I don’t think Graham Platner style guys are the future of politics in this country. Like I said before, he’s basically a caricature of what Democratic strategists try to look for in every district, just with stronger opinions and Dumb Guy Swag. But that’s not to say our 85 IQ Aryan Pete Buttigieg isn’t going anywhere. He’s remarkably skilled at finding new ways to keep his profile up.

Not only has the tattoo scandal mostly evaporated, it seems like he’s expanding his presence into more apolitical spaces. The fact he was able to get a livestream with World of Warcraft streamer Bajheera and speed runner TriHex, both of whom have hundreds of thousands of followers, is impressive and slightly baffling. These aren’t political streamers from what I can tell, they just came to some mutually beneficial agreement for cross promotion that furthered their interests. I feel the spirit of Mao’s war time opium smuggling operations in the image below, if not in the political struggle, then at least in the amount of opiates.

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After I published the YouTube adaptation of my article on the group, I got some attention from Joshua Mundy, one of the founders of Dads Against Predators. He made a video responding to me, which consisted of an hour and a half of watching my video and periodically pausing to reveal some freudian slip or hilarious incompetence.

There were a lot of really great moments in the video. One was when Mundy said that:

I enjoy this analogy a lot. First, because Mundy implies that beavers help engineers when building dams*. Second, because he seems to think beavers are building dams because they really hate water and not because water is something beavers rely on to not be homeless. If the point trying to be made is that DAP is a rodent like inconvenience to public works projects, then I must concede it, but I get the feeling he means something else.

*apparently beavers can do this sometimes but my point stands

Young Man’s Game

I also get the feeling Mundy is making these types of videos now because he knows things are changing. If you want to stay relevant as a content creator of any stripe, you either have to be really exceptional at what you do, or you have to evolve. An exceptional novelist or a cinematic auteur can mold the perceptions of their audience with just their name. But DAP is not the project of medium defining genius, it’s the project of two guys from Ohio that walk to the gas station in basketball shorts so they can buy Delta 8.

Really, it’s a miracle that they got as far as they did based off their current set up. Shaky phone cameras, ill defined mission statement, uploading videos months after they happen, it’s impressive they got this far. But catching is a young man’s game, one Josh and Jay are aging out of.

This isn’t because catching predators is particularly hard on one’s body (it’s not like they ever confront someone they don’t have outnumbered). No, the wear and tear comes from the legal demands of working in this business. Sure, for the first few years you can avoid catching that many cases as you go after guys that aren’t going to talk to the police about what they were doing, and if you do get in trouble, it’s a misdemeanor at worst. But every catch is a new chance being taken, a chance you get a little too excited and swing too hard, a chance you didn’t make it totally clear you were supposed to be 13 in those messages, a chance the person you messed with wants to take this to court.

Jay Carnicom, one of DAP’s founders, just got out of an Austin Texas jail. He got in this situation because, unsurprisingly, he was beating someone up in a parking lot for a video. Currently, it looks like he was locked up for a charge for Engaging in Organized Criminal Activity (EOCA), although there might be more in the future. He posted videos indicating he was released to Locals, went radio silent for about two weeks, and then came out with another video of him chasing someone into an apartment building in Gainesville, Florida. Of course, Jay never specifies that it’s in Gainesville to warn the residents, that was only possible because I managed to cross reference the sign for a D.P. Dough franchise location with the wording on an apartment building and the types of trees in the background.

See, it’s pretty easy to get charges like Jay’s plead down if the offenders turn themselves in. Crucially, it’s easier for everyone involved if this happens. Jay apparently did not realize this, instead opting to leave the state and getting an active warrant in the process. This resulted in Jay getting arrested for an out of state warrant in Clay County, Florida on September 24th, 2025.

Like most things with DAP, this was an incredibly stupid move that didn’t really benefit anyone in the long run. While the other suspects written up in this case (including Kick streamer Ac7ionMan) seem to have all gone free without incident, Jay has no such luck. According to a source familiar with the case, Jay is likely going to be facing the full felony charge Engaging in Organized Criminal Activity. Based on his previous behavior, this wasn’t anything radically new or different, but the fact he skipped town for almost a year makes this case much more serious.

A felony conviction would make Jay’s job a whole lot more difficult, even after he leaves prison. The minimum sentence for EOCA in Texas is six months with a maximum of two years, but if it’s bumped up to a third degree felony, two years becomes the minimum sentence. In a fast paced media ecosystem, it’s pretty hard to stay out of the game for a couple years. Sure, if you’re a lauded writer or director you can take some time off, but not if you’re a content creator. He could try the pedo hunting routine in prison, but I think thats already taken care of by everyone else in prison. It’s difficult to compete price wise with something bored prisoners do for free.

Jay can keep doing what he’s doing, but it won’t last forever. The legal repercussions will hasten the end of his operation fast if he doesn’t find a way to deal with them. Judging by the fact the first thing he did out of jail was cross state lines to film himself hitting someone in the lobby of an apartment building, I think hold habits are dying hard. At this point, the best we can hope for is that Jay has had the foresight to invest at least some of his income into his kids’ college funds before he gets locked up again, but like before, I’m not optimistic.

Joshua Mundy at least has some kind of idea for what he can do in the future. After recording his response video, he seemed to have gotten back in the mood for content creation, uploading two episodes of his podcast since. He’s also opted to reupload older videos instead of new ones. One he posted to locals showed a Christmas tree in the predator’s house and another uploaded to Instagram is at least a year old. As Jay seems content on burning twice as bright, Josh wants to go twice as long.

But it’s tough. Josh is clearly uncomfortable and out of his element trying to host a show. He seems to want his personal gravitas to carry the program without a central theme or gimmick beyond that. You certainly can get away with this type of podcast if your proprietary audience is large enough, but if he wants to live off of it, Josh needs more juice than he has.

Sure, Josh can get some decent views on his podcast, but is it enough to eventually replace his Locals revenue if he runs into legal trouble? Is there much to Josh’s brand if you phase out the predator catches? I wouldn’t point this out if it wasn’t a very real existential threat to this man’s livelihood. Who knows what will happen when such an erratic man grows desperate, what will he do to keep his lot in life? Well, we don’t know, but we do know what he wouldn’t do.

Evil Triumphs When Stupid Men Don’t Do The Bare Minimum

“It is alleged that on Monday, March 27, 2023 Kalemaj attempted to meet with who he thought was a young girl to engage in sexual activity after meeting on an internet site. A member of a group called “Dads Against Predators” was actually posing as the young girl. Kalemaj set up a date with who he thought was the young girl but two members of “Dads Against Predators” confronted him instead. The police were called and Sinan Kalemaj was arrested.” - press release by Peter J. Lucido, Macomb County Prosecuting Attorney, March 31st, 2023.

“Child sexually abusive activity and computer charges against a Sterling Heights man were dismissed this month after the witnesses did not appear in court, according to the prosecutor’s office.

Sinan Kalemaj, 24, was accused of arranging to meet a 13-year-old for sex, according to the Macomb County Sheriff’s Office.

He was scheduled for a preliminary exam Sept. 12, but when the witnesses did not attend the hearing, the case was dismissed.

He was charged with three counts of child sexually abusive activity and three counts of using a computer to commit a crime.” - report by Kara Berg of the Detroit News, September 23, 2023.

On September 12th, 2023, Dads Against Predators let a pedophile walk free, all because they simply couldn’t be asked to show up at the court house. It really boggles the mind just how easy this was to avoid, and how much of the motivation can be understood as an almost completely pure disregard for justice and child welfare. And this wasn’t some slap on the wrist being avoided either, according to another Detroit News report, Sinan Kalemaj was facing two felonies with up to 20 year sentences each.

