The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 1831 - Insane Ruling Just Cleared A Path For The Creepiest AI Use Yet

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00:00:53.300 You might like to think that your texts or DMs are at least somewhat private when you communicate with people on social media platforms like Instagram.

00:01:00.680 They're actually monitored automatically for any signs of criminal activity, particularly criminal activity that might endanger children.

00:01:06.620 And that's why in October of 2023, Meta, which is the parent company of Instagram, was able to alert the feds about a 42-year-old man in Wisconsin named Stephen Anderegg.

00:01:18.820 Now, Meta has been in the news lately for allowing Instagram to become a haven for child predators, as you may have seen.

00:01:25.180 So they've implemented all kinds of monitoring systems and algorithm changes, agreed to settlements, etc.

00:01:31.260 And in this case, they determined that Andereg was transmitting apparent child pornography to another user.

00:01:36.860 And very quickly, the feds determined that Andereg was a software engineer with a background in AI models.

00:01:43.200 They obtained a search warrant, seized all of AnderEgg's devices, including multiple cell phones and a laptop.

00:01:49.860 At that point, the authorities discovered that AnderEgg had been entering text prompts into an AI model called stable diffusion.

00:01:57.460 And the model generated thousands of explicit images depicting miners.

00:02:02.120 And more specifically, AnderEgg had installed some third party software on top of stable diffusion, which allowed the model to create these kinds of images.

00:02:09.420 So this was not something the model would have done by itself, you know, off the shelf, as it were.

00:02:14.860 Anderegg was then charged with producing, distributing and possessing child sexual abuse material or CSAM.

00:02:21.820 Watch.

00:02:23.200 A man from Holman, Wisconsin, was arrested and charged from crimes relating to inappropriate AI generated images of children.

00:02:29.860 The Wisconsin Department of Justice says 42 year old Stephen Anderegg used text to image generative AI model to create realistic images of new children.

00:02:39.420 Now, that report was from two years ago. It seemed like a pretty straightforward case. Certainly, that's how the DOJ presented it.

00:02:47.800 But last week, somewhat unexpectedly, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of the possession charge against Anderreg, saying the First Amendment of the Constitution protects his right to possess obscene material in his own home.

00:03:04.120 This ruling was based on two major Supreme Court precedents.

00:03:07.820 The first precedent is that your home is a sacred space where you can be as obscene as you want.

00:03:13.360 And additionally, the ruling was based on another Supreme Court precedent from 2002,

00:03:16.700 which basically gave the green light to the possession of child pornography,

00:03:21.000 as long as it was virtual child pornography, where no child was supposedly involved.

00:03:27.040 Now, of course, in 2002, computer graphics, technology general were, in general,

00:03:31.060 were nowhere near as advanced as they are today.

00:03:33.460 They didn't have AI-generated images at all.

00:03:36.920 But that distinction doesn't matter, at least according to the precedent that we have today.

00:03:40.040 Several of the judges made it clear that they don't like the precedent.

00:03:43.240 They want the Supreme Court to change their ruling on virtual child pornography,

00:03:46.540 but they ruled that as the law stands, you can possess AI-generated child pornography as long as it's contained within the home.

00:03:55.400 Quoting from the ruling, the Constitution extends special safeguards to the privacy of the home.

00:03:59.860 The Supreme Court has held that the state's power simply does not extend to mere possession by the individual in the privacy of his own home.

00:04:07.800 If the First Amendment means anything, the court explained, it means that a state has no business telling a man sitting alone in his own house what books he may read or what films he may watch.

00:04:18.780 So to be clear, Anderegg still faces charges of distributing and manufacturing this material.

00:04:24.200 So he's on he's on the hook for transmitting the material and for using his computer to create them.

00:04:31.320 But if this ruling stands, he won't face a possession charge.

00:04:34.140 So basically, if you're in your own home, then you can legally possess this horrific, immoral, evil material that obviously no human being should ever have.

00:04:44.720 And as long as you don't send it to somebody else.

