Tag Archive for: Jeff Bezos

WaPo’s New Direction Draws First Blood As Longtime Op-Ed Editor Ruth Marcus Quits

Ruth Marcus, a longtime editor of The Washington Post’s editorial page, resigned and accused CEO Will Lewis of spiking her piece criticizing the paper’s new direction in an email obtained by Semafor’s Maxwell Tani.

In her departure note, Marcus claimed Lewis scrapped an editorial “expressing concern about the newly announced direction for the section,” according to screenshots obtained by Tani.

The paper’s owner Jeff Bezos announced a new direction for the editorial section in February, claiming they will focus on “personal liberties and free markets” and will not be publishing criticism of those two pillars.

Marcus claimed she attempted to write an op-ed “respectfully dissenting” from Bezos’s position and was rejected.

“The traditional freedom of columnists to select the topics they wish to address and say what they think has been dangerously eroded,” she said in a message she wrote directly to Bezos and Lewis, according to Tani.

“Jeff’s announcement that the opinion section will henceforth not publish views that deviate from the pillars of individual liberties and free markets threatens to break the trust of readers that columnists are writing what they believe, not what the owner has deemed acceptable,” she also wrote, according to Tani.

Marcus had worked at the paper for over 40 years. She started in 1984 as an editorial writer and columnist, eventually becoming the deputy editorial page editor in 2016, according to her LinkedIn profile.

The act of rebellion follows a pattern. Multiple prominent WaPo employees also quit in protest after the paper’s editorial board chose not to endorse Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.

AUTHOR

Robert McGreevy

Reporter.

RELATED ARTICLE: Legacy Media Die-Off In Full Swing As WaPo Set To Lay Off Dozens: REPORT

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights resevered.

Big Tech Bends The Knee To Donald Trump

Multiple Silicon Valley CEOs congratulated President-elect Donald Trump on his win Tuesday night, from Jeff Bezos to Mark Zuckerberg.

Many of the CEOs congratulating Trump have faced accusations of left-wing bias and censorship, and their companies experienced backlash from conservatives. But despite Silicon Valley’s historically left-wing bent, multiple tech CEOs praised Trump on Wednesday.

Jeff Bezos congratulated the next president on “an extraordinary political comeback.” Bezos owns The Washington Post, which did not issue an endorsement for the 2024 presidential election. The refusal to endorse Kamala Harris reportedly cost the paper hundreds of thousands of subscribers and triggered backlash amongst its own staff.

Bezos previously wrote an op-ed detailing why “Americans don’t trust the news media anymore.”

That was only Bezos’s second tweet this year. In July, he tweeted in support of Trump after an assassination attempt at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

However, The Post and Amazon both have a history of left-wing bias.

The Post recently ran an article titled “Trump embraces violent rhetoric, suggests Cheney should have guns ‘trained on her face’” in reference to the false claim that Trump wanted Liz Cheney put in front of a firing squad.

Amazon’s Alexa previously expressed support for Harris over Trump for president, although the company claimed it was an error. Amazon has also censored books written by conservatives.

In one instance, it removed a book critical of the transgender movement from its online store in 2021. The book, “When Harry Became Sally: Responding To The Transgender Moment” was a bestseller. The Biden-Harris administration also pressured Amazon to censor books skeptical of the COVID-19 vaccine, according to emails obtained by the House Judiciary Committee.

Notably, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy also issued a statement congratulating Trump on his victory.

“We look forward to working with you and your administration on issues important to our customers, employees, communities, and country,” Jassy stated.

Other big names congratulating Trump included Apple CEO Tim Cook, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.

“Congratulations President Trump on your victory!” Cook stated in a post. “We look forward to engaging with you and your administration to help make sure the United States continues to lead with and be fueled by ingenuity, innovation, and creativity.”

“Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory,” Zuckerberg stated on Instagram Threads. “We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country. Looking forward to working with you and your administration.”

Both Meta and Google have come under fire for censorship and left-wing bias.

Facebook collaborated with the FBI to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. It also bowed to pressure from the Biden-Harris administration to censor certain COVID-19 views. Mark Zuckerberg admitted the government pressured Meta, and he expressed regret in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan.

“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”

Zuckerberg also did not issue an endorsement in the presidential election and reportedly identifies as a libertarian.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai echoed Zuckerberg’s endorsement, congratulating Trump on his “decisive victory.”

Trump stated on Joe Rogan’s podcast that Pichai called him after he visited a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania.

