In March 2021, the Biden White House initiated a brazenly unconstitutional censorship campaign to prevent Americans from buying politically unfavorable books from Amazon.
The effort, spearheaded by White House censors including Andy Slavitt and Rob Flaherty, began on March 2, 2021, when Slavitt emailed Amazon demanding to speak to an executive about the site’s “high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation.”
Their subsequent discussions remain unknown, but recently released emails from the House Judiciary Committee reveal that the censors achieved their intended result. Within a week, Amazon adopted a shadow ban policy.
Company officials wrote in internal emails, “The impetus for this request is criticism from the Biden administration about sensitive books we’re giving prominent placement to, and should be handled urgently.” They further clarified that the policy was “due to criticism from the Biden people,” presumably meaning Slavitt and Flaherty.
The Supreme Court weighed in on a nearly identical case over sixty years ago.
In 1956, the Rhode Island legislature created a “Rhode Island Commission to Encourage Morality in Youth.” Like “public health” or “inclusivity,” the innocuous language was a Trojan Horse for censorship.
The challengers argued that the Commission acted “as a censor” while the Government “contended that its purpose was only to educate people,” the NYT explained. The Government, desperate to maintain its benevolent facade, insisted its “hope [was] that the dealer would ‘cooperate’ by not selling the branded books and magazines.”
But the Government’s call for “cooperation” was a thinly veiled threat. The Commission did not just notify the booksellers; they also sent copies of the notices to the local police, who “always called dealers within 10 days of the notice to see whether the offending items had been withdrawn,” according to the book dealers.
“This procedure produced the desired effect of frightening off sale of the books deemed objectionable,” a book dealer told the NYT. They complied, “not wanting to tangle with the law.”
The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that the Committee’s reports violated the Constitutional rights of the book dealers. Justice William O. Douglas wrote in a concurring opinion: “This is censorship in the raw; and in my view the censor and First Amendment rights are incompatible.”
Here, we again see censorship in the raw; bureaucratic thugs, using the power of the U.S. federal government, call for the suppression of information that they find politically inconvenient. They hide behind the innocuous language of “public health” and “public-private partnerships,” but the Leviathan’s “requests” carry an implicit threat.
When companies refused to comply, Biden’s henchmen responded with scorn. Facebook ignored one censorship request, and Flaherty exploded: “Are you guys [expletive] serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.”
Since then, skyrocketing government spending and public-private partnerships have further blurred the line between state and private persons at the cost of our liberties.
Meanwhile, the revelations keep pouring in, adding to what we know but still concealing the fullness of what might actually have been happening. Adding to the difficulty is that the revelations themselves are not being widely reported, raising serious questions concerning just how much in the way of independent media remains following this brutal crackdown on free speech that took place with no legislation and no public oversight.
