Panic World - The secret plan to outlaw porn in the US (with Junlper)

Episode Date: February 12, 2025

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. Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude, hit them up here: ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠. Links "Nick Kristof and the Holy War on PornHub" by Melissa Gira Grant: https://newrepublic.com/article/160488/nick-kristof-holy-war-pornhub Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, Gibronies, it's Ryan. The Patreon special is all done. So I hope you guys got your 50 cents worth, and I hope you don't all immediately unsubscribe. That would be very heartbreaking. If you didn't subscribe to our Patreon, or if you did, but you still want to give a little extra support to the show, one thing you can do is go and rate us on your podcast app of choice. That is very helpful. And also, we were recently brigated by people who were mad about how woke the show is.

So if you want to do your part, fellow patriots, to defend democracy, you can rate this podcast. That's what you could do to save the country. Thank you very much. Also, if you're the listener who gave the show three stars and said, I love the show, but I had this one problem with this one episode, that's what our DMs are for. DM, Ryan, DM me, give the show five stars and argue with us on Blue Sky,

but leave it out of the comments. You clearly listen to every episode, babe. Come on. I assume those are PJ votes. A little quote from Justice Samuel Alito. Are you familiar with Justice Samuel Alito of the Supreme Court? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, no, love that guy.

Shout out. Yeah, big, big ups to that. Dude, he's gone somewhere one day. He is. So, hopefully going to hell. So Justice Samuel Lito 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 junior so june what do you think about that and what that says 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 porn hub 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 like, oh, he knows all about porn hub. 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. It's one of the two.

That's definitely possible. I think you're right. I think the two possibilities are that Justice Alito has either never been on porn hub before or is such a gooner that he had to come up with like the most outlandish sort of excuse for not knowing what porn hub is. 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 newfangled porn hub or anything like that. It's a strategy. He's trying to keep his wife.

I do wonder, like, if someone will eventually come up with an only fan substack hybrid that does bring that back, though. Like, you could do it. People don't really read anymore. But you could do, like, film essays on OnlyFans if you wanted, I guess. There's a lot of opportunity. I mean, people still read like smut. This could be like a move. People love smut. 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 porn is for the men. Like I'm surprised this hasn't happened. Men can't read because of AI. That's why that's what they're doing with AI is they're reading that way. I love when people these days be like, I had AI respond to like my hinge. my hinge link up or whatever. And it's like, can people not communicate anymore? The idea of two people grocking at each other and then using grok to read it back, I think

is quite beautiful. As of this recording, 17 states don't have access to Porn Hub 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 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 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. 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. So yeah, that wasn't in the script that Grant wrote. So yeah, okay, so we're both proud perverts.

Absolutely. And to kick things off, how much do you know about this topic, the sort of current wave of porn bands happening in the U.S.? 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.

They don't really count as people, but I understand what they're saying. In the legal definition, I suppose they're people. Yeah. 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. 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 Vera 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 man many years ago as it is sort of decimated an entire queer pocket of the internet. But for today's episode, we're going to start with our first character, sort of the general

archetypal. I love, I love characters. I love internet freaks. Oh, my God. So this guy is a real big internet freak because he writes for the New York Times. Do you know who Nicholas... Disgusting. Yeah. The most perverted thing you can do. Do you know who Nicholas Christoph is? I don't think I do.

Oh, good. Okay, cool. So he's going to be a big character in this. Nicholas Christoph, 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 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 started to piece together? I definitely think I know where this is going. 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. Deworming Kenyan school kids reduces dropout rates. You can keep a child in school an extra year for just $3.50.

Okay. All good. Very reasonable. Very reasonable. And this was sort of his thing is like 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 going to see throughout his career.

Here are some recent opeds even. Don't the lives of women and girls matter? Oh, no. 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-the-line type of guy.

For instance, here's one of his more recent. 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. Okay. So he's like someone that doesn't really, you really want you to care too much about anything outside of just elections, basically. 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 Free kind of like, for dollars a day, you can fix fistula, which honestly you should. Like they're not good. 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 going to hear Ashley Judd, and then you're going to hear Blake Lively, and finally you're going to hear Christoph himself. Sex slavery is happening 30 minutes from where I'm sitting right now. I have the new perspective of what it means to have your body.

sold in this country. Not everybody is free. 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. So you're getting a vibe of where we're headed here? For sure. Yeah. So the 2015 doc that I was just quoting from is adapted from one of Christoph's books. And this is the campaign that leads directly to the current bans on Pornhub.

But it's going to start with sex workers. and the way they network online. 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. The websites where victims are being sold the most, such as Backpage.com, you see over 14 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. Do you familiar with Backpage? I'm not actually. What's Backpage? Okay. So Backpage is kind of like a Craigslist type platform, but for sex workers. So this was the beginning. This was a test. I don't. I've never bought a sex worker.

Hey, you did a great job acting like you've never paid for sex on the- Samuel Alito moment for me right there. I hope it works. Are there articles I can read on Backpage.com? Yeah, tell me about it. What is this about? 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 Christoph'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 the sense, but, and lawful escort services, a business called backpage.com as a market leader. The public record indicates that backpage sits at the center of the online black market for sex trafficking.

The national center of missing exploited children tells us the back page 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? That does. I mean, I feel like it's probably reasonable. I know that like 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 sex trafficking is a huge thing. It is not like a, 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. Mexico, like the illegal immigrants or not. Overwhelmingly, yes. 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.

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 kind of. 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 just confiscated all of their shit.

Yes, the main Andrew Tade special. Yeah, it's like a serious problem. I knew a journalist years ago who's working on a story about how 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. 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 in 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 C. was arrested for pimping and after after a separate investigation co-run by a little california d named Kamala harris of course yes oh my god there she is yes this is this is this is this is comel's first brat moment it's a big year for that she she had a lot of moments yes that was right before she arrested thousands of people for having marijuana that was her second brunt moment she's so cool I wish she was the one setting up concentration in cancer right now, not Trump. If only. 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 Band. So to recap, Christoph 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. 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 Coucher. Oh my God. He's gone now. They buried that dude in the last few years. You don't hear about him anymore.

No. Do you, do you remember this from 2017 where Ashton Kutcher was everywhere talking about sex trafficking? I do. I do remember that. Him and his, I'm assuming they're still married. Wife. Milakunis. Yeah, Milakunis. 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 like save the children. We have to save the children in a moment. That like kind of preceded the whole trans panic. You have no idea how right you are. So Ashton Kutcher was into this for about as long as Christoph. 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. Share.

Share fellow patriots. If you agree, kind of thing. Coochre 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 seen in an article about it, which is not age to all. No one got punked Wednesday morning when Ashton Coocher came to Capitol Hill. The actor testified Wednesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a hearing on the progress in combating modern slavery.

Coochers spoke on behalf of Thorne, digital defenders of children, an organization he co-founded with then-wife Demi Moore in 2009 that built software to fight human trafficking. Bitcoin will end human trafficking. Demi Moore discovered the substance, and she doesn't need to do this anymore. Yeah. But this ends up becoming like a massive Trumper factoid where Ashton Coucher 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, we're watching Fox News coverage of these FBI raids and like text me being like, they just saved like another half a million sexual. trafficking victims this morning. And it's like, I would then like Google and like that's not, that's not like, but like Trump. Would they have like cameras in these crews, like camera, like

live feed of these raids and stuff like that with like Ashton Coucher right there behind them just being there? Is that like what it was? Would it surprise you to find out no that like there is no evidence of that happening? Oh, it just straight up did not happen. Yeah. It was just like this. But it feels real though. That's all that matter. It's all. Yeah, it feels real. It's all. Yeah, 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. I was 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. Yeah.

No, that's wild. Yeah. 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. I got them all. Yeah. So it's crazy Fox News fanfic, but it gains all of this credibility because of Christoff

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? I am not at all, no. 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. Okay. Which you would be like, okay, like maybe they should be, but if they were effectively, the internet would stop working overnight. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that seems correct. I could be wrong though, but just from face value, that seems correct. Yeah, it would be really, it'd be, I mean, like, I hate Facebook, but like, yeah, there's a lot of child predators on Facebook. Like, there's a lot of child predators on the internet. And I want this to only apply to Elon Musk. Yes.

I think we should repeal Section 230 just for X. Absolutely. We think of the whole Save the Children thing now as a Fox News, 4chan, Q&OND 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 Myers, Amy Schumer, Tony Shalub, monk. Monk's involved.

My God. Yeah. Remember this time? when like celebrities would get involved with certain movements like this and would actually matter. Like this doesn't happen anymore. What was the last time like a celebrity other than to do like that really cringe, um, a pandemic video that they all sang together for that was like,

oh, we're all one. I genuinely think that was it. Yeah. That was the last time. And they were like, we can never do this again. Because my first instinct was like maybe it's the end of the Ellen show that did it.

