[SPEAKER_01]: We will hear argument this morning in case twenty three eleven twenty two free speech coalition versus taxing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hey everyone, this is Leon from Prologue Projects.
[SPEAKER_01]: On this episode of Five to Four, Peter, Reannon and Michael are talking about Free Speech Coalition Inc.
[SPEAKER_01]: B. Paxton.
[SPEAKER_01]: This recent case is about free speech rights and online porn.
[SPEAKER_01]: In twenty twenty three, Texas passed a law requiring age verification for websites hosting sexually explicit material.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Free Speech Coalition, a trade association representing the adult entertainment industry, sued over the law.
[SPEAKER_01]: arguing that adults have the right to view explicit content, and that requiring them to verify their age puts a burden on their first amendment rights.
[SPEAKER_00]: The most closely watched first amendment cases arriving at the high court in years, the US Supreme Court now says that states can require age verification for online porn.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Supreme Court sided with Texas, ruling with the law only incidentally burdens adults' free speech rights and is not severe enough to be struck down.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is five to four.
[SPEAKER_01]: a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks.
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome to five to four, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have pounded our civil liberties like, let's actually skip the metaphor this week.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm here with Rihanna.
[SPEAKER_05]: No pounding, no slamming, no, and Michael.
[SPEAKER_03]: No wrestling distribution.
[SPEAKER_02]: All right, folks.
[SPEAKER_02]: Today's case free speech coalition V-packston.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is a case about free speech, but also online porn and other explicit content.
[SPEAKER_02]: Texas implemented a law that required age verification for any website that contains at least thirty percent, quote, sexual material harmful to minors.
[SPEAKER_02]: That law was challenged by folks saying that this burdens the first amendment, but the Supreme Court in a six to three decision said that it's fine.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, reasons it's your home state and you're the porn girl.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I love porn.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, wait, before we get started, before we get started, guys, I do think, you know, for our listeners, a content warning,
[SPEAKER_03]: We're going to be sticking to the law in the opinions and all that.
[SPEAKER_03]: But again, this is about pornography.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, be warned.
[SPEAKER_03]: If your bratty steps this over here's you listening to.
[SPEAKER_05]: No, this is my burden.
[SPEAKER_05]: This is my burden on this episode.
[SPEAKER_05]: I hope listeners really understand the work I'm putting in the sacrifice I make being on a podcast about porn with these two.
[SPEAKER_05]: with Peter and Michael.
[SPEAKER_05]: The jokes I am going to have to endure.
[SPEAKER_05]: And believe me, many will be cut.
[SPEAKER_02]: Look, I have no jokes planned.
[SPEAKER_02]: We just want to warn listeners that we're going to be saying words like boobs, you know?
[SPEAKER_02]: That's sort of content you might expect in this episode.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah guys, let's just jump right in.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay, so this Supreme Court case concerns HB-Eleven-Eighty-One.
[SPEAKER_05]: This was a law passed in Texas in twenty twenty three, championed of course by the conservative right in the state legislature and then being aggressively enforced since then by the Attorney General Ken Paxton.
[SPEAKER_05]: HB-Eleven-Edeone requires pornographic websites doing business in Texas to, quote, use reasonable age verification methods to verify that a customer is eighteen years of age or older.
[SPEAKER_05]: So the law applies to any commercial entity like any business that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material on the internet, including social media platforms, more than one-third of which is
[SPEAKER_05]: sexual material harmful to minors and according to the law companies that don't institute like this age verification they will be subject to fines of up to ten thousand dollars per day up to two hundred fifty thousand dollars if a child is exposed to pornographic content
[SPEAKER_05]: because of like a failure to verify that child's age.
[SPEAKER_05]: So what does verification actually look like?
[SPEAKER_05]: Websites according to the law have to require visitors to quote comply with a commercial age verification system.
[SPEAKER_05]: So a website can do this verification itself or it can hire
[SPEAKER_05]: a third party to do it and that verification system must use government issued ID to verify people's age or a quote commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data.
[SPEAKER_05]: You could in theory use some sort of information about like your house or your mortgage or something like that.
[SPEAKER_05]: Some other way like a bill or other proof that you have
[SPEAKER_05]: of doing business or being a resident in your place that proves you're eighteen years old.
[SPEAKER_02]: Here's my mortgage.
[SPEAKER_02]: Please let me jerk off.
[SPEAKER_05]: Right, it's ridiculous, but they have to, but they're providing something other than the ID only to verify.
[SPEAKER_02]: Getting my passport and sending it to Pornhub, so I can bust one out.
[SPEAKER_05]: Right, there is some absurdity here in having to do this with kind of like, you know, these faceless corporations, third party verification businesses that now just have a list of folks who are,
[SPEAKER_05]: signing on to point websites.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Soon, we're moving towards the world where they use the global entry technology before you jerk off, where you just put your face in the screen.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like at the airport, and they're like, yep, that's you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Get those retina scanned.
[SPEAKER_02]: The first time that I was at an airport, and they were just like, yeah, put your face here.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was like, hello, Peter.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was like, what the fuck is going on?
[SPEAKER_02]: We just let this happen.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I'm sure people are thinking, like, yeah, it's important for kids to not be able to view pornography online super easily.
[SPEAKER_05]: Maybe this is a good thing for websites to have to verify that your eighteen years of age or older.
[SPEAKER_05]: But there are some serious first amendment for each speech.
