“I actually never talk about our porn agenda,” said Russell Vought, a former top Trump administration official, in late July. Vought was chatting with two men he thought were potential donors to his right-wing think tank, the Center for Renewing America.
For the last three years, Vought and the CRA have been pushing laws that require porn websites to verify their visitors are not minors, on the argument that children need to be protected from smut. Dozens of states have enacted or considered these “age verification laws,” many of them modeled on the CRA’s proposals.
This year, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a challenge to Texas’s version, which took effect last September and drew from CRA’s model legislation.
But in a wide-ranging, covertly recorded conversation with two undercover operatives — a paid actor and a reporter for the British journalism nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting — Vought let them in on a thinly veiled secret: These age verification laws are a pretext for restricting access to porn more broadly.
“We came up with an idea on pornography to make it so that the porn companies bear the liability for the underage use,” Vought said, “as opposed to the person who visits the website getting to just certify” that they are of legal age.
Vought called this a “back door starting with the kids” and offered the age verification laws as an example of an “immediate fight leverage point that we can win” that sets up “the next fight.”
“We’d have a national ban on pornography if we could, right?” he added. Vought contributed a chapter to the Project 2025 manifesto, which argues in the foreword that all pornography “should be outlawed” and its producers “imprisoned.”
Restricting “indecent” material has long been at the heart of free speech debates, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly found that the First Amendment protects adults’ right to access sexually explicit materials, except for child porn and other extreme material.
“Sex is the canary in the coal mine of free speech,” said Mike Stabile, public policy director at the Free Speech Coalition, a porn industry group that is leading many of the lawsuits challenging these laws, including in the ongoing Supreme Court case. “It’s funny to hear him say it explicitly, because we’ve been calling age-verification laws ‘backdoor censorship’ since they were first introduced.”
Bob Corn-Revere, a First Amendment attorney, was not surprised by Vought’s strategy but noted that it’s “rare for proponents of pretextual measures to engage on this.”
“The candid statements that age verification laws are a stalking horse masking true intentions for seeking broader bans on protected speech come as no surprise,” said Corn-Revere, who is chief counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to consider the Texas law’s constitutionality.
“Using children as a way to get a ‘foot in the door’ has long been a strategy employed by those in anti-free speech movements,” he said.
Aaron Mackey, the free speech and transparency litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is also urging the Supreme Court to strike down the Texas law, said, “The text of these laws demonstrate that they were never intended to be narrow measures to protect children, despite being presented that way. And these quotes confirm their true purpose.”
As Texas, Idaho, and other states enacted these bans, companies like Pornhub have blocked their websites in those areas while industry groups challenge the laws in court.
To Vought, these state-by-state blackouts are all to plan, since shutting down porn altogether is the ultimate goal.
“We’ve got a number of states that are passing this,” he said during the July meeting, “and you know what happens is the porn company then says, ‘We’re not going to do business in your state.’ Which of course is entirely what we were after, right?”
Vought’s research director echoed that the age verification laws were a stepping stone.
“Outlawing it if we could, but right now we’re advancing the age verification stuff.”
“We’re for restricting, you know, age verification for porn,” Micah Meadowcroft said in an earlier discussion with the undercover climate reporter, which was also secretly recorded. “Outlawing it if we could, but right now we’re advancing the age verification stuff.”
Vought, Meadowcroft, and the CRA did not answer The Intercept’s questions about these statements.
“If you’re suggesting that more of pornography’s degradation of women and fewer safeguards for children are good things… no, thank you,” said Rachel Cauley, a CRA spokesperson, in an emailed statement.
There are numerous active challenges to age verification laws in federal courts around the country. Last August, a federal judge blocked parts of the Texas law on First Amendment grounds, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit lifted the injunction in March. In July, federal court blocked similar laws in Indiana and Mississippi.
Finals briefs in the Texas challenge are due to the Supreme Court in mid-November.
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