Ryan Teague Beckwith of MSNBC writes about one of Project 2025’s most unusual objectives: criminalizing porn. He digs deep and finds that beneath the rhetoric is an ill-conceived attack on transgender people and those who are LGBT.
But the immediate contradiction is that their candidate Trump has a long history of interacting with porn and—ahem—porn stars.
He writes:
Amid the 920 pages’ worth of conservative ideas in the Project 2025 plans for a second Donald Trump administration, one stands out for its sheer improbability: criminalizing pornography.
Just five pages into the foreword by the president of the far-right Heritage Foundation think tank, the proposal stakes out an uncompromising position that porn should be banned, porn producers and distributors should be sent to prison, and tech companies that circulate it should be shut down.
It’s true that politics makes strange bedfellows, but we’re talking about anti-porn crusaders teaming up with Trump, who has literally had his share of strange bedfellows. To recap:
- He was on the March 1990 cover of Playboy magazine next to Playmate Brandi Brandt, who was wearing his tuxedo jacket and nothing else. He hung it on his wall of his office in Trump Tower and often autographed copies on the campaign trail in 2016.
- He had short cameos in 1994 and 2000 Playboy videos in which he interviewed models (who, to be fair, were wearing clothes at the time) and took Polaroids, asking them if they had “what it takes” to be a Playmate.
- He opened the nation’s first strip club inside a casino in in his failed Taj Mahal venture in Atlantic City in 2013. The 36,000-square-foot club took up the space formerly occupied by three restaurants.
- He allegedly had an affair with Playmate Karen McDougal and adult film actress Stormy Daniels and was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records over hush money payments to Daniels made during his 2016 campaign. (Trump denies that he had sex with either woman.)
- He boosted future first lady Melania Trump’s modeling career by allowing her to do a photo shoot in his private jet that included partial nudity. (She also modeled fully nude before she met Trump in photos that were leaked during the 2016 race.)
Trump has said, unconvincingly, that he does not know the people behind Project 2025 and does not support all of its proposals. But on this subject, he has previously endorsed a similar idea, signing a pledge from the group Enough is Enough in 2016 to crack down on porn and potentially appoint a presidential commission to look at the “harmful public health impact of Internet pornography on youth, families and the American culture.” (He did neither.)
Hahahaha!


Re “Is Trump a Hypocrite?” Do bears shit in the woods? Is the Pope Catholic?
What a strange question.
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Is a bear Catholic?
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More importantly, does the Pope shit in the woods?
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Well, we know the Pope shits, but I’m not so sure about the woods thing. CBK
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Everyone’s focused on the election right now, but I thought I would drop a note to mention that yesterday in D.C., we had a mob of protesters vandalizing national monuments with phrases like “Hamas is coming,” carrying the Hamas flag, and attacking capitol police.
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Fringe political thinkers are always stirred by someone else getting the attention. I hope the Proud Boys don’t follow suit during this time, as the news forces the fringe into the shadows again to treat other news.
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That sounds like bad actors.
“Hamas is coming” ???? Sorry, my kid has been at pro-Palestinian rallies and that is NOT their message.
Come on. Who doesn’t see that for what it is?
Reminds me of that guy who was caught on video during the peaceful BLM marches bashing store window after store window with his face covered and it turned out he was a right wing provocateur urging protesters to join in.
It amazes me how quickly people forget when the right wing funded Project Veritas operative was recorded in January 2017 trying to get an organization to act out violently at Trump inauguration protests.
They have been caught trying to infiltrate Dem organizations multiple times.
“Hamas is coming”?? Are you kidding me? That is NOT the message of the anti-Netanyahu protesters. It is exactly the message that the right wing propaganda wants Americans to believe.
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Well they certainly weren’t good actors!
But yes, it is the message of many anti-Israel protesters. This is a thing that happened. Don’t engage in denialism because it’s politically uncomfortable.
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Traitor Trump is a serial liar, a convicted rapist, fraud and felon. If the traitor doesn’t win this election, he’s facing prison probably for the rest of his life and the end of his family crime empire and its wealth before what’s left of him is divided into nine parts and spread across all nine circles of Dante’s hell.