Even of you only cared about catching pedophiles in a way that was entirely cynical, purely just as a means to an end for making content, you would realize how moronic this is. To risk all your credibility so that you don’t have to spend an hour in a court room on a Tuesday morning. If I was a father myself, I can’t imagine how I’d be able to look my children in the eyes knowing I didn’t do the bare minimum to stop this man that hunts for children getting released back on to the streets.

FWIW, I was able to figure out what Kalemaj is up to now. He was bragging about beating the case under an Instagram post. I confirmed it was him in direct messages and alerted the boxing gym he seems to be training at now, Throwback Boxing in Fraser, Michigan, near Detroit. I’d encourage others to contact Throwback if possible and let them know to keep an eye out for this person. He’s also going by Nani now, so this isn’t the fault of Throwback for not knowing.

This really trumps all the other criticisms I’ve made against DAP in terms of what it represents. I think the sloppiness of their tactics have let far more predators get away, but I can’t prove that definitively, it exists as a theoretical outcome. This is not theoretical, this can be proven as happening and the only explanation for it is that the two members of Dads Against Predators chose to let a known predator go through their own inaction.

I don’t expect things to get better for DAP (Dads Apathetic about Predators) as the years go on. I expect this won’t be my last time writing about them, and I don’t expect they’ll stop talking about me. But my job is only getting easier, and their job harder, with each new court case.

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‘BookTok’ is a term that is used to describe a community of TikTok users who use the platform to find books (primarily YA fiction and/or romance) to read and authors that cater to them. It’s a phenomenon that’s rare, but not unprecedented, because it manages to unite fans of a genre, instead of just a certain author, into a marketable group. But once these readers and authors are brought together under a name in the collective consciousness, that name has much more social gravity than the sum of its parts.

Because of its size and online nature, BookTok is an excellent stand in for a lot of different grievances about modern society. The choking presence of fandom, the dumbing down of society, the over-commercialization of literature as a whole. It all seems like a degeneration of all the culture worth preserving, like the burning of the Library of Alexandria, or Leno returning to The Tonight Show.

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Oorah operates two facilities in the Catskills Mountains of New York, collectively referred to as ‘The Zone’. These are actually old ski resorts which were bought and converted into summer camps by Oorah. I said two facilities because they are not just gender segregated by cabins, but by geography, as the boys camp is located in Delaware County and the girls camp is located 8 miles down the road in Schoharie County. This puts it more than an hour away from the closest airport, and virtually inaccessible by any method other than a personal car or chartered bus. Unless you’re on vacation, there’s scarcely a reason to come. And there are plenty of reasons you wouldn’t want to come here. While the Catskills are no doubt beautiful, it is not these mountains which make The Zone notable. Instead, it is the scandals inside of The Zone that are justification for looking closer.

Where to even start? Probably with the safety hazards. See, there comes a certain set of upsides and downsides when you build a summer camp in an old ski resort. Upsides: more sophisticated housing, extensive facilities, potential to commune with a ghost that will help you with your tight five. Downsides: older buildings are more prone to issues, untrained counselors can mishandle equipment, that ghost is actually just the result of a gas leak caused by the aforementioned downsides.

In 2021, Oorah had to evacuate its Boy’s Zone camp because of a carbon monoxide leak in one of its dorm buildings. This wasn't a lapse in protocol that caused the state bureaucracy to seize on a long awaited opportunity. The gas leak was only reported because the entire dorm building spent one morning in various states of disorientation, including several campers passing out. By the time EMTs were able to respond, 53 campers and staff members had to be taken to the hospital after inhaling potentially lethal quantities of carbon monoxide. Schohaire County’s Director of Emergency Services, Michael Hartzel, said that the campers were still very lucky, as if the leak had happened in the middle of the night, there could have been a ‘worse outcome’

Even worse, this wasn’t the only nearly fatal incident experienced by campers in The Zone in the past fiveish years. In July of 2020, the Girl’s Zone had to be evacuated because a kitchen fire burned the dining hall to the ground. This was during the height of Covid-19 restrictions, when camps like The Zone were fighting tooth and nail to shirk any social distancing orders through technicalities. It was also not the first time that Oorah has faced criticism for not following fire safety codes. Back in 2014, its camps had their tax exempt status challenged by local government. All the way back in 2014, the city of Jefferson in Schoharie County filed a lawsuit against Oorah for it alleged were multiple fire and building code violations.

The loophole that was utilized by The Zone involved the reclassification of summer camps as ‘temporary residences’, where minors could travel with a parent or guardian. This practice was not limited to The Zone, but it seems like they’re the ones who have put the most children in danger because of it. According to a report by Schoharie County’s Public Health Director, Dr. Amy Gildemeister, busloads of unaccompanied children were being dropped off at The Zone.

Curiously, the director of communications for The Zone (who has the same role with Kars4Kids), Wendy Kirwan, defended the operation by stating that minor staff members went home at the end of the night and campers were accompanied by parents. This isn’t impossible, but if you remember how far away from any population center this place is, the story doesn’t add up. A drive from Gilboa to New York City, the closest major metropolitan area, would take around 3.5 hours. For these counselors to have worked at The Zone while following Covid-19 restrictions, many of them would have had to spend roughly 1/3 of their day shuttling to and from The Zone.

This is where Kars4Kids is sending your money, these are the titular ‘Kids’ that are being helped by car donations. It seems like the main way that children are being helped is by giving them the opportunity to spend their summer is buildings that are prone to accidents that threaten to kill any and all occupants. And this only scratches the surface of what is going on at The Zone. Crimes that go beyond fines and tax loopholes.

Humans aren’t the only ones suffering either. ‘The Zone’ is also home to a variety of different animals. The biggest draw seems to be the horses, which feature prominently in promotional material as a draw to the camp. Unfortunately, it seems that these horses are not treated all that well. According to a statement by Rosemary Farm Sanctuary that links to a Facebook post outlining the details, these horses were recovered from The Zone. The animals were found starved, exhausted, and branded by hot iron. It was only when one of the horses died from being overworked that the person leasing these horses to the camp got involved. Ultimately it was only because of this intervention that the abuse even came to light in the first place. Thankfully, the horses have found new homes with help from Rosemary Farm and Equine Rescue Resource, but the fact that it took the death of one of these horses for any investigation to occur is troubling.

Also of note is The Zone’s unusually diverse collection of birds. Beyond the standard fare of chickens and turkeys, The Zone also has resident parrots and peacocks. Why do I bring this up? Mainly because of how they choose to advertise these animals on their official YouTube channel.

It may also be the cause of an abnormally high number of exotic bird sightings around Stamford, New York. While looking for any anecdotes that might lead me to news stories in the Facebook group Stanford New York Neighbors, I noticed that a few people seemed to have spotted some kind of exotic bird walking around their yards. I’m not saying it’s necessarily an escapee of The Zone, but given all the information we have on the treatment of animals there, it’s not impossible.

Exactly one week after the dining hall went up in flames, Oorah had a new problem related to The Girl Zone’s camp.

This is normally where I would put a paywall in one of my article. However, given the nature of what is being described, I feel it would be disingenuous to hide it behind a paywall. If you would like to support me, I can ask for you to do a paid subscription. I’ll have an article about Oorah and the wider Lakewood real estate market out soon just for those subscribers.

By the time Dorina Sokolovsky settled out of court with Oorah after uploading a video detailing her sexual abuse by Gittie Kohn Sheinkopf, one of the counselors at The Girl’s Zone, over six years had passed. For all these years, Sokolovsky was pursued relentlessly by the Orthodox community for speaking up about this abuse and the issue was repeatedly pushed to rabbinical courts in order to protect Sheinkopf from answering for the crimes as an employee of Oorah. It was only thanks to the work of the people in Zaakah, a victims advocacy group working in the Orthodox community, that this case even came to light.

Speaking out against abuse in any community is hard enough, but one that prizes insularity and trust as much as the Orthodox makes coming forward a uniquely difficult emotional, mental, and sometimes physical ordeal. Zaakah actually lists on their website a few of the key difficulties with holding abusers accountable in Orthodox communities.

