project 2025 – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Stories filed under: "project 2025"

Porn Is Protected Speech. Trump’s New Presidency Will Test That Sentiment. The Courts Can Uphold It.

from the we-are-in-for-a-rough-one dept

The die is cast. Donald Trump is heading back to the White House – a remarkable victory. But a lot of people who work in the adult entertainment industry are understandably scared. From the concerns for LGBTQ+ rights under the new Trump presidency to access to reproductive care at a state and national level, the next four years will be a significant challenge.

While all valid concerns that I share, it is the specter of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda that frightens me most. Previously, I’ve written across various outlets, like Techdirt, to address the “masculine policy” Trump and his new vice president, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, and his allies envision to “make America great again.” Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and the de facto head of Project 2025, a so-called “presidential transition project,” laid out the administration’s position on key culture war issues, such as access to online porn.

Roberts wrote in Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, Project 2025’s incendiary policy treatise nearly 1,000 pages long, that their camp believes “pornography” and “pornographers” should be imprisoned and stripped of First Amendment protection. Some folks have characterized Roberts’ words as simply rhetoric, but the past twelve months have verified a coordinated effort to significantly claw back the rights of all sex workers and adult industry firms.

This time around, Donald Trump has surrounded himself with outspoken Christian nationalists who want to demonize and then criminalize sexual expression that is otherwise protected by the First Amendment.

Russell Vought, one of the central architects of Project 2025, was caught on hidden camera a few months ago confirming that the efforts to ban porn will go through a so-called “back door” framework via a patchwork of state-level age verification laws and efforts in a newly GOP-controlled Senate. In addition to that, Vance has supported a porn ban. It was also under Donald Trump’s last term that the FOSTA-SESTA monstrosity that decimated legal sex work on the internet came to fruition. Imagine what will advance under Trump.

Expect to see a renewed effort to advance the Kids Online Safety Act or a beefier version of the bill. The current form of the bill, though supposedly reformed with the input of key LGBTQ+ groups, would make design code the law of the land in an affront to years of case law. As we’ve seen in California, age appropriate design mandates rarely hold up under strict scrutiny. But, relying on the history of FOSTA-SESTA, the Kids Online Safety Act in any form will be a legal flashpoint.

For example, when the Woodhull Freedom Foundation and other civil society organizations sued to render FOSTA unconstitutional, the appeals court in that case, though upholding it, affirmed that it’s overly broad and needs to be narrowly tailored to best address cases of online trafficking while respecting free speech rights. And it’s up to the courts to essentially hold a Trump presidency accountable for any sort of unilateral action taken against legally operating pornography platforms.

The conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court is, truly, the only check and balance on key freedom of speech issues moving forward when it comes to the next four years. And it begins in January. Oral arguments are scheduled in Free Speech Coalition et al v. Paxton for January 15, 2025. The American Civil Liberties Union took up the case due to expansive First Amendment implications associated with age verification laws like Texas House Bill (HB) 1181, which specifically targets online adult website operators with requirements to verify the age of users who navigate from local IP addresses. Existing case law suggests that a law like HB 1181 is unconstitutional and clashes with other rulings.

If the Free Speech Coalition is successful, this renders all other age verification laws that specifically target porn websites and require users to submit ID cards or other types of identity verification unconstitutional.

A win at SCOTUS for online speech could set the tone for a successful series of legal victories during Trump’s imperial presidency. That is all we can hope for, right?

Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, age verification, donald trump, free speech, jd vance, kosa, porn, project 2025

Don’t Forget That The Same People Banning Books Want To Ban Porn

from the umm-no-shit-Sherlock dept

PEN America published recent data on book bans and removals just in time for Banned Books Week.

Key findings indicate that most books challenged by censorship advocates this past year focus on LGBTQ+ subject matter. Additionally, Iowa and Florida are currently the two worst states for book bans amid Republican-backed content restriction laws.

The PEN America data indicates that more than 10,000 books were removed from the shelves of school libraries across the country during the 2023-2024 academic year. The tally of removed books climbed triple-fold from last year’s tally of 3,362 removals.

