The Free Press
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard opening arguments in a case that may well determine the future of pornography in the United States. The Free Speech Coalition, which Free Press reporter River Page describes as “a sort of NRA for pornographers,” has sued the Texas attorney general over the state’s age verification law, which requires sites with explicit content to ensure users are over 18. River argues that though the rationale behind such laws makes sense, they are pointless. You can’t verify someone’s age on the internet without invading their privacy to an extent that is unacceptable to most Americans. All in all, as the headline to River’s piece has it: “Porn Is Inevitable.”
The piece sparked much debate among our readers, so we’re publishing not one but two responses. The first is from new father Harrison Runnels, from Omaha, Nebraska:
We make trade-offs between safety and privacy all the time. In order to buy alcohol, you have to take a picture of yourself, submit personal details to the government, and put it on a card that you carry with you every day. We also require this for gambling (in person and online), opening a bank account, going to strip clubs, smoking, driving, going to war, investing in the stock market, and signing contracts.
Meanwhile, to gain entry into the adult sexual world, all you have to do is tap a checkbox saying “I’m over 18.” Imagine if all a 12-year-old had to do to get booze is walk into a liquor store and say he’s 24. We’ve generally accepted that children shouldn’t be allowed in strip clubs and we have created the infrastructure and incentives to make that difficult for them. Why do we treat the internet differently?
As a new father, I don’t want my son to grow up in a world where giving him access to the internet means potentially exposing him to hardcore pornography and sexual interactions with strangers. The question these laws are trying to answer is: How can we fix that? They may miss the mark, but I appreciate that they are trying. Does it matter that age verification laws will not be 100 percent effective? Teenagers buy fake IDs, but we still have underage drinking laws. If the regulation isn’t working, we shouldn’t just give up. Our kids deserve better than that.
Here, high school teacher Micah Weiss, from New Hampshire, responds to River’s conclusion that “the institution most capable of stopping children from viewing pornography is the family: If you don’t want your kid watching porn, don’t give them unlimited access to the internet”:
River Page makes some compelling arguments about how difficult it would be to eliminate access to porn in the internet age. But it sets up the worst kind of false choice, essentially suggesting we do nothing but be better parents. After almost two decades teaching in various high schools, I wholeheartedly agree that we really need parents to be more attentive to their children’s behaviors. But as a parent of three children, I have to say: We need help.
Pornography’s ubiquity has toxified sex just at a time when our society was eroding the stigma of sexual desire—and it doesn’t take a study to understand the effects this is having on the young. As a teacher, I’ve heard boys express appetites for extreme sex acts. I’ve seen girls heavily influenced by the porn-informed trend of looking, and acting, as childlike and sexually available as possible.
My wife and I made the choice to homeschool, which entailed huge sacrifices. We did so in part to forestall our kids’ exposure to toxic influences, including pornography. But not everyone is willing or able to make the choices we made. We need collective action. Our children are drowning in a river of content, and it’s more than any parent can fight alone.
I believe in free expression—the right of porn to exist as protected speech. But the right of children to anonymously access the internet appears nowhere in the Constitution. If regulating children’s access to pornography causes inconvenience to lawfully acting adults, I really don’t care—this isn’t the right to vote we’re haggling over.
One final point: Page references, as proof of the inevitability of pornography, the 40,000-year-old ivory statue known as the Venus of Hohle Fels. This extraordinary piece of art, possibly the oldest of its kind, is termed “erotic” by art critics and archeologists, not “pornographic.” This may seem like an academic distinction. However, we should recognize the difference between a carefully crafted prayer object dedicated to the erotic aspects of fertility and a three-minute borderline snuff film—likely featuring impoverished, exploited young women—designed to help lonely men rub one out before bed.
Earlier this month, after the news that Justin Trudeau would be stepping down as Canada’s prime minister, Bari Weiss wrote a sweeping assessment of his failures—on, among other things, the economy, immigration, and free speech. “Under the guise of combating ‘disinformation,’ ” Bari wrote, “Trudeau’s government has cracked down on what news Canadians are allowed to consume.” She was referring to the Online News Act, which forces social media companies to pay media companies to link to their online content.
