With BLOCKED BY AMAZON: On the Left’s response to Charlie Kirk coming July 4th, we are pre-releasing some of the chapters to build some hype. What follows is the Introduction titled What Was Amazon Trying to Censor?, by David McKerracher, the editor-in-chief and a contributor to the volume.
I. The Block
On November 1, 2025, the world’s largest direct publishing platform blocked this book. It was not rejected for revision, but blocked full stop. The fields froze. I could not edit the cover, the title, or the manuscript I had uploaded the day before. Underground Theory Volume 2 had cleared the same review without incident that week. This was the only manuscript Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing ever rejected from us across many titles, and the wording of the rejection, which one of the world’s most famous living philosophers later told me deserved to become “world historic,” was that the book “might result in a disappointing customer experience.” Two days later they escalated the language: where the first email said the book might cause a disappointing experience, the second said it had. Past tense, confirmed, about a book no customer had been permitted to read.
Then, a couple of days later, Amazon KDP suspended our entire account and locked us out of our backlist. Per their request, Ann emailed them affirming we had read the guidelines and would unpublish anything that violated them. They reinstated our account but this book, one you are literally or figuratively holding in your hands, remained blocked.
Once we were reinstated I sent the most polite email I have ever written, asking plainly which specific aspect of the content violated the guidelines so I could adjust. The reply, in full: “As per our policy, we reserve the right not to disclose any type of information we consider sensitive data.” A book banned for harm it had not caused, on grounds that could not be specified, by reviewers I could not reach.
I wrote back that this was like getting written up at work where no one will tell you what you did, so you have no way to be on your best behavior. Compliance had been made impossible anyway: the interface no longer let me unpublish the title, only “archive,” which unpublishes nothing. Remove a title I had no power to remove, to avoid further violations of rules no one would name. The replies came signed by Vamshi, then by Sofia, then by generic Content Review Team addresses. The names changed but the decision did not.
This is not how Amazon, or any business, is supposed to work. Amazon is supposed to want my money, and yours, so that it can get its cut. Kindle Direct Publishing is a volume business, a million books from a million people, most slop, some gold, all of them paying. Blocking one book is not a market decision. It is an editorial one. When the editorial decision arrives wearing a market mask, that’s when we need to pay attention. So the question others ask me when hearing about this: what was so dangerous about this book that the largest publisher in the world decided you should not read it? The short answer is that I do not know, because they will not say. The longer answer is the rest of this book.
II. What Amazon Blocked
My call for proposals to this volume was simple: the news was not Kirk’s death, it was the Left’s response to it, and that response marked a qualitative shift in what could be celebrated in public. The shift is the normalization of celebrating a political opponent’s assassination. Welcome to the new era. That was the idea of the call for proposals, which you can read in the following preface. What I have now is the book with twenty voices, several of whom disagree with me. We’re a diverse array of voices critiquing the political field itself, the left, and/or the right, in an attempt to better understand things. That is what Amazon blocked. What follows in this section is my speed-run of the different pieces you’ll be able to read here on your own. If you would prefer to have no spoilers, you can skip to the next section where I’ll go much more in depth into the Amazon block.
This book starts with my wife. Ann takes the cherry-picked Kirk quotes that circulated after the assassination and puts them back into context, line by line: the “some gun deaths” remark on the Second Amendment, “I can’t stand the word empathy,” “I hope he’s qualified” about the Black pilot, the alleged slur that turns out to be Kirk naming Cenk Uygur. Five quotes restored, five distortions exposed. This is what scholars used to call “source criticism” and what journalists used to call “due diligence.” It’s what sadly nobody in the reaction cycle bothered with, because profiting off of reactions to truncated clips was the point. The infrastructure that once sat between a public figure’s words and the public’s reaction has eroded, and what replaced it is the decontextualized clip plus algorithmic amplification and the consequential tribal rage.
