{"id":73263,"date":"2026-07-12T02:28:40","date_gmt":"2026-07-12T02:28:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmenidean.is\/wp\/?p=73263"},"modified":"2026-07-12T02:44:27","modified_gmt":"2026-07-12T02:44:27","slug":"the-slaughtering-of-innocence-why-age-verification-laws-fail-to-protect-the-youth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmenidean.is\/wp\/?p=73263","title":{"rendered":"The Slaughtering of Innocence: Why Age Verification Laws Fail to Protect the Youth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The Sirens by John Longstaff<\/a><\/em>


The Problem that the KIDS Act Presents<\/strong>

Though it has yet to become law, the recent passage of the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act by the House of Representatives seems to be a positive step in ridding the Internet of pornography here in the United States. But this is far from the truth. This digital prohibition would sacrifice privacy in favor of a flimsy \u201csafeguard\u201d that can easily be circumvented, as presently is the case in the United Kingdom and Australia, where similar age verification legislation has already been in force for some time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The stated intentions of age verification laws are mostly noble, but further examination reveals these intentions to be full of folly. It is the pretense of those who support this species of legislation that the enactment and enforcement of age verification will be a silver bullet to the rampant immorality on the Internet.

Their idea is that by forcing young people\u2014and everyone else, for that matter\u2014to prove their identity online, that it will be possible to filter out those who are under the age of eighteen from accessing harmful content. There are multiple issues with trusting the liberal-marxist regimes of the West with the kind of power needed to make this prohibition function. Perhaps the simplest is this: what will these governments define as \u201charmful content\u201d?


The Trojan Horse of the UK\u2019s Online Safety Bill<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One only needs to look at Britain to witness what course will likely be taken here if the KIDS Act is not defeated. Since the enforcement of the 2023 Online Safety Act began last year, the Starmer regime has not limited itself to proscribing pornography as \u201charmful content\u201d. Quite predictably, it has also included \u201cinciting violence\u201d and \u201cracially or religiously aggravated public order offences\u201d among the list of \u201cillegal content\u201d that children \u201cneed\u201d protection from.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Thus this liberal-marxist state is willing to restrict a child\u2019s ability to access pornographic content\u2014so long as it can also prevent that same child from seeing content it deems \u201cviolent\u201d or \u201cracist\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is well known how arbitrarily they define what<\/em> those latter two words mean. Their vagueness is an evasion of principle in the favor of political interest. There is a distinction between direct incitement (\u201ckill this person\u201d) and political advocacy (\u201cwe want to protect our community\u201d): true incitement requires immediate lawless action, not expressly non-violent political statements that can be twisted by the commissars of the State into \u201cdog whistles\u201d for terroristic action.

When the defenseless student Henry Nowak was left for dead by corrupt British police officers, mourning his death and demanding justice was deemed \u201cracist\u201d and \u201cinflammatory\u201d, while identical mourning for the negro felon George Floyd was treated\u2014and even lauded\u2014as legitimate grounds for protest. Without clearly defined and just criteria, \u201charmful content\u201d becomes a loose casus belli<\/em> to employ against dissidents. What the British regime truly cares for in this matter is not to protect children from pornography, but to use age verification as a means to censor the \u201charmful content\u201d it really considers a threat: pro-White advocacy and Christian values.

As with any other Western regime, they cannot be trusted to sincerely protect the youth. For how can a government that teaches young people in its schools that sodomitical relationships are \u201chealthy\u201d<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> and protects gangs of foreigners who rape them<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> be trusted to prevent these same young people from seeing \u201cage inappropriate\u201d content online?


Why Should the Epstein Class Get to Decide What is \u201cHarmful\u201d for Children?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Epstein files demonstrate this matter further, for they implicate the elites in the very crimes they claim to protect the youth from. How can the establishment reasonably claim the moral right to \u201cprotect the children\u201d online, when several of their high profile members, such as President Clinton and President Trump, were professionally associated with the ringleader of the world\u2019s most infamous sex trafficking ring? Even the Windsors have been unable to escape this controversy: the now former Prince Andrew raped girls on Little St. James Island!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Western establishment, then, has plenty a pervert within its own ranks\u2014and protects perverts. How can they be trusted to protect children from perversion online, when they have failed to protect them from perversion in real life? Physicians of the state, heal thyselves!


