Video shows Jeremy Cubas accurately reflected anti-abortion message Dunleavy wanted
We now know more about the alleged “Alaska Office of Family & Life” that Gov. Mike Dunleavy claimed to have created when he promoted philosopher/photographer Jeremy Cubas and created a $110,000 state job for him.
There never was an office, just a task assigned to Cubas to create a website, oppose abortion and speak about why young women need to have more babies. Cubas resigned two weeks ago. The website was never launched.
Dunleavy and Cubas announced the creation of the alleged office at fundraising dinners in early May promoted by Jim Minnery, who runs a right-wing political and religious ministry.
No public announcement was ever made by Dunleavy or any of his public relations employees about the so-called office. Cubas, who has 9 kids, goes to Dunleavy’s church and was his photographer before his promotion.
“Without families and children, there is no North to the Future because everything we do should be about supporting our families and our children,” Dunleavy said on the video for Minnery’s group last month.
“So to that end, we’re opening up the Office of Family & Life in an effort to become the most pro-family, pro-child state in the entire country,” Dunleavy said.
“The Office of Family & Life will research the best practices, programs and approaches to support families, especially young families and children in all stages of life,” he said, the latter words spoken over the image of a pregnant woman.
Cubas was far more explicit about the anti-abortion theme at the heart of the Office of Family & Life.
“To many of us it’s obvious: Don’t kill your child at any stage of life. But at times the simple message feels insurmountable to give as a seemingly demonically possessed pro-abortionists shout and screaming, foaming from the mouth that they have the right to kill their own child,” said Cubas. The arguments for abortion all come down to selfishness, he said.
There are also attacks on marriage and the family because of “this insidious worship of the self.”
“The governor wants to offer a counter narrative to that, a true narrative grounded in reality. He wants to change the culture in order to change the politics,” said Cubas.
“To that effect, the governor is establishing the Office of Family & Life as a counterpoint to this cultural narrative. The Office of Family & Life is a pro-life, pro-family, pro-marriage, pro-children and pro-people office. We are launching this office with a website that will be regularly updated with information, resources, promotions of Alaska as a great place to start and raise a family,” said Cubas.
“The governor has appointed me to build the website and head the office for now,” Cubas said in his video.
Dunleavy withheld release of the videos for more than a month. There has still been no public announcement that Dunleavy actually created an office because he didn’t.
Reporter Nat Herz, who runs the Northern Journal newsletter, acquired the videos made by Dunleavy and Cubas under a public records request. Here is his story, posted Friday by Alaska Public Media, where Herz does some reporting work.
Herz did the heavy work here. I’m glad he pursued this story because no one else did.
I have a different interpretation of the videos than he does, however.
He thinks the story is that the Cubas video, posted below, raises questions about whether Dunleavy supervised what Cubas was doing. And it includes a claim from a Dunleavy PR man that no one in the governor’s office knew what Cubas was doing or what he said in the video.
The PR man is either uninformed or lying.
The most important story here is that Cubas accurately reflected the policies and pronouncements of Dunleavy about abortion and that Dunleavy was fine with what Cubas said in the May 11 video delivered to a Fairbanks fundraiser for Minnery’s ministry.
Based on what Dunleavy has said in the past, there is nothing “incendiary” about the Cubas commentary delivered to Minnery’s group.
Cubas was allowed to resign from his state job nearly three weeks later, only after Herz and reporter Curtis Gilbert asked questions about comments made by Cubas on his podcast about Hitler, rape, Martin Luther King Jr., etc.
In his State of the State speech, Dunleavy concluded by saying women need to have more children, expressing ideas similar to those of Cubas, and that he wanted Alaska to be the most pro-life state in the nation.
Dunleavy set up strawman arguments that some people don’t want babies and don’t want families and don’t like people and are anti-child and don’t see children as the future, but that he is a people person and we need more people in Alaska. “Kids are a blessing. They shouldn’t be viewed as a burden.”
“I know this may sound strange, but we have to make it OK again to have kids,” he said, and “we need to be a place where families want to be.”
“We’ve been fed a false narrative that you can have it all, as long as you don’t have children and a family. This doesn’t have to be. I reject that narrative. And you’ll see policies come forth that reject that narrative as well.’
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