This was also not a case of hush money being paid so that an organization wouldn't have to deal with the fallout and paperwork of a lawsuit. Oorah fought this lawsuit with its full legal might. According to Zaakah, motions and subpoenas were filed as often as possible in order to prove that the lawsuit was being brought on by Zaakah and not the plaintiff. Some of this is obviously to be expected by a group trying to win a legal battle, and we don’t have Oorah’s interpretation of events. But given how long this was drawn out and the fact Oorah went on the legal counter offensive to get as many documents sealed as possible does raise a lot of questions as to what their end goal was. The lengths gone to here, paired with what the victim was put through out of court, suggest that the goal is not quiet settlement, but explicit punishment.

Of course, the greatest revelation from all this is that the money donated to Kars4Kids/Oorah is being used to settle child sexual abuse lawsuits. There’s no way around the fact, and it should raise more red flags than even the disregard for children’s physical safety at their camps. Oorah has not publicly acknowledged this lawsuit or offered any kind of explanation of what their role was in it, leaving Zaakah as the only reliable source on what transpired. I have reached out to Oorah but have not gotten a response yet.

The final danger for those in The Zone is not to campers, but to the contractors it relies upon. Subcontracting isn’t at all unusual, and a summer camp that needs regular maintenance and new construction is going to be utilizing these services fairly often. What’s notable about Oorah is how they treat their contractors, or really anyone outside their immediate organization. According to an anonymous source who lived in the community around The Zone I spoke to, people who do work at The Zone are routinely underpaid, which would be consistent with protests outside Oorah headquarters that occurred back in 2010. This anonymous source also alerted to me to an incident that occurred in one of the ponds owned by Oorah near The Zone. Due to the restrictions on contact between men and women in Orthodox Judaism, processes like signing for a package were made incredibly difficult for delivery drivers who happened to be women.

Around 2:30pm on Friday, March 31st, 2023, police were called to respond to a call off Scotch Valley road in Schoharie County, according to the Times Union. A small boat had flipped and three of the passengers were plunged into the icy waters. Two of the men emerged, one could not be found. It would be another day before the body of Juan E. Parco Saez could be recovered. Saez, an Ecuadorian national, was being employed as part of a team installing tiles for The Zone but were not officially employees of the company, a fact that a camp spokesperson was quick to point out.

Despite only working as contractors, it was reported that these men were living on site at the camp. It was never clarified why these men were fishing in a pond that had just recently thawed. The fact these men were living on site in a remote area with potentially hostile employers makes the fact they were fishing in these conditions seem less and less like a way to pass the time. My source told me that the other two men were gone the next day, presumably going back to New Jersey or their families in Ecuador.

Oorah runs a ruthlessly efficient operation in The Zone. But the way in which it is ruthless is not in its staff management, its scheduling, or even its building, in fact, it’s pretty bad at all those things. What it is ruthlessly efficient is how they have kept this operation going for over a decade without significant public backlash, despite the fact it is the beneficiary of a nation wide advertising campaign. One hopes that changes soon.

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You might not realize that if you were one of the many people who have been sharing doomsday prophecies based on a recent article in New York Magazine about how students use ChatGPT in their coursework. Many seem to be of the opinion that those who are in school right now are irreparably damaged in terms of intellect because of LLMs. Looking at responses to the article, this attitude seems to be very popular among Millennials who see themselves as being in the last helicopter out before the fall of human intelligence.

The focus on undergrad Ivy League students is probably a mistake for discussing AI in schools. It carries the implication that the very heights of academic honesty have fallen to the AI hordes, and that no institution is safe. What goes unexamined is the possibility that being admitted to an Ivy League school is a process that these students are forced to game and plan around. Padding your application with stretched truths and even paying to become a “peer reviewed author” becomes necessary when competing with rich, connected parents who can all but guarantee a spot for their children. Why shouldn’t these kids try to take the easy route through the institution that asked them to sacrifice so much in high school just for the privilege of going into debt so they can attend?

A bachelor’s degree is also a necessity for pretty much any professional career with room for advancement at this point. Many will pursue their passion in undergrad, but many others pursue the subject that they’re the least apathetic about, or the subject they think will sound the best to prospective employers. If this is what you have to go through for a chance at a decent job after you graduate*, it’s hard to not adopt an attitude of ‘fuck you, got mine’.

*The author of this article recently graduated with a Bachelor’s in History, which is not a choice you make if you’re in college to get a job or meet people of the opposite sex.

Using AI to write your papers is obviously a problem, but the roots of that problem aren’t being interrogated and the blame is instead being fully directed at students. What I also find irritating about this attitude towards students using LLMs is that it isn’t original at all, and should be within living memory for anyone born before the new millennium. For whatever reason, coming up some time in the last 20 years of the internet is supposed to be a sign of intellectual merit, the Millennial version of walking 10 miles to school uphill both ways. The issue with this attitude is that I fail to see an aspect of the old internet enlightenment which is being permanently extinguished by LLMs.

Rose tinting is something that everyone will do to some degree, but it seems to be encroaching on our wider understanding of recent history as new generations aren’t experiencing the meteoric rises in living standards that older generations did. All of my grandparents were born before World War II (one was actually born during Pearl Harbor but thats technically pre war), reaching adulthood before the Baby Boom years. Meanwhile, my parents were both Gen Xers that never shared rave reviews of growing up in the 70s and early 80s. Maybe there was something poetic about my paternal grandfather dying right before the Dot Com Bubble after moving to Seattle in the 60s.

Were I roughly 10 years older, I might have had parents that grew up in a GI Bill subsidized home that allowed them a being the first in their family to get a college degree from UCLA back when the acceptance rate was 104% and tuition was $8.36. I would then have grown up in an era of steadily increasing levels of technological advancement, culminating in smartphones around the time I graduated high school. The recession would have hit pretty hard, but my digital skillset would evolve with the needs of the economy.

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That’s why I’m starting an actual weekly newsletter here: It’s Very Stupid. Every week I want to highlight some policy or idea being floated in American politics that doesn’t make a lot of sense for anyone involved. This won’t be things like a tax breaks for billionaires that spikes the federal deficit or bills that strip transgender people of rights, because those have some utility for the ruling class and/or part of their psychotic constituency. I want to focus on the policies which help almost nobody, that bring back forms of economic and social inefficiency thought impossible since being in government generally required one to have known how to read.

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Currently, the central pillar of Elon’s wealth, Tesla stock, is down to around its pre election price (at time of writing). This is part of an over 40% drop in the stock’s value since its December, 2024 height. Meanwhile, Elon has taken his job in the administration incredibly seriously and put his face on many of the Trump administration’s most controversial policies. This would be all well and good if Elon was going to push through a very pro business agenda, and in some ways he has. But for every slash to regulation that investors dislike, there are many more questionable decisions.

Part of it is Elon’s genuine political commitment to a right wing project. But there’s also the businessman side of Elon that wants to use his position to further his companies, which we saw in his continued insistence on shoving the Tesla brand into every possible aspect of his work. But why hasn’t this garnered huge returns in stock prices? I think this comes from a profound misunderstanding by Elon of what was holding his company back and what the government could do to remove those constraints.

Tesla is a company that has mostly thrived under Democratic presidents. The Obama Administration granted billions in tax credits for electric vehicles and by the time he left office in 2017, the company’s value had increased by over 1000%. Trump’s first two years actually saw stagnation for Tesla’s stock price, before a meteoric rise that occurred across 2020 during the zero interest rate period. This was continued into 2021 and held strong through most of 2022 before another drop that coincided with the Twitter purchase. Although personally shunned by Biden, the administration’s policies to bring back domestic manufacturing and invest in green energy was not hostile to Tesla and gave investors many reasons to feel confident.

