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Biden Cried ‘Book Ban,’ Then Pressured Amazon to Ban His Opponents from World’s Biggest Bookstore


BY: KYLEE GRISWOLD | FEBRUARY 09, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/09/biden-cried-book-ban-then-pressured-amazon-to-ban-his-opponents-from-worlds-biggest-bookstore/

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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.


Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

Biden COVID adviser can’t explain why despite lockdowns, California’s virus numbers are the same as Florida’s


White House senior adviser for COVID response Andy Slavitt had a hard time coming up with an answer this week when he was asked why California hasn’t fared better against the coronavirus than Florida, despite the Golden State’s lockdown policies.

“I want to start with what we just saw,” MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle said at the outset of the Wednesday interview. “Contrast states like Florida and California. California [is] basically in a lockdown and their numbers aren’t that different from Florida.”

New numbers coming out of both states have suggested, to the surprise of many public health experts, that states with harsh lockdown policies have not been more successful at combating the virus than states that adopted more open approaches.

Slavitt, appearing confounded, responded, “Look, there’s so much of this virus that we think we understand, that we think we can predict, that’s just a little bit beyond our explanation.”

Then, without providing evidence, he claimed, “What we do know is that the more careful people are, the more they mask and social distance, and the quicker we vaccinate, the quicker it goes away and the less it spreads.”

“But, we have got to get better visibility into variants — we don’t know what role they play — umm, large events, etc.,” he continued.

“But as we all have learned by this time, this is a virus that continues to surprise us,” he added. “It’s very hard to predict. And all around the country, we’ve got to continue to do a better job, and I think we are, but we’re not done yet.”

The Biden administration, which endorses restrictive lockdown measures, has targeted Florida in recent days, floating the idea of imposing a domestic travel ban on the state to mitigate the spread of more contagious virus variants. The notion immediately drew ire from Republicans in the state of Florida, including Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Marco Rubio.

DeSantis shot back, saying the potential plan “stinks to high heaven,” and blasted the Biden administration for employing a blatant double standard, contrasting the potential travel ban with Biden’s lax immigration enforcement.

“It is a huge contradiction and you can’t square wanting opening borders for illegal aliens, but then also restricting U.S. citizens from basically traveling around the country as they see fit and I think the American people see the hypocrisy in that,” he said.

Rubio wrote a letter to Biden slamming the idea as “an outrageous, authoritarian move that has no basis in law or science.”

“Instituting a travel ban, or any restriction of movement between the states, would be an outrageous, authoritarian move that has no basis in law or science. Instead, it would only serve to inflict severe and devastating economic pain on an already damaged economy,” the senator said in a statement.

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