The Daily Signal - #438: Making the Internet Safer for Children

Episode Date: April 10, 2019

On today's podcast, we speak to Donna Rice Hughes, president and CEO of “Enough is Enough,” an organization that works to make the internet safer for children and families, and Kassy Dillon, founder of the Lone Conservative and a rising superstar in the conservative movement.We also cover these stories:•The Justice Department announces a criminal charge against WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange.•The number of Americans filing applications for unemployment benefits decreased to a 49-and-a-half-year low last week.•Senate Republicans are considering bringing Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All” bill to the floor for a vote. The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This Black Friday, you've got a whole month to catch all the exclusive offers waiting for you. See your local Nissan dealer or nison.ca for details. Conditions apply. This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, April 12th. I'm Rachel Del Jutis. And I'm Kelsey Bowler, filling in for Kate Tranko and Daniel Davis. Today we're interviewing Donna Rice Hughes, president and CEO of Enough is Enough, an organization that works to make the internet safer for children and families.

We'll also catch up with Cassie Dillon, founder of the lone conservative, and a rising star in the conservative movement. By the way, if you're enjoying this podcast, please consider leaving a review or a five-star rating on iTunes and encouraging others to subscribe. Now on to our top news. The Justice Department announced a criminal charge Thursday against WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, accusing him of conspiring with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to commit the largest hack of classified U.S. government information in history. Assange was arrested Thursday morning and removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he was living for nearly seven years. CNBC reports the indictment filed under seal in the Eastern District of Virginia in March 2018, states that he and Manning worked together in 2010 to crack passwords on government computers and download streams of information with the intent of publishing them on WikiLeaks.

Assange, who if convicted, could face five years in prison, called it a dark day for journalism. Asked about the charges on Thursday, President Donald Trump said, I know nothing about WikiLeaks, it is not my thing. Former Pope Benedict is blaming the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church on the effects of the 1960s sexual revolution, writing in an essay that he believes the sexual revolution warmed the culture to believe that pedophilia and pornography. were acceptable, Reuters reported. It could be said that in the 20 years from 1960 to 1980, the previously normative standards regarding sexuality collapsed entirely, and a new normalcy arose that has by now been

the subject of laborious attempts at disruption, Pope Benedict wrote. What goes around comes around, for Michael Avanetti, at least. According to the AP, the former Stormy Daniels porn star attorney is being charged in a 36-count federal indictment by prosecutors in California who allege he stole millions of dollars from clients, did not pay his taxes, committed bank fraud, and lied in bankruptcy proceedings. The charges carry a potential prison sentence of 335 years, and that's not even mentioning the legal trouble he's facing in New York, where he was also arrested last month on two counts for allegedly trying to extort Nike for up to $25 million.

Avanotti, of course, took to Twitter to share he will plead not guilty to the most recent charges. A report from CNBC shows that the number of Americans filing application for unemployment benefits decreased to a 49-half-year low last week. According to CNBC, initial claims for state unemployment benefits fell 8,000 to a seasonally adjusted 196,000 for the week ended April 6th, the lowest level since early October 1969. Claims have now declined for four straight weeks. According to Politico, Senate Republicans are considering a move that would bring Senator Bernie Sanders' Medicare for all bill to the

floor for a vote, which would force Democrats to go on the record about whether they support this government takeover of the health care sector, which would eliminate private health insurance for our 180 million Americans. The move would both highlight the social agenda that is gaining steam in the Democrat Party and also expose the divide among Democrats on health care. McConnell pulled a similar stunt last month when he forced a vote on the beloved Green New Deal. Despite Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez maintaining, quote, the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change, unquote. Most Democrats voted present.

A new caravan from Honduras is forming and making its way to the U.S. Yahoo News reports that the caravan includes families with children and also includes nearly a thousand people. Alexis Perez, a 27-year-old, is quoted as saying, We are done with this government. There is no work, end quote. And speaking of the border, the Pentagon has finally awarded nearly $1 billion in contracts to two companies to build President Trump's new border wall.

These are the first funds granted to build the barrier since Trump declared a national emergency back in February. The work is expected to be completed in October 2020, according to a list of contracts published by the U.S. Department of Defense. A spokesman for that department told the hill, the barriers will be constructed as 30 feet of fencing and a five-foot-high anti-climb plate. Well, it turns out it's more than just Alexa that's listening to what you say. Bloomberg reports that a team of Amazon employees from around the world are tasked with refining the quality of Alexa and can actually hear the conversations of those who have the device. According to Bloomberg, quote, the Amazon team to voice recording captured in Echoes Owners' homes and offices.