Trump’s policies aren’t actually looking amazing for Tesla. I want to credit Max Chafkin (as I often do) for making the observation that got me thinking about this on a recent episode of his podcast, Elon Inc. Chafkin pointed out that Trump and allied Republicans have been getting hundreds of millions in Super PAC money from the Elon post election. While Trump has given Tesla endorsements that reek so badly of favoritism it could rub off, he hasn’t taken the kinds of risks for Elon that Elon has taken for Trump.

Despite Elon’s stardom among Republican voters, most of those voters are not going to buy a Tesla. The kind of people that have practical reasons to purchase an electric vehicle (upper middle class, climate conscious city dwellers) are not the people Elon appeals to. The Cybertruck is unable to usurp the market and cultural dominance of the F-150 among Republican voters. There’s probably some kind of beautiful and biting metaphor to be made about how the Cybertruck has about as much storage space as the average F-150 actually needs, but its glaring flaws in that department make it a non-option for so many truck buyers.

I don’t know what exactly Trump could do at this point to bail Elon out, even if he really wanted to. Obviously it’s a lot less likely that federal prosecutors are going to go after Tesla and SpaceX now, but that was never a massive concern the way it was for the other industries Trump rode to the White House, (crypto, venture capital, AI). It remains to be seen what exactly Elon is going to do to turn this situation around, or if it might even just resolve itself. But so far, he hasn't recouped the losses incurred by his new job.

The concerns over what trends are present in youth movements rose to new prominence after 2024 election exit polls showed that voters under 30 voted for Trump in record numbers. It dovetails with another similar issue, that being the rise of ‘manosphere’ figures like Andrew Tate among boys and young men. These trends have seemingly come together to form a new chimera of ideology, the so called ‘rightward shift of Gen Z’. It brings to mind an apocalyptic vision for the more historically informed. Maybe the Italian Blackshirts of the 1920s, maybe the Reaganite Baby Boomers of the 1980s, maybe a little bit of both. Either way, if it comes to pass, an entire generation would be spent reversing the advancements made during the past 20 years.

‘Gen Z’ could roughly be defined as anyone who was in school at the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, the psychological effects of which it will take years to fully comprehend. Because of this ambiguity everyone gets to have their own reasons for why the supposed shift to the right has happened. There is no real social risk to being a pessimist, which makes hysterical predictions about the supposed descent of Gen Z into fascism easy to throw out and difficult to disprove. Lack of economic opportunity, a void of political leadership, and ‘the damn phones’ are popular explanations across the left to center of the ideological spectrum for the phenomenon.

Rising inflation and a locked up real estate market made Gen Z slightly more optimistic about Trump’s policies on housing than other generations even if there was never much in the way of a concrete plan from his campaign. A massive upwards wealth transfer during the pandemic coupled with deepening inequality for those without real estate assets. While racial wealth inequality deepened during the pandemic, those who owned real estate (overwhelmingly older Americans) were relatively better off. The difference in growth of financial assets was 35% between Black and White Americans, while in real estate, the difference was a little under 15%. Inflation and cost of living were issues that carried Trump to victory in 2024, apparently showing that the American youth sought a right wing plan to fix it.

For the politically active members of Gen Z, 2020 was not just the year of the pandemic, but also a year of profound disillusion. Bernie Sanders had mobilized thousands of young people (myself included) to an electoral goal which inspired genuine hope for the future of the country. In the last minute before Super Tuesday, most other candidates dropped out to support former vice president Joe Biden, who had been almost completely dead in the water before the South Carolina primary. It was incredibly cynical move by the Democratic Party establishment to secure the nomination for the most conservative candidate in the primary, and one whose mental faculties were being questioned even before the Iowa caucuses.

This understandably left a bitter taste in the mouth of many left wing Gen Z activists as Covid-19 was declared a pandemic 8 days after Super Tuesday. Even after his victory was all but assured and the pandemic was declared, Biden was still encouraging his supporters to go vote in person. Biden’s

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Both of these presidencies ended engulfed in crises they actively made worse. In both cases, it was the fault of ignoring common sense that would benefit the wider public in order to loosen regulations that provided some kind of relief as the problems were made worse. Bush didn’t step on the growing subprime bubble, Trump opted to not encourage lockdowns and opted to instead pump the economy with zero interest PPP loans that would float the economy until Election Day.

Both of these administrations were supposedly staffed by experts, cold blooded killers that had a lifelong mission which they sought to carry out. To these people, seeming failures were part of the plan, reshaping the Middle East despite Saddam’s lack of WMDs being probably the most glaring example. Hyper-competence is expected, enough experts staffing a presidential administration would make it operate with almost perfect information, and if there is a crisis, it is because the administration decided it would be this way. Of course, everything didn't go according to plan. With the example of Iraq, a power vacuum left by Saddam’s fall was partially filled by Iran; the arch-enemy of Neo-Conservatives that they supported Saddam’s war against.

I am here to make the case that there are morons, especially in the forthcoming administration. There isn’t 3D chess, there isn’t a cleverly hidden plan to advance the interests of capital, there is only a group of very incompetent people that are going to steer the boat. These morons (sometimes the exact same people) existed, but now we will have to really start dealing with this fact if we want to make sense of the upcoming administration. The churn of the Trump administration has kept few long term allies, any potential future James Bakers or Donald Rumsfelds were probably too frustrated by the end of 2020 and got replaced by Laura Boomer, one of J.D. Vance’s 17 year old mutuals, or an AI generated picture of Harambe smoking a joint that Elon Musk thinks is the funniest thing of all time.

This phenomenon obviously isn’t exclusive to Republicans. I would say that the outgoing Biden administration was a masterclass in many of the ways an administration can be objectively stupid. The difference with Biden was that the stupid decisions were wrapped up in egotistical idealism and cognitive decline. There’s an entire book to be written about how much of Biden’s presidency was a trauma response by someone who was trying to be every Democratic president from the past 50 years and failing miserably, all while being supported by an unquestioning inner circle. But as we enter the second Trump administration, a different set of morons is coming into the White House.

Part I: Deportations

The first area of incompetence is Trump administration’s deportation plan. Deporting all 11 million undocumented people in the country is logistically impossible, financially ruinous, and very unpopular. Furthermore, Trump has proven to not even be the best at deportations, the Biden administration deported more people than Trump had. The incoming administration could still increase deportations, ruin countless people’s lives, focus on the weak and marginalized, and keep more of the country in a state of perpetual fear. But that isn’t all of what is being promised, it’s some of it, but the promise is to reshape the demographic nature of the country, not to enhance the policies of Obama and Biden.

One could say that this is all rhetorical window dressing, that it’s a promise made to be broken as part of a wider plan. While this could certainly be considered, the history of mass deportations tells us that showboating creates more of a headache than it is a mobilizer of popular support. While the mass deportations might bring to mind Germany during the worst years of the Holocaust in Poland and other occupied territories, the more accurate allegory would be the years before the Holocaust, when Germany tried to cleanse it’s Jewish population while maintaining a growth in its peacetime economy.

I was recently reading a book about the rise of Reinhard Heydrich (Gerwarth, 2011), one of Hitler’s ministers who was famous for his cold, calculating methods with which he carried out some of the worst crimes perpetrated by the Third Reich. Something that I took note of was how Heydrich reacted to Kristallnacht, the violent pogrom against Jewish businesses in 1938. Like most of the Nazi leadership, Heydrich felt that Kristallnacht was actually a massive headache and general step back when it came to the wider plans of purifying Germany of Jews. Until this point, the plan was to force legal emigration in such a manner that kept Jewish assets intact and able to be seized by the government. Heydrich himself was surprised by the outbreak of pogroms, and quickly sent out a telegram instructing police to make sure that only Jewish buildings (i.e. synagogues, Jewish owned businesses) were to be allowed to burn, and only if they were not endangering other buildings.

