A federal appeals court looked at a Wisconsin man’s stash of AI-generated child sexual abuse material, admitted the pictures are now “virtually indistinguishable” from images of real children being abused, and then told the government it could not punish him for keeping them at home.
That is the holding. Not a thought experiment. Not a law-review hypothetical. A published ruling from the Seventh Circuit in United States v. Anderegg.
The Post Millennial reported the decision this week. Fox News, The Daily Wire, and The Federalist all covered the same ugly line the judges said they were powerless to redraw. If no actual child appears in the file, private possession inside the house is treated as First Amendment activity.
Call it “virtual.” Call it “synthetic.” The file still exists to gratify the same appetite that wrecks children.
Steven Anderegg of Holmen, Wisconsin, was charged by the Justice Department in 2024 after an investigation that, according to court coverage, began when Meta flagged an Instagram account sending this kind of material to a minor. Prosecutors alleged he used an AI image generator to produce thousands of photorealistic images of children in sexually explicit situations, then possessed them, produced them, distributed them, and transferred them to a person under 16. A district judge tossed only the possession count. The government appealed. The Seventh Circuit affirmed.
They Know the Pictures Look Real
Judge John Z. Lee wrote the opinion. Judges Doris Pryor and Joshua Kolar joined. Lee and Kolar then filed a separate concurrence that reads like a distress signal dressed up as judicial restraint.
We now live in an age where GenAI models can render images depicting the abuse of virtual children that are virtually indistinguishable from those depicting the abuse of actual children. Given the relentless advancement in artificial intelligence models, we have some concerns about the lines these cases draw, but we are not free to redraw them ourselves.
That is a judge telling the country the law is behind the technology and that he will apply the old rule anyway. The old rule is Stanley v. Georgia from 1969, which said the state cannot criminalize a man for possessing obscene material in his own home, and Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition from 2002, which struck down a federal ban on “virtual” child pornography that did not use a real child in production. In 2002 the Court said such images “record no crime and create no victims by their production.”
In 2026 the same logic is being used on files that even the panel says a viewer may not be able to tell apart from the real crime.
Justice Clarence Thomas saw this coming. In the 2002 case he warned that if technology made it impossible to prosecute material produced through the abuse of real children, the government might have a compelling interest in regulating a narrow category of otherwise “lawful” speech. Twenty-four years later, investigators are already drowning in files they cannot quickly sort. The Justice Department argued that point. The Seventh Circuit said the Supreme Court already rejected it.
Possession Is Not the Whole Case
Do not let the headline launder the rest of the indictment. The court did not bless production. It did not bless distribution. It did not bless sending the material to a child. Those counts remain. Anderegg still has to answer for them. Morphing a real child’s face onto this garbage is still treated as child sexual abuse material. The sliver the court carved out is narrower than the cheerleaders of “AI speech” will pretend, and wider than any parent can live with.
Hans von Spakovsky told Fox the panel “had no choice” under existing precedent. He also said the quiet part. Technology has overtaken the reasoning. Some of these images can be built on top of real abuse files. Once the product looks identical, the legal fiction that “no child was harmed in the making” becomes a shield for people whose entire project is the sexual use of children, whether the child on the screen has a birth certificate or not.
That is the market argument the 2002 Court waved away. Demand does not stay on a hard drive. It trains the imagination. It is used to groom. It clogs the systems built to find actual victims. It tells a predator the Constitution is his roommate. None of that requires a law-review footnote. Parents already know it.
But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.
The Court That Drew the Line Has to Face It
The First Amendment was written to stop Congress from chaining the pulpit and the press. It was not written to create a sanctuary for a new industrial supply of child sexual abuse imagery so long as the producer used a model instead of a camera in a basement.
When a category of speech exists only to sexualize children, the claim that it is “speech” in the constitutional sense is a lawyer’s trick. Obscenity was never a preferred freedom. Child sexual abuse material involving real children is already outside the Amendment. The only reason this new pile gets a pass is that the last Court to look at “virtual” files could not imagine what a home computer can now spit out in an afternoon.
Lee all but begged the justices to take the next case. Congress can also write a statute that is not the sloppy 1996 ban the Court struck down. Target the photorealistic product. Keep bona fide art and medical texts out of it. Stop pretending a file that exists to depict the rape of a child is a cousin of political pamphlets because no one can produce a birth certificate for the face on the screen.
Until someone does, the Seventh Circuit has told a slice of the country that the home is a safe deposit box for this material. The judges say they are stuck. Fine. Then the people who are not stuck — the justices, the Congress, the voters who still believe children are not raw material — need to move. A civilization that cannot say this is forbidden has already started explaining away the millstone.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