The <\/strong>F<\/strong>ailure of <\/strong>A<\/strong>ge <\/strong>V<\/strong>erification in Britain and Australia<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, they refuse to be healed because they do not really view the plague of pornography as a problem. This in part explains the inefficacy of age verification legislation to do what it is claimed<\/em> to do in countries where it has been implemented. Immediately after the enforcement of the Online Safety Bill began nearly a year ago on July 25, 2025, Proton VPN reported \u201can hourly increase in sign-ups of over 1,400%\u201d<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> which began on that same date. Furthermore, data from Google Trends revealed that there was an immense spike in searches for \u201cVPN\u201d in the United Kingdom from late July to early August of that year, with a similar spike emerging in February of this year.<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>

This entails that many Britons were and are interested in using VPNs as a means to circumvent these restrictions. But that is not the only means by which children might evade them.

Under Australia\u2019s more draconian Online Safety Bill, which requires that no child under sixteen have a social media account, the under-sixteen age demographic has found various means to evade this ban without using a VPN. These include using family members or older friends to do the required ID scans for them\u2014rendering the Bill totally impotent.<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Every phone or computer still has the possibility to become a virtual brothel, so long as the pitch of someone\u2019s privacy is sacrificed to the faceless god of the State.


The KIDS Act: America\u2019s Online Safety Bill<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is this hypocritical digital atmosphere that the KIDS Act will bring to the United States, if it is signed into law. For it would entail \u201cprovisions that will push online services to verify all users\u2019 ages, require government-directed moderation policies for online speech,\u201d and would furthermore extend beyond public social media, as it would \u201ccreate new rules about private and encrypted communications.\u201d<\/span>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span>

The American citizen will therefore be punished for the abuses of social media\u2014these abuses that have been allowed and even promoted by the Tech oligarchy. It was this Tech oligarchy that oversaw the creation of the various social media platforms, and the usage of these platforms to circulate softcore and hardcore pornography. And they did very little, if nothing, to stop this proliferation of smut, which has slaughtered the innocence of countless young people.

Yet it is this same Tech oligarchy that has been diligently at work lobbying Congress and the Senate for years over the subject of American age verification legislation, while the American people have been kept largely in the dark about this matter.


Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s Hand in American Age Verification Legislation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) was a previous age verification bill that passed the Senate, but was not even voted on in the House because House Speaker Mike Johnson was persuaded by Meta overlord Mark Zuckerberg to drop it.<\/span>8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Zuckerberg\u2019s interest was that KOSA would have held Instagram and Facebook legally responsible \u201cto take reasonable steps to prevent specific documented harms to minors \u2014 including promotion of eating disorders, self-harm, substance abuse, and sexual exploitation\u201d<\/span>9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> under a duty of care provision.

Since this duty of care would have given parents and children \u201ca legal cause of action\u201d<\/span>10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> against social media platforms if they fail to remove harmful content, it is easy to see why Zuckerberg felt threatened by it. KOSA has since been reworked into KIDS, which replaces the duty of care provision which would require \u201cplatforms to submit to annual safety audits.\u201d<\/span>11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> These audits would be performed by the social media companies themselves, without a means of legal redress\u2014thus the wolves would guard the hen house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zuckerberg\u2019s hand has also been felt in the creation of the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA), a bill that was introduced in May 2025 which would force app stores to enact age verification in order to \u201cverify users\u2019 ages and obtain parental consent for users under 18\u201d.<\/span>12<\/sup><\/a><\/span>

As this bill shifts the burden of responsibility to app stores rather than social media platforms, it is not surprising that Meta has lobbied for this piece of federal legislation and for its state-level equivalents. The social media titan has acquired a very useful ally in this cause: the Digital Childhood Alliance, a\u201ccoalition of conservative groups leading efforts to pass app-store age verification\u201d, which has cooperated with Meta, and reportedly has received funding from it.<\/span>13<\/sup><\/a><\/span>

These are clever ruses, but ones that betray the true nature of American \u201cdemocracy\u201d: it is a democracy only for lobbyists. Age verification bills like KOSA and KIDS were never seriously debated before the public in election cycles, and were not placed before the voters on any state ballot, though several US states have adopted age verification laws of their own.<\/span>14<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Rather, they were advanced in state capitals and Washington D.C. by politicians who have been swayed either by nincompoop lobbyists who have played into the hands of the Tech oligarchs or by these oligarchs themselves, all the while the former two parties imagine themselves to be crusader\u2019s for children\u2019s innocence.


