Over at National Review, David French asks a question to which every humanist and freedom fighter in the western world wishes a resounding affirmative answer: If China cracks down on Hong Kong, will corporate America remember its morals?
Just based on looking at the three wokest industries in the country, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and fashion, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Versace, Givenchy, and Coach didn’t just destroy concert tour style t-shirts listing Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan as independent nations alongside China, the United States States, and a handful of others. They also went out of their way to bend the knee to the communist nation’s “One China” policy, with brand accounts and even Donatella Versace herself issuing lengthy apologies on social media.
As protesters waving American flags fight for popular sovereignty in Hong Kong pled with the democratic world for support, Versace posted this stunning and bootlicking statement towards a nation that’s locked up millions of Muslims in concentration camps and tortures its own civilians.
(Note: Of the three brands, only Coach is housed in the U.S., though both the Milanese Versace and the Parisian Givenchy have extensive American operations.)
Over in Hollywood, movie makers have chosen CGI-heavy franchises over original stories and scripts to satisfy cheap Chinese audiences rather than domestic artistic interests. Nearly half a decade after Stephen Colbert’s iconic sketch mocking Hollywood’s pandering to Chinese censorship, “Pander Express,” studios are still caving to the specific demands of the Chinese government.
Paramount has retroactively censored two patches featuring the Taiwanese and Japanese flags from the original Top Gun, and as Tom Rogan scooped earlier this week, the American Navy will effectively allow the film’s sequel to forgo the original patches. Of course, none of this is surprising given films like the Red Dawn remake recasting the villains from China to North Korea in post-production and Marvel whitewashing Tibet from their cannon.
Just as Hollywood is happy to boycott Georgia for a democratically passed abortion law that won’t even go into effect while cowering to a communist dictatorship, our woke overlords in Silicon Valley, Google, have clandestinely planned to collude with the Chinese government to create censorious products to control its citizens and continued to fight American laws to continue business with overtly malicious Chinese actors like Huawei.
Fashion houses and film studios are happy to scorn peaceful Americans who just so happen to disagree with the politics of Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey, but they’ll bend over backwards to beclown themselves in service of Chinese cash. No matter that our liberal brethren overseas are exemplifying the best of American values, performative wokeness is exactly that: performative.
