BONUS: The secret plan to outlaw porn in the US (is working)

This is a rerun from February this year, when 17 states in the US had banned PornHub. The tally now stands at 21, and both Mike Johnson and the Supreme Court don't seem fussed to stop there. Have a listen, especially if you haven't already, before we come back with new episodes next Wednesday, September 3. --- As of this recording, 17 states don’t have access to PornHub. You might assume that’s because of very normal people like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson needing to monitor his son’s masturbation habits, but was it conservatives’ fault? Or… was it well-meaning liberals? Junlper joins us to discuss who is behind this new and extreme porn ban, and its implications beyond those states and across the country. Our guest Junlper works for The Onion and cohosts the podcast Western Kabuki. You can follow her at ⁠https://bsky.app/profile/junlper.beer⁠ on Bluesky or ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@junikcl⁠ on YouTube. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at:⁠ https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld⁠. Links "Nick Kristof and the Holy War on PornHub" by Melissa Gira Grant: ⁠https://newrepublic.com/article/160488/nick-kristof-holy-war-pornhub⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Hey, this is Grant. So months ago, we released an episode about how states are requiring age verification for porn sites. And this led the porn sites to just not work in those states, you know, unless you have a VPN. And recently, the Supreme Court ruled that those age verification laws are legal. They're gonna stay in place. So now the internet is probably gonna look and work a whole lot different in ways that are gonna go way beyond porn. So with that in mind, we thought we should put this episode back to the top of the feed. Hopefully, it provides a bit of clarity about how we got here

• 1:09Speaker 01

  and what the ramifications might be. Spoiler, the New York Times is, uh, plays a big role in all this. Thank you for listening, and we will be back with a new episode next week.

• 1:26Ryan Broderick?

  A little quote from Justice Samuel Alito. Are you familiar with Justice Samuel Alito of the Supreme Court?

• 1:33Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely. Yeah, no, love that guy. Shout out.

• 1:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, big, big ups.

• 1:37Speaker 03

  Big ups to that dude. He's going somewhere one day.

• 1:39Ryan Broderick?

  He is. So, so hopefully going to hell. So, uh, Justice Samuel Alito on January 16th this year had this to ask of Pornhub. Is it like the old Playboy magazine? You have essays there by the modern day equivalent of Gore Vidal or William F Buckley Jr. So June, what do you think about that and what that says?

• 2:03Speaker 03

  So, okay, here's the thing. I feel like it could be two things and it maybe, maybe it's both. I think right away off the bat, it's like, oh, this dude jacks off on Pornhub and is like, doesn't want to be like, put on the spotlight on stage and like his wife, who like, what do you like? His wife is watching and she's like, oh, he knows all about Pornhub. So he's like pretending to not. But it could also just be that he is so technologically illiterate, he just doesn't know what a website is.

• 2:31Speaker 03

  It's one of the two.

• 2:32Ryan Broderick?

  That's definitely possible.

• 2:51Ryan Broderick?

  I think you're right. I think the two possibilities are that Justice Alito has either never been on Pornhub before or is such a gooner that he had to come up with like the most outlandish sort of excuse for not knowing what Pornhub is.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  I think he's gooning and trying to hide it from his wife and he thought like, oh, I can go on stage in front of everyone and pretend to not know anything about this new fangled Pornhub or anything like that. I, it's a strategy. He's trying to keep his wife.

• 3:19Ryan Broderick?

  I do wonder like if someone will eventually come up with an OnlyFans Substack hybrid that does bring that back though. Like you could do it. I, I, I, people don't really read anymore, but you could do like film essays on OnlyFans if you wanted, I guess.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  There, there's a lot of opportunity. I mean, people still read like smut. This, this could be like.

• 3:40Ryan Broderick?

  People love smut.

• 3:41Speaker 03

  People love it, especially women compared to men. So you could have like a very inclusive, like, oh, the smuts for the women. And then the, the porn is for the men. Like, I'm surprised this hasn't happened.

• 3:52Ryan Broderick?

  Men can't read because of AI. That's why, that's what they're doing with AI is they're reading that way.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  I love when people these days be like, I had AI respond to like my hinge, uh, my, my hinge link up or whatever. And it's like, can people not communicate anymore?

• 4:08Ryan Broderick?

  The idea of two people grocking at each other and then using grok to read it back, I think is quite beautiful.

• 4:15Ryan Broderick?

  As of this recording, 17 states don't have access to Pornhub and other porn sites. And the Project 2025 creeps are loud and proud about how if they ban Pornhub, it's the first step towards our dystopian trad life future. But I'd like to argue in this episode that this was all only possible because of some very well-meaning liberals. So today, we're looking into who is behind this new and very extreme porn ban? And what are the larger ramifications besides, of course, you know, every American having to download a VPN? I'm Ryan Broderick. With me also is our lovely producer, Grant Irving. Welcome to Panic World, a show about the moral panics and viral freakouts bubbling up

• 4:59Ryan Broderick?

  out of the darkest corners of the internet. And moral panics about porn have been around since basically the dawn of time, right? So in the past decade, though, on the internet, a place built by sex and staring at sex, it has radically changed how we think about all of this. And I, I didn't write this in the script, but Grant says that I'm a proud pervert. And I want, wow, okay, yeah. Thank you, Grant. Joining us anyways is someone who I'm a big fan of. She does social media for The Onion. She's a co-host of Western Kabuki. Juniper, welcome to the show.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  Thank you so much. You forgot to include the part where I'm also a proud pervert. Yeah, if you want to just like edit that part in, put that first before everything else.

• 5:42Ryan Broderick?

  So yeah, that wasn't in the script that Grant wrote. So yeah, I'll, okay, so we're both proud perverts.

• 5:47Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 5:48Ryan Broderick?

  And to kick things off, how much do you know about this topic? The sort of current wave of porn bans happening in the US?

• 5:55Speaker 03

  I know a little bit. People have made a lot of points of like, oh, this is a way to start legislating internet activity and specifically like social media and to try to like, it's a very nefarious starting point to try to legislate and keep track of like queer communities because people are, and right-wingers, when I say people, I'm talking about like right-wingers and especially this current Trump administration.

• 6:20Ryan Broderick?

  They don't really count as people, but I understand what you're saying, yeah.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  In the legal definition, I suppose they're people. They're trying to conflate being like trans as some sort of sexual deviancy. This is like a linked, in my mind, at least from what I've seen, a very linked moral panic.

• 6:38Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, I would say so. I think right now we're sort of watching like a new McCarthyism form in America where they're conflating all of these things together. And now this playbook is expanding to porn as this next step of saving the children in ways that really have nothing to do with helping children. And in a previous episode we did with director of Yara Drew, we talked about sort of what you had mentioned at the top, which is that when you go after porn on the internet, one of the most immediate things that that kind of causes is a crackdown on queer spaces where there's much more of sort of a fluid use of smut, basically. And so, you know, we saw this with the Tumblr porn ban many years ago as it sort of decimated an entire queer pocket of the internet. But for today's episode, we're gonna start with our first character, sort of the general

• 7:23Ryan Broderick?

  architect.

• 7:24Speaker 03

  Oh, I love, I love characters. I love internet freaks. Oh, my God, yes.

• 7:27Ryan Broderick?

  So this guy is a real big internet freak because he writes for the New York Times. Do you know who Nicholas?

• 7:33Speaker 03

  Disgusting.

• 7:34Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, the most perverted thing you can do. Do you know who Nicholas Kristof is?

• 7:39Speaker 03

  I don't think I do.

• 7:40Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, good. Okay, cool. So he's gonna be a big character in this. Nicholas Kristof, you know, seems like a totally normal guy, just like every other pervert, but he's been around forever. He's a fairly big reporter, and he's been banging on some very specific drums for a very long time. For instance, in 2014, he and his wife, who's also a New York Times journalist, Cheryl Wu Dunn, they publish a book titled "A Path Appears," which is about the ending of the global oppression of women. Do you know where we're going with this yet? Have you, have you started to piece together?

• 8:11Speaker 03

  I think, I definitely think I know where this is going.

• 8:14Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so let me give you a little taste. Here's an excerpt. "The counseling of pregnant teenagers and early support for children are ridiculously cheap yet hopelessly underfunded. Same goes for contraceptive programs. Dewarming Kenyan schoolkids reduces dropout rates. You can keep a child in school an extra year for just $3.50." Okay? All good?

• 8:34Speaker 03

  Very reasonable.

• 8:35Ryan Broderick?

