I have written about the censorship Amazon is doing to prevent books from being sold that address the COVID-19 pandemic. These books do not violate Amazon's terms of service, and Amazon states it is dedicated to allowing diverse interests. It is not. My book has more than 300 citations from other sources. I spent months researching it, and I had to fight to get the one version of it they did publish published. They have blocked the black and white version and the large print version from publication, and there is no way for me to fight this block.
Facebook has similarly stifled and flagged my posts. Since the beginning of COVID-19, I have not been getting the number of views I have seen in the past. One of my friends wanted me to fact check another post that had been going around about breathing difficulties from masks. Keep in mind that cloth and non-medical masks are not being regulated by the FDA (even though the FDA is legally required to regulate them), so it can be expected they would cause medical problems. I did the research and reposted the post with a statement that yes, masks can cause health problems. I then posted links to scientific papers showing masks of any kind cause health problems as a part of my post. Facebook labeled my post as partly false?!?
We are in the middle of a nasty election. I recently posted on my RSS News Website that politics-not COVID-19-is what is killing us in America this year. I don't know where you stand politically, but we as writers have to put our foot down about censorship. The Democrats in the Spring, led by Nancy Pelosi, spoke with Facebook openly and said that Facebook needs to ban sexist posts. As a woman, I don't want read sexist posts, but as a writer I would far rather be able to speak my mind than avoid seeing something offensive. Facebook should ban posts that are sexually or violently explicit--the only censorship I support because you can skip a post you disagree with but those things don't ever get out of your brain once you see them-even if by accident. A post flinging mud at a political opponent should not be banned simply because the opponent is a woman unless you are going to stop all mud slinging.
I cannot stand Arthur Miller because I truly believe he caused Marilyn Monroe's already fragile mental state to decline even more greatly. Everything I know about him makes me more firmly believe he is a self-absorbed jerk. I hate the Crucible and Inherit the Wind because many people take these plays as historical fact instead of fictional allegories. However, that hatred did not stop me from publicly reading the Crucible on Banned Book Day while in college because I don't believe in banning books simply because they don't align with my politics or because they come from someone I dislike.
My entire voting life I have voted for Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians and other third parties--even if it means writing their name on the ballot. But because the Democrats have pushed to stifle free speech so much in this election, I am not voting for a single one of them this year--even though I initially considered it. The Democrats knew Joe Biden got his son the job in Ukraine and that Joe used US funding to pressure the Ukrainian government to look the other way. Joe admitted this himself on television. Hunter admitted his father got him jobs. I mean, he worked on an Amtrak Safety Board when the only previous experience and knowledge he had was that he rode the train. I even figured out at the time about Ukraine before it became a social media pariah and posted about how bad that was for Biden to have done. Even a former Polish president admitted Joe got Hunter the Ukraine job.
The Democrats knew that Joe Biden had a bad habit of letting racist remarks slip prior to electing him. Shoot, over a year ago I wrote a quiz on Sporcle about all his verbal gaffs. Because I am an independent, when Biden got the Democratic nomination this year, I wrote another one about President Trump's gaffs, which, in turn, sparked a whole series of quizzes about this election and the candidates that I am planning to complete in the next two weeks. I did this to be fair, but the Democrats are not playing fair in this election--and when they trample free speech to do it, they need to be checked. My complaint for years is that Democrats and Republicans don't offer a true "choice"--instead they both run identical candidates with different labels. The Trump-Clinton election was an obvious deviation from this path, but the problem with this election is that the Democrats chose an equally controversial candidate and are now trying to sugar-coat him by suppressing free speech. The only way I can think to protest their attacks on free speech is to not vote for them at all. That's okay, though, there are plenty of other candidates from which to choose.
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