Tag: censorship

The Virtual Book Burning Continues: eBay Bans Listings of ‘Offensive’ Dr. Seuss Books

Online action site eBay has banned users from selling copies of the Dr. Seuss books that the left found “problematic.”

The company is now messaging users saying that their listings have been removed because it didn’t follow the “Offensive Material Policy.”

Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced this week that they are discontinuing six of the author’s books that crazy liberal activists have been complaining about, including If I Ran the Zoo and And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.

“Listings that promote or glorify hatred, violence, or discrimination aren’t allowed,” the message said.

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Biden Nominee Vanita Gupta Urged Facebook For More Censorship In Letter

President Joe Biden’s associate attorney general nominee Vanita Gupta urged Facebook in 2018 to adopt more censorship and hate speech policies because of free speech’s “harms” to “civil rights.”

In a letter addressed to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2018, Gupta’s leftist interest group The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights laid out 11 ways the company has neglected what they claim are civil rights. Gupta’s twisted interpretation was that Facebook should therefore engage in increased levels of censorship and content policing.

“As a company whose public mission is to ‘give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together,’ Facebook has a responsibility to ensure that the platform is not used to drive bigotry and stoke racial or religious resentment and violence,” the letter states. “But for years, Facebook’s refusal to acknowledge and/or chronic mismanagement of civil and human rights violations occurring on the platform have raised many questions about Facebook—primarily, whether you are willing or able to fix the toxic online environment that you have allowed to flourish.”

The letter goes on to claim that several “harms” are indicative of why Facebook must purge its “toxic environment.” This includes the idea that white men are supposedly protected from hate speech but not black people, “racially charged “advertisements” that suppress voters of color, a lack of “anti-bias training and civil rights education for staff,” as well as “insufficient protections” for users who are attacked by misogynists.

Gupta called for an “audit” of Facebook for allowing “well-documented harms” to exist on the platform. To leftists like Gupta, “hate speech” is not merely rude speech or already outlawed calls to violence, but can include expressing a mainstream conservative perspective or a religious perspective such as that male and female are objectively defined. The letter also claims that Facebook should not look into anti-conservative bias since civil rights are “non-partisan.”

Surely, civil rights are in fact non-partisan. But Gupta conflates authoritarian oppression with freedom and discourse. Facebook and other corporations have colluded to censor conservatives in an unprecedented way for years, and the LCCR’s notion that “civil rights” requires Facebook to remove “hate speech” goes against the very notion of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

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Biden Omits Mention of Dr. Seuss From ‘Read Across America Day’ Amid Concerns of Racist Undertones

President Joe Biden appears to have removed legendary children’s book author Dr. Seuss from “Read Across America Day,” which is observed on March 2, the birthday of author.

In a proclamation Monday, Biden declared Tuesday “Read Across America Day,” but left out mention of the children’s author, as has been presidential tradition in recent years. Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama both recognized the author in their respective proclamations during their time in office.

Read Across America Day was launched by the National Education Association (NEA) in 1998 to encourage children to read. The association had, until 2018, partnered with Dr. Seuss Enterprises, before the contract ended.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment and clarification.

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The Spectre of Totalitarianism

In March 2019, tax expert Maya Forstater was dismissed from her job — legally, according to a later judicial ruling — for voicing the view that “sex is a biological fact, and is immutable.” When author J.K. Rowling came to Forstater’s defence, she was bombarded with abuse, including an invitation from one lady to “choke on my fat trans cock”. The case became a cause célèbre. But it is only one of many such cases. Today, anyone who ventures a controversial opinion on “trans”, race, disability, Middle Eastern politics and a handful of other issues risks being fired, insulted, intimidated and possibly prosecuted. 

Last year, a “Journal of Controversial Ideas” was launched, offering authors the option of writing under a pseudonym “in order to protect themselves from threats to their careers or physical safety”. How did things come to this pass?

The new intolerance is often seen as a specifically left-wing phenomenon — an intensification of the “political correctness” which emerged on US campuses in the 1980s. But that is a one-sided view of the matter. It was US Zionists who pioneered the tactic of putting pressure on organisations to disinvite unfavoured speakers; far-right nationalists are among the keenest cyberbullies; and religious zealots of all stripes are prodigal of death threats. 

Generalising, one might say that left-wing groups, being more publicly respectable in our part of the world, prefer to pursue their objectives through institutions and the law, whereas right-wing groups seek out the anonymity of the internet. But the goal on each side is the same: it is to intimidate, suppress, silence. In any case, the distinction between “left” and “right” is becoming increasingly muddled, as lines shift and alliances regroup. All one can safely say is that the various forms of contemporary extremism imitate and incite each other. What has given way is the civilised middle ground.

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