SFF Creators Sign Letter Opposing Book Deals for Trump

Over 300 writers and editors have signed the No Book Deals for Traitors “letter of intent from publishing professionals of the United States,” including more than two dozen from the SFF field.

The text of the letter says:

We all love book publishing, but we have to be honest — our country is where it is in part because publishing has chased the money and notoriety of some pretty sketchy people, and has granted those same people both the imprimatur of respectability and a lot of money through sweetheart book deals.

As members of the writing and publishing community of the United States, we affirm that participation in the administration of Donald Trump must be considered a uniquely mitigating criterion for publishing houses when considering book deals.

Consequently, we believe: No participant in an administration that caged children, performed involuntary surgeries on captive women, and scoffed at science as millions were infected with a deadly virus should be enriched by the almost rote largesse of a big book deal. And no one who incited, suborned, instigated, or otherwise supported the January 6, 2021 coup attempt should have their philosophies remunerated and disseminated through our beloved publishing houses.

“Son of Sam” laws exist to prevent criminals from benefiting financially from writing about their crimes. In that spirit, those who enabled, promulgated, and covered up crimes against the American people should not be enriched through the coffers of publishing.

We are writers, editors, journalists, agents, and professionals in multiple forms of publishing. We believe in the power of words and we are tired of the industry we love enriching the monsters among us, and we will do whatever is in our power to stop it.

SFF authors and editors who have signed include:

  • Alex Acks (Author)
  • Charlie Jane Anders (author, Victories Greater Than Death)
  • Phoebe Barton (Writer)
  • Lauren Beukes (Author)
  • Holly Black (Author)
  • Stephen Blackmoore (Author)
  • Gwenda Bond (Author)
  • Cassandra Clare (Writer)
  • Anya Johanna DeNiro (Author)
  • Carl Engle-Laird (Editor, Macmillan)
  • Rose Fox (former senior reviews editor, Publishers Weekly)
  • Sarah Gailey (Author)
  • Jasmine Gower (Author)
  • Leigh Harlen (Author)
  • Sarah Hollowell (Author)
  • S.A. Hunt (Author)
  • Keffy Kehrli (Writer & Editor (GlitterShip magazine))
  • Mikki Kendall (Writer)
  • Cassandra Khaw (Senior Scriptwriter)
  • Sarah Kozloff (Author)
  • Stina Leicht (Author)
  • Malinda Lo (Author)
  • M Evan MacGriogair (Author)
  • Dan Moren (Author)
  • Sarah Pinsker (Author)
  • Chelsea Polk (Author)
  • Lev Rosen (Author)
  • Jason Sanford (Author)
  • Jon Skovron (Author)
  • Greg van Eekhout (Author)
  • Chuck Wendig (Author with PRH, S&S, etc)
  • Merc Fenn Wolfmoor (Author)

There is provision at the link for signers in the industry to add their names, so the number will be expanding.

69 thoughts on “SFF Creators Sign Letter Opposing Book Deals for Trump

  1. WELL SAID! There’s a line from the Who’s rock opera “Tommy” that ends,”Let’s forget you better still.” No more free rent in our heads for Donald J. Trump!

  2. Some people will have to be reminded that this is not a First Amendment violation. No one owes T**** or anyone else a publishing contract.

    Besides, he could always self-publish. What would THAT look like?

  3. Dave Creek: Besides, he could always self-publish. What would THAT look like?

    I think the answer to that is already known: a bunch of it was on the Hugo ballot in 2015 and 2016. 😐

  4. JJ says I think the answer to that is already known: a bunch of it was on the Hugo ballot in 2015 and 2016.

    It is possible to competently self-publish as y’all know. Of course it helps if you’re both intelligent and skilled at what you’re doing. Intelligence being not defined by an IQ rating.

    Now playing: Steeleye Span’s “The Elf-Knight”

  5. @Lis
    I have trouble imagining what he’d write. He’s the one who put together this:

    President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings.

    That’s his description of his public schedule.

  6. @P J Evans–Indeed. And he might find it harder to get a ghost writer, now that no one can even pretend not to know that he never pays his bills.

