Month: April 2022

The New Campaign for a Sex-Free Internet


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For more than a decade, both amateurs and professionals shared their sometimes sweet, sometimes weird, and often graphic sexual activity on Pornhub. Launched in 2007 not long after YouTube and with a similar free-for-all spirit, the site represented a new wave of “adult entertainment” in which anyone with an internet connection could partake and anyone with a digital camera could become a star.

Dubbed “tube sites,” Pornhub and its various peers began to dominate web traffic generally and porn consumption specifically. These sites trod on porn’s established business model, but for savvy sex workers the tube site network could provide a way to break into the business or reach audiences directly, without the porn industry’s usual middlemen. To monetize one’s presence in the early days took some creativity, but tube sites would eventually offer content partnerships that allowed people to get paid directly for their videos. Their competitors, such as cam sites and clip stores, made the process of charging money and getting paid even smoother.

The result? For the first time, people with a truly diverse array of body types, looks, races, ethnicities, sexualities, gender identities, and kinks had direct access to the tools of porn production and distribution. In the past, porn had catered to a much more narrow range of tastes, with predictable results. Now audiences could access all sorts of content that defied conventional notions of who and what was deserving of lust. On sites like Pornhub and the microblogging platform Tumblr, outside-the-mainstream content thrived.

And then, one day, it was gone.

In December 2020, without warning, Pornhub removed all videos posted by unverified users—a massive cache of content encompassing anything not posted by formal content partners or members of the platform’s official model program. More than 10 million videos were suspended, and unverified users were banned from uploading or downloading new videos.

It was more than a disruption to the site. The unannounced disappearing of so many videos was “a huge cultural loss,” says Ashley, a transgender sex worker and civil rights activist with a robust presence on social media and in offline organizing. (At Ashley’s request, we’re identifying her by first name only.) Ashley volunteers with the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) Behind Bars, a group dedicated to helping incarcerated sex workers. She recently helped spearhead a campaign protesting financial discrimination against sex workers and LGBTQ content creators. Unverified videos, Ashley says, are “inclusive, just by definition, of all the queer content that people felt unsafe with being directly affiliated with.”

The Pornhub purge came about two years after Tumblr’s ban on any content depicting sex acts, and preceded a similar announcement in summer 2021 from OnlyFans, a subscription content site popularized by sex workers. OnlyFans would later reverse this edict, but the fate of adult content on the site remains uncertain.

Then, in September 2021, the first user-uploaded porn site—Xtube, founded in 2006 and now owned by the same parent company as Pornhub—shut down entirely.

Demand for online porn hasn’t weakened, at least not according to web traffic numbers. Nor do there seem to be fewer people willing to create and post it; it’s not uncommon to hear sex workers complain about the glut of adult content creators these days.

Nonetheless, it’s a financially precarious, and perhaps even dangerous, time to be in the business of online porn. And one of the biggest reasons why is that a constellation of activist groups, rooted in deeply conservative opposition to virtually any depiction of sexuality in the public sphere, have put considerable pressure on the middlemen who keep online porn in business. In some cases, that pressure has led to the creation of onerous new laws; in others, it has been aided by support from powerful figures in business and government. These groups have repeatedly sought to conflate the existence of consensual commercial sex and porn production with the prospect of forced sexual exploitation, often with lurid statistics about exploited minors that don’t stand up to scrutiny.

Although these groups say their aim is merely to rid the web of abuse, it’s clear that their true goal is to eliminate the vast majority of adult sexual content from the web through a combination of legal pressure tactics, lobbying for new laws, and political intimidation. It’s a campaign for a sex-free web. Rather than help vulnerable women, these efforts threaten to make life worse for the very people they claim to want to help—while simultaneously stifling internet expression more broadly.

From ‘Morality’ to ‘Exploitation’

Few organizations have done as much to try to squelch online porn as the group that for most of its life was known as Morality in Media. The group was founded in 1962 to fight countercultural influences, especially those with sexually explicit material. In 1969, for example, it went after underground newspapers for “obscenities” and “push[ing] drug usage as the ‘in’ thing.” In 1971, its target was “titillating ads in the U.S. mails,” along with “smut in media”—including “nudie, homosexual, sado-masochistic and teen-age sex books”—that might be “inciting our nation’s youth to violence, perversion, promiscuity, drug experimentation, hatred and tastelessness.”

By the early ’80s, the group was bemoaning adult bookstores, soap operas, and MTV. “Really and truly, soap operas are destroying the family’s moral base,” its president said in 1984. In the ’90s, it railed against daytime talk shows and sitcoms depicting sex outside marriage. The specific nature of the threat was always shifting, but the core crusade was always about mass media portrayals of sexual activity that didn’t align with traditional values.

In 2015, the group rebranded as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE). Since then, the internet and tech companies have become its primary targets. Search engines, social media, online classified ads, digital marketplaces, and streaming video services have all found themselves under fire, along with online pornography platforms like Pornhub and OnlyFans.

Today, the group tends to trade the language of “decency” and morality for feminist-tinged talk of consent, objectification, violence against women, and sex trafficking. Pornhub “normalizes themes of racism, incest, and violence against women,” NCOSE said in a 2019 press release. HBO profits “from sexual objectification, exploitation, and violence,” it declared in 2016. NCOSE describes its work broadly as “exposing the links between all forms of sexual exploitation such as child sex abuse, prostitution, sex trafficking, and the public health harms of pornography.”

Underneath it all, though, NCOSE is still the same old musty conservative values group aimed at eradicating sexuality in the public sphere. It cloaks that under a mantle of saving the children, and it uses intimidation and legal pressure to get what it wants.

In recent years, the group’s annual “dirty dozen” list has condemned the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue for “sending a message that women’s bodies are for public consumption,” Cosmopolitan magazine for “hypersexualized cover models,” Seattle coffee stands for having scantily clad baristas, Amazon Prime Video for showing “simulated sex scenes,” and Netflix for featuring “gratuitous amounts of nudity.”

“When Netflix, a highly influential platform with over 200 million users across the globe, hosts sexually explicit content like ‘Cuties,’ ‘Big Mouth,’ and ‘Sex Education,’ it deserves to be called out for profiting from sexually exploitative content,” says NCOSE CEO Dawn Hawkins. “Sexual exploitation is not entertainment.”

NCOSE is one of a handful of influential groups intent on recasting a wide range of sexual content and activities as “exploitation.” It’s joined by groups such as Exodus Cry, which was born out of an evangelical Christian church in Kansas City and bills itself as foe of “commercial sexual exploitation”; the Justice Defense Fund, a lobbying and litigation group founded by the anti-porn activist Laila Mickelwait; and Demand Abolition, an anti–sex work group founded by the oil heiress and Clinton-era ambassador Swanee Hunt.

Though they speak the language of feminism, these groups are steeped in the spirit of conservative purity culture—an evangelical ethos popularized in the 1980s and ’90s. Purity culture hinges on abstinence rituals like virginity pledges, chastity rings, and father-daughter “purity balls.” It’s predicated on the notion that sexual activity should be relegated to monogamous and heterosexual married couples, and it preaches strict gender roles, female modesty, and total abstinence from premarital sex. It often rests on the idea that promiscuity not only destroys a woman’s value as a partner but her emotional stability and self-worth.

Some prominent anti-porn activists spring directly from this world. Exodus Cry founder Benjamin Nolot has distanced himself and his organization from the group’s evangelical roots, but he became known for giving talks like “contending for purity in a pornified world,” in which he defines sexual immorality as “all sexual activity outside of the marriage covenant between one man and one woman.” Others come from a radical feminist background that eschews gender norms and embraces queerness yet sounds strangely like its religious right counterpart when it comes to sex work. In both frameworks, women who participate in porn are ruined. Men who watch porn are damaged. Porn “kills love” and threatens the well-being of American women and families.

A shared goal of these groups is to remake the internet as a sex-free zone by casting a vast swath of nontraditional sexual activity as “sexual exploitation” or “human trafficking,” especially if it involves the transfer of money, even indirectly. “Any content that turns people into public sexual commodities has no place on the Internet or in society,” Hawkins says.

This strategy has had remarkable success, earning an audience and acclaim among reporters, politicians, and prominent feminists unlikely to be so kind to a band of moralistic Bible-thumpers denouncing promiscuity and calling sex outside marriage a sin. The purity culture ethos of shame, abstinence, and fallen women still permeates these groups’ activism. But it’s been repackaged as a bid to protect women and kids from trauma and sexual harm rather than to uphold the sanctity of marriage and biblical womanhood.

A central plank of this strategy is litigation.

In January 2021, NCOSE helped bring a lawsuit accusing Twitter of sex trafficking. The basis for this claim is that the social media site temporarily hosted a link to a video, hosted on a separate site, featuring two teenagers engaged in sex acts. The minors had taken the video themselves and shared it with a third party via Snapchat. In August, a judge ruled against Twitter’s motion to dismiss the case.

In February 2021, NCOSE helped bring a lawsuit against MindGeek, the parent company behind a number of porn sites, including Pornhub. In the suit, which is also ongoing, two Jane Does accuse Pornhub of hosting videos without their consent. And in March, NCOSE helped bring a lawsuit against WebGroup Czech Republic, the company behind one of the world’s most visited porn platforms, XVideos.

In all of these cases, an underlying kernel of harm is alleged, such as a teen being blackmailed into sending a stranger sex videos or women being duped into appearing in online porn. But rather than target the perpetrators of that harm directly, the NCOSE strategy is to go after platforms that—however briefly or unknowingly—hosted evidence of it taking place.

None of these suits would have a chance at success without the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2018 (FOSTA), a law that NCOSE backed. In addition to making it a federal crime to host content that facilitates prostitution, FOSTA amended the federal statute known as Section 230—which says that individuals and intermediaries online aren’t always legally liable for content, interactions, and transactions by clients or users—to make it easier for private citizens and state attorneys general to sue digital intermediaries.

Digital intermediaries include everything from Facebook and Twitter to Pornhub and XVideos to search engines, Substack, cloud hosting companies, dating apps, video chat platforms, web payment processors such as PayPal and Stripe, and any other website or app that serves as a conduit for content, communication, or trade.

The goal of both FOSTA and the NCOSE lawsuits is to change the Section 230 paradigm when it comes to sex. The strategy involves first recasting sex trafficking. Legally, this is prostitution that involves minors and/or force, fraud, or coercion; in the popular imagination, it necessarily involves violence, abduction, and rape. The crusaders want to make it mean essentially any activity that involves sex work, even between consenting adults, or any sexual activity involving minors, even if there is no commercialization and even if intermediaries facilitating its exposure have no reasonable expectation of knowing about it.