00:04:47.160 now it's it's needs to be pointed out here that yes this ruling is is as incoherent as it sounds

00:04:55.340 if something is too horrible to give to someone else or to you know make it then it's too horrible

00:05:03.000 to possess in your own home i mean it seems pretty obvious yet you should be secure in your home from

00:05:08.460 any kind of unlawful government search or seizure the government shouldn't be able to monitor uh you

00:05:15.060 know what goes on inside your home whenever they want but at the same time the government can

00:05:19.040 absolutely make it a crime to possess certain things inside your property and this should

00:05:23.960 obviously be one of them. Now nevertheless depending on who you ask this ruling is either

00:05:29.020 a validation of our right to privacy your home is your castle and so on or it's effectively the

00:05:34.720 legalization of child pornography in the United States. I mean after all you can imagine the

00:05:38.760 difficulty prosecutors might have in the future if they need to prove that a certain image is

00:05:43.480 genuine as opposed to AI generated. This decision opens up many different avenues for pedophiles to

00:05:49.920 fight their convictions, and it could lead to a mass release of these degenerates all over the

00:05:55.420 country. It's going to be the number one defense of every pedophile from this moment forward,

00:06:00.600 at least in the Seventh Circuit. Oh yeah, that's not real. It's just AI, they'll say.

00:06:05.740 How exactly are the prosecutors going to disprove that beyond any reasonable doubt?

00:06:08.960 In some cases, it may not be as easy as it seems, and it's only going to get more difficult as the technology improves.

00:06:16.360 And the same problem applies to all video evidence in court, by the way.

00:06:19.020 It's a nightmare with no obvious solution.

00:06:22.240 Now, first, it's important to understand that Andereg is not alone.

00:06:25.600 AI-generated child pornography is a booming industry.

00:06:28.680 There are many, many more cases like this.

00:06:31.060 So here's an ongoing case out of New Mexico, for example.

00:06:34.300 Watch.

00:06:34.580 police department search warrant a police raid on a man accused of using ai to create disgusting

00:06:44.180 images of children images so vile we can barely describe them no well i had with my coffee and i

00:06:52.040 i don't have my lighter the affiant informed mr gallagher that the cyber tip was from synchronos

00:06:58.240 which is a cloud service and that there were reports of child sex abuse material from his

00:07:03.140 account. Mr. Gallagher stated that he did not know he had the cloud. The affiant asked Mr.

00:07:10.060 Gallagher if investigators would find any images of new children on his devices. Mr. Gallagher

00:07:15.080 responded, you might. Mr. Gallagher said that those images were from a long time ago and that

00:07:21.700 they were mostly just AI. The affiant asked Mr. Gallagher if the images of the new children

00:07:27.440 provided him with sexual gratification, and Mr. Gallagher responded, yeah, I guess so. Mr. Gallagher

00:07:33.860 said that he had not been content for very long and that he was just lonely. Unlike Anderag,

00:07:40.980 Gallagher is accused of feeding genuine images of real-life children, which he found online,

00:07:46.880 into an AI app to edit them to create CSAM. This is something you need to keep in mind when you

00:07:55.340 upload family photos to websites like Facebook. You know, when you share these kinds of images

00:07:59.800 with the entire world, it's very likely that a pervert is going to see them or could see them.

00:08:04.580 And right now, these perverts have a lot of AI tools they can use in order to do whatever they

00:08:08.960 want with those images. They can create pornography or they can make deep fakes in an attempt to

00:08:13.420 blackmail you. They can steal identities. I mean, it's something everyone has to be aware of.

00:08:18.780 And this case, as alleged by the authorities, Gallagher took innocuous photos from social

00:08:23.540 media and had the AI transform them into pornography. And that might seem like a pretty

00:08:29.720 significant distinction from Anderegg, who, as far as we know, did not deliberately use any

00:08:34.980 real photos of children when he created his AI-generated content. But you have to keep in

00:08:41.120 mind that AI models, by their nature, are trained on images of actual children. That's how they work.

