Source: illinoistimes.com 10/15/26
Jeff Bast, who goes by Millstone the Klown on social media, says he is protecting children. His online following has brought scrutiny to people on the sex offender registry – and fear and lost work to people around them.
Lucy Reid took down the signs in broad daylight.
They had been posted around Winchester for weeks, calling attention to a child sexual abuse case. Reid understood the anger behind them. But the signs seemed to be everywhere, and she had grown weary of seeing her hometown defined by the worst thing alleged to have happened there.
She expected the person who put them up to be upset. She did not expect strangers to call her a “pedophile protector” or contact Our Town Books in Jacksonville, where she worked as a bookseller. Reid said the store was deluged with calls threatening demonstrations outside the shop unless it cut ties with her. One man contacted an author scheduled to appear there and the store’s book distributor.
Reid was placed on unpaid leave. When she asked to return, she said, the answer was: “No, not yet.”
Then a video began circulating online among some of Millstone the Klown’s followers showing the entrance to the building where Reid lived. She said another video named her and referred to bringing pepper spray and a knife on a future visit. She worried about her 14-year-old son coming over.
One morning, a wood chipper was parked nearby.
In the 1996 film Fargo, a murderer feeds a body into a wood chipper, leaving a leg visible as a police officer approaches. The scene gave the machine a gruesome place in popular culture. Reid said commenters on the Millstone the Klown Facebook page suggested she should be thrown into one. She did not know why the machine was parked near her home. With videos showing her door circulating online, its presence frightened her.
“All I did was pull down some signs,” Reid said.
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This guy makes Pennywise look tame, what a nut job and check his hard drive along with his supporters in the name of public safety. After all it’s a balance, but we must err on the side of public safety accoring to a law maker or DA. Excuse me you can’t have balance if it errs to one side and not even otherwise it isn’t balanced. You pissed off this Libra. Illinois needs to get rid of the clowns you have in Springfield and get your circus together.
This behavior by Bast is crossing the line. Bast is getting his info from the registry or someone informing him of somebody on the registry for use of harassment. This type of harassment is not for public safety and yet the state allows this harassing behavior to persist.
Bast has caused harm in the community, which includes those not on the registry. Bast has created a mob-on-demand to further perpetuate ostracization.
A registrant earned enough money to become a part owner of store only to have his store shuttered by mob-on-demand harassment.
The registry being available online for all to see all day and night is akin to being put in a stockyard all day and night in the town square. The latter is deemed punishment, but SCOTUS doesn’t believe the registry is the town square for the world and it stays there for decades or life.
This is another piece of evidence for ACSOL to use in a potential SCOTUS law suit to revisit Smith v Doe, 2003.
Bast does not believe any registrant can be rehabilitated, as stated in Smith v Doe, 2003’s ‘frightening and high’ 80% or higher recidivism rate by Psychology Today article, which was non-peer-reviewed. Non-peer-reviewed means it has not been evaluated, checked, or critiqued by independent, qualified experts in the same field before being published. SCOTUS did not do their due diligence on facts.
Being ignorant of a source not being peer-reviewed is legal malpractice. SCOTUS has brainwashed the public and it is allowing registrants to be harassed as well as harassed out of employment.
Registrants out in the streets again have paid their dues to society, but the courts, government and society will not let them move forward – instead, they wish to keep registrants as non-human as possible.