Civics: Amazon Prime Cancels Shelby Steele

David Harsanyi:

Though most of the focus is on Twitter’s White Knighting of Joe Biden, it’s also worth noting that many other voices are inhibited by Big Tech because they fail to conform to leftist orthodoxy.

Just today, the Wall Street Journal reported that Shelby Steele’s documentary What Killed Michael Brown?, which explores race relations in the United States, has been rejected because it “doesn’t meet Prime Video’s content quality expectations.” Amazon claims the documentary, which Steele made with his son Eli, isn’t “eligible for publishing” and that they “will not be accepting resubmission of this title and this decision may not be appealed.”

Shelby is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a well-regarded intellectual who has been writing on race in America for decades. Steele received a National Humanities Medal and won a National Book Critics Circle Award for his essay collection The Content of Our Character. In the same year, he produced an Emmy-Award winning documentary “Seven Days in Bensonhurst,” about Yusef Hawkins, a black teenager who was murdered by a white mob in 1989.

I don’t mention Shelby’s impressive resume as an appeal to authority. I mention it to put all of this in perspective. Here are some of the non-fiction efforts that apparently do meet Amazon’s “quality expectations”: