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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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It’s almost scarier if it turns out these are all technically legit businesses and the government was just this bad at not getting Dutch Booked.

Some of them are technically legit, and the people who work in child sex crimes units will agree that it is scarier. Although, not so much because the government is getting bilked.

Some of them are technically legit, and the people who work in child sex crimes units will agree that it is scarier.

Yeah. Here's a lovely story that demonstrates that at least the Somalians are (allegedly) only screwing the state government, not the kids:

A tip from gardaí has led to the chief executive of a childcare company in California being arrested and charged with 16 counts of sexually exploiting six children in his care.

Miguel Adrian Gonzalez, a 28-year-old from west Los Angeles who is the chief executive of a childcare programme and a private babysitter, was charged with a series of child abuse offences on November 25.

Gonzalez was charged with two counts of obtaining custody of a minor with the intent to produce child sex abuse imagery, seven counts of production of child abuse material, two counts of distribution of child abuse material, three counts of receipt of child abuse material and two counts of possession of child abuse material.

According to a court filing from a Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) special agent based in LA, she received information from the HSI office in Kentucky in September that implicated Gonzalez in enticing an 11-year-old male victim, called MV-1 in the court filings, to produce child sexual abuse material on Snapchat.

The HSI Kentucky office received information leading to the identification of the victim from HSI’s cyber crimes centre, which had itself been notified of the existence of the material by the Garda National Cyber Crime Bureau.

...While privately messaging PHOENIXV on Snapchat, the boy was instructed to send nude photos and videos or PHOENIXV “would come to MV-1’s home and harm him”.

The boy was sent his address by PHOENIXV as part of this threat. The PHOENIXV user then proceeded to instruct the boy to produce child sex abuse material while calling him “daddy”. The LA agent says investigators were able to establish that Gonzalez controlled the accounts using the PHOENIXV username.

A US attorney’s office statement issued in November said that its complaint against Gonzalez alleges that from 2021 to 2025 the childcare provider and CEO of Let’s Play LA LLC “produced sexually explicit images of children in his care or supervision”. It said Gonzalez also sexually abused at least one minor victim.

“In October 2023 and May 2024, Gonzalez texted the parents of two minor victims, each of them 6-year-old boys at the time, and offered to obtain custody or control of the two victims through his babysitting services, knowing that each victim would be portrayed in a visual depiction engaging in sexually explicit conduct. These requests led to two instances in which Gonzalez produced child sexual abuse material (CSAM).”

It is not uncommon at all. Other than the standard fare of boyfriends and stepdads, a very common scenario is that the son/brother/spouse of a woman running one of these "home child care" places just abuses several of the kids.