  Very reasonable. And this was sort of his thing, is like he, he was, he was sort of one of those like end of history good liberals being like, "We can fix the world," you know? And this theme of saving girls, saving women, is one that you're gonna see throughout his career. Here are some recent op-eds he's written. "Don't the lives of women and girls matter?"

• 8:56Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 8:57Ryan Broderick?

  "Trump is likely to slash funding for women's health organizations in the name of protecting life, but the result will be death." Is there a better $600 investment? Women with obstetric fistulas suffer year after year, even as $619 surgery can restore them. He's a real lean-in type of guy, which also means he's a toe-to-the-line type of guy. For instance, here's one of his more recent-ish pieces. "Don't let the liberal purity elect Trump. Even if you think Harris is flawed in the Middle East, don't try to punish the Democratic Party and risk a Trump election."

• 9:33Speaker 03

  Okay, so he's like someone that doesn't really, really want you to care too much about anything outside of just elections, basically?

• 9:40Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, and he's like globally focused, but in a way that's like, almost sort of say like, effective altruists, you know, sort of like Sam Bankman-Fried, kind of like, "For dollars a day, you can fix fistulas", which honestly, you should, like, they're not-

• 9:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:54Ryan Broderick?

  "We should fix those." But his search for simple, clean solutions in the name of protecting women and girls, well, I don't think it goes great. His work helps inspire a documentary. Here, let's listen. First, you're gonna hear Ashley Judd, and then you're gonna hear Blake Lively, and finally, you're gonna hear Kristoff himself.

• 10:12Speaker 04

  Sex slavery is happening 30 minutes from where I'm sitting right now.

• 10:18Speaker 05

  I have the new perspective of what it means to have your body sold in this country. Not everybody is free.

• 10:25Speaker 06

  We should speak out about trafficking all over the world, but we don't have the moral authority to tell other countries to clean up their act unless we make some efforts to address the violence and inequity right here in the United States.

• 10:38Ryan Broderick?

  So you're getting a vibe of where we're headed here?

• 10:40Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 10:41Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, so the 2015 doc that I was just quoting from is adapted from one of Kristoff's books. And this is the campaign that leads directly to the current bans on Pornhub. But it's gonna start with sex workers and the way they network online.

• 10:56Ryan Broderick?

  Let's listen again because beyond raising awareness, this doc lays out what I would say is the first call to action to crack down on online sex work.

• 11:05Speaker 07

  The websites where victims are being sold the most, such as Backpage.com, you see over 14,000 to 20,000 ads a day. It's an epidemic level problem that we're facing here in the United States. It's not just a few girls on street corners. Now we're talking about hundreds and thousands of ads every day.

• 11:22Ryan Broderick?

  Are you familiar with Backpage?

• 11:23Speaker 03

  I'm not actually. What's Backpage?

• 11:24Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so Backpage is kind of like a Craigslist-type platform, but for sex workers. So this was the beginning.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  This was a test. I don't, I've never bought a sex worker.

• 11:35Ryan Broderick?

  Hey, you did a great job acting like you've never paid for sex on the internet.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  Samuel Alito moment for me right there. I hope it works.

• 11:43Ryan Broderick?

  Are there articles I can read on Backpage.com?

• 11:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, tell me about it. What is this about?

• 11:47Ryan Broderick?

  So this website was used by sex workers everywhere to get clients, screen clients, use the internet to run a business in a safer and better way. But that all started to change after Kristoff's op-ed and the documentary. By November of 2015, a case is opened by the Washington State Attorney General. Congress then starts an investigation into Backpage, led by Senator Rob Portman. And this is from Portman's opening statement, "Traffickers have found refuge and new customers through websites that specialize in advertising, ordinary prostitution," I don't know what extraordinary prostitution would look like in this sense, "and lawful escort services. A business called Backpage.com is a market leader. The public record indicates that Backpage sits at the center of the online

• 12:29Ryan Broderick?

  black market for sex trafficking. The National Center of Missing Exploited Children tells us that Backpage is linked to 71% of all suspected sex trafficking reports that it receives through the general tip line." That number sounds pretty high, huh? What do you think?

• 12:46Speaker 03

  That does. I mean, I feel like it's probably reasonable. I know that sex trafficking is like a super real thing, especially in America. So I don't want to be like, ooh, this is conflated, this is a fake statistic. But I mean, I don't know. I think... This is one of those topics that's kind of tough because like there like sex trafficking is a huge, it is a huge thing. It's not like, like, I don't think that's a moral panic. Like, from what I understand and from what I've read in the past, like, a lot of sex trafficking is like, you know, people bringing in people from like Mexico, like the illegal immigrants.

• 13:23Ryan Broderick?

  Overwhelmingly, yes.

• 13:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, like people that are not here legally by force and then they're not like on the record here because they're not here legally and people will sell them very under the radar, right? So that is like a thing.

• 13:38Ryan Broderick?

  One of the more common sort of ways that this actually happens is like you come to a country, any country illegally, someone seizes your passport, you're an indentured slave, it goes from there. That's sort of like the basic.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, that's what Andrew Tate did with some people that he worked with, right? Like, he would basically like, hey, come here. And then confiscated all of their shit.

• 13:58Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, the main Andrew Tate special, yeah. It's like a serious problem. I knew a journalist years ago who's working on a story about how like it was a serious problem for like Airbnb networks. So like you like get hired, go to a country illegally, you become like a cleaner for like an Airbnb owner, they like steal all your shit and then you like live in that place. It's like a, there's like a whole sort of system that like a journalist friend of mine was looking into years ago. So, yeah, there is a serious problem, but nothing that's about to happen is going to address that problem basically at all. But that doesn't stop a bipartisan movement in the government to take action and make things, of course, a whole lot worse. In 2016, in the spring, the Senate officially holds backpage and

• 14:42Ryan Broderick?

  contempt for refusing to comply with the investigation. It's their first contempt charge since 1995. And in October, their ads for prostitution are shut down after the website CEO is arrested for pimping. And after, after a separate investigation co-run by a little California DA named Kamala Harris.

• 14:58Speaker 03

  Of course. Oh, my God, there she is.

• 15:00Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, this is, this was, this is Kamala's first brat moment.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  It's a big year for that. She had a lot of moments.

• 15:08Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 15:09Speaker 03

  That was right before she arrested thousands of people for having marijuana. That was her second brat moment.

• 15:17Ryan Broderick?

  She's so cool.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:18Ryan Broderick?

  I wish, I wish she was the one setting up concentration camps right now, not Trump.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  If only.

• 15:23Ryan Broderick?

  So a couple of years go by, another documentary comes out called I Am Jane Doe. This is about the victims of trafficking on Backpage, they're sued against the company. And this is when we also get another celebrity guest who's going to help take this from a very specific website to something that impacts the entire internet. And I want to be really clear on how all this expands, so we can see how this eventually leads to the Pornhub ban. So to recap, Kristoff writes an op ed for the Times. There's some docs that feature celebs that kind of like launch off the back of that. Backpage gets shut down. And now the call to action is to stop trafficking on social media sites and other websites like Backpage. And it gets normalized with quote unquote legitimate people. And it starts to affect more and more actual people.

• 16:09Ryan Broderick?

  Enter our next crusader, a guy who's going to play a surprisingly big role in all of this, a little guy named Danny Masterson's best friend, Ashton Kutcher.

• 16:18Speaker 03

  Oh my God, he's gone now. They buried that dude in the last few years. You don't hear about him anymore.

• 16:22Ryan Broderick?

  No. Do you, do you remember this from 2017 where Ashton Kutcher was everywhere talking about sex trafficking?

• 16:28Speaker 03

  I do. I do remember that. Him and his, I'm assuming they're still married, wife.

• 16:33Ryan Broderick?

  Mila Kunis?

• 16:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, Mila Kunis. That was like their thing for a minute, like in the, I feel like it was like end of Obama era, early Trump. I'm sure you remember this, but the like, save the children, have to save the children moment that like kind of preceded the whole trans panic.

• 16:48Ryan Broderick?

  You have no idea how right you are. So Ashton Kutcher was into this for about as long as Kristoff. I also feel like this clip in particular was like a big like one on Facebook. Like it was like Ashton Kutcher speaking up for sex traffickers.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:03Ryan Broderick?

  Share fellow patriots if you agree, kind of thing. Kutcher becomes the figurehead of this sort of movement that's very, like very early beginning. He takes up the cause as a charity. He becomes the chairman of like an Organization that's trying to stop trafficking. And this is a quote from a 2017 CNN article about it, which is not age to well. No one got punked Wednesday morning when Ashton Kutcher came to Capitol Hill. The actor testified Wednesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a hearing on the progress in combating modern slavery. Kutcher spoke on behalf of Thorn, Digital Defenders of Children, an organization he co-founded with then-wife Demi Moore in 2009 that built software to fight human trafficking.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  Bitcoin will end human trafficking.