00:08:47.180 They source an enormous amount of information, including pictures. Anyone who uses an AI model

00:08:52.700 to generate an obscene picture of a child is relying on the fact that the AI has a vast database

00:08:57.700 of millions of images of children to draw from. And that's true when it comes to stable diffusion,

00:09:03.180 the model that Andereg used. This was reported by Ars Technology back in 2023. Quote,

00:09:10.360 more than a thousand known child sexual abuse materials, CSAM, were found in a large open

00:09:15.520 data set known as LAION-5B that was used to train popular text image generators such as

00:09:22.840 Stable Diffusion, Stanford Internet Observatory researcher David Thiel revealed.

00:09:29.560 Our new investigation reveals that these models are trained directly on CSAM present in a public

00:09:36.020 database of billions of images. The data set included known CSAM scrape from a wide array

00:09:41.960 of sources, including mainstream social media websites like Reddit, X, WordPress, and Blogspot,

00:09:48.400 as well as a popular adult video sites like XHamster and XVideos. Beyond verifying 1,008

00:09:54.580 instances of this kind of material in the data set, SIO found 3,226 instances of suspected CSAM

00:10:03.020 in the data set. Thiel's report warned that both figures are inherently a significant undercount

00:10:09.460 due to researchers' limited ability to detect and flag all the CSAM in the data sets.

00:10:16.000 This report also predicted that the repercussions of stable diffusions 1.5's training process

00:10:20.680 will be with us for some time to come.

00:10:22.720 So in practice, it's reasonable to say that every AI-generated image of a child,

00:10:27.820 one way or another, involved an actual child at some point in the process.

00:10:33.480 An AI simply cannot make a realistic image of a child if it's never seen an actual child.

00:10:38.340 But in many of these cases, judges are saying that their hands are tied.

00:10:42.840 You know, in cases of AI-generated child pornography, that's what they're claiming.

00:10:47.040 Here's one more case from Indianapolis. Watch.

00:10:50.420 A Marion County judge has found a man accused of creating child pornography not guilty.

00:10:56.380 Not because he didn't do it, but because the way he did it is beyond Indiana state law.

00:11:01.660 Our Russ McQuaid examines how artificial intelligence is challenging law enforcement in their quest to protect Hoosier children.

00:11:10.260 Last year we told you about the arrest of a man charged with 10 counts of child exploitation and child pornography.

00:11:17.180 Because he was found not guilty, we can't tell you his name, but we can tell you what he was accused of

00:11:22.080 and why a judge thinks that state lawmakers need to tighten up their laws when it comes to artificially created AI pornography.

00:11:30.320 This probable cause affidavit alleges, quote, two images located on the man's phone depicted minor females.

00:11:38.480 With use of an AI mirror program, he transformed the images to depict female teenagers to be nude.

00:11:47.580 These are rulings that have clear ramifications for our culture, our politics, many other ongoing debates that we're seeing.

00:11:53.880 and it's become very common for someone to invoke the right to privacy and shut down debate across

00:11:59.580 a wide range of issues. So we need to resolve some fundamental questions about what the

00:12:05.420 Constitution says and what it does not say. We also need to identify the red lines that we simply

00:12:10.840 won't cross as a society. Now, this is hard to do because unless you are homeschooled,

00:12:19.480 then you've been through a school system that in all likelihood has been relentlessly

00:12:23.800 lying to you. So some of these questions become more difficult than they should be.

00:12:29.600 You know, one of the main lies you'll hear is that in reality, there are no difficult choices

00:12:33.900 to be made when it comes to our legal rights. Barack Obama was fond of reading lines like,

00:12:39.720 we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. That was from his first inaugural

00:12:44.320 speech, but he mentioned it many times afterwards. It was always a vapid statement, but people seem

00:12:49.000 to think it was profound. The truth is, whether we like it or not, there are indeed choices to

00:12:53.200 be made when it comes to balancing safety and ideals. The safety of our children and our ideals.

