Some of these “pedo hunter” groups have attacked completely innocent people where the accusation of someone being a pedo was completely unsubstantiated. This is the problem with monetizing vigilantism: It creates a demand, and if that demand is not being met by a supply of actual criminals, then it will be filled by vigilantes criminalizing innocent people.
Yeah they’ve come out and said recently that even interacting with any content or comments that could so much as be perceived as being related to Luigi Mangione is a violation of Reddits policies against promoting violence. People have been getting warnings that their accounts are in danger of being permanently banned just for visiting certain subs. Not for posting. Not for commenting. Not even for voting. Just for visiting.
I had two main accounts. My oldest account got permabanned for a joke about Nick Fuentes. After his address got doxxed and he pepper sprayed a woman who rang his doorbell back in December of last year, I said “hey as an incel he should be happy that the ladies know where he lives now so they can share a cocktail with him”, and I added a cartoon gif of a Molotov. It was obviously a joke, but they said it was “promoting/glorifying violence”. I ate the bullet on that one because they were technically right, even if they were a bunch of humorless twats.
My other account got banned about a month ago when I up voted a comment that was just a picture of Luigi Luigi (the Nintendo character) smoking a cigarette. Again for “promoting/glorifying violence”.
Elon Musk is a weak little crybaby and Steve Huffman is a pathetic coward.
Even more interesting is that her mother (VP Vance’s mother-in-law) was instrumental in advancing DEI at the university she works at (UCSD).
I would pay a lot of money to see a journalist ask JD Vance if he approves of his mother-in-law’s work in promoting DEI. Just knowing how awkward that next family gathering would be would make it worth it.
We’ve become so complacent. A unified community would have intervened, violently if necessary. I would love nothing more than to see a crowd of folks popping out of houses and cars and surrounding these terrorists at gunpoint.
“Join the IDF - We put the infant in infantry”
Not gonna lie, it’s pretty catchy.
If you think of the government like a restaurant, it makes more sense. Pretty much every restaurant has to deal with vermin, to varying degrees. Most of the time, the restaurant keeps it under control through regular cleaning, but you still see a roach every now and then. Maybe even a rat. So you set traps and you kill the fuckers. If it gets too bad, you hire a professional to come in and exterminate. If you’re diligent, the rats and roaches are extremely rare, your food is protected, and the customers never see vermin. But if you walk into a restaurant and see a rat crawling across the dessert display in broad daylight, that restaurant has a HUGE fucking problem. They have an infestation. The rats are eating well, and have become unafraid of being seen.
These monumental fuck-ups like Pete Hegseth are vermin. They are rats and roaches that are brazenly crawling all over the tables, out in the open in broad daylight. If this is what we the customers see, then what’s behind the walls and in the kitchen and in the dry goods storage is a thousand times worse. The American restaurant is infested. It needs to be tented and fumigated.
Imagine trying to justify killing babies by claiming babies are involved in combat.
“Do the gesture on video, exactly like Musk did, and let me show it to your boss.”
Also, if it looks enough like a Nazi salute for half the country and most of the world to think that’s what it was, then why didn’t Musk come out and address it by denouncing Nazis and apologizing for the unintended similarity? Why did he double down on it with a tone deaf Nazi joke? No serious person in such a powerful position would do that. So at best, he’s an unserious idiot who shouldn’t have his fingers in our government, and at worst, he’s a Nazi.
Ultimately though, if you’re talking to someone who is still making excuses for Musk doing a Nazi salute, there’s very little chance they are ever going to admit that it definitely was a Nazi salute, short of Musk himself coming out and saying “it was a Nazi salute because I’m a Nazi.”
You are working under the assumption that these “pedo hunter” groups are all acting in good faith and on good information. I encourage you to do some reading. There are many cases where these groups pretend to be 18 year olds, lure an unsuspecting person into a meeting, and then lie to their audience about the age they originally claimed to be online, as Xatolos has pointed out.
Lots of them do it to lure in and attack LGBTQ+ folks, while others act on false accusations they receive from third parties:
And I can’t tell you how many times they just straight up confront the wrong person. Here’s one example, and here’s another, here’s one more, and here’s yet another.
These are not professionals. They are YouTubers looking for fame and relying on outrage and violence to get it, and they all-too-often don’t care who gets hurt or killed in the process.