90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, April 26, 2022

Billionaire Cat Fight: Jeff Bezos Trolled After Knocking Elon Musk’s China Connections

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has been getting mercilessly trolled on Twitter after he wondered aloud if billionaire Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform could potentially give the Chinese government leverage over free speech.

Following news that Twitter agreed to Elon Musk’s offer to buy the company and take it private, Bezos retweeted a post from New York Times reporter Mike Forsythe citing Musk’s multitude of not-so-secret dealings in China.

“Apropos of something: Tesla’s second-biggest market in 2021 was China (after the US). Chinese battery makers are major suppliers for Tesla’s EVs. After 2009, when China banned Twitter, the government there had almost no leverage over the platform. That may have just changed,” tweeted Forsythe.

Bezos said in response, “Interesting question. Did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square?”

While it is certainly no secret that Musk has dangerously set his sights on the Chinese market — Peter Schweizer profiled it in his book Red-Handed while Breitbart News has reported on it multiple times — Jeff Bezos criticizing him for it is probably the most pot-calling-the-kettle-black moment in billionaire history. Not only did his platform, Amazon, censor critical reviews of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s book, a Foxconn factory in China was using child labor for manufacturing Echo and Kindle devices. As Breitbart News reported:

Over 1,000 students, as young as 16, were drafted from schools, hired by the factory as “interns,” and pressured to work overnight and weekend shifts for meager salaries. Chinese labor laws allow 16-year-olds to work, but not during either night or overtime shifts.

Student laborers said their work had nothing to do with their studies in school, the ostensible reason they were sent to the factories as “interns.” Nevertheless, their teachers told those who complained, also paid by the factory, that their grades and scholarship applications might suffer if they refused to work.

Critics of Bezos did not let the billionaire off the hook for his own rank and file hypocrisy.

After enough criticism and hot takes, Bezos answered his own question and defended Musk.

“My own answer to this question is probably not,” tweeted Bezos. “The more likely outcome in this regard is complexity in China for Tesla, rather than censorship at Twitter.”

“But we’ll see. Musk is extremely good at...

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Our Spanish Civil War?

Deep and brutal strife in 1930s Spain was a prelude to the barbarity of World War II. Now with the war in Ukraine, we’re reminded that the veneer of civilization is very thin.

rom 1936 to 1939, the civil war in Spain became a European laboratory of new tactics, strategies, logistics, wartime morality, and weapons. Right-wing nationalists under General Francisco Franco finally defeated loyal supporters of an evolutionary socialist republic—but only after much of the Western world had variously weighed in.

The cost to the Spanish people of such brutal and vicious strife was horrific. Over 500,000 Spaniards would die in a little over two-and-a-half years. The country was left in shambles.

Dictatorships in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and autocratic Portugal poured millions of dollars in military aid and money for Franco’s efforts to seize power. In turn, the Soviet Union often matched that aid with shipments to various communists, socialists, and anarchists of the Popular Front forces.

Whether by design or by accident, Spain became a proving ground for many of the strategies, weapons, and tactics that would follow later in World War II. And it would be a preview of just how impotent democracies and international bodies were to stop aggressive powers.

The relatively new regime of Nazi Germany sent to Spain hundreds of tanks and “volunteer” troops, pilots, dive bombers, and transport planes of the Condor Legion.

But Germany’s intervention was not always quite what it seemed. Behind the scenes, Adolf Hitler provided enough aid to ensure Franco’s likely eventual victory. But he did not send quite enough immediate help either to antagonize his European democratic rivals, or to ensure a quick victory for the Nationalists that might have created a powerful and independent Iberian fascist rival bloc to his own.

The Soviet Union ostensibly countered fascist supply chains. But Joseph Stalin had even more strings attached to his aid. He systematically favored communist recipients and harassed and often eliminated their socialist and anarchist allies in the Popular Front.

Stranger still, even before the Soviet-Nazi nonaggression pact of 1939, Hitler and Stalin were already secretly aiding each other’s rearmament in their shared hatred of Western European democracies. It would take years of research to fathom all of the subtexts and agendas behind the great powers’ interventions in the Spanish Civil war.

The same labyrinth of plots and twists will likely prove true in the present Ukrainian war. Ostensibly NATO and the EU are staunch Ukrainian allies. But powerful German interests remain worried about their tenuous energy supply lines from Russia and are not so ready to...

Less than a decade ago, my high school hosted a naturalization ceremony. Each time a new citizen, donned in red, white, and blue apparel, approached the stage to receive his certificate of citizenship, the rowdy crowd of hundreds of teenagers—myself among them—broke into irreverent but welcoming and patriotic chants of "USA! USA!"

Those days are long gone. National pride fell to an all-time low in 2020, with just 20 percent of American adults ages 18 to 29 saying they were "extremely proud" to be an American, according to a Gallup poll. And though the coronavirus pandemic and protests following the death of George Floyd factored into that number, the poll marked the sixth consecutive year of decline in patriotism.

The right blames this trend on progressivism and, more recently, critical race theory. But is CRT really to blame for this drastic shift in anti-American sentiment? Jonathan Butcher offers a guidebook on the subject in Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth.

Splintered presents critical theory as a pedagogy, or a framework through which one understands the world around him. From its origins in the 19th century German academy to its application in American kindergartens, Butcher, an education fellow at the Heritage Foundation, spells out what critical pedagogy means for the future of American education.

He begins with the German Marxists, including Felix Weil, Herbert Marcuse, and Max Horkheimer, who laid the foundation for critical theory by fusing Marx’s anticapitalism and understanding of history as a persistent class struggle with the postmodernist concept of subjective truth. As a "worldview," Butcher writes, critical theory is "meant to criticize the traditional uses of language and reason to describe the world around us."

Critical theory found its way into American law during the 20th century. Critical legal theory claims "America’s laws are systemically oppressive and...