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I think we’ll have more on this today. But because I was hunting around on this last night I wanted to give you a quick update because it’s a pretty insane story, intersects with a story we’ve been following on and off for years and is directly tied to the war in Ukraine.
Back about four years ago a state legislator from Washington State got in trouble for writing a plan for the mass killing of liberals in order to usher in a theocracy in the United States. He got booted out of Washington electoral politics for being involved with “domestic terrorism.” So, kind of a problem. Here’s one of our many pieces on disgraced former Rep. Matt Shea from 2018. So this week he showed up in Poland with a few dozen alleged orphans from the besieged city of Mariupol in Ukraine which he planned to bring to America to give away for adoption to American families.
Pretty quickly the situation aroused suspicion in Poland because Shea and his associates were very cagey about just where they’d gotten the children, what they were doing with them, even who Shea and his friends were. They gave local authorities contradictory stories and basically told them it wasn’t any of their business. The minor mystery went viral in Poland. Because … well, what the F is this guy doing and where did he get these kids and what is he doing with them?
At the risk of stating the obvious, in a war zone parents get separated from their kids all the time. Children have been flooding into Poland from Ukraine to get out of harm’s way — usually with their mothers, but sometimes not. (For now, adult men are not allowed to leave the country.) Even if you’re not on some human trafficking safari there’s really no way when a city is under nonstop aerial bombardment to know whether a child’s parents are dead or whether they have relatives who are responsible for them. And even if you can arrive at good-faith answers to those questions, that doesn’t mean you can just take them. In the chaos of wartime there are likely various parties shepherding kids out of the war-zone, sometimes in haphazard or unofficial ways. But there’s really no one who’s in a position to say, “Yeah, it’s cool if you take these kids you found and give them up for adoption in America.”
So what’s going on here? I first found out about the story from this excellent write-up in The Seattle Times. There I learned about the group Shea is working with, Loving Families and Homes for Orphans, a outfit allegedly registered in Texas, actually registered in Florida as a nonprofit but as near as I can tell not registered in any jurisdiction as a legitimate organizer of adoptions. The group’s registered agent is a woman named Irina Sipko. The group’s website is a placeholder template site that is currently offline. One of the many reasons people in Poland got suspicious is that when local officials started asking questions the group posted an explanation on Facebook which appeared to have been written in English and translated into Polish using Google translate.
But I only really got a full handle on what was going on when I saw this write up in a site I wasn’t aware of before called Range Media, out of eastern Washington. It seems to be a relatively new, reader-funded digital outlet. Basically if everything I’d told you so far seems normal enough here’s where it starts to get really weird.
Despite being registered in Florida, where Sipko apparently recently purchased a home, the enterprise seems to have grown out of the Ukrainian-American immigrant community in Spokane, Washington, the home of Shea’s former legislative district. Shea’s wife is Ukrainian and that seems to be the origin of his connection with that community. But Shea is also connected to far-right Polish Youtuber named Pawel Chojecki who is associated with various fascist groups in Poland. Chojecki is an interesting character in himself (he’s been working with Shea since 2018) since he’s viciously anti-Catholic — which is a fairly new twist on being a right-wing extremist since Poland is almost universally Catholic (Dmowski over Pilsudski, as we discussed here).
In addition to the fascism thing, Chojecki is the leader of a tiny evangelical protestant sect which appears to include him, his family, a small number of followers, various real estate holdings and obscure but ample funding from kindred groups in the United States.
For now the kids are staying a boutique hotel in Kazimierz Dolny, Lublin province, apparently because that’s Chojecki’s base of operations. The local authorities say they won’t let Shea leave the town with the children until they have proof that he is legally entitled to do so.
