Two leftist groups have enlisted the leftist media to help create yet another moral panic over a supposed threat that few, if any, people knew anything about.
This time, the horror is that Amazon is helping “white supremacists” and “neo-Nazis” market their wares, according to a report from the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE) and the Partnership for Working Families (PWF). The New York Times and the Washington Post dutifully hit the panic button with major stories about this alleged threat to humankind. According to the Times,
Amazon’s policies allow it to bar hateful or offensive merchandise and content, but the policies are “weak and inadequately enforced” and allow hate groups to “generate revenue, propagate their ideas and grow their movements.”
The report outlines a number of items available as of June, including a costume that makes it look as though wearers have marks around their neck from being hanged from a noose, and onesies for babies that include images of a burning cross emblazoned across the front and Pepe the Frog [an “alt-Right” symbol].
The report identified dozens of e-books being sold in Amazon Kindle formats that were published by groups labeled “hate organizations” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremist groups.
Neither the Times nor the Post identified ACRE or PWF as leftist organizations with an axe to grind. The Post, for some reason, called them “watchdog groups.”
The mainstream media are frequently the transmission belt for tendentious “reports” from leftists or leftist organizations. Such organizations know they can rely on the media, particularly in these days of Trump Derangement Syndrome, to peddle whatever claims they are selling.
SPLC Helps the Hate Hunt
Amazon, along with Google and other titans of the tech world, is using the SPLC to police its activities and users. Of course, the SPLC is the discredited but wealthy leftist outfit — it has squirreled away millions in offshore bank accounts — that routinely smears any group or person with which it disagrees, which is just about any group or person even remotely identifiable as a conservative. Of course, it has tried to connect the constitutionalist John Birch Society, the parent company of this magazine, with haters, too.
Indeed, such is the SPLC’s recklessness in identifying its opponents at “haters” that it recently paid a large settlement to a liberal Muslim activist it wrongly, and recklessly, identified as an “anti-Muslim extremist.”
Beyond that, SPLC, along with Amazon, Google, Twitter, and any corporation that repeats or acts upon SPLC’s defamatory claims, might well face more legal claims. Just last month, a long list of conservatives published a letter strongly suggesting that continuing to rely on the SPLC’s falsehoods might not be such a bright idea.
Last year, D. James Kennedy Ministries (DJKM) sued the SPLC, Guidestar, and Amazon because SPLC labeled DJKM a “hate group,” and Amazon and Guidestar, a charity navigator, acted upon SPLC’s falsehood.
And a few years before that, a homicidal maniac, relying upon the SPLC’s defamatory claims about the Family Research Council, walked into FRC’s headquarters and opened fire upon employees, hoping to “kill as many people as I could.”
Amazon Promotes Mass-Murderers
Yet for all the worry about Amazon’s moral hygiene vis-a-vis white supremacy and neo-Nazis, we hear nothing about some other unsavory individuals and symbols that adorn paraphernalia available at the site.
As Steve Sailer noted at VDare.com, Amazon sells myriad items bearing the visage of the racist mass-murderer Ernesto “Che” Guevara. But beyond that, one can also purchase goods with images of mass murderer Josef Stalin, mass-murderer Mao Tse-tung, mass-murderer Fidel Castro, and mass-murderer Ho Chi Minh.
And if a customer wants something a little more recent, he can purchase other goods with the image of Kim Jong-un, another communist mass-murderer with whom the leftists have no problem.
Beyond the political, Amazon retails merchandise that suggest mass murderer Charles Manson might be something of a hero.
Why else, after all, buy a Manson T-shirt? Does this mean Amazon condones the horrible murders on Cielo Drive in Los Angeles that August day 49 years ago? Maybe so.
