Newberg Transient Zachery Rian Midkiff Arrested for Rape, Ties to Progressive Groups Exposed

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Editor’s Note: A prior version of this article reported that Midkiff’s victim was a minor. This was reported based on information provided about the case from a credible source in law enforcement, however this detail has turned out to be incorrect. According to publicly available records on September 5th, 2023 Midkiff pleaded guilty to Attempted Rape I and Attempted Sodomy I. As part of a stipulated plea agreement he will be released on a five year probation term and be required to register as a sex offender.

According to publicly available records on August 7th a Zachery Rian Midkiff, 22, was arrested in Newberg for Rape in the First Degree, Sexual Abuse in the First Degree and Sodomy in the First Degree. Midkiff is presently booked at the Yamhill County Jail and held on a $150,000 bail.

Readers of the Advocate may recall my investigative video report last June, where I was harassed by PFLAG Newberg event security staff and other organizers for attending their Pride Day for children event at Newberg’s Chehalem Cultural Center and Newberg Public Library. According to a reliable source Midkiff is the same PFLAG volunteer who appeared at 1:09:28 in my video report, who followed me and threatened me with a belt while I was documenting the event from its perimeter, where later in the day a secret drag queen show for children was held by PFLAG Newberg inside the Cultural Center.

Zachary Rian Midkiff decorated himself in Pride Flag stickers at PFLAG Newberg’s Pride Day for kids event

Yamhill County Jail booking record

These types of Pride Day events for children have been harshly criticized by many in the media, including myself, for putting children into contact with pedophiles. In this case we have a PFLAG volunteer acting as security at such an event who has now been arrested for rape.

Sources have also claimed Midkiff is a transient who has stayed at homeless shelters in Newberg. The shelters in Newberg, such as the Harvest House on College Street and the shelter in Northside Community Church, have become notorious for attracting criminals who have broken into neighboring homes and vehicles. In fact I have been told by my source that Midkiff was living at Northside when he was arrested for the rape.

Northside Community Church hosts a school and youth programs, in addition to its homeless shelter program. Churches receive money from state grant programs and other pass-through funding sources for hosting homeless shelters.

I have spoken to many neighbors who live next to these shelters in Newberg, including women, who are fearful to leave their own homes alone during the day and especially at night. I have spoken to parents who do not allow their children to play in their own yards because they feel the area is dangerous. I have even spoken to people who have had their homes broken into at night by vagrants while they were sleeping. This kind of thing never happened in their neighborhoods until these shelter operations started hosting transients from outside of Newberg in exchange for lucrative contracts from state funding sources.

According to reliable sources I spoke with, vagrant ex-felons who possess criminal records for violent offenses, including rape, are presently staying at the Northside Community Church shelter. Unfortunately many of my sources are scared to voice their frustrations publicly due to the fear of retaliation against them by both the dangerous transients staying at the shelters as well as those who run the shelters who have significant political power and influence, such as City Councilor Elise Hollamon who is president of Community Wellness Collective (CWC) that is involved with these shelter programs. In fact, on August 27th at 6 PM the CWC is co-hosting a public forum with North Valley Friends Church about their shelter work.

For those unfamiliar with North Valley Friends Church, it is located next to Veritas School, a private Christian elementary school. The tiny home village for transients that North Valley Friends Church is planning, Peace Trail Village, will be located on the North Valley Friends Church property, next to what is presently the playground for Veritas School.

According to my sources on several occasions Newberg police have arrested transients who have been living at shelters in Newberg who had warrants for serious violent offenses. Several of these arrests have been for warrants from other states the vagrant had fled from to avoid arrest and they somehow ended up in Newberg at our shelters.

At present the Harvest House has been closed by its owner, Yamhill Community Action Partnership (YCAP), after disagreements with the managing partner, Community Wellness Collective (CWC), could not be resolved. According to the information I reviewed and sources, these disagreements were specifically about the lack of transparency in CWC’s financials in operating Harvest House as well as CWC permitting numerous dangerous felons to stay at the shelter who were not from the area (YCAP only intended Yamhill County residents experiencing homelessness to be at the shelter). While YCAP still intends to re-open the Harvest House as a “navigation center” (which is just a politically correct sounding label for a low barrier shelter that per Oregon State laws cannot require passing criminal background checks or drug testing as a pre-requirement for sheltering) the Harvest House is presently not operating as a shelter while YCAP attempts to obtain permits to increase its capacity by expanding the house.

