Lots of people are angry at me because I said porn should be banned. Here I will flesh out my argument and respond to every counter argument. Porn is a scourge on society and a threat to children. And that’s how it should be treated.
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Well, you guys aren't going to believe this, but a bunch of people are mad at me because of some stuff that I said.
I know it's kind of shocking to hear.
You know, I took a position, I articulated a point of view, and apparently that point of view is unpopular.
Who knew?
And now a lot of people are angry and yelling at me, and I know, again, this is very shocking to you.
I know you hear that and you think, What?
No way, Matt.
You're such an agreeable and well-liked guy.
Everybody always agrees with everything you say.
There's no way you get that kind of reaction out of people.
I don't believe it.
Well, I'm sorry to shatter that image that you have of me, but here we are.
So, the thing that got me cancelled this time, cancelled for, by my count, the 13th time since mid-September, is that I argued for banning pornography.
I argued, as I have in the past, I believe probably on this very show, that hardcore porn should be illegal.
I argued that, in fact, you do not have a God-given natural right to post your sex videos on a public forum, and you don't have a God-given natural right to view them.
That both of those things are privileges, and privileges that we should not be granted, because the proliferation of hardcore porn is injurious to the common good, and to be even more specific, it is destroying children.
I argued that your privilege to post sex videos on the internet should not outweigh the need to protect children from the profound and really quite measurable harm that exposure to those videos does to them.
So, that was my argument, and I expressed it in a piece that I published on the Daily Wire on Friday, and in a series of posts on social media, mostly on Twitter.
And it's the argument that sparked, as they say, a backlash.
Sparked a backlash, with lots and lots of people telling me that I'm not only wrong for holding that view, but I'm psychotic.
It's crazy.
There's just nothing good that can be said about it at all.
Many of those people, by the way, are conservatives, or quote-unquote conservatives, air quotes.
Really, they're libertarians who don't know that they're libertarians, and because they don't really know anything about their own ideology.
But we'll get back to that, we'll get back to that in a minute.
So, what I want to do today is lay out my case as clearly as I can, and also address the criticism that I've received.
And all I want to ask is that you hear me out.
Okay, give me a chance to explain my argument, and then decide if you agree or disagree.
If your first reaction when I say we should ban porn is to recoil in horror, and to think, well that's totally insane, then I would ask that you especially, especially you, would just hear me out.
And whatever objections you have in your head right now, and I'm sure you have many, I'll probably address them as we continue.
And if I don't, then you can always email after the show and I'll address it tomorrow.
But I think I'll probably get to it.
So you've got to give me a chance because I'm trying to be as thorough as I can.
I'm going to spend probably the entire show on this today because, number one, I think it's an interesting topic.
There are people complaining on Twitter saying, uh, it's so annoying that you started this conversation.
Who wants to talk about this?
Isn't it way more interesting?
Like what are you else?
What else are we going to talk?
You want to talk about impeachment some more?
Isn't this at least interesting to talk about something different at least.
And I want this show to be my definitive explanation of my position on this topic, which isn't to say that it will be the definitive.
Argument for banning porn somebody more intelligent than me is gonna have to give the definitive argument, but this will be my definitive argument This will be you know as thorough as I can be Now why did this come out come up in the first place?
Well as National Review reported on Friday a small group of Republican lawmakers sent a letter calling for Attorney General Barr to enforce obscenity laws and As a way to fight hardcore pornography.
Now, to be clear, what they're requesting is the enforcement of obscenity laws that are already on the books.
And we'll get back to that.
We'll talk more about that a little bit later on.
But they're not calling for new laws to be added to the books.
They're saying, we already have these laws.
Let's enforce them!
Radical idea, right?
Let's actually enforce the laws that are on the books.
Now, personally, I would hope that this would be a first step towards a wider-ranging war on hardcore porn, though that's not what the lawmakers are advocating, so I'm taking a more extreme position than they are, which, again, is probably shocking to you.
At the very least, I think this should be the beginning of a conversation about the proliferation of hardcore porn and the government's role in addressing the problem.
But this is not a conversation that most people want to have.
Now, of course, you would expect those on the political left to react in horror, to resist any restriction or ban on pornography.
That's what you expect from them.
After all, this is the side that generally supports explicit sex education for kindergartners, Child drag queens, drag queen story hour, trans kids and so on.
They are committed to exposing children to all manner of sexual confusion and degeneracy at younger and younger ages.
