[00:00:00] Speaker A: Well, well, well. Look what the cat dragged in. Another week, another existential crisis brewing in the land of the free and the home of the algorithm. Welcome back, you beautiful rebels to Critical Defiance, the podcast that dares to ask the questions your politely curated newsfeed is desperately trying to avoid.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Bill here, ready to wade into the murky waters of American culture and policy with my trusty waiters of skepticism.
Because let's be honest, folks, if they're telling you it's simple, they're either selling you something or selling you out.
[00:00:39] Speaker C: Neil's here. And speaking of things that aren't always simple, this week we're plunging headfirst into a topic that's got more layers than a conspiracy theorist's tinfoil hat.
Pornography, free speech, and the ever tempting urge by some to just ban it.
Strap in, kids, because this one's gonna challenge some assumptions.
[00:00:59] Speaker A: So, Bill Niels, ready to unpack the complexities of desire, censorship, and what it really means to be free in a society that loves to regulate everything from our speech to our pleasure?
[00:01:12] Speaker B: Always ready, bobby socks. Let's see if we can untangle this sticky web without getting too entangled ourselves.
[00:01:21] Speaker C: Or rough sticky, for that matter.
Time to shine a light on the shadows and see what truths and potential dangers lurk within the debate around pornography.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Bands before we're categorized as obscene. Head over to critical defiance.com Sign up, follow us and learn more about our captivating show. We're all over your favorite podcasting apps, Pocketcast, Spotify, Apple, Apple Podcasts, and more. Oh, and don't forget to hit that special spot over and over to like our episodes and invite your friends to the fun.
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Your donations help us stay uncut, uncensored, and keep the content coming.
[00:02:15] Speaker C: All right, guys, so it's a little bit of a weird week. We have had technical difficulties some than some of you guys out there know about for the last several days when it comes to everything from Internet connections to microphones. So it's been a ride and we decided to just cave in and get Bill and I in a room together where things might work better on one microphone and bobby socks from their remote location in the western underground bunker somewhere to the west of our underground bunker where there's another underground bunker.
Let's just start straight with Captain Crazy Pants.
Trump has been offered a 747, a flying palace of a plane as a gift from Qatar.
I'm a little thrown by this.
[00:03:02] Speaker A: So this plane, this palace in the air that is going to be given to Trump, the first thing that comes to mind is for security reasons, they're gonna have to basically deconstruct that plane to the bones by the time it gets to the US and then put it back together once they are sure there are no, like, bugs or recording instruments in it. Right.
[00:03:29] Speaker B: Even if we could be assured that it was completely free of any sort of electronic surveillance, we would still have to dismantle it to install the systems that are currently aboard our regular Air Force One. This is a flying command post. This isn't just a pretty plane that the president gets to take all over the country.
God forbid, wherever in a nuclear war, that plane goes airborne, that plane stays airborne, and he commands the US Forces from that airborne platform.
The flying palace ain't gonna cut it.
[00:04:07] Speaker A: Yeah. And this is what he wants to make Air Force One, right?
[00:04:10] Speaker C: Yeah. He wants this plane to be Air Force One. And they're basically appealing to Trump's fixation on big planes. Bill, you've been around for long enough to know this guy's weird fixation with big planes.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: The man's got a lot of weird fixations, but big planes are definitely one.
[00:04:23] Speaker C: This is a jumbo jet, Bobby. This is not like a little commuter plane.
[00:04:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:28] Speaker C: These are like. This is a McMansion in the sky.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: And isn't Qatar also one of the countries that, during Trump's first term, he spoke about not taking money and not.
[00:04:39] Speaker B: Taking gifts from other countries because they sponsor terrorists?
[00:04:44] Speaker C: And Qatar still to this day is glorifying the leader of Hamas.
But that's okay. They're not students in America, so we don't have to worry about them being anti Semitic.
[00:04:55] Speaker A: Oh, my God.
What are we doing?
I feel like that's what we say every time anything comes out of this administration at this point, the men get bribed.
[00:05:05] Speaker B: That's what we're doing. Whatever deal leader decides to do, we're watching dealing.
[00:05:10] Speaker C: Until they said he can keep the plane after he leaves office. I was like, oh, that's interesting. Yeah. And then I went, oh, that's abroad.
