Elizabeth Warren was just trying to get a book banned when she wrote to Amazon and leaned on the CEO to remove a book that didn’t support the government’s Covid narrative.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday denied a preliminary injunction requested by presidential candidate and Covid policy critic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dr. Joseph Mercola, who with their publisher have filed a lawsuit accusing Sen. Warren of using her position as a senior senator to tell the chief executive officer of Amazon.com to suppress Kennedy’s book, “The Truth About COVID-19: Exposing the Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports and the New Normal.”
The book can be seen at this Amazon link.
The 2021 book denounces FDA-approved vaccines as ineffective and possibly harmful. The book urges people to take control of their health, and to use vitamins and alternative treatments — protocols that the U.S. government has rejected.
Kennedy Jr. and Mercola said that Sen. Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, violated their constitutional rights of free speech and the First Amendment.
The Ninth Court upheld a Washington judge’s earlier ruling that said Kennedy and Mercola failed to to raise a serious First Amendment issue and did not show that the letter crossed “the constitutional line between persuasion and coercion.”
The request for a preliminary injunction demanded that Sen. Warren remove the letter from her website, issue a public retraction, and refrain from sending similar letters in the future.
“Senator Warren’s letter disparaged the book by claiming that the book perpetuated dangerous falsehoods that had led to countless deaths. It also directly impugned the professional integrity of one of the authors,” the Ninth Circuit wrote. Presumably, they were talking about Dr. Mercola, a Florida alternative medicine proponent, osteopathic physician, and Internet supplement business owner who is the lead author of the book and whose business could be harmed by Warren using the power of her bully pulpit to badmouth him.
“The plaintiffs have shown that these remarks, which Senator Warren broadcast to the public by posting the letter on her website, damaged their reputations. Reputational harm stemming from an unrestricted government action is a sufficiently concrete injury for standing purposes,” the judges said.
But then, the ruling says that Warren was just trying to be persuasive and did not cross the constitutional line. Further, she had no unilateral power to penalize the authors or Amazon, if it did not comply with her demands. And even though the letter could be seen as a threat, the court said there was no evidence that Amazon reconfigured its algorithms to steer people away from the book.
In her letter to Amazon, Warren wrote, “This pattern and practice of misbehavior suggests that Amazon is either unwilling or unable to modify its business practices to prevent the spread of falsehoods or the sale of inappropriate products.”
Yet, several weeks later, Amazon notified the publisher that it would not advertise the book — though the court said there was no evidence Amazon had actually advertised it in the past. Publisher Chelsea Green, Kennedy, Jr., and Mercola then sued Warren for trying to intimidate Amazon into suppressing their free speech.
Complicating the matter is that Kennedy is running for president as a Democrat challenging Joe Biden. He is an environmental lawyer by trade and has been an outspoken critic of the federal government’s response to Covid.
Read the ruling at this link:
