The War on Porn and the Hustler Store in Monroe, Ohio: How the political left lied about sex and sophistication–and economic development

Yes, they lied to you when they said that sex peddling was a victimless crime.  When the great argument between Simon Leis and Larry Flint in Cincinnati, Ohio, over smut in the country’s cleanest city became the talk of the world in the 1970s, the crazed owner of Hustler would go to jail for his industry of indecency.  The political left has always tried to use sex as a free speech topic, just as they are doing with pot and transgender issues now.  The radical sex education that we are now seeing in public schools started a long time ago, and the more we let them get away with it, the more they kept coming.  We ended up with a Hustler of Hollywood store in Butler County, Ohio, right down the road from my house.  Larry Flint wanted revenge for all that happened to him as he was prosecuted by Leis and driven in the media over the edge of existence by Charlie Keating.  Flint would do then as he did with President Trump and put out a bounty for any dirt he could get on political figures who stood against him.  And in the case of Keating, he put out publicly, with free speech, a bounty for the rape of Keating’s daughter, which occurred on April 12th, 1977, in Burnet Woods on the University of Cincinnati campus.  I had a front-row seat to all of it, and I remember why Flint said he wanted to put that Hustler of Hollywood at our Butler County Monroe exit.  It was to attack the morality of Cincinnati that they couldn’t stop the porn advocates under the banner of using the First Amendment to undermine our entire society.  And when people traveled down I-75 from the north into the Cincinnati city limits, the first thing they would see was a porn shop run by Larry Flint, which is still standing.

But the story doesn’t end there.  What many people don’t know is that the mob bankrolled Larry Flint, the same crime families that had been running the sex shops and strip clubs in Newport, Ohio, and Covington across the river from Cincinnati.  I have talked about my employment by the mob before, from restaurants on Chester Rd in Sharonville to Mike Fink’s on the river of Ohio, and I can say that even in the 80s, the mob was still very active in cleaning their crime money through legitimate businesses.  The smut business was an easy cover for their other crimes because it attracted the attention of the public.  The FBI was in on the game, too; over time, the mobs became tired of running from the FBI, so they became the leaders, and it all went back to the first top cop, J. Edger Hoover, Bobby Kennedy, and the Beverly Hills Supper Club.  But what kept everyone from digging into the blood-soaked streets that might scare away convention businesses across the river in Cincinnati was that people like Larry Flint were valuable distractions so the mobs could operate without fear of prosecution.   It was just another form of a Cloward and Piven strategy that we see now happening on such a grand scale.  That’s because they learned it from the mobs in Cincinnati and the battles with Larry Flint during the early 70s, 80s, and 90s.  But as Clinton was in the White House, the smut kings felt untouchable.  The internet was coming along but was not yet the free porn provider that it is now, so another business moved in next to the Hustler property in Monroe with the same kind of intentions.  It was Bristol’s topless strip club that was right in the heart of Butler County, off the highway, and became an embarrassment that still permeates to this day. 

From around the mid-1990s until 2010, Bristol’s was a little strip club intent on destroying community values in one of the most family-friendly areas of the entire state, and it was an attack.  I knew many people who went there, and I knew people who worked there.  So, I know pretty explicitly what went on.  In the back of the place, there was a sizeable outside playground where clothing was optional, and anybody could play volleyball with topless young girls.  The place was a major blight on our community in Butler County, and it all started with Larry Flint wanting to desecrate the Cincinnati area’s family values purposely.  But even more so, behind all that was organized crime using porn and compromised men to control them politically.  Because who in their right mind could resist the temptation of 22-year-old girls and their boobies?  Not many, and to this day, most people drive by that location and pretend it’s not there.  Because they are ashamed of what they did there, and they’d love to forget about it; these days, with the government learning from the mob how to control mass populations with porn, it’s free and easy to get on the internet.  But that is another story of destruction that we haven’t yet dealt with.  But when we drive by the Hustler Store in Monroe, Ohio, it’s doing what Larry Flint wanted to do, and that reminds everyone that he was in charge because he was the provider of the forbidden fruit human beings couldn’t resist.  And ultimately, he could control society through their vices.  That’s why the mobsters put Larry Flint up as their front guy.  And he did his job well for them. 

By 2018, the Bristol property had closed and was torn down.  Despite being one of the country’s hottest commercial real estate properties, it remains empty.  Every time I look at it, I think it would be an excellent location for a Love’s Travel Center.  I have been everywhere in the country, and few highways stops are as great as that one in Monroe.  I think I have been to every exit up and down I-75 from Michigan to Florida, I-71, and many along I-70, I-80, and I-90.  And the old Bristol property next to the Hustler of Hollywood location is enormous.  There has been talk of a car dealership moving into the site, but there has not been much activity.  Why? Because it’s a scar from the past when strippers compromised many Butler County men away from their wives and families.  Most people now stop by that highway access port and avoid looking in that direction to avoid shame.  And that is the price of smut on economic activity.  What the political left sold as sophisticated free speech was just a mobster’s position of hiding their crime syndicates with vice and immorality.  And you always end up with a society that has fallen from grace and is empty of resolve, which ends up in a degraded state.  People like Larry Flint were purposefully evil and looking to turn the American Constitution on its head for the destruction of our country and to desecrate anybody who might try to save it from people like him.  And to this day, the effects of that war are still constant reminders of what happened in Monroe, Ohio.  Instead of being a thriving place, which Monroe deserves, it has a haze of guilt over it that makes it come across as just another truck stop exit catering to the needs of lonely truckers and their dirty need for unregulated sex.  And it’s messy, and Larry Flint stuck his sign of smut in the ground for us to forever see.  And he laughed at us as he did it while many men who might have stood against it snuck away from their homes to enjoy the temptations of misspent youth playing nude volleyball within view of the southbound ramp to I-75.  And there was nothing any moralist could do about it because it was a legally protected operation.  The mob had moved into the government, and before anybody could dig too deep, most people were compromised and could not stop it.  These guys played for keeps, and we have the kind of government we do today, primarily because of those efforts by Larry Flint and his Hustler enterprise.  There were a lot of casualties in that smut war, and the guilt of that war is still very much alive and well by the lack of good development at that Hustler site, which continues to hold back economic growth in Butler County that otherwise would have thrived.  Which, of course, answers the question about morality and economic activity.  The political left indeed lied, just as the Bible said they would.  But only too late did anybody realize just how much.

Oh, sure, we’ve all heard it before.  Mind your own business.  Don’t stick your nose of morality into my life.  It’s all about free speech and freedom of choice.  Well, I care about my community, and the decisions of these smut peddlers have lowered the value of property in my community, and I have always taken it personally.  As a legal premise, there is no legal “greater good” over “individual value.”  There is case law that leans away from individual value and favors the greater good, but those arguments are rooted in interpretive mistakes.  Because the same kind of thing is going to happen with pot legalization.  There are consequences for bad decisions, and porn was always a bad decision.  And we can see the results of that bad decision at that Monroe exit.  Sure, people own the property and have a right to do what they want with it.  Until they impact the lives of other people, which is what that history of porn in Monroe has left us all tarnished with.  And is a lesson we should all be learning from and applying to legislation and zoning in the future.

Rich Hoffman

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