[00:05:18] Speaker B: And then it became really interesting.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Because what would happen, normally, it would.
[00:05:23] Speaker C: Revert to the Air Force and the next president would use it.
[00:05:26] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. But Trump gets to keep it in his presidential library.
[00:05:31] Speaker C: Yeah, they're going to donate it to the Trump presidential library.
[00:05:34] Speaker B: Use it. It'll sit outside that little building that houses his two coloring books and the cat in the hat. And that'll be it.
[00:05:41] Speaker A: Do other presidents, do past presidents have presidential libraries?
[00:05:45] Speaker C: It's where their writings, their papers, their work during their terms go to live so that you can learn from it.
[00:05:51] Speaker A: Got it.
[00:05:52] Speaker C: So we want to talk about Trump data and our future. During the Biden administration, there was a proposal that contained several plans to contain and control the spread of consumers private data.
Mainly it was about limiting the ability of data brokers to gather and then sell your data or use it for purposes like modifying what gets advertised to you, political campaign ads, things like that.
All of this was a big step forward. It was a big win for consumers in that it became illegal or at least against certain regulations for most of your data to change hands without your consent. And here we are, a little more than 100 days after Trump has been in office and after rolling back pretensions against us having to pay high fees on our credit cards, now he's rolling back protections on our personal data.
If you don't believe that these people have commoditized us like cattle, you have no idea what they're doing.
[00:06:52] Speaker B: Not to go all 1984 Big Brother is watching on everyone here.
But without these constrictions, it certainly becomes easier for anyone with the requisite financial resources to access our data.
And the government has already expressed more than a passing interest in establishing some demographic registries.
They've already begun work on their autism registry, which I understand has now been expanded to a chronic illness registry.
What's next?
Take a category. The field is wide open.
If they don't like it, trust me, they will eventually decide to register it.
[00:07:32] Speaker C: And these guys have yanked every aspect of these proposals, every part of them that sought to extend consumer protections to the use of new digital payment technologies like crypto, and that would have prohibited certain terms in the fine print of consumer financial products.
But now we're not good enough for.
[00:07:48] Speaker B: That, of course, because the poverty stricken and the paycheck to paycheck workers, they don't need any more protection from corporate avarice unscrupulous financial institutions or their billionaire overlords, not to mention politically powerful grifters, anyone?
[00:08:09] Speaker C: So to hit our third story for the day, one that I'm not particularly thrilled to have to be reporting, but down in Georgia, a woman who's been brain dead for the last 90 days, a little bit more actually, is currently being kept on life support, but because she's pregnant and they have a heartbeat law for those of you out there don't know how all of this works. It's pretty simple. When a state has a heartbeat law, roughly six weeks after conception, you are no longer allowed to terminate the pregnancy. Otherwise, you've committed a crime.
In Georgia, this is so extreme that the hospital is terrified of letting this poor woman just die because that might be construed as murdering the child and incur liability in the state of Georgia, which we get the state after, though. Now, if you don't think that's fucked up, there's nothing left in the universe for us to talk about.
[00:09:01] Speaker A: There's so much more. There are layers and layers of fucked up to this. Aside from the fact that Adriana is currently in this situation, doctors have found that the fetus has a good amount of fluid in its brain, and they know that there are low chances that this child survives birth at all. If they do, they will be permanently and extremely disabled. And reading more and learning more about this story. I'm not somebody who has actually watched the Handmaid's Tale yet, but I've been told about an episode that was filmed to feel like a horror movie with this exact same scenario where a woman is legally brain dead, but is being kept alive as an incubator for a baby.
So talk about dystopia becoming reality.
[00:09:49] Speaker B: And what adds to the travesty of this story is that this poor woman, very early in her pregnancy, was experiencing severe headaches.
He went to the hospital to seek treatment.
They treated her with painkillers, I believe. Advil, if I'm not mistaken. And I could be.
Yeah, that was. That was their answer.
[00:10:14] Speaker A: Yeah. Which is also a blatant show of systemic racism in this country, because I can only imagine what a white woman would have been given and the tests she would have been given if she walked in pregnant with extreme headaches in the first couple weeks of pregnancy.
