Book Burning

Ryan T. Anderson
photo from Wikipedia

Three years ago Ryan T. Anderson wrote a book. It was on a controversial topic, but sensitively presented and extremely well documented. It received praise from all sides. Well, not all. But all reasonable sides.

That book was recently removed from the Amazon online marketplace. For violating community standards. The author wasn’t informed or warned. The book had previously topped at least two of Amazon’s bestseller lists. It received high praise from experts in the field, and even from those with opposing views. It would be hard to find any more informative and sensitively written work on the subject. Amazon holds an 80% market share for booksellers.

The book is When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. You can still purchase a copy at this other online site.

image from here

Ryan Anderson is President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He spent time working at the Heritage Foundation and the Wotherspoon Institute before taking this most recent position. As a graduate student, in 2012, he co-wrote “What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense” for the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy along with mentor Robert George and fellow student Sherif Girgis. Besides many journal articles, he has also written Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom, in 2015; and Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination (co-written with Sherif Girgis and John Corvino), in 2017.  When Harry Met Sally was his most recent book, from 2018.

I’ve referred to his works numerous times here on this blog. Here are a few:

·         Bigness, April 16, 2015 

·         Path Forward for Us Dissidents, July 20, 2015 

·         Duty to Resist, September 7, 2015 

·         SOGI Laws Discriminate Against Religious People, February 22, 2019 

He is only this year turning 40. All this is to say, he is an extremely impressive young man, and a serious voice that deserves to be heard.

In a piece about his book being banned, Ryan Anderson mentioned the inaptly titled legislation currently before Congress:

It’s an abuse of our civil rights law when we add all these different protected classes and when we treat reasonable disagreements as if they’re discriminatory. We’ve done it on the gay marriage debate; we’re now doing it on the transgender debate. And the Equality Act would just make this worse.

And in a piece he wrote this week, Anderson says, 

[F]irst, a caveat: If you fear what Big Tech can do if you dissent from gender ideology, just wait to see what Big Government will do if the so-called Equality Act becomes law. Second, a lesson: If you fear Big Government, don’t turn a blind eye to Big Tech. Conservatives need to get over the misguided belief that private businesses can do whatever they want. That isn’t true. And it’s never been the American law on the issue. Nor is it what the natural law supports.

In 2019 books by researcher Joseph Nicolosi were removed from Amazon, as his son explains, “not because science dictates their removal, but because LGBT ideology has shouted down sound science.” Joseph Nicolosi, Sr., was a longtime, well-respected researcher. He wasn’t into the undefined and unregulated “conversion therapy” maligned in media depictions. He was a serious psychologist and researcher/ who developed methods that helped resolve issues for those seeking that resolution. I cited his works many times in my writings on the defense of marriage.

Note that Mein Kampf is still available. It does not violate Amazon’s community standards.

What are the false ideas so dangerous that they should not be allowed to be read—in books, in articles—or heard in recordings, speeches, or lectures? It’s SOGI issues (i.e., sexual orientation and gender issues), but also more:

·       There are two sexes of humans: male and female.

·       Permanently disfiguring a child to pretend they are something other than their biological sex is child abuse.

·       Sexual orientation is not immutable; treating with reintegrative therapy can help resolve issues for those who seek that help.

·       Covid-19 can be successfully treated with such inexpensive and widely available therapies as hydroxycholoroquine with zinc and azithromycin.

·       There is significant evidence of election fraud.

·       Race relations don’t get better when you insist on viewing everything in terms of race instead of character and ability.

You can probably think of a few to add to that list. But those are some things that will get you in trouble on social media and many other places—except maybe the HCQ treatment, which suddenly became acceptable news after being labeled dangerously false for most of a year.

There’s this sort of frenzy, among the dictators of what is allowed to be said, that posits there’s too much misinformation and disinformation being spread—and that is a danger to our democracy and must be stopped.

Tucker Carlson did an excellent monologue on February 23^rd, on the mixture of censorship, misinformation/disinformation, and truth. He noted that the MSM use the word “norms” a lot. Supposedly these so-called “norms” are violated when people say things they don’t like. And violating norms, they claim, destroys democracy. His montage was pretty amusing.

