Things may get a lot worse before they get better. – “NYE 2018”
It has been nine years since I first predicted how the “sex trafficking” mythology would implode, and though I was correct in general I underestimated how hard the government and fascist profiteers would work to extend it, resulting in my prediction being too optimistic by about three or four years. Government funding for anti-sex hate groups is still flowing like a river of toxic vomit despite most people having found a new topic to panic about, but the “true believers” have expanded the core myth cycle to include even more bizarre elements (including techno-vampirism and colonies on Mars) that apparently are too much for the same outlets that breathlessly parroted wild sexual fantasies about millions of pubescent girl chained to radiators while being raped 100 times a day. Even the paper that launched the panic in 2004, and has invested tremendous amounts of ink in promoting it for the past two decades, was forced to debunk its own lies when the newest version of its favorite fantasy featured unauthorized lies about its favorite politicians instead of only Times-approved lies about the demimonde. But the prohibitionists who infest the Times are losing their shit just as much as their collaborators in the hate groups and pro-censorship cults, so it isn’t surprising that, even in the face of decaying political and popular support for its anti-sex jihad, the Times unleashed its favorite writer of hebephilic torture porn in order to embarass the hypocritical prudes in the payment processing industry to performatively cut off the income of thousands of homebound sex workers, immediately before Christmas, in a pandemic (for The Children™, natch). This is what the end of a hysteria that government has found useful looks like; as I predicted eight years ago, it’s neither pretty nor neat:
I [once] referred to the “trafficking” myth as “an increasingly-erratic cultural meme spinning wildly out of control, whose far-flung debris is going to cause a lot more damage before it finally disintegrates”, and now that it has entered this last and most dangerous phase we should expect to see a lot more people hurt even as ever-larger numbers of people speak out against it ever more vocally. Because it’s a useful tool of social control and a versatile excuse for tyranny, governments (especially the US government) will work hard and invest huge sums to continue the panic well beyond the time when it would have died naturally; that, however, can only work for so long, and once the edifice of prohibition starts to collapse the US will no more be able to halt the process than the communists could stop the destruction of the Berlin Wall…
If you’re one of the many sex workers who has been harmed by this censorship crusade, the news that the proximate cause of your suffering is that we’re nearing the end of the hysteria is probably not much comfort. Nor will the words of Nicholas Klein, frequently misquoted and misattributed to Gandhi: “First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.” But the words are indeed true: the tyrants never fight harder than when they know they’re losing, in order to destroy the lives of as many of their chosen victims as possible while they still can. 