The recordings are transcribed, annotated, and then fed back into the software as part of an effort to eliminate gaps in Alexa's understanding of human speech and help it better respond to commands. Teams tasked with this work have said that they have heard conversations that they consider upsetting and potentially criminal, and two of the workers said they believe they heard what might have been a sexual assault. Stay tuned. Up next, I'll be interviewing Donna Rice Hughes. Do you have an opinion that you'd like to share? Leave us a voicemail at 202-608-6205 or email us at Letters atdailySignal.com. Yours could be featured on the Daily Signal podcast. Joining me now is Donna Rice Hughes, president and CEO of Enough is Enough and an Internet Safety expert. Donna, thank you so much for joining.

Thanks for having me. So you have been an expert for over 25 years in preventing the sexual exploitation and sex crimes of women and children. Tough line of work you're in. It is. It is. It's important work. Tell us about it. Well, thank you so much.

We actually started in 94 when we saw the beginnings of child pornographers, pornographers, and sexual predators using the pre-internet, if you will. And we said, aha. the internet and the digital world is going to be the next avenue for criminal enterprises and especially in the area of the sex industry, the illegal sex industry, to exploit others, to not only exploit the internet, but to exploit women and children and even met. So that's how we got started and we deal with everything from protecting children from pornography, child pornography, sex traffickers, sexual predators, cyber bullying, the whole all of it. And we work on public policy issues. We work with law enforcement. We work with corporate

America and best practices. And we also do a lot of education work. And our whole focus is prevention, because prevention is worth, you know, it's much better than dealing with victims and a lifetime of victims assistance and trauma for so many of these crimes. How did you get involved in this line of work? Well, when I started in 1994, this was just prior to the internet becoming commercial, and enough is enough was focused really just on child pornography and hardcore pornography and sex industry. And then we saw what was happening on the internet. And so I said, this is going to be the Wild Well West.

And so I actually took that on as a project within the organization, and it has been so big for so long. We changed our mission to make the internet safer for children and families. expect them. One of the areas, the small pieces of this large issue that you work to address is border security and human trafficking at the border. You attended the White House Human Trafficking and Border Security Roundtable hosted by the president. How big of a problem is sex trafficking along the southern border? Well, it's sex trafficking along the southern border as well as human trafficking along the southern border is a big problem on a lot of different levels. And one of the things that I think we do need to start separating is the legal immigration

issue from the problem of criminal enterprises that are coming into our country and are using lax border security, if you will, to whether it's smuggle people, smuggle children for sex crimes, smuggle drugs, smuggle guns, you name it. So they are distinctly different issues, but the result of the same problem of lack of comprehensive border security. So it is a big problem. And the thing with children and women that are being used for sex, once they're in this country, they get moved all around the country very quickly, just like the drugs get dispersed to towns. cities all over the nation. But unlike drugs that are consumed one time, a child or a woman can be

used and expected to perform sex acts 20 to 40 times a day. And so if you can imagine the trauma, it's unimaginable on a child or a woman. And many of these women and children are trafficked by the cartels, but a lot of them are sold into trafficking by their own family members. who may be hooked on drugs or they're poor and they need money. So there's not a one-size-fits-all situation that's happening at the border, but it's certainly something that needs to be solved. And I believe that the humanitarian crisis should be the part of this that pulls us together rather than separates us, because that's something that should pull at everybody's heartstrings,

in my opinion. And it's something that we all need to work on. because we're a nation of laws, and we've got to have laws to protect all of our citizens and even those coming here. But let me just say this. Sex trafficking is happening right in our own schools. It's happening right in our own backyard.

American children and women are being trafficked all the time. Oftentimes, kids are lured to the mall, you know, come buy an outfit or a boyfriend, make them into the sex trade. I mean, this is happening right underneath our nose. And one of the reasons that one of the causes that we see is that it's a supply and demand issue. America is the top consumer of child pornography in the world. That was brought up at the round table in front of the president.

