Thread by @barrydeutsch

(thread)
What @AbigailShrier says here about current-day censorship encapsulates what's terribly wrong with most of our free-speech-advocate pundits and journalists.

She's talking about Amazon, which sells her book, not accepting ads for it, and various places not reviewing it.

Contrary to what @AbigailShrier thinks, censorship in 21st-century America often IS the government sending police to people's homes.

It's just that people who are censored - the most harmed victims of censorship - aren't people Shrier or her peers pay much attention to.

Shrier's not paying attention to victims in marginalized groups - undocumented immigrants, prisoners, sex workers - who are censored, not by Amazon not carrying an ad, but by armed government agents.

A day and a half after criticizing the government at a public meeting, at 6:30am, Jose Bello was woken by ICE agents pounding on his door. Bello is a father, a college student, and an undocumented immigrant.

thinkprogress.org/ice-arrested-a…

ICE threw Bello handcuffed into a cell without a toilet and kept him there for eight hours, refusing his pleas for a bathroom visit. He eventually peed himself.

According to the ACLU, "ICE’s actions will chill immigrant speakers from sharing criticisms of the agency..."

Bello's case doesn't stand alone, unfortunately. immigrantrightsvoices.org lists over a thousand cases of the government censoring people for criticizing the government.

(And by "censored," they don't mean Kirkus chose not to review their books.)

These aren't cases of the government arresting undocumented immigrants who just happened to be activists. The government is targeting these people for their speech. (They even had to settle a lawsuit from some of the activists they targeted.)

washingtonpost.com/business/2020/…

I wonder what Shrier would say if the government put pressure on Amazon to not carry her book at all?

That's what happened to the documentary "Immigration Nation" - the administration tried to get Netflix to ax it. Fortunately, Netflix didn't give in.

newsweek.com/immigration-na…

Here's a couple more articles about the government's crackdown on the free speech of undocumented immigrants and those who defend them.

theintercept.com/2020/11/01/ice…

vice.com/en/article/ywa…

Now let's talk about sex workers.

In 2018, the FBI raided the homes of executives of Backpage.com, taking computers and documents. They also seized the website. Because the site had lots of ads "for prostitution."

azcentral.com/story/news/loc…

Although the Backpage executives (some of whom were arrested) were the people the FBI raided, most of the people censored by this are sex workers. Because now most of the places sex workers could advertise wouldn't take their ads - because they were afraid of being raided.

Not long after the Backpage raid, congress doubled down on the censorship by passing FOSTA-SESTA, causing yet more sites - major sites like craigslist and reddit - to shut down posts from sex workers. And not just ads.

vox.com/culture/2018/4…

Without access to media (including ads), it becomes much harder for sex workers to find and vet clients before seeing them in person.

This government censorship doesn't just harm sex workers economically (although that's bad enough) - it's actually, physically dangerous to them.

Possibly the most censored group in American is prisoners.

Denise Bonfilio, a prisoner in Florida, talked to the Miami Herald about an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease in her prison. She was put in solitary for 120 days. It's horrifying.

prospect.org/justice/how-pr…

Under coronavirus, prisoners' access to journalists has been cut off more than ever - just as journalism about how prisoners are being endangered and killed by the virus is more essential than ever.

oif.ala.org/oif/?p=20543

Prisons also censor what books prisoners are allowed to read. I suspect that Shrier's book wouldn't be banned.

Anti-racist books, however, seem particularly likely to be banned by prisons. Also books about civil rights.

bookriot.com/censorship-in-…

Former prisoner Michael Tafolla said that the book "Illegal" was incredibly valuable for him to read in prison. But shortly after he was released, the prison banned that book and 200 others, calling those books "racially motivated."

npr.org/2020/02/22/806…

Other banned books include "The Lovely Bones," Pulitzer winner "The Color Purple," various manga books (because nudity!), and books about learning sign language.

If you'd like to read much more about prison censorship, a good place to start is the Marshall Project's collection of articles about censorship.

themarshallproject.org/records/671-ce…

Saying something like this is incredibly asinine. Shrier hasn't actually bothered to learn the first thing about censorship in the US today.

But the problem isn't Shrier. It's that most of our pundits who write about free speech would agree with her. It's the mainstream view.

Shrier's book sounds awful. To be fair, I haven't read it, but Shrier has said it's based on Littman's "research" about "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria" (ROGD).

I use scare quotes because there's no evidence ROGD exists. Littman's research is garbage.
researchgate.net/publication/33…

Shrier has a first amendment right to publish a book hyping the claims of a garbage study that spreads transphobic views and encourages a moral panic.

But as even Shrier (eventually) admits, she has no right for ads on Amazon, or a review in Kirkus.

quillette.com/2020/11/07/gen…

People are being censored today. US authorities are pounding on their doors, throwing them into cells (or into solitary), banning them from reading books, and threatening publishers into not accepting their ads or comments.

Why aren't our free-speech pundits objecting?

(end)

Oh, and here's a #PoliCartoon I drew about this last year.

Transcript (and some more links on the subject): patreon.com/posts/defendin…