Trump suggested in August that Congress could “shut down” Google over its alleged bias and censorship of conservatives.

That same month, Pichai testified to the House Oversight Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on Google’s censorship of information regarding Trump’s first attempted assassination.

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, told the committee the autocomplete search results did not show results pertaining to Trump when users searched for “President Donald” because of a software “bug.”

Other prominent Silicon Valley congratulations came from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

AUTHOR

Eireann Van Natta

General assignment reporter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Bezos-Owned Amazon Opposes Mail-In Voting For Union Election

Online retail giant Amazon opposed mail-in voting for a union election, according to a filing with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

Amazon’s position on mail-in voting conflicts with that of the Washington Post editorial board’s position on mail-in voting. Both companies are owned by Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man.

In a petition filed with the NLRB on Jan. 21, Amazon argued that mail-in voting would decrease turnout and create security concerns in a unionization election at the company’s Bessemer, Alabama warehouse.

Amazon argued in the petition, uploaded by The Verge, that “concerns about election security run particularly high” due to the use of “an unreliable electronic signature platform.”

Amazon further claimed that mail-in voting in union elections is fundamentally different from that in political elections. In political elections, the Amazon lawyers wrote, a “continuously updated voter address roll” and the ability to vote in person or by mail “promote security and voter turnout.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized Amazon on Twitter, saying that the company had to let its workers form unions.

The company’s position on mail-in voting contradicts that of owner Jeff Bezos’s other major company, the Washington Post. The Post’s editorial board ran multiple articles assailing then-President Donald Trump’s criticisms of mail-in voting. One op-ed, published August 17, called his comments “bogus fear-mongering.”

Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron said in 2019 of Bezos’s tenure as owner of the newspaper, “He hasn’t interfered with a single story. He hasn’t suggested a story. He hasn’t squelched a story. He hasn’t critiqued a story, hasn’t criticized a story,” according to Deadline.

If Amazon’s efforts to force an in-person vote fail, the Bessemer warehouse will hold the union election between Feb. 8 and March 30, according to AL.com

COLUMN BY

MICHAEL GINSBERG

General assignment reporter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

AmazonSmile Program Prevents Customer Donations to Pro-Israel Organization

Here’s the disturbing tale:

Proclaiming Justice to The Nations (PJTN), a Tennessee-based non-profit evangelical Christian organization committed towards standing with Israel and fighting antisemitism, has been removed from the AmazonSmile program, which enables Amazon customers to donate a percentage of their purchase to their favorite charity.

PJTN President Laurie Cardoza-Moore told JNS that “all of a sudden, we began being inundated with e-mails from supporters whose AmazonSmile donations to Proclaiming Justice to the Nations had been repeatedly rejected. They were being instructed to choose another charity, despite wanting to support PJTN.” After reaching out to Amazon for an explanation—assuming it was a technical glitch—the retail giant informed PJTN that customers would no longer be able to donate towards the organization using the AmazonSmile platform, following the listing of PJTN as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

The SPLC, whose website says that part of its mission is to monitor domestic hate groups in the United States, has PJTN listed on its “hate map” as being one of 36 Tennessee-based hate groups. SPLC specifically accuses PJTN of being “anti-Muslim.”

Amazon employs 566,000 people worldwide. The company clearly does not lack for personnel to study non-profit groups and to  advise Amazon as to which ones qualify for its customers to use the AmazonSmile platform, which allows them to donate part of their purchase to a favorite charity.

But Amazon chose not to do that work itself. Instead, it handed over the decision making as to which groups are to be considered “hate groups” to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has a grand total of 254 employees. That means that for every employee of the SPLC, Amazon has more than 2,000 of its own. Is the SPLC so very good at its job that mighty Amazon, with its 566,000 employees, is right to rely on the 254 employees of that outside group? For years, the SPLC presented itself as beyond reproach, an organization of selfless do-gooders at a non-profit. But in recent years, defectors from the group have painted a grim picture of an organization run by scam artists – its head a “flimflam man” — who have arranged colossal salaries for themselves, in some cases have been guilty of sexual harassment of fellow employees, have exhibited racist attitudes, and have been thoroughly unmasked for these and other offenses in numerous damning reports.

