U.S. Ratchets Up
Censorship
Welcome to the Amazon aquarium,
Where you can swim without care.
If you only go where you’re supposed to,
You won’t even know that you’re there.
But thanks to my contrariness,
An upsetting thing came to pass.
Determined to showcase the truth,
I discovered the glass.
Here are a couple of customer book reviews of
interest that are currently on the Amazon.com web site:
He really cares a great deal about giving all of the various points of view...
Having arrived at this subject matter by way of
a recommendation of DC Dave (David Martin), I was a newcomer to the writing of
the author Mike Campbell. I believe that Mr. Campbell is one of the most
talented and passionate authors of non-fiction I've ever encountered. He really
cares a great deal about presenting all of the various
points of view, arguments and opinions of the numerous researchers and authors
who have attempted to solve this mystery over the past decades. I find this
book as the major authoritative compilation or encyclopedia
of all previous works on the subject of Amelia Earhart &
Fred Noonan. Mr. Campbell is concerned with one primary element, and
that is providing the reader with the straight truth. No sugar coating of
anything or anyone in this book. There is a tremendous number of persons,
dates, locations, and historical facts to keep track of, but throughout this
work Mr. Campbell presents the unvarnished truth concerning all. You will have
no doubt about what really happened when you finish reading this book. – Michael A. Hawkins,
April 24, 2018, review of Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last 2nd edition
It is very humbling to follow DC Dave’s
review...
...considering that I am just a former naval
officer interested in finding out what I can about the Navy that I loved and
hated.
As I read more books about the Navy I am fascinated by a trend that emerges
that truly typifies "Don't rock the boat"
This attitude was definitely present in my short 8 year career in "this
man's Navy"
This biography of Forrestal is a rather sad portrayal of someone who virtually
gave his life to serve his country.
"Driven Patriot" could not have been titled any more appropriately.
In a time when so few people choose to join the military, here was a man who
gave up a great deal to serve his country.
Reading about his personal life is a little like peeking in an open window but
Forrestal's relationships with Adm King and others
was fascinating. His personal life took a back seat to his appointment but
there is far more to his life than his being a patriotic workaholic.
It is ironic that the catastrophic fire that occurred on the USS Forrestal is
now a primer for how to deal with fires on board ships.
Am anxious to explore the resources that DC Dave cites but for now I would
heartily recommend this book as just another piece of the puzzle that allowed
the Greatest Generation to overcome the zealous Axis nations. – Island Sailor, July 15, 2013, review of Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of
James Forrestal
This one, whose title I did not record, I see
has been taken down:
Some time ago I wrote a
book review on Amazon of Peter Janney's book Mary's Mosaic. There are
similarities between that case and this case that Mr. DC Dave has opened up for us in his in-depth and mesmerizing analysis,
"Looking at Washington corruption through a keyhole." When I read the
review, I had a strong sense of not looking through a keyhole, but rather being
introduced to a criminal investigation "with the double doors shot wide
open on either side." There is no beating around the bushes here! On the
contrary, in every line Mr. DC Dave cuts straight through to the core, lightens
up as he goes and adds information which, in his opinion, should already have been
in the book from the beginning. Why not write his own book about this subject? I welcome it, and
so would many others. - Harald Jan, November 15, 2015, review of The Strange Death of Vincent Foster by Christopher Ruddy.*
Here is the now-deleted review that Jan was talking about.
As of September 21, 2025, the title of “Island
Sailor’s” review is out of date. There
is no longer a DC Dave review there for him to follow. That’s when Amazon, in language that even George
Orwell could hardly have dreamed up, brought down the hammer and removed all of my many book reviews from its web site. The subject line saying
“Important information regarding your Amazon posts” was so unthreatening that
it would be easy for a person to overlook it, especially when the person
sending it was “Community Help-Amazon.”
In fact, I had overlooked their first warning to me on September 16 and
hadn’t opened it in my very full inbox.
I had to go back and find it after discovering their September 21
blockbuster:
|
Obviously, in the eyes of Jeff Bezos and the
folks at Amazon, I have been a very naughty boy, but how so? They don’t make it easy. You even have to
copy and paste the URLs they provide where they promise to provide answers,
because they don’t make them hot links, and they don’t say when that initial
warning was sent, who sent it, and what the subject line of that earlier
warning was. Fortunately, the initial
warning had come only five days before, so I didn’t have to scroll back too far
to find it, and I correctly guessed that it had also come from them with the
same misleading, unthreatening subject.