Yeah. Like, like that's like a sign of the shift. Right. Yes. Yes. Wow. I wonder if it'll come back now that Trump's president again. I feel like we're not far away from like a big, cringy liberal. What I have noticed is that like liberals are posting like mid-2010s like pro-gay, like we're allies. We understand you're trans, you're gay, we stand with you. Like they're posting stuff like that again. 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 Myers come back for anything

like that again, you know, but it's manifesting in a different way this time. 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, 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. See, well, that's, that is like the perfect post 2016 liberal. Yeah. 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 what are we doing here yeah I think we need to do the ice bucket challenge to defeat sex trafficking when that's the last time we had an ice bucket challenge we got to bring that back yeah 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 um the hill dot com as 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're yeah 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 backpage 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 dangerous.

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 and 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 this situation, which is objectively horrible. 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 backpage 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 yeah i mean i i kind of fall into that mindset something times where I'm like, you know, I think we actually just need to restrict online access. It's true for X.com. It is. And 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. 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?

100%. And that is kind of what happened here when, uh, Trump signs basically two bills into law on April 11th, 2018, which, are you familiar with foster and sesta? I am. If I remember correctly, that passed in 2018. Yes, that's what we're talking about. So Trump is the one to sign these into law. I remember a lot of sex workers I knew at the time talking about how horrible this was going to be for them.

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 Fossis Sest to take it down. And because it's so nebulous, it is a chilling of free speech online. Jesus, that just sounds evil. 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. Yeah. The Senate votes into 97 to 2. Oh, my God. Wow. Very bipartisan. Very, very.

So what were the results of this big, very bipartisan celebrity endorsed effort besides QAnon? Well, if Philadelphia Public Radio Station did dig into this a bit about two years after it passed, there has not been much evidence showing that Fossa Sesta 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 Fossa Sessa's passage, that number rebounded to 75% of the original figure. So the ads came back. 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. 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. Like, of course. 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. 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 outlying behavior and things that will happen regardless, leading to crises and worsening them. Outlonging 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. I think that's good, though.

I think Stonish should die. I mean, we know, you know, sex work in, like, places like Scandinavia. There are countries where not only is it, like, totally legal, it's unionized. It's like there are regulations they have to hit to stay open. You want to know when something bad is happening. If that infrastructure is not there, you can't track things as easily. Except for stoners. Who should die?

Yeah. And lastly, maybe the creepiest and most quiet ramification of this involves Ashton Coocher, who I think helped us into a new surveillance age. And this was all before he wrote a letter supporting a rapist. Destroyed his reputation. Just completely gone. Kelso, what are you doing? Kelso, no.

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

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. using that as a source to search for children suspected of having been trafficked, which is horrifying and insane and very stupid. Yeah, it's terrifying. Like, all of our faces are scanned at this point. Everyone has been scanned. I'm scanned. You're scanned. All of our faces are in a database. I'm probably in a database like, okay, this is the jackoff database. What do they jack off to? You're probably in a database like, okay, this is the legal threat database. Who did you send threats to? Like, our faces are all in these databases.

that's terrifying. 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. Jesus, I have some, I have some settings to change. Why are you kick shaming? 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. Apple wants my genitals as much as I want Apple to have pictures of my genitals. 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, Thorne, Ashton Cochers 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, the world we live in now. The Save the Children moment, I think, really helped. usher that it. Yes. The surveillance state that we live in.

I'm just going to 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. I personally mail printed out photographs of my genitalia to Mark Zuckerberg every month. If he wants to see it so bad. 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 Fasta Sesta has not gone away. And how the character we started with, Nick Christoph, 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 before we go deeper into this, June, 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 porn hum band by the end of this story? Does it involve the Wayfair hysteria 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. Honestly, I wish. I did. I'm currently fighting with Wayfair right now because they do.

delivered a, I need a new desk really badly because mine's falling apart and I order one on a wafer and they sent it to the wrong address. They didn't even have a child in there. 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 Waifer. Oh my God. Damn. Yeah. Okay. But no, Wayfair does not factor into this. Although like I think that is probably downstream of what we're talking about. That was just like a flash in the pan of when all of this was happening and like it was like a seamless a shift from Q&ON to save the children from what I remember. 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 Christoph makes that kicks all of this off. Oh my God, I do know this guy. I remember this documentary. Yes. Go on. Sorry to interrupt. That just brought back. Yeah.

