Almost three years after it became politically “safe” for politicians to openly support sex worker rights, it’s no longer news for a politician to merely belch out the word “decriminalization” without actually doing anything about it; many just want credit for claiming to support decriminalization while actually continuing the war on whores in a different form. But putting stock in what politicians only say is like trying to build a castle on a cloud. Democratic aspirant Andrew Yang is a perfect example; a year ago he espoused support for Swedish criminalization, describing it with the typical prohibitionist weasel-words “decriminalizing sex work on the part of the seller”. And now he wants us to believe that he really does support real decrim this time: 
Never forget that for most politicians and cop-adjacent creatures, “sex trafficking” is essentially synonymous with “pimping”, and that means virtually any sex-work-adjacent activity. If a politician claims to support decrim but still devotes a lot of rhetoric in his statement to “pimps” and “trafficking”, he probably doesn’t really support decrim; he just knows it will win him support from those who are insufficiently skeptical of politicians. An old woman in Texas was convicted of “sex trafficking” for letting sex workers rent rooms in her motel. A 19-year-old girl was convicted of “interstate child sex trafficking” for giving her slightly-younger friend a ride across town (Vancouver WA to Portland OR) to work. Another young woman was convicted (and will be condemned to the “sex offender” registry for life) for letting an underage girl take a shower at her apartment. It’s dangerous to merely accept politicians’ statements that they “support decriminalization but will ‘go after sex trafficking’,” because what cops & politicians call “sex trafficking” is not usually what non-authoritarians think of upon reading or hearing the term.