[00:10:29] Speaker B: It especially begins to look like systemic racism when you find out that had they run several relatively simple tests, they could have figured out what was causing these headaches, prevented the problem, and she would never be in the position that she is in today.
[00:10:47] Speaker C: It's a living nightmare for her, for the family, for anybody involved in it. And the fact that we're letting this go on is completely insane.
The fact that this is where these heartbeat laws take us, this is where these anti abortion measures take us, needs to be known. People need to think about the ramifications of this shit.
[00:11:07] Speaker A: When we do things like reverse Roe v. Wade and say the decision goes back to the States, this is what happens.
[00:11:16] Speaker C: And this is a classic example of that. Because immediately after the reversal of Roe v. Wade is when we got Georgia's Life Act.
[00:11:25] Speaker A: There are still people out there who like to say that women's rights weren't taken by the reversal of Roe v. Wade. I would like to remind the audience and the world of the cause of the Civil War in the United States.
How the south everything to be up to the states states rights. States rights to what?
[00:11:44] Speaker C: And that's always been the question is states rights to do what?
Violate morality, invent their own disenfranchise people.
[00:11:55] Speaker D: All right, all right, Defiant Ones Skeeter here, dropping in to give you the lowdown on how to stay connected with your favorite purveyors of truth and witty banter. That's us, by the way, over at Critical Defiance. You've been showing some serious love lately and we are absolutely here for it.
So if you want to make it official and join the ranks of the truly defiant and head on over to critical defiance.com that's where you can dive deeper into what we're all about. And because we know you're all about that on the go life, you can snag our podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your audio fix. Subscribe and you'll never miss a moment of our insightful, well, you know, rambling. But wait, there's more. We actually want to hear what's bouncing around in that brilliant brain of yours.
So drop a comment on our episode pages@critical defiance.com and let us know what you think. We're also hanging out on Blue Sky, Instagram and Facebook, and we'd love for you to join the party there too. You can find all the links conveniently located on our home page. Consider it your treasure map to enlightenment and maybe a few memes. Seriously though, if you dig what we're doing, spread the word like a juicy piece of gossip at a family reunion.
Tell your friends, tell your enemies. Maybe they'll finally see the light. Tell your barista, tell anyone who will listen. And hey, if you're feeling particularly generous and want to toss a little something our way to keep the truth telling train chugging along, you can head over to buymecoffee.com criticaldefiance every little bit helps us keep the mics hot and the critical thinking flowing. Thanks for being awesome, Defiant Ones. Now go forth and challenge the status quo.
[00:13:37] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:13:38] Speaker A: All right, settle in you magnificent dissenters. Bobby socks, back in the digital trenches with you, where we arm ourselves with facts and a healthy dose of side eye for the narratives they're trying to sell us. Because around here, we don't just swallow the blue pill, we dissect it, analyze its chemical composition, and then probably write a scathing op ed about its marketing.
[00:13:59] Speaker B: Strategy after we've snorted it right on Bobby Shots.
Bill here, your resident voice of pragmatic pessimism. You know, the guy who always asks, yeah, but what could possibly go wrong?
Trust me, when we're talking about the intersection of personal freedom and government regulation, the answer is usually a whole damn lot.
Especially when we start talking about what gets to be seen, what gets to be said, and crucially for today's topic, what gets to be clicked.
[00:14:34] Speaker C: And clicking is the operative word, isn't it? Neil's here, ready to navigate the digital labyrinth where desire meets discourse and where the powers that be often try to pull the plug on anything they deem inconvenient.
Today, we're diving deep into the pixelated pandemonium surrounding pornography. It's a topic loaded with moral landmines, legal tripwires, and enough cultural baggage to sink a small ship.
[00:15:01] Speaker A: So, Bill Niels, we're talking about more than just pixels and pleasure here, right?
This isn't just about what consenting adults do in the privacy or not so privacy of their own screens.
This is about fundamental rights, the boundaries of free expression, and the very real danger of allowing the state to become the arbiter of our tastes.
[00:15:24] Speaker B: Exactly. Body socks.
Because once you start down the road of banning this, where do you stop?
