Donald Trump has not been accused of paying for sex, but several supporters protesting outside of his trial on Monday wanted to make it clear that they have. It seems the crowds that come out to protest the persecution of the former president are getting smaller, and weirder

Today, however, the crowd had thinned to a handful of true believers and true characters – those who don’t leave their house without a giant flag, a bullhorn, and an offensive T-shirt they made themselves.

It’s not only that the crowds are getting smaller, it’s that they are getting significantly weirder.

Of the people willing to step up to a microphone outside the courthouse and defend Mr Trump for allegedly paying off a porn star to hide his alleged affair from prospective voters, two offered something of a wild defence: that they opposed the charges because they too had paid for sex on more than one occasion, and assumed most men had done the same.

It didn’t matter to them that Mr Trump is not being accused of paying for sex, but rather accused of having embarked on several extra-marital affairs and falsifying business records over payments made to hide those affairs from the voting public in 2016.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Well, let’s legalize prostitution. Regulate it, tax it, legitimize it.

    Conservatives: hell no, we can’t have that depravity and vice. We need to punish women for sex outside of marriage. Oh, yeah…and no abortions for them either. (Unless it’s my daughter or mistress)

    • ThirdWorldOrder@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      It makes my head hurt how ridiculous conservatives are and how they spin things. They’re only making their lives harder. Imagine the amount of tax revenue that could be collected from legalizing prostitution.

      • someguy3@lemmy.ca
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        8 months ago

        Let’s say it together: they don’t actually care about fiscal responsibility.

        • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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          It’s obvious that they don’t because they only ever work one variable (spending) of the fucking equation:

          spending - income = deficit

          Even if you stop all of your spending entirely, you’ll remain in debt forever if you never have any income, so it’s a losing way to fix the problem, but that won’t stop them or their idiot voters from insisting upon it.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        It’s not a homogenous group. You’ve absolutely got libertarians on one end, wanting to dissolve the state and legalize a market for children as sexual commodities on one end. And then you’ve got the Holy Rollers on the order end, who think coffee and cigarettes need to be next on the chopping block.

        They formed an alliance of convenience to crush the labor movement. But now they are very awkward bedfellows.

    • danc4498@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Oh yeah, and make it more difficult for those trapped in their situation to get out of it.

    • TenderfootGungi@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      If we are going to make it illegal, we really need to flip the laws and make it illegal to hire one. This would give those in the business a legal way of asking for help.

    • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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      8 months ago

      I see this sentiment a lot from the uneducated crowd, but unfortunately human trafficking seems to increase whenever sex work is legalized so I cannot condone it.

      • frezik@midwest.social
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        8 months ago

        Human trafficking is there, anyway. The victims tend to be afraid, because they’re forced to do otherwise illegal things, and therefore don’t want to come forward. So what often happens under legalization is that a whole bunch of victims suddenly come out, which is now recorded as an increase in human trafficking.

      • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        “Uneducated”

        I think you need to do some reading, friend. Human trafficking is already a big problem. Legitimizing sex work and regulating it removes t some of the incentives to operate behind the scenes, just like legalizing pot, and frankly you get rid of the whole under-age thing because no government entity is going to allow that.

        S/he’s right.

        • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
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          8 months ago

          I wish it were true, but it’s really not. Human trafficking increases in both countries that legalize sex work and also countries where the humans are trafficked from. Tons of studies over many decades illustrate the cold hard truth.

          • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Well, damn…you’re right. TIL.

            https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-prostitution-increase-human-trafficking/

            The study’s findings include:

            Countries with legalized prostitution are associated with higher human trafficking inflows than countries where prostitution is prohibited. The scale effect of legalizing prostitution, i.e. expansion of the market, outweighs the substitution effect, where legal sex workers are favored over illegal workers. On average, countries with legalized prostitution report a greater incidence of human trafficking inflows.

            The effect of legal prostitution on human trafficking inflows is stronger in high-income countries than middle-income countries. Because trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation requires that clients in a potential destination country have sufficient purchasing power, domestic supply acts as a constraint.

            • someguy3@lemmy.ca
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              8 months ago

              The problem with these case studies are that they are small. If you don’t know what’s what and your pimp tells you it’s illegal and you can’t go to the police, you might believe them. If it’s widely and commonly known that it’s legal and that the police will actually help you, then that will change the results. That and if you throw the weight and resources of, oh let’s say, DEA marijuana enforcement against human trafficking, that will also change the results.

