You save these kids by publicly humiliating the people who would victimize them

Politico reports that a basic age verification law is driving PornHub out of business in multiple states. Given the choice between verifying the age of its users and shutting down, the porn site is choosing the latter. That’s probably hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of dollars a day the company is losing in ad revenue, all because it’s refusing to make sure children aren’t consuming its porn. Multiply that across enough states and the company would either go out of business (that would be fantastic) or else submit to a small but important child protection measure (also good).

Here’s the kicker: These age verification laws were passed by bipartisan legislatures and signed by both Democratic and Republican governors. It’s not hard to see why you can get both Democrats and Republicans to agree on this stuff: If they go against a simple, completely defensible law like this, they’re showing the world that they want young children to consume sick, perverted, corrupting pornography. Nobody wants to be that guy. If you’re that guy, it means you’re a pervert. Nobody wants to be seen as a pervert; even most perverts have a sufficient amount of shame to try and conceal it.

Public humiliation: That’s how you twist someone’s arm on this, that’s how you move a needle. You rub their faces in it. You draw a clear line in the sand and you ritualistically debase and demean the people who stand on the wrong side of the line. You point and say: “These guys are perverts! It would be so easy for them to choose the non-pervert option and they chose the pervert one!”

That’s how it’s done elsewhere, too. Another example: The U.S. is currently seeing a long, bitter, protracted fight over teaching kids sexually explicit material in school classrooms. It turns out there are a lot of people who want to give your kids really weird, gross, nasty, highly sexual books and comic books and videos while they’re in school. You don’t need a Rand McNally to figure out why someone would want to give that sort of thing to your kid; it’s pretty obvious.

Many perverts, of course, you just won’t reach. They want to do what they want to do and the most you can do is lock them up. But you can counteract their influence by publicly humiliating the people who would enable them. Here’s a great example of one way to do that, in which a woman humiliates a school board by reading some of the graphic material they’ve allowed to be spread in local schools:

You see? Utter humiliation, just rolling waves of crashing embarrassment. Nobody wants to be confronted with this kind of sordid evidence of their own promotion of pervert child sex corruption, least of all publicly. They’ll run away from it as fast as they can. Now, of course in this case they managed to shut this lady down and hustle her off. But you can at least see the potential here. This is their weak spot. They don’t like to be reminded out in public as to what it is they’re doing.

If you want to get it done, this is how. Publicly humiliate. Take the twisted, disgusting sex books to the school boards and read them out loud. Bring ten of your like-minded friends to do the same so they simply can’t get away from it. Get an age-verification law on the table in your own state, and make it clear in no uncertain terms that the hacks who vote against it will forever be associated with wanting kids to watch porn. Take mural-sized photographs of these creepy groomer “family drag shows” and haul them before your city council and ask them to raise their hands if they support these children being twerked at by obviously predatory grown men. Collect the stories of frightened women and young girls who have to share their locker rooms and bathrooms with grown men wearing panties; play that audio in open committee meetings in your statehouse.

This is the unpleasant yet very effective work we must do if we want to start forcing even more resolution on these issues. People apparently won’t respond to the obviously real threats being directed at many children these days; they will and do, however, respond to humiliation quite well. Do not be afraid to add that string to your bow. Who’s going to hate you for it—perverts? PornHub? You should be so honored.