Andy Slavitt's censorship efforts at the White House even extended to Amazon and the books it sold

He didn't just press social media companies. Slavitt targeted Amazon, by far the world's largest bookseller, too. No wonder he's defying a subpoena and refusing to testify under oath to Congress.

Andrew Slavitt - the former senior advisor to the Biden administration’s Covid response team - is having himself a week.

Last Wednesday, Slavitt told a Congressional committee he would ignore its subpoena demanding he testify about his efforts in 2021 to suppress reporting that raised doubts about the safety or efficacy of Covid vaccines. (Slavitt is a defendant in Berenson v Biden, my federal lawsuit over the conspiracy to force Twitter to ban me for my reporting on the Covid mRNA jabs in August 2021.)

But despite Slavitt’s silence - which the Biden Administration has endorsed by promising not to enforce the subpoena - the truth about his efforts to violate the First Amendment keeps coming.

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(Slavitt can’t stop my reporting - or the truth. Join the fight.)

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Yesterday, Rep. Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which issued the subpoena, released a new batch of emails showing how far Slavitt went in 2021.

Slavitt was not merely concerned with Twitter and other social media companies.

On March 2, 2021, barely a month into the Biden Administration’s reign, he complained about “propaganda and misinformation and disinformation” at Amazon, which sells roughly half of all the books in the United States.

Slavitt and other would-be censors at the White House then spent weeks pushing Amazon to - at a minimum - sharply reduce the visibility of books they didn’t like.

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(Whom can we talk to, Andy, not “who.” If you’re going to use your job at the White House to violate the Constitution, at least get the grammar right!)

SOURCE

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Slavitt’s email does not mention specific titles that he disliked.

Still, it may be further evidence of his obsession with me, which led him to push Twitter to ban me both during his stint at the White House, which ended in June 2021, and afterwards.

At the time Slavitt sent his email, the three titles in my Unreported Truths booklet series, which effectively stood as a precursor to this Substack, had sold hundreds of thousands of copies on Amazon.

Nine months before Slavitt’s complaint, in June 2020, the first Unreported Truths booklet had attracted national attention after Amazon refused to publish it. I protested the censorship, and Elon Musk backed me, calling on Twitter for Amazon to be broken up as a monopoly.

Amazon then reversed its decision and published the booklet (which took the position - controversial at the time - that only the very elderly and very ill faced a significant risk of dying from Covid).

The booklet was a hit. After I appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show to discuss the controversy, it briefly became the top-selling e-book on Amazon. Arguably even more than my Twitter presence, the booklet cemented my position as a leading Covid skeptic - as Slavitt was well aware.

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The emails that Jordan released yesterday show that Amazon initially resisted taking action. “We provide our customers with access to a variety of viewpoints, including books that some customers may find objectionable,” an Amazon employee wrote to other employees on March 2, 2021.

But a week later, Amazon had caved to the White House’s pressure, putting any book that suggested vaccines were “unsafe or ineffective [emphasis added]” on its “Do Not Promote” list.

Amazon then went further, looking for more ways to hide books the White House did not like from its customers.

So what did Slavitt make of Amazon’s willingness to bend to the White House’s demands? Did the fact that the giant retailer - a company more powerful than Facebook or Twitter - had backed down emboldened him to demand even more from social media companies in the weeks to come?

No doubt those are the kind of questions House Judiciary Committee investigators would like answered. For now, though, they won’t be.

Because for now Slavitt isn’t talking.

He seems to have decided self-censorship is the truest censorship of all.