Also, the American Library Association’s latest data additionally tracked 695 ban attempts with 1,915 unique titles challenged. Challenges, per this dataset, showed a slight decrease but further substantiated the finding concluded by PEN that most books targeted dealt with LGBTQ+ materials or sexuality.

These are sobering tallies as we draw ever closer to the 2024 presidential election and the number of civil liberties concerns riding on the final result. While Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have their own concerning positions, like Harris’ inconsistencies on FOSTA-SESTA and Section 230, the real concern, unsurprisingly, is on the Republican ticket, Donald Trump and JD Vance.

Trump and Vance offer a very real opportunity for the Heritage Foundation’s fascist Project 2025 to become a reality.

And, some of the key proposals outlined by Project 2025’s policy document, Mandate for Leadership, deal with adopting laws that could strip the First Amendment rights of millions of individuals. I wrote for Techdirt awhile back about the project’s effort to outlaw “pornography.”

Kevin Roberts, current president of the Heritage Foundation and now-alleged dog killer, wrote:

“Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today:…children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.”

“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection.”

“Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as an illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.”

“Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders…“

Considering his words, the ‘Project 2025-worldview’ is a feigned belief held by far-right MAGA populists that young adult literature featuring a gender-diverse protagonist is tantamount to a feature film streaming on Brazzers.

And, it reminds us that those who are pushing book bans are also pushing laws that restrict consensual and legal online porn through inequitable age verification laws.

It’s an inconvenient, but unsurprising, truth. Consider Russell Vought of the Center for Renewing America as an example.

Vought is a Christian nationalist and former Trump administration official. His center previously published model legislation that would implement age verification requirements on virtually all websites with content the sponsor deems to be obscene or indecent to minors.

That model legislation was drafted in a way to justify age-gating and censorship of material that isn’t even legally considered “porn.” A case can even be made that this model legislation could be used to age-gate access to information about reproductive rights or LGBTQ+ mental health.

Vought was caught on hidden camera by undercover journalists not that long ago. He was pitching Project 2025 to the journalists posing as potential donors.

During the conversation, he said they intend to ban porn through a “back door.” The “back door” he refers to is the adoption of legislation that mandates age verification, like what was adopted in Texas. As I’ve covered extensively in my reporting and analysis, Texas lawmakers adopted House Bill (HB) 1181 in 2023.

Adult industry stakeholders, led by the Free Speech Coalition, sued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to block the enforcement of HB 1181.

After a sordid litigation history in district court and the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the case is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. Free Speech Coalition et al. v. Paxton has developed into a landmark First Amendment case with broad implications.

Figures like Vought have openly advocated for book bans in addition to age verification measures that specifically target porn. And they do so without regard for the First Amendment.

An amicus brief filed in support of the Free Speech Coalition and the porn companies in the pending Supreme Court case makes this argument.

The amicus brief, filed on behalf of literary rights groups and book publishers, highlights the overlapping nature of book bans and age verification requirements.

The brief argues, “At a moment in which the political appetite for book banning is at an upswing, scaling back the searching review of such content-based restrictions poses an especially concrete threat to access to constitutionally protected materials.” Age verification is a “content-based” restriction.

Laws prohibiting access to books because of the content are virtually similar to laws prohibiting access to certain websites due to that content. Any argument to suggest otherwise is moot.

Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.

Filed Under: book bans, kevin roberts, porn, porn ban, project 2025, russell vought

Age Verification Laws Are Just A Path Towards A Full Ban On Porn, Proponent Admits

from the outing-themselves-as-the-censors-they-want-to-be dept

It’s never about the children. Supporters of age verification laws, book bans, drag show bans, and abortion bans always claim they’re doing these things to protect children. But it’s always just about themselves. They want to impose their morality on other adults. That’s all there is to it.

Abortion bans are just a way to strip women of bodily autonomy. If it was really about cherishing children and new lives, these same legislators wouldn’t be routinely stripping school lunch programs of funding, introducing onerous means testing to government aid programs, and generally treating children as a presumptive drain on society.

The same goes for book bans. They claim they want to prevent children from accessing inappropriate material. But you can only prevent children from accessing it by removing it entirely from public libraries, which means even adults will no longer be able to read these books.

