U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley – When The Abuser Goes To Work…

Publisher Says Not Right Now To Censorship

After a truly disturbing display of political censorship in the past year, Simon & Schuster Chief Executive Jonathan Karp this week drew a sort of line in the sand.

One would expect a book by former Vice President Mike Pence to be the equivalent of processed cereal but that didn’t stop 216 employees at the nation’s third largest publisher from demanding the company refrain from publishing Pence’s memoir.

In an online petition, they call Pence “a central figure of a presidency that unequivocally advocated for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-Blackness, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism, islamophobia, antisemitism, and violence. This is not a difference of opinions; this is legitimizing bigotry.”

They forgot to mention that Pence also is the guy who refused to unilaterally halt the certification of electors in the 2020 election, thus earning him the enmity of his boss, GOP President Donald Trump. (It might be interesting to hear Pence’s views on this defining moment?)

In the petition, “Solidarity With the Workforce of Simon and Schuster,” the signers demand S&S cancel any more book deals with former members of the Trump administration. The Wall Street Journal says the petition signers represent about 14% of the S&S workforce.

Delicate Political Situation?

Karp states in an internal letter that S&S’s won’t cancel Pence’s book deal because its core mission includes publishing “a diversity of voices and perspectives.”

However, S&S is owned by ViacommCBS, which finds itself in a delicate situation right now.

Behind The Madonna (Biden) Whore (Trump) Syndrome

CBS Sunday Morning Host Jane Pauley, in a lilting voice, told her audience that it literally needs to know that Democrat President Joe Biden met his wife, Jill, on a blind date and proposed five times before she said yes.

In a later segment, former GOP President Donald J. Trump was relentlessly vilified by the “journalist” who covered him at the White House, CBS News senior national correspondent Ben Tracy. Trump was called the “Disrupter in Chief.” Tracy couldn’t find anything to like about Trump, who received 75 million votes in the past election.

The Whopper

Jill Biden’s first husband was Bill Stevenson and he claims he and his wife met Joe Biden in 1972, when they worked on then-New Castle County Councilman Biden’s first campaign for the Senate Stevenson said the story about Joe and Jill’s meeting on a “blind date” is pure fiction. He says they had an affair and the betrayal led to the painful (for him) end to their marriage.

We might all agree that it’s nobody’s business how the Bidens’ met but it is our business when we are continually told bold faced lies about the circumstances of their meeting by the mainstream media.

Why don’t CBS and other national media outlets just stay silent about how the Bidens met? Why do they even bring it up? How can they justify lying to the American public this way?

The Precipitous, Alarming Decline of Free Speech

Simon & Schuster (S&S) may have had the right to drop a book written by U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-MO, on essentially political grounds.

But the act of doing so conjures up unpleasant images of suppression of unpopular and political speech.

The move is even more alarming as social media giants this week exercised their awesome power to silence the voices of American conservatives, from GOP President Donald Trump to Gen. Michael Flynn, ostensibly because they pose a threat of violence. (It may be purely coincidental that Trump recently sought to remove the platforms’ legal protection from lawsuits.)

But it feels different when a publisher silences an author. Perhaps because publishers historically championed unpopular books and authors.

Ironically, Hawley’s book is entitled, The Tyranny of Big Tech.

Not The First Time

This isn’t the first time S&S has cancelled a book by a conservative author.