How Corporate America’s Insane Hypocrisy on China Can Actually Liberate Us – By Jim Geraghty (National Review) / Mar 4 2021
A friend and longtime reader writes in, responding to yesterday’s Morning Jolt about how corporate America is likely to avert its eyes from a Chinese court ruling that homosexuality is a mental disorder, and asks, “What should people do when such profound hypocrisy is evident? Do we just hunker down and hope for the best?”
This is where I could tell you to boycott companies that do business with China . . . which would be a lot. But the debate of “how should the U.S. respond to China?” is not ending anytime soon, and this kind of ludicrous hypocrisy strengthens the argument of those of us who want America’s current approach to change, and an outcome somewhere well short of a shooting war but for the U.S. to be clear-eyed, brutally honest, and unflinching in standing up for its values while dealing with the most powerful authoritarian regime on the planet.
First, it helps us push back against the notion that leaders of American or multinational corporations have some sort of unique moral authority about social policies or have earned our deference to their perspectives on political issues. For a long while, well-known corporate executives have been describing themselves as “global change agents” and all kinds of other feel-good titles that make it sound like they’re primarily interested in building a better world, and that their company’s massive sales and profits just happen to be an inadvertent side effect of that.
