It’s astonishing how lies can take hold in political rhetoric and then become some kind of fake reality. I’m thinking in particular about the ridiculous claim that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was banning books all over Florida. It never happened. The whole calumny was based on a parent-driven effort to get sexually explicit books out of public school classrooms. It’s hardly banning: All these books can be acquired in other ways if you really want them.
Nonetheless, for the better part of a year, the claim was everywhere: on social media, in speeches, at campaign events, and so on. The volume became so loud on this absurdity that, for millions of people, it became the incontrovertible reality. The governor and others tried their best to correct the record, but the truth could hardly be heard over the cacophony of fibbery.
The company wrote in internal emails: “Is the [Biden] Admin asking us to remove books?”
The company kept pushing back, based on a probable intuition that the U.S. government cannot actually tell book distributors what they can and cannot sell. But in the end, the White House did prevail.
“We did enable Do Not Promote for anti-vax books whose primary purpose is to persuade readers vaccines are unsafe or ineffective,” Amazon wrote in internal emails.
This whole thing is rather amazing because it amounts to raw efforts to censor. And why? Because the Biden administration presumed that readers and consumers cannot tell truth from fiction. It was alarmed that in the middle of a massively well-funded push for universal vaccination, many real experts were publishing books stating the obvious.
And what was the obvious? There were three issues alive at the time. One was related to the question, “Is this vaccine necessary for everyone?” The answer is no. COVID-19 was mainly injurious to the aged and infirm at any significant degree. Working-age populations and children were never under any significant threat, but the government did not want that known, even though every bit of science revealed that.
Second, many writers doubted that the vaccine was safe. They were correct. There was simply no way any drug could be declared safe without real-world experience. There was no real-world experience with this drug. The delivery mechanism—lipid nanoparticles delivering mRNA—had never been able to get through approval before. It was stamped approved by the military in a way that bypassed the whole of the Food and Drug Administration. But there was never any test for safety because time would not allow it. Therefore, it could not be declared safe.
The same goes for whether the vaccine was effective. There is no way that anyone could know prior to experience. It was claimed to be effective based on extremely limited tests and wild statistical extrapolations without the proper time passage. It didn’t help that the vaccine makers would not allow a control group to emerge against which to compare the vaccinated group.
So the vaccine was not capable of being declared necessary, safe, or effective. It turned out over time that none of these designations applied. This is precisely what many writers began to point out. But the White House was not having it. It could not let it out.
To be sure, it should not matter whether the book in question is right or wrong. It so happens that the First Amendment is neutral to the question of whether the speech is saying truthful things. It simply bans the government from intervening in the free flow of ideas. That’s pretty simple. In other words, there is simply no way that this was constitutional.
The new evidence indicates something extremely alarming, namely that during the COVID-19 period, the government took it upon itself to exercise totalitarian power. It aspired to control every message on social media. It put itself in charge of what books were published and what you could and could not buy. It leaned on media outlets with preset messaging. These people did everything, with full and brazen disregard for the First Amendment.
One of the major players was White House employee Andy Slavitt, who also pushed Twitter to ban accounts such as Alex Berenson and many others. They were kicked off the platform for contradicting government priorities.
How in the world did they think they would get away with this? Well, they never announced this new policy. They were following no legislation passed by Congress. They just decided to do it because they wanted to reconstitute the government itself as a marketing agent for large pharmaceutical firms that were themselves running the regulatory agencies.
I use the word totalitarian with no exaggeration. The government wanted to have and tried to achieve total control over the information you could access. It worked day in and day out to get it, by sending a constant stream of intimidating messages to publishers, distributors, media outlets, and social media companies. With these messages came the presence of a threat of sorts. For example, Amazon gets a vast amount of revenue as a company from government contracts. The company might presume with reason to believe that resisting demands that they deboost or unpublish a book would endanger its bottom line.
Keep in mind that Amazon had previously acquiesced to government demands when on Jan. 10, 2021, it attacked the social media app Parler and its use of Amazon servers. On the same day, the app was taken out of the stores of Google and Apple. It was an all-out assault. We don’t have direct evidence yet that the government had a hand in this, but who can doubt it?
This is precisely what the First Amendment was written to stop. When this kind of nonsense was first tried in 1798, there was an uproar and reaction that led to a triumph of the presidency of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, who quickly repealed what was called the “Sedition Act.”
This was hardly the end of the push for censorship. The government tried it again in 1836, 1860, 1915, 1922, 1935, 1940, 1953, and so on, but each time, the courts weighed in to make it clear. This is a country that values free speech. The government cannot control what is published or what people can buy and cannot do this either directly or indirectly by pushing publishers and distribution outlets on the messages they can and cannot send. This freedom is, in many ways, the foundation of every other freedom. Without it, the public mind becomes wholly controlled by the regime. That is truly un-American.
All of this is being litigated right now. Much of this information will be shared in court hearings. This is a very dangerous hearing because if the decision of the Supreme Court does not favor the First Amendment, every media and social media company will be in the position of having to obey the government’s infinite demands for censorship. That would be a serious blow to freedom—a permanent one—and devastating to our future.
Thus the irony: While mobs of people were screaming about the mythical censorship of Mr. DeSantis in Florida, the real censorship was coming from the Biden White House the whole time. It included genuine book banning, forcing the nation’s leading bookseller to stop allowing access to texts that contradicted regime priorities.