The laws targeting drag shows aren’t about children. They’re about punishing certain people for being the way they are — people whose mere existence seems to be considered wholly unacceptable by bigots with far too much power.

The slew of age verification laws introduced in recent years are being shot down by courts almost as swiftly as they’re enacted. And for good reason. Age verification laws are unconstitutional. And they’re certainly not being enacted to prevent children from accessing porn.

Of course, none of the people pushing this kind of legislation will ever openly admit their reasons for doing so. But they will admit it to people they think are like-minded. All it takes is a tiny bit of subterfuge to tease these admissions out of activist groups that want to control what content adults have access to — something that’s barely hidden by their “for the children” facade.

As Shawn Musgrave reports for The Intercept, a couple of people managed to coax this admission out of a former Trump official simply by pretending they were there to give his pet project a bunch of cash.

“I actually never talk about our porn agenda,” said Russell Vought, a former top Trump administration official, in late July. Vought was chatting with two men he thought were potential donors to his right-wing think tank, the Center for Renewing America.

For the last three years, Vought and the CRA have been pushing laws that require porn websites to verify their visitors are not minors, on the argument that children need to be protected from smut. Dozens of states have enacted or considered these “age verification laws,” many of them modeled on the CRA’s proposals.

[…]

But in a wide-ranging, covertly recorded conversation with two undercover operatives — a paid actor and a reporter for the British journalism nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting — Vought let them in on a thinly veiled secret: These age verification laws are a pretext for restricting access to porn more broadly.

“Thinly veiled” is right. While it’s somewhat amusing Vought was taken in so easily and was immediately willing to say the quiet part loud when he thought cash was on the line, he’s made his antipathy towards porn exceedingly clear. As Musgrave notes in his article, Vought’s contribution to Project 2025 — a right-wing masturbatory fantasy masquerading as policy proposals should Trump take office again — almost immediately veers into the sort of territory normally only explored by dictators and autocrats who relied heavily on domestic surveillance, forced labor camps, and torture to rein in those who disagreed with their moral stances.

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

Perhaps the most surprising part of this paragraph (and, indeed, a lot of Vought’s contribution to Project 2025) is that it isn’t written in all caps with a “follow me on xTwitter” link attached. These are not the words of a hinged person. They are the opposite — the ravings of a man in desperate need of a competent re-hinging service.

And he’s wrong about everything in this paragraph, especially his assertion that pornography is not a First Amendment issue. It is. That’s why so many of these laws are getting rejected by federal courts. The rest is hyperbole that pretends it’s just bold, common sense assertions. I would like to hear more about the epidemic of porn overdoses that’s leaving children parentless and overloading our health system. And who can forget the recent killing sprees of the Sinoloa Porn Cartel, which has led to federal intervention from the Mexican government?

But the most horrifying part is Vought’s desire to imprison people for producing porn and converting librarians to registered sex offenders just because their libraries carry some content that personally offends his sensibilities.

These are the words and actions of people who strongly support fascism so long as they’re part of the ruling party. They don’t care about kids, America, democracy, or the Constitution. They want a nation of followers and the power to punish anyone who steps out of line. The Center for Renewing America is only one of several groups with the same ideology and the same censorial urges. These are dangerous people, but their ideas and policy proposals are now so common it’s almost impossible to classify it as “extremist.” There are a lot of Americans who would rather see the nation destroyed than have to, at minimum, tolerate people and ideas they don’t personally like. Their ugliness needs to be dragged out into the open as often as possible, if only to force them to confront the things they’ve actually said and done.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, age verification, censorship, for the children, free speech, porn ban, project 2025, russell vought
Companies: center for renewing america

FCC’s Carr Wrote A ‘Project 2025’ Chapter On Ruining The FCC And Taxing Tech Giants, Which May Have Violated The Hatch Act

from the hello-I-have-some-exceptionally-terrible-ideas dept

Tue, Jul 23rd 2024 05:27am - Karl Bode

The leading candidate to head the FCC should Trump win re-election is facing calls for an investigation into Hatch Act violations after he helped co-author the controversial Project 2025.