Do we end up with government officials curating our Netflix cues next?
It sounds absurd, but history has a funny way of turning dystopian fiction into tomorrow's headlines.
We need to unpack the arguments for and against these bans and really scrutinize who benefits or and who loses when we start legislating morality.
Never forget, just because you ban it, it doesn't just go away.
If people want it, they will get it because someone will provide it.
Don't believe me?
Just ask the folks who tried enforcing prohibition.
[00:16:14] Speaker C: And let's not forget the tech angle, folks. In an age where anything and everything is accessible with a few taps on a screen, can you even effectively ban something like pornography? Or does it just drive it further underground, potentially making it less safe and harder to regulate in other ways?
These are the thorny questions we're going to wrestle with today. So grab your critical thinking caps, maybe a strong cup of coffee, and let's get awkward. It's time for a real conversation about pornography, freedom, and the perilous path of prohibition.
[00:16:45] Speaker A: You ever Just try to look up stuff online and suddenly find out your state decided you're not mature enough anymore.
Yeah, that's not just a bad dream after too much late night pizza. Across the country, state legislatures are having a full blown moral panic, passing laws that basically demand you to show ID just to access content that last week was totally legal for adults. It's like prohibition, but instead of bootleggers, we're going to have VPN peddlers and a whole new black market for you get the idea?
This isn't about protecting kids, it's about controlling what adults can see and do online. And trust me, that slope is not just slippery, it's covered in astroglide.
[00:17:32] Speaker B: Exactly.
Once you start bans and prohibitions, everything goes underground.
All of a sudden all those relatively successful child pornography laws that you've been rightfully enforcing become almost useless.
Cuz now not only can you not find the pornography, you can't find the producers. It's buried so digitally deep you would need the quantum computing equivalent of Elon's boring company to locate it. And why?
Because if there is a market for it, someone will find a way to to exploit it. That's capitalism. Come on, you guys with these bangs, you invented capitalism. Figure it out.
[00:18:20] Speaker C: So the thing that's going on here is that a huge number of states over the last, what, year and a half have basically decided that there need to be laws in place that guarantee you are of a certain age in order to access things that they deem sensitive or obscene. And we're going to get back to those words in a minute when we start to discuss this a little bit more. Because the idea that the state is deciding what's sensitive or obscene in the first place is a little bit frightening, especially when you think about how broad those terms are. As Of March of 2025, at least 21 states have passed these laws.
[00:18:55] Speaker A: I really think that these states should be working to ban your cousin and just leave porn alone.
[00:19:00] Speaker B: Yeah, and once you've figured out the cousin quandary, maybe really go to work and try to figure out how to stop the child bribe problem.
[00:19:08] Speaker A: So the industry response, Major sites like pornhub have responded to these potential bans by blocking access in these states, arguing that the verification requirements are too burdensome and risky for user privacy and don't actually stop minors.
This has led to interesting situations where adults are suddenly blocked from content they legally accessed before.
[00:19:31] Speaker B: And this isn't just about porn.
These laws set a precedent for requiring ID to access any online content the government Deems sensitive.
Think about the implications for accessing information on reproductive health, LGBTQ issues, or even political commentary in the future.
It erodes online anonymity, which is crucial for free expression, especially for marginalized groups.
[00:20:04] Speaker C: You know, we're talking about these bands and we're looking at maps. Every year, pornhub produces these really awesome maps of the most search terms by state in a given year.
And I gotta tell you, folks, they're pretty enlightening and funny as hell. And we were looking at the gap between the 2023 and the 2024 year end maps because it gives you a stark picture.
Basically, we've got a whole gray area now.
[00:20:29] Speaker B: Interesting that the gray area is comprised of a lot of the states we mentioned who are enforcing bans. And if you look at the map from the previous year, which describes the most searched porn category, these are the kinkiest states in the union.
[00:20:46] Speaker C: Really. And let's look at that for a second.
Some of the transitions from year to year are really what blew my mind. Like, mean, totally degraded themselves. They weren't from Apple to Harry Bush. So wait a second grade in me.
[00:21:00] Speaker A: So there's also my favorite, because I don't know if this is just a downgrade or descent into madness over here, but if we go to Wisconsin in 2023, it was swingers. All right, that's all right. Understandable. Vanilla. Then jump to 2024. Wisconsin P, bro. What happened now?