I think it's like possible you could argue that he's the reason Q&ON is obsessed with pedophilia. Oh my God. I sort of, I sort of, let's talk about at the end of the episode because I do think the argument could be made here that like he's effectively cute, but like not really, but like is. You know what I mean? He's like the Jesse single of porn, basically. Yes, yes. They have almost identical, identical strategies.

So Nick Christoff is writing stuff during this time period where he's, you know, he's describing back page 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? I don't. No.

Okay. So this is a complicated one because, like, it effectively does lead to the cleanup of porn hub. You know, like, how they deleted, like, millions of videos and they kind of beefed up their age verification? Which is a great thing. Because there was a lot of 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 from when they were a child. And that's objectively horrific. So that was like a good part of this. But you're going to 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 came videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content. Mosogynist content and porn hub, get out of here. And footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for Girls under 18, no space, or 14YO, leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren't of children being assaulted. The most there.

But too many are. Now, you talk to anyone running any major platform on the internet, and the first thing they're going to tell you is that child text boost material is the most complicated to stop, the most pervasive social disease on the internet. It's on every social media. It's, yeah. There's, 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. 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 desexing 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. She is a mom and also a pharmaceutical rep. We love those.

Shout out Luigi. 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 you might be talking about? Porn addiction. She's talking about porn addiction.

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... The naked form. Thank you.

What an awful way to put the human body. Awesome. 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 marriage, lost jobs. It's still a hard behavior to quit. porn addicts as a moral panic itself is also kind of a thing.

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 or I sort of like timestamp it with like the advent of like the term simp. Like all of a sudden like a bunch of like Gen Z men were like, wait a minute, porn is like preying upon me. Yeah, no, and ever since then, 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 might post a photo and a man might compliment her in just a very normal way.

And 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, it's crazy. Yeah, it's sort of this idea that like, any sort of desire is bad. It's men policing men. 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 going to 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 while, guess. Oh, I think I have it. I really hope I'm correct. I swear, if I get this correct, I did not know this previously. Her husband, I'm just going to assume she's married.

She found her husband like watching some kink porn. Or maybe it was like gay porn. Maybe like she walked in the room and her husband was watching gay porn. That would be pretty funny. I want to be clear that like that's really funny. Oh, no, it's worse. Oh, it's worse. But the truth is so much more insane.

Oh, I have, see, I always think that the funniest thing is going to be the case, but it most often is not. She heard a Billy Eilish interview on Howard Stern. Let's listen. 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 innocent. 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 terror slash just nightmares because of it. For the record, I wish that didn't happen to Billy and her parents had a lot of, 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 going to do something about it. And she told the free press that She was going to go to Washington and tell them that adults have rights. I get it, she said. But she wanted to make it harder for kids to access videos like, I quote, I invite my step sister to take a bath to fuck her hard and come in her ass, end quote.

Oh, my God. 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. So you said 18 states currently have the ID portion where you actually have to upload an ID to prove that, or was it more than that? Sorry, I might be getting ahead of ourselves. No, 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 propose 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. Oh, my God. 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? 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, 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 world. way they have. 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 at Garbageday. Email. We'd love to do some ads for you.

Panic World is pro-gooning. We are a gooners delight. That's what I always say. No, but you're exactly right. 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. Jesus fucking Christ.

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. Like imagine, so the website Tumblr, still around, not as big as it once was. It's still, to the 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 idea to do that. That, like, I could see that eventually if things get bad enough, if things get authoritarian enough.

Yeah, actually, when I was living in the UK, there was a guy, there was a guy, a big court case going on about their they have what's called extreme pornography laws have you ever heard of these i have not hold on i'm going to make a really dangerous google search on google uh uk extreme pornography your face has just been uploaded to a new database yeah um liz trust 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 with the game it's always very sad to me when when someone like a like a normal british person if there is any of those will go like, J.K. Rowling's a turf. 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 turf. Like there is no, you have no expression if the person you're going against has money, basically. 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, like having sex.