At its core is the idea that sex work can never just be work; it’s always exploitation. Hawkins says as much: “That sex buyers must pay to sexually access the bodies of others demonstrates that the sex in prostitution is unwanted by those being paid. Payment, whether in cash or by other things of value, is the leverage used to abrogate the lack of authentic sexual desire of those in the sex trade.”

Additionally, any third party profiting from sex—no matter how indirect or inconsequential—counts as exploitation. That’s the crux of the Twitter lawsuit: NCOSE’s argument is that because Twitter runs ads alongside all content, it profited from the tweet sharing footage of teens engaged in sex acts, and therefore it violated federal law against child sex trafficking.

Under this logic, it’s incredibly risky—reputationally, legally, and financially—for online intermediaries to allow any sort of sexualized business or content. No company wants a reputation for supporting exploitation, sex trafficking, and child abuse. And hosting sex-business transactions risks FOSTA-enabled lawsuits and abandonment by credit card companies and banks.

In other words, these groups have gone after online sex work and pornography by making it difficult, if not impossible, for sexually oriented businesses to process payments and collect money for services rendered—if they can create accounts at all. These tactics threaten the entire porn industry and the livelihoods of thousands of sex workers. Online sex work is, after all, work: If you can’t collect a paycheck or bill your clients, you can’t do your job.

Creating Chokepoints

To that end, activists have been pressuring financial institutions—credit card companies, banks, etc.—not to do business with sex workers, sexually oriented businesses, or any intermediary that won’t discriminate against these groups.

This method was tested with the classified advertising platform Backpage. In 2015, activists used the press and public relations campaigns to pressure credit card companies to stop processing Backpage transactions.

But it wasn’t simply an activist pressure campaign: Cook County, Illinois, Sheriff Tom Dart, who has staked out one of the nation’s most aggressive stances against sex work, threatened action against these companies if they didn’t stop. After Dart’s threats, Mastercard and Visa both quickly ditched Backpage. A federal judge would later rule Dart’s actions unconstitutional, because they violated the First Amendment, but the damage was done.

The Backpage situation proved that popular pressure and the mere threat of sex trafficking lawsuits could work as well as, if not better than, government mandates. It’s a playbook activists are now repeating with companies like Pornhub and OnlyFans.

Private campaigns to change business practices are a vital freedom. And private businesses can “censor” or choose not to associate with whomever they want. But that doesn’t mean these actions are always a social good, nor beyond criticism. More importantly, porn’s enemies aren’t simply speaking out privately. They are also calling for, and in some cases successfully generating, legal and political sanctions.

It’s true that NCOSE is not the Department of Justice (DOJ). An Exodus Cry petition isn’t an executive order. But neither are these groups simply calling on people to boycott Pornnub or delete their Twitter accounts. They’re calling on the DOJ and members of Congress to act against them, and they’re filing lawsuits that threaten serious court-ordered consequences for these companies. These demands for state action have proven influential.

Take FOSTA. NCOSE backed the law and has taken credit for its passage. The group has alternated between appeals to women’s liberation (calling it a “test of the strength of our national resolve to deliver on the promise of #MeToo”) and appeals to saving the children (“today, ordering a child or adult online for sex is as easy as ordering a pizza”). NCOSE is now pushing another law to weaken Section 230 protections, called the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) Act, which eliminates Section 230 protections for material involving minors.

And sometimes they are clearly backed by state actors with real power, as Sheriff Dart’s campaign against Backpage shows. Dart and Demand Abolition, notably, used to partner up for a series of prostitution stings called the “National Johns Suppression Initiative.”

The threat to tech companies now is legal trouble not for failing to uphold current criminal justice norms but for failing to proactively define sex trafficking, exploitation, and obscenity as broadly as these groups would like them to be defined—and as these groups may eventually succeed at convincing lawmakers and courts to define them.

“What it comes down to really,” tweeted Gustavo Turner, an editor at the adult industry publication XBIZ, “is that there’s a well-funded, well-organized group of people working 24/7 to align the state’s definition of ‘crime’ with their own notion of ‘sin.'”

After FOSTA passed with the promise of taking down online classified ad venues, activists started focusing on other user-generated content platforms. Mickelwait’s “TraffickingHub” campaign took aim specifically at Pornhub. And as with the crusades against classified ads, former New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof amplified this crusade. (Kristof left to run for governor of Oregon, but was ruled ineligible because of the state’s residency requirements.)

In a highly sensationalistic December 2020 column, Kristof accused Pornhub of being complicit in rape and child abuse. To make this argument, Kristof relied heavily on Pornhub keyword searches and faulty assumptions. Ambiguous words and phrases like teens and young are taken to mean minors, even though these words often refer to young adults or are used to tag role-playing videos featuring adults who are actually much older. Scenes featuring “nonconsensual” encounters—another popular role-playing category—are likewise taken as indications of literal rape.

Kristof fleshes out these keyword insinuations with anecdotes from young women like Serena K. Fleites, who as a young teen took naked videos of herself, shared them with a boy, and wound up on Pornhub. She’s now at the center of a class-action lawsuit against Pornhub’s parent company, MindGeek. Fleites’ is one of several tales Kristof relays in which videos were removed by Pornhub when notified, only to be reposted on Pornhub or other websites. Their stories showcase the perils of modern digital adolescence, when intimate images shared with other teens or exploitative adults can wind up living forever and recirculating endlessly online. What they don’t suggest is a problem unique to Pornhub, since the videos often circulated around the internet. Nor do they reveal a company indifferent to underage or nonconsensual pornography.

“Any assertion that we allow CSAM”—that stands for child sexual abuse material, the new officialese term for sexualized content featuring anyone under age 18—”is irresponsible and flagrantly untrue,” protested Pornhub in a statement. It went on to point out that an Internet Watch Foundation analysis has found only “118 incidents of CSAM on Pornhub in a three year period.” This is out of millions of videos—around 13.5 million before the purge, according to Vice.

Data from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children shows MindGeek reported 13,229 instances of potential underage content to the group’s tipline in 2020—far more than many tech companies, but far less than such mainstream platforms as Google (which submitted 546,704), Imgur (31,571), Facebook (20,307,216), Microsoft (96,776), Snapchat (144,095), TikTok (22,692), and Twitter (65,062).

None of those numbers offer definitive proof of anything, since they’re a function of how much a service is used and by how many people as well as the company’s proactiveness and internal definitions. But to the extent that online exploitation is a problem, they suggest that porn sites aren’t the chief vectors. Indeed, Kristof’s op-ed even admitted that these mainstream sites may be trafficking in far higher volumes of illegal imagery. Nonetheless, he closed his column by calling on credit card companies to stop doing business with Pornhub.

Kristof’s cry was echoed by an influential hedge fund manager, Bill Ackman, who reportedly convinced Mastercard’s then-CEO Ajay Banga to comply. (Ackman’s crusade has since expanded; he has recently accused Google, Bing, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Twitter of “facilitat[ing] and profit[ing] from the distribution of child rape porn” because they allow links to or search results from porn sites.) Before long, Mastercard, Visa, and Discover suspended business with Pornhub and its parent company, MindGeek. (Visa later resumed business with some MindGeek properties.)

Last summer, Visa and Colbeck Capital were added to a lawsuit filed against MindGeek. “It is believed to be the first Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) case that attempts to hold financial institutions accountable for the role they may play in sexual exploitation by processing payments,” the Financial Post reported. If successful, it could pave the way for taking credit card companies to court any time they unwittingly aid in harm.

Many cheer these developments when they affect a business or cause they don’t like. But once the floodgates open, it creates new avenues for legal pressure against any industry, company, or individual who can plausibly be portrayed as dangerous, including political causes and movements.

It’s part of a trend of using “banks as a proxy for state censorship,” Porn Panic! author Jerry Barnett suggested in a September Quillette article. And this trend coincides with other disturbing developments, including “increasingly muscular attempts by democratic governments to censor the internet…the successful linkage of a largely baseless ‘sex trafficking’ narrative with sex work and pornography; and a zero tolerance approach to content platforms that holds them responsible for even a single illegal item of content.”

“Pushing for more aggressive content moderation, especially from infrastructure-like entities like payment processors, web hosts, [content delivery networks], etc, is a terrible idea that will always backfire against marginalized people and social movements,” tweeted Evan Greer, director of the digital rights group Fight for the Future. And “that ship has maybe sailed. There is practically an entire industry now around pushing narratives like ‘Why is XYZ web service hosting ABC terrible thing? This is an outrage!’ (and well-intentioned but misguided journalists happy to uncritically amplify).”

Mastercard Speeds the Erasure

Not long after Kristof’s article came out, Pornhub announced new policies, including the takedown of millions of videos posted by unverified users. Some treated this as a win against exploitation, while others accused Pornhub of simply trying to erase evidence of its wrongdoing. But Pornhub users and creators may see it differently.

Unverified content doesn’t translate to illegal or harmful content. Anyone posting in the early days, anyone wishing to remain anonymous, amateurs with no wish to monetize their videos—all were unverified.

“Unverified on Pornhub just meant that they didn’t want to give their ID to MindGeek,” says Ashley, the sex worker activist. These videos were removed “as kind of a sacrificial altar in the name of keeping payments.” But it wasn’t enough for the credit card companies and Pornhub “got defunded anyway.”

Meanwhile, a huge archive of diverse content was just gone. “Most of the retro movies were washed away,” lamented Steven Underwood at LGBT news site NewNowNext recently. “We lost many scenes, including content starring models who have become synonymous with queer dalliance and exploration.”

When Tumblr ditched sexual content in 2018, people realized that a lot of artistic and archival material was lost, says Ashley. “It’s only stigma against porn—the word porn, the idea of porn being central to a site—that prevents people from realizing that a similar loss of culture just happened on Pornhub.”

Last year, Ashley was one of the organizers of a day of sex worker action dubbed Acceptance Matters, which included protests, online testimonials, and a petition that got more than 2,000 signatures. While targeted at discrimination from the banking and financial services industry in general, the campaign was especially a swipe at Mastercard, which uses the slogan “Acceptance Matters” in its LGBTQ campaign.

In April 2021, Mastercard announced new rules for all adult businesses and content. The rules—which took effect October 15—state that “banks that connect merchants to our network will need to certify that the seller of adult content has effective controls in place to monitor, block and, where necessary, take down all illegal content.” Putting banks in charge of gathering information on and evaluating such policies is no small task, and likely many will determine doing business with adult content businesses isn’t worth it.

Some of the required controls Mastercard offers are that adult businesses must review all content prior to publication—a costly and time-consuming proposal that goes far beyond current practices for mainstream social media and user–generated content based platforms. In addition, they must have “documented age and identity verification for all people depicted and those uploading the content,” a rule that goes beyond what’s required by federal law, under which porn creators are required to keep such records, but web platforms that host them are not.