[SPEAKER_05]: considerations with this law.
[SPEAKER_05]: So the Supreme Court case here starts with a lawsuit brought by it's a trade association for the pornography industry and the organization is called the free speech coalition bringing this lawsuit and they're joined by free speech advocates adult entertainment websites who are saying that this law places an undue burden on adults by forcing them to
[SPEAKER_05]: jump through hoops, endanger their privacy, register themselves as accessing websites that are publicly available for adults and are not illegal for adults.
[SPEAKER_05]: They're accessing legal content.
[SPEAKER_05]: They also argue that this law is overly broad.
[SPEAKER_05]: It could easily be applied to websites that are providing information on reproductive rights.
[SPEAKER_05]: Say, sex ed, LGBTQ plus literature, and initially the district court, the lower level court agrees and issues an injunction, a stay on the enforcement of the Texas law, but the state of Texas through Ken Paxton's office appeals and the fifth circuit stayed the injunction.
[SPEAKER_05]: So Texas was allowed to go ahead and enforce the law.
[SPEAKER_05]: Ken Paxton starts suing these companies, these websites,
[SPEAKER_05]: saying they're not in compliance with the law, they're not doing the required age verification.
[SPEAKER_05]: This caused porn hub to stop operations in Texas and the lawsuit obviously continues.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's how we get to the Supreme Court.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so let's talk about the law here.
[SPEAKER_02]: The fundamental legal question is really about how rigidly the court should scrutinize this law.
[SPEAKER_02]: Should it be subjected to intermediate scrutiny or strict scrutiny?
[SPEAKER_02]: This is the question that the court is addressing.
[SPEAKER_02]: If it's subjected to strict scrutiny, the law will almost certainly be struck down.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a very rigid standard that results in almost every law that is subjected to it being struck down.
[SPEAKER_02]: So the argument is technically about which standard gets applied, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: But really, it's about whether this law gets upheld or not at the end of the day.
[SPEAKER_02]: A big thing to understand here is that there's no question that you can ban minors from accessing explicit content online.
[SPEAKER_02]: Miners do not have a constitutional right to access explicit content.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you're wondering what the definition of explicit content is, good question.
[SPEAKER_02]: We'll talk about that later.
[SPEAKER_02]: But for now, assume that there's some content that we all agree is to explicit for children, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Children do not have a right to access that content under the Constitution.
[SPEAKER_02]: But there's also no question that adults do have a right to access at least some types of explicit content.
[SPEAKER_02]: So the problem with this law is not that it prevents children from accessing explicit content.
[SPEAKER_02]: The problem is that it burdens adults who want to access this content because adults do in fact have a constitutional right to access it.
[SPEAKER_05]: And everybody's on the same page about this, right?
[SPEAKER_05]: In terms of it burdening adults.
[SPEAKER_05]: This is the issue here about whether the first amendment requires strict scrutiny of this law.
[SPEAKER_05]: There is a burden on free speech to adults here.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: What the big dispute is between the majority, written by aficionato Clarence Thomas,
[SPEAKER_02]: and the descent is what exactly the character of the burden on adults is.
[SPEAKER_02]: The majority's argument turns on whether this law directly, burden speech, or incidentally, burden speech.
[SPEAKER_02]: If a law only incidentally burdened speech, it is generally subject to a lower level of scrutiny.
[SPEAKER_02]: So this law burdens the speech of adults by requiring them to verify their age, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Accessing the content that you want to access is part of your first amendment, right to free speech.
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's really no question that it burdens adults first amendment rights.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the free speech coalition argued what I think is the correct take and the descent agreed, which is adults have a right to access this content.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're imposing an age verification requirement on them.
[SPEAKER_02]: That is a direct burden on their right.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not incidental.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the entire purpose and function of the law.
[SPEAKER_02]: But Clarence Thomas says no, it's not a direct burden.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's an incidental burden.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm going to read you his reasoning, because trying to explain it myself is essentially impossible.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think I'm just going to read you what he says.
[SPEAKER_02]: He says, because HP one one eight one simply requires proof of age to access content that is obscene to minors, it does not directly regulate adults protected speech.
[SPEAKER_02]: Adults have the right to access speech obscene only to minors and submitting to age verification burdens the exercise of that right.
[SPEAKER_02]: But adults have no first amendment right to avoid age verification.
[SPEAKER_02]: Any burden on adults is therefore incidental to regulating activity not protected by the first amendment.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's nonsense.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to read the key sentence again.
[SPEAKER_02]: Adults have the right to access speech obscene only to minors and submitting to age verification burdens the exercise of that right, but adults have no first amendment right to avoid age verification.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is incoherence.
[SPEAKER_03]: It doesn't make any sense.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's non-sensical.
[SPEAKER_02]: The reasoning as far as I can parse it is that adults have a right to access explicit material, but they don't have a right to access it without being burdened, which doesn't make sense.
[SPEAKER_02]: The whole point of a constitutional right is that the government cannot burden it without justifying that burden.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right, which is the whole point of the strict scrutiny test is the whole point of all of the tests.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's like the whole point of the analysis.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's like the whole thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: But Thomas wants to avoid that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So he does this weird little song and dance.
[SPEAKER_02]: He sort of simultaneously saying that they do have the right to access the content and that they don't.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: He compares this to O'Brien, a case from the sixties, that I think we covered about burning draft cards.
[SPEAKER_02]: There was a law saying that you can't destroy or alter your draft card during the Vietnam War when there was a draft.
