417: Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton Is Wreaking Havoc

Tech Policy Podcast

TechFreedom

Technology

4.8 • 45 Ratings

🗓️ 4 September 2025

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Host Corbin Barthold (TechFreedom) discusses why Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton is wrong, how it muddies First Amendment law, and how it is already causing wider harm. Topics include: - FSC v. Paxton: a result-oriented ruling - A credulous court - PoRn iS sCArY - Ashcroft v. ACLU is sitting right there! - tEcH Is ScARy - RIP First Amendment 101 - The porn-to-social media litigation pipeline - States cite FSC v. Paxton 1,000 times Links: Tech Policy Podcast 373: Porn and the First Amendment (https://tinyurl.com/3yepfzdh)

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome back to the Tech Policy Podcast.
0:26.9	I am Corbyn Barthold, Internet Policy Council at Tech Freedom.
0:33.6	Today I'm going to be doing some serious internet policy counseling for you.
0:43.4	Free speech coalition versus Paxton, it is a bad Supreme Court decision.
0:51.9	The Supreme Court should feel bad that it issued this decision. And the
0:57.8	consequences are already being felt. I thought about structuring this conversation in a few
1:05.1	different ways and what guests to invite on, but in the end, what I decided...
1:12.6	We'll do it live! Fuck it!
1:14.6	Do it live! I can... I'll write it and we'll do it live!
1:18.6	Bill O'Reilly, weirdly my spirit animal on this one.
1:24.6	I'm just gonna go on a rant.
1:26.6	So, at issue is Texas's HB1181. This is a law that requires
1:37.2	any commercial website, more than one-third of which is material obscene to minors to implement age verification
1:49.0	in the form of requiring a government ID or collecting transactional data,
1:56.0	or in theory using some kind of government setup system that doesn't exist.
2:06.1	The law also, although this was blocked and not before the Supreme Court,
2:12.7	the law requires a bunch of bogus health warnings to be put on to adult websites.
2:21.7	The district court saw this law for what it was, a bunch of anti-free speech nonsense, and issued a preliminary injunction. The Fifth Circuit then went all Fifth Circuit and reversed.
2:30.2	We got up to the Supreme Court in a six to three decision along the ideological split in the court.
2:42.3	Justice Thomas, writing for the majority, ruled that this law is not subject to strict scrutiny under the First Amendment.
2:53.2	It is subject instead only to intermediate scrutiny.
2:57.7	And while he was at it, he decided to go ahead and rule that the law meets intermediate scrutiny.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from TechFreedom, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of TechFreedom and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.