Apple’s entanglement with China has been taken to new heights in recent years. In 2016, for example, Cook signed a $275 billion contract with the CCP to prevent a crackdown on the corporation’s business in China.
THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY
American people deserve to know what China was up to with Joe Biden, especially when Beijing had already shelled out millions of dollars to Biden family members — including millions in set-asides for “the big guy.” What else is on that infamous Hunter Biden laptop? The conflicted Biden Justice Department cannot be trusted to engage in any meaningful oversight on this issue. We need a special counsel now.
TOM FITTON - JUDICIAL WATCH
iCrickets Chirping: Apple CEO Tim Cook Remains Silent When Questioned About Ties to Communist China
Apple CEO Tim Cook was recently asked whether he supports the rights of Chinese citizens to protest against their communist government’s strict coronavirus policies – Cook remained completely silent.
FOX Business’ Hillary Vaughn recently asked Apple CEO Tim Cook whether he supports the rights of Chinese citizens to protest against their communist government’s strict coronavirus policies which are viewed by the Chinese people as unrestrained abuses.
“Hi Mr. Cook, do you support the Chinese people’s right to protest?” Vaughn asked. Cook remained silent as he arrived on Capitol Hill in Washington where he has a number of meetings scheduled with lawmakers this week.
Vaughn then asked, “do you have any reaction to the factory workers that were beaten and detained for protesting covid lockdowns?” Cook continued to walk silently. Vaugh continued to ask: “Do you regret restricting AirDrop [Apple’s file-sharing system] access that protestors used to evade surveillance from the Chinese government?” Cook didn’t have any answer regarding his company’s recent restriction of iPhone tools allowing for easy communication by protesters.
“Do you think its problematic to do business with the Communist Chinese Party when they suppress human rights?” Vaugh asked.
The entire time, Cook remain silent and didn’t acknowledge Vaughn or her questions.
Breitbart News has reported heavily on Apple’s ties to China. Last year, Breitbart News reported that Cook signed a deal with China in 2016 worth $275 billion to prevent restrictions on its business in the country. As part of the deal, Apple agreed to help Chinese firms build “the most advanced manufacturing technologies” and invest “many billions of dollars” in the country. The five-year agreement was designed to placate Chinese government officials who felt that Apple was failing to invest enough in the Chinese economy.
Apple has long done its best to placate China, it was reported in May of 2021 that Apple made a number of concessions to the Chinese government in order to continue operations in the country.
The New York Times wrote:
Inside, Apple was preparing to store the personal data of its Chinese customers on computer servers run by a state-owned Chinese firm.
Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has said the data is safe. But at the data center in Guiyang, which Apple hoped would be completed by next month, and another in the Inner Mongolia region, Apple has largely ceded control to the Chinese government.
Chinese state employees physically manage the computers. Apple abandoned the encryption technology it used elsewhere after China would not allow it. And the digital keys that unlock information on those computers are stored in the data centers they’re meant to secure.
The Times also alleges that while U.S. regulations prohibit Apple from handing data over to Chinese authorities, storing user data on local Chinese storage creates a loophole allowing it. A Chinese firm named Guizhou-Cloud Big Data (GCBD), is actually the legal owner of Apple iCloud customer data in China. Due to this, Chinese authorities can demand access to data from GCBD rather than Apple.
Since 2017, around 55,000 apps have been removed from the Apple App Store in China, according to data provided by Sensor Tower. Some of the apps included foreign news outlets, encrypted messaging apps, gay dating services, and VPNs allowing users to bypass China’s strict internet restrictions.
Read more at Fox Business here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan
Apple Crushes Dissent in America and China
Suppressing protests in China and censoring Twitter in America.
The largest lockdown uprising in China took place at facilities run by Apple’s Foxconn supplier where workers had previously jumped to their deaths. After thousands fled the Apple gulag, making their way through the woods and rural areas to freedom, other employees battled with Communist authorities over abusive conditions and treatment in the iGulag.
Apple had nothing to say about the rights of those workers who thought differently enough to break free and fight back. If they were foolish enough to have iPhones, there’s little doubt the company would have eagerly helped authorities track them down to be imprisoned or killed.
“Think Different”, Apple’s slogan, actually means collaborating with a Communist dictatorship where thinking differently is a crime. And it also means suppressing free speech in America.
That’s why Apple is threatening free speech on Twitter just as it’s threatening it in Shanghai.
But that is what the company has always been behind the reality distortion field of its ads. “Think Different” has never meant anything other than, “Shut up and do what the visionaries tell you.”
In the 90s, to celebrate the return of its co-founder, Apple launched an ad campaign with the slogan, “Think Different.” The campaign with its images of Einstein, MLK, Lennon, Edison and Picasso was meant to suggest that Apple was a unique creative company for aspiring geniuses.
And soon Steve Jobs joined the pantheon of those geniuses. But behind the ad campaign meant to appeal to narcissistic hipsters with disposable incomes was a harder truth.
Jobs, the talented marketer who had positioned Apple as the company fighting totalitarianism with its 1984 ad, was aggressively offshoring the company’s labor to Communist China.