Mastercard’s policies “will result in a major chilling effect and destruction of many ways of working for sex workers and other impacted parties,” including all queer content creators, argues the Acceptance Matters website. In addition, “all of society suffers from restrictions on consensual sexuality and speech, increases in surveillance, and misdirection of resources that should help the most vulnerable.”

With the Acceptance Matters campaign, “we’re asking Mastercard to live up to their publicly stated goals and promises to [the LGBTQ] community,” Ashley tells me. In LGBTQ outreach efforts, Mastercard is “trying to get us to spend through them, but they’re not doing anything to make sure the card is accepted at our businesses,” she points out. “Like, it’s not that we need rainbow branded cards. It’s that we need basic access to the same basic tools everyone else has, and an end to policies that discriminate against us by targeting a job that we’re more likely to do than anyone else.”

“They’re destabilizing the entire community—even people who are not sex workers—because when your community is defined by sexual orientation, it’s seen as sexual content,” Ashley says. Rules that may make sense for professional porn producers and performers, such as mandatory IDs, “would really suck for fine artists and historians and educators and just average everyday people who deserve a right to be able to post nudity to other adults without being tracked by the state.”

OnlyFans Under Fire

Many blamed Mastercard’s new policy for a July 2021 announcement from OnlyFans that it would stop allowing sexually explicit content. The announcement came as a huge blow to adult content creators. It’s “like Taco Bell deciding not to sell tacos anymore,” commented sex worker and content creator Kimmy Kalani in an August 27 video about the announcement. “We helped build that platform, and they’re just going to kick us to the curb.”

But Mastercard’s new policy had no bearing on the decision, nor was it investor-driven, according to OnlyFans founder and CEO Tim Stokely.

“The change in policy, we had no choice—the short answer is banks,” Stokely told the Financial Times in August. Institutions such as the Bank of New York Mellon Corporation and the U.K.’s Metro Bank would “cite reputational risk and refuse our business,” said Stokely. “JPMorgan Chase is particularly aggressive in closing accounts of sex workers or…any business that supports sex workers.”

OnlyFans reversed course about the policy on August 25, stating that it had “secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community” and would “continue to provide a home for all creators.” But the situation highlights how precarious things can be for platforms that want to allow adult creators—and for the creators who rely on them for income.

It’s not just traditional banks and credit card companies aggressively policing adult business. Many online payment processors, such as Square, PayPal, and Google Pay, explicitly reject transactions for adult-oriented businesses and performers, or have been known to close sex worker accounts without warning.

The False Promise of Crypto

When OnlyFans first announced it was banning adult content, Edward Snowden tweeted, “Bitcoin fixes this.” This isn’t a rare notion. For several years, various folks have suggested that cryptocurrency can solve sex workers’ issues with banks and credit card companies. The idea really picked up in 2015, when Backpage, backed into a corner by Sheriff Dart’s pressure on credit card companies, began accepting bitcoin, litecoin, and dogecoin for paid ads. Suddenly, sex worker guides to bitcoin started popping up everywhere. Headlines have declared that “sex work is moving to blockchain payments” and “sex workers are finding freedom in cryptocurrency.” Filmmaker and performer Whitney Moore tweeted last year that “Bitcoin will be the answer when Venmo, PayPal and the like continue to shoot themselves in the foot by cracking down on [sex worker] payments.”

But while bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies might help mitigate issues with traditional banking, they’re far from a panacea.

“Over the last 4 years I have tried in vain to get my customers to pay me in crypto and let me tell you, it’s like pulling teeth,” says adult performer and content creator Allie Awesome. “Tons of sex workers are able to accept crypto, and we would love to, but that doesn’t mean our customers will adopt it.”

Besides, sex workers still need a way to convert crypto payments to cash. “My landlord does not accept bitcoin. The grocery store does not accept bitcoin. We still rely on exchanges and banks,” says Awesome. And “not all [cryptocurrency] exchanges are sex worker friendly….You also need to link your bank to an exchange in order to cash out, and banks aren’t always sex worker friendly either.”

For instance, Coinbase explicitly prohibits businesses engaged in “adult content” from using its services. On top of all that, the rules around cryptocurrency are constantly changing, making its use “somewhat of a gray area legally,” notes Awesome. “It seems like every week there is a new law being passed or the [Securities and Exchange Commission] launches a new investigation.”

And with Democrats pressing to treat cryptocurrency brokers more like traditional financial players, exchanges and other platforms that deal in cryptocurrency may wind up pressured to exclude sex workers, too.

A War on Intermediaries—and Sex Workers

What all of these tactics share is a focus on intermediaries. Payment processors. Social platforms. Even hotels. One NCOSE-backed lawsuit accuses Wyndham Hotels of sex trafficking for failing to put a stop to prostitution involving a 16-year-old that was taking place in one of its rooms; NCOSE alleges that hotel staff should’ve been suspicious of things like “large quantities of used condoms left in the room” and “excessive requests for sheets and room cleaning services.” Another suit is against the state of Nevada, where some counties allow legal (and highly regulated) brothels.

These suits give you a sense of the NCOSE mission’s scope. The group might claim its only goal is to stop extreme exploitation, not consensual encounters. But this sounds awfully close to wanting constant surveillance of people having sex outside traditional bounds.

Activists have found that they don’t need to directly ban pornography, LGBTQ content creators, sex workers, etc. They just need to portray the commingling of sex and money as “risky” and increase the threat of legal and criminal justice penalties for ignoring those risks.

Shutting down websites that largely traffic in legal and expressive content—and are keen to intervene when this isn’t the case—can raise the profile of a group like NCOSE, which fund-raises off the idea that it’s fighting “human trafficking” rather than images of consensual nudity. But threatening their livelihoods doesn’t always prompt people to quit porn. Sometimes it just makes their working conditions more dangerous. And shutting down centralized platforms doesn’t stop predators from posting illegal or exploitative content. But it does make that content and the platforms hosting it harder for investigators to reach.

“Companies like Mastercard are now accomplices in the disenfranchisement of millions of sex workers, complicit in pushing workers away from independence into potentially more dangerous and exploitative conditions,” says the Free Speech Coalition, an adult industry trade group. The grim irony is that NCOSE may be facilitating real exploitation in the name of stamping it out.

Many sex workers, it’s fair to say, don’t feel like any of these moves actually protect them. “Taking away our platforms does not help sex workers or trafficking survivors,” says Awesome. Sex work advocacy groups, she says, have offered real help in actual instances of trafficking. “Sex workers are the experts on our lives and experiences,” she says. “The [anti-porn activists] aren’t. They rely on fabrications, half-truths, and sensationalized narratives.”

“You know who actually cares the most about trafficking?” Awesome asks. “Sex workers.”

The post The New Campaign for a Sex-Free Internet appeared first on Reason.com.

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The New Campaign for a Sex-Free Internet


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For more than a decade, both amateurs and professionals shared their sometimes sweet, sometimes weird, and often graphic sexual activity on Pornhub. Launched in 2007 not long after YouTube and with a similar free-for-all spirit, the site represented a new wave of “adult entertainment” in which anyone with an internet connection could partake and anyone with a digital camera could become a star.

Dubbed “tube sites,” Pornhub and its various peers began to dominate web traffic generally and porn consumption specifically. These sites trod on porn’s established business model, but for savvy sex workers the tube site network could provide a way to break into the business or reach audiences directly, without the porn industry’s usual middlemen. To monetize one’s presence in the early days took some creativity, but tube sites would eventually offer content partnerships that allowed people to get paid directly for their videos. Their competitors, such as cam sites and clip stores, made the process of charging money and getting paid even smoother.

The result? For the first time, people with a truly diverse array of body types, looks, races, ethnicities, sexualities, gender identities, and kinks had direct access to the tools of porn production and distribution. In the past, porn had catered to a much more narrow range of tastes, with predictable results. Now audiences could access all sorts of content that defied conventional notions of who and what was deserving of lust. On sites like Pornhub and the microblogging platform Tumblr, outside-the-mainstream content thrived.

And then, one day, it was gone.

In December 2020, without warning, Pornhub removed all videos posted by unverified users—a massive cache of content encompassing anything not posted by formal content partners or members of the platform’s official model program. More than 10 million videos were suspended, and unverified users were banned from uploading or downloading new videos.

It was more than a disruption to the site. The unannounced disappearing of so many videos was “a huge cultural loss,” says Ashley, a transgender sex worker and civil rights activist with a robust presence on social media and in offline organizing. (At Ashley’s request, we’re identifying her by first name only.) Ashley volunteers with the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) Behind Bars, a group dedicated to helping incarcerated sex workers. She recently helped spearhead a campaign protesting financial discrimination against sex workers and LGBTQ content creators. Unverified videos, Ashley says, are “inclusive, just by definition, of all the queer content that people felt unsafe with being directly affiliated with.”

The Pornhub purge came about two years after Tumblr’s ban on any content depicting sex acts, and preceded a similar announcement in summer 2021 from OnlyFans, a subscription content site popularized by sex workers. OnlyFans would later reverse this edict, but the fate of adult content on the site remains uncertain.

Then, in September 2021, the first user-uploaded porn site—Xtube, founded in 2006 and now owned by the same parent company as Pornhub—shut down entirely.

Demand for online porn hasn’t weakened, at least not according to web traffic numbers. Nor do there seem to be fewer people willing to create and post it; it’s not uncommon to hear sex workers complain about the glut of adult content creators these days.

Nonetheless, it’s a financially precarious, and perhaps even dangerous, time to be in the business of online porn. And one of the biggest reasons why is that a constellation of activist groups, rooted in deeply conservative opposition to virtually any depiction of sexuality in the public sphere, have put considerable pressure on the middlemen who keep online porn in business. In some cases, that pressure has led to the creation of onerous new laws; in others, it has been aided by support from powerful figures in business and government. These groups have repeatedly sought to conflate the existence of consensual commercial sex and porn production with the prospect of forced sexual exploitation, often with lurid statistics about exploited minors that don’t stand up to scrutiny.

Although these groups say their aim is merely to rid the web of abuse, it’s clear that their true goal is to eliminate the vast majority of adult sexual content from the web through a combination of legal pressure tactics, lobbying for new laws, and political intimidation. It’s a campaign for a sex-free web. Rather than help vulnerable women, these efforts threaten to make life worse for the very people they claim to want to help—while simultaneously stifling internet expression more broadly.

From ‘Morality’ to ‘Exploitation’

Few organizations have done as much to try to squelch online porn as the group that for most of its life was known as Morality in Media. The group was founded in 1962 to fight countercultural influences, especially those with sexually explicit material. In 1969, for example, it went after underground newspapers for “obscenities” and “push[ing] drug usage as the ‘in’ thing.” In 1971, its target was “titillating ads in the U.S. mails,” along with “smut in media”—including “nudie, homosexual, sado-masochistic and teen-age sex books”—that might be “inciting our nation’s youth to violence, perversion, promiscuity, drug experimentation, hatred and tastelessness.”

By the early ’80s, the group was bemoaning adult bookstores, soap operas, and MTV. “Really and truly, soap operas are destroying the family’s moral base,” its president said in 1984. In the ’90s, it railed against daytime talk shows and sitcoms depicting sex outside marriage. The specific nature of the threat was always shifting, but the core crusade was always about mass media portrayals of sexual activity that didn’t align with traditional values.

In 2015, the group rebranded as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE). Since then, the internet and tech companies have become its primary targets. Search engines, social media, online classified ads, digital marketplaces, and streaming video services have all found themselves under fire, along with online pornography platforms like Pornhub and OnlyFans.

Today, the group tends to trade the language of “decency” and morality for feminist-tinged talk of consent, objectification, violence against women, and sex trafficking. Pornhub “normalizes themes of racism, incest, and violence against women,” NCOSE said in a 2019 press release. HBO profits “from sexual objectification, exploitation, and violence,” it declared in 2016. NCOSE describes its work broadly as “exposing the links between all forms of sexual exploitation such as child sex abuse, prostitution, sex trafficking, and the public health harms of pornography.”

Underneath it all, though, NCOSE is still the same old musty conservative values group aimed at eradicating sexuality in the public sphere. It cloaks that under a mantle of saving the children, and it uses intimidation and legal pressure to get what it wants.

In recent years, the group’s annual “dirty dozen” list has condemned the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue for “sending a message that women’s bodies are for public consumption,” Cosmopolitan magazine for “hypersexualized cover models,” Seattle coffee stands for having scantily clad baristas, Amazon Prime Video for showing “simulated sex scenes,” and Netflix for featuring “gratuitous amounts of nudity.”

“When Netflix, a highly influential platform with over 200 million users across the globe, hosts sexually explicit content like ‘Cuties,’ ‘Big Mouth,’ and ‘Sex Education,’ it deserves to be called out for profiting from sexually exploitative content,” says NCOSE CEO Dawn Hawkins. “Sexual exploitation is not entertainment.”

NCOSE is one of a handful of influential groups intent on recasting a wide range of sexual content and activities as “exploitation.” It’s joined by groups such as Exodus Cry, which was born out of an evangelical Christian church in Kansas City and bills itself as foe of “commercial sexual exploitation”; the Justice Defense Fund, a lobbying and litigation group founded by the anti-porn activist Laila Mickelwait; and Demand Abolition, an anti–sex work group founded by the oil heiress and Clinton-era ambassador Swanee Hunt.

Though they speak the language of feminism, these groups are steeped in the spirit of conservative purity culture—an evangelical ethos popularized in the 1980s and ’90s. Purity culture hinges on abstinence rituals like virginity pledges, chastity rings, and father-daughter “purity balls.” It’s predicated on the notion that sexual activity should be relegated to monogamous and heterosexual married couples, and it preaches strict gender roles, female modesty, and total abstinence from premarital sex. It often rests on the idea that promiscuity not only destroys a woman’s value as a partner but her emotional stability and self-worth.

Some prominent anti-porn activists spring directly from this world. Exodus Cry founder Benjamin Nolot has distanced himself and his organization from the group’s evangelical roots, but he became known for giving talks like “contending for purity in a pornified world,” in which he defines sexual immorality as “all sexual activity outside of the marriage covenant between one man and one woman.” Others come from a radical feminist background that eschews gender norms and embraces queerness yet sounds strangely like its religious right counterpart when it comes to sex work. In both frameworks, women who participate in porn are ruined. Men who watch porn are damaged. Porn “kills love” and threatens the well-being of American women and families.

A shared goal of these groups is to remake the internet as a sex-free zone by casting a vast swath of nontraditional sexual activity as “sexual exploitation” or “human trafficking,” especially if it involves the transfer of money, even indirectly. “Any content that turns people into public sexual commodities has no place on the Internet or in society,” Hawkins says.

This strategy has had remarkable success, earning an audience and acclaim among reporters, politicians, and prominent feminists unlikely to be so kind to a band of moralistic Bible-thumpers denouncing promiscuity and calling sex outside marriage a sin. The purity culture ethos of shame, abstinence, and fallen women still permeates these groups’ activism. But it’s been repackaged as a bid to protect women and kids from trauma and sexual harm rather than to uphold the sanctity of marriage and biblical womanhood.

A central plank of this strategy is litigation.

In January 2021, NCOSE helped bring a lawsuit accusing Twitter of sex trafficking. The basis for this claim is that the social media site temporarily hosted a link to a video, hosted on a separate site, featuring two teenagers engaged in sex acts. The minors had taken the video themselves and shared it with a third party via Snapchat. In August, a judge ruled against Twitter’s motion to dismiss the case.

In February 2021, NCOSE helped bring a lawsuit against MindGeek, the parent company behind a number of porn sites, including Pornhub. In the suit, which is also ongoing, two Jane Does accuse Pornhub of hosting videos without their consent. And in March, NCOSE helped bring a lawsuit against WebGroup Czech Republic, the company behind one of the world’s most visited porn platforms, XVideos.

In all of these cases, an underlying kernel of harm is alleged, such as a teen being blackmailed into sending a stranger sex videos or women being duped into appearing in online porn. But rather than target the perpetrators of that harm directly, the NCOSE strategy is to go after platforms that—however briefly or unknowingly—hosted evidence of it taking place.

None of these suits would have a chance at success without the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2018 (FOSTA), a law that NCOSE backed. In addition to making it a federal crime to host content that facilitates prostitution, FOSTA amended the federal statute known as Section 230—which says that individuals and intermediaries online aren’t always legally liable for content, interactions, and transactions by clients or users—to make it easier for private citizens and state attorneys general to sue digital intermediaries.

Digital intermediaries include everything from Facebook and Twitter to Pornhub and XVideos to search engines, Substack, cloud hosting companies, dating apps, video chat platforms, web payment processors such as PayPal and Stripe, and any other website or app that serves as a conduit for content, communication, or trade.

The goal of both FOSTA and the NCOSE lawsuits is to change the Section 230 paradigm when it comes to sex. The strategy involves first recasting sex trafficking. Legally, this is prostitution that involves minors and/or force, fraud, or coercion; in the popular imagination, it necessarily involves violence, abduction, and rape. The crusaders want to make it mean essentially any activity that involves sex work, even between consenting adults, or any sexual activity involving minors, even if there is no commercialization and even if intermediaries facilitating its exposure have no reasonable expectation of knowing about it.

At its core is the idea that sex work can never just be work; it’s always exploitation. Hawkins says as much: “That sex buyers must pay to sexually access the bodies of others demonstrates that the sex in prostitution is unwanted by those being paid. Payment, whether in cash or by other things of value, is the leverage used to abrogate the lack of authentic sexual desire of those in the sex trade.”

Additionally, any third party profiting from sex—no matter how indirect or inconsequential—counts as exploitation. That’s the crux of the Twitter lawsuit: NCOSE’s argument is that because Twitter runs ads alongside all content, it profited from the tweet sharing footage of teens engaged in sex acts, and therefore it violated federal law against child sex trafficking.

Under this logic, it’s incredibly risky—reputationally, legally, and financially—for online intermediaries to allow any sort of sexualized business or content. No company wants a reputation for supporting exploitation, sex trafficking, and child abuse. And hosting sex-business transactions risks FOSTA-enabled lawsuits and abandonment by credit card companies and banks.

In other words, these groups have gone after online sex work and pornography by making it difficult, if not impossible, for sexually oriented businesses to process payments and collect money for services rendered—if they can create accounts at all. These tactics threaten the entire porn industry and the livelihoods of thousands of sex workers. Online sex work is, after all, work: If you can’t collect a paycheck or bill your clients, you can’t do your job.

Creating Chokepoints

To that end, activists have been pressuring financial institutions—credit card companies, banks, etc.—not to do business with sex workers, sexually oriented businesses, or any intermediary that won’t discriminate against these groups.

This method was tested with the classified advertising platform Backpage. In 2015, activists used the press and public relations campaigns to pressure credit card companies to stop processing Backpage transactions.

But it wasn’t simply an activist pressure campaign: Cook County, Illinois, Sheriff Tom Dart, who has staked out one of the nation’s most aggressive stances against sex work, threatened action against these companies if they didn’t stop. After Dart’s threats, Mastercard and Visa both quickly ditched Backpage. A federal judge would later rule Dart’s actions unconstitutional, because they violated the First Amendment, but the damage was done.

The Backpage situation proved that popular pressure and the mere threat of sex trafficking lawsuits could work as well as, if not better than, government mandates. It’s a playbook activists are now repeating with companies like Pornhub and OnlyFans.

Private campaigns to change business practices are a vital freedom. And private businesses can “censor” or choose not to associate with whomever they want. But that doesn’t mean these actions are always a social good, nor beyond criticism. More importantly, porn’s enemies aren’t simply speaking out privately. They are also calling for, and in some cases successfully generating, legal and political sanctions.

It’s true that NCOSE is not the Department of Justice (DOJ). An Exodus Cry petition isn’t an executive order. But neither are these groups simply calling on people to boycott Pornnub or delete their Twitter accounts. They’re calling on the DOJ and members of Congress to act against them, and they’re filing lawsuits that threaten serious court-ordered consequences for these companies. These demands for state action have proven influential.

Take FOSTA. NCOSE backed the law and has taken credit for its passage. The group has alternated between appeals to women’s liberation (calling it a “test of the strength of our national resolve to deliver on the promise of #MeToo”) and appeals to saving the children (“today, ordering a child or adult online for sex is as easy as ordering a pizza”). NCOSE is now pushing another law to weaken Section 230 protections, called the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) Act, which eliminates Section 230 protections for material involving minors.

And sometimes they are clearly backed by state actors with real power, as Sheriff Dart’s campaign against Backpage shows. Dart and Demand Abolition, notably, used to partner up for a series of prostitution stings called the “National Johns Suppression Initiative.”

The threat to tech companies now is legal trouble not for failing to uphold current criminal justice norms but for failing to proactively define sex trafficking, exploitation, and obscenity as broadly as these groups would like them to be defined—and as these groups may eventually succeed at convincing lawmakers and courts to define them.

“What it comes down to really,” tweeted Gustavo Turner, an editor at the adult industry publication XBIZ, “is that there’s a well-funded, well-organized group of people working 24/7 to align the state’s definition of ‘crime’ with their own notion of ‘sin.'”

After FOSTA passed with the promise of taking down online classified ad venues, activists started focusing on other user-generated content platforms. Mickelwait’s “TraffickingHub” campaign took aim specifically at Pornhub. And as with the crusades against classified ads, former New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof amplified this crusade. (Kristof left to run for governor of Oregon, but was ruled ineligible because of the state’s residency requirements.)