• 17:50Ryan Broderick?

  Demi Moore discovered the substance and she doesn't need to do this anymore.

• 17:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:55Ryan Broderick?

  But this ends up becoming like a massive Trumper factoid where Ashton Kutcher in his testimony describes like going on FBI raids. And I like, I know of this because I have Trumpers in my family who like during this time period, were watching Fox News coverage of these FBI raids and like text me being like, they just saved like another half a million sex trafficking victims this morning. And it's like, I would then like Google and like, that's not, that's not what happened. But like, like Trump supporters-

• 18:23Speaker 03

  Would they have like cameras in these crews, like camera, like live feed of these raids and stuff like that? With like Ashton Kutcher right there behind them, just being there? Is that like what it was?

• 18:33Ryan Broderick?

  Would it, would it surprise you to find out? No, that like, there is no evidence of that happening.

• 18:37Speaker 03

  Oh, it just, it just straight up did not happen.

• 18:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it was just like-

• 18:40Speaker 03

  But it feels real though.

• 18:42Ryan Broderick?

  That's all that matters.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  It's all, yeah, it feels real to me.

• 18:44Ryan Broderick?

  It feels real. And like, yeah, there is like a genuine feeling at this time period that like, they were finding all of the houses and like clearing them all out and like letting like, and I was, and I remember telling one of my family members like, if this is, if this is true, like things are, that is the most horrifying thing I've ever heard in my life. If hundreds of thousands of sex tracking victims are being pulled out of homes this morning, like we're in serious trouble.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, that's wild.

• 19:08Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  And they found them all. They were just all in one little town. They were just on a block. All like half a million of them.

• 19:15Ryan Broderick?

  I got them all.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:17Ryan Broderick?

  So it's crazy Fox News fanfic, but it gains all of this credibility because of Kristoff and because of the mainstream celebrities. By August 1, the Senate is really into this now, and they introduce a bill that is starting to gain steam. There's now like celebrity public service announcements. There's one that underscores the urgency to clarify and update Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Are you familiar with Section 230?

• 19:41Speaker 03

  I am not at all, no.

• 19:43Ryan Broderick?

  So Section 230 is like this very thorny piece of like internet legislation. It means that an online service provider is not liable for the content on the site created by users.

• 19:53Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 19:54Ryan Broderick?

  Which you would be like, okay, like maybe they should be, but if they were effectively, the internet would stop working overnight.

• 20:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that that seems correct. That I could be wrong though, but just from face value, that seems correct.

• 20:07Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it would be really, it'd be, I mean, like, I hate Facebook, but like,

• 20:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:10Ryan Broderick?

  There's a lot of child predators on Facebook, like there's a lot of child predators on the internet.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  I want this to only apply to Elon Musk.

• 20:17Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, I actually think I think we should repeal Section 230 just for X.

• 20:21Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 20:21Ryan Broderick?

  We think of the whole Save the Children thing now as a, you know, Fox News, 4chan, QAnon thing, but listen to the list of celebrities who are doing this PSA in support of passing anti-sex trafficking laws. It's a lot of people and they're going nuts. Seth Meyers, Amy Schumer, Tony Shalhoub, Monk. Monk's involved.

• 20:41Speaker 03

  God.

• 20:42Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 20:42Speaker 03

  Remember this time when like celebrities would get involved with certain movements like this and it would actually matter? Like, I this doesn't happen anymore. When was the last time like a celebrity other than to do like that really cringe? A pandemic video that they all sang together for that was like, oh, we're all one.

• 21:02Ryan Broderick?

  I genuinely think that was it. Yeah.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  That was the last time and they were like, we can never do this again.

• 21:07Ryan Broderick?

  Cause my first instinct was like, maybe it's the end of the Ellen show that did it.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. Like, I feel like that that's like a sign of the shift, right?

• 21:14Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, yes. Wow. I wonder if it'll come back now that Trump's president again. Like, I feel like we're like not far away from like a big cringey liberal.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  What I have noticed is that liberals are posting like mid 2010s, like pro-gay, like we're allies, like we understand you're trans, you're gay, we stand with you. Like they're posting stuff like that again.

• 21:38Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  And I feel like we haven't seen like that like hyper woke, like an endearingly Gen X way sort of post in a while. We're in the early days of like that shift back to that culture, I think. I don't think we're going to see John Legend and like Seth Meyers come back for anything like that again, you know? But it's manifesting in a different way this time.

• 21:57Ryan Broderick?

  I saw a post from like a lib on Blue Sky today that it was like perfect and I'm so mad I lost it in a shuffle. It was implying that Elon Musk and Donald Trump were in a gay relationship, obviously.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:09Ryan Broderick?

  While misgendering Elon Musk derogatorily and then talking about how we're going to miss immigrants when they can't work for us illegally anymore.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  See, well, that's that is like the perfect post 2016 liberal.

• 22:21Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 22:22Speaker 03

  Where they're like, they are roasting people on the right for the things that they supposedly are like in favor of. We need to get to the pre 2016 type of post where liberals were like, we love fresh water and like stuff like that, you know, like just like something everyone kind of agrees with. And it's, it's just like, like, I agree, but like, what are we doing here?

• 22:44Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I think we need to do the ice bucket challenge to defeat sex trafficking.

• 22:48Speaker 03

  When was the last time we had an ice bucket challenge?

• 22:50Ryan Broderick?

  We gotta bring that back.

• 22:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:52Ryan Broderick?

  And during this period of time that you're talking about missing so much, just to sort of explain to you how insane all this is, the hill.com has an op-ed talking about the sort of celebrity push against sex trafficking that just sort of appears out of nowhere in 2017 and they write, although the hearing focused entirely on sex trafficking, mostly of minors, the reality is that the majority of commercial sex advertisements placed on the website back page are from consenting sex workers who claim that shutting down the online platform could put them at greater risk of victimization, which is true. Like we interviewed like a sex worker a few months ago about this for the show and they were talking about how like online is bad, but in person is so much goddamn more. More dangerous.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I mean, that is the one thing I know that if you start to take away these spaces that they can control and make it kind of go back on the streets in an unregulated, not that it's regulated in any legal sense right now, or before the time, but it does make it far more dangerous when you take their control away from the situation, which is objectively horrible.

• 23:54Ryan Broderick?

  Right. And that's exactly what former sex worker and sex worker rights advocate Caitlin Bailey wrote in Reason. She writes, "To know so many people who use this service back page to keep themselves safe, to schedule and screen their clients, and to have the government narrative be that these are like evil sex traffickers that are kidnapping and shipping children, has been absolutely bananas. The fact that we have really, really smart people who have fallen for this idea that we can end child sexual exploitation by removing websites on the internet, it continues to blow my mind." That last line, the idea that we can sort of fix whatever social evil we're talking about or thinking about by removing a website from the internet, is exactly right. Like, you just, it doesn't work that way.

• 24:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I kind of fall into that mindset sometimes where I'm like, you know, I think we actually just need to restrict online access.

• 24:44Ryan Broderick?

  It's true for X.com.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  It is. And not even, not even just X. I think that's like a big, big thing, but like, just in general, where it's like, should 14-year-olds have access to social media? I genuinely, I like, probably, like, after the election, I was like, no, they shouldn't. But then it's like, okay, but that's like a dark path, like, going down that.

• 25:06Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, yes. It is a dark path. And like, there's not, well, also, we're seeing what happens when, like, when an adversarial administration gets the keys to the car, right?

• 25:15Speaker 03

  100%.

• 25:15Ryan Broderick?

  And that is kind of what happened here, when Trump signs basically two bills into law on April 11, 2018, which, are you familiar with FOSTA and SESTA?

• 25:29Speaker 03

  I am. If I remember correctly, that passed in 2018?

• 25:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, that's, that's what we're talking about. So, yeah, so Trump is the one to sign these into law.

• 25:40Speaker 03

  I remember a lot of sex workers I knew at the time, talking about how horrible this was going to be for them.

• 25:46Ryan Broderick?

  And it was. It allows for a loophole in Section 230 where if a platform is believed to be facilitating sex trafficking, they can be liable for hosting that content. So in theory, this sounds really good, but you can claim that, you know, any website on the internet is facilitating sex trafficking and use Foss Asses to take it down. And because it's so nebulous, it is a chilling of free speech online.

• 26:11Speaker 03

  Jesus, that just sounds evil.

• 26:13Ryan Broderick?

