BUDAPEST — One of Europe’s leading right-wing publications, the Budapest-based, Viktor Orbán-aligned The European Conservative, published and editorial this week claiming that “anti-porn activists have essentially won the public argument that pornography is poisoning our society” and therefore it is now time to implement a total porn ban.
The article was penned by The European Conservative contributing editor Jonathon Van Maren, a right-wing Canadian author and anti-abortion activist who serves as the Communications Director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, an organization whose stated aim is “to make abortion unthinkable in Canada — like slavery, child labor or segregation.”
The European Conservative is published by the European Conservative Nonprofit Ltd., in collaboration with the Bibliothek des Konservatismus in Berlin, CEDI/EDIC in Vienna, and Nazione Futura in Rome, a far-right Italian think tank with close ties to the neo-fascist Brothers of Italy party of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. The Budapest-based outlet regularly publishes extravagant praises of the far-right government of the Hungarian strong-man leader, such as, “While most other Western leaders are the blind leading the blind, Orbán focuses on the future with unmatched clarity.”
Van Maren’s sensationalist tirade advocating for blanket censorship of adult content is titled “Porn Culture Has Our Girls by the Throat,” and most of the editorial hinges on several of his beliefs, such as that only cis straight men watch pornography, that they imitate what they watch, that a supposed epidemic of sexual “choking” (based on entirely anecdotal evidence and similarly sensational editorials) is exclusively the product of these men watching adult content, and other notions the anti-abortion activist developed while “speaking to students about pornography” for over a decade.
Other anecdotal examples cited by Van Maren originate in counselors working for transphobic author J.K. Rowling’s Edinburgh charity, Beira’s Place, who reported that “sexual violence has become normalized” and “strangulation and ‘breath play’ had become ubiquitous” in porn and life. One of Rowling’s counselors claimed that “We have allowed pornographers and the porn industry to write these sex scripts for us.”
Van Maren’s proposed solution is the same as that of the architects of Project 2025: a ban and criminalization of adult content.
Over the past decade, he states, “anti-porn activists have essentially won the public argument that pornography is poisoning our society. Legislators on both sides of the Atlantic agree that something must be done about this while disagreeing strenuously on what that might look like. The reality, however, is that nothing will change if we do not consider bold steps. After reviewing mainstream pornography, a government-appointed French commission advocated prosecuting pornographers. The time has come to begin discussing how we can ban pornography.”
Van Maren’s message to conservative libertarians concerned about this blatant call for state censorship is the following: “When the stories of young girls being strangled by their porn-fueled partners cross your TV screen, don’t look away. Turn up the volume. You might not like the story, but you helped write the script, too. We accepted pornography as a cultural norm, and now porn culture has our girls by the throat.”