Remember, Donald Trump won the popular vote last year. Also Remember, he did not get a landslide victory. Will Saletan declares Donald Trump Is Delusional (The Bulwark), and I think he makes a good case.
He also implied that just as he could squeeze Canada into surrendering its sovereignty, he could pressure Egypt and Jordan to accept nearly two million Palestinian refugees. “I think I could make a deal with Jordan. I think I could make a deal with Egypt,” he told Baier. “We give them billions and billions of dollars a year.”
THIS ISN’T THE WAY YOU TALK if you’re just a liar. You don’t threaten and needlessly infuriate your neighbors and allies. You don’t bet your country’s economy on trade wars. You don’t double down on ethnic-cleansing fantasies involving massive American financial commitments, much less “ownership.”
It’s time to face what the Canadians have faced: Trump isn’t kidding. When he insists that the 2020 election was stolen, that USAID is a complete fraud, that the United States can subsist on tariffs, that Canada and Greenland should surrender to American sovereignty, and that Arab states will help him empty and gentrify Gaza, he’s not saying things he knows are false or preposterous. He really believes this lunacy. He’s deranged.
And who did not think him delusional - his voters. Against the idea that a substantial number of American voters are not also delusional, I offer the following excuses: They are actually morons who did not understand what Trump was nuts, they are products of the American educational system that left them unprepared to understand how government works, and/or they were bored and irresponsible and that Trump would be a bunch of fun without considering he might endanger their lives or fortunes, or both.
Now, for the argument that Americans have always been stupid, and easily led into delusions: When it comes to pornography, what’s the harm in looking? (Aeon Essays)
Younger Americans today seem to turn to pornography not only for erotic stimulation but to learn about sex. A report on pornography consumption published in 2023 revealed not only that 73 per cent of the study’s respondents, aged 13 to 17, had viewed online pornography, but that nearly half considered it a ‘helpful’ source of information about sex. The importance of pornography within LGBTQ+ communities further complicates this picture. Some LGBTQ+ consumers of adult content defend pornography as educational, particularly given the decline of comprehensive sex education in public schools. Queer people are especially likely to describe pornography as a key source of sexual knowledge, particularly given the disproportionate representation of straight sex in film and television.
When I was in high school, we had Xaviera Hollander, and her books. We had Penthouse Forum. It also seems now for all we knew, we did not know how to apply what we read, but porn was thought to be for laughs. It was the provider of that thrill of having gotten away with something that was forbidden - you snuck over to the adult section of the magazines and got a look at what whatever there was to see. In college, one guy got a Playboy subscription, and about the centerfolds, we always made cracks about airbrushing. We did not center our lives around it. Its fascinations were not great. We also had a better idea of anatomy and the consequences of sex. At my high school, we had something like six girls pregnant a year. The first time I can recall seeing a female's vagina - certainly the first time on film - was in my 10th Grade Health class. They showed a film about emergency childbirth. I still refuse to ride an elevator with a pregnant woman. What we wanted to do was get a date, not look at pictures.
Since I woke to the mess I had made of my life, I have become more curious about the people behind the campaigns described below.
Over and again, American campaigns against pornography stir up moral panic by asserting that explicit sexual content harms the people who view it – children especially. And they make this argument by insisting that there is something about visualising sex that incites violence. It’s an unnuanced and often factually tenuous case that confuses erotica with cruelty. And it diminishes the importance of efforts to protect people from actual sexual harms. Many feminists in the 1970s and ’80s believed that a popular culture saturated with banal representations of the abuse of women created a permission structure for real violence. Too often, these activists argued, Americans made violence against women look sexy. The conservative anti-pornography movement, however, aligned with feminists who took the more extreme position that pornography itself was inherently violent, however consensual the acts portrayed. These critiques gloss over the distinctions between consent and coercion, or between abuse and pleasure. They have led to crackdowns on queer and nonmarital sexuality.
Used to be, I dismissed them as never having escaped the American fantasy that lay behind the Hays Code - the never-ending rule of Victorian morality. They may be more than just that. Political power has accrued to the fearmongers.
Of course, Indiana has to get a mention in the article. Todd Rokita is a prime example of a politician seeking power through the means of moral fearmongering.
In June 2024, free speech activists and adult content producers in Indiana sued the attorney general Todd Rokita for enacting ‘state censorship’. Like many supporters of age-verification laws, Rokita insists that these laws empower the state to defend young people against injury. ‘Children shouldn’t be able to easily access explicit material that can cause them harm,’ Rokita wrote on X. ‘We need to protect and shield them from the psychological and emotional consequences associated with viewing porn.’ Yet the idea that viewing pornography causes ‘psychological and emotional’ harm is a controversial claim – one far more often stated than proved. A similar suit out of Texas, Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, reached the Supreme Court in January of this year. During oral arguments in which Justice Samuel Alito asked if anyone perused Pornhub ‘for the articles,’ the justices indicated their likelihood to rule against free speech for the sake of child protection, a reversal of established precedent.
Most worrisome is using children for the advancement of their political power. Right now, I am such a dangerous person that I am on the sex offenders list for the next 16 years. That is to protect children; although, I was not convicted of any crime against a child and my dangerousness has never been known to me. Children make an irrefutable weapon for crimes and watch lists. Do not think that no lawyer or politician can find a way to expand this excuse to widen the groups brought within the same anathema I live under. What I did not think possible was their undermining the First Amendment.
Americans need comprehensive information about their sexual health. PornHub is not the ideal place to go for that information (the site has a section dedicated to sex education), but legislation is a crude tool for controlling speech. As legal scholar Mark Joseph Stern notes about the court’s likely support for age verification laws, ‘if the court takes this step, there’s no reason why states’ battles against explicit material must stop at PornHub,’ with online bookstores and streaming services potentially at risk. As in the past, legal permission to restrict sites like PornHub will enable censorship of information about queer sexuality, whether explicit or not. (Indeed, in the mid-1990s, HIV/AIDS activists fought against provisions of the Communications Decency Act that would have forced them to take down HIV-prevention information directed at teens.) Pornography addictions and the consumption of violent media do seem to inspire aggressive and dangerous sexual behaviors. Perhaps we should focus our public health campaigns on those issues. Instead, in a culture saturated with guns, gory video games, and shows depicting gratuitous cruelty, Americans remain far more concerned about sexual content than explicit violence. History shows that any attempt to censor pornography will inevitably also curtail access to the sort of sexual speech that we need today more than ever.
Sex happens. It is a natural act. Porn renders it unnatural, at worst, and a parody of the natural, at best. The attacks on pornography give it validity that it does not deserve, and an unwarranted moral patina to the attackers. If the politicians were truly worried about violence and children, they would be more active in gun control. If they wanted to undermine porn's grip on the young, they would back sex education. Instead, we have school shootings because gun violence is an American right, and they do not want anyone having safe sex because no one should be having sex outside of marriage and then only for procreation.
These conservatives would leave us ignorant and living in a fear born of their delusions about how we should live. They are so much more obsessive about sex than I am, more than most people I know.
That raises a question - what power grab are these politicians and moralists distracting us from?
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