Pedophiles are probably the most contemptible group in society. Despite how vigorously some of the accused have been defended, in a vacuum you won’t find many people who are willing to endorse the act of having sex with children. So, logically, anyone who stands up to pedophiles is going to be fairly uncontroversial, and probably seen as righteous. At least, that’s the idea behind Dads Against Predators, a vigilante group that has made a name for itself at the forefront of the movement to catch pedophiles.
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.
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.
Always travel in a group with your other superheroes. Criminals won’t want to fight back if it’s 3 against 1.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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
Herring, George C. “American Strategy in Vietnam: The Postwar Debate.” Military Affairs 46, no. 2 (1982): 57–63. https://doi.org/10.2307/1988113.