From the Brownstone Institute

BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE

In March 2021, the Biden White House initiated a brazenly unconstitutional censorship campaign to prevent Americans from buying politically unfavorable books from Amazon.

The effort, spearheaded by White House censors including Andy Slavitt and Rob Flaherty, began on March 2, 2021, when Slavitt emailed Amazon demanding to speak to an executive about the site’s “high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation.”

Their subsequent discussions remain unknown, but recently released emails from the House Judiciary Committee reveal that the censors achieved their intended result. Within a week, Amazon adopted a shadow ban policy.

Company officials wrote in internal emails, “The impetus for this request is criticism from the Biden administration about sensitive books we’re giving prominent placement to, and should be handled urgently.” They further clarified that the policy was “due to criticism from the Biden people,” presumably meaning Slavitt and Flaherty.

At the time, “vaccine misinformation” was parlance for inconvenient truths. Five months after the Amazon censorship crusade, Twitter banned Alex Berenson at the Government’s behest for noting that the shots do not prevent infection or transmission. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) favorably cited his Twitter ban in a September 2021 letter to Amazon  calling for increased censorship of books.

A similar process occurred at Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg wrote in internal emails that the platform decided to ban claims related to the lab-leak theory in February 2021 after “tense conversations with the new Administration.” Facebook executive Nick Clegg similarly wrote that the censorship was due to “pressure from the [Biden] administration and others to do more.” Another internal Facebook email from August 2021 wrote that the company had implemented new “misinformation” policies “stemming from the continued criticism of our approach from the [Biden] administration.”

Not only does the Biden regime’s call for de facto book bans lead to the suppression of true information regarding lockdowns, vaccine injuries, and the lab-leak theory; it was also a clear violation of the First Amendment.

The Supreme Court weighed in on a nearly identical case over sixty years ago.

In 1956, the Rhode Island legislature created a “Rhode Island Commission to Encourage Morality in Youth.” Like “public health” or “inclusivity,” the innocuous language was a Trojan Horse for censorship.

The Commission sent notices to bookshops and book dealers that potentially violated Rhode Island’s obscenity laws. The book dealers challenged the constitutionality of the Commission, and the case made its way to the Supreme Court in Bantam Books v. Sullivan.

The New York Times’ description of the case from 1962 could be transposed to a modern article on the Amazon Files, but The Gray Lady has deemed the news unfit to print and has ignored the revelations entirely.

The challengers argued that the Commission acted “as a censor” while the Government “contended that its purpose was only to educate people,” the Times explained. The Government, desperate to maintain its benevolent facade, insisted its “hope [was] that the dealer would ‘cooperate’ by not selling the branded books and magazines.”

But the Government’s call for “cooperation” was a thinly veiled threat. The Commission did not just notify the booksellers; they also sent copies of the notices to the local police, who “always called dealers within 10 days of the notice to see whether the offending items had been withdrawn,” according to the book dealers.

“This procedure produced the desired effect of frightening off sale of the books deemed objectionable,” a book dealer told The Times. They complied, “not wanting to tangle with the law.”

The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that the Committee’s reports violated the Constitutional rights of the book dealers. Justice William O. Douglas wrote in a concurring opinion: “This is censorship in the raw; and in my view the censor and First Amendment rights are incompatible.”

Here, we again see censorship in the raw; bureaucratic thugs, using the power of the US federal government, call for the suppression of information that they find politically inconvenient. They hide behind the innocuous language of “public health” and “public-private partnerships,” but the Leviathan’s “requests” carry an implicit threat.

As we wrote in “The Censors’ Henchmen,” the censorship demands from White House lackeys Rob Flaherty and Andy Slavitt are like mobsters’ interrogations. Just months after the Amazon demands, Flaherty wrote to Facebook, “We are gravely concerned that your service is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy – period.” Then came the demands: “We want to know that you’re trying, we want to know how we can help, and we want to know that you’re not playing a shell game…This would all be a lot easier if you would just be straight with us.”

In other words, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. Nice company you have here – it would be a shame if something happened to it.

When companies refused to comply, Biden’s henchmen responded with scorn. Facebook ignored one censorship request, and Flaherty exploded: “Are you guys fucking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.”

Failure to comply would threaten Amazon’s substantial government contracting operations. In April 2022, Amazon received a $10 billion contract from the NSA. Later that year, the US Navy granted Amazon a $724 million cloud computing contract, and the Pentagon awarded Amazon an additional $9 billion in contracts. Amazon also has ongoing contracts with the CIA that could be worth “tens of billions” of dollars.

