Late last week, Amazon.com took another step in silencing dissent on LGBT issues. Amazon banned a major conservative publishing company from purchasing ads to promote a book warning about the dangers transgender ideology poses to young women and girls.
“The cancel culture has made it clear that it despises diversity of opinion, and it will not tolerate science, data, facts, or anything that contradicts the approved narrative. If you’re not on board, you’ll have your head handed to you,” Regnery Publishing tweeted in a statement about the Amazon ban.
Amazon refused to let Regnery pay to promote the forthcoming book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, Fox News reported. In the book, Wall Street Journal journalist Abigail Shrier builds on a scientific study revealing the “social contagion” of transgender identity affecting a broad swath of American teenage girls and warns that various transgender “treatments” will leave girls permanently scarred.
Among other things, it warns about chest binders (meant to hide a girl’s feminine upper-body features), which may lead to “fractured or bruised ribs, punctured or collapsed lungs, shortness of breath, back pain, and deformation of the breast tissue.” This is the least invasive kind of transgender “treatment” for teenage girls. Drugs like Lupron (meant to “block” puberty) and testosterone cause more damage, and various forms of transgender surgery are even worse.
Yet Amazon reportedly sent Regnery an email on Thursday, warning that the book “contains elements that may not be appropriate for all audiences, which may include ad copy/book content that infers or claims to diagnose, treat, or question sexual orientation. Hence, this campaign will not be allowed to be advertised.”
Amazon Is ‘Expressing Public and Open Hostility Toward Conservative and Religious Organizations’
Ironically, the book warns that many teenage girls who are attracted to other women — lesbians — are particularly vulnerable to transgender ideology, which convinces them that they are “really” boys, and hence no longer lesbian. While pro-transgender content may convince young women to “question sexual orientation” in this fashion, Shrier’s book urges them not to do so.
Regnery noted that “if you search ‘transgender’ in the books category on the Amazon app right now, you will see a paid ad for LGBT pride month from a prominent publisher and a paid ad for a chest binder. Amazon has told us we are not even allowed to bid on that ad space for ‘Irreversible Damage.'”
Regnery’s statement later compared Amazon’s ad ban to other instances of recent cancel culture.
“If you go on Amazon right now and search ‘transgender books,’ you will find paid advertisements from major publishing houses promoting books on the side of this issue Amazon apparently agrees with. But if you’re a college [football] coach who wears a conservative tshirt, an editor at the [New York Times] who runs an opinion piece by a Rep senator, or a respected journalist who writes for [The Wall Street Journal] investigating a serious social issue affecting young women in America, you will be silenced,” the publisher declared.
But if you’re a college fball coach who wears a conservative tshirt, an editor at the @nytimes who runs an opinion piece by a Rep senator, or a respected journalist who writes for @WSJ investigating a serious social issue affecting young women in America, you will be silenced 3/3
— Regnery Publishing (@Regnery) June 21, 2020
Regnery was referencing Oklahoma State University football coach Mike Gundy, whose One America News shirt sparked outrage, and James Bennett, who resigned from his job as opinion editor at the Times following outrage after he published an op-ed written by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.).
The Cancel Culture has indeed gone into overdrive, but most of the recent cancelations concern allegedly offensive statements on race. Amazon’s Cancel Culture follows the nefarious Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Just this week, the Family Research Council (FRC), a conservative Christian nonprofit in Washington, D.C., found itself excluded from Amazon Smile, the online retailer’s charity partner.
FRC was merely the latest conservative group booted from Amazon Smile, following Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and D. James Kennedy Ministries (DJKM), which is suing Amazon over the exclusion. Amazon excluded FRC, ADF, and DJKM because the SPLC had accused these organizations of being “hate groups,” placing them on a list along with the Ku Klux Klan. Amazon’s exclusion of FRC seems particularly noteworthy since a deranged man attempted to commit mass murder at FRC in 2012, using the SPLC’s “hate map” to target that organization.
The SPLC began as a noble civil rights organization but has devolved into a hate-for-pay scam that routinely brands its political opponents as KKK-style “hate groups,” even going so far as to suggest its “hate group” tallies are a statistically significant measure of the threat of white supremacist terrorism. Last year, a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal got the SPLC’s co-founder fired and led to the president’s resignation. The group has yet to release its promised “internal review.”
Even though a nonpartisan group urged Amazon to drop the scandal-plagued SPLC and shareholders pressured the company to end SPLC-directed viewpoint discrimination, Amazon doubled down on using the SPLC as the gatekeeper for its charity donation platform last month.
While Amazon has not pulled Irreversible Damage, its decision to ban ads for this book while allowing ads for pro-transgender literature and dangerous chest binders is despicable. This bias falls in line with the SPLC’s defamatory Cancel Culture, however.
Americans should pick up Irreversible Damage and my book exposing the SPLC, Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. It seems Jeff Bezos would profit from reading them.
Tyler O’Neil is the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Follow him on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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