This was a surprise to Heydrich and the rest of the police apparatus in charge of ethnically cleansing Germany because it conflicted with the established plan of ‘encouraging’ Jews to emigrate while leaving their assets behind to be seized by the Reich. It was the only way to make deportations more than just a pet project for a regime strapped for cash. Getting rid of a large number of German citizens was impractical, especially in a modern country where value can't be easily grabbed and melted down. Adam Tooze Wages of Destruction elaborates on this phenomenon:

“The Jews would pay the bill for clearing up the mess, but replacing the high-quality Belgian plate glass would cost the Reichsbank 3 million Reichsmarks in precious foreign exchange. As Goering put it: 'I wish you had killed 200 Jews, and not destroyed such values’” (Tooze, Wages of Destruction, 278).

Following the assassination of a German diplomat, the violence against Jewish businesses that would be Kristallnacht was encouraged by those in Hitler’s inner circle most interested in keeping up appearances: Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels and Der Stürmer editor Julius Streicher. Stirring a population to rise up for a night of looting that terrifies their supposed mortal enemies is a great way to move papers and add gravitas to speeches. However, as could be seen previously, it didn't actually further the broader Nazi goal of conquering Europe, and only further isolated the country on the international stage.

All of this is not to say that the Nazis had some humanitarian standards on the treatment of Jews, by all accounts the core leadership still regarded them with the same genocidal hatred as during the height of the Holocaust. What is relevant is how even if a country’s government has complete contempt for a population, uprooting said population is not easy and flys directly in the face of most other government functions. It’s also to say that the whole ‘Trump = Nazi’ metaphor doesn't work for our traditional understanding of the war time Nazis, but does somewhat work when predicting the effects of civilian mass deportation.

Many of Trump’s policies seem to have come from the media side of his operation as opposed to the administrative side. Mass deportations sound exciting, but don’t originate from a practical policy that can be pursued. It has already spread fear in immigrant communities, even if deportations have not yet increased noticeably (emphasis on yet). Many of his policies beyond immigration are also made to sound good, such as ‘no tax on tips’ and ‘stopping the fentanyl coming from Mexico’, but open problematic loopholes in the tax code or try to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

Part II: Foreign Policy

This is ironically where there the Nazi allegory kind of falls apart. Trump’s insistence on making new territory a central point is not really for anyone beyond the Hearts of Iron IV players that Vance has probably brought along with him. While the Nazis sought territory with the expressed purpose of exploitation, Trump is only interested in Greenland and the Panama Canal as a rhetorical tool without a well defined use.

Some have suggested that the plans for Greenland are a response to climate change, and a savvy move to secure American interests in the area. The fact that the US military already has bases on Greenland mostly negates this as an argument and serves mostly as wishful thinking. It seems like Greenland annexation may have originated from economist Tyler Cowen who has been suggesting it as a half serious policy since at least 2006. It is a proposal more at home with ideological exercises like Matt Yglesias’ One Billion Americans than with any strategic planning discussion.

The Panama Canal at least has some history of being owned by America, but Trump’s demands are similarly nonsensical. It feels repetitive to say why it’s stupid because it’s stupid for the same reasons that the Greenland annexation would be stupid. The idea of needing the Panama Canal as a strategic counter to China is a remnant of the days of battleships and does not hold up in the era of ICBMs. In fact, trade has been seen superseding war in recent years, with Ukraine only recently cutting off Russian gas that had been flowing through its pipelines since before the start of the Special Military Operation.

The obvious exception would be the Gaza ceasefire, which the Trump administration seems to have negotiated ahead of his inauguration. But the lack of a ceasefire deal after over a year is only exceptional because of the Biden administration. An article by ProPublica highlighted how the Biden’s National Security Council essentially froze up and refused to take any actions to limit Israel’s genocide. This allowed Trump to appoint one of his New York real estate friends to put the slightest bit of pressure on Israeli negotiators to get a deal.

The takeaway from this isn’t that Trump has an idiot savant foreign policy team, rather that Biden was uniquely unwilling to do anything about Israel. Given that the deal is nearly identical to the one laid out at the end of May, it doesn't seem like Israel’s negotiators had much extracted by Trump’s team that they didn’t expect to give up already. Also of not is that market researchers in Israel already predicted in December that 2025 would be a ‘post-war recovery’ year. The only reason that Trump was able to get a foreign policy win was because Biden had given Netanyahu as much time as he needed to wait out for a party that was more reliably Zionist.

When you take away the Gaza ceasefire and focus solely on what the Trump administration wants to introduce, what remains is crude nationalism buoyed by Wall Street confidence that hopes nothing will fundamentally change. It’s based on weird ideas that originate in equal parts from the 19th century and the grand strategy games of Paradox Interactive. There is no 4D chess, there is no saying the quiet part loud, there is only a new group of very stupid people advising a new senile president.

Part III: The Economy, Stupid

We don’t know how Trump plans to change the economy, it’s one of the biggest questions in the opening days of his presidency. Will he enact deregulation and tax cuts? Probably. Will he channel the spirit of Huey Long and share the wealth by helping white people build subsidized crypto currency farms? Probably not.

So far, tariffs are the most concrete policy we have to go on. Instead of a 60% tariff on China, Trump has started by kicking the can slightly down the road on tariffs with Canada and Mexico, promising to start at a rate of 25% on February 1st. If they don’t go through, it will be a potential minor scandal/sign of weakness. If they do go through, such a sudden price change is likely to cause massive shockwaves through the economies of North America.

It could be said Trump is doing a Nixonian ‘madman strategy’ to put pressure on neighbors and extract concessions. But Canada and Mexico aren’t primed as primed to negotiate as they might have been in previous years. Ontario’s Conservative Premier Doug Ford has promised Americans that, if tariffs go through, “they will feel the pain”. Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum similarly stated that “"Mexico was preparing a list of retaliatory tariffs”.

Canada is currently waiting on an election to be called some time before October, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party is not expected to win, leaving the country is a pseudo lame duck period. In October, President of Mexico Claudia Sheinbaum began her single 6 year term and is experiencing approval ratings as high as 80%. Both Canada and Mexico have unique reasons to dig their heels in on this issue.

I would include proposed tax cuts/exemptions in here as a stupid idea, but those were at least politically useful on the campaign trail. Still, we’ll have to see if allowing volunteer firefighters to not pay any taxes will end up happening. If it does, I’ll have a lot more to write about and there will be a lot more firefighters.

Works cited:

GERWARTH, ROBERT. Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich. Yale University Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vm09x.

Tooze, Adam, 1967-. 2007. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. New York, Viking.

David Sacks has been named by Donald Trump as the incoming ‘A.I. and Crypto Czar’. Besides the irony of the title given Sacks’ obsession with Ukraine, this is not actually massive news in terms of policy. It was clear when Sacks’ hosted Trump for a lavish fundraiser in June that preceded a picking Thiel associate J.D. Vance as his running mate in July that this administration was always going to be solidly pro AI and crypto. This isn’t to say that Biden was ever particularly hostile to either, but I suspect that Trump will go out of his way to bail these industries out in case of a shake up in the coming years.

If I credit David Sacks with anything here, it would be his help in opening the floodgates to others like him joining the administration. Most notable is Elon Musk, although Marc Andreessen has been making waves recently for his deepening involvement after Trump’s victory. Where Peter Thiel failed to make much headway with Trump after his 2016 victory, his coworkers have been given essentially free rein to run their own industries. One might wonder how Thiel is feeling right now, seeing his acolytes and underlings succeed where he could have only hoped to, all without any of his help or wisdom.

While Thiel focused on patronage of fringe intellectuals and giving a new meaning to the term ‘twink death’, Sacks was the one in the trenches, putting together this new coalition. Thiel managed to conjure up an Oz-like image of himself as a master manipulator in 2016 through selective leaks and rare, but memorable public appearances. Sacks, in a Nixonian fashion, bided his time to build a more robust coalition based on business interests and social resentment. I hope that we can collectively move past Thiel as the catch-all figure, at least for now. His ideas didn't work, and getting people to think he was Dracula was really the only successful way he shaped the media narrative.