“Cooperation” is a prerequisite for these lucrative agreements. Sixty years ago, the Court recognized the threat that Government demands for “cooperation” posed to liberty in Bantam Books. Ten years later, the Court held in Norwood v. Harrison that it is “axiomatic that a state may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”

Since then, skyrocketing government spending and public-private partnerships have further blurred the line between state and private persons at the cost of our liberties.

The recent Amazon revelations add to the censors’ parade of horribles that have been uncovered in recent years. The Supreme Court will rule on the crux of the battle between free speech and Biden’s cosa nostra next month in Murthy v. Missouri.

Meanwhile, the revelations keep pouring in, adding to what we know but still concealing the fullness of what might actually have been happening. Adding to the difficulty is that the revelations themselves are not being widely reported, raising serious questions concerning just how much in the way of independent media remains following this brutal crackdown on free speech that took place with no legislation and no public oversight.

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

“You don’t even know who it is… you can be accused regardless of your intent, regardless of the factual [reality], or [the] reality of your utterance, by people who do not have to identify themselves or take any responsibility whatsoever if their denunciation turns out to be false,”

In a recent podcast episode, well-known Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and Queen’s University law professor Bruce Pardy blasted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government over Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, a proposed piece of legislation which, if passed, could lead to large fines and even jail time for vaguely defined online “hate speech” infractions.

“Recently, the Trudeau woke mob has managed to extend themselves even further into the legal nether lands with a new bill called C-63, which isn’t law in Canada yet, but is soon likely to be, and it is the most totalitarian Western bill I’ve ever seen by quite a large margin and in multiple dimensions,” said Peterson in a recent Everything You Need to Know video podcast dated April 14, which was posted on his YouTube channel. 

“And that was my conclusion, upon reading it and then my conclusion, upon rereading it and rereading it again, because I like to make sure I have these things right.”  

Joining Peterson was Canadian lawyer Bruce Pardy and podcaster Konstantin Kisin. Pardy serves as executive director of Rights Probe, a law and liberty thinktank, and professor of law at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. As for Kisin, he is a Russian-British satirist, social commentator, who serves as co-host of the TRIGGERnometry YouTube show. 

Peterson noted that in his view, Bill C-63 is “designed… to produce a more general regime for online policing.” 

“To me, that’s what it looks like,” he said. 

The trio spent the better part of two hours discussing Bill C-63, which was introduced by Justice Minister Arif Virani in the House of Commons in February and was immediately blasted by constitutional experts as troublesome. 

Among other things, the bill calls for the creation of a Digital Safety Commission, a digital safety ombudsperson, and the Digital Safety Office, all tasked with policing internet content, including already illegal internet content such as child exploitation material.

However, the bill also seeks to police “hate” speech online with broad definitions, severe penalties, and dubious tactics. 

Details of the new legislation to regulate the internet show the bill could lead to more people jailed for life for “hate crimes” or fined $50,000 and jailed for posts that the government defines as “hate speech” based on gender, race, or other categories. 

Right at the start of the interview, Peterson noted that when thinking about Bill C-63, he thought of it as a “real masterpiece of right thinking, utopian, resentful foolishness.” 

Due to the fact that the bill allows for accusations to be filed by anyone, and that there is no obligation for the government to reveal the name of the accuser to the accused, Peterson warned that Bill C-63 could see widespread corruption by individuals acting in bad faith.

“You don’t even know who it is… you can be accused regardless of your intent, regardless of the factual [reality], or [the] reality of your utterance, by people who do not have to identify themselves or take any responsibility whatsoever if their denunciation turns out to be false,” he warned.  

Pardy chimed in to say that when it comes to Bill C-63, Canadians “don’t even know what the rules are going to be.” 

“Basically, it just gives the whole control of the thing to our government agency, to the bureaucrats, to do as they think,” he said.  

Regarding Pardy’s remarks, Peterson observed that the Trudeau government is effectively “establishing an entirely new bureaucracy” with an “unspecified range of power with non-specific purview that purports to protect children from online exploitation” but has the possibility of turning itself into an internet “policing state.”

Bill uses protecting kids as ‘cover,’ will have a ‘chilling effect upon speech’ 

Pardy told Peterson that one of the main issues with C-63, in his view, is that it “starts with the cover of protecting children… from online harm,” but that beneath this “great cover” it “enables” a crackdown on the “very idea of free speech.”