[SPEAKER_02]: Protesters got charged when they burned their cards in protest, and the court held that the law only incidentally burned into their speech.
[SPEAKER_02]: And Thomas says, well, that was the same.
[SPEAKER_02]: They have the right to express themselves, but not the right to burn their draft cards.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it was incidental.
[SPEAKER_02]: But what Kagan points out in dissent was, no, in that case, the law itself was not about regulating speech, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: It was primarily a logistical law.
[SPEAKER_02]: They wanted to make sure that draft cards were preserved for use in the draft.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then the fact that you were burning it in protest was sort of unrelated to the purpose of the law in a sense, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Whereas this law is specifically about regulating access to speech.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll also add like, I don't agree with the court's conclusion in O'Brien.
[SPEAKER_02]: So like, I don't really care about Clarence Thomas's ability to like, square that case with this one or whatever.
[SPEAKER_02]: O'Brien in my mind was wrongly decided to, but I don't think that his attempt to square them makes any sense.
[SPEAKER_03]: No.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, to highlight how absurd Thomas' reasoning is here, I think it's sort of like saying, yeah, you have a right to free speech.
[SPEAKER_02]: You have a right to protest, but you don't have a right to hold up a piece of poster board with a message of your choice on it.
[SPEAKER_02]: So if a state regulates that, it's incidental.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not a direct regulation of your speech.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, it's just labeling the burden itself as incidental, which is actually where the analysis should be about whether the burden is justified.
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think Thomas is doing something kind of sneaky here, which is that like incidental has multiple meanings.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Something can be incidental if it's happening sort of almost by accident or unintentional, which is what they're saying in a bribe.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, this isn't intended to regulate speech.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's happening incidental to an otherwise non speech regulation.
[SPEAKER_03]: But incidental can also just mean minor can mean small.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's what I think Thomas is doing.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like a slight a hand.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's being like, well, this isn't a big deal though.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's incidental.
[SPEAKER_02]: cares.
[SPEAKER_02]: Or it's like it sort of depends on how you characterize the law, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like he's saying it's incidental to the primary purpose of protecting miners, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: But it's not incidental to the actual structure of the law.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the entire point of the law, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: The whole point of the law is age verification.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's an intentional minimization and obfuscation of what your constitutional right actually is, right, where he's just sort of like, well, you don't have a constitutional right to avoid age verification.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, okay, right.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's also true that you don't have like a constitutional right to avoid paperwork when you're buying a gun, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: But if a state
[SPEAKER_02]: put twenty thousand pages of paperwork in front of you before you had to buy a gun it would burden the right so dramatically that the court would say well you can't do this right it's just a way of sort of like twisting the actual words in these arguments where like it seems plausible but when you back up it doesn't actually make any sense another part of this argument is that according to Thomas the law is both quote traditional and widely accepted as legitimate
[SPEAKER_02]: which is little cutesy.
[SPEAKER_02]: What he's saying is that age verification for accessing obscene material, like you have to show ID at a store, if you buy porn, that is widely accepted, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: But sending your full ass ID or whatever over the internet, like sending your fucking mortgage application to porn hub.
[SPEAKER_02]: is neither traditional nor widely accepted as legitimate, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: So in order for this argument to work, you need to ignore the actual functioning of this law in reality.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's saying, well, we've done age verification before without reckoning with the fact that this method of age verification is completely novel.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think if you really want to understand what Thomas is doing here, I think he's basically trying to create a bespoke exception to the first amendment where if the government says that they're trying to protect children, then any regulation of speech that they want to do is incidental.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that will create a lower standard for first amendment speech as long as the government says we're trying to protect kids here.
[SPEAKER_02]: We'll talk about the downstream consequences of that shortly, but I think that's the ultimate goal here.
[SPEAKER_02]: All of these weird word games and shit, that's sort of just like him getting to a place where he's now created this sort of functional exception to the constitution where if a state says, hey, we're trying to protect children, then you can actually burden adults speech quite a bit.
[SPEAKER_03]: So there is a dissent.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's authored by Elena Cagan and joined by the two other lips.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's okay.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's an okay dissent.
[SPEAKER_02]: He sure it's not fire.
[SPEAKER_02]: He sure it's not.
[SPEAKER_02]: The fucking just fire breathing Elena Cagan just kicking ass and taking names.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's very law professory.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, it's very sort of didactic.
[SPEAKER_03]: If I had to describe the dynamic, I would say, she's the teacher.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thomas is the naughty student that she's holding after class.
[SPEAKER_02]: We can't keep doing this.
[SPEAKER_03]: up until this case.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like if you wanted to give yourself a primer on content based restrictions and first amendment law, you know, like if you're a law student reading her sort of analysis of this and her like step by step going through, you know, how it's content based, how it's burning and why that means strict scrutiny and how you apply strict scrutiny.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's great.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like a great.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: step by step this is how you do this analysis right opinion which I think frankly would be bad if that's all it was because that doesn't meet the moment I said it was okay because she does have some good stuff where she
[SPEAKER_03]: calls them out for not really engaging in legal reasoning at all for just basically having a conclusion and working backwards to get to it.
[SPEAKER_03]: She says the usual way constitutional review works is to figure out the right standard and let that standard work to a conclusion.
[SPEAKER_03]: It does not to assume the conclusion and pick the standard sure to arrive there.
[SPEAKER_03]: But that is what the majority does.
