Liberals love to talk about books being “banned,” when what they really mean is that someone decided the book–gay porn, for example–shouldn’t be one of the few selected, out of the vast number of books available, for a junior high school or high school library. Those “banned” books are freely available via Amazon, book stores and so on.
But it turns out that some books have actually been banned, or at least suppressed, and as you would expect, book banning has been done by the Left, not the Right.
The Daily Signal has the story:
Amazon yielded to pressure from President Joe Biden’s White House to suppress books that opposed COVID-19 vaccines, according to documents reviewed by The Daily Signal.
The House Judiciary Committee obtained the emails, which demonstrate the White House’s pressure on Amazon to suppress “anti-vax books” and the company’s decision to take action against the books.
Amazon employees strategized for a meeting with the White House on March 9, 2021, openly asking whether the administration wanted the retailer to remove books from its catalog.
“Is the [a]dmin asking us to remove books, or are they more concerned about search results/order (or both)?” one employee wrote.
Is the administration asking us to remove books? Good question! But not a question that anyone would have dreamed of asking, just a few years ago.
Andrew Slavitt, then a senior adviser on Biden’s COVID-19 response team, had previously asked, “Who can we talk to about the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation [on] Amazon?”
So the government thinks that books are being published that contain “misinformation”? Imagine that! There has never been a regime since the invention of the printing press that wouldn’t have said the same. And yet, the publishers of “misinformation” about covid turned out to be mostly right, much as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s critique of the Soviet Union turned out to be mostly right, no matter how hard the Communist elite tried to suppress his writing.
More at the link.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.