Elizabeth Warren, a mediocre law professor who parlayed a fake Native American identity into a gig at Harvard and a seat in the United States Senate, thought that, once in government, she’d try her hand at censorship. When Joseph Mercola and Ronnie Cummins wrote a book about COVID with which Warren disagreed, she used her position as a Senator to try to get Amazon to censor the book. Although Chelsea Green Publishing filed suit in November, people are finally becoming aware of the suit.
I’m always amazed when someone who ought to know the law doesn’t—or feels entitled to ignore it. As a lawyer and a law professor, one would expect Warren to be familiar with the First Amendment. That’s the one that says that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech.” As government has grown, that principle has been extended to the federal government as a whole, whether it’s an executive agency, Congress, or a politician acting under the color of his or her role in the government. (And of course, to state governments via the Fourteenth Amendment.)
Nevertheless, on September 7, 2021, writing in her capacity as a United States Senator, on official Senate letterhead, Warren sent a very long letter to Andy Jassy, Amazon’s CEO, expressing her concern that Amazon itself was publishing misinformation by allowing Mercola’s and Cummins’s book, The Truth About COVID-19: Exposing the Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports, and the New Normal, to appear on its bestseller list and daring to give it a favorable ranking. After waffling on for pages several pages, and mendaciously claiming the book was “potentially unlawful,” Warren “asked” Amazon to modify the algorithms to destroy the book’s ranking.
Chelsea Green responded in November by suing Warren for violating the First Amendment, although news of that filing only reached the media recently. The lawsuit relies upon Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, 372 U.S. 58 (1962). Bantam Books involved a newly-created Rhode Island Commission which had the task of educating the public about any written material that could harm the morality of or otherwise corrupt Rhode Island’s young people.
Hellbound and Down 