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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16281 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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Del. Elliott Pritt, a Republican member of the [West Virginia] House of Delegates, has been charged with enticing a minor after an investigation found that he communicated with a girl through Roblox and Snapchat.

Pritt, 36, is a public school teacher who represents the 50th District in Fayette County. He served as assistant majority leader prior to his arrest. (...)

The complaint said that Pritt began communicating with the girl when she was in eighth grade in 2024 through the online game Roblox then later on Snapchat. (...)

Pritt also sent sexually explicit photos of himself and requested that the girl send nude photos of herself through Snapchat. (...)

The complaint said that Pritt later initiated a physical relationship with the minor and requested that she meet him in his classroom at Oak Hill High School to engage in sexual activity at least five to ten times.

The comments on Reddit are gloatingly pointing out that Pritt is neither trans or otherwise LGBT, nor a drag queen, but a father of four married to a woman, and, of course, a Republican.

What is interesting is that Pritt was initially elected as a Democrat in 2022, switched to the Republican Party in 2023, and was re-elected in 2024 as a Republican. Someone commenting on his recent arrest on Reddit described him as "the same asshole that switched parties and platforms after getting elected", apparently not realizing that, for the Democrats, this was, in retrospect, a most beneficial move.

One thing that is unclear is that he "requested that she meet him in his classroom at Oak Hill High School to engage in sexual activity at least five to ten times". People on Reddit are reading this as saying that they met up and had sex five to ten times, but it could also be interpreted as saying that he was just pushy about meeting up, but that they didn't actually meet up. Am I being autistic with this reading or what? Not that asking an eighth-grader for sex and her refusing is any better than having sex with her.

Appalachia never got the Southern Strategy firmware update so national party affiliations are all a bit fuzzy. If anything it's surprising that this guy waited until 2022 to switch unlike other state politicians who did so in the 2016~18 election cycles.

There is nothing surprising about a weather-vane weather-vanning, that's what they do.

Am I being autistic with this reading or what?

It's from a journalist, so no. According to the article, the complaint said (Note: not "the facts are"):

  1. Pritt later initiated a physical relationship with the minor...
  2. and requested that she meet him in his classroom at Oak Hill High School to engage in sexual activity at least five to ten times.

I don't think that holding hands is enough to count as a "physical relationship", but it doesn't necessarily include sex.

Public school teachers being creepwads towards their adolescent students is a page five story during a slow news cycle. What makes this case unusual is being a state legislator... but state legislators are pretty much random people who are crazy and have a drive to get elected to something.

I was thinking the other day about the ignorance of legislators, but then who really has the time to take two months off of work in late winter to do legislating work, in addition to running for election? I suppose the schedule around here was made for agriculture workers?

In Texas it's spring. All of these people are business owners, and all of them are insane.

I think the roblox angle is overemphasized in this case. It seems he met the victim originally in irl and they probably incedentally used the snap and roblox because that was what the kids were already using.

But it's kind of much worse to have predators teaching in schools rather than just being on the internet.

Strictly looking at human sexual preferences, this kind of relationship isn't even that unusual except for the fact that it's probibited by society (for good reason). Under sharia law she's probably a bit old and the man too young to be getting married.

We also don't even know for sure if the suspect groomed the victim or was actually seduced by the victim. I don't have any actual numbers but I think it's not that unusual for students to make unwanted advances towards teachers. That doesn't make the perp any less of a scumbag but it kind of give a more understandable story than pedo teachers infiltrated the school to groom kids.

Strictly looking at human sexual preferences, this kind of relationship isn't even that unusual except for the fact that it's probibited by society (for good reason).

I half of Europe, 14 or 15 is the age of consent. In the rest it's 16. You'd think from the headline he's been grooming an 11 year old.

What is Roblox, and why does it seem to be ground zero for every creeper in the entire world?

To add, Roblox reportedly has the most daily active users, 145 million or 22% of all.

Quite a lot for a game that looks like this.

It's a social media and gaming site ostensibly aimed at kids (think a mix of reddit and steam with Playmobil aesthetics) who's founder has a reputation of being opposed to content moderation.

The content isn't necessarily the problem, although some games may be cause for concern. The users are, and Roblox not only consistently fails to act on credible reports of pedophiles and child molesters, but also attacks anyone who tries to get creeps arrested or even publishes reports on the problem, e.g. burying Ruben Sim in frivolous litigation.

This is entirely hear-say, but from what I have heard Baszucki and Cassel's sincerely believe that no-body nor no-thing should ever be excluded from their platform and their moderation policies reflect this.

Personally I feel like regardless of whether they're the Quokkaiest Quokkas to ever Quokka, or creepers looking out for fellow creepers is largely irrelevant at this stage, the end result is the same.

Why does it seem to be ground zero for every creeper in the entire world?

Allegedly, it has extremely lax moderation, despite constantly being caught up in child-molestation scandals.

Roblox's moderation team has put forth a disgustingly lazy effort to solve this problem. The current state of affairs has galvanized many users, including myself [Ruben Sim], to invent DIY moderation tools that uncover troves of these accounts. Lists of ERP [erotic-roleplay] accounts several thousands of lines long have been put together and sent to moderation, only to be completely ignored. My safety advocacy group, Moderation For Dummies, conducted an experiment that found out of 100 obvious ERP accounts reported to Roblox, ZERO were removed as a result of our reports. The platform could easily rid themselves of this problem by hiring a single employee to go through and clear these accounts every day, but Roblox is too defiant to even acknowledge it.

Also sheer scale of the platform has to be a factor. I'm sure all sorts of stuff goes on on Whatsapp every day but that's downstream of it being arguably the biggest communication channel in the world rather than a particular failing

It goes further than that with Roblox, which actively banned and threatened to sue one person who was uncovering child molesters on the platform (his lawyers claim that his "investigative work has contributed to six arrests").

Roblox is a platform for creating and hosting multiplayer minigames, with a Minecraft-like aesthetic.

The creepers are there because that's where the children are.

There's always creeps in every place. The difference between Roblox and most places is that most places ban pedophiles when they're reported.

There's always creeps in every place.

Sure, but the creeps are going to find far fewer children to prey on per capita in the Hearts of Iron 4 community (though I imagine they'll find plenty of weirdo commie and/or fascist femboys). Creeps prefer to congregate where they can actually creep on kids, so Roblox has way more per capita than other platforms and communities.

I've never researched it deeply but it seems like it's Minecraft with a bunch of degenerate features bolted on. It's full of groomers because it's full of children and includes a chatbox.

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