An Analogy: The Case of the Prohibition Act<\/strong>

The present situation is not all that different from one that troubled the United States a century ago. Prohibition is now infamous in the US for having caused more harm than good, for being a textbook historical case of how legislation can dramatically fail to regulate human behavior. As the saying goes, the path to Hell is paved with good intentions.

The eighteenth amendment, the National Prohibition Act, was hailed much in the same way that the KIDS Act is being hailed today\u2014a silver bullet to rampant immorality in our society, especially youth immorality. Throughout the Prohibition era, only a few saw the myopia that guided this legislation. But the famous Father Charles Coughlin perceived it clearly, and laid out his case in a 1931 radio sermon against the hypocrisy of the Prohibition Act, a case that will sound strikingly familiar to that of the proposed KIDS Act.

Recounting the history that led to the signing of the Prohibition Act into law, Fr. Coughlin mentions that:<\/span>15<\/sup><\/a><\/span>
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It is a peculiar incident that no substantial headway was made towards national prohibition legislation until great capitalists began making generous contributions to the professional prohibition organizations.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Does this peculiar incident not recall the aforementioned relationship between Meta and the Digital Childhood Alliance? Moreover, the primary motivation behind Prohibition was that, as Fr. Coughlin states, \u201cit would protect the youth of the land from the temptations of drink and of crime.\u201d<\/span>16<\/sup><\/a><\/span>

But how did their policy turn out in the end? According to the findings of the Wickersham Commission, the Prohibition Bureau, and other government sources which Fr. Coughlin cites, the exact opposite of Prohibition\u2019s intent occurred: an explosion in homemade alcohol. It drove out the saloon, only to bring the saloon within the home\u2014alcohol was therefore brought within reach of the child more than ever before. Consequently, youth alcoholism increased dramatically, amid the bootlegger mafia wars that raged in the great American cities such as Chicago and New York City.<\/span>17<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The \u201ccure\u201d proved to only increase the spread of the disease.

Thus what Fr. Coughlin said in regard to Prohibition can be today directed towards the politicians of our day (if they would like to argue that they really do<\/em> care about the children) concerning the KIDS Act or the ASAA: \u201cEither correct it or destroy it. Either rewrite it or eliminate it. For as it stands today, it forebodes no good.\u201d<\/span>18<\/sup><\/a><\/span>


A Better Solution to a Real Problem<\/strong>

To this, one might still inquire: \u201cIs nothing to be done to protect the children from pornography?\u201d

To which, it will be readily answered: yes, something ought to be done, but the present age verification approach is entirely the wrong<\/em> approach. As the examples of similar legislation in the United Kingdom and Australia demonstrate, this legislation is ineffective at stopping the children from accessing 18+ content\u2014which includes pornography. It has, however, proven effective in casting a wider state surveillance net by those liberal-marxist regimes.

In order to find a realistic solution to this grave problem, it must also be considered that pornography harms not only children, but adults as well. After all, it is not as if a pornography addiction acquired in youth suddenly ends when one turns eighteen years old. Those who patronize the digital prostitutes on OnlyFans are not children; they are, as a reasonable estimate indicates, overwhelmingly men between the ages of 18-34 (60%+).<\/span>19<\/sup><\/a><\/span> A 2022 study confirmed that the majority of OnlyFans patrons are adult men (63%). It also found that a startling 89% of these men reported being married.<\/span>20<\/sup><\/a><\/span>

But this billion-dollar flesh market<\/span>21<\/sup><\/a><\/span> is only one head of a colossal hydra, the hydra of Internet pornography, which has ruthlessly damaged and wrecked many a marriage.<\/span>22<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Though it is true, then, that children are indeed the most vulnerable to the destructive effects of pornography, any genuine solution to this societal disease must also<\/em> expand its efforts to protecting adults from it as well. A mere 18+ verification will not do.

A plausible solution can readily be found: the redefinition of obscenity laws, as they were before the 1960s, but this time infused with the spirit of Integralism. They would not only be applied to the Internet, but also would target the television, film, advertising, and book industries\u2014industries all riddled with the pornographic spirit, but ignored by the advocates of age verification.