Several pieces are built on an actual encounter. Elton L.K., an openly Christian leftist, was on vacation when his Airbnb host said “what goes around comes around” about Kirk, and asks what the Left has not answered: if the Trump coalition’s working-class voters were driven only by economic grievance they would have flocked to Bernie, and they did not, because Trump and Kirk met a spiritual need the Left has nothing comparable to. Kier Adrian Gray, a former anarchist activist, gave her piece as a talk at McKerracher Family Farm during the Theory Underground retreat of 2025. Kier said that when she was younger, she would have celebrated Kirk’s death too. What she then goes on to share is about how she has grown since the days of her youthful activism. Angel, twenty-four, phone dead on a London bus, listened to three men do comedy about the killing two rows up and came back with the cleanest account of what the comment sections do: the post is the thought now, the thought generated for the post, people publishing their way into opinions they do not hold alone.
The theoretical spine of the book is the claim that the medium produces the form of the response, carried in half a dozen vocabularies that converge on one diagnosis. David Ruiz, working from a Theory Underground canonical thinker Neil Postman, argues the urgent fight is not for “free speech” but for context. He lands on C. Thi Nguyen’s “moral outrage porn” as the name for what the comment sections do: people sifting information not to inform themselves but for material to use in the next outrage post. Solosky’s four-page hammer puts Marcuse at the center, the 1964 insight that aggression is a form of social bonding, and shows that the Left Marcuse tried to lead has become the thing he warned against. Matthew Stanley decodes the cultural references on Tyler Robinson’s bullets, the Helldivers 2 button combinations and OwO furry signaling and RickRolling, to argue Robinson is not a Left or Right radical but a more disturbing emergent type, the internet-immersed reality-divorced shooter Katherine Dee calls a carrier of “slop violence.” Alex Sappington, in the volume’s most stylistically distinct piece, asks what kind of game public discourse is and what happens when it becomes normal for a player to get killed. Chad’s Other Roommate interrogates my radical responsibility framing at length, in a Marshall McLuhan and Nick Land register. He argues that my framing presupposes a shared world, and the Left that celebrates the killing and the rest of us horrified by it may no longer inhabit one. No.investigues writes from Mexico in a Baudrillardian register refusing the books’ own terms, prescribing restraint where I had prescribed commitment, the opposite of the Preface’s “not choosing is losing.”
A second cluster works the political register rather than the moral. Edward Remus reframes the assassination as the opening shot of a civil war within the Democratic Party rather than between the parties, a warning to the realignment camp of Fetterman and Newsom, and walks us through the Newsom-Kirk podcast where Newsom called the “Trump’s for you, she’s for they/them” ad “the Willie Horton ad of 2024.” Jasper Thomas indicts the rest of us, claiming that moral, epistemic, and tactical critique of the Left are not political critique, and none unlock the historical possibilities the Left exists to unlock. Tony Chamas, Tony of 1Dime and my co-author on the forthcoming Post Left? book, gives just a genealogical deep dive: the Left/Right binary from the National Assembly to now, the asymmetry by which “Leftist” survives as a moral identity whereas “Rightist” almost never does, and the harder claim that “Leftist” has become a brand for a precarious professional-managerial fraction whose politics rationalizes the decay it claims to resist.
A third cluster of pieces turns the gaze on symmetry and on what the Right has done with the moment. Sašo Dolinšek, from Tokyo, reads Erika Kirk’s televised forgiveness of her husband’s assassin as the model the Left needs and refuses. Erika Kirk said she forgave Charlie’s assassin live in front of the Trump administration and Trump rebuked her for it. The Anonymous Professor, anonymous because the views would cost the writer a job in academia, makes the symmetry claim directly: neither party ever cared about free speech, the Left’s institutional capture normalized cancellation and the Right’s recapture of state power has stripped the mask. That the piece had to be anonymous, in 2025, in a volume about a Left that no longer permits disagreement, is the evidence it offers. Michael Tracey carries the longest comparative record, the McCain funeral in 2018, the George Floyd protests in 2020, the Kirk memorial in Arizona in 2025. What he shows is that the Right’s response is its own George Floyd Moment, i.e. the state-backed extravaganza, the canonization of a martyr, the Speaker of the House and the Secretary of War proselytizing from the stage.
