On the afternoon of April 6th 2020, two employees working for MindGeek — the company that runs some of the biggest porn sites in the world, including RedTube and PornHub — began exchanging frantic text messages. One of the messages read, “Yo sorry man can you make sure you are not cc’ing [the manager of the site] on the CSAM reports.” C.S.A.M. stands for “Child Sexual Abuse Material,” and for some reason, this employee wanted his colleague to stop alerting a manager to the presence of this content on MindGeek’s porn sites.
That request, understandably, shocked the MindGeek employee who received it. This was the reply that came back: “He doesn’t want to know how much CP we’ve ignored for the past 5 years?” In that message, in case it’s not obvious,”CP” stands for “child pornography.”
These texts, and many more incriminating documents, surfaced last week in an ongoing lawsuit against MindGeek by the alleged victims of child sex trafficking in California. It’s one of several lawsuits filed against MindGeek across the United States and Canada that accuse the company of willful and malicious conduct involving minors. According to one of those lawsuits, for example, PornHub took a large cut of the profits from videos of a 12-year-old boy being raped.
Amid all this litigation, payment processors like Visa and Mastercard have dropped PornHub, though not before a judge ruled that Visa had facilitated the dissemination of child pornography. In other documents that have been unearthed in discovery, Mastercard confronts MindGeek over apparent child pornography on their platform, prompting officials at MindGeek to brainstorm a crisis response. At one point, both the CEO and the owner of MindGeek admit that they had only one staff member reviewing videos that are flagged for containing child-sex abuse content. At the same time, they acknowledged having a backlog of nearly 700,000 potentially illegal videos that hadn’t been reviewed at all. By the way, from what I could find online, it appears that MindGeek has well over 1,000 employees. Of those 1,000, they had just one dedicated to removing child rape from their platform. That tells you how much they prioritized the issue.
In the meantime, as usual, conservative politicians are taking half-measures in response to all this. These politicians are currently attempting to keep pornography websites out of the reach of children, instead of shutting them down entirely. PornHub is a hub for hundreds of thousands of videos and images of child rape. It should simply be shut down completely. That isn’t happening though. Instead we have these efforts to put age restrictions into place on the user end. And to be fair, that is something at least, even if it clearly doesn’t go far enough. To that end, Texas, like several other states, recently passed a law requiring that users of PornHub provide proof that they’re 18 years or older. Visitors to PornHub, and several websites like it, have to upload some kind of identification proving their age. The law also requires PornHub to inform users that: “Pornography increases the demand for prostitution, child exploitation, and child pornography.” Which is all obviously true.
To be clear, the law in Texas would not prohibit any adult from accessing pornography. The law also would not stop any adult from producing pornography. But even this timid attempt to keep children away from some of the most debased sexual content known to man — something everyone in the country should agree on — was too much for MindGeek and PornHub. So they filed a lawsuit to strike down the law:
The law against showing pornographic content to kids, we’re told, violates the “Communications Decency Act.” Any measure preventing a minor from viewing content on a website that hosts child-sex abuse content is “indecent.” That’s what they’re saying, without a shred of irony. Not that we should be surprised by that total lack of self-awareness. After all, MindGeek is owned by a Canadian private equity group called “Ethical Capital Partners.” Doublespeak is all the rage among pornographers, apparently.
And predictably, these same pornographers are also saying that somehow the right to free speech grants all Americans the inalienable right to watch other people have sex. What’s more, they say, the First Amendment also grants other people the right to have sex in front of strangers. It doesn’t take a lot of sleuthing around in arcane legal textbooks to figure out how nonsensical that position is. Pornography, as we all know, is essentially just cyber prostitution, and most states already ban prostitution.
But that’s all academic. Again, Texas did not ban pornography and there is no serious effort to ban it anywhere, nor is there strong support for those kinds of measures on the right. So what’s the actual argument here? Here’s another news segment to flesh this out a bit more. This segment features a representative from the porn industry, which runs a front group with an innocuous name, “The Free Speech Coalition.” This is the case they’re making:
“People could lose their jobs and harm their marriages” if they’re caught browsing a website that allegedly hosts child pornography. Imagine that. Therefore, according to the porn industry, it’s “un-American and unconstitutional” to require ID to watch porn.
For that logic to make any sense whatsoever, it’s very important that you don’t live in the United States, or have even a passing familiarity with what life is like in this country. It’s important that you don’t realize that adult-oriented products in every other context are age-restricted, with IDs required to obtain them. That includes alcohol, tobacco products, guns, and scratch off tickets. In fact, even physical porn DVDs and magazines require identification to purchase. Anything you might buy at some skeevy sex shop on the side of the highway requires an ID to purchase. Nobody ever complains about any of this or claims that their First Amendment rights are being destroyed because they have to show their license to buy any of these things. And indeed, if that skeevy sex shop looked the other way while hundreds of 10-year-olds came in and browsed around, everyone would agree that the shop should be shut down and the owners and employees thrown in prison.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
And yet with online porn — and only online porn — suddenly the imposition of any age requirement, any ID requirement, is an untenable attack on free speech. Can that argument possibly, conceivably, hold any water whatsoever? Remarkably enough, a Reagan-appointed federal judge in Texas appears to think so.
The judge, David A. Ezra, just struck down the Texas law, saying it:
“chills the speech of Plaintiffs and adults who wish to access sexual materials.” The judge added, “The Court agrees that the state has a legitimate goal in protecting children from sexually explicit material online. But that goal, however crucial, does not negate this Court’s burden to ensure that the laws passed in its pursuit comport with established First Amendment doctrine.”