And so you expect them, you know where they're going to stand.
The real shame is that so many people on the right now are just as likely to valiantly stand up for the rights of internet pimps and smut peddlers.
We live now in a society where the most extreme and depraved forms of pornography are readily accessible to children.
It seems to me that if your primary concern when faced with this epidemic is to protect the rights of smut peddlers and people who want to masturbate to things on the internet, like if that's your primary, if that's the main thing, if that's the main issue, That you're focused on when it comes to this topic?
Then I would suggest that your priorities are out of alignment.
And I would also suggest that if you're a conservative, and that's your main thing, then you're probably not a conservative at all, actually.
Yet, you know, any talk of restriction of pornography is waved off with slogans about limited government and declarations about the ineffectiveness of prohibition and all of that.
I agree that government should be limited.
I also agree that government can't go around prohibiting everything that the bureaucrats currently comprising it happen to dislike.
So I'm on board with that.
But I also think there's a role for the government to play in the porn problem, and I'm going to explain why.
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All right, so my argument for banning slash regulating porn really boils down to two points.
These aren't the only points in support of my case, but they are the points that I'm focusing on, and they're the points that I personally find the most persuasive.
Maybe there are better points out there.
These are the ones that, to me, make the case.
Number one, children are being severely damaged by the proliferation of hardcore porn.
That's my first argument.
Argument number two, more broadly, the proliferation of hardcore porn has, as I said, a detrimental An injurious effect on the common good.
It is contrary to the common good to allow this to continue.
I'm going to elaborate on both of these.
Let's start with children.
On average, children are first exposed to hardcore pornography at the age of 11, if not sooner.
Now remember how an average works.
If the age of first exposure is, on average, 11, that means in order to get that average, there are a whole lot of kids being exposed at 78 or 9.
This exposure is not neutral in its impact.
It certainly is not positive in its impact.
I hope I don't need to explain that.
It's also not neutral.
Children are damaged in quantifiable ways, affecting their emotional and psychological development, their attitudes towards other people and towards themselves, their behavior, their ability to form healthy sexual relationships in the future.
That shouldn't be surprising either.
If you think about it, you've got kids, pre-pubescent, who have no notion of human sexuality, don't really know what it is, and their first exposure to human sexuality is smut on the internet, is X-rated Whatever disturbing dark thing that they happen to see when they're on there, that's their first, that, you know, when they're just at the beginning, before puberty, developing, you know, an impression of what sexuality is and growing into the, you know, they're in the formative years, they're beginning their real formative years of adolescence.
And it begins with that.
So that is the seed planted at the beginning of their real formative years of adolescence.
It's not hard to see how that's going to grow into something potentially very troubling.
Studies show that children exposed to porn are more likely to become victims of sex abuse, and also that porn may encourage them to become perpetrators of abuse themselves.
Children who are exposed to porn as studies show are traumatized by it.
They suffer real trauma.
Now, I know that word trauma has been cheapened by college kids complaining that they were traumatized by a Ben Shapiro speech on campus.
I'm not talking about that kind of trauma.
I'm talking about real trauma.
There is a real thing.
There is a thing called someone experiencing trauma, and young kids exposed to this, they're traumatized by it.
Porn produces neurological changes in the brain of a child, in the brain of adults as well.
We can see this in brain scans.
But the difference between the changes in a child and an adult are that a child's brain is still developing and forming.
And they're still growing.
So those changes could have a more lasting impact.
So I think this establishes that porn is widespread, ubiquitous, endemic, Millions of kids are exposed to it very young.
None of that is controversial.
That's just a fact.
And that this exposure is really harming them in tangible and serious and lasting ways.
Is there not, at a minimum, at least a reason to consider involving the state in this assault on our children's minds and bodies?
Shouldn't we at least talk about it?
By the way, for anyone who doubts the harm that porn does to a child, and honestly, I don't know how you, a thinking person, could doubt it, but if you do, I want you to imagine this.
Imagine a child wanders into a motel room where a prostitute brings her clients to engage in their business exchange.
Now, imagine a kid, 11, 10 years old, in the room, Witnessing this happening.
Would anyone doubt?
I mean, would anyone deny that the child will come away traumatized from that?
Would anyone doubt that?
Would anyone doubt that that experience, that experience of being in a motel room watching this happen, will affect him in profound, deep, bad ways that will probably reverberate through his entire life?
Now, here's what I ask.
