Censoring Amazon
Do mainstream Democrats agree with a top party official’s call for total censorship of dubiously defined “hate speech”? Must be — none have seen fit to denounce it.
Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, recently wrote Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos asking how much money his company has made from selling material linked to “hate groups.” He also demanded that Amazon “immediately cease doing business with groups that promote racist violence.”
Yes, it’s a legitimate issue: Amazon has been challenged on this before, and activists say it “has a history of responding slowly — or not at all.”
But the problem is how Ellison determines what constitutes a “hate group.” (Then, too: How is he qualified to make such demands, given his own history with hatemonger Louis Farrakhan?)
Ellison has just one criterion for defining hate: Whether it’s been so identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center. And that’s a huge problem.
Because relying on the SPLC and its long history of smearing mainstream conservatives is not a call to stand up to hatred — it’s a blatant demand for censoring anyone they dislike.
Just last month, the SPLC — which rakes in millions each year from misguided liberals — was forced to pay $3.4 million and issue a full apology to Maajad Nawaz and his Quilliam think tank.
The SPLC had called them “anti-Muslim extremists.” Yet Nawaz actually is a practicing Muslim and a prominent voice for reform dedicated to
countering extremism. And he’s far from the only conservative who’s been smeared by the SPLC over the years.
So relying on the SPLC — as Ellison would have Amazon do — means lumping people who simply don’t toe a politically correct line with those guilty of vile hatred. And Ellison is calling for a total ban.
Amazon has been mum on Ellison’s demand, other than reaffirming its policy of forbidding the sale of “products that promote or glorify hatred.”
Are newly “woke” Democrats like Sen. Chuck Schumer — who backed Ellison for DNC chair, recall — really on board with this?
In the party’s headlong rush to embrace the socialist surge, it would be nice to see at least one Democrat willing to defend the First Amendment.