00:13:01.600 These are choices that everyone makes every single day. We see it everywhere. For instance,

00:13:06.660 the presumption of innocence is an ideal. We don't want to treat people as criminals without

00:13:10.760 any evidence. But sometimes, say when people want to board an airplane, we have to balance that

00:13:17.740 ideal with security. And by the same token, we have to recognize that no right, including the

00:13:22.200 right to freedom of speech, the right to privacy, is absolute in every single case. And before you

00:13:28.480 jump down my throat, yes, I'm aware of Orwell wrote a book called 1984. I'm aware Ben Franklin

00:13:33.880 once said, those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety

00:13:37.180 deserve neither liberty nor safety. That's a handy quote, but it's also just a quote.

00:13:43.240 And for that matter, Franklin was careful to mention essential liberty and temporary safety,

00:13:49.080 which pretty clearly is a way of sort of kicking the can down the road, or at least qualifying it.

00:13:54.540 What liberties are essential exactly? And what if we can obtain permanent safety in a certain,

00:14:00.840 or something close to it, in a certain area of life? Well, Ben Franklin didn't say because he

00:14:06.560 wanted us to figure it out. But the founders, including Franklin, did have a very clear

00:14:10.600 preference for national security over some vaguely defined right to privacy at the individual level.

00:14:17.100 This is important to understand because almost no one says it anymore.

00:14:19.880 The constitutional right to privacy is an invention of the extremely left-wing Supreme Court in the 50s and 60s,

00:14:27.080 which wanted to invent a constitutional right to birth control and abortion.

00:14:31.940 So it's fake. There is no generalized right to privacy at all beyond the text of the Fourth Amendment.

00:14:39.540 Now, until the 1960s, there wasn't a single Supreme Court decision that recognized any right to privacy outside of the Fourth Amendment.

00:14:45.700 because these words do not appear anywhere in the actual document.

00:14:50.740 And this explains why when they were running the country,

00:14:53.620 the founders did not go to particularly great lengths

00:14:56.440 to enshrine anyone's privacy as a God-given right,

00:15:02.100 at least once they were outside their home, certainly.

00:15:04.620 I mean, look up the Collection Act of 1789,

00:15:06.860 which was passed by the first Congress in 1789.

00:15:10.060 This is a law that allowed the authorities to enter any ship or vessel

00:15:13.240 to search for goods that might be concealed,

00:15:15.340 they could search both American and foreign ships. The only requirement was that the authorities have

00:15:20.280 reason to suspect that taxable goods were on board somewhere. If they wanted to search a home

00:15:25.560 or business, the authorities needed a warrant. But under this law, the authorities could search

00:15:30.500 a ship top to bottom based on a mere hunch. And the next year, an even broader law was passed

00:15:35.660 allowing for, quote, all collectors, naval officers, surveyors, inspectors to go on board

00:15:40.580 of ships or vessels in any part of the United States or within four leagues of the coast

00:15:44.640 thereof, if bound to the United States for the purposes of demanding the manifest and of examining

00:15:49.840 and searching the said ships or vessels, and the said officers respectively shall have free access

00:15:54.380 to the cabin and every other part of a ship or vessel. And by the way, these kinds of searches

00:15:58.880 were not limited to ships arriving at ports of entry. Consider the tax on whiskey that was imposed

00:16:02.880 in 1791, which was also passed by the first Congress and signed by Washington. The law

00:16:07.260 permitted officers to enter, quote, houses, storehouses, warehouses, buildings, and places

00:16:11.640 that have been registered as distilleries at all times in the daytime upon request.

00:16:17.480 No warrant was needed.

00:16:19.340 There was a rebellion over this tax and how it was enforced, but in the end, the law survived.

