On paper the Take It Down Act, targeting the practice known as ‘Revenge Porn’ and AI fed manifestations of it, is about as bipartisan as it gets. The bill banning the distribution of private photos and fakes got nearly every member, Republican and Democrat, on board. Few legislators were about to come out for revenge porn.

But in the days leading up to the vote, the campaign against the Take It Down Act by leftists and civil libertarians leaned heavily on Orange Man Bad narratives. The bill was being backed by Melania Trump and President Trump had promoted it during his address to Congress. Paranoid conspiracy theories were hatched about how Trump would use it to ‘censor’ something or other. How he was going to do this with a bill criminalizing unlawful sexual materials, they never got around to actually explaining.

“President Trump himself has said that he would use the law to censor his critics,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned.

How he was going to do that?

The Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, which was supposedly created to fight revenge porn, came out against the bill because “in light of the current administration’s explicit commitment to selectively enforcing laws for political purposes, they are fatal. CCRI cannot support legislation that risks endangering the very communities it is dedicated to protecting, including LGBTQIA+ individuals, people of color, and other vulnerable groups.”

So much for protecting women. It’s more important to “protect” transgender people of color from Trump.

Now I’ve been around long enough to suspect that the ‘anti’ campaign is a shadow operation funded by some Big Tech companies and that attacking Trump was about the only way that they could sell it, but it’s still revealing that they thought Orange Man Bad could be used to sell anything. And why not? Dems have been willing in the past to be against anything as long as they had the impression Trump was for it.