Amazon is toying with our first amendment right to free speech.
Following on the heels of Amazon shadow banning Abigail Shrier’s book, “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.” about the transgender social contagion affecting young women, Ryan Anderson’s book, “When Harry Became Sally “was outright banned by the tech giant. The book, which had previously been on Amazon’s bestseller list, aimed to provide "thoughtful answers to questions arising from our transgender moment" and offered "a balanced approach to public policy on gender identity.”
“The Transgender Industrial Complex,” reporting on the industry of gender, by Scott Howard, was banned by Amazon nearly as fast as it hit the platform in 2020, though it has reappeared. This week, Amazon temporarily took down the book “Desist, Detrans, & Detox: Getting Your Child Out of the Gender Cult,” by Maria Keffler. No warning, no email, just an initial de-platforming, followed by a cryptic apology and reinstatement.
In February this year, Amazon reported that the company’s policies changed between 2018-2021, attempting to frame Anderson’s book as offensive for referring to LGBTQ+ identities as mental illness. Anderson refuted those charges. The banning itself is a blatant attack on free speech, speech that Amazon has described as hateful, though curiously, Hitler’s tome, “Mein Kampf,” didn’t make the banned-for-hate cut list. Amazon holds 80% of the book market, so a ban, a shadow ban, and a de-platforming with a re-platforming can cause damage to any profits a writer may secure through book sales, not to mention their reputations. The forced loss of income and damage to writers' reputations by de-platforming their books is egregious. But banning books goes far beyond egregious into territory we should be responding to.
Beyond this tyranny and overt assault on our first amendment rights in America, lies a darker reality yet.
Gender Identity has opened new markets for the medical-industrial complex.
What happened between Ryan’s publication of “When Harry Became Sally,” its best-seller status, and the subsequent removal of the book, while other books on the topic of the gender industry were also being removed and shadow banned? Let’s examine.
Here are some highlights of Amazon’s push into healthcare during 2019 and where they're headed.
*Teaming up with JP Morgan Chase, and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, Amazon has set its sights on hospitals and outpatient clinics in the U.S., aiming to become the leading provider of medical supplies to them.
*Amazon is among the tech giants making the biggest impact on healthcare and coupled with its vast number of users and sellers, it can be a fertile testing ground for future healthcare applications.
* In March, Amazon made a $2 million investment in Boston-based Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to test artificial intelligence tools.
* Amazon Web Services deepened its Next Gen Stats partnership with the NFL in December to advance player health. The partnership plans to use AWS artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide insights into player injuries and how equipment, game rules, and rehabilitation strategies can affect player health.
Since 2018, Amazon has made several significant partnerships and investments in the healthcare industry, which will likely continue into the new decade. In 2018, Amazon purchased PillPack for 753 Million dollars to enter the online pharmacy market. Amazon formed Amazon Care, an online virtual medical clinic for employees. Later, Amazon made a second acquisition and snapped up a start-up called Health Navigator, which provides technology and services to digital health companies to be merged with Amazon Care.
With the acquisition of PillPack and the recent release of HIPAA (The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliant Alexa skills, analysts speculate that Amazon is preparing to disrupt the $934.8 billion global pharmaceutical industry, already allowing consumers to order and refill their prescriptions as quickly as they would buy clothing or toys off of Amazon Prime and creating a full-scale pharmacy business within the Amazon infrastructure.
Unsurprisingly, as the new gender industry is poised for growth, Amazon is going all-in for its transgender employees (as well as their new pharmaceutical consumer base), creating a guidebook of benefits for their transgender employee, Aetna health plans.
Amazon transgender employee Aetna health plans cover non-surgical medical treatment such as hormone “therapy” and mental health for minors with "gender dysphoria" (surgical interventions are considered when individuals reach age 18).
Hormones and specialized surgical procedures for adults, such as double mastectomies, rib excision, nipple reconstruction, scrotoplasty, penectomy, vulvectomy, orchiectomy, vaginectomy, etc., are all covered. Amazon-Aetna also offers coverage for general surgeries related to changing one’s sex appearance: chin augmentation, laryngoplasty, liposuction, tracheal shave, facial bone reduction, rhinoplasty, facelift, etc., all for the “dysphoric employee.”
Amazon, with its new health acquisitions, clearly has an investment in identity medicine, and if our constitutional right to free speech is the cost, so be it.
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