from the not-protecting-kids-whatsoever dept
I’ve long maintained the certitude that anti-pornography campaigners aligned with the far-right and conservative Christian movements are directly or indirectly transphobic and anti-LGBTQ.
A body of evidence in my own reporting and experiences covering the rights of sex workers and the online pornography business has built out this schema of anti-LGBTQ and anti-pornography campaigners being tied at the hip in one form or another. One recent news item validates this.
As Mike Masnick summarized in a crucial Techdirt column a few days ago, the U.S. Department of Justice ordered the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to comply with GOP President Donald Trump’s Executive Order (EO) 14168 — his transphobic “gender ideology” directive blocking federal government agencies from even recognizing trans people.
NCMEC is one of the world’s leading authorities on fighting and mitigating sexual exploitation of minors on the internet through its CyberTipline program. Though imperfect, the program still serves a critical purpose for law enforcement, survivors, and their families. That purpose is to detect, track, and try to fight the proliferation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other image-based sexual abuse material on the internet — especially offending material found on social platforms such as Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter).
Considering NCMEC’s mission here, a reasonable person could have suspected that the center would be immune from the politics of a staunchly ultraconservative White House. However, it appears that even in today’s world, that is too much to ask for. As several news outlets report, EO 14168 directs all federal agencies to remove any mention of trans people and any other gender-neutral messaging. The order also makes the disbursement of federal grants contingent upon whether the benefiting groups comply with EO 14168 and other anti-DEI Trump directives.
This is how the executive order impacts NCMEC. Founded by an act of U.S. Congress with the support of President Ronald Reagan, the foundation was incorporated as a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization able to accept donations from the public. And NCMEC is supposedly independent.
However, a large chunk of NCMEC’s annual budget is revenue generated from Department of Justice (DOJ) grants and interagency funding agreements from other federal funding sources.
The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), a program office in the DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs, awarded NCMEC about $41.38 million in fiscal year 2023, with $6 million from an interagency agreement between OJJDP and the U.S. Secret Service.
According to NCMEC’s Form 990 disclosure to the IRS, the center had $65,191,787 in revenues in that same fiscal year. Of that total, DOJ grants to NCMEC were over 70 percent of all generated revenues. Add the dimension that NCMEC has the function of serving as a global clearinghouse for CSAM and online child exploitation cases, Trump’s executive order is a punch in the gut that deserves a bit of scrutiny. NCMEC being ordered by OJJDP to remove mentions of trans and gender-diverse youth in reports, promotional material, and prevention documents is counterintuitive when it comes to protecting minors – especially when the Trump administration claims that it wants to protect kids from the perversions of the world. But under what standards?
Trump’s people base their standard on protecting children from so-called “gender ideology.” The mention of “gender ideology” in plans for an ultraconservative presidency can be traced back to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led “presidential transition project” that Trump claims he knew nothing about but then turned around and appointed key architects to high-level positions.
In a previous column for Techdirt, I discuss Project 2025’s central policy document, the nearly 1000-page Mandate for Leadership: A Conservative Promise. Writing for the foreword, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts calls for the end of “transgenderism” and “gender ideology.”
He additionally calls for the prohibition of what he considers to be “pornography” and prison time for so-called “pornographers.” Roberts also links “gender ideology” and “pornography” as some sort of dark, interconnected left-wing indoctrination strategy that targets the country’s children.
Roberts wrote:
It’s worth noting that “gender ideology” is mentioned throughout the document. Other terms that are used to try and implicate our understanding of people’s most basic personal sexual identity found in the Mandate for Leadership include “transgender ideology” and “transgenderism.” Not only are Roberts’ words emblematic of some white Christian nationalist’s wet dream, but they reveal a more profound belief of people who now surround Trump. That belief is of “gender ideology,” and the otherwise First Amendment-protected right to produce porn are connected. There is absolutely no evidence that watching porn “turns” someone transgender or LGBTQ.