“Navigation centers” is a label often used by nonprofits to obscure the true nature of the homeless shelters they operate from local residents, as the general public is unaware of the term and won’t readily identify what it means when they request approval to build one in a neighborhood.

Naturally YCAP intends to use hundreds of thousands of tax payer money to increase the resident capacity of the house, as YCAP is a nonprofit that relies on public funding to operate, which unmistakably means YCAP intends to bring even more potentially dangerous transients to Newberg from other areas of Yamhill County to College Street and they will have no way to prevent this from occurring if it operates as a “navigation center”.

The Harvest House on College Street, owned by YCAP, is presently shut down while YCAP attempts to get permit approval to expand the house to increase its bed capacity. However transients still congregate at the house to use the toilet and store their possessions during the day (which I have personally verified myself is occurring). YCAP still intends to operate it as a low barrier homeless shelter despite the increase in crime the shelter has brought to the suburb area it operates out of.

In response to complaints from local residents about the Harvest House, YCAP has claimed it will better screen future residents when it re-opens the Harvest House but this is impossible. Oregon state law prohibits state funded low barrier shelters from performing criminal background checks and requiring drug testing; they cannot reject transients seeking to stay at the shelters for these reasons. This is explained as part of the “Housing First” policies of Oregon’s Emergency Housing Assistance manual.

Pages from Oregon’s Emergency Housing Assistance manual that outlines the requirements for all shelters operating in Oregon that are state funded. YCAP is state funded, as are all of the other shelters operating in Newberg. Consequently any promises they make regarding “better screening” future residents are a promise they cannot keep.

Readers familiar with my prior articles may recall that Newberg City Councilor Elise Hollamon is the president of Community Wellness Collective (CWC). Former Newberg City Counselor Stephanie Findley is its hiring manager and Kristen Stoller of Chehalem Valley Dance Academy is also a cofounder. I have harshly criticized CWC in the past for their operations inside the Newberg High School’s Wellness Center, primarily in two articles, The Truth About the Newberg High School Wellness Center and Newberg High School Wellness Center Staff Admits to Offering Gender Affirming Care to Students.

Because those who control Community Wellness Collective (CWC) and PFLAG Newberg are all members of Progressive Yamhill (a registered chapter of national political extremist group Indivisible, as I have previously documented extensively) these connections are not unsurprising. That is to say it is not unsurprising to me that PFLAG Newberg would have a transient staying at CWC affiliated homeless shelters also acting as a volunteer at one of their Pride Day for kids events because of the enormous overlaps in the agendas of those leading these groups. In my viewpoint, regardless of how many front groups they create using legal processes, there is really only one group and that group is Indivisible, and these other incorporated groups that Indivisible members are the legal agents of simply exist to serve the Indivisible agenda and they share resources — including people — between all these front groups. That is the most logical explanation for how a transient staying at a shelter ended up a volunteer at a PFLAG event.

