Hunter Moore on California's Revenge-Porn Law: "You Fucking Retards"
Earlier this week, California passed a law designed to criminalize revenge porn. Under this immediately effective legislation, any person who privately takes a consensual photo of another person nude, but then maliciously distributes the intimate image can be punished for up to six months in jail and/or $1,000 in fines. Yesterday, Hunter Moore, a Warped Tour scene goon turned proud revenge-porn thug, posted a YouTube rant about the legislation. A summary: "You fucking retards."
Moore, the sort of shit-talker who lost $250,000 in court for threatening to rape a man's wife, made the video because he'd been inundated with media requests since Governor Jerry Brown signed the bill. So instead of "doing a bunch of interviews with a bunch of fucking retards," he recorded himself offering a discursively blustering dismissal of the law. The gist of his diatribe: the law's dumb, you're dumb, girls who send dudes nudes are dumb, the government's dumb, Jerry Brown is dumb, and this legislation is not only dumb, but anti-American. "It's to help stupid people feel better," he insists. There's also some stuff about titties.
But Hunter Moore, on the other hand, is very smart:
I'm sorry I was smart enough to monetize your stupid fucking mistakes. This is fucking America, I'm gonna get my dick sucked, and I'm gonna get paid. I'm fucking—I'm smart! I'm hella smart. What the fuck? I took your titties and made money off it. And, this law doesn't stop me or anybody from doing it.
To clarify, SB 255 only targets people who both take the nude photos and distribute the photos, so selfies aren't covered. But Moore's bigger point is that the legislation doesn't directly affect revenge-porn site owners whose content is submission-based—guys like him whose livelihoods at one point consisted of gleefully posting online strangers' boobies and crotch shots, along with their full names, towns, and social media links—because they are still protected by the Communications Decency Act, specifically that handy Section 230 that absolves site publishers of legal liability regarding third-party content. Which, OK, there're constantly ongoing questions about the extent of that protection, but Moore just veers off into a theoretical attack on "retards" who send nudes:
You have these people who're making this law to protect the fucking retards who took the fucking pictures in the first place, who put that fucking brush in her pussy and sent it to some boy she met on the internet 15 fucking minutes ago and now she wants that guy to fucking go to jail because he put it up on the internet because he thinks it's fucking funny. It is fucking funny—you put a brush in your pussy, you stupid bitch, so why should we protect you? Think. Think, you stupid fucking whore. Think. Just think before you put that brush in your ass and take a picture.
This is the same rationale the n00dz troll has been offering since he went on Anderson Cooper in 2011: If you don't want your nudes on the internet, don't send them—or better yet, don't take them—but don't blame a hustler like me for capitalizing on your poor judgment. And while it's generally a fair point that sexting dongs or thongs comes with the risk they'll end up sent to your dad's inbox or ruining your political career or published somewhere else widely, this defense is horseshit coming from Hunter Moore. Why? Let's remember: many of the photos posted on Moore's defunct site Is Anyone Up were stolen during social engineering hacks—and this is why the FBI investigated Hunter Moore. So to argue that all along, he was just a businessmen benefiting from misplaced trust is just wrong. But whatever, this dude will say anything.
A few other choice quotes from his extended riff:
When you have a stupid fucking retard like Jerry Brown, the guy passing this fucking law, the guy probably can't even read his email. I've grown up on the Internet. Let people who know the Internet have a say.
Well, you see, you did, and that is why we are here.
How about this? You take responsibility for your actions and stop pointing the finger at other people. Where did this start? How did your pictures end up on the internet, on a site, where everybody's making fun of your busted-ass pussy? Well, you had a cell phone and you took pictures of it. Where did that start? Oh, it started with you? Stop being a dumb-ass bitch and stop trying to ruin other peoples' rights and freedoms.
Oh right, and Hunter Moore is a freedom fighter:
These bills do nothing except slowly chip away at our fucking rights and our freedoms. So the people who're praising this are anti-America, anti-Internet.
And a conspiracy theorist:
I think there's a lot more going on then just some fucking girls getting mad and us protecting them putting their titties online, which it doesn't do. I think there's something else going on here. I think they're slowly trying to take away our internet rights and our freedom of speech because, well, there's a lot of information getting traded right now and they're getting scared.
A lot of information traded, you say?
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