the Trump administration is doing here, you are a bad person.

According to multiple reports, including former NCMEC board member Don McGowan and independent journalist Marisa Kabas (who has been breaking story after story lately), the Justice Department informed the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that it will pull their entire funding if it doesn’t remove all references to LGBTQ+ issues and starts “deadnaming” trans kids. According to the Verge, NCMEC has already started complying and has removed at least three documents:

NCMEC’s website hosts numerous reports on the state of various child endangerment issues, including data about abduction, sex trafficking, and online enticement. However, comparisons with the Wayback Machine show that at 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. Archived copies of all three reports included mentions of LGBTQ+ and particularly transgender children. The 13 remaining publications on NCMEC’s data page do not appear to contain these references.

To be clear: NCMEC isn’t above criticism. Just months ago, we published a detailed interview with McGowan exposing serious problems with NCMEC’s board, including its history of kowtowing to Trump and its reluctance to protect trans kids due to its Trumpist board members.

But crucially: The frontline workers and systems at NCMEC — particularly the CyberTipline — operate as vital infrastructure for child protection, regardless of the board’s political failings.

The CyberTipline serves as the legally mandated clearinghouse for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) reports from online service providers, coordinating between platforms and law enforcement to investigate and combat child exploitation.

The CyberTipline isn’t perfect. Last year’s Stanford Internet Observatory report (published before Jim Jordan effectively killed the organization over bogus “censorship” claims) detailed significant challenges in the system. While Congress addressed some issues, like cloud storage restrictions, fundamental problems remain.

If NCMEC loses funding, we’re looking at the collapse of a legally mandated reporting system that processes millions of reports annually. Every tech platform, from the smallest startup to the largest social media giant, relies on this infrastructure to comply with federal law. Without it, we’d effectively create a massive regulatory black hole in online child protection.

And, in effect, this would create a world in which CSAM creators and sharers would have free rein, as the key bit of infrastructure in stopping them would be wiped out.

The CyberTipline’s current struggles stem largely from resource constraints. Increased funding for NCMEC and CSAM investigators would strengthen our child protection infrastructure.

So, of course, the Trump DOJ wants to kill the funding. Entirely.

And why? Because they’re so obsessed with what genitals anyone has (which is none of their fucking business) that they’re trying to wipe out the very idea of transgenderism existing.

And that’s especially damaging, because trans kids are disproportionately at risk of being exploited and abused. The statistics are stark: LGBTQ+ youth are three times more likely to experience unwanted and risky online interactions than their peers, and trans youth in particular face even higher rates of targeting by online predators. These aren’t just numbers – they’re exactly the kind of cases that NCMEC’s resources should be designed to prevent and address. Having resources for LGBTQ+ kids is just incredibly important to actually protect the children.

This is also why this story is so sickening. For a while now, the Trumpist disinformation peddling cultists have pushed the made up story that Democrats are a child abusing cult. Remember “Pizza Gate” bullshit? That morphed into the QAnon conspiracy theory and slogan of “save the children.” In practice, QAnon’s “save the children” campaign was really a “let’s accuse all Democrats of being pedophiles” campaign.

Yet, here, the Trump administration, which QAnon has long supported, is literally looking to pull funding from the one organization most responsible for actually protecting children… if it won’t throw a bunch of the kids it’s supposed to be protecting under the bus.

The consequences of this directive are stark and binary: either NCMEC loses its funding, effectively crippling our national CSAM reporting infrastructure, or it complies by abandoning vulnerable LGBTQ+ youth to increased exploitation risks. Either way, children will suffer real horrific levels of otherwise preventable harm — not the imagined threats of conspiracy theorists, but actual, documented dangers that NCMEC currently works to prevent.

This creates an impossible choice: either we lose the primary infrastructure for fighting online child exploitation, or we institutionalize discrimination that puts already-vulnerable children at even greater risk. Both outcomes achieve exactly the opposite of what any legitimate child protection effort should do.

Sickening.

This isn’t a policy dispute or a culture war skirmish. This is the deliberate dismantling of child protection infrastructure to score political points.

There are issues where reasonable people can disagree. This isn’t one of them. When you strip away the rhetoric and look at the actual consequences, this policy serves exactly one purpose: to harm children, whether through dismantling CSAM protections or forcing the abandonment of vulnerable LGBTQ+ youth.

To those Trump supporters showing up in our comments to gloat about how “I voted for this” — yes, you did. You voted to destroy the systems that actually protect children from exploitation. No amount of “save the children” hashtags can obscure that reality.