A group that founded the online bookstore Allstora with the intent of being a website that didn’t ban books is now banning a lot of books.
Originally, Eric Cervini and drag performers RuPaul and Adam Powel launched Allstora with the intent to “carry all books.”
“We cannot fight the ideologies of hate if we lack the ability to study, understand, and react to them. We do that by reading books,” the Allstora website previously . Allstora further said that “censorship of any book, perspective, or story is incompatible with the survival of democracy,” and “banning books is never the answer.”
Cervini specifically said that he wanted to counteract with his shop. Allstora is an outgrowth of his LGBT+ literature website “ShopQueer.”
“As a historian, I understood that even the most hateful of books can have educational value. I knew that to dismantle prejudice, we must examine its illogic,” Cervini . “We must study history so as not to repeat it, and we must understand hatred if we are to destroy it. So I directed my team to add all ten million books available for sale in the English language, no matter their contents, to our library.”
Finally, a website that gets it! No one can ever learn how to avoid the mistakes made by past generations if we can’t read history and the ideologies that caused widespread trouble in the world. This is one of the many reasons we study history in the first place.
Allstora The Reversed Course To Please The LGBT Community
But all of a sudden, the founders apologized for carrying certain “harmful books.”
Now what were these harmful books they mentioned? If you want a clue before I tell you, just look at the founders and their personal lifestyles. You’ll get an idea of what exactly these people thought were “harmful” pieces of literature.
Among the books removed from the list were anything written by Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Matt Walsh, Riley Gaines, and Libs of TikTok founder Chaya Raichik. Allstora also “removed works by the conservative publisher Brave Books, such as the Christian book Little Lives Matter,” according to .
Additionally, drag performer “Lady Bunny” criticized Allstora for carrying books by Adolf Hitler, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Huckabee, and “the extremely transphobic” Raichik. All of these books were removed three days after the website launched.
Cervini then apologized for committing the heinous crime of offending the LGBT community by making the website more than just a place where drag queens get literature they want.
“We’ve already removed the titles that visitors have called to our attention, and you can continue to report any instances of hateful material on our site,” Cervini said in his . “While other online bookstores will continue selling hate-filled books, Allstora will not. We will be a community, a home, for all.”
By catering to the LGBT community, he destroyed the purpose of his website with a single move. Instead of being an alternative website where no book is banned, he has banned a variety of books in the name of removing “hateful materials” (which is what our country calls non-LGBT viewpoints these days).
Looks like Allstora is just your average book website now.
