‘We are in a truly Orwellian culture’: Amazon yanks Covid-19 skeptic’s book for ominously vague ’content violations’
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
Amazon has joined its Big Tech fellows in ramping up censorship of any criticism of the “official” Covid-19 narrative, deploying obfuscatory excuses to justify removing journalist James Perloff’s latest book, he told RT.
After selling a respectable 3,500 copies over the last two months, Perloff’s book on the coronavirus pandemic and its weaponization by world governments, ‘Covid-19 and the Agendas to Come: Red-Pilled,’ was suddenly “banned” by Amazon.com, the writer revealed on Twitter on Thursday.
Perloff spoke to RT on Friday about the platform’s ominous act of censorship and how it seemed to validate his book’s conclusions, expressing concern that “the censorship on Covid has been getting progressively stronger, even as the death rate from Covid has been getting progressively lower.”
We are in a truly Orwellian culture.
The first sign of trouble came on Thursday when Amazon requested that he “clarify [his] rights to the book” – something he had already done upon putting it up for sale back in August. But before he could finish gathering the material required to prove once again that he owned the global rights to his own work, he received another email from Amazon, this time claiming they had removed his book “during a quality assurance review of [his] catalog” because it “violated content guidelines.”
While Perloff said he “asked them to specify what guidelines [he] had violated,” their reply merely restated that the “subject matter” of his book had been found to be “in violation of our content guidelines,” declaring the e-commerce behemoth “will not be offering this title for sale on Amazon.”
We reserve the right to determine whether content provides a poor customer experience and remove the content from sale.
With five other books already listed on the platform, Perloff has communicated with Amazon extensively over the years, but something was off about these latest messages. In previous communications, “they would usually at least give a first name,” he said. “This time I was dealing with persons – or a person – who was cowering behind total anonymity.”
The book traces how the Covid-19 pandemic has been used by governments around the world to force draconian social control measures upon a terrified populace, evaluates several theories regarding the virus’ origin, and offers some projections about what might lie ahead for humanity – including how populations might work together to avoid some of the most totalitarian outcomes.
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Perloff insists the information within was meticulously sourced from medical professionals, academic publications, and frontline physicians, with hundreds of endnotes referencing scholarly journals and other unimpeachable sources. “There is nothing I say in the book that isn’t documented,” he said, pointing out that several other coronavirus dissenters are selling their books on the platform without incident.
The political analyst is far from the first to run afoul of Amazon’s increasingly stringent censorship. But while he is familiar with the trials and tribulations of former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, who found his own corona-skeptic tome temporarily squelched until billionaire Elon Musk drew attention to the censorship on social media, Perloff cynically lamented that he himself lacks “friends among the rich and famous” to rescue his book from Amazon’s growing digital bonfire.
Ultimately, however, he has faith in the Streisand effect, in which heavy-handed censorship efforts backfire and draw attention to the content they seek to suppress. “If you say to people, ‘Don’t read this book,’ their instinct is to go and read it.”
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