  It does sound evil, yeah. Members of the House supported it 388 to 25. That's how you know you got a good moral panic. Everyone has completely lost their minds.

• 26:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:24Ryan Broderick?

  The Senate votes into 97 to 2.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. Wow. Very bipartisan, very, very.

• 26:31Ryan Broderick?

  So what were the results of this big, very bipartisan, celebrity-endorsed effort besides QAnon? Well, a Philadelphia public radio station did dig into this a bit about two years after it passed. There has not been much evidence showing that Foss Asses helped reduce sex trafficking. The government claims the laws have decreased sex trafficking ads by 90%, but an analysis by The Washington Post found that just four months after Foss Asses' passage, that number rebounded to 75% of the original figure. So the ads came back.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  And if you start cracking down on anything, whether it be alcohol during the prohibition or like abortions, stuff like that, they're not going to go away. They're just going to adapt, go on black markets, go underground, be less public.

• 27:18Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. That is exactly what happened here. It doesn't stop sex trafficking. In fact, the FBI said it made stopping trafficking harder for them. And through court cases against Backpage, it became clear that Backpage had tried to get child sex trafficking off the site and had been cooperating with law enforcement in those efforts when it was running.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  Like, of course.

• 27:36Ryan Broderick?

  What it did end up doing was putting a lot of sex workers in danger. Quoting the Philadelphia Public Radio Station that dug into this, "Sex work advocacy groups have reported a spike in the number of missing and dead sex workers across the country."

• 27:49Speaker 03

  For a long time, I've believed that, like, you know, people shouldn't do heroin, but we shouldn't criminalize people who do heroin. That shouldn't be a crime to do it, because then people aren't likely to go get help. If someone's overdosing, they're not likely to call health services. They're not likely to do this or that. So it's like, there's so many different examples of outlawing behavior and things that will happen regardless, leading to crises and worsening them. Outlawing these behaviors, cracking down on these behaviors, leads to really dark paths. I mean, what is it, in the Philippines? It's literally a crime to smoke marijuana? Like, you can be put to death for that, I believe.

• 28:29Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's good, though. I think stoners should die. I mean, we know, you know, sex work in places like Scandinavia, there are countries where not only is it totally legal, it's unionized, it's like, there are regulations they have to hit to stay open.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  You want to know when something bad is happening. If that infrastructure is not there, you can't track things as easily.

• 28:55Ryan Broderick?

  Except for stoners, who should die. And lastly, maybe the creepiest and most quiet ramification of this involves Ashton Kutcher, who I think helped usher us into a new surveillance age. And this was all before he wrote a letter supporting a rapist.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  Destroyed his reputation, just completely gone.

• 29:13Ryan Broderick?

  Kelso, what are you doing? Kelso, no!

• 29:16Speaker 03

  I would have never guessed Kelso would have made a bad decision. Fuck.

• 29:20Ryan Broderick?

  He knew a sex trafficker the whole time! And here's sort of a little cherry on top before we go into our first break. This is from The New Republic's Melissa Gira Grant, and she writes, "Since its founding, Thorn, Ashton Kutcher's organization, has more often than not sounded more like a startup than a human rights or advocacy organization. One of its few independently documented accomplishments is a piece of software called Spotlight."

• 29:45Ryan Broderick?

  And it is, it is free of charge for law enforcement. We know few details about how Spotlight works, but it appears to involve data scraping, machine learning, and facial recognition, collecting adult sex workers' data and identities from online sex work ads, then using that as a source to search for children suspected of having been trafficked, which is horrifying and insane and very stupid.

• 30:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's terrifying. Like, all of our faces are scanned at this point. Everyone has been scanned. I'm scanned, you're scanned. We, all of our faces are in a database. I'm probably in a database like, okay, this is the Jackoff database. What did they jack off to? You're probably in a database like, okay, this is the, the legal threat database. Who'd you send threats to? Like, our faces are all in these databases. It's terrifying.

• 30:32Ryan Broderick?

  I should say for listeners, if you have a new iPhone and you are someone who takes or sends nudes, I do not because I'm getting hacked all the time. So like, I just don't do that as part of my life. But if you do do that, you need to turn off Apple Intelligence on your phone because Apple's AI is absolutely scanning your genitals.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  Jesus, I have some, I have some settings to change.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Why are you kink shaming?

• 30:54Ryan Broderick?

  Hey, I'm saying there's no problem with it, but unless you want Apple's AI to scan your genitals, you need to turn that feature off. It's in the settings.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Apple wants my genitals as much as I want Apple to have pictures of my genitals. I, I do want to point out though, before we go too far, and I just want to help thread this, as far as I know, Thorn Ashton Kutcher's company, hey, let's scan all your faces and the names of Saving the Children, they were pretty early to the game. The dystopian, we're all uploaded world we live in now, the Save the Children moment, I think, really helped usher that in.

• 31:31Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 31:32Speaker 03

  The surveillance state that we live in. I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna say this before we move too far beyond, that I stand in favor of letting AI see porn genitals. And no one should turn off the AI intelligence because why would you, you really want to take away porn from AI? That seems kind of weird.

• 31:50Ryan Broderick?

  I personally mail printed out photographs of my genitalia to Mark Zuckerberg every If he wants to see it so bad.

• 31:57Speaker 03

  Have to deliver it to his door.

• 31:57Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I bring it to his door. And we're not going to talk about that after the break. But what we are going to talk about is how this save the children moral panic that led to Faustus Sesta has not gone away. And how the character we started with, Nick Kristof, comes back in a big way to effectively dismantle how pornography works in America. And we're going to do all of that after the break. Please don't goon to our sponsors. That is very inappropriate. So don't do that.

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• 33:31Ryan Broderick?

  So before we go deeper into this, June, can you, can you take a guess where we're going? Do you have any sort of sense of how we're going to end up at a Pornhub ban by the end of this story?

• 33:40Speaker 03

  Does it involve the Wayfair hysteria that, that happened for a minute where everyone was like, oh, Wayfair is hiding children in cupboards and sending them across the country. Does that come into play? Because I really hope it does.

• 33:53Ryan Broderick?

  Honestly, I wish.

• 33:55Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 33:55Ryan Broderick?

  It did. I'm, I'm currently fighting with Wayfair right now because they delivered a, a, uh, I need a new desk really badly because mine's falling apart and I ordered one at Wayfair and they sent it to the wrong address.

• 34:06Speaker 03

  They didn't even have a child in there.

• 34:07Ryan Broderick?

  There was no child in the desk and they left it outside and nobody signed for it. They dropped it off on a random street corner in New York and I want my refund, Wayfair. God damn it.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  Damn.

• 34:15Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Okay.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  People.

• 34:16Ryan Broderick?

  But, but no, Wayfair does not factor into this, although like, I think that is probably downstream of what we're talking about.

• 34:22Speaker 03

  That, that was just like a, a flash in the pan of when all of this was happening and like, it was like a, a seamless shift from QAnon to Save the Children, from what I remember.

• 34:31Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, based on sort of the research that we have here, I don't think it's totally impossible to argue that the documentary that Nick Kristof makes that kicks all of this off.

• 34:45Speaker 03

  Oh my God, I do know this guy. I remember this documentary. Yes. Go on. Sorry to interrupt. That just brought back, yeah.

• 34:51Ryan Broderick?

  I think it's like possible you could argue that he's the reason QAnon is obsessed with pedophilia.

• 34:58Speaker 03

  Oh my God.

• 34:59Ryan Broderick?

  I sort of, I sort of, let's, let's talk about the end of the episode because I do think the argument could be made here that like, he's effectively Q, but like, not, not really, but like is, you know what I mean?

• 35:08Speaker 03

  He's like the Jetty single of, of porn, basically.

• 35:11Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, yes. They, they have almost identical, identical strategies. So, um, Nick Kristof is writing stuff during this time period where he's, you know, he's describing Backpage as a brothel that's taking advantage of young girls. And he's, he's celebrating the, the closing down of Backpage. And then in 2020, he drops a piece called The Children of Pornhub. Do you remember this piece?

• 35:35Speaker 03

  I don't. No.

• 35:36Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. So this is a complicated one because like, it effectively does lead to the cleanup of Pornhub. You know, like how they deleted like millions of videos and they kind of beefed up their age verification?

• 35:48Speaker 03

  Which is, was a great thing. Cause there was, there was a lot of, um, child exploitation on there. And there was a lot of porn stars that came out at the time talking about how they had videos on there.

• 35:59Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  Um, from when they were a child. And that's objectively horrific.

• 36:02Ryan Broderick?

  It's horrific.

• 36:03Speaker 03

  So that was like a good part of this.

