In 2023, NLPC presented a shareholder proposal at Amazon that called upon the company to disclose in an itemized report the incidents in which it had received requests by the U.S. government to remove merchandise or content from its sales platform. The proposal was one of several we presented at Big Tech companies in response to their widespread censorship of conservatives, often at the behest of deep state bureaucrats in the Biden administration.
The proposal cited examples of Amazon’s removal of services and products from availability to the public including the fledgling social media platform Parler, which essentially was killed as a result of removal from Amazon Web Services, as well as books disfavored by the White House and materials that did not align with the government’s preferred narrative on COVID.
And a specific title cited in NLPC’s proposal that Amazon removed was the book “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment,” by Ryan T. Anderson, who at the time was a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and is currently president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Now, Fox News reports, Amazon has — after four years — made Anderson’s book available to customers again:
“I think this is purely a political move. Four years ago, with the Biden administration, they thought that they were on the right side of history. And now, four years later, they see that they’re not,” he told Fox News Digital.
“My guess is that they didn’t want the Federal Trade Commission to open an investigation,” Anderson continued.
“When Harry Became Sally” rose to the top of two of Amazon’s bestseller lists after it was published in 2018. The book aimed to provide “thoughtful answers to questions arising from our transgender moment” and offered a “a balanced approach to public policy on gender identity, and a sober assessment of the human costs of getting human nature wrong.”
Amazon pulled the book from its website in February 2021, just weeks after President Biden took office.
As NLPC’s proposal suggested, and now that the reality of the new Trump administration is setting in, Amazon clearly wants to avoid transparency about the details behind the ban of Anderson’s book.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, and Andrew Ferguson, Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, expressed interest in Anderson’s case this week.
“It just strikes me that this was more of a political move on Amazon’s part,” the author told Fox News Digital. “They haven’t apologized. Rather than apologizing, saying that we got it wrong four years ago, they make it seem like it’s a tough call. That this is right on the razor’s edge of what’s acceptable speech and what’s unacceptable speech.”
Glad to see it, but it shouldn’t take an election for this to happen. I still want to know why this book got banned, and understand the market conditions that make it possible for a retailer to refuse to sell a popular book for four years. https://t.co/7PI2G9Vcmh
— Andrew Ferguson (@AFergusonFTC) February 5, 2025
In 2023, NLPC’s proposal received less than two percent of support in a vote by shareholders at Amazon’s annual meeting. That means it was universally opposed on the ballots of those who are stewards over their customers’ holdings — firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, and all the others you can think of. Same goes for the financial officers and treasurers who oversee pensions and retirement funds for current and former public employees — both from red and blue states.
All of them aligned to protect the swamp from discovery of the Biden administration’s First Amendment violations, which NLPC sought to ferret out. Anderson’s book is only back on Amazon because President Trump and his administration are in the process of exposing it all.