Here is some of what Jessica Prol Smith, of the Alliance Defending Freedom, discovered about the SPLC:

For years, former employees revealed, local journalists reported and commentators have lamented: The Southern Poverty Law Center is not what it claims to be. Not a pure-hearted, clear-headed legal advocate for the vulnerable, but rather an obscenely wealthy marketing scheme. For years, the left-wing interest group has used its “hate group” list to promote the fiction that violent neo-Nazis and Christian nonprofits peacefully promoting orthodox beliefs about marriage and sex are indistinguishable. Sometimes, it has apologized to public figures it has smeared, and it recently paid out millions to settle a threatened defamation lawsuit.

These shameful secrets are no longer hidden in shadows. The New York Times, Politico, NPR and a host of other mainstream publications are reporting on the corruption and widening credibility gap. The SPLC dismissed its co-founder in March, and its president has resigned amidst numerous claims of sexual harassment, gender discrimination and racism within the organization — a parade of disgraces that vividly force the conclusion: The SPLC is hollow, rotten and failing at the very virtues it pretends to celebrate.

Morris Dees, co-founder of SPLC, was dismissed for many reasons. A multimillionaire from his work as a direct-mail marketer before founding SPLC, Dees was reportedly more concerned with fund-raising than with litigating; he had not tried a case in more than a decade, and other than raising money for himself and others, took little part in the SPLC’s day-to-day operations. During his tenure, there were accusations of gender discrimination and racism in hiring and promotions, as well as sexual harassment. The SPLC’s president, Richard Cohen, apparently resigned for much the same reasons — charges of race and gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and other, unspecified offenses. Both Cohen and Dees had been receiving very large salaries, way out of whack with non-profits of similar size.

The criticism comes from many corners. There’s the Current Affairs editor who seems sympathetic to the center’s progressive mission but decries its “hate group” list as an “outright fraud” and a “willful deception designed to scare older liberals into writing checks to the SPLC.”

There’s the retired investigative journalist who helped research and write an eight-part series on the center’s “litany of problems and questionable practices” in the mid-1990s. His Washington Post opinion piece reads with a thinly veiled message: We nearly got a Pulitzer Prize for TELLING YOU SO.

But perhaps most damning of all are the indictments leveled by former employee Bob Moser in The New Yorker. He remembers being welcomed to the “Poverty Palace” and recounts the heart-sinking reality of it all — being “pawns” in a “highly profitable scam.”

Stephen Bright, a Yale law professor and former director of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, has long questioned what he calls the center’s “fraudulent” fundraising.

“The chickens have had a very long trip, but they finally came home to roost,” Bright said.

Morris is a flimflam man and he’s managed to flimflam his way along for many years raising money by telling people about the Ku Klux Klan and hate groups,” he said. “He sort of goes to whatever will sell and has, of course, brought in millions and millions and millions of dollars.

While the SPLC funded some good work, Bright said, he had long heard complaints about race discrimination and sexual harassment from the center’s former attorneys and interns.

The SPLC has been thoroughly discredited during this last year, yet Bezos has not said a word. Could it be he still doesn’t know about the scandalous goings-on at SPLC, or is that he doesn’t care? Perhaps he’s been busy, swallowing up yet another industry, but he really ought to give Amazon’s reliance on SPLC for deciding which are the “hate groups” to be banned from AmazonSmile more of his attention. And then he might decide to cut the cord.

Given all this, here’s what Jeff Bezos ought to do to spare himself further embarrassment. He ought to read what Tim Moser, the former employee of SPLC, wrote about the organization in The New Yorker. He should read the eight-part series by an investigative journalist on the “problems and questionable practices” at SPLC. He ought to find out what The New York TimesPolitico, and NPR have reported about SPLC, which has led many to conclude, with Ms. Smith, that the SPLC “is hollow, rotten, and failing at the very virtues it pretends to celebrate.” And he ought to interview Yale Law Professor Stephen Bright, to find out why he calls Morris Dees a “flimflam man.”

What were the charges, not specified at the time, that forced SPLC co-founder Morris Dees to resign in disgrace?  What were the charges that led President Richard Cohen to quit the SPLC? What have close observers of the SPLC discovered about how it has been run, to their dismay and horror?

Jeff Bezos should take a day or two out of his busy schedule of insensate empire-building in order to learn more about the SPLC, on which he has chosen to rely for the identification of “hate groups.” He needs to do more than read what Moser, Bright, and a dozen others who have either worked for SPLC or been close observers of the organization, have written. He needs to talk directly with them, so that he will realize the full extent of the SPLC’s transgressions, can ask them probing questions, and learn more about those “flimflam men” at the top, who have lately been exposed as being guilty of gender and race discrimination, among many other sins.