Tucker Carlson, screenshot from his February 23rd show

But then he notes, more seriously, that there are real consequences to people getting the wrong information. An example he uses is the mismatch between public views and the real statistics on police killing unarmed black men. People on the street were wildly overestimating the problem. Who is doing the misinforming? is a legitimate question. He says:

A lot of Americans are completely and utterly misinformed, and that has consequences. Public policy can change dramatically on the basis of things people think they know but don’t actually know. And we have seen that a lot. Entire police departments got defunded.

So it’s worth finding out where the public is getting all this false information, this disinformation, as we’ll call it. So we checked. We spent all day trying to locate the famous QAnon, which in the end we learned is not even a website. If it’s out there, we could not find it. Then we checked Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter feed, because we have heard she traffics in disinformation—CNN told us—but nothing there. Next we called our many friends in the tight-knit intel community. Could Vladimir Putin be putting this stuff out there? The Proud Boys? Alex Jones?

Who is lying to America in ways that are certain to make us hate each other and certain to destroy our core institutions? Well, none of the above, actually. It wasn’t Marjorie Taylor Greene; it was cable news. It was politicians talking on TV. They’re the ones spreading disinformation to America.

By the way, a couple of months ago I also tried to track down Q, or QAnon if you’d rather. Just so I could see actual posts, or drops, rather than what various people said Q had said. I literally couldn’t find a way to sign up to get Q drops. If it’s intended to spread, the spreader sure does make it hard. (I hope I didn’t accidentally get on some government list, just because I was trying to do due diligence.)

The odd thing, then, is that those who are so upset about the spread of wrong ideas are the ones spreading falsehoods.

This might be intentional.

Joshua Philipp of The Epoch Times was giving a talk in Texas earlier this month in which he said this: 

If you go back and read the Communist Manifesto, what does it say? “Communism abolishes eternal truths.” And what is eternal truth, right?

It says, “Communism abolishes all religion and all morality.” We think it’s an economic theory. You go back to the 1930s, it was never an economic theory; it was a metaphysical theory, meaning it is a belief. And it’s a belief of a cult of man. And that you can only create that cult of man by destroying God and everything that God created in man. It is a system to re-create society in the image of man and not in the image of God.

And so everything they do is to make you abandon your faith. Everything they do is to undermine your morals, to destroy your traditions, to destroy your family values, to destroy everything that your country and your culture and your character is based upon. And it is only through that, if they can achieve it, that they can achieve their goals.

And so, at Epoch Times, we of course have our slogan: Truth and Tradition—meant to speak the truth and uphold traditions. This is something we’re going to be doing into the distant, distant future. And we will never be silent.

Truth and tradition are very different from “our truth” and “our norms.” I certainly don’t want someone with a Marxist ideology—or really any other ideology—dictating what I’m allowed to say or read.

Hitler Youth burning books, 1938
Alamy stock photo found here

How do you know, at the beginning of a discussion, before both sides lay out their evidence and persuasive points, which side holds objective truth? Or even which side is most persuasive? You need to be able to express things that might not turn out to be true.

If there’s going to be some rule about what you can say, because it may not be true, then you have to ask, who is the arbiter of truth?

Our founders made this clear in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” and then listed the God-given unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and then declared government’s purpose to defend these rights, “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

But, in Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope, he misconstrues that clarity this way:

Implicit in [the Constitution’s] structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course.

As I mentioned some years ago,  you can’t get from that point A, the Declaration and Constitution, to that point B, rejection of absolute truth; there is no such path. As Dr. Larry Arnn puts the question, “How did Barack Obama come to believe something so foreign to America’s heritage as the idea that in the name of liberty we must reject absolute truths—which necessarily includes rejecting those truths I just quoted from the Declaration?”

Who, then, gets to be the arbiter of truth, if not God? There are a great many people I would absolutely not want to grant that power to.

Here's the irony: the self-appointed arbiters of truth reject absolute truth. But if there is no objective, perceivable truth, then why is “their truth” so right that any other “truth” must be censored—not only as simply untrue but harmful enough to be considered subversive?   

Book burning is never about protecting the unsuspecting public from false ideas; it is about protecting the power elites from dissent.