Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida said on Wednesday that the scandal now enveloping Amazon about its caving to the Biden administration’s demands to censor books about COVID-19 that White House officials did not like shows that the left’s primary purpose is to “control” the truth.
The Fort Walton Beach Republican appeared on a podcast hosted by evangelical leader Tony Perkins. At one point, Perkins asked about Amazon’s violating the First Amendment with its willingness to subdue books that President Joe Biden opposed about COVID-19 vaccines.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan released a trove of internal Amazon emails this week revealing how the online retail giant surrendered to the White House on COVID books in March 2021.
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In just a week, Amazon officials, admitting that they were “feeling pressure from the White House,” catered to Biden officials’ complaints about alleged “propaganda and misinformation and disinformation” and committed to masking books that challenged claims about the effectiveness of COVID vaccines.
While the First Amendment applies primarily to the government, the U.S. Supreme Court held in a 2019 ruling that a business functions as an agent of the government when “the government compels the private entity to take a particular action.”
“The difference between the right and the left on this is that the right embraces the opportunity for knowledge, and exploration, and different viewpoints and comparing them to one another, and the left wants to control the very nature of truth itself,” said Gaetz.
“Part of how they control that nature of truth is to try to infect young minds with all of this nonsense that really has no place in adolescence or the public education system, and they’re trying to shape a particular viewpoint there that deviates from the traditional family and really just traditional life and society.”
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Parallel to that, Gaetz added, is the clampdown by the White House on dissenters to Biden’s COVID policies and narrative.
“If you’ve got scientific data or analysis that you want to publish that talks about vaccine injuries or herd immunity, you had people literally in the White House, people at the Department of Homeland Security, people that were senior advisers to the president of the United States, using the awesome power of government to try to manipulate and cajole companies like Amazon and others to really proliferating a political stance, not an exploration for knowledge,” said Gaetz.
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