By the way, we are number two when hosting child pornography sites in the United States, second to the Netherlands. We used to be number one. We're number one in producing and distributing hardcore, obscene pornography that is not protected speech. under our current federal laws. However, the last administration did not enforce those laws. The Bush administration did to some degree. The Clinton administration didn't.

So two years ago, we got Donald Trump to sign the first ever children's internet safety presidential pledge to make the aggressive enforcement of all the laws on the books make a top priority. We need to be talking about, in my opinion, the safety and the innocence of our children especially as much as we're talking about any of these other big issues like the opioid crisis and other types of issues because our kids, once they're innocent, if Robin is stolen, they can't

get it back. Do you think conservatives have done a good job in addressing this issue? And if not, what more could or should they do? Well, the interesting thing about protecting children, especially in the work we do, it's not a conservative or a conservative or a, a liberal issue necessarily. We found in our working Congress it's been a bipartisan issue, but I do believe that conservatives can do more. We have a tendency, and I'm conservative, I am here at CPAC, but we have a tendency to focus on a lot of the political issues of the day, like immigration, like foreign affairs, like, you know, infrastructure and everything else. And I wish we would talk, and we are focused on the pro-life issue. But we can,

extend that pro-life issue to think about children that are already born. What are we going to do to protect them? We fight so hard to even get them born when we're fighting against abortion. What are we going to do to keep them safe? And I don't think that the conservatives have been nearly as strong on holding politicians and law enforcement feet to the fire to enforce the obscenity loss. Why? Because a lot of men are hooked on this content. You just look at the sex trafficking ring, the massage parlor ring that was busted in South Florida with the owner of the Patriots, several CEOs of top businesses were caught going in and out of this massage parlor, where women were being bought for sex, and it now appears that they were brought over from

China. And you go, hello. There is an issue here where we, and we, and there, there is an issue here where we, and especially the women, but I would love to see more conservative men start to take on these hard issues. Because talking about, quote-unquote, obscene pornography is not something anybody wants to talk much about. But if we look at this content that about 70% of it is depicting women that are being choked, hurt, violated, rate, and people are using that content and becoming sexually aroused by it, at some point it's going to fuel. their appetite to act out. I think that's part of the challenge with this issue that when you describe what actually goes on, it's so difficult to hear about and imagine that people would rather just brush it

under the rug and tell themselves it's not happening. Maybe it's not happening to them and their families, but it likely is happening in their communities. What can people do on a local level? Well, first of all, everyone can, anyone who's a parent and a grandparent can make sure their own kids are safe when they're using the internet. Use the parental control tools. We need to try to prevent the next generation of young people from getting addicted to this kind of content and acting out. Because a lot of the acting out is happening with middle school and high school kids and even elementary school kids

or acting out sexually with other kids because they're imitating what they see online and protect them from sexual predators that are grooming them online and traffickers and that sort of thing. But also support organizations like ours who are trying to do something because these are hard issues.

And even the church wants to sometimes brush these kinds of the sexual brokenness issues in our culture under the rug. And I don't believe we're going to see a lot of healing come about as a nation until we start dealing with these issues that are tough and help people that need the help to get it and help prevent those who are being harmed by a lot of this content we've been talking about and a lot of this activity from keeping them safe in the first place. Donna Rice Hughes is the president and CEO of Enough is Enough.

Donna, for those who might want to learn more, where can they go? enough.org and we also have another website. It's called internet safety 101.org and they're interconnected and there's a lot of free resources. Sign up for our newsletter and we'll keep you informed with the issues of the day and the issues we've been talking about and also how to keep your kids safe. Thank you so much for joining. Thanks. Up next, we'll be catching up with Cassie Dillon. Do you own an Alexa?

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that the liberal media isn't covering. Joining me now is Cassie Dillon, founder of the Lone Conservative and a staff writer at The Daily Wire. Cassie, thanks so much for joining. Thanks for having me. First off, what is the Lone Conservative? Loan Conservative is a blog that I started in college. I'm out of college now, but when I was in

college in 2016, I really did feel like the lone conservative in my campus. I went to an all women's college in Massachusetts called Mount Holyoke, and I really was the lone conservative. And so I pretty much started this blog because I had no connections to publish op-eds anywhere else. But I was doing reporting for the Leadership Institute's campus reform, but I wanted somewhere else to write my own stuff. And so I started Loan Conservative, and today it has more than 350 students that have contributed to it because so many students just like me have a passion for writing and just want to put their work out there. And so many campus papers don't want conservative perspectives.

