One of my favorite writers, Helen Pluckrose, is one of the founders of a promising new organization called Counterweight. The mission is to help individuals resist the imposition of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) in their day to day lives. Here's one of the organization's first Tweets: What is wrong with anti-racism training that's based on Critical Race Theory?
Amazon sells most of the books sold in the U.S. This includes 72% of all adult new book sales online and 80% of ebook sales. With great power comes great responsibility, though. Amazon has now taken the brazen step of stopping all sales of Ryan Anderson's book on gender dysphoria, When Harry Became Sally, falsely characterizing it in the process. You cannot find Anderson's book mentioned anywhere on Amazon's website. Here's a few things that have recently come to light.
First, a March 16, 2021 article in the Wall Street Journal titled, "Amazon Won’t Let You Read My BookAn enterprising state attorney general might want to look into why it was withdrawn from sale now." Here's an excerpt:
In a letter last week to four U.S. Senators, Amazon justified its decision to delist “When Harry Became Sally” by claiming it frames “LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.” This recycled charge is as false now as when Mr. Bezos’ newspaper first made it.
. . .
Why would Amazon exercise its unrivaled market power to banish my book? Because the book is changing minds in a continuing debate about how best to help patients who experience gender dysphoria. “When Harry Became Sally” has been praised by medical and legal experts—and that’s what makes it unacceptable to the woke.
And, indeed, the false "mental illness" allegation was made by the Washington Post, then retracted (and the headline of the hit piece was rewritten) after the Post was unable to produce any evidence for that claim.
Here is an excerpt from the the website of the books publisher, Encounter Books:
Everyone agrees that gender dysphoria is a serious condition that causes great suffering. There is a debate, however, which Amazon is seeking to shut down, about how best to treat patients who experience gender dysphoria. When Harry Became Sally is an important contribution, praised by medical experts, to that conversation.
No good comes from shutting down a debate about important matters on which reasonable people of good will disagree. Amazon is using its massive power to distort the marketplace of ideas and is deceiving its own customers in the process.
—Ryan T. Anderson, author When Harry Became Sally and Roger Kimball, Publisher, Encounter Books
Encounter then indicates why Amazon's conduct should matter to all of us, linking to Amazon's own statement for why it refuses to sell Anderson's book:
Encounter Books is committed to publishing authors with differing views on a wide range of issues of public concern. We do this because a free society requires robust debate and spaces where dissenting opinions can be expressed unimpeded.
If Amazon, which controls most of the book sales in America, has decided to delist a book with which some of its functionaries disagree, that is an unconscionable assault on free speech. It will have a chilling effect on the publishing industry and the free circulation of ideas. It must not be left to stand unchallenged.
Note: Ryan T. Anderson, Ph.D., is the President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the Founding Editor of Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey. I would like to read Anderson's book for myself, so I have ordered it from Encounter Books. I would assume that a lot of people would like to decide for themselves, rather than allow Amazon to dictate what they should be reading.
There is also a bit of personal context for my grave concerns about Amazon decision to censor us. None of us should be subjected to any form of a Nanny-State. After the Suess uproar, Amazon dictated that I could not have a book that I had previously purchased from Amazon: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. I wanted to see that book for myself to determine whether it was inappropriate. It is not for any other person or entity to tell me what ideas are appropriate for me. Here is Amazon's cancellation email for the Suess book.
To what extent can the government prosecute lies? First Amendment Law Professor Eugene Volokh has written an excellent article considering many angles. Here's an excerpt:
Surprisingly, the Supreme Court has never resolved the question. It hasn’t resolved the big-picture question: When can the government punish lies? It hasn’t resolved the medium-size question: Can the government punish lies in election campaigns? And it hasn’t resolved the particular question: Can the government punish lies about the mechanisms of voting, and in particular about how to vote?
[T]he court considered the case of Xavier Alvarez, a local government official in an LA suburb; he had lied about getting the Congressional Medal of Honor, and was prosecuted under the Stolen Valor Act, a statute that bans such lies about military decorations. Unconstitutional, six justices said. There was broad agreement that “Laws restricting false statements about philosophy, religion, history, the social sciences, the arts, and other matters of public concern … would present a grave and unacceptable danger of suppressing truthful speech.” “The point is not that there is no such thing as truth or falsity in these areas or that the truth is always impossible to ascertain, but rather that it is perilous to permit the state to be the arbiter of truth.” (That’s from the dissent, but the concurrence endorsed it, and the plurality’s opinion was even more speech-protective than the others.)
Yet when it came to more specific lies, whether about one’s own medals or something else, there was no majority opinion.
Matt Taibbi offers a peek into the workings of the brain of a prominent member of the media elite. These people are threatened by the fact that there are some real-life independent journalists who vigorously investigate stories (including stories about the corruption of the media elite) and who zealously follow the facts where they lead. I suspect they are also jealous that these real journalists are doing what these elites only pretend to do and they cannot hide this fraud from their own friends and family. They are jealous to the point of a self-loathing that has bloomed into Nietzschean ressentiment. That's my analysis. Even though I am not a professional psychiatrist, I don't think I'm far off.
See also, Glenn Greenwald's take on who is trying to cancel who, using the most twisted of logic.
To those who people who are all comfy with their NPR/NYT news pipeline (or their FOX pipeline), Glenn Greenwald is making a stunning claim. He then presents ample evidence to back up his claim. Corporate journalism is turning into a vast Nanny-state. Letting the factual chips fall where they might is no longer part of its mission. Here's an excerpt from Greenwald's Substack site: "Journalists Start Demanding Substack Censor its Writers: to Bar Critiques of Journalists: This new political battle does not break down along left v. right lines. This is an information war waged by corporate media to silence any competition or dissent":
On Wednesday, I wrote about how corporate journalists, realizing that the public’s increasing contempt for what they do is causing people to turn away in droves, are desperately inventing new tactics to maintain their stranglehold over the dissemination of information and generate captive audiences. That is why journalists have bizarrely transformed from their traditional role as leading free expression defenders into the the most vocal censorship advocates, using their platforms to demand that tech monopolies ban and silence others.
