The following is a transcript of my radar on Thursday’s edition of “Rising” on Hill TV.
About a month ago, Apple booted Antonio Garcia Martinez, author of “Chaos Monkeys,” after a group of employees circulated a letter claiming to be “profoundly distraught” by his hiring. They ripped a few passages from the book out of context to cast him as a misogynist that threatened the company’s “culture of inclusion.”
This is obviously a laughable complaint to type from behind your Macbook, nestled into a tiny Silicon Valley office, when the salary that pays for your Seamless orders is literally built on the backs of forced laborers in China. It makes for an odd definition of inclusion.
On his Substack, Matt Taibbi raised a devastating point.
“I’m a fan of Dr. Dre’s music and have been since the N.W.A. days. It’s not any of my business if he wants to make $3 billion selling Beats by Dre to Apple, earning himself a place on the board in the process,” Taibbi wrote in May. “But if 2,000 Apple employees are going to insist that they feel literally unsafe working alongside a man who wrote a love letter to a woman who towers over him in heels, I’d like to hear their take on serving under, and massively profiting from a partnership with, the author of such classics as “Bitches Ain’t Sh-t” and “Lyrical Gangbang,” who is also the subject of such articles as “Here’s What’s Missing from Straight Outta Compton: Me and the Other Women Dr. Dre Beat Up.”
He added, “It’s easy to get someone like Antonio Garcia Martinez fired. Going after a board member who’s reportedly sitting on hundreds of millions in Apple stock is a different matter. A letter making such a demand is likely to be returned to sender, and the writer of it will likely spend every evaluation period looking over his or her shoulder. Why? Because going after Dre would mean forcing the company to denounce one of its more profitable investments.”
Where are the urgent, internal letters of concern about Apple suppliers apparently relying on oppressive labor practices? How about Apple raking in billions off Dr. Dre’s brand and including him on their board? Why is Antonio Garcia Martinez less tolerable than Dr. Dre?
If the author’s hiring helped the company establish standards of inclusion, why has a month gone by with no reports of internal efforts to emotionally demand the company part ways with Dr. Dre?
The truth is that neither Dr. Dre nor Garcia Martinez threatens Apple’s “culture of inclusion,” but Garcia Martinez is an easy target for the performative outrage the elite left now uses to shield corporations from serious scrutiny, signal in-group status, and artificially boost their own reputations and power. The result is that actual corruption metastasizes in the shadow of these distractions, which should irk our self-appointed champions of social justice who eagerly accept jobs that pay their bills with oligarchical conduct and abhorrent labor practices. They cash those checks and sleep just fine.
Why relitigate this now?
A new report in the Daily Mail exposed a bizarre 2019 text exchange Hunter Biden had with his cousin Caroline, who was offering to set him up with her model friends. “Domesticated foreigner is fine. No yellow,” Hunter wrote, after Caroline said, “I can’t give you f-cking Asian.”
Just last week, the Daily Mail reported on Hunter’s repeated use of the n-word in conversations with his lawyer just two years ago as well.
It was largely ignored by the legacy media. That would be more defensible if it weren’t obvious to everyone that legacy media would have breathlessly covered any such revelations about a Republican president’s son. Journalists would be racing each other to concoct the most creative and virtuous performances of outrage theater. Again, that’s what happens when the target is easy. When the target is less politically and ideologically convenient, the relative silence is telling.
But this is so much deeper than whataboutism. This gets to the utterly bankrupt morals of our sanctimonious establishment. Easy targets make for great shields, allowing them to construct a facade of altruism that falsely soothes their consciences and burnishes their reputations with their peers, who are all engaged in the same superficial nonsense.
The result is a self-perpetuating cycle of mediocrity and greed. When it actually counts, the most vocals champions of woke capital just prefer to cash their paychecks.