III. Disagreement Printed as Disagreement
The two contributors I have not mentioned are the two I disagree with in print, inside my own essays, by name. The standard practice for an anthology is to suppress the editor’s disagreements, frame the volume broadly enough to accommodate everyone, smooth the contradictions, and leave the reader believing the editor agrees with everyone he printed. That practice is dishonest and instrumentally rational at once, because the editor needs the famous name on the cover and the famous name needs the editor not to fight with him in the same book. Everyone wins except the reader, who loses the only thing that would have made the volume worth the time, which is access to the live argument inside it. Theory Underground does not run on the social capital that makes that bargain necessary, the tenure and grants and blurbs and reading-list inclusions that all track the record of who has not made enemies of whom, because we have none of it and have stopped pretending we want it. What we have instead is the freedom to print disagreement as disagreement.
Jacob Thomas takes a position on what he calls “trans children” that I do not share and that Theory Underground does not endorse, frames the gender culture war as finally a parental-rights question, and offers the book’s most provocative practical counsel: stop arguing with your lonely uncles and invite them to football. I like the idea of spending time with those with whom we disagree, but I do not think casting perfectly moral and totally justified concerns about the “trans child” messaging in terms of “lonely” or “paranoid” people does anything other than a disservice to the person making that move. I almost didn’t include his piece because, honestly, anyone who unironically uses the term “trans child” in 2026 is someone with whom I would rather not share anything, especially not space within a volume. With that said, I know Jacob in real life and appreciate the spirit of where he is coming from in this piece; furthermore, I feel the need to exercise my own Levinasian principles of dialogue with those with whom I disagree. You can read his piece and my own disagreement with him within this volume.
My other disagreement is with Slavoj Žižek. When he came on Theory Underground for an interview in late 2024 he asked us directly to disagree with him. Well, I haven’t done so publicly since then, but I’ve been wanting to. My first foray into public disagreement with my good friend Slavoj begins with when he took the Iryna Zarutska case that the Left had ignored and defended Kirk’s attention to it as morally serious. Where his piece falters is the Zarutska passage itself: right after the killer, unprovoked and in cold blood, stabbed Zarutska repeatedly in the neck with a knife on public transportation, we can hear on the recording the killer saying, “I got that white girl” three times. Žižek narrates the murder at length without mentioning those words. The issue with this omission is that it was also omitted by mainstream media, making it easy for liberals to think that the right was racializing a murder that the murderer himself had racialized. I asked Žižek if he knew about this and he said that he was aware and that it simply was not his focus. I think the omission shows who Žižek is writing for, i.e. the Guardian-reading NPR-listening progressive. Maybe that’s important, but it helps me get at the fact that we do not share the same big Other or superego within the era of duopoly extremism. I have owed Žižek a disagreement since 2024, so this is my first attempt to return the gift.
IV. Amazon’s Block
Five months in, with four denied appeals behind us, we are publishing through Lulu with BANNED BY AMAZON on the cover. After Sofia’s sensitive-data email the thread went quiet, I bumped it, I escalated, and the final reply came on February 24, 2026, four sentences from a new name, Dinesh, upholding the decision, linking two help pages, thanking us for our cooperation. We had been told the rules required compliance and the system had made compliance impossible. The thanks closed the loop. We went around them. For the record, the book you are reading is the exact version Amazon blocked, untouched, with three additions, Tony’s piece, the Nick Land interview transcript, and this introduction. Nothing else has been changed, softened, or removed, because Amazon would not say what to change and we refused to guess. We would rather have you guess for us.
I tried to get the press to cover this story, emailing every major news outlet as well as over fifty alternative media content creators. The most interested outlet was the Washington Post, which invited a 700-word op-ed, and then declined to run it. It’s worth noting the conflict of interest: The Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, as is Amazon KDP. Make of it what you will.
