Matt Bevin Crosses Line into Cartoonish Supervillainy
By 
Matt Bevin, who won the governorship of Kentucky by talking about his huge family which included four adoptive children, evidently abandoned one of those children at an abusive facility in Jamaica:
The other three — Emmanuel from Haiti, Cassius from Illinois and Noah from Ethiopia — are all 17 and black, and were adopted by white Christians who then changed their minds. Popular with pro-lifers, adoption in the US has an estimated failure rate of up to 25 per cent. For adoptive families in the public eye, troubled teen facilities can offer a face-saving solution…
The identity of Noah’s adoptive parents is an even bigger bombshell. The couple, who already had five children of their own, flew to Ethiopia in 2012 and came back with five-year-old Noah and three more. In 2015 Noah’s new father, Matt Bevin, was elected governor of Kentucky.
A Tea Party, Bible Belt, Maga Republican, Bevin plastered his social media feeds with boastful photos of his huge family in the governor’s mansion, while, as first lady of Kentucky, Noah’s new mother advocated for child abuse prevention. In 2018 Bevin shared an Instagram quote: “There should not be any child in Kentucky, or America, ready to be adopted who does not have a home,” adding: “Every child in Kentucky deserves the love and support of a family.”
The “troubled teen in paradise” industry:
Housed in spartan conditions, the children were subjected to a byzantine regime of rules. Even looking out of the window was forbidden, as was eye contact with the opposite sex. Any child who disobeyed was taken to a punishment room where they were forced to lie on the floor on their stomachs, allowed to sit up and stretch for ten minutes once an hour. One boy I saw in the room had been “lying on his face”, as the staff put it, for six months straight. They told me that was nothing; a girl had recently done 18 months.
Most of the children had been kidnapped from their beds at home in the US by armed guards hired by their parents to transport them there in handcuffs. Parents told me they had sent them, at $33,000 a year, for bunking off school, wearing inappropriate clothes, swearing, experimenting with cigarettes or alcohol or, in one case, “being disrespectful to his mom”.
A sizeable number of the children had been adopted by parents who had then changed their minds and didn’t want them. Some had been in trouble with the police for drugs; many more had been diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder, whose symptoms — refusing to do what an adult asks, always questioning rules, doing things to annoy adults — sound indistinguishable from typical adolescent behaviour.
The academy did not respond to the Lantern’s request for comment through the website. The toll-free number it lists is out of service.
The Times said Jamaican authorities have not been able to locate the academy’s former director but reports that four staffers have been arrested and charged with child cruelty and assault.
The Times story said a boy it called “Noah,” a pseudonym, is the adoptive son of Matt and Glenna Bevin and he was placed in the school last year. The Times story, which used pseudonyms for other boys, reports that while some parents traveled to Jamaica to collect their children after the authorities intervened and closed it, no one immediately showed up for Noah or two other boys, also adopted.
When the reporter asked Noah why Matt Bevin had adopted him, the teen replied, “public image,” the Times story said.
What a piece of shit.