  7. If speech can’t offend, there is no freedom of speech.

    If speech doesn’t incite to violence, it’s totalitarian to suppress it.

    No one owes anyone a publishing contract, true. But these authors are engaging in a totalitarian suppression attempt of free speech.

    Btw I’m left and no fan of Trump, but I come from a former totalitarian regime and I’m pro freedom of speech because I’ve seen this:

    “ First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
    Because I was not a socialist.

    Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
    Because I was not a trade unionist.

    Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
    Because I was not a Jew.

    Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

    First they came for Trump, and I didn’t speak out –
    Because I was not a trumpist…

    It’s always a slippery slope, the left is already eating its own for the slightest “error” in speech, bc what was PC yesterday is hate speech today..

  8. So much for the idea of “if you don’t like the author, just don’t buy their books”.

    FWIW, I read “The Art of the Deal” and don’t really need to read anything further to understand our current President.

    Regards,
    Dann
    “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” – George Orwell

  9. Val: No one owes anyone a publishing contract, true. But these authors are engaging in a totalitarian suppression attempt of free speech… First they came for Trump, and I didn’t speak out – Because I was not a trumpist…

    Oh, please. 🙄  These authors are also engaging in their own free speech. They have no authority to enforce anything.

    Nobody “came” for Trump. He’s still sitting in the White House being as obstructionist as possible. And if he does get imprisoned, it’ll be because of his actual crimes, not because somebody doesn’t want him to have free speech.

  10. Val:

    “First they came for Trump, and I didn’t speak out –
    Because I was not a trumpist…”

    Well, how do you do, my fellow “leftist”. This was one of the most stupid paraphrases I’ve seen in a long time. Likening someone not publishing a fascist known for inciting violence and a state coup with nazis putting socialists in concentration camps.

    Of all stupidities…

  11. Val, Trump’s fascist cult literally already came for everyone else on your stupid paraphrase. Your abuse of Niemöller’s poem would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad. Your version should probably go more like this:

    First, Trump came for everybody,
    and I didn’t speak out,
    because I thought ‘what about free speech’

    Then we started banning the fascists,
    and I suddenly spoke out
    because I sympathize with them more

    Then they came for me – and criticized my posts on the internet ;_;

  12. Right off, I wondered who it was who decides what counts as participation in the [Trump] administration. If you are going to ban a category of people from publication, shouldn’t you at least define the parameters of that category first? And, for that matter, who writes the definition? The signers don’t seem to have considered these questions.

    I wondered too whether there’s not a major over-reaction going on here. You’re binding yourself together as a group of people who are resolved that you will not — no never, not ever — consider anything, anything at all that a “participant” might write, on its merits? Your desire to punish (to exact revenge?) is so great that you excuse yourself from the effort of deliberation? My goodness.

    Please consider the potential of something like this to come back and bite you. Governments change. The safest norm is that which protects free speech even of bad people. One might oneself be calssed as a bad person one day. This proposal goes far beyond seeking justice.

  13. Please. A possible book deal isnt about free speech or ideals–its about money. Should T**** be allowed another way to profit from perfidy?

    He’ll find an eager ghost writer, probably what’s his name–the ghoul, you know–and some Murdoch will publish it and millions will buy his mein kampf piffle because millions of people are every bit as awful as he is.

    Good on those creators to demand better. It won’t prevent the “fart of the heel,” but they are doing the right thing.

  14. Dann665, The Art of the Deal was ghost-written with effectively no input from Trump. It made Trump seem like a better and more interesting person than he was. The ghost writer is painfully regretful for having contributed to Donald Trump becoming president.

  15. @Nancy Lebovitz

    I know it was ghostwritten. While Mr. Trump didn’t have much to do with the writing, I think it is safe to say that he had some input on the general themes.

    Essentially, “slather the Trump name on a building, say big things, people will buy and I make money”.

    Regards,
    Dann
    No way, I took call waiting of!@#$!(!@ ) #$! NO CARRIER

  16. Val, you don’t seem to understand the First Amendment. It’s about preventing censorship by government. Businesses can refuse to do business with people, and it isn’t a restriction of free speech in any way. (Read the terms of service on your accounts some time.)