Bezos should also investigate SPLC’s readiness to label as “anti-Muslim hate groups” those who do not preach hate of any sort, but are simply islamocritics. The SPLC long ago consigned Jihad Watch to the outer darkness. When it included Maajid Nawaz, the founder of the Quilliam Foundation, on a 2016 list of “anti-Muslim extremists,” the SPLC was sued by Nawaz, who won a $3.4 million dollar judgment against the group. That has not stopped the SPLC from continuing to describe Jihad Watch, AFDI, and similar websites as being “hate groups.” SPLC describes, with its wonted tone of hysteria, Robert Spencer as that “notorious Muslim-basher and pretend expert on Islam.”

An email request by JNS [Jewish News Service] to SPLC asking for an explanation about their listing of PJTN went unanswered as of press time.

When asked by JNS what would cause the SPLC to label her organization as being anti-Muslim, Cardoza-Moore responded, “Proclaiming Justice to the Nations exists to fight the oldest hate on earth: antisemitism. We were given no explanation as to why we were blacklisted. If our work highlighting antisemites like [Reps.] Ilhan Omar [D-Minn.] and Rashida Tlaib [D-Mich.] got us on the list, we’ll wear it as a badge of honor. Despite the financial penalties that we are facing with AmazonSmile, will not be silenced for fulfilling our biblical responsibility to defend the State of Israel and Jewish people in the face of growing global antisemitism.”

She added that “sadly, the SPLC lost its way long ago, becoming a tool to shame any organization that doesn’t share their extremist agenda.”

Cardoza-Moore said that initially, she thought it was a joke that PJTN had been placed on the SPLC list of hate groups alongside the KKK. However, she said that “I have now learned that this political witch hunt against those who don’t share SPLC’s extremist liberal views has been adopted as a religious doctrine by Amazon. This could dramatically affect our ability to raise funds and function as a nonprofit organization.”

She added that it appears that Amazon “has become the nation’s new moral compass powered by the subversive Southern Poverty Law Center. Charities should not be persecuted in this way; this has to stop.

An Amazon spokesperson confirmed to JNS via email that PJTN had been dropped, saying in a general statement that according to their policy, “organizations that engage in, support, encourage or promote intolerance, hate, terrorism, violence, money laundering or other illegal activities are not eligible.”

Just as a matter of interest, perhaps Amazon would care to tell us if CAIR is eligible to receive donations through AmazonSmile. If it does, would Bezos be willing to consider the evidence that CAIR just might be an organization that “encourages or promotes intolerance, hate, terrorism, violence”? And while we’re at it, have any of the many pro-BDS groups that many of us believe encourage “intolerance, hate, terrorism, violence” been banned from participating in the AmazonSmile program?

The statement [from Amazon] mentioned that since 2013, Amazon has relied on the SPLC along with the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (of the US Department of the Treasury) to make its determination on which organizations are eligible for the AmazonSmile program.

Cardoza-Moore says that as a result of being dropped, she is calling on her donors to bypass Amazon in order to help support Israel and combat antisemitism.

“We have asked our donors to continue supporting PJTN directly instead of through AmazonSmile. Nobody will silence us, even when we stand up against giants like Amazon; we know that we have truth and justice on our side,” she said.

“Our answer to this hateful blacklisting will be to continue building more PJTN chapters across the United States and beyond. We will continue to fight antisemitism and defend the State of Israel, wherever and whenever necessary,” she continued. “We will endeavor to reach more people than ever because our message is needed now, more than ever.”

A statement from PJTN said that in recent months, the organization has led the struggle against the BDS movement in the United States with a wave of state resolutions, and has exposed textbooks used in public schools that it says are indoctrinating children with inaccurate historical information and bias that do not reflect American values.

In 2016, JNS reported that PJTN drafted the state of Tennessee’s anti-BDS resolution, which passed in the General Assembly, making it one of the first states to pass such state-level legislation against BDS.

So PJTN, unbowed, continues to be active in its campaign against the BDS movement. And its donors will now simply find other, more direct ways to support it, now that PJTN has been banned, so absurdly, from the AmazonSmile program. Many people, as they find out more about Amazon, and its continuing reliance on the discredited SPLC for its determination of which groups promote “hatred” and “intolerance,” may want to express their own displeasure with that malevolent and powerful Amazon, and take their custom elsewhere.

COLUMN BY

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.