Friday, March 5, 2021

Canceling Dr. Seuss

Maybe you thought you lived in a free country. You don’t. In truth, your freedom to think and to speak is now controlled by tech monopolies. They decide what you can or cannot read. By their dim lights conservative thought is beyond the pale. It stokes violence and contains offensive imagery. God forbid, your pristine mind should ever be exposed to offensive imagery.

As for the larger issue, who decides what is or is not offensive, the answer is, the tech oligarchs in Silicon Valley. 

One understands that the tech oligarchs have been indoctrinated in leftist thought. They do not know it, but their minds have been manipulated by the media and their teachers, to the point where they can no longer think coherently. They think that they are free thinkers. In truth, they are tools of an intellectual elite that has taken over their minds. 


Worse yet, we the American people, are putting up with it. Don't we have laws against monopoly practices? Don't we have laws against inhibiting and proscribing speech? How docile do the American people have to be to allow this to continue?


Surely, no one elected Jack Dorsey. And yet, Jack, by his lonesome, had some kind of brain spasm and cancelled the Twitter account of a former president of the United States. Is a country where one man can silence the president a free country?


Youtube has has banned Trump on the grounds that his words incite violence. Yesterday, YouTube CEO, a pretentious and arrogant twit named Susan Wojcicki announced that Trump’s words were a threat to civil order and would remain suppressed until the threat passed.


Who elected her? And how does it happen that tech oligarchs consider the January 6 protest a violent insurrection while completely ignoring, not only the Black Lives Matter insurrection, but the Congresspeople who encouraged and fomented it.


As it happens, YouTube, like Twitter, is a quasi monopoly. There is no real competition, so, being banned by one or the other simply means that you have been silenced.


And then of course, Amazon, a monopoly bookseller, banned a book on transgenderism. The book, by Ryan Anderson, was called: When Harry Became Sally. Transgenderism has become a dogma in the Church of the Liberal Pieties, as I have been wont to call it. That means, any dissent must be suppressed. Dare we mention that transgenderism has no scientific basis. So, we are dealing with religious dogma.


Again, being banned by Amazon means being banned. Threats to ban books that violate Church dogma will surely lead publishers to refuse to publish any books that contest Church dogma.


And then, of course, Amazon also took down a film about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Without explanation. Was it because of his race? Was it because Anita Hill accused him of-- we don’t remember what? Was it because he is a conservative justice, and such thinking is beyond the pale?


One is struck by the boldness. It’s as though Amazon, which already suppressed a site called Parler, can do whatever it wants to censor speech, with perfect impunity. It knows that no one has the spine to do anything about it.


And now, there’s Ebay, the online auction site. You would think that Ebay would stick to commerce, to being an open marketplace. But no, it has taken to remove a certain number of books by one Dr. Seuss. It has deemed these books to be offensive and to be inciting violence.


For the moment Amazon is still selling them, so that is a saving grace. But still, Theodore Seuss Geisel was a liberal Democrat. He supported Democratic politicians and liberal causes. And yet, the left’s rage about gaining complete imperial control over the American mind knows no bounds. The Dr. Seuss story also suggests that what was once considered to be totally anti-racist can become, in the hands of the morons who constitute our new thought police, totally racist, in a twitch of their gray cells.


Irony of irony, this same Ebay, righteously intoning that Dr. Seuss is promoting racism and violence, that is, offensive material, allows copies of Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf to be sold. And no one has dared take down any copy of the works of Louis Farrakhan.


As you know, any suggestion on your part that Saint Anthony Fauci might have gotten anything wrong will get you banned from major social media outlets. It’s hate speech, don’t you know. It is fomenting disease. Any suggestion that you should not take the vaccine is surely a cause for dismissal.


And yet, when Louis Farrakhan tells his followers not to take vaccines, the social media world shrugs.


The Cleveland Jewish News reported this in December, 2020. Does it sound racist to you?