What is the difference between a child watching exactly that kind of thing happen through a screen or watching it in person?
Now, in this hypothetical, in both scenarios, no one's touching him, no one's interacting with him in any way, directly.
It's just he's watching something happen.
What's the difference?
You put a screen there and all of a sudden it doesn't matter?
All of a sudden the effect is less?
Why would that be the case?
Does the screen itself act as a kind of emotional and psychological barrier that protects the child?
No, I don't think so.
You talk about consenting adults.
Consenting adults may well have the right to do what they want with each other in the privacy of their homes, but do they have the right to film it and then publish it on a forum where children in elementary school might easily access it?
That's the question.
And if you say they do have this right, where does this right originate?
Don't just tell me that someone I have a right to.
What do you mean you have a right to do it?
Says who?
Where does this right originate?
Does it originate from God?
Our, in this country, if you go back to the founding of this country, The philosophical notion of rights is not that it's an arbitrary thing that the government gives you, it's that it's inherent, it's intrinsic to your human nature, instilled in us by God.
So I ask you, did God instill in all humans the inalienable and sacred right to publish footage of their orgies on the internet for everyone to see?
If God didn't, then from where and what does this right spring?
Perhaps we should consider the possibility that there is no such right.
You don't have that right.
It is, again, a privilege that society can either choose to grant or not.
The question is whether the privilege of adults to post their sexual escapades online is more important than the privilege of children to be protected from the psychological and emotional harm that being exposed to it causes.
Here's the point.
No reasonable person can deny that there's a problem here, and not a small problem.
This stuff is poisoning our kids.
That's not up for debate.
That's not my opinion.
It's a fact.
It's a reality.
Now, once you acknowledge that reality, must you not at least take seriously the notion that the state may have a role here?
There are plenty of times when wielding the massive hammer of the state is inappropriate, wrong, out of proportion, unjust.
The tool is abused very often.
I'll be the first to say that.
But doesn't the collective corruption of entire generations of children perhaps warrant bringing down the hammer, as it were?
Isn't this a time when justice calls for that step, potentially?
Now as to my second point, the common good, I believe the whole reason the government exists, and this is an important point we have to establish to begin with, I think when we start talking about what we think the government should do and not do, we can't really have an intelligent conversation or even an intelligible conversation about that unless everyone involved in the conversation has some idea of what they think the government is and why it fundamentally exists.
I would say, and not just me, by the way, but I'm going to agree with like Aristotle and Aquinas and those guys and say that the government exists to protect and advance the common good.
This should not be controversial.
But these days, a lot of people, especially conservatives, are apt to say, no, no, that's not it.
Government exists to protect rights.
Because the common good is subjective and can be abused.
And who decides what's good?
No, no, no, rights are the point.
I think this kind of a response is shallow, to be honest with you.
And I blame many things, but among them, the influence of libertarianism.
I think libertarianism has helped to create a bunch of conservatives who think that rights can be protected apart from any conception of the good.
And I was told this many times over the weekend by conservatives, that rights and what is good are two completely different things that have no relationship with each other.
And the government's only concern is with rights.
Who cares what's good?
This isn't just libertarianism, this is like radical libertarianism.
This has nothing to do with conservatism, historically.
A concept like rights in a vacuum is, of course, far more vague and carries with it far more capacity for abuse than a concept like good.
Why do you think we spend all of our time in this country arguing over who has a right to what and whose rights take precedent and all of that?
Nobody knows what the hell a right even is.
So all these people saying, I don't know, forget about good, that's vague.
No, it's about rights.
Well, what's a right?
Do you even know what it is?
Can you define it?
If we get 100 Americans into a room, could we find agreement between any two of them about what our rights actually are?
Meanwhile, you know, in this country, we've discovered the right to murder children, and 60 million have been killed under the banner of rights.
So you talk about the potential for abuse if we say that the government is there to protect and advance the common good.
What about the potential for abuse if we put the good aside and just say it's all about rights?
60 million humans have been killed from that abuse.
But to the extent that we're talking about actual rights, God-given rights, inherent human rights, then the whole reason why those rights should be protected is that it is good.
So when you say something like, we must protect rights, I ask a follow-up, a very fair follow-up, which is, why?
Who cares?
Don't just insist that the government should protect rights.
That's not the end of the discussion.
Because now I'm going to say, why?
Why should it?
Who cares about rights?
Why does it matter?
