The brazenness of governmental assaults on freedom of speech continues apace.
In addition to “aggressive IRS scrutiny” of conservative groups, using campaign finance regulations to suppress speech, and FBI raids on homes of perpetrators of journalism, we are seeing government officials openly demand that private firms suppress speech.
In September, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote a letter to Amazon chastising it for promoting books that contradict the government line about matters pandemical.
One target of Warren’s finger-wagging is The Truth About COVID-19: Exposing the Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports, and the New Normal by Joseph Mercola and Ronnie Cummins.
I don’t know how cogent it is. I’m willing to let the authors make their case.
Not Senator Warren.
In her public letter, she rebukes Amazon for being “unwilling or unable to modify its business practices to prevent the sale of falsehoods . . . .” That’s a lot of book-warehouse-burning implicitly rationalized. How many classics of Western civilization contain falsehoods? Not to mention the I Ching.
Now the authors and publisher of The Truth About COVID-19 have sued Warren for acting to violate the First Amendment by proxy. Their filing cites a 1963 Supreme Court ruling that politicians violate the First Amendment when telling booksellers that selling certain books may be “unlawful.” Exactly what Warren does in her letter.
As that Court put it, “people do not lightly disregard public officers’ veiled threats.”
Let’s hope that today’s Supreme Court recognizes the same reality.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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2 replies on “The Senatorial Suppressor”
“Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people”
― Heinrich Heine
Unfortunately, with the current SCOTUS, I don’t see the result we want, even though it would be the only lawful result.