A couple of Christchurch boys are this week learning about cartels the hard way. No one feels sorry for them, but their story is illustrative for revealing how pornography is a weapon.

In a San Diego court, one of the Kiwis involved in producing pornography has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit sex trafficking. A second Kiwi conspirator is still on the run. Both were behind a porn series called GirlsDoPorn.

The pair lured women with the promise of $5000 and an all-expenses paid trip to San Diego. The girls were told the porn was destined for private viewing by wealthy individuals in New Zealand, Australia or South America. Instead, the videos were released online, along with the girls’ identities.

The first thing to note is that, aside from the money, what convinced the girls to attend these shoots was the promise of not just a limited audience but an aristocratic audience. Would they have agreed to the filming if they were told 15 losers in Backscratchistan were watching? Doubtful. Each girl rationalised in their own mind that it was OK to perform pornography for rich people.

Maybe they believed a naïve fairy tale of being “seen” by a wealthy man and whisked off to a life of luxury, saved from their destitution. Perhaps. But the girls in question were American, and Americans are trained from birth to believe they are all nobles. Credit cards and Instagram were designed to make every American think they are just misunderstood aristocrats.

The girls fell for the porn trick because, well, it made sense in their broken brains that they would be picked and given access to the aristocratic world. That’s how narcissism works: you are the star of your own movie while everyone else is supporting cast. You may not be the most glamorous star, but you are the main character. Of course, the script will lead you to the promised land of nobility.

This is the same psychological reason normal people watch YouTube videos about other normal people flying with first-class airline tickets. They aren’t watching to “get a glimpse” into aristocratic travel. The viewers actually believe, deep down, that one day someone would offer them a free first-class ticket because, well, they are just misunderstood aristocrats.

The second point about this story is to remember that someone once said pornography is a good thing because, without it, 99% of men would never enjoy the sight of a perfect female body. This idea is specifically communist, which means pornography is communism: the Revolution is only possible when anyone can have sex with your girlfriend (after all, “wife” implies property).

You could say pornography has always been around, so it can’t be part of communism. But there is a big difference between nude pictures and the industrial production of modern pornography. Aristocratic sexual lifestyles have existed for millennia as well, but it wasn’t until recently that peasants were sold the illusion that they had a right to see (but not touch) such lifestyles.

Pornography is communism in the same way that having tourists walk through Windsor Castle or stand in front of Monet paintings is communism. If you’re not part of the royal family, then you shouldn’t be in their house. And those paintings were created for the enjoyment of their wealthy patrons, not by you. People in 2022 are so unaware of how deeply communist the West has become that conservatives actually defend the existence of public art galleries. That is amazing to me.

Yet, as with anything in a communist society, unless something is explicitly created not to be a weapon of social control, communists will eventually turn it into a weapon of social control. This weapon is what those two Christchurch boys stumbled into with their business venture. Their key mistake was in thinking that porn is a business. Wrongalongadingdong. It is a cartel weapon.

Cartels spend a lot of money trying to convince the public that cartels don’t exist. But life is a lot like prison. There’s no such thing as a lonely gunslinger in prison. You will never be left alone to “do things your way.” That’s a great way to get raped. Your only choice in prison is to join a cartel. Prey animals can only survive in herds, not by following “radical individualism.” The same is true outside.

The machinery of cartels is debt. If it’s your first night in prison and you’re feeling hungry, someone may offer you a Snickers bar. Because your stomach is rumbling, that probably sounds like a good idea. But tomorrow, that guy will want to be repaid with a Snickers bar, ten socks and three bags of rice. Oh, you didn’t know about the interest rate? Haha, bad luck; turn around.

Hollywood operates the same way. Let’s say you’re a new producer with a TV show that isn’t doing phenomenally well, but the film company decides to air the show for a few more weeks so it can gain momentum. Sounds like a good deal, right? Well, now you owe. The cartel to which that film company belongs has just created a favour it can call on at any time, a bit like in The Godfather.

If you ever get to the point of earning $5 million a month, don’t kid yourself. No one’s skill is worth $5 million a month. You are being paid that amount because you are good at following orders. Maybe the order is simple like, “kick this ball into the net” and no one bothers you too much.

But then one day, the order might be to not kick the ball into the net at a precise moment in the game. On that day, if you follow that order from the cartel to which you belong, then perhaps only you might get in trouble for match-fixing. However, if you disobey the order, then something bad could happen to your daughter, which the police will claim was a “terrible accident.”

The cartel to which you owe your success may be invisible to you, but it exists, and it keeps a ledger.

There are many kinds of cartels in this world, all competing for influence at different levels of society. Which one do you belong to? There are media cartels, road infrastructure cartels, banking cartels and oil cartels. Gay people have their own powerful cartel, as do Chinese, Jews, Catholics, feminists, black people, etc. And each cartel has unique entry prices and membership arrangements.

Interestingly, despite all the propaganda, the only group that doesn’t have a defined cartel today is European men. Something happened in the last century that gave all the other cartels a neat way to shame European men into a) not creating their own cartel and b) joining rival cartels just to get ahead. In 2022, the most important goal for every other cartel is to dissuade European men from cooperating. This singular goal acts as a type of glue since a black lesbian has no other reason to cooperate with a Chinese politician if it isn’t to suppress a mutual enemy.

This is how pornography becomes a weapon of demoralisation against European men. It makes them think and act like a conquered people by twisting the historical notion that when your women are having sex with other men while you aren’t there, that is the consequence of losing a war.

Certain powerful cartels know how to leverage this psychic torture to place the European male viewer into a permanent state of assumed mental defeat. Even if the viewer thinks he can control the torture by vicariously pretending he is the one having sex, it only creates the illusion of a harem which is a passive scenario as well. Either way, pornography achieves its goal of turning the viewer into a slave without chains.

How does this connect to the two Christchurch boys and their busted porn company?

In communism all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. Those boys were unwittingly engaging in the demoralisation of their fellow European men, which was fine for a while, especially since it was lucrative. Yet the other cartels knew it is always unwise to let your enemy own any weapons. So they crushed the company.

But the fact is, sex trafficking and pornography are the same things. Thousands of sites are producing this stuff every day. If pornography harmed the interests of the world’s most powerful cartels, then it wouldn’t exist. The well-being of those girls duped by the Kiwi duo is of zero concern to the larger cartel groups. Their motivation is simply to retain control over the flow of a specific type of weapon.

As those Christchurch boys just learned: it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. They assumed success comes from effort, grit and tenacity. They thought they could get involved in a business and make some money. Sorry, the maths says: no cartel, no success.

If you hate what those Kiwis did, don’t let this court decision cool your anger. Push further. I am not exaggerating when I say the negative effects of pornography dwarf every other political problem. Until and unless all porn is destroyed, conservative or reactionary political activity will be too weak to win, which was the entire point of the porn.

Those two Christchurch boys should be just the beginning. Our future depends on crushing the oppressive system of pornography. It is not enough for your own cartel to wield this Ring of Power. It must be thrown into Mount Doom. Your grandkids won’t exist to hate you if we fail to do this.

Nathan Smith is a former business journalist and columnist at the NBR. He also worked as the chief editor at the New Zealand Initiative policy think tank. He is now a freelance writer and copy editor.