[00:21:17] Speaker C: Michigan. Michigan. They. They've gone weird. They started with bondage, now they're on amateur wife.
Okay, Michigan is just exploring, but Ohio. I feel bad for Ohio because it was small dick last year and cuckold this year.
[00:21:32] Speaker B: Particular question about the educational system in Pennsylvania based upon these maps.
[00:21:37] Speaker A: Oh, no.
[00:21:38] Speaker B: In 2023, the most searched term was big bullies.
And then a year later, the most searched term was naked women.
Whoa. Grow an imagination, boys. Come on.
[00:21:54] Speaker A: Oh, Tennessee went from giantess to chubby milf. So that makes sense. Yeah, there's a connection there. I'm never going to understand swingers to pee. I don't know what that pipeline was, but something happened in that state. It is crazy, really, to see how many states end up being blacked out now, because this is also a perfect way to say, hey, these are states that want you to flash your ID in front of your camera before you watch whatever you want to watch. I really do love how Hawaii is basically the same, though, because Hawaii went from Hawaiian to. I'm gonna butcher that if I try to say Oahu.
[00:22:33] Speaker C: There's an island in Hawaii.
[00:22:35] Speaker B: You would think it's such a beautiful paradise, they would have a more vivid imagination than those Pennsylvanians, but apparently.
[00:22:41] Speaker A: Oh, I forgot about California, because California has something going on.
2023, Asian stepmom. 2024 friends.
[00:22:51] Speaker C: Mom, we got to talk about Alaska too, because in 2023, sex doll. And I can understand with the population problems in Alaska that you might occasionally need a plastic friend that you can pass around between the boys. Meanwhile, while the states are tripping over themselves trying to carve the Internet, there's a more insidious move happening at the federal level.
Folks like Senator Mike Lee aren't just happy with age verification. They want to fundamentally change what the government considers obscene. They're taking aim at the Miller test, that decades old standard that at least tried to factor in community standards and actual value.
Their proposed bill, the IOTA or ioda, is designed to make it easier than ever for the feds to decide what's too arousing for anyone to see, effectively rolling back decades of free speech protections. This isn't about cleaning up the Internet. It's about imposing a narrow conservative morality on the entire nation and silencing expression that they dislike. This is a direct threat to the open Internet and our fundamental right to access information.
The bill itself defines the material as being any image, graphic image, picture, videotape, file, film or other visual depiction.
And basically they're saying that visual material taken as a whole has to appeal to the prurient interest of nudity, sex or excretion. Prurient, in case you don't know the term, means sexual or sexualized. Next, they go on to say that it's anything that depicts, describes or represents an actual or simulated sexual act or sexual contact, actual or simulated, normal or perverted. Normal or perverted sexual acts or lewd exhibition of the genitals with the objective of tent to arouse, titillate, or gratify the sexual desires of a person. So to put that in English, if it's designed to turn you on, shows the goodies and doesn't in some way advance the political, social, artistic or scientific agenda. It's obscene and must be banned.
[00:24:59] Speaker B: I'm going to go out on a limb here.
I don't know Senator Lee. I don't know Representative Miller, and none of what I say may or may not apply to them. However, I've been around for almost eight decades.
I've watched this conversation go back and forth a couple of times.
And what I've seen play out almost every time is that most of the people who are most intent upon enforcing these bans have a couple of skeletons hiding in the master bedroom closet that they don't want no one else to know about.
[00:25:43] Speaker A: What's really worrying is how, again, and we've said this, how vague this definition is, does that mean that somebody gets to decide that Michelangelo's David is now, how obscene are we going to go hit art? And when we talk about science, are they going to say that science on trans people is obscene? But maybe science on other people isn't.
[00:26:05] Speaker B: Go far enough and you can even get an anatomy textbook banned?
[00:26:09] Speaker C: And what they're doing here is moving away from the idea of community standards, standards that we set as a group, as a public ourselves, and moving toward the idea of standards selected by a small group of people at the top who have their own political, religious, moral and social agendas.
And the whole thing ties back to, you guessed it, Project 2025 and, dare.