[SPEAKER_03]: To answer what standard of scrutiny applies, the majority first spends four pages, loading age verification schemes as common, traditional, appropriate, and necessary.
[SPEAKER_03]: In other words, all over the place and a good thing, too.
[SPEAKER_03]: No wonder the majority doesn't land on strict scrutiny.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's it.
[SPEAKER_03]: We think this is good.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so we're going to find a way to land on the legal test that lets it stand because it's good policy.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's all that's going on here.
[SPEAKER_03]: And she does a good job of hitting that section Peter talked about where Thomas is just totally writing incoherent nonsense.
[SPEAKER_03]: She says,
[SPEAKER_03]: So it turns out the majority says that the first amendment only partially protects the speech in question.
[SPEAKER_03]: The speech is unprotected to the extent that the state seeks only to verify age, meaning the speech is unprotected to the extent that the state is imposing the very burden under review.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, completely circular.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Or set another way, the right of adults to view the speech has the burden of age verification built right in.
[SPEAKER_03]: That is convenient if altogether circular.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's about as fiery as Kagan gets.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Kagan is like, she's a specialist when it comes to like, precedent, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and she goes through four different cases in this.
[SPEAKER_02]: President is like her arena.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you step into cake and territory on precedent, she will probably eviscerate you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Mm-hmm.
[SPEAKER_02]: However, she can't leave that arena very effectively.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: You mentioned she touches on it, but she sort of struggles to articulate this like big picture.
[SPEAKER_02]: What's the court doing here and why and all the liberals do to some degree.
[SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, this is one of those things where it's like
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, here we are at the end of the Supreme Court term.
[SPEAKER_02]: Six months of them just completely ignoring the law, right, whenever it benefits conservatives.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you're like yelling at them because they don't understand the O'Brien precedent.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, I guess you're winning.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're ACLUV.
[SPEAKER_03]: V. Ashdrop.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is like, I don't know if you guys saw that they're making a new mortal combat movie in the new trailer just dropped.
[SPEAKER_03]: in it, one of the guys does like a fatality where he like rips someone's spinal column like out of their back.
[SPEAKER_02]: Classic Mortal Kombat.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that is like like Kagan being like actually ACLU Reashcroft is not a total ban on speech.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's merely your verdict.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like that's how I think she imagines herself when she like bust out these quotes, you know?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like you said when you said like you step into that arena,
[SPEAKER_02]: She's like a really tough side quest for them.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know what I mean?
[SPEAKER_02]: And like I can't can't beat Kagan on precedent, you know, but doesn't really matter.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm just going to go beat the game.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_03]: There is like one other thing I wanted to note from her opinion.
[SPEAKER_03]: She talks about the majority saying that, like, the internet's basically developed too fast to keep up as for first of a lie on our precedence.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they say this case ACLU Viasch, which was about obscenity online from two thousand and four, like isn't really on point as a result.
[SPEAKER_03]: And she says, well, look, hardcore pornography was on the internet in two thousand and four.
[SPEAKER_03]: like that's that's not correct but I think again this is sort of missing what's really happening here which is it's not that the internet has developed too fast it's that society is developed too fast in reactionaries do not like that they don't like how society is changed since two thousand four and so precedent that's not up to
[SPEAKER_03]: The social engineering they want to do is not useful to them, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like the internet is developing too fast.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's just the gloss they're putting on.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't like how present gay and trans people are in modern Americans aside.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: And sex, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like this old sort of puritanical vibe that they have.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is something that was a much bigger deal politically when you like first saw mainstream porn, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like playboy penthouse.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_05]: pornography was like a major culture war issue in the seventies, you know, Reagan and the like courting of the religious evangelical right?
[SPEAKER_05]: Like this is today a rehashing of debates and fights that we have had for decades.
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe he knows a good time for a break.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we're back when you really saw like pornographic magazines come on to the market right that was a watershed moment right like all of a sudden pornography which was like this very niche thing is available at the store
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, religious folks were freaking out, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: This was like the decay of society.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then for a very, very long time, they sort of gave up on it politically, in part because it was everywhere.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like there's nothing you can really do to stop it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's only recently that they've sort of returned to this and and comfort like systems of regulation that might actually work.
[SPEAKER_02]: But for a long time, the proliferation of porn is actually what stopped them because it was just so clearly difficult to stop, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: You weren't actually going to be able to impede anyone's ability to consume it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: So when this became like a big issue in the sixties and seventies is also when you saw the first major court cases and the idea of obscenity is a big part of first amendment law because
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the outer boundary of what we consider acceptable, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: You're not going to see any free speech cases about like really dull in offensive speech because no one's trying to regulate that or at least not that often.
[SPEAKER_02]: So many free speech cases end up being about either like porn or offensive speech, shit like that, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: In nineteen seventy three, there's this case Miller V. California where the court says obscene speech is not protected by the first amendment.
[SPEAKER_02]: But then the test for what is obscene is really vague.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's about whether the work in question appeals to the current interest, whether it has no discernible political or artistic value, and all of that is based on the prevailing standards of the community.
[SPEAKER_02]: Very, very vague stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: And a lot of conservative legal scholars have argued for leveraging that vagueness to crack down, not just on porn, but on explicit content in film and television.
[SPEAKER_02]: And beyond that, just sort of expanding the definition of what obscene content actually is.
