Bokhari: Amazon Is on a Digital Book Burning Spree

Under pressure from left-wing journalists and activists, Amazon is purging right-wing authors from its store, including a book co-authored by English Islam critic and independent commentator Tommy Robinson.

The web retail giant has become the dominant market player in book sales, accounting for nearly 50 percent of physical and 83 percent of e-book sales in the U.S. As such, Amazon has the power to effectively cut an author off from the vast majority of the books market.

Amazon began its new round of purges by targeting the white nationalist fringe. In February, the tech giant banned a number of books from white identitarian Jared Taylor, and a book called The White Nationalist Manifesto by Greg Johnson.

This followed bans on Holocaust revisionist books in 2017, and a purge of all books by controversial pickup blogger and author Daryush “Roosh” Valizadeh in 2018.

As with financial blacklisting, a censorship spree that starts by targeting extreme ideas quickly moves towards the censorship of more mainstream ones. In early March, the online retailer banned Muhammed’s Koran: Why Muslims Kill for Islam, a Chronological Koran and critique of the Islamic religion co-authored by British populist Tommy Robinson.

The book is a chronological reordering of the Islamic Koran, followed by commentary by Robinson and his co-author, Peter McLoughlin. Amazon did not return Breitbart News’ request for an explanation of why the book was banned.

In 2010, Amazon refused to take down a book defending pedophilia on first amendment grounds. “Amazon believes it is censorship not sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable,” an Amazon representative told CNBC at the time.

“Amazon does not support or promote hatred or criminal acts, however, we do support the right of every individual to make their own purchasing decisions.”

Public and media outcry was not enough to pressure Amazon into watering down its commitment to content-neutrality when it came to a pro-pedophile book. But it now takes only the slightest pressure for the tech giant to ban right-wing critiques of religion.

And even before that, Amazon had watered down it’s commitment to “the right of every individual to make their own purchasing decisions.” In 2015, the site banned the sale of all merchandise depicting the Confederate flag.

Amazon doesn’t seem to have a problem with extremist of destructive books in general. Two of the most destructive books in history, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are available for purchase. So too are books by black nationalist Louis Farrakhan, notorious for his racist and anti-semitic comments — so it seems racial hatred isn’t subject to a blanket ban on Amazon either.

Amazon has abandoned its previous commitment to carry all books no matter how controversial, and it’s unclear what consistent principle, if any, the company now follows.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. You can follow him on TwitterGab.ai and add him on Facebook. Email tips and suggestions to allumbokhari@protonmail.com.

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Harry Reid lost his civil lawsuit against TheraBand (opposing counsel noted his problems telling the truth)

Former Senator Harry Reid lost his civil case against TheraBand last week. Reid was seriously injured in 2015 while exercising with the band in his bathroom. He later sued the manufacturer claiming the product was unsafe for use by elderly people like himself. But during the trial, attorney Laurin Quiat who represented the company that manufacturers TheraBand, showed clips of Reid telling various stories about his injury, some of which contradicted things he said on the stand during the trial. Quiat argued that Harry Reid seemed to have difficulty telling the truth, which won’t surprise anyone who is familiar with Harry Reid. Let’s count the shifting statements with some help from the Associated Press. First, his reason for not running for office again:

Reid testified last week his injuries were “the main factor” why he decided not to seek a sixth Senate term in 2016. Quiat, however, showed the jury a 2015 video news release in which Reid said his decision not to run had “absolutely nothing to do with my injury.”

Here’s an interview where he says the inijury “wasn’t the decision-maker” with regard to running for office again.

Second, Reid initially claimed the band broke then later claimed it slipped from his hand. And third, the location where the band was attached changed from a hook to a shower door:

He noted that Reid at first said the band broke, not that it slipped his grasp, and that it had been attached to a metal hook in the wall of the bathroom in his suburban Las Vegas home.

On the witness stand, Reid testified he looped a band through a shower door handle, not a hook, and that he spun around and fell face-first against hard-edged bathroom cabinets when it slipped from his grip on New Year’s Day 2015.

I walked through his shifting explanations on the band breaking here a couple of weeks ago.

According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, after playing the clips showing Reid telling various stories that differed from his testimony in the case, Quiat concluded, “The one thing we do know is he struggles with telling the truth.” Well, duh.

But it seems the biggest problem with Reid’s case wasn’t his shifting stories, it was the fact that he couldn’t even prove the band he’d been using that day was manufactured by the people he had sued. That’s because his son threw it away after the accident.

Reid’s family threw out the band after he was hurt. Months later, he and [his wife Landra] Gould lodged a product liability lawsuit against three defendants: Hygenic Intangible Property Holding Co., the Hygenic Corp. and Performance Health LLC.

But jurors decided that the defendants did not manufacture the exercise band involved in Reid’s accident…

Asked whether the verdict may have been different if the band had not been discarded, Wilkes replied, “That’s called speculation. There’s no way I can say.”