• 36:05Ryan Broderick?

  But you're gonna see how things get sort of confused here in this excerpt. So he writes Pornhub is a site infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content. Misogynist content on Pornhub, get out of here. And footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for girls under 18, no space, or 14, Y O, leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren't of children being assaulted.

• 36:34Speaker 03

  The most there.

• 36:36Ryan Broderick?

  But too many are.

• 36:37Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 36:39Ryan Broderick?

  Now, you talk to anyone running any major platform on the internet, and the first thing they're gonna tell you is that child sex abuse material is the most complicated to stop, the most pervasive social disease on the internet.

• 36:50Speaker 03

  It's on every social media.

• 36:52Ryan Broderick?

  It's everything.

• 36:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, like that was a thing on Twitter, now X, on Facebook, on Instagram, on any platform you can think of. It's always been a long problem that they've been dealing with.

• 37:04Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, and actually Tumblr eventually came out and admitted like that was largely why they banned porn. It's because they couldn't sort of figure out consensual versus exploitative sexual content. Like, it was just too much. And so he writes this piece, and it goes huge. It blows up. But it also conflates issues, and there's a kind of gleeful tone throughout all of it. And it eventually gets picked up by an unlikely but kind of perfect vessel for the further de-sexing of the internet. And that's why the next chapter of this story takes place in Louisiana. And the star of this part of our story is a woman named Lori Schlegel, who decides she's going to become a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives in 2021. But a bit more background before we get into kind of how she fits in here.

• 37:48Ryan Broderick?

  She is a mom and also a pharmaceutical rep.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  We love those. Shout out Luigi.

• 37:55Ryan Broderick?

  So she's a pharmaceutical rep that goes to Bible class, then goes like, I want to be a marriage counselor. And she says, I want to be a marriage counselor and help marriages. I just didn't want to do addiction. And then lo and behold, I'm doing addiction work. Now, do you understand what she might be talking about?

• 38:09Speaker 03

  Porn addiction. She's talking about porn addiction.

• 38:11Ryan Broderick?

  That's absolutely right. So she says, this was something I wasn't familiar with. Pornography, apparently. The Justice Alito defense. I'd still be helping marriages because a lot of people come in with that, and it's really working on betrayal, too. When you see the naked form, you get aroused. I think that's very-

• 38:30Speaker 03

  The naked form.

• 38:31Ryan Broderick?

  Thank you, thank you.

• 38:32Speaker 03

  What a, what a, what an awful way to put the human body.

• 38:35Ryan Broderick?

  Awesome. Uh, when you see the naked form, when you see our disgusting meat sacks, you get aroused. I think that's very natural, she says. I have seen people lose it when we talk about the addictive quality. Despite the consequences, broken marriages, lost jobs, it's still a hard behavior to quit.

• 38:51Speaker 03

  Porn addicts as a moral panic itself is also kind of a thing.

• 38:55Ryan Broderick?

  I do think that like something weird happened after the pandemic with like the no fat movement, where it was sort of like a funny and like sort of sad, but like something happened during the pandemic where like it went from like a sideshow to like a genuine social movement among like, around, like, like, or I sort of like timestamp it with like the advent of like the term simp. Like, like all of a sudden, like a bunch of like Gen Z men were like, wait a minute, porn is like preying upon me.

• 39:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, and ever since then, I, I think that is like a really good point because there has been this divide. You mentioning the word simp reminded me like of that time and still, which is today, of where a woman will might post a photo and a man might compliment her in just a very normal way. And I like, someone will reply to that being like, oh, you're such a simp. It's like, can you not compliment, do like some compliments anymore? Is that like being a simp or is that just being nice? I don't, I, it's crazy.

• 39:47Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's sort of this idea that like any sort of desire is, is bad.

• 39:55Speaker 03

  It's, it's men policing men.

• 39:57Ryan Broderick?

  So these things are swimming around culture and at the same time, Schlegel's working as a marriage counselor. And through that work, she is apparently realizing the evils of porn addiction. Though she claims that that wasn't her agenda for running for office or anything, which is gonna seem pretty suspicious in just a little bit. But before we get there, I want you to guess what she says supposedly inspired her to read the internet of pornography forever. Just take a wild guess.

• 40:23Speaker 03

  Oh, I, I think I have it. I, I really hope I'm correct. I swear if I get this correct, I did not know this previously. Her husband, I'm just gonna assume she's married. She found her husband like watching some kink porn, like, or maybe, maybe it was like gay porn. Maybe like she walked in the room and her husband was watching gay porn.

• 40:46Ryan Broderick?

  That would be really funny. I want to be clear that like, that's really funny.

• 40:50Speaker 03

  Oh, no, it's worse. Oh, it's worse.

• 40:52Ryan Broderick?

  But the truth is so much more insane.

• 40:53Speaker 03

  Oh, I have, I see, I always think that the funniest thing is gonna be the case, but it most often is not.

• 41:00Ryan Broderick?

  She heard a Billie Eilish interview on Howard Stern. Let's listen.

• 41:07Speaker 05

  If I had had that shit when I was 14, I would have been way overly sexualized. And I would have assumed what women want was like way more violent, probably, you know, there was an innocence. Yeah, how could you not? As a woman, I think porn is a disgrace. And I used to watch a lot of porn, to be honest. I started watching porn when I was like 11. I was watching abusive porn, to be honest, you know, when I was like 14. And I think it really destroyed my brain. And I think that I had like sleep paralysis and these like almost like night terrors slash just nightmares because of it.

• 41:47Ryan Broderick?

  For the record, I wish that didn't happen to Billie and her parents had installed like parental controls and that she had like a good sex education and stuff. But Schlegel had different solutions. So she supposedly heard the interview and that inspired her to team up with a sociologist and of course, anti porn scholar named Dr. Gail Dines. Who is described as a progressive Jewish pro sex feminist who believes in free speech. And they decided that the porn industry had gone off the rails and they were gonna do something about it. And she told the free press that she was gonna go to Washington and tell them that adults have rights. I get it, she said.

• 42:26Ryan Broderick?

  But she wanted to make it harder for kids to access videos like, I quote, "I invite my stepsister to take a bath to fuck her hard and come in her ass." End quote.

• 42:37Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 42:38Ryan Broderick?

  And that's when she comes up with the idea. To make internet porn sites have a box on them that you have to click that says you're over 18 and then ask you to upload your ID.

• 42:50Speaker 03

  So you said 18 states currently have the ID portion where that you actually have to upload an ID to prove that, or was it more than that? Sorry, I might be getting ahead of ourselves.

• 43:00Ryan Broderick?

  No, no, no, it's fine. All of our guests do it. It's great when it happens. It means I don't have to come up with a transitionary statement. In 2022, the bill that they proposed passes both the Louisiana House and the Senate with only one vote against it. The bill went into effect and traffic to Pornhub in Louisiana dropped 80%. And since then, copycat bills have spread across the southern part of America and are now being enforced in 17 states.

• 43:27Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 43:28Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Once the dust settled, Pornhub decided to just not run in the states requiring ID verification. Now, you probably kind of know why a site like Pornhub would enforce this, but can you sort of explain to our audience like the dangers of, you know, making pornography consumers upload their physical ID to a porn site?

• 43:46Speaker 03

  It's a bad track to go down. It starts at like, oh, porn, and then it starts at, oh, this queer community, you have to be 18 to access this queer community or to do this or do that. They can designate being transgender inherently like pornographic and then.

• 44:05Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  And I mean, it could spiral out in all sorts of different ways. This is like a very big overreach that has a lot of implications if the far right continues to seize power in the way they have.

• 44:17Ryan Broderick?

  That's exactly right. So Pornhub has opted not to run in these states. Like if you are in one of these 17 states, you have to use a VPN. If you're a VPN company and you'd like to advertise on Panic World, please reach out to us at ryan@garbage day dot email. We'd love to do some ads for you.

• 44:32Speaker 03

  Panic World is pro gooning.

• 44:34Ryan Broderick?

  We are a gooners delight. That's what I always say. No, but you're exactly right. We're, you know, we're literally watching the Trump administration try to find ways to codify vulnerable minorities in this country, many of them sexual minorities. They're looking for ways to. Block trans people from renewing their passports. They're looking for ways. I think this just happened as we're doing this podcast. They are passing an executive order to make it illegal for teachers to respect the pronouns of trans children and claim that they're essentially pedophiles by doing so.

• 45:06Speaker 03

  Jesus fucking Christ.

• 45:08Ryan Broderick?

  If if a site like Pornhub were to build a database of people's IDs and then in theory, log what they're looking at. That is one of the most dangerous ideas you could think of in this current political climate.