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Most reporters have focused mainly on the big numbers that Musk has been flashing, over $118 million to his ‘America PAC’ at the time of writing, along with additional donations from allies that have brought the total budget to about $140 million. This is a sliver compared to the $889 million that the Koch Brothers’ political machine spent on the 2016 presidential election, but Musk has also leveraged his substantial political capital among Trump supporters to take center stage. While that $118 million number would have an impact on any election, it’s what those millions are being spent on that I find more interesting. About $18 million of that sum has gone to 18 lucky individuals in swing states as part of a give away where one person gets gifted $1 million for signing a petition. It’s a nice gesture, and has made at least 18 people very grateful to Musk while giving him a PR boost. But what has that remaining $100 million gone towards?

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The idea of a ‘pedophile’ is actually a relatively new in society, with the term only entering the public lexicon starting in the 1970s. This is not to say that these behaviors are new, but rather that the stigma itself is. The United States and wider Anglo-sphere is where this trend has been most apparent, but it is by no means exclusive. In case you don’t believe me, the age of consent in most of America in 1880 was 10. It was only in 1982 that the Supreme Court ruled that child sexual abuse materials were not protected by the First Amendment.

After that, the idea of a pedophile as a stock villain in American life became more and more commonplace. The first major instance of this was arguably the printing of missing children on the sides of milk cartons beginning in the early 1980s. This was also the first of the campaigns that seemed too wholesome to disagree with, and asked the public to be subjected to some mild discomfort for the purpose of saving children. Morally, it was like donating to charity without opening your wallet. In what will be a very common theme going forward, this seemingly altruistic effort had a negligible effect on the safety of children and was used to benefit the owners of milk companies with tax breaks.

This is a good time to get a very important statistic out of the way: 90% of children are abused by someone they know and trust. The ‘white van and candy’ style methods, where a stranger forcibly kidnaps a child, are exceedingly rare, with the number of children taken by strangers making up around 0.06% of all cases of child kidnaping. Predators are also now able to use online tools to find victims, with one study citing 15.6% of respondents having experienced some form of online abuse from ages 13-17. This same study found that up to 79.5% of perpetrators were individuals that the victim knew from offline [1].

So, with those statistics in mind, it’s time to talk about Dads Against Predators.

Hatched in a way befitting only the most virtuous causes, Dads Against Predators was created as a YouTube channel on January 26th, 2020. This channel has been taken down, but the Facebook group boasts over 38,000 members. DAP models itself after Perverted Justice, the group made famous by To Catch a Predator. There are a lot of similar groups to DAP, but (from what I can tell) it is currently the largest one that is running a Hansen style operation.

Dad’s Against Predators has gotten a fair bit of buzz in the media since it started. Vice did a documentary on them, and according to one of the members in a live stream, a Daily Caller documentary is coming out soon. But the coverage of DAP has been fairly surface level. The criticisms only go as deep as those law enforcement has about the group’s tactics. Given police department’s have showcased an inability to prevent sexual assault at best, and a tendency to commit it at worst, it is not unreasonable for their concerns to be brushed aside.

Looking at comments online, I saw almost universal praise for DAP. Beyond the obvious merits of catching pedophiles, DAP was held up as a kind of gold standard for which other online pedophile catchers are held to. While Kick streamers have rappers with a lot of free time on their streams to “catch predators”, it is treated with some degree of skepticism. The Kick streamers are also apparently paying these rappers at least $50k to come on their streams, and the purpose of the streams is pretty clearly more to prank than to deliver justice.

The primary difference between DAP and Dateline is law enforcement integration. DAP does not seem to have a dedicated relationship with any police department, they do get people arrested and charged, but officers are rarely, if ever, on the scene and informed. There are also more obvious differences, production quality being one, and the lack of fully disclosed chat logs being the other. What ends up happening is a version of Hansen’s program with a lot less red tape, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

It’s not clear how many ‘predators’ have been caught, but the number claimed by the group’s leadership was over 400 in April of 2024. This number is almost impossible to verify but I assume it is at least vaguely related to the number of total people that have had videos made about them. What is a lot more uncertain is how many total arrests and convictions have been made because of the group’s work. There have been some for sure, but there isn’t a list or method of tracking these arrests by the group.

Dad’s Against Predators exists in a sort of moral sweet spot that makes publicly voicing concerns about them difficult for the uninitiated. Essentially, nobody wants to be the person arguing against punishing predators, and it is usually not worth the effort. This is why serious critics tend to be limited to law enforcement, who hold some claim to also working to catch these predators.

The problems in the group go much deeper than just disagreements with police. A host of legal issues, contradictions, and moral failings lay just underneath the surface, shielded from criticism by the seemingly pure intentions of its leaders. But once you pull back the facade and start to look at Dads Against Predators in a manner that is even slightly critical, the issues with DAP are revealed to be bedrock of the entire organization.

Issue #1: Incompetence

This is the first main issue that DAP has: they are almost completely incapable of making these predators face any consequences after the camera stops rolling. The implicit idea behind ‘exposing predators’ is that law enforcement does an inadequate job at punishing ‘predators’. Therefore, it falls to civilians to do the job of exposing predators and using the internet to raise awareness of the individuals who will be known as predators when their names are looked up. But if we look at this on a practical scale, the DAP model is completely unsustainable.

It takes a significant amount of attention to get someone’s name associated with a crime they committed. I looked for a DAP video where the subject had a first and last name. This was not as easy as you would think an operation based on exposing predators would make it, about 60% of video titles didn’t use any name (ex: ‘Local dad is a pedophile’), 30% used a first name (ex: ‘Antoine gets smacked pt 1’), and the remaining 10% actually used a first and last name that would be theoretically searchable by employers or neighbors. In this 10%, I found what it looked like when DAP did their most thorough documentation for concerned citizens, a video titled ‘Tool Time Tim Taylor’ from September of 2023.

Alright, so we have our perp, this Tim Taylor guy. I didn’t realize that was also the name of Tim Allen’s character in Home Improvement, but I guess it’s a coincidence, otherwise, there is very little to go on here. The state this man is in is not given, and I had to comb through footage to find license plates that confirmed it was in fact in Ohio. But besides that, it’s anybody’s guess as to where this is taking place as the suburb they’re in is a recent development without many identifying features. Once they do get to Taylor’s house, he is interrogated on camera about his messages and eventually drives off, ending the video.

So what was the impact of this video, is this creep named and shamed throughout Ohio? No! DAP does not do any work to raise public awareness after posting these videos that goes beyond adding a name to the title occasionally when they feel like it. Furthermore, there is nothing to suggest this man has faced any consequences based on the information provided. Nobody on the Ohio Sex Offender has the name of Tim(othy) Taylor, and I wasn't able to find someone with that name that worked home repair that matched this guy’s description (it was mostly Tim Allen to be fair), meaning that DAP hasn’t done anything to make this predator change his behavior besides some additional caution.

But what if we assume that DAP has only the purest of intentions for their actions and no external motivations? Well even then, what we have are a group of well meaning oafs trying to manage a public awareness campaign that is well above their level of expertise. These operations only seem to span a few screenshots worth of text exchanges and aren’t followed up on in any public capacity. The guys who make these videos don’t appear to have any particular skills that make them better at this than anyone else. They aren’t using an ultra-sophisticated method to flush serial abusers out from hiding. The extent of this operation is just catfishing.

One of the founders of DAP, Joshua Mundy, boasted the group catches 16 ‘predators’ in a four day stint. If you watched To Catch A Predator, you’d know that the cases took weeks and sometimes months to assemble to ensure that there was enough material to implicate the titular predators. With less personnel, less time, and way more videos than Hansen, the quality of these investigations is immediately called into question.

