WASHINGTON — Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump announced 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 2022, coverage of that year’s Ohio Republican senatorial race turned up an interview with a Catholic publication in which Vance 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.”
After the interview came to light, HuffPost’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
Banning porn is also 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 recriminalization 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 declares, “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 issues from a libertarian angle, noted that calls for blanket prohibition of anything the proponents consider “pornographic” are no longer limited to individuals but have made their way into legislative proposals in state legislatures 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.”