DD-Day
June 9, 2025
Last Friday Defense Distributed made its first filings in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s VanDerStok decision. Unlike the case’s other plaintiffs, we’ve maintained fully briefed Second and Fifth Amendment arguments that can now have their day. AG Bondi and the Trump DOJ asked for a sixty (60) day stay to evaluate their (love for the) ATF receiver rule. Sixty days to determine the meaning of “shall not be infringed.” It doesn’t work like that, guys. We’re going to need a decision that the Second Amendment includes the necessary right to make firearms.
This new front in an old action may be restyled as Defense Distributed v. Bondi. You can read our brief and exhibits here:
Another consequence of VanDerStok is the accelerated censorship of online speech concerning firearms. Though state laws like Texas’ HB20 have afforded firearms “influencers” years of opportunities to combat the rampant censorship and de-platforming on social media sites like YouTube, it’s telling that they’ve all so far remained asleep in their symbolic bedrooms. On Friday we filed another action in a Texas state court named Defense Distributed v. YouTube.
Why do this? Isn’t YouTube just emotional theater for “Guntubers” and gear queers? Wouldn’t it rather advance the fight for the Second Amendment to let Google crush these people’s fragile imaginary (over)identifications?
I agree these sites are places to flee from The Real. Only on YouTube might a doomstruck “rat” and his Samoan attorney, for example, nurse along the fiction that they’re sophisticated litigators. In the dream logic of YouTube, if you post a long enough string of trivial shotgun content, the earth stays solid and JStark buried in it. Myanmar and Mangione remain phantasmatic images from *out there* that can never enter to shatter your reality. As your attorney, I advise you to post more tedious AR-15 videos.
But what if in our video dreams, which we construct as an escape, we encountered a trauma more horrifying than any reality? Could the real trauma be from the excess of our dreams? Could our fictions become so traumatic that they awaken us into reality?
This is the bet I’m willing to make by suing YouTube. Now here’s a video of a general wandering the Desert of The Real.
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