Those who would dare to distribute and possess smut against these laws would be punished severely, as presently those who distribute and possess child pornography are. For in all its forms, pornography is a threat to the common good. Its victims suffer on the spiritual, mental, and physical levels: the traumatized children who have their eyes opened to the unholy perversion of the mysteries of marriage; the rise of erectile dysfunction in young men;<\/span>23<\/sup><\/a><\/span> the numerous arguments and divorces it has spawned among husbands and wives; the abused women and girls ensnared in sex trafficking rings, forced to \u201cperform\u201d against their own will.<\/span>24<\/sup><\/a><\/span> This is a plague upon society that cries out to Heaven for vengeance.

Under these laws, social media platforms would be legally obligated to take down content that falls under any of the following categories: pornographic or otherwise sexually provocative, blasphemous against Christianity, promotes drug and alcohol abuse, inordinately violent or promotes self-harm, endorses gambling, promotes racial or religious intermarriage, promotes anti-Western ideologies.

If they would refuse to cooperate, these platforms could be banned from operating in the United States, as TikTok was briefly before President Trump took office in early 2026. As is currently the case with many social media platforms, which have accommodated the Online Safety Bills of the United Kingdom and Australia, these platforms would rather buckle under pressure than lose out on a valuable market.

Pornographic websites would be outright banned within the United States. Though it is true that these sites would still be accessible via VPN services, it would still protect many without sacrificing anyone\u2019s privacy. There would be no more cases of a child accidentally discovering pornography online. However, this loophole is not impossible to solve: the US government could pressure the VPN companies to deny service to these websites or threaten them with a ban for being their accomplices in perverting the people.

It may well be argued that, owing to the increasingly secularized nature of the United States, a Catholic crusade against vice\u2014even if it finds allies in Protestants and others who desire the genuine moral improvement of American society\u2014will not be readily received by the American people. There is surely truth to this. But it must be borne in mind that despite the hurdle of public opinion, plenty of other laws have been enacted against<\/em> the will of the people, and yet mass resistance was either evaded or crushed.

Same-sex marriage was made law in this country eleven years ago as a result of Obergefell v. Hodges<\/em>, although most Americans were against it; as a result of Brown v. Board of Education<\/em>, Whites were forced to attend school with Blacks in Arkansas at the bayonet point of US paratroopers. Unpopular policies can be made popular, so long as the policies themselves are not entirely unrealistic\u2014as the Prohibition Act was\u2014and as long as advocacy groups and the media are able to recruit enough of the people on the government\u2019s side. How exactly this coalition in our case could come about, or if it could come about, is outside of the purview of this article.

There will always<\/em> be a market for pornography in this fallen world. A utopian plan has not been proposed here: it is focused on prevention, rather than absolute abolition\u2014though abolition would be the ideal. In a society as infested with lust as ours, pornography could not be realistically crushed in one fell swoop. It must therefore be quarantined. Traditional Catholic theology has indicated that prostitution may be tolerated by the State, so a similar strict regulation of pornography could be evoked on these grounds.<\/span>25<\/sup><\/a><\/span> With this in mind, the Dark Web could be unofficially designated as the Internet’s red light district, for to access it requires a complicated series of steps that will put this dangerous content out of the reach of most adults and children.


Conclusion<\/strong>

A revival of obscenity laws is a proper answer to the plague of Internet pornography. Age verification laws, on the other hand, are disastrous in both concept and practice. The KIDS Act will do practically nothing to prevent the slaughtering of the youth\u2019s innocence here in the United States, because it was not designed<\/em> to do this. It is a Trojan Horse designed to dupe the people into sacrificing their Internet anonymity to allegedly \u201cprotect the children\u201d under the aegis of the Epstein class.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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An unacceptable and impractical solution to one of the gravest evils of our time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[28,67,42,72,37,43,60,22,36],"class_list":["post-73263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-america","tag-australia","tag-britain","tag-censorship","tag-culture","tag-europe","tag-family","tag-history","tag-politics"],"gutentor_comment":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmenidean.is\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmenidean.is\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmenidean.is\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmenidean.is\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmenidean.is\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73263"}],"version-history":[{"count":35,"href":"https:\/\/parmenidean.is\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73412,"href":"https:\/\/parmenidean.is\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73263\/revisions\/73412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmenidean.is\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmenidean.is\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmenidean.is\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}