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00:17:31.140 borrow better. If you own a home, you know the temptation to ignore a problem and hope it goes

00:17:36.140 away. The dishwasher starts making a strange noise. You close the kitchen door. There, you

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00:18:35.000 apply. See representative for warranty and promotion details. So know that the founders

00:18:40.100 did not believe that you have some absolute right to avoid searches or seizures when you're outside

00:18:44.180 your home. Quite the opposite. When you engage in an activity that the government has an interest

00:18:48.340 in regulating, whether you're traveling to a port or selling whiskey, Ben Franklin would have no

00:18:53.280 problem with the authorities searching your stuff without a warrant. That's because, again,

00:18:57.120 the right to privacy as such did not exist. It hadn't been invented yet by activist courts

00:19:03.280 looking to legitimize baby murder and other atrocities. In the Roe decision, the Supreme

00:19:08.620 Court found in the Constitution a right to abortion, even though abortion is never mentioned

00:19:14.800 anywhere in the document, nor did any of the framers even hint that they had prenatal homicide

00:19:20.260 in mind when they wrote it, obviously. The court recognized this obstacle, so it inferred a right

00:19:25.020 to abortion from the right to privacy found in the 14th Amendment. The only problem, of course,

00:19:30.460 is that the 14th Amendment doesn't say anything about a right to privacy. The phrase right to

00:19:34.300 privacy appears nowhere in the Bill of Rights at all. And even if it did, of course, it would

00:19:38.400 require a galactic leap of logic to get from I have a right to privacy to I have a right to

00:19:42.260 directly kill this biological human life. So the court founded its right to abortion, which is not

00:19:47.080 enumerated, on another right that is not enumerated, and which even if it were enumerated, still would

00:19:51.340 not logically apply to abortion. Now, Roe, of course, has been overturned, but the general right

00:19:56.020 to privacy fiction remains. And, you know, when I say fiction, the point is not that we should

00:20:00.860 have no privacy or that the government has the magical right to invade our privacy whenever it

00:20:05.760 wants. Obviously, neither of those are the case or should be the case anyway. The point is that

00:20:11.620 the right to privacy is not some sort of absolute legal principle. It can't be. Just because you're

00:20:16.720 doing something in private doesn't necessarily make it okay or legal. A great majority of the

00:20:22.480 crimes people commit every single day are committed by someone, at least attempting to be,

00:20:26.580 at some level, secretive or private about it. Enforcing laws and arresting criminals will always

00:20:33.260 involve an invasion of privacy. And so privacy cannot be sacrosanct. It is conditional.

00:20:40.860 And the Constitution already recognized that and laid out some of the conditions,

00:20:44.060 which is why by the Fourth Amendment, you don't have a right to be

00:20:47.080 freeze from search and seizure generally, but from unreasonable search and seizure? Well,

00:20:52.860 what counts as unreasonable? That's a qualifier that's been debated for like 230 years and will

00:20:59.120 be debated for another 230 years if we're still around. There's really no way around it. Because

00:21:04.260 the only way around it is to dispense with the qualifiers and declare that you either have an

00:21:08.060 absolute unquestioned right to privacy in all cases or no right to privacy in any case at all,

00:21:13.640 and neither of those extremes are workable or rational. So that takes us back to the case of

00:21:19.600 Stephen Anderegg and other pedophiles who are using AI to create child pornography. Yes,

00:21:24.860 Anderegg was being charged for conduct inside his own home, which is different from being out

00:21:30.320 in public. Treated differently, legally, often. The home is entitled to far more protections than

00:21:39.500 anywhere else in terms of privacy. But once again, that cannot be absolute. There's a reason you're

00:21:45.860 not allowed to possess a nuclear bomb in your home or a dead body. Even in your own home,

00:21:52.040 the right to privacy is not absolute. It can't be. Which was my position, which you've probably

00:21:58.360 deduced by now, is that we should absolutely, of course, ban AI from making this stuff and

00:22:03.140 arrest anyone who consumes it. Pretty simple. It might not be easy to enforce in every case,

00:22:09.500 because of how widespread this technology is, but it's simple. It's a simple thing.