What China had to offer was mass production under a ruthlessly totalitarian system that would, when Jobs decided to revamp the iPhone a month before launch, wake up 8,000 workers at midnight for a 12 hour shift.
At an Obama dinner, Jobs bluntly confirmed, “Those jobs aren’t coming back.”
“What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?” Apple’s supply manager asked.
The dorms, where 12 workers live to a tiny room, everyone is monitored and so many have committed suicide that nets were put up to catch the bodies, were the real “Think Different”.
Steve Jobs loved China and the Communist dictatorship loved him back. His famous black turtleneck appeared to echo the Mao suit. There are golden busts of Jobs in China looking like a Communist dictator.When Jobs died, there was hysterical mourning in China. There was no mourning for the deaths of workers at the Foxconn plants where Apple products were made.
A year before Jobs died, fourteen men and women jumped from buildings at Apple’s Foxconn Chinese contractors. Their deaths occasioned much less interest than the outpouring of grief for the author of their misery.
In a notion that could have only come from a satirical story by Kafka and Philip K. Dick or a real life Communist dystopia, workers were forced to sign contracts promising not to kill themselves.
Afterward nets were hung up to catch the falling bodies.
Think Different.
After Jobs’ death, his widow took the money to build the Emerson Collective, pushing social justice in the fine tradition of atoning for evil with more evil, while CEO Tim Cook developed an even more incestuous relationship with Communist China that included signing a secret $275 billion pact to help Communist China develop “the most advanced manufacturing technologies” and vowed to use even more Chinese technology in Apple’s products.
When the Hong Kong protests began, the streets filled with young men and women, most of whom not only owned Apple products, but believed the hype that it was a noble company that didn’t just make gadgets, but aspired to harness human creativity for a better world.
Instead, Apple quickly moved to suppress the protests by removing an app used by the protesters to avoid police. Apple sanctimoniously declared that the protests were endangering “law enforcement and residents in Hong Kong” and claimed that it was responding to “concerned customers” worried that the popular protests threatened “public safety”.
That statement could have been and may have been written by the Communist regime. It should have been enough to finally expose the myth that Apple is animated by a creative spirit, rather than power, greed, and a willing collaboration with Communist mass murderers.
But with protests breaking out against Zero COVID tyranny breaking out in China, people were once again surprised when Apple rushed to aid Communist China’s crackdown by preventing protesters from using AirDrop to communicate and coordinate their activities.
The company wasn’t just once again collaborating with a Communist dictatorship responsible for the murder of countless millions, but it was screwing its own users, the naive students who had paid premium prices for its slave labor products because they believed in Apple.
They believed, like so many Americans and Europeans, that Apple stood for something.
And Apple does. It stands for tyranny.
That’s why Apple is threatening Twitter’s place in its app store because under Elon Musk the platform has begun to offer the very thing Apple is helping China stamp out: freedom.
It’s a mistake to believe that Apple is just doing what it’s told. That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the company as unfortunate as the one by the protesters risking their lives while believing that Apple wouldn’t kick the chair out from under its users and their movement.
Apple isn’t a great American company, it’s a great Chinese company. Its fundamental worldview is Maoist. Its simplicity of control isn’t just about manipulating interfaces, but people. Its ad campaigns, from ‘1984’ to ‘Think Different’, have always been regime propaganda. Jobs, unlike his genuinely talented co-founder, Steve Wozniak, held people in contempt. His vision of technology was essentially Communist: depriving people of control for their own good.
China had always understood Steve Jobs, with his Maoist turtleneck, his minimalist aesthetics, ruthlessness and conviction of his own genius, far better than we ever did. The real message of “Think Different” wasn’t that everyone ought to think differently, but that geniuses are a superior group who ought to have the unlimited power to rigorously implement their vision. That is what China offered Jobs. And what Apple offers the Communist elite is the power behind their vision.
Americans haven’t cared very much about Chinese workers hurriedly assembling smartwatches in freezing temperatures or children laboring in mines, but Apple’s tyranny doesn’t stay in China.
Apple’s vision for America isn’t any different than for China. In both countries, Apple helps a leftist elite implement its collectivist vision by offering customers a poisoned chalice of convenience in exchange for data harvesting and control. The company doesn’t empower its customers, it tricks them into giving up control so that they can be better controlled.
That is why it’s coming for Twitter and threatening it over its newfound free speech.
“We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology,” a Big Brother analogue intoned in Apple’s famous 1984 commercial, “secure from the pests purveying contradictory thoughts.”
Jobs was a fan of Orwell’s book. Unfortunately he viewed it as a manual.
Apple has used its illegal app store monopoly to create a walled garden of apps along a pure ideology, secure from contradictory thoughts. Now, much as China is purging political opposition, the company that helped define its new age, is doing the same thing here.
Jobs, who once claimed that PCs were totalitarian and Apple was “the only force that can ensure their future freedom” helped build an oppressive operating system tethered to an app store calculated to deprive users of their freedom. That integrated hardware and software monopoly is one of the great threats to freedom in America and China.