[SPEAKER_02]: And these cases often remind me of like criminal law in a way where people are like, well, do I really want to defend
[SPEAKER_02]: the person who did this awful crime, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And here it's like, well, do I really want to argue for access to porn?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like is this, is this a hill we're going to die on?
[SPEAKER_02]: And maybe in a vacuum, you don't.
[SPEAKER_02]: But what you're really arguing for is the establishment of red lines for free speech and expression that the government cannot cross, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And those lines need to be drawn somewhere.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you want them to be effective, they actually have to be drawn somewhere that's like a little bit questionable, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like a little bit weird, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: You're going to have to veer into obscenity if you really want to be able to protect speech.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's right.
[SPEAKER_03]: And like what's helpful in this moment is that our opponents are very open about how that's true going the other direction because they're not interested in just little tinkering at the edges, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: They want to control
[SPEAKER_03]: your every thought, your every, you know, everything you read, everything, all that shit.
[SPEAKER_03]: So like I'm not exaggerating, you can go look at Project twenty twenty five, they talk about pornography.
[SPEAKER_03]: Here's a quote, pornography manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political gory and not.
[SPEAKER_03]: inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is no claim to First Amendment protection.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's pervellers our child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women.
[SPEAKER_03]: Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime.
[SPEAKER_03]: Pornography should be outlawed.
[SPEAKER_03]: The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.
[SPEAKER_03]: Educators and public librarians who pervade it should be classed as registered sex offenders and telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
[SPEAKER_03]: Again,
[SPEAKER_03]: This is pornography manifested in the propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children.
[SPEAKER_03]: They're saying librarians should be jailed.
[SPEAKER_03]: They're talking about the books we were talking about last week.
[SPEAKER_03]: They're talking about a librarian who stocks the book about a gay couple getting married should go to prison.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's in fucking project, twenty twenty five.
[SPEAKER_02]: And not only is it in project twenty twenty twenty five.
[SPEAKER_02]: Project twenty twenty five is a nine hundred something page document this is page five yeah right this is like in the introduction and yet it's not like they say pornography by which we mean like hardcore depictions of intercourse right
[SPEAKER_02]: they immediately say transgender ideology when they're talking about pornography.
[SPEAKER_02]: Within this definition of pornography and this explanation of what should be done from a policy perspective, there isn't even really a direct mention of what we all understand pornography to be.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right, even the sexualization of children, that's not about child porn, that's about
[SPEAKER_03]: Children's books where kids might be gay or have a non-binary gender identity or something like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: I do appreciate them putting in its pervellers, our child predators, and misogynistic exploiters of women.
[SPEAKER_03]: misogynist the classic the classic enemy of conservatives one of the authors of project twenty twenty five and current head of the office of management budget Russell Vaughn was caught on like a sort of secret camera
[SPEAKER_03]: saying, we'd have a national ban on pornography if we could, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And he called age verification a back door, quote unquote, to a ban, which, you know, as Rianan said, is how it's operating in practice, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Pornhub no longer allows people to access it from from Texas.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the purpose of the law and it's working as intended.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, that's exactly right.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so much background evidence and more information about this, just looking into it a little bit more than what the majority wants you to think is going on here.
[SPEAKER_05]: Sort of it like reveals that there is a larger project here that's actually about anti LGBTQ people that's actually about anti free speech, that's actually about anti dignity, anti autonomy, anti specific participation of every individual.
[SPEAKER_05]: There was another part of this law, actually don't know if it was another part of this law, HB-Eleven-Eighty-One, or if it was just a related law, also passed in Texas at about the same time.
[SPEAKER_05]: The Texas legislature in passing this law required websites to impose a health warning
[SPEAKER_05]: pornography websites, you impose a health warning that states quote, pornography is potentially biologically addictive, is proven to harm human brain development, desensitizes brain reward circuits, increases conditioned responses, and weakens brain function.
[SPEAKER_05]: The fifth circuit struck down that part of the law because they called that unconstitutional compelled speech.
[SPEAKER_05]: You can't force somebody to say a quote.
[SPEAKER_02]: especially by the way when it's like for sure not true.
[SPEAKER_02]: Why are they so obsessed with the addictive quality of pornography?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, they are all addicted to pornography.
[SPEAKER_02]: The psychology here is just so, like, it's so clearly on display.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, it says it's a total projection.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, they're like, oh, it's so addictive.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's so addictive.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like calm down.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think that has not been my experience.
[SPEAKER_03]: You guys lost that governor race because Mark Robinson.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like terribly addicted to port auger, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: But that's a you problem.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe it's because the way that you view sex is so unhealthy and fetishistic that when you look at porn, it triggers something in your brain that you've never tried to understand or control.
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe that's what's happening.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's if I had to guess.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and of course, like Texas is not alone.
[SPEAKER_03]: There are eighteen other states with similar laws currently in effect.
[SPEAKER_03]: As we mentioned last episode, and if talked about here, there are book bands, which are also tied to, you know, the fight to supposedly protect children.
[SPEAKER_03]: from pornography, hundred-twelfth proposed state bills on loosening the standards for banning books and schools, over thirty of which are in Texas alone, over four thousand titles banned by the most recent count across school districts, probably much more than that.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's an incomplete count.
[SPEAKER_03]: Christine Bentley, a member of the State Republican Executive Committee in Texas, and a big advocate for one of these bookband bills says she backs it because she's concerned about sexually explicit books and books that tell kids to go look at porn online.