Like that's bestiality? Yeah, it was like a whole thing. How was that? 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, having sex with a tiger, but it was a man in a tiger suit. sued. Oh, okay. So the claim was that he produced it or something like that? No, no, just that he owned it and watched it and that was against the law in the UK. But 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 drop here before we move to the next break. This is in the nation from Siri Dahl, an adult performer and sex workers rights activists 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 noncompliant overseas-based sites that are willing to host any content, 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. 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 Christoph that any of this can, you know, actually go further 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. Liberals love being useful idiots, though. I feel like every so often there's like, oh, here's another fucking.

moron that's ushering in fascism because of their stupidity. 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. Ashton Coucher. 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, you know? 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, V. I'm just asking questions about the Jesse single. 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. They love, dude, they love truth. Conveniently, they always leave out the, like, so happens.

So they always leave out, like, actual previous data from, like, scientists. 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, who messaged me said that their kid, regrets getting a binder for like two months or something like that. And that's what the doctor told them to do. And now we have to shut down all medical care for all children. So there's this trick that like right wing tabloids do that's very effective, right? Where 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. Although 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. 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 Christoph fit into this is that they're the ones going and asking the question of like, well, why doesn't it reflect the entire community? 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.

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. I see flies here. There's flies. Oh, that's kind of, that's fascinating. 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 Vatt? I am not. That sounds like an evil person in the boys. I mean, honestly, like, it is the name of the evil corporation from the boys.

That's, yeah. And I think it is, like, kind of incredible that a guy named Russ Vatt is a co-author of Project 2025. Like, you really, like, you can't, like, I don't know, man. Like, that's, that's so good. 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, we're in the Sims right now.

Yeah, the ninth dimensional hyper beings that are running our simulation are running in their ideas. So Russ Vaugh was secretly recorded. Let's hear him explicitly say the entire plot out loud, shall we? 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 person who visits the website and to just certify that I'm 18. And you know what happens is the porn company then says,

we're not going to do business in your state, which of course is entirely what we were after. Right? So we're doing it from the back door, we're starting with the kids. Don't say it like that. That sounds crazy. Don't say it like that, man.

That's such an awful way to put that. That is like very much the like human trafficking shirt is just is like explained by a human trafficking shirt kind of thing. And like the I'm a human trafficking. Like, it just looks like it says I'm a human trafficker. Yeah. If you're, like, far enough away. Yeah.

You can't say it like that. If you hate pedophiles, you can't talk like one all the time, man. You can't do that. 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 porn art if we could, right? So, like, we would have, you know, the porn companies being investigated for all manner of 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. 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. I just can't get over that it's in the forward. It's like it's a 900 page document. And it's like before it's before the page one number comes.

Like this is what is on their mind. Okay. Yeah. It doesn't make sense though, actually. because if you think about it, like this is the start of the crackdown of what they view as degeneracy. Yes. Well, okay. And you did it again.

That's where we're headed. Hold on. Hold on. So this is it, right? Like you talked about the similarities with 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.

That's fucking crazy. It's crazy. You're not finished yet. Oh, my God. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitated spread should be shuttered. 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 outlying HRT for 17 and younger. That's just the start. That's laying the foundation of where they were going to go where they're going to try to ban it for everyone. And that's not where it's going to stop. By the way, you don't have to keep muting your microphone if you don't want to. Sorry, no, I'm just, I was sniffling. I have a little sniffer right now.

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

To say, I'm sorry, you said, I consent to that. Yeah, yeah. So, you'll just say, like, I'm a pervert over and over and everything. 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. Yeah.

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. 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. Well, I mean, we don't even have to go very far to find proof of that because in 2022, this is a Huff Post piece from the time. It reads, Republican Senate candidate J.D. 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 sort of like birth rate, race science, bull.

shit that's going on with Elon Musk and stuff. Right winger is 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 people not fertile anymore. That goes against my world project of continuing to increase the population. So 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.

It's effectively children of men. Like he believes that he's just living in the movie children of men. Yeah. Which, I mean, sure. But yeah, whatever. But like, so Vance tells this Catholic magazine, which is titled Crisis Magazine, very Catholic. That's so good. It's always a fucking crisis with those people.

Yeah, always. I'm going to start one called Rapture now. That's going to go crazy. 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. That's true. Yeah. That is the part that's true is that men are very lonely, isolated, and hate women. 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.

I don't think is anywhere near true at all. I can very comfortably say that. Yes. And I want to sort of bring us all the way back to Christoph 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 a New Republic in a piece titled Nick Christoph on 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 Christoph turns his notebook in the direction of women with stories of trauma, the resulting narratives most often fall somewhere between ben, ben, um, Beneficent, that doesn't, oh, is that a word? Voyeurism and journalistic malpractice. And he continued that sort of work when he was writing about Pornhub. And he spends a lot of his porn hub stuff working with an organization called Exodus Cry. Do you know Exodus Cry? Not familiar.