So it gives them a place to share their views with everyone. So it's an online platform and blog where college students, conservatives, can submit articles for publication? Yes. So it's developed more than that too. So we actually have our first magazine that we published and we've been giving out at our table at CPAC this year. Also, other things we've been doing,

we're kind of like a community. So I also teach them professional development, how to do their resume, where to get internships at, different job opportunities. So it's kind of like a community, too, because on our campuses, a lot of times, like for me, my college Republicans

was three to four people. So I didn't have a community. So I created one for me. And so it's a community for people, and it's also a publication. Well, I absolutely identify with that effort because, you know, when I was in college

and as soon as I graduated, I wanted an opportunity to write. And at the time, Policy Mike was the new millennial platform that was supposed to be for millennials by millennials. Except I quickly learned after publishing one or two pieces, they had no tolerance for conservative voices. So I welcome your effort. I thank you for it. I'm sure so many college students are appreciating that.

So tell us how you ended up at The Daily Wire, of course, is run by the one and only Ben Shapiro. So, honestly, I stress this to all the lone conservative contributors. Network, network, network. And that doesn't only mean going to conferences and passing out your business cards. I met Ben Shapiro and Nikki Haley, which are two of my favorite people, through Twitter. So I connected with Ben about two years ago, and I just started tweeting at him. He liked my stuff.

He tweeted me. Now, Ben wasn't as huge as he as now, but he was still pretty big then. And he went and spoke at Yale, and I went there, and I crashed the, after party. I was not a Yale student, but I crashed the after party. I got in somehow, and I walked up to him and I said, hey Ben, you retreat my stuff all the time, but you don't follow me. And he took out his phone right there, and he followed me, and then we've kept in contact ever since. And then this is also something I teach my contributors, is you need to have an entrepreneurial spirit, even in the media. And so I reached out to Ben in January and

told him like, hey, I'm graduating soon. I want a job. And he told me, you know, Cassie, I'm not sure if we can handle that budget-wise. I don't know if that's going to work. And I came back to him month later, I said, look, I have two fellowships that are willing to sponsor my salary. I would love to work for you. And that's where I am now. I'm a fellow for the Daily Wire through the Coke Institute and then through Interclegate Studies Institute. That's amazing. Very good advice. You know, and speaking of advice, this is something I think about a lot that's hard for younger generations in the age we live in where it seems like everything you say as a young student, high school student.

or college student, Kenan will be used against you at a later time. What's your advice when you're speaking to college students, maybe even high school students, about how to balance that line between standing up for your beliefs because we need those voices out there, but also acknowledging that these things could come back and hurt you. Unfortunately, in a future job,

maybe you're someone who doesn't want to work in politics and you won't be protected by that? What's your advice for them? No, this is absolutely a problem. And this is the problem with so many young people my age rising to a platform. I'm so fortunate to have a platform, and there have been things that I have posted online

that I shouldn't have for sure. All of us have posted stupid things, especially when you're really young. And I think that you need to, with a platform comes responsibility. You need to make sure you're putting things out there that you believe in and that you realize is okay to say

because you might be thinking one thing, but should you go tweet that out right there? If you've had a glass of wine, should you really make that tweet? No, you should not. If you have to question if something should be posted, it probably shouldn't be posted. So I really want people to look at what they say, especially high schoolers. I have had college students who wrote for me and have had these issues where people in their college Republicans chapters might not want them in the chapter and they'll dig up tweets from middle school. When you're saying things that might have not been seen as offensive then and completely ruining their whole activism career.

So you really have to be careful with what you put out there because everything on the internet is forever. Even if you delete it, it's still out there. Everything is forever on the internet. We live in an age where it's sort of information overload. And for high school students and college students, this can be very overwhelming. What outlets do you trust? What individuals at those outlets do you trust?