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that even if he’d kept the band, he’d have lost this case. For one thing, the band would not have been broken as he initially claimed in media interviews. That would prove that the band itself hadn’t failed. What failed was Reid’s grip. But the defense had evidence that physical therapists had been working with Reid for months to get him to use a proper stance when using the band. Also, he should never have been exercising in a bathroom full of hard surfaces. There’s a reason gyms have wide spaces and rubberized floors.

Quiat, the attorney for the defendants, really summed up this case when he said, “This case is about taking responsibility for one’s own actions.” It’s unfortunate that after his long career as a leading Democrat, Harry Reid still hasn’t learned that lesson.

The post Harry Reid lost his civil lawsuit against TheraBand (opposing counsel noted his problems telling the truth) appeared first on Hot Air.

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‘The Simpsons’ Showrunner: Lisa Simpson ‘Possibly Polyamorous,’ Bisexual

Al Jean, screenwriter and showrunner for legendary cartoon series The Simpsons, said in a new interview that Lisa Simpson may turn out “polyamorous.”

In an interview with Metro UK, Al Jean said that Lisa Simpson may turn out as “President and possibly polyamorous,” while Bart Simpson would be “enjoying life as he did at the end of the Barthood episode.”

Lisa Simpson is only eight-years-old in the long-running series.

Writers and fans projecting sexuality onto fictional characters is nothing new. Peppermint Patty from the Peanuts movies has long been the subject of fan speculation that she is lesbian.

Last year, a mini-controversy broke out when Sesame Street writer Mark Saltzman, who is gay, said in an interview that the Bert and Ernie characters were based around his own relationship. “I don’t think I’d know how else to write them, but as a loving couple,” Saltzman said.

This set off speculation that the popular children’s show characters were gay, which was shut down by the show’s producers, who said in a statement that the Bert and Ernie “do not have a sexual orientation.”

The Simpsons, a show which originally mocked political correctness, has been capitulating to the social justice crowd recently.

Last year, the show’s producers announced their intention to drop the character Apu, as he was offensive to Indian-Americans.

The show also recently cut an episode from the 1990s that featured Michael Jackson in reaction to the HBO documentary Leaving Neverland, which details sexual abuse claims against the pop star.

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Dan Rather & Co. Rerun Fake News on Trump’s Immigrants-as-‘Animals’ Quote

Timothy Meads at Townhall pointed out that liberal journalists shouldn’t be falling for old hoaxes…..like the claim that Donald Trump called all immigrants "animals." But there was Dan Rather, and Joy Reid, and Glenn Thrush, and Ana Navarro spreading a badly distorted quote. 

via NewsBusters – Exposing Liberal Media Bias

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Get ready for it: Newsom to blame illegal immigration on global warming

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is going all in on opposing President Trump – and the majority of the American people – on the problem of illegal migration as the caravans from Central America fire up. Now he’s heading off to El Salvador to “examine the root causes of migration,” as Big Daddy holding out the bag of goodies to would-be illegal immigrants in their home countries. To him, they’re his constituents. So he’s got to find some justification for this trip and you can bet he will. My bet’s on him using the trip as a soapbox to make claims about global warming causing it.

He’s started with this package of goodies for illegals described on his gubernatorial website:

 In his first weeks in office, Governor Newsom signed AB 72, legislation to fast-track state aid to asylum seekers who are being abandoned at bus stations and on the side of the road by the federal government. It was the first bill he signed into law. AB 72 established a Rapid Response Relief Fund of $5 million in immigration assistance, which helped support the opening of a migrant support shelter in San Diego.

Have pork, will travel.

But his claimed mission is worth looking at, too – to examine the “root causes of illegal migration” not to stop it, but as his pork demonstrates, to encourage more of it.

Latest “narrative” coming from the left is that global warming causes illegal migration. You can bet he will use it.

RealClearPolitics ran a long, very long, article from the New Yorker about how global warming is the real reason illegal migrants are heading in their caravans, not to the next convenient country, but to the United States, that country more than 1,000 miles away that is largely English-speaking and has a modern economy, with modern conventions such as flush toilets and washing machines. The link to “How Climate Change is Fuelling the U.S. Border Crisis” is here.

Global warming.

Which, though the idea is a rapidly discrediting superstitition from the left, is a wonderfully convenient excuse for justifying illegal migration. See, global warming is caused by gringos, so gringos did it. Get ready for the illegal migrants with their hands out as a result.

The New Yorker piece is very very long, (and pretty interesting as a descriptive piece), so I won’t quote it, but suffice to say, the author of it failed to make her point. I will sum up what its writer found so as to make her argument that global warming causes illegal immigration:

Guatemala’s western highlands are in a drought. That drought is creating food shortages. (Left unsaid: Guatemala’s government is apparently doing nothing about it, despite it being its own people). The Guatemalans are clueless about how to adapt to any drought-like conditions. That means they need U.S. NGO aid workers to teach them about crop rotation, saving seeds in their own seed banks, and minimizing the need for water through shade planting. Guatemalans can’t figure that out on their own. Aid from American NGO workers is the only thing that can keep people fed. And not just any aid, only American aid (Guatemala is apparently excused from the need to provide aid, despite the record remittances in hard currency it receives). Mean President Trump is cutting off aid. Yet he’s the one who caused this whole debacle because he doesn’t buy into the idea of global warming.