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 Christop's main sources for a lot of his anti-porn stuff. Can I guess the type of affiliation Exodus Cry has? You absolutely can't. Are they Christian? Are they a hyper-Christian organization? They are not a, I'm sorry, they are not a mid-2000s metalcore band. They are a Christian organization. That is correct. Yeah, the Exodus tipped me off. Like I did a little context clues right there. Opening for Avenge Sevenfold is Exodus Crab. So their founder, Benjamin Nolot,

says, in my work with Exodus Cry, I am daily conformed. 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. I don't understand how people write that sort of thing, and they are, they think that, like, yeah, I killed it. The average person would think I'm very normal about writing something like that.

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 for my family? Yeah. Yeah, you know how like the type of person that is just always mad. Yeah. And screeching. This cannot be good for your blood pressure. Like you're going to you're going to get a heart attack in a young age. Yes. And this is one of the sources Christoph is using in the fucking New York. times. He's he's the one that's normalizing this freak's entire mission. Yeah, 100%. So the very last thing is the question that I kind of posed the very top and I kind of want to come back and get your thoughts on it because, you know, we've spun through how Nicholas Christoph, 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 Q&ON? Do you feel like this really, you could argue like maybe started with just like a liberal like just asking questions that sort of like does that sort of timeline make sense to you? Yeah. I don't know if I would say started with it.

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 bass's heads. And because 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, they're talking a lot about this thing. Let's take a look at it. And then it broadens it, it legitimizes it. 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? Because, you know, because I actually don't know if, like, lay people know this, but, like, inside

the media, like, the assumption is that the entire American media is liberal. And, like, if not liberal, it's just not true. Democrat. And so, 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. In spending way too much time with Nicholas Christoph's writing, prepping for this episode.

Do you feel diseased? Yeah, I think, like, we're probably like four days away from him being like, I am, I find a despicable how my gay friends are being attacked right now. Yeah. They always have to be like, oh, they want to still be invited to the media parties. Yes, they do. Yes, his first big take down backpage campaign. Okay, maybe he was just like, saw some horrible things and like, you know, like giving like way too much benefit of doubt was like, I believe this. And then, you know, there's the deluge 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. 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 immunulation stories like he was doing a lot of sort of like really grisly global work now there are also criticisms of Christoph'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 in as as actively malicious and more just like a useful idiot. I think. I think. 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. Right. Like 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.

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. 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 Christoph 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. Democrats in Congress read Christoph'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 things work and, like, feed into one another, and they just keep playing into the hand of exodus cry leaders and vots is just fucking mind-blowing. Wait, wait, actually, I think what it really is, I think truly what it really is, is that Christoph 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. I mean, like, well, we got to 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 you take the status quo and enforce the status quo. And so they're finding these social issues and they're just being like, well, we got to do what we always do. Don't think about it too hard. Like, that's what it is. Yeah. All that, that's going to do is push people away that are, like, more liberal. And it's just going to, it's not

going to do anything for the actual conservatives out there. Like, they're going to keep watching Fox News or Newsmax. 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. You know where those Washington Post readers went? They went to, they went to the Onion. Pornhub premium, baby. Gooning. They're jacking off. They're gooning. Gooning dies in darkness. I think the solution to this porn ban is we need a perverts 2025 manifesto. Pervert 2025 is so good. We need to goon. Gooning is back. We're going to make everyone want to porn. Make America goon again.

Yeah. That's my pitch. Yep, I love it. Yeah. You just created our first pieces of merch. Thank you so much. I actually, I think that would 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? So you can find me on Blue Sky. I am June L.pur.bier on Blue Sky. And you can listen to me on the podcast, Western Kabuki. We talk about just things that are going on online. We love to talk about, like, In regards to politics, we love to talk about weird little freaks.

You guys love a good freak. 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 class and looking at a crazy freak? Panic World is a Garbage Day production. Subscribe to the newsletter at Garbageday.

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 derange logo was created by Gabby Cash. Please give us $5 at patreon.com slash panic world. Please give us products to sell by contacting multitude at multitude.

Productions slash ads. 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 Panicworldpod at gmail.com. And one piece of advice for me to you. chill out touch grass while you still can i mean we're gonna clean out we're gonna 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 got to like there's internal ranks we never really early days early days of this i'm gonna i'm gonna pop in my blue 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 you