00:22:17.600 Now, even if you can somehow prove that the AI model didn't rely on any actual pictures of

00:22:22.880 children, which, you know, you can't, it doesn't matter. Nor does it matter if some pedophile is

00:22:29.520 merely possessing this material in his own home where he supposedly wasn't hurting anyone else.

00:22:33.840 This logic, the idea that, you know, if it doesn't hurt anyone, then it's fine,

00:22:36.900 has infested our culture and conservatism more generally for decades.

00:22:41.220 And in every single case, or in a great majority of cases,

00:22:45.720 it makes society worse for everybody. 0.75

00:22:48.940 Gay marriage, marijuana, medically assisted suicide, sports betting, abortion, no-fault divorce. 0.98

00:22:54.580 Again and again, we've been told to relax.

00:22:56.600 It doesn't actually affect anyone else.

00:22:59.620 But it turns out that when you endorse deviant and immoral behavior in an individual context,

00:23:04.020 then before long you see the consequences everywhere you can't go two block two blocks 1.00

00:23:09.980 in new york without smelling pot women in massachusetts are now rallying around a woman 1.00

00:23:13.420 who executed her children one by one teenagers with mental health problems are getting put down

00:23:19.340 in canada so that the state can harvest their organs gambling has ruined sports in about 20 0.80

00:23:24.260 different ways to the point that we now have live betting odds displayed prominently on screen women

00:23:28.300 are more miserable more medicated than ever all of these downstream consequences are felt by

00:23:33.520 everyone in society, not just the people who get the abortions or take the drugs or whatever else.

00:23:41.700 So, and we've ended up in this place because of this non-existent failing moral framework

00:23:46.980 that says that something is automatically okay as long as no one else is directly,

00:23:53.020 actively harmed by it. And oftentimes when they say no one's directly actively harmed by it,

00:23:59.320 they actually are. Abortion, there's another person being actively harmed, you know, even before you

00:24:04.040 get to the societal harm, obviously. Now, along the same lines, AI generated sexually explicit

00:24:08.740 images of children harm society more broadly and the nation as a whole. And that is precisely the

00:24:16.260 kind of harm that the government must prevent. Any society where perverts can gorge themselves

00:24:22.740 legally on hours of this kind of stuff is obviously a society no healthy person wants to live in.

00:24:30.240 We would all be the victims of it.

00:24:32.840 Not to mention all the research showing that indulging a compulsion only makes the compulsion stronger,

00:24:37.820 which means real human children are put at greater risk.

00:24:42.460 Here's just one study from researchers in Montreal.

00:24:46.480 It says, quote,

00:24:47.600 This study analyzed the evolution over time of the activity of consumers of child sexual exploitation material.

00:24:52.980 to this end images and metadata were extracted from the hard drives of 40 individuals convicted

00:24:58.660 of possession of child pornography and analyzed the most prevalent pattern was a progressive

00:25:04.040 decrease in the age of the person depicted and a progressive increase in the severity of the

00:25:09.500 sexual acts so in other words over time the children in the in the in this material became

00:25:17.080 younger and the content became even more explicit. They get some exposure to this stuff and then

00:25:23.500 their compulsion becomes more severe and even more depraved. Then there's this study from the

00:25:28.680 Journal of Family Violence in 2009 known as the Butner study. They interviewed people who had been

00:25:33.360 convicted of possessing child pornography but hadn't been charged with actually abusing a child

00:25:38.640 in person. What the researchers discovered is that many of these people had also abused children in

00:25:42.960 in real life. They simply hadn't been discovered by investigators yet. Quote, our findings showed

00:25:47.320 the internet offenders in our sample were significantly more likely than not to have

00:25:50.880 abused a child via a hands-on act. They also indicated that the offenders who abused children

00:25:55.980 were likely to have offended against multiple victims, that the incidence of crossover

00:26:00.840 by gender and age is high. So this is one of the dangers posed by all forms of child pornography,

00:26:08.160 whether it's AI generated or not, very often it's not simply an online crime, as evil as that crime

00:26:13.640 already is. It's a precursor to real life sexual assault. You know, sometimes here it argued in

