The New York Times tried to pull a fast one yesterday, but we won’t let them get away with it this time. It began with a very strange and often revolting feature story headlined, “Online ‘Pedophile Hunters’ Are Growing More Violent — and Going Viral.” Unsurprisingly, the Times framed the story as almost sympathetic to the “victims” — meaning the men caught by independent sting groups for soliciting underage boys and girls for sex.
Vigilantism! Most bizarre, the story was in the Times’ long format, magazine-style, multimedia-dazzling articles. The Gray Lady invested a metric ton of column inches, technology effects, and rhetorical effort into portraying predator-catching groups as grifters, click-baiters, conmen, and violent criminals.
It spent no effort condemning the predators themselves. Instead, it thematically hinted —without saying so— that they, the predators, were the real victims here.
“In the past two years, a growing number of pedophile hunters have gone a step further and violently attacked the targets in their videos,” the Times complained. Some of “the footage shows hunters chasing their targets through retail stores, beating people bloody on public streets, and shaving the heads of their targets.” Citing only a single example, the paper generalized, “In the most extreme cases, people have been hospitalized with serious injuries.”
Awkwardly, no predator hunters have been convicted for assault or battery. This is partly because pedophiles usually eschew pressing charges, which the Times satanically characterized as a kind of legal disability that the sting operators exploit to take advantage.
But one particular sentence, pregnant with patent meaning far beyond its words, betrayed the awful reality of the situation and the Times’ co-conspiring culpability: “The Times reached out to more than two dozen people targeted by violent pedophile hunters,” the paper reported, “but none were willing to speak on the record.”
I bet not! Imagine the terror that a target outed by an amateur sting show must have felt getting an email from The New York Times asking for comments. The last thing they need now is having their name quoted in the Times as a potential pedo.
The Times stopped short of actively defending the accused, but instead focused —as ever— on public safety. “Law enforcement experts said those groups put bystanders in danger by attacking people in public places and jeopardize criminal cases.” Unnamed law enforcement experts. (I think they just made it up.) And, what is a “law enforcement expert” anyway? Is a cop a “law enforcement expert?” But set that aside.
Thanks for thinking of us, NYT, but I suspect we “bystanders” are okay with taking the risk.

Conspicuously absent from the Times’ alarmed article were any references to the growing numbers of public officials nabbed in stings. Especially law enforcement experts. In August last year, Shore News ran a salacious story headlined, “Bronx Prosecutor Resigns After Being Caught Soliciting Young Boy Online for Sex.”
In July 2024, the group Dads Against Predators confronted woke, progressive Assistant District Attorney William CC Kemp-Neal outside a Target store in Mount Vernon, after the unfortunate AG arranged to meet what he thought was a 13-year-old boy, for sex. Kemp-Neil tried to flee but was tackled by a bystander in the parking garage. He was later arrested, but never prosecuted (although he did resign as DA).
While at Fordham Law, Kemp-Neal wrote law review articles on “Environmental Racism.” So.
In other words, there was a woke fox in the law enforcement henhouse. A similar story from 2022 reinforced the point. Predators Poachers Massachusetts published a sting video exposing Stow, Massachusetts’ chief of police, Ralph “Rusty” Marino, who’d arranged to meet for sex with a person he thought was a 14-year-old boy. Marino resigned, was interviewed by state police, and charged.
Only 8% of Stow’s 7,000 residents are registered Republicans. Just saying.
At trial, although Chief Marino pleaded “no contest,” the Massachusetts judge withheld a guilty verdict, giving him probation with a three-year no-contact order. Prosecutors requested Marino be placed on the sex-offender list, but the judge refused. Marino’s case was quietly and summarily dismissed three years later without a conviction.
Court documents revealed Marino used the handle “Daddydearest” on Tinder, and had attempted to destroy evidence, including a plastic bag containing a sex toy and lubrication that he threw into the woods before his police interview. He also stupidly drove his department-issued Explorer to the sting.
It is almost impossible to find news reports about Marino’s story online.
But I found one. You won’t believe how they framed it. Check out the Miami Herald’s headline on the story, run last month —two years late— and which asked, “‘Predator’-catching group exposed town’s police chief. Are citizen-led stings helpful?” Two months before the Times’ more expansive article echoing the very same narrative, the Herald similarly reported that “some groups have gotten violent, creating concern among law enforcement.”
I can think of a few reasons why law enforcement would be concerned. Who watches the watchers?
Included in the Herald’s story, but AWOL from the Times’s, was balance. Dr. Thomas Holt, a Michigan State Criminal Justice professor, told McClatchy News that, when citizen groups collaborate with law enforcement, it is not “vigilante behavior.” Dr. Holt also said the groups were helpful, since law enforcement often gets overwhelmed with cases, and authorities “don’t necessarily have the resources to go out and investigate every single person.”
In another balanced quote, the Herald cited Parsons, Kansas Police Chief Robert Spinks, who praised the group Bikers Against Predators. “This group did everything right: they gathered evidence, involved law enforcement, and ensured the situation remained safe for everyone involved,” Chief Spinks said. “This wasn’t vigilantism — it was a thoughtful and thorough collaboration to protect our community,” he added.
Unlike the Times, the Herald also included quotes from the predator hunters themselves, who all disavowed violence and explained their motivations in their own words. Their rationale did not include grifting, click-baiting, or self-enrichment. “I feel like if I can stop these men from harming a fake child before they harm a real child, that’s what I’m going to do,” one explained.
As I read through the Herald article, it became clear the Times must have ‘borrowed’ its feature article from the Herald’s earlier work. Except, for whatever reason, the Times banished the Herald’s balance and redacted references to cases like Chief Marino’s or AG Kemp-Neal’s. Nor did the Times credit the Herald, which had already done all the heavy lifting, and had assembled a trove of balanced quotes that the Times left lying on the cutting room floor.
It’s a very strange day when I cite the Miami Herald as an example of better journalism, but here we are.