In a highly sensationalistic December 2020 column, Kristof accused Pornhub of being complicit in rape and child abuse. To make this argument, Kristof relied heavily on Pornhub keyword searches and faulty assumptions. Ambiguous words and phrases like teens and young are taken to mean minors, even though these words often refer to young adults or are used to tag role-playing videos featuring adults who are actually much older. Scenes featuring “nonconsensual” encounters—another popular role-playing category—are likewise taken as indications of literal rape.

Kristof fleshes out these keyword insinuations with anecdotes from young women like Serena K. Fleites, who as a young teen took naked videos of herself, shared them with a boy, and wound up on Pornhub. She’s now at the center of a class-action lawsuit against Pornhub’s parent company, MindGeek. Fleites’ is one of several tales Kristof relays in which videos were removed by Pornhub when notified, only to be reposted on Pornhub or other websites. Their stories showcase the perils of modern digital adolescence, when intimate images shared with other teens or exploitative adults can wind up living forever and recirculating endlessly online. What they don’t suggest is a problem unique to Pornhub, since the videos often circulated around the internet. Nor do they reveal a company indifferent to underage or nonconsensual pornography.

“Any assertion that we allow CSAM”—that stands for child sexual abuse material, the new officialese term for sexualized content featuring anyone under age 18—”is irresponsible and flagrantly untrue,” protested Pornhub in a statement. It went on to point out that an Internet Watch Foundation analysis has found only “118 incidents of CSAM on Pornhub in a three year period.” This is out of millions of videos—around 13.5 million before the purge, according to Vice.

Data from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children shows MindGeek reported 13,229 instances of potential underage content to the group’s tipline in 2020—far more than many tech companies, but far less than such mainstream platforms as Google (which submitted 546,704), Imgur (31,571), Facebook (20,307,216), Microsoft (96,776), Snapchat (144,095), TikTok (22,692), and Twitter (65,062).

None of those numbers offer definitive proof of anything, since they’re a function of how much a service is used and by how many people as well as the company’s proactiveness and internal definitions. But to the extent that online exploitation is a problem, they suggest that porn sites aren’t the chief vectors. Indeed, Kristof’s op-ed even admitted that these mainstream sites may be trafficking in far higher volumes of illegal imagery. Nonetheless, he closed his column by calling on credit card companies to stop doing business with Pornhub.

Kristof’s cry was echoed by an influential hedge fund manager, Bill Ackman, who reportedly convinced Mastercard’s then-CEO Ajay Banga to comply. (Ackman’s crusade has since expanded; he has recently accused Google, Bing, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Twitter of “facilitat[ing] and profit[ing] from the distribution of child rape porn” because they allow links to or search results from porn sites.) Before long, Mastercard, Visa, and Discover suspended business with Pornhub and its parent company, MindGeek. (Visa later resumed business with some MindGeek properties.)

Last summer, Visa and Colbeck Capital were added to a lawsuit filed against MindGeek. “It is believed to be the first Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) case that attempts to hold financial institutions accountable for the role they may play in sexual exploitation by processing payments,” the Financial Post reported. If successful, it could pave the way for taking credit card companies to court any time they unwittingly aid in harm.

Many cheer these developments when they affect a business or cause they don’t like. But once the floodgates open, it creates new avenues for legal pressure against any industry, company, or individual who can plausibly be portrayed as dangerous, including political causes and movements.

It’s part of a trend of using “banks as a proxy for state censorship,” Porn Panic! author Jerry Barnett suggested in a September Quillette article. And this trend coincides with other disturbing developments, including “increasingly muscular attempts by democratic governments to censor the internet…the successful linkage of a largely baseless ‘sex trafficking’ narrative with sex work and pornography; and a zero tolerance approach to content platforms that holds them responsible for even a single illegal item of content.”

“Pushing for more aggressive content moderation, especially from infrastructure-like entities like payment processors, web hosts, [content delivery networks], etc, is a terrible idea that will always backfire against marginalized people and social movements,” tweeted Evan Greer, director of the digital rights group Fight for the Future. And “that ship has maybe sailed. There is practically an entire industry now around pushing narratives like ‘Why is XYZ web service hosting ABC terrible thing? This is an outrage!’ (and well-intentioned but misguided journalists happy to uncritically amplify).”

Mastercard Speeds the Erasure

Not long after Kristof’s article came out, Pornhub announced new policies, including the takedown of millions of videos posted by unverified users. Some treated this as a win against exploitation, while others accused Pornhub of simply trying to erase evidence of its wrongdoing. But Pornhub users and creators may see it differently.

Unverified content doesn’t translate to illegal or harmful content. Anyone posting in the early days, anyone wishing to remain anonymous, amateurs with no wish to monetize their videos—all were unverified.

“Unverified on Pornhub just meant that they didn’t want to give their ID to MindGeek,” says Ashley, the sex worker activist. These videos were removed “as kind of a sacrificial altar in the name of keeping payments.” But it wasn’t enough for the credit card companies and Pornhub “got defunded anyway.”

Meanwhile, a huge archive of diverse content was just gone. “Most of the retro movies were washed away,” lamented Steven Underwood at LGBT news site NewNowNext recently. “We lost many scenes, including content starring models who have become synonymous with queer dalliance and exploration.”

When Tumblr ditched sexual content in 2018, people realized that a lot of artistic and archival material was lost, says Ashley. “It’s only stigma against porn—the word porn, the idea of porn being central to a site—that prevents people from realizing that a similar loss of culture just happened on Pornhub.”

Last year, Ashley was one of the organizers of a day of sex worker action dubbed Acceptance Matters, which included protests, online testimonials, and a petition that got more than 2,000 signatures. While targeted at discrimination from the banking and financial services industry in general, the campaign was especially a swipe at Mastercard, which uses the slogan “Acceptance Matters” in its LGBTQ campaign.

In April 2021, Mastercard announced new rules for all adult businesses and content. The rules—which took effect October 15—state that “banks that connect merchants to our network will need to certify that the seller of adult content has effective controls in place to monitor, block and, where necessary, take down all illegal content.” Putting banks in charge of gathering information on and evaluating such policies is no small task, and likely many will determine doing business with adult content businesses isn’t worth it.

Some of the required controls Mastercard offers are that adult businesses must review all content prior to publication—a costly and time-consuming proposal that goes far beyond current practices for mainstream social media and user–generated content based platforms. In addition, they must have “documented age and identity verification for all people depicted and those uploading the content,” a rule that goes beyond what’s required by federal law, under which porn creators are required to keep such records, but web platforms that host them are not.

Mastercard’s policies “will result in a major chilling effect and destruction of many ways of working for sex workers and other impacted parties,” including all queer content creators, argues the Acceptance Matters website. In addition, “all of society suffers from restrictions on consensual sexuality and speech, increases in surveillance, and misdirection of resources that should help the most vulnerable.”

With the Acceptance Matters campaign, “we’re asking Mastercard to live up to their publicly stated goals and promises to [the LGBTQ] community,” Ashley tells me. In LGBTQ outreach efforts, Mastercard is “trying to get us to spend through them, but they’re not doing anything to make sure the card is accepted at our businesses,” she points out. “Like, it’s not that we need rainbow branded cards. It’s that we need basic access to the same basic tools everyone else has, and an end to policies that discriminate against us by targeting a job that we’re more likely to do than anyone else.”

“They’re destabilizing the entire community—even people who are not sex workers—because when your community is defined by sexual orientation, it’s seen as sexual content,” Ashley says. Rules that may make sense for professional porn producers and performers, such as mandatory IDs, “would really suck for fine artists and historians and educators and just average everyday people who deserve a right to be able to post nudity to other adults without being tracked by the state.”

OnlyFans Under Fire

Many blamed Mastercard’s new policy for a July 2021 announcement from OnlyFans that it would stop allowing sexually explicit content. The announcement came as a huge blow to adult content creators. It’s “like Taco Bell deciding not to sell tacos anymore,” commented sex worker and content creator Kimmy Kalani in an August 27 video about the announcement. “We helped build that platform, and they’re just going to kick us to the curb.”

But Mastercard’s new policy had no bearing on the decision, nor was it investor-driven, according to OnlyFans founder and CEO Tim Stokely.

“The change in policy, we had no choice—the short answer is banks,” Stokely told the Financial Times in August. Institutions such as the Bank of New York Mellon Corporation and the U.K.’s Metro Bank would “cite reputational risk and refuse our business,” said Stokely. “JPMorgan Chase is particularly aggressive in closing accounts of sex workers or…any business that supports sex workers.”

OnlyFans reversed course about the policy on August 25, stating that it had “secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community” and would “continue to provide a home for all creators.” But the situation highlights how precarious things can be for platforms that want to allow adult creators—and for the creators who rely on them for income.

It’s not just traditional banks and credit card companies aggressively policing adult business. Many online payment processors, such as Square, PayPal, and Google Pay, explicitly reject transactions for adult-oriented businesses and performers, or have been known to close sex worker accounts without warning.

The False Promise of Crypto

When OnlyFans first announced it was banning adult content, Edward Snowden tweeted, “Bitcoin fixes this.” This isn’t a rare notion. For several years, various folks have suggested that cryptocurrency can solve sex workers’ issues with banks and credit card companies. The idea really picked up in 2015, when Backpage, backed into a corner by Sheriff Dart’s pressure on credit card companies, began accepting bitcoin, litecoin, and dogecoin for paid ads. Suddenly, sex worker guides to bitcoin started popping up everywhere. Headlines have declared that “sex work is moving to blockchain payments” and “sex workers are finding freedom in cryptocurrency.” Filmmaker and performer Whitney Moore tweeted last year that “Bitcoin will be the answer when Venmo, PayPal and the like continue to shoot themselves in the foot by cracking down on [sex worker] payments.”

But while bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies might help mitigate issues with traditional banking, they’re far from a panacea.

“Over the last 4 years I have tried in vain to get my customers to pay me in crypto and let me tell you, it’s like pulling teeth,” says adult performer and content creator Allie Awesome. “Tons of sex workers are able to accept crypto, and we would love to, but that doesn’t mean our customers will adopt it.”

Besides, sex workers still need a way to convert crypto payments to cash. “My landlord does not accept bitcoin. The grocery store does not accept bitcoin. We still rely on exchanges and banks,” says Awesome. And “not all [cryptocurrency] exchanges are sex worker friendly….You also need to link your bank to an exchange in order to cash out, and banks aren’t always sex worker friendly either.”

For instance, Coinbase explicitly prohibits businesses engaged in “adult content” from using its services. On top of all that, the rules around cryptocurrency are constantly changing, making its use “somewhat of a gray area legally,” notes Awesome. “It seems like every week there is a new law being passed or the [Securities and Exchange Commission] launches a new investigation.”

And with Democrats pressing to treat cryptocurrency brokers more like traditional financial players, exchanges and other platforms that deal in cryptocurrency may wind up pressured to exclude sex workers, too.