[SPEAKER_05]: Absolutely in the public school library for second graders.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now there's classic books that we all know.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's how old kids to go look at porn online.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: She says it's sexually grooming children.
[SPEAKER_03]: Meanwhile, the books they're banning are like the handmade style and the degree of road.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Although I will say Bentley mentioned blues the warmest color and I haven't read that book, but I watch the movie.
[SPEAKER_03]: Fair.
[SPEAKER_03]: I was watching that movie and my wife yelled from the other side of the house, are you just watching porn?
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a lot.
[SPEAKER_03]: One of the groups in Texas that's like pushing a lot of this stuff.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's called Texas values.
[SPEAKER_03]: their missions include banning pornographic books and teaching creationism and biology and evolution.
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, this project of course, it's also tied to making life more difficult for sex workers, a lot of whom find clients online now.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so it's about
[SPEAKER_03]: making it harder for clients to find them, harder for them to get payment processors.
[SPEAKER_03]: This also opens the door to surveillance of this favored groups.
[SPEAKER_03]: This law in particular puts the burden on this websites.
[SPEAKER_03]: But, you know, these laws can also take the form of government verification, in which case, you know, you'd have to be setting your ID to the Texas government in order to access pornography, which if you want the Texas government having your porn search history, you are a braver or a stupider person, then I can possibly imagine.
[SPEAKER_03]: As Vianne mentioned, it's also very easy to see how this can be expanded to Mr. King access to abortion, to information about abortion, to plant parenthoods website in Texas.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, maybe that's actually explicit.
[SPEAKER_03]: as we've discussed multiple times in the last few weeks, the Conservatives' idea of what's pornographic and explicit in sexual material is very different from what I think the normal person says.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, and what they're handing the state is, you can just say it's protecting children and we'll give you, we'll give you the out.
[SPEAKER_03]: It just has to be thirty percent explicit, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Thirty percent pornographic.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's actually a good microcosm of how a lot of right-wing politics operate these days, where the goal is something that's very palatable to the majority of people, make it difficult for children to access online pornography, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: The sort of stated narrow goal, very palatable to the general public, the actual practice of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: is a burdening adult's ability to access adult content and then be all of these downstream effects that you get from broadening the definition of what adult content really is, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: You see a similar thing in like the immigration context where
[SPEAKER_02]: They're like, we want to get criminal immigrants out of the country, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: If you're a criminal illegal immigrant out of the country, you can run an entire presidential campaign off that, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And then you see what it looks like in practice, where that's not their goal at all.
[SPEAKER_02]: Their goal is just to get immigrants out of the country, period to establish white supremacy in certain respects within our country.
[SPEAKER_02]: As soon as the rubber meets the road on their policy, you can see the discrepancy between their rhetoric and the reality of their governance.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, and they're taking what is palatable to a majority of people.
[SPEAKER_05]: What we kind of have referred to as like easy cases, like superficially or on their face easy cases, right?
[SPEAKER_05]: Peter, you already made the comparison, which we've talked about before in criminal law, where conservative judges
[SPEAKER_05]: Take advantage of the fact that somebody has been found guilty of murder for instance.
[SPEAKER_05]: They take advantage of that visceral instinct that that person should be punished in order to justify that that person doesn't get, for example, procedural constitutional protections at trial or in appeals or on habeas, right?
[SPEAKER_05]: And so here you see a similar thing.
[SPEAKER_05]: It is understandable and in fact most people probably agree that it was okay with them if it was harder for their kids to you know access obscene materials access pornography online.
[SPEAKER_05]: But we always have to make sure that we contextualize
[SPEAKER_05]: and cast Supreme Court cases, especially with this court, especially over the last several decades, right in the larger project of implementing brick by brick.
[SPEAKER_05]: The judiciary in specifically the Supreme Court right now, actually, the judiciary is where the conservative social movement
[SPEAKER_05]: is doing the work and the Supreme Court does the work for them, brick by brick by brick.
[SPEAKER_05]: So here you have an easy case where, yeah, people generally don't have a big problem with this.
[SPEAKER_05]: Maybe they don't personally feel like they're free speech is that burdened by this and maybe the benefit of protecting kids.
[SPEAKER_05]: outweighs whatever burden or inconvenience they might feel by having to do age verification when they go to porn hell or whatever.
[SPEAKER_05]: You have to see this as in a long line of what's to come.
[SPEAKER_05]: You have to see this as what did the court actually rule?
[SPEAKER_05]: Being so vague about a word like incidental, a handing the conservative legal movement, the conservative social movement, the ability to just say we're protecting kids.
[SPEAKER_05]: It sort of reveals actually to just say that we're protecting kids and then that allows them to do all manner of anti free speech, legislation and policy.
[SPEAKER_05]: It utterly reveals what is actually anti free speech, anti liberty,
[SPEAKER_05]: anti-privacy certainly about the conservative project and it's something that I think is hard or it's quite like a nuanced discussion especially about culture or issues because these issues do feel so relevant they do feel so close to home they do invoke such visceral reactions on both sides
[SPEAKER_05]: But I cannot stop thinking.
[SPEAKER_05]: I cannot stop thinking about the size of the Supreme Court's docket and what cases they take and what cases they don't.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the prioritization here of this kind of case
[SPEAKER_05]: and gay books and trans kids getting healthcare, taking up such a large proportion of the tiny amount relatively speaking of cases that the Supreme Court takes.
[SPEAKER_05]: We have to see this as part of the project to actually distract and recast what societies problems are to the public.