The traitor will say and do anything to keep his ill begotten gains, power and freedom. Even make a deal with an evil worse than his, an evil represented by the fascist, MAGA Nationalist Christian cult, who are too greedy and power hunger to realize they are making a deal with a traitor and cheater who breaks deals all the time.
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I have a certain sympathy for those who don’t like porn. It generally is exploitatative of females and children. You can’t make sexually explicit material without hurting someone.
That said, restrictions on others often open ways for those who want power to exaggerate risk and effect, so I would support decency standards that protect the powerless.
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I agree the porn can be exploitative. That said, The goal of Project 2025 is to define porn so broadly that it would result in massive censorship and harassing people because if their gender orientation and sexuality.
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Let me tell you about obscenity. Obscenity is a freaking nanny state telling adults what they can and cannot do with their own bodies because they bought two millennia of sex shaming by the creepy hypocrites of the Church.
There are laws against exploitation. Those are sufficient. We don’t need the Taliban morality police too.
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You want exploitation, ugliness beyond belief or utterance? Then send it underground again where it is controlled entirely by criminal mobster cartels.
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Just thank all the gods it wasn’t Trump posing nude. Would your mind ever recover from that trauma?
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😹😹😹GOOD ONE, Lloyd.
Yes, TRAUMA.
What a riot. The dumpster naked is definitely porn! What a sight!
Ever wonder how long it takes the dumpster to put on all that make-up, hair goo, and his awful clothing…OY!
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Congrats to First Lady Melania for being the first nude model to serve as First Lady (perhaps)! Break the barriers! Be best! Report everything, however small, back to the Center.
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Bob, remember when Republicans were outraged that Michelle Obama wore a sleeveless dress?
https://search.app/k6uDeLTUK3M85fDt7
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IKR? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
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If the GOPee wants to criminalize PORN. They should begin with their own loyalists. The images of Kamala Harris Sexuality being posted everywhere by MAGA are intended to portray dominance, violence, submission, coercion, capitulation and consensual exploitation. These are the foundational behaviors of colonialism, enslavement, Manifest Destiny & economic/emotional/psychic destruction. The very human history they suppress yet simultaneously EXPRESS.
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And the Greying Old Party defines “porn” to include Madame Bovary and Sister Carrie and Maus and In the Night Kitchen. But it’s fine with Gaetz and Trump and what they did to their underage victims. Sick, ignorant, mindless people utterly in denial.
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As the late Norm Macdonald’s friend said, the worst thing is the hypocrisy.
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Hilarious! And true.
Although to be fair, neither Diane’s post nor anyone here nor any prominent Dems have said that hypocrisy is the worst thing about the GOP! It is definitely 10 pages in! But it is still important to call it out, in my opinion, because as Norm points out, most bad people are hypocrites.
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It just goes to show that the “Republican Party” has little to do with MAGA. The RNC convention had Amber Rose, an OnlyFans star and Hulk Hogan, a washed up show wrestler with a sex tape as speakers. Project 2025 belongs to the old order Rep Party while MAGA is a star studded event hosted by the dregs of society wrapped in glittered spandex, edgy haircuts and expensive suits (a circus event). Trump is probably correct when he states that he knows very little about Project 2025 and who developed it.
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That’s a good point about the MAGA folks at the convention, but Trump did pick a VP favored by the Project 2025 folks, not a VP favored by those MAGA folks.
Trump likely knows as little about Project 2025 as he knew about the Supreme Court. Which is that Trump doesn’t care about the whys or details – Trump knows that what is good for Trump is to make sure that the billionaires behind the far right anti-democracy movement get what they want, whether it is the Supreme Court or the Project 2025 takeover of this country. And Trump always does what is good for Trump.
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Yeah. I had no idea who Amber Rose was. Looked her up. Was surprised. FUNNY as heck.
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They are such weirdos. This is the theme everyone intuitively understands. They are so freaking weird.
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