On Wednesday, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments for Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton — a suit brought against the Texas law mandating that pornography websites require age verification to prevent minors from accessing sexual content online.  Supreme Court Justices Seem Friendly to Age Verification Texas is one of 19 states that require age verification as lawmakers and parents across the nation seek to protect children from online pornography. The Free Speech Coalition (FSC) — a trade organization for the “adult entertainment industry” — challenged the Texas law, arguing that the age verification requirement is not the “least restrictive means” by which to address the problem of juvenile access.  The case made its way to the Supreme Court where, if oral argument is any indicator, the Justices seem likely to “land somewhere in between the two” sides.  Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) scholar Brad Littlejohn wrote on X/Twitter that “not a single justice questions that youth porn exposure is a public health crisis requiring urgent gov[ernmen]t action.” Moreover, he wrote, “not a single justice seems interested in the porn lobby’s argument that ‘content filtering’/parental controls can get the job done just fine.”  “The court is grappling with how to allow states to protect children from obscenity online … while also protecting adults’ access to protected speech,” Clare Morell, also an EPPC scholar, wrote in WORLD. Regardless of the eventual contours of the Court’s ruling, the oral argument signified the rapid progress of the anti-pornography, pro-child movement. Louisiana became the first state to require age verification in 2022. And, as subsequent states have adopted similar laws, Pornhub has refused to provide access to citizens in those states rather than comply with age verification. It’s not a perfect solution — virtual private networks (VPNs) can circumvent age verification — but it’s an important step in the right direction.  Why Bother?  For some critics, however, the age verification laws are an exercise in futility. Ahead of oral argument, the Free Press published an article by reporter River Page titled “Porn Is Inevitable.” While acknowledging that “the rationale behind the laws is understandable,” Page deems them “fundamentally pointless.”  “First etched into mammoth tusks 40,000 years ago, porn predates the written word,” he writes. “It is inevitable — and in the internet age, infinitely accessible — even in places where so-called ‘porn bans’ have been enacted.” Citing the surge in VPN downloads in Florida after the state’s age verification law went into effect, Page argues that the digital age offers plenty of workarounds. Social media sites, for example, contain an abundance of explicit content that minors can encounter even without directly searching for it.  At first, it seems as though Page believes that pornography is too insurmountable to be controlled. But, as the article continues, it becomes clear that freedom is the real sticking point. He writes:  The day an American teenager with a normal IQ can’t access porn on an unfiltered internet connection is the day freedom no longer exists in the United States. If you want an open internet where even a nominal amount of privacy is possible, that is the cost. It’s hardly a logical conclusion. Internet privacy is already an antiquated illusion; data is collected, bought, and sold by private companies and the government alike for marketing or surveillance purposes. And the false binary of “freedom” and porn for kids or CCP-style oversight overlooks the more important question at stake.  Appealing to freedom with respect to addictive substances often allows the freedom to start engaging in a behavior to overshadow the freedom to stop engaging in that behavior. With the average age of pornography exposure hovering around 12 years of age, kids are not equipped to fight the “digital fentanyl” of online porn. And they certainly aren’t “more free” for their ability to stumble across explicit sexual content, either by accident or by choice.  Parents vs. Pornography Rather than turn to the government, Page suggests, conservatives should look closer to home: “The institution most capable of stopping children from viewing pornography is the family: If you don’t want your kid watching porn, don’t give them unlimited access to the internet.”  But, as Morell and Littlejohn argue in the February issue of First Things, parents cannot reckon with the leviathan of the digital age alone. “Parents were assured that ‘parental controls’ left them in control, but even the most dedicated parents found the technological ground shifting beneath their feet,” they write. “The digital ecosystem poses an urgent collective action problem, and we cannot ask parents to shoulder the full burden of bringing children safely to adulthood.” In the brave new digital world, age verification laws may be only a partial step towards protecting children from the scourge of pornography, but they are undoubtedly a step in the right direction. Pornography might abound online, and, like most human vices, it will never fully disappear. But inaction in the face of the crisis of childhood porn exposure and access isn’t inevitable — it’s a deliberate choice.  READ MORE by Mary Frances Devlin:  Pope Francis Gets His Man in Washington  ‘Shield Laws’ Protect Abortionists Who Send Chemical Abortion Pills Across State Lines Kevin Roberts’s Fiery New Fusionism Mary Frances (Myler) Devlin is a contributing editor at The American Spectator. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2022. Follow her on X/Twitter @maryfrandevlin.  The post <i>Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton</i>: Porn Doesn’t Have to Be ‘Inevitable’ appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