[SPEAKER_05]: in that we have massive, massive inequality.
[SPEAKER_05]: We have massive structural racism.
[SPEAKER_05]: We have massive systemic problems that the Supreme Court in an ideal world might weigh in on might take up quite seriously and instead what we have is the Supreme Court actually lifting up
[SPEAKER_05]: putting in like this super seeding priority on this kind of frankly bullshit that has not been shown to actually be harming a large amount of people or a large percentage of our society the same way so much else is right now.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so you are having social engineering, like you mentioned, Michael, you're having social engineering also happening by being told what the problems are in your life.
[SPEAKER_05]: And those problems are inaccurate.
[SPEAKER_05]: They are not what you should be mad at.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's right.
[SPEAKER_03]: I do think this is a good way to think about the conservative movement writ large is they're upset about social trends.
[SPEAKER_03]: They can't control and and so they are reaching for power.
[SPEAKER_03]: to arrest those social trends.
[SPEAKER_03]: But like, you know, the fucking government can't tell you whether or not you like trans people, whether or not you want your kid to have friends of many races and all that shit, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like the government can't tell you that.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so they're just getting more and more authoritarian and more and more demographic.
[SPEAKER_03]: as they try to shape culture with institutions that are not really fit for that for that task.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, this is one brick in the thought police project in the mind control project of authoritarianism that's inherent to right wing tyranny.
[SPEAKER_02]: And one of like very important part of this that we've touched on a bit here is the vagueness of this law.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are two like really vague components of this law.
[SPEAKER_02]: One is like what is sexual material harmful to minors?
[SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: Obviously the right wants to include completely inoffensive content like gay people and children's books.
[SPEAKER_02]: But that's a very vague standard to be used in a law.
[SPEAKER_02]: The other
[SPEAKER_02]: is that this applies to websites that have thirty percent or more sexual material harmful to miners.
[SPEAKER_02]: What does that mean?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thirty percent based on what?
[SPEAKER_02]: Thirty percent of the web pages have offensive material is it thirty percent of the total video content by length by volume what by what?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like what are you talking about exactly right?
[SPEAKER_02]: This could be challenged
[SPEAKER_02]: as unconstitutionally vague, you can challenge the constitutionality of provisions like this based on vagueness, basically saying they're so vague that they should be void, that you can't constitutionally enforce something this vague because it sort of it lends itself to being abused.
[SPEAKER_02]: And to sort of build on what you're saying, Ree, they could have taken up the vagueness question.
[SPEAKER_02]: They could have said, hey, there's a really interesting issue here with how vague this law is that we need to address.
[SPEAKER_02]: Instead, they take up the question of whether it's strict scrutiny or intermediate scrutiny, which
[SPEAKER_02]: As Cagan lays out, should have been a settled question, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's just not a hard one.
[SPEAKER_02]: They, they wanted to create a new avenue for, you know, quote unquote obscene speech to be shut down by the states.
[SPEAKER_02]: But we have like all of these constitutional problems built into the law that the court's not addressing here and should probably be addressed, frankly, but I mean, the sort of absurdity of this
[SPEAKER_02]: case and what's so frustrating about it.
[SPEAKER_02]: What I think becomes so frustrating about life under fascism is that you're having two separate conversations at once, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: You're having a conversation about what the law says it is and what we all know it is.
[SPEAKER_02]: It says that it's this like very narrow law trying to protect kids from online porn, but we all know that it's much broader than that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's very frustrating conversation to have when the other side won't even admit to what they're talking about.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's also really frustrating to be put on a quote unquote side of the argument where what you feel you have to argue for or like defend is, you know, no actually sorry.
[SPEAKER_05]: It should be easier.
[SPEAKER_05]: for kids to access porn.
[SPEAKER_05]: Again, noting at once, the vagueness of the law, the vagueness of how they talk about it, the vagueness of the legal analysis that they take on, but the sharp intentionality of the subject matter.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: As soon as you have them speaking freely in like project twenty twenty five all of a sudden they're very articulate.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: I also want to mention since we're talking about like the constitutional deficiencies of this law.
[SPEAKER_03]: One point that's not really discussed in the descent that I think should have been and why I don't think this law should it should survive strict scrutiny one of the many reasons.
[SPEAKER_03]: Is it's not very effective at achieving its aims, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: If the aim is to block access to pornographic websites, you know, the WWE stands for World Wide Web.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the world's
[SPEAKER_03]: has lots of perveurs of pornography that are outside the jurisdiction of the United States.
[SPEAKER_03]: And all this means is that when porn hub leaves the state that little teenagers are going to go to websites that are hosted in Russia or Eastern Europe or whatever, which by the way, tend to operate under more lag standards.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, that's it.
[SPEAKER_03]: That was at my next point, which is yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: One of the sort of odd things about the internet porn world is that like I was reading about this case and one of the more fascinating things about what's happened in the last like fifteen years is that the consolidation of money and power in just like a couple of websites.
[SPEAKER_02]: has led to them professionalizing in a lot of ways and taking like steps to crack down on exploitative content which used to be relatively pervasive on these platforms and then they crack down on aggressively.
[SPEAKER_02]: So now only like verified content creators can upload porn to these sites.
[SPEAKER_02]: So like your best bet
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, if you want to prevent your child from seeing online porn, this really won't work.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I would imagine that most parents would prefer that if their kids were going to access porn, that it wasn't like something that is gross and exploitative, right, that it doesn't include non-consensual content or a child pornography, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you want that, then you probably want one of these large companies who is US based to be the company that your kid uses, frankly.
