I got an email today: "Dear Amazon.com Customer, you might like to know that "Rules For Republican Radicals" is now available. You can order yours for just $18.68..." Following the link, you are offered this Product Description: "...Saul Alinsky, a notorious, militant, terrorist, and con artist, the infamous Rules For Radicals was written as a step-by-step guide for radicals who wanted to move from theory and rhetoric to actual, societal manipulation and governmental overthrow. Designed to teach terrorists how to identify the vulnerable and easily duped and organize them into a militant army..."
As this hate speech targeting the memory of community organizer Saul Alinsky would not be enough, the text goes on...
"Rules For Republican Radicals reveals the methods employed by Barrack (sic!) Obama, a racist, militant, Marxist, as well as his ultra-liberal, anti-American cohorts, and his foreign, moneyed, backers (Team Obama), to usurp the power and rights of the American people using Alinsky techniques. Without understanding the steps that Obama took to manipulate voters, usurp the power of the democratic process, turn the media into his own personal Gestapo, and hide his radical associations and anti-American agenda in plain sight, we are powerless to combat the greatest threat in living memory to democracy and to the American Dream."
We may well ignore right-wing ranting about "Marxist" Obama, but we should not ignore the bizarre support Amazon gives to lunatic authors like Beck and O'Reilly. Amazon.com is a powerhouse in distributing books, and its power in the so called "marketplace of ideas" is enormous.
Which support? Take Amazon's Kindle, for example. If you connect to its Wireless Store and go to "History," you find Glenn Beck's "Arguing With Idiots" as the n. 4 bestseller. But what has Beck's tract to do with a History book? Nothing, of course. So, why Does Amazon display it prominently in this category?
It happens that Beck's ruminations are present in the category "Politics & Current Events" as well: here Beck is n. 3, closely followed by Bill O' Reilly's Memoir and Mark Levin's Conservative Manifesto. How reliable is Amazon's ranking? Judge by yourself: positions from 7 to 15 are all filled by Machiavelli's The Prince. While it may well be that this classic of political thinking knows a resurgence of interest in the general public, it seems doubtful that it might represent half of Amazon Kindle's bestsellers by itself.
I suspect that Kindle's ranking simply is stupid, but I wonder if something else is at play. Amazon seems to be more than willing to promote right-wing books and align itself with the lunatics' crowd that tries to undo the results of 2008 elections.