Ishmael Muhammad, National Assistant to Nation of Islam Leader Louis Farrakhan, warned blacks against COVID-19 vaccines in a recent lecture series titled “America’s Wicked Plan.”


Quoting Farrakhan, Muhammad said, “In the 1960s, the honorable Elijah Mohammed [who led the Nation of Islam before Farrakhan] advised his followers not to take the polio vaccine. He said some of the earlier vaccines we could take, but now that this Kissinger National Security Study Memorandum 200 on depopulation is the policy of our government, we have to be careful of what injections we allow ourselves to take.”


Farrakhan, said Muhammad, had learned that there were two types of flu vaccine, one containing mercury and other additives and another, without them, “for Jewish people, and those who are knowledgeable about the chemical additives in these vaccines.”


“Why do you put additives in one, and remove it from another, except that there’s something in that additive that you want to infect the population with, that over time will manifest in ailments, sickness, disease and a compromised immune system,” said Muhammad.


Muhammad quoted Farrakhan as saying that such things were part of a “plot to kill an entire people because we are the next inheritors of rulership over the planet. He, the enemy, already knows this. He knows our future but doesn’t intend for us to see that future. Because we are rising.”


We have the country that we deserve. We have the free expression that we deserve. Right now, tech monopolies are flexing their muscles in order to suppress anything that resembles conservative speech. It’s well past time for our legislators to join together and to break up these trusts.


Monopoly power is subject to abuse. Nothing about it bespeaks the free market. In truth, it has more in common with absolute government control over the marketplace of ideas. Considering that the Democratic Party has openly encouraged social media platforms to deplatform conservatives should tell you all you need to know about these practices and their authors.


7 comments:

David Foster said...

Yet there are plenty of non-Silicon-Valley companies that could express dissenting ideas, and provide platforms for others to express such ideas, should they so choose. The major newspapers and the traditional broadcast networks all have websites, in addition to their legacy paper & electronic media, and have plenty of options for hosting or self-hosting these sites. Yet their political postures are 95% aligned with FB & Twitter...or would it be more accurate to say that FB and Twitter are 95% aligned with them?

Perhaps the deep monopoly is the monopoly of ideological opinion which is enforced in most of academia and which drives these ideas through all levels and aspects of American society.

Sam L. said...

Fortunately, Americans are a fractious people, and as the old saying goes, every action begets an opposite reaction, and not necessarily an EQUAL reaction. Stand back, folks, it's gonna be a STORMY night/day/season/year... Slooooooooooow to anger, but when the anger bursts, it's too late for those who started it.

Sam L. said...

And speaking of books, I am reading an old paperback from '82: The Eureka Years: Boucher and McComas's Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, in which there is a story by Ray Bradbury entitled "The Exiles", in which the shades of writers past are on Mars and know that those who hate books are coming to kill them and burn their books. It is so TIMELY...

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exiles_%28Bradbury_story%29

It may be somewhere on the web.

jmod46 said...

It's all part of the Chinafication of America.Trump and his supporters were a potential threat to all those who have thrown in their lot with the CCP. Big Tech, Big Business, Academia,Big Media,politicians of both parties, and others have been corrupted by the easy money thrown at them by the Chinese. These people will all assert their power to keep what they believe is their due. The Deplorables are a roadblock which will be run over.

Walt said...

Finding "racism" in Seuss's illustration of a kid in Chinatown in the 1940s reminds me of the nuts who found that if you played some Beatles record backwards you'd hear a satanic voice yowling 666. You have to look hard through distirted glasses to find what you seek.

Tilcut Hassayampa said...

Reply to Walt,

It is not Beatles records that you play backwards. It's Led Zeppellin "Stairway to Heaven" and AC DC "Highway to Hell".

Or you could play country music backwards. That way you get your job back, your wife back, and best of all, you even get your dog back.

Sam L. said...

jmod46, you should know that the Deplorables have rifles and guns and ammo, ammo, ammo, and are asking, "You talkin' to me????"