Pardy warned that Bill C-63 will see the return of an “old” Human Rights Act provision, titled Section 13, that was repealed by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2013 after it was found to have violated the right to free expression.

“One of the problems with the human rights regime is that complaints can be made very, very easily without a lawyer, without any cost,” said Pardy. “And because the Canadian federal government has jurisdiction over the internet, this section is going to authorize complaints of all kinds to be made against people who are speaking their minds online…” 

Pardy noted that the revival of this type of process will “have a chilling effect upon speech, no question about it,” and it risks ending the “idea of free speech itself.” 

Pardy observed that society already has a mechanism to protect kids, despite modern society’s idea that the “government is responsible for keeping people safe.”

“That’s ignoring the best mechanism we already have to keep children safe, which is their parents, right. It’s assuming that this is what this state is for if you went up to somebody on the street, anybody at random,” he said.  

“We’ve lost the proposition that we’ve made a choice to have this large overwhelming government tell us what to do in place of all of the other things we used to have.” 

Speaking further, Pardy observed that what laws like Bill C-63, and many other laws already passed by the Trudeau Liberals such as Bill C-16, are attempting to do, is change the way people perceive how laws should be enforced. 

“The ethos of managerialism has supplanted the rule of law as the basic idea instead of the rule of law,” said the law professor. 

“We have rule by law now, which means that the law is nothing more than a tool for the government to use to create a law on a whim,” he continued, adding that this is “not the way the Western legal system used to work.” 

Criminalizing ‘hateful’ speech is ‘troublesome’ if bureaucrats decide what is ‘hateful’ 

In a recent opinion piece critical of Bill C-63, law professor Dr. Michael Geist said that the text of the bill is “unmistakable” in how it will affect Canadians’ online freedoms. 

Geist noted that the new bill will allow a new digital safety commission to conduct “secret commission hearings” against those found to have violated the law. 

“The poorly conceived Digital Safety Commission lacks even basic rules of evidence, can conduct secret hearings, and has been granted an astonishing array of powers with limited oversight. This isn’t a fabrication,” Geist wrote. 

He observed specifically how Section 87 of the bill “literally” says “the Commission is not bound by any legal or technical rules of evidence.” 

Peterson noted that giving “hate speech” such prominence and such a broad definition is “troublesome” as it will be up to bureaucrats to decide what is “hateful.”  

“The whole notion of hateful speech, that’s troublesome. One, for me, because there’s an obvious element of subjective judgment in it,” he said, questioning who gets to decide what is “hateful” and on what “grounds” do they have the authority to make such a judgement.

Peterson warned that if Canada decides to “open the door” of tasking bureaucrats with determining what is or isn’t “hateful” speech, and if it blocks transparency on who is making accusations of hate, it “leads us to anonymous denunciation,” which he sees as dangerous because it fails to hold complainants accountable.

To make his point, Peterson said that “everybody, including every school child who’s like older than three, and maybe even three,” understands that there’s almost “nothing worse than a snitch, and all children are wise enough to know that.” 

“Even if you are being bullied at school, let’s say, it has to get pretty damn brutal and bad before going to report it to the authorities is acceptable or justifiable,” he said. 

“Now you know you can debate about the conditions under which that should or shouldn’t occur. My point is that even kids know that.” 

Geist has noted that when it comes to Bill C-63, the “most obvious solution” to amend the bill “is to cut out the Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions, which have nothing to do with establishing internet platform liability for online harms.” 

Giving historcal examples for why Bill C-63 worries him, Peterson explained that “we certainly know from places like the Soviet Union, just exactly what happens, or East Germany, what happens when one-third of the citizens, which was the case in East Germany, become government informers.” 

“…Trust is gone. The worst people have the upper hand. It’s a complete catastrophe… Now in Bill C-63, you have a concatenation of these problems… now you know hate speech is going to be constrained and it can be identified by anonymous informants,” forecasted the psychologist.

Indeed, it is not just Peterson, Pardy and Geist who are warning of Bill C-63, but major law groups as well.

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) has said Bill C-63 is “the most serious threat to free expression in Canada in generations. This terrible federal legislation, Bill C -63, would empower the Canadian Human Rights Commission to prosecute Canadians over non-criminal hate speech.” 

JCCF president John Carpay recently hand-delivered a petition with 55,000-plus signatures to Canada’s Minister of Justice and all MPs, urging them to reconsider their sponsoring of the law.