And your response eventually, we might go through a few back and forth, but eventually your response is going to be at bottom.
Well, because it's good.
It's the right thing to do.
That's why.
Because, in effect, it's good for society.
It's good for us.
It's good for us as individuals and as a country to have our rights protected.
What you're saying is that protecting rights serves the common good, which means that the common good is more fundamental, more foundational.
It lies deeper down, closer to the root.
When I say the government exists for the common good, I'm not saying that as a replacement of or in contradiction to the theory that it exists to protect rights.
I'm saying that rights, real human rights, serve the common good.
I can't believe I have to even explain this, but like I said, over the weekend, so many conservatives were insisting that the government should not protect the common good.
This is...
These are conservatives, and this is what conservatives have done in the last few decades.
They've taken their own intellectual history and just thrown it in the wood chipper without even realizing they're doing it.
It should be shocking that any conservative would say that the government shouldn't protect the common good, but that's what they said.
In fact, I had people saying, oh, that's communist.
That's communist.
Common good is about common.
This is what happens.
See, this is what happens when people, they choose a political ideology without reading any books.
They have no idea.
And now all of a sudden, you know, arguments made by Aquinas and Aristotle are communist.
Good God.
The point with hardcore porn is that it is grievously harmful to the good.
It has an egregiously negative effect on the society.
There is literally nothing at all good that comes of it, ever.
Not one good thing has ever come of it, and ever could come of it.
It only harms, it only destroys, it only causes problems, it only hurts people.
Really hurts them.
Hurts those involved, hurts those exposed, hurts those who are not involved or exposed, but are in the families of those who are involved or are exposed.
It's bad for society.
It's only bad.
It's never good.
It's never neutral.
It harms marriages, destroys marriages, destroys families, destroys children.
None of these are bald assertions on my part.
This is all backed by extensive research.
You can just go and look at it yourself.
And I would encourage you to do that.
So when you have something that is very bad, has a very bad effect on people, has nothing to recommend it, has no positive application at all, nothing good about it, then you have something that I would argue, at a minimum,
is a candidate for regulation, restriction, prohibition.
This is the argument, by the way, in favor of making stuff or keeping stuff like heroin,
for example, illegal.
Thank you.
Some people think that heroin should be legal.
Because they say, well, you know, everyone who uses it, for the most part, consents to it.
It's their choice.
Let them do it if they want.
Okay, and that's true, for the most part.
But heroin is so terrible, has such a detrimental effect on people and society, and is so devoid of anything positive or redeeming, that I ask, why the hell should we make it legal?
I mean, this seems like the very definition of something that shouldn't be legal.
It will not help society in any conceivable way for it to be legal.
This is something that cannot help anyone.
There is nothing good that comes of it.
Not everything is about consent all the time.
There are also factors like good versus evil, right versus wrong.
These things also must be weighed when we make laws.
We have to take that into account.
Nobody has a God-given right to heroin, and heroin is a noxious poison that destroys community.
Thus, why not make it illegal?
I'd say the same thing about porn.
So, to review.
Porn is toxic to children, toxic to families, toxic to marriages, toxic to society, has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and therefore it should be banned.
In a nutshell.
That's my argument.
So I want to go through some of the objections to this argument.
First objection.
These are just the most common things I've heard.
Maybe anticipating some of the things you're thinking right now.
First objection.
This is crazy.
You're insane.
You're an idiot.
You should go jump off a cliff.
I don't mean to pick low-hanging fruit here, but this is basically the counter-argument that I've gotten from 99% maybe of everybody that I've heard from.
So I guess I have to address it.
And I bring it up only to make one point here.
If you're a conservative, you should not be shocked and scandalized by the argument that hardcore porn is not a human right and should be regulated or banned.
I'm not saying you have to agree.
I'm not saying we have to be on the same page with it.
I'm just saying that the argument I'm making here is an argument that every conservative 50 years ago would have at least taken seriously.
Every single one.
If you recoil in horror at the very thought of regulating or banning porn, it's because you have so totally accepted the left's premise on pornography, and probably on so many other issues as well.
Not just pornography.
You have hook, line, and sinker.
You have accepted the left's cultural arguments, and you don't even know it.
You are looking, and I don't mean this as, oh, you're acting like a leftist, like some empty insult.
I mean it literally.
You are seeing the world through the eyes of a leftist and you don't even know it.
And that's the case if a classic conservative argument about obscenity scandalizes and shocks you.