The writer keeps trying to circle around and claim that global warming is the cause of the Guatemalan drought, as if the region had never seen one earlier, but it’s a tenuous and unpersuasive argument, never proved. The writer can describe problems, but can’t analyse or consider multiple scenarios, and she wrecks her piece by trying to shoehorn it all into a “narrative’ about global warming with insufficient evidence.

Rest assured, she didn’t wreck her piece from the perspective of the agenda she was promoting. That influential ”narrative” is going to get into the Democratic party line as justification for cartel-led and gang-led illegal immigration, which of course strengthens cartels and gangs at U.S. taxpayer expense. Global warming means it’s all O.K.., and never mind that detail about Guatemala’s failure to take care of its own people during what in reality is a temporary weather condition for farmers whose capacity to adapt is basically by fleeing north.

Rest assured, Newsom will be up on this by the time he gets out of El Salvador. He’s got to claim he did something other than shovel pork. He’s going there to blame Trump for everything, and global warming is a big low hanging fruit for him.

Image credit: Refracted Moments, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0

 

 

 

 

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is going all in on opposing President Trump – and the majority of the American people – on the problem of illegal migration as the caravans from Central America fire up. Now he’s heading off to El Salvador to “examine the root causes of migration,” as Big Daddy holding out the bag of goodies to would-be illegal immigrants in their home countries. To him, they’re his constituents. So he’s got to find some justification for this trip and you can bet he will. My bet’s on him using the trip as a soapbox to make claims about global warming causing it.

He’s started with this package of goodies for illegals described on his gubernatorial website:

 In his first weeks in office, Governor Newsom signed AB 72, legislation to fast-track state aid to asylum seekers who are being abandoned at bus stations and on the side of the road by the federal government. It was the first bill he signed into law. AB 72 established a Rapid Response Relief Fund of $5 million in immigration assistance, which helped support the opening of a migrant support shelter in San Diego.

Have pork, will travel.

But his claimed mission is worth looking at, too – to examine the “root causes of illegal migration” not to stop it, but as his pork demonstrates, to encourage more of it.

Latest “narrative” coming from the left is that global warming causes illegal migration. You can bet he will use it.

RealClearPolitics ran a long, very long, article from the New Yorker about how global warming is the real reason illegal migrants are heading in their caravans, not to the next convenient country, but to the United States, that country more than 1,000 miles away that is largely English-speaking and has a modern economy, with modern conventions such as flush toilets and washing machines. The link to “How Climate Change is Fuelling the U.S. Border Crisis” is here.

Global warming.

Which, though the idea is a rapidly discrediting superstitition from the left, is a wonderfully convenient excuse for justifying illegal migration. See, global warming is caused by gringos, so gringos did it. Get ready for the illegal migrants with their hands out as a result.

The New Yorker piece is very very long, (and pretty interesting as a descriptive piece), so I won’t quote it, but suffice to say, the author of it failed to make her point. I will sum up what its writer found so as to make her argument that global warming causes illegal immigration:

Guatemala’s western highlands are in a drought. That drought is creating food shortages. (Left unsaid: Guatemala’s government is apparently doing nothing about it, despite it being its own people). The Guatemalans are clueless about how to adapt to any drought-like conditions. That means they need U.S. NGO aid workers to teach them about crop rotation, saving seeds in their own seed banks, and minimizing the need for water through shade planting. Guatemalans can’t figure that out on their own. Aid from American NGO workers is the only thing that can keep people fed. And not just any aid, only American aid (Guatemala is apparently excused from the need to provide aid, despite the record remittances in hard currency it receives). Mean President Trump is cutting off aid. Yet he’s the one who caused this whole debacle because he doesn’t buy into the idea of global warming.

The writer keeps trying to circle around and claim that global warming is the cause of the Guatemalan drought, as if the region had never seen one earlier, but it’s a tenuous and unpersuasive argument, never proved. The writer can describe problems, but can’t analyse or consider multiple scenarios, and she wrecks her piece by trying to shoehorn it all into a “narrative’ about global warming with insufficient evidence.

Rest assured, she didn’t wreck her piece from the perspective of the agenda she was promoting. That influential ”narrative” is going to get into the Democratic party line as justification for cartel-led and gang-led illegal immigration, which of course strengthens cartels and gangs at U.S. taxpayer expense. Global warming means it’s all O.K.., and never mind that detail about Guatemala’s failure to take care of its own people during what in reality is a temporary weather condition for farmers whose capacity to adapt is basically by fleeing north.

Rest assured, Newsom will be up on this by the time he gets out of El Salvador. He’s got to claim he did something other than shovel pork. He’s going there to blame Trump for everything, and global warming is a big low hanging fruit for him.

Image credit: Refracted Moments, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0

 

 

 

 

via American Thinker Blog

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