Add President Trump’s nominee for the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division to the growing list of government officials who may be shaping policy with an anti-porn agenda. Adam Candeub, currently general counsel at the FCC, has authored work arguing that obscenity laws should be revived and used to prosecute online distributors of adult material.
The nomination requires Senate confirmation, but with the Republican majority still a reality (at least until the midterms), it’s another move toward banning content the Right doesn’t like in the United States.
Candeub, who was nominated to head the DOJ Antitrust last week, wrote “Restoring Obscenity Regulation in an Internet Age” for the Heritage Foundation, arguing for expanded prosecution of online sexual content. As Wet Ink has reported, the Foundation is the group behind Project 2025, which wants to deem these forms of entertainment as obscene, as well as limit sex education and queer/trans rights.
The official, who served in Trump’s first administration targeting Big Tech over alleged suppression of conservative speech, has endorsed the Comstock Act as a way to punish large platforms including Google, and has argued that obscenity enforcement should be folded into how the government approaches online distribution.
According to the St. Louis Riverfront Times, Candeub wants to motivate state and local prosecutors to get convictions in conservative communities. He has characterized the current non-enforcement posture as “a social suicide pact,” as reported in Reason, which also notes that his contribution to Project 2025, includes “taking social media’s effect on our happiness into account when considering whether these platforms are violating antitrust laws.”
The bigger picture is clear: while the Antitrust Division isn’t historically a home for obscenity policy, this nominee wants to connect antitrust enforcement against large platforms with obscenity prosecution and censorship of sites like OnlyFans and Pornhub, as well as payment processors and web hosts.
For creators, the exposure is not the platform-level age-verification fight already underway in the states, but a federal prosecutorial approach aimed at distributors. Though the nomination may not be for a policymaker role, Candeub —whose misguided reasons for banning porn include protecting marriage and promoting “human flourishing” —would like it to be.