  • SquishyPandaDev@yiffit.net
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    8 months ago

    FFS he is not in trouble for paying for sex. He is in trouble for paying hush money using campaign funds. Good lord, conservatives are so brainwashed

          • ickplant@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            The Stormy Daniels case is also about election interference. He interfered in the election by paying to conceal critical information that may have changed voters’ minds.

              • ickplant@lemmy.world
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                8 months ago

                It’s not in the charges, it’s the nature of the case. This isn’t my opinion but that of legal expert from the podcast Legal Scrutiny. And they know their shit.

                • disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world
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                  8 months ago

                  I could see conviction in this case being used as evidence in the election fraud trial, but he’s not being tried by a federal prosecutor. It’s a criminal trail brought up by the State of NY.

    • NABDad@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Just like Clinton wasn’t in trouble for the blowjob. He was in trouble for lying about it under oath. But everyone who talks about it now says he got impeached for a blowjob.

      • Asafum@feddit.nl
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        8 months ago

        It’s exactly why Republicans cried “purgery trap” when people wanted to have Trump testify as president. They knew what they did during the Clinton investigation and just assume Democrats would somehow “force” Trump to lie about something completely unrelated…

        The Clinton investigation was over real estate and somehow made it’s way over to blow jobs.

      • HubertManne@kbin.social
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        8 months ago

        Exactly. He got impeached for lying about questioning unrelated to the investigation on him after the actual subject of the investigation bore no fruit.

    • the_crotch@sh.itjust.works
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      8 months ago

      I mean, this is right out of the liberal playbook. They’ve been screaming for 30 years that Clinton was impeached for a blowjob. He wasn’t. He was impeached for purjury, trying to cover up the blowjob. Same shit different party.

  • crusa187@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    Chud Life Baby 😎

    Yes, let’s legalize and give protections to all the sex workers.

    Chuds: No, not like that!!

  • Diplomjodler@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Isn’t that a crime in the US? Did these people just confess to crimes? But of course they’re “conservatives” so it’s OK.

    • Worx@lemmynsfw.com
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      8 months ago

      TBF, I wouldn’t want people to be persecuted just for saying out loud that they did a crime. Imagine if I went outside today and shouted, “My house doesn’t have a secondary fire escape and is therefore outside building regulations!”. Should I then be investigated for committing a crime, or should someone just tell me to shut up and stop shouting in the middle of the road?

          • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Haha yeah you’d expect an example to be something somewhat close to a thing that people would actually say.

        • Worx@lemmynsfw.com
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          8 months ago

          Haha definitely not relevant to me 😅

          I was just struggling to think of an example of a crime which wouldn’t warrant investigation. Flying Squid has a good example further down of confessing to a murder which had just happened, which would need to be investigated probably

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I would say it depends on the type of crime and the amount of detail. If you say out loud, “I murdered John Smith last Tuesday” and John Smith had been murdered last Tuesday, I think you should probably get investigated for the murder of John Smith.

        If you say “I’ve had sex with a prostitute” but don’t go further than that in terms of any details, definitely not.

      • frezik@midwest.social
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        8 months ago

        IIRC, the person who owns the production company can’t be the one getting it on. Even that’s probably not enforced much.

        • IamSparticles@lemmy.zip
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          8 months ago

          This was the plot of an episode of Boston Legal. I wouldn’t assume it would actually hold up in court. In the story a professor of sex studies had paid a prostitute to answer some interview questions for a study, and he “got carried away”. But he was filming it, so they argued that he was actually making a pornographic film, which is protected speech.

    • snekerpimp@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Not a crime everywhere in the US, cat houses are still around in Nevada. I’m assuming the gentlemen making these statements frequented a couple cities in that state to come to this assumption.

      • irreticent@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Actually, prostitution is not legal in Clark County (where Las Vegas is). It is legal in the rest of Nevada, though. The sex workers that advertise in Vegas are based just outside of the county lines and travel into the city when called. The cops pretty much just look the other way so it seems legal there.

  • danc4498@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Just like Jesus from his pedestal… Let whoever amungst us hasn’t paid for sex throw the first felony.

    • snooggums@midwest.social
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      8 months ago

      Actually Jesus said “Let whoever among us who hasn’t falsified business records throw the first felony.”

      The paying for sex was a mistranslation.

