Summary

Project 2025, a manifesto supported by the conservative Heritage Foundation, calls for a ban on pornography, labeling its purveyors as criminals and advocating for strict penalties, including jail time for producers and registered sex offender status for educators distributing it.

The manifesto argues that porn lacks First Amendment protection, framing it as harmful and exploitative.

With a right-leaning Supreme Court, proponents aim to overturn existing protections established in Miller v. California, potentially impacting mainstream media.

Donald Trump has pledged to bring Project 2025 contributors onto his team.

  • kat_angstrom@lemmy.world
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    14 days ago

    Hilarious. As if this could ever actually be instituted nationwide. Regulations on sale and access maybe, but moral crusades like this are perpetually doomed to failure, much like the War on Drugs.

    Doesn’t mean they won’t try, won’t posture, won’t grandstand about it, but to actually succeed in this goal when over 50% of the populace isn’t going to be behind it? I guess we’ll just have to watch them try.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      14 days ago

      It’s not to try and ban porn

      It’s a way to snoop on all Internet traffic.

      Like cops “smelling weed” anytime they want to hassle someone. If they don’t like a person, they’ll spy on their Internet usage, obviously find some kind of porn, and then make a public spectacle out of to distract from what they’re mad at that person for.

      They don’t care about the crime, they want an excuse to investigate people they don’t like.

      Say something mean on twitter, and they’ll search your IP till they find something they can call porn.

      • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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        14 days ago

        They’ll say they’re gonna ban it and when there’s uproar they’ll say to “protect the kids” you need a digital ID to access porn. Then they’ll expand it to everything, ban VPN’s, encryption and there will be no more privacy. Big brother is watching, and if he deems you too woke, for whatever arbitrary reason, you’re off to the gulag.

    • fadingembers@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      14 days ago

      They don’t care about total enforcement. They’ll just use it against their enemies and people they want to take down while protecting their own. Rules for thee etc

      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        14 days ago

        This is what people don’t seem to grasp about fascism… It doesn’t matter. None of the rules or social mores that you’ve known since you were born will matter anymore.

        People need to read some history books, this has happened before. We aren’t special, it is already happening here.

    • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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      14 days ago

      Strange comparison. The war on drugs wrecked so many lives, and hasn’t really ended, just cooled off a little. I don’t see that as a cause for optimism.

      • kat_angstrom@lemmy.world
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        14 days ago

        It’s meant as a comparison in terms of Moral Crusades via Prohibition tactics. I have a feeling that a “ban” on pornography will likely end the same way, with hyperbolic responses and lives disrupted to no positive resolutions. But it really seems untenable as a concept, that genie is so far out of the bottle that there is no bottle anymore; only the whole entire internet

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      14 days ago

      No, but they can go after the owners and operators of major porn sites and have them shut down (and possibly executing them). Then the subsequent chilling effect that will occur, making sure nobody dares try to take their place.

      You could probably use a VPN and find stuff, but say goodbye to pornhub, youporn, xvideos, etc. And in certain states they will probably make accessing it illegal (or simply using a VPN at all. And no, it will not matter that they’re legitimately needed for all sorts of legal shit, it’ll be used at the government’s discretion (which means singling out people who are using it to access porn. Until it isn’t, and they use it for whatever they want because they are the law).

      This is what fascism is. People really don’t seem to grasp this. We need to stop viewing he world from this current paradigm, because come January 20, this nation will become unrecognizable.

    • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works
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      14 days ago

      The war on drugs only failed if you truly believe its goal was getting rid of drugs.

      To quote John Erlichman, one of its architects:

      “The Nixon Campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

      By the strandards of what it was created to do, the war on drugs was fantastically successful.

      The war on porn will be successful in exactly the same way, because Republicans have already spent decades redefining all LGBTQ content as “pornographic”. This is will be a tool for disrupting queer and trans communities, for erasing queer and trans resources and tearing down queer and trans rights activists. Stopping porn isn’t the point, and it never was.