  17. There are plenty of conservative niche publishing houses out there and self-publishing is also a viable option, so I doubt that Trump or any senior members of his administration (and no, I don’t think we should punish the guy assigned to guard the left backdoor of the White House by refusing to publish his debut novel either) will have problems getting published and having their voices heard.

    However, with a lot of these political memoirs and books, it’s more about the huge advances (which rarely earn out) than about getting their voice heard.

  18. @P J Evans

    Val, you don’t seem to understand the First Amendment. It’s about preventing censorship by government.

    Why are you splaining the 1st Amendment to Val? He didn’t bring it up.

  19. @Val

    With all due respect, your comment is idiotic.

    If speech doesn’t incite to violence,

    Except that Trump’s speech did incite to violence. Right after he finished speaking, the insurrectionists marched on the Capitol.

    But these authors are engaging in a totalitarian suppression attempt of free speech.

    Oh, please. That is downright stupid. As many people have pointed out, Trump has plenty of publishing paths. Regnery, the publisher that pumps out largely conservative tomes, will likely snap him up. And, guess what! There’s always Kindle Unlimited and Smashwords! (Except that I’m sure he’ll need a gazilliion-dollar advance to help him pay off his debts, now that DeutschBank won’t have anything else to do with him.)

    Your comment is a continuation of something I see from a lot of conservatives–they want to have their “freeze peach” without consequences. Sorry, after inciting a riot and trying to overthrow a free and fair election, that ain’t happening.

  20. @ bill

    Why are you splaining the 1st Amendment to Val? He didn’t bring it up.

    Yes, Val implicitly did by calling the letter “totalitarian,” which speaks of government intervention. And the letter is closer to being a boycott than anything involving the First Amendment.

  21. @Bonnie McDaniel

    Trump has plenty of publishing paths.

    And the signers of the letter seek to block all of them.

    @Rob Thornton

    Val implicitly did by calling the letter “totalitarian,”

    Censorship is totalitarian. If the signers don’t want to read Trump’s book, that’s fine. But they are trying to keep everyone from reading it. When a few people work to impose their will on everyone, what is that but totalitarianism?

  22. And the signers of the letter seek to block all of them.

    That’s rather difficult, since I strongly suspect that a conservative niche publisher won’t give a flying fart about what some left-leaning writers and publishing professionals demand. Or do you honestly think that the likes of Regenery, let alone Castalia House care? Let alone publishers from outside the US.

    And even if no publisher can be found who is willing to take on a book by Trump or any senior member of his administration, they can always self-publish. Yes, Amazon, Smashwords, B&N, Kobo, Draft2Digital, etc… occasionally block books, usually because of plagiarism, fraud or taboo erotica. But it’s difficult to imagine that all of them would block a book by Trump or a member of his administration, just because they don’t like Trump. Unless Trump’s next book is “Having hot tentacle sex with the underage babysitter next door”, he should be fine.

    There’s a lot of highly problematic stuff, much of it self-published, to be found on Amazon and the other vendors and no one cares. I once reported a book that was basically a manual for how to murder your neighbour and steal their stuff in case of the apocalypse to Amazon and got the response that they think a manual on how to murder your neighbour is totally fine. There’s a book by some self.styled Christian parenting experts that advocates massive child abuse and has been linked to the deaths of children and yet Amazon won’t pull it, because pulling the book (which has been linked to actual deaths) would supposedly violate the author’s religious freedom.

    And even if somehow the entire traditional, hybrid and self-publishing would conspire to keep Trump and his staff from publishing, Trump could pay for his own print run and sell e-books from his own website and paperbacks in his hotels. There are always ways and Trump, being fairly wealthy, has more of them than most of us.

  23. “When a few people work to impose their will on everyone, what is that but totalitarianism?”

    Lobbying, democracy, marketplace, lawmaking and more. But for some people it is totalitarianism to impose laws on the usage of seatbelts.

  24. 15) Gilbert Seldes recording from the NYPR Archives is quite good.

    “Something is coming at us, and that something is dangerous. The enemy is outside, and we are placed in a defensive position.”
    “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.”
    “We don’t like to think the fault is in ourselves, so we have projected a scapegoat, from an outer world. An outer world that is hostile.”