On the ironically titled ‘Kid L Podcast’, Mundy told the host that their strategy is to spend time in a town until they’ve deemed the predators to be scared off, before they move on to another town. If that sounds familiar, it might be because it is very reminiscent of Vietnam War era ‘search and destroy’ missions used by the Americans. During search and destroy, American troops would drop into an area of suspected Viet Cong activity, engage suspected hostiles, and then leave the area [2]. This did nothing to prevent the Viet Cong from immediately moving back in and resuming their activities. Similarly, DAP does nothing to prevent these ‘predators’ from resuming their activities after they leave while also operating from the premise that there is some kind of predator community that will inform each other of these things as they happen.

Granted, some of the videos have resulted in arrests by police, but the videos themselves do nothing to help the case of the police, and give those being recorded a number of new ways to wriggle out of charges. In Sandusky, where the group originated, the local police told DAP to disband, as they were only making it harder to catch predators . So why do they even record these videos? That brings us to the next big problem.

Issue #2: The Money

So, if I was trying to raise awareness of a particular person’s activities to the general public, I would start by putting their name out there. DAP has proven not to be the best at the whole ‘names’ aspect, but maybe that’s fine, names can change, faces can’t. This is why they put up videos of these ‘predators’. So even if it isn’t perfect, there’s still a chance that these videos can be shared by anyone hoping to raise awareness.

Right?

This is the part where it becomes very difficult to continue giving these guys the benefit of the doubt. If you want to access roughly half the videos that DAP posts, then you’re going to have to cough up at least $12 for a month of access on Locals, the platform they use, or if you want pay $132 up front, you could have a year of access for $11 a month. What this means is that the people running DAP have deemed some predators (by their own definition) to be of less concern to the public than others. There are some pedophiles that the public will need to pay money to hear about and see pictures of.

Originally, DAP made money through YouTube monetization. This was arguably a more noble way to go about it, as the videos were available for anyone to watch. However, YouTube’s guidelines did not mesh well with DAP, and they eventually got taken down.

If we believe what DAP wants us to believe about their work, where are doing something incredibly important to public welfare, the paywall becomes even more egregious. This is a mercenary system of justice, and it pays very well. On the sidebar of their Locals page is a box that indicates DAP has over 10,000 new supporters. Locals doesn’t let you see how many members a channel has specifically, but it could be well over 10,000 at this point. If you remember, these are supporters paying $11-12 a month, meaning that DAP is making six figures monthly even when you take the 10% platform fee that Locals has. This is a lot of money, especially for an operation of what I can surmise is, at most, five dudes.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with making a lot of money because your content is popular, I know people that have found themselves in that situation almost on accident. But what differentiates DAP from the guys I know is that the latter is under no illusion that their work is supremely necessary and moral the way the former sees itself. There’s no difference between the types of videos on the public feed and those on the private, it means that DAP is insulating some ‘predators’ from the public in a completely arbitrary fashion.

The reason for this price is apparently to “allow us to continue producing content”. I’m going to give the benefit of the doubt and assume that tagline was the default on Locals, but it’s still why you should apparently give money, in order to keep this project going. The issue here is that the production quality on these videos has not changed at all. They’re still recorded on shaky phone cameras, they don’t seem to have a more sophisticated set up process (it’s still just short Grindr conversations), in fact, the only real change that the money has made is that DAP will now fly to random cities to do catches and their shoes are now nicer.

Issue #3: The Titular Dads

So, I gave a brief rundown of DAP’s history at the beginning of the article, but it obviously wasn't the entire story. Even when DAP started, its attitude towards traditional law enforcement was uneasy. The first mention of DAP in news coverage (their nasty habit of getting banned makes it hard to find anything from earlier) comes from a local NBC affiliate in Fremont, Ohio. This article mentions both the early success of DAP with their operations and the issues law enforcement had with their methods.

Sandusky County Prosecutor Zachary Selvey is quoted saying about the kind of operations that DAP had conducted:

"For a crime to occur, there's a statute in Ohio called the Importuning Statute, which is what we believe cases like these would fall under, and it could create issues if the person involved is not a law enforcement officer or a minor child."

The DAP leaders spoken to for the article are “Joshua and Jay”, which refers to Joshua Mundy and Jay Carnicom. Throughout the organization’s history, these two have been running the show uninterrupted from the start. Ohio natives, Joshua is from Fremont, and Jay is from Toledo. Both are interesting in their own right, and both have certain eccentricities that manifested both before and during their time with DAP.

I’ll start with Mundy. I couldn't find much info on Joshua Mundy’s early life, but that doesn’t mean he’s a ghost. The largest digital footprint left by Mundy is in the website of the Fremont Municipal Court, where his name is attached to 25 separate cases. Fifteen of these are traffic, one is civil, and nine are criminal cases, but one in particular interests me.

2100031, that’s the number of the case against Joshua Mundy where he was found guilty of violating Section 2923.02 of the Ohio Revised Code on April 20th, 2021. Mundy had attempted to inflict physical harm upon the defendant, one Keith Harris. From what I can gather based on the date, the crime committed, and knowledge of how Mundy’s organization operates, it seems like one of the ‘catches’ went wrong. Based on DAP’s modus operandi, Harris probably interacted with one of the organization’s decoy accounts and had decided to meet up, when he got to the meeting place, he was instead greeted by Mundy, who threatened him repeatedly before Harris left and/or the police arrived. As of writing this, there is no Keith Harris on the Ohio sex offender registry.

Outside of criminal proceedings, Mundy is the member of the duo that appears to be more media savvy. His sense of style is more obvious in how he dresses carries himself. I think the best way to demonstrate the differences between Mundy and Carnicom is this screenshot of the ‘Garage Boozing’ podcast, where the former has a lighting set up in his room with carefully hung flags, and the latter is smoking weed in his car.

Mundy represents what I consider to be the commercial side of DAP. He was the one who was doing early catches with the previously mentioned aspiring rapper, Flip Conley/Snoozegod. The single contact email on DAP’s website appears to be Mundy’s, and I feel safe in assuming this means that he handles most of the business deals and media appearances. When he appears on podcasts, Mundy is usually the one complaining about monetization of the group’s YouTube channel being taken away.

I’ll give some choice quotes from Mundy on a recent video:

“I grew up on Martin Luther King, I don’t give a fuck if you’re black, white. I grew up playing sports”

“If you want straight violence, go watch Jay’s videos, Jay beats the shit outta them”

“I should never have to explain myself, I’ve done this for, fuckin’, a long time”

“80% of these smacks are agreed upon, because I’m not trying to go to jail”

“I’m leaving a situation where I just got charged for assault”

That brings us to the second member of the duo, Jay Carnicom. Also from Ohio, Carnicom is a childhood friend of Mundy. There are emotional aspects of Carnicom that I find interesting, but there’s a less complex way that he differentiates himself.

Stating it in the kindest possible terms: Jay Carnicom is a complete moron. Carnicom has not gotten better at catching ‘predators’ in the five years he’s been doing it. Carnicom has his own Locals page where he locks a lot of catches behind a paywall. One thing that is not paywalled are some of the conversations that he has with ‘predators’. In these conversations, Carnicom repeatedly messes up on very basic details that would tip a ‘predator’ off to the fact that he is deceiving them.

Mistakes like this should not be happening if it is your job! We’ll never know how many catches were aborted because of mistakes like these, but if we’re supposed to believe that each catch is a child saved, then Carnicom’s incompetence has resulted in some really horrible things. Of course, if we look at what these really are (content), then Carnicom is a really shitty content creator who hasn’t attempted to improve his craft in half a decade in order to focus on going viral.

But beyond the competence issues lies something deeper, more primordial to the soul. Jay Carnicom is the heart of Dads Against Predator’s mission. While Josh does logistics and branding, it’s Jay that truly made DAP stand out as an organization. As alluded to in one of Mundy’s quotes, the way that Jay makes DAP unique is through violence. While Mundy only had a charge of attempted assault, Carnicom is currently wanted in Hall County, Nebraska for assault to cause bodily harm.

