RUTHFULLY YOURS

My February 22 post noted that the “deplatforming” of seemingly mainstream conservative voices by the Big Tech oligarchs was reaching ever greater levels of audacity. That post covered some truly extreme instances of the phenomenon, including the total blocking by Twitter on January 8 of all accounts associated with then-sitting President Trump, and the removal on January 11 of Twitter’s biggest competitor Parler from its Amazon servers and then from the Google and Apple app stores. Those examples are rather hard to top.

But those apparent successes have only inspired the deplatformers on to new gambits. Clearly, this phenomenon is not going away any time soon. Even since that post less than two weeks ago, there has been a continuing series of strikes by the big tech censors, each time aimed at someone who has transgressed the current boundaries of political correctness.

On the other hand, from observing each new strike of the censors as it occurs, it’s hard to perceive exactly what the grand plan may be. Maybe there isn’t one. This is much more like the Cambodian genocide than its Nazi predecessor: rather than the enemies all getting rounded up and hauled off at once to the extermination camps, we instead have, every few days, another one or a few seemingly randomly-selected enemies suddenly disappearing without explanation, never to be seen again. One imagines at each Big Tech company a group a several twenty-somethings, just out of college, sitting around the conference room filled with open pizza boxes, rubbing their hands together and giggling and saying things like “Let’s see who we can get away with canceling next!” OK, today this is probably happening on Zoom meetings rather than in actual conference rooms, but it’s the same idea.

I have compiled below some of the more recent deplatformings, all of which are certainly well up there on the audacity scale. Here goes:

• Clarence Thomas. On or about February 26, a PBS documentary titled “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas In His Own Words” mysteriously disappeared from the streaming service Amazon Prime Video. Thomas is of course the only black Supreme Court justice, and arguably the most important black government official in the country. According to a report at The Federalist, a search for the title on February 26 returned the message “This video is currently unavailable to watch in your location.” Amazon had not announced or given any reason for the disappearance. Oddly, however, the title remained available from Amazon on DVD, although a search would only find it if the letters “DVD” were specifically included in the search. Amazon does not appear concerned that its erasure of Justice Thomas might be considered racist since, as we all know, the concept of racism does not apply to discrimination against conservative blacks, no matter how blatant.

• Alpha News/Trump CPAC Speech. From Scott Johnson at PowerLine: on Sunday (February 28) the independent Minnesota-based news site Alpha News posted on YouTube the full video of former President Trump’s February 26 speech at CPAC. The next day (March 1), YouTube (Google) took the video down, and sent Alpha News an email informing it of the removal, and also issuing Alpha a “strike” — meaning that Alpha would be banned entirely from YouTube for seven days, and if it got two more “strikes” it would be banned permanently. Here is the relevant text of the email from YouTube: “Our team has reviewed your content, and unfortunately, we think it violates our spam, deceptive practices, and scams policy. We’ve removed the following content from YouTube: Video: President Trump Full CPAC Speech.” Alpha News promptly appealed the “strike” within YouTube, but on March 2 YouTube affirmed its decision. Meanwhile, according to Johnson, multiple other videos of the same Trump CPAC speech remained available on YouTube, for example at Reuters and The Hill.

• The Epoch Times. This one pre-dates my February 22 post, but not by much. You may know the Epoch Times as a fairly ambitious conservative news site (and print newspaper) founded by Chinese Americans who fled from the Communist regime in that country. You may also know the site as a relentless critic of and irritant to the Chinese regime — to the point of consistently referring to Covid19 as the “CCP virus.” The Epoch Times has been the subject of constant attacks and harassment from the Chinese authorities. (“[T]he Chinese Communist Party has done everything in its power to shut us down. It has arrested and imprisoned our reporters and editors in China, intimidated our staff in the United States, tried to block our advertising, and launched incessant cyber-attacks against us. In November 2019, masked intruders set fire to one of our printing presses in Hong Kong.”) On February 1, the Epoch Times reported that its YouTube channel had been “demonetized” by Google: “Recently, YouTube demonetized The Epoch Times’ account without prior warning or a specific explanation as to why.” In the same post, the company revealed that it had previously been subject to similar restrictions from Facebook: “This is not the first time we were targeted by a major tech company. Facebook previously blocked our ability to advertise our newspaper subscriptions on the platform.” Breitbart News contacted YouTube seeking information as to the reason for the demonetization of the Epoch Times, and received only this meaningless response: “All channels on YouTube need to comply with our Community Guidelines and in order to monetize, channels must comply with the YouTube Partner Program policies, which include our Advertiser-Friendly Guidelines. Channels that repeatedly violate these policies are suspended from our partner program.” All right then! Obviously, Google gets oodles of money from China.

• Ryan Anderson, “When Harry Became Sally.” On February 22, Fox News reported that the book “When Harry Became Sally,” by Ryan Anderson, had been removed from from sale at Amazon without notice or explanation. The book had previously appeared on Amazon’s best seller lists. It is described in the Fox piece as providing “thoughtful answers to questions arising from our transgender moment” and offered a “a balanced approach to public policy on gender identity, and a sober assessment of the human costs of getting human nature wrong.” A search of Amazon for the Anderson book on February 22 by Brian Flood of Fox turned up only books taking the opposite view of the transgender issue. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat suggested that the Anderson caper represented Amazon “conducting an experiment in what they can get away with.”

• Dr. Seuss. And finally, we come to the ultimate absurdity. Apparently a couple of years ago some obscure academic journal (Research on Diversity in Youth Literature — yes there is such a thing), desperate for some new fake controversy to foment, published a piece titled “The Cat is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss’s Children’s Books.” Fortunately, almost nobody reads this drivel, so there it sat. But apparently at some point these ridiculous accusations came to the attention of the heirs of Theodore Geisel (Seuss), who control the ongoing sale of the works. On Tuesday (March 2) the heirs issued a statement saying that they had decided to discontinue sales of six of the books, apparently because somewhere in those six are drawings deemed insufficiently sensitive to Asians and/or blacks. According to Steven Malanga at City Journal yesterday, that then set off a frenzy of bidding wars on eBay among people trying to get their hands on these Seuss classics before they disappeared completely. As prices for some of the titles soared into the hundreds of dollars, eBay today suddenly banned the sale of all of them. From Malanga: “[The] irony of this latest cancel-culture episode is that Geisel himself was a man of the Left, a progressive who opposed fascism, decried ‘red baiting’ in the 1950s, and devoted an entire book to educating kids about the budding environmental movement of the early 1970s. . . .” Yes, Dr. Seuss, you too can be canceled, and a lifetime of fealty to progressive causes will not save you.

Readers who see other examples of this phenomenon can send along pointers for me to include next time I put together one of these compilations. I expect this phenomenon to continue, and to get far worse before it gets better.