Here is what it said:
|
Bad, Bad DC Dave
So, what is it that I did that was out of
compliance with their policies, that is to say, that
violated their precious, apparently quite delicate “Community Guidelines,”
after all these years? That earlier
warning was a bit more informative, listing six lines that I might have stepped
over and telling me that I’d better go back and fix it or I risk being banished
from their “Community,” whatever that means.
My missing that first warning, it turns out, made no difference in what
resulted. I had used no profanity, I had
harassed no one, had used no hate speech, had shown no spite toward anyone, and
had provided no sexual content or engaged in any illegal activity. I can’t imagine what changes I could have
made in any of my three recent book reviews, at that point, to put me in right
with the “Community.”
It’s clear to me, though, that it was my
uncharacteristic spate of book-reviewing activity in September that caught the
attention of the Amazon censors. The
genesis of that activity was the confluence of two things. First, I made the discovery that the bedrock
book of the cover-up of the obvious assassination of America’s first Secretary
of Defense, James V. Forrestal, the 1963 book, James Forrestal: A Study of
Personality, Politics, and Policy by Arnold A. Rogow was available on Amazon,
and, to date, it had received only one review, which was very short and favorable, giving it five stars. I couldn’t, in good conscience, let that
situation stand. I had to do my part to
correct the record with my own review. Second,
I have been reminded by messages in my inbox that I have a large and growing
number of followers on Substack, and I could make the review of the Rogow book
perform double duty by putting it up on Substack. Then I thought of a couple of other book
reviews that I had posted on my web site and circulated but had never put up on
Amazon. They are my reviews of The Money and The Power: The Making of Las Vegas and
Its Hold on America by Sally Denton and Roger Morris and Black 9/11: Money, Motive, and
Technology by Mark Gaffney.
I posted my reviews of the three books each two
days after the other, starting with my review of the Rogow book on September
10. To conform to their length
requirements, I had to shorten my previously published reviews of The Money and the Power and Black 9/11 only a little bit. The links to the original versions of their
reviews are behind the titles. Here is
my complete Amazon review of the Rogow book as I posted it on Substack, except
that I forgot to give the title I used.
I’m providing it here from memory:
A propaganda book of great importance
If you want to be badly misinformed about the suspicious death
of America’s first Secretary of Defense, this is the
book for you. Rogow’s purpose is to persuade readers that James Forrestal more
or less went crazy and, after weeks of confinement in a room on the 16th
floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital, he finally tried to hang himself out of
the window of a kitchen across the hall from that room, and the sash that he
had tied to the radiator under the window somehow didn’t hold and he fell to
his death (would you believe?).
The book is replete with confident-sounding assertions for which Rogow has no
references and key statements of supposed fact that have been proven to be
false. For brevity’s sake, we shall offer only two examples. The first is
referring to the day of Forrestal’s supposed breakdown as he has returned home
from his last day at the Pentagon:
“In the privacy of his home Forrestal confessed to [Ferdinand] Eberstadt that
he was a complete failure and that he was considering suicide. He also expressed
the conviction that a number of individuals—Communists,
Jews, and certain persons in the White House—had formed a conspiracy to ‘get’ him, and had finally succeeded. He insisted that some of ‘them’
were probably in his home at that very moment, and he proceeded to search
closets and other areas of the house where they might be hiding.”
Eberstadt, one must assume, must be the source for that assertion, but Rogow
has no reference to any document or statement from Forrestal’s supposed closest
friend and confidant, the New York investment banker Eberstadt. One may search
the historical record high and low for direct verification of Rogow’s
sensational claims, and he will not find them. Rogow also tells us that
Forrestal returned from the Pentagon to an empty house in the company of an “aide,”
whose identity he fails to share with his readers. We later learn from the much
better Forrestal biography, “Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James
Forrestal,” by Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, that, in fact, Forrestal’s
longtime Filipino butler, who went by his first name of “Remy,” was at the
house, and we learn from a number of sources, including the aide himself, that
the man was Forrestal’s top assistant, Marx Leva. A likely reason why Rogow did
not identify Leva is because what Leva later had to say in an oral history
interview by the Truman Library undercuts almost everything that Rogow tells us
about what happened at the house, and Leva’s interview in no way supports that
supposed account from Eberstadt through Rogow.
Perhaps Rogow’s most important proven falsehood concerns the night of Forrestal’s
death:
“Late on the evening of May 21 Forrestal informed the Naval Corpsman on duty
that he did not want a sedative or sleeping pill and that he was planning to
stay up rather late and read. When the Corpsman looked in at approximately 1:45
on the morning of Sunday, May 22, Forrestal was copying onto several sheets of
paper Sophocles’s brooding ‘Chorus from Ajax’...”
