WASHINGTON — Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump announced on Monday that he had selected as his running mate Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, who in a 2021 interview called for an “outright ban” on porn.
As XBIZ reported in May 2022, coverage of the Ohio Republican senatorial race turned up a year-old interview with a Catholic publication where he called for an “outright ban” on porn.
Vance, who rose to fame as the author of the nonfiction bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy,” gave the interview in August 2021 to the MAGA-friendly, right-wing Catholic magazine Crisis. At the time, it was suggested that Vance’s own campaign was behind the renewed attention to the statements in order to court anti-porn voters following his win in the Ohio primary.
The 2021 Crisis Magazine article was headlined “The Political Path Forward: Get Married and Have Kids.”
Vance is a Harvard-educated venture capitalist who, after the success of “Hillbilly Elegy,” became a Republican politician backed and encouraged by conservative ideologue and billionaire Peter Thiel. Vance told Crisis that “the only metric that should matter” in American society is that “our birth rate continues to go down.”
“I think the combination of porn, abortion have basically created a really lonely, isolated generation that isn’t getting married, they’re not having families and they’re actually not even totally sure how to interact with each other,” he told interviewer Jessica Kramer.
When asked for his thoughts on porn and birth control and their effects on familial decline, Kramer wrote, “Vance admitted he wants to outright ban pornography.”
Kramer finished her 2021 piece by writing, "As a single Catholic woman in her twenties who knows plenty of other young single women, I don’t need to be convinced that marriage and family are what will change the culture and prove to be more fulfilling than devoting ourselves to the post-industrial workforce. What we need convincing of, though, is that there are apt men to marry. What we need is not a new economic proposal, but a revival of men willing to put to death the culture of self that has kept them from the Church, and who believe that the family they form will be what actually makes America great again."
The Huff Post’s Liz Skalka pointed out that the last time the GOP drafted an official platform, in 2016, it declared porn “a public health crisis.”
Vance's Anti-Porn Extremism No Longer Fringe Among GOP Figures
The re-criminalization of all porn production and distribution is a core tenet of Project 2025, a controversial initiative led by the Heritage Foundation with the objective 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, much like Trump's new Vice Presidential candidate, Project 2025 proposes the re-criminalization of all porn production and distribution, and considers most LGBTQ+ content of any kind to be pornographic.
Earlier this month, 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.”
Reason Magazine’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown, who regularly covers free speech from a libertarian angle, noted that calls for blanket prohibition of anything the proponents consider “pornographic” are not longer limited to individuals; she noted that “similar sorts of attitudes, similar legislation, in state houses” can be observed around the country.
“We’re seeing national lawmakers like J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley talking about how we need to ban porn,” Brown wrote. “This is not a totally fringe position within today’s GOP.”
