On this episode of “The Federalist Radio Hour,” President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center Ryan T. Anderson joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss Amazon’s recent attempt to deplatform his book “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.”
“When we think about trusts, antitrust law, or monopoly or collusion, it’s something different here. It’s not the historic thing, it’s more of like an ideological collusion,” Anderson explained. “I think one thing conservatives are going to have to get over is ‘It’s a private business. It can do whatever it wants.’”
“Apparently, Amazon has an 83 percent market share for book sales in the United States,” Anderson continued. “If you control that much of the market, and then if other big technology companies, social media companies, other book publishers, other platforms, share a similar ideology … that always cuts in the same direction, you might want to think that there are limits to economic liberties, there are limits to private property rights, and what should those limits be? We have other laws that we use: Anti-discrimination limits on private business owners, we have anti-monopoly, antitrust limits, we have common carrier and utility limits. I don’t think Big Tech is a perfect fit on any of those categories, which just says we need to have a new model.”
Shutting down the conversation surrounding certain topics such as transgenderism, Anderson said, is dangerous and only enabled by policies such as the Democrat-proposed Equality Act.
“It’s an abuse of our civil rights law when we add all these different protected classes and when we treat reasonable disagreements as if they’re discriminatory,” Anderson concluded. “We’ve done it on the gay marriage debate; we’re now doing it on the transgender debate. And the Equality Act would just make this worse.”
Buy Anderson’s book here.