The violent aspect of DAP is something that connects deeply within the male psyche. It’s something most men reading this will probably recognize. In contemporary life, men very rarely encounter situations where we have to get into a physical fight. This is generally a good thing, young men usually realize war is hell pretty quickly after enlisting and there are non-violent legal routes to rectify most wrongs.

But the urge for this doesn’t totally go away. Getting to dominate a person that did something objectively wrong is a very real fantasy for a lot of people, not even just men. Stand Your Ground laws make this fantasy a possible reality, and drive a large share of gun purchases in the United States. It’s what drives what many call ‘Facebook Guy Comments’, where a news story about any crime being committed prompts certain guys to take to the comments section to describe how he would have reacted if one of these hip-hop thugs tried that on him.

It’s wanting to be a hero, which is a chance rarely afforded to most people. Many women obviously also want to attain this, but I think it would be fair to say that the fantasy and urge to show off is more common in men, at least culturally. By definition, being a hero is difficult. It should go without saying, but if you want to be beloved and renowned, you will have to show a great deal of bravery, dedication, or usually both. The closest you can get to being a hero through violence in the United States is by being a special forces operator who was really good at shooting people that were probably terrorists, but this is a very limited group.

So what if you want to be a hero but you don’t have the time, skills, or motivation to be one? What if you act like a superhero, beating up criminals on the streets, protecting the innocent? That would be pretty noble, but superheroes hide their identities so their alter-egos aren’t noticed, and they need to be gifted with powers or be extremely talented. It’s a relatively easy fix. Here is the plan for being a real life superhero that anybody can follow with ease.

1. Instead of wearing a mask, make sure everyone knows it’s you doing it. This way, you skip to the end of the movie where the people cheer for the vigilante after his identity is revealed.

2. Always travel in a group with your other superheroes. Criminals won’t want to fight back if it’s 3 against 1.

3. Target criminals that nobody would defend the actions of. Murders are relatively rare, and gang members are far too dangerous for your operation. Potential child predators are the best option as they don’t have a dedicated network and are likely to be pretty dim if they are falling for your decoys.

4. Disregard law enforcement. You are acting on behalf of the people, at worst, you are doing what the corrupt cops won’t do, and at best, you’re helping them out. Expect to use the former argument much more than the latter.

5. Solicit customers for your content. Call these payments you need to keep your crusade going. Doing this shouldn't require any sacrifice from yourself, as your work is that important.

6. Never engage in any work outside of what is profitable. If you did the last steps right, you won’t need any extra praise, so trying to fix societal issues off camera is worthless to your brand. Encourage your followers to do this as a form of outsourcing.

If you follow these correctly, you should never have to worry about personal, financial, or spiritual insecurity again. Time to return to this program’s biggest success story.

Carnicom is very fond of a particular tactic in his videos where he asks the ‘predator’ if he can slap them, they usually oblige, and then get slapped. It often very quickly devolves into more impactful forms of violence, before Carnicom and his entourage leave. The ends of these videos can very quickly go from juvenile to Bumfights levels of violence that are clearly meant for sheer sadistic pleasure.

I think Jay assumes that if ask before doing it then it’s legal and completely protected, even though they are pretty clearly under what a court of law could consider duress. There’s also instances where he doesn’t ask, and just hits them repeatedly. The only thing that seems to be preventing these from going to court is that those being hit really want to move on and not attract any more attention to what they’re trying to do.

But that doesn't always work, as evidenced by the charge in Nebraska. In North Carolina there’s an active warrant for Carnicom after an altercation at a Target resulted in Carnicom being shot in the knee and fleeing the scene with the rest of his filming crew. DAP goes all over the country now, which means it is very possible that there are more warrants that I wasn't able to find.

I want to circle back to that North Carolina incident for a second. It started like any regular ‘catch’, a group of three guys (Carnicom, Mundy, and a local man, Jason Chipps) march into a store filled with people so they can confront a ‘predator’ they convinced to meet up with a decoy. The group approach the man, Dontaye Kentrell. Unlike most of the other videos, in this one, the ‘predator’ does not immediately fold and actually puts up some kind of resistance by slapping the phone out of Mundy’s hands. Once this happens, Carnicom immediately drops his phone to join in on the altercation while a Target employee repeatedly tells all four men to stop. Kentrell eventually pulls out a gun and shoots Carnicom in the knee, who then runs out of the store with his group to his car and drives away.

Now, consider what witnessing this whole sequence of events would do to a bystander (aside from the very real risk of being shot). You could be a parent going grocery shopping with your 3rd grader, and suddenly there are four men getting in a fist fight 10 feet away you. Then, after your child witnesses something that most parents do their best to shelter them from, a gun goes off and these three guys run out of the store leaving a trail of blood behind them. According to himself, the man running away while covering linoleum in his own blood is protecting your child.

Issue #4: The Suicides

On November 5th, 2006, Bill Conradt shot himself in the head as a SWAT team made their way through his house, dying an hour later. Conradt had been talking with a decoy from the group Perverted Justice, who were working with the local police. Conradt was supposed to go to a house outfitted with cameras and sound equipment, where his reaction was going to be the subject of a segment on To Catch A Predator. By the following year local officials had resigned over the incident, Conradt’s sister filed a lawsuit against NBC, and To Catch A Predator was cancelled, in that order.

Dad’s Against Predators operations have caused four people to commit suicide. Don’t take my word for it, local police have confirmed the correlation, and DAP will gleefully admit to this fact. On a recent live stream, one of the viewers inquired about how many suicides the group caused, to which Jay Carnicom said four suicides. One of the people he was streaming with then proclaimed “four and oh!”, which seemed to imply he didn’t know how scoreboards worked. Joshua Mundy bragged on his Instagram story that “We don’t count arrests and catches, we count bodies”.

This is not the behavior of a group that wants to improve society. This is a cult of sociopaths that worship violence and adorn themselves in the skin of those they kill. A crowd cheers them on as they do this, paying handsomely to see a violent fantasy enacted on their behalf. Blood and money drive these men to do what they do, not protecting children, not scaring predators, not helping survivors.

What does someone committing suicide do to improve society? DAP would say that it stops a predator from committing another crime against a child. Of course, that is theoretical and impossible to prove on a per-case basis. What suicide does do is tear a hole in the lives of everyone connected to that person. There was no process for those connected to reckon with these facts, no opportunity to re-evaluate what they thought of this person, or even to intervene and ensure they never try something like this again.

A predator that commits suicide will never face consequences. They took the easy way out to never feel pain again. They don’t have to live in the world they left behind, where their victims still have to feel the pain they inflicted, where their family now has to put their life back together without knowing the extent of what they did to others.

This is why it is a death cult. There is no love of anything good about life in Dads Against Predators, the goal is only violence and death. Using tactics that are extremely ineffective at exposing predators, DAP is willing to hide predators behind a paywall so that they can make more money. Once they have ‘exposed the predator’, it is almost always impossible to send that predator to prison due to the group’s actions, and all that DAP has done is give them a ‘get out of jail free’ card.

As a society, we generally accept the fact that death will not make the pain go away. Death only makes others feel pain. Dads Against Predators knows this as well. They know that none of this matters, if it did, they would do something to ensure these predators face actual consequences. Dads Against Predators then sells a fantasy, that they are improving the world somehow, and that you can join too, for $12 a month.

Works cited:

1. Finkelhor, D., Turner, H., & Colburn, D. (2022). Prevalence of Online Sexual Offenses Against Children in the US. JAMA network open, 5(10), e2234471. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.34471

2. Herring, George C. “American Strategy in Vietnam: The Postwar Debate.” Military Affairs 46, no. 2 (1982): 57–63. https://doi.org/10.2307/1988113.