As the anti-porn troops are quick to point out, then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016 signed a pledge to “give serious consideration to appointing a presidential commission to examine the harmful public health impact of internet pornography on youth, families and the American culture.”
Social cons may be moral scolds, but they are not above a little pragmatism in using a thrice-married consorter with adult actresses to achieve their policy ends. “Whatever else might be said about it,” the Dead Consensus manifesto concludes, “the Trump phenomenon has opened up space in which to pose these questions anew.”
The intellectual tendency toward leaning hungrily into the wind of power has been with us for all recorded history. So has, as any visitor to Pompei can tell you, the human desire to view sexual imagery. Trump-era manifesto artists, responding as they are to a democratic upheaval, are seeking to use anti-democratic means to criminalize expression enjoyed by tens of millions. A task that herculean will require much more than strongly worded letters.
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