[00:26:32] Speaker B: I say, white Christian nationalism.
[00:26:35] Speaker C: Some sources link this effort to conservative think tanks like the Heritage foundation, which advocates for aggressive measures against pornography and views it through a lens of transgender ideology and the sexualization of children.
This highlights the political and cultural motivations behind these vans. These people are not doing this to protect the kids. They're doing it to change people. They're doing it to limit freedom of expression. They're doing it to regulate sex. Let's be honest, they want to tell us how to.
[00:27:05] Speaker A: And wouldn't you guess it? I'm so shocked. I'm enemy number one again, right? It's the longest time I've been on the top.
[00:27:14] Speaker C: Can I get you a Public Enemy T shirt? Would you wear it?
[00:27:17] Speaker A: Yeah. So we can also add into this conversation some historical context. The original definition of sodomy meant rape. And then through the church, it evolved to gay acts. So when we take the history of seeing how the word sodomy has evolved, we can tie this into the current administration trying to redefine what is obscene to include things about trans people or trans healthcare.
And it is not the first time something like this has happened either. We've spoken in the past about the book burning at the Institute of Sexual Science. And outside of the fact that institute was run by Jews, that was the first reason it was targeted.
They helped trans people, which the Nazis considered obscene. A federal redefinition of obscenity could have a chilling effect on a wide range of expression beyond just commercial porn. It raises concerns about censorship and the government deciding what kind of sexual content is permissible for adults.
[00:28:22] Speaker B: Let's not Lose sight of the fact that pornography existed long before pornhub.
These definitions could have a chilling impact upon painting, literature, photography, virtually any form of artistic expression.
Never forget Playboy, that softest of soft pawn icons barely survived the 50s. It was scandalous. To understand where we are now, we need to look back.
The push to control sexual content online isn't new.
It's just the latest skirmish in a culture war that's been raging in America for centuries.
From the Comstock act in the late 1800s, driven by moral crusaders, to the court battles of the 20th century, there's a long history of attempts to regulate what Americans can read, see, and access based on evolving, or perhaps not so evolving, standards of morality.
These movements often gain steam during moments of social change or perceived crisis. Using fear, he will lead the fear for children to push through broad restrictions that impact everyone.
Understanding this history helps us see the current wave of bands not as a sudden isolated event, but as part of a long and often unsuccessful campaign to police private behavior and expression.
Given that context, my question would be this.
Where the hell is the moral panic over school shootings?
It's pretty obvious that thoughts and prayers aren't cutting it. Unless perhaps they're the thoughts and prayers of politicians hoping the NRA won't pull their campaign contributions.
Quite frankly, if I were a parent of a school age child today, I'd be far more worried about them surviving the school day than stumbling upon my pornhub account.
[00:30:37] Speaker A: Oh, that's just.
That really puts it into perspective too. We're always yelling, protect the children.
[00:30:44] Speaker C: Protect children from what? We don't protect them from the basics. We are not successfully protecting their lives and we want to protect them from trans people.
[00:30:52] Speaker B: I am old enough to remember the atomic bomb drills in school where we had to either get under the desk or go out in the hallway, put our hands over our head and our head against the wall.
You know what?
They were a little unsettling, but I had no clear idea of what war was. I had never lived through a war. I wasn't alive for World War II. I wasn't in a bombed out city. I. I didn't know what I was drilling for.
These poor kids today know exactly why they're going through these crazy shooting drills. Yep, they understand on a visceral level what's at stake.
[00:31:31] Speaker C: And yet they're worried about shelling ID for Cornhub.
[00:31:37] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a mess. State bans, federal threats, tech headaches, and the same old moral panic dressed up in new clothes. But here's the Thing. Critical Defiance listeners, this is exactly the kind of moment where critical thinking isn't just a good idea, it's essential. But we can't let fear mongering and political posturing dictate what we can and can't access online.
[00:32:02] Speaker C: If we really want to approach this as informed, intelligent adult consumers who can make our own decisions by our own standards, using our own morality, then the first thing we need to do is stop looking past this sensationalized coverage of how porn bans are going to protect the children.
Start looking at who actually benefits from the moral panic.