• 45:18Speaker 03

  Like imagine, so the website Tumblr, still around, not as big as it once was, it's still to this day, a very heavy queer population. The average user is probably queer in some way. Imagine if you had like on the search bar on Tumblr to search the word transgender. You have to enter your ID to do that. That like I could see that eventually if things get bad enough, if things get authoritarian enough.

• 45:42Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, actually, when I was living in the UK, there were, there was like a big court case going on about there. They have what's called extreme pornography laws. Have you ever heard of these?

• 45:50Speaker 03

  I have not.

• 45:51Ryan Broderick?

  Hold on, I'm gonna make a really dangerous Google search on Google. UK extreme pornography.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  Your face has just been uploaded to a new database.

• 45:59Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, Liz Truss just breaks down the door and punches me in the face or whatever. Keir Starmer. So basically they don't have freedom of speech like that's why British people are all fucked up in their brain.

• 46:10Speaker 03

  It's always very sad to me when when someone like like a normal British person, if there is any of those will go like JK Rowling's a TERF and then she's like, if you don't retract that, I will sue you and put you underground. And then they have to be like, I swear she's not a TERF. Like there is no, you have no expression if the person you're going against has money, basically.

• 46:30Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, and then that extends to sort of the way that they deal with these sort of things. So like the UK version is they have this law against what they define as extreme pornography that they define as. So this is from the Met Police website and it's material that is grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise obscene. The court case that was happening when I was in the UK was over whether or not a man should have been arrested for watching a video of a man dressed like a tiger. Having, like, having sex. It was like a weird-

• 46:57Speaker 03

  Like, that's bestiality?

• 46:58Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it was like a whole, yeah, it was like a whole thing.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  How was that?

• 47:02Ryan Broderick?

  It was a man in a tiger suit and a bus driver was accused of owning this video that, you know, depicted a woman being, uh, having sex with a tiger, but it was a man in a tiger suit.

• 47:15Speaker 03

  Okay, I, so, so the claim was that he produced it or something like that?

• 47:18Ryan Broderick?

  No, no, just that he owned it and, and watched it, and that was against the law in the UK. But I, yeah, I think it's just like a really good, useful example of like how outrageous trying to police people's pornography habits can get when the government has that kind of access to your identity, to what you're looking at, all of that stuff. And this is the last quote I'll, I'll drop here before we move to the next break. This is, uh, in The Nation from Siri Doll, an adult performer and sex workers, writes activist who wrote, "The goal seems to be to cripple the legitimate companies in the adult industry by passing and enforcing burdensome draconian laws. So that inevitably, when the illegitimate, legally compliant adult sites lose the majority of their traffic to non-compliant overseas-based sites that are willing to host any content,

• 48:00Ryan Broderick?

  even illegal, abusive content, then it will just add more fuel to the conservative argument that all porn is exploitative. In my view, they're doing more to enable sexual exploitation than anybody in the modern porn industry has."

• 48:12Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 48:12Ryan Broderick?

  So, she might sound conspiratorial to the listener, but in the next section, we'll go over how she's kind of totally right, and how it's only possible because of good liberals like Nick Kristof, that any of this can, you know, actually go further and, and get stuff done. But while you're listening to our sponsors, I need, I desperately need to ask all of you listeners to not goon. Please do not goon to our sponsors. We'll be right back.

• 49:22Speaker 03

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• 49:38Speaker 03

  Liberals love being useful idiots, though. They're like, I feel like every so often, there's like, oh, here's another fucking moron that's ushering in fascism because of their stupidity.

• 49:49Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, they do. So all of this is building towards the Project 2025 plan to just full on ban pornography in America. But before we get to that, there was something that happened early in this episode when I was kind of like, I was sort of like reading through these like good hearted liberals talking about saving children.

• 50:09Speaker 03

  Ashton Kutcher.

• 50:10Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah, saving women and all this stuff. And you were sort of laughing. And I was hoping you kind of explain like, I want to call them like liberal dog whistles because you were clearly picking up on them. So like, how would you sort of describe this thing that you're talking about? This sort of useful idiot, kind of like very coded. We're going to protect women and children and just so happen to go after this thing that conservatives don't like either.

• 50:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. Typically, the way it manifests, I feel like the best manifestation that I've seen it. And this is used by far right people too, but also like just liberals, more liberal leaning people. The, I'm just asking questions about.

• 50:49Ryan Broderick?

  The Jesse Single.

• 50:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, the Jesse Single type of framing of a like, no, I'm just following the fact. I'm just following the data. I'm just talking to people. I'm just talking to people that have these predisposed biases against exactly what I'm against. But I won't say it, though. I won't say it. I'm just asking about it. I'm just trying to get to the truth.

• 51:12Ryan Broderick?

  They love, dude, they love truth.

• 51:16Speaker 03

  Conveniently, they always like leave out the.

• 51:18Ryan Broderick?

  Just so happens.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  So they always leave out like actual previous data from like scientists. I'm thinking, I'm talking specifically right now about how, you know, like trans care tends to have very good outcomes, especially for kids. But that doesn't matter because this one person who messaged me said that their kid regrets. Getting a binder for like two months or something like that. And that that's what the doctor told them to do. And now we have to shut down all medical care for all children.

• 51:48Ryan Broderick?

  So there like, there's this trick that like right wing tabloids do that's very effective. Right. Where they they find the most unwell, most out of control person to symbolize a social evil in their mind. So they'll find a violent immigrant or they'll they'll find a sexual predator that identifies as queer or something. And they'll say, this is everyone. Or they'll find one parent that had some sort of horrible experience with hormone blockers or something like, and they'll be like, that's it. And the way that I think a lot of the reporting of, you know, good liberals like Jesse Single or Nicholas Kristof fit into this is that they're the ones going and asking the question

• 52:30Ryan Broderick?

  of like, well, why doesn't it reflect the entire community?

• 52:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's like, oh, all of these conservatives are freaking out about this. I think it's time we cover this as legitimate.

• 52:41Ryan Broderick?

  We've, we should finally do the brave work of going and sticking a magnifying glass on the pile of shit that everyone's staring at and pointing at like, that's really what

• 52:49Speaker 03

  I see flies here. There's flies. Oh, that's kind of, that's fascinating.

• 52:52Ryan Broderick?

  This is the exact kind of media ecosystem that Project 2025 was built to fit into. So are you familiar with, do you know the name Russ Vaught?

• 53:03Speaker 03

  I am not. That sounds like an evil person in The Boys.

• 53:08Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, honestly, like it is the name of the evil corporation from The Boys.

• 53:11Speaker 03

  That's, yeah.

• 53:12Ryan Broderick?

  And I think it is like, kind of incredible that a guy named Russ Vaught is a co author of Project 2025. Like you really, like, you can't like, I don't know. Yeah. Like, that's, that's so good.

• 53:24Speaker 03

  You ever, you ever find things like that? And then you start to understand why people believe that we live in a simulation? Like, that's one of those things. It's like, all right, they're kind of cooking something. I think this is where we're in The Sims right now.

• 53:36Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. The, the, the ninth dimensional hyper beings that are running our simulation are running out of ideas. So Russ Vaught was secretly recorded. Let's, uh, let's hear him explicitly say the entire plot out loud, shall we?

• 53:48Speaker 00

  We came up with an idea on pornography to make it so that the porn companies bear the liability for the underage use as opposed to the, the person who visits the website getting to certify that I'm 18.

• 54:03Ryan Broderick?

  And you know what happens is the porn company then says that we're not going to do business in your state, which of course is entirely what we were after. Right? So we are, we're doing it from the back door, starting with the kids. Don't say it like that.

• 54:16Speaker 03

  That sounds crazy.

• 54:18Ryan Broderick?

  Don't say it like that, man.

• 54:20Speaker 03

  That's, that's such an awful way to put that.

• 54:23Ryan Broderick?

  That is like very much the like, the like, human trafficking shirt is just, is like explained by a human trafficking shirt kind of thing.

• 54:29Speaker 03

  And like the, I am a human tra, like it just looks like it says, I'm a human trafficker.

• 54:33Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 54:33Speaker 03

  If you're like far enough away, yeah.

• 54:35Ryan Broderick?

  You can't say it like that. Uh, if you like, if you hate pedophiles, you can't talk like one all the time, man. You can't do that. So Jesus. Okay. Let's listen to the end of the clip now. And then we don't want, we would, we'd have a national ban on pornography if we could, right? So like, uh, we would have, you know, the porn companies being investigated for all manner of hu- human rights abuses. And he says it even more explicitly in the foreword to Project 2025, which argues that all pornography should be outlawed and its producers imprisoned.

