Facebook shut down our hopes for an anti-woke book world for children

The books I want to buy for my children, books like the ones I was raised on, are no longer on the market. Children are now bombarded with mind-numbing, repetitive, didactic woke indoctrination. These books don’t even tell stories anymore. They teach children to hate their country and themselves. 

Heroes of Liberty, my new children’s-book company for which I’m editing, was created to give parents an alternative. We can’t take back the schools overnight, but we can start taking back the bookshelves. 

We decided to build a community on Facebook to share our message and market our books to like-minded parents. Parents who might be interested in wholesome stories about Ronald Reagan, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Thomas Sowell. 

But then Facebook decided to snuff out our little enterprise. Apparently, an illustrated biography celebrating the achievements of President Reagan is no longer permissible according to our Big Tech cultural overlords. They have informed us that our content is “disruptive” and locked our ad account, our data banks, our digital assets. 

They sunk our investment just like that, with a curt e-mail message. We appealed and were informed that the decision is final and permanent. 

The Facebook logo on a phone being held in front of a Christmas tree.
The publisher’s account was shut down just days before Christmas, when it was in the midst of ramping up advertisements.
Filip Radwanski/SOPA Images/Shutterstock

Marketing shut down

The best way we thought we could find and serve families that share our vision is by building a relationship. And what is the best place to create and nurture relationships in the 21st century? The biggest social network in the world. We poured most of our marketing budget into building communities on Facebook and Instagram. 

But then, days before Christmas, we had the brakes put on our entire plan. 

Our ads weren’t flashy or exciting; one of the most popular ones read, “Christmas is here, and it’s the perfect time to celebrate with your children. Celebrate family, celebrate freedom, celebrate America. And meet the PERFECT celebration bundle!” We included photos of the book bundle and figurines, with promises of free shipping. 

Ronald Reagan and wife Nancy.
Former President Ronald Reagan was one of the biographical subjects the publishing house wrote about that came under fire.
Everett/Shutterstock

Your standard stuff in the run-up to Christmas — you see advertisements like it all over the Internet. 

Except Facebook decided to shut ours down. They deemed our ads “disruptive content” and permanently disabled our account. With that, we were no longer allowed to advertise, and our assets — our content on our page — were disabled. 

The “disruptive” part was found in the comments on our posts about our books, with Facebook users objecting to our promotion of individuals they found worthy of cancellation. They likely reported our content en masse, triggering Facebook’s censors. The same mob that tears down statues in the real world finds the online equivalent in reporting content that is not for his radical taste. 

One comment read, “You do know that your hero Regan illegally supported the reigns of dictators in Central America?” Another user remarked, “I am conflicted. My respect for the 1st Amendment says they should be allowed to publish this twaddle — but my sense of decency is telling me to buy these books just to burn them. Maybe burn the Barrett book twice due to cellular level evil.” 

Burning desire 

They didn’t manage to burn our books, but they did figure out how to figuratively burn a burgeoning book publisher. 

We used to criticize Facebook for censoring conservatives’ opinions. Now it seems like it censors everything that is not woke. 

Writing on Twitter about our situation, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) opined, “When conservatives start independent publishing outlets and platforms, #BigTech companies like Facebook now work to destroy them. This latest example is particularly galling.” 

Ted Cruz speaks into a microphone and points into the distance.
Cruz came to the defense of the publishing company, saying “Big Tech” tries to stifle conservatives’ voices.
Polaris

We aren’t destroyed, but this move has seriously undercut our ability to market our books to a community that we worked hard to find and cultivate — and it’s also a financial setback. But there are some things even Facebook can’t undo. In the last two months we found that we have an audience that ordered tens of thousands of books and came back to tell us — in so many ways — that they are as passionate about our mission as we are. 

Book banning and burning have been a popular strategy among authoritarians for hundreds of years. Authoritarians know that controlling the written word and ideologically capturing a generation is the best way to ideologically brainwash a society. Over the course of the last decade, we’ve seen how woke ideologues have taken over the publishing industry and Big Tech, trying to influence a future generation of Americans with radical content. 

They told us: If you don’t like it, do your own thing. Well, we did our own thing, and they tried to take us down. But we are not going away, and we invite you to get off Facebook, find us, join our journey and help create an alternative to the woke culture that Big Tech is trying to force on our bookshelf and eventually our kids. 

Twitter and Instagram: ­@bethanyshondark

source: nypost.com