    Seldes dislikes the mad scientist, who tries to overcome the laws of nature in order to defeat them.

    He speaks of the Lysenko case, and rails against the idea of science being dependent on political power.

    In sum, an intelligent and fun commentary, even though he gets a name wrong: Roy Bradbury.

    Bonus: the only comment is by Barry Malzberg, a fine anecdote about Seldes commencment address at Syracuse in 1960, where the valedictorian speech by Joyce Carol Oates was rained out by a sudden storm.

  25. @Bill

    From the Encyclopedia Brittanica:

    Totalitarianism, form of government that theoretically permits no individual freedom and that seeks to subordinate all aspects of individual life to the authority of the state.

    (italics mine)

    You are barking up the wrong tree here. You are also ignoring what everyone else is saying, that there are more paths to a finished book than traditional publishing. Answer the question. Can Trump self-publish his book through his own website or print on demand (or Amazon, Smashwords, etc etc etc), whether or not a traditional publisher will have anything to do with him? Yes or No, please.

    If Yes, how does that qualify as “censorship”?

  26. The would-be censors miss the point – the 1st Amendment is a means for securing freedom of speech, not an end in itself. Freedom of speech is the goal, and finding workarounds and limitations in the Constitution to get around it is contrary to that goal. (Cue the mocking cries of “freeze peach”.)

    In deciding whether to publish a book, publishers should weigh its merits, its veracity, how it will inform the public conversation, (and how much money it will make). They should pay no attention at all to people who want the book or its author suppressed.

  27. Hyman Rosen:

    “In deciding whether to publish a book, publishers should weigh its merits, its veracity, how it will inform the public conversation,.”

    They don’t have to do any of that if they don’t want to and there’s certainly nothing in the first amendment that says they have to. If that’s your ideal for a publisher, then go for that when you publish books. Other publishers can do whatever they want, including ignoring people like you and instead opting to listen to the signatories of the letter.

    There’s no “should” for a publisher decided by people without a majority shareholder position.

  28. Hyman Rosen: In deciding whether to publish a book, publishers should weigh its merits, its veracity, how it will inform the public conversation, (and how much money it will make). They should pay no attention at all to people who want the book or its author suppressed.

    I’m going to quote a section of Wikipedia’s article on Freedom of Speech. It’s got citations, so if you question it, feel free to check them yourself.

    Freedom of speech and expression, therefore, may not be recognized as being absolute, and common limitations or boundaries to freedom of speech relate to libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, and perjury. Justifications for such include the harm principle, proposed by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, which suggests that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

    The dude incited a violent assault on the Capitol, on the United States’ elected representatives, and an attempted coup to overthrow the results of an honest and valid national election.

    Any publisher who decides that he committed sedition and incitement of an attempted coup is perfectly within their rights to refuse to publish further such statements to prevent further harm to the Democracy of the United States. The goddamn country is on the brink of losing its democracy, thanks to the big baby throwing the tantrum from the Oval Office. I would call that severe harm, and so would a lot of other Americans.

    Ex-President Whiner will be able to find a way to publish what he wants. Nobody has an obligation to provide him with that method, and individuals certainly have a right to try to persuade publishers that doing so would cause further harm.

  29. Personally, I think that if you are setting such broad guidelines on who shouldn’t be published, you also shouldn’t publish books by anyone who supported the disastrous wars against Libya and Iraq.

    That includes Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton.

  30. Hampus Eckerman: Personally, I think that if you are setting such broad guidelines on who shouldn’t be published, you also shouldn’t publish books by anyone who supported the disastrous wars against Libya and Iraq. That includes Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton.

    And if a bunch of authors published a statement arguing this, I would not argue against their right to do so, nor against publishers’ rights to not publish such works.

  31. Freeze Peach Advocates: “The best antidote to bad speech is more speech!”

    SF Writers: “OK.” Writes, signs letter urging publishers to refuse a book deal with Trump.

    Freeze Peach Advocates: “Not like that!”

  32. @Bonnie — Of course Trump has the right/ability to self-publish, that’s not the point. The point is that more and more, lefties are trying to tell the rest of the world what to read, what to think, what to say. That’s bad, and it’s censorship, even when it’s not the government doing it, and it’s what totalitarians do.

    I’m perfectly capable of deciding for myself what I don’t want to read. I don’t need authors, publishers, facebook, twitter, Amazon, the Washington post, NPR all deciding, “Nah, suppress this — they don’t need it anyway.”

    (And since we’re asking each other to pick references apart – here‘s Trump’s speech of Jan 6. You said “Trump’s speech did incite to violence.” Can you point to the passage where this happened? Where he said “Go do violence”?

    You said “Right after he finished speaking, the insurrectionists marched on the Capitol.” When you’re done finding the incitement passage, you may want to look up “Post hoc ergo propter hoc.“)

  33. bill: For a crowd that Trump’s cronies had summoned, riddled with insurrections they were calling the signals for, this passage seems quite sufficient to insure a violent outcome:

    All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing. And stolen by the fake news media. That’s what they’ve done and what they’re doing. We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved

    Did you know that in Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day Speech, at no point does he say, “Go do violence”? And yet the Battle of Agincourt somehow happened.

  34. bill: The point is that more and more, lefties are trying to tell the rest of the world what to read, what to think, what to say. That’s bad, and it’s censorship, even when it’s not the government doing it, and it’s what totalitarians do.

    You know what, when the “right” (and boy, is that an oxymoron if there ever was one), when the right stops:
    – putting corporate profits ahead of the best interests of the planet and the environment
    – putting corporate profits ahead of the health, safety, and wellbeing of workers
    – putting corporate profits ahead of the ability for all people, especially those in service professions, to be able to make a living wage, regardless of the perceived level of their “contribution”
    – blocking the ability for the government to provide both preventative and therapeutic healthcare for everyone in the country at no cost to individuals (the U.S. is a third-world “shithole” country in this regard, nationalized healthcare can and does work)
    – making laws telling women what they can or can’t do with their own bodies
    – endorsing and subsidizing policing and legal policies which target and persecute people who don’t have white skin
    – making quality education something that only wealthy can afford
    – putting the majority of the population into subsistence or poverty conditions while they accumulate all the wealth and control everything
    – trying to take equal voting rights away from everyone but themselves

     
    then, then, you can come back and I’ll be willing discuss this claim with you.

    Until then — nope. Because this is what “lefties” are telling the rest of the world they have to think and say and do:
    – no, you can’t treat workers abusively or underpay them
    – no, you can’t denigrate and persecute people of color, women, or LGBTQ
    – no, you can’t destroy the environment in the course of making yourselves a profit
    – no, you can’t force your religion down other peoples’ throats
    – no, you can’t avoid paying your fair share of taxes
    – no, you can’t enact laws and engage in practices which impoverish the majority of the country while you wallow in wealth and luxury
    – no, you can’t turn this country into an authoritarian dictatorship run by you

    And if you object to “lefties” telling people that they can’t do these things and that they have to stop saying that doing them is okay, it pretty much tells me all I need to know about you.

  35. bill:

    “Of course Trump has the right/ability to self-publish, that’s not the point. The point is that more and more, lefties are trying to tell the rest of the world what to read, what to think, what to say.”

    I’d say this is something that goes for both sides of the spectra. The cancel culture is extremely strong on the right where they try to monitor universities and teachers, getting them fired if they get out of line. Several rightwing states has passed illegal laws saying people can’t be vocal against Israeli apartheid while being state employed, something that is against the first amendment.

    So lets not pretend this is something only coming from the left. Especially at it is mostly rightwing capitalist companies that control who gets to say what to what audience. Such as when Facebook systematically lowered the number of hits to leftist sites like Mother Jones to cause them to loose millions in revenue and to appease republicans.

  36. @Hampus Eckerman

    I’d say this is something that goes for both sides of the spectra.

    That is a fair observation. Although the recent takedown of Parler was done by companies with a pretty left-leaning culture among their employees. It’s hard to pigeon hole everything into simple “right/capitalist” vs. “left/socialist” categories.