To be clear, this judge’s ruling isn’t the final word. It’s already being appealed. And it has no weight in the several other states that have passed similar ID requirements on pornography websites. So it’s important not to blow this out of proportion. We’ve seen a lot of insane rulings from individual federal judges that are quickly overturned — including judges appointed by Republicans. It just happened in Tennessee, when judge Eli Richardson — the guy who keeps hiring Left-wing clerks — tried to strike down the state’s ban on child genital mutilation. He was quickly overturned.
At the same time, it’s important to read the PornHub judge’s decision carefully, because the truth is that — as insane as his ruling is — conservative politicians bear some of the blame for it. If these politicians want to make any headway in stopping the depravity and the cultural rot that these pornography sites are responsible for, then they have to start crafting better laws. This decision makes that clear. There’s no way around that. The free speech argument from the judge is blatant nonsense. But he does raise another point that is not so nonsensical. One of the problems that judge David Ezra identified with the law is that it didn’t really accomplish the goal that legislators said it would.
I’m going to share a long paragraph from this decision because it’s important to highlight the exact reasoning behind this decision, if conservatives want to have any hope of getting decisions that go their way in the future:
“[The law] will do little … to prevent children from accessing pornography. Search engines, for example, do not need to implement age verification, even when they are aware that someone is using their services to view pornography ..The same is true for blogs posted to Tumblr, including subdomains that only display sexually explicit content. Likewise, Instagram and Facebook pages can show material which is sexually explicit for minors without compelled age verification. … In sum, the law is severely underinclusive. It nominally attempts to prevent minors’ access to pornography, but contains substantial exemptions, including material most likely to serve as a gateway to pornography use.”
The judge continues:
“In addition, social media companies are de facto exempted … This means that certain social media sites, such as Reddit, can maintain entire communities and forums (i.e., subreddits), dedicated to posting online pornography with no regulation.”
In other words, the law in Texas doesn’t really stop minors from accessing pornography. It’s not much of a roadblock at all, because minors can just go on Reddit, or use search engines like Bing and watch porn there. This is a very important distinction. As arbitrary and frustrating as it is, it’s a distinction that conservative politicians need to grasp, if they want to have any chance of protecting children from the never-ending fountains of filth like PornHub. Voters in several states, including Virginia, Mississippi and Utah, have passed age-verification laws that apply to porn sites. There isn’t a lot of dissent on this issue among sane people. And yet, conservative politicians have found a way to bungle this issue. They’ve passed flimsy laws that can’t stand up in court. Of course, even if the Texas law had loopholes that would allow some children to access pornography, still you’d think that a flimsy attempt to protect kids is better than no attempt at all. But the flimsiness of the law provides a pretense for striking it down entirely, and that’s the issue.
The solution is obvious. First, these politicians should come out and say what everyone knows, which is that the Left’s concerns about “free speech” are a smoke screen. Sites like PornHub protest age restrictions because they stand to lose millions if minors aren’t granted access to their platforms. They are knowingly profiting off of the sexualization and trauma of children. The average porn user, on the other hand, protests these restrictions because he doesn’t want to be hassled or inconvenienced in his pursuit of masturbatory material. Both groups cry about free speech but couldn’t give less of a damn about it.
Right now in the United States, actual free speech rights are infringed every day. Pro-life activists hunted down by the FBI. Right-wingers jailed for posting memes. And yet suddenly the courts and the Left have decided to become free speech absolutists when it comes to porn and sexual depravity. That’s the only area where they care about free speech. To give another recent example: After a lawsuit from the ACLU, a federal judge in Tennessee just blocked a local D.A. from enforcing the state’s law protecting kids from sexually explicit performances at a so-called “Pride” event. All the D.A. did was send word to organizers telling them they can’t involve kids in their fetishes. That’s a reasonable concern, if you’ve seen any of the millions of videos of naked adults twerking in front of children from the past few months at these “Pride” parades. But the Left pretended it wasn’t reasonable. They shut the D.A. down.
This is, among many other things, hypocritical. The same people who believe that basic political speech should be outlawed and prosecuted as hate crimes are suddenly starting to care about “free speech” the moment the right makes any effort to protect children from degenerate sexual content. But the right can’t simply scream “hypocrisy” and call it a day. That doesn’t accomplish anything. Leftists know they’re hypocritical. They know they’re using the court system to overturn the will of the well-adjusted, sane majority. They don’t care.
The correct response from the right — as that Texas PornHub case shows, albeit in a roundabout way — is to one-up these degenerates. Stop passing half-measures into law. Stop with the flimsy, thrown-together legislation that doesn’t remotely accomplish what you say you want to accomplish. Start, instead, with a total ban on pornography for children, across all platforms — search engines, websites, and so on. And it should be a ban that extends not just to the websites but to the devices that are used to access the website. There should be laws in all 50 states mandating that cell phones used by children have filters and blocks on them that prevent the user from accessing this material. Cell phone companies should be required to sell devices that are safe for kids, as long as kids are going to be using them. Really, kids shouldn’t have phones at all. But millions do, and so we should have laws that account for that. Ironically, that kind of law is more likely to withstand scrutiny from federal judges.
It’s also more likely to bring about what every responsible adult should want, which is the safeguarding of our kids. They didn’t choose to be born into a depraved society filled with degenerate filth. The least we can do is make even the slightest effort to protect them from it.