If you jangle a shiny object in front of a cat with one hand, it doesn’t matter what you do with the other hand: the cat will be so hypnotized by shiny thing, it will ignore everything else.
It’s the same with Corporate America virtue signaling its wokeness to Western leftists on one hand, while caving to China’s evil bidding on the other hand.
Nike wants to confront America’s troubling history of slavery … while using Chinese slaves to make their overpriced shoes.
Disney demands a diverse array of actors for its movies … but doesn’t want Black people on their Chinese movie posters.
Google once promised to “Do No Evil". . . but then it went into China and dumped even that ridiculous pretext.
And on and on. For heaven’s sake, even the Pope sold out to China.
Now, Microsoft would like to join the list of giants who would rather tweet about principled stands rather than actually take one.
Last week Microsoft-owned social media platform LinkedIn blocked an Axios reporter in China because she posted about alleged “prohibited content,” a term that – like “community guidelines” – seems destined to someday be in a museum about how World War III happened
Before joining Axios, Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian was lead reporter for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ China Cables project, which exposed classified Chinese government documents about its mass internment camps in Xinjiang. (These are the same camps on whose doorsteps Disney filmed Mulan, incidentally.)
Apparently, she’s still interested in catching the Chinese tiger by the tail, like every Western reporter should be.
Last week, she tweeted, “I woke up this morning to discover that LinkedIn had blocked my profile in China. I used to have to wait for Chinese govt censors, or censors employed by Chinese companies in China, to do this kind of thing. Now a US company is paying its own employees to censor Americans.”
In response, Republicans rushed to her aid -- despite being a member of the mainstream media.
Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., sent a letter to LinkedIn, excoriating the company for blocking profiles like hers and demanding to know if LinkedIn had ever delivered American user data to the Chinese Communist Party.
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., is also pushing back on Microsoft’s malfeasance. At a mark-up last week, Massie revealed information from a whistleblower that Microsoft had received an advance copy of major antitrust legislation that would have clamped down on their monopolistic practices.
The document Massie revealed is the original version of the Platform Competition and Opportunity Act, one of Democrats’ six pending antitrust bills targeting Big Tech. It was watermarked with the text “CONFIDENTIAL – Microsoft.”
In recent years, Microsoft has expanded its empire not by innovation, but acquisition. It has bought LinkedIn, Skype, Yahoo's search business, and others – more than $84 billion in acquisitions over the past 10 years, more than Google, Amazon and Facebook combined.
This is partly thanks to the Obama administration’s “look the other way” approach to antitrust and the efforts of folks like Jonathan Kanter, incidentally the Biden administration’s nominee to be his antitrust enforcer.
Kanter made $20 million representing Microsoft, Nike, Uber and others. Clients he wouldn’t be able to investigate for two years according to government ethics rules.
While the administration has abandoned any values on this front, Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren in the same hearing last week also criticized changes to the legislation that would protect Microsoft.
One hopes that more Democrats like Lofgren will remember their values, but there’s cause to be concerned.
Big Tech is evil, and the Biden administration is hopelessly corrupt.
Rank-and-file liberals – who used to be the ones worked up about monopolies, abuses of corporate power, and human rights abuses – are so distracted by rainbow flags, Black fists, and similar shiny things that they’ve been hypnotized.
Republicans need ethical Democrats’ help to make sure big companies remember the America part of Corporate America. Companies that censor at the behest of the CCP can’t be allowed to continue, and neither can the Chinese government.
Jared Whitley is a long-time politico who has worked in the U.S. Congress, White House and defense industry. He is an award-winning writer, having won best blogger in the state from the Utah Society of Professional Journalists (2018) and best columnist from Best of the West (2016). He earned his MBA from Hult International Business School in Dubai. Read Jared Whitley's reports — More Here
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