    Personally, I think that if you are setting such broad guidelines on who shouldn’t be published, you also shouldn’t publish books by anyone who supported the disastrous wars against Libya and Iraq.

    That’s really a big part of the problem. Our mainstream media offers a moral discount to Democrat politicians. Left-leaning politicians playing footsie with radicals is largely ignored by the media while similar behavior is thoroughly demonized when right-leaning politicians are involved with other radicals.

    I have both good and bad things to say about Mr. Trump and his administration. That is viewed as an unconscionable position by both the strident left and the strident right.

    @Bonnie McDaniel

    Except that Trump’s speech did incite to violence. Right after he finished speaking, the insurrectionists marched on the Capitol.

    As a technical matter, Mr. Trump’s speech on the 6th didn’t violate the Brandenburg test for incitement. Focusing on that one speech is a flawed distraction, IMO.

    Those people would not have been in DC if Mr. Trump and his team hadn’t been repeatedly asserting that the election was stolen. It wasn’t. It was a close election. There were (and are) issues worthy of investigation, but none of them would have altered the outcome. If Mr. Trump and his team hadn’t been lying, then there would not have been a rally. If there was no rally, then there was no cover for those insurgents to use in their assault on the capitol.

    Kind of a long-winded way of saying I agree with your assertion of incitement even if the particulars are debatable.

    Separately, if these authors had focused solely on Mr. Trump, then I probably wouldn’t care…much. Any book with his name on the cover would likely be ghostwritten with minimal input from him. Basically, I don’t think that he is likely to offer any thoughtful reflections or meaningful introspections on his term in office.

    Broadening it to cover anyone in the administration is more than a bit totalitarian even if it doesn’t satisfy the definition of censorship that requires government action.

    Additionally, such a ban on other administration figures would decrease the ability of those figures to provide a productive accounting of their time in office. Ajit Pai’s term has been largely productive. Reading Jared Kushner’s account of negotiating (4) peace agreements would be informative for future generations. Hell, Dr. Fauci would be covered under this project to silence Trump administration figures.

    Their project is ill-considered.

    Regards,
    Dann
    “It used to be said that it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness. Today, we admire those who curse the candle—because it is not perfect, not free, not whatever the complainers want it to be.”–Thomas Sowell

  37. Dann665:

    “That is a fair observation. Although the recent takedown of Parler was done by companies with a pretty left-leaning culture among their employees.”

    It was done by companies ruled by rightwing capitalists with a rightwing culture, yes.

    “Left-leaning politicians playing footsie with radicals is largely ignored by the media…”

    When left-leaning politicians play footsie with radicals, it is usually with rightwing radicals who support coups and war crimes in other countries. There is bipartisan agreement in US to support capitalist and colonialist attacks against other countries.

    US more or less has no left. It has center-right and lunatic-right.

  38. @Mike Glyer — Projection. You see what you want to see. Trump pushed for a strong protest, he did not push for violence. He explicitly said, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

    WRT to Henry V, I’m not sure what you are getting at, but I’m pretty sure that a dramatic speech written in 1599 had nothing to do with what actually motivated soldiers in 1415. (And FWIW, Henry [the Shakespeare character, not the historical figure] did say “Go do violence” in Scene VII:
    “Besides, we’ll cut the throats of those we have,
    And not a man of them that we shall take
    Shall taste our mercy.”)

    @JJ — a laundry list of policy differences between Left and Right is irrelevant to the fact that a robust embrace of freedom of expression is a good thing, and the left is pushing against it, hard.

    “If you object to “lefties” telling people that they can’t do these things and that they have to stop saying that doing them is okay,”
    Read for comprehension. I’m not objecting to what lefties say; I’m objecting to lefties supressing the speech of the right (by acts such as shutting down Parler, by campus speech codes and disinviting conservative speakers, by Twitter and FB suspending right-biased accounts and threads, etc.) You, as a leftie, can say whatever you want. Just don’t close the paths for you ideological opponents to do the same.

    @Hampus — I don’t think your links support your position (especially the second one — I don’t think that California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey are “rightwing” states). And your post is the first time I’ve seen Facebook described as a “rightwing capitalist company”.