A War on Intermediaries—and Sex Workers

What all of these tactics share is a focus on intermediaries. Payment processors. Social platforms. Even hotels. One NCOSE-backed lawsuit accuses Wyndham Hotels of sex trafficking for failing to put a stop to prostitution involving a 16-year-old that was taking place in one of its rooms; NCOSE alleges that hotel staff should’ve been suspicious of things like “large quantities of used condoms left in the room” and “excessive requests for sheets and room cleaning services.” Another suit is against the state of Nevada, where some counties allow legal (and highly regulated) brothels.

These suits give you a sense of the NCOSE mission’s scope. The group might claim its only goal is to stop extreme exploitation, not consensual encounters. But this sounds awfully close to wanting constant surveillance of people having sex outside traditional bounds.

Activists have found that they don’t need to directly ban pornography, LGBTQ content creators, sex workers, etc. They just need to portray the commingling of sex and money as “risky” and increase the threat of legal and criminal justice penalties for ignoring those risks.

Shutting down websites that largely traffic in legal and expressive content—and are keen to intervene when this isn’t the case—can raise the profile of a group like NCOSE, which fund-raises off the idea that it’s fighting “human trafficking” rather than images of consensual nudity. But threatening their livelihoods doesn’t always prompt people to quit porn. Sometimes it just makes their working conditions more dangerous. And shutting down centralized platforms doesn’t stop predators from posting illegal or exploitative content. But it does make that content and the platforms hosting it harder for investigators to reach.

“Companies like Mastercard are now accomplices in the disenfranchisement of millions of sex workers, complicit in pushing workers away from independence into potentially more dangerous and exploitative conditions,” says the Free Speech Coalition, an adult industry trade group. The grim irony is that NCOSE may be facilitating real exploitation in the name of stamping it out.

Many sex workers, it’s fair to say, don’t feel like any of these moves actually protect them. “Taking away our platforms does not help sex workers or trafficking survivors,” says Awesome. Sex work advocacy groups, she says, have offered real help in actual instances of trafficking. “Sex workers are the experts on our lives and experiences,” she says. “The [anti-porn activists] aren’t. They rely on fabrications, half-truths, and sensationalized narratives.”

“You know who actually cares the most about trafficking?” Awesome asks. “Sex workers.”

The post The New Campaign for a Sex-Free Internet appeared first on Reason.com.

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McMaken: The “Rules-Based International Order” Is Dead… Washington Killed It

McMaken: The “Rules-Based International Order” Is Dead… Washington Killed It

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

The lack of self-awareness among the many American officials who are striking a moralistic pose in opposition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is striking.

For example, Foreign Policy has published a column by Col. Yevgeny Vindman, asking how the world can tolerate a country like Russia on the United Nations Security Council. His specific point was that any country that invades another country must not be allowed veto power in the United Nations. Responding to Vindman, however, Stephen Wertheim pointed out what should be obvious to everyone: that’s a “fair question” and one “that applies to 2003, too.”

In other words, the view that the current Russian invasion is somehow unique in its aggressiveness requires a complete rewriting of history and a willingness to ignore the reality of the US’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. If an aggressive power’s veto in the UN was perfectly fine in 2003, why is it suddenly not acceptable now? The reality, of course, is that the United States is powerful enough to invade whatever country it wants and still get away with it. A second-rate power like Russia can’t do the same, even when it basically mimics the acts of the United States.

Nonetheless, Washington continues to have the audacity to portray itself as a white knight that stands for a “rules-based” international order—an order supposedly built around respect for national sovereignty and multilateral enforcement of international law. But, it has become abundantly clear that these alleged rules mean nothing at all when the United States wishes to invade countries in preemptive and elective wars. For those who don’t wear the American selective-memory goggles, it is not clear that the US should be in a leadership position in a rules-based order that it is so obviously willing to flout.

There are implications here well beyond simply pointing out hypocrisy, and they extend to global trade, international law, and the prospects for a new Cold War. Multilateralism means nothing to the US when the notion gets in the way of the next US regime change scheme, and as a result, it is likely no coincidence that the US’s latest demand for a multilateral moral crusade has yielded little cooperation from the rest of the world. As has already become clear, few regimes outside of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have been willing to go along with the US’s demands that the world’s regimes impoverish their citizens by cutting themselves off from Russian oil and wheat—and everything else. Much of the world, it seems—from Asia to Africa to Latin America—is no longer willing to get lessons in morality from Washington, and even less willing to make their populations go hungry in order to please Washington politicians.

This is likely to become an increasing issue for the global economy and for global international institutions moving forward.

Iraq 2003 versus Ukraine 2022

In 2003, the United States invaded a sovereign state in an elective and “preemptive” war. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis—most of them civilians—were killed. Portrayals of Iraq as a threat to the US and its neighbors were exposed as lies.

In 2022, Russia invaded a sovereign state in an elective and “preemptive” war. Military and civilian casualties may someday rival those of Iraq, but given that Ukraine’s population is now twice as large as Iraq’s was in 2003, totals will need to grow considerably to be comparable to the carnage in Iraq.

Yet, the way the US regime, the US media, and US public treat these two invasions is truly a sight to behold. A few minutes on Twitter make it clear that Americans are still making excuses for the US’s blood-drenched Iraq invasion. Some claim that the deaths of Iraqi women and children should be ignored because the Iraqi regime wasn’t “democratic.”

Others portray the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq—a lowball figure being two hundred thousand out of a population of twenty-three million—as a negligible matter of a few “stray drones.”

Forgotten by these apologists are the times US troops opened fire on children and the US mercenaries who fired machine guns into crowds of unarmed Iraqis. Moreover, the US shelled and completely destroyed both Fallujah and Mosul. The bloodshed was remarkable, indeed. The US media, on the other hand, now hints the Russians are uniquely barbaric for using cluster bombs—but the US used these in Iraq. The US also purposely fomented a civil war through its needless de-Ba’athification policy, which rendered millions of Iraqis unemployed and abolished the nation’s few institutions designed to maintain local order.

Those caught up in the current anti-Russian frenzy denounce anyone who mentions these historical facts because they don’t fit Washington’s present narrative. But for most of the world, which isn’t as emotionally invested in the idea that the United States is the beacon of moral foreign policy, the last twenty-five years of US foreign policy make it clear that talk about a rules-based order is nothing more than talk.

Will the World Isolate Russia on Moral Grounds?

Even in the wake of the alleged massacres in and around Bucha, we’re hearing almost nothing at all from regimes outside the US’s inner circle of NATO and near-NATO allies. For example, in Fox’s piece on “world leaders” reacting to the alleged massacre, we quickly find that “the world” means a handful of countries like Japan, New Zealand, and NATO members. All the same regimes keep showing up in every piece about “the world’s” reaction.

Even within NATO, Turkey continues to engage in efforts to facilitate peace talks with Russia. There is still no sign that Latin America desires to throw its economies into recession by signing on to the US’s sanctions regime. No Latin American countries have yet been added to Russia’s list of “unfriendly countries.” As Mexico’s president has already made clear, Mexico’s interest is in maintaining friendly relations with all nations. India and China, of course, continue to trade with the Russians. In fact, the US-NATO axis only makes up one-third of global GDP (gross domestic product). The US is going to have to convince the rest of the world to cut themselves off from critical commodities in the name of joining the US’s rules-based order. But the US in no moral position to do so. 

Will the United Nations Eject Moscow?

One more key plank of the US strategy is now coming into focus. Within days of Vindman’s article in Foreign Policy calling for the removal of Russia from the UN Security Council, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky demanded the same, claiming that no country that invades another country can continue on the Security Council. Short of expelling Russia, Zelensky maintains, the council should dissolve itself. Needless to say, no similar demands were made when the US invaded Iraq, or when NATO devastated Libya. 

Zelensky, however, may have stumbled across a good idea. Now may be a good time to abolish the UN. The United States has spent the last thirty years turning the United Nations into a US-dominated institution designed to rubber stamp US military interventions, make excuses for US allies, and wag its finger at US enemies. This has long provided a patina of a rules-based international order, one that can also be ignored when it suits Washington. Thus, when the US failed to get its rubber stamp from the UN prior to the Iraq invasion, Washington denounced its opponents in the Security Council and instead embraced its eastern European partners like Poland and Ukraine, which apparently had no problem with invading and occupying countries unprovoked. (Ukraine sent at least 5,000 troops to help occupy Iraq.)

Prior to this, of course, the Security Council was deadlocked most of the time because the US and the Soviet Union would simply veto each other. Although both Washington and Moscow invaded other sovereign states during this time, neither was delusional enough to think other states in the Security Council could be ejected for such acts. That was then. 

Biden’s New World Order

This all continues to highlight how the world is descending into a post-globalization world of at least two blocs: the anti-Russian one and the neutral one. Biden has already claimed that Washington will lead the ”free world” in this “new world order.” But this “free world” is increasingly looking like the US, Europe, and a handful of other allies versus everyone else. Enlarging this bloc would depend on expanding soft power based at least in part on moral leadership, especially as the US continues to become a smaller and smaller part of the global economy. Thanks to the US’s blatant disregard for a rules-based order in recent decades, this looks increasingly unlikely.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/08/2022 – 23:40

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These Are The American Cities With The Highest (And Lowest) Rents

These Are The American Cities With The Highest (And Lowest) Rents

While the real-estate market has calmed down from the insanity of 2021 (as mortgage rates have soared to their highest levels in years) the cost of housing remains higher than it was three or four years ago. And while American workers have seen their wages climb in recent months, buoyed by a labor shortage and decidedly “non-transitory” inflation…

…the fact remains that housing is unaffordable for many. And since housing costs (rent, or mortgage) is typically the largest component of a consumer’s fixed monthly costs, fluctuations can have an outsize impact on social cohesion – even more so than rising gas prices.

While the pandemic-inspired savings glut that in turn helped spur demand has slackened, the lack of housing supply has continued to ensure that home prices remain elevated and the market for homes remains tight enough to price out first-time buyers.

And after rents plunged during the early days of the pandemic as workers fled cities (and millennials moved back into their parents’ suburban basements en masse), data show that while rent increases didn’t exactly move in tandem with home prices, landlords are finally starting to hike rents as they demand a greater return on their investments.

But rents aren’t rising uniformly everywhere. A recent report from Stessa found that the states with the most unaffordable rents are typically coastal states like Hawaii, California, Massachusetts, and New York.

In these expensive locations, median rents can approach or top $2,000 a month, while a studio apartment can cost more than a typical 3- or 4-bedroom house in other parts of the country.

On the other end of the spectrum, Arkansas is the most affordable state for renters at $881 per month, approximately one-third of the median rent cost in the most expensive state, Hawaii ($2,537).

