It won't be parade of Confederate flags going up that starts second Civil War. It will be porn sites coming down via Project 2025

A rendering of what a computer screen would look like after a moment with an angry user. Source: Generated by Substack

The conservative master blueprint Project 2025 will start the next civil war.

Just not in the ways you think.

In a crammed catalog of things I just don't want to think about — in a kind of running and screaming and kicking way — the storyline I’d most like to avoid considering, the clear topper in a Canadian football-sized field of contenders, is conservative Think Tankers talking about pornography and issuing confident decrees on sexuality as if they were Alfred Kinsey or the recently departed Dr. Ruth Westheimer.

Enter now Project 2025, the user's guide for the real Handmaid's Tale, which on Page 5 of the introduction calls for the criminalization of pornography — the motivation for the invention of Facebook (which ranked women as commodities) and the clogger of search engines and big reveals on computer histories the world over.

The conservative proposal on pornography is essentially this: The only societal interest in sex is in the furtherance of life. Once people figure out they are gay, or reach a certain age as heterosexuals, there really is no need for them to have sex. So shut down the porn sites.

The real concern here is at more of a Fort Sumter level, though, as in a world devoid of Two Clicks to Paradise, to paraphrase what the late Eddie Money might have said about porn sites, the Project 2025 elimination of what amounts to public-access porn, utility for the masses, will stratify who can easily get porn, and who can't.

This will start the next civil war.

It will pit Public Golf Course Guy against Country Club Golf Guy.

In the Project 2025 regime, men of means will still get porn by constructing virtual private networks, or just showing up to Tampa strip clubs with $100 bills after chartered fishing trips with strippers.

The working man will click to porn and get an endless string of messages on his screens telling him the sites are not available. No porn for you.

The resentment will fester into a Mason-Dixon Line of class resentment and seed the Second Civil War. It won't be a parade of Confederate flags going up that starts the Civil War, it will be porn sites coming down.

This whole business of Red State-Blue-Pilled men, flush with cash, running around landing younger ladies has created a cottage industry for gold-digging types, and allowed people like the late Hugh Hefner to further infuriate the 100 million-plus  straight American males who aren’t him. Someone once asked Hefner, the Playboy founder and prodigious womanizer, the best pick-up line he’s ever heard. “Hi, my name is Hugh Hefner,” the magazine mogul responded.

But the real problem with the churchy ideologue types going after pornography with Project 2025 is that such a policy will flat-out ruin municipal golf courses across the nation, make them into snake pits of working-class indignation.

The distinctions between rich and poor are many and varied.

At the end of the day, though, it boils down to this: The chief difference in America between rich men and poor men is that the more well-to-do play golf at country clubs, whereas the blue-collar schleps and retired desk jockeys go to the municipal golf courses, where, in most of the nation, it takes six hours to play 18 holes, the beer is warm and flat and the greens are about as fair and true as Turkish elections.

To sum it up, Public Golf Course Guy makes up the most peeved-off demographic in America. He’s always there in that unraked bunker, the one with the exposed Glad-bag foundation, thinking about the rich country clubbers and their smooth sand and single-malt Scotch. If Public Golf Course Guy knows that Country Club Golf Guy is getting as much porn as his speedy home computer can download, while he is left with dead-site alerts, no access to porn, the Civil War will start one 9-iron through one Mercedes window at a time.

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Here is the actual Project 2025 language on pornography:

(Douglas Burns, a fourth-generation Iowa journalist from Carroll, is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Read dozens of the most talented writers in Iowa in just one place. The Iowa Writers' Collaborative spans the full state. It’s one of the biggest things going in Iowa journalism and writing now — and you don’t want to miss. This collaborative is — as the outstanding Quad Cities journalist Ed Tibbetts says — YOUR SUNDAY IOWA newspaper. )

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