As Secretary of Defense-designate Pete Hegseth is grilled by senators, with Democrats attacking Hegseth’s supposed lack of qualifications, some history is called for. The Office of the Secretary of Defense (DoD) was created in 1947 in the Truman administration, a successor to the War Department that came to be in the George Washington era. Truman, post-World War II, was determined to modernize American military and intelligence capabilities. The DOD and the Central Intelligence Agency were key to Truman’s modernization. In the years since, there have been 27 secretaries of defense, with Donald Rumsfeld having served twice. Once under President Ford, the second time under President George W. Bush. In light of the attacks on Hegseth, it is worth a look specifically at seven of those 27: President Dwight Eisenhower’s two secretaries, Charlie Wilson and Neil McElroy, had no military experience. Wilson had been the CEO of General Motors and McElroy the president of Procter & Gamble. Secretary James Schlesinger had not served in the military either, yet was the secretary for Presidents Nixon and Ford. He began those two stints after a career as an academic and bureaucrat, teaching at the University of Virginia and moving on to the RAND Corporation. Secretary Harold Brown, a President Jimmy Carter appointee, had no military service. His career was as an academic and bureaucrat, the latter including service as secretary of the Air Force. Secretary Dick Cheney, a George H.W. Bush appointee, had a previous career as a politician (congressman from Wyoming, White House chief of staff for President Ford), but never served in the military. Secretary William Cohen, Clinton’s second secretary, was a lawyer and politician (a congressman and senator from Maine) with no military service. Secretary Ash Carter was an Obama appointee with a background as a physicist and bureaucrat, but no service in the military. That is to say, Pete Hegseth — he who served in the Army National Guard with deployments to the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq and ended with the rank of Major — stands head and shoulders when it comes to military experience above the 7 secretaries who had not a minute of service in any branch of the military, much less on-the-ground experience in a war zone as an active combatant. The real problem here is politics — played by Democrat senators and other Trump opponents — who are apparently clueless that previous presidents of both parties have turned seven times to men with zero military experience to run the Pentagon. There is no small irony as the Hegseth hearings unfold that it is the Democrat senators on the panel who have no idea what they are talking about when they try and make an issue of  Hegseth’s wrongly alleged lack of experience in the military. It is more than likely that Hegseth’s well-on-the-record views about the need to restore “lethality, competency, and color blindness” to the Pentagon (as he wrote in his bestseller The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free) and ridding the Pentagon of woke political correctness is the real reason for the Democrat objections to him. In fact, history shows those seven previous secretaries of defense had nothing close to Hegseth’s hands-on military experience, every one of them was viewed favorably for their performance running the Pentagon and the military experience they brought to the task. Experience that more than qualifies Hegseth for confirmation to run the Pentagon. READ MORE from Jeffrey Lord: Jennifer Rubin: Washington Post Liberal Columnist Quits in Protest No, Joe, It Ain’t So Biden Rewards Liz Cheney for Betraying the Constitution The post Military Vet Hegseth Attacked by Democrats Clueless About Past Secretaries of Defense With No Military Experience appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

In the early 1990s, I visited Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s former home in the countryside of Kent in southeast England. Entering the house and traversing the grounds, I had a sensation of walking the footsteps of history, of imagining the great man dictating to secretaries the speeches that warned about the Nazi threat and the “gathering storm,” of seeing where Churchill worked long hours building brick walls and painting pictures, of standing in awe in Churchill’s study where he crafted his marvelous historical works, and of thinking about the meetings held there and the decisions made there that altered the course of world history. And now, there is a book about the happenings at Chartwell in the 1930s, written by Chartwell’s curator, Katherine Carter. It is Carter’s first book, and it is a delight to read. The book’s title, Churchill’s Citadel, is derived from a description by one of Churchill’s secretaries of the most important use of the house other than as living quarters for the Churchills. Carter writes that Chartwell in the 1930s became “the headquarters from which Churchill mounted his campaign against Nazi Germany.”  