00:26:21.460 defense of AI child porn or other supposedly fictional depictions of child abuse, you'll

00:26:26.900 sometimes hear it argued that, well, you know, this might be a way to actually prevent child

00:26:30.900 abuse because it gives the perverts an allegedly safe outlet. Well, even if that were true,

00:26:40.860 the stuff should still be banned. No such outlet should exist. And anyone who needs that sort of

00:26:45.720 outlet should simply be imprisoned at a minimum, at a minimum. But it turns out that this whole

00:26:50.920 outlet idea is a psychological misnomer. You don't tamp down a compulsion or keep it contained

00:26:56.140 and under control by indulging it.

00:26:58.440 The more it's indulged, the stronger it grows.

00:27:01.700 And that's true of any compulsion.

00:27:03.740 And it's certainly true of this,

00:27:05.600 which is the worst compulsion a person can have.

00:27:08.880 So put simply, there's no compelling reason at all

00:27:10.820 to allow people to use AI this way.

00:27:15.240 You know, does anyone have a God-given right

00:27:16.980 to generate horrific sexual images with AI?

00:27:20.280 Obviously not.

00:27:22.480 Does anyone have a God-given right

00:27:23.880 to use AI at all for anything?

00:27:26.140 No. Does it help society or the country in any way for people to be doing this? Obviously not.

00:27:33.340 Is it grotesque and evil and bad? Obviously it is. Therefore it should be banned.

00:27:41.180 It really is that simple. College is often discussed entirely as an investment.

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00:29:48.500 If you've got something that you don't have a right to do it, it's not a God-given right, it does not improve society in any way, it's horrifically evil, and degrades society at a minimum.

00:30:04.560 In all those cases, that thing should be banned, whatever it is.

00:30:09.020 And that's why we have prohibitions.

00:30:10.560 That's why you have the concept of banning things.

00:30:12.480 It's for precisely those kinds of things.

00:30:16.120 There's no real argument to not ban it.

00:30:19.360 Now, people will argue that, well, you know, we have violent video games like Grand Theft Auto, and they allow you to do horrible things as well, like shoot police officers.

00:30:28.120 Although I'll note that they don't allow you to murder children, much less sexually assault them.

00:30:32.300 And yes, it's clearly a net negative for society, I would say, to have millions of children murdering police officers in a game for fun.

00:30:41.880 But there are two important distinctions to draw here.

00:30:44.200 First, Grand Theft Auto has a narrative, at least superficially.

00:30:48.080 the games have a story that you're working through. And even when you take a detour to

00:30:52.260 commit an act of domestic terrorism in the game, you're still playing as one of the characters from

00:30:56.360 that narrative. And secondly, and more to the point, and this is really all that needs to be

00:31:00.860 said, is you have to draw lines somewhere. Obviously, we all agree that there have to be

00:31:05.940 lines. And if we can't draw the line here, then where exactly do you draw them?

00:31:13.720 And this is where I disagree with a lot of commentators on the common good conservatism

00:31:17.620 debate. It's a question of whether the government should only protect individual liberty or does it

00:31:24.040 have a role in protecting the general welfare of its people and to some extent promoting public

00:31:28.800 virtue. And I would say the government does have an obligation in the latter respect to protect

00:31:35.200 the general welfare. If you're an individual liberty conservative, then you have no argument

00:31:40.900 really, or only a weak one for banning AI-generated child pornography. If you believe the government

00:31:48.260 should be protecting the general welfare of the people, on the other hand, then it's not even a

00:31:53.800 question. Like, obviously this should be banned. But the government, for the most part, has been

00:31:59.540 totally powerless against this evil. The attitude seems to be that, you know, AI exists and will do

00:32:06.140 whatever it wants. And there's nothing we can do to stop any of it. So why even try?

