So far this year, Holdenreid tells us, religious groups and figures have been silenced by tech companies at a rate of about one a week.
LifeSiteNews, a popular religious news website had its YouTube channel permanently banned by Google in February. All its videos were deleted.Then there was this:
Google claimed its action was a response to Covid-19 misinformation but wouldn’t tell LSN which video had offended its standards. The tech giant had flagged LSN for a video of an American Catholic bishop criticizing vaccines developed with fetal cells. The website’s editor in chief said “our best guess is that the channel was taken down for our frank and factual discussion of the controversy around abortion-tainted medicines and vaccines.”
In January, Bishop Kevin Doran, an Irish Catholic, was banned from Twitter for tweeting, “There is dignity in dying. As a priest, I am privileged to witness it often. Assisted suicide, where it is practiced, is not an expression of freedom or dignity.” The company reversed its decision only after public opposition.
The previous month, Twitter blocked a post from the Daily Citizen, which is run by Focus on the Family, an evangelical Christian nonprofit, and suspended its account. The reason: a tweet that respectfully challenged the underlying premise of transgenderism.Holdenreid concludes with this sage and important admonition:
Twitter made a similar move against Catholic World Report, though the company later said it had acted in error. Ryan T. Anderson of the Ethics and Public Policy Center saw Amazon ban his book criticizing transgenderism, “When Harry Became Sally.” Amazon shows no signs of changing course.
Books from specific publishers are often targeted, such as Catholic TAN Books. One of its authors is Paul Kengor, who wrote an anticommunist tract called “The Devil and Karl Marx. ” TAN Books can’t advertise his work on Facebook, or that of Carrie Gress, who wrote a book on “rescuing the culture from toxic femininity.”
Facebook has also banned ads for Kimberly Cook’s book, “Motherhood Redeemed.” The offending ad called it “a book that challenges feminism in the modern world.”
It seems likely that religious groups and individuals will face mounting threats from tech companies. Their views on marriage, sexuality, life and other moral issues are unpopular among the Silicon Valley set. Religious groups should refuse to silence themselves, change their views, or otherwise back down.Tyrants and totalitarians always ban ideas. They realize at some level that their movements are built on lies and that the free exchange of ideas disinfects their lies. They understand that as long as people have access to contrary ideas their nonsense will be exposed and never prevail, but if their views are the only ones ever heard or read then they'll seem compelling and people will accept them, like people accept a current fashion, in order to demonstrate their own moral and intellectual sophistication.
Censorship is a symptom of a national collapse in civic culture. Curing the deeper disease will take all the courage and conviction we can muster.
Thus, our high tech, elite barbarians ban books and cancel people. Given the power they'd be happy, if necessary, to eliminate altogether both the books and the people who write and read them.