“I actually never talk about our porn agenda,” said Russell Vought, a former top Trump administration official, in late July. Vought was chatting with two men he thought were potential donors to his right-wing think tank, the Center for Renewing America.

For the last three years, Vought and the CRA have been pushing laws that require porn websites to verify their visitors are not minors, on the argument that children need to be protected from smut. Dozens of states have enacted or considered these “age verification laws,” many of them modeled on the CRA’s proposals.

This year, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a challenge to Texas’s version, which took effect last September and drew from CRA’s model legislation.

But in a wide-ranging, covertly recorded conversation with two undercover operatives — a paid actor and a reporter for the British journalism nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting — Vought let them in on a thinly veiled secret: These age verification laws are a pretext for restricting access to porn more broadly.

“We came up with an idea on pornography to make it so that the porn companies bear the liability for the underage use,” Vought said, “as opposed to the person who visits the website getting to just certify” that they are of legal age.

Vought called this a “back door starting with the kids” and offered the age........

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