there’s an interesting article over at Rolling Stone on NBC’s To Catch A Predator. the thing that scares me about that show isn’t that creepy pervs are preying on young girls. it’s that some nerdy, trollish, and by all accounts antisocial computer geek has hoodwinked the television execs into putting them on the air and in some cases even the government into changing laws.

i have no love of pedophiles. none at all. i can think of no worse scourge on the face of the earth. but this isn’t about pedophilia or predators or making our planet safer for our children. this show is about revenge. it’s about a thirst for vengeance of the sort that never dies down, but only grows stronger with each passing day. these are the puny, pasty-fleshed weaklings weary of having sand kicked in their face. this show is for them. their time has come.

referred to in the article as the “new american witch hunt” the show takes place on set, a vacant two-story house decorated to look inhabited. there’s always a decoy to play the ‘victim’. usually a college student, dressed down to look more immature.

And there’s the body of the operation: Casey, a sexpot college student and aspiring dancer in tight jeans who is playing jailbait decoy today because her landlord dad owns this house. (Added bonus: Local prosecutors wrote her college a note so she could get out of a chemistry test.)

if attempts to get the “predator” over to the trap set via the preferred means of a computer — the pasty-fleshed coordinators known as Perverted Justice (PJ) sit in a dark room and bait men for hours –

…coordinating the thirty-five volunteers who are working on this sting remotely. They chat with men on Yahoo!, AOL and MySpace about topics such as “have u ever given a bj b4?” and “do you have thick or thin pussy lips?” In the past few days, PJ members posing as young girls and boys have chatted with nearly 300 men. About thirty will actually show up at the house this weekend.

if that doesn’t work, no worries. they’ll just call them up!

Casey gabs to potential predators on the phone. “Come on over, we’re not going to get caught,” she says. “If we got caught, I would get into trouble, and everybody would call me a slut, and I don’t want that, either. I’ll pay for your gas. It’s no big deal, trust me. My dad gave me plenty of money for the weekend.” When the guy fails to take the bait, her voice rises in pitch. “OK, fine, whatever, lame. L-A-M-E. You’re being a baby. I told you I’ve done it a million times!”

now that’s a ringing endorsement. i don’t want all the femi-nazis to come crawling out of the woodwork and tell me how much it’s still not okay, even if the twelve year old in question begs for it, but COME ON. she’s no more twelve than i am and if you have to work that hard for it — free gas, money, i’m a slut — you’re just working too hard for it. where is common sense in all of that?

30 predators though! you say to me. like i’m supposed to be impressed that these guys are going to have to register as sex offenders every single place they go for the rest of their lives. like i should be pleased that even if not convicted their lives are ruined. all of their information, as well as offense will be posted on the internet for the world to see. forever. some of them have to wear GPS tracking bracelets. you know, so we’ll know at all times if they are preying on anyone. seriously. while it may sound like i’m all for the rights of the pedophile, hear me out. the majority of them have no criminal history. they are in the wrong place at the wrong time being stupid, STUPID men. not all of them. probably not most of them. it’s a serious problem and it needs a serious fix, mainly, i don’t know, parents? they could pay attention to who their children talk to on the internet? where their kids go? who they hang out with? i’m sorry? is that asking too much again?

the problems with the program loom larger:

In reality, though, the stings conducted by Perverted Justice are essentially designed to circumvent the Constitution. Police departments are largely overtaxed in the area of Internet crimes, and since Dateline reportedly pays Perverted Justice $100,000 per sting, the group is able to provide its services to the cops for free. In many ways, it is a subcontracted police force, with Del and Frag even deputized by local cops for one Dateline sting. But because its members are private citizens, their actions are impervious to charges of entrapment. Casey’s come-on at the New Jersey house is not unusual: Perverted Justice tries to talk predators who have decided against a date into changing their mind, making calls in calming, baby-girl voices to men who are having second thoughts.

What’s more, Perverted Justice’s tactics may actually make the threat of child sex abuse worse instead of better. While the group has caught dangerous predators who eluded other law-enforcement methods, ninety percent of the men busted on To Catch a Predator have no rap sheet, and few have any sort of sex offense on their record. By whipping up public frenzy about online strangers, Perverted Justice diverts attention from the real source of child sex abuse: relatives and acquaintances. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, ninety-three percent of perpetrators of child sexual abuse are known to the child. “The focus on ‘stranger danger’ makes most people less suspicious of those they know,” says Jill Levenson, a leading sex-crimes researcher at Lynn University in Florida. “And that could make it easier for known abusers to fly below the radar.”