It’s foolish, conspiratorial rubbish. But it’s officially the policy of the federal government. I draw attention to the anti-pornography component because many of the same groups who supported Project 2025 also support efforts to restrict or outlaw legal and consensual pornography through “back door” age verification laws or to push content restrictions like bans on LGBTQ books in the public school and library systems. These are also the same groups that spread transphobic conspiracy theories and moral panics about trans people in athletics, the culture, and society.
It is also these groups that claim that platforms like Pornhub.com are supposedly hotbeds of criminal activity and exploitation. And, often, they point to NCMEC CyberTipline data as “truth” to these claims and suggest other equally as problematic right-wing organizations are much more credible and reliable than the premier child protection agency—case in point: the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE). Though NCOSE is not a signatory to Project 2025, a body of growing evidence indicates direct links to organizations part of the Heritage-led effort and how some of the same organizations are regarded as anti-LGBTQ hate organizations by the civil rights groups Southern Poverty Law Center, Human Rights Campaign, and GLAAD.
For example, on NCOSE’s board, Patrick A. Trueman serves as president emeritus. Trueman served as the president of NCOSE for years, especially before the group’s rebrand from Morality in Media in 2015. Morality in Media was a far-right Catholic anti-pornography pressure group. Trueman has also previously served in positions and as counsel for quite similar organizations, including the Family Research Council and the American Family Association. While NCOSE is essentially a byproduct of far-right anti-pornography campaigning, the origins of the group are still deeply connected to several hate groups that are a part of Project 2025 and have advocated against so-called “gender ideology” tropes under the guise of protecting minors from perverts.
In actuality, these groups have done very little to protect youth – especially NCOSE. If you draw your attention to NCMEC CyberTipline reporting data for the year 2023, the National Center for Sexual Exploitation only reported three potential cases of online child sexual exploitation – three out of a total of 35,944,826 reports. Despite framing Pornhub and similar platforms as the root issue of the problem, anti-porn groups often neglect to mention how these porn sites voluntarily report to CyberTipline. To wit, Pornhub’s parent company Aylo reported 2,597 reports across all of its platforms. Fenix International Limited, the parent company of OnlyFans, filed 347 reports.
Pornhub and OnlyFans additionally participate in NCMEC’s Take It Down program alongside the adult platforms Clips4Sale, RedGIFs, and popular social media platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, Threads, Facebook, Instagram, and Yubo. Take It Down was developed as a free, anonymous service for youth to use NCMEC’s resources to take down unwanted nude images found online.
It is also important to note that groups like the Heritage Foundation, Family Research Council, and the American Family Association have never reported potential CSAM to NCMEC’s tipline.
These groups and scores of others, not all linked to Project 2025 but still with similar agendas, use their platforms to advocate against equal rights for transgender people, especially youth. I point to examples of this in another column I did for Techdirt. I wrote about amicus briefs filed in the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in his defense of the controversial porn age verification law House Bill (HB) 1181. Adult industry stakeholders sued Paxton to block HB 1181, arguing that it violates adult platforms’ and users’ First Amendment rights. Oral arguments in the case were heard on Jan. 15, 2025. As customary with high-profile legal cases, amicus briefs are filed to support the petitioners and the respondents in the dispute.
Many of the groups supporting Paxton support the idea of restricting or banning pornography despite its First Amendment protections. These groups have also endorsed transphobic and anti-LGBTQ policy positions that President Trump is now implementing. One group that filed in support of Paxton is the “child’s rights” group called Them Before Us. Founded by the far-right journalist Katy Faust, this group is also on the cutting edge of transphobia and pseudoscientific fearmongering about IVF and surrogacy. Faust’s group says they “[protect] every child’s right to their mother and father,” and they do so by repeating bigoted tropes about transgender people.
Considering these additional details, it seems these organizations are getting what they want: carte blanche to discriminate against human beings. And it comes at the expense of helping fight child exploitation on the internet by staking critical funding on far-right ideological bullshit.
Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.
from the what-happened-to-states'-rights? dept
I’m quite certain that by now, a few weeks into the second Trump term, many or most of our readers are already tired of the coverage over the administration’s actions. And if that’s you, your quarrel is not with us. It’s with the administration and its plainly stated strategy of “flooding the zone with shit” in an attempt to overwhelm the people, the press, and every other mechanism for checks and balances on an administration that is so obviously and completely out of control so as to constitute a constitutional emergency. That isn’t some partisan stance, it should be noted. Members on both sides of the aisle are coming to this realization. And it all stems from a presidential administration that either genuinely believes that the office is inherently dictatorial and can fashion law with the stroke of a pen or, by sheer force of will and an absurdly large signature, can make it so thanks to a compliant Congress incapable of asserting its own constitutional power.
But whether enough of the country wants to play make believe that it’s a practical reality, the documented reality in American governance is that federal law is written by Congress, that those laws are subject to the Constitution, and that any authority for laws not enumerated to Congress by that Constitution redounds back to the states. And that basic methodology for governance is going to be tested in a very real way now that the Trump administration has sued both Illinois and the city of Chicago over its so-called “sanctuary laws.”
Alright, the lawsuit is embedded below, but there’s a lot going on in it. Let’s start with the Supremacy Clause.
This is pretty basic stuff. Put simply, federal law generally supersedes state or municipal law. But, of course, it’s not that simple. This UNC School of Government article does a really nice job of explaining the nuance. A state or local law is in violation of the Supremacy Clause if it does any of three things:
- Attempts to take over a legal duty that is explicitly enumerated to the federal government by the Constitution.
- Encroaches in an area of federal law that Congress explicitly intended the states or municipalities to take no action therein
- Is written in such a way so as to make it impossible to comply with both the federal and local laws at once or if the local law acts as an obstacle to the “full purpose and objectives of Congress.”
This lawsuit for absolute certainty fails at least two and a half of those tests. These laws in Illinois are not about taking any action at all. In fact, they seek only to limit action. Those action limitations can be generally put into two buckets: the collection of any information about immigration status by state and local law enforcement, or the participation in any immigration enforcement by state and local law enforcement, up to and including sharing information about suspects or transferring custody in some situations by local LEOs. That these laws are all about limiting action takes bullets 1 and 2 above completely out of the equation.
The first half of the 3rd bullet is out as well. There is nothing contradictory about any congressional immigration law and these Illinois laws. Instead, the lawsuit focuses on the last bit of that bullet, claiming that these local laws are an obstacle to what Congress was attempting to achieve through federal legislation.
There are a couple of very remarkable things about that claim. For starters, the lawsuit barely lists any actual federal laws. That would seem to be kind of an important thing to note in your lawsuit about the Supremacy Clause. The Lakan Riley Act is in there, sure, but that was just signed into law. Beyond that and a few other oblique references, the suit makes a great deal to do about the executive orders Trump signed shortly after entering into office. Executive orders are not laws, however, and certainly not congressional laws. They carry the force of law if, and only if, they direct the actions of the Executive Branch as to the enforcement of some other congressional law. The administration may well be able to convince a federal court, or SCOTUS, that non-compliance with an EO is a violation of the Supremacy Clause, but I both think they’d be wrong on that and that is by no means a certainty.
And, also remarkably, the parent Illinois law that is at the heart of all of this was signed into law in 2017 by Bruce Rauner. This same Trump administration was in office in 2017, yet no lawsuit was filed at that time. What changed? Rauner is — checks notes — a Republican. Sure, current Governor Pritzker is very much a Democrat, but the laws he passed updating Rauner’s laws were on the margins.
And the ultimate point is what, exactly? Is the idea behind this lawsuit that the courts force state and local law enforcement to take an active role in federal immigration enforcement? We’re saying that the federal government can, in ways big or small, commandeer the personnel of state and municipal LEOs? Not require them to stand aside, mind you, as that’s what the law currently instructs them to do. But to actually compel action from a non-federal actor, all in the absence of a criminal warrant?
I can’t claim to know what the framers of our country had in mind in every last instance, but I’m quite confident that they didn’t intend that.