How does Rogow know that that’s what the Navy corpsman did and saw? As with his
supposed account by Eberstadt he has no reference. And just as he doesn’t name
Marx Leva, he doesn’t name the corpsman, who was identified in the newspapers
at the time as Robert Wayne Harrison. Rogow also gives readers the false
impression that Harrison was the regular attendant for that time of night,
which he was not. He was in his second night of filling in for C. F. Suthers.
Hoopes and Brinkley don’t name him, but they tell us that he had gone AWOL,
although they have no verification for their assertion that that was the reason
why there was a substitute on duty.
The really Important thing, though, Is that, according to Harrison's own
testimony before a Navy review board, what Rogow told us was not true (Rogow
tells us correctly in a terse footnote that the board’s report—quite amazingly
so, we might add—had not been made public). Thanks to this reviewer’s FOIA
request, the board’s report was made public in 2004, and here is the key
testimony from Harrison:
Q. How many times did you speak to Mister Forrestal between the time you took
over the watch and the time he was missing?
A. Approximately three or four times.
Q. Did you notice anything unusual about Mister Forrestal’s behavior
during that time?
A. No, sir, I didn’t.
Q. Did he say anything to you that would lead you to believe that he was in any
way disturbed?
A. No, sir, he didn’t.
Q. At what time did you last see Mister Forrestal?
A. It was one forty-five, sir.
Q. Where was he then?
A. He was in his bed, apparently sleeping.
Q. Where were you at that time?
A. I was in the room when I saw him.
So much for the copying of that morbid poem, and so much for Arnold Rogow’s
credibility.
(For Substack readers who want a fleshing out of the conflicting
[all false] accounts of what happened at Forrestal’s home, see chapter 2 of the
second edition of my book, The Assassination of James Forrestal. One might notice that the Rogow book was
published by Macmillan Publishers, one of the Big Five, as Wikipedia tells us.)
There you have it, the three book reviews that got the folks at
Amazon all in a lather. It looks to me
that I must have been found guilty of a sort of Amazon thought crime in which
some anonymous people at the company have performed the role of prosecutor,
judge, and jury, with no defense permitted.
Well, you might say, they gave me an opportunity to offer a defense by sending me that first warning, which, as they
saw it, I ignored. So, in fairness,
let’s see what we find by checking out the Community Guidelines at the site to which they invited me. There we find a list of 13 bullet points of
things that are not allowed:
·
Seller, order, or shipping feedback
·
Comments about pricing or availability
·
Content written in unsupported languages
·
Repetitive text, spam, or pictures created with symbols
·
Private information
·
Profanity or harassment
·
Hate speech
·
Sexual content
·
External links
·
Ads, conflicts of interest, promotional content
·
Compensated reviews
·
Plagiarism, infringement, or impersonation
·
Illegal activities
Just
looking at that list, all I can say is, “Not guilty, Your Honor.” Put me before a jury of my peers who would
read my articles, and I guarantee you that my reviews would have to be restored
to Amazon in a heartbeat, but, as I say, they’re the prosecutor, judge, and jury. The closest thing to a transgression of those
rules that I can think of was the fact that I saw fit to make comments on the
Rogow book on James Forrestal and his death.
One can read the reviews for it on Amazon and see that I am the author
of the definitive book on Forrestal’s death entitled The Assassination of
James Forrestal.
Who is better qualified to write a review of Rogow’s book? One might invoke that “conflict of interest”
prohibition and say that by putting down Rogow I nudge readers in the direction
of my own book, but it’s a stretch. I
don’t know how long that old book had been up on Amazon, but the fact that it
had only one review tells me that it has drawn virtually no attention. It would be a very odd way for me to promote
my own book, especially when I make no mention of it, when mention of it might
have been called for to strengthen my argument.
Furthermore, if that “conflict” perception is their problem, they could
have just told me that. I wouldn’t have
liked it but just taking that one review down for that reason wouldn’t have
caused me to lose much sleep. Virtually
no one would have been likely to have seen it there, anyway. I’m sure a lot more folks have already read
it on Substack than would have ever read it on Amazon, and I think I’ve already
demonstrated to the world with my book and a host of articles online that the
late Arnold Rogow was not to be trusted when it came to the matter of James
Forrestal’s death.
Clearly
the die was cast before I posted that fourth review, which is thoroughly
unpolitical and should have been uncontroversial. The book in question is The Life and Times
of Wilber Hardee: Founder of Hardee’s. Similar to the Rogow
book, though it is much more current, it had only one posted review, which was
generally favorable, and it was also on a subject
that I might know more about than any writer alive. I had to do my part to set the record
straight. Here is how my review appears on Substack:
An
Intrepid but Flawed Man’s Flawed Story
Wilber Hardee started quite a few restaurants in his long career
and all of them eventually went out of business. He was simply not a very good
manager, and he was apparently not an easy person to get along with. That
started very close to home, because he admits to cheating repeatedly on his
first wife in the book. But concerning his restaurants, he even had a chain of
fast-food hamburger restaurants in Eastern North Carolina on the McDonald's
model. But that chain was not named "Hardee's." It was called "Little
Mint," which you can read about in the book.
