Jeff Bast(-ard) and his band of low-IQ miscreants harassed two women in his community, accusing them of defensing "P**ophiles." Now he wants a gun? The police should investigate this POS because he is blatantly plotting a murder.
https://www.illinoistimes.com/news/vigilante-justice/
Vigilante justice
Millstone the Klown targets people on the sex offender registry and those he believes support them
by Scott Reeder
October 15, 2026
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.
After seven weeks out of work, Reid returned to the bookstore part time the week of Oct. 5. Store owners Alex and Christina Helmich did not respond to a request for comment from Illinois Times.
Llaina Groves, owner of Llaina’s Dance & Gym in Jacksonville, said Bast posted a claim linking her husband and business to an alleged sex offender. Groves said he had the wrong person. Bast later posted an apology, she said, but people had already reacted to the accusation. She went to the police because she feared what strangers might do.
When Groves arrived at work Sept. 25, she found “DPDRE” spray-painted on the parking lot in front of the entrance, an abbreviation for “Dead Pedophiles Don’t Reoffend.” The identity of the person who painted them is not known.
Their experiences expose a question larger than one dispute in one small town. Public sex offender registries were created to give people information about convictions. Online, that information can also become a call to punish employers, co-workers and anyone seen as defending them. The consequences reach people who committed serious crimes, people trying to keep a business open and, as both women learned, people with no connection to the registry at all. Whether such campaigns protect children depends on what they accomplish after the crowd arrives.
The man behind the mask
Jeff Bast, a 56-year-old Macoupin County man, calls himself Millstone the Klown. Wearing a creepy clown mask, he carries a sign that reads, “Dead Pedophiles Don’t Reoffend” and sells merchandise with that slogan. His Facebook page identifies people accused or convicted of sexual offenses, along with those he believes support them, and publicizes court cases.
Bast said the idea came from a California campaigner he saw on Facebook. The man wore a clown mask to draw attention to his signs, Bast said, and inspired him to bring the approach to Illinois. His Millstone the Klown Facebook page, which launched this summer, has already amassed 11,000 followers.
Bast’s clown name comes from Matthew 18:6. Jesus of Nazareth warns that anyone who causes “one of these little ones – those who believe in me – to stumble” would be better off with “a large millstone hung around their neck” and drowned in the sea.
Bast said he does not attend church. “I’m not really a religious person, but I’m very spiritual,” he said. When the interviewer suggested that the verse did not literally say what Bast’s sign says, Bast agreed. “It’s what everybody perceives it as,” he said. “And perception is reality pretty much anymore.”
Bast said he has never been sexually abused. He described his childhood as “normal” and free of that harm. He and his wife have no children, but he said accounts of children who have been abused – and his belief that the law has failed them – draw him to demonstrations across central Illinois.
He calls the people who follow his page “supporters.” He estimates that he receives around 120 messages a day, many asking him to examine a case or expose someone. He cannot pursue every request. A post, however, often prompts his followers to call a business, leave comments or demand that it stop employing someone.
Bast’s page has also asked supporters for money to help pay for a concealed carry permit. In his interview, he said he does not carry a gun, though he carries pepper gel and a knife. He described an earlier militia group, the Illinois Sentinels, that met and trained at his home.
“I’ve got a shooting range,” he said. “We used to train there.” Bast said the group did not last long.
He says his campaign is about justice, not vengeance. Asked what his sign means, Bast called for the death penalty for people who sexually abuse children and said he wants the U.S. Supreme Court ruling barring execution for child rape when the victim was not killed overturned.
“There’s no reason they should be out in the public,” he said. “They’re suckling off the state now for the rest of their life instead of facing the death penalty.”
While some of the shirts he sells on his Facebook page simply bear the message “Protect our children,” others have a darker tone. New Halloween-themed offerings include “Save a pumpkin – smash a pedo” with an image of a boot and skull, along with an orange shirt that reads “Curbstomp your local pedophile” with an image of a boot print...Reid, the woman who took down the signs in Winchester, does not object to a family gathering supporters outside a courthouse. She objected to the signs filling her town – and to the conclusion that removing them meant she supported abuse.
“Most abuse victims just want to move on and not think about it every 50 feet driving down Main Street,” she said.
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| Here is Jeff Bastard's frumpy-assed face. The mask in an improvement. |