What facts do you even trust? Because nobody can even agree on facts anymore. What are some of the strategies you have for fact checking and finding reliable information for you to now use as a journalist, but also as a news consumer? So I have fallen into this trap where I've trusted the mainstream media and I was wrong with the Covington situation. When I first saw those videos, I was like, yeah, it doesn't look so bad. But when I read all the media outlets, it sounded like there's some context they knew that I didn't. And I was like, wow, you know, maybe those high schoolers didn't do the right. thing. And then it comes out, the mainstream media was wrong, and they're being sued now, and

they should be. And so you have to be very careful who you trust. Honestly, you need to talk to experts in the field, because the mainstream media will often go out there and tell you, tell you one thing where they're not talking to experts, and that, like, for instance, immigration, they'll tell you, they'll make the inference that the border wall is racist, the border wall won't work. But I went to the border, and I talked to Border Patrol agents, and they told me in areas where there is a barrier that it's 90% to 99% effective. So you really have to be careful who you trust. And honestly, even reading both sides of the aisle news sources, you still might not get all the facts.

You really need to do investigating and be very careful what you believe. So I'm curious, where along the border did you visit? San Diego. So I went there probably over a year ago now. I thought it was a very eye-opening experience. I say now anyone who's involved in writing on this issue or legislating on this issue or open. pining on this issue should go down there and see it for themselves because it is night and day what happened in the San Diego Border Patrol sector before and after that wall.

But what was your biggest takeaway? Well, I think even when you were there, it doesn't look the same as it does now because they've been doing so much construction. So if you were there about a year ago, then you probably saw they were using Vietnam helicopter landing mats as the first barrier on the border. These are 10 feet tall, green, rusty, nasty-looking things that we use. I can confirm that. In Vietnam.

Like, that's a long, all right, I appreciate the fiscal conservativeness. They're using, reusing, repurposing things. That's great, but it doesn't work. It stopped vehicles, which was the purpose of it. Because people were literally driving over the border before 1991 and just right on over, just drive off the road, come back on, go on our highway, you're in America. And so they use that to mainly get rid of vehicles. from coming over. And then in 1990, three or four, they put up the second barrier, which you probably

saw as well. It's a 15-foot to 20-foot steel mesh fence with hundreds of incisions all throughout it because they, for some reason, thought putting up a fence, you can easily take a power chainsaw cut right through it. And so now they're actually replacing the Vietnam barrier with a steel-baller fence. It's 18-foot-tall. They're calling it a wall. I think it looks more like a fence. You can see through it, which Border Patrol wants, by the way. This is all semantics, though. It shouldn't even matter what we're calling it. It's true. Just call it a barrier.

It's a barrier. It's a barrier. It's stopping people. It's stopping vehicles. And it's effective. And people want to say there really isn't a crisis. Okay, maybe it's not a crisis if you want to see it that way. But I will say 110 people a day are getting stopped at just the San Diego border section. That's a lot of people coming in. And once they hop over that fence, you can blend into the civilian population in San

Diego within two minutes. There's a highway there, you're off. You're in the city. You won't be found. It doesn't give board ritual enough time to stop that person. Well, the last question I would like to end on is to ask you as a young conservative woman. Do you identify as a feminist, why or why not? So I have always said I do not identify as a feminist, but there's this movement in the conservative woman's sphere where they want to reclaim the word. And when we talk to, about it in that context, sure, I'll do it. I went to an all-woman's college. Trust me, I've seen feminism, third wave, fourth wave is now a thing. Yeah, I think we're in fourth wave now. Fourth wave, a direct result of second and third waves. Yes. So I've seen it firsthand, and if it's

called reclaiming the word, then I'm for it. If it means letting women do what they want to do without judgment or without telling them. So if you want to be a housewife, you can be a housewife. But fourth wave feminism's not doing that anymore. In my classes, they would shame you. Don't be a housewife, that's letting yourself be subjugated to a man, which isn't true. I think being a housewife, you are doing one of the best jobs in society. You're making the next generation in being there and nurturing them in a way that's more direct. So if it's reclaiming the word, I'll call myself it. But if it's not, no, I'm not going to use the word. Cassie Dillon is the founder of the lone conservative and a staff writer at The Daily Wire.

You can follow her on Twitter at Cassie Dillon. Cassie, thank you so much for joining us. you for having me. That'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to the Daily Signal podcast brought to you from the Robber H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation. Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or SoundCloud. And please leave us a review or rating on iTunes to give us any feedback. Rachel and Robb will see you on Monday. You've been listening to the Daily Signal podcast, executive produced by Kate Trinko and Daniel Davis. by Michael Gooden, Lauren Evans, and Thalia Rampersad.

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