      • dogslayeggs@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        It’s an easy mistranslation to make, especially when you had a large group of scholars reading hundreds of accounts of stuff that happened hundreds of years earlier written in several different languages and deciding which stories were “real” and worth putting in one book. Then a thousand years later you had another group of people translating THAT.

        I’m surprised there aren’t more stories about Jesus falsifying his business records after trying to cover up a sex scandal.

  • tootoughtoremember@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Sex work is work. And if it’s work, there are customers.

    There’s probably a long list of reasons to criticize these Trump supporters, including not understanding what this case in particular is about, but being customers of sex work ain’t it.

    Demonizing customers of sex work maintains the taboo and hurts the movement to legitimize, legalize, regulate, and provide normal employment benefits to sex work.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      Conservatives love to hate on sex workers, particularly when they are migrants or POC or (God help us all) LGBT.

      Demonizing customers of sex work maintains the taboo and hurts the movemen

      The prevailing view of Republicans in this moment is that Stormy Daniels is trying to extort Trump for more money and using the NY Southern District as leverage.

      Far from demonizing customers, this view holds the client up as a victim and the sex worker as some kind of intrusive parasite who has failed to know her place.

      • tootoughtoremember@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Totally agree with you. But this:

        this view holds the client up as a victim and the sex worker as some kind of intrusive parasite who has failed to know her place.

        Is because their golden god can do no wrong. That every law he broke was somehow not his fault, and clearly the fault of the accuser or corrupt prosecutors. They will shift the focus away from an argument they can’t win, campaign funds being used for non-campaign purposes, to anything they can get the base whipped up about.

        But my complaint isn’t even about that. My problem is that this article demonizes these Trump supporters for one wrong reason. That characterizing customers of sex work as weirdos for admitting it, regardless of their presidential candidate of choice, hurts the effort to legitimize sex work. There’s a lot of fish in the barrel of criticism for this group, no need for the author and OP to support a conservative anti-sex work narrative at the same time.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Is because their golden god can do no wrong.

          I think its a more broad understanding of sex workers as disposable playthings.

          My problem is that this article demonizes these Trump supporters for one wrong reason. That characterizing customers of sex work as weirdos for admitting it, regardless of their presidential candidate of choice, hurts the effort to legitimize sex work.

          There’s a general generic insult in modern media that boils down to “you’re fat and ugly and nobody wants to fuck you”. And the anti-Trumpers latch on to people visiting sex workers as an opportunity to hurl out this age-old insult. If this was an article about a movie star or popular musician admitting to patroning sex workers, I doubt the criticisms would match.

    • Emerald@lemmy.world
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      If conservatives really don’t like sex work because it is exploitative, they should want capitalism eradicated. It kinda shows the real reason they actually don’t like sex work.

      • tootoughtoremember@lemmy.world
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        Conservatives don’t like sex work because it ruins the “wife will submit to her husband” power dynamic around sex they were taught is the norm.

        Sex work being illegal, and as a result inherently ripe for exploitation, is the feature not a bug to conservatives.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I’m not so sure that the author wasn’t taken in by a Yes Men style prank. Because honestly, that sounds like satire and the satire wasn’t coming from the author of the article.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        I agree, but I think there are hints here and there.

        For example-

        “What do you think I do in Thailand, just sit in a chair?” he asked, incredulously. “That’s what we do as men, you know?”

        Thailand isn’t really famous for it’s ciswomen prostitutes…

            • deranger@lemmy.world
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              That doesn’t refute my point. Thailand has ladyboys, sure, but there are easily 10x the number of female sex workers. It’s one of the most well known cis sex tourism destinations.

              • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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                I think you’re confused. I’m not talking about the reality, I’m talking about why I think this is a hint that it’s satire.

                • Asafum@feddit.nl
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                  But they’re saying why it shouldn’t be taken as satire, because in reality that is a place you go to for ciswomen too.

                  I’ve rotted my brain enough in the past trying to figure out what Trump reality is by watching Fox news that I can’t be bothered to rot it anymore, but I’d bet that fox or Newsmax is twisting this as “Trump unfairly being brought to court for paying for sex” which is why these jokers are out there arguing that “we all do it.” Kind of like the “locker room talk” from his first election that supposedly all guys do… :/

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    8 months ago

    They’re mad that they had to pay for sex because they expect to get their wee-wees wet for free.