[SPEAKER_05]: Right.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: And what's going on here with the majority in sort of like hand waving, strict scrutiny and actually like engaging and scrutinizing the law is that there's no analysis about whether or not the laws effective in its goal, about whether or not it actually protects kids.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the other way it doesn't protect kids is that a lot of these sites are not secure.
[SPEAKER_03]: You're far more likely to get a virus or some shit that's going to steal your credit card information or your personal information on one of these, you know, weird, fringe, foreign sites than you are on porn hub, right, which is very professionalized and makes, you know, lots of effort to make itself safe and acceptable to federal regulators to US regulators and their funders.
[SPEAKER_03]: So,
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's just, it's bad policy.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like it's setting aside everything else.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like it's, it's not good.
[SPEAKER_03]: I do think important context for this also Clarence Thomas writing the majority.
[SPEAKER_03]: I was reading recently.
[SPEAKER_03]: Somebody described walking into his apartment when he was between wives after his first marriage ended but before he married Jenny Thomas.
[SPEAKER_03]: This was when he was in like in his thirties.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a full grown fucking adult.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it worked at the EOC at this point and they were like, yeah, you had just had like, you know, torn out like full page pornographic spreads just like pin two's walls.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, look, we've only briefly referenced the fact that
[SPEAKER_02]: Clarence Thomas from everything we know, at least at some point in the past, was like a bit of a porn connoisseur, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: He was a porn guy, which by the way, it wasn't easy to be back in the eighties or whatever back in the seventies.
[SPEAKER_02]: right you had to get to go to weird little fucking movie theaters which Thomas reportedly did do right um it's it's not like now where it's just like you know www dot big boobs dot com and you're there right and it's just you and you have to this is you have to go meet another creep
[SPEAKER_02]: And then by by porn from them, it's like a multi person operation back in the day and there's something so weird about how many conservatives and I don't want to get I don't want to get do too much armchair psychology here, but like it's like this simultaneous
[SPEAKER_02]: Revolution and fascination that they have with this stuff and like they're belief that it is like evil and addictive and all this stuff as well as like their deep fascination with it and desire to consume it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I found the passage.
[SPEAKER_03]: And especially in his younger years, mayor and Abrams' sources were called Thomas as a pornography official nato who'd enthusiastically discuss it with anyone within your shop.
[SPEAKER_03]: A colleague who stopped by his studio apartment shortly after he'd moved in, remembered encountering a mattress on the floor, a stereo system, and a huge, compulsively organized stack of playboy magazines.
[SPEAKER_03]: Five years worth of them were organized by month and a year.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thomas said also papered every wall, including those in the kitchen with center folds of nude women, joking to his unnerved colleague that the magazines were the only thing worth taking from his marriage.
[SPEAKER_02]: Lord, my God, a full ass adult.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll say this.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've met
[SPEAKER_02]: over the course of my life.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like hundreds of guys who are probably complete, sleigh's back.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know what I mean?
[SPEAKER_02]: Just like incidentally.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like they come into your life briefly.
[SPEAKER_02]: You meet them.
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe you're at their apartment.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, to buy drugs or something.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've never had anyone bring up pornography to me as like a topic of discussion.
[SPEAKER_02]: Never once.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Clarence Thomas is more of a purve than every person I've ever met in my entire life.
[SPEAKER_03]: between his politics and his love of pornography, I feel like the character in popular media that like most makes me think probably is what Clarence Thomas is like, is the guy in taxi driver, you know?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Who like takes his date to one of those porn theaters and is also like super reactionary anti crime guy.
[SPEAKER_03]: I feel like that's Clarence Thomas.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's that's yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: if only his story ended in similar fashion.
[SPEAKER_02]: Probably had to cut that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, look, again, we're a Supreme Court podcast and what Clarence needs is the greatest psychologist in the history of the world.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yes, yes.
[SPEAKER_02]: So if anyone knows the best psychologist on Earth, please reach out.
[SPEAKER_02]: We need to get him to our boy Clarence immediately.
[SPEAKER_05]: Freud is confounded.
[SPEAKER_02]: Freud's scrapping all of his previous theories.
[SPEAKER_03]: He got... Young.
[SPEAKER_03]: Uh-huh.
[SPEAKER_02]: Slobics.
[SPEAKER_03]: Does not know what's going on.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's in some kind of weird purgatory and gods like you can come in to heaven once you figure out Clarence Thomas and he's just surrounded by a library of like mountains of books furiously going through them at all times.
[SPEAKER_02]: Alright, folks, next week we're going to talk about what happened a month ago in LA.
[SPEAKER_02]: The moment of the National Guard, the resulting lawsuit brought by the ACLU, now that
[SPEAKER_02]: some time has passed we actually have a relatively good understanding of what happened on the ground.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we're going to talk about it, talk about what might happen in the future and what these sort of like legal angles are for throwing gum in the gears of the Trump administration.
[SPEAKER_02]: follow us on social media at five or four podcasts, subscribe to our patreon patreon.com slash five or four podcasts, I'll spell that for access to that episode, other premium episodes and ad free episodes, special events access to our Slack all sorts of shit.
[SPEAKER_02]: We'll see you next week.
[SPEAKER_05]: Bye.
[SPEAKER_03]: Bye, everybody.
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