Also unmentioned in the article were broader trends in progressive thinking and how they may have contributed to the “vigilante” problem. Over the last four years, leftists have demonized cops as racists and mercilessly prosecuted them. They’ve fired cops for not getting shots. They’ve persecuted subway defenders. They’ve defunded the police. They’ve elected Soros prosecutors who let violent criminals (including pedophiles) off with no bail and sentences gentler than any nonviolent January 6th Capitol tourist.
Isn’t the rise of citizen law enforcement a reflection, to some degree at least, of the failure of progressive “reforms?” Isn’t vigilantism the entirely predictable byproduct of hamstrung police departments and corrupt Soros prosecutors? The Times’ article would have been much more interesting had it quoted a single “law enforcement expert” explaining why the videos are so popular, and why the market for grassroots justice is booming.
Tellingly, the Times curtly closed the article’s comments after only 122 submissions. I’m not surprised. The very first comment —from a Times reader in San Fransisco— began by making the obvious point that should have started the article: “Clearly, there is not enough law enforcement to handle the amount of pedophiles and predators on the internet,” MKH said.
Duh. Enter pedophile hunters, filling the void.
Another anonymous user, using a familiar liberal dog whistle about incels, said “I, for one, would much rather see hateful, vengeful men going after sexual predators than victimizing women who don’t want to date them.” DFJ881 opined that, “police stings do not seem to be enough to deter pedophiles from trying to lure kids into meeting them on social media, so adding the danger of getting beaten by a live streamer may be a useful deterrent.”
Michael Levy from Colorado asked, “How about we take a harder look at the penalties and enforcement of these sorts of heinous crimes of pedophilia (and or lack thereof)?” On the flip side, other, more broad-minded commenters who slurped up the Times’ “vigilante” narrative surged past the paper, openly speculating about the immoral entrapment of totally innocent people who just made a tiny mistake one time.
Those comments didn’t help the Times much, either.

So, what the Dickens is the Times up to this time? The Gray Lady’s latest exposé wasn’t journalism. It was a narrative psyop — a glossy, multimedia operation aimed not at predators, but at the citizens daring to expose them.
The word “violent” did a lot of heavy lifting in the article. The Times only cited one example of serious harm — the kind of thing that could’ve been addressed with a single police statement. But they used it to smear an entire emerging genre of grassroots justice as inherently dangerous.
And the NYT’s high-profile format — glossy visuals, embedded videos, multimedia effects — is normally reserved for war crimes exposés or rainforest depletion. The style is meant to manufacture credibility through gimmicks where it may otherwise be lacking. And this time, they deployed the style to paint pedophile hunters as villains.
The worst failing might be that the Times never confronted the essential moral calculus: these predators arranged to meet children for sex. Period. The article didn’t just downplay the predators’ unforgivable misconduct — it Photoshopped it out. Click, click, gone.
The papers’ revolting inversion of ordinary logic and garden-variety decency wasn’t even subtle.
My best guess is the growing proliferation of pedophile hunters threatens the progressive message, casts a pall on LGBTQ+ politics, and throws a broadening net that is scooping up leftwing officials. Surely not all the fingered pederasts are registered Democrats, but troublingly, too many of them are.
In other words, these sting ops keep yanking skeletons out of the closets of the wrong kind of people. If the sting targets were MAGA truckers, youth pastors, or Republican senatorial staff, the Times would be leading the outrage parade. But when it’s woke prosecutors and progressive police chiefs, the narrative whipsaws to “public safety,” “privacy,” and “law enforcement experts.”
This article wasn’t about protecting the public. It was about protecting the political class.
The actual threat isn’t vigilantism, clickbaiters, or a few rogue sting ops. The actual threat is the public’s loss of faith in the institutions supposed to protect children in the first place. These videos are ugly and sometimes reckless — but they’re popular for a reason: they fill a vacuum that the justice system has left gaping and festering.
When free people start to feel the absence of justice, they eventually make justice. The Times wants to shut that trend down — fast — before it spreads too far, gets too loud, and starts dragging more bloody skeletons out of woke closets that were never supposed to be opened.