Nick Land, a justifiably controversial yet nonetheless unavoidable and incisive voice in the world today, was flabbergasted when we shared with him the news of our Amazon ban. Land had filed Bezos under opportunistic capitalist and not under massive political censorship operation conducted in the drag of doing business. “Drag” is Land’s word for it. The losses Amazon now eats from the block, in reputation and in the revenue from this book and the others by us it could have sold, dwarf anything it would have lost by letting the book through, so the appeal to customer experience is capitalist drag, the decision dressed in profit language when the motive is not economic at all. When sympathetic readers shrug that it was probably just AI, the decision puts on AI drag, the appeal to a faceless system in which no human is responsible, what Land calls an inverted Turing test, not an AI persuading you it is human but something out of the cathedral persuading you it is an AI. What it really is, in his reading, is a religious offense. This book is too heretical, and not in any way Amazon will specify, because to specify the heresy would be to avow a doctrine the platform cannot afford to endorse. “We reserve the right not to disclose any type of information we consider sensitive data” is not a refusal to share trade secrets. It is a refusal to name the religion, which can keep operating only so long as it stays unspoken, because once articulated it could be argued with, refuted, and opposed. Land calls this a definitional “reign of terror,” where you are denied any account of what you are being persecuted for so that everyone watching internalizes a censor they cannot identify. The block is not a discrete event, but a transmitter.
A fellow traveler at a publishing conference was told by someone high up at KDP, openly, that anything related to Charlie Kirk after the assassination had been blocked platform-wide as internal policy. “There you have it,” the source said, as though that settled the matter. The Kennedy assassination is not blocked on Amazon. The MLK assassination is not blocked on Amazon. There is no neutral principle on which the universal blocking of Kirk material can stand. I forwarded the block to Žižek, whose entire reply was, “Thanks. Really, we see now what censorship is, right?” When I read this response to Land, he disagreed: “We do not see what censorship is, we are more confused after several hours than when we started!” The Cold War kind of censorship was simpler. This version wears the clothes of customer service, hides behind algorithmic or A.I. deniability, and refuses to say what it is censoring or why.
The diagnosis the book makes about the post-Kirk Left is the diagnosis the block makes about the book. The Left’s logic on Kirk was that he said things that hurt, so he should not have said them, so silencing him could be celebrated. Amazon’s logic on the volume is that it contains material that would have caused, or did cause, “customer dissatisfaction,” so silencing it was justified. The agent shifts from a decentralized mob to a centralized gatekeeper and the structure holds: preemptive elimination of the not-yet-spoken disagreement on the grounds that someone, somewhere, would have been hurt by hearing it. The official language is therapeutic, dissatisfaction rather than disagreement, and that is the giveaway, because disagreement is something you can argue with and dissatisfaction is something you can only avoid causing.
I do not love being an exhibit. I would rather have shipped the book on time and let it argue on the merits, in a year that has cost me enough already. During the time that I was wrestling with Amazon KDP my wife was pregnant, my dad fell off a ladder and broke his ribs and collapsed a lung, and consequently my mom and I have been working overtime on our regenerative family farm. Yet the block has also been a backhanded gift. It signal-boosted the whole affair. It got the attention of many people who would have otherwise never taken note. It made the audience larger than it would have been if Amazon had simply let the book through. That is the Streisand effect on a story that should never have been a story. The cover is permanent now: BANNED BY AMAZON. As long as the book is in print, on the shelves where Lulu’s distribution lands it, in every photo anyone posts. The op-ed that the Post killed had ended on a line about not judging a book by its cover. The book now wears the censorship on its cover, so both are true: do not judge the book by the cover, and also, notice the cover. The block was meant to make the book disappear. It made the block visible instead. That is the final answer to what Amazon was censoring. They were censoring this answer.
V. What This Volume Is For
Theory Underground exists to create the conditions for rigorous thinking about the problems we actually face, the work the old institutions have either lost the will or lost the freedom to do. It happens here now, in this volume, on the Substack, in the lectures, in the cohorts, and on the farm. If you want more of what the book is doing, subscribe at theoryunderground.com/subscribe. The Substack ran several of these pieces ahead of the print release because the block had slowed it and the conversation could not wait. Read the pieces together, in order, but pass them around individually too, to the people who need them. The book is a book and a toolkit.
The situation has only gotten worse since I wrote the Preface. Silence is not neutral, the platforms will fill it, and what they fill it with is built to maintain the chilling silence that hides under the cacophony of permitted slop and trained passivity. The choice is between speaking imperfectly and being filled in for. The contributors chose to speak. The forces that be would have kept our voices from ever reaching the public. Rather than allow the ban to force us to go quietly into the dark, we insist on making a scene. We will be heard.
Welcome to the new era.
D.J.M.
McKerracher Family Farm
Careywood, Idaho
April 2026