What are their political motivations? How does this distract from other issues?
Why are they selling it to you?
[00:32:31] Speaker B: When you can promise me that a porn ban will protect my child from a flying bullet in the classroom, I'm jumping on board. Till then, fuck off.
[00:32:42] Speaker A: Yeah, and also think about maybe what they may be doing behind the scenes when they put these flashy, sensational headlines out. Because right now, with this administration, they're always pulling some other shit. While we're all concerned about a porn ban, another thing we can all do is just understanding our rights.
[00:33:02] Speaker B: Amen.
[00:33:04] Speaker A: So what can we do? What can our listeners do? We can start by supporting organizations that fight for digital rights, like the ACLU or the eff.
Contact our representatives. We'll never stop saying that. If y' all haven't got five calls downloaded on your phone yet, you can head over to critical defiance.com where we have the link where you can download the app. Great resource for. Really.
Anytime that our administration is doing shit that makes us go, excuse me. What the fuck? Yeah, so just educating yourself and others on the complexities of these issues. Don't let your friends and family think it's just about porn, because it's not.
It's always more layers.
[00:33:48] Speaker C: Simple math, kids. If it's sensitive enough for you to have to show id, to view it, engage with it, or otherwise consume it, then it's sensitive enough that you've just given them your name to be added to a list. Considering the folks we're dealing with and the tendency of people like this to make lists, I don't think we want to give them this power.
[00:34:14] Speaker E: They operate in the shadows. They move among us, unseen, unheard. Until now. Uncover the truth behind the trans agenda. For too long, the mainstream media has kept you in the dark, blindfolded by a homogenized reality of heteronormative normal normality. But we here at Critical Defiance are pulling back the curtain on the shocking realities of the trans agenda. What is their ultimate goal. What do they want from us? Global domination through better skincare routines, the strategic placement of more comfortable public restroom options. The insidious plot to make everyone appreciate a good statement earring. The evidence is mounting, though admittedly it's mostly glitter. They want you to understand them, to respect their identities, to maybe even use the correct pronouns. The audacity. But fear not, informed citizen. By tuning into Critical Defiance, you'll gain the knowledge you need to politely ask questions and maybe even learn something new.
Because the most dangerous agenda of all, it just might be understanding each other a little bit better. But the tendrils of the trans agenda reach further than you think. Have you noticed the sudden increase in affirming and accurate representation in media? Coincidence? We think not. This is clearly phase three of their master plan. Normalization through relatable storytelling. And what about the children? They're coming for your children.
With age appropriate books that foster empathy and understanding, they'll learn about different ways of being, expanding their worldview beyond the rigid confines of the binary.
[00:35:53] Speaker C: The horror.
[00:35:54] Speaker E: But there is hope. By staying vigilant, by questioning everything, especially pronouns, and by subscribing to Critical Defiance, you can arm yourself against this, this wave of inclusivity.
[00:36:08] Speaker B: So this week's freedom fumbles kids.
This is interesting. Kristi Noem wants migrants to compete for citizenship on a new reality show.
I wasn't in the room, but I can almost guarantee you that she sat down with her boss, a famous television reality star, and concocted this scheme on the fly. She has been working with writer and producer Rob Warsoff to pitch a reality TV show titled the American where immigrants will compete in a string of challenges across the country, quote, for the honor of fast tracking their way to U. S. Citizenship. This, according to the Daily Mail.
[00:36:52] Speaker A: Excuse me, what in the Hunger Games?
Yeah, pretty much what in the Hunger Games.
[00:36:59] Speaker B: But I can see the image now.
Instead of getting up and saying, you're fired, he says you're deported.
[00:37:10] Speaker A: That's.
Man, that's. I like. I know we put it as a fumble, but that's scary.
[00:37:16] Speaker B: That's what happens when you hire a failed reality TV star to run your country.
[00:37:21] Speaker C: Yeah, pretty much.
[00:37:23] Speaker A: Not only a failed reality TV star, failed businessman, a failed steak seller, a failed hotel owner, a failed monopoly, U. S President Donald Trump has given members of South Africa's Afrikaner community refugee status, alleging that a genocide was taking place in the country.
Let's talk history for a second.
