"The shooter calls for attacks on 'large pornographic industry conferences, the headquarters of international pornography companies, and prominent individuals who are pornographic actors or actresses themselves ... Porn and pornography are mentioned about 32 times in the manifesto.'

"U.S. Senator Jim Banks of Indiana, who last month urged the Department of Justice to ramp up obscenity prosecutions, on Wednesday introduced a bill that would make age verification by adult websites federal law." www.xbiz.com/news/298803/...

"There are now more births to women over 40 than to teens — not the worst thing" www.nationalreview.com/magazine/202...

What watching kids' movies is like in my household

Trump’s new Homeland Security task forces are supposedly fighting an immigrant “invasion" & taking on human smuggling networks, foreign gangs, transnational crime, & “terror-related activities” But they seem mostly to be doing drug war, & going after U.S. citizens reason.com/2026/06/23/t...

Piece by me this week - looking at the surging number of killings by police in the United States: www.economist.com/united-state...

👎 Ohio. 'The Social Media Parental Notification Act "does not raise meaningful concerns about muting valuable protected discourse"' @enbrown.bsky.social: 'a mandate that everyone must attach their real name or face to every online account undoubtedly will chill speech' 💯 reason.com/2026/06/22/6...

First (but *not* last) #SCOTUS ruling is in Cisco. For the usual 6-3 majority, Barrett effectively guts the Alien Tort Statute and forecloses aiding-and-abetting liability under the Torture Victims Protection Act. A really big (and bad) ruling for accountability for human rights abuses:

The UK is proposing age-verification — biometrics and government ID — for sexting. But don't worry, they're not taking away your rights! "Adults would ⁠still ⁠be able to take, ⁠share ​or view nude content through an age verification process"

But this is where we are. In like 2 years, we’ve gone from “we just want to make porn sites block kids” to “yes, it’s totally reasonable to make people submit their IDs or do facial recognition before they can even use a computer or phone”

"Adults would ⁠still ⁠be able to take, ⁠share or view nude content through an age verification process” is just such a dystopian sentence reason.com/2026/06/17/c...

Last week, Sen. Banks proposed a FTC-enforced national age-verification for site with "sexual material harmful to minors" — the SAFE for Kids Act. He believes this should include "gender ideology."

Really interesting post from @stephhmurray.bsky.social dispelling myths about Americans use of daycare. "Enrollment in childcare, and especially full-time, center-based childcare, isn’t terribly common among young kids in America. At any age," she writes stephaniehmurray.substack.com/p/rightsizin...

Today, in my newsletter: The White House vs Anthropic (if it looks like retaliation and walks like retaliation...) UK to ban under-16s from social media, online gaming An Ohio police chief faces 70(!) counts of felony sex crimes Arkansas' librarian criminalizing law in court [...]

Antonia Crane: "Sex workers — like me — get arrested because cops and politicians have something to prove. It’s Election Day, it’s the World Cup, it’s whatever. We are not dirt to sweep up when they clean up the streets ." thelalocal.org/neighborhood...

Thanks to a 2023 law, librarians and booksellers face jail time in Arkansas for stocking LGBTQ+ books. Conservative parents claim the books are "harmful to minors" — and thus criminal to allow minors to read. The original law was enjoined. The 8th Circuit heard the case last week.

If you yourself have not personally sucked dicks for money, then I don’t wanna hear you use the word “whore” as a slur like you’re fighting for freedom or some shit. No sir, that is misogynistic as hell, and you ain’t no comrade of mine

"UK teenagers too dumb to learn how to use a VPN will be banned from the following..." There, FIFY.

Happy Pride to this Caravaggio self-portrait that made one man so gay he had to go to the hospital

“When The Plains Sentinel contacted Nebraska’s state police about Waugh’s claim of 30,000 annual trafficking tips, a spokesman quickly admitted the colonel was mistaken. In fact, there were only 88 such calls in 2025….” @enbrown.bsky.social @maggiemcneill.bsky.social

Again, @enbrown.bsky.social debunks some of our constant phone panic. 'Alas, we live in a period of total paranoia and doom about smartphones...I want to look (once again) at why this fatalistic view is unwarranted and how the hype about phones & fertility doesn't hold up' reason.com/2026/06/10/t...

I am humbly begging people to stop acting like a drop in unintended pregnancies among teen girls is some great tragedy Also to look at what this new NBER paper actually measured before making grand pronouncements about phones killing fertility. reason.com/2026/06/10/t...

"Did you know 79% of baristas masturbate?" a truly exceptional level of paranoia

Your reminder that Pennsylvania, Florida & Indiana will actually spend taxpayer funds to DEFEND cops who rape sex workers, referring to the rapes as "prostitution investigations". Indiana even had a cop on payroll who'd testify as an "expert defense witness" (even on loan to PA and FL).

You had me at “Four penis massages for an undercover detective later, and …” reason.com/2026/06/01/i... @reason.com @enbrown.bsky.social

The co-chair of the Indiana Protection for Abused and Trafficked Humans Law Enforcement Task Force spent 4 months getting taxpayer-funded penis massages and no one batted an eye reason.com/2026/06/01/i...

The infamous Fifth Circuit has stayed an injunction, meaning the Texas App Store Accountability Act now goes into effect. App stores — essentially, Apple, Google and Microsoft — will now be required to age verify all users, through facial scans and other means.

Labeling entire accounts “adult” and hiding them, no matter what they are posting, will inevitably suppress vast amounts non-explicit political speech around sex work and censorship. The accounts most likely to speak out about over moderation are the ones first to experience it — the whistleblowers

This is a real ad the Paxton campaign is running right now

maybe instead of creating broad and vague new categories of people to label "extremists" in need of surveillance, the FBI should talk to U.S. and state leaders about halting their own extreme anti-tech rhetoric and regulation reason.com/2026/05/27/a...

One of the conservative architects of the UK's Online Safety Act is suddenly shocked — shocked! — to find that it applies to anti-immigrant content she likes. Censorship is a hungry, hungry, profoundly stupid beast.

To borrow from a someone else that used to preach about correlation/causation, you know what else has gone down as birth rates have declined? The number of pirates. Maybe we just need more pirates in the world to fix the birthrate emergency.

It is just really weird to act like dating around (with some sex) in one’s 20s and then going on to monogamy, marriage, motherhood is some sort of crazy, exceptional trajectory that Call Her Daddy’s Alex Cooper was rare & lucky to pull off reason.com/2026/05/20/c...

If the options are humanity persists OR women have rights, I’m picking women having rights every day. But those also aren’t the options, people just hate women!

“One of the biggest factors driving a decline in fertility rates in the US is a decline in teen pregnancies. We've gone from more than 80 births/1,000 girls aged 15-19 in 1950 to ~50 births/1,000 in 2000 to just 12.7 births/1,000 in 2024.”🧪

"United States K-12 students are not uniquely bad at reading, in fact, they are among the very best in the developed world." freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/one-more-t...

Birth rates have been declining for hundreds of years. Blaming smart phones for recent declines is nothing more than moral panic at its finest reason.com/2026/05/18/t...

“First Amendment shill” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it

This is actually great. Let the people who want a sex-free, LGBTQ-free internet purchase it for themselves and leave the wider internet alone! reason.com/2026/05/13/w...

‘Let people who want a G-rated internet purchase it for themselves and leave the wider internet alone.’ @enbrown.bsky.social celebrates the free market & choice. Live your life as you please & let others live theirs as they like, without harming others. Crazy. reason.com/2026/05/13/w...

Kickstarter officially banning adult content now. Knew this was coming, but it still sucks to have yet another part of the internet that I've been explicitly evicted from. Digital gentrification is exhausting.

EU regulators call VPNs "a loophole that needs closing," as more people use them to get around their poorly designed age-verification laws. Their solution? Age-verification for VPN use.

I got to write for @reason.com about children's book author/illustrator Richard Scarry! We're currently on a big Busytown kick in the Brown/ @swin24.bsky.social house... reason.com/2026/05/05/t...

ChatGPT didn't "advise" the FSU shooter last year to do anything — except get professional help for depressive and suicidal thoughts. Otherwise, it provided neutral information. OpenAI should not be liable for the shooter's actions reason.com/2026/05/11/d...

this AI slop has the Lincoln Memorial backwards and tripled the width of the reflecting pool

“The bar argued that simply because the women were Asian, they had no way of knowing if they were SWs or not.”

Really important book from @reitman.bsky.social on how banks, credit cards & payment processors are chilling & censoring speech It makes very clear that this isn’t just the “whim” of financial institutions but comes from pressure—direct & indirect—from government reason.com/2026/04/29/b...

What witnesses? What documents? Comey's obviously not going to say it was a violent threat. The term itself is used all the time in contexts where it clearly means "get rid of" without any connotation of killing or violence. It's hard to imagine what kind of evidence they could possibly produce.

this is an elite joke. joke of the year nominee IMO

A social media ban for Canadian kids sounds protective. But it won't work. Australia's own regulator found 70% of under-16s retained access 3 months after its ban, with no reduction in cyberbullying. My post on why a ban causes more harm than good. www.michaelgeist.ca/2026/04/the-...