Jeff Bezos Embraces Personal Liberties?

Bezos' Amazon banned films like "What Killed Michael Brown?"

Hi all,

The culture war continues to shift in America. I had a rare day off yesterday and missed most of the news. Today, a film critic, Christian Toto, who has reviewed every film of mine on his Hollywood In Toto website, tagged me in the following post:

Bezos for personal liberties? This was coming from the man whose company, Amazon, banned my film, “What Killed Michael Brown?” with my father, Shelby Steele, for over a week?

I found Bezos’ statement on X from yesterday and saw that he was speaking of personal liberties in relation to his Washington Post newspaper. “I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages,” Bezos wrote. “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

Personal liberties, at its core, means the freedom to make choices and decisions without interference from others or the government. This freedom includes artistic expression.

My father and I had originally decided to release “What Killed Michael Brown?” on the Amazon platform because the company had presented itself as a platform as opposed to a publisher. A publisher has the right to decide what content it publishes whereas a platform allows everything as long as it meets certain criteria — for example, no gratuitous violence, nudity, and the like.

America had just exploded after George Floyd’s death and we had lived through a summer of boarded up windows, Defund the Police, Black Lives Matter, and endless protests, many of them violent, and we felt — no, we knew — that publishers like Netflix, etc., would reject our film. Amazon, at least we thought, would leave us alone to sink or swim against the competition.

(I won’t recount every detail that happened — you can read about that here.)

When we received the rejection letter from Amazon the Tuesday before the Friday release in 2020, it shook us. We had put money into advertising, PR, and had our ducks lined up. We lost all that money. That was just the immediate stuff.

We had spent the previous two years documenting what happened in Ferguson, MO, where a white officer shot to death a black teen. I remember how people told us that we were crazy, that it was suicide, for us to go against the hysterical culture of that time and make this film. After all, people were being canceled like flies. But we believed in what we were doing and that gave us the power to create this film. We truly believed that we could bypass the leftist Hollywood system by plugging our film into the powerful Amazon ecosphere.

But Amazon along with nearly every American institution took a knee during the George Floyd wave. Amazon gave $10 million to Black Lives Matter. They created a prominent “Black Voices” section on their film homepage. All to say that they were not a racist company.

“What Killed Michael Brown?” went against all of that and broke the dam on the systemic racism lie that had choked America since Trayvon Martin in 2012. The film said all the unsayables. It gave voice to everyday blacks in Ferguson who had been ignored by the mainstream media because they did not go along with the narrative. Most of all, the film exposed the Left’s treatment of blacks since the 1960s as the true systemic racism.

Amazon wanted nothing to do with this film. Bezos was on record saying that he will never have to worry that his son “might be choked to death while being detained one day… I want you to know I support this movement that we see happening all around us and my stance won’t change.”

His wife at that time, MacKenzie Scott, went on to donate billions of dollars to organizations that address racial justice and other causes, including over $567 million to organizations in 27 states after the murder of George Floyd.

They were the very example of the white guilt that our film exposed and attacked.

The reason why the Amazon rejection and its absolute refusal to entertain any appeal shook us was because we could not help but see it as a violation of our personal liberties. Amazon is a private company and at the same time it is a world (utility) onto itself and its power of distribution is unparalleled. But if its playing field wasn’t level for all of those films that met its guidelines as ours did, then what power did we have?

None. We couldn’t sue. We had no case.

The only thing that saved us was my father’s public status from his writings. The Wall Street Journal came to our rescue. Then FOX. Then many others. The public outcry exposed the political hypocrisy of Amazon’s platform: they were featuring “Black Voices” on their homepage while silencing us. After a week, they relented and posted our film which soared to the number one spot and stayed in the top ten for over a month.

What my father and I took most pride in was the cultural impact that our film had. The film broke through the George Floyd malaise and gave hope and courage to many. People from Senator Tim Scott to Megyn Kelly thanked us for making the film. My father’s ideas in the film are now repeated by countless today.

But the damage was done. Would a filmmaker or writer spend years on a project if they knew the biggest distribution platform might deny them and relegate them to the margins? That’s a hard gamble to bet on. That is the pain that Bezos’ companies have inflicted on many Americans. It’s not just Amazon. Anybody reading these words know it would have been laughable to even think of taking one of my father’s Op-eds to the Washington Post or any other leftist paper.

Now we are to believe that Bezos somehow saw the light and now stands for the personal liberties that classical liberals and conservatives have always stood for? Or is this a cynical ploy to play to the cultural winds of the day and increase revenue?

In either case, this shift of Bezos reveals why we Americans can never give people like him the power over us and how we think or what we create. If we had given into fear and self-censorship, we would never have made “What Killed Michael Brown?” If other writers and thinkers had not pursue truth in the face of the ideological lies that define today’s culture war, then the winds that moved Bezos now — even it is for the reason of money — would never have shifted in the first place.

My best,

Eli

Also, please check out Christian Toto’s website, “Hollywood In Toto.” He is one of the very, very few critics have reviewed films on the Right side of the aisle for years. Here is one of my favorite reviews of his for my first feature length documentary, “How Jack Became Black.”