Maybe it was his untruthfulness that made him a bad businessman. One can see it
right there on display in the very misleading subtitle of his book,
"Founder of Hardee's." He was not the founder of the Hardee's food
chain. As a restaurateur in Greenville, NC, he had traveled
to Greensboro to observe the operation of the first McDonald's in the state and
was inspired. He built a similar restaurant with the exception that it was more
like a stationary food truck with no inside space for people to sit and eat.
Charcoal grilling had just come into fashion in the country, so he gave his
hamburgers the twist of being grilled over charcoal.
Leonard Rawls, the accountant son of the Rocky Mount owner of the construction
company that built Hardee's in Greenville, was inspired by Hardee's venture,
and working with Hardee and with Jim Gardner, the son
of the Gardner's Dairy owner in Rocky Mount, who mainly provided financing,
Rawls opened a second Hardee's restaurant in Rocky Mount with the same menu,
but this one was a full sit-down restaurant. Rawls was the man who founded
Hardee's Food Systems, which is the Hardee's chain of restaurants as we know
it. The mendacious Hardee has told a couple of
mutually exclusive stories as to how he was "snookered" out of the
business bearing his name, but the fact of the matter is that he sold out his
part of Hardee's before it became a chain of restaurants. One can read the full
story online in my article, "Leonard Rawls, Wilber Hardee, and Hardee's Restaurants: Creating a
Chain-Restaurant Foundation Myth."
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RCPTM4WN9384J/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8
I have
supplied the link to my article here, which Amazon does not allow one to do.
I think you
would agree that that one hardly qualifies as the straw that broke the camel’s
back. What really got me crossways with Amazon was
what I reveal about our Deep State with those first three articles. There is no way that Amazon could specify
what they think I did to violate their precious “Community Guidelines” without
making themselves look very bad. I
committed truth, and they don’t like it one bit.
Amazon’s
Bad Record
I should be
the last one to be surprised at this most recent outrageous action by
Amazon. Consider the information in my
two previous articles, “Censored by Amazon,” and “Amazon Censorship Hits Home.” In that first article I reveal that Amazon
simply refused, without explanation, to put up my heavy-duty
review of
Phillip Nelson’s powerful Remember the Liberty!:
Almost Sunk by Treason on the High Seas. I
also talk about how, after years of listing mine as the top critical review of
Christopher Ruddy’s book, The Strange Death of
Vincent Foster,
they had recently gone to ingenious and very dishonest lengths to hide the
review away from its readers. Now, as we
see they’ve taken the final logical step and found an excuse to erase it
entirely. I top it off by noting that,
in the past, Amazon reviews have served a valuable educational purpose. It was through reading one of them that I
learned of the attempt of the Zionist Stern Gang to assassinate President Harry
Truman in 1947 with a letter bomb, a fact ignored by most of the press,
historians, and all Truman’s biographers except for his daughter,
Margaret. It was also ignored by
Wikipedia until I wrote my article based on this discovery.
In the
second article I talk about how Amazon has systematically excluded from its
offerings books that approach the World War II Jewish “holocaust” narrative
from a critical perspective, elaborate further on my own experience with
Amazon, and top it off with a link to an article about how Amazon systematically excluded negative reviews of a
book by Hillary Clinton.
But why, one
might wonder, didn’t I title the article, “Amazon Ratches Up Censorship”? It is because Amazon has unprecedented power
over the American book market, a major source of information. Amazon censorship is, in effect, American
censorship. According to this site, 50% of all print books
sold in the United States are from Amazon, but that seems like a very
conservative number, considering the disappearance of almost all of our
bookstores, driven out of business by Amazon.
And consider the fact that Amazon’s owner, Jeff Bezos, also owns The
Washington Post. Lord Acton would
hardly be surprised at the resulting corruption that we are witnessing.
I could be
upset at the personal affront by Amazon in removal of all my book reviews with
what amounts to no explanation or justification at all, but I’m hardly the big
loser here. I have other, better ways of
reaching my audience. The big losers are
the public. Amazon is, with malice
aforethought, depriving them of important information and opinion.
David Martin
September
24, 2025
*I have
since taken Mr. Jan’s advice and published The Murder of Vince
Foster: America’s Would-Be Dreyfus Affair.
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