As we approach a 2024 election, more legislators are waking up and fighting back against Apple’s walled app store of ideology. And if the Communist collaborating company comes after Twitter, it may discover that the whirling sledgehammer from its 1984 ad is coming its way.
Josh Hawley Calls on Apple to End ‘Unconscionable’ Operations in China, Reshore Manufacturing to U.S.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) is calling on Apple CEO Tim Cook, considered the “architect” of the multinational corporation’s offshoring business model, to end all operations in China and reshore manufacturing to the United States.
Most recently, workers at Apple’s largest iPhone plant in Zhengzhou, China, have started fighting back against the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “Zero COVID-19” policy that keeps China residents locked up in their homes and CCP-controlled pods.
In response, Apple has bowed to the CCP in restricting the use of Airdrop file-sharing capabilities on Chinese iPhones to help silence dissidents behind anti-lockdown protests.
Hawley writes, in a letter to Cook, that Apple’s recent actions in China are “unconscionable” and warrant the corporation to move all operations out of the communist country and reshore manufacturing to the U.S.
“Your continued dependency on Chinese labor not only undermines the interests of the American economy and its workers but has once again led your company to crack down on speech at the Chinese Communist Party’s behest,” Hawley writes to Cook:
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the Chinese Communist Party has subjected the Chinese people to draconian public health measures. During the past week, dissatisfaction with the nation’s so-called zero-COVID policy came to a head: from Beijing to Shanghai and Urumqi, citizens took to the streets to protest and voice their dissent. This included demonstrations at a Foxconn factory in the city of Zhengzhou, one of the largest manufacturers of Apple’s iPhone. After enduring weeks of stringent pandemic mitigation measures, workers protested and clashed with Chinese law enforcement. Videos of these confrontations, including shocking images of workers being beaten and kicked by officials in hazmat suits, were widely circulated on social media and in the press. [Emphasis added]
Since Apple makes more than 95 percent of its iPhones in China, these disruptions pose substantial material risks to Apple’s stakeholders. To make matters worse, your company appears to be actively supporting the Chinese government’s brutal crackdown. For example, public reports indicate that Apple, through a recent software update for iPhones in China, has modified the AirDrop function to make it more difficult for protestors to use this function to evade censorship and surveillance. Unconscionable though this decision may be, it is not surprising: under your leadership, Apple has time and again assisted the Chinese Communist Party in surveilling and suppressing the basic human rights of the Chinese people. At the same time, it appears that Apple might be importing this model of speech control to the United States: reports indicate that your company might de-platform Twitter from the App Store as a consequence of the free speech policies implemented by new ownership. [Emphasis added]
You have been called the architect of Apple’s strategy to outsource production to China. While this strategy has yielded short-term profits for you and your shareholders, cracks are beginning to emerge in the aftermath of the pandemic and in the face of intensifying geopolitical tensions. It is time for Apple to chart a new path forward. I, therefore, urge you to take meaningful steps to reduce your dependence on Chinese labor, especially by reshoring production in the United States. [Emphasis added]
Apple’s entanglement with China has been taken to new heights in recent years. In 2016, for example, Cook signed a $275 billion contract with the CCP to prevent a crackdown on the corporation’s business in China.
Months after the contract was signed, Apple hit a record 23 percent market share in China — allowing the corporation to reclaim its spot as the number one smartphone brand in the communist country for the first time in six years.
At the expense of America’s working and middle class, Cook has driven Apple’s market value to $2.3 trillion by relying on an offshoring business model that has sent hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs to China.
Apple has seemingly had little regard for China’s history of employing slave labor.
In 2020, a report issued by an Australian think tank detailed how Apple was among a number of multinational corporations that has ties to Chinese factories where Uyghur Muslims are reportedly used as slave labor at the direction of the CCP.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY
American people deserve to know what China was up to with Joe Biden, especially when Beijing had already shelled out millions of dollars to Biden family members — including millions in set-asides for “the big guy.” What else is on that infamous Hunter Biden laptop? The conflicted Biden Justice Department cannot be trusted to engage in any meaningful oversight on this issue. We need a special counsel now.
TOM FITTON - JUDICIAL WATCH
Cotton: Apple Needs to Stop Helping CCP Keep Chinese Protestors from Communicating
On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) criticized Apple, a company “deeply invested in China,” for restricting features like the AirDrop file-sharing service in China that the Chinese people protesting against the Chinese Communist Party’s oppressive COVID policies could use to bypass CCP censorship to communicate with each other and organize bigger protests and called on the U.S. government to do whatever it can to help protestors in China voice their desire for freedom.
Cotton said, “Corporate America, for instance, could take steps to help China — to help these Chinese citizens communicate with each other. Apple, which of course, is deeply invested in China, and has deep market penetration on its iPhones, could be enabling certain features that would allow them to communicate with each other so they can organize even larger protests. We should be taking every step possible to help these Chinese voice their deepest aspirations for freedom. It’s exactly what Ronald Reagan did in the Cold War. It’s what we should be doing now. And as I write in ‘Only the Strong,’ it didn’t lead to confrontational war. It led to peace and success and victory.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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