In 1948, South Africa's African led government introduced apartheid or apartness, taking Racial segregation to a more extreme level. This includes laws which ban marriages across racial lines, reserved many skilled and semi skilled jobs for white people, and forced black people to live in what were called townships and homelands. They were also denied a decent education, with Africanard leader Hendrik Verwood infamously remarking in the 1950s that, quote, blacks should never be shown the greener pastures of education.
They should know their.
I feel gross quoting this. They should know their station in life.
[00:38:27] Speaker C: Is to be ewers of wood and drawers of water. Bobby. And that's the thing that's really disgusting about this is a group of people that immigrated to Africa claimed it as their own claim dominance and superiority suppressed, minimized and abused the local population. And now they're saying we're refugees because the black people aren't treating us well enough.
What the in the Elon is this? And then, you know, last week, Grok starts spitting out random hallucinations and weird little side notes that it's been instructed to inform people about white genocide.
[00:39:11] Speaker A: What the Elon and poor little AI Grock was doing so well, you can.
[00:39:17] Speaker B: Present almost any question to it, the most innocuous topic, and it will suddenly, in the middle of discussing that topic, skirt into some quick discussion of the white African genocide.
And if you ask it why it.
[00:39:40] Speaker C: Apologizes, it's so weird.
[00:39:42] Speaker B: And then goes down with the topic and does it again.
[00:39:46] Speaker A: Now, I'm still learning AI in a broader sense, but that sounds like a broken AI to me.
[00:39:53] Speaker C: The AI doesn't have a psyche, but they are making it inconsistent and prone to hallucinations. Oh, my God. It's just that last quote should never be shown the greener pastures of education. They should know their station in life is to be hewers of wood and drawers of water.
It doesn't get much more racist than that when you're establishing systemic racism and now 75 years later, you're yelling about how they're treating you.
Every week we like to talk about what we can do, what you guys can do, what we can all get into to get into some good trouble. And the place to start with this one is vote no. When one of these measures shows up in your state, when one of these porn bans, which is basically just censorship, shows up in your state, get off your ass and say something about it. Call your reps, vote against it. This is not what America is about.
[00:40:47] Speaker B: I can't stress it enough.
You have to get out and vote.
And I'm as guilty as many I don't get to every election. I have not voted in every school board election. I have not voted in every school budget election.
But I have made a much bigger effort in the last, I'll call it a decade, longer than a decade.
For the first time in my life, I actually went out and worked on a campaign when Obama first ran for office. And since then I have made a concerted effort to get to elections.
And these are the ones that are critical because these are the ones that affect your rights directly. If you can't vote for these, then you don't deserve the rights.
[00:41:39] Speaker A: And as we say a million times every episode, we'll continue to say, call your reps, make it their problem. Because it's our problem and they're our representatives, so make it their problem. Be up their ass. Call them, call them, text them, email them. Start sending an influx of postcards. If they're ignoring all your digital calls, start sending the physical ones. It's really hard to hide when like 30,000 postcards just show up at your door. Didn't the Harry Potter bitch do it? You can't hide it.
And there you have it. From state houses to the halls of Congress, the pearl clutching brigade is hard at work trying to put digital blinders on us all.
Remember, the fight against censorship, whether it's about what adults can watch or what history gets taught is all part of the same struggle. It's about who controls the narrative, who gets to decide what's acceptable, and whether we have the freedom to think for ourselves.
Don't let the moral panic distract you from what's really going on. Stay critical, stay defiant, and for the love of democracy, protect your online privacy.
[00:42:53] Speaker B: Now, speaking of challenging narratives and making sure all our stories are heard, you are not going to want to miss next week's episode.
Just in time for the long weekend, we're bringing you our very special DEI Memorial Day extravaganza.
That's right. While some folks are busy trying to ban books and pretend certain parts of our history just didn't happen, we're gonna dive deep into why diversity, equity and inclusion aren't just buzzwords, but essential pieces of understanding who America really is and honoring everyone who's been part of its story.
Especially on a day dedicated to remembrance.
Get ready for some truth bombs wrapped in inconvenient facts.
[00:43:46] Speaker C: That's all the time we have for this week on Critical Defiance. See you next time.