• 55:07Speaker 03

  That's fucking crazy. So I'll be totally honest. I am honestly a little shocked that in there, they're just like, let's straight up ban porn.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Sorry. I just can't get over that it's in the foreword. It's like, it's a 900 page document.

• 55:21Speaker 03

  Top priority.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  And it's like, it's like before, it's before the page one number comes, like this is what the, is on their mind. Okay.

• 55:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  I'm going away.

• 55:29Speaker 03

  It does make sense though, actually, because if you, if you think about it, like this is the start of the crackdown of what they view as degeneracy.

• 55:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. Well, okay.

• 55:36Speaker 03

  And, and that's.

• 55:37Ryan Broderick?

  You did it again. That's where we're headed. Hold on, hold on, hold on. So, so, so this is it, right? Like you talked about the similarities with the, the executive orders going after trans people. This is the next line. Educators and public librarians who purvey it, as in like any public librarian or educator that's caught viewing pornography should be classified as a registered sex offender and tele.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  Fucking crazy.

• 56:02Ryan Broderick?

  It's crazy.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  Finish yet. Oh my God.

• 56:04Ryan Broderick?

  And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitated spread should be shuttered.

• 56:09Speaker 03

  That is like such a disgusting overreach. Like they're not just going to stop at these different points. They're all a through line through each other. It's very obvious they're not going to stop at outlawing HRT for 17 and younger. That's just the start. That's, that's laying the foundation of how, where they were going to go, where they're going to try to ban it for everyone. That's not where it's going to stop.

• 56:31Ryan Broderick?

  By the way, you don't have to keep muting your microphone if you don't want to.

• 56:33Speaker 03

  Sorry, no, I'm just, I was sniffling. I have a little sniffer right now.

• 56:36Ryan Broderick?

  Hey, you can sniff all you want. It's totally fine. Yeah, don't worry about it. In fact, it's probably easier that way because we have an engineer that can just cut that out anyway. So we're using, we also are making an AI model of your voice that we can just sort of plug in, you know, to say.

• 56:48Speaker 03

  I didn't even consent to that. That's crazy.

• 56:50Ryan Broderick?

  To say, I'm, I'm sorry, you said, I consent to that? Yeah, yeah. So they'll just say like, they'll just say like, I'm a pervert over and over again. So, you know, the thing that like really, really frightens me about the entire Project 2025 thesis is they want to put every single thing that they don't like under the banner of sexual degeneracy and they want to classify anyone that fits that banner as a sex predator, as a predator.

• 57:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:17Ryan Broderick?

  And, and it doesn't really matter what we're talking about, whether it's pornography, whether it's being trans, whether it's being gay married, whether it's illegal immigrants.

• 57:24Speaker 03

  And like, let's not forget, I feel like, sure, like the Heritage Foundation and up until very recently with Project 2025, they've been very irrelevant from political discourse and culture, but like, I'm old enough to remember back in 2012 and a little bit after and before that where Heritage Foundation people would go on national television, holding the Bible, talking about why gay people shouldn't have rights or shouldn't be married because they're degenerates and they don't want their kids to see that in public, stuff like that. So it's like, we know who these people are. This is the Republican Party still. The Heritage Foundation is still enmeshed. The Christian right controls the party still.

• 58:01Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I mean, we don't even have to go very far to find proof of that because in 2022, this is a HuffPost piece from the time. It reads, Republican Senate candidate JD Vance told a Catholic magazine last year that pornography should be banned because it's stopping Americans from getting married and starting families. So this totally ties into the entire birth control, the, the sort of like birth rate, race science bullshit that's going on with Elon Musk and stuff.

• 58:26Speaker 03

  Right wingers especially like Elon Musk, people like him. This type of person is very obsessed with the birth rate. And you're like, why are you obsessed with this? And okay, like this is a theory I have that I think is pretty verified at this point. The reason he is against trans people. And why he was really upset with his daughter being trans is that that and like this isn't even necessarily true when transitioning will make you infertile. That's not 100% true all the time, but in his mind, he's like, oh, estrogen makes makes people not fertile anymore. That goes against my world project of continuing to increase the population.

• 59:03Speaker 03

  So that's the, I think that's actually the genesis of why specifically Elon became anti-trans is because it goes against his, his like always must increase white population mindset.

• 59:13Ryan Broderick?

  It's effectively children of men, like he believes that he's just living in the movie, Children of Men.

• 59:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:17Ryan Broderick?

  Which, I mean, sure, but yeah, whatever. But like, so Vance tells this Catholic magazine, which is titled Crisis Magazine, very Catholic.

• 59:27Speaker 03

  That's so.

• 59:28Ryan Broderick?

  It's always a fucking crisis with those people.

• 59:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. I'm gonna start one called Rapture Now. That's gonna go crazy.

• 59:34Ryan Broderick?

  That would go crazy. Yeah. So Vance tells Crisis Magazine in 2021, I think the combination of porn and abortion have basically created a lonely, isolated generation that isn't getting married. Yeah, dude, they're voting for you. You want them that isolated and lonely. They're not having families and they're not actually even totally sure how to interact with each other, which like, yeah.

• 59:54Speaker 03

  That's true. Yeah, that is the part that's true is that men are very lonely, isolated and hate women.

• 1:00:01Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, he later says like, he just outright wants to ban pornography, like that is a thing and he believes that that will fix all of this, which I don't think is true.

• 1:00:08Speaker 03

  I don't think is anywhere near true at all. I can very comfortably say that.

• 1:00:13Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. And I wanna, I wanna sort of bring us all the way back to Kristoff and the good liberals, because I feel like this is a very important point to sort of understand how we go from, I'm just asking questions, to full-blown hysteria, to fascist takeover of America. So this is from the, once again, very excellent Melissa Gira Grant, who writes in New Republic in a piece titled, Nick Kristof and the Holy War on Pornhub, which is a really good piece. I recommend reading it. We'll link to it in the show notes. So she writes, "When Kristoff turns his notebook in the direction of women with stories of trauma, the resulting narratives most often fall somewhere between beneficent, that doesn't, that's, oh, is that a word? Voyeurism and journalistic malpractice."

• 1:00:55Ryan Broderick?

  And he continued that sort of work when he was writing about Pornhub and he spends a lot of his Pornhub stuff working with an organization called Exodus Cry. Do you know Exodus Cry?

• 1:01:07Speaker 03

  Not familiar.

• 1:01:07Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. So I want to read you a quote from the founder of Exodus Cry that I think captures their mission statement pretty well. It's the org that was later revealed to be one of Kristoff's main sources for a lot of his anti-porn stuff.

• 1:01:20Speaker 03

  Can I guess the type of affiliation Exodus Cry has?

• 1:01:24Ryan Broderick?

  You absolutely can.

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  Are they, are they Christian? Are they a hyper-Christian organization?

• 1:01:29Ryan Broderick?

  They are not a, they are, I'm sorry, they are not a mid 2000s metalcore band. They are a Christian organization. That is correct.

• 1:01:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, the Exodus tipped me off a little. Like I did the little context clues right there.

• 1:01:40Ryan Broderick?

  Opening for Avenged Sevenfold is Exodus Cry. So their founder Benjamin Nola says, "In my work with Exodus Cry, I am daily confronted with the horrors of a world ravaged by the degradation of women and children. As we examine the emergence of Babylon throughout history, it becomes clear that we must see the increase of human trafficking as the tip of a much larger historic iceberg, one of several troubling trends that will converge in the birth of the next world empire, Harlot Babylon." Normal stuff.

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  I don't understand how people write that sort of thing and they are, they think that like, yeah, I killed it. I, the average person would think I'm very normal about writing something like that.

• 1:02:24Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. My test, like when I look at like someone like Single or something, or like Glenn Greenwald or whatever, is I always go like, if I posted that, would I get a wellness check from my family?

• 1:02:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, you know how like the type of person that is just always mad?

• 1:02:38Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:38Speaker 03

  And screeching, this cannot be good for your blood pressure. Like you're, you're gonna, you're gonna get a heart attack in a young age.

• 1:02:45Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. And this is one of the sources Kristoff is using in the fucking New York Times. He's, he's, he's the one that's normalizing this freak's entire mission.

• 1:02:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, 100%.

• 1:02:55Ryan Broderick?