She persuasively argues that the “gatherings at Chartwell strengthened Churchill’s resolve and added to the evidence, accounts and testimonies he was painstakingly accumulating at his country home.” Those gatherings, Carter continues, armed him with information that eventually propelled him to the office of prime minister on May 10, 1940. Each chapter of the book highlights the visitors to Chartwell that came bearing stories of aggressive Nazi plans; the German military build-up; the deficiencies of British defenses against air attacks; political insights as to the intentions of Europe’s other powers, the United States, and Japan; divisions within the British government; and eventually the growing sentiment for Churchill’s return to office as war became more likely. Albert Einstein visited Chartwell in July 1933 and warned Churchill about Germany’s growing rearmament, despite the provisions of the Versailles Treaty. After Einstein’s visit (the book includes photographs of Churchill and Einstein in Chartwell’s rose garden), Churchill, Carter notes, “began to weave the threat of Nazi Germany into his speeches at every opportunity.” A month after Einstein’s visit, Churchill read a speech in the House of Commons titled “Europe’s Hour of Danger” in which he called for British rearmament. In February 1934, Churchill’s friend T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) came to Chartwell and reinforced Churchill’s view that Britain lacked adequate defenses against aerial bombardment. A little more than a year later, Lawrence was dead after being severely injured in a motorbike accident. That same year (1935), Joseph P. Kennedy and his wife Rose arrived at Chartwell, and Churchill used the occasion to urge Kennedy to persuade President Roosevelt to coordinate naval activities and expand the “special relationship” between the two English-speaking peoples. Kennedy would later become America’s ambassador to England during which he joined the appeasement of Hitler crowd and repeatedly made disparaging remarks about Churchill. The next year in November, France’s former Prime Minister and then-Foreign Minister Pierre-Étienne Flandin met with Churchill at Chartwell and provided Churchill with insight into the thinking of French leaders regarding the Nazi threat. Flandin, like Churchill, believed that a closer alliance between France and Britain could deter German ambition, but it was not to be until too late. Churchill hoped that the French army — the largest in Europe — could be mobilized for peace, but France’s “Maginot Line mentality” and appeasement of Hitler combined with outdated military strategy doomed France and scuttled hopes of an effective Anglo-French alliance. In August 1937, as war clouds gathered in Europe, Heinrich Brüning, who served as Germany’s Chancellor near the end of the Weimar Republic, came to Chartwell to encourage Churchill to urge Britain’s leaders to reach out to some of Germany’s generals who wanted to remove Hitler from power. Austrian Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi met with Churchill in February 1938 at the suggestion of Leo Amery. This was a month before the Anschluss incorporated Austria into the Third Reich. Coudenhove-Kalergi was the founder of the Paneuropean Union in 1931, and he discussed with Churchill plans to form a coalition of states to stop Hitler. After the Anschluss, Coudenhove-Kalergi and his Jewish wife escaped to Switzerland. A few months after Coudenhove-Kalergi’s visit, German lawyer and anti-Nazi Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, at great risk to himself, visited Churchill to warn him of Hitler’s intention to seize Czechoslovakia and, like Bruning, suggested that Britain had allies among Germany’s generals. Carter does not neglect the more regular Chartwell visitors such as Desmond Morton, Ralph Wigram, and Robert Vansittart, British bureaucrats who risked their careers to provide Churchill with secret information damaging to the British appeasers; foreign correspondent Shiela Grant Duff who armed Churchill with developments in Czechoslovakia; Conservative Member of Parliament Harold Macmillan, the future prime minister who became an ally of Churchill’s in the late 1930s; Professor Frederick Lindemann who advised Churchill on war-related scientific subjects; China’s foreign minister, Quo Tai-chi, who served as an intermediary between Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek, and many others. Carter also notes that Chartwell was where Churchill wrote his multivolume biography of the Duke of Marlborough and his multivolume History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and where he and his family lived their interesting personal lives. But Chartwell’s historical significance is as the citadel or fortress where Churchill began the work that eventually led him to save Western civilization in the early years of World War II. It is a monument to democracy’s greatest hero. READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: Biden’s Foreign Policy Was a Colossal Failure — From Ukraine to China The Bureaucracy Will Fight Trump’s Counterrevolution Will Reagan’s Strategy Work With China? The post <i>Churchill’s Citadel</i>: His ‘Wilderness Years’ Headquarters appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

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by Mike Whitney, The Unz Review: Last weekend, US proxies launched a drone attack on a critical part of the TurkStream gas pipeline located in southwest Russia. The incident was largely ignored by the mainstream media, but its importance to energy starved Europeans cannot be overstated. The attack is clearly a continuation of the same hostile […]