00:32:13.140 Obviously, there's plenty of AI alarmism on the other side. And we've talked about that

00:32:17.680 previously. There are various factions that want to shut down AI for political reasons or because

00:32:22.680 it gets clicks or because they're paid by China or whatever. But the AI defeatism, right? The

00:32:28.440 attitude that, well, we can't and shouldn't even try to do anything to regulate AI at all,

00:32:33.720 even in these really extreme cases like AI child pornography, that is just as extreme in the other

00:32:40.820 direction. And it's kind of hysterical in its own way. Because it also seems to say that AI is like

00:32:50.980 this mystical, unstoppable force, and we're utterly powerless in its grasp. There's nothing

00:32:57.840 we could do at all. No laws could have any effect. I find that to also be hysterical.

00:33:06.540 It's a technology. That's what it is. It's not magic. And so we don't need to treat it like evil

00:33:12.800 sorcery, but we also shouldn't treat it as some sort of God that cannot be in any way controlled

00:33:19.220 and we shouldn't even try. And also the idea that we can't possibly regulate anything that

00:33:26.920 takes place in the home or even on public streets, again, is an extreme. It's a kind of hysteria.

00:33:34.340 These are positions that on the surface appear to be pro-liberty, anti-authoritarian, even

00:33:39.200 patriotic. But in fact, the idea that we shouldn't regulate AI at all or anything like that, but

00:33:44.940 in fact, they are the antithesis of what the founders and the constitution stood for. They

00:33:49.160 represent a breathtaking miscalculation about the severity of the threats we face and that our

00:33:54.480 children face. No, we shouldn't give up any essential liberty in exchange for temporary

00:34:00.120 safety. Franklin was right about that. But the right to possess AI child porn on our computers

00:34:05.300 is not an essential liberty. When we deny that a civilized society necessarily involves trade-offs,

00:34:13.020 when we buy into Obama's tripe about false choices, then we invite collapse at the

00:34:17.480 civilizational level. Some lines need to be drawn. And if we can't draw the line at this,

00:34:25.500 then we can't draw any line anywhere for any reason. As the saying goes, our constitution

00:34:30.280 is not a suicide pact. Before our children are made to endure any more of these horrors,

00:34:36.000 it's incumbent on the courts to stop pretending that it is.

00:34:41.060 That'll do it for the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you

00:34:43.120 tomorrow. Have a great day. Godspeed.

00:34:47.480 But in all of my years of public life, I have never profited from public service.

00:34:57.660 I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their

00:35:02.040 president's a crook.

00:35:03.420 Well, I'm not a crook. 0.97

00:35:04.520 For more than five decades, from Iran-Contra to Monica Lewinsky to Russiagate, every political

00:35:09.900 scandal has been measured against one, the Watergate affair.

00:35:13.720 But what if Richard Nixon was telling the truth?

00:35:15.920 What if Watergate isn't what it seems?

00:35:18.920 What if hundreds of thousands of pages of sworn testimony,

00:35:21.920 memoirs, and newly released government documents

00:35:24.920 tell a different story than the one you learned in school?

00:35:27.920 I know America.

00:35:28.920 In 1972, Nixon won the biggest electoral landslide

00:35:31.920 in modern American history with grand plans

00:35:33.920 to remake the federal government.

00:35:35.920 Two years later, he was out of office.

00:35:38.920 You were taught that Nixon's men broke into

00:35:40.920 the Democratic National Committee headquarters

00:35:42.920 to spy on his political opponents.

00:35:44.920 You were taught that when he found out, Nixon covered it up and that the cover-up was worse than the crime.

00:35:51.920 You were taught that two heroic Washington Post reporters, guided by a righteous FBI whistleblower,

00:35:58.920 brought the most powerful man in the world to justice.

00:36:01.920 But you were never taught what really happened.

00:36:03.920 I shall resign the presidency, effective at noon tomorrow.

00:36:06.920 The Real History of the Watergate Scandal is available now on Daily Wire Plus.

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The Matt Walsh Show - August 31, 2026

Ep. 1831 - Insane Ruling Just Cleared A Path For The Creepiest AI Use Yet

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