For some time now, Democrats have sought to impose tyranny through the back door.
Rather than imposing policies they know are blatantly unconstitutional, they instead work to pressure companies to cram down their favored policies on employees and customers. Left-wing, pseudo-Native American Sen. Elizabeth Warren pulled such a stunt two months ago.
Yet one of her targets is fighting back.
The controversy began in September when Warren issued a letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy to complain that the online retail giant was “peddling misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines and treatments,” said a press release from the Massachusetts senator’s office.
That claim was based on Amazon searches by her staff. Entering terms like “COVID-19,” “vaccine” and “pandemic” returned results that “consistently included highly-ranked and favorably-tagged books based on falsehoods about COVID-19 vaccines and cures,” the release stated.
Among those were books by Dr. Joseph Mercola, an osteopath from Cape Coral, Florida.
Critics claimed Mercola, according to a New York Times article from July, routinely spread misinformation about the COVID vaccines.
Mercola had dubbed the COVID vaccines a “medical fraud” that, as the Times paraphrased it, “did not prevent infections, provide immunity or stop transmission of the disease.”
Yet we know all of that is true.
The evidence is found in thousands of breakthrough infections, and President Joe Biden himself has admitted as much, by once saying the vaxxed must wear masks in order to stop the spread to the unvaxxed.
Nonetheless, Warren wanted Amazon to squelch Mercola.
In her letter, she wrote, “Amazon is either unwilling or unable to modify its business practices to prevent the spread of falsehoods or the sale of inappropriate products — an unethical, unacceptable, and potentially unlawful course of action from one of the nation’s largest retailers.”
“At a time when every step towards ending the pandemic could save countless lives, misinformation poses a substantial obstacle,” Warren argued to Jassy.
“Given the seriousness of this issue, I ask that you perform an immediate review of Amazon’s algorithms and, within 14 days, provide both a public report on the extent to which Amazon’s algorithms are directing consumers to books and other products containing COVID-19 misinformation and a plan to modify these algorithms so that they no longer do so.”
This week, according to the Washington Times, Chelsea Green, a Vermont-based publisher that produced “The Truth About COVID-19,” a book by Mercola and activist Ronnie Cummins, sued Warren for violating the authors’ First Amendment rights by pressuring Amazon.
The Times reported that the book, which includes a foreword by prominent anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy Jr., “promotes unproven and possibly dangerous treatments for the coronavirus.”
But Mercola and Cummins’ lawyers argue that is not the point.
Rather, the point is that on Oct 1., about three weeks after Warren issued her ultimatum to Amazon, the company told the publisher that it would no longer accept ads for the book.
The Times did note that it remained on Amazon on Tuesday as a best-seller in the “political freedom” category.
The Times reported: “The lawsuit says the book contains factual information and reasonable opinions protected by the First Amendment, and that Warren‘s ‘veiled threats’ that Amazon could face legal repercussions if it doesn’t stop selling the book amounted to unlawful government censorship.”
Chelsea Green is targeting only Warren in the lawsuit. Amazon has not been named as a defendant.
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