Here, Jeremy A. Cook, from Harris, Saskatchewan, defends the legislation:
The Free Press proffers a clear-eyed view of Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and his many blunders. However, one aspect of his legacy needs salvaging. I do not believe the Online News Act is government censorship. The real villain here is Big Tech.
Many argue that social media caused the collapse of legacy media in the 2010s. People sharing news articles earns Meta a lot of money, even as newspapers struggle to remain profitable. The Online News Act forces social media companies to pay revenue to any legitimate Canadian news organizations, not only the legacy press.
Journalism and the paying of journalists are important, as The Free Press reminds me daily by email. Yet Facebook is unwilling. Like a greasy concert organizer tricking bands into playing at his event for free, Facebook insists that news organizations be “paid in promotion.” And so, instead of following the directives of our democratic government, Meta has chosen to prevent Canadians seeing news on its platform.
It is not Canada’s fault that I cannot see Rupa Subramanya’s articles on Facebook. It is Meta’s decision. This is not a censorious law and a daring company’s principled stand against it. It is Zuck being cheap.
Why is The Free Press siding with Big Tech over Canada’s democratically elected government? The misdeeds of these companies are regularly decried in these digital pages. And the idea behind this online act—supporting journalism—is a good one. Bari Weiss writes that Trudeau’s problem is “bad ideas, strongly held.” In the case of this bill, I think it is more accurate to label it a noble idea, badly executed.
One of the biggest shocks of the 2024 election involved the gains Donald Trump made among racial minorities, traditionally seen as reliable Democrat voters. So it was ironic, wrote Ritchie Torres in our pages, that Trump was inaugurated on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Torres, the U.S. representative for New York’s “heavily African American and Latino” Fifteenth District, argued that Trump created “the kind of multiracial working-class coalition that Democrats like me dream of building.” Meanwhile, the left was stuck in its ivory towers.
Here, friend of The Free Press Eli Steele argues that this problem is not a new one:
In his recent article, “The Rising Democratic Coalition Fell. Now What?,” Representative Ritchie Torres writes that the “original sin of the new left is that it speaks for people of color without actually speaking to them—and listening.” This valid insight misses the truer and larger mark. Democrats have not only failed black Americans in the last decade, by allowing identity politics to run rampant; they have been failing black Americans for decades, by encouraging minorities to believe they can’t succeed without preferential treatment.
After the end of segregation, many Democrats wrestled with the daunting question of how to lift, and integrate, a profoundly oppressed people into American society. They deserve credit for this. However, their efforts to develop this population into productive citizens through the American principles of hard work, responsibility, and accountability were largely undermined by those who believed minorities should be exempt from meritocracy.
This approach reached its apotheosis, perhaps, with the celebration of Ebonics, now known as African American Vernacular English. Consider the first line of this 1996 news report from the Los Angeles Times: “Saying it has failed to adequately educate African American youngsters, the Oakland Unified School District has declared black English a second language.”
It was policies like this that lowered standards for black pupils in many public schools, to the point where my father now says he believes he received a better education at his segregated school in Chicago in the 1950s than he would have in, say, the ’90s. He and I both believe that, in America, everyone should be given the opportunity to play on an even field.
But in the latter half of the last century, Democrats’ policies—from education to the War on Poverty—left many blacks believing they can’t make it without allowances being made. We are still dealing with the consequences today. While Torres understands that identity politics has not served black people well, he vastly underestimates the depth of the damage the Democrats did. Rather than reckoning with this, the party evades responsibility by pointing fingers at racist Republicans and talking about white supremacy. But it will never make true and meaningful progress until it confronts its long history of racial failures, and begins to see all Americans as the individuals they are.
Donald Trump, just sworn in as the 47th president, was reelected to be a wrecking ball to the Beltway elites. And while this populist moment feels unprecedented, Eli Lake, host of our new show Breaking History, says it’s not—the rebuke of the ruling class is encoded in our nation’s DNA. Listen to the first episode below or wherever you get your podcasts.