Tag: censorship

If Nazi & Bomb Making Books Can Openly Sell On eBay, Why Did They Cancel Dr. Seuss?

Earlier this week, the internet was in an uproar amid the controversy over the company who owns the rights to Dr. Seuss announcing that several of their titles will no longer be sold because they were deemed to contain “insensitive and racist imagery.”

Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which preserves the author’s legacy, announced this week six books – “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” “If I Ran the Zoo,” “McElligot’s Pool,” “On Beyond Zebra!,” “Scrambled Eggs Super!,” and “The Cat’s Quizzer” – would no longer be printed.

“These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong,” Dr. Seuss Enterprises told The Associated Press in a statement.

“Ceasing sales of these books is only part of our commitment and our broader plan to ensure Dr. Seuss Enterprises’ catalog represents and supports all communities and families,” it said, noting that they came to the decision internally.

Whether planned or not, the companies decision to stop selling these six titles sent sales of Dr. Seuss books through the roof. As of Thursday “The Cat in The Hat,” “Oh, The Places You’ll Go” and “Green Eggs and Ham,” three of Seuss’s best-known works, were all out of stock on Amazon and other places.

For a brief moment, the banned books were gaining premium prices of several hundred dollars on eBay as well.

People aren’t buying these now-cancelled books for hundreds of dollars each to preserve the imagery of the controversial content so they can teach their children racial stereotypes. They are simply snagging — what they think will be — a valuable collectable in the future because of nostalgia and to make sure the books don’t entirely disappear; which they should absolutely be doing.

While outlets like Amazon and others all continued to sell Dr. Seuss’s works, sites like eBay quickly moved to ban the sale of these six titles in a failed attempt at virtue signaling that was embarrassing on many fronts. What’s more, it exposed a hypocrisy that runs deep in the realm of big tech.

On eBay right now, there are multiple auctions for books on how to make improvised explosives and racism. Yet the auction giant is worried about questionably offensive children’s books with messages on how to be a good person.

Kurt Saxon, 88, is a former member of the American Nazi Party and author of The Poor Man’s James Bond, a series of books on improvised weapons and munitions. Currently, there are dozens of copies of these books for sale on eBay.

If Nazi bomb making isn’t your thing, there are also dozens of copies of the U.S. Army Improvised Munitions Handbook US Army Survival Paperback for sale on the platform.

In fact, there are countless “controversial” books that remain for sale on eBay despite the auction giant cancelling Dr. Seuss.

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How Democracy Dies: Big Tech Becomes Big Brother

“Digital giants have been playing an increasingly significant role in wider society… how well does this monopolism correlate with the public interest?,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said on January 27, 2021.

“Where is the distinction between successful global businesses, sought-after services and big data consolidation on the one hand, and the efforts to rule society[…] by substituting legitimate democratic institutions, by restricting the natural right for people to decide how to live and what view to express freely on the other hand?”

Was Mr. Putin defending democracy? Hardly. What apparently worries him is that the Big Tech might gain the power to control society at the expense of his government.

What must be a nightmare for him — as for many Americans — is that the Tech giants were able to censor news favorable to Trump and then censor Trump himself. How could the U.S. do this to the president of a great and free country?

Putin made these comments at the Davos World Economic Forum, in which he and Chinese President Xi Jinping, sped on by the “Great Reset” of a fourth industrial revolution, used enlightened phrases to mask dark plans for nation states in a globalist New World Order. Thus did Xi caution attendees “to adapt to and guide globalization, cushion its negative impact, and deliver its benefits to all countries and all nations.”

In March 2019, Putin signed a law “imposing penalties for Russian internet users caught spread ‘fake news’ and information that presents ‘clear disrespect for society, government, state symbols the constitution and government institutions.'” Punishments got even heavier with new laws in December.

Meanwhile, opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been sentenced to prison for more than three years (with a year off for time served), in part because he revealed photos of a lavish Russian palace allegedly belonging to Putin on the coast of the Black Sea. Its accouterments supposedly include an $824 toilet brush. Many of the thousands of people protesting Navalny’s imprisonment have since been protesting Putin by waving gold-painted toilet brushes.

How nice that American Big Tech companies is pushing democracy in Russia — even while it is denying it at home. Do you notice how many leaders in Europe have risen to condemn censorship in America even though many in Europe are censoring their citizens as well, and are not exactly fans of the person who was being censored, former President Donald J. Trump? Like Putin, they probably do not want Big Tech competing with their governments, either.

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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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