WASHINGTON — This year’s National Conservatism Conference held in Washington hosted a “Big Tech and Big Porn” panel earlier this week where a spokesperson for right-wing think tank Ethics and Public Policy Center confirmed that the age verification laws currently promoted around the country by religious conservatives are merely a step towards a total ban of porn.
The event was covered by Sarah Jones, senior writer for New York magazine’s Intelligencer news site, who reported that the fourth installment of the conference was marked by “an explicit obsession with white Christian fertility, which consumes the speakers and animates the crowd perhaps more than any other subject.”
The “Big Tech and Big Porn” panel was chaired by Megan Basham, of the Ben Shapiro-aligned Daily Wire news site. Speakers included Clare Morell of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Michigan State University law professor Adam Candeub and Emily Jashinsky, a commentator for the Federalist conservative news site.
“During the question-and-answer period, a male college student wanted to know why they shouldn’t try to ban pornography for everyone and not just children,” Jones reported. Morell said that starting with porn bans for minors is “more feasible and ‘builds momentum’ for ‘furthering things down the road.’”
Morell works for the influential Ethics and Public Policy Center, a group linked to Federalist Society architect and Republican judiciary power broker Leonard Leo, who sits on its board. The center is led by J. Robinson Hays III, a Texas finance and hospitality millionaire and bills itself as “Washington, D.C.’s premier institute working to apply the riches of the Jewish and Christian traditions to contemporary questions of law, culture, and politics, in pursuit of America’s continued civic and cultural renewal.”
During the panel, Michigan law professor Candeub shared his notion that American conservatives “should avoid porn altogether.”
“Bad men, bad male libido,” Candeub told the crowd, raising his voice, according to Jones.
Candeub is a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America, a Trumpist think tank founded by the presumptive republican nominee’s former staffers in 2021. His scholarly interests include the law and regulation of communications, internet and technology. He has no reported background on male human sexuality studies, or on theories of different types of human libido.
A Conference Haunted by the Specter of Project 2025
The National Conservatism Conference’s predominantly male audience listened to panelists and speakers, many with considerable ties to the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation.
The conference coincided with the Heritage Foundation being prominent in the news during this phase of the 2024 presidential election, due to its leadership of Project 2025, a controversial initiative to remake the U.S. government and American society along hard-right, Christian Nationalist lines in the event of a Donald Trump victory in November.
As XBIZ reported, Project 2025 proposes the re-criminalization of all porn production and distribution, and considers most LGBTQ+ content of any kind as “pornographic.”
Last week, after mainstream commentators highlighted the most inflammatory proposals of Project 2025, Trump sought to distance his campaign from the group and its extreme Christian Nationalist wish list.
Pornography, Project 2025 decrees, “has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
Heritage Foundation figurehead Paul Dans extolled the virtues of Project 2025 at the conference.
During another presentation, the Heritage Foundation’s Chris DeMuth told the crowd that “faith, family and fertility are the new mainstream,” and railed against “feminized culture.”
Other panelists presented ideas coherent with the notion, increasingly influential among American conservative movement ideologues, that there should be a campaign to end all “recreational sex.”
Jones quoted the work of prominent National Conservative Conference speaker Albert Mohler, of the Southern Baptist Convention, stating that heterosexual sex “cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party.”
“A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants,” Mohler theorized in his treatise “Fidelity: What It Means to Be a One-Woman Man.”
A woman, he added, “receives, surrenders, accepts.”
Main Image: Pro-censorship activist Clare Morell of the Ethics and Public Policy Center