In addition, they post their own “investigations” under a section called “Human Shields.” Perverted Justice also posts the pornographic material that predators have sent to decoys — Webcam photos of their penises, videos of themselves masturbating — alongside their first names and hometowns, thus disseminating the very perversions it fights.

seriously? why hasn’t this thing won an emmy? a Pulitzer? anything? but forget all that. if you can. the show is a joke. obviously not doing what we all wish it would. but check out the guy behind it. what a piece of work he is. we’re talking intimidation tactics, public humiliation and retaliation. when he talks he reminds me of hitler. he sounds fun!

Von Erck, whose nickname is X, is sitting in a bookstore cafe in Portland, dressed all in black. He looks a little like Philip Seymour Hoffman, five-eleven and round all over. He wears tinted eyeglasses and walks with a limp because he spends so much time at the computer that his eyes are now light-sensitive and his leg muscles have seized up.

i’m not going to copy & paste everything i want to about this guy from the article. you should read it yourself. but basically, just picture a troll huddled over his computer, mad at the world. that’s him. that’s the guy. plus, he’s surrounded himself with minion trolls who are just as angry. they’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore! at what, they’re not quite sure, but pedophile “predators” are as good a target as any. who is more hated? who in society is more vile? anyone who condemns their actions would be branded a sympathizer and thus, also likely a pedophile. and so the burning begins. it blows my mind! this is 2007, people! but of course, it’s exactly BECAUSE it’s 2007 that it’s allowed to happen. the fact that some guy can sit in his house on his computer for so long that it actually causes him to stoop, leg muscles to seize up and he’s going, you know, basically blind? that doesn’t really, sadly, surprise me so much. the fact that this same pile of flesh can actually impact nationwide public media and worse, legal precedent fucking blows my mind away.

have we sunk so low? have we really? i’m going to say something shocking. i hope you’re sitting down. i don’t want to be responsible. which is really ironic considering what i’m about to say. which is this: WE ARE RESPONSIBLE. that’s it. alert the media. call the mayor. telephone, telegraph, tell-a-friend.

WE
ARE
RESPONSIBLE.

if you drop it, pick it up.
if you spill it, clean it.
if you broke it, fix it.
if you gave birth to it, IT’S YOURS. WATCH IT. PARENT IT. PAY ATTENTION TO IT. ALLA THE TIME. NOT SOME. NOT LIL BIT. ALLA.

i don’t know what’s so hard to understand about that. we would rather trust some whacked out weirdo in a cave to save our children from the baddies of the world than spend what god-given common sense we have doing something far more productive and cost-effective. what is it? is it too hard? then you shouldn’t have had kids in the first place. but it’s too late now, bucksnort, so get with the program or your kid’s gonna get raped. either way, it’s not the government’s job to keep that from happening. it’s not NBC’s. and it’s definitely not some freak in a dark room leading a wannabe vigilante gang in the fight for “justice” on your behalf. they’re just as creepy as the “predators” they’re supposed to be “catching”. so do your job. YOU. DO. YOUR. JOB. how’s that for being a concerned parent? groundbreaking, i’m sure. but give it a try. and stop watching that show. it pains me to think of anyone bankrolling this thing’s habit.

It’s easy to see how Perverted Justice resembles a game to Von Erck. Intentionally enigmatic himself, he demands utter transparency from predators and Perverted Justice members, like a junior-high-school kid playing D&D who always wants to be the dungeon master so he can control every aspect of the game. He guards his power closely, requiring members to give him their entire Internet history (all screen names, all pages joined) and going to war with “stupid” people who dare to criticize Perverted Justice. He exacted a particularly sadistic form of revenge against Bruce Raisley, a software developer from Arkansas who launched an aggressive anti-PJ crusade. Posing as a woman named Holly, Von Erck began an online flirtation with Raisley, who was smitten enough to leave his wife and rent a new apartment. On the day Raisley went to pick up Holly at the airport, Von Erck sent a friend to snap his photo and posted it with a warning: “Tonight, Bruce Raisley stood around at an airport, flowers in hand, waiting for a woman that turned out to be a man. . . . He has no one. He has no more secrets. . . . Perverted-Justice.com will only tolerate so much in the way of threats and attacks upon us.”

Here, after all, is the point of Perverted Justice: to destroy and vanquish, to re- establish utopia, both online and off. With or without To Catch a Predator, the man known as X is onto the next stage of the game, taking on even bigger prey than horny guys who stalk young girls. Von Erck’s new obsession is what he calls “corporate sex offenders” ? online sites that don’t do enough, in his view, to rein in the pedophiles who use their services. MySpace is exempt from the campaign — since March, at the request of PJ, it has removed more than 3,000 predators from its site and forwarded their addresses and online profiles to the police. But Von Erck is mobilizing his thousands of followers to write letters to companies advertising on LiveJournal and YouTube, demanding they withdraw their support.

“Corporations have a choice about having the pedophile community use their service and upload videos on their sites,” he says. “People want to know if you’re responsible on this issue.”

Von Erck looks out into the distance, imagining a world in which every predator has been ferreted out and cyberspace is his again.