Using an analysis of data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Census Bureau, the organization broke down the most affordable small and medium-size metro areas.

Finally, here’s a breakdown of the 15 most expensive large metros, ranked from least to most expensive, courtesy of Stessa’s data.

15. Austin.

14. Orlando

13. Portland

12. Miami-Fort Lauderdale

11. Denver

10. Sacramento

9. Riverside

8. Washington DC

7. NYC

6. Seattle

5. San Diego

4. LA

3. Boston

2. San Francisco

1. San Jose

Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/08/2022 – 23:20

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Biden Moves Toward Expanding Obamacare To Eliminate The ‘Family Glitch’ In The Plan

Biden Moves Toward Expanding Obamacare To Eliminate The ‘Family Glitch’ In The Plan

Authored by Nick Ciolino via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

President Joe Biden is taking steps meant to expand the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare.

President Joe Biden speaks during an event to mark the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act in the East Room of the White House on April 5, 2022. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Alongside the government health plan’s chief architect, former President Barack Obama, at the White House Tuesday, Biden announced plans to fix the “family glitch” in the ACA and signed an executive order that will “protect and strengthen Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.”

Should Biden’s family glitch rule be finalized, it would allow non-employee family members with private insurance from an employer that costs in excess of 10 percent of the household income to qualify for coverage under the ACA. The administration estimates that 200,000 uninsured people would gain coverage, and nearly 1 million Americans would see their coverage become more affordable.

A senior administration official on a call with reporters ahead of the announcement conceded not all of the roughly 5 million families who qualify for the change may want to switch coverage if the rule is approved, saying that some might “find it more convenient to have their whole family in a single health plan.”

The ACA has seen its premiums skyrocket over its 12-year existence.

The administration has not offered details as to how much the new rule would cost taxpayers but has said that if approved it would take effect at the start of next year.

Biden’s executive order he signed on camera Tuesday continues an order he signed at the start of last year directing agencies to “[make] coverage more affordable and accessible for American families.”

In a speech, Biden scolded repeated Republican efforts to repeal the ACA since its inception.

“I got a better idea: Instead of destroying the Affordable Care Act, let’s keep building on it,” said Biden. “Let’s extend it.”

Biden also made calls to “close the Medicaid coverage gap” in states that have chosen not to expand Medicaid. He also called for a change in law to allow Medicare to negotiate prices for drugs that are on the market.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed into law in 2017 by former President Donald Trump gutted the ACA by removing penalties for those who violate the plan’s individual mandate rule requiring all Americans to pay for health insurance.

In March of last year, Biden signed into law the American Rescue Plan that included boosts to the ACA, including enhanced subsidies and incentives for states to expand the program.

This past winter, the administration ran what it calls “the most successful open enrollment period under the ACA ever” with 14.5 million sign-ups, plus another 1 million that signed up for a related program called the “Basic Health Plan.”

Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/08/2022 – 23:00

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Objects Of Desire: Record-Breaking Auction Sales In 2021

Objects Of Desire: Record-Breaking Auction Sales In 2021

2021 may have been the year of the NFT, but, as Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu and Rosey Eason detail below, wealthy collectors still dropped plenty of cash on physical objects. This included the usual items like paintings and cars, as well as some more obscure ones like meteorites.

To gain insight into the world of rare collectibles, this infographic summarizes the biggest auction sales of 2021, spread across 12 different item categories.

The Numbers

The key details of these sales are listed below in tabular format. Some broke all-time records, while others set the record for 2021 specifically.

The Details

Here are some interesting facts and details about these rare collectibles, starting with:

Pablo Picasso’s Femme assise près d’une fenêtre (Marie-Thérèse)

This 1932 painting is a depiction of Picasso’s lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter (1909-1977). Walter is believed to have had a significant impact on Picasso’s work, and the pair had a child out-of-wedlock in 1935.

He loved the blondeness of her hair, her luminous complexion, her sculptural body.

– BRASSAÏ

Sold by Christie’s in New York, this was the first painting to auction for over $100 million in nearly two years. The all-time record holder is Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, which sold for $450 million in 2016 to Mohammed Bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

1995 McLaren F1

Produced between 1992 and 1998, the McLaren F1 is widely regarded as one of the most desirable supercars in the world. It features many innovations that are still rare in modern road cars, including a carbon fiber monocoque (the main structure of the car), active aerodynamics on the underbody, and a centered driving position.

The F1’s legacy is cemented by the fact that only 106 were ever produced, many of which have been owned by celebrities. That includes Elon Musk, who famously crashed his F1 in 2000 without insurance.

The specific car highlighted above was sold by Gooding & Company, a classic car auction company. It has just 242 miles (390 km) on the clock, which translates to an average of 9.3 miles (15 km) being driven on the road per year.

1933 Double Eagle Coin

The 1933 Double Eagle is one of the last $20 gold coins ever produced in the United States. It dates back to an era when the U.S. dollar’s value was tied to gold, which is a system known as the gold standard. The coins were melted down when the U.S. transitioned to fiat money, and only 13 examples are known to exist today.

After selling for $18.9 million, this Double Eagle holds the title as the most valuable rare coin in the world.

The Revolver Used to Kill Billy the Kid

The Colt single-action revolver that was used to kill Billy the Kid is now the most expensive firearm ever sold at an auction. It belonged to Sheriff Pat Garrett, who killed Billy in 1881.

Billy is one of the most notorious figures from America’s wild west era and was responsible for the deaths of eight men, including two sheriff’s deputies during an escape from jail.

Because of Billy’s legacy, this revolver is lauded as one of the most desirable Western firearms in existence. Surprisingly, it was the gun’s first appearance in a public auction.

Final Text of the United States Constitution

This first-edition copy of the U.S. constitution is an incredibly rare and historically significant artifact. The story of how it sold is equally as impressive.

Bidding came down to two parties, one of which was Ken Griffin, billionaire CEO of Citadel. If you’re an investor, that name may sound familiar—Citadel was a hedge fund involved in the r/wallstreetbets saga of 2021.

The other party was ConstitutionDAO, a group of 17,000+ crypto investors who pooled together $47 million worth of Ethereum. The term “DAO” refers to a decentralized autonomous organization, which is an online entity that’s collectively owned by its members without centralized leadership—and that takes action based on transparent rules set on a public blockchain.

In the end, the copy was sold to Griffin for a total of $43.2 million. Organizers of ConstitutionDAO could not place a higher bid because they wouldn’t have had enough money to insure, store, and transport the document.

About Those NFTs…

NFTs only exist in the digital realm, but they’ve quickly become some of the world’s most valuable collectibles. How valuable, you may ask?

For starters, consider the $7.6 million sale of CryptoPunk #3100, a profile picture (PFP) NFT that depicts a blue zombie. Then there’s The Merge, a digital artwork comprised of 312,686 pieces. In December 2021, it was sold to a collective of 28,983 buyers who, altogether, paid $91.8 million.

All of this hype has led some of the world’s oldest auction houses to begin selling NFTs through online events. This includes Christie’s (founded in 1766), which surpassed $100 million in NFT auction sales in less than a year.

Whether this momentum can carry forward is questionable. Interest in NFTs has plummeted, and crypto markets remain incredibly volatile.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/08/2022 – 22:40

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/QSKj9NI Tyler Durden

Media Vilifies Polymer80 In Preparation For Biden’s “Ghost Gun” Rule Change

Media Vilifies Polymer80 In Preparation For Biden’s “Ghost Gun” Rule Change

Submitted by The Machine Gun Nest (TMGN).,

While we in the firearms industry brace for the Biden DOJ to release their new “ghost gun” regulation, the corporate media has been hard at work spinning up their propaganda machines to defame companies that enable citizens to make their own firearms at home.

Their latest target? Polymer80.

For those unfamiliar with Polymer80, they are a company that produces unfinished polymer frames for firearms. With these kits, people can build firearms in the comfort of their homes 100% legally. Unless you have a criminal record, you’d be breaking the law. Remember that point because we’ll be revisiting that.

The ATF has previously determined that Polymer80’s kits do not meet the legal definition of a firearm. They even have a determination letter from the ATF to prove it.  

The Biden DOJ announced in 2021 that they would be pursuing a rule change to regulate 80% kits as firearms themselves. This is a dangerous precedent yet seems to be where the Biden DOJ and ATF are headed.

So, to prepare for this move, the corporate media has started its propaganda campaign. If you keep an eye on the news cycle, you’ll begin to see many more articles about the “ghost gun problem in America.” Check out this graph showing the increase in the use of the term ghost gun.

This media campaign is just the groundwork being laid so that Biden can step out later this month and announce that he’s “won the war on ghost guns” with his new rule change.

While the DOJ and ATF point to an increase in the use of these privately made firearms in gun crimes, it is worth noting that if these so-called “ghost guns” suddenly disappeared off the face of the earth, criminals would continue to use stolen or straw-purchased firearms to commit crimes. 

For those unfamiliar with home manufacturing, it’s completely legal under current US law to build a firearm at home for personal use. For those who own CNC machines or 3D printers, it’s an easy process. For those who don’t, it’s much more complicated.

Companies like polymer80 seek to make this home build process easier by selling what amounts to an unfinished Glock frame. Private citizens can finish these frames at home, and because of the extensive aftermarket for Glock pistols, home builders can buy most other components like slides and barrels online.

Also, regulating things that are not legally considered firearms as firearms themselves is an insane precedent that stands to endanger law-abiding citizens. We saw an example of this play out in real-time earlier this year when the ATF randomly decided to mass deny form 1 kits for solvent traps. This, in a way, mirrors the current proposed rulemaking as many in the firearms world saw solvent traps as 80% kits for home suppressor building, which is also 100% legal.

Those who tried to follow the legal process to build a suppressor were then told that what constituted a “silencer” in the eyes of the ATF was the intent. What they had in their possession didn’t much matter, whether it was oil filters, solvent traps, or a six-inch section of metal pipe.

Now, the Biden DOJ stands to do the same with 80% frames.

The real question is how far this line of thinking will go. Will the ATF regulate PLA plastic and blocks of aluminum? Will Home Depot be required to hold an FFL to do business? This may sound like a ridiculous argument, but when all the government needs to prosecute you is to determine your “intent,” the law becomes a tool for them to strip you of your rights instead of something that protects citizens from bad actors.

Keep in mind that gun control is like red meat for the base in Biden’s eyes. Much of this legislation is useless at best at stopping actual gun crime yet is pushed to better Biden’s poll numbers with his neoliberal base. Right now, with low poll numbers and headed into the midterms, Biden needs all the victories he can get. So, it’s no surprise that his allies in the corporate legacy media are drumming up a “problem” for him to “solve.”

Watch: TMGN’s Steph breaks down what’s happening in the firearms industry and what’s about to be announced by the Biden administration. 

Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/08/2022 – 22:20

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/NBDv6EK Tyler Durden

Tesla Recalls 127,785 Vehicles In China Due To Possible Inverter Failure

Tesla Recalls 127,785 Vehicles In China Due To Possible Inverter Failure

The tsunami of Tesla recalls that started months ago shows no signs of stopping. The most recent recall was announced this morning, when it was reported that 34,207 imported and 93,578 China-made vehicles were being recalled.

The recall is due to a possible inverter failure, according to Bloomberg, who cited a statement from State Administration for Market Regulation.

The vehicles in question were produced between January 11, 2019 and January 25, 2022. 

Gordon Johnson of GLJ Research said in a Thursday morning note to clients: “This does not sound like an over-the-air update (i.e., these cars will likely have to be fixed, manually), and seems (very) important/critical (i.e., losing power while moving)…”

It is the latest in a flurry of recalls by Tesla. More than one million Teslas have been recalled in recent months. 

… and the recalls could increase as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced in February that it’s reviewing complaints about Tesla vehicles suddenly braking at high speeds. 

“This process includes discussions with the manufacturer, as well as reviewing additional data sources, including Early Warning Reporting data. If the data show that a risk may exist, NHTSA will act immediately,” according to a statement from the agency. 

NHTSA reviewed complaints from drivers about ‘phantom braking’ on highways resulting in near-collisions. 

One unidentified 2021 Tesla Model 3 driver in Madison, Wisconsin, complained about his unexpected braking incident on a major highway last month. “I was driving north on Wisconsin route 14 at about 60 mph in my Tesla model 3 using the cruise control,” the driver said, adding that the sudden braking almost sparked an accident. 

Popular automotive magazine Car and Driver has been right: Tesla cars are “hampered by quality problems.” 

We wrote in February that the number of new stories on the Bloomberg terminal covering the keyword “Tesla recall” has surged over the last three years.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/08/2022 – 22:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/iWDBj5m Tyler Durden

Former Teacher Chooses Homeschool: “An Incredible Blessing for Our Family”

Former Teacher Chooses Homeschool: “An Incredible Blessing for Our Family”

Authored by Barbara Danza via The Epoch Times,

As some parents decide whether to homeschool their children, a specific facet of the homeschooling population may offer some unique insight. Among homeschoolers you might be surprised to find a great many former public school teachers who said “no thank you” to the prescribed route and chose the path of homeschool for their own children.

One such parent is Sarah Miller from Kalamazoo, Michigan. Sarah taught professionally for 10 years before choosing to homeschool her own children. She now blogs about her experience and helps other parents who are just getting started.

One of the greatest benefits of homeschooling, Sarah Miller found, was the bonding between siblings. (Iren_Geo/Shutterstock)

I recently asked Sarah about her homeschooling journey. Here’s what she said.

The Epoch Times: How old are your children, and how long have you been homeschooling?

Sarah Miller: My son is 6 and in first grade. My daughter is 3 and starting preschool this year. We are starting our fourth year homeschooling, since we started when my son was in preschool.

The Epoch Times: As a former teacher, what factors led to your decision to homeschool your children?

Ms. Miller: Our decision to homeschool started when trying to choose a preschool for my son. He has a late birthday and would have started preschool just weeks after turning 3. We didn’t qualify to delay a year in our local public school, but my son was very young and very active. I wanted him to have another year at home to play, explore, and grow up before spending time in a classroom environment. We decided to homeschool for one year.

By the end of the year, we knew that homeschooling was an incredible blessing for our family. I had watched my son thrive with the focused attention and customized lessons I could give him, and we both loved the quality time we got to spend together. I am so grateful that we found homeschooling. It’s a great solution for our family.

The Epoch Times: Would you say your teacher training and experience helped you as a homeschooling parent?

Ms. Miller: In some ways, my teacher training does help in our homeschool. I know how to plan a lesson and how to evaluate and choose a curriculum that will work well for us. I am familiar with a lot of research about how kids learn best that I am able to apply to our homeschool.

But in some ways, being a trained teacher is a disadvantage too. I often have to challenge myself to think outside the box about what our school looks like. For many families who are successful at homeschooling, school looks very different than what the public schools offer. I am learning to challenge what I learned in school about how to teach and to adapt it to fit how my kids learn in a more natural way.

The Epoch Times: Do you feel that homeschooling parents without teacher training are at a disadvantage?

Ms. Miller: I don’t think that parents without teacher training are at a disadvantage. There is so much information available about how to homeschool, especially now that it is becoming more popular. All homeschool parents, whether or not they are trained teachers, will learn how to teach each of their individual children as they spend time teaching them.

Parents have a unique advantage that more than makes up for any lack of teacher training they have. As parents, they are an expert on their own children. They know how their children think, what they are interested in, and what motivates them better than anyone else. They care about their children’s success more than any other person on Earth.

The Epoch Times: What have you found to be the greatest challenges of homeschooling?

Ms. Miller: Homeschooling is a big time commitment, so balancing the time it takes to homeschool well with my other life responsibilities is a challenge. It can also be hard not to take things personally when we have a hard day in our homeschool. I care so much about my kids’ learning and I want nothing more than for them to be successful. It’s hard when they are struggling with what they are learning or not feeling motivated to learn. I am learning to be patient and to prioritize my relationship with my kids first, my kids’ love of learning second, and then whatever I am trying to teach them that day third.

The Epoch Times: What have you found to be the greatest benefits of homeschooling?

Ms. Miller: Homeschooling allows us to spend a lot of quality time together as a family. Every day I have the opportunity to invest time intentionally into my relationships with my children. It is such a blessing to be the one who gets to see the light in their eyes when they understand something for the first time, or their excitement about new skills they are learning.

My kids also have a close relationship with each other because they are homeschooled together. They are forming a strong sibling relationship now which I hope will be a lifelong blessing for them.

The Epoch Times: What’s one thing you wish you knew about homeschooling when you were just getting started?

Ms. Miller: Everyone’s homeschool is unique, because everyone’s kids are unique. As a homeschool parent, it is important not to compare what you are doing with what you see others doing. Instead, spend time observing your kids and how they learn. Try to create an experience for them that will help them love learning, and give them lots of opportunities to learn in the way that they learn best. Because every child is different, this will look different for every family. But that is a good thing!

The Epoch Times: What advice would you give a parent today who is considering homeschooling their children?

Ms. Miller: I would recommend taking some time to adjust. This is a big change in your family’s priorities. Start slow and take some time to get used to your new normal. It’s OK to lower your expectations and relax, and it’s OK not to get everything done at first. Learning how to homeschool takes time, both for you and for your child.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/08/2022 – 21:40

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/RZJWNlG Tyler Durden

“It’s Curtains For The US” – Billionaires Are Backing Bitcoin Over “Fiat Fraud”

“It’s Curtains For The US” – Billionaires Are Backing Bitcoin Over “Fiat Fraud”

Bitcoin 2022 has already established itself as one of the more memorable such conferences in recent memory not only because of the sheer number of bold-faced names on the speaker’s roster, but also because of what they have said. During his keynote speech, Peter Thiel denounced the “finance gerontocracy” (Dimon, Fink & Buffett) for their opposition to bitcoin, and declared the cryptocurrency as a critical alternative to fiat money – and, more importantly, equities.

Interestingly enough, Thiel wasn’t the only billionaire to share a scathing criticism of the fiat money system during this year’s conference (something that bitcoin enthusiasts have been shouting from the rooftops for years). During a panel entitled “Billionaire Capital Allocators”, a host of other billionaires shared similar skepticism of the fiat system.

They have a distinct advantage over most of their audience: while many crypto enthusiasts belong to the younger generation, millennials and Gen X, billionaires like Mexico’s third-richest man, Ricardo Salinas, have visceral memories of the failures of fiat – namely, hyper-inflation. And they shared this experience with his audience.

“I have a big grudge against fiat, I call it the fiat fraud,” Salinas, the owner of Mexico’s Banco Azteca, said on Thursday.

He then shared a story about how his salary as a young business school graduate in Mexico during the 1980s declined from around $2,000 a month to just $20 during a period of six years.

“That’s hyperinflation,” he said.

SEchoing Peter Thiel’s controversial comments, Salinas also spoke to the religiosity of its high priests in his keynote address.

“This fiat religion has its high priests, and you can see them right there. And their religion is not tolerant,” Salinas explained.

“They hate anyone who is a heretic. There’s a lot of heretics in this room right now.”

Closing his thoughts, Salinas warned the crowd of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).

“If the CBDC is issued these people will have full control over how you can spend your money,” he cautioned.

Why does Salinas think they are so bad? Because you lose all sovereignty in the use of your funds.

“They think it’s a bad idea, they close your capacity to spend your money,” Salinas predicted.

That being said, Salinas noted that not all crypto is created equal:

“Unfortunately, it’s curtains for the US. Sell your shitcoins, and buy bitcoin.”

Salinas added that 60% of his investment portfolio is now in bitcoin or bitcoin-linked equities. According to Bitcoin Magazine, that’s up from 10% in 2020.

Salinas also denounced bonds as toxic and a “terrible investment” that he wouldn’t “touch with a 10-foot pole.”

Of course, he’s not the only high-profile investor to say as much about bonds in the era of inflation (short-dated Treasuries just endured one of the rockiest first quarters in modern history).

Another billionaire speaker, the Puerto Rican financier Orlando Bravo, the co-founder of private equity firm Thoma Bravo, told his audience that he’s been getting calls from sovereign wealth funds and pension funds (some of the largest pools of capital around), and they’re inquiring about getting into crypto. Even these firms are looking for ways to hedge the collapse of the dollar-based international financial system. And is there a better alternative than crypto?

“You don’t have to be an economist to see what’s going on with inflation,” he said, pointing to the $2 trillion that was injected into the economy. “You can make all kinds of excuses on supply chains and all the geopolitical issues, but when you pump that much money into the economy, you’re going to grossly devalue that currency.”

Finally, Marcelo Claure, the former SoftBank COO (who is famously battling it out with Masa Son over billions in compensation he clams he is owed) said he was increasing the crypto allocation of his personal holdings to 10%.    

“We’re starting to see Bitcoin as one of the safest ways in order for us to maintain our wealth,” he said.

While these comments are certainly encouraging for crypto bulls, and they represent a critical shift in crypto being accepted by a growing number of powerful figures who still see themselves as outsiders in the closely guarded world of Wall Street, we would be surprised if their comments didn’t elicit some kind of push back, not just from the “financial gerontocracy”, but from the central bankers who are the stewards of the fiat system. Just this past week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that crypto poses a risk that could disrupt the financial system.

It’s a familiar strategy: the central banker cabal is skeptical of all crypto except central bank digital currencies – blockchain based cryptocurrencies that they can control, and use to strip society of the last vestiges of privacy and monetary freedom.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/08/2022 – 21:20

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/UIaslp2 Tyler Durden