  So the very last thing is the question that I kind of posed at the very top and I kind of want to come back and get your thoughts on it because, you know, we've, we've spun through how Nicholas Kristof, you know, he makes this documentary, he reaches out to celebrities, celebrities do the dumb celebrity thing that celebrities always do with social sort of like crises like this. It then spins out even further into like full on moral panic. The South is now banning porn. Oklahoma is trying to literally ban porn entirely. Do you feel like the sort of like decade-long mass hysteria around child trafficking and sex trafficking encapsulated by QAnon, like, do you feel like this really, you could argue like maybe started with just like a liberal,

• 1:03:39Ryan Broderick?

  like just asking questions that sort of like, does that sort of timeline make sense to you?

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know if I would say it started with it.

• 1:03:46Ryan Broderick?

  No.

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  But, but I think the problem always is, and you can talk about this in any sort of moral panic that we see in the modern day is conservatives are really good at drumming up hysteria among their own base. Look at Matt Walsh, something that the right wingers do very well. They hammer and hammer and hammer and hammer and hammer the same points over and over and over and over, and it drills into their base's heads. And because they, all of these freaks just won't stop talking about whatever topic they're freaking out about, that's when the liberal comes in and they're like, hmm, they're talking a lot about this thing. Let's take a look at, and then it broadens it, it legitimizes it.

• 1:04:27Ryan Broderick?

  In my experience in newsrooms, when like they decide to ask the questions in like a piece, it's usually like, I have a dangerous idea. What if we talk to conservatives about like what they're doing and see if it's real? Cause you know, like, cause, cause I don't actually don't know if like laypeople know this, but like inside the media, like the assumption is that the entire American media is liberal. And like, if not liberal, Democrat. And so like, like there's like reporters are always just like, you know, it'd be kind of like sexy and like really freak people out is if we were conservative. And it's like, well, okay, I don't think that's true. I think you're all like that kind of.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  In spending way too much time with Nicholas Kristof's writing, prepping for this episode.

• 1:05:13Speaker 03

  Do you feel

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think like we're probably like four days away from him being like, I am, I find it despicable how my gay friends are being attacked right now.

• 1:05:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, they always have to be like, oh, they, they want to still be invited to the media party.

• 1:05:33Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, they do.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  Yes, his first big takedown back page campaign. Okay, maybe he was just like, saw some horrible things and like, you know, like giving like way too much benefit of the doubt was like, I believe this. And then, you know, there's the, the delusion of evidence that it was actually like really terrible for sex workers, for actual people being trafficked. Like it was just bad. And then to do it again, I can't wrap my head around, is he malicious? Or is he just not see how these things are connected? Because the only way they get legitimized, he writes an op ed and then four months later, it's cool to talk about in Congress.

• 1:06:10Ryan Broderick?

  I could totally see a world where like you spend a lot of time reporting in like Sub Saharan Africa and like the peak of, you know, the AIDS crisis there, you're doing a lot of sort of like female genital mutilation stories like he was doing. A lot of sort of like really grisly global work. Now, there are also criticisms of Kristoff's work in those spaces, but that's a whole other episode. But like, I could totally see the mental jump and how you sort of like, don't learn anything new. And you are like a useful idiot. Like I actually sort of think, I don't, I don't see him as, as, as a actively malicious and more just like a useful idiot. I think, I think.

• 1:06:46Speaker 03

  Like the way that the Heritage Foundation specifically, because I feel like there's such a storied history with clawing back towards a social conservatism where it's like they lost the battle, like under Obama on gay marriage. At least for now, who knows what this Trump administration is going to do, but they lost this. And they took a step back and they were like, we're not. Changing our position, we still think being gay is degenerate. How will we attack this issue? How will we pull the window back in our frame? And the way they are doing that and doing that now actively is the porn issue and also attacking like, oh, trans children? Sounds like grooming of kids.

• 1:07:25Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  Like they're, they're, they take a different approach. And this is why like, it's terrifying that social conservatism always has the capacity to change and adapt, but liberalism never does.

• 1:07:36Ryan Broderick?

  And there are organizations like Exodus Cry that are more than happy to go to a report and be like, oh, you're working on a story? Well, like, we actually have like a very selected curated version of that story that we'll give you full access to. And you don't have to do any work if you don't want to. Which, by the way, is the thing that I've heard Kristoff be criticized about in the past is that he doesn't do a lot of work to get the story. So it doesn't surprise me that he just sort of was like, give me your research, I'll publish it.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  Democrats in Congress read Kristoff's op-eds and that motivates them. It is just a very small world that has a real dramatic effect. I mean, Ezra Klein said that the reason he went to the New York Times op-ed was because he's like, through this pulpit, I command more power than if I had money just running a Substack. Looking at this and the way that those, those things work and like feed into one another. And they just keep playing into the hand of Exodus Cry leaders and, and vaults is just fucking mind blowing.

• 1:08:37Ryan Broderick?

  Wait, wait, actually, I, I think what it really is, I, I think truly what it really is, is that Kristoff and all these well-meaning, good liberals, they can isolate and identify problems. They can say, okay, there's a sex trafficking problem, there's a child trafficking problem, there's an exploitative digital content problem. But they're operating from this extremely centrist mindset and they can't think of any new or interesting ways to deal with those problems. So what they're doing is they're just going to the same thing over and over again, be like, well, We gotta ban it, or, oh, we have to remove from the internet, or we have to do this or that. But they're not actually, like liberalism is sort of an ideological dead end. It is, it is, it is, you take the status quo and enforce the status quo.

• 1:09:19Ryan Broderick?

  And so they're finding these social issues and they're just being like, well, we gotta do what we always do. Don't think about it too hard. Like, that's what it is.

• 1:09:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. All that that's going to do is, is push people away that are like more liberal. And it's just gonna, it's not gonna do anything for the actual conservatives out there. Like, they're gonna keep watching Fox News or Newsmax.

• 1:09:40Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 1:09:40Speaker 03

  I, I don't have numbers in front of me right now, but I know so many liberals, at this current point, canceled their Washington Post subscription because of how the endorsement process was handled. So like, all this does is eventually destroy these actual institutions.

• 1:09:58Ryan Broderick?

  You, you know where those Washington Post readers went?

• 1:10:00Speaker 03

  They went to, uh, they went to, they, they went to the Onion.

• 1:10:04Ryan Broderick?

  Pornhub Premium, baby.

• 1:10:07Speaker 03

  They're jacking off. They're gooning.

• 1:10:08Ryan Broderick?

  Gooning dies in darkness.

• 1:10:11Speaker 03

  I think the solution to this porn ban is we need a perverts 2025 manifesto.

• 1:10:17Ryan Broderick?

  Pervert 2025 is so good. Oh, my god.

• 1:10:20Speaker 03

  We need to goon. Gooning is back. We're, we're gonna make everyone watch porn.

• 1:10:23Ryan Broderick?

  Make America goon again.

• 1:10:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:27Speaker 03

  That's my pitch.

• 1:10:28Ryan Broderick?

  Yep. I love it.

• 1:10:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  You just created our first pieces of merch. Thank you so much.

• 1:10:33Ryan Broderick?

  I actually, I think that'd be really funny. June, this was awesome. Thank you for coming on. If people want to find you on the internet, where can they find you?

• 1:10:40Speaker 03

  So you can find me on Blue Sky. I am June L. Per. dot beer on Blue Sky. And you can listen to me on the podcast, Western Kabuki. We talk about, uh, just things that are going on online. We love to talk about, like, in regards to politics, we love to, like, talk about weird little freaks.

• 1:11:00Ryan Broderick?

  You guys love a good freak.

• 1:11:01Speaker 03

  We love, we love our freaks. Oh, my god. Love a freak. Who doesn't love a freak? Who doesn't love, like, going under a magnifying glass and looking at a crazy freak?

• 1:11:12Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a Garbage Day production. Subscribe to the newsletter at garbage day dot email. Panic World is written and produced by Grant Irving. It's hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. It's engineered by Rebecca Seidel. Our Durang's logo was created by Gabby Cash. Please give us $5 at patreon.com/panicworld. For any other way you would like to give us money, or work with us, or promote us, or become financially entangled with us, you can reach out to our fixer, our wonderful bag man, Josh Fielstad, and you can reach him at [email protected]. And one piece of advice from me to you: chill out, touch grass while you still can.

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  I mean, we gotta clean up, we gotta clear up this policy position because sometimes we're telling people to goon, other times we're telling people not to go into our ads. Like, we gotta, like, there's internal ranks. We gotta get it clear.

• 1:12:05Speaker 03

  Early days, early days of this.

• 1:12:07Ryan Broderick?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna pop in my Blu-ray of a woman having sex with a man in a tiger costume and not tell the British police about it. That's what I'm gonna do.

• 1:12:18Speaker 05

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