    [Parler’s takedown] was done by companies ruled by rightwing capitalists with a rightwing culture,

    The three biggest events causing Parler’s takedown were Apple and Google removing the app from their app stores and Amazon denying them server space. None of the companies are in any way “rightwing”.

  39. @bill, Mike is not projecting the fact that Trump used the word ‘fight’ over 20 times in exhorting the crowd to go over to the Capitol and do whatever it was he wanted them to do. That proportion makes the word ‘peaceful’ come off like a perfunctory fig leaf of deniability.

    Not to mention that he outright lied that he was going to go with them to the Capitol. If he had accompanied them and guided them to stand down if they acted against his allegedly peaceful intentions, that would have gone a long way to showing he actually DID want a peaceful demonstration. But instead he prudently slunk back to the White House and watched the outcome on TV, refusing for hours to tell his followers to stop what they were doing…thus lending strength to the interpretation that they were doing what he wanted them to. If this all DOES come to trial on the Senate floor, I expect testimony of what he said and did during the time after the speech will go a long way toward further clarifying his intentions.

    “The three biggest events causing Parler’s takedown were Apple and Google removing the app from their app stores and Amazon denying them server space. None of the companies are in any way “rightwing”.”

    So, you think these capitalist giants are ‘leftwing?’ To me, it just looks like they made a cool calculation that the political instability pushed by Trump would cut into profits, and acted accordingly.

  40. @ Dann665

    I’m going to disagree with you about the Brandenburg test.

    Here’s the Supreme Court applying the test in NAACP vs Claiborne Hardware Co (1985):

    “Strong and effective extemporaneous rhetoric cannot be nicely channeled in purely dulcet phrases. An advocate must be free to stimulate his audience with spontaneous and emotional appeals for unity and action in a common cause. When such appeals do not incite lawless action, they must be regarded as protected speech.”***

    If a speech persuades its listeners to go out and perform “lawless action,” it fails the Brandenburg test. I think a good case can be made that Trump incited the crowd to march on Congress.

    ***from Cornell’s Legal Information Institute site, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/brandenburg_test

  41. bill: I’m sorry, it was Donald Trump Jr. who said: “The best thing for America’s future is for Donald Trump to go to total war over this election to expose all of the fraud, cheating, dead/no longer in state voters, that has been going on for far too long.”

    A lot of people tried to shield Nixon and make it look like he didn’t know about the illegal things his underlings were up to, then the tapes came to light. The lesson should not be forgotten that underlings don’t call their own plays. What happened on January 6 was the fulfillment of the message Trump’s family and underlings put out. And we know who the beneficiary was.

  42. bill:

    Facebook is absolutely a rightwing capitalist company, just as Google, Apple and Amazon. They are brutally anti-unionist and campaigns for tax-extemptions and low wages. That is as rightwing as you can be. And you only make yourself look stupid when you only mention four states out of the thirty-two that has passed laws.

  43. @Jayn

    So, you think these capitalist giants are ‘leftwing?’

    Of course. For example, their employees donated to Democrats at multiples over Republican (Apple 5 to 1, Google 7-1, Amazon 4-1).

    @Mike Glyer

    And we know who the beneficiary was.

    Absolutely no one benefitted from the events of Jan 6.

    @Hampus
    Pretty much all big corporations are anti-union and for low wages. That doens’t make them right wing, it makes them interested in profits.

  44. bill: Absolutely no one benefitted from the events of Jan 6

    According to T*ump’s staffers, he was glued to the TV for hours during the insurrection and was absolutely elated about it. His ego certainly benefited from it.

  45. bill: Absolutely no one benefitted from the events of Jan 6.

    Citation needed. The Trumpists who set those events in motion intended to benefit from them.

  46. bill:
    .

    “Pretty much all big corporations are anti-union and for low wages. That doens’t make them right wing, it makes them interested in profits.”

    It absolutely makes them rightwing. Thank you for so clearly stating that pretty much all big corporations are rightwing entities. Leftwing companies would be those that don’t try to avoid taxes, that are pro-union and believe in an egalitarian system for giving out the profits to the employees, i.e those who work to make the profits possible.

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