Democrats and their accomplices in the media have expended an awful lot of ink, breath, and energy trying to convince voters that people on the right want to “ban books.”
The leftist firestorm attacks concerned parents working to eradicate pornography and other age-inappropriate books from taxpayer-funded schools and libraries. These works include titles such as All Boys Aren’t Blue, which contains descriptions of rape, incest, and pedophilia, and Gender Queer, which shows graphic depictions of oral sex, masturbation, and homosexual acts.
Democrat activists have come out in full-throated defense of explicit sexual content for children and likened conservatives who oppose it to Nazis who want to burn books. Last month, MSNBC host Joy Reid grilled the co-founder of Moms for Liberty about why parents should have any say in how their tax dollars are used and argued that kids who identify as LGBT “feel seen” by stories about child rape.
One Democrat governor ironically argued that Republican efforts to shield children from age-inappropriate content are “castrating them.” President Joe Biden has also smeared Republicans for “banning books,” and even announced during “pride month” that he would appoint a “book ban coordinator” to make sure schools weren’t removing filth from their shelves.
That’s why it was so ridiculous to learn this week that all while Democrats were shrieking about pornography “book bans,” the Biden White House was actively “pressuring” Amazon, the world’s largest bookseller, to nuke books that raised concerns about experimental Covid-19 shots. It’s a pretty good bet that’s not the only topic the White House pressured Amazon to ban, either.
According to internal documents and emails subpoenaed by Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee, senior Biden official Andy Slavitt, who pressured Facebook to censor speech, was pushing Amazon to ban books disagreeing with Democrat policies.
Because Slavitt didn’t like the “concerning” results that turned up when he searched Amazon books for “vaccines,” he emailed the corporation on March 2, 2021, to ask to whom Biden officials could speak about “the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation of [sic] Amazon.” The vaccine debate was, and is still, ongoing. But the White House was mad that Amazon didn’t slap a warning from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention onto books that stepped out of line from the government’s Covid claims.
At first, Amazon opted not to manually censor books. But as House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan wrote on X, it wasn’t “out of any commitment to free speech, but because doing so would be ‘too visible’ to the American public and likely to spur criticism from conservative media.” Amazon noted it was already taking heat for censoring Ryan T. Anderson’s book on the transgender debate, When Harry Became Sally, the month prior.
The White House fired back, irritated that Amazon didn’t editorialize its book product pages with context tags, the way X and Facebook propagandist “fact-checkers” do. As Jordan pointed out, the administration couldn’t have Americans thinking for themselves.
Biden’s team was so demanding that by the time Amazon met with White House officials the next week, the company’s No. 1 question was, “Is the Admin asking us to remove books?” And the demands apparently worked. March 9, the same day as Amazon’s meeting with administration officials, it opted not to “promote” books the Democrat administration didn’t like. Just a few days later, it said it was looking into other steps “to reduce the visibility” of books that ticked off the Biden regime.
So just to be clear, at the same time the propaganda press and Democrats were crying “book ban” because rightly concerned parents were trying to eradicate taxpayer-funded gay porn from school libraries, the Biden administration was colluding with the world’s biggest bookstore to bury non-leftist viewpoints from sight.
Since we’re talking about Amazon, here’s another thing. Democrats, who claim to be mad that you don’t want your kid waltzing into the library and willy-nilly snagging a picture book about one little boy giving another little boy a blow job, can effortlessly nab a copy of any of these books with the click of a button and have them Amazon “Primed” to their doorsteps overnight. These graphic books aren’t “banned” in any sense of the word.
Meanwhile, Democrats are willing to exert undo pressure from the highest office in the land to ensure mainstream viewpoints it doesn’t like are as difficult as possible to find — or nuked from Amazon’s mega bookstore altogether.
Maybe there is such a thing as a “book ban.” But it’s not on gay porn for kiddos.