According to documentation I have reviewed and reliable sources in the know, YCAP leadership did not approve of the way CWC was operating the Harvest House, as they were explicitly bringing transients from areas outside of Yamhill County to Newberg to receive services at Harvest House and other shelters CWC is associated with. Newberg residents should also be aware that CWC is also deeply involved with North Valley Friends’ Church’s tiny home village project, the so-called “Peace Trail Village” which in August 2022 was granted $400,000 of the City of Newberg’s ARPA (federal covid-19 relief money) to construct in cooperation with CWC and Providence. The Peace Trail Village project will be located next to a private Christian school, Veritas School. The tiny home village project was pitched to the City as for providing housing for homeless transients receiving outpatient mental health and drug treatment through Providence’s  Better Outcomes Thru Bridges (BOB) program. It is also worthwhile to mention that Elise Hollamon who is President of CWC involved with these shelters also works for Providence Health and Services as Director of Access Strategies, which means her job is to help Providence create new revenue streams– such as by facilitating new homeless shelters to bring potential new customers for Providence’s grant funded outpatient programs in Newberg. This means that, in addition to the political agenda motivations she possesses for her so-called ‘charity work’, Hollamon also has a vested financial interest in bringing more transient mentally ill / drug addicted people to Newberg to help Providence’s bottom line and her own, as she is President of a nonprofit that for many years did not file its taxes despite receiving significant grant funding from tax payers. Interestingly enough, the IRS automatically revoked CWC’s tax exemption status in August 2022 the same month the City of Newberg awarded it ARPA money to operate Harvest House (it is, at present, somehow re-instated by the IRS).

And now, one of these transients connected to both the shelters CWC is involved with and the PFLAG Newberg organization, and therefore the operations of Progressive Yamhill, has raped.

Readers may recall I previously reported on the arrest of a Newberg High School Girls Rugby Coach for raping a student., John David Ali Gispert. After some digging I have a reliable source involved with the hiring of Gispert who said he had been recommended by a respected member of the community, and someone who is also known to me as a Progressive Yamhill member: Former Newberg Mayor Rick Rogers. While I doubt that Rogers expected that Gispert would do what he is accused of doing, the ideological leanings of Rogers and other Progressive Yamhill members makes them, in my opinion, extremely bad at spotting potential child predators because they support the introduction of children to sexual fetish lifestyles. In past years, any adult who wanted to share pornographic imagery to young children would be deeply scrutinized as a potential predator but this has now become commonly accepted and even encouraged behavior for adults to do, to the point where the Newberg Public Library has pornographic comics depicting minors engaged in sexual acts on its own shelves. So it should be no surprise that those who support and encourage these radical sexual identity politics cannot protect children from abuse by identifying red flags in the predators they associate with, because the rhetoric they support as activists is the same rhetoric that child predators champion, too.

The worst thing about all of this is that these groups use taxpayer money to subsidize their operations. Peace Trail Village, Harvest House, the Wellness Center in the High School, and the Chehalem Cultural Center and the shelters at the churches are all operated with tax dollars. The public and school libraries are tax funded, too. So whether we all want to contribute to how these things operate, we are helping them achieve their goals because they are using our tax money to exist at all. And they using our tax money to put the desires and wants of the most horrible people in society ahead of the good and decent people, to the point that they are using our tax dollars to buy and operate shelters for mentally ill criminals in suburbs, driving away families from those suburbs and making them unsafe for raising families in — as is the intended purpose of a suburb. They are using our tax money to undermine the interests of tax payers, and the welfare of the community in general.

When will the people who are using our tax dollars to subsidize the lifestyles of dangerous people finally face some justice for their own part in the crimes the people they attract to our community do? When will everyone accept that events designed to introduce young children to fringe sexual activities put them into contact with those who wish to do them harm and make children more likely to be abused? When will those who are actually making our community less safe be held responsible? Will they even hold themselves responsible?

How many more people must be terrorized in their own homes and how many more must be raped before people finally say enough is enough, and common sense is restored to the way we operate?

If the people operating these shelters had a genuine conscious they would voluntarily shut down their shelters and stop putting others at risk. YCAP would sell the family home they are using as the “Harvest House” to a family and build a shelter somewhere closer to Providence Hospital that is not located in a suburb. The churches who have shelters would shut down their shelters and stop putting the children of their congregations and surrounding homes at risk. The people running these shelters would stop allowing their greed for easy tax dollars to over-ride their sense of common decency and respect for others. They would employ some common sense and understand that operating a shelter for drug addicts and criminals will only serve to draw drug addicts and criminals to the places that shelter operates in. This makes everyone, especially children, in those areas at risk of becoming abused by the most evil people in our society.

If you build a place for monsters then you will get monsters. You should never build a place to attract monsters in a suburb or next to a school. That will only inevitably lead to monsters abusing children.

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