It's not just that conservatives have abandoned their own positions, it's that now conservatives are actually offended by conservative positions on things.
That's how thoroughly the left has won.
The left has won so thoroughly that, like I said, on common good, I was talking about common good, someone told me that the idea of the common good is jargon.
This is a conservative, so it's just jargon.
The very concept of good is now jargon.
This is relativism.
This is nihilism in relativism, and it has infiltrated conservatism in a major way.
When conservatives decided that government should not be used to advance the good, when that happened, and it wasn't at one point that it happened, but over the course of decades, But that is when conservatism became limp, shallow, and ineffectual, also divorcing itself from its own intellectual history.
And that is why the left always wins, because the right has abdicated, has run away, has surrendered.
My friend Josh Hammer, who also works at The Daily Wire, writes great pieces every day.
He made the point last night that the right has almost entirely abandoned moral arguments and arguments rooted in justice.
The right has almost completely stopped making those arguments and ceded all of that to the left.
The left makes those arguments all the time.
And they always win.
They always win because nobody opposes them.
They're just running up and down the football field, scoring touchdowns, and there's no defense on the field to stop them.
They say, we should do this or that because it's right and it's just.
And these weak, emasculated conservatives are sitting off in a corner going, oh, we don't want to legislate morality.
So we're not going to chime in here.
Hey guys, let's not legislate morality.
No, we don't want to do that.
That's wrong.
We shouldn't do that.
And then they try to make all their arguments based on economy or something like that, or even worse, based on rights divorced from the good.
And they lose every damned time because their arguments are weak and timid and toothless and grounded in nothing.
If you've noticed that you're a conservative and you always lose every argument, this is why.
Because your arguments are terrible.
And have no grounding.
Okay, so that's the first objection.
Objection number two.
In fact, okay, let's go to the next objection.
I just mentioned it.
Legislate morality.
Oh, we shouldn't legislate morality.
We now... I keep going back to this, but I don't mean to harp on it, but just...
The fact that conservatives are now saying, don't legislate morality, this dumb, this stupid bumper sticker slogan that you hear from conservatives now, I mean, it's so depressing.
Of course we legislate morality.
What are you talking about?
Of course we do.
Everything that is illegal is illegal because we have decided that it's wrong.
So, every law we make, every single law we make, is based on a moral conception.
We can be wrong, okay?
We have decided in this society that it would be, that it's good, in fact, that it would be evil to stop women from killing their babies, and thus it is legal for them to kill their babies.
So we can be wrong with our moral conceptions, but what I'm establishing here is that there is no such thing as not legislating morality.
That is a thing that doesn't exist, ever, anywhere.
If a thing is illegal, it is because we have decided, or the government's decided, that it's wrong.
If something is not just wrong, but evil, morally evil.
If something is not morally evil, then it shouldn't be illegal.
Simple as that.
There is no morally good thing that should ever be illegal.
Now, there are morally evil things that shouldn't necessarily be illegal.
Because you have to take into consideration many different factors.
Like, how do you enforce it?
What would that entail?
Degrees of things.
Who's affected?
You do weigh all of these things.
But my point is, the only reason why anything is ever a candidate for being illegal is that it's evil.
According to, at least, the people in power.
So this don't legislate morality thing, I just wish everyone would stop saying that.
Because when you say that, you reveal that you have no idea why laws even exist, and yet you have opinions about laws.
And I know the response is, oh no, it's not about evil, it's about things that harm others should be illegal.
Yes, but why should things that harm others be illegal?
Because it's wrong to harm others.
If it wasn't wrong to harm others, then it shouldn't be illegal.
Objection number three.
Porn is a consensual act between adults.
I've already addressed this.
It's not an act between adults.
It's an act that adults partake in and then post on a public forum where kids can easily access it.
So, this idea that it's consensual and private, it's not.
If you do it in your house and that's it, then yeah, that's consensual, it's private, there's nothing else to be said about it.
But when you take the step of recording it and then putting it on the internet, It is not private anymore, and you are involving now potentially children who could access it.
Also, how do you know that porn itself is indeed an act between consenting adults anyway?
You don't.
The link between the sex trafficking industry and porn is well established.
The porn viewer may assume that the figures on the screen are acting consensually, but the fact is, at least some of the time, they're not.
The porn viewer may also assume that the figures on the screen are adults, but many times, they're not.