Sixteen House Democrats have sent a letter to government officials arguing that Carr’s involvement in the openly political Project 2025 is a clear violation of the Hatch Act and should be investigated:

“The Misuse of Position Rule clearly prohibits federal employees from using their government positions, titles, or authority to sign letters, write op-eds, speak in their personal capacity, or—as it were—draft the blueprint for archconservatives to take over their agency.”

For his part, Carr claims he was only participating in the controversial project in his capacity as a citizen, and received the green light from FCC ethics officials before his participation. Even should he be investigated and found culpable, fines for Hatch Act violations are generally rather pathetic.

Project 2025 is, if you’re unfamiliar, a extremist proposal being circulated by key MAGA Republicans that calls for the mass firing of civil servants based on their ideological beliefs, a radical and undemocratic expansion of power for the president, the dismantling of the Department of Education, numerous new corporate tax cuts, draconian new abortion restrictions, and a ban on pornography.

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who, you’ll recall, spends most of his time on cable news complaining about a company he doesn’t actually regulate (TikTok) in order to get attention, wrote a chapter about what should happen at the FCC under a second Trump term.

If you’re familiar with Carr there’s nothing too surprising here. Instead of proposing the agency do its actual job and protect competition and consumers from the whims of AT&T and Comcast, Carr instead calls for a dramatic expansion of the agency’s efforts to “rein in big tech” (which in Trump parlance means harassing any company that tries to moderate racist right wing political propaganda on social media).

Carr has a few sections of his chapter where he pretends he’s interested in “empowering consumers,” but again that mostly involves vaguely whining about tech companies and a dangerous dismantling of Section 230. It has nothing to do with “antitrust reform” or “reining in corporate power” and everything to do with bullying companies that don’t toe the increasingly unhinged authoritarian line.

Should Trump win the next election and Carr is appointed FCC boss, his biggest proposal will indisputably be a giant new telecom tax on tech companies. For half a decade now, AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and friends have used Carr as the spearhead for their plan to impose major new taxes on tech giants under the pretense of funding U.S. broadband deployment (sometimes called “sender pays”).

I’ve discussed (more times than how I can count) how this unserious policy is largely just a handout to subsidy-abusing regional telecom monopolies. It involves falsely claiming that tech companies get a “free ride on the internet” and should pay telecom giants billions of dollars for no coherent reason.

It’s a plan that drives up costs for consumers (since tech companies will simply forward the costs on to you) and effectively breaks the internet (just ask the Internet Society). In South Korea it drove companies like Twitch out of the country because they couldn’t afford to do business. All so telecom giants with a long history of subsidy fraud and abuse can get billions in additional subsidies.

I’ve written extensively on why Carr and AT&T’s call for a “big tech telecom tax” isn’t serious adult policy, but I’m still not entirely sure that “big tech” execs fully understand the scope. In the EU, telecoms have pushed proposals that would charge any internet service that accounts for over 5 percent of a telco’s average peak traffic billions of dollars in additional extra-government surcharges “just because.”

To be clear, the FCC’s Universal Service Fund (USF) program (which helps fund rural and school broadband) is in a dire need of a revamp, since the contributions historically came from levies on your home phone line.

And while Democrats and Republicans have flirted with the idea of including tech companies in that contribution base, I (as somebody that has studied this sector for decades) think it makes more sense to address widespread existing subsidy program fraud and abuse by industry giants and take direct aim at monopoly power (which is directly responsible for high broadband costs and stunted deployment).

That’s not stuff Carr is interested in because it’s not something AT&T and Comcast are interested in.

What Carr and AT&T are interested in is a big fat punitive, nontransparent, and badly managed tax that will be pocketed by subsidy-abusing telecom giants in exchange for fiber networks you’ll probably never actually see. And if Carr is Trump’s pick to head the FCC (a position Carr has been positioning himself for for the better part of a decade) it’s absolutely a policy that’s getting implemented on day one.

Filed Under: big tech, big tech tax, brendan carr, corruption, fcc, hatch act, project 2025, sender party pays, sender pays, tech, telecom