The viewer simply has no way of knowing whether he's watching the rape of a trafficked woman or the abuse of a minor.
He could be.
He doesn't know.
And part of the problem is, he doesn't really care.
See, he's willing to take that risk, as long as he gets his pleasure out of it.
So he's looking to get pleasure out of seeing this thing on the internet, and he knows in the back of his mind that, like, I don't know, this woman could be drugged, this person could be a minor, I don't know.
But the most important thing for me right now is to get what I want out of it.
And so it has this desensitizing effect on the viewer, on top of all the other problems.
Where they get used to seeing other people as objects that exist purely for their own enjoyment and no other reason.
Number... what, objection four we're on now?
This, maybe I should have done number one, because this is maybe one of the main things I hear.
It's, well, we don't need the government to solve this.
This is up to the parents.
And, oh, you just want the government to ban it or regulate it because you're a bad parent.
I don't know how many people told me this weekend.
That if you simply put parental locks on your computer, you won't have to worry about it.
Now, that would have been a great argument in 1996.
If we were living in 1996, if we just went through a time warp through some sort of wormhole and we're living in 1996 again, then yeah, pretty much put a parental lock on your computer and probably the kid won't be able to access it.
But I'm pretty sure we're living in 2019 America.
Where, in fact, the situation now is that parents cannot even begin to protect their children, or can barely begin.
I mean, they can.
It does matter.
So it is a step that should be taken, don't get me wrong.
But parents can barely begin to protect their children from porn simply by locking down their family computer, putting locks on the phone, or not giving the kid a phone in the first place, which I highly recommend.
My kids don't have phones.
But porn is so pervasive now, so widespread, that a parent cannot possibly shield their kid from it permanently.
It only takes one friend with a phone, one friend with a laptop, one unsupervised moment on a computer or a laptop at school.
You don't know how many parents have told me.
Many schools, most schools, all schools these days require kids to use computers at school.
You don't know how many parents have told me that their own kids or kids they know have accessed porn at school on these computers that somehow are not locked down or the kids know how to bypass the controls.
So you could be the best parent in the world, you could be the most attentive parent, the most disciplined and loving parent, and your 12-year-old could still access view and be corrupted by hardcore internet porn.
That is the reality of our current situation.
So, if there's a solution that does not involve government, I'm all ears, but don't tell me the solution is putting parental locks on phones.
The problem is so massive, so big, and so serious, that it is beyond the capacity of any one parent to solve, or even sufficiently address, in the case of their own individual child.
The reason governments are instituted among men is that there are some things individuals cannot do on their own.
Okay?
I mean, if we want to stop an invasion by a foreign power, I can't do that.
And I could probably get some of my friends together, but we're not going to do a great job.
That's something that we need the government to do.
If we could do everything on our own, then we would have no government.
We'd be living in an anarchist utopia.
But we're not.
There's some things that we cannot do on our own, and that's why we have a government.
And what I'm saying is that fighting the porn epidemic is one of those things, and nobody has convinced me otherwise.
The next objection, well, you can't ban porn because the Supreme Court found that it's protected under the First Amendment.
Okay, now even if this were true, it wouldn't change my position.
You also can't right now ban abortion because the Supreme Court discovered in the Constitution, looking through some sort of decoder ring, looking at the invisible ink, they discovered a right to abortion.
The Supreme Court can be wrong and has been wrong many times.
So my position in principle doesn't change based on what the Supreme Court said.
If I think something is evil and should be illegal and is not protected by the First Amendment, I'm not going to suddenly say, well, I guess I was wrong because some people in black robes said so.
They can be wrong.
And in this case, I think they are.
Despite what any robed figure may claim, I don't think that porn is speech.
Having sex on camera is not speech.
Speech communicates a discernible, coherent idea.
There is no idea being communicated or conveyed by porn.
It's just porn.
It's there to appeal to the basest parts of us.
It's not there to engage us intellectually or make a point or send a message.
It's not speech.
A guy masturbating on a park bench is not engaged in speech.
Put a camera in front of him and live stream it on the internet and all of a sudden it's speech now?
What?
That's insane.
That doesn't make any sense.
I made this point and people said, oh that's crazy, that's so dumb.
A guy masturbating on a park bench is totally different from people because, you know, people choose to access porn whereas they wouldn't necessarily choose to see the guy on the bench.
Okay, but first of all, I'm making a point about the act itself.
The act itself.
If sex or masturbation is speech when filmed, then it would also be speech when it's not filmed.
Can you think of any other thing that is only speech if it's broadcast to billions of people, but it wouldn't be speech if you just said it or did it in front of ten people?
Doesn't make any sense.
If the act is speech, it is speech no matter if there's a camera there or not.
Period.
So if you're telling me that porn is speech, then you cannot escape the fact that two people having sex publicly are engaged in speech.
Now, what you might say is that this is, that's bad speech that should be restricted, whereas porn is not.
But, you see, when you make, and this is why you don't want to make that argument, this is why you want to try to pretend that one is speech and one isn't, even though that makes no sense.
But you don't want to make that say, you don't want to say, OK, yeah, but that's speech that should be restricted.
Because now you've admitted that, OK, there could be scenarios where people are doing this and it should be restricted.
You don't want to admit that.
And also, as I've covered now multiple times, children do not have the capacity to consent.
And so the millions of children who access porn, access that content, they did not consent to it.
Unless we're saying now that 11-year-olds can consent, which I'm sure this is where this is headed.
And so if you're on board, if you're one of the porn defenders, you're on board with the people who are working towards the normalization and legalization of pedophilia.
Because what you're saying is that 11-year-olds can consent to view porn.
And if they can consent to view porn, then it's not that far from saying they can consent to do the things that are being portrayed in the porn.
What I'm saying is, I don't think they can consent to any of it.
I don't think they can psychologically, I don't think they have the mental capacity to consent to any of it.
So, if children cannot really consent to view porn, and you put that porn on the internet, and a children's child sees it, whose fault is it?
It's not the child's.
Now, as it happens, though, actually, the Supreme Court has not ruled out regulation or even criminalization of many forms of porn.
In fact, there are obscenity laws already on the books that can be enforced, could be used to prosecute hardcore pornographers.
That's what started all this.
I mean, there are laws right now that could be used.
Also, there are steps you could take, the government could take, to heavily regulate, disincentivize, segregate pornography.
Stuff like, for example, an opt-in thing where if you want your service provider to provide porn to you, you got to call them up and say, I want to opt into the porn.
And then the porn will be relegated to like a .xxx domain rather than .com.
Things like that.
Now, and that all is constitutional.
We could do all that.
That doesn't constitute an all-out ban.
But as far as this goes, if your response to me is, well, I don't think we can do an all-out ban, but let's do this instead, I'm going to say, sure.
I mean, I'm all about incremental gains when it comes to this.
So that's better than nothing.
Let's start with that.
I still think, in principle, ultimately, our goal is what I've been talking about.
But if we want to start here, fine.
I have no qualms about that.
Let's start there, sure.
And we can do that.
The next objection.
Well, so you want to ban porn but not guns?
You're such a hypocrite!
Can't tell you how many times I've heard this.
Which is like accusing me of being a hypocrite because you catch me eating a steak after I just got through explaining that we shouldn't eat diapers.
And you say, oh, so now you think it's okay to eat things?
Look at you, you big hypocrite!
You're going around saying don't eat things and here you are eating something.
Except that I never said we shouldn't eat anything.
I singled out a particular thing and said we shouldn't eat that.
And I had very good reasons for saying it.
Likewise, I never said we shouldn't ban anything.
I just said we shouldn't ban guns.
And plenty of other things we shouldn't ban also, but guns are protected by the Bill of Rights, specifically.
Porn is not.
Guns are a tool that can be used to protect our liberty.
Porn is not.
Guns have many positive applications.
Porn does not.
A gun is a morally neutral object whose dangers or benefits are determined entirely by the person using it.
Porn, on the other hand, is morally debased filth with no redeeming quality and there is no positive application for it whatsoever.
So, these are two very different things.
And there is no contradiction at all between saying one should be banned and the other not.
Kat Kempf is a Fox News personality.
She made a version of this argument to me on Saturday.
She was, by the way, very upset with the idea of regulating or banning porn.
So she's a big, you know, she just really, really, really upset her.
And she sent a whole bunch of tweets attacking me for it.
And, um, just a, you know, another great spokesperson for conservatism here.
A great, great thoughtful thinker and everything.
She said, this was her argument.
She said, to be clear, with this logic, you're arguing that anything that isn't suitable for children should be banned from the internet.
Oh, Lord.
No.
And this is someone who gets paid to communicate ideas.
And this is how she interprets.
No, I didn't say that.
Just because I'm arguing that one unsuitable thing should be banned, doesn't mean that I think all unsuitable things should be banned.
And I'm not making the argument, I'm not saying, it's unsuitable, therefore it should be banned.
I'm being much more specific than that.
There are many stipulations I am making here.
It's not as simple as, porn is unsuitable.
That's not the word that I would use to describe it.
I mean, it is that, but it's also many other things as well.
So, documentaries about the killing field in Cambodia.
Those also are unsuitable for children.
Should they be banned from the internet?
Well, why ban porn but not educational documentaries?
Well, because there are literally dozens of ways in which porn and documentaries can be distinguished, as any reasonable person understands.
And governing is all about drawing these kinds of distinctions.
The next argument.
Oh, it's a slippery slope.
What are you worried that we might slip into?
Decency?
We could be slipping and sliding into a world where people are decent.
What exactly is the worst case scenario here?
That the anti-porn law may be used against TV networks that broadcast obscene content?
Well, okay.
Why should that be such a horrific outcome?
There are already a bunch of laws determining what TV networks can broadcast.
Is that a slippery slope?
I mean, you can't turn on ABC at 8 p.m.
on a Tuesday and watch two people naked having sex.
Is that a slippery slope?
Are you worried that we're teetering on the edge of tyranny because of that?
But, here's the thing.
Porn is a severely toxic thing that has a profound and lasting impact on children and adults, that is pervasive and readily accessible by the click of a button, and that has no positive or neutral application.
In other words, there's really nothing else like it.
I mean, for the most part, there isn't anything else in this category.
A slippery slope is when you, you know, ban one thing in a certain category, but there are a bunch of other things in that very same category that are almost identical to it.
And now it's, OK, well, now we're going to ban all that, too.
So that's a slippery slope.
But porn, I think, is kind of stands alone.
Everyone sort of knows what it is.
And I don't think anyone's been watching a porn ever.
And for a minute, been confused about, wait, is this a documentary?
Or is this a Martin Scorsese film?
No, I think when you look at porn, you know it when you see it.
To paraphrase.
Let's see, what else?
I think I've covered everything.
Banning porn would infringe on rights.
I already covered this, I think, many times.
You know, that kid CJ Pearson, big following on the right, told me that it's tyranny to stop people from posting hardcore sex videos on the internet.
Tyranny!
Tyranny!
I just cannot emphasize enough what a radically left-wing argument that is, coming now from so-called conservatives.
Tyranny?
You're telling me you'd be oppressed and tyrannized if you weren't able to take a sex video and put it on the internet?
And as for rights, you know, I would just ask again, where do you think you get this right from to make porn or watch it?
The founder's conception of right was that they're inherent to our human nature and given to us by God.
So do you think that this is inherent to our human nature?
If you weren't able to do this, would you be deprived of something that is essential to your nature as a human being?
I don't think you can make that argument.
Finally, I think... You know what the real objection is?
I've gone through all the objections people throw at me, and I think that pretty much is all of them.
Maybe there's something else you can email me if you have it, but... Finally, but I think it really boils down for most people to...
Well, I don't want porn banned because I personally enjoy it.
And I think most people... They make other arguments, but that's really what their argument is.
And... At least if you came out and just said that, it'd be honest.
And I wish more people would.
Because that's the one thing that you notice when you talk about this issue.
People get so defensive.
And so angry.
Like, it shouldn't make you angry, okay?
At the very least, if I'm talking about hardcore pornography, and, you know, me insulting or attacking hardcore porn shouldn't make you angry.
And if it does, then I think that's a really good indication that you are far too attached to this and addicted to it.
Or you have a severe compulsion to it.
Which really only proves my point even more.
It proves how insidious this stuff is and what a toxic effect it has on people and on society.
And so, ironically, most of the people who've been coming after me about this are accidentally proving my point all the way.
By reacting like Gollum when the ring is taken from him, you know, they're only showing that, you know, this...
This is why.
This is what it does to you.
All right.
So there's my argument.
And I will invite you to, if you've listened to all of this by now, I would invite you to do your best to tear it apart and send me emails.
I think it's an important conversation to have, at least.
I'm glad, at the very least, that we're having the conversation.
And as I said at the top, I think maybe we can agree that even if you don't think it's an important conversation, maybe it's a good change of pace from talking about impeachment all the time.
All right.
We'll leave it there.
Thanks everybody for watching.
Thanks for listening.
Godspeed.
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